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English Pages 686 [687] Year 2012
Human Destinies
Gerald Hanratty
(1941–2003)
HUMAN DESTINIES Philosophical Essays in Memory of Gerald Hanratty
edited by FRAN O’ROURKE University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana
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Copyright © 2013 by the University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Human destinies : philosophical essays in memory of Gerald Hanratty / edited by Fran O'Rourke. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-268-03734-5 (cloth)—ISBN 978-0-268-08865-1 (e-book) 1. Philosophical anthropology. 2. Philosophy and religion. 3. Philosophical theology. I. Hanratty, Gerald. II. O'Rourke, Fran. BD450.H8555 2012 190—dc23 2012024901
∞ The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
c o n t e n t s
Introduction 1
one Human Nature and Destiny in Aristotle Fran O’Rourke
19
two Aristotle’s Self Peter L. P. Simpson
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three Mechanisms That Respond to Reasons: An Aristotelian Approach to Agency Rowland Stout four Plotinus on Fate and Free Will Andrew Smith five A Zealous Convert: The Legacy of Augustine’s Break with Manichaean Gnosticism Eoin G. Cassidy
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vi Contents
six Answering Back: Augustine’s Critique of Heidegger Cyril O’Regan seven Man’s Natural Condition: Aquinas and Luther on Original Sin † Michael Nolan
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eight Philosophical Sources of Aquinas’ Quarta Via 197 Patrick Masterson nine Philosophy and Its Value: Reflections on Fides et Ratio 224 Tim Lynch ten Kant and Dennett on the Epistemic Status of Teleological Principles James R. O’Shea
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eleven Human Nature and One-Eyed Reason Ciarán McGlynn
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twelve Relativism and Religious Diversity Maria Baghramian
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thirteen The Plagues of Desecration: Roger Scruton and Richard Rorty on Life after Religion Mark Dooley fourteen Dawkins’ Fear of Reason Brendan Purcell
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337
Contents vii
fifteen The Experiential Argument for the Existence of God in Gabriel Marcel and Alvin Plantinga Brendan Sweetman sixteen A Secular Spirituality? James, Dennett, and Dawkins Ciarán Benson seventeen Eucharistic Imagination in Merleau-Ponty and James Joyce Richard Kearney eighteen Immanence, Self-Experience, and Transcendence in Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein, and Karl Jaspers Dermot Moran
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nineteen Presuming the Other from Stein to Husserl: Empathy 468 and the Margins of Experience Belinda McKeon twenty The Unity of Thought in Aristotle, Kant, and Heidegger 491 Brian Elliott twenty-one Communication, Struggle, and Human Destiny: Ricoeur’s Judicial Praxis and Heidegger’s “Power of Destiny” Eileen Brennan twenty-two Forgetting Aristotle? Heidegger’s Reflections on Mimesis Liberato Santoro-Brienza
519
543
viii Contents
twenty-three Immanent Transcendence? Adorno’s Reconception of Metaphysics Brian O’Connor
563
twenty-four On Losing Uniqueness: Singularity and Its Effacement 588 in Derrida Timothy Mooney twenty-five The Person and the Common Good: Toward a Language of Paradox David Walsh
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twenty-six Ethics and Economics: Friends or Foes? Gerard Casey
647
List of Contributors Index of Names
663 672
Introduction
To his colleagues and many friends, the news of Gerald Hanratty’s unexpected death on 9 October 2003 came as a deeply personal shock. Gerry was a profound, simple, and uncomplicated person, universally held in fond regard; one never heard even the slightest negative comment about him—lamentably a rare tribute even among philosophers. There was nothing special or extraordinary about Gerald Hanratty’s life; in the manner of his living, devotion to learning, and dedication in the service of others, however, he was unique. Born in Co Roscommon on 26 May 1941, where his father was a primary school teacher, Gerry attended Blackrock College, Dublin. In 1958 he entered Clonliffe, seminary of the Dublin Diocese, and also began his philosophical studies at University College Dublin. He graduated with an MA in 1962. He attended the Pontifical Irish College in Rome from 1962 to 1966, pursuing theological studies at the Pontifical Lateran University. He received a BD in 1964 and an STL in 1966; in the same year he was ordained a priest for the Dublin Diocese. He moved to Switzerland, in order to write his PhD under the direction of Professor Norbert Luyten at the University of Fribourg. In 1970 he completed his doctorate on the mind/body problem in Anglo-Saxon philosophy. 1
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In 1968 Gerald Hanratty was appointed to the Department of Metaphysics of University College Dublin; in 1976 he was promoted to College Lecturer, and in 1997 to Senior Lecturer. Generations of philosophy students appreciated Gerry’s wisdom, openness, good humor, reflectiveness, and generosity. He was highly popular also with students of the Department of Psychology, to whom he provided service lectures in philosophical psychology. Throughout University College Dublin, among academics and nonacademic staff, Gerry was a popular friend and colleague. In addition to working as an academic, he was chaplain for years to the Holy Family Home at Roebuck, located beside the UCD campus. He was devoted to the residents, ministering to their spiritual needs and providing company, encouragement, and friendship. A most moving sight was the guard of honor formed by aging residents along the avenue as Gerry’s funeral cortege departed the grounds. Gerry loved philosophy and often read into the early hours of the morning, kindling and smoking his pipe in tranquil recollection. His was the proper attitude of the university person who took an interest in all aspects of culture; he was widely read in literature and history. He bore his learning lightly, however, and never sought to impress. His nonacademic interests were few and simple; for years he played soccer with the UCD staff club. All his life he was a passionate follower of Gaelic games; while visiting a famous church in Bavaria one Sunday in early autumn, as a friend extolled the beauties of baroque architecture, he wondered aloud: “I wonder how Roscommon are doing in Croke Park.” He looked forward to monthly meetings with priest friends from his student days. He enjoyed a cross-country run in the Phoenix Park and an occasional meal in a good Italian restaurant. His brother Seamus was also a great friend, and they dined together almost every evening. He made an annual trip to Paris, enjoying the musty atmosphere of a Parisian hotel whose elegance was a nostalgic relic of the trendy twenties. Gerry had a wonderful sense of humor—a profound sense of levity, one might even say. He loved to laugh at the apparent absurdities of life—and especially at philosophers who took themselves too seriously. He enjoyed life to the fullest and was permanently in good
Introduction 3
humor. All of this stemmed from the grounded spirituality of someone who was deeply happy within himself, with his neighbors, and with God. The present volume is a tangible token of genuine affection from Gerry’s philosopher friends—colleagues, former students, and pro fessors. The essays reflect Gerald Hanratty’s philosophical interests, dealing with central questions of the nature of human existence and ultimate meaning of the universe. Whether engaged in historical investigation into Gnosticism or the Enlightenment, Gerry’s reflections were concerned with fundamental and final themes. His interests covered a wide range of topics and historical periods under the broad span of the philosophy of religion and philosophical anthropology. All of his writings and thinking were concerned with the search for the ultimate meaning of human beings and the world. He liked to quote the playwright Eugene Ionesco: “There is no way for fundamental questions not to exist in human consciousness.” (A selection of Gerald Hanratty’s writings is available at www.ucd.ie/philosophy/archive.) The title of the volume, “Human Destinies,” is both fortuitous and intentional. On the day after Gerry’s death I received an e-mail from an undergraduate who wanted to express her sympathy with his colleagues. The words she was reading the moment she heard the news were Heraclitus’ fragment, “Character for man is destiny”—words, she well remarked, which fitted Gerry most eminently. For Gerry, philosophy had to do with life; otherwise it had no value. In his calm outlook, philosophy was an earnest of the revelation of the mystery which can only come with death. As Cardinal Desmond Connell, former head of the Department of Metaphysics, said at his funeral, Gerry’s death was the greatest moment of his life, the moment he had anticipated in faith, hope, and love. Gerry would himself be embarrassed by this gesture of pietas; he was self-effacing and shy of attention. The greatest reward for the contributors is to know that he would be embarrassed yet grateful. In the spirit of Gabriel Marcel, one of Gerald Hanratty’s favorite philosophers, the commitment of true friendship is the affirmation that life continues, that truth, goodness, beauty, and love endure. This collection is a token of that belief and a tribute to a true friend and a truly noble person.
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— One of the striking features of the present volume is the wide diversity of topics collectively addressed by the various contributors. A unifying concern nonetheless pervades the ensemble insofar as each engages with one or another aspect of the central task of what it is to be human or addresses the question of the wider horizon of the human enterprise. A number of essays deal directly with human nature, others with the nature of philosophical thought in its attempt to illuminate the human situation. The question of God and the practice of religion are addressed, as are the nature and importance of interpersonal relations. Specific areas of action are considered—artistic, literary, economic—in light of ultimate human purpose and fulfillment. Some essays are thematic in approach, others historical. A variety of thinkers from the ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary periods are considered; for this reason the contents have been ordered in a broadly historical sequence. In the opening essay, “Human Nature and Destiny in Aristotle,” I have aimed to provide an overview of the nature and destiny of man as understood by the Stagirite. Discerning a variety of particularities in man’s physical makeup, Aristotle evaluates all of these as subservient to the higher power and activity of human logos. Nature allots to man a unique place in the cosmos: equipped for the good life of reason and virtue, he alone partakes of the divine. The human soul is unique among natural substances—open to the totality of the cosmos and manifesting immaterial powers and activities. Aristotle is faced, however, with serious difficulties in reconciling any possible immortality of the soul with the indissolubility of soul and body in the human individual, which seems to be demanded by his hylomorphism. Significantly in Aristotle we find intimations of personality—one might even say that he conveys a pronounced sense of the self: of the I as I, for whom individual life and activity is a goal to be achieved and enjoyed. This theme is further developed by Peter Simpson in a chapter entitled “Aristotle’s Self.” The essay contrasts the understanding of the self typical of modern philosophies with the self that is present, if sometimes only implicitly, in the thought of Aristotle. The modern self is either the individualist or solipsist self generated by Cartesianism
Introduction 5
and its legacy, or the social self generated by the modern reaction to Cartesianism. Aristotle’s self is, by contrast, neither solipsist nor socialist. Because of his robust metaphysical and empirical approach to things, he has both real, substantial individuals, the individuals who are living bodies, and individuals who, in the concrete exercise of their rationality, are able to engage with each other in the real sharing of communal goods in virtuous friendship. Aristotle’s understanding of the concrete lived reality of human beings is best revealed in his discussion of friendship in his ethical writings. That discussion also shows how people, who are naturally ontological selves, become, through virtue, moral selves or, through vice, fail to become moral selves but are left dissipated and fragmented. Aristotle’s self is thus neither solipsistic nor a social construct. Instead it keeps to the mean between these two modern extremes, and by so doing it achieves a higher degree of selfhood and of community than either. Simpson suggests that Aristotle furnishes us with a better basis, not only for the ontology of the self and consciousness, but also for a morality and a politics that give genuine and equal worth to individuals and community instead of subordinating one to the other. The question of human agency is analyzed from an Aristotelian perspective by Rowland Stout in an essay entitled “Mechanisms That Respond to Reasons: An Aristotelian Approach to Agency,” in which he works out in detail what it is to be responsive to reason. He argues that this can be explained in causal terms only if causation is itself understood in the way Aristotle understands it, namely, as the realization of a potentiality, rather than in the way philosophers since David Hume have understood it—as a special sort of relation that holds between events. Stout adopts the Kantian assumption that what characterizes agents is that they are responsive to reason: agents are those beings which have the potentiality to make things happen in the way they should according to practical rationality. As he puts it, agents are reasons-responsive mechanisms. The rationalistic and mechanistic slant of this position is slightly softened by Stout’s flexible conception of practical rationality, which includes space for emotional rationality. It follows that a mechanism that is sensitive to practical rationality is not governed by determinate laws.
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The question of human destiny according to another ancient thinker is considered by Andrew Smith in his essay “Plotinus on Fate and Free Will.” Most Greek philosophers tried to maintain human free will within a system of cause and effect. Plotinus, who regarded the failure to solve this issue as dangerous to morality, approached it through his distinction of a higher and lower self, the correlate of transcendent and physical levels of reality. The higher could be aligned with providence, the lower with a negatively conceived fate. The in dividual finds his freedom in the former. Although the higher realm, too, involves necessity—most importantly for the human that his soul must descend to the physical world—this is an aspect of the soul’s nature and hence different from the compulsion of fate. But although human freedom is located in the transcendent world, it operates more widely, and Plotinus is no otherworldly escapist. For in the physical universe the soul has the freedom to become more or less involved with body than is necessary. In this relationship with the bodily, virtue is deemed to be active, immorality passive; true freedom is found in the active reasoning soul rather than in passivity, which is ignorance (yet still our responsibility). Moreover, providence as a whole extends to this world insofar as it is an image of the higher realm. Similarly, the individual can and should exercise an active relationship to the physical world through the resources provided by his higher self, his intellect. Neoplatonist elements are beneath the surface in Eoin Cassidy’s essay entitled “A Zealous Convert: The Legacy of Augustine’s Break with Manichaean Gnosticism.” A key theme that marked the philosophical output of the late Gerald Hanratty was an analysis of the persistence of Gnostic speculation in the history of European culture; Cassidy’s essay is a contribution to furthering the scope of this work. In its reflective analysis of the extent to which Augustine’s struggle with Manichaeism influenced both his life and his literary output for well over two decades, it offers a telling reminder of the manner in which this struggle has also shaped the intellectual history of Christianity. For example, he argues that if it were not for Augustine’s rejection of the Manichaean denial of free will it is unlikely one would have had that remarkable Augustinian synthesis of the relation between free will and grace, which has in turn prompted the most sublime of spiri-
Introduction 7
tual writings in the history of Christianity and the most violent of controversies over the course of the last fifteen hundred years. Augustine is made to engage in a confrontation of quite a different kind by Cyril O’Regan in an ambitious and wide-ranging essay entitled “Answering Back: Augustine’s Critique of Heidegger,” in which Augustine and Heidegger are brought into critical dialogue. O’Regan rehearses in detail Heidegger’s explicit critique of Augustine’s view of time and self in Being and Time and of Augustine’s Platonic commitments in the even earlier lectures on Augustine. O’Regan expands this further by bringing out the implied critique of Augustine in Heidegger’s work after Being and Time, which concerns the bishop of Hippo’s view of transcendence and way of being in the world. What is remarkable about the essay is the way O’Regan reverses the direction of argument and allows Augustine to interrogate the “later” as well as the “earlier” Heidegger on precisely those topics of time, self, transcendence, and worship that Heidegger finds so problematic in Augustine. An encounter between another pair of giant figures is rehearsed by Michael Nolan in his essay “Man’s Natural Condition: Aquinas and Luther on Original Sin,” which presents their respective and opposing views regarding human nature and the conflict between good and evil. Nolan argues that according to Luther human nature is perverted but that Aquinas takes the opposite view: while we are not perfect, we have a knowledge of good, and this knowledge leads us to appreciate the natural law. Nolan challenges what appears to be a deeply embedded attitude of the typical Christian mind, namely that we have a strong inclination to evil. Humans do wicked things, sometimes exceedingly wicked. But for the most part we have an inclination to good. Indeed, if we had an inclination to evil there would be so much wrongdoing that the human race could scarcely survive. In his study “Philosophical Sources of Aquinas’ Quarta Via,” Patrick Masterson charts the main lines of the philosophical sources of Aquinas’ fourth argument for the existence of God. These are early Greek, Neoplatonic, medieval, and Arabian sources. He discusses the interplay in the argument between Platonic and Aristotelian influences and elucidates the priority accorded by Aquinas to the latter. The discussion calls into question interpretations of the proof which deny
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importance to the textual reference to the principle of efficient causation. It therefore disputes interpretations in terms of exemplarism which suggest that our comparative judgments are possible only because we possess a virtual but real knowledge of God as the ultimate object of our intellectual desire. (A detailed defense of the argument in terms of efficient causation is provided in the author’s recent book The Sense of Creation.) The relation between philosophy and theology, and the autonomous grounding of philosophy, are explored by Tim Lynch in his essay “Philosophy and Its Value: Reflections on Fides et Ratio.” Lynch draws upon the papal encyclical Fides et Ratio to outline the emergence of philosophy in the native wisdom carried by the traditions and stories of all cultures and societies. The development of philosophy in a more formal sense is then traced to the deliberate consideration given by some ancient Greek thinkers as well as later Christian writers to the evidence for prospective judgments and to the logical grounds for potential conclusions. The sense in which formal philosophy depends upon its informal predecessors is explored, and in this light views attributed to Cottier, Russell, and Heidegger are critically assessed. The legitimacy of philosophy’s quest for the originative source of all things is affirmed, so that the naturalism of thinkers like Quine and Sellars is brought into question. Lynch’s essay then examines the view that the philosopher seeks truth merely for the joy of the quest and asserts the irrationality of withholding judgment when the evidence is given. The achievement of true judgment is not desertion from the cognitive quest but rather its partial fulfillment. Some brief reflections on the usefulness of philosophy with regard to ethical questions, to the special sciences, and to theology are added, and the piece concludes by affirming the intrinsic value of the subject, so that there is a sense in which philosophy is quite useless. A somewhat different approach is adopted by James O’Shea in his contribution “Kant and Dennett on the Epistemic Status of Teleological Principles.” O’Shea investigates the vexed issue of how to correctly interpret Kant’s attempted justification of the use of teleological principles in natural philosophy (in particular, in biological explanation), which he seeks to illuminate by means of a comparison with
Introduction 9
Daniel Dennett’s views on the “design stance.” The central difficulty is that while well-known aspects of Kant’s critical philosophy entail the objective primacy of mechanistic explanation and seem to rule out the possibility of any objective purposiveness in nature, Kant also argues plausibly that the attribution of adaptive functional forms to living things is typically indispensable if we are to successfully explain their behavior. It is not enough to respond to this problem by pointing out that Kant characterizes his regulative maxims of teleology as “merely subjective” heuristic principles. Kant’s account is more than just the unsatisfying conclusion that we must treat nature “as if ” it were governed by principles that we know, objectively, cannot really be true of nature. By means of a comparison between Kant’s teleological maxims and Dennett’s views on the intentional stance and the design stance, O’Shea offers a compelling argument that Kant’s views on the status of teleological explanation are more insightful than has often been thought. In attempting to defend a conception of the quasi-objective and norm-laden explanatory ascription of purposes to organisms, while simultaneously contending for the objective primacy (in principle) of mechanistic explanation, Kant was not merely offering an implausible patch-up job in response to ruptures in the critical system. Rather, he was grappling with a crucial philosophical problem that continues to raise structurally similar conceptual challenges, as Dennett shows, even within the post-Darwinian framework of contemporary evolutionary biology. In his contribution “Human Nature and One-Eyed Reason,” Ciarán McGlynn considers the limitations of the Enlightenment’s understanding of human nature by exploring Whitehead’s famous image. He argues that the metaphors and mode of abstraction dominating Enlightenment thinking, and much of contemporary science, have facilitated the construction of a diminished ontology. The metaphor of one-eyed reason has the merit of suggesting that the Enlightenment worldview is deficient in what it sees to be the extent of reality. This limitation is particularly evident in the case of human nature: first-person ontology is notoriously difficult to fit into the third-person view of contemporary science. Having surveyed how Enlightenment thinkers and their progeny addressed or eschewed the problem of
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human nature, McGlynn argues that the existence of consciousness is the deep mystery eluding contemporary theories of human nature. The monocular approach of the Enlightenment legacy needs to be revised by first being detached from the metaphors that have bewitched it in the past. It is necessary to have a more encompassing view of the self and to recognize that such a view will involve elements not currently offered by any theory of human nature. In her essay “Relativism and Religious Diversity,” Maria Baghramian investigates the phenomenon of religious diversity and disagreement. She outlines five possible approaches to the phenomenon of diversity and finds them unconvincing. She then considers relativism as a solution to the problem of religious disagreement; she argues that the relativist achieves a resolution of the initial problematic at the cost of undermining the claim that religious beliefs can be true or objective. To accept religious relativism as a solution to the problem of diversity is to deprive religion of its power to convince or persuade the nonbeliever. If diversity of religious belief is a fact, then the only reasonable approach, she suggests, is to adopt an ethical stance of mutual tolerance and respect for such diversity. In his contribution entitled “The Plagues of Desecration: Roger Scruton and Richard Rorty on Life after Religion,” Mark Dooley challenges the solution to the question of religion proposed by Richard Rorty, who writes that getting rid of God-talk is “no big deal.” From his neopragmatist perspective, it is simply a matter of reweaving a particular belief that has run its course. Mark Dooley asks whether our webs of belief and desire can be rewoven so randomly. In seeking an answer to this complex question, he turns to the writings of the English philosopher Roger Scruton, who argues that even though the “human world is a social world, and socially constructed,” we cannot follow Rorty in constructing it “simply as we please.” There are, Scruton argues, “constants of human nature”—moral, aesthetic, and religious—which we defy at our peril and which we must strive to obey. Dooley seeks to defend Scruton’s position and to show (pace Rorty) that mankind’s “peculiar metaphysical predicament” persists in spite of neopragmatism in particular and postmodernism in general. For Scruton, that predicament is revealed in the tension between the
Introduction 11
subjective viewpoint and the world of objects, a tension that ultimately “gives rise to the experience of sanctity.” The most militant, programmatic challenge to religion in recent philosophy is commonly associated with the writings of Richard Dawkins. “Dawkins’ Fear of Reason,” by Brendan Purcell, might be seen as an “open letter” to Richard Dawkins. It begins by situating Dawkins’ God Delusion in the Vienna School’s reduction of reason to the rationality of the natural sciences. There, what alone counts as evidence is reducible to sense perception—a criterion not established in any scientific experiment. Next, Dawkins’ blind spot in philosophical theology, his conflating of God with religion, is considered. And, given Dawkins’ attack on religion, his avoidance of the one nonreligious tradition where the notion of God emerged—classical Greek philosophy—is strange, if not intellectually weak-kneed: Xenophanes and Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle, all formulated their understanding of God in terms of reason, yet go unmentioned in The God Delusion. Dawkins’ core argument against the existence of God is that of complexity, since the existing complexity of the world must be explained by a more complex cause, while traditionally God is held to be simple. Purcell suggests that Dawkins’ own practice of advocating what he regards as a simple theory (natural selection) to explain complex realities should at least have given him pause. On another front, Thomas Nagel and John Cornwell criticize Dawkins’ refusal to consider what has always been regarded as a philosophical starting point for the question of God, namely contingency. The final sections of the essay question Dawkins’ assertion that religion is primarily a by-product of fear and wonder whether Dawkins himself is fearful of the radical openness to the logos to which Pope Benedict XVI has invited all genuine truth seekers. In his essay “The Experiential Argument for the Existence of God in Gabriel Marcel and Alvin Plantinga,” Brendan Sweetman argues that the work of Gabriel Marcel makes an important contribution to the question of what is involved in an experience of God. He develops this position by means of an elaboration of Marcel’s key themes in the philosophy of religion and by concrete illustrations of the experiences of fidelity and hope. The paper concludes with a comparison of
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Marcel’s approach to religious experience with that of Alvin Plantinga from the Anglo-American tradition in recent philosophy of religion. Sweetman argues that Marcel’s approach can be more fruitful than Plantinga’s for an analysis of religious experience and its connection to the existence of God. A different perspective on religion is offered by Ciarán Benson in a meditative reflection entitled “A Secular Spirituality? James, Dennett, and Dawkins.” Benson writes as a secular humanist anxious to defend the category of “the spiritual.” Taking Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett as his interlocutors, he is fully accepting of the evolutionary account of human being but critical of the ways in which cultural- historical achievements, with their attendant structuring of symbolic consciousness, are diminished by Dawkins in particular. The work of the Canadian evolutionary psychologist Merlin Donald finds much greater favor with Benson. Dennett fully acknowledges the continuing power of William James’ magisterial The Varieties of Religious Experience while arguing that the explanatory power of James’ analyses of subjective experiences is superseded by the reach of evolutionary forces. Against this, Benson argues that the category of “the mystical experience,” as unfolded by James, retains its importance today, if not in many contemporary evolutionary psychological approaches, then certainly in the field of what may be called the “poetic imagination.” In support of this he draws on the reflections of many prominent contemporary poets. Benson argues for the neglected potency of “poetic apprehensions” of the world as a counterbalance to “scientific apprehensions.” He endorses the view that art and religion have common evolutionary and historical experiential roots, and he reminds us that the divisive nature of contemporary religious debate within and between religions, as well as between orthodox religions and forms of atheism, is due not to what James understood as the originating mystical sense of “the More”—the reality of which might be accepted across the board—but rather to the institutionalization of what James called “over-beliefs.” Art and religion are central also to Richard Kearney’s essay “Eucharistic Imagination in Merleau-Ponty and James Joyce.” Kearney compares a phenomenology of the flesh with James Joyce’s writing on
Introduction 13
sacramental epiphanies in Ulysses. Starting with an analysis of Husserl’s phenomenological account of the lived body, Kearney goes on to show how this is radically developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his notion of sacramental sensibility in The Phenomenology of Perception and other writings on literature and art. In the second part of the essay, Kearney relates this to Joyce’s literary exploration of an aesthetics of everyday incarnation and eros where the sacred and the secular intertwine. A number of other contributions also treat themes central to the phenomenological movement. Dermot Moran’s wide-ranging essay is entitled “Immanence, Self-Experience, and Transcendence in Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein, and Karl Jaspers.” Moran argues that phenomenology, understood as a philosophy of immanence, has had an ambiguous, uneasy relationship with transcendence, the wholly other, or numinous. If phenomenology restricts its evidence to givenness and what has phenomenality, what becomes of that which is withheld or cannot in principle come to givenness? In his essay he examines attempts to acknowledge the transcendent in the writings of two phenomenologists, Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein (who attempted to fuse phenomenology with neo-Thomism); he also considers the influence of the existentialist Karl Jaspers, who made transcendence an explicit theme of his writing. Moran argues that Husserl does recognize the essential experience of transcendence within immanence; even the idea of a physical thing has “dimensions of infinity” included within it. Similarly, Husserl asserts profoundly, every “outside” is what it is only as understood from the inside. Jaspers too makes the experience of transcendence central to human existence: it is the very measure of my own depth. For Edith Stein, everything temporal points toward the timeless structural ground which makes it what it is. Transcendence is an intrinsic part of being itself. Furthermore, the very lack of self- sufficiency of my own self shows that the self requires a ground outside itself, in the transcendent. There is strong convergence between the three thinkers studied on the concept of transcendence, which is indeed a central, if largely unacknowledged, concept in phenomenology in both Husserl and his followers (Stein) but also, through Jaspers, in Heidegger.
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It is perhaps apt that, tackling as it does the challenge to phenomenology from intersubjectivity, Belinda McKeon’s essay, “Presuming the Other from Stein to Husserl: Empathy and the Margins of Experience,” moves from personal reminiscence to an analysis of the difficulties and complexities of accounting phenomenologically for the Other. When McKeon was a postgraduate student in the School of Philosophy at UCD, Gerald Hanratty, knowing that she was working on Husserlian theories of intersubjectivity, loaned her his own heavily annotated copy of Edith Stein’s On the Problem of Empathy. In the act of reading another’s annotations on yet another’s words (indeed, on the translated words of another, lending to the encounter a fourth level of distance and fallibility), McKeon finds a metaphor for the fraught process of intersubjective empathy with which Stein and Husserl grappled in their phenomenology. Her essay shows how Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations (1931), which is regarded as his mature work on intersubjectivity and which approaches that subject through the lens of empathy, allows him to trace in intricate detail the way in which the Other is experienced as Other by the ego. However, Husserl’s empathydriven process is, as McKeon shows, problematic because it fails ultimately to account for the experience with the limit-Other, the subject who is truly radically Other to the intending ego for whom the question of empathy persisted as a serious challenge throughout his career. The Cartesian Meditations represents a departure, on the question of empathy, from the manuscripts and research notes on which Edith Stein would have worked with Husserl at Freiburg. But since it was Stein’s editing and reworking of those manuscripts (and, some argue, her writing of some sections) which gave shape and focus to the sections of Ideen II which reckon with the question of empathy, Stein’s shadow—her pencil marks, so to speak, in the margin—can be seen, too, in the work which is regarded as Husserl’s mature work on intersubjectivity, the Fifth Cartesian Meditation, which dates from 1928. Like Stein, Husserl argues in the Fifth Meditation that empathy is a specific mode of consciousness which puts us in touch with the feelings and beliefs of others in a manner that is not direct but is still highly reliable. But like Stein he struggles with the problem of pre-
Introduction 15
sumption—the presuming of the other, which comes as an unavoidable corollary of the kind of empathic understanding traced and described by them both. Three essays are concerned with Husserl’s most famous—and controversial—pupil, Martin Heidegger, as his thought relates to others in the ongoing tradition of Western philosophy. In “The Unity of Thought in Aristotle, Kant, and Heidegger,” Brian Elliott assesses Heidegger’s contribution to understanding human cognition. Within accounts of Western philosophy it is generally assumed that Kant’s critical project marks a definitive break with the metaphysical tradition founded by Aristotle. Through detailed analysis of certain aspects of the theories of cognition offered by Aristotle and Kant respectively, Elliott questions this standard assumption. One salient feature of convergence between the two thinkers is the notion of imagination as a key mediating cognitive act or function. Both thinkers also endorse what might be called a vertical hierarchy of cognitive powers, with sensation or sensible intuition counting as basic and primitive, and rational thought as ultimate and most advanced. The overriding concern in both the Aristotelian and Kantian accounts is to identify an effective act or source of cognitive unity. In both cases a form of imagination is seen as key to such unity, though the respective analyses of imagination offered fail to give consistent and cogent grounds for assuming that such unity can in fact be achieved through acts of the imagination. In his 1929 work Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger identifies Kant’s notion of the transcendental imagination as key to his critical account of cognition. Heidegger claims that Kant’s account of the imagination brings the traditional concern for unity within Western thought to the edge of an abyss, an abyss that he identifies as human freedom. Rather than offering an interpretation of Kant that effectively clarifies the nature of this “abyss,” Heidegger’s account turns on putative contradictions and tensions within Kant’s text that are in fact testimony to the subtlety and complexity of the Kantian account of cognition. Instead of offering a genuine alternative to the concern for ultimate rational unity that characterizes the tradition of Western thought, Heidegger’s concept of “ecstatic temporality” constitutes a less subtle, more strictly univocal reaffirmation of such a concern.
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In her study “Communication, Struggle, and Human Destiny: Ricoeur’s Judicial Praxis and Heidegger’s ‘Power of Destiny,’ ” Eileen Brennan explores parallels between Heidegger’s notion of “Destiny” and Paul Ricouer’s concept of ethical judicial praxis. Martin Heidegger famously declared that only in communicating and in struggling does the power of destiny become free. Brennan documents the references to communication and struggle in Paul Ricoeur’s account of ethical judicial praxis and considers the possibility that there might be something akin to Heidegger’s “power of destiny” in Ricoeur’s social and political philosophy. She notes that, on Ricoeur’s account, communication and struggle take place in and around the phenomenon of legal argumentation and provide the conditions for the emergence of the “better argument.” She observes that because it has both a “probabilistic logic” and an “ethics of argumentation,” (i.e., Audi alteram partem, “Hear the other side”), this winning argument has the power to more or less constrain the court to find in favor of the litigant who has made that argument. She draws attention to the fact that Heidegger saw the “power of destiny” as the very antithesis of a power to constrain. She concludes that there is no direct link between Ricoeur’s judicial praxis and Heidegger’s “power of destiny.” Nonetheless, she is convinced that had it not been for the communication and struggle that took place among Ricoeur’s contemporaries in the 1990s, it is unlikely that the problem of the seriously dysfunctional French justice system would have been properly identified and tackled. She suggests that Ricoeur’s engagement with French intellectuals, jurists, and politicians provides an illustration of the very power that Heidegger spoke of in § 74 of Being and Time. Heidegger is also at the center of Liberato Santoro-Brienza’s contribution, “Forgetting Aristotle? Heidegger’s Reflections on Mimesis.” The paper aims to show that, in his scattered reflections on the nature of art, Heidegger seems to imply that art has been understood—in the Western tradition, since Plato—primarily as the activity of copying and re-presenting, rather than as disclosure of Being: as aletheia. He devoted much attention to Plato’s reflections on mimesis and art, but—to begin—he gave us a simplified and impoverished version of Plato’s conception. More significant, however, is the fact that Heideg-
Introduction 17
ger shows a baffling lack of interest in what Aristotle had to say about both mimesis and art. The interpretation of Aristotle’s understanding of mimesis sheds light on a considerable lacuna in Heidegger’s awareness of the complexity of the issue. His forgetfulness of Aristotle’s conception of mimesis renders Heidegger’s reflections on the subject either confused or unconvincing. In his essay “Immanent Transcendence? Adorno’s Reconception of Metaphysics,” Brian O’Connor examines the efforts of Theodor Adorno to develop a new metaphysics in the face of widespread hostility in twentieth-century philosophy. As criticized by the Analytic and Continental philosophical movements, metaphysics appears to be inextricably grounded in certain quasi-theological philosophical commitments that are no longer defensible within philosophy. O’Connor demonstrates that Adorno’s reconception of metaphysics operates consistently from within historical materialism. It is therefore a modification of that position in view of historical materialism’s conventional eschewal of metaphysics. O’Connor’s essay reconstructs Adorno’s idea of nonidentity in order to assess whether, as Adorno contends, it can provide a new philosophical articulation of “metaphysical experience.” In his essay “On Losing Uniqueness: Singularity and Its Effacement in Derrida,” Timothy Mooney considers the French philosopher’s thesis that the irreplaceable uniqueness or singularity of every person is ultimately lost by graphic writing, which effaces it and leaves nothing but its trace. This view is already enunciated in Derrida’s early work. He goes on to contend that only in the perceptual experience of the Other can we apprehend something of what he calls his or her “intersection of singularities.” In this latter account Derrida might seem to privilege the apprehension of singularity through bodily presence. Mooney seeks to show, however, that he affirms the defeasible character of such experience, since he is attentive to the ineliminable roles of iterability, culture, and context, and indeed to various possibilities of dissimulation. In “The Person and the Common Good: Toward a Language of Paradox,” David Walsh considers one of the great problems in political language: how to talk about the common good when individuals always exceed it. Individuals are of course parts of the political whole
18 Human Destinies
and subordinate their private interests for the sake of their common interest. The difficulty is that individuals are not simply reducible to this role. Their significance constantly overflows their contributions to the common good. We recognize that in the most fundamental sense the value of individuals vastly surpasses any social good. This is why we accord them the inalienable protections of rights. Yet the ordinary political language of parts and wholes utterly fails to do justice to this most fundamental perspective. A notable exception is the contribution of personalist philosophy, although even it has fallen short of what is required. Personalism still discourses about persons as if it could treat them from the outside. What is needed is a willingness to accept the existential impossibility of stepping outside the horizon of personhood even while talking about persons. To confront the challenge, political language must embrace the language of paradox. Only by including in the linguistic formulations themselves the sense that persons are always more than we can say about them can we properly say anything about them. This is what Maritain aimed at in suggesting that society is “a whole composed of wholes.” Finally, in his essay “Ethics and Economics: Friends or Foes?,” Gerard Casey examines the relationship between economics and ethics. While there is a prereflective belief that ethics and economics could, in principle at least, engage with each other, both of them dealing with human action, the received wisdom is that they differ essentially, inasmuch as economics is descriptive, ethics prescriptive—the one telling us the way things are; the other, the way things ought to be. As such, then, while their interests may coincide materially, their formal perspectives appear to be ineluctably diverse. Not everyone accepts the received wisdom, so Casey traces a discussion between sharply opposed views on the appropriate way to conceive the relationship between economics and ethics. His conclusion is that two recurrent temptations must be resisted: the first, and more historically prevalent, is to fail to recognize the intrinsic constitutive order of economics by taking it to be merely a branch of ethics; the second, more recent and more potent temptation is to fail to recognize the limits of economics by attempting to make ethics a province of economics’ empire.
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Human Nature and Destiny in Aristotle Fran O’Rourke
Aristotle’s inquiry into human nature is manifold and far-reaching.1 Each aspect of his philosophy discloses an understanding of man as unique—distinguished by his diversity. Aristotle’s man merits the Odyssean epithet πολύτροπος: of many turns, versatile and resourceful. Superficially his creative and adaptive character is confirmed by the titles of Aristotle’s various treatises. A cursory review indicates that man is a living, breathing animal endowed with soul; he investigates the world and deliberates how he himself should live, pondering his actions as dramatically represented by the tragic poets. Aristotelian man sleeps, dreams, and is anxious about old age; living in a political state and fascinated by the animal world, he looks to the heavens in hope of discerning his destiny. Unsurprisingly man is the model and exemplar for Aristotle’s investigations in the animal world. Man is at once that which he knows best, and the best of what he knows. Aristotle introduces the History of Animals with an appropriate analogy: “First we should consider the parts of the human body. Every nation reckons currency with reference 19
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to the standard most familiar to itself; and we must do the same in other fields: man is, of necessity, the animal most familiar to us.”2 In Parts of Animals he declares: “The shape of his external parts is better known than that of other animals.”3 Through his observations as biologist Aristotle claims to indicate a variety of physical characteristics marking off man from other species. Man is the only creature whose hair goes gray, who laughs and can be tickled.4 He is the only animal with different eye colors—or at least the species with the greatest variety—and the only one, moreover, with eyelashes on both lids.5 While uniquely he can learn to make equal use of both hands, he is also the only animal that cannot move his ears.6 These quirky characteristics are of course mere obiter dicta and in no way intended as a serious catalog. Most philosophically significant is Aristotle’s observation that man is the only animal that stands upright, looks ahead, and projects his voice straight in front.7 There is for Aristotle a higher purpose in this anatomical difference: “For nature, as we declare, does nothing without purpose; and man alone of the animals possesses speech.”8 What distinguishes man most properly from other animals is the possession of logos. This is the source of all that is distinctive of human nature and behavior. It provides, moreover, the internal goal or telos for the elements which together make up his constitution. In one of those universalizing accounts which reveal his deep sense of metaphysical order and synthesis, Aristotle offers the following panorama concerning diverse life forms: Since it is the nature of plants to permanently remain in one location, they do not have a great variety of heterogeneous parts. For where there are few functions, few organs are required for their performance. . . . In those animals, however, that have not only life but also sensation, there is a greater multiplicity of parts; there is more diversity in some than in others, the greatest variety being found in those animals whose nature it is to share not only in life [τοῦ ζῆν], but in the good life [τοῦ εῦ ζῆν]. Such is mankind, for of the animals known to us, man alone partakes of the divine, or at least more than all the rest.9
Human Nature and Destiny in Aristotle 21
Man’s special place in the cosmos provides the ultimate reason for certain aspects of his makeup that are indispensable to his nature and function. Aristotle thus discerns cosmic purpose in the unique design of human anatomy. Instead of forelegs and forefeet, man has hands and arms, which allow him to turn his upper body toward the higher regions of the universe.10 There is even transcendent purpose in the distribution of the human body: “Man is the only animal that stands upright, and this is because his nature and essence are divine. Now the business of that which is most divine is to think and to be intelligent; and this would not be easy if there were a great deal of the body at the top weighing it down, for weight hampers the motion of the intellect and of the common sense [κοινὴ αἴσθησις].”11 Anatomy thus favors man’s special place in the universe. Nature never makes anything without a purpose;12 moreover, out of given conditions, she always effects that which is the better.13 Nature provides the necessary means to fulfill the various functions performed by each living substance. The theory of “intelligent design” is applied with particular detail by Aristotle to man’s head and face, since these are clearly associated with his ability to interpret the world and communicate his thoughts. His comment upon the face is noteworthy: “In man the portion of the body between the head and the neck is called the face [πρόσωπον], thus called, it would appear, from the function it performs. Man, the only animal that stands upright, is also the only one that looks straight ahead [πρόσωθεν ὄπωπε] and who directs his voice straight before him [πρόσω].”14 Aristotle’s explanation accords with the standard explanation of “person”—the actor’s mask that is worn to portray a character and that helps to project the voice on stage. The structure of the head also serves a purposive goal, in keeping with the different operations of sight and hearing. “Nature has located the sense-organs in a very satisfactory manner. The ears are half-way round the circumference of the head, because they are to hear sounds from all directions alike and not only from straight before them. The eyes face front: this is because sight is along one straight line, and we must be able to see along the line in which we are moving, which is directly forward.”15 Nature’s handiwork may be observed likewise in the structure of the mouth and tongue, which are coordinated to make speech possible.
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Whereas in other animals the lips serve as protection for the teeth, in man “they are more especially intended to serve a higher office, contributing in common with other parts to man’s faculty of speech. For just as nature has made man’s tongue unlike that of other animals . . . for the perception of savours and for speech, so also has she acted with regard to the lips, and made them serve both for speech and for the protection of the teeth.”16 He provides a detailed description: For vocal speech consists of combinations of the letters, and most of these it would be impossible to pronounce, were the lips not moist, nor the tongue such as it is. For some letters are formed by closures of the lips and the others by applications of the tongue. . . . It was necessary that the two parts should from the start be severally adapted to fulfil the office mentioned above, and be of appropriate character. Therefore are they made of flesh, and flesh is softer in man than in any other animal, the reason for this being that of all animals, man has the most delicate sense of touch.17
The articulation of meaning through the manipulation of sound requires that the organs of speech be free and easily adaptable. If man were tongue-tied—literally, like other animals—he could not produce the endless sounds required to express thoughts symbolically through the physical medium of sound. “It is in man that the tongue attains its greatest degree of freedom, of softness, and of breadth.”18 The human tongue is designed to articulate various sounds and produce speech; it has a looseness and freedom lacking in the tongues of other animals. “It has, also, to articulate the various sounds and to produce speech, and for this a tongue which is soft and broad is admirably suited, because it can roll back and dart forward in all directions; and herein too its freedom and looseness assist it.”19 The voice, moreover, manifests the deeper presence of human soul: “Voice is the sound produced by that which has a soul; for none of the soulless creatures has a voice; they can only be said metaphorically to speak.”20 Aristotle contends that man’s erect stature is in keeping with his divine nature. Instead of legs in front, nature has given him hands and
Human Nature and Destiny in Aristotle 23
arms. Anaxagoras had earlier claimed it was the possession of hands that made man the most intelligent of animals. Aristotle argues it was the other way around; it is more plausible that man is endowed with hands because he is the most intelligent. “Hands are an instrument; and Nature, like a sensible human being, always assigns an organ to the animal that can use it.”21 It is worth citing his view at length: We may conclude, then, that, if this is the better way, and if Nature always does the best she can in the circumstances, it is not true to say that man is the most intelligent animal because he possesses hands, but he has hands because he is the most intelligent animal. We should expect the most intelligent to be able to employ the greatest number of instruments to good purpose; now the hand would appear to be not one single instrument but many; it is, as it were, an instrument for instruments. Thus it is to that animal which has the capacity to acquire the greatest number of arts that nature has given the most useful of instruments, namely the hand.22
It must be recognized that there is a circularity in Aristotle’s explanation of the stewardship of nature. He declares that nature always provides the apparatus appropriate for the operations performed by any particular kind of animal or plant. Should he not affirm, more importantly, that it is nature itself which is the very origin of such living individuals in the first place? Aristotle rejects the view that man is the least well constructed of animals because he is barefoot, unclothed, and without a weapon to defend himself. He points out that all other animals have just one means of defense, which they cannot exchange for another. “They are forced to always sleep and perform every action, as it were, with their shoes on.”23 Man, on the other hand, is not restricted to a single mode of defense but has a great many at his disposal from which he can choose the most appropriate. The secret of his armory is his hand, whose marvelous versatility is extolled by Aristotle: “For the hand is talon, claw and horn; it is spear and sword, and any other weapon or tool whatever: it can be all of these, because it can grasp and hold them
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all.”24 Aristotle outlines in detail the marvelous manner in which nature has designed the shape (εἶδος) of the hand so that it can fulfill all of these tasks: its diversity and adaptability, its joints, parts, mutual order, and arrangement, the varying length of fingers and their relative position vis-à-vis one another. There is an obvious parallel between this passage and De Anima III, 8, where Aristotle compares νοῦς, paramount among the powers of soul, with the hand as the principal organ of the body. The hand is the tool of tools, as νοῦς is the form of forms. The hand literally manu-factures all physical tools—just as νοῦς cognitively receives into its own intellective form the essential forms of all natures. Given the parallel between body and soul, yet the priority of soul, the primacy of the hand in the physical world derives from its role in the service of intellect. In the Politics Aristotle declares outright that man is the summit and goal of all nature. There is an evident hierarchy between all living substances within the cosmos. Plants exist for the benefit of animals, and animals for the good of man: “Now if nature makes nothing incomplete, and nothing in vain, the inference must be that she has made all animals for the sake of man.”25 The universe presents for Aristotle a scale of value and perfection, with man at the summit of the observable world. Within human nature there is also an order and hierarchy: the soul is superior and therefore the natural ruling principle; the hierarchy of the natural world is reflected within the individual. Reason and intelligence are the goal toward which our nature strives (ὁ δὲ λόγος ἡµῖν καὶ ὁ νοῦς τῆς φύσεως τέλος).26 Both the birth and education of humans are ordered toward this end. While recognizing that man’s nature manifests a number of dualities, Aristotle stresses that these comport a series of subsidiary and subservient functions, all of which point to the supremacy of reason. As soul and body are two, so we observe that the soul also has two parts, the irrational part and the part possessing reason [τὸ λόγον ἔχον], and their corresponding states, desire [ὄρεξις] and intelligence [νοῦς]. And as the body is prior in its development to the soul, so the
Human Nature and Destiny in Aristotle 25
irrational part of the soul is prior to the rational. And this also is obvious, because passion and will, and also appetite, exist in children even as soon as they are born, but it is the nature of reasoning and intelligence to arise in them as they grow older. Therefore in the first place it is necessary for the training of the body to precede that of the mind, and secondly for the training of the appetite to precede that of the intelligence; but the training of the appetite must be for the sake of the intellect, and that of the body for the sake of the soul.27
Man’s natural superiority above animals, and his moral and social nature, are grounded, as noted, in the possession of intellect and language. While some animals have a “voice” with which to indicate pain and pleasure, speech enables man to articulate the meaning of the world. Animals sense pleasure and pain, but man alone grasps their nature and cause; he distinguishes between what is beneficial and harmful, and he alone knows right from wrong. The possession of logos explains why he is more political than even the most gregarious of animals. Aristotle again invokes his guiding maxim that nature does nothing in vain.28 “For it is the special property of man in distinction from the other animals that he alone has perception of good and bad and right and wrong and the other moral qualities, and it is partnership in these things that makes a household and a city-state.”29 The endowment of logos, with its fruits of reason, deliberation, speech, and logic, however, has its associated dangers: “For man, when perfected, is the best of the animals [ὥσπερ γὰρ καὶ τελεωθὲν βέλτιστον τῶν ζῴων ὁ ἄνθρωπός ἐστιν], but, when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all; since armed injustice is the more dangerous, and he is equipped at birth with arms, meant to be used by intelligence and virtue, which he may use for the worst ends. That is why, if he has not virtue, he is the most unholy and the most savage of animals, and the most full of lust and gluttony.”30 Viewed also with regard to emotional and moral dispositions, man is the most advanced creature. Aristotle engages in his characteristic search for similarity with an investigation into the “character” of
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animals.31 He even detects constant patterns of behavioral difference between male and female across the animal world. He catalogs all animal species according to gender with respect to such dispositions as compassion, shame, deceit, memory, courage, and cunning.32 “There are traces of these characters in virtually all animals, but they are all the more evident in those that are more possessed of character and especially in man. For man’s nature is the most complete [ἔχει τὴν φύσιν ἀποτετελεσµένην], so that these dispositions too are more evident in humans.”33 Both the continuity of nature and the excellence of mankind are again observed. According to Aristotle, all living things necessarily possess a principle distinguishing them from nonliving beings: “That which has soul is distinguished from what does not, by living.”34 Soul (ψυχή) is the actualizing form (εἶδος) or animating element which causes a substance to live, investing it with relative autonomy. He notes that his predecessors defined the soul by three properties: movement, perception, and incorporeality—each of which, he remarks, refers to a basic principle.35 “What primarily distinguishes something which has a soul from that which does not, is movement and sensation.”36 Ψυχή is for plants the principle of nutrition; animals are endowed, in addition, with sensation,37 and humans with intellection. Of all investigations, that into the soul is one of the most difficult but also the most important—recall Heraclitus’ remark that we could never fathom the depths of the soul, so deep is its logos.38 Aristotle repeatedly notes the difficulties associated with the study of soul and mind.39 The soul is the most elusive of targets and cannot be fastened upon by reason. The difficulties arise from its excellence. Aristotle begins his treatise On the Soul with the declaration: “We regard all knowledge as beautiful and valuable, but one kind more so than another, either in virtue of its accuracy, or because it relates to higher and more wonderful things. On both these counts it is reasonable to put an inquiry into the soul among subjects of the foremost rank. Moreover this investigation seems likely to make a substantial contribution to the whole body of truth, and particularly to the study of nature; for the soul is in a sense the principle [ἀρχὴ] of animal life.”40
Human Nature and Destiny in Aristotle 27
According to Aristotle, the distinctive characteristic of soul is that it is itself its own cause of movement;41 in turn it is the source of movement in the body.42 It is fundamental for Aristotle that the soul unifies all vital activities of the human individual: vegetal, sensitive, and intellective. “It is the soul by which we primarily live, perceive, and think; so that soul is the logos or form, and not the matter.”43 Although it has distinct capacities and operations, the soul itself is one—the body certainly cannot be the source of unity for the individual: “On the contrary the soul seems rather to combine the body into a whole; for when the soul departs, the body disintegrates and decays.”44 Aristotle provides the radical explanation for the unity of the body in his definition of soul as the “first actuality of a natural body which potentially possesses life.”45 The soul gives to the body its unity, existence, and life. While unity and existence are used in many senses, their primary sense is that of actuality.46 He explains: “In living beings life is their existence, and of these the soul is the cause and first principle.”47 Aristotle was obliged to coin a new term to formulate his definition: “Soul is the first actuality [ἐντελέχεια, i.e., completeness, perfection] of a natural body with organs.”48 The soul is the primary perfection which completes the body, determining it as the kind of essence it is. The soul is said to be the “cause and first principle of the living body” and “the essence of a particular body.”49 The unity of the individual substance is guaranteed by the actualizing force with which the soul organizes the body into a unitary whole; it is grounded in the relation of act to potency. The activity of the soul pervades all of its aspects; even the unity of the organs which feed the blood supply is attributed to soul. They begin from a single source, yet extend throughout the body: “The reason why these vessels coincide in one principle and begin from a single cause is that the sensory soul is in all animals actually one.”50 According to Aristotle, it is a universal law of nature that in every whole that is composed of parts, there is a commanding principle and a submissive element.51 This is verified most clearly in living things, where soul is the ruling principle. “In the first place an animal consists of soul and body, the former naturally ruling, the latter being ruled.”52
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If the individual is corrupted, the soul will be dominated by the body, but nature ordains that the soul should rule the body, and intelligence the appetites. Similarly, men are the natural rulers of nonrational animals, since these submit not to logos but to their passions.53 Aristotle emphasizes the unity of actions performed by the soulbody composite. Thinking, remembering, loving, and hating, for example, belong not to the mind but to the individual.54 It is more accurate to say, not that the soul pities, learns, or thinks, but that the individual man does these things by means of the soul.55 Aristotle recognizes the intimate bond between soul and body, as illustrated by the psychosomatic character of such affective states as anger, gentleness, fear, pity, courage, joy, love, and hatred. Referring to the “affections” of the soul (παθή), he remarks: If we consider the majority of them, there seems to be no case in which the soul can act or be acted upon without involving the body; e.g. anger, courage, appetite, and sensation generally. . . . It seems that all the affections of soul involve a body—passion, gentleness, fear, pity, courage, joy, loving, and hating; in all these there is a concurrent affection of the body. In support of this we may point to the fact that, while sometimes on the occasion of violent and striking occurrences there is no excitement or fear felt, on others faint and feeble stimulations produce these emotions, viz. when the body is already in a state of tension resembling its condition when we are angry. Here is a still clearer case: in the absence of any external cause of terror we find ourselves experiencing the feelings of a man in terror. From all this it is obvious that the affections of soul are ideas expressed in matter [λόγοι ἔνυλοι].56
The relation between soul and body is one of the most challenging topics of De Anima. Though Aristotle has declared that there obtains between soul and body a relationship of act to potency, the nature of soul remains as obscure as ever. In De Anima Aristotle states that while the soul cannot exist without the body, neither is it in any sense a body.57 It is the form of the body but is not itself corporeal. One of the
Human Nature and Destiny in Aristotle 29
most testing remarks in Parts of Animals is the statement that no part of an animal is either purely material or purely immaterial.58 By emphasizing the simplicity of the individual substance, and the unity of body and soul, Aristotle raises the greatest obstacle to the independence of the soul and its survival after death: “One can no more ask if the body and the soul are one than if the wax and the impression it receives are one, or speaking generally the matter of each thing and the form of which it is the matter.”59 We are confronted with two fundamental and related problems in Aristotle’s psychology: the relation between body and soul, and the ultimate nature of soul. Aristotle’s basic premise is that the soul is the form of the body. The question is whether its entire being and activity are exhausted by that function and role, or whether it has independence beyond its actualization of the body. Is it a τόδε τι (hoc aliquid, “real particular”) in itself as well as the εἶδος of the body? Can it exist independently as an incorporeal reality? Aristotle is concerned from the start of De Anima, not only with the nature of the soul, but also with its ultimate destiny: Is it indissolubly bound to the body, or is it immortal? This would be an expected corollary of its “divine” nature, which—possibly for cultural reasons—he seems to accept. From the frequency of his assertions it appears that Aristotle hopes, if possible, to establish the immortality of the soul—or at least of the intellect. Early in De Anima he outlines the context for his discussion of the soul’s ultimate status and its possible survival. Having emphasized the unity of body and soul, and having strongly stated the problems of the soul acting in separation, he states: “Thinking seems the most probable exception; but if this too proves to be a form of imagination or to be impossible without imagination, it too requires a body as a condition of its existence. If there is any way of acting or being acted upon proper to soul, soul will be capable of separate existence; if there is none, its separate existence is impossible.”60 In the first book of De Anima Aristotle tentatively proposes the immortality of the intellect: “Νοῦς seems to be an independent substance implanted in us, which cannot be destroyed.”61 He remarks that if the intellect, like the sense organs, were subject to decay, this would
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inevitably occur with the debility of old age; this, as we know, does not happen. Sensation on the other hand usually declines with the aging of the body’s sense organs: Aristotle suggests that if an old man were to receive a young man’s eyes he would regain a young man’s sight.62 The mind is unaffected since it has no special organ; it may be affected indirectly, because its activity belongs to the individual, whose body is clearly affected by the aging process. The individual ceases to think when the substance is corrupted, and the compound of body and soul dissolved. “Thinking, loving and hating are not affections of the mind, but of the individual man who possesses the mind.”63 It is the individual who thinks, just as it is the individual who perceives, loves, and hates; the individual is a unity of body and soul. The dependence of intellect upon the body, however, is not the same as that of sensation. Aristotle makes an important distinction: memory and love terminate with the death of the individual, but thought and reflection (τὸ νοεῖν καὶ τὸ θεωρεῖν) are beyond destruction.64 The mind, he suggests, is perhaps more divine and therefore unaffected (ὁ δὲ νοῦς ἴσως θειότερον τι καὶ ἀπαθές ἐστιν).65 In De Anima II, Aristotle restates his belief in the immortality of the mind, while recognizing the intrinsic obscurity of the inquiry: “In the case of the mind and the thinking faculty nothing is yet clear, but it seems to be a distinct kind of soul, and it alone admits of being sepa rated, as the immortal from the perishable.”66 While once again the mind’s immortality is tentatively proposed (ἔοικε), it is clear (φανερὸν) that while other parts of the soul may be conceived in isolation from the body they cannot exist separately. He stresses the essential difference between senses and intellect. “There is,” he asserts, “a difference between the faculties of sensation and thought, just as perceiving is different from thinking.”67 Animal and plant souls may indeed be conceived by thought as separate but can have no independent existence. And while strict hylomorphism theoretically requires that the human soul should perish with the individual’s death, νοῦς may be an exception, since it is not material (i.e., composed of parts) and cannot suffer disintegration.68 Aristotle’s hylomorphism has been praised by some as best safeguarding the unity of the human individual;69 for others it is intrinsi-
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cally linked to an outmoded physics and hence no longer sustainable. The current orthodoxy regards Aristotle’s views on the immateriality of nous as an awkward inconsistency. H. M. Robinson remarks: “More often than not nowadays the favoured opinion is that Aristotle is essentially or in spirit some sort of materialist. I say that the favoured opinion is that he is a materialist essentially or in spirit because few dare to say that he actually is a materialist, because few dare to deny that his doctrine of nous is immaterialist.”70 While expressing reservations concerning Robinson’s exposé, Christopher Shields agrees that “the majority of commentators have disregarded Aristotle’s conception of an immaterial nous.”71 The immateriality of νοῦς, however, is pivotal to many aspects of Aristotle’s theory of man and may not be readily dismissed. Before dealing with νοῦς, we should point out that, according to Aristotle sensation is also an immaterial activity, since it is “the reception of the form of sensible objects without the matter” (ἄνευ τῆς ὕλης).72 Thus while physically absent the objects of knowledge can be present immaterially through sense images.73 Aristotle distinguishes between the organ of sensation, which has spatial magnitude (µέγεθος), and the (immaterial) power of sensation, which resides within the organ but is without magnitude.74 Aristotle notes the obvious parallels between intelligence and sensation.75 The fundamental difference is that sensation depends intrinsically upon a physical organ while intellect does not. The senses know individual things here and now, confined in time and space; νοῦς knows universal realities. These exist in some manner, he suggests, within the soul itself. A person may contemplate his thoughts at will but cannot arbitrarily chοose to sense a particular object; the object must itself be present, since sensation knows what is individual and external (τὰ αἰσθητὰ τῶν καθ’ ἕκαστα καὶ τῶν ἔξωθεν).76 Borrowing from Anaxagoras, Aristotle states that, since the soul knows all things, it must be “unmixed” (ἀµιγῆ).77 For Anaxagoras, the universal mind must be untainted in order to control the universe; for Aristotle, the human soul must be unadulterated in order to know. There is good reason, he says, to affirm that it is not mixed with the body but is noncorporeal or immaterial.78 If it were corporeal, it would
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inevitably have a determinate quality (such as hot or cold), which would make cognition of its contrary impossible. It would also require a physical organ, similar to those of the senses.79 Were it material, it could not receive the intelligible natures of all things; it must therefore be immaterial, simple, and impassible, without a determinate nature of its own.80 The soul, Aristotle states, has been well described as the “place of forms” (τόπος εἰδῶν);81 this applies, he explains, not to the soul as a whole, but to its thinking element; and the forms are contained not actually but potentially. He also defines it as the “form of forms” (εἶδος εἰδῶν),82 since it assimilates the forms of all things. The immateriality of the intellect is established in the first place by its universality; the clearest proof is its unlimited openness to every possible object. The sense faculties function, each infallibly in a particular domain, because they have a clearly limited range, determined by the receptivity of the sense organ. Sensation is directed toward a particular material object here and now, located narrowly in time and space. The intellect is open to the totality because it has no such organ. Its universality is a consequence of its immaterial capacity. Its target is universal reality—the unrestricted totality of beings in general (τα πάντα), as well as the universal concepts of those essences which are instantiated in countless substances (τα καθόλου). There is nothing in being whose essence cannot be the object of intellect; universality is the mark of immateriality. While the senses grasp particular individuals, the intellect knows universal essences according to their immaterial intelligibility.83 The nonmaterial character of intellect, and especially its independence from a physical organ, is further evidenced by its impassibility, that is, its imperviousness to damage by its object. The sense organ can be destroyed by violent stimulation: the ear by deafening sounds, the eye by intense light.84 The intellect does not suffer damage from intense thought; on the contrary, Aristotle remarks that if it has struggled with difficult matters it reflects more easily upon simpler matters. This allows him to conclude that “the faculty of sense is not apart from the body, whereas the mind is separable.”85 Of its nature immaterial, and independent of a physical organ, the intellect has neither magnitude nor parts: these would be a hindrance
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to the process of thinking. Examining Plato’s theory of the world-soul, Aristotle denies that it could be a magnitude;86 his reflections are equally valid for the human intellect. “The mind is one, and continuous like the process of thinking; and the process of thinking implies thoughts. But these are continuous in the same sense as numbers and not as magnitudes. So also the mind is not continuous in this sense, but it is either indivisible, or at any rate is not continuous as a magnitude. For, if it is a magnitude, how will it think with any one of its parts?”87 The mind must be single and complete, as are its thoughts, which are simple and indivisible. Mind grasps thoughts once and entire, not successively piece by piece, one part after another. If the mind were a material magnitude, it would have to know its object through its divisible parts. As Aquinas points out, “The intellect’s object is intelligibles, and intelligibles compose a unity.”88 In De Anima III, Aristotle considers the specific character of νοῦς, the thinking part of the soul; he specifically asks whether it is separable—either actually or only in thought. To explain the process whereby the forms of all things cognitively enter into the soul, he distinguishes between two functions of mind: a passive element, which “becomes” everything, and an active element, which “makes” everything.89 The latter is a positive state or “habit,” resembling that of light, which illuminates the potential meanings latent in sense images and transforms them into actually intelligible concepts to be received by the passive intellect. In this role, Aristotle states, the mind is separable, impassible, and unmixed, since its essence is activity.90 He then makes one of the most contested and controversial pronouncements to be found anywhere in his work: “Only when separated [χωρισθεὶς] does it achieve its proper nature, and this alone is immortal and eternal.”91 Aristotle’s reasoning is that since it is entirely active this element of the mind cannot itself be acted upon (ἀπαθές) and will thus be unaffected by the processes causing death;92 by contrast, the passive intellect is perishable (ὁ δὲ παθητικὸς νοῦς φθαρτὸς).93 To act upon is always superior to being acted upon; the active intellect is fully constituted in itself as cause and agent.94 Eternally active, it cannot be affected in any way and is entirely independent of the senses. It alone fulfills the condition laid down by Aristotle for immortality.
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To establish the soul’s immortality, Aristotle must prove that it is independent of matter, entirely free from the processes of the body. Any dependence whatsoever will negate the possibility of immortality. Thus if in order to act the intellect needs the cooperation of the senses, it will be unable to exist in separation from the body. Aristotle states repeatedly that the soul cannot think without images (ἄνευ φαντάσµατος);95 these are received through the senses and must be illuminated by the agent intellect. Thus Aristotle has no alternative but to declare that the passive intellect is mortal. The active intellect alone can exist separately from the body. Much debate and controversy would have been spared if Aristotle had explained more carefully what he meant by “separate.” Aquinas for one has no doubts about its meaning and expresses surprise at the controversy it provoked: “Indeed it is astonishing how easily some have let themselves be deceived by his calling the intellect ‘separate’; for the text itself makes it perfectly clear what he means,—namely that, unlike the senses, the intellect has no bodily organ. For the nobility of the human soul transcends the scope and limits of bodily matter. Hence it enjoys a certain activity in which bodily matter has no share; the potentiality to which activity is without a bodily organ; and in this sense only is it a ‘separate’ intellect.”96 One of the most disputed questions is the nature of immortality and eternity referred to by Aristotle. The meaning of this passage turns upon the meaning of “separate” (χωρισθεὶς). In an interesting interpretation, Gérard Verbeke rejects the customary reading of the passage as referring to the intellect in the state of separation which ensues after death, when the soul is removed from the accidental modifications which characterized its union with the individual.97 According to such an interpretation, death would restore the active intellect to its pure essence. Verbeke suggests, however, that the passive aorist of the verb here has, not a temporal meaning (i.e., “having been separated”), but a causal meaning (i.e., “because it is separated”). Aristotle is thus contrasting the agent intellect, not with its own previous condition of union, but with a different power (the passive intellect). Because the active intellect is separate, it is exclusively that which it is, namely cause
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and agent (αἴτιον καὶ ποιητικόν).98 The passive intellect, by contrast, depends upon the senses for its intelligible content; instead of being fully itself, it becomes all things (πάντα γίνεσθαι),99 in that identity with its object which, for Aristotle, is the essence of knowledge. In his discussion of the successive emergence of the distinctive souls, together with their graded powers, in Generation of Animals, Aristotle raises what he calls “the question of greatest difficulty” (ἀπορία πλείστη): “When and how and whence is a share in reason [νοῦς] acquired by those animals that participate in this principle?”100 His suggestion in that context is that it is not generated by the parents but can only come from outside (θύραθεν): “It remains, then, for the reason alone so to enter and alone to be divine, for no bodily activity has any connexion with the activity of reason.”101 According to Hicks, the latter phrase correctly explains the meaning of the word χωριστός in De Anima III, 5: the intellect is not only separable but actually separate, that is, “not involved in physical life.”102 This passage refers to the undifferentiated intellect, as does Aristotle’s statement at Metaphysics XII, 3, 1070a26, that there is nothing to impede the survival of νοῦς. Aristotle’s view on the immortality of the soul is far from definitive. His hesitation and lack of clarity allowed some to conclude that he denied the soul’s immortality. Martin Luther pronounced harshly: “Why, this wretched man, in his best book, On the Soul, teaches that the soul dies with the body, although many have tried with vain words to save his reputation.”103 The position of De Anima, that only the thinking function of the soul is immortal, involves a twofold inconsistency. First, it poses an obstacle for the unity of the individual, which is essential to his hylomorphic theory. Man’s substantial unity was a fundamental point of disagreement with Plato; for the latter the body was an impediment, whereas for Aristotle the soul needs the body to actualize its proper nature. Aristotle emphasizes in particular the unity of knowledge as the collaboration of mind and body. Knowledge is a continuity from sense and intellect, a progression from the sensible grasp of the individual physical object to an immaterial, intellectual insight into its universal character. While distinct, body and soul are inseparably united in the cognitive process: inseparable but not identical.
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Rejecting Plato’s view that the soul is separate, Aristotle himself argued: “It is quite clear that neither the soul nor any parts of it, if it has parts, can be separated from the body.”104 He himself, however, introduces such a distinction into the soul and proposes that νοῦς may be separable; to further compound the problem, he suggests that νοῦς properly constitutes the essence of the individual. The first objection against the immortality of the active intellect is that it jeopardizes the unity of the complete individual. A second objection is that it threatens the unity of the soul. Early in De Anima Aristotle emphasized that by the soul we live, perceive, and think; he is committed to the unity of all powers, vegetative, sensitive, and intellective, in a single soul. The human soul is origin of both the physical and immaterial operations of the individual. Aristotle’s requirement for survival is that at least one of the soul’s activities be independent of the body: one noncorporeal activity suffices to prove its essentially immaterial nature. If this requirement is fulfilled (by the agent intellect, as he argues), logically the entire soul should be immortal, not only a single isolated function. As we saw, Aristotle has a strong sense of the unity of the acting, living individual; this has been illustrated in a particular way by the close bond between the affective states of the soul and the condition of the body.105 Before considering the ultimate destiny of man in the light of a wider examination of his nature, I wish first to briefly consider the status of self-knowledge as treated by Aristotle. One of the most disputed questions of his psychology is how we know that we know. In his discussion of perception, Aristotle asks how we come to perceive that we see and hear (αἰσθανόµεθα ὅτι ὁρῶµεν καὶ ἀκούοµεν).106 He takes it as an evidence that the perceiver is aware of himself; in sensation we are aware not only of the object but also of the very activity of sensation and of our own existence.107 Were he troubled by Cartesian doubt, he could without hesitation assert: “I perceive, therefore I exist.” In De Anima, he suggests that the self-awareness accompanying perception is the work of the sense faculty itself.108 This, however, cannot be a satisfactory explanation in light of his distinction between sense and intellect. Intrinsically dependent upon a physical organ, sen-
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sation cannot be reflexive; consisting of parts outside parts (partes extra partes), the senses cannot bend back upon themselves in an act of selfknowledge. The activity of perception cannot be itself the object of sensation. He remarks in De Somno that it is not by sight that we become aware that we see.109 The solution may be found, I suggest, in the assertion that the soul is “in a sense” all that is.110 Aristotle states that when the soul has become each of its objects (ὅταν δ’ οὕτως ἕκαστα γένηται), then the mind is capable of thinking itself (αὐτὸς δὲ αὑτὸν τότε δύναται νοεῖν).111 Thus a significant consequence of the soul’s universality is its self-reflection. Because of its universal scope, the intellect may introspectively and concomitantly know every cognitive act of the individual, whether sensible or intellectual. The intellect knows itself, Aristotle suggests, as it does any other immaterial object: “And it is itself an object of thought, just as its objects are. For, in the case of those things which have no matter, that which thinks and that which is thought are the same; for contemplative knowledge and that which is known in that way are the same.”112 Aristotle applies to cognition his own metaphysics of causation: the action of the agent is identical with the passivity of the subject113—thus there is identity between the act of intellect and the reality of the intelligible as actually known. In knowing its intelligible object, the intellect knows itself; such knowledge, however, is always indirect.114 Although there is no direct knowledge of the self, this does not mean there is no substantial reality at the core of each human individual; the problem has to do rather with the very nature of knowledge and its origin in the senses. Considered in isolation, the mind as such has no complete nature in actuality; it must be activated through the objects of perception. In itself it resembles a tablet upon which nothing has been actually written. Until it thinks, the mind is itself nothing in actuality (ἐντελεχείᾳ οὐδέν).115 Awareness of oneself and of one’s activities is therefore concomitant with a knowledge of objects.116 All knowledge begins with the senses; “The mind in itself can have no nature [φύσιν µηδεµίαν] except its capacity to receive. That part of the soul, then, which we call mind . . . has no actual existence until it thinks.”117 Self-consciousness
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for Aristotle is always an attendant awareness of the self as acting. As Joseph Owens notes, “In that concomitant cognition, however, there is immediate and unshakable awareness of a single agent, namely oneself. This immediate awareness is not of a sense, or of a mind, or of a soul. It is of the man or woman as cognitive agent. It is of the anthropos, or, as we would say today, of the person who thinks and acts by means of those faculties or parts.”118 In an insightful passage of De Anima, already referred to, Aristotle points out that it is more accurate to say, not that the soul pities, learns, or thinks, but that the individual man does these things by means of the soul.119 “Thinking, loving and hating are not qualities of the mind, but rather of the individual man who possesses the mind.”120 In his treatise On Sense and Sensible Objects, he notes that vision occurs not in the eye but in the observer.121 Aristotle’s most important inquiry into man’s nature and destiny may be found in the Nicomachean Ethics, where he treats explicitly the question of man’s end and purpose. He begins this work with the general observation that all things seek the good. This description has indeed the value of a definition: “The good is that which all things seek.”122 The ultimate human good has a special name, “happiness” (εὐδαιµονία).123 Man’s supreme good and the nature of happiness may be ascertained, he suggests, if we determine the function of man. Just as the goodness and efficacy of a flute player, sculptor, or any craftsman with a function is considered to reside in the fulfillment of that function, so also with man—if indeed he has a function. Aristotle asks rhetorically: “Are we to suppose that, while the carpenter and the shoemaker have definite functions and activities and man has none, but was designed by nature without any purpose to fulfil? Must we not rather assume that, just as the eye, the hand, the foot and each of the various members of the body manifestly has a certain function of its own, so a human being also has a certain function over and above all the functions of his particular members?”124 Man’s function cannot be simply the activity of either growth and nutrition, which man shares with plants, or of sensation, which is shared with animals. Since man’s distinguishing mark is reason, his proper function must be action and activities of the soul in accordance
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with reason (ψυχῆς ἐνέργεια καὶ πράξεις µετὰ λόγου).125 The function of the good man is to perform these actions well and nobly. Aristotle sums up therefore: “If a function is well performed when it is accomplished in accordance with its own proper excellence (i.e., virtue), it follows that the good of man is the active exercise of his soul’s faculties in accordance with excellence or virtue [τὸ ἀνθρώπινον ἀγαθὸν ψυχῆς ἐνέργεια γίνεται κατ’ ἀρετήν].”126 Human happiness, the highest good of all individual men, consists in activity of the soul; this life of active virtue is, moreover, essentially pleasant (ὁ βίος αὐτῶν καθ’ αὑτὸν ἡδύς).127 It is at once the best, noblest, and the most pleasant of all things.128 Aristotle’s definition of a friend as “another self ” is deservedly well known; intuitively it offers immediate evidence in its own right.129 Less explicit is the deeper metaphysical basis for his definition and the insight it provides for Aristotle’s understanding of selfhood. His exemplar is the “good man” (ὁ σπουδαῖος), whose virtue is the moral measure of all things. The virtuous man is well-centered and self-rooted in all respects. Aristotle makes repeated use of the reflexive personal pronoun (ἑαυτὸν/ἑαυτoῦ/ἑαυτῷ): the σπουδαίος “is of one mind with himself [ὁµογνωµονεῖ ἑαυτῷ], and desires the same things with all his soul [κατὰ πᾶσαν τὴν ψυχήν].”130 The good man wishes for himself his own good (ἑαυτῷ τἀγαθὰ), striving actively to attain it for his own benefit; “He does it for the sake of the intellectual element in him, which is thought to be the man himself.”131 The good man, moreover, desires his own life, seeking especially to preserve his rational part (µάλιστα τοῦτο ᾧ φρονεῖ). There follows a powerfully personalist statement, which conveys a clear sense of both the fundamental character of existence and the inalienable and intimate nature of the thinking and acting individual: “For existence is good for the virtuous man [ἀγαθὸν γὰρ τῷ σπουδαίῳ τὸ εἶναι]; and everyone wishes his own good: no one would choose to possess every good in the world on condition of becoming somebody else . . . but only while remaining himself, whatever he may be; and it would appear that the thinking part is the real self, or is so more than anything else.”132 In a similar vein Aristotle refers again to the intellect, which, “though small in
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bulk, in power and value far surpasses all the rest. It may even be held that this is the true self of each, inasmuch as it is the dominant and better part; and therefore it would be a strange thing if a man should choose to live not his own life but the life of some other than himself.”133 Paradoxically the deep bond of friendship is experienced only when individuals retain their distinct and inalienable identity. Aristotle points out that parents love their children as themselves (ὡς ἑαυτούς)— they are “other selves”—because they are separate (ἕτεροι αὐτοὶ τῷ κεχωρίσθαι).134 Aristotle offers the following metaphysical description of the individual’s interior life: “The good man desires his own company; for he enjoys being by himself, since he has agreeable memories of the past, and good hopes for the future, which are pleasant too; also his mind is stored with subjects for contemplation. And he is keenly conscious of his own joys and sorrows; for the same things give him pleasure or pain at all times, and not different things at different times, since he is not apt to change his mind.”135 It is in light of this self-understanding that the philosopher offers his definition of a friend as “another self.” Friendship is best fulfilled between individuals of such character: “Good men’s wishes are steadfast, and do not ebb and flow like the tide, and they wish for just and expedient ends, which they strive to attain in common.”136 The sense of self-being, and the ineradicable link between existence and action, are likewise conveyed in a passage where Aristotle explains why the artist loves his work, the poet his poems, parents their children, and benefactors the fruits of their generosity: “The reason of this is that all things desire and love existence; but we exist in activity, since we exist by living and doing; and in a sense one who has made something exists actively, and so he loves his handiwork because he loves existence.”137 Action is an affirmation and enactment of some new modality of being. Through πρᾶξις and ποίησις new potencies are actualized, actualities are perfected. Aristotle states as a fundamental principle of nature: “What a thing is potentially, its work reveals in actuality” (τοῦτο δὲ φυσικόν· ὃ γάρ ἐστι δυνάµει, τοῦτο ἐνεργείᾳ τὸ ἔργον µηνύει).138 We are close
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to the insight of medieval metaphysics that agere sequitur esse: insofar as something is actual it acts through a necessity which, rather than constrained, is natural and self-fulfilling. Prime matter is inert although it provides the receptivity necessary for new modes of being to take shape. Beyond the incomplete action of motion, which depends on potency, there is, Aristotle emphasizes, the perfect action of ἐνέργεια. This is the goal and target of human fulfillment: “While the actuality of the present [τοῦ παρόντος ἡ ἐνέργεια], the hope of the future, and the memory of the past are all pleasant, actuality is the most pleasant of the three, and the most loved.”139 Only ἐνέργεια is self-contained and complete in itself, and, as we will see, the highest human actuality is the activity of θεωρία. Aristotle repeatedly asserts that intellect is the real self. In Nicomachean Ethics IX he argues this in detail, in the course of a discussion of the moral merits of self-love. He distinguishes between egotistical selflove, dominated by passion and irrational desires, and the noble selflove of the individual who in all things strives for moral excellence. “Such a man might be held to be a lover of self in an exceptional degree. At all events he takes for himself the things that are noblest and most truly good.”140 These are attained by self-control—effectively domination by the intellect. Drawing an analogy with a political sovereign, who in a sense may be said to be the state, and suggesting that any composite may be identified with its dominant part, Aristotle concludes that the intellect is man, adding: “It is our reasoned acts that are felt to be in the fullest sense our own acts and voluntary acts.”141 Aristotle provides a deeper metaphysical dimension for his definition of happiness, viewing it as an actuality to be attained as final fulfillment. It is an unenunciated principle for Aristotle that action is the natural consequence of being. Each thing will actualize itself precisely in the measure that it is actual: if it is perfect, its actuality is already complete and will not cease; if it is imperfect, it will be actualized through the imperfect actuality of change as it moves from potency to ever more perfect actuality. Life is a form of activity (ἡ δὲ ζωὴ ἐνέργεια τίς ἐστι),142 and happiness is activity in accordance with virtue (ἡ εὐδαιµονία κατ’ ἀρετὴν ἐνέργεια.).143 Such activity must be
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self-sufficient (αὐτάρκης); lacking nothing, it is an end in itself (τέλος γὰρ αὕτη).144 We exist in our activities, and it is in the optimal exercise of these activities that happiness is to be found. Human nature is defined by Aristotle as the capacity for sensation and thought.145 He elucidates this definition in light of the primacy of actuality: “A capacity is referred to its activity, and in this its full reality consists. It appears therefore that life in the full sense is sensation or thought [ἔοικε δὴ τὸ ζῆν εἶναι κυρίως τὸ αἰσθάνεσθαι ἢ νοεῖν].”146 He even asserts that being is defined as perceiving or thinking (τὸ γὰρ εἶναι ἦν αἰσθάνεσθαι ἢ νοεῖν).147 It is in keeping with this intensive notion of being, which identifies human existence with the highest activities of sensation and thinking, that he asserts that being is desirable. It is personal being that is desired—vital and intellective—not just the brute fact of being there; for living things, existence is their life itself (τὸ δὲ ζῆν τοῖς ζῶσι τὸ εἶναί ἐστιν).148 Since happiness consists in activity, it is not something that we possess but something we must continually actualize. It consists of living and acting (ἐν τῷ ζῆν καὶ ἐνεργεῖν) in accordance with the excellences proper to the highest capacities of the soul;149 such activity, Aristotle has emphasized, is pleasant in itself.150 And since, for living things, to exist is to live, existence is naturally desirable; to be happy is to actualize human existence in the best possible manner. We do not have simply a vague desire for the fact of being. Our happiness derives from the awareness of our own life as good; each man’s existence is desirable for himself: τὸ αὐτὸν εἶναι αἱρετόν ἐστιν ἑκάστῳ.151 “It is the consciousness of oneself as good that makes existence desirable, and such consciousness is pleasant in itself.”152 Selfawareness is a certainty; it is the concomitant self-awareness of ourselves in our activity of knowing the world, and as agents within the world: “If one who sees is conscious that he sees, one who hears that he hears, one who walks that he walks, and similarly for all the other human activities there is a faculty that is conscious of their exercise, so that whenever we perceive, we are conscious that we perceive, and whenever we think, we are conscious that we think, and to be conscious that we are perceiving or thinking is to be conscious that we
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exist.”153 Because he identifies existence with perception and thought, to exist is to be self-aware as perceiving and thinking. This passage is a remarkable expression of selfhood and of the experience of personal existence, not usually associated with Aristotle. He concludes that “to be conscious that one is alive is a pleasant thing in itself [τὸ δ’ αἰσθάνεσθαι ὅτι ζῇ τῶν ἡδέων καθ’ αὑτό].”154 For good men, existence is good and pleasant (τὸ εἶναι ἀγαθόν καὶ ἡδύ),155 because they are aware that their activities, which constitute their existence, are directed toward their final goal and happiness. Their entire existence is an actualization of their prospective happiness. The context of these reflections, the foundation of friendship, provides a suitable analogue for the affirmation of personal happiness: the joy at the existence of one’s friend, another self, is reflective confirmation of the value of our own being. One ought to share one’s friend’s consciousness of his existence and to rejoice in a friend’s existence as in one’s own.156 The happy life is one in accordance with virtue (εὐδαίµων βίος ὁ κατ’ ἀρετὴν);157 it consists in noble and serious activity—not pastime and amusement. The nobler the activity, the better and more productive of happiness. The activity of highest virtue is that of our best part, namely, the intellect (or whatever else naturally governs us), which has knowledge of what is noble and divine, being either itself divine or the most divine part of us. It is the activity of this part, in accordance with its proper virtue, that constitutes perfect happiness. According to Aristotle it is the activity of contemplation.158 He summarizes: “Contemplation is at once the highest form of activity (since the intellect is the highest thing in us, and the objects with which the intellect deals are the highest things that can be known), and also it is the most continuous, for we can reflect more continuously than we can carry on any form of action.”159 Contemplation is the only activity that is loved for its own sake, since it produces nothing other than the very act of contemplating; it is its own fulfillment. As an activity it is self-sufficient: whereas the just man needs others in order to act justly, the wise man is able to contemplate by himself. It is moreover the most pleasant of the virtuous activities; it is the activity of leisure par excellence.160 “If the attributes of this activity are self-sufficiency, leisuredness, such
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freedom from fatigue as is possible for man, and all the other attributes of blessedness: it follows that it is the activity of the intellect that constitutes complete human happiness.”161 Having reasoned carefully to the conclusion that human happiness consists in the virtuous exercise of activity in accordance with reason, Aristotle curiously remarks that it is effectively beyond human attainment and may be achieved only through a higher agency. “Such a life as this will be higher than the human level: not in virtue of his humanity will a man achieve it, but in virtue of something within him that is divine; and by as much as this something is superior to his composite nature, by so much is its activity superior to the exercise of the other forms of virtue. If then the intellect is something divine in comparison with man, so is the life of the intellect divine in comparison with human life.”162 There is no doubt for Aristotle but that man should aim for divine and immortal life. He criticizes those, such as Pindar, who counseled men to confine their thoughts to mortal affairs and not to covet kinship with the gods. (The poet scornfully discouraged the most glorious athlete of his day: “Die, Diagoras, you will not be able to reach Olympus.”)163 Aristotle countered: “We ought so far as possible to achieve immortality [ἀθανατίζειν], and do all that man may to live in accordance with the highest thing in him; for though this be small in bulk, in power and value [δυνάµει καὶ τιµιότητι] it far surpasses all the rest.”164 If intellect is the true self, this means that man should seek his happiness in the perfect activity of contemplation. Echoing his earlier teaching that it is absurd to want to live as another, he states: “It may even be held this is the true self of each, inasmuch as it is the dominant and better part; and therefore it would be a strange thing if a man should choose to live not his own life but a life of some other than himself.”165 He repeats his essential teaching: “That which is best and most pleasant for each creature is that which is proper to the nature of each; accordingly the life of the intellect is the best and the pleasantest life for man, inasmuch as the intellect more than anything else is man; therefore this life will be the happiest.”166 Whereas intellectual virtues pertain to activities of the intellect, moral virtues relate to the bodily nature of man and the passions and therefore lead only to a second-rate happiness. The distinction is
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grounded in the metaphysical constitution of man: moral virtues, which are purely human, belong to the composite (τοῦ συνθέτου) of body and soul, whereas the happiness of the intellect is separate (ἡ εὐδαιµονία . . . τοῦ νοῦ κεχωρισµένη).167 We are confronted again with the paradox that man’s ultimate happiness is located beyond his natural condition, in some disembodied state. To illustrate that “perfect happiness is some form of contemplative activity” (ἡ δὲ τελεία εὐδαιµονία ὅτι θεωρητική τίς ἐστιν ἐνέργεια),168 Aristotle compares man to both the gods and animals. The gods, who are understood to be happy and blessed, are thought of as alive and active (ζῆν καὶ ἐνεργεῖν). If one removes from the gods the limited activities of “doing” (πράττειν) and “making” (ποιεῖν), only contemplation (θεωρία) remains.169 “It follows that the activity of God, which is transcendent in blessedness, is the activity of contemplation; and therefore among human activities that which is most akin to the divine activity of contemplation will be the greatest source of happiness.”170 The kinship of human nature with divinity becomes obvious in Metaphysics XII, where Aristotle defines the prime mover as self-thinking thought (νόησις νοήσεως).171 Mind is the “most divine” (θειότατον) of phenomena.172 Because he is the only animal that can contemplate—albeit intermittently—man is the only animal that can be happy; at least he can approximate in a deficient manner to the happiness of the gods. By contrast: The lower animals cannot partake of happiness, because they are completely devoid of the contemplative activity. The whole of the life of the gods is blessed, and that of man is so in so far as it contains some likeness to the divine activity; but none of the other animals possess happiness, because they are entirely incapable of contemplation. Happiness therefore is co-extensive in its range with contemplation: the more a class of beings possesses the faculty of contemplation, the more it enjoys happiness, not as an accidental concomitant of contemplation but as inherent in it, since contemplation is valuable in itself. It follows that happiness is some form of contemplation.173
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It appears that for Aristotle, in the final analysis, man is what he is because he contains an element of divinity. Though it threatens the unity of his metaphysics as applied to the human individual, the destiny of Aristotle’s man lies beyond his natural state and is in some sense beyond his control. It seems likely that the man who pursues intellectual activity, and who cultivates his intellect and keeps that in the best condition, is also the man most beloved of the gods. For if, as is generally believed, the gods exercise some superintendence over human affairs, then it will be reasonable to suppose that they take pleasure in that part of man which is best and most akin to themselves, namely the intellect, and that they recompense with their favours those men who esteem and honour this most, because these care for the things dear to themselves, and act rightly and nobly. Now it is clear that all these attributes belong most of all to the wise man. He therefore is most beloved by the gods; and if so, he is naturally most happy.174
In Generation of Animals, Aristotle presents another grand panorama on the existence and purpose of living things. He pronounces the most basic evaluation possible: being is better than not being, living than not living.175 Whereas divine and eternal being exists of necessity, contingent beings might equally not exist; thus they must strive to preserve their being and to perpetuate life. “For any living thing that has reached its normal development . . . the most natural act is the production of another like itself, an animal producing an animal, a plant a plant, in order that, as far as its nature allows it, it may partake in the eternal and divine [τοῦ ἀεὶ καὶ τοῦ θείου].”176 All animals have a natural impulse to participate in the divine and eternal, and since they cannot do so by continuity of individual existence, they do so in the only manner possible, namely through the perpetuation of their kind.177 This is for Aristotle the radical reason for male and female: unable to live eternally as individuals, living beings strive to maintain their kind through the process of generation. Since the being of things resides in the particular, nature cannot be eternal in the numerical identity of the individual, but only through the specific form.
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Is man likewise governed by this universal law of nonpersonal life? Is human individuality nothing but a transient link in the advance toward an indeterminate cosmic telos? Is man simply the carrier of a selfish gene? While it seems Aristotle hoped to discern in man a cipher of transcendence, an element rising above the stream of biological continuity, he did not fully succeed within the terms of his own philosophy. He provided, nonetheless, a context within which later philosophers would continue to discuss the question of human nature and destiny.
Notes 1. On the comprehensive and multifarious character of Aristotle’s thought, Hegel remarked: “He penetrated into the whole universe of things, and subjected its scattered wealth to intelligence; and to him the greater number of philosophical sciences owe their origin and distinction.” Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aristotle: A Chapter from the History of Science, trans. George Henry Lewes (London: Smith, Elder, 1864), p. 18. See Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), vol. 2, p. 132: “Aristoteles ist in die ganze Masse und alle Seiten des realen Universums eingedrungen und hat ihren Reichtum und Zerstreuung dem Begriffe unterjocht; und die meisten philosophischen Wissenschaften haben ihm ihre Unterschei dung, ihren Anfang zu verdanken.” 2. Aristotle, History of Animals (Hist. An.) I, 6, 491a20–23, trans. A. L. Peck, History of Animals, Books I–III, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 37. 3. Aristotle, Parts of Animals (Part. An.) II, 10, 656a9–10, trans. A. L. Peck, Parts of Animals, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 173. 4. Aristotle, Generation of Animals (Gen. An.) V, 1, 780b4–5 (on human hair going gray); Part. An. III, 10, 673a7–9 (on human laughter and response to tickling). 5. Hist. An. I, 9, 492a5–6 (on human eye colors); Part. An. II, 14, 658a15–16 (on human eyelashes). 6. Hist. An. II, 1, 497b31–32 (on human use of both hands): µόνον δὲ καὶ ἀµφιδέξιον γίγνεται τῶν ἄλλων ζῴων ἄνθρωπος. Hist. An. I, 11, 492a 22–23 (on human inability to move ears). See H. C. Baldry, The Unity of Mankind in Greek Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 89.
48 Fran O’Rourke 7. Part. An. II, 1, 662b20–22. 8. Aristotle, Politics (Pol.) I, 2, 1253a9–10, trans. H. Rackham, Politics, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 11. 9. Part. An. II, 10, 655b37–656a8, my translation after Peck, p. 173. 10. Part. An. II, 10, 656a10–13; IV, 10, 686a25–27. On man defined as “upward gazer,” see Plato, Cratylus 399c: “The word ἄνθρωπος implies that other animals never examine, or consider, or look up at what they see, but that man not only sees but considers and looks up at that which he sees, and hence he alone of all animals is rightly called ἄνθρωπος, because he looks up at [ἄναθρεῖ] what he has seen [ὄπωπε].” Trans. B. Jowett, The Dialogues of Plato (New York: Random House, 1937), vol. 1, p. 189, modified after H. N. Fowler, Cratylus, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), p. 59. 11. Part. An. IV, 10, 686a27–31, trans. Peck modified, p. 367. 12. Part. An. II, 13, 658a8–9: ὀυδεν γὰρ ἡ φύσις ποιεῖ µάτην. For an excellent treatment of this principle, see James G. Lennox, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Biology: Studies in the Origins of Life Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), ch. 9, “Nature Does Nothing in Vain . . . ,” pp. 205–23. 13. Part. An. II, 14, 658a23–24. 14. Part. An. III, 1, 662b18–22, trans. Peck modified, p. 217. 15. Part. An. II, 10, 656b26–32, trans. Peck, p. 179. 16. Part. An. II, 16, 659b33–660a2, trans. W. Ogle, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes (1984; repr., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), vol. 1, p. 1028. 17. Part. An. II, 16, 660a2–13, trans. Ogle modified, p. 1028. 18. Part. An. II, 17, 660a17–18, trans. Ogle, p. 1028. 19. Part. An. II, 17, 660a22–25, trans. Peck, p. 201. 20. Aristotle, On the Soul (De An.) II, 8, 420b5–7: ἡ δὲ φωνή ψόφος τίς ἐστιν ἐµψύχου· τῶν γὰρ ἀψύχων οὐθεν φωνεῖ, ἀλλὰ καθ’ ὁµοιότητα λἐγεται φωνεῖν. Trans. W. S. Hett modified, On the Soul, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935), pp. 115–17. 21. Part. An. IV, 10, 687a9–12, trans. Peck modified, p. 371. 22. Part. An. IV, 10, 687a15–23, trans. Peck modified, pp. 371–73. 23. Part. An. IV, 10, 687a28–9, trans. Peck modified, p. 373. 24. Part. An. IV, 10, 687b2–5, trans. Peck modified, p. 373. 25. Pol. I, 8, 1256b20–22, trans. Benjamin Jowett, in Barnes, Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, pp. 1993–94.
Human Nature and Destiny in Aristotle 49 26. Pol. VII, 15, 1334b14–15. 27. Pol. VII, 15, 1334b17–28, trans. H. Rackham modified, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), p. 617. 28. Pol. I, 2, 1253a9–10: οὐθὲν γάρ, ὡς φαµέν, µάτην ἡ φύσις ποιεῖ, λόγον δὲ µόνον ἄνθρωπος ἔχει τῶν ζῴων. 29. Pol. I, 2, 1253a15–18, trans. Rackham, p. 11. 30. Pol. I, 2, 1253a31–7, trans. Jowett slightly modified, p. 1988. 31. Hist. An. VIII, 1, 588a16–31. 32. Hist. An. IX, 1, 608a21–608b4. 33. Hist. An. IX, 1, 608b4–8, trans. D. M. Balme, History of Animals, Books VII–X, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 219. 34. De An. II, 2, 413a21–2: διωρίσθαι τὸ ἔµψυχον τοῦ ἀψύχου τῷ ζῆν. Trans. Hett, p. 75. 35. De An. I, 2, 405b10–12: ὁρίζονται δὲ πάντες τὴν ψυχὴν τριςὶν ὠς εἰπεῑν, κινήσει, αἰσθήσει, τῷ ἀσωµάτῳ. 36. De An. I, 2, 403b25–27: τὸ ἔµψυχον δὴ τοῦ ἀψύχου δυοῖν µάλιστα διαφέρειν δοκεῖ, κινήσει τε καὶ τῷ αἰσθάνεσθαι. My translation. 37. De An. II, 2, 413b2: τὸ δὲ ζῷον διὰ τὴν αἴσθησιν πρώτως. See Part An. III, 4, 666a34: τὸ µὲν γὰρ ζῷον αἰσθήσει ὥρισται. 38. Heraclitus, frag. 45: ψυχῆς πείρατα ἰὼν οὐκ ἂν ἐξεύροιο, πᾶσαν ἐπιπορευόµενος ὁδον· οὕτω βαθὺν λόγον ἔχει. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, ed. Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz (Zurich: Weidmann, 1964), vol. 1, p. 161. 39. Aristotle, Metaphysics (Met.) XII, 9, 1074b15: τὰ δὲ περὶ τὸν νοῦν ἔχει τινὰς ἀπορίας. 40. De An. I, 1, 402a1–7, trans. Hett slightly modified, p. 9. 41. De An. I, 3, 406a17: ἐστιν ἡ οὐσία τῆς ψυχῆς τὸ κινεῖν ἑαυτην. 42. De An. I, 3, 406a 30: φαίνεται κινοῦσα τὸ σῶµα. 43. De An. II, 1, 414a12–14: ἡ ψυχὴ δὲ τοῦτο ᾧ ζῶµεν καὶ αἰσθανόµεθα καὶ διανοούµεθα πρῶτως. Trans. J. A. Smith modified, in Barnes, Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 1, p. 659. For a comprehensive account, see II, 4, 415a14–415b28. 44. De An. I, 5, 411b7–9: δοκεῖ γὰρ τοὐναντίον µᾶλλον ἡ ψυχὴ τὸ σῶµα συνέχειν. ἐξελθούσης γοῦν διαπνεῖται καὶ σήπεται. Trans. Smith modified, p. 655. 45. De An. II, 1, 412a31–2: ψυχή ἐστιν ἐντελέχεια ἡ πρώτη σώµατος φυσικοῦ δυνάµει ζωὴν ἔχοντος. See the entire passage 412a20–412b6.
50 Fran O’Rourke 46. De An. II, 1, 412b8–9. 47. De An. II, 4, 415b13–14: τὸ δὲ ζῆν τοῖς ζῶσι τὸ εἶναί ἐστιν, αἰτία δὲ καὶ ἀρχὴ τούτων ἡ ψυχή. Trans. Hett modified, p. 87. 48. De An. II, 1, 412b5–6: ἐντελέχεια ἡ πρώτη σώµατος φυσικοῦ ὀργανικοῦ. 49. De An. II, 4, 415b7–8: ἔστι δὲ ἡ ψυχὴ τοῡ ζῶντος σώµατος αἰτία καὶ ἀρχή. De An. II, 1, 412b11: τοῦτο δὲ τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι τῷ τοιῷδι σώµατι. 50. Part. An. III, 4, 667b21–23: τοῦ µὲν οὖν εἰς µίαν ἀρχὴν συντελεῖν καὶ ἀπὸ µιἆς αἴτιον τὸ µίαν ἔχειν πάντα τὴν αἰσθητικὴν ψυχὴν ἐνεργείᾳ. 51. Pol. I, 2, 1254a33. 52. Pol. I, 1254a34, my translation. 53. See Pol. I, 1254a36–1254b15, 1254b23–4: τὰ γὰρ ἄλλα ζῶᾳ οὐ λόγῳ αἰσθανόµενα ἀλλὰ παθήµασιν ὑπηρετεῖ. I am leaving aside Aristotle’s justification of slavery, which is the context of these remarks. 54. De An. I, 4, 408b25–27. 55. De An. I, 4, 408b13–15: βέλτιον γὰρ ἴσως µὴ λέγειν τὴν ψυχὴν ἐλεεῖν ἢ µανθάνειν ἢ διανοεῖσθαι, ἀλλὰ τὸν ἂνθρωπον τῇ ψυχῇ. 56. De An. I, 1, 403a5–25, trans. Smith, slightly modified, pp. 642–43. 57. De An. II, 2, 414a19–20: µήτ’ ἄνευ σώµατος εἶναι µήτε σῶµά τι ἡ ψυχή. See De Juventute 1, 467b14: “It is clear that the soul’s substance cannot be corporeal” (δῆλον ὅτι οὐχ οἷον τ’ εἶναι σῶµα τὴν οὐσίαν αὐτῆς). 58. Part. An. I, 3, 643a24–25: οὔτε γὰρ ἄνευ ὕλης οὔδὲν ζῴου µόριον, οὔτε µόνη ὑλη ἡ ὕλη. 59. De An. II, 1, 412b6–8, trans. Hett, p. 68. 60. De An. I, 1, 403a7–12, trans. Smith, p. 642. 61. De An. I, 3, 408b18–19: ὁ δὲ νοῡς ἔοικεν ἐγγίνεσθαι οὐσία τις οὖσα, καὶ οὐ φθείρεσθαι. 62. De An. I, 4, 408b21–22. 63. De An. I, 4, 408b25–27: τὸ δὲ διανοεῖσθαι καὶ φιλεῖν ἣ µισεῑν οὐκ ἔστιν ἐκεινου πάθη, ἀλλὰ τουδὶ τοῦ ἔχοντος ἐκεῖνο. 64. De An. I, 4, 408b24, 408b27–28. 65. De An. I, 4, 408b29–30. 66. De An. II, 2, 413b24–27, trans. Hett, slightly modified, p. 77. 67. De An. II, 2, 413b29–31, trans. Hett modified, p. 77. 68. Howard Robinson comments: “Right from the beginning of the De Anima Aristotle affirms that the soul is the form of the body and that it remains to be discovered whether all faculties of the soul are embodied. It never seems to cross Aristotle’s mind that the doctrine of the soul as form of the
Human Nature and Destiny in Aristotle 51 body strictly requires that the soul is embodied in all its parts. It follows that either Aristotle was very obtuse about the basic features of his own concept of form, or that that concept is fundamentally different from that attributed to him by those who deny that any part of a bodily form could be nonbodily.” “Form and the Immateriality of the Intellect from Aristotle to Aquinas,” Aristotle and the Later Tradition: Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 2, suppl. (1991): 210. 69. Enrico Berti, “Aristote était-il un penseur dualiste?,” Thêta-Pi 2 (1973): 97. 70. H. M. Robinson, “Aristotelian Dualism,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 1 (1983): 123. 71. Christopher Shields, “Some Recent Approaches to Aristotle’s De Anima,” in Aristotle, De Anima, Books II and III, rev. ed., ed. Christopher Shields, trans. D. W. Hamlyn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 165. 72. De An. II, 12, 424a17–19, trans. Hett, p. 137; see also 425b23–24. 73. De An. III, 2, 425b24–25. 74. De An. II, 12, 424a26–28. 75. De An. III, 4, 429a13–15. 76. De An. II, 5, 417b22–28. 77. De An. III, 4, 429a18: ἀνάγκη ἂρα, ἐπεὶ πάντα νοεῖ, ἀµιγῆ εἶναι. 78. De An. III, 4, 429a24–25: διὸ οὐδε µεµῖχθαι εὔλογον αὐτὸν τῷ σώµατι. 79. De An. II, 4, 429a25–26. 80. De An. III, 4, 429b23: ὁ νοῦς ἁπλοῦν ἐστὶ καὶ ἀπαθὲς. 81. De An. III, 4, 429a27–28. 82. De An. III, 8, 432a2. 83. De An. II, 5, 417b22–3: τῶν καθ’ ἕκαστον ἡ κατ’ ἐνέργειαν αἴσθησις, ἡ δ’ ἐπιστήµη τῶν καθόλου. 84. De An. III, 4, 429a30–429b5; III, 13, 435b7–16. 85. De An. III, 4, 429b4–5: τὸ µὲν γὰρ αἰσθητικὸν οὐκ ἄνευ σώµατος, ὁ δὲ χωριστός. Trans. Hett, p. 167. 86. De Αn. I, 3, 407a2–3: οὐ καλῶς τὸ λέγειν τὴν ψυχὴν µέγεθος εἶναι. 87. De An. II, 3, 407a6–11, trans. Hett, p. 39. 88. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on De Anima (In De An.) Ι, lect. 8, § 111, trans. Kenelm Foster and Silvester Humphries (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951), p. 108. 89. De An. III, 5, 430a14–15: καὶ ἔστιν ὃ µὲν τοιοῦτος νοῦς τῷ πάντα γίνεσθαι, ὁ δὲ τῷ πάντα ποιεῖν, ὡς ἓξις τις οἷον τὸ φῶς.
52 Fran O’Rourke 90. De An. III, 5, 430a17–18: καὶ οὗτος ὁ νοῦς χωριστὸς καὶ ἀπαθὴς καὶ ἀµιγὴς τῇ οὐσίᾳ ὢν ἐνεργείᾳ. 91. De An. III, 5, 430a22–3: χωρισθεὶς δ’ ἐστὶ µόνον τοῦθ’ ὅπερ ἐστι, καὶ τοῦτο µόνον ἀθάνατον καὶ ἀΐδιον. 92. De An. III, 5, 430a24. 93. De An. III, 5, 430a24–25. 94. De An. III, 5, 430a18–19. 95. De An. III, 7, 431a16–17: διὸ οὐδέποτε νοεῖ ἄνευ φαντάσµατος ἡ ψυχή. III, 7, 431b2: “The thinking faculty thinks of its forms in mental images” (τὰ µὲν οὖν εἴδη τὸ νοητικὸν ἐν τοῖς φαντάσµασι νοεῖ). 96. In De An. III, 7, 699: “Mirum est autem quomodo tam leviter erraverunt, ex hoc quod dicit quod intellectus est separatus, cum ex litera sua huius rei habeatur intellectus, dicit enim separatus intellectus, quia non habet organum, sicut sensus. Et hoc contingit propter hoc, quia anima humana propter suam nobilitatem supergreditur facultatem materiae corporalis, et non potest totaliter includi ab ea. Unde remanet ei aliqua actio, in qua materia corporalis non communicat. Et propter hoc potentia eius ad hanc actionem non habet organum corporale, et sic est intellectus separatus.” Trans. Foster and Humphries, p. 410. 97. Gérard Verbeke, “Comment Aristote conçoit-il l’immatériel?,” Revue philosophique de Louvain 44 (1946): 227–28. 98. De An. III, 5, 430a12. 99. De An. III, 5, 430a14–15. 100. Aristotle, Gen. An. II, 3.736b5–7, trans. A. Platt, in Barnes, Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 1, p. 1143. 101. Gen. An. II, 3, 736 b 27–29: Λείπεται δὲ τὸν νοῦν µόνον θύραθεν ἐπεισιέναι καὶ θεῖον εἶναι µονον· οὐθὲν γὰρ αὐτοῦ τή ἐνεργείᾳ κοινωνεῖ σωµατικὴ ἐνεργεία. Trans. Platt, p. 1143. 102. De An. III, 5, 430a17. See R. D. Hicks, ed. and trans., De Anima (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907), p. 502. 103. Martin Luther, “An Open Letter to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation Concerning the Reform of the Christian Estate” (1520), in Works of Martin Luther (Philadelphia: A. J. Holman, 1915), vol. 2, p. 25. 104. De An. II, 1, 413a4–5, trans. Hett, p. 73. 105. De An. I, 1, 403a16–25. 106. De An. III, 2, 425b12. 107. Aristotle, De Sensu VII, 7, 448a26–8: ἐι γὰρ ὅτε αὐτὸς ἁυτοῦ τις αἰσθάνεται ἢ ἄλλου . . . µὴ ἐνδέχεται τότε λανθάνειν ὅτι ἐστίν.
Human Nature and Destiny in Aristotle 53 108. De An. III, 2, 425b16. 109. Aristotle, De Somno 2, 455a17. 110. De An. III, 8, 431b21: ἡ ψυχὴ τὰ ὄντα πώς ἐστι πάντα. 111. De An. III, 4, 419b5-6, 429b9–10. 112. De An. III, 4, 430a2–5, trans. Hamlyn, p. 59. 113. An interesting application of this doctrine is to be found at Aristotle’s Physics 202b6–8: “It is not absurd that the actualization of one thing should be in another. Teaching is the activity of a person who can teach, yet the operation is performed in something—it is not cut adrift from a subject, but is of one thing in another.” Trans. R. Hardie and R. Gaye, in Barnes, Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 1, p. 345. 114. See Verbeke, “Comment?,” 226. 115. De An. III, 4, 429b29–430a2. 116. Cf. Met. XII, 9, 1074b36–37: φαίνεται δ’ ἀεὶ ἄλλου ἡ ἐπιστήµη καὶ ἡ αἴσθησις καὶ ἡ δόξα καὶ ἡ διάνοια, αὑτῆς δ’ ἐν παρέργῳ. 117. De An. III, 4, 429a21–24, trans. Hett, modified, p. 165. 118. Joseph Owens, “The Self in Aristotle,” Review of Metaphysics 41 (1988): 707. 119. De An. I, 4, 408b13–15. 120. De An. I, 4, 408b25–27: τὸ δὲ διανοεῖσθαι καὶ φιλεῖν ἣ µισεῖν οὐκ ἔστιν ἐκεινου πάθη, ἀλλὰ τουδὶ τοῦ ἔχοντος ἐκεῖνο. Trans. Hett, p. 49. 121. De Sensu 438a8. 122. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (NE) I, 1, 1094a3. 123. NE I, 7, 1097a34. 124. NE I, 7, 1097b28–33, trans. H. Rackham modified, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), p. 31. 125. NE I, 7, 1098a13–14. 126. NE Ι, 7, 1098a14–16, trans. Rackham modified, p. 33. 127. NE Ι, 8, 1099a7. 128. NE I, 8, 1099a24–25: ἄριστον ἄρα καὶ κάλλιστον καὶ ἥδιστον ἠ εὐδαιµονία. 129. NE IX, 4, 1166a31–32: ἔστι γὰρ ὀ φίλος ἄλλος αὐτός. 130. NE ΙΧ, 4, 1166a13–14, trans. Rackham modified, p. 533. 131. NE IX, 4, 1166a16–17, trans. W. D. Ross, in Barnes, Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, p. 1843. 132. NE IX, 4, 1166a19–23, trans. Rackham, p. 536. 133. NE X, 7, 1177b34–1178a4, trans. Rackham, pp. 617–19. 134. NE VIII, 12, 1161b28–29.
54 Fran O’Rourke 135. NE IX, 4, 1166a23–29, trans. Rackham, p. 535. 136. NE IX, 6, 1167b6–9, trans. Rackham, p. 543. 137. NE IX, 7, 1168a5–8, trans. Rackham, p. 547. In Pol. I, 2, 1254a7, Aristotle stresses: “Life is a doing, not a making” (ὁ δὲ βίος πρᾶξις, οὐ ποίησις ἐστιν). 138. NE IX, 7, 1168a8–9, trans. Rackham, p. 547. 139. NE IX, 7, 1168a13–15, trans. Rackham, p. 547. 140. NE IX, 8, 1168b28–30, trans. Rackham, p. 553. 141. NE IX, 8, 1168b35–1169a1, trans. Rackham modified, p. 553. 142. NE Χ, 4, 1175a12. 143. NE Χ, 7, 1177a12. 144. NE X, 6, 1176b5-6 and 1176b31. 145. NE IX, 9, 1170a16–17. 146. NE IX, 9, 1170a17–19, trans. Rackham, pp. 561–63. 147. NE IX, 9, 1170a35. 148. De An. II, 4, 415b13. 149. NE IX, 9, 1169b30–31. 150. NE IX, 9, 1169b32–33: τοῦ δ’ ἀγαθοῦ ἡ ἐνέργεια σπουδαία καὶ ἡδεῖα καθ’ αὑτην. 151. NE IX, 9, 1170b7. 152. NE IX, 9, 1170b8–10: τὸ δ’ εἶναι ἦν αἱρετὸν διὰ τὸ αἰσθάνεσθαι αὑτοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ὄντος, ἡ δ ὲ τοιαύτη αἴσθησις ἡδεῑα καθ’ ἑαυτήν. Trans. Rackham, p. 565. 153. NE IX, 9, 1170a29–33, trans. Rackham, p. 563. 154. NE IX, 9, 1170b1, trans. Rackham, p. 563. 155. NE IX, 9, 1170b4. 156. NE IX, 9, 1170b10–11 and NE IX, 12, 1171b33–35: καὶ ὡς πρὸς ἑαυτὸν ἔχει, οὕτω καὶ πρὸς τὸν φίλον, περὶ αὑτὸν δ’ ἡ αἴσθησις ὅτι ἔστιν αἱρετή· καὶ περὶ τὸν φίλον δή. 157. NE Χ, 6, 1177a2. 158. NE Χ, 7, 1177a12–18. 159. NE Χ, 7, 1177a19–22, trans. Rackham, p. 613. 160. See NE Χ, 7, 1177a22–1177b6; 1177b19–23. 161. NE Χ, 7, 1177b21–25, trans. Rackham modified, p. 617. 162. NE Χ, 7, 1177b26–31, trans. Rackham, p. 617. 163. Pindar, Isthm. 4.16. 164. NE Χ, 7, 1177b33–1178a2, trans. Rackham, p. 617. 165. NE Χ, 7, 1178a2–4, trans. Rackham, p. 619.
Human Nature and Destiny in Aristotle 55 166. NE Χ, 7, 1178a5–8, trans. Rackham, p. 619. 167. NE Χ, 8, 1178a20–22. 168. NE Χ, 8, 1178b7–8, trans. Rackham, p. 623. 169. NE Χ, 8, 1178b18–21. 170. NE Χ, 8, 1178b21–23, trans. Rackham, p. 623. 171. Met. XII, 9, 1074b35. 172. Met. XII, 9, 1074b16. 173. NE 10, 8, 1178b24–32, trans. Rackham, pp. 623–25. 174. NE 10, 8, 1179a23–31, trans. Rackham, p. 627. 175. Gen. An. II, 1, 731b24–732a1: “Now some existing things are eternal and divine whilst others admit of both existence and non-existence. But that which is noble and divine is always, in virtue of its own nature, the cause of the better in such things as admit of being better or worse, and what is not eternal does admit of existence and non-existence, and can partake in the better and the worse. And soul is better than body, and the living, having soul, is thereby better than the lifeless which has none, and being is better than not being, living than not living. These, then, are the reasons of the generation of animals. For since it is impossible that such a class of things as animals should be of an eternal nature, therefore that which comes into being is eternal in the only way possible. Now it is impossible for it to be eternal as an individual— for the substance of the things that are is in the particular; and if it were such it would be eternal—but it is possible for it as a species. This is why there is always a class of men and animals and plants.” Trans. Platt, p. 1136. 176. De An. II, 415a26–415b1, trans. Smith, p. 661. 177. De An. II, 415b3–415b8.
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Aristotle’s Self Peter L. P. Simpson
The preoccupation with the self or subjectivity is one of the distinctive features of modern philosophy, understood as the tradition that goes back to Descartes. The turn to the self is centrally present in Descartes: the self or ego is the fons et origo of his philosophical system. Everything else is ultimately to be traced back to the self and its immediate conscious states. This modern notion stands in marked contrast to the understanding of the self found in earlier thinkers, especially Aristotle. The dominance in contemporary philosophy of the modern concept might suggest that a notion of the self did not exist, or not with any self-conscious clarity, before Descartes. This supposition is false: I hope to show that Aristotle had a very robust notion of the self—which indeed makes more sense than that inherited from Descartes. I do not wish quixotically to maintain that Aristotle had already grasped everything about the self and that we moderns have gained no insights in its regard. We must, however, turn to thinkers other than Descartes and those indebted to him to find these advances. I will return to this point but will concentrate in this essay on Aristotle’s appreciation of selfhood in contrast to the modern Cartesian tradition. That 56
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he had a conception of the self, and what that conception was, are not now well understood. For purposes of exposition I will first describe the dominant Cartesian interpretation of self and then turn to Aristotle’s notion to indicate how it differs. My description of the modern self, and indeed of Aristotle’s self, will be schematic, focusing on the essence of its reality and on its chief consequences, rather than on the nuances, qualifications, and hesitations that, at least in the modern case, mitigate it in both theory and practice.1
Modern Selves The modern self discovered, or invented, by Descartes is more or less identified with presence to self: the self is self-consciousness. Animals are thus not selves because they are not self-conscious. Indeed, animals are not even alive, properly speaking. Life does not, contrary to what Aristotle supposed, come with self-movement but rather with self- consciousness.2 Accordingly there is a splitting off or a separating of self from body, at least at the level of the meanings of terms, since consciousness does not, or need not, include any reference to body. The point still holds true of modern materialists in philosophy of mind, for while they are keen to reduce the being of consciousness to body they are not as keen to reduce the meaning of consciousness to body (as in the case of functionalists). Self-motion, by contrast, does very much include reference to body, for self-movers are paradigmatically bodies. The separating of self and body, initiated if not fully intended by Descartes, brings with it a separating of the self from the public and observable and its retreat into the radically private. For just as the public world of bodies is cut off from the self behind the screen of the self ’s ideas, so is the self cut off from the public world of bodies by its merely instrumental and nonconstitutive relationship to bodily motion. Bodily motion can be the effect of the self, but it need not be. Bodily motion is fully intelligible in its own right as a mechanical process. Only subjectively, or in our own self-consciousness, can we speak of effects of self on bodily motion. There is nothing in the idea of the
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body’s motion as such that requires the presence of the choosing, active self. Descartes famously reduced animals to machines but exempted men from the same reduction because of the fact of speech.3 Among publicly perceptible phenomena it is speech that tells us that behind the phenomena there is another self like our own. Many contemporary authors, of course, whether in the Analytic or Continental traditions, do not like this Cartesian idea of a self hidden behind the speaking. They do not wish to posit, in either themselves or others, such private, unobservable entities. But they curiously hang on to the idea that such a self is the only individual self that in theory there could be. For when, in their flight from the private, they make publicly perceptible language the primary and distinctive phenomenon in human life, they identify the human with such public language and hence also with the social and historical. Thus there are individuals, on this view, only to the extent that individuals are socially and historically embodied, or in short to the extent that they are not individuals but social constructs. What is lost on this view, and what, by its absence, makes an individual self impossible to conceptualize, is the self as a self-mover. For while speech is a public and social phenomenon, the act of speaking is an individual one. So there could be a place for genuine individuals and genuine individual selves in the context of public language if individuals could be conceived as the centers of action from which acts of speaking (and indeed all acts generally) self- consciously proceed. But acts of speaking are the movings of bodies (of mouths in particular), and, as Descartes taught us, and as we moderns still want to believe, there is no self to a moving body as such. Moving bodies are explicable in purely mechanical terms. It is only the symbolic aspects of speech (the structure and the meaning), not its material production in the noise-makings of speakers, that mechanics fails to explain. Hence these symbolic features of language are that to which the distinctively human retreats, and these features are socially, not individually, constructed. There are thus two reductions of the human that we have inherited from Cartesianism: the reduction that Descartes himself gave us, which is to the absolutely private self, and the reduction that the reac-
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tion to Descartes gave us, which is to the absolutely social self. The first gives us individual selves, or rather one individual self, namely one’s own self (for other selves are known indirectly, by analogy and extrapolation—analogy and extrapolation that always remain doubtful). The second gives us only one self too, but not the individual and ineradicably private self. Rather, this private self is denied, and all that is allowed as real is the one social self into which the individual is to be absorbed. The first also gives us individuals that are understood to be complete as selves all at once and on their own; the second gives us individuals that are not selves at all and that are never selves as individuals, but only as constructed into the existing social whole. These reductions at the metaphysical and epistemological levels are repeated at the moral and political levels. Here both theory and practice tend to split into the rival camps of individualism and collectivism, and our conflicts, physical and verbal, concern whether and how far we are to take our bearings by the atomic individual, for whom society is a means, or by the social community, for whom the individual is a means. The former leads to capitalism and the stress on the individual’s rights, economic as well as moral and political, against the community; the latter leads to communism and the stress on the community’s rights, economic as well as moral and political, against the individual. There are problems with both reductions and at each of the two levels mentioned. The first or individualistic reduction, with which we in the West are more familiar, has the drastic effect of closing the self up within itself. The fact is evident enough at the level of metaphysics and epistemology, for there is no being that we know save our own subjective states. Whether there is some being beyond these states which they represent is impossible to answer. For we never have the access to such being to know whether there is any thing of the sort and, if so, whether it is like our conscious subjective states or not. At the level of morals and politics, the self is identified with the individualized subject of certain self-regarding rights, and the political state is a sort of guarantor of these rights against infringement by others. The self is the center, and the world of morals and politics and
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economics is constructed from the self outwards. Perhaps the classic expression of this idea is the theory of the social contract as derived from Descartes’ contemporary Hobbes. Society and the state are, according to Hobbes, constructed by an agreement between what I shall call “solipsistic selves.” By solipsistic selves here I mean self-seeking selves, or selves that are motivated only by the desire to achieve the subjective satisfaction of whatever passions they happen to have at any given time (which is already a sign and beginning of what we may call the economic orientation of modern morality and politics). The pursuit by everyone of his own passions naturally leads to conflict of self with self, and the social contract is a way of removing or minimizing the conflict. Each self agrees to demand for itself no greater freedom to pursue its own passions than it is prepared to grant to others to pursue theirs; each self also agrees to set up a public force or coercive power to enforce and guarantee this agreement. The agreement is the social contract, the terms of the contract and obedience to it are morality, and the coercive force is the state. The features particularly distinctive of this understanding of ethics and politics are rational choice and rights. Rational choice refers to the mechanics, as it were, of making the contract, and rights to the principles and results of the contract. Self-interested individuals are understood to be rational only to the extent that they make agreements that serve their self-interest better than any alternative agreements would. Rational choice theory is the study of what such an agreement should look like. Rights are essentially the self-interested desires of the parties to the contract taken as normative for the contract, that is, as motivating the contract and as being guaranteed by the contract. Self-interest is what, on this account, gives content to rational choice and rights and hence also to the political association that is produced. Such an association is essentially an alliance of mutual convenience and not a community. I mean that what each pursues as his good is not some good common to all but rather a private good peculiar to each. The good of others is viewed as merely instrumental to one’s own individual good, and one makes room for or cares about the good of others only to the extent that this is necessary to secure one’s
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own private good. In a genuine community, by contrast, there is a genuinely common good, I mean a good that is the joint good of each and is essentially constitutive of the good of each. There is, however, no place for such a good in the theory of rational choice and self-interested rights. Indeed, that theory rules out such a good from the start and proceeds on the supposition that whatever goods there may be are always private to the individual. It thus also rules out, or gives no importance or systematic attention to, goods that are increased, as opposed to decreased, when shared, or, in short, to the internal goods of character (the virtues) as opposed to the external and bodily goods (wealth, fame, and the like). The doctrine of rational choice and rights proceeds on the idea that we want to take to ourselves as much as possible and to give up to others as little as possible. But this doctrine would have no place if the goods at issue were goods that existed precisely in giving and were necessarily perfected by giving. Love, for instance, which is such a good, plays no role in this doctrine. Yet if we consider the family and its role in our lives (in the way that Aristotle does, for instance, but Hobbes and Rawls do not), if we recall that the family is our origin and our place of development, we see how vital to our lives genuine community and the goods of community really are. The self, however, which is the basis for the doctrine of rights, is predominantly the self of passions and feelings. The self seeks to satisfy itself, and rights are the means for guaranteeing its satisfactions against threats from others. The self is happy when its passions and feelings are thus indulged and gratified. The self is therefore happy by virtue of its passivity or its capacity to be affected by things that happen to it. For feelings and the satisfaction of feelings are essentially things that we undergo. They are not things that we do, though admittedly they may happen to us because of things we do. There is no or little sense in this theory of the self that is happy, not because of what happens to it or how it feels, but because of what it does and how it gives. Passion and passivity take precedence, not action and activity. But this should not be surprising. The solipsistic self, from which this whole theory begins, is precisely the self turned in upon itself, the self
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absorbed by its own inner states, not the self turned outwards and absorbed in acting and being for others. The self that suffers or undergoes and that, so to speak, finds itself in what it suffers and undergoes, also has the feature, at the metaphysical level, of lacking a robust or substantial coherence and unity. It exists or is a self only insofar as it undergoes or feels or is conscious of something, and the things it undergoes or feels or is conscious of can be as various and as disconnected as one wishes. The self thus tends to get dissolved into the succession of its feelings. It collapses, to follow Hume, into the bundle of its impressions.4 But provided the impressions or feelings are pleasant, nothing else much matters, not even that it is the same self—if indeed any sense can be given, in this context, to the concept of the same self that is different, say, from the concept of a replicated self.5 So much may be said about the first modern reduction of the human, the reduction of the self to the absolutely private self. As regards the second modern reduction of the human, the reduction of the self to the absolutely social self, the following may be noted. To begin with, on the ethical and political level, it is in conflict with the facts. We are clearly existing beings with a full range of powers and abilities quite independently of and prior to society and the structures of the state. Indeed, it is these powers and abilities that make society and the state, for these latter are, if nothing else, human productions. We, by contrast, are produced by nature. Admittedly, we are produced by nature to live in community with each other (that we are produced in and by families proves that fact). But we are not produced to be instruments of the community, let alone the state. We are produced rather to flourish and reach perfection in communities; hence the structures of community and state must be for us rather than we for them. Socialism, to tell the truth, hypostatizes and makes a fetish of community. It attributes a being to community over and above the being of the individuals who, as a matter of observable fact, make it up. For otherwise one could not speak of individuals as being for the community in the sense of being for something that exists indepen-
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dently of them and to which they are to be subordinated. In reality, of course, this fetishism of the social is a sort of deceit that hides the fact that socialism has, often enough, been just another instrument of tyranny; certainly it has been an instrument of the few, the few who constitute the ruling party, for controlling the lives of everyone else. The few of this party are the only independent community, and it is to this group of individuals that everyone is to be subordinated, everyone, that is, who is not part of the inner circle of the party. Liberal individualism and socialism are in fact two sides of the same bad coin. The first subordinates community to individuals and the second subordinates individuals to community. Neither sees, let alone allows room for, the possibility that the two are really on the same level and do not need to be subordinated. Community, true community, is just the individuals who make it up understood as pursuing common goods together, the goods that only exist in, and are necessarily increased by, acts of sharing. Admittedly, to be able to engage in such acts of sharing, individuals cannot be taken in their raw or initial state as bundles of desires and passions, or, to use my earlier phrase, as solipsistic selves. After all, that is the condition of children and the childish, from which we have to be weaned by education. Such weaning comes, of course, from the community or society (or at least the family). But it is nature that gives us the powers to be weaned, and not community or society. Nature also gives us the goal or point of these powers. Our capacity to speak, for instance, which we have by nature, is precisely that: a capacity to speak. And speaking is by nature a naming and judging of the being of things. Our capacity is therefore to be weaned or educated in the direction of such naming and judging. The sounds used for this purpose and their syntactical ordering can vary infinitely, and it is of course true that the particular sounds and ordering we come to use are determined for us by our society. But society and society’s language do not determine the beings we name and judge. Nature determines those as she also determines our capacity to speak. People who would limit our grasp of being by the limits of our language are no less despotic, and no less to be resisted, than those who would limit our pursuit of good by the limits of
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our rulers’ decrees. If being outstrips the language, let the language be made to catch up; and if our pursuit of good outstrips the decrees of our rulers, let the decrees and the rulers be made to catch up. Neither in our moral and political life nor in our speaking and thinking are we mere creatures of a fetishized society or state, totally absorbed in and instrumental to its alienating, despotic goals.
Aristotle’s Self The characterization I have given of the modern self is schematic. If one descended more into the details, one would find that things were not so simple or clear-cut and that other views of the self can be found. Still, this characterization does pick out the main features, and the main deficiencies, of the modern self. Any other views of the self that can be found are going to constitute an interesting alternative only if they avoid these deficiencies. Such views must include elements of an understanding of the self that is of a decidedly Aristotelian cast: not because these elements are found only in Aristotle (they are at least implicit in Plato and can be found in many ancient, as well as medieval, thinkers), but because they receive a particularly compelling presentation in his writings.6 Certainly one can put together from passages of the Metaphysics, the De Anima, and the Ethics in particular an account of the self that is superior in all the decisive respects to the modern accounts just discussed. To begin with, one has in Aristotle (and for the first time) a fully articulated account of substance as the ontological or metaphysical reality of each particular thing. What makes a thing be in the first place— what makes it stand out, as it were, from bare nothingness—is its substantial being. A thing exists in a variety of ways or with a variety of properties (as in having a certain size, shape, or color and so on), but it is not reducible to these properties; rather, these properties are reducible to it. Sizes and shapes and colors do not exist by themselves; they exist as the size or shape or color of something that exists and perdures as the same even if it changes its size or its shape or its color. Its
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being, therefore, is conceptually separable from its properties while they are not conceptually separable from it.7 Empiricists are, of course, going to reject such a distinction. For them the thing is just the bundle of its perceptual properties and nothing else. But empiricists assert this on the basis of an irrealist theory of perception. What we directly perceive, they declare, are sensations, that is, mental contents and not really existing things external to us. For if such is the case, indeed, a thing will be reducible to its sensations; its substance, if one may so speak, or that of which these sensations will be modifications, will be consciousness itself, not some external reality. The opposite will be true, however, if what we perceive are externally existing things. For then a thing will be its own self-subsistent reality, and its properties will be modifications of this reality, conceptually but not really separable from it. Central to Aristotle’s doctrine is the primacy of substance as a real given of experience and not a mere posit after the fashion of Locke. The substance of a thing is also primarily its form or structuring principle. In the case of material things, the structuring principle is combined with matter which it structures so that the whole is an enduring sensible entity.8 The particular form or principle of a thing will be sufficient, not only to individuate the thing as what it is, but also to make it the same individual thing throughout all changes (including changes in the material particles that we nowadays suppose make it up, for these will be particles of the whole only to the extent that their being is the being of the form that is structuring the whole). The doctrine of substantial form is what explains, for Aristotle, the identity over time of individual material things. It is, moreover, the first and principal part of his answer to the problem of personal identity. We tend to wonder if personal identity is to be explained by reference to bodily or psychological continuity or both.9 Aristotle would say it was neither. Personal identity is identity of form or identity of the structuring principle that keeps the body the same despite changes and that is the enduring source of all a person’s powers and acts. This structuring principle that constitutes personal identity over time is the soul or, as Aristotle describes it, the first actuality of the
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rganic body.10 It is what sets the body in act as a body and as a living o body. Without it the body would not be a body. For whether or not soul, or some soul, can survive without the body, it is certain, for Aristotle, that the body cannot survive without the soul.11 For the body, the living body, is essentially something that moves and grows and acts in various ways, and this it could not do without soul. A dead body is no longer a body but the decaying remains of a body.12 The soul is thus both the source of being for the body and the ground of all the acts of the body: growing, moving, sensing, desiring, thinking. These acts are the second actualities of the living body, the actualities in which the powers of the living thing come to exercise. The body is of course not always exercising these powers, as in sleep, for instance. But it is always exercising its first actuality, for without that it would not be a living body at all. From all this it follows that the principle of personal identity is not identical with acts of self-consciousness, or even with what is immediately known in acts of self-consciousness. For acts of self- consciousness are intermittent, but the actuality of the soul is not. Moreover, what is known in self-consciousness are the various acts being performed at the time, the acts of perceiving or thinking, and not the actuality of the soul as such; what is known are second actualities and not first actuality.13 Of course this first actuality of the soul does come to view in a way, since our conscious acts are acts of us sensing, thinking, and so on, and hence must involve some reflexive awareness of the substantial unity from which those acts spring. But the acts need not, perhaps, have any further unity among themselves; they can, depending on our psychological state at the time, be episodic, haphazard, or disorganized. Perhaps in extreme cases it might even be unclear, at least from inside consciousness, if the acts all belong to the same soul. Self-consciousness might, in other words, be Humean: a mere bundle of otherwise independent states. From outside consciousness, however, or outside the given individual’s consciousness, there will be no doubt that all the acts belong to one soul, since the substantial entity that is this living body will always be one and the same and will always be publicly observable as such.
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Our awareness of ourselves as one and the same may thus owe as much, or more, to the external awareness of our body as to the internal awareness of our own acts. Perhaps indeed there is no awareness of the unity of the self apart from awareness of the body and the unity of the body. Aristotle would reject the Cartesian ego, which is supposed to be a unitary given even in the absence of reference to the body. He would, as far as self-consciousness goes, sympathize more with the bundle theory of Hume. Of course, since he would reject Hume’s empiricism (Aristotle did not reduce experience to states of sensation and imagination as empiricists do), he also keeps the external reality and hence the substance of perceived things. He still preserves the substantial unity of the externally existing, and publicly observable, animate body. We may say, then, that the primary self for Aristotle, the enduring entity that is the person, is the ontological reality of the body/soul composite. This reality, which can, to be sure, become an object of self-consciousness, has a being independent of self-consciousness and acts of self-consciousness. Consequently it is not the self of Descartes’ cogito (for that self is pure self-consciousness), or the self of Hume’s bundle of perceptions (a collection of particular conscious acts), or the self of Kant’s transcendental apperception (a theoretical posit), or indeed the self of any theory that seeks to ground the self in and through self-consciousness. Aristotle’s primary self functions rather at the level of natural philosophy and biology. It is the self that comes to view, and to public view, as this particular animate body. The self is the animal, the rational animal: precisely what Descartes rejected as a possible understanding of the self.14 It does not follow from this, however, that this biological or ontological self, as we may call it, is all there is to Aristotle’s self. In fact we might say that for Aristotle this biological self is the lowest level of selfhood. For beyond the unity of the animal’s substance, which is an immediate given, there is also the unity of the animal’s powers and acts, which is not an immediate given and does not automatically flow from the former unity. The body, for instance, can, in its powers, be estranged and divided from itself, through disease, deformity, paralysis,
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and so on, when parts of the body do not act in coordination or do not follow the commands of reason and will. Similarly, disease and paralysis can strike the psychic powers when passion conflicts with passion or with reason and one is driven now this way and now that.15 A man may be, as it were, one self in his substance but many and conflicting selves in his acts. These considerations bring us, however, directly to Aristotle’s moral and political thought. For unity of actions, or what we may call the moral self, is not, like the ontological or biological self, a given of nature; it is an achievement of practice and habituation, or in short the result of virtue.16 Without virtue both individual and community are torn and divided. Aristotle presents a vivid picture of such a state in his description of the bad man: “The base are divided against themselves and, as in the incontinent, their appetites are other than their wishes. For they choose, in place of what they think good, things pleasant but harmful. Some shun doing what they think best for themselves through cowardice or sloth. . . . For their soul is riven by faction, and one part, because of depravity, grieves to be kept from certain things while another is pleased, and one part pulls them in this direction and another in that as if splitting them asunder.”17 In contrast with this is the description of the good man: “The decent man is of one mind with himself, and he desires with his entire soul the same things. He wills for himself what is and appears to be good, and does it. . . . He shares the same griefs and pleasures as himself, for at all times the same thing is painful or pleasant to him and not one thing at one time and another at another.” The bad man, then, is not really a unity, while the good man is. The bad man is in fact a many, and a many that is conflicted. As Aristotle says again: That which is good is simple but what is bad is multiform. And while the good man is always alike and does not change in character, the base and the senseless man is one thing in the morning and another at night. In the wicked man there is dissonance, and it is for this reason that it seems possible for a self [autos] to be an enemy of itself
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[hauto¯]. . . . But qua one and undivided a self [autos] is desirable to itself [hauto¯], and such the good man is . . . since the depraved man is not one but many and within the same day is a different self [heteros].18
I have translated this latter passage somewhat unusually (though not, I think, inaccurately) to bring out expressly how much the idea of self is present in the Greek. Aristotle’s message here is that the bad man is not a self but many selves, and selves that have no intrinsic connection but are hostile to each other. The bad man is a sort of schizophrenic. The only unity his many selves have is that they are all states or moods or acts, of one and the same body/soul composite. The bad man may thus be ontologically one self (for he is one animal body) but not existentially one self. On the contrary, his lived experience is a bundle of conflicting acts and emotions. “The depraved do not have any fixity in them, for not even to themselves do they persist in being alike.”19 The reason for all this is plain. For the vices, which are what disfigure the bad and depraved, do not have any principle of unity to them. To begin with, they form pairs of conflicting opposites: rashness opposes cowardice, prodigality opposes meanness, irascibility opposes passivity, and so on.20 It is likely that the bad man will share something of both pairs of vices. He will run rashly into needless danger at one moment and then at the next, when he realizes his mistake, run out of it again like a coward. He will give his money prodigally at one moment but then at the next, when he sees it dissipating too quickly, seek to increase it like a miser.21 The very nature of the vices, therefore, will deprive the bad man of unity. Second, the vices oppose reason and nature. They oppose reason because vices are by definition failures to keep to the mean marked out by reason. They oppose nature because our nature is directed to a life of virtue as its proper end and function.22 Moreover, our nature is ultimately one with reason, for reason is its principle. The soul is the principle of our nature (it is our form and substance), and the principle of our soul is reason. Indeed, Aristotle says on several occasions that reason or intellect is what we truly are (or is our true self ).23 It is not
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surprising, therefore, that to be vicious is to be driven against oneself and to experience a perpetual state of opposition within oneself—an opposition between what one is, reason, and what one does, vice. As remarked in the Magna Moralia: “Then only will the soul be one, when the reason and the passions are in accord with one another,” that is, when one lives a life of virtue.24 “The object of our search is this, that things simply good be good to the self. For what one should choose is what is simply good, but what one should choose for oneself is what is good for one’s self. These must harmonize together, and that is what virtue does. This is also what political science is for, so that those who do not yet have this harmony may come to have it.”25 Virtue is what brings the soul to unity and makes us into single as opposed to multiple selves. For no virtue opposes any other, but all are united in and through the virtue of prudence, which, as right reason, falls into the definition of each.26 Moreover, as has been remarked, the virtues accord with reason and nature, or are indeed the perfection of reason and nature. Thus they integrate the soul with itself and with its acts, and integrate the acts with each other too. Virtue is for the sake of acts, and the good man is good in action, not merely in having the power and disposition to act.27 It is in activity that the self of the good man, the self which he is, must come fully into being as a self, and action is itself complete in and through the body. Thus it is in the self-moving body that the self most comes to view— precisely the opposite of what Descartes wished.28 Our self-motion, however, unlike that of plants and animals, is self-conscious motion. For our self-motion is deliberate and chosen, and choice is impossible without self-awareness, since without such awareness we could not know our acts as our own and so could not, as choice requires, direct ourselves to and in these acts. We would instead be directed or moved by something else, and so would be acted on rather than acting. Besides, the very idea of a self denotes reflexivity, the returning of awareness back on the self as source of that awareness. A self that had no awareness of itself would not be a self. It would not know itself as “I” or “myself,” or have any awareness of anything as “mine.” Self- awareness and self-possession are integral to being a self and an agent of acts.
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In one sense self-awareness is easy and automatic. As soon as we are awake we are aware of ourselves and of our existence and activity. We do not have to put any effort into being aware of ourselves; it comes at once with each of our waking acts. We perceive a tree, for instance, and in that very perceiving we perceive that we perceive. We know a mathematical equation, and in that very knowing we know that we know. We walk and talk, and in that very walking and talking we know that we walk and talk.29 The same is true of all our activity, including our deliberating and choosing. But such immediate self- awareness, while enough for awareness of self, is not enough for knowledge of self. It does not give us to ourselves in a full and direct way. The “I” of immediate self-awareness is always given to us alongside something else and, as it were, in its shadow or on its margin. What we directly know and perceive is the other (the tree, the equation, the walking); the self we know and perceive only reflexively. We can, to be sure, bring ourselves into direct awareness in another way, when in one of our acts we make another act the object. So we recall in memory something we did and, focusing on it, try to see why we did it and in what state of mind or feeling. Or, while performing some act now that we can do easily and without much concentration, we distance ourselves from it in thought, as it were, and watch ourselves doing it. But this kind of awareness, while able to provide us with the source of a deeper knowledge of ourselves, is always performed at one remove from ourselves. It is our self as somehow other, as belonging to another time or another act, that we focus on. It is not the present “I,” the “I” given immediately in the act we are now absorbed in, that comes to us like this. Self-knowledge is not the same as immediate self-awareness, and it is harder to achieve. Aristotle observes: “We can study our neighbours more than we can study ourselves and their deeds more than our own.” Again: “It is a most difficult thing, as some of the sages have said, to attain a knowledge of oneself. . . . We are not able to see what we are from ourselves, and that we cannot do so is plain from the way in which we blame others without being aware that we do the same thing ourselves.”30 Aristotle’s stance is anti-Cartesian. The self is not, as Descartes argued, what we first and most know, but what, in a way, we know last
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and least.31 Even our immediate self-awareness, which accompanies each of our conscious acts, is not first, though it be contemporaneous. To be aware that one is seeing or hearing or walking presupposes as logically, though not temporally, prior that one is seeing or hearing or walking.32 These remarks of Aristotle’s about the difficulty, yet necessity, of self-knowledge (as opposed to immediate self-awareness) come in the middle of his discussion of friendship and the need the good man has of friends. They form part of complex arguments to the effect that we can know ourselves best and easiest in our friend, and that by contemplating and knowing him and his acts we can thereby contemplate and know ourselves and our acts. But such contemplation of oneself in one’s friend will, of course, be possible only if one’s friend is like oneself, for otherwise what one contemplates in him will not manifest what is in oneself. The only friend, therefore, who can play this role must be a friend who is another self and who is, as it were, a mirror in whom we can see ourselves reflected.33 Only virtuous friends are other selves and mirrors to each other, for only their friendship is founded on love of what the friend is essentially, as opposed to accidentally.34 If self-knowledge, therefore, comes to its full completion in such virtuous friendship, and if self-knowledge is necessary to being fully a self, then it follows that the self comes to full completion only in being a virtuous friend to a virtuous friend. It will be in virtuous friendship, and in virtuous friendship alone, that selves come to their perfect realization as selves. In the virtuous friend the self is given to the self in direct focus, as it were, and in a direct act, so that in seeing him directly I see myself directly. For he is the faithful mirror of my own self. Likewise, he too in seeing me directly sees himself directly. We each reflect the self back to the other, and the self-knowing that we could not do, or not do well, on our own, we do easily together. This is, I take it, what Aristotle ultimately has in mind by the striking phrase that the friend is heteros or allos autos and even heteros ego.35 This phrasing is normally translated as meaning that the friend is “another self ” or “another I,” and this is undoubtedly right. But the phrasing has a greater grammatical richness, and there is no reason not to
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translate it also as meaning that the friend is “the self or I as other” or even “the other as self or I.”36 All of these translations only serve to highlight, in different ways, the same and decisive fact about virtuous friendship: that the friend makes the self, as it were, stand opposite itself and thus, by bringing the self into direct view for itself, brings the self to fuller knowledge of itself and so also to fuller being as a self.37 However, as was already mentioned, the friend cannot do this service for his friend without the friend doing the same service for him at the same time. Virtuous friends necessarily complete each other mutually in their acts of friendship. As I become fully aware of myself and my life and being in him, so he becomes fully aware of himself and his life and being in me. In a real sense we each give ourselves to the other in our acts toward each other. Moreover, we thus give ourselves fully to each other, for there is no more that we can give to each other than our very selves. Each of the friends’ acts thus becomes another act of self-giving, and each act of self-giving intensifies the being of the self that gives and receives. For, if we are to follow out the implications of Aristotle’s remarks, we must note that the giving and receiving must be not only mutual or reciprocal but also immediate to each other. In giving myself to him I receive the gift of himself to me. At least this must be so in the most complete acts of virtuous friendship, when both friends are active toward each other together. For then my act of giving myself to him is immediate with his act of giving himself to me. This remains so even if the act in question is the friend’s doing me a benefit and my thanking him for it. For an act of gratitude is a giving too (we ourselves call it a “giving of thanks”). Of course, there can be an interval between the act of beneficence and the act of gratitude, say, if my friend saves my life by taking me to hospital when I am wounded or ill and unconscious. But when I have recovered enough to know what my friend did and to thank him for it expressly and personally, then at once the activity of mutual giving and receiving is restored. For I give myself to him again in giving thanks and he to me in receiving thanks. The sort of acts, of course, which virtuous friends do together as friends are virtuous acts, and virtue and virtuous acts are goods that are par excellence communal. They are goods which, as remarked
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e arlier, are realized in two or more acting together and are increased, rather than diminished, in being shared.38 Money is a material good that is diminished in being shared, but the generous use of money is a good of virtue that is increased in being shared. For if all share in being generous to each other according to their means, generosity is necessarily increased. The same holds also of the acts of the intellectual virtues, for contemplation and study can often be done better and more intensely and continuously by several together than by one alone. Of course, even bad men can cooperate for particular purposes, and even the lower grades of friendship, the friendships of mere utility or pleasure, necessarily involve some cooperation and some doing together of one and the same action. There is doubtless even some degree of self-giving in these friendships. But such self-giving is necessarily going to be imperfect and flawed because the selves who are giving and receiving are imperfect and flawed selves. Besides, it is not the friend’s self that they love but some feature attaching to the friend which they currently have need of or currently find pleasure in. Their friend likewise loves them back in the same way. Hence there is no mutual giving and receiving of selves. The friendship of the virtuous, of course, is not like this. Not only are the virtuous, because of their virtue, complete selves, but their love is for the self of their friend. They give their selves, and the selves they give are gifts worthy of their friend, for they are, as it were, giving the friend back to himself in the mirror of their own souls.
The Selves Compared Such is what must be implied by Aristotle’s teaching on friendship, even if Aristotle himself does not spell it out in so many words. Aristotle’s self stands in marked contrast to the modern selves discussed in the first part of this essay. For, to begin with, this self has substantial reality as an individual self. One might say that Descartes’ self is something substantial but that his way of understanding it leads too easily to the loss of substantiality. For he identifies this substantiality with con-
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sciousness, and consciousness in us is, first, an act or a series of acts and not a substance, and, second, passive rather than active. It expresses the self in its mode of experiencing itself and not in its mode of moving itself. The very separating of the body from the self, which is the chief legacy of Cartesianism, or the very loss of the embodied animality of the self, is what leads also to the loss of substance and action. It is what leads, indeed, to the Humean self, which, though at some distance from the Cartesian self, is nevertheless a natural development from the Cartesian self. A bundle of feelings or impressions is what consciousness, understood as identical with conscious acts, must always threaten to become. Aristotle’s insistence on the reality of the objects of immediate perception, including especially the reality of our own bodies, is what enables him to keep the substantial reality of the self as the abiding source and ultimate object of consciousness. It is also what enables him to keep the substantial reality of individual selves as the source and perfection of the social. He loses real individuals neither into bundles of perceptions nor into social constructs. For Aristotle has as many individual selves as he has rational animals, and these individuals, because each is real and a substance, can genuinely communicate and share with each other. Neither the selfabsorbed or solipsistic self of liberal individualism nor the socially constructed self of socialism is his starting point. His starting point is rather the embodied rational animal. This animal stands out, even as an animal, because of its capacity for sharing genuinely communal as opposed to private goods, or goods of the soul over and above goods of the body. It is in such sharing that this animal comes fully to itself and indeed becomes fully a self. There can be here no conflict between the good of others and the good of the self, or between altruism and selfishness.39 Communal goods are precisely that: communal goods. They are goods that satisfy each as much as all, and indeed that satisfy each in satisfying all and that satisfy all in satisfying each. It is as much an error here to raise, with the liberal, the idea of a conflict between self and other as it is to raise, with the socialist, the idea of the self losing itself in the other or in society. On the contrary, in the pursuit of
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communal goods, each self is perfected as a self and finds itself again and again in other selves. Such is the conclusion one must reach if one speaks about selves who are selves not merely in their substantial being as animals but also in their activity as rational. The communal goods are the rational goods of the virtues, and the virtues have the effect, not only of enabling self genuinely to share with self, but also and especially of bringing the self to the fullness of selfhood. The unity that the self already is by its substantial reality as body and soul is, as already explained, not automatically carried over into the activities of the self. There is need in addition of the virtues which alone can make the self one in this way. Without the virtues the self is dissipated and ceases, in its lived experience, to be a self. Not only does the self that is unified by the virtues complete itself by becoming, in its acts, one self as opposed to many selves; it also completes itself by becoming the only sort of self that, through union with other selves like itself, can fully come to itself and fully grasp and possess itself. The perfect self is, as it were, the unimpeded flow of existence from substance to powers to acts. This perfection is achieved finally and fully in virtuous friendship, wherein the friends, while different in their being, are united in their living and are to each a true other self. In such a case the difference between substance and acts, and between the substantial and the moral self, may remain ontologically, but it has little importance existentially. In the experience of their lived being, friends are one in their joint act of self-gift.40 Such friendship marks the high point of Aristotle’s self and also, of course, of the good life and of happiness. Only the good man is properly speaking a self. The bad man is many and conflicting selves. Only the good man is truly happy. The bad man is torn and tortured by the war between his selves. Only the good man truly acts and, in acting, realizes himself. The bad man is not so much acting as being acted upon as he is seized by now one and now another of his warring selves. Happiness for him, if we may call it happiness, is not what he does but what he undergoes because of what he does, namely the pleasures or satisfactions, however temporary, that his conflicting actions bring. Consequently he measures his relations with others, not according to
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the mutual self-gift of virtuous friends, but according to how these relations may bring him satisfaction, that is, according to the principles of rational choice. He demands from others his self-focused rights; he does not expand into others through self-perfecting love. By contrast, not only do the virtuous achieve genuine community with others through their friendship, but this community completes their selfhood. They are not lost in some hypostatized social mass. Each is and remains a genuine self. Aristotle’s self is evidently neither solipsistic nor a social construct. Instead it keeps to the mean between these two modern extremes, and by so doing it achieves a higher degree of selfhood and community than either. Aristotle furnishes us, therefore, with a better basis, not only for the ontology of the self and consciousness, but also for a morals and a politics that give genuine and equal worth to individuals and community instead of subordinating one to the other. Doubtless more can be said on this matter, and there are further developments one could explore—for there are insights about the self in modern philosophy that go beyond what one can find in, or tease out of, Aristotelian texts.41 Nevertheless these texts already represent a remarkable and a remarkably balanced achievement.
Notes 1. On the displacement or “disconnect” between modern theory and practice, see the essay by David Walsh in this volume (chapter 25). 2. For Aristotle’s view, see De Anima (De An.) I, 2, 403b25–27; II, 1, 412a 14–15; III, 3, 427a17–19. 3. René Descartes, Discourse, pt. 5, in Descartes: Selected Philosophical Writings, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 44–45, and in Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Vrin, 1964–76), vol. 6, pp. 56–59. 4. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), § 6, especially pp. 252–53. 5. See especially Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), pt. 3.
78 Peter L. P. Simpson 6. I would refer especially in this regard to Suzanne Stern-Gillet’s excellent book Aristotle’s Philosophy of Friendship (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995). Much of my essay has taken its inspiration from this book. See also Desmond Connell, “Substance and the Interiority of Being,” Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 25 (1983): 68–85. 7. This is the teaching of Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Met.) VII, 1. 8. Met. VII, especially 6 and 15. There is considerable scholarly dispute about Aristotle’s teaching on substance in the Metaphysics, but this dispute concerns rather the details than the main points of the doctrine and so need not concern us here. The interested reader may consult Sheldon M. Cohen, Aristotle on Nature and Incomplete Substance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Mary Louise Gill, Aristotle on Substance: The Paradox of Unity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); Frank A. Lewis, Substance and Predication in Aristotle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Charlotte Witt, Substance and Essence in Aristotle: an Interpretation of Metaphysics VII– IX (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). 9. Parfit, Reasons and Persons, pt. 3; Friedo Ricken, “Ist die Person oder der Mensch Zweck an sich selbst?,” Information Philosophie 2 (1997): 5–17. 10. De An. II, 1, 412a27–28. 11. I have in mind here the agent intellect of De An. III, 5, if this is supposed to be a part of the soul and not something separate (a matter of much and long-standing scholarly dispute). 12. Aristotle’s position on the body is the reverse of Descartes’. The body is not an independently subsisting machine. It has no being of itself but exists with the being of the soul, which is its structuring and energizing principle (De An. II, 1, 412b20–27). 13. De An. III, 2, 425b12–17. 14. René Descartes, Second Meditation, in Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Selected Philosophical Writings, p. 81, and in Adam and Tannery, Oeuvres, vol. 7, p. 25. 15. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (NE) I, 13, 1102b16–28. 16. See Stern-Gillet, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Friendship, pp. 25–29. 17. NE IX, 4, 1166b7–22. My translation. 18. Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics (EE) VII, 5, 1239b11–14; VII, 6, 1240b12– 17. My translations. 19. NE VIII, 8, 1159b7–9. 20. NE II, 7. 21. NE III, 7, 1115b28–6a9; IV, 1, 1121a30–2a13. 22. NE I, 7, 1097b22–8a20.
Aristotle’s Self 79 23. NE IX, 4.1166a16–17; IX, 8, 1168b34–69a3, X, 7, 1178a2–3. For this sort of reason too, there is something of the good and decent in all of us, including the base; EE VII, 3, 1238b12–14, and cf. NE II, 1, 1103a24–25. See also Stern-Gillet, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Friendship, pp. 25–26. 24. Aristotle, Magna Moralia (MM) II, 11, 1211a34–35. 25. EE VII, 2,1236b38–37a3. 26. NE VI, 1, 5, 13. 27. NE I, 8, 1098b31–9a7. 28. Descartes, Second Meditation. 29. De An. III, 2, 425b12; NE IX, 9, 1170a29–32. 30. The first quotation is from NE IX, 9, 1169b33–35, the second from the MM II, 15, 1213a13–18. On these passages, see John M. Cooper, “Friendship and the Good in Aristotle,” Philosophical Review 86 (1977): 290–315, especially pp. 295–97. 31. Descartes, Second Meditation. See also Stern-Gillet, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Friendship, pp. 22–23. 32. NE IX, 9, 1170a29–32. 33. NE IX, 9, 1170a1–4; MM II, 15, 1213a20–24. 34. The other two kinds of friendship, those of pleasure and utility, are based on accidental qualities of the friend (NE VII, 3). For a valuable discussion of this point, see John M. Cooper, “Aristotle on the Forms of Friendship,” Review of Metaphysics 30 (1976–77): 619–48, esp. pp. 634–43. 35. NE IX, 4, 1166a31–32, IX. 9.1170b6–7; EE VII, 12, 1245a29–30, 34–35; MM II, 15, 1213a11, 23–24. See Stern-Gillet, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Friendship, pp. 28–29. 36. Contra the reservations of Stern-Gillet, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Friendship, p. 12; see in particular the contrasting discussions, especially of Aristotle’s idea of “perceiving together” or sunaisthesis, in April Flakne, “Friendship and the Sunaisthetic Self,” Epoche 10 (2005): 37–63, and John von Heyking, “Sunaisthetic Friendship and the Foundations of Political Anthropology,” International Political Anthropology 1 (2008): 179–93. 37. See especially NE IX, 9, 1170a32–b7. 38. Cf. Cooper, “Friendship and the Good,” 304–10. 39. Cf. Stern-Gillet, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Friendship, pp. 120–22. 40. Cf. ibid., pp. 99–101, 140–42. 41. These insights are, however, to be found in a tradition of thinking, namely personalist phenomenology, that has consciously eschewed the excesses of Cartesianism; see among others John Crosby, The Selfhood of the Human Person (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1996);
80 Peter L. P. Simpson Max Scheler, Der Formalismus der Ethik (Bern: Francke, 1966); Josef Seifert, Essere e Persona (Milan: Centro di Ricerche di Metafisica dell’Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, 1989); Karol Wojtyla, The Acting Person, trans. Andrzej Potocki (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979); Peter Simpson, On Karol Wojtyla (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2001). The essays by Flakne and von Heyking, mentioned above, very interestingly claim to find much more of this personalism in Aristotle than I have suggested. Their interpretations of particular Aristotelian texts are not always convincing, but the general contention may well be right.
t h r e e
Mechanisms That Respond to Reasons An Aristotelian Approach to Agency
Rowland Stout
Are there any mechanisms in the natural world that respond to reasons—that are sensitive to considerations about what they should do? I think the answer is that there are approximately 6.6 billion of them on this planet alone. This is not to say that there is nothing more to being a person than being a rational agent—a reasons-responder. My claim is just that to the extent that we are agents we are mechanisms that respond to reasons. The idea of being a mechanism that is responsive to reasons is thoroughly Kantian and represents us both as belonging to the phenomenal world and as being in touch with the “supersensible” space of reasons. It is on the one hand an idea completely characteristic of the Age of Enlightenment—a way of defining the human condition that makes no essential reference to God. As such it belongs to a structure of ideas that Gerry Hanratty criticized for being too limited. But it is 81
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also precisely this idea of being caught between two spaces—the straightforwardly physical and the transcendent—that interested Hanratty in his discussions of Gnosticism.1 The central idea there was that physical material entities like us can gain knowledge of a transcendent reality and thereby regain some element of divinity that our material nature has otherwise blocked from us. Hanratty’s research has revealed that there was an element of Gnosticism in Hegel’s thinking. But it would be harder to claim that Kant’s conception of the will as the sort of causality that belongs to living things insofar as they are rational—as the power to act according to the idea of rules—has any such element.2 According to Kant we bring the transcendent space of reasons into a physical manifestation every time we move our bodies, and not just at moments of religious insight. Practical rationality seems to be an altogether more mundane concept than Sophia—the special and indeed secret insight that the Gnostics claimed for themselves. We must not be railroaded by the proponents of “rational choice theory” into treating practical rationality as the trivial calculation of preference maximization. The simple reason for this is that preferences are themselves determined by practical rationality. Not only must practical rationality be what determines the best means to ends, it must also choose between ends when they are not all achievable. But more than this it must be the articulation of a conception of value out of which the ends themselves are seen as ends. As such it must reflect and build upon human nature. Such a conception of value is not in any way given to us in simple logical principles. It evolves as our conceptual articulacy evolves and in response to challenges from other conceptions of value. And there is no reason to suppose that there is some final codification of such a conception. Whatever conception of values we come up with is always subject to modification in the light of further experience. This is Hegel’s great insight in his conception of the dialectical method. Rationality is dynamic, open-ended, and uncodifiable. There can be no reduction of the norms of rationality into non-normative facts or logical formulas. But that does not make it mystical in any sense. Rationality
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is embedded in the human condition and emerges from the history of the human condition. So I defend the claim that people are mechanisms that respond to reasons in this tribute to Gerry Hanratty because it is just the sort of claim that he would have tried to undermine in his characteristically unassertive way. The claim that, as agents, we are mechanisms that respond to reasons has a rather dispiriting quality to it. In particular it may strike one as both too optimistic and too pessimistic about human nature. It will seem too optimistic to the extent that the requirement that one can respond to reasons seems very demanding. Are we not also irrational creatures—still very recognizably doing things in the world when behaving in a way that fails to respond to reasons? My reply to this will be to insist on very undemanding conceptions of rationality and reasons when defending the claim that, as agents, we are sensitive to such things. Even when acting irrationally we are responsive to reasons. The claim will seem too pessimistic to the extent that the idea that we are mechanisms is somehow demeaning. It makes our agency seem mechanical and it makes the notion of free will problematic. If our agency is characterized by the law-governed regularity of the behavior of a mechanism or machine, then where is spontaneity; where indeed is choice? My reply to this is to point out that a mechanism that responds to reasons would be a very unmechanical sort of mechanism. The law that governs its behavior would be the open-ended law: “Do what rationality dictates.” Assuming that rationality itself cannot be codified, then neither can the behavior of such a mechanism. Part of what it is to be an agent with free will is to be capable of determining what one should do according to the reasons one has. This makes free will coincide with Kantian autonomy, and while many people still find this identification problematic, I will leave it unchallenged here. There are plenty of misleading images that we can pull down from popular imagination of what a mechanism that responds to reasons might look like. One of the most familiar is Mr. Spock from Star Trek. He is an alien Vulcan logic machine incapable of emotion—very good at 3-D chess but not so good at relating to the human predicament.
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The image is misleading because our emotionality should be taken to be part of our rationality (and vice versa).3 The reasons that we respond to may be “agent-centered”—they may respect our very human and very particular perspective in the world. Logic—usually taken to be an impersonal structure of truth-preserving inference—need not be taken to capture rationality. This is all by way of preamble. I am not going to be able to argue for very much of that here. What I will be concerned with is the causal aspect of our agency. I think that getting this right is the key that unlocks much of the so-called problem of agency. If we can characterize our causal relationship with reasons in a way that does not leave utterly mysterious how abstract (“supersensible”) rationality can be manifested in physical behavior, then we will have made some real progress. We will have shown how something that cannot be determined by empirical science (rationality) can still be bound up in physical processes without our having to make any reference to God.
A Causal Approach to Agency I will argue for a causal approach to agency based on an Aristotelian model of causal processes rather than on the more familiar model of a network of causal links. In this way I defend the Enlightenment conception of humans causally bound up with reasons. But I will do this not by accepting the Enlightenment (or at least the Humean) conception of causation as a law-governed link between events. Instead I will defend the very model of causation that these Enlightenment thinkers rejected. Processes in this Aristotelian model are the realizations of potentialities. Mechanisms are the things that have potentialities. Thus processes can also be thought of as the workings of mechanisms. So this approach takes the working of a certain kind of mechanism to be essential to agency. That special kind of mechanism is what we refer to as an agent. I will suggest that the potentiality that is characteristic of agency is the potentiality to respond to reasons. Agents are reasons-responsive mechanisms, to use a phrase coined by John Fischer and Mark Ravizza.4
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We are agents; that’s what we are: reasons-responsive mechanisms. Fischer and Ravizza claim that what is required for morally responsible agency is not a condition they call “regulative control,” which is the power to act differently. Rather, it is what they call “guidance control,” which agents exhibit if their behavior issues from their own reasonsresponsive mechanisms. What Fischer and Ravizza are doing here is presupposing a notion of acting for a reason and trying to work out what is required for the extra condition of acting with moral responsibility. My goal is different; it is to work out what is required for acting for a reason. The two accounts are accounts of different things. Also there are some technical differences between the ways the accounts of reasons-responsiveness are worked out. So although I want to mark the clear similarities between our approaches I am not setting out to defend Fischer and Ravizza across the board. My first task is to motivate having a causal approach to agency at all. Although many people trying to construct theories of action will straightaway assume that they are aiming for a causal theory, this is by no means trivial. Indeed, I am going to reject the standard causal theory of action, which identifies action with mental states or events causing physical behavior. I think the standard causal theory gets the cause wrong, gets the effect wrong, and fails to characterize how the effect is brought about. So my defense of causalism will not go through this route. I want to start a bit further back with the claim that agency is best understood in terms of something—the agent—making events happen and states obtain in a certain way. In my version of a causal approach to agency the cause is the agent, not a mental state of an agent; the effects are worldly states obtaining and events occurring, rather than just the bodily behavior of the agent; and what really characterizes agency is how the agent brings about these things—the process. The claim that agency essentially involves a certain kind of making things happen and states obtain is certainly not accepted by everyone, not even by everyone who accepts some sort of causal approach to agency.5 I want to consider a two-stage argument. First, agency should be understood in terms of a certain kind of doing. Then, doing things should be understood in terms of making the things done happen or obtain. For example, raising one’s arm is making one’s arm rise. Thus
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agency should be understood as a certain kind of making things happen or obtain. Here is the argument spelt out: 1. Agency should be understood in terms of a certain kind of doing things. 2. Doing things should be understood in terms of making things happen or states obtain. 3. Therefore, agency should be understood in terms of a certain kind of making things happen or states obtain.
The phrase “a certain kind of doing things” is very clumsy. It is really just a placeholder for whatever turns out to be essential to agency. Presumably the intentional quality of our doing things is essential to its counting as a manifestation of our agency. But I need make no commitment to such a theory of agency at this stage. The second stage of the argument is the debatable one. It might be thought that action would be a paradigmatically causal concept. But it would not follow that we should seek a causal analysis of doing, since there may be no causal notion more basic than that of doing which could be used in an analysis of doing. No one doubts that causation itself is a causal concept, but causation should not be understood in causal terms. If doing is a very basic causal concept, then a causal analysis of doing might be as futile as a causal analysis of causation. We can see this threat clearly when we ask what it is that is made to happen when an agent, in doing something, makes something happen. For if there is nothing less than the action itself that the agent makes happen, then no progress would be made by saying that in doing something one makes something happen. Indeed, the claim would clearly be false. It is certainly not right to identify eating a banana with causing oneself to eat a banana. For in that case eating a banana would be causing oneself to cause oneself to cause oneself, and so on ad infinitum, to eat a banana. Now, in the very simple case of an action that is moving part of one’s body there is an obvious candidate for the thing that the agent makes happen which is not the action itself. It is the event of that part
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of the body moving. For example, my raising my arm might be identified with my causing the event of my arm rising.6 My arm rising is not an action—it is not the same thing as what I do. To employ the Aristotelian terminology made familiar by Jennifer Hornsby’s work, it is an intransitive movement, whereas moving my arm is a transitive movement.7 Even in this simple case of an action, it might be objected that I am not really causing my arm to rise; I am just raising it. The idea of causing my own arm to rise might sound rather odd—as if I had to employ some nonstandard device like autohypnosis to make the arm rise. But I think this oddness may easily be attributed to the fact that in normal cases we have a simpler way to express what happened— namely, that I raised my arm. The implication that there is some nonstandard route to the arm rising when I make it rise can easily be canceled. Suppose there was something else like a force field or an electric shock that might have made my arm rise, though it did not. Then a sensible question for someone to ask would be: “Did you make that happen?” And the sensible reply would be: “Yes, I caused my arm to rise.” So I think it is right to identify moving one’s body with causing one’s body to move. But the real problem is that on the face of it not everything one does is moving one’s body. The example of raising one’s arm is a questionable choice as a paradigm of agency. Philosophers of action very often look at these simple acts or achievements as the targets of their analysis. But it is not at all clear that what characterizes agency are acts like this rather than more complex activities. Many of the things we do seem to be activities rather than achievements. Eating a banana, going for a walk, thinking about a problem, chatting with a neighbor, praying, are all doings that do not seem to amount to mere achievements. Most of these things involve moving one’s body in some way, but it is not at any rate obvious that they should be identified with moving one’s body, even in very complex ways. Now, there are some influential arguments in favor of the nonobvious claim that anything one does is a case of moving one’s body.8 But even if one rejects these arguments there is a more plausible fallback position, which is that everything one does is a case of achieving some
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structure of intransitive results. These results might include one’s body moving in certain ways; but they might also include things happening outside the body. For example, we might try to identify my eating a banana with my making a structure of events happen and states obtain that are characteristic of my banana eating—roughly speaking, by making the banana become ingested through my mouth into my digestive system. Perhaps my going for a walk is my causing some characteristic structure of achievements associated with going for a walk. It is not obvious exactly how to describe such a characteristic structure of achievements; but working it out looks like a perfectly reasonable philosophical task. One consideration in favor of thinking of actions in terms of achievements of some sort is that with these activities it is always still possible to try but fail to do them. It would be strange, but not impossible, to try but fail to eat a banana, go for a walk, chat with one’s neighbor, or pray. Perhaps you gag every time you attempt to swallow a bit of banana, the wind blows you over every time you take a step, the sound of traffic means that you cannot hear a word your neighbor is saying, or your mind wanders every time you start to pray. This suggests that with these activities there is something that can be successfully achieved or not. And this in turn suggests that these activities involve the achievement of goals. If eating a banana is achieving a structured goal, then it is also making that goal become achieved. So I propose that a subject, S, φ-ing can be identified with S causing a structure of results characteristic of his or her φ-ing. Putting this together with the first stage of the argument that what characterizes agency is a certain kind of doing things, we get the conclusion that what characterizes an agent’s agency is the agent’s causing in a certain way a structure of results characteristic of some activity.
Two Kinds of Causal Theory The standard way to analyze a causal notion—F—uses the following sort of schema:
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S F-s O if and only if some aspect of S causes O to have some quality characteristic of F. As a simple example, consider the wind drying the washing. This schema is to be understood as some aspect of the wind causing the washing to be dry. Which aspect of the wind should be specified here is up for discussion. Perhaps it is the wind itself that is doing the causing, or perhaps it is some event or state associated with the wind. This analysis explains the causal notion in terms of a causal link between two things—a characteristic cause and a characteristic effect. As such, the analysis uses a causal chain model of causation. This model takes a basic causal process to be constituted from two particular events or perhaps complexes of events and states—the cause and the effect—and a generic relation of causation linking them. The causal world can be described according to this conception by specifying which structures of events and states are linked to one another by this relation. The causal world will look like a huge chain or network of events and states linked together. A diagram of such a causal world will have names for the events and states and a complex structure of arrows linking these names. But this is certainly not the only model of causation. There is also an Aristotelian model that allows in addition to a cause and an effect not just a generic relation of causation linking them but individual causal processes. In this model we can ask what the cause is and what the effect is, but in addition we can ask how the effect results from the cause—that is, what the mechanism is. And this how-question is not to be answered just by introducing more links in a causal chain. It is answered by specifying the potentiality whose realization is the process to which the effect belongs. This Aristotelian model of the causal world cannot be fully pictured as a network of arrows, since each arrow would have to represent a different sort of causal process. It is a world of mechanisms having potentialities which are realized in the workings of the mechanisms and which realize each other.
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The obvious inadequacy of the causal chain model as an account of the wind drying the washing is that by only specifying the cause and the effect it misses the way the effect is caused, and this way too has to be characteristic of wind-drying. We can easily see this by constructing a deviant causal chain counterexample. Suppose the wind blew open the window, which banged into the button that turned on the tumble dryer, in which the washing soon dried. The wind caused the washing to be dry, but it did not dry the washing. This is because it caused the washing to be dry in the wrong sort of way. It did not result in the washing becoming dry through the realization of a wind-drying mecha nism. This explanation suggests an alternative way of analyzing causal notions—the causal process model. S F-s O if and only if O having the F-quality belongs to a process that is the working of an F-mechanism (the realization of its F-potenti ality) embodied by S.
For example, the wind dries the washing if and only if the washing being dry belongs to the working of a drying mechanism embodied by the wind. “F ” appears on both the left and the right hand side of this biconditional, which means that this is not a reductive account. But there is no vicious circularity here. The characteristic results that go with a certain kind of causal notion can be established at least partially independently, and then we can establish on any particular occasion whether something belongs to a process that is the working of a mechanism with these characteristic results. For example, the characteristic results of the mechanism of the wind drying washing are something like this: the longer the washing is in the wind and the stronger the wind, the drier the washing becomes, until it is completely dry. If the drying of the washing belongs to a process that is the working of a mechanism with these characteristic results embodied by the wind, then we can say that the washing was dried by the wind. In the deviant causal chain example, the washing becoming dry does not belong to the working of such a mechanism. There is a drying mechanism in this example, but it is not embodied by the wind.
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And the way the relevant bit of the mechanism that is embodied by the wind works does not have these characteristic results. In general the causal process model is immune from deviant causal chain counterexamples precisely because it does not employ the idea of a causal chain.9 However, this account does employ ideas that many modern philosophers of causation find deeply suspicious. First of all is the idea of a mechanism. A mechanism is identified by its potentiality. Here I am using the Aristotelian notion of a potentiality. Aristotle stated: “The fulfilment of what exists potentially, in so far as it exists potentially, is motion.”10 So a process is the realization of a capacity or disposition for certain results in certain circumstances. You have to characterize a structure of stages to specify the potentiality. But what is required for the process to be happening is not just that this structure of stages is in train but that there is a potentiality for such a structure and that this potentiality is being realized. There are two sets of conditions associated with something having a potentiality. There is the set of statements that describe what the potentiality is a potentiality for. And there is that underlying nature or set of conditions that grounds the potentiality.11 These latter conditions are divided into two categories—the conditions that constitute the potentiality or mechanism itself and the conditions that constitute the realization of the potentiality or the operation of the mechanism. Usually this distinction is made in a pragmatic way, and for simplicity we can take them together as the underlying conditions of the process. One worry people have with this sort of account is that introducing potentialities and mechanisms provides empty explanations. Citing the dormitive virtue of opium has little explanatory value when you are trying to explain why opium puts you to sleep. Likewise, saying that the wind dries the washing if and only if the washing becoming dry belongs to a process which is the realization of a drying mechanism embodied by the wind does not have much explanatory power. In line with my approach to causal notions, I do want to say that the opium put the patient to sleep if and only if the patient falling asleep belonged to a process that was the realization of a dormitive virtue or potentiality embodied by the opium. I also want to say that this claim is explanatory. But it does not explain why or how the opium
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put the patient to sleep; it explains what it means to say that the opium put the patient to sleep. No wonder it has the sound of an empty tautology. Also, it is not the end of the explanation but only the start. For one must go on to explain what a dormitive potentiality is—what the characteristic results of such a process are. The claim that the opium put the patient to sleep does of course explain why the patient fell asleep. If saying that the dormitive virtue of the opium in the patient was realized is equivalent to saying that the opium put the patient to sleep, then this claim about the realization of the dormitive virtue of opium also explains why the patient fell asleep. Neither claim explains how or why the opium put the patient to sleep. But that is beside the point.
A Causal Process Account of Agency Let us go back to agency. I argued above that we should start by trying to understand the special way an event is made to happen or a state is made to obtain in action. More precisely, we should start by understanding what it is for an agent to cause things to be G in the way that is characteristic of agency, where G takes the place of the intransitive characterization of what the agent is achieving. A typical way for the causal chain model to explain this is the standard causal theory of action, which works in the following sort of way, though of course there are many variations of this: An agent causes things to be G in a way that is characteristic of agency if and only if the agent’s intending to cause things to be G causes things to be G.
This is vulnerable to the deviant causal chain objection I raised earlier. The Aristotelian causal process model looks instead for a way to describe the sort of mechanism whose working constitutes the process of acting. Harry Frankfurt has been an important proponent of this sort of approach:
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The state of affairs while the movements [of a person’s body] are occurring is far more pertinent [than the causes from which they originated]. What is not merely pertinent but decisive, indeed, is to consider whether or not the movements as they occur are under the person’s guidance. It is this that determines whether he is performing an action. Moreover, the question of whether or not movements occur under a person’s guidance is not a matter of their antecedents. Events are caused to occur by preceding states of affairs, but an event cannot be guided through the course of its occurrence at a temporal distance.12
For Frankfurt, what distinguishes guided action is the causal mechanism, not the causal antecedents. The way this mechanism works must be characteristic of an agent causing things to be G. What the characteristic results of such a mechanism are is a central question of the philosophy of agency. Charles Taylor gave the following account of the teleological explanation of action: “To offer a teleological explanation of some event or class of events, e.g. the behaviour of some being, is, then, to account for it by laws in terms of which an event’s occurring is held to be dependent on that event’s being required for some end. To say that the behaviour of a given system should be explained in terms of purpose, then, is, in part, to make an assertion about the form of laws, or the type of laws which hold of the system.”13 I think he is right; a mechanism whose working is characteristic of an agent achieving things is one that involves sensitivity to reasons—particularly tele ological reasons. When we do things—cause things to be a certain way—we do them for reasons. And very often these reasons are tele ological; we do things for the sake of other things. For example, I walk to the letterbox because that is what I should do in order to post the letter. So I am embracing a powerful Kantian tradition in the philosophy of action, in which what is special about the way things are made to happen in action is that they are made to happen in a way that is sensitive to reason. For this to be even plausible, however, some qualifications are required. First, it is possible to act but not for any particular
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reason. I might eat a banana but not do it because I was hungry or even because I particularly felt like it. I just chose to eat a banana and proceeded to eat it. But even if the action as a whole has no reason, the process of acting is still sensitive to reason. The top-level goal of eating a banana may just be given, but my behavior is still sensitive to what I should do to achieve it. Second, it must be possible for quite irrational behavior still to count as done for a reason. Somehow we must allow for behavior that is rational within an irrational system. This behavior may be irrational absolutely, but relative to that system it is rational. My suggestion for accommodating this is to require that the behavior that accords with reason does so relative to a version of practical rationality. A version of practical rationality is to be construed as a way of making recommendations for action. Perhaps it must involve some sort of means-end rationality, though this might be questioned. But it may also embed certain goals and certain assumptions which need not be justified by this or any other version of practical rationality. For example, the goal of eating a banana may be fixed in a version of practical rationality, and that version may also embed the quite false assumption that there is a banana in the kitchen. According to this version of practical rationality, and assuming that there is no better way to get a banana and so on, going to the kitchen is the thing to do. This goal of going to the kitchen is not fixed in that version of practical rationality but derived from applying it to the agent’s environment. In general, a version of practical rationality, although it may embed certain fixed assumptions and goals, must also involve some sort of sensitivity to the way things are. So when I talk about a mechanism resulting in what “should happen” I am using a relative notion of “should.” It results in what should happen according to some version of practical rationality. The reasons the mechanism responds to are reasons according to some version of practical rationality. We also use the words should and reason in an absolute way. We might say that really there is no (absolute) reason to go to the kitchen, since there is no banana there. But we are not responsive in such instances to such absolute reasons.
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Fischer and Ravizza, in their account of reasons-responsive mecha nisms, appear to be working with an absolute conception of reasons.14 This leads to far too demanding a requirement of agency, where to be a morally responsible agent your behavior has to fit the contours of absolutely correct reasoning perfectly. There is no scope here for more or less irrational morally responsible agents. Fischer and Ravizza of course realize that this will not do, and they concede that the responsible agent’s behavior need only be loosely or “moderately” responsive to absolute reasons. But this makes their account very untidy, with ad hoc complications introduced to deal with a series of reasonable counterexamples. Instead of requiring only moderate sensitivity to absolutely correct reasons, Fischer and Ravizza might have required actual sensitivity to only relatively correct reasons. We do not require every agent to be in touch with some perfect version of rationality. Agents can get things wrong even when they are acting for reasons. The reasons for which you act need not be reasons that would figure in a perfect version of rationality, just reasons that figure in some—possibly quite flawed— version of practical rationality. It is not obviously false that nonhuman animals do things for reasons. But if other animals do things for reasons, what count as reasons for them will do so only according to a very limited version of practical rationality. I propose in conclusion that the special kind of mechanism that is characteristic of agency is simply a mechanism that characteristically results in what should happen according to some particular and perhaps inadequate version of practical rationality. This gives us the following causal process theory of action: Suppose that the result characteristic of something, S, φ-ing is G. Then S φ-ing counts as an action if and only if 1. there is a version of practical rationality that recommends in the circumstances that G is to be achieved; 2. G being achieved belongs to a process that is the working of a mechanism embodied by S which characteristically results in what should happen according to that version of practical rationality.
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We Are the Mechanisms If I am right, agency is characterized by the working of a certain sort of mechanism—a mechanism that works by making happen what should happen (according to some version of practical rationality). But we, all 6.6 billion of us, are agents. That does not mean that we contain agency inside us. It means that we are identified as agents: we are things that act. So the special mechanism that responds to reasons and that characterizes our agency, on this Aristotelian picture of action, is not just part of us: it is us. We are such mechanisms. This is not to deny some essential place for consciousness in our conception of ourselves. For a mechanism that is sensitive to reasons must be sensitive to the world. You cannot be the sort of mechanism that makes happen what should happen unless you are aware of the world around you. In virtue of being agents we are also subjects.
Notes 1. See Gerald Hanratty, Philosophers of the Enlightenment (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1995) and Studies in Gnosticism and in the Philosophy of Religion (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997). 2. See Immanuel Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten [Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals], vol. 4 of Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften, Akademie Ausgabe (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1900-), pp. 412 and 427, and Kritik der practischen Vernunft [Critique of Practical Reason], vol. 5 of the same, p. 32. 3. The Vulcans turn out to be a proud and loyal people—very far from being unemotional. See Robert C. Solomon, The Passions (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1976), for a spirited—more or less Aristotelian—defense of the inextricable entangling of reason and passion. 4. John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, S.J., Responsibility and Control (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 5. See Irving Thalberg, “Do We Cause Our Own Actions?,” Analysis 27 (1967): 196–201. 6. As Ursula Coope argues, if the event of my arm rising is itself an Aristotelian process then it is not clear that it is distinct from the transitive event
Mechanisms That Respond to Reasons 97 of my raising my arm after all. So to avoid this problem we must be clear that the event of my arm rising is to be understood as the realization of a structure of changes in the position of my arm, not as the process that results in these changes. See “Aristotle on Action,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 81 [suppl.] (2007): 109–37. 7. Jennifer Hornsby, Actions (London: Routledge, 1980). 8. See Donald Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), essay 3. 9. Some of the classic examples which get included in the deviant causal chain discussions do not strictly speaking employ deviant causal chains. For example, Chisholm’s original example of Joe running down his uncle by mistake in his hurry to drive to the spot where he could kill his uncle can be adapted to one where Joe kills the pedestrian on purpose but still does not intentionally kill his uncle. Here the process resulting in Joe’s behavior is properly characteristic of agency; it is just that it is wrong to describe this behavior as intentionally killing his uncle. See Roderick Chisholm, “Freedom and Action,” in Freedom and Determinism, ed. Keith Lehrer (New York: Random House, 1966), 28–44. 10. Physics III, 1, 201a10–11, trans. R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), vol. 1, p. 343. 11. Philosophers opposed to this talk of mechanisms and potentialities are also suspicious of this idea of a grounding relation, and certainly the Aristotelian approach needs to provide a treatment of it, even though I will not attempt one here. 12. Harry Frankfurt, “The Problem of Action,” American Philosophical Quarterly 15 (1978): 158. 13. Charles Taylor, The Explanation of Behaviour (London: Routledge, 1964), 9. 14. Ibid.
f o u r
Plotinus on Fate and Free Will Andrew Smith
To assert man’s dignity and freedom in respect of the world around him had been a main concern of most Greek philosophers from the Hellenistic age onwards. The Epicureans had removed what to them seemed to be the restricting force of “providence” by denying the existence of a divinely planned universe. Of course, they were far from denying the law of cause and effect; and in maintaining that all things are caused, but not by any external or transcendent agent, they ran the risk of positing a mechanically determined universe, a situation from which they tried to extricate themselves by the curious notion of the atomic swerve. This minimal indeterminacy in the movement of the atoms of which the universe and the human mind were composed was intended to break the seemingly ineluctable chain of causal connections and, in the case of the human individual, to allow for the possibility of free will. The Epicureans strongly maintained that man’s free will is demonstrable even if their explanation of how it operates is not altogether clear. Lucretius thinks that he can demonstrate the fact of freedom from the chain of causation by distinguishing external causation from internal volition, as seen, for example, in racehorses 98
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whose bodies actually lurch forward only after they have willed themselves to move. The momentary interval is seen as isolating the volition as a cause distinct from the subsequent mechanical implementation: “Don’t you see how also when at an instant the starting gates are opened the eager strength of horses can nevertheless not surge forward as suddenly as the mind itself wishes? For all the mass of matter has to be stirred up throughout the body, so that stirred up through all the limbs it may in a concerted effort follow the mind’s desire.”1 The Stoics, on the other hand, were vociferous in proclaiming the workings of divine providence and so presented themselves with the problem of demonstrating the freedom of the individual in a universe in which the smallest detail was part of the divine plan. Another and more popular guise in which the same issue arose was astrology, which seemed to assert that the stars not only indicated but were in fact the cause of events in our lives and even of our actions, characters, and dispositions. If man’s every action and even thought is determined in this way it becomes difficult to maintain the value of human moral action. The popularity of astrology and some idea of the problems it presented to philosophers may be seen in Plotinus’ treatise On Whether the Stars Are Causes.2 One of the most extreme expressions of determinism in the ancient world may be found among those Gnostics who declared all men fated either to be saved (those granted gnosis/ knowledge) or to be condemned. This situation was clearly apparent to Plotinus in a Gnostic group that had attached itself to his own circle. In a masterful treatise in which he argued for the goodness of the universe and its divine origin he was severely critical of the beliefs of this Gnostic group which regarded the physical universe as the creation of a fallen spirit and preached a doctrine of salvation for the few chosen ones.3 Such a doctrine, according to Plotinus, removed the basis for moral action and spiritual progress and could lead only to immorality: “But this doctrine censures the lord of providence and providence itself still more crudely, and despises all the laws of this world and the virtue whose winning extends back through all time, and makes selfcontrol here something to laugh at, that nothing noble may be seen existing below, and abolishes self-control and the righteousness which
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comes to birth with men’s characters and is perfected by reason and training, and altogether everything by which a man could become nobly good.”4 These traditional problems were, then, important for Platonists of the later imperial period, such as Plotinus, who regarded the inadequate defense and even denial of providence and human freedom as ultimately corrosive of all moral order. We may see this concern amply demonstrated in Plotinus’ treatise on fate. Here he discourses on the inadequacy of the solutions put forward by Epicureans and Stoics and tries to neutralize the influence of astrology.5 Yet the way in which he poses the basic problem might well have been penned by a Stoic: “What other cause, then, occurs to us, besides these, which will leave nothing causeless and will preserve sequence and order, and allow us to be something, and not do away with prophecies and divinations?”6 Like the Stoics Plotinus is anxious to reconcile cosmic order and causality with human freedom, and not to do away with prophecy, which obviously brings with it the difficulty of apparently predetermined actions. While many of his specific arguments in this treatise are traditional, his main insight, that other “cause” which he seeks, introduces new elements from his general understanding of the nature of man’s soul as possessing a dimension, the “inner” or “higher” self, which transcends the physical universe and his “lower self.” With this distinction of two levels of the human individual and indeed of reality in general he neatly aligns the traditional twofold designation of causality as providence and Heimarmene (fate), the former expressing the positive concept of divine order, the latter the more negative concepts of restriction and compulsion. These two ideas may be already found in Stoicism and were specifically expressed in hierarchical terms by Platonists before Plotinus.7 With this device he is able to restrict the negative connotations of fate or Heimarmene to this world and distinguish it from providence, which embodies the ordering of the transcendent universe and is responsible for the positive aspects of the physical cosmos. He can thus explain away the sort of external necessities which seem to restrict our lives in this world as of a secondary and unimportant kind which we can tolerate, while our inner self is unaffected and
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can transcend them. But, as we will see, the matter is more complex than this; for even in the transcendent world there is order and a sequence of cause and effect (only the ultimate principle, the One, is strictly uncaused), while a simple reduction of the physical universe to the dominance of fate might suggest that human action in this world has no value. This simple view is suggested in the opening remarks of a later treatise on the descent of the soul into body: Often I have woken up out of the body to my self and have entered into myself, going out from all other things; I have seen a beauty wonderfully great and felt assurance that then most of all I belonged to the better part; I have actually lived the best life and come to identify with the divine; and set firm in it I have come to that supreme actuality, setting myself above all else in the realm of Intellect. Then after that rest in the divine, when I have come down from Intellect to discursive reasoning, I am puzzled how I ever came down, and how my soul has come to be in the body when it is what it has shown itself to be by itself, even when it is in the body.8
Here Plotinus contrasts the wonder and freedom of the transcendent life with the restrictions of our normal physical existence. But this sort of juxtaposition is only an opening statement which sets out in extreme form the opposition between disembodied and embodied states, between the inner self and the external man. The apparent paradox is to be explored and refined in the remainder of the treatise. We will begin with the problems presented even by that wonderful world of freedom, the transcendent life of the soul unencumbered by those bodily restrictions which belong to the physical world ruled by fate. We may wonder, as Plotinus does, why the soul ever left this transcendent world in the first place. This is the main issue dealt with in the treatise from which we have quoted the opening lines. Has the soul “fallen” into the embodied state in some way through a desire for the less perfect? Plato seems to suggest this when he speaks disparagingly of the embodied state and, in the Phaedrus, famously describes the soul losing its wings. But in the Timaeus Plato speaks more positively of the
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physical universe and the soul’s role in shaping and governing it; human souls may even be seen as being sent on a divine mission to complete and perfect the universe. This tension between a negative and more positive evaluation of the physical universe and man’s relationship to it is central to Plato’s cosmic outlook and even more essential to Plotinus’ worldview, which has often been misunderstood as unduly pessimistic. In fact, if anything, he is more optimistic than Plato, since he evidently believed that it is possible for some people to reach the transcendent world even during their earthly lifetime. In the treatise under discussion Plotinus sets himself two tasks: to reconcile the apparently contradictory statements of Plato and to maintain man’s freedom, since, if we are sent down by god as part of the divine plan to complete the universe, does this not involve necessity? No, argues Plotinus, in the sense that this task of soul is part of its nature rather than something imposed on it. It is thus a necessity in the sense in which a circle cannot be square, but it is not due to external compulsion. Thus, like all creation from the One (the ultimate principle) downwards, what is produced is a natural and spontaneous product of the very nature of the producer. It is of the nature of soul to give life to body. But where then is our moral freedom? Well, there is another side to this ensouling of the universe. And we will begin to see this when we understand that there is a difference between the universal Soul and individual souls. The universal Soul which is responsible for the universe as a whole deals with something which is in complete accord with nature, whereas individual souls in their care for individual bodies encounter in those bodies recalcitrant elements which are alien to nature: “In the All all parts are naturally set in their appropriate place—and our individual bodies need a great deal of troublesome thought, since many alien forces assail them and they are continually in the grip of poverty, and require every sort of help as being in great trouble.”9 There are in fact two kinds of “care,” that of the universal Soul and that of the individual soul. And in the latter case, if we are not careful—and this is where choice and freedom comes in—we may easily succumb to the snares of the body and become dangerously overinvolved in its affairs. The idea is neatly expressed by the Christian
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Platonist Synesius when he says that his soul has been sent down to earth as a servant but has become a slave to matter.10 There is a temptation to read into Platonism a dismissive attitude to our normal earthly life as a relatively unimportant phase in the ultimate return of the soul to its origins with god in the transcendent sphere. The Platonic goal of becoming as like god as possible might seem to point to this.11 And Plotinus, more than most Platonists, appears to espouse a form of escapism which finds its most extreme formulation in his references to mystical experience, when the individual soul becomes one with its divine origin in a timeless experience, as the highest form of human endeavor. Although the opening of the treatise we have been citing does not refer to the highest level of mystical union with the One, it provides a good example of this praise of detachment. This might seem to be confirmed by Plotinus’ apparently all too easy appeal to a higher realm into which we may escape from the web of fate which encompasses our lower lives. But while the key to Plotinus’ solution to the problem of fate for the individual may lie in that transcendent aspect of ourselves, he is also concerned about the value of the moral life lived in this world and with how we deal with the difficult circumstances in which we daily find ourselves. “Good and wise men do act and do noble actions by their own will,” he strongly declares at the end of the treatise on fate.12 And yet in circumstances serious enough to impede normal moral activity Plotinus seems to have recourse solely to the transcendent life of the inner self. In one of the last treatises he composed before his death he envisages such difficult situations in an ascending scale of external pressures: for example, the annihilation of one’s family, extreme physical pain, and even the loss of consciousness.13 He imagines the ultimate form of torture and of human misery, being roasted alive in the bronze bull of the notorious tyrant of Akragas, Phalaris. In fact the bull of Phalaris is the stock example used by Stoics and Epicureans for the ultimate test of the wise man’s endurance. For Plotinus, however, the traditional explanations of the wise man’s continued “happiness” in the midst of such extreme distress are totally inadequate and even contradictory. As he explains, they merely assert that the wise man feels pain but declares
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he is happy: that is, one and the same faculty, our human self, declares at the same time, “I am faring well and faring badly,” which in Plotinus’ eyes is a contradiction. His solution is to appeal to the inner man, for it is the inner man who is happy (faring well), while the outer man feels the pain (faring badly). It is the most extreme example of the workings of transcendence, and the same principle may be used to explain how a man who is unconscious in his outer self may nevertheless be enjoying happiness (faring well) in his inner self. But these are not normal circumstances and are envisaged only in an attempt to explore the nature of the human individual to its furthest limit. In more normal circumstances there is a clear link between the inner and outer man, for the good man is able to change and make use of the web of circumstances in which he finds himself and must yield to them only as a last resort, and only if it is not wrong to do so.14 It is the weaker soul that yields to external pressures. It is important to note that Plotinus rejects as a mark of free will the freedom to act immorally, which is often taken as a mark of true moral freedom. Immoral behavior is for him not something freely chosen but rather a state of the soul when it allows itself to become passive to the external. The mark of the stronger soul is that it remains active in its dealing with the external world.15 And this active control comes from its use of reason. Only when reason is in control are we truly free. Plotinus is here being genuinely Platonic in the close alliance of moral activity and reason and, conversely, in the association of immorality with ignorance. According to Plotinus, then, when our impulses are not controlled by reason, “the soul is altered by external causes and so does something and drives on in a sort of blind rush.”16 And only when our impulses are under the control of reason are we truly free: When however in its impulse it has as director its own pure and untroubled reason, then this impulse alone is to be said to be in our own power and free; this is our own act, which does not come from somewhere else but from within from our soul when it is pure, from a primary principle which directs and is in control, not suffering error from ignorance or defeat from the violence of the passions,
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which come upon it and drive and drag it about, and do not allow any acts to come from us any more but only passive responses.17
Yet even if the soul is passive to its passions and they are not truly its own freely chosen actions, it is still responsible in some way for them. The immoral life may be defined in terms of being a prey to passions and externals acting on it as “necessities,” but the soul is ultimately responsible insofar as it has failed to control itself (Platonic akrasia/lack of control) and has allowed itself to fall into this state. Plotinus alludes to this when he says that the soul may be “worse from itself and does not altogether have its impulses right or under control.”18 Many of these ideas are presented in a more comprehensive and subtle exposition in Plotinus’ treatise on providence.19 Here the freedom of the individual is set in the context of providential order. All causality is to be referred back to the Intelligible archetype or Intellect (and ultimately to the One), including what we may designate as discord or “evils” in our universe. But Intellect does not “produce evils.” Rather, it embraces them as part of the overall cosmic harmony. For even “evils,” both natural and those caused by human moral failings, may work to some good in the end. We must also take into account the fact that this universe is a diminished version of the Intelligible archetype, a world of plurality derived from one of unity. And such plurality naturally produces discordant elements whose origins are not discordant. Plotinus gives the analogy of the genus horse, which subsumes a plurality of different and often mutually hostile horses.20 Providence, whose origin is in the higher realm, also then embraces the physical universe. He can call the former “perfect providence” whereas the latter, its manifestation in the physical universe, is a secondary and derived form of providence. Fate, on the other hand, is found only in this world and would appear to be the term we use to designate those events which we misleadingly consider to be outside our control and thus as exerting on us a compulsion of negative value. The truth of the matter, according to Plotinus, is that these events have no negative value in themselves, only the value conferred on them by our own disposition: what compulsion they manifest is operative on the soul only when it allows itself to be passive.
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It is this internal disposition or attitude which is the key to free will and moral empowerment. As human beings we have a double nature, an inner self and the outer man, a higher soul/intellect and a lower soul.21 By living the life of the inner self, that is the life of intellect, we attain freedom from the constraints of the physical universe, but, more importantly in the context of free will, by the same means we also attain the active control of our external lives. Of course, we may at times feel compelled by events, but because our disposition toward them is according to reason and therefore according to providence we are not in opposition to them. We are not forced by providence to act; rather, it is we ourselves who act because our intellect is on the same level as providence and, in a sense, identical with it. The opposite of this is the man who does not live the life of intellect and who therefore does not have available to him the illumination of intellect on his disposition to externals. He is passive rather than active, and what happens to him is “fated” rather than providential: “The action which proceeds from the dissolute man is done neither by providence nor according to providence, but what is done by the chaste man is not done by providence, because it is done by the man himself, but is done according to providence.”22 The chaste man is, Plotinus explains, rather like a sensible patient who accepts the doctor’s prescription which thus promotes his health (a natural state), whereas the dissolute man is like the patient who rejects the doctor’s advice and does what is unhealthy (unnatural and “against the providence of the doctor”). Both have freely chosen.23 The status of external events is in fact determined and its course often shaped by our own disposition: “The beauty of Helen produced one effect on Paris, but Idomeneus was not affected in the same way.”24 Idomeneus did not run off with Helen! There is one further issue to deal with. What if our disposition itself has been fashioned by Intellect (providence)?25 In this case the very instrument of our “freedom” is already determined. Plotinus counters this by arguing that human beings are made the way they are like any other entity in the universe. If we don’t blame providence for making plants the way they are, say, without the possibility of motion, why should we find fault with it for making man “imperfect” or lack-
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ing in some respect? After all, if there is to be a plural world there must be differences between entities—trees, lions, men, gods: Why then, where plants and animals are concerned, is it unreasonable for us to blame them or their creator, but reasonable in the case of men, because man is not a better thing than he is? For if it is because he was able to be something nobler than he is, if he was able to add something to make himself better, he is responsible to himself for not doing it; but if it was not from himself that the addition had to come but it was necessary for it to come from outside, from his producer, then it is absurd to ask for more than was given, as it would be in the case of the other animals and of plants. For one ought not to enquire whether one thing is less than another but whether it is, as itself, sufficient; for all things ought not to have been equal.26
Providence has, in fact, endowed man with something different from other entities, the capacity to use or not use his intellect. All men have intellect, but not all men use it. The capacity for greater nobility is given to man, but he is responsible for using it or not, and this freedom of choice possessed by man is an essential part of his nature and not a defect in the divine plan. We can see from this account that Plotinus really is concerned to provide a coherent explanation of how man acts as a free moral agent in the physical universe. His explanation in terms of the “inner man” may tend to give the impression that he is more concerned with the transcendent self than with the self which is facing the problems of daily living. A more correct perspective, however, will recognize that in the discussions we have been following the inner man is introduced as a solution to the difficult issue of man’s apparent entrapment in a determined universe. In fact, the original contribution of Plotinus to this debate lies not simply in shifting the locus of freedom to a transcendent element, the higher self, but rather in exploring the connection between the transcendent and immanent, between the inner and outer man, a parallel to the relationship between providence as Intelligible archetype and the manifestation of that archetype in the physical universe.
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Enough has, I think, been said to convey the possibility and importance for Plotinus of man’s freedom in this world. But since that very freedom is bound up with his concept of the higher self it is necessary to return to the discussion of the freedom of the individual in the transcendent or Intelligible world. For Plotinus this freedom is even greater than that of the embodied soul. “Now when the soul is without body it is in absolute control of itself and free, and outside the causation of the physical universe; but when it is brought into body it is no longer in all ways in control, as it forms part of an order with other things.”27 But as we noted earlier, it is a freedom which is not excluded from the chain of causation which subsists between the different levels of transcendent reality. There is no space here to discuss the question of the freedom of the Hypostases (the One, Intellect and Soul), a topic which has, in any case, received much attention.28 The basic approach of Plotinus is to maintain the freedom, for example, of the One, not in the sense of its having possibilities for action presented to it from which it may choose, but in its being free of any external compulsion. Its “will” is in perfect conformity with what it is. In general terms the same must apply to the individual when fully integrated with Soul or Intellect. But there remain a number of problems involved in trying to integrate the freedom of the individual (whether considered at the level of intellect or of soul) within the structure of the Hypostases. And this is a real issue, since, for Plotinus, individuality is not determined by the physical body or physical environment but is found in the disembodied state. There are individuals in the Intelligible world,29 as is clear from the passage we have just cited and elsewhere in the Enneads. If individual souls, then, are not dependent on body for their individuality, how can they be distinguished from the universal Soul when they are disembodied? The substantial identity of the individual soul or intellect with universal Soul and Intellect must be upheld by Plotinus if he is to ensure the integrity and unity of the transcendent universe. But in this case the individuality of each human soul seems to be sacrificed and with it any notion of personal worth. This is a problem which is touched on in several treatises where Plotinus employs many subtle arguments and analyses to reconcile multiplicity
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and unity at the highest levels. How can it be that an individual intellect is both individual and identical with Intellect and all other intellects?30 This reconciliation of unity and plurality, the major theme of the Enneads at every level of reality, must also lie at the heart of any attempt to reconcile individual human freedom with providence. The many creative ways in which Plotinus handles this major challenge of Greek metaphysics is another story. It will suffice here to conclude with the observation that the traditional problem of human freedom must, for Plotinus, in the end also be subsumed under this overriding inquiry.
Notes 1. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 2.263–68, trans. A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), vol. 1, p. 106. 2. Ennead 2.3. All translations are taken from Plotinus, Enneads, trans. A. H. Armstrong, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966–88). 3. This treatise was subsequently split up by Porphyry in his edition of Plotinus in accordance with his plan to produce groups of nine books (“enneads”). The separate treatises with their Porphyrian titles which originally formed one whole work are Ennead 2.9, Against the Gnostics; Ennead 3.8, On Nature, Contemplation and the One; Ennead 5.8, On the Intelligible Beauty, and Ennead 5.5, That the Intelligibles Are Not Outside the Intellect, and on the Good. 4. Ennead 2.9.15, 10–17. 5. See Ennead 3.1.5–6, On Fate, and Ennead 2.3, On Whether the Stars Are Causes, in which he denies that the stars cause events but admits that they may point to them. Their causal force is diffused by treating it as something purely natural and of no greater significance than that of any other cause and, in fact, of very limited scope. 6. Ennead 3.1.8, 1–4. 7. For Stoics, see Cicero, De Fato 40–44 (reporting Chrysippus) with its distinction of primary and secondary or triggering causes; for Platonists before Plotinus, see John Dillon, The Middle Platonists (London: Duckworth, 1977), pp. 210–11. 8. Ennead 4.8.5, 1–11.
110 Andrew Smith 9. Ennead 4.8.2, 10–14. Poverty here is a word with strong metaphysical overtones. It ultimately refers to the story of “poverty” and “plenty” found in Plato Symposium 203bc. 10. Synesius, Hymn 1.574–75, in Hymni et Opuscula, ed. N. Terzaghi (Rome: Acad. Lyceorum, 1949), vol. 1, and De insomniis 5.14–15, in Terzaghi, Hymni et Opuscula, vol. 2, p. 159. The idea may probably be traced back to Porphyry. See Andrew Smith, Porphyry’s Place in the Neoplatonic Tradition (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974), pp. 36–38. 11. Plato, Theaetetus 176b; Republic 613b. 12. Ennead 3.1.10, 11–12. 13. Ennead 1.4.7–13. See the commentary of Kieran McGroarty on these chapters in Plotinus on Eudaimonia: A Commentary on Ennead I.4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 14. Ennead 3.1.8, 17–20: “[The better soul] holds its own in these very same circumstances and changes them rather than is changed by them; so it alters some of them and yields to others if there is no vice in yielding.” 15. We may note the same insistence by Plotinus on the active rather than passive nature of sense perception. In this way the incorporeal soul is protected from being directly affected by the physical. 16. Ennead 3.1.9, 4–6. 17. Ennead 3.1.9, 9–16. 18. Ennead 3.1.9, 7–9. 19. An original treatise divided into two parts (Ennead 3.2 and 3.3) by Porphyry to fit into his enneadic (groups of nine) division of Plotinus’ treatises. For the ideas which follow, see especially 3.3. Porphyry’s division of the original treatise is not without philosophical purpose, since the contents of the shorter 3.3 are the real core of Plotinus’ doctrine of providence and free will. 20. Ennead 3.3.1, 12–15: “For just as in the case of particular living creatures there is one genus of horses, even if they fight and bite each other, and are pugnacious and furiously jealous, and the same applies to all the other genera, so, certainly, men must be considered like this too.” Such observations give Plotinus a very human face! He also mentions the further factor of matter as a cause of diminution and distortion. 21. Armstrong rightly points out that for Plotinus the essential di chotomy is not that of soul/body, disembodiment/embodiment, but higher and lower self. See note to Ennead 3.3.4 (vol. 3, p. 122).
Plotinus on Fate and Free Will 111 22. Ennead 3.3.5, 46–49. 23. Ennead 3.3.5, 49–54. Plotinus is fond of the contrast natural/ unnatural, health/illness. See Ennead 5.8.11, 25–40. 24. Ennead 3.3.5, 41–43. 25. Ennead 3.3.3. 26. Ennead 3.3.3, 9–18. 27. Ennead 3.1.8, 9–11. 28. See Ennead 6.8, On Free Will and the Will of the One, and Lloyd Gerson, Plotinus (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 38; J. Busanich, “Plotinus’s Metaphysics of the One,” in The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus, ed. Lloyd Gerson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 43; Georges Leroux, “Human Freedom in the Thought of Plotinus,” in Gerson, Cambridge Companion to Plotinus, pp. 294, 312. 29. The existence of individuals at the level of the Intellect should not be confused with the vexed question as to whether Plotinus believed in Forms of individuals. 30. The question of the identity of soul and universal Soul is dealt with, for example, in Ennead 4.9, If All Souls Are One, and that of intellect and universal Intellect in Ennead 5.9.8, 5–16.
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A Zealous Convert The Legacy of Augustine’s Break with Manichaean Gnosticism
Eoin G. Cassidy
Twelve books—no less than half of Augustine’s prodigious output in the fifteen years after his conversion—were directly aimed at countering the teaching of the Manichaeans. In many of the others written during this lengthy period, the effects of his struggle to free himself from the teachings of this sect are not far below the surface. If this were the only evidence it would indeed be ample testimony to the momentous effect on Augustine’s life and writings of nine years as a Mani chaean, but in addition we have from his own pen, in the Confessions, a vivid picture of the manner in which the legacy of his nine formative years as a Manichaean hearer or aspirant would determine not only the course of much of his subsequent life but, even more importantly, the questions that would shape the course of a lifelong defense of the core truths of Christianity.1 A key theme that marked the philosophical output of the late Gerald Hanratty was his analysis of the persistence of Gnostic speculation in the history of European culture and of the manner in which the age112
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old conflict between Gnosticism and Christianity has contributed to the shape of European civilization as we know it today.2 As a contribution to furthering the scope of his work, this essay will examine how Augustine’s struggle with the Gnostic speculation of Manichaeism influenced his subsequent philosophical and theological output. Given the significance of Augustine for the history of Christianity, the latter provides an invaluable lens through which to view the evolving shape of Christianity as it has engaged with European civilization over the past sixteen hundred years.
Understanding Gnosticism Following the important discovery in 1945 in Upper Egypt of the Nag Hammadi library of Gnostic texts, there has been an unprecedented growth of scholarly and public interest in the origins and nature of Gnosticism.3 Gerald Hanratty’s pioneering research carried out over many years merits a high place in this field of endeavor. The eclectic nature of much Gnostic writing and the fact that the Gnostics showed no interest in recording historical data make it difficult to trace with any accuracy the origins and sources of Gnosticism. There has been much speculation that the origins of Gnosticism predate the Christian era or at least that the original Gnostics were influenced by a wide range of philosophical and mythological traditions emanating from such diverse places as Egypt, Syria, Babylonia, and Iran. In a study entitled “The Early Gnostics,” Hanratty offers a penetrating reflection on the various and competing claims and concludes that there is no consensus on this issue.4 This fact, allied to the difficulty in finding clear documentary evidence to substantiate the various and competing claims on the origins and sources of Gnostic speculation, leads Hanratty to conclude: It is futile to attempt to trace the origins of the Gnostic movement to a particular location. The context in which it emerged and developed was the complex and varied culture of the areas into which
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Christianity was introduced in the first half of the second century AD. The Gnostic movement assumed many different faces as it absorbed materials from the numerous religious and philosophical currents which circulated in the cosmopolitan societies of the age. The Gnostics borrowed ideas, images and symbols from the Old and New Testaments, from Greek and Oriental mystery religions, from competing philosophical schools, from the storehouse of mythology, and from astrological, alchemical and magical sources.5
Despite the diffuse character of Gnostic speculation, Hanratty suggests it constitutes a distinct category of philosophico-religious speculation. The cardinal principle of the Gnostics was their assumption that they were the recipients of privileged knowledge which “freed them from what they saw as the anguish, terror, torpor, forgetfulness, or even drunkenness which afflicted those who remained in a state of ignorance.”6 Most importantly, this privileged and absolute knowledge (gnosis), which was confined to those elite who had been initiated, was also a guarantee of salvation. It liberated them from the worldly existence to which the uninitiated were consigned. In proposing an explanatory hypothesis for the existence of the world in their overall cosmology, some Gnostics argued for the acceptance of a radical dualism, positing two primordial divinities or principles perpetually engaged in mutual conflict.7 The radically opposing systems of God/goodness/light and a world-immanent demiurge/ evil/darkness were conceived as independent, if unequal, first principles or causes. In this belief system God was a remote and completely transcendent being which had no involvement with the universe; evil was the demiurge which created and sustained the material universe. The Gnostics were preoccupied with resolving the problem of evil, which they identified with the material existence in which humans are trapped. This dualist cosmology allowed them to explain not only the origin of evil but also, and arguably more importantly, the human propensity to commit evil acts in the context of the conflict between the two opposing systems. The Gnostics distanced themselves radically from the classical Greek vision of the universe that gave expression to the presence of
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divine intelligence and order. In contrast, the Gnostic mentality was marked by an uncompromising hostility toward the material universe, portraying human existence in the world as the condition of an exile cast into the prison of matter.8 One of the cardinal features of Gnostic speculation was the assumption that the “spiritual” self was a fragment of the divinity—now existing in a state of alienation in the material universe.9 Liberation from this alienated existence was to be the supreme concern for all Gnostics and would provide the key to understanding the diverse strands of this religious movement.10 Despite the evidence of a moral/ascetical lifestyle among many adherents of Gnosticism, there is much evidence that even at the height of its influence Gnosticism was criticized for promoting indifference to the moral dimensions of human actions; this may have its origins in Gnostics’ explanation of the nature of evil and their conviction that gnosis delivered them from the constraints of temporal existence.11
Manichaean Gnosticism Drawing on Henri-Charles Puech’s magisterial work on Manichaeism, Hanratty offers this perceptive assessment of its significance in the history of Gnostic thought:12 The religion founded by Mani was the most widely diffused and most durable of all the Gnostic systems. . . . The followers of Mani were absorbed into a rigidly organized society which proclaimed clearly articulated doctrines and a definite moral code. During the century which followed Mani’s death in AD 276, foundations were established over a vast area which extended from Turkestan to Carthage. The Manichean expansion was based on the proclamation of a definitive solution to the problem of the origin of evil and a concomitant guarantee of salvation. It was these simple and apparently conclusive responses to the burning existential questions which attracted the young Augustine who adhered to Manichean dualism from AD 373 to 382.13
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How to explain human life as embedded in a material world and prone to evil and suffering? Manichaeism was a universal dualistic gnosis that sought to explain this human predicament in terms of a metaphysical materialism cloaked in a highly imaginative myth. In keeping with its Gnostic character, Manichaean dualism professed its belief in the existence of two uncreated and totally separate principles—namely, God and the Demiurge: the one variously described by the symbols of light, goodness, and soul/eternal substance; the other by the symbols of darkness, evil, and body/material substance. In the Manichaean account, the nature of the human predicament was to be found in the conflict between these two uncreated principles. In the course of this conflict light and darkness had become intermingled, and a part of the divine (the human soul) had become detached from the good and embedded in a body/material world. The destiny of the human soul was to be liberated from the evil/material world and reunited with the divinity. This was made possible through the attainment of gnosis—that privileged knowledge which was the guarantee of salvation for those who had been initiated. In keeping with mainstream Gnosticism, Manichaeism was characterized by a number of core beliefs that reflected both a deep-seated hostility to the material world as it was experienced and a preoccupation with the problem of evil. However, first and foremost it was a doctrine of salvation for those privileged few, namely the elect who had renounced the “world” and had been initiated into gnosis—special knowledge that revealed to them that they were strangers to evil and truly belonged to God.
Augustine: A Zealous Convert The extent to which the desire to confront the teachings of Manichaeism shaped Augustine’s early philosophical and theological output can be gauged by the fact that in the fifteen years after his conversion, 387–402, Augustine was to write no fewer than fourteen anti- Manichaean treatises, a total that took in more than half of his literary output during this period. The focus of these works and the manner in
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which Augustine confronted the teachings of Manichaeism give us an insight into the concerns that preoccupied the young Augustine and continued to challenge the new convert. Broadly speaking, Augustine’s anti-Manichaean treatises can be grouped around four key issues that Augustine revisits with unfailing regularity: (1) morality and moral hypocrisy; (2) biblical hermeneutics; (3) evil, free will, and the critique of a materialist cosmology; and (4) the relationship between faith and reason. Morality and Moral Hypocrisy The earliest anti-Manichaean treatises are De Moribus Ecclesiae Catholicae and De Moribus Manichaeorum. Written in 388, less than two years after his conversion, they offer a set of contrasting pictures of holiness as proposed by Christianity and Manichaeism—the morality of the former contrasted with the hypocrisy of the latter. In the first book Augustine goes to some length to establish the primacy of love, which for him is the unique path to holiness; in book 2 he mercilessly critiques the ascetical practices of the Manichaeans, which, as he claims, promote elitism, encourage superstition, and foster moral hypocrisy.14 For Augustine, the seriousness of this issue is never in doubt. As he says: “There are two pretexts in particular by which the Manichaeans entice the unwary into choosing them as teachers—first, that of finding fault with the Scriptures which they misinterpret or wish to have misinterpreted, and, second, that of feigning chaste lives and extraordinary continence. How easy it is to simulate virtue, yet how difficult it is to possess it.”15 To the eyes of Augustine, the contrast between the path of love and that of moral hypocrisy could not be greater. Biblical Hermeneutics To one familiar with contemporary biblical hermeneutics it is hard to understand just how easy it must have been for the Manichaeans to ridicule the truth claims of the Old Testament. However, given the number of treatises that Augustine devotes to countering the claims of the Manichaeans on this topic, it was clearly a major issue for the
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Christian community at that time. Arguably, the most important of these treatises is De Genesi contra Manichaeos, books 1 and 2. Written between 388 and 390, they were almost contemporaneous with De Moribus Ecclesiae Catholicae and De Moribus Manichaeorum. In the context of meeting the two-pronged challenge of Manichaeism, as outlined above, they may indeed be classified together. In the course of critiquing the Manichaean rejection of the Old Testament, Augustine goes to great lengths to emphasize the figurative meaning of the biblical text as something that both complements and places constraints on an all-too-simplistic literalist or anthropomorphic reading of a passage. Frequently, in the course of his commentaries on the early books of Genesis, he encourages his audience to discern the spiritual meaning of the text rather than to be caught up in futile arguments regarding the historical accuracy or scientific plausibility of certain events as recounted in the text. The complexity of the issues surrounding biblical interpretation was such, however, that Augustine would return at some length to this theme in Contra Adimantum (394) and also in two of his last anti- Manichaean tracts, Contra Faustum (397–99) and De Natura Boni (404). The Contra Adimantum treatise is particularly interesting both for the fact that it is addressed to a key figure in the Manichaean hierarchy, and for Augustine’s strong defense of the unity of the Old and New Testaments. Evil, Free Will, and the Critique of a Materialist Cosmology Over the course of his life Augustine attempted no fewer than five commentaries on the book of Genesis. This is as much a testament to the importance of the question concerning the origin of evil addressed in the early chapters of Genesis as it is to the issue of biblical interpretation. Unquestionably the most challenging theme Augustine would address in the course of these anti-Manichaean tracts was the problem of evil. Although not explicitly written against the Manichaeans, the earliest of Augustine’s writings on this issue, namely book 1 of De Libero Arbitrio (387–88), contains a sustained refutation of Manichaean
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dualism. Written during his second visit to Rome, it is constructed as a dialogue with his friend and colleague Evodius. The dialogue is framed by a series of questions posed by Evodius that succinctly test the coherence of the Christian belief that God cannot be blamed for the pervasiveness of evil in the world.16 Augustine’s response provides the focus for book 1. He offers a detailed exposé of the nature of evil as a transgression of order—the turning from divine and eternal realities toward temporal and uncertain realities, an explanation that firmly places the existence of evil within the ambit of the abuse or misuse of free will.17 Although De Libero Arbitrio was not completed for another seven years (395), there is nevertheless a thematic unity to the work that is assured by the opening question from Evodius in book 2: If the existence of evil depends upon free will, then why did God create us with free will?18 Book 2 contains Augustine’s response, which emphasizes the privilege of free will—a good which may be abused, but a good nevertheless and therefore a gift from God.19 Given the tentative character of this explanation, it is not surprising that book 3 returns to the question of how to explain the abuse or misuse of God’s gift of free will. Augustine’s lengthy response is somewhat diffuse. However, the book concludes with a useful reflection on pride as providing the template which will explain the misuse of free will.20 At around the same time that the latter two books of De Libero Arbitrio were written, Augustine also addressed the problem of evil in a number of other treatises, two of which, Contra Fortunatum and De Duabus Animabus, were composed in 392. The focus of these two works, however, is more explicitly anti-Manichaean than De Libero Arbitrio; the shape of the content in both works reflects that focus.21 They offer a telling critique of Manichaean dualism, according to which evil is a substance that is the equal of God or the good. Given their belief in the existence of two distinct substances, the core problem for Manichaeans, as Augustine perceptively recognizes, is how to account for a movement within the evil substance toward the good substance. If, according to Manichaeism, there is the possibility of liberation from the world of darkness or evil, there must already be some knowledge or
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conjecture of the good in the evil, but this can be the case only if the evil is not completely evil.22 The existence of three anti-Manichaean treatises from as late as 398, namely, Contra Secundinum Manichaeum (398), De Natura Boni (404), and Contra Felicem (404), that continue to focus on a critique of Manichaean dualism testifies to the continuing importance of this intractable problem of evil in the apologetic writings of Augustine.23 How to explain his preoccupation with this issue? Why, in all these works, does one find the same concern to affirm the freedom of the will and to counteract Manichaean dualism? The importance of this issue can be understood only in the light of Augustine’s own personal odyssey, one that he would understand in the context of the leitmotif of conversion. From Augustine’s point of view, the Manichaeans’ denial of free will and thus of personal responsibility does not allow them to explain the need for conversion, just as their espousal of a radical dualism between good and evil substances does not allow them to explain the possibility of conversion. With all their talk of setting free, the Manichaeans had no room for the more subtle processes of growth, healing, and renewal—in short, conversion. Faith and Reason If to the eyes of Augustine Manichaeism was marked on the moral plane by an overoptimistic assessment of human nature, on the plane of knowledge and self-understanding he believed it was marked by an intellectual arrogance that countenanced no boundaries to rational speculation and that denied the need for an intellectual as well as a moral conversion. In the course of two substantial anti-Manichaean works, De Vera Religione (389–92) and De Utilitate Credendi (391–92), he addresses the claims of the Manichaeans—and proposes a renewed emphasis on the relation between faith and reason. In the former treatise Augustine will stress the role of faith—the acceptance of authority as that which both precedes and prepares the way for reason.24 He is by no means a fideist but holds the view that the role of authority is justified by a pedagogic necessity.25 Owing to our “fallen” nature our
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sight is blurred; we have need for a temporal medicine that calls not the knowledgeable but believers. In short, we need to be re-educated by God.26 As the title suggests, De Utilitate Credendi is written in the same vein and is very conscious of the error of putting reason before faith. But whereas De Vera Religione argues against Manichaeism by pointing to a wide array of problems, De Utilitate Credendi is focused on this precise question. It is particularly interesting in its reference to the importance of the issue in Augustine’s personal faith journey, which was based on the painful recognition of the need to be intellectually purified in and through the submission of reason in the acceptance of authority.27
Augustine Confronted by his Manichaean Nemesis What attracted Augustine to Manichaeism? On the face of it, it is hard to understand how Augustine could have been attracted to a sect such as Manichaeism, with its highly contrived account of cosmic conflict— one that he would mercilessly ridicule in subsequent years. Yet he spent nine of his most formative years, between the ages of nineteen and twenty-eight, as an adherent. What attraction could Manichaean Gnosticism hold for a person who one would imagine as not easily swayed by the ascetical pretensions of a self-appointed elite? We are fortunate that in Augustine’s Confessions we have a firsthand account of the intellectual turmoil that would draw Augustine into the Manichaean orbit and make it so difficult for him later to extricate himself from its influence, even after he was no longer convinced by the validity of their truth claims. Written in his early forties, some fifteen years after his rejection of Manichaeism, the Confessions provides remarkable testimony to the influence of Manichaeism on his formative years—one which to his eyes was as malign as it was pervasive. Finally, the Confessions offers a privileged insight into the manner in which his engagement with Manichaeism would shape the concerns that he would bring to his reflections on Christianity.
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What was the focus of the Confessions, and to what extent does it replicate the concerns that are documented in the anti-Manichaean treatises written for the most part prior to the Confessions? Given that Augustine’s reflections in the Confessions on his youthful engagement with Manichaeism were written in 398–99, twelve years after his conversion, it would be indeed surprising if his anti-Manichaean treatises that spanned this period did not reflect the same concerns. Indeed, it could be persuasively argued that these anti-Manichaean treatises marked a critical first public engagement with the issues that were to be addressed with such incisiveness in the Confessions.
Can One Achieve Certainty? The earliest intimations of the direction of Augustine’s intellectual and spiritual odyssey are to be found in the third book of the Confessions, where he recounts the effects of first reading Cicero’s Hortensius in 383 as a nineteen-year-old: “My heart began to throb with a bewildering passion for the wisdom of eternal truth.”28 It was this all-consuming desire for truth or, more precisely, the certainty of truth attained by reason alone that would first attract Augustine to embrace Manichaeism.29 Above all else, the Manichaeans promised rational certainty, and Augustine, seduced by their avowed intellectualism, was to find the magnetic attraction of this promise irresistible.30 He returns to this theme in Confessions 6, where he reflects on his sojourn in Milan in the autumn of 384 and his encounter once more with the writings of Cicero, although this time with a Cicero who was increasingly sympathetic to the skeptical standpoint of the New Academy. The book opens with a telling observation on his state of mind eleven years after having first read Cicero, wary of the claims of Manichaeism and yet still “in despair of finding the truth” (Conf. 6.1). As he says, “Anxiety about what I could believe as certain gnawed at my heart all the more sharply as I grew more and more ashamed that I had been misled and deluded by promises of certainty for so long” (Conf. 6.4).31 One should never underestimate the central place that the desire for certainty had in the Manichaean doctrine and the attraction that
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certainty held out for adherents, including Augustine. Judging from the perspective of the Confessions, it was arguably the single most important issue which would preoccupy him during his Manichaean period and the one which would ultimately prompt his definitive conversion to Christianity. While it would be foolish to underestimate the importance which must be accorded to Augustine’s encounter with Neoplatonism, nevertheless, both the manner of Augustine’s engagement with this issue and the importance he attached to it imply that his conversion to Christianity cannot be conceived in any sense to be simply an extension of his preconversion Platonism. Through the long years as a follower of the Manichaean cult, Augustine was preoccupied with an almost obsessive desire for rational certainty. This was undoubtedly motivated by his unyielding conviction that only in the attainment of certain truth could wisdom be achieved and his belief that truth could indeed be attained by the unaided use of human reason. In that context, one would not want to underestimate the reality of the despair which he felt on losing confidence in the Manichaean gnosis, a loss of confidence that was made all the more real by his contact with the skepticism of the New Academy and his failure to find any alternative source of rational certitude.32 Augustine describes his conversion under the rubric of a journey from pride to a humility that found expression in the acceptance of the belief that only faith can heal the proud heart. The relentless drive for certitude was replaced by the acceptance in faith of the assurance that came from another (God)—a transformation that involved the remarkable acceptance of the truth of the words from Isaiah 7:9: “Unless you believe, you will not understand.”33 This transformation was truly remarkable because it flew in the face of all that had attracted him to Manichaeism, namely, its promise of certainty and its disdain for those who took things on faith.34
The Blame for Evil? It has often been remarked that Augustine’s journey toward conversion—an odyssey from pride to humility—has two distinct
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paths: an intellectual one characterized by acceptance of the authority of faith and a moral one characterized by the acknowledgment of personal responsibility for the shape of his life. Whether or not one agrees with this assessment, there is no doubt that the Confessions is shaped by its detailed reflections on the origin of evil—reflections that are unquestionably marked by Augustine’s early and sustained engagement with Manichaeism.35 Who is to blame for evil in the world—God, humans, or some impersonal demiurge? One of the undoubted strengths of Manichaeism was that it seemed to offer a solution to this most intractable of all problems that raises such questions over the coherence of a theistic worldview. Gnostic cosmic dualism absolved not only God from any responsibility for evil in the world, but also humans, whose evil acts could be explained as unfortunate but inevitable consequences of actions that had their origins in the cosmic conflict between good and evil. The evidence of the force of the Manichaean arguments on Augustine is nowhere more tellingly illustrated than by the lengths to which he would go to argue both for a coherent theodicy and, on the human level, for a theory of the will that would explain the psychology of moral evil. In book 5 of Confessions Augustine offers the clearest statement of the manner in which his engagement with Manichaeism in his early twenties was influenced by the fact that it seemed to provide answers to key questions on this topic. Not only did Gnostic cosmic dualism propose a theory that exonerated God from any culpability for the suffering in the world, but it also exonerated human beings from all guilt. And, as Augustine would only too readily admit even as late as 382 when, at the age of twenty-eight, he prepared to leave Carthage for Rome, it was a theory that was not without its attractions. As he says: “I still thought that it is not we who sin but some other nature that sins within us. It flattered my pride to think that I incurred no guilt. . . . My sin was all the more incurable because I did not think myself a sinner” (Conf. 5.10). If Augustine was tempted by the Manichaean assurances that sought to exonerate one from moral culpability, he was far less im-
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pressed in his formative years by the moral elitism and hypocrisy which he detected among the Manichaean elect. What he regarded as the vanity of a false asceticism was to provoke some of the most scathing comments against Manichaeism in the Confessions.36 For a theist such as Augustine, concerned to propose a coherent theodicy, the truly crucial issue was how one could exonerate God from responsibility for evil in the world. His comments as late as 382 show the extent to which he was still influenced by a Manichaean cosmology even as he increasingly recognized the incoherence of this position: “I imagined that there were two antagonistic masses, both of which were infinite, yet the evil in a lesser and the good in a greater degree. . . . My theories forced me to admit that you were finite in one point only, in so far as the mass of evil was able to oppose you. . . . Better to believe that you had created no evil than to suppose that evil, such as I imagined it to be, had its origin in you. . . . Ignorant as I was, I thought of evil . . . as an actual bodily substance” (Conf. 5.10). Repeatedly in the Confessions Augustine returns to this issue, one which raises questions concerning not only the freedom of the will but also how to conceive of a God who has created human beings with the power to commit evil. This is nowhere more evident than in the lengthy series of reflections on this theme throughout Confessions 7, the force of which is wonderfully captured in the following passage: “Who made me? Surely it was my God, who is not only good but Goodness itself. How, then, do I come to possess a will that can choose to do wrong and refuse to do good, thereby providing a just reason why I should be punished? Who put this will into me?” (Conf. 7.3). Even though by this time (384/85) Augustine was no longer convinced by the explanation offered by Manichaean cosmic dualism, it was to take him almost two more years to be convinced of the coherence of any alternative. Any other theory would not only have to offer an explanation of creation that would be compatible with a belief in the goodness and omnipotence of God; it would also have to address the related problem of how to account for a theory of the freedom of the will that did not avoid the difficult questions surrounding the apparent attractiveness of evil.
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Augustine recounts in some detail the manner in which he resolves to his own satisfaction the “problem of evil.”37 His assertion that evil is a privation would provide the conceptual framework that would shape the classic Christian response to the problem of evil for the best part of fifteen hundred years.38 It is by no means certain that Augustine would have gone to such trouble to propose such a radical theory if he were not driven by the need to sustain a position that was in direct contrast with the more “commonsense” Manichaean claim that good and evil are two opposing substances. In addressing the related problem of how one explains the psychology of moral evil, Augustine was aware that his theory of evil as a privation would on its own not be persuasive in accounting for the apparent attractiveness of evil. Furthermore, he was under no illusion as to the seriousness of this issue if he were to sustain his theodicy in the face of a Manichaean alternative. These considerations undoubtedly explain the care that Augustine takes to address this issue in a detailed series of reflections in Confessions 2.39 The apparent attractiveness of evil is to be understood in terms of a misplaced or misdirected desire that has its origin in the weakness of the will. At the heart of his explanation is the distinction between ordered and disordered love, which for Augustine finds its classic expression in the difference between the desire to be like God and the desire to be God. At one level there is a very fine line between these two desires, yet for Augustine the gulf separating the paths that are trod in obedience to these contrasting desires could not be greater. The former path is traced by the humble and the latter path, the desire to be God, by the proud. There are those who would argue that Augustine’s most important contribution to the history of philosophical endeavor has been his exploration of the nature of the will. But it is also arguable that the theological doctrine of “original sin,” highlighted by Augustine’s need to explain the weakness of the will, left an equally strong impact on the history of Christian thought—the legacy of which is still contested today. What is unarguable is that this legacy takes its inspiration at least in part from Augustine’s desire to propose a theory of the psychology of moral evil that would offer a coherent alternative to that proposed
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by Manichaeism.40 To explain the logic of freely choosing a path that is inherently self-destructive, Augustine would have to develop a sophisticated theory of the will that took account of the manner in which, in the concrete situation of the here and now, the will is weakened or in conflict with itself.41 He was in no doubt that the source of this inner conflict could be explained by reference to the concept of habit (habitus)42—the cumulative effects of an immoral disposition that has its origin in the repeated misuse of human freedom. What distinguishes Augustine’s explanation, however, is his recourse to the doctrine of original sin as necessary to provide an ultimate explanation for what he would regard as the flawed character of human nature, something that is reflected in this tendency to misuse human freedom.43
A Nonmaterial Substance? If Augustine’s account of the tortuous nature of his journey to conversion is to be believed, the single most intractable problem that stood in the way of his conversion was his inability to conceive of a spiritual substance.44 Apart from the importance of resolving this issue if he were successfully to address questions surrounding the coherence of love or friendship in the face of death, it was only the recognition of God as a spiritual being that would allow him to break free from the influence of the Manichaean cosmic myths.45 As we have seen, this breakthrough was of the first importance in enabling Augustine to resolve to his satisfaction the problem of evil and, at the same time, to affirm the freedom of the will. Finally, the possibility of acknowledging the coherence of the Christian scriptures in the face of Manichaean ridicule of crude anthropomorphic conceptions of God was critically dependent on his ability to resolve this issue.46 By prompting Augustine to search for the spiritual meaning behind a text and so to break free from biblical literalism, his encounter with the sermons of Ambrose in late 384 or early 385 was to prove crucial in overcoming the Manichaean prejudice against the Bible, in
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particular the Old Testament. However, the difficulty he had in extracting himself fully from a materialist framework long after he had become disillusioned with Manichaeism is well reflected in the following passage from the seventh book of the Confessions: “With all my heart I believed that you [God] could never suffer decay or hurt or change . . . [but] although I did not imagine you in the shape of a human body, I could not free myself from the thought that you were some kind of bodily substance extended in space, either permeating the world or diffused infinitely beyond it” (Conf. 7.1). If we are to acknowledge the influence of Ambrose in 384/85 in prompting Augustine to reassess the coherence of Manichaean materialism, the importance likewise of his encounter in 386 with the books of Plotinus in completing this critique of Manichaeism cannot be overestimated.47 One will nevertheless understand the true significance of this encounter with Neoplatonism just one year before he was baptized only if one appreciates just how difficult it was for Augustine to break free of the materialist framework proposed by Manichaeism. Moreover, what was at issue was not just the materialist conception of God but, arguably just as important, a materialist understanding of human nature. As Augustine readily acknowledged, “These books served to remind me to return to my own self . . . and with the eye of my soul, such as it was, I saw the Light that never changes casting its rays over the same eye of my soul, over my mind” (Conf. 7.10). This motif of interiority, captured by the idea of a spiritual journey to the core of one’s own being, prompted by Augustine’s encounter with Neoplatonism, was to shape his whole understanding of human nature. Furthermore, there are those who would argue that this creative engagement with Neoplatonism would engender an anthropological focus on the human subject that in the course of time would contribute to the “turn to the subject”—a legacy that has shaped in no uncertain manner the history of modern thought. This essay has reflected on the extent to which Augustine’s struggle with Manichaeism influenced both his life and his literary output for well over twenty years. What is often forgotten is the manner in which this struggle shaped the intellectual history of Christianity for much of the following fifteen hundred years. If it were not for Augustine’s re-
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jection of the rationalist presumptions of the Manichaeans, would one have that classic reflection on the relation between faith and reason that has shaped the various strands of Christian tradition to this very day and that is expressed in the immortal phrase borrowed from Isaiah, “Credo ut intelligere”? Likewise, were it not for Augustine’s rejection of the dualist metaphysic of the Manichaeans, would one have the concept of evil as a privation, a doctrine that continues to be a core Christian principle in its struggle to comprehend the darkest of all mysteries, namely the existence of sin and suffering in a world created by a loving God? If it were not for Augustine’s rejection of the materialism of the Manichaeans, would we have a Christian theology that for almost a thousand years was shaped by an acceptance of key tenets of Neoplatonist metaphysics? Finally, if it were not for Augustine’s rejection of the Manichaean denial of free will, would one have that remarkable Augustinian synthesis of the relation between free will and grace which has in turn prompted the most sublime of spiritual writings and the most violent of controversies over the course of the last fifteen hundred years in the history of Christianity? As mentioned at the beginning of this essay, the writings on Gnosticism of the late Gerry Hanratty provide evidence that significant strands of Gnosticism are to be found in the culture of modernity. In this they are to be welcomed, if for no other reason than that they reawaken in us a sensitivity to the manner in which the conflict between Gnosticism and Christianity has helped to shape European civilization over two millennia. As these brief reflections on the legacy of Augustine’s struggle with Manichaeism illustrate, a renewed interest in the history of the relationship between Christianity and Gnosticism is long overdue.
Notes 1. Although not one of the elect—the inner circle of adherents who claimed to have received gnosis (see Conf. 5.6)—nevertheless, from approximately the age of nineteen to twenty-eight (373–82) Augustine was an adherent of Manichaeism.
130 Eoin G. Cassidy 2. See Gerald Hanratty, Studies in Gnosticism and the Philosophy of Religion (Dublin: Four Courts, 1997) and Philosophers of the Enlightenment: Locke, Hume and Berkeley Revisited (Dublin: Four Courts, 1995). 3. For a good introduction to the significance of the Nag Hammadi library, see Churton Tobias, The Gnostics (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), pp. 3–32. 4. Gerald Hanratty, “The Early Gnostics,” in Studies in Gnosticism, pp. 14–40. 5. Ibid., p. 22. See also Simone Pétrement, Le dieu séparé: Les origines du gnosticisme (Paris: Cerf, 1984), pp. 9–21, and Henri-Charles Puech, En quête de la gnose, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), esp. vol. 1, pp. 1–23. 6. Hanratty, “Early Gnostics,” p. 23. See also the following quotation from the Nag Hammadi Treatise on the Resurrection: “We are predestined from the beginning not to fall into the foolishness of those who are without knowledge, but we shall enter into the wisdom of those who have known the truth” (p. 23). Not surprisingly, this belief puts the Gnostics at odds with a core teaching of Christianity on the universal nature of salvation. 7. See ibid., pp. 30–32. 8. Ibid., pp. 35–37. 9. Ibid., pp. 27–30. 10. As Hanratty perceptively points out, “Gnostic resentment against the material universe—and against the constraints of embodied human existence—was complemented by the titanic claim that the initiates’ acquisition of ‘knowledge’ actually divinized them and liberated them from the fateful worldly existence to which uninitiated philosophers and mere believers were consigned” (ibid., p. 10). 11. Ibid., pp. 37–40. “According to Plotinus, the most harmful consequences for the world-despising attitudes of the Gnostics were the dissolution of the moral sense and the abandonment of traditional moral principles” (p. 37). See p. 36: “Unlike the mass of humanity which could not escape from an anguished existence in the spatio-temporal world, the initiates relied on their privileged gnosis which enabled them to reclaim their original paradisi acal and divine condition.” 12. See Henri-Charles Puech, Le manichéisme: Son fondateur. Sa doctrine (Paris: Musée Guimet Bibliothèque de Diffusion, 1949) and Sur le manichéisme et autres essais (Paris: Flammarion, 1979). For a concise but informative treatment of Manichaean Gnosticism, see also Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism, trans. R. McLachlan Wilson (San Francisco: Harper, 1984), pp. 326–42.
A Zealous Convert 131 13. Hanratty, “Early Gnostics,” p. 41. 14. See De Moribus Manichaeorum 2.10.19, where Augustine turns to ridicule in order to critique the three symbols (mouth, hands, breast) that the Manichaeans esteem so highly in their moral practice. He declares: “And what do they signify? That man should be pure and innocent in mouth, hands, and breast, we are told. But what if he sins with his eyes, or ears, or nose? What if he injures or even kills someone with his foot? How can we hold him responsible when he has not sinned with his mouth, his hands, or his breast?” 15. De Moribus Ecclesiae Catholicae 1.2, trans. Donald and Idella Gallagher (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1992), pp. 27–28. 16. De Libero Arbitrio 1.1.1; 1.2.4; 1.3.6. 17. See De Libero Arbitrio 1.16.35. 18. See De Libero Arbitrio 2.1.1. 19. See De Libero Arbitrio 2.18.48. 20. See De Libero Arbitrio 3.25.76–77. 21. Nevertheless, Augustine’s comments in Contra Fortunatum 19–22 on the gift of free will and the role of habit are valuable reflections in light of the issues raised above. 22. See De Duabus Animabus 12.16–18; also Contra Fortunatum 14–15. 23. Contra Secundinum Manichaeum offers a clear extended statement of Augustine’s arguments against Manichaean dualist cosmology (12–15). For an extended reflection on the nature of evil as a privation, see p. 19. In Contra Felicem 2.3–12 there is a good treatment of the freedom of the will. 24. See De Vera Religione 7.12-10.20. 25. See De Vera Religione 7.12-10.24, 45. 26. The theme of the need for an intellectual conversion is treated at length in this work. See De Vera Religione 37, 68–55, 110. 27. Augustine, De Utilitate Credendi 8.20. 28. Augustine, Conf. 3.4, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (London: Penguin Classics, 1961, p. 59. All subsequent passages from this work are from this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text. 29. The importance of the influence of Manichaeism in the context of Augustine’s quest for truth that can be known with certainty can be seen in the detailed treatment of this theme in the following passages from the Confessions: 3.4–6; 5.3–7 and 14; and 6.1–5 and 11. 30. This is eloquently reflected in the following passage: “Truth! Truth! How the very marrow of my soul within me yearned for it as they dinned it in my ears over and over again!” (Conf. 3.6).
132 Eoin G. Cassidy 31. See also Conf. 6.4: “I wanted to be just as certain of these things which were hidden from my sight as that seven and three make ten.” 32. In Conf. 5.3–7, Augustine recounts in some detail his debate with the Manichaean Faustus that was to prove a critical turning point in his growing disillusionment with the truth claims of Manichaeism. For the inner turmoil that this disillusionment engendered, see Conf. 5.14; 6.1; and 6.4. 33. “Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis.” See De Magistro 2.37; De Libero Arbitrio 1.2.4; In Joannis Evangelium 29.6. Intimations of the importance of this insight are to be seen in Confessions, book 4, where Augustine expresses the conviction that, much more important than the truth of propositions, faith gives us access to the truth of the One who is Truth. “Now, at last, tired of being misled, entrust to the Truth all that the Truth has given to you and nothing will be lost. All that is withered in you will be made to thrive again” (Conf. 4.11). Further details of this theme are to be found in the course of a reflection on key insights gleaned from his life experience. See Conf. 10.23–28 and 10.40. 34. Conf. 6.5: “They [the Manichaeans] laughed at people who took things on faith.” 35. The legacy of Manichaeism for Augustine can be seen as much in the significance which he attaches to addressing the problem of evil as in the manner in which he confronts Manicheism on this issue. The extensive list of passages in the Confessions devoted to this theme include 2.4–10; 3.7–9; 4.10; 5.10–11; 7.1–16; 8.3–5 and 8–12. 36. See in particular Conf. 3.7–10; 4.1. 37. Conf. 7.11–16. 38. The position is clearly stated in the following passage: “So we must conclude that if things are deprived of all good, they cease altogether to be, and this means that as long as they are, they are good. Therefore, whatever is, is good; and evil, the origin of which I was trying to find, is not a substance, because if it were a substance, it would be good” (Conf. 7.11). 39. Ostensibly dedicated to examining the causes of an adolescent misdemeanor, Conf. 2.4–10 offers a sustained treatment of this theme which has rarely if ever been equaled for the subtlety of its analysis of the psychological factors at work that either seek to explain or indeed to justify moral evil. 40. The more common explanation is that this doctrine was developed by Augustine in the course of his controversy with Pelagius over the centrality of grace. For a summary of this viewpoint, see Karl Rahner’s article on original sin in Karl Rahner, ed., The Encyclopaedia of Theology: A Concise Sacramentum Mundi (London: Burns and Oates, 1972), pp. 1148–55.
A Zealous Convert 133 41. Augustine describes this situation succinctly in the phrase “My inner self was a house divided against itself ” (Conf. 8.8). The detailed treatment of this theme in the Confessions indicates the importance Augustine attached to countering the claims of the Manichaeans. See Conf. 8.5–12. 42. As he says: “I was held fast, not in fetters clamped upon me by another, but by my own will, which had the strength of iron chains. . . . For my will was perverse and lust had grown from it, and when I gave in to lust habit was born, and when I did not resist the habit it became a necessity” (Conf. 8.5). For an extended treatment of habitus, see Contra Fortunatum 22. 43. This is well expressed in the following passage, “So I was at odds with myself. I was throwing myself into confusion. . . . My mind was being punished. . . . It was part of the punishment of a sin freely committed by Adam, my first father” (Conf. 8.10). 44. The legacy of this aspect of Manichaeism for Augustine is reflected in the number of times in the Confessions that he addresses this issue. See Conf. 3.6–7; 4.12–15; 5.11; 6.1; 7.1, 9 and 19–20. 45. The theme of how love and friendship can endure is treated in some detail in Conf. 4.4–12, where Augustine reflects at length on his reactions as a twenty-two-year-old, in the year 376, to the death of his close friend. See in particular the following passage: “Blessed are those who love you, O God, and love their friends in you and their enemies for your sake. They alone will never lose those who are dear to them, for they love them in one who is never lost, in God, our God” (Conf. 4.9). 46. The Manichaeans took great pleasure in ridiculing the supposedly materialist or anthropomorphic implications of the Christian belief that we are made in the image of God. The seriousness of this problem for Augustine is reflected in the following passage from the Confessions: “Nor had I the least notion what it is in us that gives us our being, or what the Scriptures mean when they say that we are made in God’s image” (Conf. 3.7). 47. The significance of the writings of Plotinus is well captured in the following passage from the Confessions: “By reading these books of the Platonists I had been prompted to look for truth as something incorporeal. . . . I was certain both that you are and that you are infinite, though without extent in terms of space either limited or unlimited. I was sure that it is you who truly are, since you are always the same, varying in neither part nor motion” (Conf. 7.20).
s i x
Answering Back Augustine’s Critique of Heidegger
Cyril O’Regan
Belatedness is the fate of philosophers with regard to significant thinkers who have gone before. The greater the intellectual and spiritual achievement of the earlier thinker, the greater the authority enjoyed by his or her texts, the less opportunity for genuine contribution or prospect for genuine novelty. Belatedness, however, is not simply a matter of burdens. Should one survive the acute feeling of disadvantage, with its debilitating consequences that go all the way to paralysis, one comes to experience the gifts of being late. Belatedness grants to the later thinker the privilege as well as responsibility of interpreting and constructing the earlier thinker, of setting criteria and rendering verdicts with respect to adequacy and validity, and of evaluating the influence of the thinker, and the Wirkungsgeschichte of his or her texts, as either baleful or salutary. Thus, if Heidegger is by the nature of the case forced to deal with Augustine as a canonic figure of the Western tradition, and is encouraged thereby to resort to coping strategies, this disadvantage is more than offset by the advantages that belatedness 134
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bestows. First, Heidegger can and does set the terms of interpretation, which concern the occlusion by the metaphysical tradition of originary experience in which Being (Sein) is disclosed to a finite responder who is the site or “there” (Da) of disclosure and who in disclosure becomes constituted precisely as this site. The basic question Heidegger puts to the bishop of Hippo is whether, and if so to what extent, Augustine transcends the metaphysical tradition. Second, Heidegger’s construction of Augustine both before and after the so-called “turn” (Kehre) in Heidegger’s thought involves setting criteria of validity and adequacy with respect to originary experience, whereby Augustine critically can be judged to have avoided or succumbed to rationalist tendencies in the Western tradition that fail to be responsive to the event quality of Being.1 That Augustine presents a less compelling case for having succumbed to rationalism than Plato, Descartes, or neoscholasticism does not prevent Heidegger finally delivering a negative verdict. This essay argues that the relation between Heidegger and Augustine is essentially agonistic or competitive.2 Obviously, entry into the agon is provided by Heidegger, who, if initially positive about the escape of Augustine’s thought from the gravitational pull of Western rationalism, fairly quickly turns negative. In an effort to offset the advantages Heidegger enjoys precisely because of belatedness, I allow Augustine to “answer back.” The answering back covers not only Heidegger’s explicit criticism, in Being and Time, of Augustine’s views on time, self, experience, and the divine but also his more implied post– Being and Time construction of this Christian thinker as nothing less than a connoisseur of ontotheology, that is, a thinker who conflates Being with a particular being, indeed the highest being. Worthwhile as it is to frame an Augustinian answer to the early Heidegger, arguably it is even more important to attend to the later Heidegger, who not only dismisses Augustine as a link in the chain of the “forgetfulness of Being” (Seinsvergessenheit) but also articulates an alternative position on time, self, the divine, and language. The essential reason is that the later, more “mythopoetic” Heidegger enjoys more currency in contemporary philosophical and theological thought. Augustine’s “talking back” involves, on the one hand, a defense of his stances on time, self,
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death, and the divine and, on the other, an attack on Heideggerian alternatives. In my defensive moves, as well as my offensive strikes, I enlist the assistance of religious thinkers as different as Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and Catherine Pickstock. The argument of the essay unfolds as follows. The first section provides an account of Heidegger’s reading of Augustine both before and after the Kehre. I distinguish between Heidegger’s earlier, more ambivalent response to Augustine and his later, almost entirely negative construction, in which Augustine and the tradition he confirms and transmits is to be rejected. At the same time, I mark the continuities of problematic and fundamental concern between both periods and argue that Augustine’s eclipse represents neither the discovery of a new Augustine nor the coming into being of a totally different Heidegger, but rather the radicalization of reservations Heidegger harbors from the beginning toward philosophies, Christian or otherwise, anchored in the classical tradition. The second section provides a defense of Augustine against objections delivered both sides of the Kehre and focuses primarily on those texts which we know Heidegger read at least in part. There are essentially two foci of defense. Against reservations by Heidegger expressed in Being and Time and other texts from the same period that Augustine’s view of time is at once superficial and fatally undermined by both its Platonic and its Christian commitments, I offer a reading of book 11 of the Confessions that shows that Augustine’s reading of time is profound and that much of the profundity derives from his specifically Christian commitments.3 Against Heidegger’s post-Kehre dismissal of Augustine as a connoisseur of metaphysics, I argue for the primacy of the language of worship in Augustine, which, if it does not rule out all ontological claims, certainly calls for some emendation regarding Augustine as a metaphysical foundationalist. I complement my defense of Augustine on both fronts by questioning both the coherence and adequacy of Heidegger’s view of time and transcendence as articulated in his Being and Time period and the view of “piety” proposed by the later Heidegger as the alternative to rationalist deformation.
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Escalating Negativity: Heidegger’s Reading of Augustine It is a commonplace in commentary on Being and Time that the depth existential structures that make possible a genuine response to the disclosure of Being (Sein) bear a positive correlation with the more experiential articulations of Christian faith. If the Christian thinker who is Heidegger’s most obvious dialogue partner is Kierkegaard, we must recognize that Augustine is also a definite presence. In any event, even before Being and Time (1927), Heidegger was clearly viewed by Bultmann and others as an important Christian resource, albeit a critical one that enabled the genuine thinker to uncover the truly primal experiences of Christianity that belied its historical sedimentation into a system of beliefs and practices. It is true that the relation between Being and Time and Christianity in general, and more specifically its relation to Bultmann’s theology, on the one hand, and its debt to the religious thought of Kierkegaard, on the other, have often been explored.4 Nevertheless, before the pioneering work of Theodore Kisiel (and followers such as John van Buren) on the intellectual trajectory of Heidegger between the Habilitationsschrift on Duns Scotus (1915) and Being and Time (1927), interpreters of Heidegger really have not been in a position to assess the extent of Heidegger’s engagement with the Christian tradition, the significance of his affinities to St. Paul and Luther, and the operation of what amounts to a critical vetting of Augustine as a religious and philosophical resource.5 As both Kisiel and van Buren point out, if Augustine is of major interest to Heidegger throughout his various lecture courses in 1917– 24, the status he enjoys is somewhat different from that enjoyed by St. Paul and Luther, and also by Meister Eckhart.6 To all three of these religious thinkers Heidegger gives virtually unconditional approval. By contrast, Heidegger’s reading of Augustine is from the very beginning marked by reservation, even ambivalence. In the various lecture courses on religion, and more specifically religious experience, given in 1917–19, Augustine is one of a handful of important Christian thinkers whose experientially based thought suggests itself as a possible
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resource for elaborating an adequate basis for a truly adequate phenomenology of experience.7 Encouraged in significant part by Wilhelm Dilthey’s construction of Augustine, which squares neither with the image of Augustine as dogmatic theologian nor with the image of him as a forerunner of Descartes’ egological turn, Heidegger portrays Augustine as offering an adumbration of a historically and temporally specified self, characterized by unrestricted questioning and quest.8 Texts such as the Confessiones, Enarrationes in Psalmos, De Trinitate, and De Civitate Dei are read as articulating a self whose complexion is just the opposite of the ego cogito of Descartes, at once singularly unengaged and defined by an objectifying relation to the world. While all of these texts are classics, and thus representative of Augustine’s intellectual and spiritual achievement, admittedly Heidegger’s textual focus is fairly narrow. Heidegger does not deal with the broad drift of these texts or the relation between texts or themes; nor does he pay attention to the audiences of these texts or remark on how the texts are intended for spiritual formation and/or cultural critique. Rather, he limits his focus to specific passages which highlight various aspects of the experiential dynamics he finds both rendered in and recommended by these texts. Heidegger follows Dilthey in taking De Trinitate, book 10, and De Civitate Dei, books 9 and 11, as two key loci where Augustine articulates important dimensions of a constitutionally erotic self, that is, a self defined ultimately by desire.9 Heidegger opens new ground, however, in calling attention to the treatment of cura in Enarrationes in Psalmos (7.9). Cura, which becomes in Being and Time the highly important existential property of Care (Sorge) (§§ 39–44, SZ 180–220, BT 225–73), is precisely the opposite of Cartesian objectification. It suggests that one finds oneself already involved in and with one’s world, which does not stand before one as an inert object. Heidegger believes that with this notion Augustine has anticipated an important correction of the Western rationalist construction of the self, which is variously inflected in the medieval and modern periods. Heidegger also finds pertinent Augustine’s emphasis on “call” (Beruf ): it is in listening and being able to listen that the self exercises that responsiveness that Heidegger associates in Being and Time with authentic responsibility for self.
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As early as the lectures on religion of 1920–21, however, Heidegger expresses serious reservations about Augustine’s capacity to serve as a historical paradigm for an opening of thought beyond the Western tradition collapsing under the weight of its own rationalistic excesses. In one sense the reservations are not new. There are moments, according to Heidegger, in which Augustine relapses into the very rationalism which the experiential dimension of his thought promises to transcend. There are moments also in which Augustine seems to confirm rather than break with the dogmatic certainties of the metaphysical tradition.10 Heidegger becomes increasingly ambivalent regarding the nature and scope of Augustine’s achievement. While he continues to underwrite Augustine’s articulation of an erotic self of interminable questioning and open-ended quest, there is considerably more concern as to where Augustine falls short. The general diagnosis is that Augustine’s thought consistently backslides into the theoretical and the metaphysical. On the one hand, its experiential disposition is insufficient to resist the pull of the theoretical attitude that issues in a substantialization of the erotic self and the substitution of a goal of eros for its dynamic movement.11 On the other hand—and here a Nietzschean note is struck that resounds even more loudly in post-Kehre Heidegger12—Augustine falls victim to the lure of metaphysics in two ways: (i) when he offers God as a ground to secure intelligibility, and (ii) when he fetishizes this ground as a thing among other things—the ancestor of what Heidegger in his post-Kehre phase fatefully calls “ontotheology.” Moving from description to explanation, Heidegger puts the blame firmly on the Platonism that Augustine is unable to overcome.13 As with Nietzsche’s genealogical diagnosis of Christian thought, Heidegger’s point is not quite a historical one, or at least not merely a h istorical one. Platonism is at once one historical manifestation of philosophy among others and a trope for philosophy’s propensity to spurn concrete reality and replace it by a tissue of consolatory illusion. At the same time, given Heidegger’s religious interests, there is at least an echo of the “Hellenization” hypothesis that was made famous by Adolph von Harnack but that also in another guise represented a complaint by the earlier Protestant theologian Ernst
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Troeltsch.14 In any event, Heidegger makes it perfectly clear that with respect to a phenomenology of experience Augustine falls well short of the level of transparency achieved in the letters of St. Paul.15 For Heidegger, then, the great texts of Augustine betray their essential promise. The inquietum cor nostrum of the Confessions is betrayed in and by the self ’s certainty of itself and its proper object; cura is reneged on when tranquillity (tranquillitas) becomes the zenith of achievement; and eros is replaced, as it is displaced, when in De Trinitate Augustine focuses on the vision of God (visio Dei). Even if this vision is only eschatologically real, nonetheless, Augustine’s emphasis on God “before our eyes” (prae oculis est) represents a profound misstep— although as such only a repetition of the more primordial misstep of the Western tradition. As something more than a synecdoche for metaphysics, Platonism causes particular mischief in two areas. The first concerns what might be regarded as the most spectacular achievement of the Confessions, namely Augustine’s exploration of human temporality in contradistinction to cosmological time. Heidegger judges that, as with Husserl’s own investigations with which it is rightly associated, Augustine’s view of time proves superficial.16 The temporal dynamism of the self, characterized by care and orientation toward the future, is in Heidegger’s view short-circuited by being grounded in the eternal in which it participates and of which it represents a mimesis.17 Here Heidegger anticipates the critique of the primacy of the present carried out in Being and Time. Moreover, this critique is not only left standing in the later Heidegger but deepened ontologically in that the problem with the present is that it freezes a dynamic reality that withdraws as it gives, and thus for which no intuition or concept is adequate. Second, in adopting the topographical-axiological frame of Platonism in which there is a definite hierarchy of Being, Augustine represses a dynamic or truly “ecstatic” understanding of transcendence.18 While there are moments of charity in Heidegger’s interpretation of Augustine, it is evident that in a relatively short period Heidegger moves from a qualified positive view of Augustine to a negative view in which he is dismissed as a resource for a thinking that would lead beyond the impasse that is the Western tradition. In consequence Au-
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gustine can no longer be coupled with St. Paul and Luther, or for that matter with Meister Eckhart.19 This double uncoupling is important in the context not only of the early but also of the post-Kehre Heidegger. As Caputo has charted so comprehensively, Eckhart continues to play the role of exemplar and conversation partner.20 Although Heidegger speaks less frequently of Luther, the Reformer is still viewed as the model of authentic theology as properly evangelical. Importantly, however, Luther remains viable largely for methodological rather than substantive reasons: his theology of the cross represents a fundamental critique of the metaphysical contamination of Christianity.21 Here, however, Heidegger is not, any more than in his post-Kehre concessions to Christianity as a form of discourse as well as experience, essentially interested, as is Luther, in the health of Christian theology. His fundamental interest from the very beginning is in the prospects for a philosophical discourse that transcends metaphysics. With respect to this, Christian discourse is not the answer. At worst, Christian theology represents an obfuscation; at best, it represents an opening or a sign of a more universal and fundamental language of disclosure and existential attunement. Of course, the other side of the uncoupling of positives is the coupling of negatives. While Heidegger commences his exploration of Augustine with the presumption that he represents the antidote to scholasticism rather than a version of the same disease, even before Being and Time this hope could not be sustained. Augustine now fails to pass muster, just as somewhat earlier Heidegger came to the conclusion that, as a representative medieval thinker, Duns Scotus fails.22 In the end, rationalist and propositionalist bias vitiates their programs. The other lesson learned from reading Augustine and Scotus is that the alliance between philosophy and Christianity, which in significant part is defined by particular beliefs, is detrimental to the health of philosophy, if philosophy is defined—as it must be—by unrestricted search. Heidegger consequently advocates “atheism” precisely as a methodological principle.23 As a methodological principle, philosophy adopts a principled neutrality toward theology. Whether neutrality is the case in practice, however, is a question that must be asked of
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Heidegger, who summarily dismisses “God-talk.” In addition, Heidegger’s post-Kehre elaboration of the event of Being as Appropriation or Ereignis raises the issue of whether this form of postmetaphysical discourse intends to suggest that faith misconceives itself when it prays to the one God and focuses on a unique historical figure as the site and agent of redemption. For Heidegger, Being and Time represents precisely the beginning that philosophy always aspires to but that, on the evidence of the Western philosophical tradition, it equally often betrays. Because its method proceeds through the analysis of the existential structures of Dasein as the privileged mode of access to Being (Sein), philosophy is in a real sense more precisely a beginning of a beginning. While Being and Time appears only to advertise the Destruktion of metaphysics, the other side of the uncovering of the depth existential structures in Being and Time is in fact a sketch of the Destruktion of the philosophical tradition. Now, while destruction has the positive intent of uncovering the genuine questions posed by the tradition, critique of categorial and propositionalist thought of the West is admittedly to the forefront. Augustine does not fare worse than most major figures in the Western tradition and almost certainly fares better than Descartes, who is excoriated (SZ, 24–25, BT 46–47), Aquinas, Suarez (SZ, 22–23, BT 3–4), and Hegel (SZ 428–36, BT 480–86). There are a number of references to the Confessions. The first reference occurs in the introduction (SZ 43–44, BT 69) and appears to be positive. Heidegger draws attention to Confessions 10.16, where Augustine points to the self that proves elusive and opaque. In a questioning in which the self reveals itself as question, the self loses the complacency of being taken for granted and becomes “a land of trouble and inordinate sweat” (terra difficultatis et sudoris nimii). Heidegger recoups a point he granted to Augustine in his earlier lectures on religion, while extending it by drawing attention to the tensional aspect of a mysterious self that has been exposed. The second reference is to Augustine’s reflection on time as distentio animi in Confessions 11.26 (SZ 427, BT 479– 80), which famously sums up Augustine’s shift from the cosmological views of time. Although Heidegger remains descriptive rather than
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evaluative, the association of Augustine’s view with that of Timaeus (37d) creates ambiguity. Given Heidegger’s objections even at this early stage of his career to Plato’s prioritizing of the eternal, and the evacuation of time that is the effect of time’s status as a “mobile image,” is Augustine guilty by association, or is the Augustinian revolution being marked off from classical thought? Even if one decides that on balance Heidegger is positive about Augustine, the ambiguity is at the very least instructive. The third reference to the Confessions is to Augustine’s prioritization in 10.35 of sight over the other senses (SZ 171, BT 215) and his argument from common experience and customary use of language that the relation between seeing and knowing is more or less intrinsic. Heidegger gathers together quite a few passages from 10.35 and offers nothing by way of critical evaluation. His earlier critique of ocularism in Augustine, and the fundamental challenge presented by Being and Time to the privileging of sight, characteristic of the metaphysical tradition, leave little doubt that Augustine is not being praised. It is obvious that in Being and Time Augustine is still treated with a measure of approbation. In line with his earlier affirmative response, Heidegger acknowledges Augustine’s contribution in opening up the ontological dimension of the self and in disclosing very basic outlines to such fundamental existential structures as care and anxiety. In addition, in his view of time as distentio animi Augustine is granted some measure of respect for a basic shift of paradigm for understanding time. Nonetheless, the estimate of Augustine is in the end not positive. As we saw, according to Heidegger, in committing himself to the primacy of sight in Confessions 10.35, Augustine fails to delve deeply enough into what constitutes knowing as truthfulness and thoughtlessly repeats the specular tendency of the metaphysical tradition inaugurated by Plato. This error is fundamental and from Heidegger’s perspective necessarily infects a thinker’s entire thought. At the same time, Heidegger’s affirmation of Augustine’s view of the self and time is not without some ambiguity. His evaluation looks less positive when Augustine is associated with Descartes’ turn to the self. While undoubtedly Heidegger thinks that Augustine’s reflection is deeper than
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that of Descartes, on the basis of his lectures on Augustine it is not clear that Augustine is not vulnerable to two fundamental objections leveled against Descartes.24 These objections are (1) that the questioning self gets substantialized and thus becomes an object of metaphysical anatomy; and (2) that the certainty that the self enjoys is spuriously secured by reference to ens infinitum. Moreover, given these two vulnerabilities, despite Augustine’s articulation of cura as defining the fundamental mode or tonality of the self, it is open to question whether the metaphysical and theological ascriptions that apply to it do not in the end figure a complacent self for whom the world and other selves are objects to be used. In any event, Heidegger takes it that this objectifying and utilitarian tendency is implied in Augustine’s uti/frui distinction, in which Augustine sanctions the use of all things other than God and defers enjoyment to the human being’s post mortem state.25 The attribution of Kehre or “the turn” represents an attempt to mark a perceived fundamental change in Heidegger’s perception of the point of departure for philosophy, and in consequence philosophy’s discursive practice. Heidegger abandons further exploration of Dasein as the privileged means of access to Being and instead shifts his attention to the disclosure of Being as event that constitutes the “there” (Da) of existence as the site of disclosure. A basic motive for the shift is that Heidegger becomes concerned that the analytic of Dasein carried out in Being and Time ensnares philosophy in precisely the kind of foundational enterprise he believes philosophy should forswear. Correlatively there is a significant shift in method. Heidegger effectively renounces the rigorous linear logic of Being and Time for a more supple, flexible, and hermeneutical modus operandi. At the same time, compared with the narrow band of discourses invoked in Being and Time, Heidegger’s reading of the Western tradition is much more expansive, not simply in its philosophical range of reference, but also with respect to genre. With language becoming a crucial consideration, poetry comes to have an authority for Heidegger matching that of philosophy,26 and religious texts, both East and West, become objects of postmetaphysical rumination.27
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In some obvious sense Heidegger’s hermeneutic tack is not new: it is operative in the various lecture series before Being and Time, where, as we have seen, Heidegger probed nonphilosophical as well as philosophical texts. And, of course, even if Being and Time is not itself a work of text interpretation, the importance of interpretation—indeed, its necessity—is argued for both in the introduction and throughout. In the introduction Heidegger links the discourse of phainomenon (SZ 28–31, BT 51–55) intrinsically with hermeneuein (SZ 37, BT 62); and in chapters (31–34) central to the hermeneutic movement of the twentieth century he deals specifically with interpretation and understanding as fundamental structures of Dasein’s orientation toward the world as well as fundamental modes of “being-with” (Mitsein) other existences. Nonetheless, it is not simply the case that the later Heidegger regresses to earlier interpretive practices. Before Being and Time the interpretation of texts is carried out with a view to elaborating the fundamental structures of the self. After the Kehre, texts themselves are viewed as sites of disclosure of Being and not simply of structures of existence with privileged access to Being. With this difference in mind, it can be said that Heidegger’s episodic interpretation of pre-Socratic philosophy, Plato, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche, but now also of literary figures such as Sophocles, Rilke, Hölderlin, and Trakl, and religious figures such as Lao-Tzu and Meister Eckhart, contributes to the Destruktion of the Western tradition that Heidegger announces as the concluding and missing part of Being and Time. This Destruktion, which means not only a razing but a laying bare (Abbau) of what has been covered over, is necessary because of the bankruptcy of the Western tradition, which defines for Heidegger discourse in its fallen state. In what will become a master narrative of mourning, the fall is coincident with the emergence of classical philosophy, with Plato standing in for Adam. If Plato is the supposed origin of the fall, its name is ontotheology. By this term Heidegger means to suggest more than the illegitimate mixing of philosophy and theology—although this is not excluded. It suggests a constellation of missteps (and mishaps) that belong to and even define the history of philosophy precisely as the history of metaphysics.28 Ontotheology is
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most generally and formally defined as the confounding of Being (to on) with a being or specifically the highest being (to theion). More specifically ontotheology involves the search for a foundation (hypokeimenon, subiectum) that serves to explain all that is experienced as well as the structure of experience itself.29 For Heidegger, Plato and Descartes represent the ancient and modern poles respectively of what in Augustinian language would be typified as the lust for domination (libido dominandi). The critique is unrelenting regarding both. In the case of Plato ontotheology valorizes the theoretical and privileges seeing. If the case against Plato is prosecuted with numbing regularity, arguably the most famous critique occurs in Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit, in which Heidegger offers a highly tendentious reading of Plato’s reflection on the divided line in book 6 of the Republic.30 In an interpretation that is as controversial now as it was when it was originally published, Heidegger argues that even the Good (to agathon) is an object of thought (noein).31 Thus a text that appears to say that all knowledge is based on nonknowledge, and all being on a dimension of reality that surpasses it, is read as suggesting the universal rule of knowledge over being and as legitimating the correspondence theory of truth. In the case of Descartes, his quest for a fundamentum inconcussum veritatis at the beginning of the modern age translates ocularism into a representationalist or objectifying key that sets the table for the trajectory of modern philosophy through Leibniz to Hegel and beyond.32 Moreover, modernity is nothing more than the unfolding of the Cartesian turn in which the transcendence of the world is denied and in which the world becomes a resource to be exploited.33 All of classical and medieval philosophy is plotted between these two poles of differently inflected ontotheological deformation. This has obvious implications for the interpretation of Augustine, who, placed between both, is interpreted as an actual carrier of Plato’s ocular and noetic disease, while also representing something of a preparation for the representationalist deformation of Descartes. I will return to these points shortly. A prior question that needs to be addressed, however, is, What, if anything, does the conjugation in the Western tradition of metaphysics and theology have to do with onto-
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theology? As we have seen, ontotheology itself is not a synthesis; thus it is not a monster in the sense of something put together from different, even incompatible elements. Nonetheless, for Heidegger, the conjugation of philosophy and theology is a singularly unpropitious event in that it both confirms and exacerbates the illusion of the fixed identity, nameability, and utility of Being. Precisely as ontotheology, the history of Western thought is the history of the “covering over” of Being, and a prophylaxis against its disclosure. Augustine is not so much featured in this story as embedded in it. He is a node in the articulation of a discursive fall. On the basis of conclusions arrived at before Being and Time, but now captured in the code word ontotheology, Augustine’s thought is a search for foundations precisely as a search for certainty as well as truth. Thus Augustine’s thought can be judged not only historically but systemically to be “between” the differently inflected falls of Plato and Descartes. The consigning of Augustine to a more general discursive perdition of the West is reinforced in Heidegger’s reflections on which thinkers and forms of thought escape the gravitational pull of metaphysics. Heidegger suggests that poetry rather than philosophy or Christianity in its historical embodiments enjoys special prerogatives with respect to the disclosure of truth. Pindar and Sophocles can rightly then be regarded as Plato’s superiors,34 just as Hölderlin can be regarded as superior to Kant and Hegel. Authentic poetry is precisely the letting be of reality. In poetic discourses Being is disclosed, although finitely and historically, never infinitely and comprehensively. Moreover, for Heidegger it is no accident that authentic speech seems to be consigned to the “philosophical languages” of Greek and German, and arguably even more narrowly to forms of Greek speech that preceded the emergence of rationalism in Socrates and Plato, and to German forms of speech that repeat in some respect the unfallen Greek speech of the pre-Socratic philosophers and the tragedians. Hölderlin is here the great exemplar. As with the entire Latin tradition in philosophy and theology, the Latin literary contribution can be ignored, as can great works in any of the non-Germanic vernacular languages. Very interestingly, however, Meister Eckhart continues to
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function as an exception. Heidegger reads him as representing a rupture in the metaphysical tradition, as a thinker whose joining of scriptural exegesis and philosophy submits to neither. Calling on important Eckhartian tropes such as Gelassenheit to suggest a response to the call of Being that is the opposite of what is dominant in the Western tradition, Heidegger solidifies the binary opposition between Augustine and Eckhart that was an important result of his pre-Kehre explorations.35 Eckhart and his tradition (e.g., Angelus Silesius) become the apostles of the postmetaphysical in that they refuse explanation. They refuse thereby the “why” (Warum) that inaugurates metaphysics. Instead, abandoning explanation, they render with great subtlety the event of Being, its giving of being, its “because” (Weil) that represents the refusal of the giving of reasons.36 Both Hölderlin and Eckhart are especially important in that they contribute to Heidegger’s constructive alternative to ontotheology as the “will to explain” that trammels the deliverances of Being. This alternative might be expressed as the elevation of the doxological in terms of both discourse and mode of existence. The language of Hölderlin’s great hymns is, for Heidegger, evocative rather than constative, a site of invocation and address rather than a site of naming.37 Formally the poems praise and give thanks, as they plead and hope and wait patiently for revelation that comes under the auspices of the return of the gods, who, however apparently uranic in form, have a rooting power (dwelling) that is associated with the chthonic. As poems of praise and thanksgiving, Hölderlin’s hymns can be understood to repeat under specifically modern conditions the odes of Pindar. It is their emphasis on deliverance and waiting that makes them prayers and plausibly associates them with the Psalms, especially since the reference is not only to the presence of God that will guarantee our individual human prospering but also to our collective well-being. In an important sense, then, Hölderlin’s poems are read by Heidegger as if they constituted a form of scripture: not only do they resist exhaustive interpretation, but they are also in a certain sense unsurpassable. In Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin’s poems, mode of existence is correlative to discourse. As such, existence is characterized by humility,
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gratitude, openness to whatever happens or does not happen. Such a stance is required in a modern world defined by the absence (Fehl) of the gods, or their flight.38 Considered either as a repetition of Pindar or on an analogy with the Psalms, Hölderlin’s poetry offers a model of the doxological whereby all pretenders can be judged. Of course, given the normativity of Hölderlin as a repetition of a pre-Socratic form of doxology, this means that forms of theological discourse such as Augustine’s Confessions and De Trinitate, which have prima facie doxological credentials, must be judged as inadequate. The judgment would apply equally to Enarrationes in Psalmos, which is, arguably, Augustine’s most self-consciously doxological text. In all cases, certitude of the existence of a uniquely powerful and good being who disposes over all other beings as creatures makes prayer less than it can be, that is, a pledge of one’s being for a reality without any idea of security and/or recompense. For Heidegger, thankfulness is not the native disposition of Augustine’s texts. What he sees as constitutional is the urge to find the one “thing” that will bring an end to the incorrigible restlessness of the soul. According to Heidegger, Meister Eckhart also contributes to the doxological alternative of the Western tradition, which is perfectly capable of dissimulating the doxological attitude of humility. If the hideand-seek of Eckhart’s elliptical German sermons indicates a break with predictable lines of philosophical and theological discourse, and his use of paradox forces one out of standard conceptualities ruled by binary oppositions such as being and nonbeing, dark and light, activity and passivity, Eckhart’s notion of Gelassenheit sums up the required stance toward reality that transcends the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love advocated by Augustine.39 “Letting be” means abandoning the will to know and control and more positively points to transcendence toward the mystery of Being. But it is not only Eckhart’s apophaticism that prevents the congealing of Being into a particular something: it is Eckhart’s refusal to spatialize transcendence as the transcendent. This refusal, for Heidegger, is also characteristic of Hölderlin’s poems. For Heidegger the illegitimate spatialization of transcendence is a constitutive error of the metaphysical tradition.
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Even more, it is the constitutive error of metaphysics that gets reinforced and exacerbated in the jointure between philosophy and theology that is executed by such magisterial figures as Augustine and Aquinas. Lessons from Hölderlin and Eckhart reinforce the proscription of any doxology that would univocally identify the addressee and intend a reality that is not simply other but on a constitutionally “higher” plane of existence. Similarly, Hölderlin and Eckhart are presented as suggesting alternative ways of being responsive to a world replete with the overture of meaning and disclosure and thus sacred.40 As sacred the world has a truly transcendent dimension. At one level the world is amorphously divine. At another the world is polymorphously divine. Hölderlin, for example, not only accepts Thales’ description of the world as full of gods but clearly suggests the greater adequacy of address to a plurality of divine beings which represent our highest values. While Heidegger through Hölderlin will continue to value the uranian, the basic thrust is in a tellurian or chthonic direction. Heidegger insists that the polymorphously sacred or theophanous world is a world in which one finds roots, truly “dwells,” and is “sheltered.”41 Heidegger also avails himself of the symbol of “earth” to suggest a form of rootedness that is dynamic or ecstatic and that is inseparable from transcendence. It is obvious that Hölderlin is thought both to subvert and to correct basic interpretive tendencies of the Christian tradition, especially as it has been contaminated by metaphysics. In principle Hölderlin’s status as a postmetaphysical thinker does not disqualify him as a Christian thinker,42 albeit of a peculiar type, but it is interesting that in Heidegger’s voluminous work on Hölderlin no mention is made of Hölderlin’s attraction to Christ, his mediator role, and Christ as the emblem of sacrifice, nor to Christ as a form of heroism that consists primarily in acceptance and waiting. Equally no mention is made of how the “Father,” precisely as the father of the Son, gestures toward a refiguration of the wrathful father who demands recompense from humankind and who sadistically is prepared to sacrifice his son as a substitutionary device that confirms the logic of wrath. In Heidegger’s extended appreciation of Hölderlin, the genu-
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ineness of Hölderlin’s Christianity is repressed rather than argumen tatively defeated. Interpreted as a repetition of a primordial Greek religiousness, Hölderlin is for Heidegger a post-Christian thinker who anticipates the clarion call of Nietzsche’s “death of God” and overcomes Nietzsche’s virulent form of nihilism before the fact.43 Heidegger extracts from Hölderlin’s poems a vocabulary with meanings that run in precisely the opposite direction to Christianity. Words such as sacred, divine, gods, absence, trace, and night are all pregnant with meaning and indicate a world of divine presence. Hölderlin then functions as grist to the mill for what in effect is Heidegger’s alternative to Christianity, with its commitments to a transcendent God who bleeds the world and humanity of its own self-transcendence and who above all takes the mystery and eventness out of existence. For Heidegger, with Hölderlin as his point of departure, hope is eschatological in that the revelation or apocalypse of the absent gods can be neither predicted nor determined. One waits for the event from, and of, the future. The god who is to come is what Heidegger, in Beiträge, calls the “last god” (der letzte Gott).44 The complexion of this last God as the other to the Christian god is evident in the following passage, which is worth quoting in full: “The last god has its own unique uniqueness and stands outside these calculating determinations meant by titles such as ‘mono-theism,’ ‘pan-theism,’ and ‘atheism’: ‘Monotheism’ and all other types of ‘theism’ exist only since JudeoChristian ‘apologetics,’ which has metaphysics as its intellectual presupposition. With the death of this god, all theisms collapse. The multitude of the gods cannot be quantified but rather is subjected to the inner richness of the grounds and abgrounds in the site for the moment of the shining and sheltering-concealing of the hint of the last god.”45 This passage could be critically deployed to scour Christianity of illicit metaphysical assumptions, thereby returning it to its primordial stratum. Still it is hard to get past the tone of outright agon in which the moral God is judged to be philosophically illegitimate, epochally obsolete, and lacking mystery which is provided only by the reserve of hiddenness. It certainly seems that here a would-be supporter of the essential compatibility of the thought of Heidegger and
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Augustine is dealing with a real difficulty. Something more than methodological atheism appears to be at work, indeed, nothing less than a substantive confrontation (Auseinandersetzung). Moreover, precisely in the agonistic framework set up by Heidegger’s concerted opposition, the possibility needs to be raised of whether Heidegger’s alternative to an Augustinian doxological framework depends to a significant extent on his borrowing from this doxological framework while disguising it, as he shifts the intention and changes the meaning of praise and thanksgiving.
Augustine’s Quarrel with Heidegger In this section I reply to the implicit as well as explicit objections leveled by Heidegger against Augustine. I limit myself textually to the Confessiones, Enarrationes in Psalmos, and De Civitate Dei.46 My reply involves both a defense of Augustine and a critique of Heidegger that has two major foci. The first has to do with time or temporality. With Paul Ricoeur as my guide, I begin by defending Augustine against three criticisms of his view of time: (1) it represents the victory of metaphysics, since it unequivocally supports the primacy of the present; (2) it is incapacitated by its Platonic commitments, more specifically (a) by its linking of time and eternity, in which eternity gets valorized, and (b) by the hierarchical or topographical model of transcendence to which Augustine has recourse; (3) it is compromised by its attention to the relation between time and creation, and the relation between time and the creator. The defense of Augustine on all three points is supplemented by a counterattack in which the radicality of Heidegger’s own account of time and transcendence is questioned. The second area of reply concerns the quarrel between the rival doxologies of Augustine and the later Heidegger. I argue that in the texts of Augustine doxology is constitutive of metaphysics rather than metaphysics being constitutive of doxology. Granting that this dependence of metaphysics on doxology does not fully meet Heidegger’s objection, through a brief analysis of Confessions I demonstrate that at
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the very least it mitigates it and, indeed, puts pressure on Heidegger’s prohibition against any and all forms of metaphysical language. In the mode of counterattack I question the work of the later Heidegger on a number of different points and different levels. With Enarrationes in Psalmos as the template, one line of questioning concerns the pedigree of Heidegger’s “piety.” Specifically I ask whether this piety suggests a regression to a pre-Christian mode of religiosity or articulates a postChristian mode subsequent to the “death of God,” and, if the latter, whether this piety is such that essentially it mimes and distorts a pregiven Christian discourse of grace. A related question addressed to Heidegger concerns the relativization of the ethical in his later writings. Here I supplement Enarrationes in Psalmos by appeal to Augustine’s critiques of both astrology and Manichaeism in Confessions, book 7, and his critique of Roman religion in De Civitate Dei, books 1–6. Since the issue of how time is understood or misunderstood is so important to the early Heidegger, as he attempts to correct the metaphysical tradition, it is crucial that Augustine engage Heidegger on this topic. As we saw in the first section of this essay, Heidegger at once acknowledges the importance of Augustine’s contribution to the topic in Confessions, book 11, and remains dismissive of it. The broad outline of an Augustinian response to Heidegger is traced by Paul Ricoeur’s chapter on Augustine in the first volume of Time and Narrative.47 Ricoeur does not claim that his recommendation of Augustine’s view on time represents a defense against Heidegger’s charge that it is philosophically superficial and compromised both by Platonism and by a commitment to an assertoric or dogmatic form of Christianity. Nonetheless, that this represents at least one of its basic intents can be inferred from Ricoeur’s decision to put in brackets the metaphysical and theological frame of book 11 and to focus initially on the experience of time rendered in Confessions 14.7–28.35. The separating out of Augustine’s more purely phenomenological divagations on time from a discussion of time’s theological and ontological commitments is methodologically rather than substantively motivated.48 Ricoeur recognizes that Augustine’s phenomenological exposition of time is tied to argument, as it is tied to reflection on time’s relation to eternity, and obviously time’s
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relation to God. He advises the strategy because it serves two important purposes. First, it enables the reader to bring out, pace Heidegger, the radicality of Augustine’s investigations, which, he believes, is illustrated rather than subverted in Augustine’s emphasis on the “present.” Second, treating the relation between time and eternity only after temporality has been phenomenologically exposited enables one to see that eternity, and finally the eternal, not only represent the therapy for time but actually allow time to be time, to be what it is. While Ricoeur provides the general coordinates of my reply, I amplify what he actually says and even supplement it by allowing Augustinian reflection to function as a critical lens whereby to analyze and critique Heidegger’s own take on time and its ontological constitution. As Ricoeur shows well, in the Confessions the question of time is radical. It is not an issue that admits of solution or resolution. The phenomenon of time eludes analysis and encourages open-ended investigation in which more adequate perspectives lead to new puzzles, new questions. Thus, for Ricoeur, the movement of Augustine’s reflections away from taking time for granted, through the insufficiencies of cosmological views of time, to reflection on time as the threefold activity of memory, attention, and expectation (20.26) and distentio animi (26.33–28.37) is nothing less than an aporetics in which time can be indicated but not grasped. On this basis Ricoeur suggests a way in which Augustine’s view of time as the threefold present and as distentio animi can be defended against Heidegger’s reading that it serves to secure a self that is as integral as it is self-transparent. On Ricoeur’s reading, the threefold present of memory, attention, and expectation is purely phenomenological: it by no means indicates the primacy of the present as an ontological commitment. Augustine’s opening characteri zation in chapter 14 of time as pure evanescence is never erased. Time is thus pure disappearing, an articulation of being as nothingness. The present of which Augustine speaks is, therefore, not presence (An wesen) in the Heideggerian sense of something given for inspection. Rather, the Augustinian present indicates the formal condition of saying, “I think,” “I hope,” or “I pray” in a flux that has the quality of pure dispersal.49 Time does not secure the self; the self remains entirely un-
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secured. Nor does time allow the self to become transparent: it determines just the opposite. In temporal transition the self is given only in passing, thus at best horizonally and by intimation, rather than in some form of beholding. The Augustinian self, then, is just the opposite of the Cartesian cogito, which Heidegger thinks is defined by pure selftransparence. Time indicates precisely the otherness of the self with respect to itself, its fundamental lack of self-coincidence. This in turn indicates the impossibility of autonomy of the sort realized in Descartes’s cogito, or even in the more modest form of Kant’s practical philosophy. Time also indicates the unrelievable opacity of the self that is given in experience, precisely as the nongivenness of the return of self to self that is the aim—if not attainment—of Neoplatonic and idealist philosophy. To this Augustinian riposte, extrapolated from Ricoeur’s reading, Heidegger could reply that the only way plausibly to support the values of heteronomy and opacity with respect to Dasein is to prioritize anticipation or expectation as the dynamic orientation toward the future. In this fundamental orientation nothingness and ungroundedness are more truly experienced, and the self is left totally unaccommodated from an ontological point of view. While Augustine could respect the eschatological and apocalyptic exigency of Heidegger’s view, he would wonder why for Heidegger nothingness is experienced only in the orientation toward the future. Surely the “tragic” dimension of time is opened up by all three modes of time.50 Neither memory not attention proves decisively victorious over the evanescence and nothingness that signal the undoing of the self. Certainly neither memory nor attention guarantees that the self becomes its own act and product. Moreover, the defender of Augustine can wonder whether Heidegger has sufficiently distinguished his view of temporality from Nietzsche’s romantic exaltation of time over eternity, or decontaminated it sufficiently from rhetorical recommendation to make illegitimate Jean Paul Sartre’s existentialist appropriation. For Heidegger suggests that the self comes into possession of itself, comes to “mineness” ( Jemeinigkeit) and “ownness” (Eigentlichkeit), by exposing itself to what has not been given, and what may not be given, in short, to the nothingness of the future.
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Augustine’s exposition of temporality, which grants the future no priority while indicating systemic fragility and insecurity, exposes the mock heroics of Heidegger’s articulation of ecstatic temporality. Given the Augustinian vantage point, what is wrong with Heidegger’s view is not that relative to the Christian thinker his view is too tough and too nihilistic. Rather, it is not tough enough, not nihilistic enough, or not nihilistic in the proper way. It refuses to accept that all temporal flow, past and present as well as future, is haunted by nothingness, meaningless, and untruth. It fails to recognize that even if the “present” of memory and attention appears other than the “present” of expectation, these two presents are hollowed out. The “present” of the past is always a simulacrum rather than the reality of something given, and what is given in attention becomes immediately ungiven, precisely as the once and already given. Moreover, Heidegger’s nihilism is finally soft rather than hard in that it comes with the consolation that “nothing” can be given a meaning. Heidegger’s assertion of “resolve” (Entschluss) as articulating the authenticity of the self would strike Augustine not only as cutting in the opposite direction to his account of “thrown-ness” (Geworfenheit) but as signifying a heroic self that can master the conditions of its finitude.51 Importantly, however, Heidegger has in reserve even more fundamental objections to Augustine’s elaboration of time. First, Augustine’s view is compromised by its Platonic heritage, which, Heidegger consistently claims, provides the matrix of all of Augustine’s reflection. The problem of heritage here expresses itself in Augustine’s elaboration of the relation between time and eternity, which relation is ex pressive of a hierarchical or topographical ordering of being. From Heidegger’s perspective, the radical nature of inquiry is procedurally undermined when Augustine refers time to a reality other than time, and is materially undermined when time is figured as privative with respect to the nunc stans of eternity, which guarantees integrity and transparency. At the same time, the metaphysical deformation induced by Platonism deepens when Augustine has recourse to the Christian God as the reality that defines eternity. To the degree to which Ricoeur can be conceived as defending Augustine against a Heideggerian reading, he should be understood to
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mine the forensic capacity of Augustine’s move from the discourse of the relation between time and eternity to the discourse of the relation between time and the biblical God. But before we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the relation-difference between the Platonic construal of eternity and Augustine’s view of God as creator, it is important to outline the broad strokes of a defense of Augustine against the charge that in the final analysis his view of time is determined by its Platonic heritage. Obviously, here as elsewhere, no defense of Augustine can afford to ignore his Platonic and Neoplatonic heritage. Still, as even Heidegger is sometimes prepared to accept, Augustine’s view does in some respects represent a revolution, even if elements of it are anticipated in Aristotle and Plotinus. An important aspect of this revolution is that in the experiential matrix of book 11 eternity functions more nearly as a limit concept than a metaphysical surety.52 This is not to say that Augustine refuses to assent to the reality of eternity. But it is important to realize that he assents to it more on grounds of trust in the one who vouchsafes it than in metaphysical demonstration of its reality. A possible mark of the distinction between Plato and Augustine can be found in Augustine’s suggestion of human temporality as illustrative of the regio dissimilitudinis. Not only does the locution have a Platonic ring, but it also seems to bring out the negative side of the mimetic relation between the temporal and the eternal. Time is indeed an image of eternity, thus a likeness of eternity.53 But, as Plato in the Parmenides and Plotinus in the Enneads point out, likeness logically implies unlikeness.54 Thus mimesis is always and everywhere bivalent, and capable of negative as well as positive valorization. Clearly, Augustine is aware of the Platonic provenance of the language of “unlikeness.” Still, one could say that in the Confessions metaphysics is led back to experience, which in turn will lead back to God as the origin and goal of the experiencing self that cannot ground its own existence.55 What is true of book 11 is also true of the Confessions as a whole. It is the lesson of Augustine’s seduction by the Manichaeans that Platonism can and does function to correct inadequate speculative construals of the divine and the relation of the divine to the world and human beings (books 5 and 7). But Augustine also argues energetically that Platonism
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cannot provide its own justification. Moreover, to the extent to which it attempts to do so, it ends in the cul-de-sac of self-mirroring that is pride. While Augustine does not satisfy Milbank’s hyperbolic description of theology “evacuating” metaphysics, the claims of Platonic metaphysics are satisfied if and only if the language of metaphysics yields to a language of confession, and philosophical conceit gives way to the humility of acknowledging not only one’s createdness but one’s creatureliness.56 For Heidegger, relating time to eternity takes away the seriousness of time and represents a valorization of presence. From his perspective it would not be enough to admit that temporality is haunted by nothingness. This is only a provisional posture, moreover, one which in Augustine is disingenuous, since presence is reinscribed into temporality by being referred to eternity as the eternal present. The failure to think rigorously and truly radically about time and being is confirmed, indeed developed, in Christian thought when God and eternity are identified. On the Heideggerian view, then, Augustine’s theism underwrites the relation-difference between time and eternity that constitutes one of the axioms of the metaphysical tradition. The Augustinian mésalliance undercuts the ontological difference between Being and beings and thus leaves Being unthought. Heidegger’s position in Being and Time and even earlier is basically Nietzschean:57 Christianity is Platonism for the people.58 But, as Ri coeur suggests, just the opposite case can be made with greater cogency. In the Confessions Christianity overcomes Platonism. The true eternal is not being as such but the person who says, “I am” (Ego sum qui sum).59 God is not, therefore, the highest metaphysical presence. God is interlocutor, the one to whom I speak because I discover that he has already spoken to me, as he has already spoken me. I discover the words of the Word to be prior. And these words are deeds as well as words which speak to me often only in delay. I understand them long after they are spoken. My speaking to and with God is the environment in which God’s speaking secures me. The self is secured only from the outside, from a height that the self cannot attain, and to which it ought not—although systemically it does—to aspire. Even if
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one puts in parenthesis the excess of dispersal in human lives contingent on rebellion against God and his order, integrity and transparence can be confirmed only from the outside. Integrity and transparence are always gifts. They are gifts in the prelapsarian state as they are gifts after the Fall. At a deep—but not necessarily the deepest—level we are shadowed by the nothingness from which we came. Time gives testimony to the continued and continual effect of nothingness in the very ecstasy that is human life. It is no accident for Ricoeur that Confessions, book 11, opens with a reference to the opening words of Genesis: “In principio fecit Deus caelum et terram.”60 Equally, it can be said that it is no accident that books 12 and 13 represent an interpretation of Genesis 1. God is reality as the totally other, whom I cannot but praise precisely as other. It is only as other that God is eternal, unchanging, and impassible. These attributions are an effect of prayer; prayer is not an effect of these attributions. It is to God as totally other that I pray in my own words or in the words of the Psalms as the exemplary discourse of the church in via. It is to God as totally other that I pray in the mode of petition, lamentation, and above all thanksgiving. Two closely related issues need to be addressed. The first is implied in Heidegger’s connection in Being and Time of ecstatic temporality and death, which connection he judges to be obscured by the Western tradition. Given Heidegger’s ambivalent reading of Augustine’s achievement on time, and his sense that Augustine ultimately authorizes a specular and complacent self, it is appropriate to raise the issue of whether Augustine fails to take death seriously. The second issue has to do with Heidegger’s accusation that a Platonic hierarchy or topography haunts all of Augustine’s works and limits the achievement of even his most radical-seeming investigations. I begin with the first of these issues. It is obvious that in Being and Time Heidegger thinks that his characterization of the temporality of Dasein as “being-toward-death” (Sein-zum-Tode) is original (§§ 46–53). This is true even if Heidegger’s characterization is anticipated by thinkers within the Christian tradition, for Christian reflection is only a regional discourse and can pretend to be neither universal nor fundamental. Interestingly, despite Heidegger’s reading of the Confessions and
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of De Civitate Dei in particular, Augustine is not regarded as a Christian anticipator in the way, for example, that Kierkegaard is. But this raises the question of whether it is truly possible to read either of Augustine’s texts without reference to death. Of course, it is insufficient to note that death makes its mark in both texts. In the Confessions death is everywhere present. Augustine weeps for the death of his friends Patricius (4.4) and Nebridius (9.3), his son Adeodatus (9.6), and his mother Monica (9.11–13). In De Civitate Dei (book 13) death is a fundamental reality of human being as historical. For Heidegger, however, reference to the death of others represents not simply the temptation to evasion but actual evasion of concern with my own death. While Augustine would demur, as postmoderns such as Levinas and Derrida have, still he would acknowledge the relative—although not a bsolute— specialness of my own death and my orientation to the event of nihilation.61 In De Civitate Dei he proposes that the following general lesson be applied to each of us: “Everyone is in death from the moment that he begins his bodily existence. For what else is going on, every day, every minute, but this process of death? And when that comes to fulfilment, and death has completed its work, then the period after death follows the period in death, when life was taken away” (13.10). Is it not possible, even necessary, to read the Confessions and De Civitate Dei as plangent evocations of evanescence? The finally non recuperable nothingness that constitutes the fundamental motor of temporality in book 11 of the Confessions portends the nothingness of death. If Augustine does not make the point explicit, death confirms the scattering, the lack of integrity and transparency, that defines a temporal self. The distentio animi is a holding together as well as a dispersal, or the holding together in intention of what is dispersed or dispersing. But this holding together is internally fraught and unstable. In the Confessions, then, time provides a protocol for death in the “not” that constitutes it. As the “not” is inside temporality, it defines the very structure of the self. Yet the “not” is paradoxical in that it is also outside the self, precisely what is not self, what reduces the self to nothing and thus disqualifies the self even as a host of “nothing.” Similarly, in De Civitate Dei (book 13.10–11) passingness means that death is an operation intrinsic to the self, its hollowing out from within. Yet in the
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separation of soul and body death is also apocalyptic (13.6); it is the unanticipated coming from the future which brings the temporal distention of the self to a close (13.8). Death is the outside coming in, preventing the self from being a work of the self. The uncontainability of death by the self is brilliantly marked in Augustine’s discussion of the oddness of the grammar of the verb “to die.” The perfect mortuus est marks a break in the language of tense and gives a conjugation for an impossible tense, for, as he observes, mortuus functions adjectivally rather than as a past participle. He concludes: “And so, appropriately, the verb cannot be declined in speech, just as the reality it signifies cannot be declined.”62 If I read the Confessions and De Civitate Dei correctly, then Heidegger is wrong about Augustine’s seriousness with respect to death and his failure to connect death in an intimate way with temporality. More, the apocalyptic or eschatological dimension to time forecloses the prospect that death can in any sense be “mine.” If to face death properly means to clarify what one is dealing with, then it provides at the depth level no opportunity for authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) in the Heideggerian sense of the term.63 Properly facing death is facing the disaster of disowning and being disowned—this is what distinguishes saints and martyrs from the rest of us. Here a number of postmodern admirers of Augustine take issue with Heidegger’s “being-towarddeath” (Sein-zum-Tode). Pickstock thinks that this represents one of the most flawed—yet typical—aspects of Heidegger’s work, where the critique of the tradition does not protect him from repetition, and specifically from the illusion of romantic assertion of selfhood.64 Derrida more profoundly argues that Heidegger fails to understand the transcendence of death precisely in his articulation of the transcendence of Dasein, in which death, or one’s attitude toward death, grants integrity and transparence.65 For him, no such integrity and transparency is possible. Death is the gift that gives transcendence, precisely in its exploding of the self. But death is also indiscriminate. It does not distinguish in the way Heidegger legislates between the irreducibility of my death and the death of others. Without commenting on his affinity to Augustine on this point, although he has plenty to say in general about his Algerian forebear, Derrida does seem to prompt a particular reading of
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the Confessions.66 Augustine’s concern with the death of others in the Confessions could be regarded as equally important to the prospect of one’s own death. For if death incites in those who grieve something like an imitation of the loss of possession, perhaps the text also indicates a porousness with respect to the “subject” of death? We are experientially co-implicated in the death of others. Our porousness to the death of others, which ontologically and not simply existentially shakes us, is the condition of our salvation. For Christ overcomes our death because he can receive it. And we are open to redemption only because we can receive this death that is paradoxically life (4.4; 4.10). A second issue that requires comment is to what extent Augustine’s reflection in Confessions, book 11, is determined by the Platonic hierarchy of being. In one sense Heidegger’s would-be dramatic unmasking of Augustine is a commonplace in commentary on Augustine,67 although not all commentators are prepared to condemn him on this point. Similarly, Heidegger’s suggestion that Augustine’s creator/ created distinction roughly maps or remaps the Platonic distinction between time and eternity is not unusual in Augustinian criticism. I would like to suggest, however, that these particular readings ignore the extent to which in the Confessions Platonism gets relativized even as, or precisely as, it is used as a critical instrument to chastise speculative discourses with respect to God. Reading book 11 in light of books 1 through 7 of the Confessions brings out three different facets of this relativization: (1) The difference between Augustinian and Platonic naming of God; (2) Augustine’s kenotic Christology; and (3) Augustine’s rhetoric of place. I begin with (1). As early as chapter 4 of book 1, keeping biblical witness in the foreground, Augustine unfolds Christian attribution made with respect to God who is the exclusive object of veneration. Importantly, the context and tone of this nomination are set by the opening question of the Confessions: “What, then, is the God I worship? He can be none but the Lord God himself, for who but the Lord is God?” (1.4; Ps. 144.3). Simplifying a complex discussion, it is possible to divide the attributions made with respect to God into the language of superlatives and the language of coincidences of opposites.68
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Superlatives include God’s unsurpassable goodness, power, justice, and mercy. These are all unproblematically biblical attributions. To these Augustine adds the not so obviously biblical attribution of unchangeability. Examples of coincidences of opposites in attribution include the pairs revelation/hiddenness, activity/rest, and love/absence of need. Obviously the best evidence for the active presence of Platonism is the attribution of unchangeability. It would be interpretively irresponsible to deny that Platonism is at least the proximate context for the attribution of “unchangeability” with respect to God. As attributed to God, “unchangeability” clearly marks the difference between God and the world. At the same time, there seem to be at least three ways in which Platonic implications are curtailed in the shift. First, the primary contrast is no longer between the impersonal “really real” (ontôs on) of Plato and Plotinus and the nonreality of what is changeable but between the creator and created. Second, given this, Augustine is not prepared to concede that “unchangeability” is primarily or even importantly an attribution that is philosophical in the strict sense. For him, there is no essential difference between the attribution of “unchangeability” and the other attributions made of God in the superlative mode. All of them he takes to be biblical. Third, the doxological saturation of the Confessions suggests that Augustine is providing a “rhetoric of attribution” rather than unfolding a “logic of attribution” which literally defines the essence of God. By contrast with the logic of attribution, the rhetoric of attribution intends relative rather than absolute adequacy with regard to definition. This is indicated by Augustine in his continued legitimation of an attribution such as anger to God (1.4), for anger implies not only emotion but change. Moreover, “unchangeability” is explicitly doxologically and existentially formatted in chapter 6. Here without attribution Augustine allies God’s “unchangeability” with the Hodie of the Psalms: “In you ‘today’ never comes to an end, and yet our ‘today’ does come to an end in you, because time as well as everything else exists in you” (1.6.9).69 While the contrast here has implications with respect to the identities of both
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ourselves and God, the purpose of the contrast seems to be that of pointing to the wholly other and its relation to human being. Now, while the topic of the effect of Augustine’s Christology on his received Platonism is a huge one, which cannot possibly be handled adequately here, something like a relativization of Platonism is hinted at as early as 1.11 and carried through to 3.10–12.70 Augustine’s reference to the kenosis of Christ, in the context of a Christian discourse that is essentially biblical in type and doxological in mode, suggests the ultimate illegitimacy of anything like a Platonic divide (chorismos) between the immaterial and material, the unchangeable and the changeable, the impassible and the passible, and ultimately the eternal and the temporal. The context of the reference to the kenosis of Christ in book 3. 11 makes it likely that Christ is regarded as the reply to Manichaeism’s derogation of the material and the temporal. But the critique in principle applies to any speculative system that would derogate the material and decry the temporal. Thus, while Platonism serves as an instrument for the critique of Manichaeism, this by no means implies that it is not reflexively vulnerable to critique if it entertains similar views—however differently articulated—on the physical and temporal. A third way in which relativization of Platonism can be seen to be operative in the Confessions is in what might be called Augustine’s doxological rhetoric of “place.” If God is other than the stars and heavens in dignity, if God has no place, this suggests that metaphysical as well as physical hierarchies with respect to God are in the Christian scheme of things left behind. The dehierarchicalization is gestured to in Moni ca’s correction of Augustine in book 3: “One should not say ‘where he is, you are’ but rather ‘where you are, he is’ ” (3.11.20). It is, however, in book 4, chapter 15, that Platonic hierarchy seems to be completely overthrown. If God is no place—utopic—he is the giver of place, and no place is more or less distant for a God whose absolute immanence not only does not contradict his transcendence but actually confirms it. It is time to turn to the second and, arguably, more important part of my assignment: that is, demonstrating how Augustine’s articulation of theology within a doxological framework offers a significant defense against Heidegger’s critique of Augustine’s thought as meta-
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physical and thus serves as a model whereby to diagnose and critique Heidegger’s post-Kehre articulation of a doxological form of thought. In the Confessions Augustine’s addressing of God is punctuated and articulated by doxology. To the extent to which confession is moved by lamentation, petition, and praise of the surprise of the totally other, it is a form of doxology. Confession is more specifically doxology on the way, in motion, the traversal of the self in which the self becomes authentically prayerful—indeed, becomes prayer. The Confessions makes clear, however, that confession depends on the totally other, that selftranscendence is called for and enabled by the other who is the self ’s surprising interlocutor. There is nothing heroic about the process in which the self is (re)called to itself, becomes (re)collected. What coherence and integrity it enjoys is neither its own act nor its own property. They are gifts granted by a God who does not forget. God calls and recalls us all in his Word. It is in the Word that the evanescent syllables of our lives cohere into a sentence (3.10–12). In our movement toward the condition of being prayer in the sense of being a total offer to God—whose realization is eschatological—God is “with us” as God is “for us.”71 God is the way as well as being origin and destination of human being as prayer. Throughout the Confessions nothing indicates the gravamen of the doxological as much as Augustine’s appeal to the Psalms.72 Some of the reasons for this appeal, which result not only in a supersaturation of citation but in adaptation of Psalmic modes of expression, are fairly obvious. First, lamenting one’s lostness, beseeching God’s assistance, and thanking God for his manifold gifts and especially for his patience and long-suffering provide a structure for Augustine’s personal journey. By placing his confession within the structure of the Psalms, Augustine is precisely not the private self of Locke and Descartes, criticized so brilliantly by Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations. To those who are outside the church, Augustine is Everyman. To those inside it, his confession interprets and animates the figure of Israel, which is the central dramatis persona of the Psalms but which interpreted by the Christian community is a type of the church. Second, the God who is figured in and by the application of the Psalms is not an
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impersonal transcendence but rather the transcendent personal God who redeems and sanctifies what he creates (books 12 and 13). This God is unchangeable because he does not share our condition. He is impassible for the very same reason (book 7). But the Confessions reveals a God who is not subject to the calculus of metaphysical axioms and their derivations. This God hears the cries, requests, and praise not only of groups but of each and every individual. The glory of the biblical view of God is that each and every individual is significant for God. With the Incarnation as its focus, Augustine is assured that every moment of existence is significant: every now is an opportunity for grace and healing for every single individual. Books 12 and13 respond to the question posed in book 10, “Who do I love when I love thee?,” in that the addressee is further denoted as a transcendence who accounts for the very being of the questioner. The “later” Heidegger, for example, in Introduction to Metaphysics, will see in the configuration of the creator the specter of the metaphysical disease of explanation. What otherwise might have been a deep question is answered with the implication that the questionableness of the self finds relief. But if God as creator is in some sense an answer, the answer is at the same time a peculiar one. No more than redemption and providence does the act of creation answer to the principle of sufficient reason. It exceeds reason giving. Since God is manifest in God’s acts, this says something about God. Specifically, it intimates what Augustine makes explicit in De Doctrina Christiana (1.6), that is, God is comprehended only as incomprehensible, and what is something of a formula in sermons 52 and 118 the Sermones: if you comprehend, it is not God (si comprehendis, non est Deus). In the Confessions the knowing of God at the end is, as it was in the beginning, praise. Indeed, as Augustine makes clearer elsewhere, it cannot be otherwise. But this leaves intact the Heideggerian objection that desire, which defines the self, is extinguished. If Heidegger means by extinguishing of desire an end to doubt and the alleviation of perturbation, then desire is indeed extinguished. But matters are much more complex and Augustine is much more subtle in the Confessions. Augustine is interested not in the over-
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coming of desire as such but simply in the overcoming of the wrong sort of desire. Admittedly, it is easier to see the more distorted form of desire, which is cupidity. But the issue for Augustine is always love and thus always desire. His question is what will purify it and by so doing complete rather than extinguish it. At one level books 12 and 13 indicate that desire is irremediable given the ontological and epistemic gap between the self and the unknowable God. But books 10 and 11 have already insinuated something existentially profound. Augustine asks whether and how the temporal self inclined to dissipation can be gathered or recollected, and he decides that it cannot recollect itself out of its own resources. But the interest is not solely in our metaphysical haplessness. For Augustine fully recognizes that the dissipated self is not the ecstatic self; it is the self as nonself. For ecstasy to be possible, there has to be a focus and concentration in and of the self. It is only this focused self who gives itself away, as it is only this self who can focus sufficiently on and adhere to the radically other. Only this self comes into the orbit of praise, where it finds its realization and definition. Enarrationes in Psalmos reinforces the centrality of the Psalms for individuals and groups on their way toward an intimate relationship with God. Reciting Psalms suggests selves in need, who err far from God’s kingdom—thus petition and lamentation. But the Psalms help to form a self more and more open to recognizing the God who acts on our behalf. The Psalms shape the praise and thanksgiving that are, or at least ought to be, ineluctable features of our existence. The different forms of discourse of the Psalms are not externally related. Lamentation and petition are ordered toward praise and thanksgiving, which are forms of pure prayer. Crucially, for Augustine, the Psalms make available a self-involving language of direct address (e.g., Ps. 87.2). By contrast with the Confessions, however, the ecclesial character of the Psalms is more properly to the fore.73 Not only singing the Psalms, but their elucidation, takes place in a church setting. But singing and elucidation not only illustrate and perform a central function of the church, they also inform and help constitute the church as a site of repentance, conversion, and adhesion to God. Of course, this is so
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not simply because of the beauty and power of the words of the Psalm—although Augustine will certainly allow this. It is so because in his kenotic aspect Christ is fundamental to the voice of the Psalms.74 More clearly than in the Confessions, in the Enarrationes in Psalmos Augustine presents a primarily soteriological view of God as the one who saves and makes us members of the heavenly Jerusalem. This God is totally other in his wisdom, goodness, power, and mercy. God is totally other also in that he does not exist under the limitation of changeability. While Augustine continues, more assertively in the Enarrationes than the Confessions, to think of the biblical God as defining “unchangeability,” he points to the language of the Psalms as disclosing God only in “ineffable” (ineffabilis) fashion (Ps. 85.12) and as grasping God “ineffably” (ineffabiliter) (Ps. 146.11). While the language of the Psalms allows metaphysical elucidation and indeed calls for it, it is a language not primarily of information but of the play of the presence and absence of God. The biblical God, who says “I am who am,” does not in a straightforward way come within the ordinance of metaphysical syntax so as to become an object of sight or conceptual inspection. The utterance rather announces the sovereignty of God who cannot be identified without remainder with Being, and for whom Being is but a relatively adequate designator. In incredible detail Augustine unfolds in Enarrationes in Psalmos the efficacy of the Psalms in shaping and reforming the self. This reformation of the self takes place in and through the reforming of the passions. Here Augustine shows a greater affinity to the Stoics than to the Platonists. Equally importantly, his commitment to the passions indicates the distance between him and Meister Eckhart. Eckhart recommends the extirpation of all passion, and of the self of which passion is constitutive. Gelassenheit signifies a state beyond will and the individuation of existence. For Eckhart, this means that love in any and all forms must be transcended. For Augustine, on the other hand, it is not passion that is bad or good but its orientation, as directed toward either the good of the self or the good of God. Oriented toward the former, it is amor sui, and this is loss of God. Oriented toward God, that is, amor Dei, will or passion is the rightly ordered self that can enjoy intimacy with God.75 Obviously not only Eckhart and Heidegger but
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also Luther and Nygren have found Augustine’s language of love problematic.76 From Augustine’s point of view, however, the language of love is problematic if and only if the love is understood as eros. Were eros dominant, then once again Augustine would be vulnerable to the charge that his thought is dominated by his Platonic heritage and that he compromises mystery. But it is clear that with respect to its goal and the ability to persevere, properly ordered love is not the work of individuals or communities. It is God who makes intimacy with him possible through the mediatorship of his Son. But Enarrationes in Psalmos is not only a text in which Augustine attempts to induce a Psalmic form of life in his hearers and readers. It is a text also in which Christian doxology is specified, both in its general structure and in its details. Here I will comment on the basic structure, specifically its two poles, namely God and human being. On the side of God, Christian doxology presupposes (1) a transcendent God to whom lament, petition, and praise are directed; (2) a God concerned not only with humanity in general but with each individual; (3) creation as intrinsically good, but human beings having erred through pride and the abandonment of God; (4) a God who not only continually relates but makes possible good relationship with him by grace; and (5) Christ as communicating this grace. On the human side, the Christian doxology presupposes (1) that human being is constituted through relation to God in the modes of lament, petition, and praise; (2) that human being is essentially defined by praise both protologically and eschatologically; (3) that relating in a mode of gratitude requires grace of God; and (4) that this grace is mediated through Jesus Christ, who also speaks directly through the Psalms as our representative. Augustine’s Enarrationes in Psalmos might be said to offer a benchmark, as it were, to examine Heidegger’s espousal of the human celebration of the gods or the divine. In light of this text it is clear at once that a remarkable formal similarity exists between Heidegger and Augustine along both the divine and human axes. It raises the question whether something like a Christian doxological view is functioning at least as a template for the postKehre Heidegger. Still, it is obvious that there are even more significant material differences. If Heidegger affirms worship as the normative
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disposition of Dasein, he refuses to underwrite doxological posture by means of the idea of creatureliness. Even more, despite his finding Dasein to be haunted by nothing, he finds anathema any idea of creation from nothing, which in Augustine’s scheme ontologically and theologically underpins creatureliness. Again, it is not clear that in his later writings Heidegger is any more successful than he was in Being and Time in distinguishing between the order of finitude and the order of the fall.77 It is also evident that Heidegger has no truck with the idea of the conversion of human beings from their aggressive relation to reality by means of a unique figure, at once historical and more than historical. In this respect, Heidegger reduces all savior figures, actual or possible, to myth. In addition, while in Heidegger’s scheme praise and expressions of gratitude make sense, lament and petition do not. Lament and petition presuppose a moral God who understands our weakness and hears our cries. But it is precisely this view of the divine that has to be forsworn. For Augustine, however, a Christian doxology demands this view of God. Enarrationes in Psalmos spells out that only a radically transcendent God merits worship, for only this God effects salvation: it is God who is the author of all that is. A major lesson from reciting and commenting on the Psalms is that it is part of the logic of worship that all immanent divinities are reduced to the level of creatures. As is well known, this relegation of everything other than God to the status of a creature is the express theme of the first six books of De Civitate Dei, where the credibility of “gods” is undermined both by their inability to secure either temporal (books 1–5) or eternal (book 6) happiness and by their lack of correspondence with our noble instincts and best efforts at truth. Arguably, Augustine’s discussion of the relation between “mythic,” “civil,” and “natural” theology in book 6 constitutes the most pertinent Augustinian response to Heidegger’s postmetaphysical alternative to Christianity. In his attack against mythic religion in particular, Augustine seems to articulate more fully than even Heidegger’s postmodern critics the appropriate reservations with respect to mythopoetic religion and/or philosophy. I would like to underscore four elements of Augustine’s critique. First, the gods of the ancient world, celebrated in drama and enacted in ritual, are nothing
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other than human constructions that mirror or pander to human desire. Second, as the not totally other, these gods at best belong to the realm of the daemonic as the divine more proximate to the earth and human being than the singular God of monotheism. Third, these gods are at best morally neutral and at worst morally bankrupt. Finally, the happiness they purportedly procure is temporal, not eternal, although even in this they fail. Augustine’s list is surprisingly comprehensive by comparison with contemporary thinkers who critique the mythic tendencies in the thought of the later Heidegger. For instance, thinkers as different as Levinas and Hans Urs von Balthasar criticize the later Heidegger for both his predilection toward the daemonic and the lack of an axiological base in his thought.78 Derrida and Caputo underscore Heidegger’s resolute commitment to the immanence of the gods, even as he avails himself of the biblical language of Spirit.79 Milbank and Marion recognize well the constitutively poetic nature of Heidegger’s gods and abjure them explicitly in the name of Augustine’s God, who, as the God who is love, is ineluctably triune.80 And Milbank and von Balthasar together share an Augustinian concern with the effect of Heidegger’s immanentist orientation on the prospect for eternal life, which precisely as “eternal life” is Christianity understood in qualitative and relational terms rather than in terms simply of continuing life outside relation to others and especially to a power greater than oneself. From Augustine’s point of view in De Civitate Dei these elements of mythic religion constitute a false worship (Preface to book 6). Should this mode of religion continue to persist after the coming of Christianity, it can be viewed only as a regression to a lower, possibly more atavistic stage of religion. At the same time that Augustine critiques mythic religion, he forges a connection between mythic and civil religion that is relevant to Heidegger’s postmetaphysical construction. At 6.6–7 Augustine refutes Varro’s distinction between these two types and argues that civil religion institutionalizes in rituals and observances the dubious spectacles of the gods that are represented on the stage. This is an important critical point, since Heidegger insists that the kind of worship that can be extrapolated from Hölderlin’s hymns is neither
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purely individual nor aesthetic. Rather, worship is communal, historical, and profoundly practical and performative. Augustine’s ability to see that types cannot be separated neatly in the way Varro supposes doubles the diagnostic and critical power of his discussion vis-à-vis the post-Kehre Heidegger. Along this line of reflection I would like to make one further point. At De Civitate Dei 6.7 Augustine supports Varro’s distinction between natural or philosophical theology and the other two forms of theology. Unlike Varro, however, Augustine believes that the distinction is not only descriptive but also normative. Natural theology not only is different from these mythic and civil theologies but also provides tools whereby both mythic and civil theology can be critically examined and their shortcomings exposed. This is a point Augustine made much earlier in his career with respect to the utility of Platonism in the critique of astrology and Manichaeism in book 4. From Augustine’s perspective, natural theology or philosophy should not be beholden in any way to mythic or civil theology of whatever form. As Confessions, book 7, makes clear, his own lack of understanding of the opposition of critical rationality and mythic forms of thought made him vulnerable to Manichaeism’s speculative tendencies. By contrast with Scripture, Manichaeism was invested with the appearance of reason and science. As Augustine determines it from a retrospective point of view, there is nothing remotely scientific about Manichaeism: it deals in fantasies. It brooks no application of critical reason to its underlying mythic story about the clash between two contradictory principles that is accepted on authority. Arguably, the failure to clearly demarcate reason from myth marks the work of the later Heidegger,81 even as he suggests that the language of the holy and the divine is provisional rather than ultimate. For if the less symbolic language of philosophy translates the language of the holy and the gods into another idiom, it confirms the basic thrust of this language regarding the nature of transcendence and human being as worship and prayer. It is precisely not the interrogation that Augustine calls for. The discourse of the post-Kehre Heidegger represents a legitimation of a doxological discourse that is less vulnerable to cri-
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tique than Scripture. Moreover, this discourse tolerates unexamined implications regarding the destiny of Being, which in turn supports a highly problematic politics.82 Here chance is dressed in the guise of fate. From Augustine’s perspective both represent the contrary of the properly Christian view of providence. — The question of the relationship between Augustine and Heidegger is necessarily complex and ramified, given what Heidegger did and did not say about Augustine, and the prerogatives of Augustinian reply. It is impossible to pretend even relative adequacy. Only a much more nuanced account of the quarrel and a considerably more detailed textual probing would suffice even for that. Led by Heidegger’s explicit comments on Augustine, as well as his implicit figuration, I have focused on selected elements in the thought of both thinkers. As I have done so, I have resisted the apologetic stance by refusing to lessen the distance between the Christian thinker and the German philosopher whose thought is constitutionally religiously inflected. While necessarily schematic, my account brings out the essential quarrel between two modes of religious thought whose fundamental horizons are essentially opposed. Highlighting this quarrel is a matter of intellectual honesty. If I have read the debate correctly, what is at stake finally is nothing less than the legitimacy of Christian discourse. Heidegger and Augustine disagree about God-talk, the nature of language in which we speak to God and also about God. They also disagree about what texts are crucial from a doxological point of view and what is implied in a prayerful stance toward reality. They also differ in their views of time, specifically whether time does or does not relate to God and whether thinking time in relation to God represents a betrayal of time or brings out more clearly its intrinsic meaning. They differ about the possibility and necessity of transcendence providing ethical leverage on the present condition of the self and social arrangements. They differ finally on the prospects of a particular figure, for example, Christ, effecting a turn away from the deformation of rampant selfwill, and in figuring the eschatological.
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On all of these issues Heidegger adopts a negative stance toward the historical Augustine. The essential thrust of my essay consists of a defense of Augustine against a Heideggerian misreading and a questioning of the coherence and adequacy of Heidegger’s own positions. I have sought to defend Augustine against the charges that his view of time is superficial; that his discourse is “metaphysical” in Heidegger’s pejorative sense of the term; that his discourse is determined by its Platonic background; that his God is the moral God rightly rejected by Nietzsche; and that Augustine is complacent with respect to the nameability of God and his effective presence in human history. This essay in turn questions Heidegger’s view of time; his particular sense of discourse and human being as doxological; the radicality of the so-called ontological difference; and the noticeable absence of ethical leverage in its postmetaphysical experimentation. On my reading, the dispute between Augustine is structural and irremediable. As with human history—if we adopt Augustine’s point of view—peace here is eschatological. No matter how we attenuate differences, Augustine fails to be Heideggerian, just as Heidegger fails to be Augustinian. Still, the challenge presented by Heidegger’s postmetaphysical philosophy in either of its two instantiations should be underscored. Under pressure from Heidegger’s critique, it is not only possible but necessary to read Augustine less superficially, less complacently. In this noncomplacent reading Augustine has much to offer. And he has much to offer in his own person, not simply as a figure who chastises Heidegger for not having gone far enough. For while there are critiques of Heidegger prosecuted in the name of Augustine that have some basis in his actual texts, there are other critiques that bear little relation to Augustine of Hippo. Jacques Derrida’s Circumfessions represents the acme of a self- conscious reflection in which Augustine is the figure of critique devoid of any of Augustine’s actual commitments.83 This Augustine does not know and cannot say who his God is, and his prayers are not to anyone for anything. Certainly, they are not prayers and tears before a God who always was, who has come, who promises to be with us in our exile, and who will come again. Rather, prayers and tears are meta-
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phors of hope for a God who not only has not come but would not be God if he did come. Of course, it is Caputo who transforms Derridian allusion and allusiveness into dogma, thereby making Augustine a pure trope: there is simply no match between this refigured Augustine and the historical one, and all commitments are attenuated. In this postmodern regime Augustine’s God is not simply the hidden God but hiddenness itself. There is almost no apophasis radical enough to capture genuine Augustinian intent, which need not correspond to something Augustine actually said. If in the tradition Eckhart arguably comes closest,84 even here too there is residual hierarchy that needs to be dismissed. And the (re)constructed Augustinian self is not simply a wandering self but a self bereft of coherence granted from outside as well as inside. Augustine is truly Augustine only as filtered through Eckhart, only as filtered through Heidegger, who is filtered through Derrida. This Augustine is religiously and philosophically viable in the way the Augustine of the patristic period is not. In this, postmodern discourse, which proceeds under the flag of “Augustine,” provides an et tu quoque to Heidegger, without reneging on his critique of the Western tradition which has Augustine as one of its standard-bearers. Needless to say, Augustine’s own subtle articulations that are both within and without this account remain unvoiced. This essay has attempted to voice Augustine, to reverse the roles by enlisting him as the critic of Heidegger and by implication some of the postmodern lines that continue his critique of the premodern tradition even as they depart from some of his substantive positions in important respects. It has done so in the hope of suggesting a space in which the Christian naming of transcendence might be heard and the Christian way toward it might be disclosed. Notes 1. The so-called “turn” has been a much-debated issue in Heidegger interpretation. Arguably, the two commentators who have set the stage for European and North American discussion are Karl Löwith and William J. Richardson. See Karl Löwith, Heidegger: Denker in dürftiger Zeit (Frankfurt:
176 Cyril O’Regan Fischer, 1952); William J. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1963). Nonetheless, not only has there been much debate about how to describe the “turn” and when it occurs, but the very idea of the “turn” has been contested. See, for example, Laurence Paul Hemming, Heidegger’s Atheism: The Refusal of a Theological Voice (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001). Of course, in arguing against the existence of the “turn,” Hemming is also arguing against the view of Löwith and Richardson that the “turn” consists of a shift of focus from Dasein to Sein that marks Heidegger’s post–Being and Time writings. 2. In asserting that this relation is fundamentally agonistic, I am taking a stance on the fundamental hospitality of Heidegger’s thought toward the Christian tradition. This is an issue that has been as much debated as the “turn.” From the very beginning within both Protestant and Catholic theology, Heidegger has been understood to represent an opportunity for theology. Bultmann and Ebeling on the Protestant side, and Rahner, Bernard Welte, and Heinrich Ott on the Catholic side, have recommended Heidegger as a resource for the renewal of theology. Of course, the recommendation comes with the proviso that theology overcome the dogmatic and propositionalist stances which unfortunately mark the history of theology. This leaves it an open question just how dominant dogmatism and propositionalism are within the theological tradition. Cases have been made, for example, that Aquinas exceeds this tradition and thus is exempt from Heidegger’s criticism and capable of being a productive resource. This is a tack pursued by John D. Caputo in Heidegger and Aquinas (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982), and more recently by Laurence Paul Hemming. In contrast, the position adopted here is that however one reads Augustine, and however one reads Heidegger, the two cannot be brought together: there are ineluctable differences. 3. I am using the translation by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson of Sein und Zeit. See Being and Time (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967), hereafter BT. This text translates the seventh edition of Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1953), hereafter SZ. 4. For the very important Bultmann-Heidegger connection, see John Macquarrie, An Existentialist Theology: A Comparison of Heidegger and Bultmann (New York: Macmillan, 1955). 5. See Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s “Being and Time” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); John van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).
Answering Back 177 6. The relevant pre–Being and Time religious writings have now been gathered in Phänomenologie des Religiösen Lebens, ed. Claudius Strube, Gesamtausgabe 60 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1995). See Kisiel, Genesis, pp. 80–115, 149–219; van Buren, Young Heidegger, pp. 113–30, 157–202. The most concerted treatment of Augustine is in a lecture course Heidegger gave in 1921 on Augustine and Neoplatonism. Kisiel’s treatment is exemplary, pp. 192–219. 7. See Kisiel, Genesis, pp. 103–8; van Buren, Young Heidegger, pp. 158, 169–70, 179, 186–88, 191–92. 8. On Heidegger and Dilthey, see Kisiel, Genesis, pp. 77, 100–106, 192–99. The most important text of Dilthey for Heidegger is Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (1886). As Kisiel in particular underscores, in Dilthey’s historiographical construction Augustine’s thought is figured as emerging from a richer “lifeworld” (Lebenswelt) than that of Descartes. Heidegger develops and deepens Dilthey’s reflections. He also corrects Dilthey by arguing against any suggestion that Augustine’s turn to inwardness represents an anticipation of Descartes. For Heidegger’s general response to Dilthey, see “Wilhelm Dilthey’s Research and the Struggle for a Historical Worldview” (1925), trans. Charles Bambach, in Supplements: From the Earliest Essays to Being and Time and Beyond, ed. John van Buren (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), pp. 147–76, 195–97. 9. See Kisiel, Genesis, pp. 106, 217. 10. See ibid., pp. 100–105. 11. See ibid., pp. 213–18; van Buren, Young Heidegger, pp. 158–59, 196. 12. See Kisiel, Genesis, pp. 200–201; van Buren, Young Heidegger, pp. 158–59, 186–87. 13. See Martin Heidegger, “Augustinus und der Neuplatonismus,” in Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens, Gesamtaugabe 60, 286, 292–93. See Kisiel, Genesis, pp. 105, 161, 200–201; van Buren, Young Heidegger, pp. 158–59. 14. See Kisiel, Genesis, pp. 77, 156–58. 15. St. Paul is a major figure for the early Heidegger. See ibid., pp. 173–91. 16. See Martin Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundation of Logic, trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 198–99, 149. This is a translation of Metaphysiche Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1978). The text, however, is based on lectures given in 1928, a year after the publication of Sein und Zeit. Husserl’s classic text was Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1905). 17. See Kisiel, Genesis, p. 161.
178 Cyril O’Regan 18. Thus the locution in Being and Time (§§ 65–66) of “ecstatic-horizontal temporality.” 19. Luther is a major figure for Heidegger before Being and Time. Kisiel and van Buren are again particularly strong on this point. See Kisiel, Genesis, pp. 111, 115, 174, 183, 210–12; van Buren, Young Heidegger, pp. 160–65, 180– 84, 188, 198–201. Heidegger’s relation to Luther supports his relation to Paul. This Paul-Luther paradigm in turn brings him close to Bultmann and the Marburg school of theology. For a lucid account of this school, see HansGeorg Gadamer, Heidegger’s Ways, trans. John.W. Stanley (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), pp. 29–43. Kisiel and van Buren have decisively demonstrated that Eckhart is one of the very earliest influences on the thought of Heideg ger. See Kisiel, Genesis, pp. 71, 81–84; van Buren, Young Heidegger, pp. 113–29. 20. See especially John D. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 1986). 21. Heidegger continues to support the decisive step made by Luther in the Heidelberg Disputations where he resists the metaphysical God, the God that defines the so-called theology of glory. Van Buren has an excellent account of Heidegger’s early recognition of this point in Young Heidegger, pp. 160–64. 22. As is well known, Heidegger wrote his Habilitationsschrift on the doctrine of categories in Duns Scotus (1915). Martin Grabmann subsequently showed that the text Heidegger worked on was in fact by Thomas of Erfurt. Heidegger believed that in “Scotus” he might have found a way through the conceptual stranglehold of the Western tradition and that Scotus and Eckhart were but two sides of the same coin. By 1917 he had ceased to believe this. Scotus, he now thought, confirmed the rationalism of the Western tradition. See Kisiel, Genesis, pp. 73, 81, 115; also 19, 20, 30, 32, 37. 23. A condition of the possibility of theological appropriation of Heidegger is that at a minimum his professed atheism is read as a methodological move rather than a substantive position. A perception of deep-seated hostility to Christianity and Christian self-reflection would tend to exclude Heidegger as a possible resource. Nonetheless, Heidegger has been read as exhibiting precisely this hostility by a commentator such as Löwith and, arguably, JeanLuc Marion. Supporters of the methodological reading include George Kovacs and Laurence Paul Hemming. See Kovacs, The Question of God in Heidegger’s Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990); Hemming debates with Marion on just this point in ch. 8 of Heidegger’s Atheism. 24. SZ 24–25, BT 46–47.
Answering Back 179 25. See Heidegger, “Augustinus,” 273. For a good discussion of Heidegger’s problem with this schema, see Kisiel, Genesis, pp. 201–2; van Buren, Young Heidegger, pp. 185–86. 26. For Heidegger, it is important to distinguish between poets as the practitioners of verse and Dichter, those select individuals such as the poets Hölderlin, Rilke, and Trakl, in whose poems Being is disclosed and human being as historical becomes rooted. 27. In his post-Kehre period the Western texts that command Heidegger’s focus tend to be mystical. Eckhart continues to be a significant influence. Angelus Silesius, a seventeenth-century mystic who synthesizes the mystical traditions of Eckhart and Jacob Boehme, is also a major influence and is to the fore in the critique of the modern metaphysical tradition in particular. In addition, however, Heidegger reflects on the possibility that Eastern religions such as Buddhism and Taoism might represent alternatives to the Western cul-de-sac and possible correctives to Western thought. 28. There is a significant difference here in terms of connotation. Whereas misstep suggests human agency and the ability to avoid thinking in a particular way, mishap suggests that how human beings think is not within their own power but rather within the ordinance of Being itself. A commentator who adopts the latter approach is Joan Stambaugh. See Thoughts on Heidegger (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991), pp. 138–56. 29. This point is made with stunning frequency throughout Heidegger’s oeuvre. It is central, for example, to Heidegger’s work on Nietzsche. See in particular Der Europäische Nihilismus (1940). For an English translation, see Nietzsche, vol. 4, Nihilism, ed. David Farrell Krell, trans. Frank A. Capuzi (New York: Harper and Row, 1982). For a more succinct account from the same period of Heidegger’s production, see “Die Metaphysik als Geschichte des Seins” (1941), trans. Joan Stambaugh, in The End of Philosophy (New York: Harper and Row, 1973). 30. Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit (1931). See also §§ 25 and 26 of Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 4. 31. Paul Friedländer is a good example of a Plato scholar who in the forties vehemently resisted Heidegger’s interpretation. See his Plato I: An Introduction, trans. Hans Meyerhoff (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 221–29. 32. For a good account of Descartes’ role in continuing foundationalist metaphysics by other means, see in particular Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 4, §§ 15–20.
180 Cyril O’Regan 33. See especially “The Question Concerning Technology” and “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), pp. 3–49, 115–54. 34. For the superiority of Sophocles and Pindar over Plato and Aristotle, see Martin Heidegger, The Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Mannheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), pp. 106–8, 146–65, 101, 103, 113. 35. The most important text on Gelassenheit is a publication of the same name (1959), translated as Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper and Row, 1966). For a good discussion of Gelassenheit, see John D. Caputo, Mystical Element, pp. 118–26, 173–83. 36. This locus classicus of this distinction that rests on an exegesis of a passage from Angelus Silesius is Der Satz vom Grund (1965). An excellent discussion is to be found in Caputo, Mystical Element, pp. 60–66. 37. Hölderlin rivals Plato, Aristotle, and Nietzsche in terms of the volume of Heidegger’s commentary. For convenient translations of some of Heidegger’s more important reflections on Hölderlin, see Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, trans. Keith Hoeller (New York: Humanity Books, 2000), and Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971). For an astute account of Heidegger’s interpretation, see Veronique Foti, Heidegger and the Poets: Poesis/Sophia/Techne (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1992). 38. Heidegger’s best-known discussion of Fehl is to be found in his essay “What Are Poets For?,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, pp. 91–142. 39. See Caputo, Mystical Element, pp. 118–26, 173–82. 40. The “holy” (das Heilige) is the key interpretive concept for the later Heidegger. It has priority over the concept of divinity, which in turn has priority over the concept of gods. See Fran O’Rourke, “The Gift of Being: Aquinas and Heidegger,” in At the Heart of the Real, ed. Fran O’Rourke (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1992), pp. 309–38. 41. See in particular Heidegger’s essay “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, pp. 145–59. 42. This is certainly von Balthasar’s view of Hölderlin. See my essay “Von Balthasar’s Valorization and Critique of Heidegger’s Genealogy of Modernity,” in Christian Spirituality and the Culture of Modernity, ed. Peter J. Casarella and George P. Schner (Grand Rapids, MI: William Eerdmans, 1998), pp. 123–58, esp. 139–47.
Answering Back 181 43. It is clear that Heidegger regards Hölderlin’s reflection on the absence of the gods as both broader and less metaphysically inclined than Nietzsche’s “Death of God.” Not only is Nietzsche’s view couched in extraordinary assertoric language, but its reference is solely the moral God of Christianity. 44. The full German title of this text, whose approximate date is 1937, is Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis). This text is of exceptional interest, being one of the few systematic texts Heidegger produced after Being and Time. It has played, and continues to play, a significant role in the argument concerning the existence and nature of the Kehre. See Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), esp. pp. 277–97. 45. Ibid., p. 289. 46. The relevant translations are Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Expositions of the Psalms, trans. Maria Boulding, vols. 1–4 of The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, ed. John E. Rotelle (New York: New City Press, 2000–2002); City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin, 1972). 47. See Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. Kathleen Mc Laughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 5–30. That Ricoeur is in effect offering an Augustinian response to Heidegger becomes clear only when the chapter on Augustine is linked to the chapter on Heidegger and time in the third volume. See Time and Narrative, vol. 3, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 60–96. Here Heidegger’s view of temporality as elaborated in Being and Time is submitted to an Augustinian and Kantian critique in which serious questions are raised regarding a pure phenomenology of time and the extent to which Heidegger has continual recourse to more superficial accounts of time to buttress his own account. For a good account of Ricoeur’s response to Heidegger’s challenge to Augustine, see Richard James Severson, Time, Death, and Eternity: Reflection on Augustine’s Confessions in Light of Heidegger’s “Being and Time” (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1995). 48. See Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, pp. 5–6, 29–30. Ricoeur understands full well that the theological is constitutive of Augustine’s re flections. 49. See ibid., vol. 1, pp. 7–12. 50. The word tragic can be used only in scare quotes when one is discussing Augustine. Time is tragic only under conditions of sin. Conceived in the
182 Cyril O’Regan light of the incarnation and the passion and death of Christ, the “tragic” element of time is in principle overcome. 51. On Entschluss, see SZ 305–10, 325–31, 335–39 inter alia; on Geworfenheit, see SZ 192, 228, 228, 251, 278 inter alia. 52. See Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, pp. 23, 26. 53. Here there is an obvious recall of Timaeus 37. 54. See Enneads 3.7. 55. Regio dissimilitudinis is intended by Augustine to capture the theological difference between creatures and the Creator. This prohibits Augustine from also capturing in the locution the exacerbation of distance between God and human beings consequent on sin. 56. For Milbank’s view of the relation between theology and philosophy first suggested in Theology and Social Theory, see John Milbank, Truth in Aquinas (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). 57. While it is true that Heidegger’s concerted encounter with Nietzsche dates from the thirties, Nietzsche is still an influence before Being and Time. Hemming, for example, adopts this view in Heidegger’s Atheism, p. 71. Kisiel makes the interesting point that before Being and Time Nietzsche’s thought is mediated through other thinkers such as Spengler and especially Franz Overbeck (Genesis, pp. 111, 218–19). 58. Heidegger actually quotes this passage from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil in Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 106. More important, however, is Heidegger’s agreement with Nietzsche that Platonism remains embedded in the Christian West. This is marked in Nietzsche, vol. 4, by a detailed account of Nietzsche’s attack on Platonism (§§ 25–26). Although they adopt quite different stances on the topic, Löwith and Hemming offer the two best accounts of Heidegger’s relation to Nietzsche. See Karl Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, ed. Richard Wolin, trans. Gary Steiner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 96–127; Hemming, Heidegger’s Atheism, pp. 135–55, 215–47. 59. See Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, p. 26. 60. See ibid., vol. 1, p. 23. 61. See Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen, (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), pp. 68–79; Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, pp. 33–52. 62. Augustine, City of God, trans. Bettenson, p. 521. 63. See Hemming’s perceptive comments on this point, Heidegger’s Atheism, p. 64.
Answering Back 183 64. See Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: The Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1997), pp. 111–13. 65. See Derrida, Gift of Death, pp. 35–52. 66. This is an important leitmotif of “Circumfession: Fifty-Nine Periods and Paraphrases,” in Jacques Derrida, by Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). John D. Caputo is especially acute on this point; see “Toward a Postmodern Theology of the Cross: Augustine, Heidegger, Derrida,” in Postmodern Philosophy and Christian Thought, ed. Merold Westphal (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), pp. 202–25, esp. pp. 217–18, and The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 297–302. 67. The doyen of Platonic interpreters of Augustine is Robert J. O’Connell. See St. Augustine’s Early Theory of Man, AD. 386–391 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), St. Augustine’s Confessions: The Odyssey of Soul (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), and Augustine’s Platonism (Villanova: Villanova University Press, 1984). It should be noted that O’Connell also takes the view that Platonism is not confined simply to the earlier Augustine. While elements in later works such as De Trinitate and De Civitate Dei are in tension with Platonism, it is O’Connell’s considered view that these texts not only do not overcome Platonism but are structurally determined by it. See The Origin of the Soul in St. Augustine’s Later Works (New York: Fordham University Press, 1987). 68. When I speak of the language of “coincidences of opposites,” I am not using the locution in the technical sense given to it in the fifteenth century by Nicholas of Cusa. I am simply drawing attention to the fact that attribution regarding God evinces paradox. 69. From Augustine’s treatment of time in book 11, it is clear that Psalm 2 is especially important in understanding the difference between today as distinct from yesterday and tomorrow, and today understood as different from the order of time as such. See especially chs. 13 and 14. 70. For more on Augustine’s Christology and his Platonism, see in particular Goulven Madec, Le Christ de Saint Augustin: La patrie et la voie (Paris: Desclée, 2001). This text represents a new edition of La patrie et la voie: Le Christ dans la vie et la pensée de Saint Augustin (Paris: Desclée, 1989). 71. See De Trinitate, bk. 15. 72. See Georg Nicolaus Knauer, Psalmenzitate in Augustins Konfessionen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1955).
184 Cyril O’Regan 73. See especially Michael Cornelius McCarthy, “The Revelatory Psalm: A Fundamental Theology of Augustine’s Enarrationes in Psalmos” (PhD diss., University of Notre Dame, 2003). 74. See ibid., ch. 3. 75. See John Burnaby, Amor Dei (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938). 76. See Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1955). 77. The great scholar of Gnosticism Hans Jonas makes this point against Heidegger in The Gnostic Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), pp. 320–40. See also John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 296–306. 78. See Hans Urs von Balthasar, Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 1, Seeing the Form, ed. Joseph Fessio, S.J., and John Riches, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1982), p. 158; Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Dusquesne University Press, 1969). 79. See John D. Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 169–85; Jacques Derrida, Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 96–98, 102. 80. See John Milbank, “The Second Difference,” in The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 171–93; JeanLuc Marion, God without Being, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 81. See Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger. For a similar criticism from a very different vantage point, see Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. L. Tarnowski (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). 82. The literature on the interconnection of Heidegger’s philosophical position and his politics is a veritable industry. See, among other texts, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics, trans. Chris Turner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); Michael E. Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). 83. For a good account of Derrida’s reading, which focuses on Augustine’s prayers and tears and not on the theological content of the Confessions, see Caputo, “Toward a Postmodern Theology,” pp. 202–23. 84. See ibid., pp. 1, 4, 9, 49–50.
s e v e n
Man’s Natural Condition Aquinas and Luther on Original Sin
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In his Lectures on Genesis (chapter 3) Martin Luther writes: “It is a cause for great error when some men minimize this evil [original sin] and speak of our depraved nature in the manner of the philosophers, as though it were not depraved.” He further explains his view of this teaching: The scholastics argue that original righteousness was not a part of human nature but, like some adornment, was added to man as a gift, as when someone places a wreath on a pretty girl. The wreath is certainly not part of the maiden’s nature; it is something apart from her nature. It came from outside and can be removed again without any injury to her nature. Therefore they maintain about man and about demons that although they lost their original righteousness, their natural endowments have remained pure, just as they were created in the beginning. . . . Nothing was more common and received more general acceptance in the schools than this thesis.1 185
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In contrast he states his own view: “Sin has not merely deformed nature, most shamefully, but has perverted it in the worst possible manner.”2 Luther writes rhetorically, but he lived among scholastics, of whom a substantial number must have held, in some form, the theory he attacks. It would appear that Thomas Aquinas was among these. In his Commentary on the Sentences Aquinas discusses God’s providence, which extends to all creation, and seeks to deal with the problem that evil is found in that creation. He believes that realities are of two kinds: realities that have free will (voluntarii) and others, which he calls naturalia. The latter are in turn of two kinds: the heavenly bodies and those found on earth. There can be no evil in the heavenly bodies, for they are incorruptible. As for the naturalia on earth (the world of nature), in it things on the whole happen for the better. (Aquinas is, in this respect, a dedicated follower of Aristotle, according to whom what Nature does is normally successful.) Turning to the world of voluntarii, he says that these also are of two kinds: angels and human beings. He asserts, without providing any particular evidence, that the number of good angels was greater than the number of those that rebelled, and indeed was perhaps greater than the number of all those that will be damned—human beings, it would seem, included.3 For the most part, then, God’s creation is good. But he admits that in human nature good is found for the lesser part (in paucioribus). He explains: “In human nature good seems to be in fewer things: and the reason for this can be given in two ways [dupliciter]: one is through the corruption of human nature from original sin . . . the other can be taken from the very condition of human nature.”4 He explains the condition of human nature as follows: There is a type of nature that has an admixture of potency but that has nevertheless in its very nature a certain power directing its operation, and so it is in angels, and hence such a nature falls away from rectitude for the lesser part. But in human nature the secondary perfections by which operations are directed are either acquired or infused. Hence the Commentator [Averroes] compares the potential human intellect to prime matter, and the Philosopher [Aristotle]
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compares it to a tablet on which nothing has been written. And so human nature considered in itself equally or indifferently to what is to be understood or to be done, and because according to Dionysius evil happens in many ways and good only in one way, (human nature) is for the greater part turned to evil.5
Aquinas appears to be formulating a super-Murphy’s law. Not only will things go wrong if they can go wrong, but they are more likely to go wrong. But how is this labile state related to original sin? In what sense is it caused by original sin? Aquinas writes: “The defect acquired from the origin is acquired, not through any subtraction or corruption of any good that human nature possesses from its own principles, but through the subtraction or corruption of something that was added to [the] nature.”6 He explains his position in a passage it is best to quote at length: The end to which the human being is ordained—namely the happiness that consists in the vision of God—is beyond the power of created nature, for it is connatural only to God. . . . So it was fitting that human nature be so instituted as to have not only what was due to it from its natural principles but also something further by which it might easily reach its end. And because it could not adhere to its ultimate end by love or come to hold it except through its supreme part, which is mind or intellect or reason in which the image of God is impressed, then so that that part might tend to God, the lower powers were made subject to it so that nothing might happen in them that would hinder or impede the mind in its journey to God; for the same reason the body was so disposed that no passion could occur in it that would impede the contemplation of the mind. And because all this was ordered in man to an end, when a turning away from this end was brought about by sin, it all ceased to exist in human nature, and man was left in possession of only those goods which followed from (his) natural principles. And Dionysius says this explicitly, writing that man has his own principle in corruptible generations and was fittingly brought to the end following from that principle: as it is through
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sin that he merited this, since corruption is due to the principles of which he is composed, through sin he should be reduced to the end for which his principles fitted him, and this is to be gathered from what is said in Genesis: You are earth and will go to earth.7
So Luther’s maid has lost her garland, perhaps become a maid of fragile virtue, but she is not deformed. Human beings are back to square 1, perhaps even to square 0, but certainly not to square -1. They are in what one might call their natural condition. But does not original sin carry a penalty? And can being in one’s natural condition truly be a penalty? Aquinas explains: The defects [in this condition] can be compared to human nature in two ways. They can be [compared to] it according as it is considered only in its natural principles, and in this way they are without doubt not penalties but natural defects, just as having come into existence out of nothing, or needing conservation, is a natural defect found in every created thing and is not a penalty [incurred by that] thing. Or they can be compared to human nature as it was instituted, and in [this comparison] they are penalties without any doubt, for the taking away of something that has been conceded to someone ex gratia is said to be a punishment.8
An example may be helpful. Suppose a wealthy couple dissipate their fortune and are reduced to backbreaking work. In their aches and pains they are paying for their foolishness, and in a sense their aches are due to that foolishness. But they may still be normally healthy humans, and their aches those that would be suffered by anyone engaged in that heavy work. Aquinas makes just this point: “In the beginning when God fashioned [the first] man, he could have formed another man from the soil of the earth and left him in the condition of his own nature, namely that he be mortal and open to suffering and would experience the fight of concupiscence against reason. In this nothing would be taken away from human nature, because [all] this follows from the principles of nature. But this defect in [his] nature would not have the nature [ratio] of fault and pain because this defect was not
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caused by the will.”9 Two men could be working side by side, both wearied by their work: the formerly rich man would be paying for his foolishness, the man born in poverty would not. Of course, one could say that the rich man’s foolishness caused his backache, but this does mean that his foolishness injured his back. The reign of causation may perhaps be illustrated as follows. Suppose that in cold weather police find on the road the body of a man wearing only indoor clothes. Pathologists attribute the death to pneumonia. Suppose they find that the dead man had been infected by HIV. They might certify death as being due to pneumonia following on AIDS. Suppose, however, that the man had been of normal health but had lost his overcoat, gone out in light clothes, contracted pneumonia, and died. The death certificate would not give “loss of overcoat” as a cause of death. Suppose, nevertheless, that the police discovered that muggers had stolen the man’s overcoat and left him to catch pneumonia in the cold; the police might then argue that the muggers had caused the man’s death and bring a charge of manslaughter. Now, as Aquinas said, the death can be explained in two ways: it can be attributed to pneumonia or to the loss of the overcoat. But it does not follow that the loss of the overcoat damaged the man’s health in the way in which the HIV infection damaged it, or that the loss of the overcoat of itself injured the man’s health. Aquinas is clear that death is among the defects that are natural to human beings and devotes a complete article to explaining his position. He writes: The necessity of dying comes in part from nature, in part from sin. From nature because the body of a human being is composed of contrary things which are meant to act on, and be acted on by, one another, and this gives rise to the dissolution of the composite. But in the state of innocence a certain gift given by God was in the soul so that above the mode of action of other forms it would give according to its own mode unfailing life to the body. . . . But because of sin this gift was taken away, and so human nature was left . . . in the state due to it from the nature of its own principles.10
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And “Death, or the necessity of dying, is said to be a penalty when compared to the state of innocence of which an element was that it was possible not to die. Nevertheless, if at the beginning of the condition of human nature the aforesaid gift of grace had not been given to human nature, there would have been the necessity of dying, but as a natural defect, not as a penalty.”11 So far as philosophy is concerned death is a perfectly natural event. Aquinas writes: “Seneca and other philosophers considered human nature according to what belongs to it by reason of its principles. They could not know its state in the first condition. Only faith holds that. So they spoke of death as being only a natural defect.”12 This statement of Aquinas coheres with what we have seen previously: nothing has been subtracted by original sin from what human nature possesses from its own principles. It follows that defects, even death, cannot provide evidence of such a subtraction and cannot show that at one time human nature had gifts which it has now lost. As we have seen, this is for Aquinas a matter of faith. The present condition of human nature is not evidence of a previous happier mode of existence. Aquinas believes that original sin is inherited and that this inheriting is effected through the infection of human semen.13 This may suggest that Aquinas thinks that original sin has damaged human nature biologically. In fact he wants to argue that original sin is inherited in the way membership of a family is inherited, that is, through normal birth.14 He supposes that God, who had made man from earth, might make a man from someone’s finger. This man would have all the defects of being human, but he would be without the guilt of original sin because he would not be a descendant of Adam by way of semen. That is, he would not be a child of Adam. The example is not as fanciful today as it was in the thirteenth century. Suppose at some time in the future scientists could produce a child from a person’s DNA that they might have taken from his clothes. The child so produced could scarcely be said to be a member of the family for the purposes of inheritance. Or if a family that had lost its ancestral inheritance took in a stray orphan, it could not be said that the orphan had lost his or her inheritance. Aquinas believes that human beings were instituted to achieve happiness in the vision of God as he is,15 and that this is possible only
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through the gift of God, a gift that was lost through original sin. Aquinas, however, does not believe that human beings who do not reach this goal are necessarily unhappy. The problem arises when he is dealing with the fate of unbaptized children. He is adamant that they do not come to the vision of God, but he writes: It is to be noted that if someone lacks what exceeds his proportion, he is not upset if he is of right reason, but only if he lacks something that in some way is proportionate to him—just as no wise man is upset because he cannot fly like a bird or because he is not a king or an emperor, but would be upset if he were deprived of something for which he had in some way an aptitude. . . . Children, however, were never proportioned to have eternal life, because it was not due to them from the principles of nature, since it exceeds all natural faculty, nor could they perform acts by which they would achieve so great a good. And so they do not at all lament the absence of the divine vision; rather, they rejoice that they participate greatly in the divine goodness and in natural perfections.16
Aquinas accepts that the defects found in human nature constitute not only a penalty (poena) but also a fault (culpa). Fault implies some element of the voluntary, but he introduces a distinction between the fault of nature and the fault of a person: A thing should have the nature [ratio] of fault according as the nature of voluntariety [voluntarium] is found in it. Since, however, there is a certain good that relates to [respicit] nature and another that relates to the person, so there is a certain fault of the nature and a certain fault of the person. Hence for a fault of the person there is required the will of the person, as is clear in actual sin which is committed through the act of a person; for the fault of a nature nothing is required except the will in that nature.17
This of course asserts that we share in Adam’s sin by inheriting his nature,18 but that this is not a personal sin. This is not perhaps as strange as it sounds. West Europeans today may feel a sense of shame at their
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ancestors’ part in the black slave trade and may even feel it fitting that we should compensate our African contemporaries. We do not feel similarly ashamed of the boyars’ treatment of serfs because we are not descended from the boyars. On the other hand, we would not feel it just that we ourselves be brought to court and sentenced for the sins of our ancestors. The distinction between culpa naturae and culpae personae makes sense. To our ears, of course, the phrase corruptio humanae naturae suggests that our human nature lacks something that belongs to it by virtue of what we are—ex principiis. All the more reason therefore to recall his central thesis: “The defect acquired from the origin is not acquired through any subtraction or corruption of any good that human nature possesses from its own principles, but through the subtraction or something that was added to [the] nature.”19 And that, if Luther is to be believed, was also the thesis of many Schoolmen. Notes 1. Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis 3.7; ed. J. Pelikan, trans. George V. Schick (St. Louis, MO: Concordia, 1958), pp. 164–65. 2. Ibid., p. 187. 3. Thomas Aquinas, In I Sententiarum (In I Sent.), dis. 39, q. 2, art. 2 ad 4: “Malum potest accipi vel in rebus naturalibus, vel in voluntariis. Et si accipiatur in naturalibus, constat quod malum est ut in paucioribus, tum secundum supposita, quia malum naturae non contingit nisi in sphaera generabilium et corruptibilium, quae est parvae quantitatis respectu corporum caelestium in quibus malum esse non potest, quia incorruptibilia sunt, et motus eorum inordinationem habere non possunt, cum semper eodem modo sint; tum etiam considerando in eodem, quia causae naturales consequuntur effectus suos in majori parte, et deficiunt in minori, et ex hoc malum incidit. Sed in voluntariis etiam quantum ad numerum invenitur malum ut in paucioribus in natura angelica: quia multo plures fuerunt remanentes quam cadentes; et forte etiam plures quam omnes damnandi, Daemones et homines.” All translations are my own. 4. In I Sent., dis. 39, q. 2, art. 2 ad 4: “Sed in natura humana bonum videtur esse ut in paucioribus: et hujusmodi ratio potest assignari dupliciter. Una
Man’s Natural Condition 193 est propter corruptionem humanae naturae ex peccato originali, quam etiam Deus praevidit et praeordinavit, sicut et alia mala; sed non prohibuit ut natura maneret in sua libertate, qua subtracta naturae ratio deperiret. Alia ratio sumi potest ex ipsa natura conditionis humanae.” 5. Aquinas, In I Sent., dis. 39, q. 2, art. 2 ad 4: “Sicut enim in naturalibus invenitur triplex gradus; aliquid enim est quod habet esse tantum in actu; et huic nullus defectus essendi advenire potest: aliquid autem est quod est tantum in potentia, sicut materia prima; et hoc semper habet defectum, nisi removeatur per aliquod agens reducens eam in actum: est etiam aliquid quod habet actum admixtum privationi; et hoc propter actum dirigentem in opere recte operatur ut in majori parte, deficit autem in minori, sicut patet in natura generabilium et corruptibilium; ita etiam est in intellectualibus. Est enim aliqua intellectualis natura quae est actus completus sine admixtione alicujus privationis vel potentiae; et ex hac non potest aliquid non rectum procedere, sicut patet de Deo. Est etiam quaedam natura cui admiscetur potentia, sed tamen in ipsa sua natura habet aliquem actum dirigentem in operatione, sicut est in Angelis; et ideo talis natura deficit a rectitudine ut in minori parte. Sed in natura humana perfectiones secundae, quibus diriguntur opera, non sunt innatae, sed vel acquisitae vel infusae. Unde Commentator in 3 de anima, comparat intellectum potentialem humanum materiae primae, et philosophus tabulae in qua nihil scriptum est; et ideo ipsa natura humana in se considerata aequaliter se habet indifferenter ad omnia vel intelligenda vel facienda; et quia malum contingit multifariam secundum Dionysium, et bonum uno modo; ideo ut in pluribus flectitur in malum.” 6. Thomas Aquinas, In II Sententiarum (In II Sent.), dis. 33, q. 2, art. 1: “Defectus autem qui per originem traducitur, rationem culpae habens, non est per subtractionem vel corruptionem alicujus boni quod naturam humanam consequitur ex principiis suis; sed per subtractionem vel corruptionem alicujus quod naturae superadditum erat.” 7. Aquinas, In II Sent., dis. 30, q. 1, art. 1: “Respondeo dicendum, quod ea quae sunt ad finem, disponuntur secundum necessitatem finis, ut ex 2 Physic. patet. Finis autem ad quem homo ordinatus est, est ultra facultatem naturae creatae, scilicet beatitudo, quae in visione Dei consistit; soli enim Deo hoc connaturale est, ut ex dictis in 23 dist. patet. Unde oportuit naturam humanam taliter institui ut non solum haberet illud quod sibi ex principiis naturalibus debebatur, sed etiam aliquid ultra, per quod facile in finem perveniret. Et quia ultimo fini amore inhaerere non poterat, nec ad ipsum tenendum pervenire nisi per supremam partem suam, quae est mens et intellectus, seu ratio,
194 † Michael Nolan in qua imago Dei insignita est; ideo, ut illa pars in Deum tenderet, subjectae sunt sibi vires inferiores, ut nihil in eis accidere posset quod mentem retineret et impediret ab itinere in Deum: pari ratione corpus hoc modo dispositum est ut nulla passio in eo accidere posset per quam mentis contemplatio impediretur. Et quia haec omnia ex ordine ad finem, ut dictum est, homini inerant; ideo facta deordinatione a fine per peccatum, haec omnia in natura humana esse desiere, et relictus est homo in illis tantum bonis quae eum ex naturalibus principiis consequuntur. Et hoc expresse Dionysius dicit, sic inquiens: proprium autem principium habens homo in generationibus corruptibilibus, merito ad principii consequentem ductus est finem; id est, hoc ex peccato meruit ut cum ex principiis suis, ex quibus compositus est, sibi corruptio deberetur, reduceretur per peccatum ad talem finem qui suis principiis congrueret: et hoc accipitur ex hoc quod dictum est Genes. 3, 19: terra es, et in terram ibis.” Emphasis added. 8. Aquinas, In II Sent., dis. 30, q. 1, art. 1: “Isti defectus possunt ad naturam humanam dupliciter comparari: vel ad eam, secundum quod in principiis naturalibus suis tantum consideratur, et sic procul dubio non sunt poenae ejus, sed naturales defectus, sicut etiam esse ex nihilo, vel indigere conservatione, est defectus quidam naturalis omnem creaturam consequens et nulli est poena: vel ad eam, prout instituta est; et sic procul dubio poena sunt sibi: quia etiam ex privatione ejus quod gratis alicui conceditur postquam concessum est, puniri dicitur aliquis.” 9. Aquinas, In II Sent., dis. 31, q. 1, art. 2 ad 3: “Poterat Deus a principio quando hominem condidit, etiam alium hominem ex limo terrae formare, quem in conditione naturae suae relinqueret, ut scilicet mortalis et passibilis esset, et pugnam concupiscentiae ad rationem sentiens; in quo nihil humanae naturae derogaretur, quia hoc ex principiis naturae consequitur. Non tamen iste defectus in eo rationem culpae et poenae habuisset; quia non per voluntatem iste defectus causatus esset.” 10. Thomas Aquinas, In III Sententiarum (In III Sent.), dis. 16, q. 1, art. 1: “Necessitas moriendi partim homini est ex natura, partim ex peccato. Ex natura quidem, quia corpus hominis compositum est ex contrariis, quae nata sunt agere et pati ad invicem, ex quo accidit dissolutio compositi. Sed tamen in statu innocentiae donum quoddam a Deo gratis datum animae inerat, ut ipsa praeter modum aliarum formarum, secundum modum suum vitam indeficientem corpori largiretur. Sed propter peccatum istud donum ablatum est; et ideo relicta est humana natura in statu qui debetur ei ex natura suorum principiorum.”
Man’s Natural Condition 195 11. Aquinas, In III Sent., dis. 16, q. 1, art. 1 ad 5: “Si tamen in principio conditionis naturae humanae, dictum donum gratiae humanae naturae non fuisset collatum, necessitas quidem moriendi fuisset, sed tamquam naturalis defectus, non poena, ut supra probavit Magister ex verbis Augustini in praecedenti distinctione. Et ideo, quia philosophi illud donum non cognoverunt, dixit Seneca, quod mors est hominis natura, non poena.” 12. Aquinas, In II Sent., dis. 30, q. 1, art. 1 ad 1: “Seneca et alii philosophi consideraverunt naturam humanam secundum ea quae ex principiis suis naturalibus ipsam consequuntur: statum enim illum primae conditionis scire non potuerunt, quem non nisi fides tenet; et ideo de morte non nisi sicut de naturali defectu locuti sunt.” 13. Aquinas, In II Sent., dis. 18, q. 2, art. 1 ad 3: “Quamvis peccatum originale sit in anima sicut in subjecto, tamen causatur in anima ex infectione seminis, et est in eo, scilicet in semine, quamvis non sicut in subjecto, tamen sicut in causa; et ideo per traductionem seminis, et non animae, peccatum originale traducitur.” 14. Aquinas, In II Sent., dis. 31, q. 1, art. 2, arg. 3: “Praeterea, sicut Deus ex costa viri mulierem formavit, ita etiam potens est nunc ex digito hominis, vel alio membro, corpus humanum formare. Constat autem quod ille qui sic formatus esset, non descenderet ex Adam secundum rationem seminalem.” In II Sent., dis. 31, q. 1, art. 2 ad 3: “Ad tertium dicendum, quod si aliquis divina virtute ex digito formaretur, originale non haberet; haberet nihilominus omnes defectus quos habent qui in originali nascuntur, tamen sine ratione culpae: quod sic patet. Poterat Deus a principio quando hominem condidit, etiam alium hominem ex limo terrae formare, quem in conditione naturae suae relinqueret, ut scilicet mortalis et passibilis esset, et pugnam concupiscentiae ad rationem sentiens; in quo nihil humanae naturae derogaretur, quia hoc ex principiis naturae consequitur.” 15. Aquinas, In II Sent., dis. 19, q. 1, art. 2. 16. Aquinas, In II Sent., dis. 33, q. 2, art. 2: “Sciendum ergo, quod ex hoc quod caret aliquis eo quod suam proportionem excedit, non affligitur, si sit rectae rationis; sed tantum ex hoc quod caret eo ad quod aliquo modo proportionatus fuit: sicut nullus sapiens homo affligitur de hoc quod non potest volare sicut avis vel quia non est rex vel imperator, cum sibi non sit debitum: affligeretur autem, si privaretur eo ad quod habendum aliquo modo aptitudinem habuit. . . . Pueri autem nunquam fuerunt proportionati ad hoc quod vitam aeternam haberent; quia nec eis debebatur ex principiis naturae, cum omnem facultatem naturae excedat, nec actus proprios habere potuerunt
196 † Michael Nolan q uibus tantum bonum consequerentur; et ideo nihil omnino dolebunt de carentia visionis divinae; immo magis gaudebunt de hoc quod participabunt multum de divina bonitate, et perfectionibus naturalibus.” 17. Aquinas, In II Sent., dis. 30, q. 1, art. 2: “Unde oportet quod secundum hoc quod aliquid rationem culpae habet, secundum hoc ratio voluntarii in ipso reperiatur. Sicut autem est quoddam bonum quod respicit naturam, et quoddam quod respicit personam; ita etiam est quaedam culpa naturae et quaedam personae. Unde ad culpam personae, requiritur voluntas personae sicut patet in culpa actuali, quae per actum personae committitur; ad culpam vero naturae non requiritur nisi voluntas in natura illa.” 18. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I–II, q. 81, art. 4: “Unde illi soli peccatum originale contrahunt, qui ab Adam descendunt per virtutem activam in generatione originaliter ab Adam derivatam, quod est secundum seminalem rationem ab eo descendere, nam ratio seminalis nihil aliud est quam vis activa in generatione. Si autem aliquis formaretur virtute divina ex carne humana, manifestum est quod vis activa non derivaretur ab Adam. Unde non contraheret peccatum originale, sicut nec actus manus pertineret ad peccatum humanum, si manus non moveretur a voluntate hominis, sed ab aliquo extrinseco movente.” 19. See note 6 above.
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Philosophical Sources of Aquinas’ Quarta Via Patrick Masterson
In his “fourth way” of showing that God exists, Aquinas argues for the existence of an absolutely supreme being from the degrees of perfection observed in the things about us: The fourth way is taken from varying degrees which are found in things. For among things one finds that some are more and less good, true, noble, etc. But more and less are predicated of different things according as they approximate in their different ways to something which exemplifies [the predicated perfection] supremely. For example, that is more hot which more closely resembles that which is hottest. There is, therefore, something which is truest, best, noblest, and, consequently, the greatest being. For what are greatest in truth are greatest in being, as is stated in Metaphysics 2. But what is declared to be the highest instance in any class of things is the cause of everything that belongs to that class; just as fire, which is the greatest instance of heat, is the cause of all hot things, as the same book 197
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bserves. There is, therefore, also something which is the cause of o the existence, and goodness, and every other such perfection of all beings, and this we call God.1
It is generally acknowledged that the fourth way is the most controversial of St. Thomas’ arguments for the existence of God. Philosophers differ not only in their exposition of the argument but also in their interpretation of the text in which it is outlined. For instance, those, such as Etienne Gilson, who favor an argument in terms of exemplarism maintain that the part of the text which contains an appeal to efficient causation is of secondary importance and not essential to the proof.2 To clarify this issue it is worthwhile to consider some of the more important philosophical sources of the argument, which extend back to the philosophy of Plato. Indeed, it has been maintained that “the proof is not only characteristically Platonic, but is also consciously derived from Platonic sources.”3 Whatever we may decide about the accuracy of this observation, it is certainly true that in an earlier work, where he proposed an argument similar to the fourth way, St. Thomas refers to Plato as a source of his argument.4 Consequently, we begin our outline of the sources of the fourth way with reference to the philosophy of Plato. However, I think it would be a mistake to consider this famous Quarta Via as of merely historical interest. Certainly it has had a record of checkered evaluation—often dismissed as a Platonic illusion, a confusion of the real with the conceptual, or too easily accepted as providing immediate evidence of the existence of Infinite Being as the obscurely intuited prerequisite of any affirmation of finite being. In fact, however, the text focuses attention on a central theme of Aquinas’ philosophy, namely, the analogy of being which embodies a powerful “cipher” of the sort of asymmetry which characterizes the relationship between God and the world. I believe that the proof, considered in this light, provides a “way” for a convincing argument for the existence of God as the ultimate foundation of the analogy of being. It provides an illuminating cipher of the asymmetrical transcendence of God vis-à-vis creation, which in turn, by way of indirect
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causal argument, makes sense of the asymmetries which characterize the analogy of being. In my recent work The Sense of Creation, taking account of the historical background indicated below, I have described how such an argument can be elaborated.5
Plato According to Plato, there exists an ideal world of absolute perfections, and our judgments concerning degrees of perfection are possible only in virtue of a reference to this ideal world. He does not propose to prove the truth of these assertions. Rather, they are offered as hypotheses which, if granted, validate his general philosophical position. In the Phaedo he writes: I turn back to those oft-mentioned things and proceed from them. I assume the existence of a Beautiful, itself by itself, of a Good and a Great and all the rest . . . and if someone tells me that a thing is beautiful because it has a bright colour or shape or any such thing, I ignore these other reasons—for all these confuse me—but I simply, naively and perhaps foolishly cling to this, that nothing else makes it beautiful other than the presence of, or the sharing in, or however you may describe its relationship to that Beautiful we mentioned, for I will not insist on the precise nature of the relationship, but that all beautiful things are beautiful by the Beautiful.6
Taking for granted the existence of a world of exemplar perfections, Plato further maintains that we had knowledge of these exemplars in a previous existence. Moreover, we can make comparative judgments concerning degrees of various perfections only because the objects compared partake of the realm of absolute perfections of which we were previously aware. However, he does not provide any very clear account of the nature of this participation. Although Plato offers no strict proof of the existence of the exemplar perfections which he postulates, he maintains that we can come
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to an awareness of them, and to knowledge that they are the source of all degrees of perfection. In the Symposium we are told how one may attain to this knowledge: “Starting from individual beauties the quest for the universal beauty must find him ever mounting the heavenly ladder, stepping from rung to rung—that is from one to two, and from two to every lovely body, from bodily beauty to beauty of institutions, from institutions to learning, and from learning in general to the special love which pertains to nothing but the beautiful itself—until at last he comes to know what beauty is.”7 In this text he invites us to rise from many and differently beautiful objects to knowledge of the one and supreme form of beauty itself. Our ascent is not merely to knowledge that there is a supreme beauty but to knowledge of the supreme beauty itself. In other words, Plato teaches that we become aware of a supreme perfection by a dialectic of the mind which culminates in vision. He returns to the same theme in the Republic, where he considers the most sublime form, the form of the good: “In the world of knowledge the idea of the good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and, when seen, is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right.”8 The Timaeus throws some light on the texts quoted, for here Plato seems to indicate that the ideas, though sublime, eternal, and uncreated, are nevertheless distinct from God: “Which of the patterns had the artificer in view when he made [the world],—the pattern of the unchangeable or of that which is created? . . . Everyone will see that he must have looked to the eternal; for the world is the fairest of creations and he is the best of causes.”9 This passage, however, is not conclusive, and it remains a somewhat disputed issue whether the exemplar ideas should be viewed as the divine reality in Plato’s philosophy. Plato himself did not dwell upon the relationship between these ideas and God. Indeed, the question of the existence of God is not, as such, an explicit problem in his philosophy. His major concern is to establish the nature of true knowledge and to show how we can attain this knowledge. The problem of degrees of perfection presents itself to him, therefore, as the problem of how comparative judgments are possible. He solves this problem by postulating a world of ideas. These ideas are the exem-
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plar perfections in which degrees of perfection participate, and they are also the norms or principles of knowledge which render comparative judgments possible. His theory of the dialectic by which we come to a direct knowledge of the ideas is intended to justify his postulation of this world of ideas. Aquinas had little direct knowledge of Plato’s writings.10 The relationship between the philosophy of Plato and the fourth way is established chiefly through Neoplatonism and earlier Christian writers. In Christian thought, however, the exemplar ideas will be identified with God. This means that the Platonic dialectic leading to knowledge of the ideas will become a dialectic leading to knowledge of God. One difficulty in this approach becomes at once apparent. The Platonic dialectic seems to involve an intuitive process culminating in a direct awareness of the ideas. If this approach is accepted, does it not follow that a direct knowledge of God is involved in Christian philosophy? This is but one aspect of the general problem of ontologism that has arisen by reason of the incorporation of Platonism into Christian philosophy. It is against this background that one should evaluate an interpretation of the fourth way widely advocated in the twentieth century. It is an interpretation which claims that an analysis of the dynamism of our intellect reveals that our affirmation of limited degrees of perfection is possible only because we possess some virtual, but nevertheless real, knowledge of God, the supreme perfection, as the ultimate object of our desire for knowledge.11
Aristotle Although many are convinced that the fourth way is distinctively Platonic, Aquinas refers explicitly to Aristotle as the source of the principles which he employs in this argument. A question, therefore, arises whether the Aristotelian principles which Aquinas found so helpful were used by Aristotle himself to prove the existence of God. To answer this question we must distinguish the early from the later writings of Aristotle. Several authors maintain that in his early career Aristotle
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anticipated Aquinas’ fourth argument for the existence of God. Thus Arthur Little remarks: “In one of the surviving fragments of his early and still Platonizing work, the De Philosophia, we have the full proof of the existence of God from the degrees of perfection nearly in the same words as those of the Summa Theologiae.”12 In the fragment referred to, Aristotle states: “In general, where there is a better there is also a best. Since, then, among existing things one is better than another, there is also something that is best, which will be the divine.”13 This fragment of De Philosophia is preserved by Simplicius, who quotes it in his commentary on De Caelo. There is, however, reason to doubt whether in this fragment Aristotle is offering a proof for the existence of God. He argues from some things being better than others to the existence of something divine. But in his terminology something divine does not necessarily mean God. Certainly in the De Caelo the word divine refers to the outer heaven, which is made of a primary substance or fifth element. This fifth element, according to Aristotle, is more excellent than the other four, and its natural movement, unlike theirs, is circular and everlasting. It is because of its lasting movement that it is called divine or immortal.14 Commenting on this, Simplicius quotes De Philosophia to the effect that the heavenly or divine body is the best there is and so cannot change. Aristotle also seems to refer to De Philosophia in this passage of De Caelo, though more briefly than Simplicius. He writes: “Often in the popular philosophical works when dealing with divine realities it has been made abundantly clear that the divine must be unchangeable because it is primary and supreme. This confirms what has been stated. For there is nothing more powerful which could change it—since that would be more divine—and it has no defect and lacks none of its proper excellences. So it is reasonable to declare that its movement too must be unending.”15 It would appear that both Aristotle and Simplicius are proving, not that God exists, but that the divine and most perfect heaven is unchanging and everlasting. The word divine as used by Aristotle does not correspond to the meaning assigned to it in Christian philosophy. He uses it in the traditional Greek sense as indicating something of superior excellence, as, for example, when reason is styled the divine element in man. Therefore, when Aristotle argues
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from degrees of perfection to the existence of something divine, we cannot conclude that he anticipates the argument of the fourth way. It is generally agreed that Aquinas was unaware of the fragment from De Philosophia when he wrote the fourth way. Certainly he makes no explicit reference to it. The translated text of De Caelo, with the commentary of Simplicius, was probably not available to him until after he had formulated his argument, and there is no evidence that he may have been aware of the fragment through some more indirect source.16 Whatever conclusion we may reach concerning Aristotle’s early thought on a proof for the existence of God, it may be safely asserted that in his mature thought he does not offer a proof based on the degrees of perfection. Nevertheless, the later writings contain principles which are involved in the fourth way. The most important text, one to which Aquinas refers explicitly in his argument, is to be found in the second book of the Metaphysics: Now we do not know a truth without its cause; and a thing has a quality in a higher degree than other things if in virtue of it the similar quality belongs to the other things (e.g. fire is the hottest of things, for it is the cause of the heat of all other things); so that that which causes derivative truths to be true is most true. Therefore the principles of eternal things must be always most true; for they are not merely sometimes true, nor is there any cause of their being, but they themselves are the cause of the being of other things, so that as each thing is in respect of being, so is it in respect of truth.17
In this not very luminous text Aristotle affirms the real identity of transcendental perfections such as truth and being and claims that what causes a perfection in all other things is the supreme expression of that perfection. Although he does not argue for the existence of an infinite cause of finite degrees of perfection, he is well aware of the problems posed by these degrees, and he emphasizes that they imply a relation of causal dependence. Frequently in his writings Aristotle returns to the topic of degrees of perfection. Furthermore, he reiterates the Platonic doctrine that our comparative judgments can be rendered intelligible only by reference
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to some norm.18 Although he does not maintain the Platonic view that we have an innate knowledge of this norm, or that we become aware of it by a dialectic, he insists that one must know the supreme expression of a perfection in order to make comparative judgments. He elaborates this point of view in his doctrine of measure. A measure, he explains, is an objective principle of knowledge which enables us to gauge the extent of quantities or the relative intensity of qualitative perfections. In any ordered series the measure is that member of the series which possesses the greatest unity and simplicity. He observes that, although the doctrine of measure is intended primarily to account for our knowledge of numbers, its use can be extended to categories other than that of quantity. “For measure is that by which quantity is known; and quantity qua quantity is known either by a ‘one’ or by a number, and all number is known by a ‘one.’ Therefore all quantity qua quantity is known by the one, and that by which quantities are primarily known is the one itself, and so the one is the starting-point of number qua number. . . . For everywhere we seek as the measure something one and indivisible; and this is that which is simple either in quality or in quantity.”19 In its strict sense a measure is not only something which possesses a perfection with the greatest unity and simplicity but also an objective principle of knowledge which, being known first, enables us to evaluate other instances of the perfection as more or less perfect. However, a loose sense of the term measure can be inferred from the strict Aristotelian doctrine. In this loose sense, adopted by Aquinas, a measure is something which, because it possesses a perfection with the greatest unity and simplicity, can render ultimately and ontologically intelligible judgments concerning degrees of this perfection. Thus God can be called the measure of degrees of being, although our knowledge of these degrees is prior to and independent of our knowledge of his existence. Aristotle’s doctrine of measure is concerned only with particular predicamental perfections. He does not affirm the existence of God as the measure which renders our judgments of degrees of being ultimately intelligible. If such a being exists, his existence must be proved, and Aristotle does not seek to prove his existence in this context.
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However, in the passage of the Metaphysics referred to in the fourth way, he provides a principle which enables Aquinas to relate degrees of being to a proof for the existence of God. As we have noted, Aristotle points out that what causes a perfection in other things must itself possess the perfection in the highest degree. Although he does not make clear how the highest perfection functions as cause, he states a principle which Aquinas can invoke in his argument. If he can prove that degrees of being require the existence of an absolutely supreme being as their first cause, he will have demonstrated the existence of God as a principle or measure adequate to render ultimately intelligible our judgments concerning degrees of being. Thus the Platonic doctrine that our comparative judgments are rendered intelligible only by reference to some norm can be incorporated into a proof for the existence of an absolutely supreme being without involving either innate knowledge or a dialectic attaining to direct knowledge of this Being. In conclusion, although it appears that the later writings of Aristotle do not contain a proof for God from degrees of perfection, they do contain principles involved in the fourth way. Aristotle’s doctrine of the real identity of the transcendental perfections (i.e., perfections which do not connote a limited category of things) and his doctrine of measure are both reflected in the proof. But his chief significance lies in the emphasis he places on the principle of causation in providing an explanation of degrees of perfection. This is probably why Aquinas referred to him rather than to Plato or one of his followers as the main source of his proof, even though on first reading the proof seems more in the Platonic tradition. His repeated reference to Aristotle, and to him alone, in this proof may be intended to make his own account clearer by distinguishing it from a Platonic interpretation.
Plotinus As we have seen, Plato maintained that we can ascend by a dialectic of the mind from knowledge of degrees of perfection to direct knowledge of a supreme perfection. However, he did not clearly identify the term of this dialectic with God. This synthesis is effected by Plotinus
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(AD 204–70), who incorporated the dialectic of degrees into his philosophy as a means of returning to God. Plotinus is not preoccupied with proving the existence of God. The existence of God—the One—is assumed. God is above every perfection, above all thought. He does not create, but from him proceed all things in a descending scale of perfection: nous, soul, and ultimately matter. The union of soul with matter is viewed as a fall from which it is necessary to make an ascetic or mystical ascent back to the One. This the soul achieves by rising from sense perception and passing through higher levels of knowledge until, finally, knowledge of the One is attained in ecstatic vision. “The vision is hard to put into words. For how could one announce the divine as another, when in the vision he did not see it as distinct but as one with himself ?”20 Plotinus teaches that we come to know the existence of God, not by proving his existence, but by a dialectic of the soul ascending through various degrees of perfection and culminating in direct knowledge of God. However, although he uses the Platonic dialectic to attain knowledge of the Divine, he does not identify the Platonic ideas with God. The ideas are not in God but in nous, which, although inferior to God, contains within itself the pattern of the world. The ultimate term of the dialectic is not the world of exemplar perfections but rather the utterly transcendent God. Plotinus lays great stress upon the absolute transcendence of the One; it is beyond all comparison with the world. It infinitely surpasses the existence, truth, and beauty which are observed in creatures. Therefore, according to Plotinus, the predicates we use to describe such perfections in creatures cannot be predicated meaningfully of God. This is a point which will be stressed by subsequent writers and cannot be ignored when considering an argument such as that of the fourth way. The philosophy of Plotinus marks a development in Platonic thought on the function of the dialectic in relation to God. His views have exercised considerable influence on Christian writers such as Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Anselm. In this way the teaching of Plotinus is an indirect source of the background of Aquinas’ argument for the existence of God from degrees of perfection.
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Augustine In an argument for the existence of God similar to that which he proposes in the fourth way, Aquinas refers to Augustine as a source of his thought.21 The relevant text of Augustine is one which praises and endorses certain Platonic views. These are the doctrines that mutable perfections require an immutable exemplar and that comparative judgments are possible only on condition that this exemplar be somehow present to the mind.22 In his Confessions, Augustine offers a similar point of view in a context bearing directly upon the question of the existence of God: I was now studying the grounds of my admiration for the beauty of bodies, whether celestial or of earth, and on what authority I might rightly judge of things mutable and say: “This ought to be so, and that not so.” Enquiring then what was the source of my judgment, when I did so judge, I had discovered the immutable and true eternity of truth above my changing mind. Thus by stages I passed from bodies to the soul which uses the body for its perceiving, and from this to the soul’s inner power . . . and from there I passed on to the reasoning power, to which is referred for judgment what is received from the body’s senses. This too realized it was mutable in me, and rose to its own understanding. It withdrew my thoughts from its habitual way, and abstracting from the confused crowds of phantasms that it might find what light suffused it, when with utter certainty it cried aloud that the immutable was to be preferred to the mutable, and how it had come to know the immutable itself: for if it had not come to some knowledge of the immutable, it could not have known it as certainly preferable to the mutable. Thus in the thrust of a trembling glance my mind arrived at That Which Is. Then I saw clearly Your invisible things which are understood by the things which are made.23
This text provides a synopsis of the protracted and complicated proof which Augustine proposes in De Libero Arbitrio, book 2.24 This
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proof, known as the proof from the eternal truths, starts from the fact that we are aware of our own existence. It goes on to describe ascending degrees of perfection such as inanimate existence, life, and understanding. It proceeds to demonstrate that we make immutable true judgments. But the eternal and immutable truth which these judgments express is of a higher order of perfection than our mind, which is a mutable faculty of limited perfection. Therefore, from the fact that we make eternally true judgments, the argument concludes that there must exist an eternal truth which is God. The climax to which the proof builds is somewhat unsatisfactory. It is not clear what precisely Augustine means. Some commentators believe that he passes intuitively from awareness of immutable truth to the assertion of God as its source, without pausing to indicate why this is so. Others insist that he has demonstrated the existence of God, the supreme truth, in showing that our reason is inadequate to account for the existence of truth. Still others reject the validity of the proof unless an explicit appeal to efficient causation is invoked—an appeal not evident in Augustine’s own text. It does appear that, in his approach to the existence of God, Augustine concludes immediately from our awareness of truth in general to an affirmation of his existence. He seems to regard all truth as somehow participating in a supreme truth but does not show clearly how this doctrine of participation establishes the existence of God. Hence his proof from eternal truths appears inconclusive, if considered as a strictly philosophical argument. Whatever view one takes of the validity of Augustine’s proof from eternal truths, it is certain that his approach to the question is essentially Platonic. The existence of an absolutely supreme truth is required as a condition of our immutable true judgments. The same Platonic viewpoint can be detected in the De Trinitate, where he shows that we could not make judgments concerning degrees of goodness were we not somehow aware of God, the supreme good, in whose goodness all lesser things participate.25 We have seen how according to Plato our judgments concerning degrees of perfection presuppose a reference to an exemplar idea. Ex-
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plicit knowledge of this exemplar idea can be attained by a dialectic of the mind culminating in immediate awareness. However, Plato does not identify the exemplar ideas with God. Plotinus, carrying on the Platonic tradition, makes the dialectic attain to God, who is, however, distinct from the ideas. Augustine identifies the ideas with God and would seem to believe that our comparative judgments involve a real, but not fully explicit, knowledge of these ideas. Further, there is some ground for finding in his writings the view that we become actually aware of these ideas by a dialectic, be it mystical or purely rational, through which we attain to knowledge of God. In Augustine, therefore, we find the main framework of Platonic speculation on degrees of perfection related to the question of the existence of the Christian God. He has coordinated the data on which later Christian writers will work. In rethinking these data, mainly with the aid of Aristotelian principles, Aquinas will arrive at his fourth proof for the existence of God.
Pseudo-Dionysius One idea which Aquinas could assume in his readers was that the world is a hierarchically structured system of perfection. This view was made popular in Christian thought by the writings of Dionysius, a late fifth- or early sixth-century writer who throughout the Middle Ages enjoyed pseudonymous renown as the Athenian convert of St. Paul mentioned in Acts 17:34. Because of his supposed identity, his writings were highly respected and exercised great influence on medieval thought. His principle of plenitude was generally accepted in the Middle Ages. This essentially Neoplatonic principle states that the world is hierarchically structured so as to include every possible level of being. Reality is then one great chain of perfection from the infinite God down to the most imperfect material creature. This principle, commonly held in the thirteenth century, enabled Aquinas to treat degrees of perfection in summary fashion. An argument in terms of these degrees would be more significant to his contemporaries than to a modern reader. As Gilson remarked: “The doctrine of Denis called
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for many precisions and corrections, or, rather, for a reinterpretation in terms of a metaphysics of being: yet, such as it was, it has provided Christian thinkers with a general framework within which their interpretation of the world could easily take place.”26 Pseudo-Dionysius is, therefore, to some extent responsible for the fourth way being readily appreciated by Aquinas’ contemporaries. Perhaps even more important is his view, derived from Plotinus, that we have no positive knowledge of the divine nature. When we affirm perfections such as being, truth, and goodness of God, we must correct our affirmation by denying that the divine perfection is in any way similar to the perfections we observe in creatures. Perfection as realized in God is infinitely beyond any conception of perfection we may derive from creatures. When we ascribe perfections such as being, truth, and goodness to God, we mean, not that he resembles these perfections as they are found in creatures, but rather that he is the cause of these created perfections. In himself he is Supra-Being, SupraTruth, and Supra-Goodness. Indeed, the emphasis laid by Dionysius on the fact that the perfection of God is incomparably beyond the perfections of creatures inclines him to subordinate the divine ideas to the divine nature.27 The influence of Plotinus is evident in this tendency to stress the transcendence of God to the extent of affirming a distinction between him and his ideas. Thus Dionysius writes: “We cannot know God in his nature, since this is unknowable and is beyond the reach of mind or of reason. But we know him from the arrangement of everything, because everything is, in a sense, projected out from him. . . . We therefore approach that which is beyond all as far as our capacities allow us and we pass by way of the denial and the transcendence of all things and by way of the cause of all things.”28 Though strongly influenced by Plotinus, Dionysius differs from him in insisting that God, the supreme perfection, can never be an object of human awareness. We can know God only as the cause of created perfection, never as an object directly experienced. This is a profound modification of the Platonic theory, according to which we can arrive at a positive awareness of the supreme perfection by a dialectic of the mind. The manner in which Dionysius related efficient
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causation to our knowledge of supreme perfection bears a closer resemblance to Aristotelian than to Platonic thought. The same approach is to be noted in Boethius, his putative contemporary, who bases his affirmation of the existence of God not on a Platonic dialectic but on the causal principle that what is imperfect requires the perfect as its cause.29 Boethius greatly influenced the thought of Anselm, whose proofs for the existence of God we will consider next. Aquinas was decidedly influenced by the views of Dionysius and incorporated them to a large extent into his own philosophy. The insistence of Dionysius on the fact that we can never attain to positive knowledge of the divine nature is likely to have influenced Aquinas in his view that the existence of a supreme perfection must be established indirectly in terms of efficient causation and not by a dialectic of the mind or a direct analysis of our comparative judgments.
Anselm The theological and philosophical reflections of the eleventh-century monk Anselm influenced the thought of Aquinas both negatively and positively. He explicitly reacted against the view expressed by Anselm in his work Prosologion, that we can argue directly to the existence of God from the definition of him as the being than which no greater can be conceived.30 The reason why Aquinas rejects this proof is that it involves an illicit transition from the logical to the real order.31 However, in the early chapters of a previous work, the Monologion, Anselm offers three proofs similar in outline to that of the fourth way.32 They argue not from the definition of God but from the degrees of perfection we observe in the world. The starting point of the first of these proofs is our awareness of many kinds of good things. Assuming that their goodness is caused, Anselm asks whether each good thing has its own particular cause or whether there is one single supreme cause of all goodness. It is evident, he maintains, that a perfection can be considered in terms of more and less only because there exists a single principle of this
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perfection. For example, we could not compare things as more and less just unless we were somehow aware of an absolute justice in which all just things participate. Therefore, since we compare things as more and less good, there must be a subsistent goodness in virtue of which all other things are good. This “argument” can scarcely be called compelling, since it contains no clear statement or analysis of the principle of causation, which it assumes and on which it depends. Further, its validity would seem to depend on some kind of positive awareness of the supreme perfection, and this, as we have previously noted, is highly problematic. The influence of Augustine and of Neoplatonism generally is evident throughout the argument.33 The second proof argues from the perfection of being found in all things.34 Since every particular being has a cause, the question arises whether there are many causes of being or whether all beings derive from one single cause. If there are many causes, either they lead back to one single cause, or they exist by themselves, or they cause each other. If they lead back to one cause, it is this which is the cause of all things. If they exist by themselves, they have in common this nature of existing by themselves. They can, therefore, still be said to exist in virtue of a single cause, namely, their common nature. The third possibility, which states that the many causes cause each other, is seen upon analysis to be contradictory. For how could a thing exist in virtue of that to which it gives being? The only acceptable conclusion, therefore, is that every being exists in virtue of a single cause and that this cause alone exists by itself. Now, whatever exists in virtue of another is less perfect than that which exists by itself. There exists, therefore, something which is the greatest and most perfect of all beings. This proof, like the first, begs the principle of causation in assuming that all things which exist are caused. Further, it does not warrant the affirmation of an absolutely unique supreme being. According to the argument, the cause of all beings could be a supreme nature common to many individuals. Therefore, as it stands, the proof is not very convincing. The third proof of the Monologion is based on the degrees of perfection that are found in things.35 That things differ in degree of perfection is at once evident to everybody. For example, one could not be
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human and doubt that humans have greater perfection than horses, and that horses have greater perfection than trees. Given that natures are more and less perfect in being, one must admit either an infinite hierarchy of more and less perfect beings and therefore no most perfect being, or else a finite number of beings and consequently a supreme degree of being. Now that there should be an infinite hierarchy of beings is unthinkable. Therefore, there exists a nature which is more perfect than all others. It may be, however, that there are several supreme natures of equal perfection. But these could be equal only in virtue of what they have in common. If what they have in common is their essence, then, having a common essence, they are not several natures but one and the same nature. If, however, that in virtue of which they are equally perfect is something other than their essence, it is a nature distinct from them and more perfect than them. It is more perfect than them because that which causes something to be perfect is more perfect than that which it makes perfect. So, whatever way we consider the matter, we realize that there must be one supremely perfect nature. That this supremely perfect nature must exist by itself and that everything else exists in virtue of it is evidently true. For it merely states the converse of the truth mentioned earlier, namely, that what exists by itself and causes the perfection of everything else is the supreme perfection. There exists therefore something supremely perfect which contains the principle of its own being and is the cause of all other degrees of perfection. Although this proof is more elaborate than the first two it is, nevertheless, defective. As in the case of the second proof, it does not establish the existence of an absolutely unique supreme being, only the existence of a supreme kind of being. It is questionable whether it establishes even this, for it assumes that an infinite hierarchy of beings is impossible and unthinkable. In a proof for the existence of God from degrees of perfection, an infinite hierarchy of beings should not be rejected simply because it seems unthinkable; it should be rejected only because it can be shown not to adequately account for these degrees of perfection.
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Another point may be noted. The proof mentions that the supremely perfect being must be the uncaused cause of the perfection of all other beings because the converse holds true, namely, that the uncaused cause of the perfection of all other beings must be the supremely perfect being.36 It is interesting that in the fourth way Aquinas similarly inverts a comparable quotation from Aristotle. Aristotle had remarked that the cause of a perfection in all others is the supreme instance of that perfection. Aquinas, however, quotes him as saying that the supreme instance of a perfection is the cause of it in all other instances. It may be that reflection on Anselm’s proof inspired Aquinas to maintain the validity of this inversion when establishing the existence of a supreme being by proving that limited beings of varying degrees of perfection must be caused. When the three proofs I have outlined are compared with the fourth way of Aquinas, it can be seen that the thought of Anselm, with which he was familiar, is a significant source of the proof. Anselm’s writings provide an important link between the philosophy of Au gustine and that of Aquinas. Further, although his three proofs do not discuss the principle of causation in a detailed way, they attach great importance to it. In this respect Anselm is more likely to have influenced the thought of Aquinas than other Neoplatonic writers. Also, his arguments have a certain logical structure and formal articulation which bear a closer resemblance to the text of the fourth way than is to be found in previous reflection upon the experience of degrees of perfection. Nevertheless, Anselm’s thought was essentially in the Neoplatonic tradition, and his proofs for the existence of God involve several unexamined assumptions. Although they lay great emphasis on the principle of efficient causation, they do not comment upon or analyze this principle but rather take its universal validity for granted. Also at least one of the arguments seems to involve the typically Platonic doctrine that our comparative judgments somehow presuppose positive awareness of a supreme perfection. Therefore, it would be difficult to endorse the assertion that the proofs of the Monologion are identical with those of the fourth way.37 It would seem more accurate to say that An-
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selm provides the version of Platonic thought on degrees of perfection which can be most easily integrated into the deeper creationist metaphysics of Aquinas.
Arabic and Jewish Influences Mention must also be made of Arabic and Jewish philosophers who influenced the thought of Aquinas on issues of natural theology. The first to be noted is Avicenna (980–1037), whose writings were influential in introducing Christian writers to the philosophy of Aristotle.38 Avicenna developed a proof for the existence of God as the first efficient cause of all finite beings. He based the proof on the distinction between essence and existence, and on his classification of being into necessary, possible, and impossible. Accepting the view that the world and everything in it belong to the category of possible being, he shows that there must exist a necessary being as the cause of all possible being. He also shows that where a perfection such as existence is found diversified in many subjects, as is obviously the case, a supremely perfect instance of this perfection must be affirmed as the requisite cause of this diversity. Aquinas in two early works, where he proposes arguments similar to that of the fourth way, refers approvingly to Avicenna in this context.39 However, although the philosophy of Avicenna is centrally concerned with the perfection of existence, a distinct tension is evident in his thought. Decidedly influenced by Neoplatonism, he proposes an account of reality, typical of Plotinus and al-Farabi, according to which a hierarchical universe necessarily emanates from God. The major conflict in his thought is that although he speaks of God as the omnipotent creator of all finite existence, he also maintains that “every created thing is preceded by matter.” Thus he insists that, although God is the cause of existence, he can effect existence only in what is somehow possible. Because he equates the realm of possibility with prime matter, Avicenna is forced to affirm prime matter as a co- principle of reality. As one writer remarks: “Hence for Avicenna as for
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Plato and Aristotle, God’s act of creation meant the giving of form to pre-existent matter. He was an artificer rather than a creator ex nihilo, a conception for which the religious minded never forgave him.”40 Avicenna directed attention to the significance of the act of existence in questions of natural theology and in this respect can be called an important source of the fourth way. However, he fell short of elaborating a satisfactory philosophy of existence because he failed to deepen and transform the Platonic and Aristotelian principles on which he based his system of philosophy. The other great Arabic philosopher, Averroes (1126–1198), sometimes referred to simply as the Commentator, must also be mentioned as influencing the formulation of the fourth way. We saw earlier that Aquinas derived from Aristotle a doctrine of measure according to which the most perfect member of a class can render intelligible the hierarchically ordered perfection of other members of the class. However, Aristotle did not extend his doctrine to include the notion that the most perfect being accounts for the degrees of being which we note in the world. Averroes, commenting on Aristotle’s doctrine, took this step and asserted that God, the most perfect being, is the principle which renders intelligible all other degrees of being.41 Aquinas incorporated this advance of Averroes into his own doctrine. It must be remembered, however, that when Aquinas speaks of God as the measure of degrees of being he does not use it in the Aristotelian sense according to which God would be the principle through which we come to know degrees of being. He uses it rather in the loose sense according to which God is a measure because he is the ontological principle which can render degrees of being ultimately and metaphysically intelligible.42 Averroes also influenced the formulation of the fourth way in that it was most probably a translated Arabic edition of the Metaphysics, with Averroes’ commentary appended, to which Aquinas referred when writing the text of the proof. That this is so can be ascertained by reviewing the various editions he might have used.43 This is an important point because it partly explains and justifies a feature of the text of the fourth way which we observed when considering the proofs of St. Anselm. We noted above that Aquinas inverts a quotation from Aristotle
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concerning the causality of the supreme member of a class. According to Aristotle, “A thing has a quality in a higher degree than other things if in virtue of it the similar quality belongs to the other things (e.g. fire is the hottest of things, for it is the cause of the heat of all other things).”44 In his proof, however, Aquinas inverts this principle and quotes Aristotle to the effect that the supreme member of a class is the cause of the other members.45 All the medieval editions of the Metaphysics, save the translated Arabic edition, state the principle in the same sense as Aristotle. The Arabic edition and also the commentary of Averroes render the principle as we find it expressed by Aquinas. The fact that the Arabic edition and the commentary translate Aristotle in this manner indicates that Aquinas did not quote him in a casual and unprecedented manner. Finally, to complete our outline of the philosophical background to the argument of the fourth way, mention must be made of a Jewish philosopher, Rabbi Moses. Rabbi Moses—or Maimonides—(1135– 1204) is a significant source of the proof, for he reintroduced in extreme terms the view of Pseudo-Dionysius that the perfections which we predicate of creatures cannot be predicated of God. Pseudo- Dionysius had admitted that such perfections were somehow predicable of God, though in an infinitely superior and altogether incomprehensible sense. Rabbi Moses, however, insisted that a perfection can be predicated of both creatures and God only in a purely equivocal sense. Aquinas was well aware of the objections that Rabbi Moses proposed on this topic. He realized that they were objections which would have to be resolved if he wished to maintain the validity of his argument in which God is identified as the supreme expression of the various degrees of perfections which we observe in creatures. The contention of Rabbi Moses would have impressed upon him the importance of developing an adequate theory of analogical predication that could support the argument of the fourth way, involving the claim that the transcendental perfections which we note in creatures are properly, indeed most properly, predicable of God. Otherwise the argument could be accused of sophistry. Aquinas thus observes:
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But some claim otherwise, that nothing can be predicated of both God and creature by analogy but only by sheer equivocation. And this is the view of Rabbi Moses as is clear from his writings. . . . But this opinion is false . . . for since all our knowledge of God is derived from creatures, if there is merely nominal commonality of predication we could know nothing of God except empty terminology signifying nothing real. Further, it would follow that all the proofs for God given by philosophers are sophistries; for example, if it were claimed that whatever is in potency is rendered actual by something actual and from this it were concluded that God is actual being since all things are brought into being by him—one would be involved in a fallacy of equivocation, and similarly with all other proofs.46
— In this essay on philosophical sources of Aquinas’ “Fourth Way,” we have seen how Plato raised the issue of how our knowledge of various degrees of a perfection relates to knowledge of the existence of a supreme expression of that perfection. We noted also how Aristotle suggested certain principles concerning the causality of the supreme instance of a perfection vis-à-vis its lesser expressions. We saw how St Augustine linked Platonic speculation on degrees of perfection to the question of the existence of God. Further, we noted how Plotinus, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Rabbi Moses questioned the possibility of degrees of finite perfection providing any knowledge concerning the divine perfection. In describing the proofs for the existence of God proposed by St. Anselm in the Monologion, we observed that great emphasis is laid upon the principle of efficient causation. However, the principle tends to be assumed, rather than argued, and is incorporated into the broader Platonic context of his thought. Nevertheless, his proofs do indicate the influence of Aristotelian logic and are more formal in character than was typical of Neoplatonic philosophy.47 They bear a closer resemblance to the kind of reasoning formulated in Aquinas’ fourth way.
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We also indicated briefly the influence of Arabic thought, such as the bearing of Averroes’ text on that of the proof, and the particular, if somewhat ambiguous, emphasis which Avicenna placed upon the significance of the act of existence. Aquinas, by formulating a deeper metaphysical understanding of the perfection of existence, in which he corrects Plato by Aristotle in a new philosophical synthesis, is able to develop an argument for the existence of God as the creator—rather than the artificer—of the analogical diversity of being. As Fernand Van Steenberghen remarked: “St Thomas unifies Platonism and Aristotelianism in a higher synthesis by taking the original step of transforming the doctrine of participation. At the level of metaphysical causality, Platonic participation is expressed by St Thomas’ doctrine of the real composition of esse and essentia in the finite being, and by the total dependence of the finite being on the creative influence of Infinite Being.”48
Notes This essay, in memory of my dear late colleague Gerry Hanratty, is based upon unpublished research undertaken some years ago. It aims to identify philosophical sources of Aquinas’ much disputed “Quarta Via.” It thereby seeks to shed some light on what influenced the formulation of the proof. But it does not provide an evaluation of the proof. This I have tried to do in chapter 6 of The Sense of Creation: Experience and the God Beyond. 1. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1.2.3, my translation. 2. See Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas (London: Gollancz, 1957), pp. 70–74. 3. See Arthur Little, The Platonic Heritage of Thomism (Dublin: Golden Eagle Books, 1950), p. 73. 4. Aquinas, De Potentia 3.5: “Et ista videtur ratio Platonis, qui voluit, quod ante omnem multitudinem esset aliqua unitas non solum in numeris, sed etiam in rerum naturis.” 5. See Patrick Masterson, The Sense of Creation: Experience and the God Beyond (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 84–106. 6. Plato, Phaedo 100b–d, trans. G. M. A. Grube, in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), p. 86.
220 Patrick Masterson 7. Plato, Symposium 211c, trans. Michael Joyce, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), pp. 562–63. This quotation concludes and summarizes the lengthy description of the dialectic by which one may come to an intuitive knowledge of the subsistent beauty which is the source of all lesser beauty. 8. Plato, Republic 7.517b, trans. Benjamin Jowett, in The Dialogues of Plato (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), vol. 2, p. 379, slightly modified. 9. Plato, Timaeus 28c–29a, trans. Benjamin Jowett, in The Dialogues of Plato (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), vol. 3, p. 716. 10. See Fernand Van Steenberghen, Aristotle in the West (Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1955), p. 64: “St Thomas would have had direct knowledge of only the Phaedo, the Meno, and a fragment of the Timaeus.” For an exhaustive account of the Platonist influences on Aquinas, see Wayne J. Hankey’s excellent and comprehensive “Aquinas and the Platonists,” in The Platonic Tradition in the Middle Ages: A Doxographic Approach, ed. Stephen Gersh and Maarten J. F. M. Hoenen (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2002), pp. 279–324. See also Fran O’Rourke, “Aquinas and Platonism,” in Contemplating Aquinas, ed. Fergus Kerr (London: SCM Press, 2003), pp. 247–79. 11. Joseph Maréchal’s work Le point de départ de la métaphysique, bk. 5 (Louvain: Museum Lessianum, 1926), is the acknowledged inspiration of various such interpretations of the proof which argue from an analysis of our existential judgments. 12. Little, Platonic Heritage, p. 70. The same claim is made by Gilson, Christian Philosophy, p. 453. 13. Aristotle, De Philosophia, frag. 16, trans. Jonathan Barnes and Gavin Lawrence, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes (1984; repr., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), vol. 2, p. 2392. 14. See Aristotle, De Caelo 270a13–279b3, trans. J. L. Stocks, in Barnes, Complete Works, vol. 1, pp. 450–63. 15. Aristotle, De Caelo 279a30–279b1, trans. Stocks, in Barnes, Complete Works, vol. 1, p. 463, modified. 16. The proof was certainly formulated before 1270, and, according to Eschmann’s chronology, Aquinas was unacquainted with the commentary of Simplicius before 1271. See Gilson, Christian Philosophy, p. 402. 17. Aristotle, Metaphysics (Met.) 2.993b23–31, trans. W. D. Ross, in Barnes, Complete Works, vol. 2, p. 1570.
Philosophical Sources of Aquinas’ Quarta Via 221 18. Aristotle, Met. 4.4.1008b32–1009a2: “There is a more and a less in the nature of things; for we should not say that two and three are equally even, nor is he who thinks four things are five equally wrong with him who thinks they are a thousand. If then they are not equally wrong, obviously one is less wrong and therefore more right. If then that which has more of any quality is nearer to it, there must be some truth to which the more true is nearer” (trans. Ross, vol. 2, p. 1592). Aquinas refers to this passage in Contra Gentiles 1.13, where he gives a proof very similar to that of the fourth way. 19. Aristotle, Met. 10.1.1052b20–24, 33–35, trans. Ross, vol. 2, p. 1663. 20. Plotinus, Enneads 6.9.10, trans. A. H. Armstrong (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 341 modified. 21. Aquinas, De Potentia 3.5. 22. See Augustine, De Civitate Dei 8.6. 23. Augustine, Confessions 7.17, trans. F. Sheed (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006), p. 133. 24. See Augustine, De Libero Arbitrio 2.2–12. 25. Augustine, De Trinitate 8, ch. 3: “Bonum hoc et bonum illud. Tolle hoc et illud, et vide ipsum bonum si potes; ita Deum videbis, non alio bono bonum, sed bonum omnis boni. Neque enim in his omnibus bonis, vel quae commemoravi, vel quae alia cernuntur sive cogitantur, diceremus aliud alio melius cum vere iudicamus, nisi esset nobis impressa notio ipsius boni secundum quod et probaremus aliquid et aliud alii praeponeremus.” See also Augustine, Confessions, 12.25. 26. Etienne Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (London: Sheed and Ward, 1955), p. 85. For an excellent account of the influence of Pseudo-Dionysius on the thought of Aquinas, see Fran O’Rourke, PseudoDionysius and the Metaphysics of Aquinas (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005). 27. See Gilson, History, p. 84: “Let us note, however, that there is in Denis a marked tendency to subordinate the divine Ideas to God.” 28. Pseudo-Dionysius, On the Divine Names 7.3.869C–872A, in The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (London: SPCK, 1987), p. 108. 29. Boethius, De Consolatione Philosophiae 3, Prosa 10, trans. S. J. Tester, The Consolation of Philosophy, Loeb ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 275. 30. See Anselm, Prosologion, chs. 2–3. The influence of Augustine on the formulation of this famous “Ontological Argument” is evident from a comparison of the text with De Libero Arbitrio, bk. 2.
222 Patrick Masterson 31. See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1.2.1 ad 2. 32. See Anselm, Monologion, chs. 1–4. 33. See Mary Annice Donovan, “The Henological Argument for the Existence of God in the Works of Saint Thomas Aquinas” (PhD diss., University of Notre Dame, 1946), p. 28: “St Anselm was greatly influenced in his philosophy by the works of St Augustine and Plotinian philosophy as interpreted by Boethius and Pseudo-Dionysius.” 34. See Anselm, Monologion, ch. 3. 35. Ibid., ch. 4. 36. Ibid., ch. 4: “Est igitur quaedam natura, quae est summum omnium quae sunt. Hoc autem esse non potest, nisi ipsa sit per se id quod est, et cuncta quae sunt, sint per ipsam id quod sunt. Nam cum paulo ante ratio docuerit id quod per se est et per quod alia cuncta sunt, esse summum omnium existentium: aut e converso id quod est summum, est per se et cuncta alia per illud.” 37. See A. Van Weddingen, Essai critique sur la philosophie de S. Anselme de Cantorbéry (Brussels: Hayez, 1875), p. 261: “L’identité de l’argumentation de S. Thomas avec celle d’Anselme est evidente.” 38. Van Steenberghen, Aristotle in the West, p. 18: “Avicenna bequeathed to the Christian West an encyclopaedic work which is a vast paraphrase of the writings of Aristotle completed by a Neoplatonic interpretation of creative causality.” 39. Aquinas, De Potentia 3.5: “Unde oportet quod ab uno illo ente omnia alia sint, quaecumque non sunt suum esse, sed habent esse per modum participationis. Haec est ratio Avicennae.” See also In II Sententiarum, dis. 1, q. 1, art. 1. 40. Soheil Muhsin Afnan, Avicenna: His Life and Works (London: Allen and Unwin, 1958), p. 130. 41. See Gaston Isaye, La théorie de la mesure et l’existence d’un maximum selon saint Thomas (Paris: Beauchesne, 1940), pp. 54–56. 42. Aquinas, De Veritate 23.7: “Et per hunc modum ipse Deus est mensura omnium entium, ut ex verbis Commentatoris ibidem haberi potest. Tantum enim unumquodque habet de esse, quantum ei per similitudinem appropinquat; secundum vero quod ei dissimile invenitur, ad non esse accedit. Et sic de omnibus quae in Deo et creaturis pariter inveniuntur, dici oportet.” 43. The manner in which Aristotle is quoted in the text of the fourth way bears a far closer resemblance to the text of the translation from the Arabic than to the Metaphysica Vetustissima, Metaphysica Vetus, Metaphysica Media, or
Philosophical Sources of Aquinas’ Quarta Via 223 Metaphysica Nova translations. This point is conclusively established by V. De Couesnongle in “La causalité du maximum: Pourquoi Saint Thomas a-t-il mal cité Aristote?,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 38 (1954): 658–80. 44. Aristotle, Met. 2.1.993b24–26, trans. Ross, vol. 2, p. 1570. 45. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1.2.3: “Quod autem dicitur maxime tale in aliquot genere, est causa omnium quae sunt illius generis; sicut ignis qui est maxime calidus, est causa omnium calidorum ut in eodem libro dicitur.” 46. Aquinas, De Potentia 7.7, my translation. 47. See Gilson, History, p. 363: “St Anselm of Canterbury, who expressly affirmed that he had said nothing that could not be found in the writings of Augustine, used a dialectical mode of exposition that little resembled the free and supple digressions so frequent in the works of his master.” 48. Van Steenberghen, Aristotle in the West, p. 185.
n i n e
Philosophy and Its Value Reflections on Fides et Ratio
Tim Lynch
In this essay I propose to first outline the nature of philosophy as emerging from the human desire to know, and from its early expression as the native wisdom or folk philosophy present to some degree in every developing mind. I will then comment on its contribution to three areas of life: ethics and human behavior, the special sciences, and theology. I thereby wish to highlight some of the salient points in the encyclical Fides et Ratio, the most significant statement of John Paul II on the value of philosophy.
The Desire to Know Given the satisfaction of certain basic or elemental needs, the human being emerges into consciousness as a desire to know, as a question addressed to all that is. The historical legacy of all literate societies witnesses powerfully to this human desire for meaning and truth.1 224
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Aristotle already drew it to our attention at the beginning of the work we now call his Metaphysics: “All human beings by nature desire to know.”2 This fundamental desire finds expression in the process of asking questions. Indeed, all human living, embracing all knowing, deciding, and doing, springs from questioning. Inquiry stands at the root of all human endeavor in every area. Moreover, the process of questioning carries human beings beyond what is merely given to the senses, for through attentive inquiry we may come to a knowledge of the intelligible structures that underpin the flux of experience. The transformations of nature are not totally random; they display certain regularities, the understanding of which greatly facilitates the human struggle to survive and indeed to develop more fruitful procedures and techniques. The early efforts of hunter-gatherer societies are transformed over time into more settled and culturally rich civilizations based on agriculture. And then, with the emergence of cities, space and time become available for what Louis de Raeymaeker once referred to as a more “impartial intellectual life.”3
Folk Philosophy Equipped, then, with a desire to know, human beings commonly seek to understand the environment around them as best they can, and also indeed to understand themselves. Their questioning moves beyond a concern with the immediate and pragmatic needs of survival to a concern with the knowable order of reality for its own sake.4 Moreover, the desire to know is not restricted to this immediately knowable mundane realm.5 It gives rise to questions that transcend altogether the immanent world of experience and that reach out beyond what is contingent to the ultimate grounding of all things. The human being is driven to seek “the ultimate truth of existence.”6 As the papal encyclical Fides et Ratio intimates, the work of ancient historians provides us with a deal of evidence favoring the belief that these most fundamental human questions arose at around the same
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time in many different parts of the world and in many different cultures.7 This suggestion calls to mind Karl Jaspers’ notion of the axial period, the time, as Jaspers himself put it, “from Homer to Archimedes, the time of the great Old Testament prophets and of Zarathustra, the time of the Upanishads and of Buddha, the time from the Songs of Shiking to Lao-tse, Confucius and Tschuang-tse.”8 It was, in Jaspers’ view, a kind of watershed of history in which the processes of discovery accelerated in a remarkable manner across many cultures. Some of the fundamental questions that seem to have first appeared around this time are formulated in the encyclical as follows: “Who am I? Where have I come from and where am I going? Why is there evil? What is there after this life?”9 These are the questions which, as Georges Cottier suggests, constitute the most basic issues that “sooner or later everyone asks himself in one way or another.”10 No one can entirely avoid such inquiry, for it addresses the age-old questions concerning the meaning of life and the related issue of what, if anything, happens after death (if such a notion makes sense). These puzzles emerge in our living whether we wish it or not. It is in this sense that the encyclical can suggest that “the human being is by nature a philosopher.”11 Everyone must face these ultimate questions, and indeed, no one can totally avoid coming up with some plausible responses to them.12 The set of understandings and answers attained from this quest for meaning constitute for each human community an important cultural resource in the form of a native wisdom.13 It is this kind of wisdom that Maurice Gilbert has in mind when he writes of a knowledge “based on observation, developed by reflection, [and] expressed in vivid formulae . . . that are easy to remember and widely known among the people.”14 Such a native wisdom underpins and guides the behavior of individuals and groups within society. As the encyclical puts it, the set of answers “given to these questions decides the direction which people seek to give to their lives.”15 It may, indeed, be said that the individuals and groups composing any society are shaped and formed by the traditions and stories that carry this cultural treasure of the community. “In the light of this they interpret their own life’s course and regulate their behaviour.”16
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Such native wisdom might well be described as folk philosophy. This term is suggested by analogy with the now well-established use of the phrase folk psychology by the Churchlands and their followers.17 Our notion of folk philosophy, however, does not imply any of the pejorative significance that the Churchlands attribute to their conception of folk psychology. With regard to the former, it may be noticed that the late pope makes use of a seemingly comparable term, namely implicit philosophy. However, he is referring to “a core of philosophical insight within the history of thought as a whole.”18 He specifies this core as embracing “the principles of non-contradiction, finality and causality,” as well as a certain conception of the human person as free and open to the transcendent, and as also involving “certain fundamental moral norms which are shared by all.”19 This understanding of implicit philosophy is broader than what I refer to as folk philosophy insofar as the former term connotes a set of fundamental stances which are operative in all human thought, whether folk or formal, as I have defined them. On the other hand, the encyclical’s notion of implicit philosophy is narrower than what is intended here by folk philosophy, because implicit philosophy in the pope’s sense operates within the domain of folk philosophy in the sense proposed here, constituting a set of basic stances which guide that domain from within.20 For these reasons, then, the terms formal and folk philosophy—rather than implicit and explicit philosophy—seem more appropriate to express the distinction I have in mind.
Formal Philosophy As society and culture develop, however, the issues addressed in the folk philosophy of a community may become the object of more explicit attention and more considered inquiry. As far as Western civilization is concerned, this first occurred in ancient Greece. Under the influence of the Socratic witness to the richness and value of the examined life, Plato and Aristotle in particular developed philosophy in a more formal and explicit manner.21 Their hugely significant achievement was further enhanced by the efforts of thinkers throughout the
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whole of the medieval period, and especially by Augustine and Aquinas. In the compositions of the classical Greek thinkers and also of their Christian successors, there was a new and deliberate consideration given to the evidence for prospective judgments and to the logical grounds for conclusions reached. Through all this work, including that of many others too numerous to mention, philosophy was raised to the status of “an autonomous enterprise, obeying its own rules and employing the powers of reason alone.”22 Philosophy in its full formal sense had emerged, aiming at logical coherence and organic unity, and oriented toward the articulation of a systematic body of knowledge, both theoretical and practical. Cottier makes the claim that “fully developed philosophy,” that is, formal philosophy, philosophy that makes use of “highly technical concepts,” presupposes, as he writes, the “more basic level,” the level that is termed folk philosophy.23 This suggestion must however be treated with some caution, for it can be accepted only in a qualified sense. His claim that technical or formal philosophy presupposes the informal philosophy of the community is true in what might be termed a genetic sense. In other words, formal philosophy does seem to have its origin, from a psychological point of view, in the more untutored and spontaneous thinking of folk philosophy. Nevertheless, from the viewpoint of logic and system, Cottier’s claim is not persuasive. Philosophy in the strict and formal sense must be able to justify its every assertion within its own more exacting terms. It cannot absorb judgments from the world of ordinary commonsense living without subjecting them to careful critical scrutiny and without assessing their truth by its own more rigorous standards. It may be appropriate to note here, in passing, that analogous points are made by Wilfrid Sellars with respect to the relationship between commonsense knowing and the special sciences. As he puts it, the scientific account of things may be “methodologically dependent on the world of sophisticated common sense,” but it does not rely “in a substantive sense” on ordinary prescientific understanding.24 Adopting Sellars’ terminology for the present context, it may be conceded that formal philosophy depends methodologically upon its informal origins, but, pace Cottier, it must be pointed out that it is not substantively dependent on these sources.
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To reject any logical or systematic dependence of formal philosophy upon its informal predecessor is not, of course, to claim that philosophy in its formal sense must begin with a kind of universal methodic doubt such as Descartes seems to have envisaged. The point is rather that while formal philosophy does have its origin in the informal knowledge that we have of a surrounding community and world in which we live and move and have our being—and in that sense always emerges in medias res—it is reflective and critical in such a manner that no element of that antecedent inheritance is immune from critical inquiry. As Fides et Ratio itself points out: “Philosophy must obey its own rules and be based upon its own principles.”25 Approaching this point from another angle, it may be said that philosophy has the task of uncovering the ultimate grounds for the informal beliefs and values held by a community. In this connection a brief illustrative remark on the significance of myth may not be out of place. The complex of symbols, legends, parables, and rituals that are partially constitutive of myth is not something to be merely dismissed by the philosopher. As writers such as Mircea Eliade and Eric Voegelin have amply shown, mythologies and early symbol systems represent, however compactly and inadequately, the ultimate objective of the desire to know that unity of person, society, and world that is embraced in some way under or within the notion of being.26 As Thomas McPartland points out in a recent book: “Myth does not cease to have a legitimate truth function after the advent of philosophy . . . for it is a representation of the paradoxical known unknown. Thus it is imperative for scholars to ascertain the exact status of myth and symbolic consciousness.”27 It may be suggested, then, that the deliverances of the mythopoetic mind have import for the work of the philosopher, and especially perhaps for that of the metaphysician. However, any adequate exploration of the precise cognitive significance of myth clearly exceeds the scope of the present paper. It remains clear, nevertheless, that the philosopher has the task of examining this question and indeed, as indicated already, the responsibility and privilege of investigating the grounds for all general beliefs and values held by the community. Thus philosophy is intrinsically dialectical. It involves, on the one hand, a dialogue between the informal
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ideas and opinions that are brought by the philosopher as a member of the community to his or her work and, on the other, the processes of clarification, interrogation, and criticism that constitute that work, as well as the more formal propositions, evidence, and arguments that emerge from the endeavor. For this reason, one cannot but have misgivings and reservations with regard to the views of Russell and Heidegger when they seem to suggest, from their rather disparate and diverging standpoints, that Christian believers cannot be authentic philosophers.28 The suggestion, at least in Russell’s case—that of Heidegger is perhaps more complex—seems to be based upon what appears to be an illusory contrast between the Christian thinker, who is “in thrall to religious beliefs,” and the purely rational philosopher, who “starts with an unadorned mind, at square one, and follows the argument whither it goeth, obedient only to the exigencies of reason.”29 As will be obvious to readers persuaded by our remarks in the preceding section, the idea of “a philosopher who has no antecedent convictions and no cultural ambience within which he does his professional work” is an idea that can never be instantiated.30 In this light it seems plausible to suggest, as Bernard Lonergan does, that a religious vision (or indeed a mythological account) may play an extrinsic role in helping the philosophical neophyte in bringing his or her world as an inquiring, knowing, and caring subject into harmony with the universe of being.31 It remains the case, however, as Ralph McInerny reminds us, that a philosophic position must be grounded in criteria that are publicly articulated, criteria moreover that are intrinsically independent of the informal and antecedent stances and motivations that lead the philosopher to take up his or her formal quest in the first place.32 Thus one must insist that whether philosophers are believers or unbelievers, they must, qua philosophers, bring their informal views and opinions to the court of philosophic inquiry and reflection. In this respect, the situation of the unbeliever is in no way superior to that of the believer, nor is the stance of the believer superior to that of the unbeliever. Both must face the dialectical task. Nevertheless, one is willing to concede that the whole problematic of Christian philosophy is an extremely complex one, and one that presents dilemmas and difficulties that call for fuller and more elaborate discussion than is possible here.
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Returning to our topic of philosophy in its strict and formal sense, I have been suggesting that it aims at an ultimate ideal of systematic unity. This does not imply, of course, that philosophy is to be understood as an abstract and merely objectivistic discipline. Philosophy is insistently concrete: it inquires into the nature of the sensible things around us and, equally importantly, into the nature of ourselves as the beings who seek the truth about such things.33 It aims at a unified and systematic understanding of all these matters. Sellars expresses this universal orientation of philosophy in his own somewhat quirky manner: “The aim of philosophy . . . is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term. Under ‘things in the broadest possible sense’ I include such radically different items as not only ‘cabbages and kings,’ but numbers and duties, possibilities and finger snaps, aesthetic experience and death. To achieve success in philosophy would be, to use a contemporary turn of phrase, to ‘know one’s way around’ with respect to all these things. . . . It is the ‘eye on the whole’ which distinguishes the philosophical enterprise.”34 It should perhaps be noted in parentheses that, despite the remarks just quoted, Sellars, although rejecting the epistemological naturalism associated with Quine, defends in his work a metaphysical naturalism according to which everything that exists lies within the causal network of nature.35 Indeed, empirical science seems to provide for Sellars the ultimate criterion in ontological matters. His position, accordingly, differs significantly from the stance underpinning the present essay, namely that the whole envisaged by philosophy is not in any way restricted. Thus, as was hinted above and as will emerge below, human openness to the transcendent, for example, cannot in principle be excluded from philosophy. The use just now of the perhaps slightly contentious phrase “merely objectivistic,” as well as the emphasis placed upon self- knowledge, is not intended to disclaim the significance of philosophy’s orientation to objective truth. The point is simply to underline the correlative and equal importance of knowledge of the subject who is engaged in the pursuit of philosophical understanding. Indeed, it is to be hoped that this knowledge of the subject will itself be objective knowledge of the subject. Augustine’s well-known definition of philosophy
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already brought out this emphasis upon self-knowledge as a part of the bipolar nature of philosophy as he understood it: “To philosophy pertains a twofold question: the first treats of the soul; the second of God. The first makes us know ourselves, the second, our origin.”36 At its source then, philosophy is the living of the examined life, the reflective life that seeks answers to the radical questions about all things, about personal existence and about being, and even, as Augustine suggests, about God.37 For philosophy, from its earliest beginnings, attempted to discover something of the originative source and cause of all things. Aristotle, for example, suggested that philosophy in its deepest sense is the discipline “that investigates the first principles and causes” of all things, and at its peak, he held, it will consider God, who “is thought to be among the causes of all things.”38 Aquinas commented on this passage as follows: “The name wisdom considers first principles and causes. . . . Moreover the science which considers first and universal causes must also be the one which considers the universal end of all things, which is the greatest good in the whole of nature [that is, God].”39 For both of these great thinkers, then, the tasks of philosophy include inquiry into the intelligible causes of things in the world, including the causes of the self; they also involve going beyond this to discover what can be known about the ultimate cause of all causes, the ultimate end of all ends, the One who is called God. The encyclical Fides et Ratio approaches this point as follows: “People seek an absolute which might give to all their searching a meaning and an answer— something ultimate, which might serve as the ground of all things. In other words, they seek a final explanation, a supreme value, which refers to nothing beyond itself and which puts an end to all questioning. Hypotheses may fascinate, but they do not satisfy. Whether we admit it or not, there comes for everyone the moment when personal existence must be anchored to a truth recognized as final, a truth which confers a certitude no longer open to doubt.”40 Nevertheless, the capacities of human beings are limited in various ways, and philosophers are of course aware of this. “The natural limitation of reason and the inconstancy of the heart often obscure and distort a person’s search. Truth can also drown in a welter of other
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concerns.”41 It is human to err. In this connection, Fides et Ratio draws its readers’ attention to “the temptation to identify one single stream with the whole of philosophy.”42 Indeed, one may go further and point out that even when the philosopher does manage to attain to a genuine system of thought, it cannot be that he or she comes into complete and articulated possession of the whole of truth. Reality always exceeds what we can come to understand, and no philosophical system can encompass the fullness of what is. Hence the encyclical suggests that philosophy must recognize “the primacy of philosophical enquiry, from which [every philosophical system] stems, and which it ought loyally to serve.”43 This remarkable assertion seems to imply that the fidelity of the philosopher must in the first place be given, not to any particular philosophical system, but rather to the questioning desire to know, from which all true philosophy springs. Furthermore, it may be suggested that the passages cited from Fides et Ratio bring to light an element of existence-in-tension as characteristic of the human condition, for while philosophers will be aware of human fallibility and human limitations, they must also “recognize the human being’s ceaselessly self-transcendent orientation towards the truth.”44 As the encyclical points out, the human being striving for authenticity will not “abandon the passion for ultimate truth, the eagerness to search for it or the audacity to forge new paths in the search.”45
The Importance of Philosophy In light of this broad account of the nature of philosophy, the significance and value of that discipline will now be explored by examining its contributions to three areas of life: ethics and human behavior, the special sciences, and faith and theology. It should be made clear, first of all, that the foundational commitment of the philosopher to the desire to know is not to be understood as implying the view of the eighteenth-century German dramatist Gotthold Lessing, according to whom the philosopher seeks truth only for the joy of the quest.46 Indeed, this attitude of Lessing is not
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uncommon today, resonating, as it does, with writers influenced by the postmodernist tendencies current in contemporary philosophy. It seems to find expression, for example, in a recently published introduction to philosophy: “We begin with the assertion that there are no right answers. . . . Of course it would be foolish to deny that there are some right answers, but the key to this subject is not to recognize them as such. From the moment you do, the search for truth is ended, and in this subject the process, the search, is more important than the product.”47 On this account an authentic philosopher must decline to accept any putative truth because to accept it is to bring the search for truth to an end, this end being construed as a negative form of closure. However, it is surely unintelligible and incoherent to engage in a quest for truth that is governed by the rubric that truth must not be accepted even if discovered. The value of the intellectual quest is as a means, not as an end. Moreover, it seems clear that the philosopher must accept the responsibility for judgment once the evidence is given! It is every bit as irrational and unreasonable to decline judgment when the evidence for it is given as it is to rush to judgment in the absence of such evidence.48 Finally, the acceptance of truth under such conditions does not, in any sense, constitute a negative outcome to the inquiring cognitional process; it is rather the completion and fulfillment of that process, not its abandonment. Thus, pace Lessing, the goal and purpose of philosophy is not merely the search for truth but also, and more significantly in a sense, the attainment and possession of truth insofar as that is humanly possible.49 Indeed, as Aristotle already suggested, philosophy culminates in a kind of theoretical contemplation that constitutes the noblest activity of the highest capacity of the human being.50 Such contemplation, at least as elaborated by the later tradition, is a matter not merely of knowing or possessing the truth but more of being possessed by the truth and of delighting in it.51 Accordingly, philosophy, in its highest reaches at any rate, that is, in its contemplation of the first and ultimate cause, is engaged in for its own sake and not as a means to some further end. This position has, of course, been much challenged. Francis Bacon is occasionally cited in this connection,52 though one suspects that there is not much historical or textual justification for regarding Bacon
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as an opponent of the speculative dimension of philosophy, even if he valued—as, indeed, who does not?—the practical applications of knowledge. The most influential opponent of the position sketched is surely Marx, who famously asserted in his Theses on Feuerbach: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”53 Philosophical knowledge, it would seem, was to be valued only to the extent that it led to the transformation of society. A not dissimilar view is also to be found among the American pragmatists. According to them, notably Peirce, James, and Dewey, the in tellect and reason were to be understood merely as instruments for gaining more and more effective control over the environment. The very truth of ideas was, to some extent at any rate, assessed merely in terms of the practical applicability of those ideas. To the extent that these utilitarian and pragmatic tendencies are pushed to the extreme of denying altogether the contemplative dimension of philosophy, they are surely unacceptable. As the encyclical puts it: “To men and women there falls the task of exploring truth with their reason, and in this their nobility consists.”54 Philosophy, Ethics, and Human Behavior It must be conceded, nevertheless, that part of the value and importance of philosophy lies in the contribution it can offer to other aspects of human endeavor. Preeminent among these, of course, is the way philosophy provides a background intellectual framework in terms of which the first principles of ethics and moral conduct can be grasped and articulated. Philosophy in its ethical role is concerned, not with the perfection of the works produced by human beings, but rather with the good and perfection of human agents themselves, and with the free use of their capacities for decision and action. In this mode, philosophy at its best can articulate general rules for the guidance of behavior, and also at times even rules of more particular applicability to concrete contexts.55 This is achieved, however, not in view of some particular goal of human devising, but rather in the light of the ultimate end of the human person. Hence it retains that focus on the whole which is characteristic of philosophy.56
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It is not to be imagined, nevertheless, that philosophy in its ethical mode is sufficient to cause the philosopher, let alone men and women in general, to act morally. The human being is an agent possessed of free will, even though this is a situated and incarnate freedom. Moreover, the complexity of concrete circumstances calls for the virtue of prudence, that virtue which “applies to particular cases the rules of moral science and reason.”57 Hence, it remains the case that disordered passion and weakness of will may lead even the most informed ethicist astray. If, then, knowledge of moral philosophy is not a sufficient condition for moral behavior, neither is it a necessary condition for such living. Not everyone is called upon to be a philosopher, let alone an ethicist. Yet all human beings must make decisions as to how to live their lives, and all must choose those actions which will lead either to their flourishing and fulfillment or to their decline and stagnation. To address these needs, all men and women are naturally equipped with a fundamental moral orientation that is manifest in the desire to know as it unfurls and extends itself in becoming the desire for the good.58 This provides them with the necessary basis for moral discernment and facilitates the direction of decision and action. All human beings are called to live morally. Accordingly, while philosophy in its ethical mode is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for moral living, part of its importance lies in the contribution it can make to the intellectual explication and defense of the ultimate bases of morality, as well as in the articulation of the general and sometimes the more particular rules of moral behavior. In a time of considerable moral confusion, this is a not insignificant task. Philosophy and the Special Sciences Another aspect of the value and importance of philosophy lies in the contribution it is able to offer to the special sciences. This should not be misunderstood. Philosophy cannot and should not dictate to physicists or chemists, for example, the judgments they make in their own
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fields, for, as Jacques Maritain puts it, “Every science is mistress in her own house.”59 It should be noted, of course, that the knowledge achieved by the special sciences does not provide us with what might be termed ultimate truth. Scientific theories, and even scientific laws—indeed, the very nature of what is to count as science—all are subject to revision as further evidence is uncovered, or new insights lead the community of scientists in a novel direction. It remains true, all the same, that each special science provides its practitioners and students with “the best available opinion at the given stage of scientific development.”60 Moreover, each science should be free to follow its own immanent rules of procedure and should not be encroached upon by arrogant or dogmatic interlopers from philosophy with an inadequate understanding of both the scientific discipline in question and the nature of philosophy itself. Thus every special science is in command of the competence and the methods to seek the attainment of that best available truth in its own sphere, and no other discipline has the capacity or authority to deny a finding appropriately established within that science. It belongs by definition to philosophy, nevertheless, especially in its epistemological role, to articulate, consider, and defend the first and most basic principles of all human knowing. The principles I have in mind include, of course, the fundamental principles of noncontradiction and of causality, which are significant as ultimate if implicit assumptions of the special sciences.61 As Andrew Beards points out, scientists presuppose such principles and do not attempt to justify them in any way, let alone prove them.62 Moreover, these most basic principles underpin the more proximate principles that more immediately ground the intellectual endeavor of particular special sciences. In other words, the principles operative in any special science will be more particular specifications or instantiations of the most basic principles already mentioned. In this light, it must be said that philosophy provides the ultimate defense and most basic justificatory ground for the cognitional operations and activities in all the special sciences. As Maritain has remarked: “Since the principles of philosophy . . . are the absolutely first principles of all human knowledge, the principles or
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postulates of all [the special] sciences are in a certain sense dependent on them.”63 Thus one contribution that philosophy bestows upon the special sciences is to provide them with the explicit articulation and defense of their ultimate cognitional foundations. While this is an important contribution from philosophy, it is not to be exaggerated. The most fundamental and basic principles of all human knowing are not created by philosophy or even derived from philosophy. Rather, they pertain to the natural endowments of the human being that have already been mentioned. They are naturally known, at least implicitly, by every practicing scientist—as indeed by every human being—independently of philosophy.64 Though operative, these principles are not necessarily consciously entertained by the scientist. “To be proficient in the sciences it is not necessary to be a philosopher or to base one’s work on a philosophy.”65 The contribution that philosophy makes to the special sciences is simply to render these innate endowments explicit and to defend them as true. It is, of course, a not insignificant contribution. As Maritain wrote: “Human knowledge would remain excessively imperfect and weak . . . if the postulates of the sciences were not explained, discussed and defended.”66 A further contribution to the special sciences that may fairly be attributed to philosophy lies in the fact that, on the basis of its universal viewpoint, it is able to determine and articulate the particular subject matter and unity of each special science as distinct from others. In other words, it can contribute significantly to the task of classifying the different special sciences. “Philosophy alone enables scientists to understand the position and bearings of their own special science in the sum-total of human knowledge.”67 Philosophy is thus able to govern or direct the special sciences in view of the “common transcendent goal” of full knowledge of the natural world, to which their particular ends are subordinate, and upon which they may be said asymptotically to converge.68 In this sense, a further element in the importance of philosophy lies in its role as exerting classificatory governance over the special sciences.
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Philosophy, Faith, and Theology Human beings are offered a source of knowledge that transcends what can be discovered through the use of natural reason. They may be raised up by faith to receive a share even in the very knowledge that is proper to the divine Being.69 Thus the religious life of Christian believers is founded upon what has been divinely revealed—upon a sharing in the divine understanding—to which they assent by a supernatural act of faith. Clearly, then, such believers make use, not only of natural capacities of knowing, but also of sources that “belong to an order beyond nature.”70 This raises the problem of the relationship between these two distinct realms of knowledge.71 It should be stressed immediately that philosophy must follow its own principles and cannot be deprived of its complete autonomy within its own sphere.72 This independence is immanently constitutive of philosophy as such and is profoundly rooted in the human intellect’s intrinsic orientation to being and truth.73 It is not, however, incompatible with religious faith. The philosophical enterprise is, indeed, “always open—at least implicitly—to the supernatural.”74 The notion of some Enlightenment thinkers that religious faith destroys philosophy is unacceptable because it is untrue.75 It remains the case, of course, that the contents of faith cannot be invoked to settle philosophical disputes or disagreements. Nevertheless, in the end truth is one, and revealed truths “can never debase the discoveries and legitimate autonomy of reason.”76 What, then, is the importance of philosophy with respect to faith, and to that elaboration of the faith called theology?77 In fact, its significance in their regard is massive. The encyclical itself “considers philosophy an indispensable help for a deeper understanding of faith and for communicating the truth of the Gospel to those who do not know it.”78 It goes further: the very acceptance of revelation necessarily presupposes knowledge of certain truths that pertain to philosophy.79 These truths, which are about human beings, the world, and God, are traditionally called the “preambles of faith,” and they constitute a “condition of possibility for faith itself.”80 We cannot reasonably
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believe that God is communicating with us if we do not already know that God exists, that this divine Being is an intelligent and free being who can communicate, that human beings are capable of deciphering the divine message, and so on.81 This should not be taken to mean that attendance at courses in philosophy is required before one may reasonably assent to what is revealed.82 The knowledge of the preambles of faith that is mediated in and through the informal philosophy sketched above obviously suffices. When it is a matter of that more intellectual and elaborate systema tization of faith and its content that is called theology, however, the examination and justification of the preambles of faith that are provided in formal philosophy in the strict sense will be necessary. Fides et Ratio makes this point explicitly: “As a work of critical reason in the light of faith, theology presupposes and requires in all its research a reason formed and educated to concept and argument.”83 The encyclical furthermore provides examples of issues within theology that simply could not be adequately explored without drawing upon philosophy. Without philosophy’s contribution, it would in fact be impossible, for example, to discuss the use of language to speak about God, the personal relations within the Trinity, God’s creative activity in the world, the relationship between God and man, or Christ’s identity as true God and true man. This is no less true of the different themes of moral theology, which employ concepts such as the moral law, conscience, freedom, personal responsibility, and guilt, which are in part defined by philosophical ethics.84 There is much more to say concerning the importance of philosophy with respect to faith and theology. For example, we have not been able to explore the contribution philosophy can make in helping to safeguard faith and theology from fideism on the one hand or from rationalism on the other;85 we could not examine philosophy’s contribution to the clarification of the notion of miracle, a notion that plays an important role in apologetics; we have had to pass over in silence philosophy’s role in the preaching and teaching of the faith;86 and, finally, it has not been possible to consider the important role of phi-
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losophy in the task of dialogue with those who are not Christian.87 Nevertheless I have argued, if in a somewhat succinct manner, that the reasonableness of the assent of the believer to what is revealed presupposes a knowledge of some truths explored in philosophy; and it has been claimed, furthermore, that theology as a formal discipline is ineluctably dependent on the understanding and conceptual clarity that are among the intrinsic goals of philosophy. — The hopefully uncontroversial suggestion of this essay has been that philosophy in the strict and formal sense may be characterized as the response of intellect and reason to the fundamental human desire to know, where that desire is followed in a methodical and deliberate manner to seek a fundamental explanation of the totality of what is. As an organized discipline, philosophy makes use of our natural capacities of knowing only and does not draw upon what has been revealed.88 In this light, the value and significance of the subject were sketched by outlining the contributions it makes to three areas of human life. First of all, in its ethical mode, it renders explicit and defends the ultimate bases of morality, as well as articulating general and more particular rules for moral behavior. Second, with regard to the special sciences, philosophy expresses, explores, and defends their ultimate operational and foundational postulates and also clarifies the nature and limits of each science in directing it toward the “common transcendent goal” of all the special sciences, namely, full knowledge of the natural world. Third and finally, philosophy contributes to religious belief insofar as it examines and defends those foundational truths termed by Aquinas the “preambles of faith”; and it assists theology by providing the intellectual tools necessary for the development of many of its most central theorems. These considerations show clearly the importance of philosophy in terms of how it may be utilized. Ultimately, however, it must be said that the significance of philosophy is intrinsic to itself and is not derived from its use for some external purpose. Indeed, the very notion of usefulness is a parasitic one in the sense that its explication requires
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some other in terms of which it may be characterized. Logically, utility demands some ultimate goal not itself useful for any further purpose. Philosophy is among those ultimate and so, in a sense, useless practices. As Aristotle pointed out, people engage in this subject “in order to escape from ignorance . . . in order to know, and not for any utilitarian end.”89 Living, as he did, in a society that partly depended upon slave labor, the same author provides us with a helpful analogy for the intrinsic value of philosophy, an analogy drawn from his own social context: “As the man is free, we say, who exists for himself and not for another, so we pursue [philosophy] as the only free science, for it alone exists for itself.”90 The essence of philosophy, then, is the contemplation of truth, and particularly of the highest truth. As Aquinas wrote from a rather different perspective: “Truth is a divine thing, a friend more excellent than any human friend.”91 Notes I acknowledge with gratitude the encouragement and assistance of Andrew Beards. My thanks are also due to Patrick Gorevan and Brendan Purcell for their very helpful comments on an earlier draft. 1. John Paul II, Faith and Reason (London: Catholic Truth Society, 1998), pp. 49–50 n. 28; hereafter cited as F&R, with paragraph or note number and page numbers in this edition. The original Latin text of F&R may be consulted in Restoring Faith in Reason, ed. Laurence Paul Hemming and Susan Frank Parsons (London: SCM Press, 2002). This volume also contains articles on various aspects of the encyclical. Other helpful sources include The Challenge of Truth: “Fides et Ratio,” ed. James McEvoy (Dublin: Veritas, 2002); The Two Wings of Catholic Thought: Essays on “Fides et Ratio,” ed. David R. Foster and Joseph W. Koterski (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2003); Faith and Reason, ed. Timothy L. Smith (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2001). 2. Aristotle, Metaphysics (Met.) I, 1, 980a22, trans. W. D. Ross, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), vol. 1, p. 1553. F&R quotes this well-known passage at § 25, p. 40, though it strangely omits the not insignificant phrase “by nature.” The omission does not, however, imply any disagreement by the author with what
Philosophy and Its Value 243 that phrase intends, for the encyclical repeatedly stresses the intrinsic character of the desire to know. To cite one of many passages that could be offered in evidence: “The desire for truth is part of human nature itself. It is an innate property of human reason to ask why things are as they are” (F&R, § 3, p. 6). 3. Louis de Raeymaeker, Introduction to Philosophy (New York: Wagner, 1947), p. 3. 4. Maurice Gilbert, “Israel’s Wisdom,” L’Osservatore Romano, weekly English ed., 10 February 1999, p. 14; also available in “Reflections on the Holy Father’s Encyclical Fides et Ratio,” www.ewtn.com/library/Theology/ fides.htm. 5. F&R, § 5, p. 9: “Men and women are always called to direct their steps towards a truth which transcends them.” 6. F&R, § 4, p. 6. 7. F&R, § 1, p. 4. 8. Karl Jaspers, The European Spirit, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (London: Stanhope Press, 1948), pp. 32–33. 9. F&R, § 1, p. 4. 10. Georges Cottier, “Crisis of Meaning Proves the Encyclical’s Timeliness,” L’Osservatore Romano, weekly English ed., 4 November 1998, p. 10. 11. F&R, § 64, p. 95. As Andrew Beards remarks: “We are all called to love wisdom (sophia) and truth and goodness, and to seek these values.” “Philosophy and Evangelisation: The Vision of Fides et Ratio,” in Hear, O Islands: Theology and Catechesis in the New Millennium, ed. John Redford (Dublin: Veritas Publications, 2002), p. 96. 12. H. D. Lewis makes this point as follows: “Almost everyone asks philosophical questions sooner or later. . . . Certain situations force upon us all the questions to which philosophers give close and systematic attention and whose status, as problems, occupies the minds of philosophers a great deal.” Philosophy of Religion (London: English Universities Press, 1965), p. 1. 13. F&R, § 3, p. 6. 14. Gilbert, “Israel’s Wisdom,” p. 14. 15. F&R, § 1, p. 4. 16. F&R, § 30, p. 46. 17. See Paul M. Churchland, Matter and Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984); Patricia A. Churchland, Neurophilosophy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986). 18. F&R, § 4, p. 8. 19. F&R, § 4, p. 8.
244 Tim Lynch 20. On a different if related point, it is interesting to speculate whether philosophy is informal in a sense in which other academic disciplines are not. We all, for example, observe the laws of physics, chemistry, and the rest of the natural sciences, whether or not we are capable of formulating them in an explicit manner. In that sense, it might be suggested that we have an informal awareness of some of the truths of natural science. Should we then speak of an informal physics and an informal chemistry, and so on? Or is it the case that philosophy, dealing with more fundamental issues as it does, is implicit in some sense that is unique? 21. Indeed, as is well known, Plato reports Socrates as going so far as to assert, in the heightened and serious context in which he was on trial for his life, that “the unexamined life is not worth living” (Apology 38a). 22. F&R, § 75, p. 109. 23. Cottier, “Crisis of Meaning,” p. 10, emphasis added. 24. Wilfrid Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” in Science, Perception and Reality (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), p. 20, emphases in original. 25. F&R, § 79, p. 115. 26. Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality (New York: Harper and Row, 1963); Eric Voegelin, Israel and Revelation, vol. 1 of Order and History, ed. M. P. Hogan, Collected Works of Eric Voegelin 14 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000). 27. Thomas J. McPartland, Lonergan and Historiography (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2010), p. 124. 28. Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945), p. 463; Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 6. 29. Ralph McInerny, introduction to Thomas Aquinas: Selected Writings (London: Penguin Books, 1998), p. xiv. 30. Ibid. 31. Bernard Lonergan, Understanding and Being: The Halifax Lectures on “Insight,” ed. Elizabeth A. Morelli and Mark D. Morelli (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), p. 183. 32. McInerny, introduction. 33. The importance of self-knowledge, which was present in philosophy from its Socratic origins, is strongly emphasized in Fides et Ratio. Indeed, the encyclical begins with a vigorous and robust emphasis on this quintessentially philosophical task.
Philosophy and Its Value 245 34. Sellars, “Philosophy,” pp. 1–2. 35. Sellars rejects Quine’s naturalism on the grounds that epistemology is inherently normative. 36. Augustine, Divine Providence and the Problem of Evil II, 18, 47, in Writings of Saint Augustine, ed. Ludwig Schopp, Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 1 (New York: Cima, 1948), p. 324. 37. F&R, § 5, p. 11. 38. Aristotle, Met. I, 2, 982b9, and I, 2, 983a8, trans. Ross, vol. 2, pp. 1554–55. 39. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle I, 2, trans. John P. Rowan (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1961), vol. 1, p. 21 (modified). The term wisdom as used here may, for present purposes, be taken as synonymous with the term philosophy, while the term nature in the passage seems to signify the totality of what is, the totality of being. 40. F&R, § 27, pp. 43–44. 41. F&R, § 28, p. 44. 42. F&R, § 4, p. 7. 43. F&R, § 4, pp. 7–8. 44. F&R, § 23, p. 37. 45. F&R, § 56, p. 86. For a fascinating exploration of some of the issues discussed in this section, one that stands at a slight angle to the position outlined above, see Gerard Casey, “Faith in Search of Understanding,” in Credo: Faith and Philosophy in Contemporary Ireland, ed. Stephen J. Costello (Dublin: Liffey Press, 2003), pp. 1–14, esp. pp. 3–9. 46. See Chris John-Terry, For the Love of Wisdom (New York: Alba House, 1994), p. 33. 47. Bryan Greetham, Philosophy (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 1–2, emphasis in original. 48. Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), pp. 309–10. 49. The question as to the purpose of philosophy is, of course, a strange and mysterious one. Consider for a moment a possibly related issue. One might, on some bright morning, ask oneself what the purpose of one’s own being is. It is difficult to answer this question in philosophical terms, for while one may have projects in mind, and so have means in mind to realize those projects, one does not seem to be, at least prima facie, a means to some other project in terms of which the question about one’s own purpose might be
246 Tim Lynch a nswered. It may however be suggested, at the risk of theoretical collapse into solipsism, that the answer to the question as to one’s purpose coincides, without remainder, with the answer to the question as to the purpose of philosophy. To respond adequately to the one question is to respond adequately to the other. Whether this implies that there is an intelligible answer to the putatively single query expressed in the two verbal questions will be touched upon in what follows. 50. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, X, 7–8, 1177a12–1178b8, in Barnes, Complete Works, vol. 2, pp. 1860–62. 51. I do not claim that Aristotle thought of contemplation in the manner of later traditions, that is, of traditions informed and enriched by Christian revelation. 52. See, for example, John-Terry, For the Love of Wisdom, p. 34. 53. Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in The Portable Karl Marx, ed. E. Kamenka (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), p. 158. 54. F&R, § 17, p. 29. See also F&R, § 33, p. 49: “It is the nature of the human being to seek the truth.” 55. Jacques Maritain, An Introduction to Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2005), p. 173. 56. Sellars, “Philosophy,” pp. 1–3. 57. Maritain, Introduction to Philosophy, p. 173. 58. F&R refers to this natural endowment at § 4, p. 8, where the writer mentions “certain fundamental moral norms” that constitute an element in the “implicit philosophy . . . which all feel that they possess . . . albeit in a general and unreflective way.” 59. Maritain, Introduction to Philosophy, p. 62. 60. Lonergan, Insight, p. 89. 61. F&R, § 4, p. 8. 62. Beards, “Philosophy and Evangelisation,” p. 106. 63. Maritain, Introduction to Philosophy, p. 63. Maritain presumably adds the qualifying clause “in a certain sense” because these fundamental principles are operative—as will be argued below—in all human knowing and are thus “in a certain sense” known to all (including scientists), independently of the grounding defense that nevertheless can be provided only by philosophy. 64. Ibid., p. 64: “They can be known without an explicit knowledge of metaphysics.” Relevant here again is the notion of “implicit philosophy” and its contents, sketched in F&R, § 4, p. 8. It may be worth noting that Lonergan makes a related if more differentiated point even more strongly: “Whether
Philosophy and Its Value 247 one likes it or not, heuristic structures and canons of method constitute an a priori. They settle in advance the general determinations, not merely of the activities of knowing, but also of the content to be known.” Insight, p. 128. 65. Ibid., p. 65. 66. Ibid., p. 67. It should perhaps be noted that the principles in question are predominantly, at least with respect to the special sciences, purely formal in nature rather than material and have to do with operations rather than content. 67. T. Richard, quoted in ibid., p. 65. See also Sellars, “Philosophy,” p. 4: “The specialist knows his way around in his own neighbourhood as his neighbourhood, but doesn’t know his way around in it in the same way as a part of the landscape as a whole” (italics original). 68. Maritain, Introduction to Philosophy, p. 65. While recent developments in the academic study of philosophy and the history of science—including important work by Kuhn, Lakatos, and other more recent writers—show that the situation is more complex than Maritain could have divined, his position on these matters still seems defensible. 69. As Fides et Ratio expresses the point: “By virtue of the splendour emanating from subsistent Being itself, revealed truth offers the fullness of light” (F&R, § 79, p. 115). Indeed, the content of faith is derived from and is thus a share in God’s own knowledge. Aquinas makes this point with regard to sacred doctrine or theology: “Sacred doctrine is a science, because it proceeds from principles established by the light of a higher science, namely, the science of God and the blessed. Hence, just as the musician accepts on authority the principles taught him by the mathematician, so sacred science is established on principles revealed by God.” Summa Theologiae, I, 1, 2, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Christian Classics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981). 70. De Raeymaeker, Introduction to Philosophy, p. 20. 71. At least for those who used to be termed “cradle Christians,” and who were baptized soon after birth, it would seem that religious faith is de facto and temporarily prior to the emergence of philosophy, for it is, in an important sense, received before any philosophical inquiry has arisen. Never theless, it may be suggested that logically there is a sense in which philosophy (at least as implicit) is prior to faith, for it is constituted by the emergence of the human person’s intellectual and rational exigence for meaning, and it is to such an exigence, consciously felt or not, that Christian revelation is addressed. (Indeed, it may be in such a philosophically aroused human
248 Tim Lynch condition that faith is most profoundly and fruitfully received.) It is this, I think, that the pope has in mind when he writes as follows: “From all that I have said to this point it emerges that men and women are on a journey of discovery which is humanly unstoppable—a search for the truth and a search for a person to whom they might entrust themselves. Christian faith comes to meet them, offering the concrete possibility of reaching the goal which they seek. . . . Christian faith immerses human beings in the order of grace, which enables them to share in the mystery of Christ, which in turn offers them a true and coherent knowledge of the Triune God. In Jesus Christ, who is the Truth, faith recognizes the ultimate appeal to humanity, an appeal made in order that what we experience as desire and nostalgia may come to its fulfilment” (F&R, § 33, p. 51, emphases added). Enrico Berti also touched on this point, in commenting upon the encyclical’s use of the term openness: “This idea of openness suggests the priority, at least from the logical standpoint, of philosophy as natural knowledge over faith, whose proper concern is the supernatural: a priority also mentioned in reference to Thomas’s position that ‘faith builds upon and perfects reason’ (F&R, § 43, p. 65), and in the statement that philosophy is ‘a truly propaedeutic path to faith’ (F&R, § 67, p. 99).” Enrico Berti, “Philosophy Is One of the Noblest of Human Tasks,” L’Osservatore Romano, English weekly ed., 25 November 1998, p. 10; see also note 5 above. 72. F&R, § 49, p. 75: “Philosophy must remain faithful to its own principles and methods. Otherwise there would be no guarantee that it would remain oriented to truth and that it was moving towards truth by way of a process governed by reason. A philosophy which did not proceed in the light of reason according to its own principles and methods would serve little purpose.” 73. F&R, § 49, p. 75. See also F&R, § 16, p. 28: “Faith intervenes not to abolish reason’s autonomy nor to reduce its scope for action.” 74. F&R, § 75, p. 109. In a fascinating observation, Berti points out that the encyclical “repeatedly uses a concept which, if I am not mistaken, was not so widely found in previous documents of the Magisterium, that is, openness” (“Philosophy,” p. 10). This encouraging term, already mentioned in note 71 above, draws attention, among other things, to the possibility and the freedom of the act of faith. 75. Andrew Beards celebrates most eloquently the value of human openness to revelation: “If human reason will bend the knee before the Crib and the Cross it will not commit suicide, it will not be led into complete absurdity and paradox, but it will be led into an infinity of deeper, broader wis-
Philosophy and Its Value 249 dom, where its own Creator will reveal to it new vistas of meaning and intelligibility” (Introduction to Philosophy (Birmingham, IN: Maryvale Institute, 1996). The encyclical makes a similar point, drawing upon the Summa Theologiae of Aquinas: “Just as grace builds on nature and brings it to fulfilment (ST I, 1, 8, ad 2), so faith builds upon and perfects reason” (F&R, § 43, p. 65). It is interesting, in this connection, to recall the experience of Augustine following his conversion in August 386. During the period in which he awaited baptism the following Easter, he composed a number of works commonly referred to as the Cassiciacum dialogues. These include the Contra Academicos, the De Beata Vita, the De Ordine, and the Soliloquies. As William Mathews remarks: “Augustine’s religious conversion, far from damping down his intellect, had awakened in him a new passion for understanding. Involving an element of intellectual conversion, it had, as Augustine told a friend, ‘broken the most hateful bonds that had held me away from the breast of philosophy—the despair of finding truth, truth which is the nourishing food of the soul.’” William A. Mathews, Lonergan’s Quest: A Study of Desire in the Authoring of “Insight” (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), p. 58. 76. F&R, § 79, p. 115. See also the clear formulation at F&R, § 34, pp. 51–52: “This truth, which God reveals to us in Jesus Christ, is not opposed to the truths which philosophy perceives. On the contrary, the two modes of knowledge lead to truth in all its fullness. The unity of truth is a fundamental premise of human reasoning, as the principle of non-contradiction makes clear. Revelation renders this unity certain, showing that the God of creation is also the God of salvation history. It is the one and the same God who establishes and guarantees the intelligibility and reasonableness of the natural order of things upon which scientists confidently depend, and who reveals himself as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” The encyclical attributes this understanding in a special way to the genius of Aquinas: “Thomas had the great merit of giving pride of place to the harmony which exists between faith and reason. Both the light of reason and the light of faith come from God, he argued; hence there can be no contradiction between them” (F&R, § 43, p. 65). 77. The inverse question, what is the importance of faith with respect to philosophy, is equally worthy of interest, but reasons of space preclude its treatment here. Let it suffice to refer readers to the apposite remarks in F&R, § 14, p. 23. 78. F&R, § 5, p. 9, emphasis added.
250 Tim Lynch 79. F&R, § 67, p. 98: “Recalling the teaching of Saint Paul (Rom 1:19– 20), the First Vatican Council pointed to the existence of truths which are naturally, and thus philosophically, knowable; and an acceptance of God’s revelation necessarily presupposes knowledge of these truths.” Also relevant in this connection is the strong statement at F&R, § 35, p. 53, which brings out the fact that what is revealed is received by the believer in a manner appropriate to the nature of that believer: “The truth conferred by revelation is a truth to be understood in the light of reason.” 80. André-Mutien Léonard, “Rational Justification of the Act of Faith,” L’Osservatore Romano, English weekly ed., 3 March 1999, p. 6; see also note 5 above. 81. See ibid.: “How can we believe that God reveals himself to us in history, unless we have already recognized that he exists, that he is an intelligent and free being who can reveal himself, that man is capable of deciphering his Word, etc.? These, then, are the preambles of faith. It is these truths, in themselves accessible to natural reason, which are logically presupposed by faith, since they are conditions of possibility for recognizing the very fact of revelation and for accepting its content. It is in this sense that right reason demonstrates the foundations of faith. Among these rational affirmations, which are also presuppositions of faith, we must especially mention the existence of a personal God who can reveal himself, the recognition of the fact itself of revelation and the development of the motives of credibility which testify to its divine origin in the eyes of reason, the ability of the human intellect to know the truth and express it, whether it is truth in general or the truth of revelation in particular, and, lastly, on the moral level, the capacity for discovering the great principles of the natural law inscribed by the Creator in the human heart.” 82. As Aquinas already pointed out, it is perfectly reasonable and appropriate, and therefore fully in accord with human dignity, to accept “as a matter of faith, something which in itself is capable of being scientifically known and demonstrated” (Summa Theologiae I, 2, 2, ad 1). This position has been powerfully argued in recent times by Alvin Plantinga. See, for example, “Reason and Belief in God,” in Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God, ed. Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), pp. 16–93. 83. F&R, § 77, p. 113. 84. F&R, § 66, p. 97. It may be worth adding that the development of speculative theology has in fact not infrequently been driven by philosophy.
Philosophy and Its Value 251 For example, philosophy has on occasion enabled a clarification of natural dimensions that served to bring further clarity to the mysteries of faith. It always remains, of course, as Lonergan puts it, that these mysteries “have the apex of their intelligibility hidden in the transcendence of God.” Bernard Lonergan, Grace and Freedom: Operative Grace in the Thought of St Thomas Aquinas, ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), p. 10. 85. To the extent that philosophy comes to know and to articulate the capacities of intellect and reason, it may contribute to protecting faith and theology from an antirational fideism; and to the extent that it comes to awareness of its own weaknesses and limitations, it may assist in shielding faith and theology from an overweening rationalism. 86. See Beards, “Philosophy and Evangelisation,” in Redford, Hear, O Islands. 87. This is an important issue touched upon in various places in the encyclical. See § 104, p. 148: “Philosophical thought is often the only ground for understanding and dialogue with those who do not share our faith. The current ferment in philosophy demands of believing philosophers an attentive and competent commitment, able to discern the expectations, the points of openness and the key issues of this historical moment. Reflecting in the light of reason and in keeping with its rules, and guided always by the deeper understanding given them by the word of God, Christian philosophers can develop a reflection which will be both comprehensible and appealing to those who do not yet grasp the full truth which divine Revelation declares.” 88. In this context, it may be recalled that St. Paul seems to imply that faith, unlike charity, will pass away, no longer being required in the immediate presence of that which theologians term the Beatific Vision. If this is so, it may perhaps be suggested that the discipline of theology, based as it is upon faith, must also pass away. Dare one conclude, by contrast, that philosophy— in the form of contemplative delight—would continue in the souls of the blessed? On this supposition, it would not pass away with the ending of earthly life but would be massively, perhaps infinitely, enhanced. In this sense, philosophy, unlike theology, would be eternal. 89. Aristotle, Met. I, 2, 982b20–22, trans. Ross, vol. 2, p. 1554. 90. Aristotle, Met. I, 2, 982b26–28, trans. Ross, vol. 2, p. 1555. 91. Thomas Aquinas, Exposition of Aristotle’s Ethics, I, lect. 6, trans. Thomas Gilby, in St. Thomas Aquinas: Philosophical Texts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951), p. 36.
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Kant and Dennett on the Epistemic Status of Teleological Principles James R. O’Shea
In the second half of his Critique of the Power of Judgment (Kritik der Urtheilskraft, 1790), which concerns teleological judgment, Kant presents an antinomy between two regulative principles or maxims of reflecting (or “reflective”) judgment.1 The first maxim, which we may call the “mechanistic maxim,” appears to affirm the sufficiency of mechanistic principles to explain the possibility of all the products of material nature.2 The second principle, however, which we may call the “teleological maxim,” appears to deny that sufficiency by asserting the necessity of nonmechanistic teleological explanation in the case of at least some of the products of material nature, most notably in the case of “organized beings” or living things. Kant states the two regulative principles as follows: The first maxim of the power of judgment is the thesis: All generation of material things and their forms must be judged as possible in accordance with merely mechanical laws. 252
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The second maxim is the antithesis: Some products of material nature cannot be judged as possible according to merely mechanical laws (judging them requires an entirely different law of causality, namely that of final causes [Endursachen] ).3
Broadly speaking, the mechanistic maxim reflects what Gerald Hanratty once described in relation to the Enlightenment period in general as “the momentous project of extending the Newtonian scientific method to all levels of reality.”4 When proper distinctions are drawn, there will clearly remain a sense in which Kant enthusiastically embraced and extended the broadly Newtonian explanatory project that is given expression in the maxim of mechanism. It will be important to keep in mind, for instance, Kant’s repeated insistence that true insight (Einsicht) into objective laws of nature is possible for us only in terms of what he sometimes calls “the mechanism of natural causes” (die Mechanik der Naturursachen).5 However, as Hanratty also notes, there are other respects in which “Kant, who was himself an enthusiastic exponent of the Enlightenment, reacted against what he saw as the superficial materialism and exaggerated optimism of the age.”6 In the present context, the teleological maxim points to Kant’s recognition that the explanation of the nature of living things as “organized beings” (organisirte Wesen) presents special challenges for his own robust defense (as I read him) of the objective primacy of mechanistic explanation. The primary question to be investigated in this essay concerns the nature and epistemic status of Kant’s teleological principles considered in relation to the objective primacy of mechanistic explanation in natural science.7 Again speaking generally to begin with, it is a familiar idea that Kant attempted to reconcile teleology with the objective mechanism of nature by in some sense relegating teleological principles to the status of “merely regulative” maxims. As such, teleological principles are characterized by Kant as being merely subjectively valid in comparison with the objective validity of mechanical principles of causality—although Kant also stresses that for a variety of important reasons we human beings must regard nature “as if ” it were governed by various teleological principles. Teleological principles, on
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this picture, turn out to be indispensable regulative ideas (Ideen) that serve to forward the ends of our own systematizing reflections on nature; but they are not objectively true of the products of nature as such. There are undoubtedly many strands of truth in this familiar characterization of Kant’s views on teleological principles. However, if that were the whole story, then the result of his so-called “resolution” of the antinomy concerning teleology and mechanism would strike most philosophers as being of limited philosophical interest. As John Zammito in The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment expressed the worry in this connection: “Kant’s presentation does not resolve the dilemma it uncovers, but only offers the unpleasant but ostensibly ineluctable expedient of ‘thinking’ about actual problems of nature in terms which violate fundamentally the principle of his own science and epistemology.”8 I want to suggest, however, that the epistemic status of teleological principles in Kant’s conception of natural science is both more complex and more interesting than this common picture of an entirely subjective but necessary retreat from objectivity might s uggest. Toward this end I want to explore here in very general terms what I hope is a fruitful comparison, despite the wide historical gap, between Kant’s complex conception of the epistemic status of teleological principles and Daniel Dennett’s well-known (and perhaps equally elusive) conception of the intentional stance and the design stance as predictive strategies taken up in the explanation of natural phenomena. There are obviously fundamental differences in outlook between these two philosophers, not only in epistemology, the philosophy of biology, and the philosophy of mind, but in metaphysics and the theory of human agency too. But I want to suggest that there are some interesting similarities between their views on the status of teleological explanation within the domain of nature—a fact which is perhaps surprising given the crucial role of Darwinian evolution in Dennett’s conception of nature. First I will further explain the problem Kant was addressing in his “Critique of Teleological Judgment,” and then I will briefly indicate his solution to that problem. Then I will give a quick outline of Dennett’s intentional stance, and I will end by drawing out some of the key comparisons to be made between the two approaches.9
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Kant’s Third Critique was divided into two main parts: the first half treats of aesthetic judgments of taste; the second examines teleological judgments that ascribe an inner purposiveness or “final causality” to natural things. The wider issue in the Third Critique concerns the unity of the realm of moral freedom with the realm of deterministic physics; and a notable feature of Kant’s overall response to this problem is that it involves our thinking of nature as if it were the product of an Intelligent Designer, while respecting the critical conclusion of the First Critique that we cannot demonstrate the existence of such a being on theoretical (as opposed to practical) grounds. We shall see that the heart of Kant’s argument for this more embracing conclusion, however, concerns the nature of explanation in natural science—in particular the possibility of teleological explanation in biology, the science of living things. The stunning success of Newtonian physics, for Kant, entailed that the material world is essentially mechanical in its operations. Apart from free human agency, everything that happens in nature is strictly determined by mechanistic laws of physics. Kant, of course, famously thinks he can prove a priori that nature must be a mechanistic system of this kind—that nature is necessarily subject to that general categorial framework, if experience is to be possible. The crucial question of the Third Critique concerned with teleology is this: What is the status of living things and of biological explanation in this new mechanistic universe? Aristotle’s natural teleology had been based in part on his insight that you cannot get anywhere in biology unless you view the parts and activities of organized beings as subserving various ends or functions. This is an insight that both Kant and Dennett will also want to ac commodate, but within very different historical and philosophical contexts. To grasp that something is an organ, for instance, is to see it as performing a certain functional role within the systematic self- maintenance of the organism. “What it is to be” (to adopt the Aristotelian conception) an eye, or a wing, or a leaf, is defined by its goal- directed purpose: the eye is delicately organized to produce vision; the wing is designed for flight; the role of a leaf is to provide sustenance
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or protection for the plant; and so on for all organic or “self-organizing” beings and their parts. Simplifying a complex and subtle metaphysical account, we can say that Aristotelian teleology or final causality thus involved attributing an intrinsic goal-directedness or inner purposiveness (an “inner principle of change and stasis”) to the products of nature. The nature of an internally organized being or living thing is to actualize various characteristic end-states as a result of the self-sustaining functional relationships obtaining among its parts or organs. From the post- Newtonian perspective of Kant and his contemporaries, however, natural teleological explanation had become deeply problematic. In teleological explanation, as popular modern historical accounts would tend to put it, one explains the process in terms of the goal, and prior to Galileo and Newton this held not only for living things but throughout all of what we would now call “physics”: the fundamental elements tended toward their natural resting places, and so on. But the key to the success of the scientific revolution, on this standard historical sketch, was to stop viewing material things as intrinsically goal directed in this way. After Newton it was fundamental to Kant’s outlook that the book of nature is written in the language of quantifiable laws of matter in motion and that the “essence” of matter is not to tend toward any end, whether internal or external, but rather to be indifferently subject to the universal laws of gravitational attraction and repulsion. The resulting difficulty for post-Newtonians such as Kant, as both he and Dennett would agree, is that Aristotle was basically right about the nature of biology at least to this extent: you literally cannot explain what you are looking at in the case of a biological entity unless you see its salient parts as subserving various functional purposes in the ways indicated above. Biology is blind, to adapt a Kantian conception, without the concept of what Kant calls a “natural purpose.” In short, the dilemma confronted by Kant is that it seems we both cannot hold—and yet must hold—that some of nature’s products are “objectively purposive.” On the one hand, it is clear that from Kant’s perspective we cannot ascribe real goal-direction to physical things without endorsing various mistaken views of material nature.10 For example, on Kant’s
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view if we attempt to attribute immaterial “vital” principles to matter, we either violate its mechanical nature or at the very least endow matter with powers it cannot be known to possess. Or, to take another example, one might try a direct appeal to God’s intentions in order to explain natural biological functions—asserting that God designed the heart to circulate the blood, and so on—but this direct intrusion of the divine will into properly biological explanation would have been as unacceptable to Aristotle—and Aquinas for that matter—as it was to Kant. The purposiveness we grasp in nature is intrinsic to the organic realm,11 and the theologian’s arguments are built on that fact. So on the one hand it seems that we may not ascribe “natural purposes” to material things without detriment to the integrity of physics. On the other hand, Kant himself emphasizes that in our experience we continually discover that certain types of material thing allow of causal explanation only if we view them as intrinsically goal-directed teleological systems. As Kant puts it: We can and should be concerned to investigate nature, so far as lies within our capacity, in experience, in its causal connection in accordance with merely mechanical laws: for in these lie the true physical grounds of explanation, the interconnection of which constitutes scientific cognition of nature through reason. But now we find among the products of nature special and very widely distributed genera, which contain within themselves a combination of efficient causes that we must ground in the concept of an end, even if we wish to employ only experience, i.e., observation in accordance with a principle suitable to their inner possibility.12
Kant gives the example of attempting to explain the movements of the lens in the eye.13 One can try to explain these movements mechanistically, or one can try to explain them teleologically. Judging teleologically, one would ask what purpose is being served by the tiny ligaments in the eye bending the lens to various degrees in response to various changes in the environment. What are all these minute adjustments for? Taking up this teleological perspective, one may well discover the functional law that the muscles adjust the lens so that the
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light rays will converge on the retina, which is necessary for vision. Vision is crucial for the self-maintenance of this type of organism, and so on. Such teleological judgments are the way of discovery in biology. Judging mechanistically, on the other hand, one would have to try to figure out just which enormously complex prior sets of pushes and pulls ultimately caused the lens to reshape to just this degree, and so on. One would require a God-like knowledge of the minute physical particulars in order to deduce the movements of the lens from mechanical laws alone. Note that for Kant we have a priori insight only into the general causal principle that everything that happens in nature has some determining mechanical cause or other. Our capacity to discover the particular empirical laws by which different kinds of things are produced is not a matter about which we can legislate a priori. And in fact, Kant argues, in the case of such a complex empirical phenomenon as the human eye we can make a start on grasping how it works mechanically only if we first view it teleologically. So here we have the roots of Kant’s antinomy of teleological judgment. On the one hand we know, in accordance with general Kantian principles, that all changes in matter have mechanically determining causes in accordance with the laws of physics. In the case of organisms and their parts, however, we find by experience that we can discover the causal laws governing their particular operations only if we view them as organized beings: that is, only if we view their parts as serving various purposes, as fulfilling various functions, as tending toward specific ends, and so on. But to ascribe an inner goal-directedness to matter in a straightforwardly objective manner would be inconsistent with the Newtonian concept of matter. For there is no objective principle inherent in matter, from this perspective, whereby it tends toward states that happen to be for the best. But unless we attribute such final causes to organisms and their parts, we literally cannot observe the functional dependencies that explain what is going on in such cases. What is Kant’s proposed solution to this antinomy? This is a notoriously tangled area of interpretive dispute, but for present purposes I will focus on the initial Kantian conclusion alluded to earlier.14 For Kant our teleological judgments are what he calls subjective maxims of
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reflective judgment rather than objective principles of understanding. His conclusion is that we must view certain products of material nature (notably organisms) as if they and all their parts were intrinsically and systematically goal directed. This is necessary if in these particular cases we are to have any hope of achieving the sort of coherent explanation in terms of causal laws that understanding requires. However, in thus investigating nature under the regulative idea of teleology we do not claim that such goal-directedness is an objective characteristic of natural beings. What exactly is the epistemic status of Kant’s teleological maxim? According to Kant, we are clearly in some sense entitled to view certain material things as “natural purposes.” The limitations of our understanding make it necessary for us to do so relative to certain warranted epistemic ends we possess or project. We investigate the behavior of such entities by viewing them as teleological systems, and we find that this is necessary for the discovery of various causal laws peculiar to their specific forms. On the other hand, Kant holds that it is only when we discover a mechanistic causal law that we have genuine insight into an objective law of nature. We cannot assert that there is a real purposiveness in nature, only that this is how we are required to reflect on nature’s products if a coherent understanding of them is to be possible. What should we make of this doctrine? Kant holds that in relation to some material things, “Judging them requires a quite different causal law—viz., that of final causes,”15 but he adds that we need not worry that this violates the mechanistic picture of nature, since the teleological judgment has only “subjective validity.” A reasonable critic might well contend that Kant is simply fudging the issue here: with one hand he argues that we must ascribe a certain property to objects, but with the other he takes it back again. A sympathetic critic of this kind might be inclined to offer a diagnosis of the following sort. Suppose that Kant’s premises were accepted as broadly correct: suppose, for example, that one were to accept that final-cause explanations of material things had been rendered deeply problematic by the advancing scientific picture of nature.
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It might then be held that Kant quite reasonably rejected the main alternative accounts of biological reality that were available in the eighteenth century. He rejected the various hand-waving, pre-Darwinian mechanistic accounts of organic life for being wildly implausible, and he rejected the more vitalistic or metaphysical accounts for reasons briefly hinted at earlier.16 So Kant attempted to finesse a middle course, arguing strongly for the necessity of judging that some natural things obey a nonmechanistic final causality but then seeming to take this attribution back by suggesting that it amounts only to a useful way of thinking, not to a principle that can in any way be ascribed to nature itself, objectively considered. Finally, our sympathetic critic might suggest that we should not fault Kant for failing to see how biology could be objectively integrated into the new scientific conception of nature. From the perspective of mainstream thought today, neither did anyone else have this insight prior to the Darwinian account of the evolution of adaptive biological forms by an essentially mechanical process of natural selection. However, there is more to be said for Kant’s account in its own terms and perhaps even from the perspective of contemporary evolutionary biology. Or more cautiously, there are some striking parallels to be drawn with the currently influential conception of intentional and functional explanation in psychology and biology put forward by Daniel Dennett. Both Kant and Dennett accept what might be termed the primacy of physics (though Kant holds this for stronger a priori reasons than Dennett would either accept or require). Whatever their basic epistemological differences, both thinkers essentially contend that when one has hold of a genuine physical law, one has grasped an objectively necessary connection between two kinds of thing or two types of event. Ideally, if in any given case we were really in possession of all the applicable physical laws at the appropriate level of nature, and if all of the relevant circumstances were known, then our predictions from the physical stance would in principle be lawfully guaranteed. At the biological level, by contrast, functional laws hold true “only for the most part,” as Aristotle himself correctly emphasized. Predictions as to how
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the lens in the eye will react based on what it is supposed to do will be epistemically warranted only in the case of a properly functioning eye. By contrast (setting some well-known controversies aside), if one had a “God’s eye” knowledge of all the minute physical particulars involved in the event, one could in principle calculate the precise movements of the lens in every case—whether those processes happened to give rise to successful vision or not.17 Dennett, as we know, distinguishes three “stances” that one might fruitfully take toward an object in attempting to explain and predict its behavior: the physical stance, the design stance, and the intentional stance. One of his favorite illustrations is the attempt to predict the behavior of a chess-playing computer, but the distinctions hold equally well in the case of biological entities, and this has in fact been a central concern of Dennett’s investigations since the 1960s. It is the chessplaying computer’s turn to move, let us suppose, and the human opponent has its king in check. Prediction from the physical stance of how the computer will respond would involve tracing out the effects of the input energies all the way from the keyboard through the computer circuitry and attempting to calculate the resulting digital states electronically. In principle, let us assume, this sort of prediction could work every time; the inexorable laws of physics would enable stable prediction even if in frustration the opponent were to submerge the computer under water. The crucial point here is that to explain malfunctions of this kind one typically moves to explanation from the physical stance, and with sufficient knowledge the right prediction is in principle always available from this perspective. In actual cases, of course, no one can actually predict how the chess-playing computer will respond by calculating the complex pathway of responses in the electronic circuitry. Rather, as Dennett puts it, what we do is negotiate “a trade-off between ease of use and immunity from error”: we abandon the (in principle) immunity from error that the physical stance provides, and we simply assume that the chessplaying program has been well designed.18 If one knows how (or even that) the computer was programmed to play chess, then to varying degrees depending on one’s knowledge
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of its design one can predict its response to any given input from this design stance; or at least, one can do so provided there is no malfunction and everything works as it is supposed to. “The essential feature of the design stance is that we make predictions solely from knowledge or assumptions about the system’s functional design, irrespective of the physical constitution or condition of the innards of the particular object.” One can take up the design stance at various levels of design, “but all of them are alike in relying on the notion of function, which is purpose-relative or teleological.”19 Even if one traces out the electronic impulses in the computer by using a schematic diagram, for example, one is still relying on the design stance here to the extent that one assumes that each type of gate on the diagram will function as it is supposed to, and so on. The extrapolation to biological explanation is obvious: we take up the design stance whenever we appeal to the notion of proper functioning, and this (as we have seen, and as Aristotle appropriately emphasized) is what biological explanation is centrally about.20 Dennett’s third type of explanatory stance is the intentional stance, which is closely related to the design stance. Here one assumes “not only (1) that the machine will function as designed, but (2) that the design is optimal as well, that the computer will ‘choose’ the most rational move.”21 For example, one attempts to figure out what the best chess move (or subset of moves) would be in the given case, and then one predicts that the computer will make one of those moves. We treat the computer as if it were a rational agent: the computer will move its king that way because it wants to avoid checkmate, and it knows you have it pinned down. This is in fact the most practical predictive stance to take up with regard to chess-playing computers, despite the cost of this strategy in terms of lack of certainty.22 The key point for present purposes is that according to Dennett both the design stance and the intentional stance involve the attribution of a goal-directed function to the thing under consideration; and he holds in fact that “the problems of interpretation in psychology and the problems of interpretation in biology are the same problem.”23 The important point is that, unlike the physical stance, both the design and intentional stances involve the normative notion of proper function-
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ing. While the intentional stance adds the further assumption of optimal goal-seeking behavior, the design stance already involves assumptions about what a thing ought to accomplish if it is working as it is supposed to: “Psychologists can’t do their work without the rationality assumption of the intentional stance, and biologists can’t do their work without the optimality assumptions of adaptationist thinking.”24 Dennett is thus explicit that meaning or intentionality on the one hand, and biological function on the other, are both in the same teleological box. And as he further argues: “There is no more bedrock for what we might call original functionality than there is for its cognitivistic scion, original intentionality.”25 Fundamental to Dennett’s view is the idea that the attribution of intentionality to any system (including oneself ) and the attribution of function to any biological item both involve treating some complex physical system as if it were a well- designed goal-directed system. Both the design stance and the intentional stance are instances of what we might call the teleological stance. Anyone familiar with the debates surrounding Dennett’s philosophy of mind will know that one of the more perplexing issues has to do with whether he is a “realist” about mental states. For according to Dennett, “Intentional systems are, by definition, all and only those entities whose behavior is predictable . . . from the intentional stance.”26 So as Dennett emphasizes, “The definition of intentional systems I have given does not say that intentional systems really have beliefs and desires, but that one can explain and predict their behavior by ascribing beliefs and desires to them.”27 Throughout his writings Dennett has in fact attempted to find a middle way between realism and instrumentalism regarding the mental. Our attribution of mental states to others is pragmatically indispensable if we are to come to predictive grips with their behavior. Not only that: these attributions uncover real patterns in the cognitive and behavioral repertoires of the beings we are trying to understand. But for Dennett these psychological attributions involve normative elements in such a way that along certain dimensions they fare less well as lawful explanations than the physical-stance predictions that might in principle be made of the underlying con stitutive physical phenomena. Attributions of mental states involve charitable assumptions about the rationality of the being under
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consideration—assumptions that normally work splendidly for the purposes of action and prediction but that, for example, cannot account for malfunction at the neurological level. Only a God-like knowledge of the physical particulars and the right physical laws would reveal the causal laws that cover both the normal and abnormal cases—precisely by being blind to that teleological distinction.28 So as Dennett puts it, on the scale of immunity from error, “Physical stance predictions trump design stance predictions which trump intentional stance predictions.”29 Yet it remains true that with such complex phenomena as intentional human behavior the intentional stance is likely to remain the key level of pattern description at which successful predictions are actually to be found.30 Perhaps less well known is that, according to Dennett, precisely the same situation obtains in relation to the design stance and our attribution of proper functions to biological organs.31 Dennett, as is well known, holds that Darwinian evolution by natural selection affords a completely adequate nonteleological account of the generation of all biological forms: “The theory of natural selection shows how every feature of the natural world can be the product of a blind, unforesightful, non-teleological, ultimately mechanical process of differential reproduction over long periods of time.”32 For Dennett, the perspective opened up by Darwinian evolution in principle provides a completely adequate physical-stance explanation of all those biological entities that the design stance picks out as idealized patterns of proper functioning—functions which for the most part and to various degrees such entities do indeed tend to realize. Working out these matters in full detail would of course involve carefully articulating the many important differences that distinguish Kant’s world from Dennett’s world—not to mention the differences between both these worlds and Aristotle’s. I will, however, briefly put forward by way of conclusion some of the more striking similarities between Kant’s and Dennett’s conceptions of attributions of teleology to natural things that result from the views examined above. The following general picture, I suggest, holds for both thinkers in their very different contexts of inquiry.
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Put briskly, according to both thinkers, when we try to explain the behavior of anything in nature we should always seek primarily for explanations in terms of physical mechanisms. For in various senses (different for Kant and Dennett), only these give us insight into genuine laws of nature. The correct attitude to hold, in fact, is that everything in nature is in principle explainable in terms of physical laws. On the other hand, both Kant and Dennett stress that it is also correct to assert with regard to certain phenomena in nature—in particular, with regard to living things—that in such cases there is a systematic pattern of activity that can be grasped by us only if we take up a certain conceptual stance toward those entities. Only by viewing such entities and their parts as goal directed—by analogy with the rational activity of human agents—can we make any headway in the epistemically fundamental task of uncovering the laws that govern their activities. Teleological attributions are thus humanly indispensable if we are to explain certain natural processes. We cannot, in the view of either thinker (in contrast to Aristotle, for instance), assert that nature is objectively teleological; for “matter knows no purposes,” as it were. But despite this, for both thinkers our teleological judgments are warranted by the predictive power they afford us (as Dennett would put it), as long as we recognize that the attribution of function to a thing is only a practically indispensable strategy for interrogating nature in order to uncover its actual mechanisms. Reference to proper biological functioning, which is indispensable to biological explanation for us, thus ineliminably requires reference to the stance or judgment of one who is attempting to render such a complex causal system comprehensible. As Kant remarks, “We put, it is said, final causes into things, and do not as it were draw them out of their perception”;33 and Dennett, as we have seen, “does not say that intentional systems really have beliefs and desires, but that one can explain and predict their behavior by ascribing beliefs and desires to them.”34 Everything in this picture, I suggest, essentially holds for both Kant and Dennett. Now what about, from the perspective of contemporary biology, the crucial difference made by Darwin? In the Critique of the Power of Judgment itself, Kant famously and interestingly raises,
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only to dismiss, the possibility that there might some day appear a Newton of biology: “We can boldly say that it would be absurd for humans even to . . . hope that there may yet arise a Newton who could make comprehensible even the generation of a blade of grass according to natural laws that no intention has ordered; rather, we must absolutely deny this insight to human beings.”35 But presumably this general kind of mechanistic framework for explaining the origin and processes of living things is similar in many respects to what Dennett would take modern evolutionary biology to have successfully outlined in principle. So it is clear that one important difference between Kant and Dennett concerns the possible mechanization of biology: Kant apparently thinks that this is a task that is in principle forever beyond our ken, while Dennett thinks that in fact we already have the basic story in hand, at least in principle, thanks to evolutionary biology. So it turns out that for Kant, in the end, the only way for us to represent to ourselves the thoroughgoing systematic unity of mechanism with organic purposiveness is to think of the universe as if it were the product of an all-powerful organizing mind. Considerations of freedom and morality aside, this abstract idea of a divine designer for Kant is in effect equivalent to the bare thought that somehow, at bottom, there is a unified and fully comprehensible basis in which both mechanism and life are grounded. This methodologically useful way of thinking is as far as physical teleology goes for Kant. It is a way of thinking, he concludes, that belongs most fundamentally to natural science; and even treated as a mere idea, its content falls far short of the traditional theistic idea of God. The latter, for Kant, is a matter that pertains more to our moral ends than our explanatory aims. In this respect Kant concludes the Third Critique by arguing that physical teleology is of crucial service to moral teleology and to rational faith in a theistic God. For physical teleology, properly speaking, ultimately leads us to think of nature as a whole as if it were purposefully designed; and for Kant this way of thinking meshes neatly with our moral obligation to view even deterministic nature as ultimately subservient to our highest moral ends. Briefly put, that is how the Third Critique is supposed to unify the first two critiques.
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As in Raphael’s painting of Plato and Aristotle, then, Kant’s teleology ultimately gestures upwards while Dennett’s teleology points firmly downwards. For Dennett the teleological stance is an explanatory waystation ultimately in the service of delivering more genuinely explanatory underlying mechanisms; and the theory of natural selection provides the fully comprehensive framework embracing both mechanism and purpose—just the sort of framework toward which Kant was gesturing but, from Dennett’s perspective, in the wrong direction. However, there is a further important epistemic similarity between their two views, even in the midst of these sharpest of differences. Kant’s pessimism with respect to the possibility of a future Newton of biology is based on his claim that from the human standpoint we will always require the teleological stance even to pick out what needs explaining, never mind to explain its ultimate origins. One is lost as a biologist unless one is attuned to nature’s intricate designs. But the purpose of Dennett’s “design-stance” interpretation of biological adaptation is to hammer home essentially the same point. The teleological stance, as it were, is a methodologically indispensable normative framework for seeking causal explanations in both psychology and biology. Furthermore, after Kant suggests (as we saw) that it is absurd to expect some future Newton to successfully mechanize biology, he carefully adds: “But for us to judge in turn that even if we could penetrate to the principle of nature in the specification of its universal laws known to us there could lie hidden no ground sufficient for the possibility of organized beings without the assumption of an intention underlying their generation would be presumptuous: for how could we know that?”36 And in fact Kant thinks that we must make it a regulative goal of our investigation of nature always to seek mechanistic explanations of biological forms. For Kant we must think of a mechanistic reduction of teleology not only as, in some sense, conceivable in principle (“in idea”) but in fact as an intellectually mandatory ideal to approximate as far as we can. Nonetheless it remains true for Kant, as for Dennett, that our explanatory reliance on the teleological stance is here to stay.
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Notes 1. References to Kant’s Third Critique, the Critique of the Power of Judgment, are to the translation by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), which provides the standard marginal page references to vol. 5 of the Akademie Edition of Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften; hereafter cited as CJ. References to Kant’s unpublished “First Introduction” to the Third Critique (printed in vol. 20 of the Akademie Edition) are also to the translation in Guyer and Matthews, again using the Akademie page references. Guyer and Matthews translate Kant’s reflectirend and bestimmend (Urtheilskraft) as “reflecting” and “determining” (power of judgment), rather than, for example, as “reflective” and “determinative” (or “determinant”) judgment, which may be more familiar from earlier translations. 2. When no distinctions are required, I will refer indifferently to teleological or mechanistic “maxims,” “principles,” “explanations,” “laws,” and “entities” (products of nature), while recognizing that there are contexts that call for explicit distinctions between them. 3. CJ, p. 387. 4. Gerald Hanratty, “The Enlightenment,” in The New Dictionary of Theology, ed. J. Komonchak, Mary Collins, and Dermot Lane (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1987), pp. 323–24. 5. CJ, p. 411. 6. Hanratty, “Enlightenment,” p. 324. 7. The present essay is a nontechnical overview of some large-scale features of Kant’s conception of the role of teleological judgments, including some schematic comparisons to the recently influential outlook of Daniel Dennett on structurally similar issues. Elsewhere I have examined Kant’s own conceptions of causality, mechanism, and purposiveness in considerable detail and with full references to the relevant secondary literature. In particular, see James O’Shea, “The Needs of Understanding: Kant on Empirical Laws and Regulative Ideals,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 5 (1997): 216– 54, and “Kantian Matters: The Structure of Permanence,” Acta Analytica 15 (1996): 67–88, for a reading of Kant’s conception of material substance. In a longer article in preparation I examine the complex logical relationships that obtain between the transcendental causal principle of Kant’s Second Analogy and the regulative principles of reason and reflective judgment.
Epistemic Status of Teleological Principles 269 8. John H. Zammito, The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 224. 9. For an alternative comparison of Dennett and Kant on these matters, see Matthew Ratcliffe, “A Kantian Stance on the Intentional Stance,” Biology and Philosophy 16, no. 1, (2001): 29–52. While I do not find plausible Ratcliffe’s main argument that Dennett’s attempt to naturalize intentionality presupposes irreducible intentional notions, there is much that is instructive in Ratcliffe’s discussion of Kant’s views. 10. For the various rejected alternatives from Kant’s perspective, see CJ, p. 392 n. 11. Traditionally, Kant explains, the argument was from the intrinsic good design of natural things, to God’s good governance. On classical Aristotelian views, he suggests, natural things were explicable in terms of their own internal principles, the perfections of which might then support a further inference to God’s design. 12. Kant, “First Introduction,” p. 236. 13. Ibid.; see p. 240. 14. A more complete discussion would have to wrestle with problems pertaining to the interpretation of CJ, § 70, and also with the question whether the principle of mechanism in Kant is itself a reason-regulative principle in this context, among other issues. 15. CJ, p. 387. 16. See also CJ, § 72. 17. Quantum indeterminacies do not affect the issues at this level of analysis, according to Dennett; so we may set that complication aside for present purposes. See Daniel Dennett, Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology (Montgomery, VT: Bradford Books, 1978), p. 5. Dennett points out that, for example, digital computers can be predicted from the physical stance, so in this sense quantum effects cancel each other out. These are not uncontroversial claims, of course. 18. Daniel Dennett, Brainchildren: Essays on Designing Minds (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), p. 119. 19. Dennett, Brainstorms, p. 4. 20. Here I am leaving unmentioned various important contemporary disputes concerning “Panglossian adaptationism” in contemporary (i.e., evolutionary) biology and for present purposes simply assuming Dennett’s perspective on that particular issue. 21. Dennett, Brainstorms, p. 5.
270 James R. O’Shea 22. Dennett of course realizes that, whatever might be the case in principle, the so-called “rationality” in the case of the average personal computer is primarily derived from whoever designed the program. But on Dennett’s view the programmer’s rational capacities are also ultimately derived by a long process of biological evolution, cultural evolution, learning, and so on. All intentionality and rationality are derived, according to Dennett—but that is a long story, and it is not a controversy that I am taking on here. 23. Daniel Dennett, The Intentional Stance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), p. 277. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., p. 321. 26. Daniel Dennett, Kinds of Minds: Toward an Understanding of Consciousness (New York: Basic Books, 1996), p. 45. 27. Dennett, Brainstorms, p. 7. 28. See Dennett, Brainchildren, p. 357. 29. Ibid., p. 119 n. 30. See ibid., p. 120. 31. Dennett’s paper “Evolution, Error, and Intentionality,” in Intentional Stance (pp. 287–322), is particularly useful in this regard; see also p. 236. 32. Dennett, Intentional Stance, p. 284. 33. Kant, “First Introduction,” p. 220 n. (although the editors point out that it is not clear that this marginal reference occurring in Kant’s text was by Kant himself). 34. Dennett, Brainstorms, p. 7. 35. CJ, p. 400. 36. Ibid.
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Human Nature and One-Eyed Reason Ciarán McGlynn
One-Eyed Reason and the Enlightenment Project Gerry Hanratty distrusted the Enlightenment project. In undergraduate lectures his favorite quotation was that of Whitehead describing the Enlightenment as “the age of one-eyed reason.” To undergraduate minds, such criticisms seemed like heresy—a true treason of the clerks. But Gerry’s rejection of central aspects of the Enlightenment project was informed by long study of the effects of this project on later philosophical and political thought. Like Whitehead, he saw the dominant Enlightenment worldview, based as it was on empiricism, a commitment to a particular form of reason, and a materialistic metaphysics, as deficient in depth and understanding. For such critics, and many others like them, the Enlightenment project ignored something that was essential and concentrated only on a limited aspect of the world. Among these critics, however, there has been no unanimity as to what it is that the Enlightenment project eschewed. Certainly, 271
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many have felt that the Enlightenment worldview greatly diminished what it is to be human. Through Whitehead’s powerful metaphor of one-eyed reason, the present essay attempts to identify the limitations of the Enlightenment project as a means of studying human nature. Critics like Whitehead and Hanratty did not naively reject all products of the Enlightenment in the domains of politics, philosophy, and science, but they questioned the presuppositions of the movement which stemmed from what Whitehead called a series of abstractions— abstractions that left out much that had been essential to the human experience of the world. Besides these abstractions, such as the reduction of large sections of the world to its quantitative aspects, the Enlightenment thinkers were guided by some dominant metaphors— metaphors which, when combined with the quantitative approach, led them and many of their intellectual progeny to construct a greatly diminished picture of reality. Three great metaphors or images which found wide currency in the seventeenth century influenced not only Enlightenment thought but subsequent natural philosophy down to the present day. The clockwork metaphor was applied initially to the universe as a whole but in the eighteenth century was increasingly also used in relation to humans. It gave rise to the hugely popular “man as machine” metaphor of la Mettrie. John Locke’s metaphor of the mind as a blank slate also enjoyed wide currency right down to the behaviorist school of psychology in the twentieth century. Finally, the corpuscular or atomic view that everything could be split into the ultimate indivisible building blocks of reality, combined with the materialist hypothesis, became the accepted ontology of most natural philosophers until very recent times.1 Locke, however, seemed to treat the corpuscular theory more as a useful model than as necessarily a true depiction of reality.2 The seventeenth-century natural philosophers, particularly Galileo and Newton, found that, through the abstractions of mathematical physics, we could describe and, crucially, predict many aspects of the physical world. This outstanding discovery encouraged the eighteenthcentury philosophers to believe that all of reality would follow the same pattern of abstraction. The key was to find the right features of
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the world to abstract: each science sought its own Newton. To philosophers of a religious disposition, the Enlightenment’s greatest failing was its construction of a worldview which, for many, dispensed with God. Many of the Enlightenment’s philosophers believed that they had found the correct principles on which to base all future inquiry— a set of principles that did not need a God. The principles or pre suppositions for future inquiry were deductive reason from firmly established premises, a commitment to sensory experience organized to acquire knowledge through empirical observation, and a materialist metaphysics generally seen as atomistic. It was the scientific scheme of Newton, above all others, that made the materialist clockwork view of the universe seem plausible. A main tenet of Enlightenment thinkers was that all knowledge was of a piece; all truths coalesced to form a single fabric. Diderot defined encyclopédie, and hence the project that he and other philosophes like d’Alambert were working on, as “the interrelation of all knowledge.”3 Most contemporary natural philosophers see themselves in the same Enlightenment mode and likewise believe that this interrelatedness is a prerequisite for genuine knowledge. Recently, the entomologist and sociobiologist E. O. Wilson has restated significant aspects of the Enlightenment’s ideal in the context of contemporary science: “The central idea of the consilience world view is that all tangible phenomena, from the birth of stars to the workings of social institutions, are based on material processes and are ultimately reducible . . . to the laws of physics.”4 The problem with Wilson’s formula is that what it is to be human, more than anything else, is to have a human mind—an attribute which is generally not considered to be a tangible phenomenon. Many contemporary critics of Enlightenment, such as Richard Rorty, see truth from a historical perspective and hence do not subscribe to the idea that there is ultimate truth or that the truths we uncover must form a unity. For such philosophers, there are only different narratives, different ways of representing truth. There is no reason why these narratives must line up. This position is detrimental not only to the Enlightenment ideal but also to those critics of Enlightenment,
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such as Whitehead and Hanratty, who saw it as an age of one-eyed reason. For while they might decry the Enlightenment’s blinkered approach to the study of reality, they subscribe to the key Enlightenment beliefs that there are ultimate truths and that anything which is true must cohere with the body of other truths. The metaphor of “one-eyed reason” is particularly fruitful because it raises the prospect of there being not so much a different way of looking at the world as an augmented way of doing so that would include a lot that the naturalistic stance leaves out. What the one eye sees is, indeed, real, and this monocular approach has revealed such a bounty of truths about the natural world that all previous methods of investigating seem merely childish. In fact the scientific project, which is the contemporary version of the Enlightenment project, has been so successful that most within the tradition still see it as the only reliable route to knowledge. If a claim to insight about the world is not testable through empirical methods, or derivable using the principles of deductive logic from empirically established premises, then it is not a genuine insight. Consequently, its proponents will say, science’s field of vision, although not infallible, nevertheless does not need to be augmented by any spurious extra eye. These proponents of a physicalist worldview understandably ask: If science is monocular, what constitutes an extra eye, and what type of insights does the extra eye provide? Claims that theology, traditional metaphysics, or mysticism could complete the binocular view of the world have been generally rejected by natural philosophers on the grounds that such disciplines have been remarkably deficient in providing an account of reality that is remotely as coherent as the naturalistic story. Theologians, mystics, and metaphysicians have been prolific in their theories but have offered no generally accepted criterion for deciding between competing claims. Worse, none of these claims seems to give us the type of handle on the world (in terms of actually enabling us to do things) that the theories of science provide. As no discipline comes anywhere near the success of the natural sciences in presenting a usable and coherent account of reality, few scientists have been impressed by claims that their reasoning has been deficient in depth or understanding.
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A problem arises when it comes to offering an account of that most perplexing product of the natural world, humanity. It was the Enlightenment philosophers who emphasized that humans were as much a part of nature as trees and planets, but the naturalistic accounts of what it is to be a human have been nearly as prolific and as barren as the despised metaphysical accounts of reality as a whole. Human nature has proved to be elusive when it comes to explanation through empirical observation, materialist metaphysics, or the necessities of deductive logic. The latest crop of naturalistic accounts of what it is to be human, which tend to revolve around theories inspired by Darwin or integrated circuits, seem no nearer to answering the deep philosophical questions about personal identity, the nature of free will, and the relation of mind to body than the earlier naive theory of man as machine. To the philosophers of the eighteenth century and to their successors among the natural philosophers, their age was quintessentially the Age of Reason. Dumarsais declared: “Reason is to the philosopher what grace is to the Christian.”5 A point not often enough commented on is that the philosophes hijacked the term reason as denoting an activity peculiar to their own pursuits. Yet the medievalists, whom the philoso phes derided, the theologians, and the Enlightenment critics did not see what they were doing as being irrational. No age has ever proudly designated itself “the age of unreason.” Since the invention of the term rationality, all serious thinkers have seen what they were doing as rational. What led the philosophes to proclaim their age as uniquely one of reason was their particular emphasis on the set of tools that they used in their rational investigations: empirical methodology and a systematic skepticism toward any set of beliefs that could not be justified or at least supported in some way by empirical methods. Their epigones have not given up the practice of coining or purloining self-referential honorific terms. Daniel Dennett has attempted to have thinkers like himself and Richard Dawkins designated as “Brights.” For the eighteenth-century philosophers only the measurable aspects of reality were real. The abstraction of mathematical physics demanded that only the quantitative components of the world should be included in the list of the things that are. As Isaiah Berlin observed:
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“Space, time, mass, force, momentum—the terms of mechanics— [were] to take the place of final causes, substantial forms, divine purpose, and other metaphysical notions.”6 To this end, the Enlightenment philosophers made prodigious use of Ockham’s Razor. Descartes knew that mind was not susceptible to investigation using the new tools of empiricism, materialism, and mechanistic models. Hence he tried to corral mind as a region of reality which must be treated in a separate way. The mind was designated as spiritual in that it was composed of a substance devoid of mechanical properties. At best, its properties were analogous to those of a machine, what Ryle would later deride as a “para-mechanical hypothesis.”7 Although early empiricists, such as Locke, abided by this Cartesian bifurcation of the world, the success of the mechanistic approach, supported by strict empiricism, led many eighteenth-century philosophers to use Ockham’s Razor to lop off Descartes’ spiritual realm altogether and to seek explanations of the mind solely within the resources of physicalism and empiricism. This approach is still the dominant trend within the natural sciences and can be seen in the theories of the mind put forward by philosophers like Daniel Dennett. Locke’s “blank slate” was the metaphor that dominated Enlightenment thinking about the mind. But how was this slate to be filled in, and how best could we examine its contents? Here the atomic model was applied to the mind. The “ideas” of Locke became, later in the eighteenth century, the equivalent of the atoms of the material world. Like the material atoms, they were simple in that they were irreducible to anything more fundamental. And, like material atoms, they could combine to form more complex structures. It was this image that inspired Condillac to imagine that we could create a statue that, through the addition of senses which would provide ideas, would gradually become human.8 Fantasies, such as Condillac’s, based on a materialist world composed of tiny atomic parts which worked together as a great machine led enthusiastic spirits such as la Mettrie rashly to declare: “Let us conclude boldly then that man is a machine, and that in the whole universe there is but a single substance with various modifications.”9 La Mettrie’s disciple Cabanais more explicitly materialized
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thought when he hypothesized that “the brain secretes thought as the liver bile.”10 Hume, too, subscribed to a mechanical view of the mind. Just as we observe the mechanistic world at large, so we must also inspect the mechanical properties of our own mind. These properties of the mind do not present themselves as material atoms but as “ideas.” The contents of our minds are laid out before us through introspection. Hume, to a large extent, invented introspective psychology, a mode of investigating the mind that would last until it was displaced by behaviorism in the early twentieth century. While the Enlightenment project may not have been altogether beneficial in forging an image of what it is to be human, it did make a significant achievement in proposing the commonality of human nature. The eighteenth-century philosophers popularized the notion that human beings share a common nature that has been basically the same since the earliest days and will continue to be the same into the future. Not all eighteenth-century philosophers, however, shared the increasingly materialist view of human nature. Berkeley seemed to be making an earlier version of Nagel’s point that we cannot conceive how it is possible that some physical matter can think.11 Earlier, Leibniz had also seen the danger of applying the machine metaphor to human beings. Like Descartes he knew well the inadequacies of a mechanistic model for explaining the workings of the mind. In the Monadology he presented an earlier form of Nagel’s problem of consciousness. In his analogy of the mill, Leibniz pointed out that no matter how complex a machine that simulates human thought may be, there is, apparently, no scope within it for the characteristics of mind.12 But Leibniz’s way of looking at the mind is less Cartesian and dualist and more akin to the older Aristotelian idea of the soul as form. In the end, his warnings were rejected in the light of a combination of the two powerful metaphors of atomism (which makes materialism seem plausible) and mechanism. It is interesting to note that the greatest philosopher of the age, Kant, who, like Locke, Hume, and the philosophes, put so much emphasis on the centrality of experience, proposed a philosophy in which the self was ultimately and inescapably unknowable. With Kant ruling out
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any possibility of a rational metaphysics of what lay beyond experience and even denying us any knowledge of the true nature of the self that was the subject of that experience, the way was left clear for a shallow, one-eyed, naturalism erected on the uncontested metaphysics of materialism. That the most profound philosopher of the age ended up with a worldview that was so truncated should have made others wary of the limitations of empirical experience as the basis of philosophy.
Human Nature and the Continuation of the Enlightenment Project Contemporary science is the true inheritor of the Enlightenment ideal. Over the last two centuries natural philosophers have frequently recommitted themselves to the central tenets of the Enlightenment. Anglo-American philosophy, with the exception of its wayward neopragmatic offspring, is the main area of traditional philosophy which still subscribes to the materialist vision of the Enlightenment. The one-eyed handicap has thus been retained as an integral part of most attempts at formulating a theory of human nature in the Englishspeaking world. The twin problems of what human nature is and how best to study it have been a central concern of philosophy since the Enlightenment. As one commentator has argued: “It is no exaggeration to say that the main theme of philosophy since the seventeenth century has been this problem of the relationship between scientific and other understandings of human nature.”13 But whereas in philosophy there have always been defenders of a more expanded view of human nature, within the Western intellectual tradition as a whole the trend has been toward materialism/physicalism—a trend that has accelerated with the decline in the role of religion in the thought of Western intellectuals. For Richard Rorty, this change happened around 1910, when the intellectuals “began to be confident that human beings had only bodies, and no souls.”14 While the majority of the intellectual successors of the Enlightenment are probably materialists, the overwhelming majority of humanity are undoubtedly dualists. For the one, how conscious minds
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can arise from inert matter is a mystery; for the other, how spiritual substances have become involved with (but will eventually disentangle themselves from) physical bodies is as deep a mystery. In the nineteenth century, natural philosophers had abandoned any conception of human nature that was not circumscribed by the physicalist’s account of the world. Thinkers such as Mill and Durkheim maintained that explanations of human nature from either social or psychological perspectives could not, as a matter of contingent fact, be reduced to the facts of physiology. Nevertheless, they believed that in principle both psychological and social capacities were rooted in the physical characteristics of human beings. Although he could not claim absolute knowledge on the matter, Mill thought it highly probable that all mental states were caused by the physical states of the nervous system. The only reason, he believed, why there should be a science of psychology at all and not just a science of physiology was that “we are wholly ignorant of the character of these [underlying] nervous states.”15 Materialists, in fact, shelved the problem of how mind was rooted in body. The problem of the natural or physical constitutional aspect of human nature was ignored by materialists with phrases like “Of course, we cannot here go . . . into the actual physical nature of man” (Marx), or “Here . . . we shall keep clear of all speculations respecting the mind’s own nature” (Mill).16 The metaphor that still guided theorists of human nature throughout the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth was the blank slate image. They might not have had a clue as to how human nature was connected to human physiology, but they knew that however it was, it produced a blank page on which could be written the dominant mores and beliefs of whatever culture human beings found themselves in. This model, so beloved of behaviorists, gave way in the late twentieth century to an evolutionary model in which the human being was to a large extent determined by the evolutionary past of the species. This evolutionary model at least had the virtue of recognizing that people possessed an original constitution in some way connected to, if not wholly determining, the mental aspect of their nature.
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This development brought more fully into view the deficiency of the one-eyed approach which saw people in terms of their physicality, yet was unable to state how this physicality gave them the characteristic mental traits of being human. Furthermore, if human beings were constrained by their biology, to what extent were they so constrained? Humans’ creativity and originality were as rooted in human biology as their hereditary constraints. How was it possible to have programmed into humans all sorts of abilities and creativity that would have had no place during our long evolutionary history on the African savannah? The success of evolutionary psychology makes more urgent the need to address the question of how a living physical being can have mental, in particular conscious, characteristics which seem to be influenced, but not wholly determined, by the being’s biology. Our biology seems to provide us as much with open-ended potentiality as with constraints on our mentality. There is a tension here that has been largely ignored by natural philosophers. We are biological organisms with an evolutionary history which has shaped much of our mental tool kit, while at the same time we are largely free, creative, and insightful beings who, most of the time, are unaware of any constraints imposed on our mentality by our physical constitution. Richard Dawkins can, at the same time, solemnly declare that we are lumbering robots controlled by our genes—mere vehicles for their reproduction—and yet blithely state that we can transcend the influence of our genes and create our own destiny.17 Another evolutionary theorist of human nature, E. O. Wilson, has endorsed Dawkins’ idea that the human mind is largely a creation of a breed of Darwinian replicators, analogous to genes, called memes. Wilson believes human nature to be the product of a set of epigenetic rules which provide “the hereditary regularities of mental development.” It is these epigenetic rules which root mind and culture in genes.18 Wilson’s thesis has the merit of recognizing that what it is to be human is inseparably connected with human embodiment. Of course, Wilson shows little awareness of the hard problem of how the first-person ontology of the mind, human or otherwise, can possibly emerge from the electrochemical activity of the brain. Wilson, like
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Dawkins and Dennett, sees memes as self-replicating units of culture which furnish the mind with its beliefs. Meme theory can, indeed, play some role in providing a model for how some beliefs and practices spread through a culture, but as an analysis of the nature of the minds that go to make up the culture it is vacuous.19 At least the recognition by evolutionary biologists that the mind must be rooted in the genetic code while at the same time not determined by that code is a significant advance. Hopes of explaining minds in terms of Darwinian replicators such as memes is the contemporary equivalent of the “man as machine” view of la Mettrie in that it completely bypasses any question as to the metaphysical nature of mind. In fact, the machine metaphor is never far beneath the surface. As Wilson observes: “All that has been learned empirically about evolution in general and mental processes in particular suggests that the brain is a machine assembled not to understand itself, but to survive.”20 Wilson borrows from Dennett the multiple-drafts theory of consciousness: “The mind is a self-organizing republic of scenarios.” These scenarios pass quickly through the brain, spawning “thought and physical activity.” Consciousness is a virtual reality composed of these scenarios.21 As to how the first-person ontology of these scenarios comes about, neither Wilson nor Dennett can tell us. Their view of conscious thought is depressingly reminiscent of Cabanais’ notion of the brain secreting thought. Human nature evidently contains significant innate elements—but what they are and how they arise are the great mysteries. Two theorists have revealed to us the depth of our ignorance about the nature of the human mind. Sigmund Freud and Thomas Nagel have shown just how little we know about our nature. Freud, among others, realized that there are hidden currents in our mental life which we cannot reach, even through introspection. At best, some inkling of these subconscious mental events might be revealed through the analysis of dreams and slips of the tongue. Since the time of Descartes the metaphysical mystery at the heart of human nature has always been apparent—to many philosophers anyway. The mind’s relation to the body was always considered to be
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problematic, but, notoriously, it was difficult to bring the nature of the problem into sharp focus. It was Thomas Nagel’s 1974 paper “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” that did most to tighten up the focus by concentrating on the problem of how physical things could be conscious.22 This hard problem led more philosophers to wonder again at how there can be mind in a physical universe. More than any other text, Nagel’s article made many philosophers realize that the naturalistic approach lacked metaphysical depth. If the essence of human nature is that mind and all its characteristics are rooted in the physical aspect of a person, then Nagel showed that human nature cannot be plumbed either through a third-person account of the physical aspect or through a first-person analysis of mental contents. Neither empirical observation nor introspection can tell us how the mental is instantiated in the physical. These insights, added to Freud’s insights about the limitations of introspection, demonstrate just how baffling the mystery of human nature is. This impasse has led some philosophers to settle for the position that we must live with two different ways of describing what it is to be a person. While the Enlightenment project still motivates the majority of those who try to understand human nature, some within the tradition believe that it may be practically impossible ever to have a science of human behavior that is on a par with the physical sciences. Thus Donald Davidson still subscribes to the physicalist monism of the Enlightenment but believes that mental occurrences, although physical events, are not susceptible to being described, let alone predicted, in physical terms. Davidson prefers to call his position anomalous monism because mental events are anomalous in that they “do not fall under strict laws when described in psychological terms.”23 It is largely an article of faith with Davidson that all mental events are causally related to physical events, from which he concludes that “there exists a closed and deterministic system of laws into which these events, when appropriately described, fit.”24 In other words, he subscribes to the Enlightenment tenet that all truths must ultimately cohere; they must be capable of being held in a single vision—maybe not by us, but, in principle, by some suitably equipped cognitive being.
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Furthermore, this “closed and deterministic system of laws” will rest firmly on a physicalist ontology. Thus, even when the radical irreducibility of the mental to the physical is fully realized, there is a reluctance to abandon the Enlightenment physicalist ontology. Having coherence as an article of faith, while at the same time admitting that the knowledge will not cohere for us, would appear to be a weakening of the tenet of the unity of knowledge. Contemporary materialists, such as Dennett and Wilson, continue the eighteenth-century foible of trying to explain too much with too little. Darwinism is a valuable adjunct to the materialists’ tool kit: replicating genes and memes may end up having a place in the final story, but they will by no means constitute that story.
Human Nature and Two-Eyed Reason Richard Rorty rejects the notion of human nature, yet recognizes that something happens in socialization and education that enables an “animal” to become a human being. However, it is not just any animal which can become human; only a very specific type of being can become a self-actualizing member of human society. That being must have the requisite powers and dispositions; and these qualities are found only in beings of the necessary physical makeup.25 We do not know what connection there is between our mental constitution and our physical constitution; we do not know how the physical either gives rise to the mental or is a necessary corollary to the mental—that is the deep mystery of human nature. Most natural philosophers today would not know that there is a deep metaphysical mystery at the heart of human nature—hence the widespread blasé assumption that our brains are just sophisticated computers designed through eons of R & D by natural selection. But it is the deep enigma at the heart of human nature that makes claims about humanlike robots so implausible. We do not know what it is that makes human beings human, still less how to make a machine human. The best we can do is make machines that simulate some of the human powers and dispositions.
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We know that what it is to be human is either wholly or largely connected with the specific physical constitution that we have. The overwhelming number of Western natural philosophers would see this nature as being wholly a function of our physicality. But even committed dualists would not deny that our mental being is intimately connected with the physical structure of our being. We face two problems as a result of this: First, how is our mental being grounded in (or, at least, intimately connected with) the physicality of our body? Second, to what extent is our nature constrained by, or even determined by, our physical bodies? It seems unlikely that our physical nature produces a mind that is a blank slate, an infinitely malleable entity that can be molded into any format by its environment. Nor does it seem plausible that this physical basis renders the mind a wholly determined set of processes whose thoughts and emotions can, in principle, be read off with an omniscient grasp of the underlying physical structure of the body. Given its probable physical basis, it seems even more implausible that the mind could be characterized by a radically free will that is at liberty to create its own essence. If, as seems likely, the human mind, like all other minds we know of, arises in some way from (or is dependent in some way upon) the physical makeup of the body, then it would appear plausible that this underlying physical structure should influence the scope of the mind’s ability to perceive its environment and to cogitate on its own nature and that of the world external to it. If what we are, more than any other aspect of our being, is a mind—a first-person ontological being—then a true grasp of human nature would necessitate a grasp of how this first-person ontology is dependent on a physical structure. In the absence of any plausible theory of how we can have conscious minds in a physical world, and how much this physical structure influences the mind, it is fair to say that no theory of human nature so far offered can be anything more than a vague outline of what any true final theory would be. Furthermore, progress toward such a theory would seem to necessitate a significant breakthrough in our understanding of reality as a whole. If the Enlightenment belief that all knowledge ultimately coheres is true,
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then there is some coherent story to be told about how first-person ontologies can exist in a third-person ontological world. Until those two realities are presented in a unified vision, there will be no theory of human nature that can be based on anything more than a one-eyed perspective. Calling the naturalistic approach “one-eyed” implies that another mode of investigation could fruitfully augment the scientific approach forged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But, as we have seen, there is no likely candidate that would seem to be able to match science in its ability to achieve results. Whatever about a lack of consensus on the methodology that should characterize the other eye, there is little doubt as to what the eye should be looking at—human nature. It is in the realm of what it is to be human that the materialist approach has been most deficient. The grounding of human nature, the very “being” of a human being—the grounding of a first-person ontology—is a mystery in a purely physical universe. For philosophers who believe in the possibility of immutable truth, what Rorty calls truth with a capital “T,” there seems to be at least one tenet of the Enlightenment project to which they must subscribe: all immutable truths in some way cohere. If both physics and metaphysics, say, are capable of producing unchanging truths, then it must be possible to hold those truths within a single vision; to return to our metaphor, both eyes must present us with a world, all of whose details can be held simultaneously in focus. The unity of knowledge, so treasured by the scientific inheritors of the Enlightenment and attained in so many ways with regard to the natural world, has been deficient when it comes to including that most crucial component of nature—ourselves. The absence of the most fundamental aspect of human nature, how the first-person human ontology arises from, or is connected to, physical reality, indicates the deficiency of depth and understanding that Whitehead saw as the failing of the Enlightenment project. If progress is to be made, we need a new unified science—science in the old meaning of an “organized body of knowledge”—that allows us to hold in a single vision our successful physical third-person ontology of the world with an account of
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first-person ontology. This new vision will have to be driven by different metaphors. The old dualist world, of two places or two substances, has proved inadequate by creating an impassable barrier for the tools that have worked so well in the domain of the physical to be applied in the transcendent realm. Similarly, the metaphor of a machinelike world of purely physical objects ticking away in accordance with the laws of physics has been disastrous in that it has led to attempts to diminish the importance of first-person ontology. The first step is perhaps to recognize the importance of metaphors in our thinking and, having done that, to realize that these metaphors are not truths but can, and should, be changed to stimulate thought. The Enlightenment thinkers were right; experience is crucial, but experience is of two related but different types: the subjective and the intersubjective. We have produced a rich account of the intersubjective world. What eludes us is how the subjective exists within this intersubjectively agreed world. The impasses of Freud and Nagel seem to suggest that there is a great deal more to being human than meets either the eye of science or the eye of conscious introspection. Beyond, below, or alongside consciousness there seems to be a reality that we would wish to designate as mental and which in some way joins up with the physical aspect of our being. What the nature of this extended self is, is beyond us and, if Colin McGinn is right, will always be beyond us.26 Part of the problem may be an overdependency on metaphors (such as the above spatial metaphors of “beyond,” “below,” or “alongside of ”) which may set our thinking on the wrong track. For philosophy, or intellectual thought in general, to progress, it is necessary to shake off the constricting metaphors of the past. The metaphors of the Enlightenment— materialism, atomism, mechanism—were liberating for their time. But machine metaphors of clockwork or computers, or images of tiny particles blindly colliding with each other, while somehow creating elaborate forms, have inevitably led to sterile debates over free will and determinism. Similarly, Cartesian dualism has created an unnecessary barrier between two allegedly separate realms labeled physical and mental.
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Maybe it is time to return to an older organic metaphor to describe all aspects of nature, including human nature. A world characterized by potentiality and growth seems less susceptible to the pitfalls of determinism and the inescapable ironlike laws that govern all change. Determinism was never as much a problem for Plato and Aristotle as it is for the modern inheritors of a machine world. This is not to argue that the ancients in some way “got it right,” whereas the Enlightenment thinkers “got it wrong.” Guiding metaphors and images can either help or hinder philosophers. Metaphors, like analogies, can be pushed only so far. Probably a good sign that a culture’s dominant metaphors are becoming less useful is when they no longer shed light on intractable problems that the metaphors themselves seem to entail. The old chestnuts of the mind-body problem and the problem of free will and determinism, which seem unsolvable, might indicate that the metaphors that dominate the debate need to be discarded. It is, of course, not an easy matter to come up with alternative tropes to guide our thinking. It is easier to cast doubt on the utility of existing images. Certainly, neither the machine metaphor nor the dualist image of two entities shackled together will suffice in trying to solve the problem of a first-person ontology in a physical world. Perhaps a better way of looking at the nature of a human being is not in terms of a physical thing and its ghostly counterpart but in terms of a third and more basic realm of being that could be characterized by potentiality. This idea will obviously share some of the demerits of previous proposals such as James’ neutral monism. The problem of proposing another realm of being is the risk of falling under the sharp blade of Ockham’s Razor. But, as noted above, the nature of the human mind requires a far richer view of reality than is provided by contemporary materialism. In the end, if human (or other) minds ever grasp the true essence of what it is to be human, their story will include elements that are currently beyond our ken. We need a new Enlightenment view without the hubris: a view that is aware that it employs abstractions and metaphors but sees these not as the framework of reality but as a set of tools that have proved useful in investigating reality. Such a view would acknowledge its own limitations and realize that it
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was not the only perspective on the world. To hold a first-person ontology and a third-person world in a single vision will require a field of view that contains many things that are not now on the horizon. The other eye will reveal a far richer reality than we have hitherto imagined.
Notes 1. I will use the term natural philosopher rather than scientist to emphasize that I am speaking about all those engaged in the type of cognitive enterprises that would have been labeled “philosophy” in the eighteenth century. 2. See Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, bk. 4, ch. 3, sec. 16. 3. Quoted in Isaac Kramnick, ed., The Portable Enlightenment Reader (New York: Penguin, 1995), p. 17. 4. E. O. Wilson, Consilience (London: Abacus, 1998), p. 297. 5. Cited in Kramnick, Portable Enlightenment Reader, p. 21. 6. Isaiah Berlin, The Age of Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 17–18. 7. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 21. 8. See Kramnick, Portable Enlightenment Reader, pp. 220–21. 9. Quoted in ibid., p. 208. 10. Isaiah Berlin, Age of Enlightenment, p. 269. 11. See Gerald Hanratty, Philosophers of the Enlightenment: Locke, Hume and Berkeley Revisited (Dublin: Four Courts, 1995), pp. 88–89. 12. G. W. Leibniz, Monadology, in G. W. Leibniz: Philosophical Texts, ed. R. S. Woolhouse and R. Francks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 270. 13. Leslie Stevenson, The Study of Human Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 79. 14. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 168. 15. Quoted in Stevenson, Study of Human Nature, p. 128. 16. Ibid., pp. 140, 126. 17. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 19. 18. Wilson, Consilience, p. 181.
Human Nature and One-Eyed Reason 289 19. Sound waves might help to explain how some units of information can pass through air, but an understanding of them does not explain the nature of air. 20. Wilson, Consilience, p. 105. 21. Ibid., p. 120. 22. Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 23. Donald Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 231. 24. Ibid. 25. A relatively small difference in DNA separates a human from a chimpanzee. 26. Colin McGinn, “Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?,” in Modern Philosophy of Mind, ed. William Lyons (London: Everyman, 1995), pp. 272–95.
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Relativism and Religious Diversity Maria Baghramian
Cultural diversity creates not only sociopolitical but also philosophical headaches. The Encyclopedia Britannica estimates that there are about ten thousand distinct religions, of which 150 have at least one million followers. According to other methods of individuation, there are nineteen major world religions subdivided into 270 large religious groups, and many smaller ones.1 These religions often profess conflicting articles of faith, metaphysical outlooks, ethical beliefs, and injunctions for religious practices.2 Logically speaking, not all religious doctrines could be true, but the difficulty is to decide which one(s), if any, are. Given seemingly incompatible and competing religious beliefs, there are at least five options available.3
Secular Atheism Secular atheists deny the truth and validity of all religious claims and explain religions’ prevalence in terms of the social and psychological needs of believers; in other words, we can maintain that all religions are equally false and based on an explainable “God delusion.”4 This op290
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tion, despite its satisfactory simplicity and its many vocal and articulate supporters among the intelligentsia, has failed to gain widespread support.
Exclusive Monism Religious exclusivism maintains, rather heroically, that only one of the many existing religions has an exclusive claim to truth and that those not fully in accord with it are mistaken or misguided. Religious exclusivism is a prominent feature of the orthodox interpretations of major religions and is defended strongly by fundamentalists of all creeds. Adherents of different religions almost inevitably believe in the inherent superiority of their faith, but their partiality does not offer grounds for establishing its unique truth. The difficulty with religious exclusivism is the absence of a universally accepted criterion, evidence, or experimental procedure to establish a ranking of different religious beliefs. It may be suggested that the superiority of a particular religious outlook can be established by virtue of its beneficial consequences. The approach is sometimes justified by reference to Matthew 7:16: “By their fruits you shall know them.” But which “fruits” are to be picked as relevant to the task of comparing different religions, and what are the criteria for establishing the success of such fruit inspection? Are we to concentrate on worldly goods or the redemption and reward awaiting the faithful in the hereafter? The ultimate goal, in many religions, is to achieve eternal salvation rather than comfort or happiness in this transient realm. The two types of good seem incommensurable, and if the eternal trumps the worldly, as it is claimed to do, then the suggestion that we should rank religions in terms of their beneficial consequences becomes unworkable. Alternatively, it may be claimed that religions should be ranked in terms of their conceptual or theoretical superiority: we could, for instance, use criteria such as internal coherence and rational plausibility to establish the superiority of a particular religious doctrine. Such measures, however, even if successfully applied, introduce extraneous rational and prudential considerations that are alien, if not antithetical, to religious faith. In almost all religious traditions,
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having faith involves an element of unquestioning and hence nonrational acceptance. To rank religious beliefs in terms of internal coherence or rational plausibility flies in the face of this defining feature of faith. Inclusive Monism The inclusive or liberal version of religious monism denies the import of the perceived diversity and minimizes its scope; the claim is that the extent of the alleged differences between religions has either been exaggerated or misunderstood. Beyond the apparent dissimilarities, many core similarities unify all religions into a single overarching true message. According to one version of this approach, as explored by people such as William James, John E. Smith, and Ninian Smart, the essential unity of religious beliefs is located in the recurrent patterns of diverse religious systems. For instance, William James proposes that in every clearly articulated religious system there are at least three discernible structural elements: first, a vision of an Ideal, variously described as Ground, Order, Person, Divine Nothingness, or similar, which defines the true fulfillment of man and everything else; second, a judgment which discloses in the actual world some defect or flaw that separates present life from the ideal fulfillment; and third, the Power— be it knowledge, a person, a divine law, or a model of conduct—whose function it is to nullify the distorting effect of the flaw and unite man with the Ideal.5 This option dissolves the original dilemma by questioning its very premise but flies in the face of evidence for the irreconcilable differences among religions. It seems implausible to maintain, for instance, that the foundational article of faith in Christianity that Jesus is the Son of God, the Jewish belief that Jesus was a mere pretender and not the anticipated Messiah, and the Moslem claim that Jesus was indeed a messenger of God but a very human one whose message was to be superseded and perfected by the ultimate messenger, the Prophet Mohammad, are all equally true and compatible claims.6 Inclusive monism is sometimes defended indirectly or implicitly by emphasizing the expressive and symbolic, rather than the assertoric,
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functions of religious language. It is argued that seemingly incompatible descriptions of God or accounts of the actions of his messengers are metaphors for a singular higher truth which can never be fully expressed by our mundane languages. One difficulty with this approach is that it leaves no room for distinctions between true religions and apostasies and heresies. If religious language is purely metaphorical and expressive, then the messianic visions of fringe cult leaders and the orthodoxies of traditional faiths are equally valid expressions of the ineffable religious truth. Such a permissive conclusion, however, should not satisfy even the most liberal adherents of established religions. A possibly more promising avenue is to acknowledge that religions often are a mix of cognitive and noncognitive or metaphorical elements. This admission complicates the picture but does not undermine the claim that religious discourse is not wholly immune from the claims of reason.7 Religious expressivism or noncognitivism may appear to resolve our original dilemma by placing religion beyond the claims of rationality and truth. If religious beliefs are beyond the mundane truths of reason, then there is no real conflict between seemingly contradictory religious credos. But this is a pyrrhic victory only, for the advocates of the nonrationality of faith render the practitioners of each religion prisoners of their own system of belief immune from criticism but by the same token unable to engage in critical discourse with other religions. The result is a radical religious incommensurability that undermines the very attempt to reconcile or adjudicate between incompatible religious claims. The result not only is intellectually unsatisfactory but also could have serious political and social ramifications. Where reason and rational discourse are excluded, violence, guided by fervor and passion, finds ready entry.
Religious Pluralism Inclusive monism in general, and expressivist approaches to religion in particular, have commonalities with so-called “vertical pluralism,” the philosophical approach according to which questions of truth and
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f alsity in different domains of discourse, such as the ethical, the scientific, or the religious, are distinct and should not be reduced to a single overarching idea of truth.8 Some versions of fideism and the approaches to religion inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein—insofar as they see religious discourse (e.g., prayer) as a distinct language game enacted within the context of a specific form of life—belong to this variety of pluralism. Vertical religious pluralism is compatible with religious exclusivism and leaves our original dilemma untouched, for even if we accept that religious discourse has its own sui generis criteria of validity, rational acceptability, or even truth, leaving aside the implausibility of such a claim, we still face the original dilemma of adjudicating between incompatible religious claims without resorting to the ethnocentric claim of the superiority of a local religious belief set. Horizontal pluralism, on the other hand, maintains that there could be more than one correct account of how things are in any given domain. When it comes to religion, the claim is that many, if not all, religious doctrines are true and that their perceived differences result from each religion tradition offering its own particular perspective on an ultimate spiritual truth or reality. Ernst Troeltsch, for instance, advocates horizontal religious pluralism when he states that the great world religions all have equal claims to validity and that Christianity is the culmination of these equal claims.9 John Hick also advocates a more developed version of pluralism where, drawing on the Kantian distinction between noumenal and phenomenal reality, he argues that a single religious reality is “differently conceived, and therefore differently experienced, and therefore differently responded to from within our several religio-cultural ways of being human.”10 The diversity of claims about the divine is explained by Hick as an outcome of the ultimate unknowability and ineffability of God. According to Hick, the “different ‘faces’ of God, or different divine personae, have come about at the interface between the ineffable divine Reality and our human spiritual receptivity, a receptivity that has been variously formed within the different traditions.”11 Horizontal religious pluralism acknowledges the truth or legitimacy of a variety, if not all, of seemingly irreconcilable religious doctrines, but in doing so it faces the standard dilemma of pluralism: How to understand the claim that conflicting
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and even contradictory beliefs could all be true? How to reconcile the claim to pluralism with the logical requirements of consistency and coherence? The horizontal religious pluralist faces three options. The first option is to suggest, as Hick does, that all religions are different conceptions of the same transcendental reality and hence that their logical incompatibility is apparent rather than real. This weak form of pluralism collapses into inclusive, liberal monism and faces the very same claim of implausibility. Hick attempts to overcome the original problem of diversity by denying that there are substantive and irreconcilable differences between varying religious claims. “Allah is the phenomenal Real of Islam; Brahman the phenomenal real of Advaitic Hinduism. Both of them are manifestations of the same noumenal Real.”12 He adds: “The great world faiths embody different perceptions and conceptions of, and correspondingly different responses to, the Real from within the major variant ways of being human; and . . . within each of them the transformation of human existence from selfcentredness to Reality-centredness is taking place. These traditions accordingly are to be regarded as alternative soteriological spaces within which men and women can find salvation, liberation and ultimate fulfilment.”13 Like the liberal monist, the weak pluralist attempts to reconcile diverse religious claims by postulating a foundational unity in the ultimate objects of belief. In doing so it ignores the lengths human beings are willing to go in order to establish the superiority of their particular brand of religious conviction and thus fails to reflect the realities of religious belief and practice. More importantly, the solution is unconvincing because it brushes aside the irreconcilability of core religious doctrines. For instance, the beliefs surrounding Allah, the manner in which the Holy Koran characterizes the one true God as a personal deity, a creator of the universe but distinct from its creation, are fundamentally at odds with the beliefs surrounding Brahman in Advaitic Hinduism, where the concept of a personal deity does not exist and where there is no real separation between the creator and the created. It is very difficult to see how both these core religious claims could be true versions or manifestations of the same ultimate religious reality.
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The second option is to maintain that religious discourse, in virtue of its subject matter, can accommodate paradoxes and logical incongruities and therefore that religious pluralism is not threatened by contradictions.14 The suggestion is unsatisfactory for reasons outlined in our discussion of fideism. To allow that religion is beyond the grasp of logic and reason is to admit the legitimacy of any system of belief that claims to be based on faith or revelation. Furthermore, even if religious discourse is not bound by the usual constraints of logic, it does not follow that metareligious discourse is also immune from the strictures of rationality. Nonbelievers, for instance, could not be denied the chance of discussing religion within a rational or logical framework. Even if the avowal of faith is fundamentally nonrational, it does not follow that discussions of such avowals are also nonrational. To adopt this approach would make philosophy of religion, including this paper, otiose. Third and finally, we can attempt to remove the air of incompatibility between divergent faith-based claims by adopting a strong version of pluralism which accepts that there could be many true religions but which localizes their truth or rational acceptability to specific conceptual frameworks or cultural contexts. This approach, in effect, collapses pluralism into relativism, an option that we will discuss in the next section. To recap, all versions of religious pluralism prove implausible. The vertical pluralist separates religious discourse from others but does not address the issue of religious diversity. The horizontal pluralist claim may be given a weak and strong interpretation. The weaker version, like liberal monism, proves too permissive, unable to distinguish between traditional religions and what their faithful would see as mere faddish cults. The stronger version is indistinguishable from relativism.
Relativism The relativist about religion believes that there is no real conflict or genuine disagreement between different religions because the truth of
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religious beliefs is relative to the differing social and cultural frameworks from which they arise and within which they are embedded. Relativism, like strong horizontal pluralism, affirms the truth of many religions and insists that their truth or acceptability is a local matter. The remainder of this paper focuses on this last of the five possible reactions to religious diversity that I have sketched. Religious relativism is the claim that the truth, legitimacy, and authority of religious beliefs and practices, at least partially, are a function of and hence reside in their social and cultural contexts. Relativists argue that our judgments and beliefs take place within a social and cultural framework, against a background of personal and collective assumptions, interests, and values, and that even if they may not be wholly determined by their conceptual and sociocultural contexts, they are influenced by them. Since religious beliefs, like all other beliefs, are formed and held under specific cultural and historical conditions, their evaluations should include a reference to both the believers’ and the evaluators’ cultural and historical contexts. Whichever perspective is adopted, there is no neutral ground for surveying various religions. The idea of relativism permeates our current intellectual climate. Virtually the whole spectrum of current philosophical debates, from ethics to epistemology and from science to religion, has responded to this heady and seemingly subversive idea. With the dissipation of the ideological conflicts of the twentieth century, relativism has come to dominate the intellectual ethos of our time. Almost simultaneously, religious discourse has become a potent force in the political arena. The coalescence of these two powerful ideas poses a variety of intellectual and social challenges. Opinions as to the merits of religious relativism are sharply divided. On the one hand, relativism is seen as a serious threat to the survival of organized religion. Pope Benedict, for instance, warns that the West is fast moving toward a “dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires.”15 Catholic theologian Roger LeBlanc thinks that the single biggest threat to the papacy is the rise of religious relativism—the rejection of the central credo of Christian faith that
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there is and could be only one true set of beliefs that emanate from the Holy See, whose authority can be traced directly to Jesus.16 The position of the Catholic hierarchy is mirrored not only by the practitioners of other Christian denominations but also by other religions. The webpage of the Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry, for instance, states: “Relativism is invading our society, our economy, our schools, and our homes. Society cannot flourish or survive in an environment where everyone does what is right in his own eyes, where the situation determines actions and if the situation changes, lying or cheating is acceptable—as long as you’re not caught. Without a common foundation of truth and absolutes, our culture will become weak and fragmented.”17 Similar sentiments are expressed by leading conservative Moslem clerics who brand their critics as “relativists.” A group of conservative Iranian seminary scholars in Qom, for instance, issued an open letter to the more liberal Ayatollah Nuri’s seminary supporters, accusing them of consorting with people who argued that “right and wrong are relative” and that “even the Emams and the prophets were not absolute.” Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi states: “The culture of tolerance and indulgence [advocated by relativism] means the disarming of society of its defense mechanism.”18 At the other end of the spectrum of opinion, religious relativism, particularly in its postmodernist and Wittgensteinian manifestations, is seen as the best hope for reintroducing faith to a secular and materialist world.19 John Caputo, for instance, in his commentary on Derrida’s recent writings, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, claims that Derrida’s philosophy opens the space for an affirmative faith to occur and be professed.20 In On Religion he explains that the deconstruction of modernity’s scientific certainties and rational dogmas leads not to atheism but to a situation “in which we see a certain recuperation or repetition of the pre-metaphysical situation of faith.”21 Don Cupitt and D. Z. Phillips, on the other hand, rely on Wittgenstein’s ideas of form of life and the grammar of religious discourse to dispel the suggestion that objectivity, modeled after scientific rationality or even truth, is a requisite of religious faith.22
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What these diametrically opposed reactions to relativism about religion have in common is their affirmation of the legitimacy of religious faith and the validity of a spiritual approach to the world. The religious relativist and the religious absolutist are united in their rejection of atheism and a naturalist understanding of the world. Their view is often contrasted with a purely scientific conception of the world which aims to be objective and universal in its scope. In the remainder of this paper I will focus on religious relativism and its role in overcoming the phenomenon of religious diversity. The term relativism has been applied to a bewildering array of doctrines and positions. At its most basic, relativism is the view that cognitive, moral, or aesthetic norms and values are dependent on the social or conceptual systems that underpin them in such a way that a neutral standpoint for evaluating them is not available. Relativism is also frequently contrasted with absolutism, universalism, realism, and monism.23 Relativism takes many shapes and forms; prominent among them are cognitive relativism on the one hand and moral relativism on the other. Relativism regarding religion is frequently linked with the cognitive variety of relativism and its subdivisions of alethic, epistemic, and conceptual relativisms. Relativism about truth—alethic relativism—claims that the truth of an assertion is relative either to the beliefs, attitudes, and other psychological idiosyncrasies of its utterers, or, more generally, to their social and cultural background. It relativizes the truth-value of assertions with a religious content to specific cultural or religious frameworks: what is true for a Christian believer, for instance, may not be true for a Buddhist, and vice versa. In the subjectivist version of alethic religious relativism, the truth of religious beliefs is relativized to the cognitive and psychological framework of individual thinkers and actors—faith, accordingly, is seen as an expression of a private psychological state or individual preferences. Alethic religious relativism may take one of two further forms: it could be given a broad or global scope where the truth and falsity of all beliefs, including religious beliefs, are relativized to their social, historical, or cultural context; it could take a narrower scope and concern
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itself with the truth of religious discourse only.24 In the first case, religious relativism is trivially a consequence of the broader doctrine of alethic relativism, the target of the most vocal critics of relativism, and stands or falls with it. Global alethic relativism, at least in its most straightforward formulations, is either self-defeating or devoid of the intellectual resources to convince the nonrelativist. Here is why: the alethic relativist claims that Religious beliefs are true relative to their cultural context because (TR) the truth of all beliefs is relative to their cultural context. (TR) is either an absolute or a relative truth. If (TR) is an absolute truth, then (TR) is false, for there is at least one truth that is not relative to its cultural context. If (TR) is relative, then it is true only in cultural contexts where relativism is taken to be true. So, (TR) is not true for the nonrelativists, and hence those who oppose religious relativism have nothing to worry about, for in their absolutist or nonrelativist cultural context religious beliefs are not taken to have relative truth—no belief is.
It may be suggested that what the religious absolutist fears is a change of cultural context where truth comes to be seen in a relativist light and religious relativism is made acceptable. But how is the relativist going to achieve this end and persuade the nonrelativist of the superiority of her position? What measures is she going to take to ensure the triumph of a relativist cultural ethos? Relativists presumably believe that all their beliefs, including their religious beliefs, are true only relative to their social and cultural norms and that other societies have an equally valid claim to the truth of their beliefs. So the relativist has to believe that the absolutist claim is as true (for absolutists) as are the relativist claims for relativists. The relativist is denying the possibility of genuine disagreement with the absolutist; consequently, on pain of inconsistency, she should not argue for or proselytize on behalf of relativism. The relativist may adopt a Rortyan position and claim that the nonrelativist, by engaging with relativism, will come to prefer it to
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her original position. But the relativist does not have the intellectual resources for such pragmatic justification of her position; for instance, she cannot argue that everyone should be a relativist because (W) the relativist’s world is a better or happier place. For the truth of (W) can be established only relativistically and hence would not be convincing to the nonrelativist. Alternatively, alethic religious relativism may be treated as a local doctrine concerning the standing of religious beliefs only. The claim is that religious beliefs are such that their “truth” and “falsity” are relative to their cultural or social background. The approach resembles noncognitivism in ethics and aesthetics, where values are seen as expressions of personal or societal preferences, sentiments, and attitudes devoid of truth-evaluable content. But such an approach should not satisfy the religiously inclined. Religions, almost invariably, propose universal and absolute truth claims. They affirm what they see as a genuine, timeless divine message or revelation worthy of universal assent. Alethic religious relativism comes into conflict with this foundational precept of nearly all religions and hence creates a troubling dilemma: How could world religions remain true to their universalist message and yet be treated relativistically? The local alethic relativist may attempt to highlight the differences between religious and scientific or empirical discourses and argue that religious beliefs, not unlike ethical and aesthetic beliefs, have an expressive rather than an assertoric role. Religious truths, the argument goes, cannot be established using the objective methodology of the natural sciences, for the data used in the domain of science are empirically testable while religion is not. The response is unconvincing because it fails to acknowledge the ways in which religious doctrines stake a claim to truth and objectivity. Furthermore, as we shall see, there are strong parallels between relativism about religion and relativism about science which this response ignores. Conceptual relativists take an altogether more complicated route toward establishing relativism regarding religion. The motivating idea behind conceptual relativism is that our knowledge of the world is mediated through a language, a theory, or a conceptual scheme and that
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there is a plurality of such mediatory schemes. The world does not come ready-made or ready-carved; rather, human beings supply the different ways of categorizing and conceptualizing it.25 Furthermore, it is argued that there are different ways of categorizing and conceptualizing the world and that there is no point in attempting to decide which of these different conceptual perspectives is better, for such a judgment would presuppose something outside all conceptual schemes to which they could be compared, or by the standards of which they could be judged. There is no neutral vantage point for surveying and comparing various conceptual schemes. Hilary Putnam, for instance, argues: “We cut up the world into objects when we introduce one or another scheme of description.”26 The “same” world may be described as consisting of chairs and tables or consisting of space-time regions, or particles and fields. These descriptions need not, and may not, be reducible to a single version of the world.27 Religious differences result from applying a variety of possibly incompatible conceptual tools to explain a single underlying religious reality.28 There is no real conflict, for instance, between the Buddhist and Christian characterizations of the Divine, for each is employing a distinct but perfectly acceptable conceptual scheme to make sense of religious reality. Joseph Runzo, for instance, relativizes the truth-value of religious beliefs, not to a culture or society, but to diverse conceptual schemes. According to him, “The truth of any statement P depends in part on the conceptual schema from within which P is formulated and/or assessed.” He goes on to claim that “a conceptual relativist . . . holds that, corresponding to difference of world-view, there are mutually incompatible, individually adequate, sets of conceptual schema relative truths.”29 It is difficult to see how we can give substance to religious conceptual relativism or even make it intelligible. Conceptual relativism, as construed in standard philosophical literature, presupposes a division between an underlying content or experiential substratum, on the one hand, and conceptual schemes or categories used for organizing that common content, on the other. On the content side of the division, it is not clear whether we could make sense of the suggestion that differ-
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ing conceptual schemes give varying but equally adequate expressions of the same underlying reality or experience when by definition we are unable to give any account of that substratum. The Kantian “thing in itself ” remains forever inaccessible; however, we can treat it as a limit concept presupposed by the very acts of knowing and experiencing. It is difficult to see what warrant we have for assuming that there is a common content underlying all religious experiences. Atheists question the genuineness of religious experiences and the “objects” of religious belief. Religious experience is a delusion, they claim, that comes in different varieties, and the addition of the apparatus of conceptual schemes does nothing to establish its veracity. On the scheme side of the division, the very suggestion that religions are conceptual schemes or categorial frameworks on par with Kantian or neo-Kantian metaphysical categories (time, space, individuals, substance, objects, etc.) is open to doubt. Religious doctrines provide a complex of narratives, moral and prudential injunctions, and frameworks of interpretation for dealing with the world. They provide guidelines for the conduct of our lives and aim to regulate human affairs, often down to its last detail, in this life and the hereafter. Such complex systems of beliefs are far removed from the barebones idea of categorial frameworks and conceptual schemes proposed by Kant, and further developed by the likes of such thinkers as Strawson and Putnam. Furthermore, as Donald Davidson has argued, it is difficult to make sense of the suggestion that different conceptual schemes could give rise to mutually incompatible, but individually adequate, scheme-relative truths. He states: “The dominant metaphor of conceptual relativism, that of differing points of view, seems to betray an underlying paradox. Different points of view make sense, but only if there is a common co-ordinate system on which to plot them; yet the existence of a common system belies the claim of dramatic incomparability.”30 According to Davidson, any language incorporates a largely correct shared view of how things are. Communication and interpretation across various languages prove the existence of a shared and generally true view of the world. In the absence of successful communication or interpretation, however, we shall not have any criterion for ascribing
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beliefs to a biological entity. We can understand a language only if we share a view of the world with its speakers, and if we fail to communicate then we will also fail to identify the linguistic community that is supposed to be radically alien to us. Davidson’s generalized argument relies on a number of assumptions about the connections between truth and meaning and is consequently open to a variety of objections;31 nevertheless, the argument has particular potency when applied to religious conceptual relativism. To accept that there are differing and incompatible religious conceptual schemes we need, in the first place, to identify such schemes by picking out the characteristics common to them; yet the assumption of commonality belies the claim of dramatic incomparability between these schemes—as Davidson would say, the acknowledgment that there is such a thing as a religious conceptual scheme undermines the very claim that the schemes are radically different or incompatible. The abstract transcendental arguments for conceptual relativism do not readily support conceptual relativism in the narrower domain of religion. Epistemic relativism is the final variety of cognitive relativism I wish to consider. Epistemic relativists believe that there are many radically different, at times incompatible, and yet equally acceptable standards of rationality, criteria of logical validity, and ways of knowing the world.32 Barry Barnes and David Bloor have become the standardbearers of this branch of cognitive relativism. They state: “For the relativist there is no sense attached to the idea that some standards or beliefs are really rational as distinct from merely locally accepted as such. Because he thinks that there are no context-free or super-cultural norms of rationality he does not see rationally and irrationally held beliefs as making up two distinct and qualitatively different classes of thing.”33 Relativism about science is the most controversial and yet the most interesting instance of epistemic relativism. As indicated earlier, there are striking parallels between it and relativism about religion, for the two, despite their many differences, share comparable underlying assumptions and have a common architectonic. Relativism about science relies on a number of claims against the assumption of the objectivity of scientific beliefs. It argues against
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1. Scientific realism: scientific theories are attempts to describe the one real world—a world that exists independently of human thinking— and there is a single correct description of any given aspect of that world. 2. The universality of science: genuine scientific laws apply to all times and places and are invariant. 3. A univocal scientific method: there is such a thing as a uniquely correct scientific method. 4. Context-independence: there is a sharp distinction between the context of justification of a scientific theory and the context of its discovery. The social, economic, and psychological circumstances that give rise to a scientific theory should not be confused with the methodological procedures used for justifying it. 5. Meaning invariance: scientific concepts and theoretical terms have stable and fixed meanings. They retain their meaning across theory changes. 6. Convergence: diverse and seemingly incompatible scientific views will ultimately converge into one coherent theory. 7. Scientific knowledge as cumulative: there is a steady growth in the range and depth of our knowledge in any given area of science, and progress in science is made possible by such accumulation.34
The religious relativist, in parallel, argues against 1´. Religious realism: there is a single correct religion.35 2´. The universality of religion: religious relativism arises out of the acknowledgment that there are many religions, each with its own distinct and equally legitimate claim to truth. 3´. A univocal method of salvation: there is no such thing as a unique path for achieving religious salvation. 4´. Context-independence: religious beliefs, like all other beliefs, arise out of particular social and historical contexts and are strongly influenced, if not formed, by these concepts. 5´. Meaning invariance: religious terminology has a stable and fixed meaning, and the vocabulary of the sacred and the profane manages to retain its meaning across all religions.
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6´. Convergence: diverse and seemingly incompatible religious doctrines will ultimately converge into one coherent overarching religion. 7´. Religious knowledge as cumulative: each new religion complements and adds to the already existing body of religious revelation.
In addition to these antiobjectivist stands shared by relativism regarding science and religion alike, positive arguments are adduced on behalf of both types of relativism. Relativism in science has been strongly supported by sociologists of science, social constructionists, radical feminist epistemologists, and postmodernists. Researchers in the area commonly known as “science studies,” influenced by Bruno Latour, maintain that scientific facts, and even reality—or what we call “the world” with its objects, entities, properties, and categories—are not “out there” to be discovered by scientists; rather, they are constructed via interactive norm-governed processes and practices such as negotiations, interpretations, and manipulation of data (as well as accidental and opportunistic developments).36 Scientific discoveries and theoretical knowledge are the products of socially sanctioned norms and practices and are guided by projects that are of cultural, economic, or political importance. The social constructionists claim that “knowledge is a construct produced by cognitive agents within social practices” and that these practices may vary across social groups.37 This move relativizes knowledge insofar as it implies that different social and conceptual conditions can lead to the construction of different systems of knowledge. The constructionist claim, if taken seriously, would equally apply to science and religion.38 Science and religion are social activities with norms and procedures that are constituted and sanctioned by the activities of communities of practitioners and hence have the imprint of group thinking. Different social forces present us with different methods, theories, and worldviews; therefore, in evaluating the claims of science or religion, we should take into account the social and historical particularities of these claims and practices. The parallels between relativism about science and religion undermine the attempts to legitimize relativism about religion by contrasting
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it with the objective domain or scientific knowledge. Religious relativism shares fundamental assumptions with, and hence is no less convincing than, relativism about science. For those who embrace relativistic views of science, relativism about religion should also seem a plausible option, but relativism about science has proven singularly unpopular among practicing scientists, not least because it trivializes the very enterprise of scientific investigation and the methodological principles involved in it.39 Should persons of faith, unlike the “toughminded” scientists, accept an emasculated view of religion? It is difficult to see why they should. If religions are recognized as mere social constructs, then it will be difficult, if not impossible, for the faithful to find a way to argue against the atheist and the agnostic or to proclaim the superiority, or even the desirability, of their worldview.40 Relativism about religion does manage to resolve the problem of religious diversity, but the cost associated with it is too high. To be a relativist about religion is to deny a fundamental feature of religion, the belief in the unassailable and universal truth of the core tenets of one’s faith. In this essay I set out to examine the problem of religious diversity and disagreement. I outlined five possible approaches to the phenomenon of diversity and judged them all to be unconvincing. Religious diversity is an empirical fact which may not be open to theoretical resolution. Relativism about religion, the focus of the second half of this essay, has been offered as a solution to the problem of religious disagreement. The desired resolution of the initial problematic, however, is achieved at the cost of denying that religious beliefs could be true or objective. To accept religious relativism as a solution to the problem of diversity is to deprive religion of its power to convince or persuade the nonbeliever. If diversity of religious belief is a fact, then the only reasonable approach is to adopt an ethical stance of mutual tolerance and respect for such diversity. This pragmatic approach accepts that questions of truth and falsity of religious beliefs may be central to the practices of the faithful of different religious persuasions but emphasizes the need to bracket their relevance in the social and political encounters between differing religious viewpoints. Ultimately we cannot know which, if any, of the many existing religions is true or
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closest to truth. It is of course possible to hold strong beliefs about one’s religious worldview; after all, that is what religious faith amounts to. But in the absence of any convincing evidence or useful theoretical strategies for overcoming religious disagreement, the only option left is to accept diversity as a genuine and irrevocable datum of religious faith and as something that should be accommodated through tolerance and openness rather than denied by resorting to religious exclusivism or relativism.
Notes 1. See David B. Barrett, in World Christian Encyclopedia: A Comparative Survey of Churches and Religions in the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), § 2:1. 2. For the purposes of this paper, religion is defined as a shared set of beliefs, values, and practices revolving around what can be loosely termed as the “holy,” “sacred,” or “divine.” Most religions are oriented toward some spiritual being(s) or deity with supernatural attributes who is presumed to have ultimate authority over what there is. The definition skims over major differences in the phenomena treated. For instance, within Christianity, Unitarians or Quakers have no credal commitment and hence prescribe no core beliefs. Judaism and Buddhism place emphasis on practice over belief. Mahayana Buddhism is far removed from the monotheism of Judeo-Christian religions. The difficulty of finding an all-encompassing definition of religion underlies the problem addressed in this paper rather than undermining it. 3. The standard framework for the discussions of this topic employs a threefold distinction between exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism as the basic taxonomy (e.g., Hick, Quinn, Alston, Knitter, McKim, Van Inwagen). My expanded fivefold distinction has some elements in common with that of Harold A. Netland, Philosophy of Religion: A Contemporary Perspective (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 226–37. 4. Richard Dawkins’ popular and provocative book The God Delusion (London: Bantam Press, 2006) is one of the more popular expressions of such a view. 5. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Triumph Books, 1991). I owe this account to Patrick Masterson, whose comments on an earlier draft of this essay greatly advanced my thinking on the
Relativism and Religious Diversity 309 topic. Masterson believes that a religion must have a putative rational infrastructure even though its central credal beliefs transcend this rational core. For a full account of his views, see The Sense of Creation: Experience and the God Beyond (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008). 6. There are many similar examples of irreconcilable religious diversity. Keith Yandell has argued, for example, that central beliefs of three major world religions, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, make mutually incompatible ontological claims. See Keith E. Yandell, Philosophy of Religion: A Contemporary Perspective (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 34. 7. I owe this point to Paul O’Grady. This essay has benefited greatly from O’Grady’s careful and extensive comments on an earlier draft. 8. For the original version of the distinction between vertical and horizontal pluralism, see Huw Price, “Metaphysical Pluralism,” Journal of Philosophy 89, no. 8 (1992): 387–409. 9. See, for instance, Ernst Troeltsch, The Absoluteness of Christianity and the History of Religions, trans. David Reid (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1971), p. 114. 10. John Hick, The Metaphor of God Incarnate: Christology in a Pluralistic Age (Westminster: John Knox Press, 1993), p. 140. 11. John Hick, “The Latest Vatican Statement on Christianity and Other Religions,” New Blackfriars 79 (2007): 539. 12. John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 37. 13. Ibid., p. 14. 14. The legitimacy of the classical understanding of the law of noncontradiction and its role as a precondition of intelligibility has been questioned by paraconsistent logicians such as Graham Priest. Priest in fact believes that his version of paraconsistent logic could be helpful in allowing the legitimacy of the role of paradoxes in illuminating religious discourse. See, for instance, Beyond the Limits of Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). However, the whole area of paraconsistent logic itself is too contentious to be of much value in clarifying the issues at hand. 15. In an address to the Italian Senate on 13 May 2004, then Cardinal Ratzinger described a spiritual, cultural, and political “crisis” facing the Western world. An expanded version of this lecture was published as Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Christianity, Islam (New York: Basic Books, 2006); it lays out what the pope sees as a central task of his pontificate. 16. Roger LeBlanc, Relativism as Religion: Tracing Its Historical Roots to the Modern Day Crisis (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1998).
310 Maria Baghramian 17. Matt Slick, “What Is Relativism?,” 1995, http://carm.org/what- relativism. 18. Charles Kurzmany, “Critics Within: Islamic Scholars’ Protests against the Islamic State in Iran,” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 15, no. 2 (2001): 354. 19. I have argued for the relativistic implications of postmodernism in general and Derrida in particular in my Relativism (London: Routledge, 2004), ch. 3. The same chapter also discusses some relativistic interpretations of Wittgenstein. 20. John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). 21. John D. Caputo, On Religion, Thinking in Action (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 58. 22. See Don Cupitt, Is Nothing Sacred? The Non-Realist Philosophy of Religion: Selected Essays (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), for Cupitt’s statement of radical fideism. See also D. Z. Phillips, Belief, Change and Forms of Life (London: Macmillan, 1986). 23. On absolutism, see, for instance, David Bloor’s “Epistemic Grace, Antirelativism as Theology in Disguise,” Common Knowledge 13, nos. 2–3 (2007): 250–80. 24. It is of course possible to acknowledge, as for instance Hans Küng does, that religious belief and practice are at least partially a function of social and cultural contexts and that general religious truths are embedded within different cultural milieus. I owe this point to Paul O’Grady. 25. See Baghramian, Relativism, ch. 7, for a more detailed discussion of conceptual relativism. 26. Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 52. 27. Hilary Putnam, Realism with a Human Face, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 20. 28. V. S. Harrison, “Internal Realism, Religious Pluralism and Ontology,” Philosophia 36, no. 1 (2007), is one example of use of Putnam’s argument to justify religious pluralism. 29. Joseph Runzo, Reason, Relativism, and God (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), p. 351; see also Runzo’s “God, Commitment, and Other Faiths: Pluralism vs. Relativism,” Faith and Philosophy 5 (1988): 343–64. 30. Donald Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” in Enquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 184.
Relativism and Religious Diversity 311 31. See, for instance, Maria Baghramian, Relativism (London: Routledge, 2004). 32. See Paul Boghossian, Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 2, for this way of characterizing the problem. 33. Barry Barnes and David Bloor, “Relativism, Rationalism and the Sociology of Knowledge,” in Rationality and Relativism, ed. M. Hollis and S. Lukes (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), pp. 21–47. 34. See Maria Baghramian, “Relativism about Science,” in Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Science, ed. Stathis Psillos and Martin Curd (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 236–48, for a detailed discussion of relativism about science. 35. See, for instance, Runzo, Reason, Relativism. 36. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 37. Lorraine Code, “Taking Subjectivity into Account,” in Feminist Epistemologies, ed. Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 15. 38. Similar points apply to other advocates of relativism about science, radical feminist epistemologists and postmodernists. The considerations they introduce in support of a relativistic understanding of science are easily translated to religious beliefs and dogma. Feminine knowledge, the claim goes, has its own justificatory sphere, as does masculine knowledge; scientific knowledge is thus relativized to gender, which in turn is a socially constructed, rather than natural, category. 39. See Alan Sokal, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” in Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers’ Abuse of Science, ed. Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont (London: Profile Books, 1998), for a scientist’s reaction to postmodern relativism about science. 40. Don Cupitt embraces the full consequences of going relativist all the way down. He is willing to reject the role of science as arbiter of truth and thinks of it as “one human cultural activity among others.” He also believes “religion cannot claim objective truth. . . . The concept of objective truth has itself been banished. Religion can no longer be descriptive but expressive, action-guiding and symbolic.” Don Cupitt, The World to Come (London: SCM, 1982), p. xiv.
t h i r t e e n
The Plagues of Desecration Roger Scruton and Richard Rorty on Life after Religion
Mark Dooley
Twenty years ago the English philosopher Roger Scruton published a remarkably prescient essay entitled “The Philosopher on Dover Beach.”1 The title was a play on Matthew Arnold’s richly construed poem “Dover Beach” (1851), in which the poet agonizes over the decline in religious faith. Arnold mourns: The Sea of Faith was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world.
Once drained of the religious urge, mankind “hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.” We 312
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are then nothing but bewildered creatures scattered across “a darkling plain, / swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / where ignorant armies clash by night.” In “The Philosopher on Dover Beach,” Scruton shows that Arnold’s pessimistic picture of our postreligious condition was neither misguided nor misjudged. For ours is a world that has been transformed by Arnold’s atheistic contemporaries, Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche. It is one in which the latter-day disciples of Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud are everywhere in the ascendant, and one where the postmodern protégés of Michel Foucault have hijacked contemporary culture. According to Scruton, “From that disenchanted vision of the cosmos flow two rival moralities: the atheistic one of self- affirmation, and the political one of Utopian justice” (pp. 4–5). Gone thus, is the time-honored view that “we are creatures who need to be joined not only to each other, but to our forebears and our progeny, and who are called to sacrifice ourselves for the sake of collective survival” (p. 6). Gone is the idea that “religion is the voice of the species, which becomes articulate in us, in order that we should more willingly obey it” (p. 7). Instead, we moderns are unsparingly subject to the secular doctrines of those who “regard God as deriving his nature and purpose from our own activity” (p. 6). Put otherwise, in the world shaped by Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, Christianity and the Kantian morality that was shaped by it are condemned as “illusions of the resentful, distorting mirrors in which the strong are crumpled and the cripples stand tall” (p. 4). For Scruton, however, what constitutes the real illusion is secularism’s declaration that salvation can be attained only by placing God’s “redemptive capacity in the hands of man” (p. 6). Like Matthew Arnold, he believes that when man elides God at the epicenter of existence, we have neither joy, nor love, nor light: If you point to the actual unhappiness of modern man under the rule of secular doctrine; if you mention the Holocaust, the Gulag and the self-expanding system of enslavement which has been built from the new morality of Marx and Lenin; if you say that here, for everyone to see, is the proof of original sin, and the evidence that man is
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after all not sufficient for his own redemption, failing most dismally in emancipating himself precisely when he seeks to free himself from God: if you say such things, a thousand excuses are offered, and a thousand accusations made against the old transcendental faith. And it is indeed right to insist that all human institutions— religion included—are contaminated by man’s vanity and imperfection. Nevertheless, rather than dismiss the accusations that are made against the Marxian and Nietzschean religions, we should look more closely, I believe, at what is peculiar about the cruelties that have been perpetrated in the name of them—apart from the fact of their astonishing scale. (p. 7)
If we follow Scruton’s admonition and look critically at the totalitarian systems spawned in the shadow of Nietzsche and Marx, we will encounter there “a severance of evil from the network of personal responsibility.” We will find a “depersonalization” and a “de- socialization” of the world, or a process in which “human life is driven underground, and the precious ideas of freedom and responsibility— ideas without which our picture of man as a moral subject disintegrates entirely—have no public recognition” (p. 7). What principally characterizes the Nietzschean and Marxist dystopias, in other words, is a violent voiding of the sacred. Quite literally, the social space is desecrated. This means, according to Scruton, that “evil is the true legacy of the naturalistic view of man.” Moreover, the transcendental freedom identified by Kant as that which distinguishes moral subjects from the brutes is considered a distortion of our true condition. From the naturalistic perspective, man is simply “an accident of nature,” devoid of a divine spark, and beneath whom “rides the same implacable causality, the same sovereign indifference, which prepares death equally and unconcernedly for all of us, and which tells us that beyond death there is nothing.” The consequence of this, for Scruton, is the abandonment of piety, respect, and true human freedom. In its place remains only a “presumptuous ignorance, fortified by science” (p. 8). Stated simply, in those societies where the sacred view of life has been replaced by secular scientism, human life has no fortification
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against dissolution and defilement. Having embraced the naturalistic interpretation of life, we in the West currently find ourselves “in the midst of a culture of widespread desecration . . . in which little or no public acknowledgement is afforded the ideas of the sacred, the holy and the forbidden.” “Our institutions and our cities,” laments Scruton, “are alike entirely secular, with no inner sanctuary where the old gods can hide. Our art is full of sacrilegious images and satires of the godly. And the city is being blown apart by a new kind of joke architecture, which has put aside the puritanical discipline of the modernists in order to remind us that there is no permanence, no eternity, no heavenly city to be built in stone, but only a facetious, glassy laughter.”2 Scruton believes that these plagues of desecration have descended upon us thanks to the pervasive influence of postmodernism. One of the postmodern philosophers that he singles out for considerable opprobrium is the recently deceased American pragmatist Richard Rorty.3 In the years preceding his death, Rorty wrote extensively about the role of religion in contemporary life. At first glance, Rorty’s antiessentialist philosophy of religion appears reasonable.4 On closer study, however, it does nothing to fundamentally undermine Scruton’s thesis. If anything, it proves why Roger Scruton’s diagnosis of our current situation is potent and persuasive.
Giving Up on God-Talk In a chapter from a book published just before his death, entitled “Cultural Politics and the Question of the Existence of God,” Rorty defined cultural politics as an activity that includes “projects for getting rid of whole topics of discourse.”5 As a devout disciple of Wilfrid Sellars, Rorty believed that “all awareness is a linguistic affair.” Hence, to paraphrase his other great philosophical influence, Ludwig Wittgenstein, there is no way to come between the object and its word. This means that, because we have no way of independently verifying whether our linguistic descriptions accurately mirror mind or
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l anguage-independent “reality,” it cannot be said of any given discourse that it is necessary. For the pragmatist, therefore, all human descriptions of the nonhuman environment are contingently construed and thus may be disposed of once they no longer serve mankind’s current purposes, needs, and interests. Religious vocabularies are no exception to this general rule. That is why cultural politics must ultimately dispose of religious ways of talking and thinking if human progress is to prevail. And, as if to unwittingly substantiate Roger Scruton’s assertions regarding the prevalence of scientific socialism, Rorty invokes Karl Marx to assert “that we should just stop talking about God.” He writes: Lucretius’ Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum has been quoted for two millennia in order to remind us that religious conviction can easily be used to excuse cruelty. Marx’s claim that religion is the opiate of the people sums up the suspicion, widespread since the Enlightenment, that ecclesiastical institutions are among the principal obstacles to the formation of a global cooperative commonwealth. Many people agree with Marx that we should try to create a world in which human beings devote all their energies to increasing human happiness in this world, rather than taking time off to think about the possibility of life after death.6
No mention of what Scruton rightly describes as the “actual unhappiness of modern man under the rule of secular doctrine.” No mention of the “system of enslavement which has been built from the new morality of Marx and Lenin,” one that resulted in the liquidation of one hundred million citizens. Instead, Rorty proposes that only if we follow Marx’s advice and escape from the manacles of institutionalized religion will genuine human happiness be ours. One way of achieving this is to come to grips with the pragmatic assertion that “truth and reality exist for the sake of social practices, rather than vice versa.”7 In other words, to say that something is true or real is not, from the pragmatist’s perspective, to give it ontological weight. It is simply to say that it is useful to talk about such things because, by doing so, we are enhancing the prospect of human happiness. If, however,
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we discover that some of our descriptions are impeding that prospect, they should simply be made redundant. The issue for Rorty boils down to this: “Is there an authority beyond that of society which society should acknowledge—an authority such as God, or Truth, or Reality?”8 For him, the answer is clearly “No.” Why? Because “to say that everything is a social construction is to say that our linguistic practices are so bound up with our other social practices that our descriptions of nature, as well as of ourselves, will always be a function of our social needs.” As such, “All our knowledge is under descriptions suited to our current social purposes.”9 Hence it is impossible to twist free of our sociolinguistic practices in order to access some unmediated or prelinguistic knowledge of the world, God, or Truth. In sum, the postmodern pragmatist believes it is useless to argue about the existence or nonexistence of God. The proper question to ask is whether, on the basis of our current purposes, it is worthwhile to continue talking about God. What, in other words, are the relative advantages and disadvantages of God-talk in the current sociopolitical context? For Rorty, there are few such advantages, which is why we should simply drop all talk of “God,” in a manner equivalent to the way, in the wake of Nazism, we sought to abandon all talk of “race.” And we did so, not because we somehow disproved the “fundamental reality” of race, but because continuing to speak in those terms thwarted the quest for human solidarity. So, urges Rorty: “Instead of talking about races we can, for many purposes, talk about genes. Instead of talking about God the Creator we can (as physicists do) talk about the Big Bang. For other purposes, such as providing foundations for morality, we can talk (as Habermas does) about consensus under ideal communicative conditions rather than about the divine will. When discussing the future of humanity, we can talk (as Marx did) about a secularist social utopia instead of about the Last Judgment.”10 Rorty borrows Wittgenstein’s private-language argument to assert that a descriptive term has a sense only if its application is regulated by some public criteria.11 For him, there is no one way the world is, over and above the way it is described in a particular language game.
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Likewise, there can be no experience of God which exceeds the place that name occupies in cultural politics. Like the vexed question of whether there is really some thing (qua extralinguistic entity) that corresponds to the word consciousness, the question of the existence of God “is not a matter which appeals to experience could ever resolve, any more than one can appeal to experience to determine whether or not marriage across caste or racial lines is or is not intrinsically disgusting.”12 That, in turn, implies that philosophers and theologians would do well to abandon what Thomas Nagel has called “the ambition of transcendence.” Rorty believes that giving up on that ambition will enable us to cast aside our traditional self-descriptions, those which have been bequeathed to us by “metaphysicians” like Plato, Aristotle, Christ, Aquinas, Augustine, and Kant. Instead, we should adopt the description of humanity given us by Charles Darwin. For it was Darwin who “made it hard for essentialists to think of the higher anthropoids as having suddenly acquired an extra added ingredient called ‘reason’ or ‘intelligence’, rather than simply more of the sort of cunning which the lower anthropoids had already manifested.”13 As such, Darwin gave us a selfimage in which language is seen as a set of tools for utilizing objects “rather than representations of objects.” That is not to say that “Darwin tells us how things really and truly are,” thus obliging us “to adjust our self-image to suit.” Rather, “it behoves us to give the self-image Darwin suggested to us a whirl, in the hope of having fewer philosophical problems on our hands.” Stated otherwise, we should “see what happens if we (in Sartre’s phrase) ‘attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheist position,’ one in which such phrases as ‘the nature of human life’ no longer distract us from the absence of a God’s-eye view.”14 To adopt the naturalistic self-image of Darwin is, for Rorty, to reject the idea that human beings have a sacred, transcendental or transcendent core. “Darwinian evolutionary theory,” he writes, “made it possible to see all human behaviour—including that of the ‘higher’ sort of behaviour previously interpreted as fulfilment of the desire to know the unconditionally true and do the unconditionally right—as
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continuous with animal behaviour.”15 It is better, thus, that we see ourselves as “clever animals,” creatures that invented language to cope with, rather than represent our environment. In that way, the prospects for realizing a “global cooperative commonwealth” are positively enhanced. That is so because the difference between what Rorty labels “the Greek conception of human nature” and that proposed by Darwin “is the difference between closure and openness—between the security of the unchanging and the Whitmanesque and Whiteheadean romance of unpredictable change. This element of romantic hope, this willingness to substitute imagination for certainty, and curiosity for pride, breaks down the Greek distinction between contemplation and action.”16 In short, Rorty believes that through Darwin we are given “a glimpse of a new moral world waiting to be disclosed,” one that is founded on “romantic hope.” “Such hope,” he concludes, “amounts to saying the world is still young. The cultural evolution of our species is just beginning. We do not have any idea yet of the possibilities, but we need to take full advantage of people like Luther, Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, and Freud, because they give us our chances. They are our chances to transform the candidates for truth and thereby make previous patterns of justification obsolete.”17 To sum up: Rorty believes that by abandoning God-talk we would advance the cause of a “global, cosmopolitan, democratic, egalitarian, classless, casteless society.”18 If we had the courage to dismiss the idea that religious vocabularies are somehow in greater correspondence with reality than either their scientific or literary equivalents, we could then shift our attention from “eternity to future time, from speculation about how to win divine favour to planning for the happiness of future generations.”19 That is so because, in getting rid of God-talk, we would concomitantly drop “the idea that human beings are responsible to something nonhuman.” In turn, humans would gradually “set aside religious and ethnic identities in favour of an image of themselves as part of a great human adventure, one carried out on a global scale.”20 We would then no longer be tempted to think of truth in terms of correspondence to the will of God, but simply as a compliment we pay to those beliefs that have nudged us in the direction of a global egalitarian
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utopia. As such, Rorty’s sense of the holy, insofar as he has one, is “bound up with the hope that someday, any millennium now, my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.”21
Saving the Sacred In what remains of this essay, I want to say why Richard Rorty’s religion of social hope does nothing to disprove Roger Scruton’s declaration that man is “not sufficient for his own redemption, failing most dismally in emancipating himself precisely when he seeks to free himself from God.” For what Scruton provides is a way of saving the sacred that is perfectly compatible with the so-called “linguistic turn” in philosophy, and with Darwinian evolution. He achieves that, not by following Rorty in urging that we abandon the traditional metaphysical view of the human being, but by pointing philosophy in a new direction. Scruton argues that philosophers like Rorty are right to be suspicious of the Platonic quest for eternal perfection. This does not mean, however, that we cannot encounter the timeless or eternity in time. Indeed, as modern history has taught us, it is only when we “dismiss the sacred from our view of things” that we lose all claim to genuine liberty and human fraternity. Contrary to what Rorty would have us believe, therefore, “Nothing in the scientific view of things forbids the experience of the sacred” (p. 10). Rather, it is only when we succumb to the belief that “science has the answer to all our questions, that we are nothing but dying animals and that the meaning of life is merely self-affirmation, or at best the pursuit of some collective, all-embracing and all too-human goal” (p. 11), that genuine human happiness is threatened. For it is when man is conceived, not as a source of sacred freedom, but as a “slowly evaporating gobbet of flesh,” that we lose “the impulse of piety upon which community and morality are founded” (p. 8). Like Rorty, Scruton is an anti-Cartesian.22 Following Wittgenstein, he repudiates Descartes’ idea of the mind as an inner sanctuary transparent only to the thinking subject and “connected only contingently
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with ‘outer’ circumstances.”23 And, once again like Rorty, Scruton heavily subscribes to Wittgenstein’s “private language” argument as formulated in the Philosophical Investigations. That argument roundly refutes the Cartesian assumption that mental processes are private to their possessor, being present to him immediately and indubitably. Were Descartes correct in that assumption, argues Wittgenstein, we would be incapable of translating our feelings and sensations into words. Why? Simply because all language acquires its sense publicly. Hence there can be no private language through which the subject refers to his private mental states, to which he alone has direct access, and that escapes the rules of a public “language game.” For once the subject employs words drawn from a public discourse to refer to his private sensations, they automatically cease to be private. Moreover, even if the Cartesian persists in maintaining that he has his own private language, and that it directly corresponds to his own mental states, it still must be learnable by others. Or, as Scruton puts it: “If you can think about your thinking, then you must do so in a publicly intelligible discourse. In which case, you must be part of some ‘public realm,’ accessible to others.”24 In accepting the implications of Wittgenstein’s private language argument, Scruton follows Rorty in adhering to what Nelson Goodman called linguistic “nominalism.” That position denies that “we can look outside linguistic practice for the thing which governs it. The ultimate facts are language, and the forms of life which grow from language and make language possible.”25 Both philosophers can be said, therefore, to reject the “first-person point of view,” or “a point of view that produces knowledge of intrinsic, non-relational properties of mental events.”26 Instead, they prioritize the “third-person viewpoint,” or that “which sees the mind from outside, as we see the minds of others.” The third-person perspective is necessary to us, since, argues Scruton, “without it we could neither teach nor learn what words like “mind,’ ‘thinking,’ ‘sensation,’ and so on refer to.”27 We would, in short, be incapable of communicating. What this highlights is that both Rorty and Scruton deny the possibility of a pure phenomenology which, as Edmund Husserl believed, must seek to isolate what is intrinsic to mental states. That is because
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neither philosopher thinks that there is such a thing as what Rorty calls “intrinsic, nonrelational features of conscious experience.”28 If there were such a thing, then philosophers like Thomas Nagel would indeed be correct in their assertion that “the sources of philosophy are preverbal and often precultural.”29 They would, moreover, have a point in saying that “the content of some thoughts transcend every form they take in the human mind.” But that would mean we could attain “a God’s-eye standpoint—one which has somehow broken out of our language and our beliefs and tested them against something known without their aid.” For Scruton and Rorty, however, there can be no such standpoint, for the reason “that we have no idea what it would be like to be at that standpoint.”30 They are thus at one in their conviction that there can be no “precultural” sources of thought and that what we call the “self ” is thus socially constructed. In short, for both philosophers, there is simply no point in trying to pinpoint “preverbal” foundations for human belief. For, as Scruton instructs, “if you can think about your thinking, then you must be speaking a public language. In which case, you must be part of some ‘public realm,’ in which other people could wander. This public realm is no fiction of the [Cartesian] demon, but the fundamental reality.”31 Rorty assumes, however, that because “there is no perduring, intrinsic character of a human self—no ‘real’ me,” no me en soi, for myself to grasp—so there is, for the usual Wittgensteinian-Sellarsian psychological nominalist reasons, no intrinsic character of any object to grasp.”32 This leads him to conclude that all objects and selves are “centres of descriptive gravity,” suggesting that because there can be no first-person access to language-independent reality we can redescribe our social “reality” as often as our needs and purposes demand. “If we drop such representationalist notions as ‘appearance’ and ‘making true,’ ” he asserts, “then we can let numbers and tables, quarks and stars, lost socks and moral values share the same ‘objective’ status. The interesting differences among them will be those made by our (often fluctuating) notions of what is relevant and irrelevant to the truth of beliefs about each sort of object. These notions will not be responsible to something called ‘the intrinsic character of the object in question,’
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but only to the ordinary process of reweaving our webs of belief and desire, often in unpredictable ways.”33 That is why, for Rorty, getting rid of God-talk is no big deal. From his nominalist perspective, it is simply a matter of reweaving a particular belief that has run its course. But can our webs of belief and desire be rewoven so randomly? Are we really capable of redescribing our social reality as often as our needs and purposes demand? Scruton suggests that we are not. Yes, he agrees with Rorty that the “human world is a social world, and socially constructed,” and that there is nothing to suggest that “it must be constructed in only one way.”34 But (pace Rorty) he also thinks it is the height of hubris to argue we can construct it simply “as we please.” There are, Scruton suggests, “constants of human nature—moral, aesthetic and political—which we defy at our peril, and which we must strive to obey.” But does this appeal to the “constants of human nature” not serve to undermine Scruton’s belief in social constructionism? No, and that is because it would only do so if Scruton sought extralinguistic foundations for those constants. But he does not seek such foundations. Rather, his argument is based on the belief that the constants of human nature emerge in and through the social world. For Roger Scruton, “The principal task for philosophy in modern conditions is to vindicate the human world, by showing that the social intimations that underlie our understanding are necessary to us, and part of our happiness.”35 At a time when “we live in a crowded world of strangers, from which the standards of taste have all but disappeared, in which the educated class retains no common culture, and in which knowledge has been parcelled out into specialisms, each asserting its monopoly interest against the waves of migrant ideas,” the task of philosophy must change. If it is not to run the “risk of being disengaged from the life surrounding it,” philosophy must cease being an “abstract study” that seeks to liberate its practitioners from “custom, prejudice and the here and now.”36 Instead, urges Scruton, it must endeavor to “restore what has been thoughtlessly damaged . . . : the world in its innocence, the world in spite of science.”37 Rorty, however, wants to peel away the world’s innocence. He desires, on the one hand, to undermine the view that an empirical science
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has a redemptive function, being as it is just one more useful set of descriptions for predictive purposes. On the other hand, he wants to privilege the Darwinian description of the world, as that which best guarantees the long-term prospect of human happiness. In other words, Rorty may contend that natural science is not a natural kind and is thus incapable of accurately representing reality. But, in the end, little separates his pragmatism from the naturalism of militant atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.38 It is true that Rorty does not follow Dawkins in asserting that religion is a virus that destroys the minds of its hosts. However, the upshot of both Rorty’s and Dawkins’ theories is the same: the religious view of man, along with its philosophical parallel, should be driven from the public sphere if human happiness is to prevail. Roger Scruton points to the feeble condition of modern man in order to expose the lie that a Darwinian self-image, divorced from the religious and philosophical urge, is a precondition for personal happiness or salvation. His basic argument is this: the Darwinian description of the world elides “all reference to the subject of experience.” In so doing, it abstracts from the “givenness” of human experience, or what he terms, following Husserl, “intentional understanding.” Intentional understanding, he remarks, “fills the world with the meanings implicit in our aims and emotions. It tries not so much to explain the world as to be ‘at home’ in it, recognizing the occasions for action, the objects of sympathy, and the places of rest. The object of such an understanding is not the scientific universe described by scientific theory, but the Lebenswelt, the world as it is revealed, in and through the life-process which attaches us to it” (p. 108). The Lebenswelt is, for Scruton, the ordinary human world. It is the surface upon which we glide, and through which we come to an understanding of self. The problem with scientific self-explanations, Scruton tells us, is that they “may render the surface unintelligible.” For example, when science tells us that religion is a virus, or, as in the case of Rorty, when we are urged to give up on God-talk, it “runs the risk of severing the vital connection which links our response to the world, and the world to our response, in a chain of spontaneous human com-
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petence” (p. 109). As agents of action, we are in an immediate relation to the surrounding world. We rely on certain everyday concepts that cannot be replaced “with anything more useful than themselves— even if we find concepts with greater explanatory power.” That is because those concepts, or what Rorty would designate “descriptions,” are not merely the product of chance but “have evolved under the pressure of human circumstance, and in answer to the needs of generations.” They are nothing less than “the gift of culture” (p. 109). The principal consequence of this is that the concepts we have developed to describe the Lebenswelt resist reformulation along the lines recommended by Rorty—the reason being that they are rooted in something that “could feature in no true scientific theory of man: the concept of the person” (p. 109). To repeat, Scruton’s definition of personhood cannot be confused with the first-person viewpoint of Descartes. It should not be interpreted as a natural kind, one that permits us to look outside language for the nonlinguistic foundations which govern it. Neither does it denote a “functional kind,” since there is no particular “set of purposes” which limits or constrains the concept. Instead, “The person enters our Lebenswelt as the target of interpersonal responses.”39 Such responses may well have no place in the scientific worldview. Despite that, we inevitably order our social world in accordance with those responses and the idea of personhood that underlies them. Indeed, perceiving the world in personal terms is, for Scruton, the principal precondition of human happiness. There is, he explains, a “strange metaphysical shadow” that casts itself across “all our thoughts about one another.” When a human being says “I,” he does so, not in reference “to this animal from whose lips my voice emerges, but to something else.”40 What exactly is this “something else”? It is the idea of the self, which is a “by-product of our day-to-day understanding of rational agency.” Scruton remarks: “Because the ‘I’ seems transparent to itself, through and through disclosed to itself, and because all my projects, all my rights and liabilities, and all my beliefs and feelings, are ascribed to this thing, the idea irresistibly arises that what I am essentially is this selfknowing I, this subject, who lies concealed within, behind or beyond
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the organism, but who cannot be identical with the organism, for the very reason that the bodily states and the substance of this organism remain obscure to me, while my mental life is thoroughly and completely known.”41 Once again, this is not a descent into Cartesianism. It is simply the commonsense proposition that self-knowledge cannot be reduced to knowledge of one’s physiology. “I” am not identical, in other words, with my bodily states. Rather, “I” am the source of action and agency in a social world composed of competing selves. Action and agency stem from the intentional self and not from the body in which it is situated. That is so because the body “does not listen to reason, any more than does a car or a cow.” Bound up with the “metaphysical idea of the self as the true locus of my individuality” are, therefore, the related ideas of the will and freedom, both of which are absent in any meaningful sense from the animal condition. Scruton’s idea of personhood is heavily reliant on the moral vision of Immanuel Kant, especially on the latter’s notion of “a ‘transcendental self ’ whose freedom lies beyond the reach of nature’s laws.”42 But for nominalists like Rorty, thinkers who rely on Kant’s moral theory have failed to fully embrace the linguistic turn. Rorty follows John Dewey in viewing Kant “as a figure whose view of human beings could never be reconciled with Darwin’s naturalistic account of our origins.”43 Darwinians, he tells us, “cannot be at ease with the Kantian idea of a distinctively moral motivation, or of a faculty called ‘reason’ that issues commands.” Indeed, he claims: “The idea of a law-giving faculty called ‘reason,’ it seems to me, lingers on only among two sorts of people. The first are masochists who want to hold on to a sense of sin while still enjoying the comforts of a clean, well-lighted, fully mechanized, Newtonian universe. The second are professors of moral philosophy whose job descriptions presuppose a clear distinction between morality and prudence, and so are suspicious of Deweyan attempts to break down that distinction.”44 But Scruton disagrees. He believes that it is possible to reconcile Kant and Darwin, and that the moral description of mankind formulated by Kant endures in spite of Darwinian science. In other words,
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Kant’s notion of the “transcendental self ” is precisely one of those concepts that has “evolved under the pressure of human circumstance, and in answer to the needs of generations.” Scruton calls it “an in evitable idea.” To say as much is not to suggest that it has an extralinguistic provenance beyond the Lebenswelt. Rather, like the notion of personhood itself, it is part of our intentional understanding. That said, Scruton is quite happy to subscribe to the basics of the Darwinian description of humanity. He agrees with Rorty that “we are animals, and have no securer individuality than animals have. Nor do we stand outside nature, or in any other sense possess a freedom from the bonds of causality which the animals are denied.”45 He also shares Rorty’s view that what distinguishes us from the brutes is our ability to “live and think in symbols.”46 But in sharp contrast to Rorty, for whom the capacity to live and think in symbols suggests that you can simply dispense with traditional self-descriptions, Scruton thinks that language forces upon its users ideas that are not so easily disposed of. We might explain the issue thus: Roger Scruton gives us a way of embracing the implications of the linguistic turn without having to jettison traditional beliefs, values, and conceptions of the person. He shows us a way of affirming Darwin and Wittgenstein without thinking that we must also abandon the metaphysical view of man. He does so by arguing that the process of reweaving our beliefs and desires is not so straightforward as Rorty suggests. In other words, though we have “no securer individuality than animals have,” the idea of personhood is not something that language will readily permit its users to dispel. Language, explains Scruton, “forces upon us two indispensable ideas, that of self-reference, which casts the shadow of the metaphysical I, and that of responsibility, which casts the shadow of a metaphysical freedom.” No matter how hard we try to vanquish the related notions of self-reference and personal responsibility from our self- image, they mysteriously persist. Those who reject the consequences of linguistic nominalism will endeavor to explain that mystery by maintaining that freedom and self-reference are intrinsic to the human condition. But in order to be faithful to Wittgenstein, Scruton cannot take refuge in such essentialism. Instead, he urges that we should treat the
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shadow of the metaphysical I, and that of metaphysical freedom, “as nothing more than shadows.” We should treat them thus because we can provide no extracultural “ground” for their justification. But that, to repeat, does not render them any less present or meaningful in our lives. “They wander with us everywhere,” he explains, “and to lack them would indeed be a terrible misfortune, far worse than the loss of one’s real shadow.” Moreover, “These shadows loom large, and determine our interpersonal attitudes in countless ways. They provide the focus of much that is most real in human existence—including love, longing and desire—while remaining unreal.”47 So, on Scruton’s view of the matter, the linguistic turn does not serve to dissolve, as suggested by Rorty, “a brood and nest of dualisms.”48 Instead, mankind’s peculiar metaphysical predicament persists in spite of the linguistic turn. Following Kant, Scruton asserts that we see ourselves “in two contrasting ways—both as objects, bound by natural laws; and as subjects, who can lay down laws for themselves. The human object is an organism like any other; the human subject is in some way ‘transcendental’, observing the world from a point of view on its perimeter.” Seeing ourselves in this way is a need that is “presupposed in language, in self-consciousness, and in the ‘practical reason’ that is the source of all human action and moral worth.” This is not to imply, however, that there is a “real transcendental self behind appearances.” The shadows, in short, cannot be cast aside to reveal a transcendental core to the human being. Yet there is “a way of treating people as if there were such a thing: addressing them as free beings governed by reason, with a point of view that uniquely identifies them and which is not revealed to empirical observation.”49 Scruton draws an analogy with the painting of a face. We do not consider such a face to be an illusion. Neither, however, is it part “of the material world in the way that the pigments in which it is seen are part of the material world.” The face is there “for us” and is central to the interpretation that “rational beings place upon empirical reality.” Consequently, “Anyone who failed to see a woman’s face in the Mona Lisa would be in some way defective.” What is true of the face is true also of human freedom, subjectivity, and personality. They “point to a
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way of seeing our fellow human beings, which both distinguishes them from the rest of nature and creates the basis for those moral, legal, and political relations in which our freedom is exercised and fulfilled.” In sum, without the transcendental perspective in which the metaphysical shadows of freedom and responsibility loom large, “we would be as blind to the human world as the person who could see only lines, shapes, and colours would be blind to the world of pictures. And being blind to the human world, we would also cease to belong to it.”50 Language forces upon us a self-description that is predicated on subjective freedom, understood as the ability to seek meanings, reasons, and values where the scientist searches for laws, causes, and explanations. As such, transcendental freedom “is the mysterious lining of the human organism, the subjective reality which gives sense and direction to our lives.” That is not to say, however, that the laws of science or nature are suspended in the actions of free beings. “When we see another’s smile,” writes Scruton, “we see human flesh moving in obedience to impulses in the nerves.” The act of smiling is not one that happens in spite of, “but because of, nature.” That said, as actors in the Lebenswelt, “we understand a smile in quite another way: not as flesh, but as spirit, freely revealed.” “A smile,” he says, “is always more than flesh for us, even if it is only flesh” (p. 9). The free being, thus, is not two separate entities but a complete creature, one that belongs to the natural world and is unavoidably subject to its laws. It has, however, “a unique perspective on the physical world,” inasmuch as it can, in contrast to other creatures, ask the questions “of what to think, what to feel, and what to do.” We are simultaneously in the world but not of the world. We peer at it “from a point of view at its very edge: the point of view where I am.” In trying to understand this peculiar predicament, we invoke “images of the soul, the psyche, the self, or the ‘transcendental subject.’ ” Such images, for Scruton, are not merely the product of the philosophical imagination. They arise naturally, he insists, “in the course of a life in which the capacity to justify and criticize our thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and actions is the basis of the social order that makes us what we are.”51
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According to Roger Scruton, the human condition is characterized by this subjective viewpoint, and it is precisely “the tension between this point of view and the world of objects, that gives rise to the experience of sanctity.” The revelation of the sacred does not require us to withdraw from the natural world but is to be found in the midst of it. It is “the sudden glimpse of the free and transcendental being in the most ordinary things of this world,” and this sense of the sacred is also revealed through physical objects in the natural sphere: “Sacred things are removed, held apart, and untouchable—or touchable only after purifying rites. . . . In seeing places, buildings, and artefacts as sacred, we in effect project onto the material world the experience that we receive from each other, when incarnation becomes a ‘real presence’ and we perceive the other as forbidden to us and untouchable.”52 Now, although the contemporary world has been seduced by Darwin’s self-image, believing that we are simply “parts of the natural order,” that the gods are our invention, and “that death is exactly as it seems,” we still do not behave as though that were the sum of our condition. None of us, no matter how “enlightened,” can avoid “praise and blame, love and hate, reward and punish.” We still persist in seeing “others as if they were free beings, animated by a self or soul, and with a more than worldly destiny.” Furthermore, the sense of the sacred is entirely compatible with the scientific outlook. Science can only tell us that the sacred sense has a natural cause. However, as Scruton explains, “those who seek for meanings are indifferent to causes, and those who communicate with God through prayer should be no more cut off from him by the knowledge that the world does not contain him, than they are cut off from those they love by the knowledge that words, smiles and gestures are knowledge of the flesh” (p. 10). In short, Darwinian evolution can only explain the human object but stays silent on the question of the sacred, defined as “freedom, translucency and moral presence.”53 Or, “When you look on people as objects, then you see that Darwin was right. When you look on them as subjects, you see that the most important thing about them has no place in Darwin’s theory.”54
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The Darwinian self-image recommended by Rorty as a cure for God-talk does not, according to Scruton, fulfill the longing of human happiness. It only serves to “peel away the personality of the world” by seeking to dissolve the metaphysical shadows that confer upon the subject its sacred sense. However, the sacred is not something that can be easily peeled away, and that is because it is presupposed in language itself. As such, we cannot describe the world as we please without disenchanting the Lebenswelt, described by Scruton as “this thin topsoil” in which “the seeds of human happiness are sown.” For it is there “that we live and act; it is there that we are created.”55 It is there, in other words, that the subject or the person is formed in spite of evolution. The fact remains, however, that the Lebenswelt has been disenchanted, depersonalized, and desacralized. We have, it seems, given up on God-talk. But, in keeping with Scruton’s analysis, nothing like Rorty’s global utopia has emerged. By cleansing the common culture of concepts that sustained the subject at the heart of the Lebenswelt, an “entirely novel product” has surfaced, one from which “the idea of human distinction, of the sacred nature of our form and the consecration of our loves, has been driven away.” Consequently, the human being is no longer regarded as something “removed from nature and destined for a higher sphere.” It is no longer considered a reflection of the divine but is interpreted simply as an animal “rooted in the natural world and obedient to its dark imperatives.”56 The world is, in other words, slowly being robbed of “the sacred, the forbidden and the sacramental.”57 It is now a world of alienation and metaphysical isolation. Richard Rorty is certainly right: religion has often led to disaster, persecution, and oppression. As Scruton admits, “Religious belief can exercise a stultifying effect on the intelligence, the imagination and the humanity of those who subscribe to it.” But that does not mean that there cannot be “a proper development of the religious urge, in which people learn to worship the right things in the right way.” Hence there is nothing in linguistic nominalism that forbids us from taking up a position “at the window of our empirical world” and gazing toward those places “from which light from that other sphere floods over us.” And
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by “looking for the sacred we are also constructing a community, so that the meanings and values that we find are shared with others.” Such a community, Scruton observes, is not a scientific community. It is one that “contains idiocy, prejudice, ignorance and stupidity in all the proportions that these are displayed by mankind as a whole.” But that should not be seen as a vice but rather as a rare virtue. It gives people of every persuasion “a shared apprehension of their condition. It can teach them humility and justice, and remind the one with power, knowledge, wealth or artistic talent, that he is the equal of the one beside him in the moment of worship, however ignorant, weak or sinful that person may be.”58 There will always be people, in other words, who use religion to justify violence and oppression. There will always be those whose actions vindicate Marx and Dawkins. But while such people make the most noise, they are not, for Scruton, “the most numerous among religious people.” The truth is that the majority of religious people consider religion as “a cultivation of piety, a humility in the face of creation, and an attempt to live according to a shared moral code.”59 Such people show in their sacred rites and customs that there is indeed a proper cultivation of the religious urge. They demonstrate that we humans “instinctively connect the sacred with the transcendental, seeing holy places, times and rituals as windows onto another realm.”60 That experience cannot be redescribed, made redundant, or rejected as Enlightenment superstition without fundamentally dislocating man from the surrounding world. Put simply, religion, when properly construed, “is both a ritual reaffirmation of membership, and a stance towards the transcendental.” It gives us a way of understanding our condition that situates the subject at the center of our moral compass. The sense of the sacred depends, in other words, on “the collective ritual which compels us to listen to the voice of the species.” It depends on the “willing cooperation of the whole community.” Without that cooperation, the sense of the sacred is dissolved as man is reduced to a Darwinian brute, his human form desecrated, dragged down to its “animal essentials,” and displayed “as pure object, in which the light of selfhood and freedom have been extinguished.”61 And without the sacred, Scruton argues, we
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live in a “depersonalized world” where nothing has “absolute value.” Such is our current situation: [We live] in a world in which erotic feelings can no longer be easily rescued from the desecrating maelstrom of pornography, in which the human body is reduced to panting chunks on the screen, in which children are brought up on images that show the body not as the place where empirical and transcendental meet, the I-hole in the screen of nature, but as a target, a thing to be assaulted, ravaged and consumed, to be shown in all its contortions as a squirming, needing, agonizing worm… The cherishing of each other, which is the lived experience of our mortality, withers away, as does the habit of paying tribute to the dead, and being at one with them in our thoughts.62
If giving up on God-talk has brought us to such a point, then it is perhaps time to reject the postmodern condition and follow Roger Scruton in once again looking “seriously at the human world.” In so doing, we are invited to renounce those “forward-looking attitudes” recommended by postmodern philosophers such as Rorty, in favor of “things as they were.” In Scruton’s view, “People have always been wrong to look to the future for the test of legitimacy, rather than to the past. For the future, unlike the past, is unknown and untried.” That means rediscovering “the world which made us” and, in so doing, seeing ourselves “as part of something greater, which depends upon us for its survival.”63 To undertake that journey would, however, require us to understand that our condition, “properly seen, is neither temporal nor timeless.”64 It would be to condemn the postmodern message “as an expression of despair, not of hope.”65 It would be to recognize the wisdom of all true philosophy, “that we are both subject and object, and that between these two lies an impassable barrier through which at every moment we must nevertheless pass.”66 Finally, it would require us to recognize that “our experience of the sacred is the sudden encounter, in the midst of contingent things, with the creator’s freedom.”67 And then, having recognized all that, we would be better able to appreciate that the loss of “piety, humility and morality” is anything
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but a precondition for human happiness. Rather, perceiving “how they might be directed to the right objects and in the right way” is the only real guarantee of happiness we have. Notes 1. Roger Scruton, “The Philosopher on Dover Beach,” in The Philosopher on Dover Beach: Essays (Manchester: Carcanet, 1990), pp. 3–11, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 2. Roger Scruton, “Religion and Enlightenment,” in A Political Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2006), p. 135. 3. Richard Rorty died on 8 June 2007. I devoted my column “Moral Matters,” in the Irish Daily Mail, 12 June 2007, to his life and work. See also Roger Scruton, “Richard Rorty’s Legacy,” 12 June 2007, www.opendemocracy.net. 4. See Mark Dooley, “Private Irony vs. Social Hope: Derrida, Rorty, and the Political,” Cultural Values 3, no. 3 ( July 1999): 263–90, “The Civic Religion of Social Hope: A Reply to Simon Critchley,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 27, no. 5 (2001): 35–58, and “On Circumventing the Quasi- Transcendental,” in A Passion for the Impossible: John D. Caputo in Focus, ed. Mark Dooley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), pp. 201–28. 5. Richard Rorty, “Cultural Politics and the Question of the Existence of God,” in Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers IV (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 3. 6. Ibid., p. 4. 7. Ibid., p. 7. 8. Ibid., p. 8. 9. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 48. 10. Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics, p. 8. 11. Ibid., pp. 11–12. 12. Ibid., p. 13. 13. Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, p. 64. 14. Richard Rorty, Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 48–49. 15. Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, p. 68. 16. Ibid., p. 88.
The Plagues of Desecration 335 17. Richard Rorty, “On Moral Obligation, Truth, and Common Sense,” in Debating the State of Philosophy, ed. Jozef Niznik and John T. Sanders (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), p. 52. 18. Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, p. xii. 19. Ibid., p. 208. 20. Ibid., pp. 238–39. 21. Richard Rorty, “Anti-Clericalism and Atheism,” in The Future of Religion, by Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo, ed. Santiago Zabala (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 40. 22. For a more comprehensive account of Roger Scruton’s philosophy, see Mark Dooley, Roger Scruton: The Philosopher on Dover Beach (London: Continuum, 2009). 23. Roger Scruton, Philosophy: Principles and Problems (London: Continuum, 1996), p. 46. 24. Ibid., p. 50. 25. Roger Scruton, A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 290. 26. Rorty, Truth and Progress, p. 99. 27. Scruton, Philosophy, p. 50. 28. Rorty, Truth and Progress, p. 100. 29. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 11. 30. Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 6. 31. Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey (London: Pimlico, 2004), p. 54. 32. Rorty, Truth and Progress, p. 105. 33. Ibid., pp. 106–7. 34. Scruton, Modern Philosophy, p. 495. 35. Ibid. 36. Scruton, Philosophy, p. 13. 37. Ibid., p. 15. 38. See Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam Press, 2006). 39. Roger Scruton, Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation (London: Continuum, 2006), p. 55. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., p. 56.
336 Mark Dooley 42. Ibid., p. 57. 43. Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics, p. 188. 44. Ibid., p. 189. 45. Scruton, Sexual Desire, p. 57. 46. Scruton, Philosophy, p. 65. 47. Scruton, Sexual Desire, p. 57. 48. Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, p. xii. 49. Roger Scruton, Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 123–24. 50. Ibid., p. 124. 51. Ibid., p. 178. 52. Ibid., p. 179. 53. Scruton, On Hunting (London: Yellow Jersey Press, 1998), p. 78. 54. Ibid., p. 79. 55. Scruton, Philosophy, p. 24. 56. Scruton, “Religion and Enlightenment,” p. 135. 57. Ibid., p. 138. 58. Roger Scruton, “Better Off without Religion?,” originally posted on Right Reason: The Weblog for Conservative Philosophers, 12 April 2007, and reposted at www.catholiceducation.org/articles/apologetics/ap0217.htm. 59. Ibid. 60. Scruton, “Religion and Enlightenment,” p. 130. 61. Ibid., p. 136. 62. Ibid., pp. 136–37. 63. Scruton, Political Philosophy, p. 208. 64. Scruton, Philosophy, p. 164. 65. Ibid., p. 163. 66. Ibid. 67. Roger Scruton, Xanthippic Dialogues (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1993), p. 166.
f o u r t e e n
Dawkins’ Fear of Reason Brendan Purcell
No one who has read The Selfish Gene or has drawn on his wonderfully presented The Ancestor’s Tale will be inclined to speak ill of Richard Dawkins’ intelligence and ability to present a case persuasively.1 That is why The God Delusion is so surprisingly less than persuasive.2 Is it because, as Thomas Nagel wrote in his review, “Dawkins is operating mostly outside the range of his scientific expertise”?3 Even if this is so, the book offers a bracing challenge to philosophers, not least because of its enormous popular success, sparking a range of responses from philosophers, theologians, and Christian apologists.4 Without claiming to offer an adequate critique of what is a rather lengthy book, in the present article I will discuss some of the issues raised by The God Delusion. I begin with an examination of its implicit epistemology. I will argue that Dawkins too readily conflates the notion of God with the phenomenon of religion. I will suggest that his position rests upon a radical closure—which may perhaps explain his avoidance in particular of the one set of experiences of God that might have been expected in a discussion based on reason alone, namely the Greek rational experience. I will then examine his principal 337
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argument against the existence of God, that is, complexity. I will refer to the serious criticisms by Thomas Nagel and John Cornwell that Dawkins ignores the notion of contingency. I will examine his explanation that religion is a by-product of our evolutionary need for survival. Finally I will propose that Dawkins’ quest for unlimited understanding should be expanded to a wider notion of reason as a basis for a worldwide dialogue of cultures.
An Epistemological Blind Spot: Reducing Reason to the Rationality of the Natural Sciences Beginning, then, with an epistemological point, a few words on the term delusion may be helpful. Dawkins is content with the dictionary definition he quotes: “a false belief or impression” (p. 27). Considering the title of the book, the notion of delusion is given short shrift in chapter 3 of The God Delusion in the section on “The Argument from Personal ‘Experience’ ” (pp. 112–17). Along with comments on how the human brain can provide us with dreams and images we might take to be true, Dawkins approvingly quotes (p. 113) from Sam Harris’ The End of Faith: “We have names for people who have many beliefs for which there is no rational justification. When their beliefs are extremely common we call them ‘religious’; otherwise, they are likely to be called ‘mad,’ ‘psychotic’ or ‘delusional.’ . . . While religious people are not generally mad, their core beliefs absolutely are.” The diagnosis of “delusion” does not apply to what Dawkins would consider to be the experience of delusion itself, since no one denies its occurrence, so the characterization must refer to the content of the experience—what Harris calls “core beliefs,” for which he has said there is no rational justification. Since Dawkins seems to treat all experiences of transcendence as religious, one wonders what he would make of the following nonreligious expressions of experiences which go beyond those dealt with by the natural sciences: It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it e xists.
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We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, our problems of life remain completely untouched. . . . One keeps forgetting to go right down to the foundations. One doesn’t put the question marks deep enough down.5 Would Harris or Dawkins find that there is “no rational justification” for these experiences of Wittgenstein? If there is even a possibility that they might be valid, it does not make sense to call them delusions, with all that word’s connotations both of a serious lack of interest in intellectual inquiry and a fear that such experiences may not in fact be true at all. Again and again, Dawkins will insist that there is no evidence for what he calls religious beliefs, where his notion of evidence is strictly within the criteria of inquiry and verification used by the natural sciences. This narrow notion of verification, characteristic of the Vienna Circle, was clearly formulated by A. J. Ayer: I require of an empirical hypothesis, not indeed that it should be conclusively verifiable, but that some possible sense-experience should be relevant to the determination of its truth or falsehood. If a putative proposition fails to satisfy this principle, and is not a tautology, then I hold that it is metaphysical, and that, being metaphysical, it is neither true nor false but literally senseless. It will be found that much of what ordinarily passes for philosophy is metaphysical according to this criterion, and, in particular, that it can not be significantly asserted that there is a non-empirical world of values, or that men have immortal souls, or that there is a transcendent God.6
But there is no scientific experiment which can prove that the only true propositions are those referring to events in the world perceivable by sense experience. Certainly the questions Wittgenstein is asking are precisely questions that cannot be answered by an investigation limited to the methods of the natural sciences. That does not mean that the questions are meaningless—though, as Eric Voegelin notes, “an epistemologist of the positivist persuasion will dismiss them as pseudoquestions, as Scheinprobleme, devoid of meaning.” Voegelin continues:
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Within the limits of the positivist horizon, the argument is valid; the questions can indeed not be answered by reference to the world of sense perception. The argument becomes invalid, however, when it goes on to declare the questions, for this reason, to be meaningless; for the people who have asked them through several thousand years of history to this day do not consider them meaningless at all, even if they find the adequate articulation of their meaning sometimes a baffling task. The denial of meaning runs counter to the empirical fact that they rise again and again as meaningful from the experience of reality.7
To characterize an experience of transcendence as “a false belief or impression” requires that the person making that assessment has achieved a grasp of truth in terms of which the “belief ” or “impression” is false. That is to say, it presupposes an overarching experience of being within which the distinction between reality and the mere appearance of delusion can be made. And of course such an overarching experience of being is prior to the subset of reality explored by the natural sciences. The core issue remains unchanged, it seems to me: the kind of question regarding the mystery of existence raised by, say, Wittgenstein, is not removed by any assertion that the methodology of the natural sciences is the only criterion for every inquiry. I am not sure that Dawkins has articulated his implicit positivism beyond simply affirming it. In a discussion with him on RTE Radio some years ago, I focused on the last section of his book A Devil’s Chaplain, “A Prayer for My Daughter.”8 This is a letter he had written to his young daughter warning her off religious belief as not based on evidence. I suggested that it could be seen as an expression of the love of a father for his child. He agreed, and when I volunteered that the evidence for his fatherly love was quite different from the kind of evidence required by natural science, he also agreed. In other words, the evidence for the most important things in life, like our relationships with others, transcends the highly controlled evidence required in the natural sciences. I am reminded of Aristotle’s point that “it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits.”9 This presumably would also
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hold for the evidence for experiences of transcendent reality. But because Dawkins does not investigate the content of what he calls a delusion—the content that in Western culture is often called “God”— he is not in a strong position to claim that the content is a delusion. Not only does Dawkins completely ignore millennia of philosophical inquiry into God as a reality definable as beyond categorization, but he seems completely unaware that the best analogy for an intellectual and moral approach to divine reality would be our experience of the mysterious depths of the people closest to us. If Dawkins took himself seriously, he could just as well have written “The Lalla [his wife’s name] Delusion,” since he has no evidence of the laboratory sort that would ever approach who or what another human being is as human.
A Blind Spot in Philosophical Theology: Reducing the Notion of God to Religion Dawkins might be excused for not providing an explicit epistemology to deal with the notion of “delusion”; however, his lightweight approach to “God” recalls Voegelin’s remark that “anyone who takes the easy way in spiritual matters has no right to participate in this discussion.”10 We have already spoken of the question of God, and that seems the right way to go about a serious examination of the issue. In his Ecumenic Age—where he capitalizes the “Question” as the core act of questioning the mystery of existence—Voegelin points out that “conventionally historians, philosophers, and theologians are concerned with the answers to the Question. What I am trying to do here is to analyze the Question as a constant structure in the experience of reality and, since the experience is part of reality, in the structure of reality itself.”11 Elsewhere, Voegelin focuses on an Aristotelian instance of this Question when he interprets Aristotle’s programmatic “All men by nature desire to know” as “All men by nature are in quest of the ground [of existence].”12 But Dawkins is not dealing with the topic of “God” as an answer to a question; rather, in The God Delusion he mostly conflates specific religious beliefs like the virgin birth of Jesus, the raising of Lazarus,
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the resurrection of Christ—all, for Dawkins “strictly scientific” questions—with what he calls “the God hypothesis” (p. 83). But it seems a misconception to consider “God” and “religion” as the same reality. Dawkins seems to take the easy way. The word religion is found neither in the Old Testament nor, with the unimportant exception of the letter of James (1:27), in the New Testament. So it is not the primary concern of the biblical authors. Nor is religion an expression developed by any major thinker, as for example theology was by Plato: rather, it is picked up and given whatever meaning (as here by Dawkins) the user wants it to have. Centrally, to have any meaning at all, religion depends on the meaning attributed to God. Strangely, given his interest in evolution, Dawkins does not attend to the gradual development in the understanding of “God” within the only historical traditions where the notion of one God—as distinct from mythic experiences of divine reality—first emerged, that is, in the Old Testament, in the New Testament, and in classical Greek philosophy. And since classical Greek philosophy is more or less a religion-free zone, it is surprising that The God Delusion makes no reference to the Greek philosophical development of an understanding of God based on reason.13
A Radical Refusal to Question Underlying Dawkins’ Epistemological and Theological Blind Spots? Underlying Dawkins’ epistemological and theological blind spots is, I suggest, a more deep-seated failure, a kind of radical refusal to know, a condition described by Plato as agnoia. Voegelin in his discussion of the Stoic treatment of a similar closure speaks of Chrysippus’ treatment of the “phenomenon of rational argument in defense of the escape from noetically ordered existence.”14 For many of his followers, Dawkins comes across as passionately committed to reason. At the same time, he does not seem seriously interested in exploring the experience of the classical philosophers who originally defined reason in terms of its quest for the ground of existence.
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The Vienna Circle, with its closure to questions of existence, is only a minor episode in the centuries-long infatuation of Western culture with scientistic and technological reductionism. Voegelin gives a summary treatment in his essay “Immortality: Experience and Symbol” of a historical dialectic which begins with (i) experiences of transcendent reality and their symbolization and is followed by (ii) a gradual degradation of those symbols when their inner experiential substance fades.15 Finally, (iii) the degraded symbols—and not their original grounding experiences—provoke a skeptical reaction. A word on each of these phases. The first phase can be found in undoubted symbolizations of experiences of transcendence. Since Dawkins claims a commitment to reason alone, we may limit our example of such symbolizations to those emerging in the one tradition in the West that developed the experience of God on the basis of reason alone. It is unnecessary to add that this tradition occurred without, and to some extent in opposition to, what Dawkins would regard as the trappings of a religion: insofar as there was a religion in classical Greece, it was an expression of what some pre-Socratic thinkers, followed by Plato and Aristotle, criticized as irrational myth. Here we will just mention two pre-Socratic thinkers who rationally analyzed their experiences of transcendence. It is very easy to see the purification of myth in the fragments of Xenophanes (565–470 BC). Xenophanes does not have the terminology to grasp that Homer and Hesiod are part of the gradually differentiating process which made his own discoveries possible. So he criticizes their earlier formulations: “Homer and Hesiod have ascribed to the gods all things that are a shame and disgrace among men, such as stealing, adultery and cheating each other.”16 His pointed critique reminds us of Feuerbach’s much later complaint of humans “projecting” their own qualities onto their gods: “Ethiopians make their gods flat-nosed and black, the Thracians let theirs have blue eyes and red hair” (B16). Given Dawkins’ own attack on an anthropomorphic God—one instance of which we will quote in a later section—it is interesting to see how much Xenophanes would agree with his critique of such painfully inadequate images. To the deficient formulations of
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the gods in terms of their shape and color, Xenophanes opposes his own understanding of God: “One God is greatest among gods and men, not like mortals in body or thought” (B23). Xenophanes shows his awareness that he is laying down new conditions for writing about the One God, when he declares of all earlier attempts that “it is not seemly” to write about God as a physical or animate object: “It ever abides in the self-same place and never moves; nor is it seemly [epiprepei] for it to go now hither now thither” (B26). Xenophanes gives the basic experience underlying his own answer to the question of the mystery of existence, a formulation quoted by Aristotle: Xenophanes was the first of the thinkers about the One, for “Looking up at the expanse of the Heaven, ‘The One’, he said, ‘is the God’ ” (A30).17 The God Delusion might possibly be excused for ignoring Xenophanes’ discovery of the “One.” But not to discuss in any way Parmenides’ formulation (ca. 475 BC) of the first philosophy of Being seems to be a case of the intellectual oblivion Heidegger calls the “forgetfulness of being.” For once this experience has been articulated, it can hardly be forgotten other than by the steadfast refusal to ask the central question of existence. Again, to remind ourselves, here are some of the relevant fragments, beginning with his epochal discovery of the notion of existence as such: B2 & 3: The Way of Truth: the ways of inquiry that alone are thinkable. The one way, that IS and NOT IS cannot be, is the path of Persuasion which is attendant upon Truth. B8: One way only is left to be spoken of, that IS; and on this way are many signs that IS is uncreated and imperishable, whole, unmoved, and without end. And it was not, and it will not be, for it is altogether Now. . . . The decision on these matters depends on the following: IS or IS NOT. . . . How could IS perish? And how could it come into being? If it came into being, it Is Not; and so too if it is about-to-be at some future time. Thus is “becoming” extinguished and “passing away” not to be heard of.18
Voegelin highlights the carefulness with which Parmenides has articulated his experience of transcendence by indicating why Parmenides
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chose to use what Voegelin translates as “IS,” without a grammatical subject, rather than the word Being. Parmenides wanted to ensure that the object of his experience would not be considered in the manner of material objects, or even world-immanent objects of thought, such as ideas. Having safeguarded the world-transcendent nature of his experience of existence as such, Parmenides then carved out its implications as trans-spatial and transtemporal. Whatever Dawkins might think of such an experience, he can hardly dismiss it as irrational. Xenophanes’ experience of the “One,” and Parmenides’ of IS are equivalent answers to the quest for the ground of existence. The very care with which each developed a unique vocabulary for his experience indicates their awareness that their “answers” did not fall within the world of sense experience. To argue that Parmenides’ experience of IS is a delusion would require an epistemology that itself would have to be rooted in IS, in order to show that IS is not IS: as Aristotle wryly remarked, one must invoke the principle of noncontradiction if one wishes to refute that very principle.19 The second phase in the historical dialectic of the loss of experiences of transcendence can be seen with the separation of expressions from experience. In his “Immortality” essay, Voegelin notes the gradual thinning out of experiences of transcendence in the School philosophy—say of a Theophrastus—after Aristotle. But there is a second thinning out and loss of experiences of transcendence that attaches itself to both classical philosophy and the Judeo-Christian tradition and that finds its expression from late medieval nominalism through the Reformation and the wars of religion to the French Enlightenment.20 By the time the word God has come to be used by Dawkins, it has become detached from the experiences that originally gave it the meaning it had within the three traditions we have mentioned.21 Aristotle’s careful reworking of Heraclitus’ and Plato’s notion of the human being as one who is in love with divine wisdom is completely lost in Dawkins’ polemic of divine intelligence modeled on a Cray supercomputer. For Aristotle, the human is potency at the level of intelligence; God is pure act. This correlative grasp of the human in relation to the divine can be found in his Metaphysics, where in the opening book the human can
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be defined as the being in search of the ground of existence, while that ground itself is “the understanding of understanding.”22 As pure act, “the understanding of understanding” could no more “come into existence” than Parmenides’ IS could. The third phase is that of skeptical reaction, not to the originating experiences of transcendence, but to their emptied-out symbols. The Russian poet Osip Mandelstam in his 1923 poem “The Horseshoe Finder” well catches the hollowness of such symbols: The sound is still ringing, though the cause of the sound has gone. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . And so, the one who finds a horseshoe blows the dust from it . . . . . . . . . hangs it over the door to let it rest where it won’t ever have to strike sparks from the flint again. Human lips, that have nothing more to say keep the shape of the last word uttered.23
Our topic is Dawkins’ The God Delusion, so this third phase has to do with the almost inevitable rejection of a symbol like “God” when it is used by “human lips, that have nothing more to say.” One of Saul Bellow’s characters remarks that we should not allow the visions of genius to be turned into the canned goods of the intellectuals.24 It is hardly surprising that after Aristotle had been neatly canned by figures like Theophrastus and Strato, at the close of the second century AD Sextus Empiricus would gather together the arsenal of skeptical argument against the philosophy of the schools. The modern wave of skepticism has its beginnings in the fifteenth-century Italian Enlightenment and its better-known flowering in the skepticism of Montaigne and other luminaries.25 While I do not think that Dawkins is any more aware of these three phases in a historical dialectic than he
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is of Vienna School reductionism, it seems useful in order to diagnose a cultural collapse which affects every word of The God Delusion. In the wider context of a philosophy of history, Voegelin speaks of “the historical torment of imperfect articulation . . . skepticism, disbelief [and] rejection.” The reason for such a diagnosis is to help bring about “renaissances, renovations, rediscoveries, rearticulations, and further differentiations.”26 Even though Dawkins shows no interest in recovering the philosophical or revelational grounding experiences underlying the notion of God in our culture, there is an astringent value to his far more than merely skeptical rejection of God that can help provoke such meditative rediscoveries. Since “God” is an answer to a question, by not attending to the experiences which give rise to the question we can understand why Dawkins in The God Delusion seems to keep missing what he has named as the principal target of his attack. It will be necessary, therefore, to consider his principal argument against the existence of God.
Dawkins’ Core Argument from Complexity At the end of chapter 3, Dawkins succinctly states what he himself regards as the “central argument” (p. 187) and “main conclusion” (p. 189) of his book: “The whole argument turns on the familiar question ‘Who made God?’ . . . A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right. God presents an infinite regress from which he cannot help us to escape. This argument, as I shall show in the next chapter, demonstrates that God, though not technically disprovable, is very very improbable indeed” (p. 136). In chapter 4, he takes the scientist Fred Hoyle’s example that it would be highly improbable for a Boeing 747 to be assembled by a hurricane sweeping through a scrapyard (pp. 137–38), where for Dawkins the argument from improbability states that complex things could not have come about by chance
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(p. 139). But he makes things easy for himself right through this chapter by taking the intelligent design (ID) theorists—who have often been regarded as contemporary versions of William Paley—as his main opponents to be disposed of. John Haught notes that “a key component of the new atheists’ case against God is to suppose that creationism and ID represent the intellectual high point and central core of theistic traditions.” But theistic philosophers have criticized the ID argument—as they have criticized William Paley’s version of the same argument—for using “God” as an explanation when gaps arise in biological theory. Haught notes that “thinking of God as a hypothesis reduces the infinite divine mystery to a finite scientific cause.”27 And what intelligent design theory and Dawkins have in common is that both treat the notion of “God” as something continuous with the kind of questions that arise in the natural sciences, for which Haught’s apt phrase is “explanatory monism.”28 Michael Ruse criticizes evolutionists such as Dawkins and Edmund O. Wilson for an atheism which is “smuggled in [to Darwinian theory] and then given an evolutionary gloss.”29 It may be similarly argued that intelligent design unwittingly smuggles theism into biology, which as a natural science is neither theist nor atheist. So the “God” that Dawkins—faced with the ID argument—wishes to dismiss is a being within the chain of natural causes and effects, who, because of the complexity of the sequence he has caused, would himself have to be even more complex (pp. 184–89). Thomas Crean discusses Dawkins’ argument for complexity in terms of the exemplary cause of a cathedral, that is to say, the design that was worked out by the original architect. Such a cause has neither weight nor extension, other than the bare set of drawings on which the building of the cathedral was based. So that design plan of a highly complicated building is itself quite simple.30 The idea itself as an idea does not have parts, even though, as a plan, it organizes sets of parts into an ordered whole. Why then could not the design of the universe be simple? Dawkins fails to notice the contradiction between his principal objection and his own practice as a scientist advocating Darwin’s theory of natural selection as the overarching explanation for all living things.
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He has grasped the interrelationships of all genera and species, from the first prokaryotic bacterium through the eukaryotes, protists, plants, fungi, through the thirty-six or so great animal phyla, up to human beings, in terms of that overall unifying principle. However, Dawkins himself states that, rather than being complex, “The theory of natural selection is genuinely simple” (p. 180). For good measure, Dawkins follows other writers about science by including with natural selection the “anthropic principle” as an equivalent explanatory context for physical cosmology. This is an attempt to understand the overall intelligibility of the sequence of improbable but real events that lead from the Big Bang up to the emergence of a planet like ours capable of giving rise to human, intelligent life. Allowing for the ontological difference between human ideas and a first cause, we may ask: If overarching ideas—including the two embraced by Dawkins, the anthropic principle and natural selection—can be simple, even though there are ranges of ranges of facts whose understanding they unify, why could not the ground of the existence of the ordered universe be simple? From the viewpoint of the natural sciences, the intelligibility of the universe is simply a matter of fact, to be taken for granted. Dawkins frequently notes that biological and zoological reality looks “as if ” it were designed. The reason for speaking of design in nature as mere appearance is to forestall illegitimate appeals to divine providence. And a philosopher like Bernard Lonergan would agree that appeals to a God of the gaps are to be rejected. Lonergan notes that the requirement of achieving an understanding of immanent reality as immanent cannot be dodged “by appealing to divine wisdom and divine providence, for that appeal reinforces the rejection of obscurantism and provides another argument for affirming an intelligible order immanent in the visible universe.”31 But the fact that the experienced intelligibility of living things can be explained by the life sciences does not mean that the overall impression of order is some kind of illusion, what Dawkins repeatedly calls “the appearance of design” (p. 188). The insistence on randomness and meaningless contingency as part of the evolutionary explanation has been strongly contested at several levels. In terms of biological,
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botanical, and zoological realities, the title of a recent collection of essays edited by Simon Conway Morris, The Deep Structure of Biology: Is Convergence Sufficiently Ubiquitous to Give a Directional Signal?, gives a hint as to the direction in which some contemporary biologists are moving.32 Just as those who have developed the “anthropic principle” claim to find constant physical and chemical laws underlying the emergence of the astrophysical universe, so Simon Conway Morris—preceded by Michael Denton, and much earlier, in 1922 by Leo Berg—discusses an overall design apparent in, for example, convergent evolutions of organs like the camera eye in unrelated species like some jellyfish and mammals, or of cognitive behavior in, say, corvids and primates.33 This intrinsic design seems to have been interestingly confirmed by the discovery since the late 1980s of the common body plan of all animals.34 Once it is clear that we are not preempting natural scientific inquiry into the relationships between any components in this universal scenario, the further question of the overall intelligibility of that scenario is surely a legitimate one. Simon Conway Morris quotes Howard van Till on the relation of the anthropic principle to biology: “It is not simply the numerical values of certain parameters that must be ‘just right’ in order for life to develop. No, it’s the entire formational economy of the universe that must be ‘just right’. The full menu of the universe’s formational capabilities must be sufficiently robust to make possible the actualization of carbon-based life. . . . I would argue that the formational capabilities of the universe are more fundamental than the numerical values of certain physical parameters.” Conway Morris continues: “Not only is the Universe strangely fit to purpose, but so, too . . . is life’s ability to navigate to its solutions.”35 All of these scientists accept evolutionary theory, but with the qualification that the process of evolution is not random but constrained by laws that are gradually becoming known. Behind the law-regulated convergences being unearthed is an awareness of an overall order underlying the complex physical-chemical-biological-botanical- zoological universe they are investigating. In the early 1950s, Lonergan developed a heuristic notion for such a universe that he called emergent probability.36 However inelegant the phrase, it was an attempt to formalize an understanding of the order of the material universe. Such
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order—in light of the modern natural sciences as the form or intrinsic intelligibility of the astrophysical-chemical-biological-botanical- zoological universe—is the starting point of Aquinas’ “fifth way.” Conway Morris notes that “science necessarily works in a naturalistic framework, but the identification of any general principle immediately begs foundational issues.”37 What are those “foundational issues” which arise with the identification of a general or overall principle in the natural sciences? John Haught identifies these foundational issues in what has been treated as the merely apparent order in the lifeworld by writers such as Dawkins. For Haught, there is an underlying purpose that requires its own dramatic narration: “What requires understanding . . . is the delicate blend of openness, constraint, and temporality that clothes the cosmos in the apparel of drama. It is this combination—and not chance, necessity or time considered in mutual isolation—that allows evolution to be purposive. Nature is narrative to the core, and the story is not over.”38 The foundational question has to do with that overall order: the human mind will not readily concede that such a marvelous order can emerge from chaos or pure randomness. And it is that requirement of an ordering reality capable of grounding the universe we know to exist as a fact that Dawkins does not acknowledge. Einstein is often quoted as saying that “the one thing that is unintelligible about the universe is its intelligibility.”39 We would say here, as I think is implied by Einstein’s statement, that the intelligible order of the universe is unintelligible from the viewpoint of the natural sciences, so that question must be asked from a different, ontological, perspective. Another aspect of the question of an ontological ground of existence is contingency, which cannot as such explain itself; rather, it implies a necessary ground in relationship to which it is “merely” contingent. This brings us to the next part of our discussion.
Nagel and Cornwell on Dawkins’ Neglect of Contingency If Dawkins had focused more on the questions to which “God” is offered as an answer, he might have taken up some of the most obvious
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issues. One of these issues he seems to ignore in The God Delusion is that of contingency. Before referring to some comments of Thomas Nagel and John Cornwell, I would note that Dawkins’ proffered summary of Aquinas’ “third way” is a classic example of what Voegelin called taking “the easy way in spiritual matters.” Dawkins manages to put contingency aside in his summary of Aquinas’ third way by focusing on physical time, which was not at all the core of the problem for Aquinas: “There must have been a time when no physical things existed. But, since physical things exist now, there must have been something non-physical to bring them into existence, and that something we call God” (p. 101). The question of contingency arises whenever one asks why there is anything at all. Thomas Nagel’s was one of the most interesting and penetrating reviews of The God Delusion, all the more so as he wrote it as a philosophical atheist.40 Nagel deals with two weaknesses in Dawkins’ approach: the nature of God and the origin of life. Dawkins assumes, in Nagel’s words, that God is “a complex physical inhabitant of the natural world.” But, as Nagel points out, no one—perhaps other than Dawkins—considers God to be some kind of intramundane phenomenon, subject to a question of the type asked by Dawkins, “Who made God?” Rather, “If the God hypothesis makes sense at all, it offers a different kind of explanation from those of physical science. . . . The point of the hypothesis is to claim that not all explanation is physical, and that there is a mental, purposive, or intentional explanation more fundamental than the basic laws of physics, because it explains even them.”41 In The God Delusion Dawkins simply asserts without evidence that the origins of life are chemical, that life emerged once, and that it is likely that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe (pp. 165–66). So, having rejected Dawkins’ world- immanent God, Nagel turns to what he identifies as a weakness in Dawkins’ understanding of the origins of life: a lack of awareness of contingency in the emergence of life. According to Nagel, Dawkins has taken for granted the existence of the (physical-chemical) material that is “a precondition of the possibility of evolution.” Since this is so, “evolutionary theory cannot ex-
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plain its [own] existence. . . . So the problem is just pushed back one step: how did such a thing come into existence?”42 Nagel does not accept as scientifically accurate the rather high probability Dawkins assigns to the emergence of life from chemical reality, and sees his assertion of the existence of matter without explanation as on a par with the theist’s assertion of the existence of God. Dawkins accepts that the origins of life, and later of consciousness (he does not separate out the different kinds), are lucky events that require something like the anthropic principle to explain them, since these events do not fall under natural selection (pp. 168–69). Nagel objects, maintaining that while we know that the emergence of life happened, Dawkins has not explained its existence, still less the existence of “all subjective consciousness, sensory appearances, thought, value, purpose, and will.” He chides Dawkins for his “reductive physicalism” and, agrees with Aristotle that different forms of understanding are needed for different kinds of subject matter. The great achievements of physical science do not make it capable of encompassing everything, from mathematics to ethics to the experiences of a living animal. We have no reason to dismiss moral reasoning, introspection, or conceptual analysis as ways of discovering the truth just because they are not physics. Any anti-reductionist view leaves us with very serious problems about how the mutually irreducible types of truths about the world are related. At least part of the truth about us is that we are physical organisms composed of ordinary chemical elements. If thinking, feeling, and valuing aren’t merely complicated physical states of the organism, what are they? What is their relation to the brain processes on which they seem to depend? More: if evolution is a purely physical causal process, how can it have brought into existence conscious beings?43
Significantly Nagel’s own philosophical stance seems to prevent him from advancing beyond his criticism that Dawkins ignores the contingency regarding the coming to be of biological, sentient or intellectual
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life. The question of contingency is primarily a question regarding the more basic level of existence as such, rather than the transition from one level of existence to a higher one. John Cornwell in Darwin’s Angel: An Angelic Riposte to “The God Delusion” raises this further question explicitly: The question how come anything as opposed to nothing is one that stretches human beings to their limits. . . . If God is the answer to the question “How come everything?” then he is not included in that everything. . . . God and the universe do not add up to two. Nor does God make the universe out of anything; for whatever God’s creation may be it is not a process of making. Nor does God interfere in the universe, since He would have to be an alternative to, or alongside, what He was interfering with. . . . What God accounts for is that the universe is there instead of nothing. Of course this is a point at which a philosopher might ask: “How come God in the first place?” But by definition He must contain within himself the reason for his own existence: it is not possible for Him to be nothing.44
Cornwell has, it seems to me, gone to the core of the philosophical question; Dawkins refuses to ask this question, and Nagel leaves it unanswered: the question is that of the very existence of the universe. Of course, to raise the question of contingent existence is already to ask about necessity, since the two issues are, like Heidegger’s “being” and “Being,” mutually implicative.45 It could be suggested that it is not only what Nagel describes as a “fear of religion [that] leads too many scientifically minded atheists to cling to a defensive, world-flattening reductionism.”46 Could it not also be a fear of reason in its classic sense? We will conclude with a brief consideration of how Dawkins treats both these issues.
The “Fear of Religion”? Religion Considered as a By-Product of Fear Dawkins’ account of the origins of religion might be seen as a final example of his persistence in eclipsing the question of God. He men-
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tions in the preface to the paperback edition of The God Delusion (p. 17) that his audiences’ favorite passage at public readings is his rousing opening to chapter 2: “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sado-masochistic, capriciously malevolent bully” (p. 51). For someone who takes evolutionary development so seriously, it is surprising he has spent so little time in understanding the almost bimillennial development of the understanding of the experience of God in the Old Testament. Eric Voegelin’s Israel and Revelation is just one such study of this movement toward an understanding of God ever more sharply differentiated from an ancient Near Eastern world dominated by various versions of cosmological myth. Perhaps the sentence immediately following Dawkins’ robust quote indicates his failure to outgrow his Sunday School version of God: “Those of us schooled from infancy in his ways can become desensitized to their horror” (p. 51). There are minor differences between Dawkins’ treatment of the origin of religious experience and those of Pascal Boyer and Daniel Dennett—he refers to Boyer’s explanation of religion, who holds that it is a by-product of “normal psychological dispositions” (p. 206).47 But essentially all three amount to a reduction of what Ernst Troeltsch treated as a religious a priori, and what Rudolf Otto called the “Holy,” to a mere biological stratagem for survival. He writes that “religion is a large phenomenon and it needs a large theory to explain it,” what he calls “Darwinian ultimate explanations.” For Dawkins that means refusing to accept merely neurological or political explanations as sufficient to explain why people are “vulnerable” to religious pressures (pp. 196–97). Still, the “large theory” he offers to explain religion is the notion of “the Darwinian survival value of religion” (p. 200). For Dawkins, religion does not have a direct survival value but is, rather, a by-product of something else. He proposes survival behavior as the value to children of obeying their elders without question, of which religion is a by-product (p. 203). Natural selection produces such unquestioning
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obedience in children’s brains. In different regions, along with common sense there will be the common nonsense of different “arbitrary beliefs” (p. 205), handed on by parents and elders to their children. These “arbitrary beliefs” will evolve from neurological mechanisms of natural selection: “Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal leaders tell them. Such trusting obedience is valuable for survival. . . . The inevitable by- product is vulnerability to infection by mind viruses” (p. 205). We need not go into the dubiousness of Dawkins’ notion of “mind viruses” here, since they would simply amount to “memes” (his catchall term for what everyone else calls ideas) that he profoundly disagrees with. We may simply refer to the distinction between necessary and sufficient causes. John Haught remarks: Just because religion and morality have a natural, neurological, psychological, or evolutionary explanation, it does not follow that a theological explanation is superfluous. Even if religion and morality have been adaptive—say in the evolutionary sense of aiding the survival of human genes—theology is not necessarily wrong to claim at the same time that religion and morality exist because of a quiet divine invitation to each personal consciousness to reach beyond itself toward an infinite horizon of Meaning, Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. Such an explanation in one way competes with or rules out evolutionary and other scientific accounts of religion and morality.48
And just how convincing is Dawkins’ assertion that religion is primarily a survival mechanism? In the many “spiritual outbursts” (in Voegelin’s phrase) characterizing the “opening of the soul”—as Henri Bergson called the series of discoveries of what made a human being human, from China through India through Persia through Israel through Greece—there are too many factors that evade explanation at the level of survival mechanisms produced by natural selection. Just two of these need be mentioned here: the requirement of questioning which accompanies many of the principal religions and the readiness to sacrifice everything, up to the point of one’s own life, for the sake of a value experienced as transcending the requirements of survival.
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Quite contrary to the unthinking nature of belief that Dawkins ascribes to religious experiences is the requirement of self-examination. In the case of a person born into religious belief there may be an initial stage of childhood belief, although, as weary parents know too well, even this is hardly unquestioning. But that stage must be followed by the exigency to make those beliefs one’s own, or, if they are found inadequate or untrue, to move on to a more profound understanding of one’s humanity and its place in the world. Lonergan catches the tension of that deepening exigency in terms of what he calls minor and major authenticity: “The question of authenticity is twofold: there is the minor authenticity of the subject with respect to the tradition that nourishes him; there is the major authenticity that justifies or condemns the tradition itself.”49 Nor is the religious cupboard bare of such exercises in “major authenticity.” In the Old Testament, the Books of Job and of Qoheleth are immensely critical of intellectually or theologically complacent attitudes toward religion. And from Origen onwards, the Christian tradition has regarded the questioning of the faith—well summarized in Anselm’s formula “fides quaerens intellectum,” faith seeking understanding—as a normative task for Christian culture. That attempt at questioning faith continued from Augustine to Kierkegaard and beyond, well exemplified in the work of a philosopher-theologian like Aquinas, centered on the quaestio, expressing the cascade of questions put to him in the living dialogue of the philosophical or theological lesson. Rather than trying to explain why religion should be a by-product of a biological need for survival, Dawkins gives a list of the weird beliefs of Christians,50 none of which is, in fact, a Christian belief at all. His title for the unnamed Christ in this list is “the fatherless man.” In Christian theology and belief, Christ is not “a man,” but the Second Person of the Trinity who assumes human nature. Certainly, the author of The God Delusion has earned Orr’s comment in his review that “the most disappointing feature of The God Delusion is Dawkins’s failure to engage religious thought in any serious way.”51 There is a further problem with a survival-mechanism interpretation of religion. Can it explain how belief in God—to which we can
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add here the classic philosophic awareness of God—has been accompanied, in its most serious exemplars, by a consciousness that this belief might require one to die physically rather than deny that experienced truth? Just how is the attitude of Socrates, of Christ, of St. Thomas More, all of whom faced death in full awareness of its horror, “valuable for survival” within Dawkins’ utilitarian ethic? Certainly, in the history of Western culture, it has very often been those with profound religious convictions who have had the courage to resist the pressure to survive by conforming to power and the lie.52 Some nonbelievers too have similarly opposed threats to individual autonomy, but common to all such profoundly courageous individuals has been their capacity, at critical and testing moments, to put their adherence to truth and freedom above the obvious biological and human desire we all have to survive.
Fear of Reason? Implications of Dawkins’ Rejection of Religion Dawkins begins the tenth and final chapter of The God Delusion, entitled “A Much Needed Gap?,” with a quote from Michael Shermer regarding scientific awe “in the face of the universe’s creation” as “sacred science” (p. 388). For Dawkins, the gap that used to be filled by religion is now “completely superseded” by science (p. 389). Both in The God Delusion and throughout his writings he conveys a sense of wonder at the existence of life,53 which he concedes may perhaps be found only on this planet (p. 411). He concludes the book with a flourish similar to that which occurs toward the end of The Selfish Gene—where he famously contradicts its reductionist argument by asserting that we can rebel against our genes.54 In The God Delusion he suggests we may be able “to emancipate ourselves” from the Middle World (that is, of what is neither too big nor too small): “Could we, by training and practice, emancipate ourselves from Middle World, tear off our black burka, and achieve some sort of intuitive—as well as just mathematical—understanding of the very small, the very large, and the very fast? I genuinely don’t know the answer, but I am thrilled to
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be alive at a time when humanity is pushing against the limits of understanding. Even better, we may eventually discover that there are no limits” (p. 420). This stance is perhaps not too far from Aristotle’s “dangerous idea”—to adapt a title of Dennett’s—of God as “the understanding of understanding.” Does Dawkins the human being, as distinct from the fervent atheist, betray at least the desire for participation in the final goal of understanding, which Aquinas would say we call God?55 Perhaps, but for him the only questions he can take seriously are those occurring within the natural sciences: “What are ‘why questions,’ and why should we feel entitled to think they deserve an answer? There may be some deep questions about the cosmos that are forever beyond science. The mistake is to think that they are therefore not beyond religion, too. . . . ‘That which we don’t understand’ means only ‘That which we don’t yet understand.’ Science is still working on the problem. We don’t know where, or even whether, we ultimately shall be brought up short.”56 But in a book purporting to examine the evidence for religious belief that runs to 460 pages, nothing is more obvious than the omission of a serious investigation of what, in the above review, Dawkins called “why questions.” Instead of rhetorical denunciations of “religion,” or attempts to explain it away as a by-product of biological needs, it would have been a more difficult but worthwhile task to ask why the question of God arises at all. As Lonergan puts it: “It is a question that will be manifested differently in the different stages of man’s historical development and in the many varieties of his culture. But such differences of manifestation and expression are secondary. . . . However much religious or irreligious answers differ, however much there differ [sic] the questions they explicitly raise, still at their root there is the same transcendental tendency of the human spirit that questions, that questions without restriction, that questions the significance of its own questioning, and so comes to the question of God.”57 Dawkins could have given some arguments as to why that question is in fact meaningless—other than his principal argument, that it does not fall under the rubric of natural science. But that can be dismissed as the ideological dogma von Hayek and others called
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s cientism, which has never been nor could be demonstrated by any natural scientist, since it is an epistemological issue. If Dawkins were successful in abolishing all rationality other than that of the natural sciences, then indeed the answers variously entitled “I am who am,” “the One,” “Is,” “the Good,” “Being,” “Son of Man,” and so on, might be meaningless. But since he has not adverted to the question, it is hardly surprising that he never approaches an insight into those answers. The trouble with what I will call here Dawkins’ “fear of reason” is in fact a flight from the radical questioning occurring within both philosophy and theology. Such a flight is uncomfortably close to the irrationality Pope Benedict XVI warned against in his Regensburg Lecture, which we have already called a radical refusal to question—in that case a closure to reason linked with a lethally aggressive religiosity which George Weigel has called “jihadism.” Various reviewers of The God Delusion noted an underlying, if not always explicitly stated, motivation for the crop of polemic attacks on religious belief by the quartet of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens—the 9/11 attacks and their explicit invocation of Islamic belief. Weigel comments: Yet contrary to the claims of these new atheists and their call to the “maturity” of unbelief, a West that has lost the ability to think in terms of “God” and “Satan,” and that has forgotten the drama contained in the idea of “redemption,” is a West that will be at a loss to recognize what inspires and empowers those enemies of the West who showed their bloody hand on September 11, 2001. A West that does not take religious ideas seriously as a dynamic force in the world’s unfolding history is a West that will have disarmed itself, conceptually and imaginatively, in the midst of war.58
One can only suggest to Dawkins, if he can put aside polemics, to return to and deepen his proclaimed allegiance to reason—though not to the severely undernourished rationalism that has forgotten its roots in the classic discovery of reason.59 If he does so he can enter into the “dialogue of cultures” expected from those whose vocation truly be-
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longs to the university rather than to the polemics of television and the blogosphere, a dialogue implying a shared openness to reason. Benedict XVI’s conclusion to his lecture at the University of Regensburg echoes that invitation to a common radical rationality: “‘Not to act reasonably, not to act with logos, is contrary to the nature of God,’ said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor. It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures. To rediscover it constantly is the great task of the university.”60 Notes 1. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), and The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004). 2. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Black Swan, 2007); hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 3. Thomas Nagel, “The Fear of Religion: Review of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion,” New Republic, 23 October 2006, p. 25. 4. Cf. David Berlinski, The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (New York: Crown Forum, 2008); John Cornwell, Darwin’s Angel: An Angelic Response to “The God Delusion” (London: Profile Books, 2007); Thomas Crean, O.P., A Catholic Replies to Richard Dawkins (Oxford: Family Publications, 2007); John F. Haught, God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008); John C. Lennox, God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? (Oxford: Lion Books, 2007); Keith Ward, Why There Almost Certainly Is a God: Doubting Dawkins (London: Lion Books, 2008). Since it is relevant to our topic, we may include here Anthony Flew with Roy Abraham Varghese, There Is A God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind (New York: HarperCollins, 2007). 5. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), 149e, and Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 62e. I owe the suggestion of these Wittgenstein references to Edward Oakes: “Edward T. Oakes and His Critics: An Exchange,” First Things 112 (April 2001). 6. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (London: Gollancz, 1962), p. 31.
362 Brendan Purcell 7. Eric Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, vol. 4 of Order and History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), p. 316. 8. Marian Finucane Programme, RTE Radio 1, 11 February 2003; Richard Dawkins, A Devil’s Chaplain (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2003), pp. 241–48. 9. Nicomachean Ethics I, 3, 1094b23–25, trans. W. D. Ross, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), vol. 2, p. 1730. 10. Eric Voegelin, The History of the Race Idea from Ray to Carus (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), p. 25. 11. Voegelin, Ecumenic Age, p. 326. 12. Eric Voegelin, What Is History? and Other Late Unpublished Writings (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), pp. 102–4. 13. Brilliantly summarized in Werner Jaeger’s The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967). 14. Eric Voegelin, “Reason: The Classic Experience,” in Published Essays, 1966–1985, ed. Ellis Sandoz (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), p. 277. 15. See Eric Voegelin, “Immortality: Experience and Symbol,” Harvard Theological Review 60 (1967): 52–94. 16. Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, vol. 1 (Zurich: Weidmann, 1985), Xenophanes B 11 (DK number: part B, fragment 11); hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by DK number. 17. Translations of the pre-Socratics are taken from Eric Voegelin’s The World of the Polis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), pp. 172, 181. 18. Ibid., pp. 209, 212. 19. See Aristotle, Metaphysics IV, 4, 1005b35–1006a28. 20. Voegelin, “Immortality,” pp. 54–55. 21. As, for example, when he speaks of “God” as “a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us.” His objection to this notion of God is that “any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution” (p. 52, italics in original). 22. Metaphysics, XII, 9, 1074b34. 23. Trans. Clarence Brown in Mandelstam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 291. 24. Saul Bellow, Herzog (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 82.
Dawkins’ Fear of Reason 363 25. See Richard Popkin, The History of Scepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 26. Voegelin, Ecumenic Age, p. 316. 27. Haught, God and the New Atheism, pp. 42–43. 28. Ibid., p. 86. 29. Michael Ruse, Can a Darwinian Be a Christian? The Relationship between Science and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 128. 30. Crean, Catholic Replies, pp. 9–34. 31. Bernard Lonergan, Insight (London: Longmans, 1961), p. 261. 32. Simon Conway Morris, ed., The Deep Structure of Biology: Is Convergence Sufficiently Ubiquitous to Give a Directional Signal? (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Foundation Press, 2008). 33. Simon Conway Morris, Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Michael Denton, Nature’s Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe (New York: Free Press, 1998); Michael J. Denton, Craig J. Marshall, and Michael Legge, “The Protein Folds as Platonic Forms: New Support for the Pre-Darwinian Conception of Evolution by Natural Law,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 219 (2002): 325–42; Leo S. Berg, Nomogenesis or Evolution Determined by Law (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969). 34. This rather profound modification of classic Darwinian theory can be charted in Wallace Arthur, The Origin of Animal Body Plans: A Study in Evolutionary Developmental Biology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), and Creatures of Accident: The Rise of the Animal Kingdom (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006); Sean Carroll, Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom (New York: Norton, 2005). 35. Morris, Life’s Solution, p. 203. 36. Lonergan, Insight, pp. 121–28. 37. Conway Morris, “Evolution and Convergence: Some Wider Considerations,” in Morris, Deep Structure of Biology, p. 62. 38. John F. Haught, “Purpose in Nature: On the Possibility of a Theology of Evolution” in Morris, Deep Structure of Biology, p. 229. 39. Anthony Flew in ch. 5 of There Is a God quotes many similar remarks by physicists including Einstein, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger. In Devil’s Delusion, 110–12, David Berlinski quotes physicist Paul Davies as saying that, because of the evidence for lawfulness in the physical universe, “Physicists are slowly waking up to an inconvenient truth—the universe looks suspiciously like a fix.” Berlinski adds the grumpy response of physicist Fred Hoyle, a
364 Brendan Purcell former atheist, to the discovery of the very narrow temperature range that allows the emergence of carbon in nucleosynthesis: “The universe looks like a put-up job.” Berlinski concludes: “The universe looks like a put-up job because it is a put-up job” (emphasis in original). 40. Thomas Nagel, “The Fear of Religion,” New Republic, 23 October 2006. 41. Ibid., p. 26. 42. Ibid., p. 27. 43. Ibid., p. 29. 44. Cornwell, Darwin’s Angel, p. 151. 45. Dawkins frequently assails the motivations of those he disagrees with, so, without attributing any personal bias to him, the question can still be asked, Just why does he refuse to raise what has been the defining metaphysical question since Parmenides, the question of existence? Plato uses the term thnétoi, or “mortals,” in his Symposium for those who refuse to be philosophers, seekers of the truth of existence. And discussing an early example of what he calls the “aggressive dilettantism” in philosophical matters exhibited in the Clarke-Leibniz correspondence, Voegelin notes that exchange as being one of the first where philosophical ignorance is proffered as an advantage in an argument: “Clarke’s ‘I do not understand’ in answer to Leibniz’s exposition of the problems of time and space is the ominous symptom of the new attitude. He really does not understand—and that settles the argument in his favor.” See Eric Voegelin, “The Origins of Scientism,” in Published Essays, 1940–1952 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), p. 194. Voegelin’s essay concludes with a diagnosis of what he calls “a primitivization of intellectual and spiritual culture” (p. 192) brought about by the enormous social success of scientistic intellectuals. 46. Nagel, “Fear of Religion,” p. 28. 47. Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Human Instincts That Fashion Gods, Spirits and Ancestors (London: Vintage, 2002); Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (London: Allen Lane, 2006). 48. Haught, God and the New Atheism, p. 85. 49. Bernard Lonergan, “Existenz and Aggiornamento,” in Collection (New York: Herder, 1967), p. 246. 50. To get the flavor of this list, here are a few items: “In the time of the ancestors, a man was born to a virgin mother with no biological father being involved. The same fatherless man called out to a friend called Lazarus, who had been dead long enough to stink, and Lazarus promptly came back to life.
Dawkins’ Fear of Reason 365 The fatherless man himself came alive after being dead and buried three days” (pp. 207–8). 51. H. Allen Orr, “A Mission to Convert,” New York Review of Books, 11 January 2007. 52. It might be no harm to remind polemic atheists like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and others, that believers both now and in the recent past have faced the kind of angry and unrestrained persecution they come close to advocating. Books like George Weigel’s The Final Revolution: The Resistance Church and the Collapse of Communism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Barbara von der Heydt’s Candles behind the Wall: Heroes of the Peaceful Revolution That Shattered Communism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1993); and Etty Hillesum’s Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, ed. Klaas A. D. Smelik (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), are only a few of the many accounts of the relationship between belief and resistance, where the believers’ priority is to serve others and God rather than themselves, accepting if necessary the loss of their own lives. 53. Never more so than in his at times beautifully written Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (London: Penguin, 1999). 54. Dawkins, Selfish Gene: “We, that is our brains, are separate and independent enough from our genes to rebel against them” (p. 332). 55. Having written this, I wasn’t too surprised to note that in debate with Oxford mathematician and philosopher of science John Lennox, Dawkins conceded that “a serious case could be made for a deistic God.” See Melanie Philips, “Is Richard Dawkins Still Evolving?,” Spectator, 10 October 2008. 56. Richard Dawkins, “Snake Oil and Holy Water,” review of The Sacred Depths of Nature, by Ursula Goodenough, Forbes, 4 October 1999. 57. Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1972), p. 103. 58. George Weigel, Faith, Reason, and the War against Jihadism: A Call to Action (New York: Doubleday, 2007), p. 16. 59. See Voegelin, “Reason.” 60. Benedict XVI, “Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections,” speech presented at Regensburg University, Regensburg, Germany, 12 September 2006, www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/ 2006/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060912_university- regensburg_en.html.
f i f t e e n
The Experiential Argument for the Existence of God in Gabriel Marcel and Alvin Plantinga Brendan Sweetman
In these brief reflections, I wish to explore and extend Gabriel Marcel’s approach to the question of the existence of God. I believe that Marcel’s work offers many profound insights on the subject that have not received sufficient attention or appreciation. Indeed, within contemporary philosophy of religion his approach can be accurately described as unique. As with many of Marcel’s major themes, his ideas on the existence of God require a certain amount of excavation and reconstruction. This is in part due to his philosophical style, which is sometimes cursory, inchoate, and suggestive; as a result, his ideas are often loosely organized and developed on particular topics, over a range of his works. As Gerald Hanratty accurately notes: “More than most philosophers, it is true of Gabriel Marcel that the form and the content of his thought are inseparable.”1 He frequently fails to develop his ideas in logical fashion or with the necessary detail to allow his readers to fully tease out his train of thought. Many of his ideas are 366
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best approached by bringing to the subject under discussion an overall familiarity with his work. Indeed, Marcel frequently assumes knowledge of his previous work and regularly quotes from earlier expositions. This is particularly the case with regard to the question of God’s existence. Nevertheless I believe he has made a profound contribution to the question of what is involved in an affirmation of God. In this essay, I will begin by briefly recalling some of the key themes in his work that are relevant to the topic; then I will seek to elaborate upon his own position; and last, I will compare and contrast his standpoint with that of Alvin Plantinga from the Anglo-American philosophical tradition. This comparison will help us not only to further explicate and understand Marcel’s view but also to appreciate the profundity of both Marcel’s and Plantinga’s positions. At the same time, it will suggest why Marcel’s approach may be more fruitful than Plantinga’s for an analysis of religious experience and its connection to the existence of God. This would not be an insignificant conclusion, given the very favorable reception granted to, and the large influence of, Plantinga’s view in contemporary philosophy of religion.
I Marcel is well known for drawing a general distinction in his work between reflection and experience. This is a distinction found in many contemporary European philosophers, including Bergson, MerleauPonty, Heidegger, and Buber. However, as I have argued elsewhere, Marcel develops his view very differently from these other philosophers;2 in particular, he wishes strongly to avoid an analysis of reflection and experience, and their relationship, that may lead to epistemological or moral relativism (a problem the other philosophers mentioned sometimes have difficulty avoiding). He develops his own unique view of the relationship between reflection and experience; the central concepts in his analysis are primary and secondary reflection, and problem and mystery. One of his main points is that the realm of conceptual knowledge, which includes both philosophy and science, is inadequate to capture the fundamental experiences of human beings
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in their world.3 These experiences take place at the level of what he calls being-in-a-situation and include the experience of our own embodiment, the relationship of mind to body, and the “concrete approaches” to being that are revealed in our intersubjective relations with others: faith, fidelity, hope, and love. Marcel argues that as human beings we first experience the world in intersubjective relationships; later, we reflect on our experiences by means of various acts of abstraction and analytic reasoning. This kind of reasoning can be part of ordinary everyday thinking, or it may be the more systematic, detailed work that takes place in academic disciplines, such as philosophy and science. But in this type of reflection, Marcel argues, we must realize that no matter how careful or deeply philosophical our reasoning is, we can never fully capture at the level of reflection the nature of our various experiences. This level at best only partially, and therefore inadequately, captures our experiences; yet it does allow us to understand something about them. At worst it can distort the experience or even devalue it by prompting the conclusion that any experience which cannot be adequately captured in conceptual knowledge is therefore not to be taken seriously. This is a major mistake, according to Marcel, because it can result in the devaluing of some of the most significant experiences of human beings, experiences that are at the heart of what it means to be human.4 It can also lead to the dangerous conclusion that empirical verification and the scientific approach to knowledge must be the foundational approaches to knowledge—the main ways to understand knowledge. This conclusion, if generally accepted, can bring about the marginalization of not just philosophy but also the arts and literature. Indeed, such a view, if unchallenged, can contribute to the dehumanization of whole societies. This has in fact occurred, according to Marcel, in the latter half of the twentieth century, partly because of the domination of consumerism (which identifies individuals with their functions), a hedonistic approach to culture, and a utilitarian approach to knowledge, especially the view that scientific knowledge can solve all of society’s problems. Marcel’s critique of contemporary culture is penetrating; his ideas are prescient and relevant in today’s world of unchecked consumerism, moral relativism, escalating social problems, and loss of meaning.5
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Marcel develops this general approach to human existence—the condition of human beings in their world—by appealing to his famous concepts of problem and mystery.6 These are well known and need only brief mention here. For Marcel, the realm of conceptual knowledge can be understood and described as a realm of problems. A problem is something that normally arises, or confronts us, in our experience and that calls for our reflection. Problems are tackled by human reason in a logical, conceptual, scientific, “objective” manner. Reason seeks solutions that are empirically verifiable, universal, objective, and applicable to everybody. The solution, however, always fails to do complete justice to the experiences that gave rise to the problem; indeed, the experience is partially lost in the move to abstraction. The being-in-a- situation of the subject is abstracted out of the experience in the shift to the reflective level. Marcel gives many examples to illustrate this point, but one of the more interesting is the fact of evil in human experience.7 He distinguishes between what philosophers now refer to as the existential problem of evil (how a particular individual copes with evil in his or her own life) and the philosophical problem of evil (how a philosopher might think about the “problem” of evil—how evil is to be reconciled with the existence of an all-good and all-powerful God). He notes that the existential problem cannot be fully discussed at the philosophical level precisely because the experience of the questioner is left out. As he puts it: “Evil which is only stated or observed is no longer evil which is suffered: in fact, it ceases to be evil. In reality, I can only grasp it as evil in the measure in which it touches me—that is to say, in the measure in which I am involved. . . . Being ‘involved’ is the fundamental fact.”8 In addition, the philosopher seeks solutions to the problem of evil that he can present to everyone in a logically objective manner, so almost by definition these solutions cannot fully address the existential question. Marcel’s view is that for the ordinary person the existential problem of evil should be the main focus, but he does not deny that the philosophical approach is both valuable and necessary. Sometimes the philosopher falls into the error of thinking that the philosophical approach should be the main way to consider the experience of evil,
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and as a result he can fail to appreciate the necessity of helping people deal with the existential problem. In general, this failure is something we can observe in many different areas of primary reflection, including academic disciplines.9 These disciplines often lose touch with the experiences that gave rise to the problems the disciplines are supposed to solve. This realm of problems must be contrasted with the realm of mystery. Marcel understands the latter as a deeper realm in which the subject is involved, as, for example, in the existential experience of evil. In this realm, it is not possible to separate oneself from the experience totally in order to analyze it conceptually. Marcel notes: “In a concrete philosophy we must almost inevitably confront the drama concealed by the problem. As long as we think in terms of a problem, we will see nothing.”10 One can provide some conceptual analysis, but this does not capture everything about the experience. The experience is primary; the analysis is secondary—not just in a philosophical (or ontological) sense but also from the vantage point of ordinary human life. Indeed, while conceptual analyses are important for philosophers trying to understand the human condition, they are not crucial in actual life experiences. The risk for academic disciplines is that “experts” will forget that life should be driving their research, not the reverse. Marcel believes that a spin-off effect of failing to appreciate the distinction between problem and mystery is that thinkers in certain areas of contemporary philosophy have set themselves up as the arbiters of what counts as real knowledge and of what is worth studying and thinking about in human life. These are familiar, well-known themes in Marcel; I recall them here because they are significant background themes in his discussion of the question of God’s existence.
II We are especially interested in how Marcel’s ideas on the question of God’s existence might fit into the themes of contemporary philosophy
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of religion. Can Marcel’s reflections on religion, faith, and the experience and affirmation of God make a contribution to the contemporary discussion in philosophy of religion? Does he have anything to contribute to the debate over the rationality of belief in God? I believe he does. Let us note a few preliminary points before elaborating his view in detail. First, we must acknowledge that Marcel does not follow his ideas on these matters all the way through. For example, he does not appear to adequately consider the question of the rationality of religious belief. He focuses primarily on the experience of God; this is understandable, given his primary interest in existential experience. Nevertheless, the rationality of the religious worldview is a crucial question. It is not that Marcel ignores the question, but he nowhere offers a sustained discussion of the matter and often speaks as if it is of no great importance. In our own time, the question has become increasingly acute, given the conflict between religious and secularist worldviews. In a modern pluralist society, there is overt debate regarding diverse value systems and visions of the good life. Marcel did not sufficiently focus on how one could develop his view so as to argue for the rationality of belief in God in the modern world. He dealt with this task only in a cursory way. Our task is to develop the argument that he sketched and to show that his view has in fact a very profound contribution to make to the question of the rationality of religious belief, perhaps also to show the superior rationality of the religious worldview over the secularist worldview. Second, Marcel begins his discussion of the nature of an affirmation of God with some reflections on the notion of “proof ” in philosophy.11 He is thinking of the various attempts in the history of philosophy to prove the existence of God by means of rational argument, such as those of St. Thomas Aquinas (Marcel seems to have the Thomistic approach particularly in mind). In general, Marcel is suspicious of this approach. One of the reasons for this suspicion is that he regards the proofs as belonging to the realm of primary reflection. What this means, as is clear from our earlier remarks, is that any proof or argument for God’s existence would not capture the experience of God. Something would be lost in bringing the subject matter into the
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form of an abstract proof. For Marcel, as Gerald Hanratty comments, to attempt to prove the existence of God “is to reduce the mystery of God and of man’s relationship to Him to the level of problematic thought.”12 The proof will not demonstrate the existence of God in any real, living, experiential sense to an atheist (or to a theist) because the experience of God will of necessity be missing from the argument. Martin Buber has noted in his critique of theology (and Marcel agrees) that there is a difference between the idea of God and the experience of God.13 While this is true, one wonders whether the distinction is relevant when dealing with arguments for the existence of God. It could be the case that even though the arguments for the existence of God do not convey an experience of God, they may be of great value in the debate about the reality of God. Marcel acknowledges this but does not pursue it further. We must also note that the arguments for the existence of God, as usually understood in the history of philosophy of religion, are not meant to convey an experience of God. This would be too much to expect from a “proof ” for God’s existence. The third point to make is that Marcel does not clearly distinguish between the task of “proving” the existence of God and the more modest task of showing that belief in God is rational, which may also include showing that the religious worldview is the most rational. An argument for the existence of God (such as the cosmological or the teleological argument) might show that belief in God is reasonable, even though the argument might not reach the level of proof. Even so, the conclusion that belief in God is reasonable would obviously be of great significance. Many of the arguments in philosophy of religion concerning the ultimate cause of the universe, its nature and design, the soul and immortality, the nature of religious experience, and the ultimate justification of morality are at the center of the debate between religion and secularism in our contemporary pluralist society. If one holds that the religious view of the world, understood in a general sense, is the most reasonable view, this is tantamount to saying that the secularist view is not reasonable; and vice versa. The question of God’s existence is crucial to the debate between contemporary religious and secularist alternatives.
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Marcel notes that religious believers strongly committed to their religion are not greatly interested in arguments for the existence of God and may even look upon such arguments with suspicion. He also remarks that atheists are not often persuaded by these kinds of arguments.14 While this is true, it does not follow that the various “proofs” have no merit, are not good arguments, and are not necessary in the contemporary debate. We must recognize that one of the reasons theologians, in particular, are not interested in such arguments is that they place a great deal of emphasis on the experience of God, namely on one’s personal relationship with God. Many are hostile to the discipline of philosophy in which the arguments are usually developed and debated. However, while the experience of God is central for religious belief, it is important to be able to defend the rationality of one’s worldview. This is a challenge for both the religious believer and the secularist; the traditional task of philosophy of religion—discussing the rationality of religious belief—is therefore still very important. In short, in a pluralist state—where we often have many conflicting worldviews competing to influence the culture—one cannot ignore the matter of the philosophical defense of the religious outlook. Fourth, Marcel illustrates very profoundly that one of the problems facing the arguments today is that many people are not open to the religious worldview. He distinguishes between “anti-theists” and “atheists” to make this point. An atheist is somebody who genuinely does not believe in God; an anti-theist is somebody who does not want to believe in God. This latter category is an interesting one and can be observed throughout modern culture. The reasons people do not want to believe in God include the fact that they do not want to be limited by religious morality. Some also lack the humility that religious belief requires. It is possible, Marcel points out, to close oneself off from the religious worldview, not for rational reasons, but for reasons of selfinterest, self-obsession, and indeed self-righteousness. Not only is this view widespread today but, Marcel argues, “the history of modern philosophy seems to supply abundant illustration of the progressive replacement of atheism by . . . an anti-theism, whose mainspring is to will that God should not be.”15
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Nevertheless, despite these cultural blinders hampering a genuine debate between the worldviews, Marcel realizes that we must address the question of how the religious believer might develop an argument for the existence of God aimed at somebody who was genuinely interested in the question (and who might or might not be an atheist). He suggests there may be a way to show that there is what he calls an “Absolute Thou” who is the foundation of various profound human experiences; analysis of these experiences can be a way to develop a type of argument for God’s existence. Marcel’s approach to the question is, therefore, phenomenological in character. He simply describes various human experiences and attempts to bring out their underlying meaning. Phenomenology, of course, aims at accurate descriptions, descriptions that expose or reveal something important about the human condition. Marcel’s position is that there is a set of profound human experiences which reveal the presence of God (the “Absolute Thou”).16 These experiences are present in the lives of most human beings, even though a particular person may not necessarily connect them with a religious worldview or come to an affirmation of God based on them. Let us consider two of these experiences in more detail in order to elaborate his argument further. Marcel is well known for providing an analysis of the human experience of fidelity.17 In a variety of works he discusses different instances of fidelity in life, such as a mother’s fidelity to her children, the fidelity present in various friendships, and marital fidelity. Marcel is trying to emphasize in his descriptions that fidelity requires an unconditional commitment. This becomes evident when one analyzes an experience of fidelity, especially marital fidelity, to identify the type of commitment that is involved. The commitment between a man and a woman entered into in marriage is unconditional, which means that the pledge they make to each other is not based on multiple conditions that each partner must fulfill. One does not say when one gets married, “I will pledge my commitment to you for life as long as you satisfy the following requirements” and then specify a set of conditions! It is clear that such an understanding of a marital relationship is inadequate. The
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other person, as Thomas Anderson has noted, is not seen as a person with a certain set of desirable characteristics, or as identified with a function, or even as a rational, autonomous subject; rather, he or she is experienced as a “thou,” a person with whom I identify and am one with on the path of life.18 It is an experience that the other will not fail me, and I will not fail him or her, and so is deeper than constancy (though sometimes in marriage fidelity can be reduced to constancy).19 Generally, a marital commitment involves a pledge that one will love the other person no matter what happens. This is the true understanding of marriage; the fact that many people do not regard marriage in this way today does not refute Marcel’s point. Many people do understand their marital commitment in this way, even though they may not often put it into words. Marcel is arguing that the true meaning of fidelity involves an unconditional commitment, a commitment that is quite impossible to capture conceptually and that is even very difficult to reveal phenomenologically: “Fidelity is based on a certain relation which is felt to be unalterable, and therefore on an assurance which cannot be fleeting. . . . We cannot eliminate the mystery by trying to reduce fidelity to habit.”20 This commitment, experienced at the level of mystery, may indeed be harder to achieve, and therefore harder to appreciate, in some societies (such as our own) which expose unconditional relationships to various pressures and temptations. These pressures create well-documented problems for marriage, but it does not follow that unconditional social relationships are not possible, or real, or that they are not experienced by many people. Most importantly, it does not follow that they are not a natural part of the human condition. A similar analysis can be given for deep friendships and for sibling and filial relationships. Let us also briefly discuss Marcel’s phenomenological analysis of the experience of hope as a way of further elaborating the unconditional nature of various human experiences.21 He notes that human beings do hope in and for many different things in their lives. Hope is to be understood as an experience of trust or confidence in human life and its meaning and value. Marcel is not talking about a more colloquial or localized experience of hope, where we might hope that we
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will encounter a better opportunity tomorrow, that our team will win the game, or that we will get a raise. In these kinds of situations, Marcel states that the reasons for hoping are exterior to myself rather than in the depths of what I am as a human being.22 He is here speaking of another kind of hope—hope understood in an ontological sense. He gives the example of a mother whose soldier son has gone missing in action but who still does not fall into despair.23 There are two ways to think about her experience of hope in her son’s well-being. One can look at it from the outside, as it were, and argue that her hope might be unfounded. Or perhaps her hope is irrational because she is not looking at the matter objectively. Or indeed, even if her hope is not irrational or unfounded, it could still be wrong in the sense that her son might be dead. But Marcel suggests we also must look at this experience from the mother’s point of view. And we must notice that she does not see it as an unfounded or irrational hope. This is because she has an unconditional commitment to her son’s well-being. Indeed, unconditional commitments are perhaps most profoundly revealed in a mother’s love for her child. This unconditional commitment does not mean her hope will not be frustrated, at least in this instance. Nevertheless, it is a profound human experience, an important part of what it means to be a human being. The mother experiences an unconditional hope, and Marcel believes it is correct and moral that she should do so (indeed, even if she finds out that her son is dead, her hope that she will see him again is justified). A more “rational” or indeed cynical understanding of the mother’s experience of hope would be impoverished precisely because it would miss or ignore the kind of experience that is part of the mother’s life. Marcel points out that the attitude of those who would criticize the mother’s experience of hope is one of attempting to avoid disappointment, because for them hope is like taking a risk; so to avoid the risk “we have a tendency to substitute for an initial relationship, which is both pure and mysterious, subsequent relationships no doubt more intelligible, but . . . more and more deficient as regards their ontological content. . . . The spirit of mistrust, not only of others but of life itself, [makes] the human soul less and less a possible dwelling place for hope, or indeed for joy.”24
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We can generalize from this experience to talk about hope in human existence itself. This is the hope that human existence has overall purpose and meaning, a hope that Marcel refers to as an “existential assurance” in the value and meaning of our existence. He argues that we do not, indeed cannot, regard our lives as a product of blind chance, but must regard them as the result of necessity and purpose and as having an overall meaning. This is why many people, when reflecting on the finitude of their existence, find it difficult to avoid thinking of their lives as being a gift. Marcel is suggesting that this experience is part of the essence of being human.25 Of course, we have to demonstrate the reasonableness of regarding our lives this way; otherwise this attitude may be just wishful thinking. I have been arguing that this task is an important one for the philosophy of religion, especially in a pluralist world where the view that the universe and all life have no ultimate purpose is becoming more prominent. Marcel is arguing that such experiences are real and prevalent; they are not manufactured or psychological delusions, yet we must make sure that we are open to receive them. As philosophers, we need a philosophical defense, as well as an existential appreciation, of these experiences as part of the overall articulation of this position. Marcel goes on to argue that profound experiences which involve unconditional commitments point in a religious direction. He holds that such unconditional commitments are best explained if understood as being pledged to an absolute transcendence. Of hope he declares: “The only possible source from which this absolute hope springs must once more be stressed. It appears as a response of the creature to the infinite Being to whom it is conscious of owing everything that it has and upon whom it cannot impose any condition whatsoever.”26 “Unconditionality,” as he has also noted, “is the true sign of God’s presence.”27 Developing this view further, he affirms that such experiences are founded upon a transcendent reality. Although this transcendent reality is part of the experience for many people, and helps them to make sense of their experiences, reflection upon the fact that there is a transcendent reality underlying these experiences also helps to made sense of such experiences from a philosophical point of view. The
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sense of the transcendent as part of the overall experience explains why people make such unconditional commitments in the first place and also helps the philosopher understand why such commitments make sense from a rational point of view. In fact, the experience of transcendence is often the reason one is able to make such profound commitments. This is because in all human relationships there is the possibility of deception and betrayal, and there is also the inescapable fact of death, which is the sharpest reminder of the contingency of human affairs. Fidelity is vindicated because it triumphs over this threat and defies the absence which death entails. And so Marcel suggests that a phenomenological analysis will reveal that our under lying trust in the rationality of unconditional commitments, even though these commitments are generally experienced and not necessarily rationally analyzed in the lives of ordinary people, at least most of the time, is possible because unconditional commitments involve an experience of being grounded in an Absolute Thou (or Absolute Presence).28 Marcel argues that this grounding is something many people experience. It is not just a conclusion that the philosopher deduces from the experience. People do experience this transcendent dimension as long as they remain open to it. As noted earlier, it is possible to close oneself off from these experiences, or to practice a kind of self- deception with regard to them (the “anti-theism” referred to earlier). It is also obviously true that many people may not make the move to the affirmation of God. In addition, a single experience of this kind probably will not bring a person to the experience of God, or to the affirmation of God. But many experiences over a period of time might do so, and even if a person does not arrive at the affirmation of God, Marcel is arguing that the transcendent reality is still the ultimate ground of his or her experiences. Let us now move on in the final section of this essay to contrast Marcel’s position with another approach to religious experience, that of Alvin Plantinga, one of the most influential thinkers in the contemporary analytic movement of philosophy of religion. A comparison and contrast of their respective views will be most instructive and will help to further explicate the depth of Marcel’s view.
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III In recent Anglo-American philosophy of religion, a new argument for the existence of God based on religious experience has been proposed by Alvin Plantinga, William Alston, Nicholas Wolterstorff, John Hick, and others.29 This new approach has become known as “Reformed epistemology,” after the Reformed tradition in theology inspired by John Calvin. Let us take Plantinga’s version of this new argument as representative of the position of Reformed epistemology. The traditional argument from religious experience had a clear premise leading to a clear conclusion. The premise was that if one had a religious experience of some kind, one could infer from this experience that God exists, or could infer that God was the best explanation for the experience. What is distinctive about this argument, from the point of view of our discussion, is the inference from a religious experience to the existence of God. Critics would typically attack the argument at the point of the inference, suggesting that, for various reasons, the inference was not justified, or rational, or that it was hasty, or based on an “interpretation” of an experience which was not in itself religious. The contemporary argument, developed by Plantinga, suggests that there is in fact no inference involved in most types of religious experience, that one can move directly from a religious experience, as it were, to the existence of God. One is somehow directly aware of God in the experience; the presence of God is directly evident in the experience (which, if true, would mean that God exists, so that it would be rational for a believer who had had such an experience to believe in God on the basis of it). One can see immediately that Plantinga’s approach has clear affinities with the approach of Marcel. One of Plantinga’s aims is to remove as illegitimate a certain kind of objection to religious beliefs that is based on the demand for “objective evidence” for those beliefs. He calls this the “evidentialist objection” and tries to show that it is misplaced. He begins with a critique of the traditional epistemological theory known as “classical foundationalism.”30 Classical foundationalism, held by many philosophers in the past, including Descartes and Locke, is based on the view
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that there are two types of beliefs, namely, basic beliefs and inferred beliefs. Basic beliefs are ordinary, everyday beliefs, and are justified beliefs in virtue of being basic. Examples would include beliefs such as “I am sitting at my desk now reading a book,” “I drove to work this morning,” “2 + 2 = 4,” “I went to the library yesterday,” and so on; in short, beliefs that are, as Plantinga puts it, “self-evident, evident to the senses, or incorrigible.”31 These beliefs are basic because they are not inferred from any other beliefs. The second type of beliefs—inferred beliefs—are inferred on the basis of other beliefs, namely, the basic ones. For example, my belief that it will rain this afternoon is inferred; so is my belief that Eisenhower was a good president. All of our inferred beliefs are eventually traceable back to dependence upon some set of basic beliefs. Basic beliefs include those that would fall under the general categories of ordinary perceptual and observational beliefs, memory beliefs, beliefs arrived at by introspection, and so on. Plantinga goes on to argue that belief in God may not be an inferred belief for a wide range of people but may, in fact, be a basic belief. This is not to deny that for some it may be an inferred belief—if they believe on the basis of the traditional arguments, for instance— but for those who believe on the basis of their own religious ex periences, belief in God is a basic belief, just like beliefs based on perception, observations, or memories. Plantinga can be read as not attacking classical foundationalism as such; rather, he is arguing that there is a tacit criterion underlying classical foundationalism, a criterion for deciding what would count as a basic belief. He wants to broaden the criterion, so that belief in God based on religious experiences may be included among foundational, or basic, beliefs. Plantinga claims there is a contradiction at the heart of classical foundationalism, based as it is on the criterion that “whatever is selfevident, or evident to the senses, or incorrigible” is a basic belief. This criterion, however, is self-referentially incoherent because it itself is not self-evident, evident to the senses, or incorrigible! The criterion undermines itself because it states, on the one hand, that we should begin with beliefs that are self-evident, evident to the senses, and incorrigible, but on the other hand that we are supposed to accept the criterion, which is none of these things.
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There are several difficulties facing Plantinga’s view. Let me mention three that will help us develop his position further and will also be helpful when we return to Marcel’s view. First, some critics have argued that Plantinga is implicitly suggesting that belief in God is actually groundless: we do not need any evidence or reasons to believe in God.32 We can believe in God on the basis of our own experiences and, if challenged about our belief, can simply reply that it is a basic belief. A second criticism is that Plantinga’s view appears to sanction just about any kind of belief, no matter how ridiculous, poorly supported, or even dangerous (the problem of relativism). For example, what is to prevent a person who worships the Abominable Snowman from arguing that this is a properly basic belief ? And that because it is basic, it is therefore rational and does not require any further justi fication? In reply to these objections, Plantinga thinks it is obvious that some beliefs are not justified; he gives examples of beliefs about the Great Pumpkin (from the Peanuts comic strip), or about voodoo, or astrology. Beliefs relating to these topics are often groundless because they are not based on genuine experiences. Plantinga argues that the proper way to establish whether a belief is a properly justified basic belief is through induction. What we must do, he says, is “assemble examples of beliefs and the conditions in which those properly basic beliefs are called forth such that the former are obviously properly basic in the latter.”33 He often compares religious beliefs based on experience with perceptual beliefs. For perceptual beliefs, an example might be “I see a tree before me”; we know the conditions under which this belief would be justified even though it is a basic belief. If, for instance, you were taking a particularly strong medicine that caused you to have occasional hallucinations of different types of trees, then you might not trust this perceptual belief, but otherwise you would. It is the same with religious beliefs. Plantinga argues that we know the appropriate kinds of conditions in religious communities that call forth basic religious beliefs. For example, in a Christian community people typically have religious beliefs of the sort that “God is near” or “God created this flower,” and so forth. These are properly basic, and therefore justified, beliefs. Plantinga holds that many people have some kind of
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d irect experience of God (which he does not describe fully), an experience which makes their belief in God basic, rational, and justified. A third problem with Plantinga’s view is that he does not give an adequate description of religious experiences. The problem is that many people do not have religious experiences of the sort mentioned, whereas everybody has ordinary perceptual experiences. This is surely a large part of the reason why the latter are not controversial but the former are, and so the analogy with perceptual experiences is quite strained. This is why a description of religious experiences is an essential part of the debate. Take as an example the experience that “God created this flower.” Many people have probably had this or a similar experience (and then they would form the belief that God exists, and this belief would be rational). But the question must be raised: Was the experience “God created this flower” properly basic in Plantinga’s sense, or did I form the belief because I was antecedently committed to the religious worldview? Since one might believe in God to begin with, one might tend to see or interpret the world, as it were, through “religious eyes.” Without a detailed description, it is difficult for us to see whether there is an inference involved in the move to the affirmation of God. One way around this difficulty might be if religious experiences of the noninferred sort that Plantinga is referring to were very common in our lives. If many people could recognize these experiences, then perhaps we could confirm his argument through our own experiences. But such experiences do not seem to be common. After all, Plantinga is not talking about mystical experiences, let us remember, but about fairly common religious experiences, so their features and descriptions should be readily recognizable to most people. Returning to Marcel, it seems to me that his argument for the existence of God on the basis of human experiences has advantages over Plantinga’s approach and does not come with the problems that face Plantinga’s view. From the philosophical point of view, we might say that Marcel is arguing that the existence of God is inferred on the basis of our experience of unconditional commitments; it is also the best explanation for these commitments. But let us remember that he is not only saying that this is what the philosopher might argue; he is saying
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that the “Absolute Thou” is experienced by a person who is involved in an unconditional commitment. The experience of commitment is of such depth and profundity that we realize it needs an absolute ground in order to be sustained, and this absolute ground is the “Absolute Thou.” In short, the move to an experience of an Absolute Thou is prompted by our experience of unconditional commitments (this is why Marcel suggests that the proofs for the existence of God sometimes have the effect of confirming for us something which has been given in another way).34 A person moves from the experience of unconditional commitment to the experience of God as the ground of such experiences. The philosopher notes the move to the existence of God in later reflecting on the phenomenological analysis of the experience. It is important to emphasize, however, that although the philosopher is drawing attention to the inference in a sequential, discursive manner, the move to the existence of God is founded upon an actual experience that people undergo and is not something that is known only from a conceptual or philosophical point of view. Many people experience unconditional commitments in this way themselves, even if some do not, or if some deny that such commitments are possible. This approach enables Marcel to avoid, it seems to me, the problems with Plantinga’s view. One problem he avoids is that of relativism. Marcel escapes this problem because the experiences he describes are ordinary experiences of human life, profound to be sure, but experiences that are part of the lives of many people. So he is not talking about rare events, of an esoteric or even a mystical sort; the rarity of these latter experiences would undermine the argument because they would not be available to most people. Many people know exactly what Marcel is referring to when he draws attention to the nature of our unconditional commitments to other people in various relationships and to the fact that they often lead to an experience of, assurance of, or appreciation for the transcendent. Such experiences are part of the human condition. As such, they confirm Marcel’s point that “man is naturally religious,”35 as we reach out to make ultimate sense of our lives and our relationships. This natural religiousness can be
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smothered, of course, but this point does not detract from the truth of Marcel’s argument. Another problem with Plantinga’s approach, as we have noted, is that he does not offer us much by way of an actual description of a religious experience, a description that his argument seems to require. His descriptions are vague at best and leave us wondering precisely how the existence of God is presented in the experience; they also leave us with the obvious worry whether we are having the experience only because we are already religious believers. We run the danger on his view of interpreting various experiences as religious because we are antecedently committed to the religious worldview, rather than actually experiencing the world in a genuinely religious way. Plantinga, however, might agree that while we need to guard against this danger we can easily do so. He could argue in a similar way to Marcel that the experiences he is talking about are common to human beings and are available to many people, if only they would open themselves up to them. I have suggested elsewhere that one may liken being receptive to religious experiences to being receptive to good-quality music.36 One could be tone deaf to the beauties of music for many reasons: general lack of interest in music, denial of the aesthetic sensibility, bad experiences in music class, peer pressure, and so on. Similarly one could be “tone deaf ” to the whole realm of religious experiences available in our universe, for a variety of reasons: aversion to religion as a child, a refusal to recognize the “religious” dimension in experience, distraction by more worldly goods, peer pressure, and so on (Marcel’s “anti-theism”). Someone in this condition might not be easily capable of having religious experiences, might not recognize their possibility and value, might be completely tone deaf to them; yet, just as with music, religious experiences might still be real, valuable, and an accurate expression of a certain type of human relationship with God. While I think that Marcel and Plantinga would agree on this point, the advantage of Marcel’s approach is that he provides detailed examples and descriptions of experiences that on first evidence do not seem to be religious in character but that lead to a religious way of looking at things because they call for the absolute trust of those in-
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volved. This trust does not just call for the affirmation of God when pursued to its logical conclusion; as we have noted, these experiences point in a religious direction for many while they are engaged in them. Marcel, therefore, may be said to have a stronger overall argument for the existence of God. In comparison to Plantinga, Marcel can point out that in any argument for the rationality of belief in God based on religious experience he is appealing to universal experiences with which all human beings can identify, whereas Plantinga appeals to experiences that are questionable from the start. While Plantinga may claim that the experiences he refers to are more common than critics of religious belief will allow, nobody can deny the reality of those experiences that are the basis of Marcel’s argument. Marcel raises the debate concerning religious experience from the realm of private experience to a level where it can become at least partly an issue of public (philosophical) discussion. We can all agree with Marcel about the fact that many of our relationships are based on unconditional commitments, that these commitments seem to require some kind of absolute grounding for the absolute trust involved in them to make sense. Many will also agree that this absolute grounding leads in a religious direction, that is, to a transcendent being who is the source of all meaning and value. Plantinga, however, may be forced to conclude, on his version of religious experience, that it is up to God to reveal himself to the individual if the individual is to have a religious experience that will make belief rational. In other words, the religious experience is something that has a subject-object structure, as Nelson Pike puts it,37 and the object is God’s revelation of himself to us in various ways by means of religious experiences. Marcel, however, because he appeals to universal experiences, can suggest there is something each individual can do personally to bring about an affirmation of God, namely, actively seek out those experiences and their ultimate explanation. By the same token, if one cuts oneself off from these kinds of experiences, one will be impoverished in the area of human relationships. One will fail to appreciate the religious dimension of the human condition, a problem that various peoples in history have had to grapple with, including in our own time.
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Notes 1. See Gerald Hanratty, “The Theistic Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel,” in Studies in Gnosticism and in the Philosophy of Religion (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997), p. 160. 2. See my “Gabriel Marcel and the Problem of Knowledge,” Journal of French Philosophy 7, nos. 1–2 (Spring 1995): 148–63. 3. See Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being (hereafter MB), (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2001), vol. 1, esp. pp. 83–93. 4. See MB, vol. 1, p. 21; see also Gabriel Marcel, “Existence and Objectivity,” in The Participant Perspective: A Gabriel Marcel Reader, ed. T. Busch (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987), pp. 71–72, and Being and Having (hereafter BH) (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), p. 117. 5. For Marcel’s critique of contemporary culture, see Man against Mass Society (Chicago: Regnery, 1962). 6. For an excellent overview of these themes, see Gabriel Marcel, The Philosophy of Existentialism (hereafter PE ) (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1956), ch. 1. 7. PE, pp. 19–20. 8. PE, p. 19. 9. See Marcel’s discussion of two types of “research” in MB, vol. 1, ch. 1. 10. Gabriel Marcel, Creative Fidelity (hereafter CF ) (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1964), p. 135. 11. See CF, pp. 175–76. 12. See Hanratty, “Theistic Philosophy,” p. 166. 13. See Martin Buber, Eclipse of God (New York: Harper, 1952), ch. 3. 14. See Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1979), vol. 2, p. 176; see also CF, p. 179. 15. MB, vol. 2, p. 176. 16. See CF, pp. 36, 136. 17. For Marcel’s analysis, see BH, pp. 41–42, CF, p. 167, and Homo Viator: An Introduction to a Metaphysic of Hope (hereafter HV) (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), pp. 132–34. 18. See Thomas Anderson, “The Experiential Paths to God in Kierkegaard and Marcel,” Philosophy Today 26 (Spring 1982): 31. 19. See CF, p. 154. 20. CF, p. 164.
The Experiential Argument for the Existence of God 387 21. See HV, ch. 2; MB, vol. 2, ch. 9. 22. See HV, p. 30. 23. See HV, ch. 2, for this and various other examples that make a similar point: a father hoping for news of his son who has not been in touch for a long time; an invalid hoping for recovery from an illness; a religious believer hoping that existence has an overall meaning and purpose. 24. HV, pp. 56–57. 25. See MB, vol. 2, pp. 164, 173. 26. HV, p. 47. 27. Gabriel Marcel, “Theism and Personal Relationships,” Cross Currents 1 (1950–51): 40. 28. See Hanratty, “Theistic Philosophy,” p. 170. 29. See Alvin Plantinga, “Is Belief in God Properly Basic?,” in Contemporary Perspectives on Religious Epistemology, ed. R. Douglas Geivett and Brendan Sweetman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 133–41; Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff, eds., Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983); William Alston, “Religious Experience and Religious Belief,” in Geivett and Sweetman, Contemporary Perspectives, pp. 295–303; William Alston, Perceiving God (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), ch. 13 (reprinted in Geivett and Sweetman, Contemporary Perspectives, pp. 304–19). I have discussed Alston’s and Hick’s views in “Marcel on God and Religious Experience, and the Critique of Alston and Hick,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 80, no. 3 (Summer 2005): 407–20. 30. See Plantinga, “Is Belief in God Properly Basic?,” p. 133. 31. Ibid., p. 135. 32. For some critical reflections on Plantinga’s views, see Stewart Goetz, “Belief in God Is Not Properly Basic,” in Geivett and Sweetman, Contemporary Perspectives, pp. 168–77; and Phillip Quinn, “In Search of the Foundations of Theism,” Faith and Philosophy 2 (1985): 469–86. 33. Plantinga, “Is Belief in God Properly Basic?,” p. 140. 34. See BH, p. 121. 35. MB, vol. 2, p. 122. 36. See Brendan Sweetman, Religion: Key Concepts in Philosophy (London: Continuum Press, 2007), ch. 6. 37. See Nelson Pike, Mystic Union (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 32.
s i x t e e n
A Secular Spirituality? James, Dennett, and Dawkins
Ciarán Benson I dislike arguments of any kind. They are always vulgar, and often convincing. —Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest Who says “hypothesis” renounces the ambition to be coercive in his arguments. The most I can do is, accordingly, to offer something that may fit the facts so easily that your scientific logic will find no plausible pretext for vetoing your impulse to welcome it as true. —William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
We live in a time of energetic argument for which, in the United States, the phrase “the culture wars” has for some time now been current. For some in these wars the conception of an argument is evidentially supported reason, for others it means assertions supported by intuitions or by the authoritative interpretation of texts. It is a time when words that seem to have most to say about the best of human being are undergoing anxious reassessment, revaluation, and realignment. I say “anxiously” to indicate that these words matter to us all. They engage 388
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us at profound levels of identity and self-understanding. I have in mind words such as artistic, spiritual, religious, conscious, moral, true, sacred, interior, and so on. In what follows I want to reflect on some aspects of these fraught contemporary debates, and I want to do so in the spirit of interdisciplinarity. The focus of my reflection is the question: Can those who think of themselves as agnostics, atheists, or simply nonbelievers still lay claim to being spiritual? If they can, how might we situate that wish within a modern intellectual tradition? My suggestion is that it is reasonable to argue for the notion of a secular spirituality, despite the repugnance that writers like Richard Dawkins might feel about secular attempts to reclaim this particular category. I return to William James’ magisterial The Varieties of Religious Experience to make my case, supported by the reflections of modern poets.
Bright Lights in Dark Places This inferiority of the rationalistic level in founding belief is just as manifest when rationalism argues for religion as when it argues against it. —William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience Human beings recognize themselves only in history, not through introspection. Basically, we all search for the human being in history; but more broadly, we look to history for what makes us human and religious, etc. We want to know what “the human” is. If there were a science of the human being, it would be anthropology, which aims at understanding the totality of lived experiences according to their structural nexus. The individual never realizes more than a possibility of his or her development, which could always have taken a different direction from what was decided upon. The human being is there for us only under the condition of realized possibilities. —Wilhelm Dilthey, The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences
Coming, as I do, from a philosophical tradition in psychology where words and symbols are the constituents of the phenomena that
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interest me—phenomena that rely upon, and emerge from, the uses to which symbolizations are put, individually and collectively—I stumbled somewhat when I first read of a new use for an old word. My hesitancy became the more particular when I realized that the word was meant to apply to the likes of me. It is a word that nominates a disparate group as one, some of whose eligible members want this new use of the old word to be a battle standard around which they can assemble and engage with what they take to be the forces of obscurantism. This self-applied label is bright, but it is now to be used as a noun rather than adjectivally. It is analogous to the changed use of the word gay. Some of us, it seems, are “Brights.”1 Why should I cavil at my inclusion in such a select and happily self-regarding club? Trying to answer that question for myself is the motivational source of this paper. We have in Ireland a saying, now a cliché, that the first item on the agenda of any new movement is “the Split.” In what follows I want to outline grounds for the emergence of the Self-Denying Brights. The source of this dissent goes wider than assertions about the nature of religion and its consequences, religion being the bête noire of the Brights. It resurrects historically ancient questions about the relations between intuition and reason, about how we as humans understand our connectedness to what we take to be reality, and about how our taking of portions of that reality makes them “ours.” It concerns what Hilary Putnam characterizes as “deep” and “shallow” concepts of experience.2 It concerns the renegotiation of the borders between the human sciences and the natural sciences, which have been uncertainly policed since Dilthey staked his claim in 1883 for the distinction between the Geisteswissenschaften and the Naturwissenschaften. It focuses on new meanings for kinds of causality in human life where, for example, ultimate no longer implies the metaphysical but rather takes its meaning from processes of natural selection understood in their evolutionary biological sense. But the roots of the unease go deeper still in that they concern ideas of subjectivity, time, and uncertainty, issues that should have played a more central part in psychology but that still must fight for theoretical significance in the loose federation that is contemporary psychology.
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But of most interest to me is how these interrelated themes demand the inclusion of phenomena that tend to be ignored or brushed aside, particularly in the work of an energetic polemicist like Richard Dawkins. What I have in mind comes into focus when certain features of the categories “artistic/aesthetic,” “religious,” and “spiritual” are considered. In short, this particular theater of the culture wars profoundly engages interdisciplinary perspectives, especially, it seems to me, when we consider the existential significance of contrasts between two emblematic kinds of clarity—let’s call them the poetic and the scientific—and the uses to which we put them in deciding how we should live our lives. Scientific clarity can be blinding and, although literally wonderfull, can sometimes seem to destroy deeply valued personal phenomena in its pursuit of understanding them—Wordsworth’s “We murder to dissect”! Poetic clarity, on the other hand, is often closer to the epigrammatic agnosticism of the Ulster poet Michael Longley when he said, “If I knew where poems came from, I’d go there.”3 In what follows, I want to briefly review the case for common, often penumbral, sources for artistic/aesthetic and religious experience in evolutionary, historical, and individual time. I do this to stress commonalities among different protagonists in the various culture wars, but not in a Pollyanna way of ignoring the profound differences at play. Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins are the Silverbacks of the assembling Brights—that sounds like something out of The Lord of the Rings! Each published a best-selling book in 2006 specifically designed to do battle with the forces of institutional religion, and to do so in the name of evolutionary biology and its more uncertain offspring, evolutionary psychology. Their titles are Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, by Dennett, and The God Delusion, by Dawkins. Dennett’s book is the more compelling intellectually and ostensibly the more tolerant, Dawkins’ the more dogmatic and polemically coercive. The cross-references make it clear that both are engaged in what they see as a common sociocultural enterprise, which is to tackle the social consequences of religion by treating it as a natural phenomenon to be considered on equal terms with any other from an evolutionary perspective.
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Again let me be clear about my purpose in considering this recent work. It is not to do with their conclusions per se. How we stand on these is a matter of personal judgment. My concern has to do with reflecting on what they seem to imply is not worth noticing, and on why they feel that their evolutionary biological accounts are ultimate explanations of human behavior, including religious. For them, psychological explanations are “proximate” explanations and therefore of lesser significance for how we are to think about how people lead lives that they actively wish to characterize as “religious” to some degree or other. My approach will be to engage with their arguments by revisiting the work of a thinker who, for many of us, remains an intellectual friend, William James, and to do so after a century that would have fascinated him in its scientific advances and horrified him in its intolerant coercions, self-certainty, and awfulness of human suffering. Part of my reason for taking this approach is that I discern other intellectual forces at work in Dawkins’ cruder versions of the argument, forces that may be all too happy to move against the subtleties of Dilthey’s conception of the “human sciences.” To give a simple flavor of the energies behind this debate, consider Dawkins’ impatience with physicists’ metaphorical use of the word God to convey, as Einstein did, that which is beyond what our mind can grasp but “whose sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection.” It matches his own feelings, Dawkins tells us, but he then goes on to say that he wishes that physicists would refrain from this metaphorical use of the word God, given the possibility that it may be confused with the God of the Bible. “Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion,” he writes, “an act of intellectual high treason.”4 Such uses of the words God or religious are for Dawkins, in that word of peremptory dismissal, trivial. To argue for their validity is an act of Chamberlain-like appeasement in the face of the forces of obscu rantism. Nor has Dawkins much patience with arguments from personal experience for the existence of “God.” Again, one might, with caveats, have sympathy with this as a general point, but, significantly for my theme, he goes on to say that apart from such experiences convincing
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those who have them, they are “least convincing to anyone else, and anyone knowledgeable about psychology.”5 At a stroke this dismissal removes William James’ great book of 1902, The Varieties of Religious Experience. The subtitle of James’ magisterial book was A Study in Human Nature, and I will return to it shortly. Dawkins’ impatience with this kind of psychology, as opposed to contemporary evolutionary psychology, pervades his argument. For him the touchstone of rationality is when any psychological phenomenon can be, as he writes, “translated into Darwinian terms.”6 “Psychological explanations,” he asserts, “to the effect that people find some belief agreeable or disagreeable are proximate, not ultimate, explanations.” He continues: “The proximate cause of religion might be hyperactivity in a particular node of the brain. I shall not pursue the neurologi cal idea of a ‘god centre’ in the brain because I am not concerned here with proximate questions.”7 His wish is not to belittle them, he says, but he wants “ultimate” Darwinian explanations of why people are vulnerable to “the charms of religion and therefore open to exploitation by priests, politicians and kings.”8 Dennett is, once again, more philosophically circumspect than Dawkins in noting the prematurity of such speculations: “Using neuroimaging to study religious beliefs is almost as hapless,” he writes, “as using a voltmeter to study a chessplaying computer.”9 While acknowledging and welcoming the increased intercourse between the human and the natural sciences, Dennett warns human scientists—anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, historians, and others—against letting “disciplinary jealousy and fear of ‘scientific imperialism’ create an ideological iron curtain that could conceal important underlying constraints and opportunities for them.”10 I heartily endorse this warning. That said, however, mention of the words hermeneutic or semiotic will have both Dennett and Dawkins reaching for their Lugers, as Goering notoriously threatened to do when he heard the word culture. Dawkins shows no signs of ever having read William James, but Dennett is full of praise for the richness of James’ insights into religious experience. His own focus, however, is, like Dawkins’, on the institutionalization of the supernatural in religion and its evolutionary
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biological origins. “Today,” he writes, “there are good reasons for trading in James’ psychological microscope for a wide-angle biological and social telescope, looking at the factors, over large expanses of both space and time, that shape the experiences and actions of individual religious people.”11 I welcome Dennett’s evolutionary approach, but I want to argue that now, more than ever, is the time for not trading in James’ psychological microscope. My reasons for this, I hope, will become clearer and may have some cogency. Part of my unease as a reader of both works, but especially of that by Richard Dawkins, is rooted in my memories of growing up in the deeply orthodox religious world of Catholic-Nationalist Ireland in the 1950s. I have lived most of my life since my late teens as a secular humanist, but I still want to apply the words spiritual and religious to myself. Early nontheistic, noninstitutional, “primitive” Buddhist analyses such as one finds in the Dhammapada, or in the humorous reflections of the great Taoist thinker Chuang Tzu, have been long-standing resources of my own, as have the thoughts of the Roman Stoics.12 One consequence of this particular autobiographical trajectory is my antipathy toward coercion, whether intellectual or polemical. I don’t think that any orthodoxy, long established or currently reaching for the light above the forest canopy—as Dawkins might think of his own monoatheism as doing—should go unchallenged. I allow this brief bit of autobiography to intrude because both of these books, and others in the same or opposing genre, cannot be read without the reader’s own existential position being to the fore, and both Dennett and Dawkins are explicit about requiring that. I want to suggest, notwithstanding Dennett’s identification of those aspects of institutional religion which have the evolutionary biological roots he argues for, that in matters of religion and art explanations couched in temporally proximate, psychological frameworks are often more explanatory of action than the long-distance reach of naturally selective processes of the kind favored by Dawkins and, though more subtly, by Dennett. To pull together the subplots in this ramifying narrative, I next want to reexamine a word which, as Richard Sorabji reminds us, characterizes a philosophical turn that runs from Heraclitus through the
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Stoics and Plotinus to St. Augustine, and on through Hume and Hegel to Husserl and the preoccupations of many contemporary philosophers.13 It is a word familiar to readers of religious commentaries. It has, however, slipped from use in psychology since the time of William James. I think it timely to reconsider its contribution, not least in bringing to attention phenomena of exactly the kind that evolutionary approaches, of the type under discussion, tend to dismiss as trivial, or at best to ignore on the grounds of excessively favoring first-person accounts of reality in an era when scientific third-person accounts are taken to be more plausible as explanations of human action. These are phenomena that are central to conceptions of religious and aesthetic experience and indeed are constitutive of them. They are also central to the arts. The word I have in mind is the adjective inward with its noun inwardness. I want to endorse the value of certain kinds of obscurity and shadow in subjective experience and to support the idea that they have no need to be at odds with good science. I think it is a case that Dennett could have in mind when he speaks of the implications of making yourself large enough, or small enough, to contain more, or less, of the world that is “you.”
Inwardness and the Origins of Art and Religion in the Shadowlands of Reason Lyric poetry and music are alive and significant only in proportion as they fetch these vague vistas of a life continuous with our own, beckoning and inviting, yet ever eluding our pursuit. We are alive or dead to the eternal inner message of the arts according as we have kept or lost this mystical susceptibility. —William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
Evolutionary and Historical-Cultural Time: Contrasting Evolutionary Emphases If you exclude the psychological from your exploration of the roots of religion, then you will also tend to exclude the period of elite literate consciousness definitive of historical time—three thousand to six
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thousand years?—and of mass literate consciousness, which is of such recent historical vintage—some hundreds of years, still ongoing, and arguably transforming once again in this new digital age. The major institutional religions of the written word arise in historical time. If you then take a Darwinian explanatory perspective on the sociocultural dynamics of historical time, and its products, you will look for ways in which natural selection works, not as a metaphor of its biological field of operation, where the core criterion is the transmission of genes, but as an extension of these same principles. This is what Dennett and Dawkins do with that pallid, strangely detached, and unconvincing analogy of the gene, the meme. But that is not the only evolutionary perspective to take. You could argue that not only is culture an outcome of e volution— there would be general agreement on that among those who like evidence—nor simply that human culture coevolved with human biology, where again there would be general agreement, but that, especially in the period of growing literate historical consciousness, the adaptive tasks for humans shifted from biological ecology to a humanly made, cognitive-cultural ecology which subsumes the biological to some extent and which opens up the possibility of shaping and controlling it. This is what Merlin Donald does in his accounts of the evolution of cognition and consciousness.14 It is not work called upon by either Dennett or Dawkins in their accounts of the roots of religion, but it is work of great relevance to our understanding of the roots of both religion and art. Whether the rules governing the evolution of culture are the same as those operating in biological natural selection, as argued by evolutionary psychologists, is a contentious issue but is not my present concern. Suffice it to say that my own intuition is that they are not, or at least not in a simply extendable way. To jump to one of Donald’s general conclusions: contemporary minds are hybrids, and their hybridity is contingent on differently evolving modes of representation, which continue to coexist and interconnect in all our psyches today. If this is right, then it has profound implications for our understanding of the roots, and the branches, of religion and of art, since they would be the flowering of representational hybridity.
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Inwardness, Religion, and Art in Evolutionary, Historical, and Personal Time I will now outline a case in favor of the common roots of art and religion across the different scales of evolutionary, historical, and personal time. I do this to prepare the ground for reinvigorating the concept of inwardness in general, but more specifically to suggest continuing kinship between poetic sensibilities and religious ones, specifically mystical ones as understood by William James. My claims in brief are these. Religion and art have common evolutionary origins in that radical inward representational turn, the mimetic turn, postulated by Merlin Donald. This peaked with Homo erectus over a period from two million years ago to four hundred thousand years ago, and on down to the present time. Our game of charades depends on this capacity. This then had radical outward consequences for the construction of shared symbolic cultures. These were taken up by the subsequent “mythic” turn of collective oral culture—the outcome of language capacity. The mimetic and the mythic cohabited until recent historic times, when the “theoretic turn” developed, giving us today’s natural sciences and their kinds of rationality and prestige. Merlin Donald argues that “the mimetic turn” is the evolutionary source of artistic, aesthetic, and religious experience.15 Art and religion were intertwined in historical time and remained so until very recently. It is said that poetry is the sister of philosophy—“the one that wears makeup,” as someone aptly said! While that is probably true of the sensibility favoring Continental/ hermeneutic kinds of philosophy, it is probably truer to note the sisterhood of poetry and religion. Gadamer reminds us that “it was through poetry that the real religious tradition of the Greeks was transmitted.” He notes that poetic and religious speech diverged in the Christian tradition but that did not mean that religious content ceased to be transmitted through poetry.16 James maintained that they remain most intertwined in mystical traditions. For him the sine qua non of admission to the arts was a “mystical susceptibility,” as indeed it was for John Dewey.17 In contemporary science it might be thought that the poetic is trivialized as a means of grasping the world. The word mystical remains noxious even
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for Einstein. Nonetheless, Richard Rorty’s reading of The Varieties of Religious Experience ends by positioning James the religious thinker between two Romantic poets, Walt Whitman on the one side and William Wordsworth on the other.18 My next question is this: Can the originating, shared sources for the poetic and the religious still be discerned today? My judgment is that they can. They can be found in the reflections of connoisseurs of both art and religion, in accomplished poets on the one hand and in those with a religiously interpreted “mystical susceptibility” on the other. To express this more clearly I will first sketch, in a necessarily skimpy way, why I think we can speak of “kinds” of inwardness. Then I will briskly review James’ account of those kinds of experience that he calls “mystical.” I will follow this by presenting some supportive comments from contemporary poets, whom I take as my exemplars of the artistic voice in general. I will do all this to highlight a kind of “inward noticing” of what is frequently nominated by poetic and by religious thinkers as “The More.” On the Claim That There Are Kinds of Inwardness What do I mean by “kinds” of inwardness? I am using the word inwardness, rather than interiority, deliberately to focus on the ways in which inwardness is an action or series of actions where the focus of attention is on specific aspects of personal consciousness, on passages or elements in the flows of individual subjective consciousness. Here are some ways of classifying inward acts. First, I could class them along an evaluative dimension, such as Positive (calmness, serenity, stillness, peacefulness) versus Negative (agitated, self-troubling, self-absorbed). Mark Rothko, to take just one example, spoke of those “pockets of silence where we can root and grow.”19 Or I might try to classify them by some criterion such as the purpose of the acts I perform when scrutinizing some or other aspect of my subjectivity. For example:
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When the writer Jung Chang arrived from China in London in 1978, she knew that now she had the freedom to write but she suddenly lost the urge to do so, since, as she said, “to write would mean to turn inwards and look at my past, and I didn’t want to look at the past: it was extremely painful to me.”20 I might take an Epicurean stance toward the pleasure an object of attention gives me and make that a habit governing my life. I might discipline myself to exclude all but a few objects of attention in my inner life, as advised by, for example, Thomas à Kempis in his account of the inner life.21 The texture of my subjectivity, of how the world is and feels to me, might become the book of my life that, in my writing of it, would feel as if it were writing me, as in the work of Michel de Montaigne or, more latterly, in the analysand’s psychoanalytic experience. I might be looking for very general patterns in the flow of my stream of consciousness, such as are explored in Cziksemihalyi’s work on “flow” or in John Dewey’s conception of “AN experience” as aesthetic experience.22 I might connect to Husserl’s ideas on what motivates self-reflection.23
These are examples of just some of the purposive acts performed on privately available objects of attention that could be used to delineate and classify kinds of inwardness. Or I might base my “kinds” on differently expressed individual subjectivities. For example, the art critic Peter Campbell can speak of the different kinds of inwardness that characterize the painters Pieter de Hooch, Carel Fabritius, and Johannes Vermeer. Fabritius, he writes, “seems to look outwards,” whereas de Hooch and Vermeer “look inward.”24 My point is that it is possible to speak of kinds of inwardness, to specify some criteria for the taxonomies, and to make the point that the concept of “inward” has a reasonably vigorous life in contemporary vernacular discourse, even if it has faded somewhat in the language of psychology. My present concern, however, is with one very particular kind of experience, a large but subtle one, referred to
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s urprisingly often and in contexts where those identifying and attending to this aspect of inwardness feel it is of great significance both to themselves and to dialogues and debates with others, such as the debate over the nature and significance of religious and aesthetic experience. This is a kind of inwardness, I want to suggest, that needs to be valued and better understood. Recovering the Value of Ubiquitous but Shadowy Feelings: William James on “the Mystical” and “the More” As with other rich thinkers, different readers identify with different versions of William James. Dennett reads him differently than, say, Charles Taylor, Richard Rorty, or Clifford Geertz. This is not surprising given these thinkers’ contrasting approaches to the “human,” as in the human sciences. What one group notices and selects as important the other does not select or value as equivalently important. This is specifically the case with James’ treatment of “the Mystical” and its correlate “the More.”25 Although he himself felt he had no such ability, there can be no evading James’ placement of kinds of mystical experience at the very heart of religious experience, and indeed at the heart of artistic-aesthetic experience. His lectures 16 and 17 in The Varieties of Religious Experience are, it seems to me, pivotal. He is the thinker who credits the shadows of experience and values feeling, inwardness, and the intuitive while, at the same time, following the clarifications of rationality to just those borderlands where they seem to threaten and distort the greater complexities of phenomenological experience. For these very reasons he is exactly what Charles Taylor characterizes him as being, “our great philosopher of the cusp.”26 His championship of the shadows of feeling, intuition, and uncertainty is exactly the reason for not removing his kind of psychology from the fray at this point in time.27 I may say in passing that James’ championship of feeling in these matters is also in sharp contrast to the thinking of the founder of my own university, Cardinal Newman. James’ four marks of the mystical bear repetition. Mystical kinds of experience are ineffable in that adequate descriptions cannot be given in words. They are, he says, more like “states of feeling” than “states of intellect.” They
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have a “noetic quality” which yields insight into what he calls “depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect.” They are quickly transient—lasting a half an hour or an hour at most as reported—but their cultivation yields feelings of “inner richness and importance.” Their last feature is what he calls their passivity. Although voluntary preparation (as by fixing attention or enacting certain bodily performances) may facilitate the occurrence of such states, once the state sets in “the mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power.”28 James struggles to say what this means, talks in terms of feeling the oppositions of the world melting into a kind of unity, reflects that this sounds like a “dark saying,” but then says simply: “Those who have ears to hear let them hear; to me the living sense of its reality only comes in the artificial mystic state of mind.”29 Although there is so much more to say here, all we can do is restate that for James the root and the center of personal religious experience is to be found in that “mystical susceptibility” that is the common ground the religious shares with the artistic-aesthetic. Furthermore, he argues, such states are found across the whole realm of religious experience and mark a commonality that is masked by what he calls “the over-beliefs” that take over and become institutionalized.30 Let me abstract out one further articulation by James in the face of those experiences he collected at second hand, but also those of a first-person kind which he takes into account. This is the idea of “the More,” which I want to highlight as the correlate of the mystical, a correlate which is also pervasive in accounts of artistic-aesthetic experience, and for which I will let the poets shortly speak. I will let James state his own position on this: “We pass into mystical states from out of ordinary consciousness as from a less into a more, as from a smallness into a vastness, and at the same time as from an unrest to a rest. We feel them as reconciling, unifying states. They appeal to the yesfunction more than to the no-function in us. In them the unlimited absorbs the limits and peacefully closes the account.“31 In such states people become one with the More, and they become aware of their oneness. Again, as is the case with artistic-aesthetic creation and experience, it is the holding of “self ” in abeyance, albeit
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temporarily, that is the most commonly recommended means of access to “the More.”32 Furthermore, what is central in this account is immediate experience, which is to say the proximate and the psychological. Long-term, mediated “ultimate” forces of a Dawkinsian kind are not central to the decisions people make as to what is most important to them.33 I turn now to the insights of poets and ask what contemporary poets, as spokespersons for the arts in general, have to say about experiences akin to those which James calls “mystical,” and in particular to this phenomenon of feeling connected to “a More.” Contemporary Poets on the Mystical and “the More” For reasons of brevity, in what follows I will simply give a sequence of poets’ reflections to make my point that this concern with a sense of “the More” is far from a recondite preoccupation of an out-of-date nineteenth-century philosopher and psychologist.34 As with the ap prehension of poetry itself, I will let these comments do their work directly, without interpretation from me. First, on the feature of ineffability and poets’ mission to raid the inarticulate: “What they say ‘there are no words for,’ ” writes Marvin Bell, “that’s what poetry is for.” Gary Snyder, the American poet and Pulitzer Prize winner, writes that “I find language is well after the fact: and the fact is a way of seeing, feeling, thinking that is prelinguistic, that is in blocks of imagery, in blocks of feeling.”35 From the late, Nobel Prize–winning Russian poet, and poet laureate of the United States, Joseph Brodsky: “Poetry is essentially the soul’s search for its release in language.”36 When it comes to Jamesian intuitions of the More and its significance, here is the Scottish poet Don Paterson: “If you want meaning, read history, read philosophy, but poetry’s not about meaning at all, at least not in the sense they are. It’s about connecting you back to a primal feeling of unity.”37 Or the French poet and essayist Yves Bonnefoy: “Precisely because the word, in poetry, is not only a meaning but also a sound, a nascent rhythm, a physical presence, the poem interrupts a conceptual reading of the world, becomes an awareness of
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the unity that lies beyond the conceptual grasp, and thus gathers together all existing things through a single act of naming.”38 And as to the value of the immediate, the particular, and their presentation as felt, the Lithuanian-Polish Nobel Prize–winning poet Czeslaw Milosz writes that “since poetry deals with the singular, not the general, it cannot—if it is good poetry—look at things of this earth other than as colourful, variegated.”39 What, then, of the power of such sensibilities and of what they bring to a richly lived conscious life? The Irish poet and Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney writes: “When a poem arises from the psychic deep, it can possess soothsaying force. The emotional mark it makes can be so unexpected that it feels more like impersonal revelations than personal utterance. And when a poet gets in this close and this deep, you stop admiring and start being commanded.”40 The Canadian poet, and another poet laureate of the United States, Mark Strand, writes that “a poem permits us to live in ourselves as if we were just out of reach of ourselves.”41 And what of the effects of a poem on a poet? Remembering my opening quotation from Michael Longley—“If I knew where poems came from, I’d go there”—here is the best-known Australian poet and T. S. Eliot Prize winner, Les Murray: “It’s the only way I can figure heaven to myself, that eventually one day you get into the poem and live there.”42 Can we speak of the almost prayerlike reach of the poetic voice? The English poet Elaine Feinstein has observed: “The dead know nothing and we cannot speak with them. Still, in that silence, let me write: dear friend.”43 These are not reflections from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, James’ time. Nor are they the distillations of the untalented unknown. Every reflection I give was made in the last decade or so. My point is simply this: the arts, and in this case the reflections of poets, deeply and emphatically confirm James in his insistence that the dark, shadowy, difficult-to-notice, and linguistically challenging patterns of feeling which form the vast backdrop of our consciousness, individual, cultural-historical, and evolutionary, must not be ignored. If scientists fail to appreciate subjectivity in its full flowering, which is what James’ hypothesis is calling us to notice, then it is to the cost of
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their arguments when they try to turn the scientific spotlight on phenomena of the kinds familiar to the artistic, the aesthetic, and the mystical. This, I believe, is the case with Richard Dawkins’ account of the roots of religion. He simply does not understand or mention them.
A Light Too Bright for the Shadows That Nourish Us! Let me then propose, as an hypothesis, that whatever it may be on its farther side, the “more” with which in religious experience we feel ourselves connected is on its hither side the subconscious continuation of our conscious life. —William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
For me, a Dawkins-like monoatheism seems intolerant in its dismissal of fuzzy feelings of connectedness and felt needs for consolation or imaginative self-transcendance, in its seeming dismissal of a Jamesian pluralistic universe. Hume’s attitude to polytheistic systems was more benign than his attitude toward monotheism because they at least entailed a tolerance of diversity.44 In our time, as in Hume’s, intolerance and dogmatism are the greatest threats. Even were it possible, the replacement of current religious diversity by monoatheism seems rather like offering nutritious pills to our ancient palates long used to the rich menus of colorfully varied taste. Natural aesthetics alone should warn us away from uniformity. More seriously than that, it has the look of a brave new utopianism which, in addition to demoting the religious, would also inadvertently demote subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and, collaterally, the arts and the human sciences. This possibility was certainly clear to the late Clifford Geertz in his invocation of Wittgenstein: “Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn’t an indistinct one exactly what we need?”45 Geertz argued for a more constructive dialogue between the natural scientific projects driven, on the one hand, as he wrote, “by the ideal of a disengaged consciousness looking out with cognitive assurance upon an absolute world of ascertainable fact” and, on the other, human scientific projects driven by an ideal “of an engaged self struggling uncertainly with signs and expressions to
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make readable sense of intentional action.”46 In this he was quite critical of what he took to be Charles Taylor’s underappreciation of modern science. Runaway subjectivism and runaway objectivism are both dangers, the correctives for which must be a closer dialogue between the natural and the human sciences. “The world does not run on believings alone,” writes Geertz, “but it hardly runs without them.”47 As an anthropologist, he knew that suppression of individual religious experience could lead to its expression as social assertion. Religion “without interiority” was, for Geertz, “hardly worthy of the name.”48 But the personal dimensions of religious change, he felt, were barely researched at all. Since our connectedness to the world, as James insisted, is much richer and more embracing than simply a connectedness by scientifically established reasons; since in that sense our minds are, as Merlin Donald argues, hybrid minds with intertwining mimetic, mythic, and theoretic kinds of understanding—each with its matching modes of objectively sustaining culture; since our Darwinian understanding of the world is so compelling but also so emblematically theoretic in Donald’s sense of the word; and since the roots of religion and of art are so deeply sourced in our mimetic and oral-mythic past, then a quasi-political call for the theoretic to erase the flowering of the mimetic and the mythic, in this case the currently dominant kinds of religious experience, as though that could simply be accomplished by a fiat of scientific reason, is curiously paradoxical. It is evolutionary understanding that suggests to us the deep roots of religion. That same understanding suggests to us the limitations of the power of rational scientific argument alone, detached from more existential feelings, to change certain deep-seated impulses and tropes of our hybrid minds. Arguments are just one force for change in human culture, however compelling they seem to their makers— unless, that is, one is not convinced that natural selective processes continue to operate in culture as they do in nature, that cultural evolution operates according to its own novel dynamics that emerge from reflexive adaptations to humanly constructed and constantly changing cognitive ecosystems with their own particular power structures and responsiveness. Historical time—with its engendering and lengthy
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eriod of oral-mythic prehistory—operates according to more idiop syncratic principles of transformation than was the case in the dynamics of less symbolically articulate evolutionary time. There is no difficulty in agreeing that culture is the outcome of evolution. There is difficulty in agreeing at this stage of understanding and knowledge that culture operates subject to, as Dennett puts it, “the universal acid” of natural selection. Curiously, if you adopt this second “agnostic approach” to the dynamics of culture—let’s call it the Donaldian version of human evolution—you could find yourself agreeing with Dawkins’ conclusion that human minds could in time be reformed to become more Einsteinian in their religiousness and less, say, Abrahamic. Or indeed another kind still. But this is not Dawkins’ theoretical position as I understand it, so the call seems correspondingly less reasonable in Dawkins’ own terms than it does in Donald’s. That being the case, the Bright version of human evolution, which calls for a rational theoretic transformation of human nature and its religious/ aesthetic psychology, seems, as I suggested, dangerously narrow, intolerant, and utopian. We might speculate on the ontogenetic origins of this “sense of More” in infancy when the “nine-month revolution” of shared attention and triadic representation opens up an infinite world to the infant, in conditions of the most profound and loving sharing. We have recent books like Gopnik, Meltzoff, and Kuhl’s The Scientist in the Crib.49 However more difficult it might be to imagine, we can also speak of “the poet in the crib,” but those feelings are likely to be much more global and foundational than we are used to conceptualizing and expressing without losing the respect of our harder-nosed colleagues! Look at the contemporary predicament of psychoanalysis. But when did that ever stop us! Whatever the origins of such feelings in the past, in the present they project us forward in such a way that we can know what James meant when, at the end of The Varieties of Religious Experience, he could write that “no fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance.”50 If Stephen Jay Gould called for NOMA (nonoverlapping magisteria of science, morality, and religion), and Richard Dawkins for a brand of SM (bondage of the others by the scientific magisterium), then my
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call is for a version of OM (overlapping magisteria), especially of art and religion! Of course, I say this tongue-in-cheek but also with some seriousness. Some kind of need for “consolation” in the face of Pascal’s espaces infinis lies at the core of James’ account. The first step of James’ two-stage process is a subjective “mystical” experience of union with some felt “More.” On this foundation is built step 2, faith in the objectivity of a particular articulation of this “More,” such as an understanding of the felt More as a personal God of Faith. But it is step 1, with its kinds of inwardness reaching from the shadows to the light, but often refusing final illumination to preserve its shadowy identity, that is the common ground of art and religion, that ground which is so contested in our time by aesthetic and religious experiences and their respective institutionalizations. As a brief aside, I should add my own conviction that John Dewey’s unfortunately failed attempt to establish the primacy of a novel, nondualistic concept of experience still offers rich possibilities for those who find this view plausible.51 It is James’ step 1 which so preoccupies Charles Taylor in his critique of the historical-cultural rise of subjectivism.52 This is the step so swiftly dismissed by contemporary evolutionary biological accounts of religion. And this is the step which, I want to argue, merits, in its richly textured variety, an appreciative, interdisciplinary exploration as a historical-cultural phenomenon with distinctive cultural- historical dynamics rather than exclusively evolutionary ones. There is still much to be mined in James’ step 1. Otherwise there cannot be a focus on the commonalities of human experience and self- understanding which our species so urgently needs at this precarious time in both its history and its evolution. Consolation finds no serious place in a wholly evolutionary perspective, and a sense of our species’ precariousness must often struggle for a serious place in the orthodoxies and orthopraxes of many faiths. A human community or an individual human consciousness for whom a need for consolation in the face of the transience of all things is completely absent would be a peculiarly cold and unimaginative entity. This, it seems to me, is at the heart of James’ concerns, as it is for all— believers, nonbelievers, and disbelievers—who love being in this world.
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All this discussion of the blinding sun of a systematic scientific explanation of psychic life and of human longings, and the residual feelings that have some quality of unaccountable bereftness, brings to mind that line from Philip Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings: “. . . sun destroys / The interest of what’s happening in the shade.” So much of spiritual-aesthetic interest happens in the subjective shadows as, when faced with the prospect of what to make of ourselves in the face of transience and death, we confront these great questions of art, religion, and scientific understanding. Perhaps my original hesitation in being included in any group that thinks of themselves as “Brights” arose from the Larkinesque intuition that forms the ground of so much great artistic and religious experience, the intuition that what happens in the deep shades of human feeling is profoundly important, and that while this may sometimes be capable of brilliant elucidation—note the luminous source of both of those last words!—its nature may also be such as to be annihilated if too bright a midday sun is shone on it, or at least if it is shone too soon. The costs to us all—religious and nonreligious believers, religious and nonreligious nonbelievers—of that happening has been my underlying concern in this essay. And here is another paradox: the greatest kinds of self-fulfillment in those corners of the poetic and religious traditions of which I have being speaking—a paradox noticed and endorsed by Daniel Dennett, by the way, in his Breaking the Spell, albeit as a near throwaway comment—is that this fulfillment is achieved, however temporarily, by leaving self, with all its interests, concerns, and tendencies to control, in abeyance. This has lain at the heart of my own attempts to understand phenomena like aesthetic absorption as understood by pragmatic philosophers and psychologists like James and Dewey. Acts of silently listening to the world, to the impact of the world on us, again characterize this. Thomas à Kempis raised this question when he asked, “Where are you when your thoughts go wandering off ?” His answer, and his reasons for the answer, however, are quite the contrary of mine.53 The great thing about the artistic impulse, that mysterious sister of the religious impulse, is that an artist can choose to be possessed by
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an intentional object which to anyone else is so sparrow-like in its commonness that it goes unnoticed by most others. Think of Giorgio Morandi’s bottles, year by year becoming clothed in their patina of dust, and he, ever more diligently, calmly, painting them in their almost imperceptible transformations, apparently repetitively, silently, but, to those with eyes to see—which is to say those with selves open to wander as directed by those we come to trust—always afresh. What Morandi notices, what he does, what becomes available to us in what he notices and in what he does, is something, for me, deeply religious. It appeals to me in my time, my tiny moment of historical time, my infinitesimal moment of evolutionary time. I don’t think Morandi’s dusty rows of bottles appeal to me for reasons of natural selection, either of my genes or of my “memes.” I think they call for my attention because I, like most others, act on feelings that, although often ineffable, direct me toward meanings which objects actively help me create so that I can know them. That these objects are often those made by another human person makes us that bit more interesting to ourselves. These are meanings of my brief time, meanings that shape how I might like to think I might live, and, in that sense, Morandi’s painted bottles lie before me like a firefly, calling for me to reach them, to coexist, however briefly, with them, if I can reach them, and him, and us. That “More” is, as a matter of fact, quite satisfying to us religious nonbelieving humanists. I don’t think that evolutionary monoatheists have come sufficiently to earth to notice the significance of this. If they did, they might, perhaps with a smile of self-recognition, resonate to this lastliner from Samuel Beckett: “Here under lies the above”!
Notes This essay is based on the Fr. Royden Davis, S.J., Annual Lecture delivered at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., on 21 March 2007. The chapter’s epigraphs to William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience are all from The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Longmans, Green, 1902), pp. 510–11, 73, 374, and 502 respectively.
410 Ciarán Benson The epigraph to Dilthey’s Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences is from the edition edited by Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 298. 1. See the homepage for “The Brights” at www.the-brights.net/. 2. Hilary Putnam, “The Depths and Shallows of Experience,” Templeton Lecture 2004, www.srhe.ucsb.edu/lectures/info/putnam.html. 3. Dennis O’Driscoll, ed. The Bloodaxe Book of Poetry Quotations (Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2006), p. 229. 4. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam Press, 2006), p. 19. The quotation is from Einstein’s famous Credo of 1932. 5. Ibid., p. 88. 6. Ibid., p. 168. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., p. 169. 9. Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (London: Allen Lane, 2006), p. 316. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., p. 11. 12. See Marie Heaney, ed., Sources: Letters from Irish People on Sustenance for the Soul (Dublin: Town House, 1999), pp. 116–24. See also William Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 13. Richard Sorabji, Self: Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life, and Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 51. 14. Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991) and A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001). From his own poem which begins this book to his concluding paragraph, it is clear that Donald also shares a sense of the Jamesian “More.” 15. Merlin Donald, “Art and Cognitive Evolution,” in The Artful Mind, ed. Mark Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 16. Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, ed. R. Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 143, 150. 17. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Capricorn Books, 1958), first published in 1934. See also Ciarán Benson, The Absorbed Self: Pragmatism, Psychology and Aesthetic Experience (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), ch. 2, pp. 11–50.
A Secular Spirituality? 411 18. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 164. 19. Mark Rothko, Writings on Art, ed. Miguel Lopez-Remiro (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 157. 20. Jung Chang, “This Much I Know,” Observer Magazine, 11 June 2006. 21. Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005). See also St. John of the Cross, The Dark Night of the Soul, ed. Benedict Zimmerman (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1973). St. John focuses his reflections on his poetic stanzas. Of particular interest here are Stanzas 3 and 4: In that happy night, In secret, seen of none, Seeing nought myself, Without other light or guide Save that which in my heart was burning. That light guided me More surely than the noonday sun To the place were He was waiting for me, Whom I knew well, And where none appeared. St John argues that out of that dark night the searcher first comes upon him- or herself and on that basis builds a knowledge of God, as Augustine also believed (p. 58). He concludes the book with an explanation of verse 3, where the light of love and faith, not of understanding, makes the soul “fly upwards to God along the road of solitude, while it knows neither how nor by what means that is done” (p. 199). For contemporary psychological reflections on adjacent issues, see Peter Hampson, “Beyond Unity, Integration and Experience: Cultural Psychology and the Theology of Mediaeval Mysticism,” New Blackfriars 86, no. 1006 (2005): 622–41. Hampson refers to Meister Eckhardt. 22. Many other purposive acts might constitute kinds of inwardness. I may adopt a stance of puzzled inquiry toward an idea such as characterizes intellectual work, for example, or perhaps I can become adept in scrutinizing my feelings as to why I should decide this or that in the belief that “gut feel-
412 Ciarán Benson ing” is the truest intuition of what would be good for me, in the spirit of a humanistic psychologist like Carl Rogers, for example. The list would be large. 23. Dan Zahavi, Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), p. 54. 24. Peter Campbell, “At the National Gallery,” London Review of Books, 5 July 2001, pp. 23, 13. 25. His final words on this in The Varieties of Religious Experience are as follows: “The only thing that [religious experience] testifies to is that we can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace” (p. 525). 26. Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 59. 27. See James, Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 73: “Nevertheless, if we look on man’s whole mental life as it exists, on the life of men that lies in them apart from their learning and science, and that they inwardly and privately follow, we have to confess that the part of it of which rationalism can give an account is relatively superficial. It is the part that has the prestige undoubtedly, for it has the loquacity, it can challenge you for proofs, and chop logic, and put you down with words. But it will fail to convince or convert you all the same, if your dumb intuitions are opposed to its conclusions.” Also, p. 431: “I do believe that feeling is the deeper source of religion, and that philosophic and theological formulas are secondary products, like translations of a text into another tongue.” 28. Ibid., p. 372. 29. Ibid., p. 379. 30. Ibid., p. 494: “When we survey the whole field of religion, we find a great variety in the thoughts that have prevailed there; but the feelings on the one hand and the conduct on the other are almost always the same, for Stoic, Christian, and Buddhist saints are practically indistinguishable in their lives. The theories which Religion generates, being thus variable, are secondary; and if you wish to grasp her essence, you must look to the feelings and the conduct as being the more constant elements.” 31. Ibid., p. 416. 32. Ibid., p. 409: “Since denial of the finite self and its wants, since asceticism of some sort, is found in religious experience to be the only doorway to the larger and more blessed life, this moral mystery intertwines and combines with the intellectual mystery in all religious writings.” See also Ciarán
A Secular Spirituality? 413 Benson, The Cultural Psychology of Self: Place, Morality and Art in Human Worlds (London: Routledge, 2001), chs. 11 and 12. 33. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 445: “Conceptual processes can class facts, define them, interpret them; but they do not produce them, nor can they reproduce their individuality. There is always a plus, a thisness, which feeling alone can answer for.” Emphasis in original. 34. For what follows I am wholly grateful for the encyclopedic abilities regarding all things poetical of the Irish poet and Lannan Prize winner Denis O’Driscoll, whose Bloodaxe Book of Poetry Quotations is a thesaurus of inspiration and information. 35. Both of these quotations are in ibid., p. 232. 36. Ibid., p. 213. 37. Ibid., p. 214. 38. Ibid. Other examples of “the More” might include the statement of the English poet Julia Casterton that “poems show us that we are both more and less than human, that we’re part of the cosmos and part of the chaos, and that everything is a part of everything else” (p. 234). 39. Ibid., p. 211. 40. Ibid., p. 234. 41. Ibid., p. 233. 42. Ibid., p. 213. 43. Ibid., p. 238. 44. David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. Norman Kemp Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935). 45. Clifford Geertz, Availiable Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. xiii. 46. Ibid., p. 150. 47. Ibid., p. 174. 48. Ibid., p. 178. 49. Alison Gopnik, Andrew N. Meltzoff, and Patricia K. Kuhl, The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us about the Mind (New York: William Morrow, 2000). 50. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 516. 51. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Capricorn Books, 1958). See also my review and use of Dewey’s account of “absorption” in Ciarán Benson, Absorbed Self. 52. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989) and Varieties of Religion
414 Ciarán Benson Today: William James Revisited (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 53. The mystical susceptibility of religious sensibilities here differs radically from that of artistic-aesthetic sensibilities. For many in religious mystical traditions, exercises involve the radical exclusion of “outward” objects of the world and their replacement by highly controlled and restricted objects of attention. The mystical susceptibilities of the arts, in contrast, delight in the objective world and in all that the arts add well to it, and in consequence delight in all that those additions contribute to constructing subjectivities in endlessly unfolding novelties. For a fascinating recent treatment of silence, see Sara Maitland, A Book of Silence (London: Granta, 2008).
s e v e n t e e n
Eucharistic Imagination in Merleau-Ponty and James Joyce Richard Kearney
Some of my best memories of Gerald Hanratty are of various conversations, when I was a student and later a colleague of his at University College Dublin, on the philosophy of religion. His passion for interdisciplinary research, spanning philosophy, theology, history, and the arts, was infectious, and I always guarded a deep admiration for his generous method and imagination. I offer the following reflections on the “eucharistic imagination” in phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty) and literature ( James Joyce) in homage to such an inspiring mentor and friend.
Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of the Flesh Husserl blazed a path toward a phenomenology of the flesh when he broached the crucial theme of embodiment in Ideas II, a theme largely ignored by Western metaphysics since Plato. This may seem strange 415
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given that almost fifteen hundred years of the history of metaphysics composed what Gilson called the “Christian synthesis” of Greek and biblical thought. But metaphysics (with some exceptions) managed to take the flesh and blood out of Christian incarnation, leaving us with abstract conceptual and categorical equivalents. It would take Husserl and the modern phenomenological revolution to bring Western philosophy back to the flesh of prereflective lived experience. Husserl himself, however, for all his talk of returning us to the “things themselves,” remained caught in the nets of transcendental idealism and never quite escaped the limits of theoretical cognition. Heidegger took a step closer to the flesh with his existential analytic of “moods” and “facticity,” but the fact remains that Heideggerian Dasein has no real body at all: it does not eat or sleep or have sex. It too remains, despite all its talk of “being-in-the-world,” captive of the transcendental snare. While Scheler made sorties into a phenomenology of feeling and Sartre offered fine insights into shame and desire, it was really only with Merleau-Ponty that we witnessed a credible return to the flesh—and not just as cipher, project, or icon but as flesh itself in all its ontological depth. Here at last the ghost of Cartesian and Kantian idealism is laid, as we finally return to the body in all its unfathomable thisness. It is telling, I think, that Merleau-Ponty chose to describe his phenomenology of the sensible body in sacramental language, amounting to what we might call—without the slightest irreverence—a Eucharist of profane perception. In the Phenomenology of Perception (1944) we read: Just as the sacrament not only symbolizes, in sensible species, an operation of Grace, but is also the real presence of God, which it causes to occupy a fragment of space and communicates to those who eat of the consecrated bread, provided that they are inwardly prepared, in the same way the sensible has not only a motor and vital significance, but is nothing other than a certain way of being in the world suggested to us from some point in space, and seized and acted upon by our body, provided that it is capable of doing so, so that sensation is literally a form of communion.1
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This is a bold analogy for an existentialist writing in France in the 1940s, a time when close colleagues like Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus considered militant atheism as de rigueur. Merleau-Ponty goes on to sound this eucharistic power of the sensible as follows: “I am brought into relation with an external being, whether it be in order to open myself to it or to shut myself off from it. If the qualities radiate around them a certain mode of existence, if they have the power to cast a spell and what we called just now a sacramental value, this is because the sentient subject does not posit them as objects, but enters into a sympathetic relation with them, makes them his own and finds in them his momentary law.”2 We shall have occasion to refer below to numerous idioms of eucharistic empathy in the work of James Joyce. Suffice it for now to note the curious paradox that precisely when Merleau-Ponty traces the phenomenological return all the way down to the lowest rung of experience (in the old metaphysical ladder, the sensible) he discovers the most sacramental act of communion, or what he also likes to call “chiasmus.” What exactly is meant by this notion of “chiasmus”? The crossing over of ostensible contraries: the most in the least, the highest in the lowest, the first in the last, the invisible in the visible. Here we have a reversal of Platonism and idealism: a return to flesh as our most in timate “element,” namely, that which enfolds and envelops us in the systole and diastole of being, the seeing and being seen of vision. Phenomenology thus marks the surpassing of traditional dualisms (body/ mind, real/ideal, inner/outer, subject/object) in the name of a deeper, more primordial chiasmus where opposites traverse each other. This is how Merleau-Ponty describes the enigma of flesh as mutual crossingover in his posthumously published work The Visible and the Invisible (1964): “The seer is caught up in what he sees. . . . The vision he exercises, he also undergoes from the things, such that, as many painters have said, I feel myself looked at by the things”—so much so that “the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which sees and which is seen. It is this Visibility, this generality of the Sensible in itself, this anonymity innate to Myself that we have previously called flesh, and one knows there is no name in traditional
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philosophy to designate it.”3 Here, I suggest, Merleau-Ponty gets to the heart of this nameless matter and descends—in a final return, a last reduction that suspends all previous reductions—to the incarnate region of the “element”: “The flesh is not matter, in the sense of corpuscles of being which would add up or continue on one another to form beings. Nor is the visible (the things as well as my own body) some ‘psychic’ material that would be—God knows how—brought into being by the things factually existing and acting on my factual body. In general, it is not a fact or a sum of facts ‘material’ or ‘spiritual.’ ” No, insists Merleau-Ponty: “The flesh is not matter, is not mind, is not substance. To designate it, we would need the old term ‘element,’ in the sense it was used to speak of water, air, earth, and fire, that is, in the sense of a general thing, midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea, a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style of being wherever there is a fragment of being. The flesh is in this sense an ‘element’ of Being.”4 Returning to examples of painting—Cézanne and Klee—in “Eye and Mind” (1964), Merleau-Ponty expounds on this chiasmic model of the flesh as a mutual transubstantiation of the seer and the seen in a “miracle” of flesh: “There really is inspiration and expiration of Being, action and passion so slightly discernible that it becomes impossible to distinguish between what sees and what is seen, what paints and what is painted. . . . There is no break at all in this circuit; it is impossible to say that nature ends here and that man or expression starts here. It is mute Being which itself comes to show forth its own meaning.”5 In Signs (1960), a collection of essays devoted to questions of language and art, Merleau-Ponty repeats his claim that the flesh of art is invariably indebted to the bread of life. There is nothing so insignificant in the life of the artist, he claims, that it is not eligible for “consecration” in the painting or poem. But the “style” which the artist creates converts his corporeal situation into a sacramental witness at a higher level of “repetition” and “recreation.” The art work still refers to the lifeworld from which it springs, but it opens up a second-order reference of creative possibility and freedom. Speaking specifically of Leonardo da Vinci, he writes:
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If we take the painter’s point of view in order to be present at that decisive moment when what has been given to him to live as corporeal destiny, personal adventures or historical events, crystallizes into “the motive” [i.e., the style], we will recognize that his work, which is never an effect, is always a response to these data, and that the body, the life, the landscapes, the schools, the mistresses, the creditors, the police, and the revolutions which might suffocate painting are also the bread his work consecrates. To live in painting is still to breathe the air of this world.6
In short, the bread of the world is the very stuff consecrated in the body of the work. We will return to this aesthetic of transubstantiation in the discussion of Joyce. But before leaving Merleau-Ponty I wish to mention one other intriguing passage in Signs where the author—no theologian and certainly no Christian apologist—has an interesting interpretation of Christian embodiment as a restoration of the divine within the flesh, a kenotic emptying out of transcendence into the heart of the world’s body, becoming a God beneath us rather than a God beyond: The Christian God wants nothing to do with a vertical relation of subordination. He is not simply a principle of which we are the consequence, a will whose instruments we are, or even a model of which human values are only the reflection. There is a sort of impotence of God without us, and Christ attests that God would not be fully God without becoming fully man. Claudel goes so far as to say that God is not above but beneath us—meaning that we do not find Him as a suprasensible idea, but as another ourself which dwells in and authenticates our darkness. Transcendence no longer hangs over man: he becomes, strangely, its privileged bearer.7
This insight of “immanent transcendence” is not of course original to Merleau-Ponty. Many Christian mystics—from John of the Cross to Hildegarde of Bingen and Meister Eckhart—said similar things, as did Jewish sages like Rabbi Luria and Rosenzweig or Sufi masters like
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Rumi and Ibn’Arabi. Indeed, I am also reminded here of the bold claim by Teilhard de Chardin that God does not direct the universe from above but underlies it and “prolongs himself ” into it. But what Merleau-Ponty provides is a specific philosophical method—namely, a phenomenology of radical embodiment—to articulate this “nameless” phenomenon of sacramental flesh. And it is arguable that a number of recent phenomenologists have followed Merleau-Ponty’s lead (or parallel path) when seeking to inventory the sacred dimensions of the flesh—I am thinking especially of Jean-Luc Marion’s writings on the “flesh” as a saturated phenomenon in On Excess, or Jean-Louis Chrétien’s phenomenological commentary on the Song of Songs.8 But Merleau-Ponty has the advantage, in my view, of not only being the first phenomenologist to explicitly identify the sacramental valence of the sensible but also maintaining a certain methodological agnosticism with regard to the theistic or atheistic implications of this phenomenon. Indeed, his philosophy of “ambiguity,” as he liked to call it, is particularly well suited when it comes to interpreting the sacramental idioms of eucharistic epiphany in Joyce. Merleau-Ponty is no crypto-evangelist, as several of those belonging to the “theological turn” in phenomenology have been accused of being. On the contrary, he keenly observes the methodic suspension of confessional truth claims recommended by Husserl. And this chimes well, it seems to me, with the poetic license enjoyed by artists and writers when it comes to the marvel of transubstantiation in word, sound, or image. For poetic license entails a corollary confessional license from which no reader is excluded. In this respect, we could say that the phenomenological method—which brackets beliefs—is analogous to the literary suspending of belief and disbelief for the sake of all- inclusive entry to the “kingdom of as-if.” And this suspension, I will argue, allows for a specific “negative capability” regarding questions of doubt, proof, dogma, or doctrine, so as to better appreciate the “thing itself,” the holy thisness and thereness of our flesh-and-blood existence. The attitude of pure vigilance and attention that follows from such exposure to a “free variation of imagination” (the term is Husserl’s) is not far removed, I believe, from what certain mystics have recognized
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to be a crucial preparatory moment for sacramental vision, calling it by such different names as “the cloud of unknowing” ( Julian of Norwich), the “docta ignorantia” (Cusa), or, in Eastern mysticism, the “neti/ neti”—neither this nor that—which paves the way for the highest wisdom of reality. True belief comes from nonbelief. Or, as Dostoyevsky put it, real “faith comes forth from the crucible of doubt.” In the free variation of imagination, indispensable to the phenomenological method, as in all great works of fiction and art, everything is permissible. Nothing is excluded except exclusion. All is possible. By allowing us to attend to the sacramental marvel of the everyday without the constraints of any particular confession, Merleau-Ponty offers fresh insights into a eucharistic character of the sensible. What pertains to Merleau-Ponty also, I will now suggest, pertains to the sacramental imagination in Joyce. Whether we are concerned in his work with an aesthetic religion or a religious aesthetic—or both— is something I wish to bear in mind throughout.
Joyce’s Priesthood of the Imagination Joyce invokes idioms of transubstantiation to describe the writing process. Already in the Portrait Stephen Dedalus describes himself as a “priest of the eternal imagination,” transmuting the “bread of daily experience” in the “womb” of art. This is more than irony. Taking his cue from the sacramental operation of transubstantiation in its liturgical formulation, Joyce treats the transformative act of writing as the “advent of new signs and a new body.”9 In a discussion with his brother Stanislaus, he has this to say: “Don’t you think, said he reflectively, choosing his words without haste, there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do? I mean that I am trying in my poems to give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own.”10 The act of life-text transfiguration is echoed at several key junctures within Joyce’s texts. I have written elsewhere of the pivotal role of
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“epiphanies” of repetition in Ulysses where Joyce treats a remembered event as both past (separated by time) and really present (regained miraculously in the epiphany of the moment).11 And yet there is a deeply deconstructive lining to many of Joyce’s sacramental allusions. Indeed, Ulysses itself may be read as a series of anti-Eucharists or pseudo- Eucharists leading, I will suggest, to a final eucharistic epiphany at the close of Molly’s soliloquy. Let’s start at the beginning. The novel opens, significantly, with Buck Mulligan’s mimicry of Mass on the turret of the Martello tower. He is carrying a shaving bowl for a chalice and mockingly intoning the liturgical Introibo ad altare Dei. Holding the sacrificial bowl, he addresses Stephen as a “Jesuit” before adopting a priestly tone: “For this, O dearly beloved, is the genuine Christine: body and blood and soul and ouns. Slow music please. Shut your eyes, gents. One moment. A little trouble with those white corpuscles. Silence all.”12 Mulligan’s black Mass is followed, in the fourth episode, by Bloom’s morning feast of fried kidneys, during the course of which, as Molly later recalls, he delivers himself of “jawbreakers about the incarnation” before burning the bottom of the pan! Later again in the novel we witness Stephen’s parodic Mass in Nighttown and Bloom and Stephen’s failed Mass over a cup of cocoa in the penultimate “Ithaca” chapter, not to mention the mock-allusions to transubstantiation in the “Oxen of the Sun” and “Scylla and Charybdis” episodes. This series of pseudo-Eucharists may be read as a long via negativa which eventually opens up the space for the “kiss” of the seedcake on Howth Head in the final chapter. This “long kiss” between Molly and Bloom when they first went out, as recalled by Molly in her soliloquy, is redolent with sacramental associations. It could be said, for example, to reprise not only the “kisses of the mouth” celebrated by the Shulamite woman in the Song of Songs but also the eucharistic Passover of Judeo-Christian promise. Molly’s remembrance of the “long kiss” where she gave Bloom the “seedcake out of [her] mouth” might be thought of as a retrieval of a genuine eucharistic gift of love after the various deconstructions of failed or parodied Eucharists—and loves— recurring throughout the narrative. And it is this kiss which triggers
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off—in true kairological fashion—the earlier memory of Molly’s first kiss as a young woman in Gibraltar: a first kiss which becomes the final kiss of the novel itself, climaxing in the famous lines: “how he kissed me under the Moorish wall . . . and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”13 This kiss may, of course, also be read as an epiphanic repetition of the particular moment on 16 June 1904 when Joyce finally went out and found pleasure with Nora Barnacle: the day subsequently known as Bloomsday on which Ulysses is set. Nor should we forget that the closing chapter in which Molly remembers times past (and future) is, according to Joyce’s notes, dedicated to the “flesh” and that it crowns a narrative which Joyce described as his “epic of the body.” In repeating a past moment, epiphany gives a future to the past. It somehow transubstantiates the empirical thisness of a particular lived event into something sacred and timeless.14 So when Molly recalls her first kiss as a young woman, she does so—tellingly—in the future tense! “Yes I will Yes.” And we might be tempted to suggest that Molly’s promissory “yes” here epitomizes Walter Benjamin’s intriguing notion of “messianic time” as an openness to “each moment of the future as a portal through which the Messiah may enter.” This is, in short, epiphany understood as a transfiguring of an ordinary moment of secular, profane time (chronos) into sacred or eschatological time (kairos). It is also worth noting that epiphany, in its original scriptural sense, involved witnesses who came as strangers from afar. This could be read, in terms of a sacramental hermeneutics, as an event of textual openness to new, strange, and unprecedented meanings through the textual encounter between author, narrator and, above all, reader. Such a sacramental reading epitomizes the “desire to open writing to unforeseeable effects, in other words, to the Other. It is a function of a responsibility for the Other—for managing in writing a place for the Other, saying yes to the call or demand of the Other, inviting a
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response.”15 And here we might recall Derrida’s invocation of Elijah (also a favorite figure for Leopold Bloom) as a messianic model of the reader: the unpredictable Other par excellence who calls the text forth and is called forth in turn by the text. This notion of Ulysses as an open textual invitation to “refiguration” in the reader finds confirmation in Joyce’s repeated appeal to the “ideal reader,” a gesture somewhat akin to Proust’s appeal to his future reader who would discover in his book the book of his or her own life. One of Joyce’s most telling appeals (on the penultimate page of Finnegans Wake, and anecdotally on his deathbed) is “Is there one who understands me?” In other words, both Joyce and Proust invoke the sacramental idiom of transubstantiation to convey the miracle of textual composition and reception. In both cases, we are confronted with a miracle of repetition that recalls the past forwards and explodes the chronology of time.16 But how are we to read these novelistic “repetitions,” in Kierkegaard’s sense of repeating forward rather than merely recollecting backward?17 What is the particular genre, idiom, or style which performs such gestures? To borrow a phrase from Joyce himself, we might call it “jocoserious.” For it is a way of celebrating the eternal in the moment by bringing us back to earth. Molly, for example, is a mock-heroic parody of the elevated and aristocratic Penelope. She repeats her Homeric prototype forward by opening up new modes of reinscription. One needs only to compare Molly’s all-too-mundane musings with the following description of Penelope in the last scene of Homer’s Odyssey: “So upright in disposition was Penelope the daughter of Icarius that she never forgot Odysseus the husband of her youth; and therefore shall the fame of her goodness be conserved in the splendid poem wherewith the Immortals shall celebrate the constancy of Penelope for all the dwellers upon earth.” This is a far cry from Molly’s final cry. Certainly Penelope could never say of her beloved what Molly says of hers—“as well him as another”! And yet it is typical of Joyce’s irony that in turning Homer’s epic heroism on its head, his characters curiously maintain the truth of the situation in a kind of creative repetition. Bloom is strangely blessed with his wife (however unfaithful) and does manage to defy his rivals (Boylan, the Citizen), however indirectly
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and passively; Molly does not forget Bloom, and her ultimate affirmation is “celebrated” by many “dwellers upon earth”! In short, by transliterating Penelope and Odysseus into Molly and Bloom, Joyce performs a daring act of eucharistic comedy. And, in so doing, he proves his conviction that the “structure of heroism is a damned lie and that there cannot be any substitute for individual passion.”18 Molly’s rewriting of Penelope conforms to the basic features of comedy outlined by Aristotle and Bergson, namely the combining of more with less, of the metaphysical with the physical, of the heroic with the demotic, of Word with flesh—and we might add, bearing in mind a central motif of comedy, the combining of death with love. (Recall that the novel begins with a series of death and burial themes, lived or remembered—Stephen’s mother, the Blooms’ son, Paddy Dignam—and that it ends with a call to love: eros defying the sting of thanatos.) Molly’s ultimate passing from thanatos to eros is prefigured several times during her soliloquy, from fantasies of being buried (e.g., “well when Im stretched out dead in my grave then I suppose Ill have some peace I want to get up a minute if Im let wait O Jesus . . . O Jamsey let me up out of this pooh sweets of sin”) to the climactic cry of eschatological bliss: “yes I will Yes.”19 And it is surely significant that Molly herself is “full with seed” as she records her fantasy of death and rebirth, just as Bloom himself is described as a “manchild in the womb.” In her final memory of the kiss, Molly echoes the Shulamite woman’s celebration of wild flora in the Song of Songs as she affirms that “we are all flowers all a womans body.” Indeed, the culminating Moorish and Mediterranean idioms of sensory ecstasy and excess are deeply redolent of the Shulamite’s Canticle—itself styled after the JewishBabylonian nuptial poem or epithalamium. And this impression is amplified, I think, by the multiple allusions to seeds, trees, waters, and mountains and irresistible passions between men and women. “What else were we given all those desires for?” Molly asks. If there is something irreducibly humorous in this replay of the Song of Songs, there is something deeply serious too. As always in Joyce, the scatological and the eschatological rub shoulders—as do Greek and Jew, Molly and
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Bloom, life and death. And they do so without ever succumbing to some totalizing synthesis. Joyce’s comic transubstantiations do not amount to Hegelian sublations (Aufhebungen), in spite of Derrida’s onetime suspicions.20 Joyce keeps the dialectic open to the end, refusing the temptation of metaphysical closure. The eucharistic transformation of death and rebirth is carried out on earth. Word is always made flesh of our flesh. Elsewhere I have written about the importance of epiphany in Joyce.21 Epiphanies imply Magi; I have suggested that the three Magi who bear witness to the textual epiphany of meaning are Stephen, Bloom, and Molly and that each reincarnates a seminal moment in the author’s own life. But, as suggested above, the Magi may also be interpreted more textually as author, actor, and reader. Thus we might say that while (a) the lived action of Joyce’s world “prefigures” the text and (b) the voice, style, and plot of the actors (Stephen-Bloom-Molly) “configure” the meaning in the text, it is (c) the reader who completes the narrative arc by serving as a third witness who “refigures” the world of the text in his or her return to lived experience. Our own world as readers may thus be said to be enlarged by the new meanings proposed by the text. This triangular model of epiphany—celebrated in the sacrament of word-made-flesh—always implies a rebirth. It constitutes something of a miracle of meaning, the impossible being transfigured into the newly possible. And here we might invoke those famous biblical epiphanies when, for example, the three angels appear to Abraham to announce the conception of an “impossible” child (Isaac) to Sarah, or, in Christian literature, when the three Magi bear witness to the “impossible” child Jesus in Bethlehem, or, again, when the three persons of the Christian Trinity herald the birth of an “impossible” kingdom, as in Andrei Rublev’s icon of the Blessed Trinity. Indeed, this last Rublev example—featuring the three persons of the Trinity seated around a eucharistic chalice—could be said to foreground the pivotal role of the free space (chora) at the center of the triadic epiphany. The movement of the three persons/angels/Magi around the still womb—which the patristic authors named peri-choresis, or the dance around the open
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space—may be read, hermeneutically, as the creative encounter of author/narrator/reader in and around the locus of the word. This suggests, moreover, that the triadic model of epiphany always implies a fourth dimension—namely, chora understood as the space of advent for the new (Isaac, Jesus, Pleroma). Eucharistic epiphany might thus be said to signal a miracle of reversible semantic innovation: of flesh into word and of word into flesh. That the witnessing of the three personas is usually met with a celebratory “yes” (Sarah’s “laugh” in Genesis 17, Mary’s “Amen” in the Gospels, Molly Bloom’s final “yes I will Yes”) is itself a significant illustration of how kairological time cuts across conventional time and opens up a surplus of possible meaning hitherto unsuspected and unknown. The epiphanic event may be seen, accordingly, as one which testifies simultaneously to the event of meaning (it is already here) as an advent always still to come (it is not-yet here). And in this wise it reenacts the Palestinian formula of the Passover/Eucharist which remembers a moment of saving while at the same time anticipating a future (“until he comes”).22 So I repeat: Molly’s final cry blends and balances past and future tenses in a typically kairological way—“I said yes I will Yes.” Her scatological memories of all-too-human eros are repeated forward to the rhythm of eschatological time. Word becomes flesh as flesh becomes word. The secular and sacramental traverse each other. At the beginning of Ulysses, the question is asked, “What is God?,” to which Stephen replies, “A cry in the street.” Perhaps the cry is Molly’s and the Street is Eccles Street? — How do the phenomenological investigations of Merleau-Ponty and the literary explorations of James Joyce complement or supplement each other? What phenomenology and literature share is a suspension of our habitual presuppositions and prejudices regarding what is real. Phenomenology, taking its cue from its founding father, Husserl, calls for the “bracketing” (epoché) of the natural attitude, while literature,
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following Coleridge, speaks of the “suspension of disbelief.” MerleauPonty subscribed to Husserl’s bold claim that the phenomenological method shares with art an essential access to the ultimate life of experience. This is how Husserl put it in a famous passage in Ideas: “If anyone loves a paradox, he can really say . . . that the element which makes up the life of phenomenology, as of all eidetical sciences, is ‘fiction,’ that fiction is the source whence the knowledge of ‘eternal truths’ draws its sustenance.”23 Thus phenomenology may be said to radicalize Aristotle’s statement in his Poetics that art and drama reveal the “essential” truths of human existence whereas history merely deals with facts. One of the “essential” dimensions of such existence is what Merleau-Ponty—and other phenomenologists like Gaston Bachelard, Jean-Louis Chrétien, and Michel Henry—refer to as the sacred or sacramental: the disclosure of the ultimate in the ordinary, of the universal in the singular, of the “eternal” (in Husserl’s sense) in time. Even the ostensibly atheistic Heidegger saw phenomenological thinking and poetic thinking as close allies in their shared attention to the “sacred” (das Heilige). The intimate affinity between phenomenology and fiction no doubt helps explain why Merleau-Ponty so frequently invokes the evidence of writers like Proust and Stendhal and of painters like Cézanne and Klee. He recognized that the “as if ” perspective of the imaginary was, in fact, an indispensable path to the invisible depths of the visible—a position echoed by Paul Ricoeur when he speaks of narrative imagination as a “laboratory of possibilities” which reveal fundamental truths of being inaccessible to our habitual modes of so-called “naturalist” perception. Although Merleau-Ponty does not, to my knowledge, refer to Joyce explicitly, in his published work, I have proposed in my dual analysis above that there are profound analogies and supplementary insights in their respective approaches to the “eu charistic” metaphor of existence. Merleau-Ponty refers to the “little miracles” of Proust, while Joyce speaks of “epiphanies” of the “silver womb of imagination.” Both, in their different ways—one philosophical, the other poetic—provide privileged portals to the hidden truths of the real.
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Notes 1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 246. I am grateful to John Manoussakis for this reference. See his extended discussion of this theme in God after Metaphysics: A Theological Aesthetics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). 2. Ibid., p. 248. 3. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 139. 4. Ibid. 5. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in Continental Aesthetics, ed. R. Kearney and D. Rasmussen (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 292, 303. 6. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 64, emphasis added. 7. Ibid., p. 71. 8. See also Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (London: Routledge, 2003), and Manoussakis, God after Metaphysics. Nor should we omit reference here to Gabriel Marcel’s intriguing philosophical reflections on incarnation and embodiment, which exerted a considerable influence on the “religious” phenomenological writings of Ricoeur and Levinas. 9. See J. Kristeva, “Joyce the Gracehoper,” in New Maladies of the Soul (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 172–78. See in particular her opening statement, p. 173: “Joyce’s Catholicism, which consisted of his profound experience with Trinitarian religion as well as his mockery of it, impelled him to contemplate its central ritual—the Eucharist—which is the ritual par excellence of identification with God’s body and a springboard for all other identifications, including that of artistic profusion. This ritual is also prescribed by the Catholic Faith. It is likely that the cultural context of Catholicism—which Joyce had completely assimilated—was challenged by a biographical event that endangered his identity and enabled him to focus his writing on the identificatory substratum of psychic functioning, which he masterfully laid out against the backdrop of the grandest religion.” And she goes on, p. 174: “The obsession that Joyce the ‘Gracehoper’ had with the Eucharist theme is exemplified by his many references to transubstantiation or to Arius’ heresy, to the consubstantiality between father and son in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and between Shakespeare, his father, his son Hamnet, as well as to Shakespeare’s complete works in the sense of a veritable source of
430 Richard Kearney inspiration. Let us recall, moreover, the condensation of ‘trinity’ and ‘transubstantiation’ in Joyce’s umbrella word ‘contransmagnificandjewbangtantiati ality.’” Pointing out that Joyce had read both Freud and Jung by 1915, Kristeva offers many intriguing psychoanalytic readings of Joyce’s eucharistic aesthetic, including the following: “In this way can Dedalus-Bloom achieve the plenitude of his text-body, and thus release his text to us as though it was his body, his transubstantiation. The narrator seems to say, ‘This is my body,’ and we know that he sometimes identifies with HCE in Finnegans Wake. As for the reader, he assimilates the true presence of a complex male sexuality through textual signs and without any repression. This is a prerequisite for enigmatic sublimation: the text, which restrains but does not repress libido, thereby exercises its cathartic function upon the reader. Everything is to be seen and all the places are available; nothing is lacking and nothing is hidden that could not indeed be present” (pp. 176–77). Other informative treatments of Joyce’s sacramental aesthetic include William Noon, Joyce and Aquinas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957); Robert Boyle, James Joyce’s Pauline Vision: A Catholic Exposition (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978); and J.-L. Houdebine, “Joyce, littérature et religion,” in Excès de langage (New York: Denoel, 1984). Although Stephen Dedalus rejects the Eucharist of Jesus for the art of Icarus early in A Portrait, later in the novel he revisits an aesthetic of the sacred in his reading of Thomistic radiance (claritas): “The supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. . . . The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani . . . called the enchantment of the heart” (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [New York: Penguin, 1992], p. 231). It is typical of Joyce’s incarnational aesthetic to link Aquinas’ transcendental category of beauty here with the more physiological category of heart and flesh. Tellingly, we read in the concluding lines of A Portrait of the wish that Stephen “may learn in [his] own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. So be it. Welcome, O life!” (p. 275). 10. Conversation with Joyce recorded in Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper (New York: Viking Press, 1958), pp. 103–4. 11. See Richard Kearney, “Joyce: Epiphanies and Triangles,” in Navigations: Collected Irish Essays, 1976–2006 (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2006), pp. 131–49, and “Traversing the Imaginary: Epiphanies in Joyce and Proust,” in
Eucharistic Imagination in Merleau-Ponty and James Joyce 431 Traversing the Imaginary: Richard Kearney and the Postmodern Challenge, ed. Peter Gratton and John Manoussakis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007). On epiphany in Joyce, see also George Steiner, Real Presences (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), p. 112. On parodied, failed, or deconstructed Eucharists in Joyce’s stories—“Sisters,” “Clay,” and “The Dead”—see the work of theologian Joseph O’Leary, e.g., “Enclosed Spaces in ‘The Dead,’ ” English Literature and Language (University of Sophia, Tokyo) 34 (1997): 33–52. 12. James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Vintage, 1993), p. 3 (1.21–23). 13. Ibid., pp. 643–44 (18.1604–9). On the subject of the eschatological kiss, see also my comparison between Molly and the Bride of the Song of Songs in “The Shulammite’s Song: Divine Eros, Ascending and Descending,” in Toward a Theology of Eros: Transfiguring Passion at the Limits of Discipline, ed. Virginia Burrus and Catherine Keller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006). One might also compare and contrast this kiss with another moment of recollected love in Joyce’s story “The Dead,” where Gretta recalls her kiss with Michael Furey, her first love: a scene that is also associated with a sacramental feast, celebrating the Incarnation of the Word at Christmas. 14. See my discussion of Joyce’s proximity to Duns Scotus’ notions of haecceitas (thisness) and ensarkosis (the ongoing enfleshment of the divine in the world) in “Joyce: Epiphanies and Triangles,” in Kearney, Navigations, pp. 133–36. 15. Rudolphe Gasché, Inventions of Difference: On Jacques Derrida (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 230. Gasche is here elaborating on Derrida’s reading of Joyce in “Ulysses Gramophone,” in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992). 16. On this later point, see Julia Kristeva, Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 3–22. For a eucharistic hermeneutics of reading, see also Valentine Cunningham, Reading after Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 148–49: “Here is a body of text and the text as body, the body of the other, the text as other, to be consumed, ingested, in a memorial act, an act of testimony, of worldly witness. . . . In holy communion the believer is blessed and graced, signed as Christ’s own, marked as sanctified. In reading on this [eucharistic model], the reader is, in some way or another, also graced, blessed, marked as the text’s own.” 17. Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941).
432 Richard Kearney 18. In a letter to his brother Stanislaus in 1905, in Selected Letters, ed. Richard Ellmann (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), p. 54. Earlier in the letter Joyce had asked, “Do you not think the search for heroics damn vulgar?” (p. 53). 19. Joyce, Ulysses, pp. 632–33 (18.1103–4, 1128–29) and p. 643 (18.1608–9). 20. Derrida offers a useful gloss on the language of Molly/Penelope in an intriguing footnote to his commentary on the relationship between Greek and Jew in Emmanuel Levinas, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” in Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 320–21. Commenting on a phrase in Ulysses— “Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet”—Derrida not only attributes this to “woman’s reason,” as in Joyce’s text but also identifies Joyce here as “perhaps the most Hegelian of modern novelists” (p. 153). The implication here seems to be that the discourse of “feminine logic,” associated with Molly/Penelope, is one which, for Levinas at least, suggests an “ontological category” of return and closure: namely, Ulysses returning to Penelope in Ithaca, Stephen and Bloom returning to Molly in Eccles Street, where they may find themselves “atoned” as father-son, jew-greek, greek-jew, et cetera. It is not quite clear where Derrida himself stands toward Joyce in this early 1964 text, though it is evident that he thinks Levinas would repudiate the Joycean formula as overly Hegelian and Greek (that is, not sufficiently respectful of the strictly Jewish/messianic/eschatological need for a radically asymmetrical relation of self and other). In his later essay “Ulysses Gramophone,” first delivered as a lecture to the International Joyce Symposium in Frankfurt in 1984, he makes it clear that the “yes” of Molly/Penelope marks an opening of the text beyond totality and closure to an infinite and infinitely recurring “other” (Ulysse gramophone: Deux mots sur Joyce [Paris: Galilée, 1987]). Even if it is a response to oneself, in interior dialogue, “yes” always involves a relay through an other. Or, as Derrida cleverly puts it, oui-dire, saying yes, always involves some form of oui-dire or hearsay: “A yes never comes alone, and we never say this word alone” (p. 300). With this relay of self through the other, this willing of yes to say yes again, “this differing and deferring, this necessary failure of total self-identity, comes spacing (space and time), gramophoning (writing and speech), memory” (p. 254). And this “other” clearly implies a reaching beyond the text of Ulysses itself to the listener, the reader, an open call for our response. In this sense we would say that Ulysses is a deeply anti-Hegelian book. Molly’s finale represents, not some great teleological reconciliation of contra-
Eucharistic Imagination in Merleau-Ponty and James Joyce 433 dictions in some absolute synthesis of Spirit, but an ongoing affirmation of paradoxes, struggles, contraries, contingencies, spoken in a spirit of humor and desire. “What else were we given all those desires for?,” asks the polymorphously perverse Molly, a far cry from the Hegelian triumph of Identity. We may conclude, therefore, that the story of struggle and trouble does not end when Stephen follows Bloom out of the library, it only begins. And by the same token, Molly, when she finally arrives, does not put paid to Trinities as such but simply reintroduces us—along with Stephen and Bloom—to another kind of trinity, one without a capital T and more inclusive of time, movement, natality, and desire (all those things banned from the Sabellian Trinity of self-enclosed Identity parodied by Stephen in the National Library scene)—and, one might add, more inclusive of the reader. For like any epiphany, Molly’s too calls out to an open future of readers. 21. See Kearney, “Traversing the Imaginary.” 22. See my discussion of the eschatological temporality of the Palestinian formula in both Judaic and Christian messianism in “Enabling God,” in After God: Richard Kearney and the Religious Turn in Continental Philosophy, ed. John Manoussakis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), as well as “Hermeneutics of the Possible God,” in Givenness and God, ed. Ian Leask and Eoin Cassidy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). My own sketch of microeschatological possibility, temporality, and carnality is powerfully articulated in Denise Levertov’s poem “The Annunciation,” especially in these lines: “The engendering Spirit / did not enter her without consent / God waited,” offering her the “astounding ministry . . . to bear in her womb / Infinite weight and lightness; to carry / in hidden, finite inwardness, / nine months of Eternity; to contain / in slender vase of being, / the sum of power— / in narrow flesh, / the sum of light. / Then bring to birth, / push out into air, a Man-child / needing, like any other, / milk and love—” (Denise Levertov, Selected Poems [New York: New Directions, 1969], pp. 162–63). Mother Teresa of Calcutta expresses a similar sentiment when she writes of the same reversibility of eucharistic giving: “In each of our lives Jesus comes as the Bread of Life—to be eaten, to be consumed by us. That is how he loves us. He also came as the Hungry One, hoping to be fed with the bread of our life, with our hearts that love and our hands that serve.” Total Surrender, ed. Brother Angelo Devananda (Ann Arbor, MI: Servant Publications, 1985), p. 26. See also these lines by Yves Bonnefoy, “L’ange qui est la terre / Va dans chaque buisson et paraître et brûler.” (I am grateful to Anne Davenport for this reference.) 23. Edmund Husserl, Ideas (New York: Collier, 1962), pp. 200–201.
e i g h t e e n
Immanence, Self-Experience, and Transcendence in Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein, and Karl Jaspers Dermot Moran
Phenomenology and Transcendence: The Problem Phenomenology’s relationship with the concept of transcendence is not at all straightforward. Indeed, phenomenology, from its inception, has had an ambiguous, uneasy relationship with transcendence, with the wholly other, the numinous. Phenomenology, as the French philosopher Jean-Luc Marion has recently emphasized, is par excellence the philosophy of givenness, reflecting specifically on the “givenness” of the given, on what Husserl speaks of as the “how” (Wie) or “mode” (Art, Weise) of givenness. Phenomenology deliberately restricts itself to describing carefully and without prejudice whatever is given to experience in the manner in which it is so given. Marion frames the essential question of phenomenology thus: “Can the givenness in 434
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presence of each thing be realized without any condition of restriction?”1 But if phenomenology is restricted to givenness, what becomes of that which is withheld or cannot in principle come to givenness? As such, and from the outset, then, the epoché of Husserlian phenomenology brackets the transcendent and, specifically, traditional metaphysical or onto-theological conceptions of God as a transcendent being outside the world. Is, then, the relation between phenomenology and transcendence always one of distance and renunciation, or is another way of relating possible? In this essay I wish to reexamine the role of the concept of “transcendence” in phenomenology, focusing explicitly on the work of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and Edith Stein (1891–1942), but I shall also refer briefly to the German philosopher of existence, Karl Jaspers (1883–1969), precisely because he made transcendence a central theme of his philosophy, and because of his influence on Martin Heidegger (1889–1976).2 Heidegger’s conception of the transcendental and of transcendence appears to have come from his Auseinandersetzung with his mentor Husserl,3 but also from his close personal relationship during the 1920s with Karl Jaspers, the medic turned philosopher, who himself was greatly influenced by Kierkegaard and existential philosophy. Following a discussion of the Husserlian problematic of transcendence, I shall examine Edith Stein, specifically her work attempting to relate phenomenology to Thomistic ontology. Here I shall be concentrating on her understanding of being as fullness and of the ego as the primary sense of being, as somehow encapsulating the mystery of being. Stein sees a way of combining the insights of Husserlian eidetic phenomenology with traditional Thomistic talk about the divine, to find a new way of articulating transcendence. What unites Husserl, Stein, Jaspers, and Heidegger is that they all accord a special place to the transcendence of the self, the transcendence of human existence or Dasein. The paradox at the center of their philosophies is that the most immanent self-experience is precisely that which reveals transcendence. Transcendence means literally “going beyond.” In one sense, transcendence refers to the region of “otherness,” whatever lies beyond or
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is other, especially other than one’s self.4 In this regard the French phenomenologist Natalie Depraz has claimed, for instance, that phenomenology is the philosophy of otherness.5 But in Husserl’s phenomenology, transcendence as going-beyond is intrinsically related to a deeper experience of selfhood or “self-experience” (Selbsterfahrung), such that, paradoxically, genuine transcendence has to be acknowledged in immanence. The original transcendence, for Husserl, is the living ego itself, in that it is directly experienced and is temporally constituted and hence never completely able to be captured in a totalizing view. The self is ab initio essentially self-transcending. Heidegger makes this “transcendence of Dasein” into an essential part of the existential analytic of human existence. Both Husserl and Stein begin, as do in their own ways St. Augustine and Descartes, with one’s own first-person experience of one’s own being. Self-experience, as Husserl argues in the Cartesian Meditations, has to be the starting point and the measure for all other experiences if these experiences are to be captured purely under the epoché.6 Of course, this is not to say that self-experience ought to be considered as self-enclosed and solipsistic. Quite the reverse: Husserl and Stein both saw subjectivity as a one-sided abstraction from the interrelated nexus of concrete intersubjectivity. On the other hand, it would be phenomenologically inaccurate to deny that experience is deeply “egoic” and first-personal in its core originary nature. Stein received her doctoral training under Edmund Husserl and was intimately involved in the theory and practice of Husserlian phenomenology at Göttingen; but she later moved to embrace Catholi cism, and in her mature writings she offers a very original and independent reconceptualization of the Thomistic heritage illuminated by her phenomenological background. This work of synthesis between phenomenology and Thomistic metaphysics receives its fullest articulation in Endliches und ewiges Sein (Finite and Eternal Being), a book written, as she said, echoing Husserl’s own view of himself as a phenomenologist, “by a beginner for beginners,” to explain Thomistic philosophy for the modern mind.7 In this work, Stein explicitly acknowledges that she wants to use Husserlian phenomenology as a way of gaining access to Thomistic or “Scholastic” thought (FEB, p. 12). Finite and Eternal
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Being, a vast compendium of speculative commentary on key Aristotelian and Thomistic concepts, including a kind of new cosmology, is at its core a very deep appreciation of the experience of being as fullness, a concept that unites Husserl and Aquinas, although Husserl is attempting to approach being precisely from its experiential meaningfulness as given. Husserl’s own leanings toward empiricism and his suspicion of Hegelian invocations of the absolute led him to distrust metaphysical speculation that was not grounded phenomenologically. Furthermore, when he embraced the Kantian critical and “transcendental” approach, he further distanced himself from naive discussions of the transcendent. But transcendence is problematic for Husserl for an even more essential reason, namely, because of the methodological strictures phenomenology imposes on itself with regard to the importation of speculative assumptions. Indeed, it is one of the explicit functions of Husserl’s “bracketing” or “suspension” (epoché) to exclude consideration of the transcendent, at least in the sense of that which may in principle be considered apart from consciousness. If there is to be transcendence, for the mature Husserl, then this is always transcendence under the epoché; it is “transcendence-within-immanence,” hence not pure “transcendence.” As Husserl says in his programmatic Ideas I, the eidetic attitude of phenomenology after the reduction “excludes every sort of transcendence.”8 Yet, paradoxically, as Husserl will attest in his Formal and Transcendental Logic, it is an essential part of phenomenology’s brief to explore “the sense of transcendence” (Sinn der Transzendenz), that is, the manner in which we have experience of an objective world as such.9 While Husserl always insisted that phenomenology proceeds in immanence, in an important essay on the relation between Thomism and phenomenology, Edith Stein points out that he was seeking a region of genuine immanence in the sense of a region of immediate, inviolable self-givenness from which all doubt is excluded, but no matter how much he attempted to purify his starting point transcendentally, “traces of transcendence showed up.”10 Stein maintains this is because Husserl’s ideal of knowledge is in fact divine knowledge, where knowing and being are one and where there is no transcendence (a version
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of the “view from nowhere”), where knowledge is simply disclosure of the given without mediation or obstruction or slant. In other words, for Stein in her critique of Husserl, his philosophy of pure immanence cannot escape transcendence. The finite and determined has to open up to the infinite, undetermined, and indeterminate. In thinking of transcendence, Husserlian phenomenology begins by rejecting thinking of transcendence framed in Cartesian terms, paradigmatic in modern epistemology, whereby the central question is how to “transcend” the closed sphere of subjectivity in order to attain to an “external” objectivity beyond the subject. This conception of transcendence as objectivity opposed to subjectivity is precisely what comes to be challenged in Kantian critical philosophy. Consider the question famously formulated by Immanuel Kant is his letter to Markus Herz of 21 February 1772, written some years before the First Critique but still considered to express the essentials of the transcendental turn. Kant asked: What is the ground of the relation of that in us which we call “representation” [Vorstellung] to the object [Gegenstand]? If a representation is only a way in which the subject [Subiect] is affected by the object, then it is easy to see how the representation is in conformity with this object, namely, as an effect in accord with its cause, and it is easy to see how this modification of our mind can represent something, that is, have an object. . . . In the same way, if that in us which we call “representation” were active with regard to the object [des Obiects], that is, if the object itself were created by the representation (as when divine cognitions are conceived as the archetypes of all things), the conformity of these representations to their objects could be understood. . . . However, our understanding, through its representations, is not the cause of the object (save in the case of moral ends) nor is the object [Gegenstand] the cause of the intellectual representations in the mind [in sensu reali]. Therefore the pure concepts of the understanding must not be abstracted from sense perceptions, nor must they express the reception of representations through the senses; but though they must have their origin in the nature of the soul, they are
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neither caused by the object [vom Obiect] nor bring the object [das Obiect] itself into being.11
Kant is the source of most twentieth-century worries about transcendence (insofar as things in themselves transcend every possibility of being meaningfully cognized), and his recommendation of a transcendental turn, whereby we reflect on the subjective conditions that make transcendent objecthood possible, has dominated post-Kantian philosophy. Yet Kant also recognizes the inalienability of the human desire for transcendence, and this recognition inspired philosophers such as Jacobi to attempt to find again a place for a faith that grasped the transcendent in a way inaccessible to reason. As Hegel comments in his “Faith and Knowledge” essay of 1802: “Reason, having in this way become mere intellect, acknowledges its own nothingness by placing that which is better than it in a faith outside and above itself, as a beyond [to be believed in]. This is what has happened in the philosophies of Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte. Philosophy has made itself the handmaid of a faith once more.”12 Husserl actually tries to find a new way to understand transcendence, not by assigning it to a suprarational faculty or to faith, but rather by rethinking it from within the concept of phenomenological givenness, as we shall see. Both senses of transcendence (as that which cannot be attained but also as that which must be sought) found in Kant continue to play a significant role in Husserlian and especially in post-Husserlian phenomenology (Levinas, Marion, Henry). Emmanuel Levinas (1906–95), for instance, speaks of the desire for the absolutely other, l’Autre. But this tendency in Levinas and recent phenomenology is somewhat at odds with Husserl and Stein, who begin with self-experience. Let us now examine Husserl in more detail.
Immanence and Transcendence in Husserl’s Phenomenology Several concepts of transcendence are at play in Husserl’s thought, and it is not clear that these different senses of transcendence ever get fully
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resolved in his writing. The term transcendence does not occur in the first edition of the Logical Investigations (1900–1901). It appears more or less simultaneously with his discovery of the reduction (ca. 1905) and is prominent in The Idea of Phenomenology lectures of 1907.13 As Stein puts it, Husserl’s “absolute starting point” for phenomenology is the immanence of consciousness, to which is contrasted the transcendence of the world.14 In fact, however, this is only a first sense of transcendence. In his mature publications beginning with Ideas I, Husserl explores a deeper sense of transcendence, as we shall see, whereby corporeal things are transcendent because their essence contains a kind of infinity that is never intuitable in a completely adequate and fulfilled way. Every thing is graspable only through a manifold of “adumbrations” (Abschattungen) and “aspects” (Aspekte), which can never be fully actualized by a finite cognizing mind. Even the corporeal thing, then, is in essence what Husserl calls a “Kantian idea,” a manifold of infinite perspectives. As the French phenomenologist Michel Henry has recognized, one of the first places where Husserl tackles the issue of transcendence and immanence is in his 1907 Idea of Phenomenology lectures.15 Husserl begins with the classic epistemological problem—How do I know that I know? How do I know that my knowledge is secure? Husserl characterizes this classic epistemological problem as the problem of transcendence.16 The “riddle” of knowledge is put in Kantian terms as the possibility of its contact with the transcendent.17 Nothing transcendent can be taken as pregiven; as Husserl writes: “The transcendence of the thing requires that we put the thing in question.”18 According to Husserl, the very nature of the contact (Triftigkeit— a term inherited from Kant) with the transcendent is precisely what the traditional epistemologist cannot master. Some philosophers have abandoned the possibility that knowledge can be in contact with the transcendent, and at that point what remains to be explained is how the prejudice has arisen whereby it is assumed that human knowledge does reach the transcendent. For Husserl, it is Hume who took this latter route. For Husserl, on the other hand, the epistemological reduc-
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tion must be performed whereby every transcendence is excluded and intentional connections of meaningfulness are revealed. Overcoming the problematic of traditional epistemology, Husserl defines a new kind of givenness—“absolute givenness”—which he attaches to the very act of conscious experiencing itself, to every “thought” or cogitatio. This leads Husserl to declare in the Second Lecture of the Idea of Phenomenology: “Every intellectual experience, indeed every experience whatsoever, can be made into an object of pure seeing and apprehension while it is occurring. And in this act of seeing, it is an absolute givenness.”19 The stream of experience given in reflection has “absolute givenness.” Husserl goes on to discuss the manner in which the given is immanent in our experience while at the same time emphasizing that there is no actual thing present or immanent in the actual occurring Erlebnis. This leads to a double meaning for transcendence: “It can refer to the fact that the known object is not really [reell] contained in the act of knowing.”20 Yet “There is another sense of transcendence, whose counterpart is an entirely different kind of immanence, namely, absolute and clear givenness, self-givenness in the absolute sense.”21 This absolute self-givenness consists in “an immediate act of seeing and apprehending the meant objectivity itself as it is.” Only the immanent cogitatio is given. The problem now becomes that of how to safeguard the purity of the phenomenon of the cogitatio from contamination by our prejudices, including the psychological reading of the cogitatio (as a psychological fact, a datum in space-time, and so on). This purification goes beyond the epistemological reduction, so Husserl calls it the “phenomenological reduction,” whose aim is to purify the “psychological” phenomenon into the absolute givenness of the pure phenomenon.22 Husserl contrasts this absolute givenness of the immanent with the “quasi-givennesses” (Quasi-Gegebenheiten) of transcendent objects.23 The pure phenomenon contains an intentional referring beyond itself, but that must be treated precisely as it is given in immanent seeing. This brings us squarely into the phenomenological perspective, or, as Husserl puts it, “And thus we drop anchor on the shore of phenomenology” (Und so werfen wir schon Anker an der Küste der Phänomenologie).24
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Continuing the metaphor, Husserl warns that this shore has its share of rocks, is covered by clouds of obscurity, and is threatened with the gales of skepticism. We have what is given absolutely and purely in immanence: “On the other hand, the relation to something transcendent, whether I question the existence [Sein] of the transcendent object or the ability of the relation to make contact [Triftigkeit] with it, still contains something that can be apprehended within the pure phenomenon. The relating-itself-to-something-transcendent [Sich-auf-Transzendentes-Beziehen], to refer to it in one way or another, is an inner characteristic of the phenomenon.”25 It is worth rehearsing Husserl’s first tentative uncovering of the transcendent at the heart of the immanent in these lectures as a guide to what is the relation between phenomenology and transcendence. Not every transcendence is excluded; there is a genuine transcendence recognized that is the counterpart of the pure immanence of absolute givenness. But about this genuine transcendence Husserl has little to say in these years other than to point to the subject-transcending nature of validity, truth, and other values. From out of the “Heraclitean stream of Erlebnisse” comes a consciousness of unity, identity, transcendence, and objectivity, and other such consciousnesses of stability, continuity, and fixity of the world.26 How is that possible? Husserl furthermore acknowledges that the mere apprehension of the cogitatio in itself is of little value; what matters is the turn toward the eidos. Indeed, the possibility of the critique of knowledge depends on the recognition of forms of givenness other than the singular hic et nunc. We already move beyond these cogitationes themselves when we make judgments about what is true, valid, and so on. The first genuine transcendence within immanence is then the intuition of the eidos. In later works, specifically Ideas I and Cartesian Meditations, Husserl is particularly interested in the manner in which the givenness of the world transcends the imperfect type of evidences that display it,27 as no imaginable synthesis can bring the world to adequate evidence. The being of the world necessarily transcends consciousness; nevertheless, the world is inseparable from transcendental subjectivity.
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Transcendence in Husserl’s Ideas I In Ideas I (1913), transcendence is again discussed in a number of places from different points of view. As in The Idea of Phenomenology lectures, the transcendence of the physical thing is contrasted with the “immanence” of the conscious experience apprehending it.28 This transcendence is not merely the fact that the thing is not “inside” the conscious experience. There is also the eidetic insight that a physical thing can never be captured by any Erlebnis, which distinguishes it essentially from any episode of consciousness. This is not the same as the transcendence in which another person’s conscious experiences are recognized in empathy, Husserl says: “The physical thing is said to be, in itself, unqualifiedly transcendent.”29 There is an essential contrast between the “mode of givenness” (Gegebenheitsart) of something immanent and that of something transcendent. A physical thing is adumbrated while a mental process is not. For Husserl, it is almost an article of faith that what is absolutely given in immanent consciousness cannot in principle be given in profiles or adumbrations. However, it is at this point that Husserl’s idealist commitments enter the picture, since he proceeds to speak of the merely “phenomenal being” of the transcendent as opposed to the absolute being of the immanent.30 A physical thing is “undetermined” (unbestimmt) in relation to its hidden sides, but it remains infinitely “determinable” (bestimmbar) concerning all those aspects of it that remain to be discovered (some of which of course will never be fulfilled in actuality, e.g. the view of the object from the moon, and so on). The thing is graspable in a highly regulated series of possible perceptions, but there always remains a “horizon of determinable indeterminateness” (ein Horizont bestimmbarer Unbestimmtheit).31 No God can alter that, Husserl remarks. In this sense, the physical thing is really an “Idea in the Kantian sense.”32 The idea of a physical thing has “dimensions of infinity” included in it.33 As Christian Lotz has shown, Husserl applies the language of regulative ideas in a rather loose manner, namely, to the constitution of perceptual objects, to the unity of the Erlebnisstrom, to the world as
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such, to essences of exact types, and, finally, in a certain sense, to his own philosophy and the infinity of the phenomenological task.34 There are therefore many transcendencies in Husserl, but a central intuition is that the experience of time is intimately wrapped up with the experience of the transcendent.35 Essentially correlated with the notion of givenness is the notion of a possible consciousness perceiving it.36 Husserl more and more wants to examine the nature of the transcendental ego as that which is there to apprehend the givenness of the world. The primary infinity, for the mature Husserl, is the transcendental ego itself, which he calls the most basic or “original concept” (Urbegriff ) of phenomenology.37 Moreover, as he puts it in the Cartesian Meditations, the science of transcendental subjectivity is the sphere of “absolute phenomenology,” the ultimate science.38 Thus, in 1927, Husserl could write: “The clarification of the idea of my pure ego and my pure life—of my psyche in its pure specific essentiality and individual uniqueness—is the basis [das Fundament] for the clarification of all psychological and phenomenological ideas.”39 Husserl’s analysis of the ego widened to include a range of related issues: the unity of consciousness, the nature of self, subjectivity, personhood, and the “communalization” of the self (Ver gemeinschaftung) with the “open plurality of other egos,” amounting to the whole “intersubjective cognitive community,” or what in his “reconstruction” of Leibniz Husserl calls “monadology.”40 From Ideas I onward, Husserl characterizes the ego as an “I-pole” (Ichpol) or “I-centre” (Ich-Zentrum), “the centre of all affections and actions.”41 It is a “centre” from which “radiations” (Ausstrahlungen) or “rays of regard” stream outward, or toward which rays of attention are directed. It is the center of a “field of interests” (Interessenfeld), the “substrate of habitualities,” “the substrate of the totality of capacities.”42 This I “governs,” it is an “I holding sway” (das waltende Ich) in waking conscious life, yet it is also “passively affected.”43 In its “full concretion,” it is a self with convictions, values, an outlook, a history, a style, and so on: “The ego constitutes itself for itself in, so to speak, the unity of a history.”44 It is present in all conscious experience and “cannot be struck out” (undurchstreichbar). It is more than a formal prin-
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ciple of unity (in the sense of Kant’s unity of apperception), since it has a living, growing, unifying nature. It is also grossly misunderstood if it is treated as a “piece of the world”; it is not a “thing” or res at all. Rather, it exists both as anonymous source of all meaningfulness and as a growing, developing self, with a history and a future, in relation to other selves, possessing life in the fullest sense of the word. The transcendental ego covers “the universe of the possible forms of lived experience.”45 Husserl sees the “self-explication” (Selbstauslegung) of the transcendental ego as a set of “great tasks,”46 but it is beset by paradoxes: How can the ego be that which constitutes the world and also that which is concretized (as an embodied individual), mundanized (inserted into history and culture), and corporealized in the world? How can the transcendental ego, the source of all meaning and being, inquire into itself as a meaning- and being-constituting entity? Part of the complexity stems from the very self-referentiality of the ego’s self- knowledge. How can I inquire into what founds me as a self ? When I as investigator turn to examine the ego, I am in fact doubling back on myself, inquiring into what constitutes me as functioning self. This necessarily involves a “splitting of the ego” (Ichspaltung) and is extraordinarily difficult to carry out without lapsing into various forms of transcendental illusion. Indeed, Husserl acknowledges, even to say that I who reflect is “I” involves a certain equivocation.47 Yet there is both identity and difference in this I. The reflecting ego is in a different attitude and different temporal dimension from the ego reflected upon, yet there is a consciousness of the unity or “coincidence” (Deckung) of the two. Husserl’s transcendental idealism claims that the objectivity of the transcendent real world outside us is an achievement of “transcendental intersubjectivity.” This is already articulated in his 1910/11 lectures,48 but it is constantly reiterated in later works, for example, in the 1928 Amsterdam lectures: “Transcendental intersubjectivity is the absolute and only self-sufficient foundation [Seinsboden]. Out of it are created the meaning and validity of everything objective, the totality of objectively real existent entities, but also every ideal world as well. An
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objectively existent thing is from first to last an existent thing only in a peculiar, relative, and incomplete sense. It is an existent thing, so to speak, only on the basis of a cover-up of its transcendental constitution that goes unnoticed in the natural attitude.”49 Everything we experience as transcendent has the “value” written on it: “valid for all,” für Jedermann. Everything I experience outwardly is in principle what someone else could experience. This is the very meaning of objectivity (note that Husserl reconstrues the assertions of ideality of the Logical Investigations into the language of intersubjective constitution in later works). The world of spirit coheres into a unity for Husserl. It is a goal-oriented, rational, communicative world, a “community of monads” (Monadengemeinschaft), a “world of development” (eine Welt der Entwicklung), where, according to one lecture, as in Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy, everything takes place for the sake of the Good.50 According to Husserl, the discovery of the transcendental brings with it a responsibility to live life on a new level. One remains a “child of the world” (Weltkind),51 but one is also a disinterested spectator grasping this natural life as the unfolding work of the transcendental ego. The meditator must live thereafter in the very splitting of consciousness brought about by the epoché. There is no going back from the epoché, no healing of the split in consciousness. Genuine transcendental idealism requires living both in the natural attitude and in the transcendental philosophical attitude, while somehow achieving a “synthesis” of these two.52 For Husserl, someone who adopts the transcendental attitude is like a person born blind who recovers his sight as a result of an operation.53 The newly disclosed world looks completely new so that one cannot rely on any of one’s previous habits and convictions with regard to this entirely new landscape. One has left behind the childhood of naive natural existence and has entered, to invoke Husserl’s own frequent religious imagery, “the kingdom of pure spirit” (Reich des reinen Geistes).54 In the Cartesian Meditations it is precisely the realization that all being and sense come from the transcendental ego which provokes the profound reflection, in the Fifth Meditation, on the meaning of the experience of the other. How can the other in principle show itself within
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the horizon of my self-experience? Husserl here talks of an “immanent transcendence”: “Within this ‘original sphere’ (the sphere of original self-explication) we find also a ‘transcendent world.’ ”55 The puzzle is that the objective world, the “first transcendence,” is always already there for me as fully formed but at the same time is somehow a result of constitution by the transcendental ego. As I mentioned at the outset, one of phenomenology’s tasks is to explore “the sense of transcendence” (Sinn der Transzendenz); in other words, the very meaning of the experience of transcendence, that which runs beyond the subject.56 As Husserl writes in his Formal and Transcendental Logic: “If what is experienced has the sense of ‘transcendent’ being, then it is the experiencing that constitutes this sense, and does so either by itself or in the whole motivational nexus pertaining to it and helping to make up its intentionality.”57 Husserl makes the very important point in Formal and Transcendental Logic, § 99, that nothing (neither the world nor any existent) comes to me “from without” (he uses the Greek adverb thúrathen). Rather, “Everything outside [Alles Außen] is what it is in this inside [in diesem Innen], and gets its true being from the givings of it itself [Selbstgebungen], and from the verifications [Bewährungen], within this inside—its true being, which for that very reason is itself something that itself belongs to this inside: as a pole of unity in my (and then, intersubjectively, in our) actual and possible multiplicities [Mannigfaltigkeiten], with possibilities as my (and our) abilities: as ‘I can go there,’ ‘I could perform syntactical operations,’ and so forth.”58 Transcendental phenomenology, according to the Crisis of European Sciences, even expresses the inner essence of religion,59 and it provides Husserl, as a deeply religious convert to Lutheran Christianity, with the only philosophically justified basis for comprehending God, given the “absurdity” of thinking of him as an item in the factual world.60 As he puts it in Formal and Transcendental Logic, “Even God is for me what he is, in consequence of my own productivity of consciousness.”61 Husserl goes on to insist that this does not mean that consciousness “makes” or “invents” (erfinde) God, this “highest transcendence” (diese höchste Transzendenz).62
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As we have seen, the concept of the transcendent in Husserl is multifaceted. In his mature writings it is most often encountered in relation to transcendental philosophy. In Crisis, § 14, for instance, Husserl contrasts traditional objectivism in philosophy with what he calls “transcendentalism.” Here he defines transcendentalism as follows: Transcendentalism, on the other hand, says: the ontic meaning [Seinssinn] of the pre-given life-world is a subjective structure [subjektives Gebilde], it is the achievement of experiencing, pre-scientific life. In this life the meaning and the ontic validity [Seinsgeltung] of the world are built up—of that particular world that is, which is actually valid for the individual experiencer. As for the “objectively true” world, the world of science, it is a structure at a higher level, built on prescientific experiencing and thinking, or rather on its accomplishments of validity [Geltungsleistungen]. Only a radical inquiry back into subjectivity—and specifically the subjectivity which ultimately brings about all world-validity, with its content, and in all its pre-scientific and scientific modes, and into the “what” and the “how” of the rational accomplishments—can make objective truth comprehensible and arrive at the ultimate ontic meaning [Seinssinn] of the world.63
Husserl sees the traditional, Cartesian problematic of epistemology as the problem of transcendence.64 How can the certainties I arrive at in the immanent stream of my conscious life acquire objective significance?65 How can evidence claim to be more than a characteristic of consciousness and actually build up to the experience of an objective world as a whole? What the reduction shows is that this is a nonquestion because all transcendence is constituted within the domain of transcendental subjectivity: “Transcendency in every form is a within-the-ego self-constituting being-sense [Transzendenz in jeder Form ist ein innerhalb des Ego sich konstituierender Seinssinn]. Every imaginable sense, every imaginable being, whether the latter is called im manent or transcendent, falls within the domain of transcendental subjectivity, as the subjectivity that constitutes sense and being.”66 The transcendental ego is the “universe of possible sense,” so that to speak of an “outside” is nonsense.67
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We see then that specifying transcendence-within-immanence might very well be employed to summarize Husserl’s project. He never rejects the underlying Cartesian assumption that all “being and sense” is founded upon the self-activity of the transcendental ego (though inserted into the plurality of egos in transcendental intersubjectivity). On the other hand, he never thinks of this constitution of being and sense simply as a kind of Neoplatonic or, indeed, Fichtean, self-externalization of the ego. Transcendence is something essential to ego-hood, and this renders meaningless every attempt to portray Husserl as some kind of solipsist. However, his stubborn refusal to describe the work of transcendental subjectivity in anything other than egoic terms did tend to paint him into a corner and invited the Heideggerian move to redescribe human subjectivity in terms of Dasein.
Karl Jaspers on Transcendence Before moving on to discuss Edith Stein, I wish to turn to another conception of the transcendent that was being explored in Germany around the time Husserl was writing. I am referring of course to Karl Jaspers, who had a huge influence on the Heidegger of Being and Time and thereby, indirectly, on Edith Stein. Jaspers made transcendence a central issue in relation to the “illumination of existence” (Existenzerhellung), especially in his massive three-volume work Philosophie, which, although it did not appear until 1932, had been in gestation all through the 1920s.68 Indeed, many of Jaspers’ central concepts had already been articulated in nuce in his 1919 Psychology of Worldviews (Psychologie der Weltanschauungen), which Heidegger reviewed critically at a formative stage in his own career.69 In his writing Jaspers outlines various ways of dealing with the individual openness to transcendence; one can deny or resist it, or seek a way in the world to accommodate it.70 But transcendence continues to intrude on our individual lives, since transcendence is what makes our lives individual and authentically experienced. Jaspers begins from the existential starting point: “Everything essentially real is for me only by virtue of the fact that I am I myself.”71 My existence is the “arena” for my self-realization. Existenz (a term he
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consciously borrows from Kierkegaard, who himself found it in Schelling, who opposed Existenz to the Hegelian Idea) refers to “possible” individual existence in terms of its freedom and willing. For Jaspers, the very essence of Existenz is its intentional tending to the other, that is to say, its transcendence.72 Jaspers writes: “Just as I do not exist without the world, I am not myself without transcendence. . . . I stand before transcendence, which does not occur to me as existing in the world of phenomenal things but speaks to me as possible—speaks to me in the voice of whatever exists, and most decidedly in that of my self-being. The transcendence before which I stand is the measure of my own depth.”73 For Jaspers, Existenz is always directed toward transcendence: “Its authentic being consists in the search for transcendence.” Thus “Existence is the self-being that relates to itself and thereby also to transcendence from which it knows that it has been given to itself and upon which it is grounded.”74 Freedom exists only with and by transcendence.75 Transcendence is that which is experienced as beyond the person; but it cannot be thought of as anything empirically real or actual. Transcendence encompasses individuals, but it cannot be objectified; it is beyond both subjectivity and objectivity. Transcendence is not something in the world, nor is it simply to be identified with human freedom, but transcendence appears wherever there is Existenz. Jaspers begins, as does Husserl, with the subject-object relation familiar to modern philosophy. But for Jaspers, to become aware of the subject-object relation is already to be moving in the domain of what he calls the “encompassing” (das Umgreifende). All thinking involves transcending, beyond the objective and toward the “encompassing,” which we experience as the “horizon of horizons,”76 the being which is beyond our categorizations: “The encompassing preserves my freedom against knowability.”77 Jaspers writes: “But the encompassing [Umgreifende] is not the horizon of our knowledge at any particular moment. Rather, it is the source from which all new horizons emerge, without itself ever being visible even as a horizon. The encompassing always merely announces itself—in present objects and within the horizons—but it never becomes an object. Never appearing to us itself, it is that wherein everything else appears.”78 Jaspers and Husserl share
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this concept of the “horizon” as that in which objectivity appears as such. The problem for both is that to try to think of the “encompassing” or of “horizonality” is already to objectify it. The result is therefore, as Jaspers says, that “every proposition concerning the encompassing thus contains a paradox.”79 Though we cannot grasp the encompassing, Jaspers suggests that we can become aware of it in a lucidity different from determinate knowledge. Jaspers wants us to philosophize “in the modes of the encompassing” by detaching ourselves from determinate knowledge.80 Transcendence is experienced through “ciphers.” Existenz is the cipher for transcendence.81 These ciphers appear in art, religion, and specific aspects of lived human existence (especially our “limit situations”) and, while somehow pointing toward transcendence, also withhold knowledge of the transcendent, and indeed confirm the impossibility of such knowledge. As consciousness comes to recognize its own limits, it takes on an attitude of foundering or “failing” (Scheitern), an experience of insufficiency before the transcendent. More specifically, it is my historicity that makes me aware of transcendence: “Only through historicity do I become aware of the authentic being of transcendence—and only through transcendence does our ephemeral existence acquire historical substance.”82 My very contingent existing is itself a cipher of transcendence. Paradoxically Jaspers maintains that there is only one transcendence even though there are many existences. The experience of absolute reality is that it is one and that it contains no possibility: “Existenz is not a self-contained unity. If there is unity it only is in transcendence.”83 Moreover, “Transcendence is not a matter of proof, but one of witness.”84 For Jaspers, moreover, the perennial task is communication, but the transcendent does not communicate directly with humans. Transcendence in itself is ineffable and incommunicable; yet it can be experienced only insofar as it appears in existence. It can somehow be experienced or lived through. As he writes: The question “What is Transcendence?” is not answered . . . by a knowledge of Transcendence. The answer comes indirectly by a clarification of the incompleteness of the world, the imperfectibility
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of man, the impossibility of a permanently valid world order, the universal failure bearing in mind at the same time that there is not nothing, but that in nature, history, and human existence, the magnificent is as real as the terrible. The decisive alternative in all philosophizing is whether my thinking leads me to the point where I am certain that the “from outside” of Transcendence is the source of the “from inside,” or whether I remain in Immanence with the negative certainty that there is no outside that is the basis and goal of everything—the world as well as what I am myself.85
Jaspers further says that “the paradox of transcendence is that it can only be grasped historically but cannot be adequately conceived as being itself historical.”86 He is seeking to show that the very contingency and (in Heideggerian terms) thrownness of human existence is precisely and paradoxically that which points to transcendence. Meaning requires a dimension beyond the contingent in order to be meaningful. Jaspers defines transcendence in relational terms: “There is transcendence only by virtue of the reality of my unconditionality.”87 There is no transcendence except for existence: “Existenz is either in relation to transcendence or not at all.”88 “I am existentially myself in the act of apprehending transcendence.”89 I experience myself as given to myself not by myself but by something other, by transcendence.90 Jaspers maintains that the “place of transcendence is neither in this world nor beyond, but it is the boundary—the boundary at which I confront transcendence whenever I am my true self.”91 For Jaspers, my sense of being-in-myself is shattered by the experience of transcendence. Transcendence is primary. Jaspers’ powerful if idiosyncratic explorations of transcendence lie in a somewhat orthogonal relation to those of Husserl. Nevertheless, we can see that he had a strong and enduring influence on Heidegger and other (though reluctant) followers of Husserl in foregrounding transcendence over immanence. Jaspers’ influence on Hannah Arendt, for instance, is well known. There was, however, another line of thinking within Husserlian phenomenology itself which pointed in the same direction as Jaspers: namely, the inquiries of Edith Stein.
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Edith Stein’s Starting Point: Natural Experience For Edith Stein, as she asserts in Finite and Eternal Being, both phenomenology and Thomism begin with “natural experience as the starting point of every kind of thinking that goes beyond natural experience” (p. 333). She continues: “Even though not all knowledge rests exclusively on experience and even though there is, rather, a valid basis of experience which can be known by pure reason, it nonetheless remains the aim of all thinking to arrive at an understanding of the world of experience. Thinking which does not lead to the establishment of the bases of experience but to the abrogation of experience . . . is without any real foundation and inspires no confidence” (pp. 333–34). Stein thinks that Husserl and Aquinas both begin from experience, respecting the givens of experience. For Stein, the tacit assumption of natural experience is that there is a multiplicity of objects (p. 333). There is an assumption that there is a natural world. But, following Husserl, Stein points out that this concept of nature is actually partly constituted by culture; it emerges from an “interlacing” (Verflechtung) with mind (p. 334). The natural world is always already united with intellect, but, Stein goes on, not just finite minds. It also refers to infinite mind: “The worlds of nature and mind, however, do not exhaust all that which is if by ‘world of the mind’ [Geisteswelt] we mean only a world of finite minds and of structures created by finite minds. The totality of the created world refers back . . . to those eternal and non- become archetypes [Urbilder] of all created things (essences or pure forms) that we have designated as divine ideas. All real being (which comes to be and passes away) is anchored in the essential being of these divine ideas” (pp. 334-35). Here Husserlian essentialism is wedded to Thomistic reflections on the relation between the finite, created order and its infinite ground. It is important to emphasize that, in Finite and Eternal Being, Stein is emphatic that her inquiry is philosophical and not dependent on revealed truth. Nevertheless, she recognizes, at the same time, that her inquiry has to be constrained by revealed truth. For her, theological
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knowledge gives philosophy the distinction between essence and existence or between person and substance (pp. 23–24). Philosophy uses theology but is not the same as theology. The philosopher who borrows from theology is concerned with revealed truth but not with that truth qua revealed (p. 24). On the other hand, the ultimate ground of our existence is unfathomable, and hence philosophy needs to be— following Erich Przywara (1889–1973), who strongly influenced her thinking in this regard—“reduction to the mystery” (reductio ad mys terium).92 Stein recognized, as did Husserl (in Philosophy as a Rigorous Science and in the Crisis) that a purely methodological conception of philosophy could not satisfy the age. People seek truth, they need meaning in their lives; they seek a “philosophy of life.”93 Both Stein and Heidegger agreed on this point. They further agreed that the existing philosophies of life were flights into irrationalism. With regard to the religious orientation of Husserl’s own thinking, Edith Stein reports (albeit in fictional form in her dialogue between Husserl and Aquinas) Husserl as saying: “It never occurred to me to contest the right of faith. It (along with other religious acts that come to mind, for I have always left open the possibility of seeing visions as a source of religious experience) is the proper approach in religion as are the senses in the area of external experience.”94 But knowledge through faith or the faith-intuition is different from rational reflection on faith. Aquinas, on the other hand, believes that faith makes accessible truths which elude the grasp of reason, and that reason can “analyse” these truths and “put them to use.”95 Stein’s point, which she puts in the mouth of Aquinas, is that natural reason is not able to set bounds on itself.96 Faith, for Stein and Aquinas, on the other hand, provides its own guarantee. Phenomenology and the Meaning of Being Edith Stein claims—paralleling Heidegger—that the Greeks’ great question concerned the nature of being. Modern philosophy, however, has lost interest in being, turning instead to epistemology. However, Stein suggests, again in agreement with Heidegger, that ontology was revived by Husserl with his “philosophy of essence” (Wesensphilosophie),
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thereafter by Heidegger with his Existenzphilosophie, and by Hedwig Conrad Martius with her “ontology of the real” (Realontologie) (FEB, p. 6). Stein in fact sees phenomenology as deeply concerned with the sense of being. She defends Husserl’s “doctrine of essences” (Wesenslehre) against some neoscholastic misconceptions. For her, the lesson is that factual being requires a timeless ground: “Nothing temporal can exist without a timeless formal structure [Gestalt] which regulates the particular course of the temporal sequence of events and is thereby actualized in time” (FEB, p. 102). Stein takes a traditional view of the divine nature as a self- contained timeless plenitude (Fülle), but she also emphasizes the divine as person and uses typically phenomenological ways of articulating both this plenitude and the concepts of personhood and subjectivity. This approach takes her beyond her Thomistic beginnings into an interesting elaboration of Husserlian phenomenology. Being, for Stein, is to be understood as plenitude or “fullness”: “Being is one. . . . Its full meaning corresponds to the fullness of all existents. And when we speak of being, we mean this total fullness” (FEB, p. 332). Stein grasps this meaning of being in intentional terms. When we refer to, intend, or mean (meinen) something, we mean the whole thing, even if we are presented with only one side or aspect of it. Hence Stein concludes that our aim is to approximate to fullness: “To approximate the apperception of this fullness is the infinite task and goal of human knowledge” (p. 332). All plenitude of meaning is contained in the divine being. This for Stein is one possible interpretation of the opening sentence of the Prologue of John, Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ Λόγος: “In the beginning was the meaning [Sinn]” (p. 106). Interestingly, Husserl makes use of the concept of plenitude or fullness in his own description of the manner in which an object is intended as a whole while at the same time is seen only in part. For Stein, however, to recognize this timeless ground of temporal entities is not to assert that humans have direct intellectual cognition of the purely intellectual or spiritual sphere. She denies, with Kant and Husserl, that we can have knowledge of “things in themselves” (p. 104). Our knowledge of essences is always “fragmentary” (p. 104).
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Edith Stein and the Recognition of the Eternal at the Heart of the Finite Edith Stein first attempted a reconciliation of Aquinas and Husserl in her contribution to the invited collection prepared for Husserl’s seventieth birthday in 1929.97 In this Festschrift essay she begins by emphasizing the link with Brentano and the scholastic background of exact concept formation. She portrays both Husserl and Aquinas as seeing philosophy as a matter of reason (logos or ratio), not “feeling and fancy” or “soaring enthusiasm.”98 Stein says that Husserl would not have accepted Thomas’ distinction between natural and supernatural reason. Husserl would have seen that distinction as empirical; he is referring to “reason as such.”99 Stein recognizes that Husserl, like Kant, begins from the critical and transcendental standpoint: we can work only with our own organs of knowledge—“We can no more get free of them than we can leap over our shadow.”100 Stein focuses on the fact that for Husserl philosophy and reason unroll themselves endlessly and that full truth is a Kantian regulative idea. Aquinas, on the other hand, holds that “full truth is”; God as truth is “fullness at rest.”101 Furthermore, Stein believes in a distinction to be made between original and fallen reason. Not everything that is beyond our mind in its natural setup is beyond our mind in its “original makeup.”102 For Stein, as for Aquinas, God as ultimate being is the first principle of knowledge, and hence epistemology is really a chapter in ontology. Stein contrasts phenomenology, as egocentric, with Thomistic philosophy, which is theocentric. Her basic criticism is that transcendental phenomenology can uncover only being which is for consciousness. Being is understood as that which is constituted by consciousness, whereas for Thomas being has to be what it is in itself. The ego, for Stein too, is the primary transcendent entity but in a manner which is very difficult to articulate. There is “fragility” of the ego (FEB, p. 53). According to Stein, following Husserl, the ego relies on a twofold transcendence: one that is “external” and one that is “internal.” The external is, of course, the content of the world. The internal transcendent is mood, emotion, inner experience. She writes: “The
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conscious life of the ego depends thus by virtue of its contents on a twofold beyond [transcendence in Husserl’s sense of the term], an external and internal world both of which manifest themselves in the conscious life of the ego, i.e. in that ontological realm which is inseparable from the ego [immanence in Husserl’s sense of the term]” (FEB, p. 54). In Finite and Eternal Being, however, Stein mingles Heideggerian with Husserlian descriptions of our subjective life. Thus, besides talking of the ego, she invokes the Heideggerian notion of the “thrownness” of existence (p. 54), which she interprets as meaning that humans do not know the “whence” of their existence. Stein maintains that the starting point of inquiry is the “fact of our own being,” which—and here she quotes St Augustine’s De Trinitate, book 15—is given to us as certain (FEB, p. 35).103 Husserl, following Descartes, asks for an abstention from judgment concerning everything human and relating to the natural world to get at what remains, namely, “the area of consciousness understood as the life of the ego” (FEB, p. 36). My selfcertainty is the most immediate and primordial knowledge I have; it is an unreflected knowledge prior to all reflection. This being I am conscious of (myself ) is inseparable from temporality (p. 37). This very temporality of my being gives me the idea of eternal being. This is Stein’s way of moving beyond Husserl and Heidegger. Later in the book she writes much more extensively about the “ego-life” (Ichleben) and its relation to the soul. At one point she declares: “Ego-life is a reckoning and coming to terms of the soul with something that is not the soul’s own self, namely the created world and ultimately God” (p. 434). There is a constant self-transcendence going on in the soul and its ego-life (p. 425). This ego is characterized by a “being-there-for-itself ” (Für-sich-selbst-Dasein): The primordial undivided ego-life already implies a cognitive transcending of the sphere of the pure ego. I experience my vital impulses and activities as arising from a more or less profound depth. The dark ground from which all human spiritual life arises—the soul—attains in the ego-life to the bright daylight of consciousness (without however becoming transparent). The ego-life thereby
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r eveals itself as soul-life, and the soul-life—by its going forth from itself and by its ascending to the brightness of light—simultaneously reveals itself as spiritual life. (p. 430)
Depth of soul is something Stein analyzes subtly and at great length. She gives the example of two people hearing of the assassination of the Serbian monarch that gave birth to the First World War. One person hears it, registers it, and goes on planning his vacation. “The other is shaken in his innermost being,” foresees the outbreak of war, and so on. In this latter case, the news has struck deep in his inner being: “In this latter kind of thinking the ‘entire human being’ is engaged, and this engagement expresses itself even in external appearance. . . . He thinks with his heart” (p. 437). She goes on to write that the personal I is most truly at home in the innermost being of the soul (p. 439) but that few human beings live such “collected” lives. Because of its essentially changing nature, Stein characterizes the being of the ego as received being (FEB, p. 439). Jaspers has a very similar claim. In Existenzerhellung (Philosophie, vol. 2) he describes my being as temporal and partial; yet in “metaphysical transcending,” he explains, I can address my being on the basis of a completed temporal existence—the view from eternity, as it were.104 For Stein, as for Augustine and Jaspers, my own experience of myself is a kind of void or nothingness (FEB, p. 55). Jaspers writes: “I myself as mere being am nothing. Self-being is the union of two opposites: of standing on my own feet and of yielding to the world and to transcendence. By myself I can do nothing; but once I surrender to the world and to transcendence, I have disappeared as myself. My self is indeed self-based but not self-sufficient.”105 On Stein’s account, there is something very similar with regard to my zones of self-familiarity. My self-experience runs off into vagueness. I do not have awareness or direct intuition of the origins of my ego. There is always a horizon of indeterminacy. It is precisely this sense of horizonality that leads Stein to think of the ego as finite and created. In fact Stein, following Husserl (and Augustine), takes the divine self-revelation as the “I am who am,” which she interprets as meaning
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that the personal “I” has primacy (FEB, p. 342). Only a person can create, according to Stein. She conceives of the “I” in Husserlian terms as a standing-streaming. For her, the ego on its own is empty and needs to be filled from without (p. 344). The divine being, on the other hand, has no contrast between ego-life and being. Stein notes that Husserl calls the self that is immediately given in conscious experience the “pure ego,” which in itself has no content (FEB, p. 48). This is rather like a point from which streams emanate. It is the pure “I” of Husserl. But there is, also following Husserl, a fuller, more concrete ego. This ego is alive according to different degrees of Lebendigkeit. As Stein writes, “The pure ego is, as it were, only the portal through which the life of a human being passes on its way from the depth of the soul to the lucidity of consciousness” (p. 501). Stein tends to think of the ego as rooted in a soul, which has a character and individuality uniquely its own. “The innermost center of the soul, its most authentic and spiritual part, is not colorless and shapeless, but has a particular form of its own. The soul feels it when it is ‘in its own self,’ when it is ‘self-collected.’ . . . The innermost center of the soul is the ‘how’ of the essence itself and as such impresses its stamp on every trait of character and every attitude and action of human beings, it is the key that unlocks the mystery of the structural formation of the character of a human being” (pp. 501–2). The ego-self arises from the hidden depth of the unique soul. — For Stein, the being of the ego is being to a preeminent degree, but at the same time it is fragile, as it cannot say when it began and is surrounded by a zone of haziness. It is in this experience of my own “livingness” or liveliness, of the unbounded horizon of my life, that I experience transcendence. Jaspers, Stein, and Husserl, all coming from their different perspectives, agree on this point. This, I think, can be contrasted with Levinas. There is an excess in my self-experience together with a rupture and a pointing beyond. Now in Husserl, Jaspers, Heidegger, and Stein the experience of horizons and horizonality so intrinsic to my existence is also a feature
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of the transcendent world. Givenness by its very nature requires horizons within which it can be encompassed and hence grasped. Jean-Luc Marion, on the other hand, maintains that the very notion of an intuition in Kant and Husserl is of something necessarily constrained by limits, by boundaries. There can by definition be no intuition of the unbounded or infinite. For Marion, failure to make something an object is not failure to appear. There is for him the possibility of an intuition that passes beyond the concept. The phenomenon is exceptional by excess.106 It is a dazzling phenomenon: “The eye cannot not see it, but neither can it look at it as its object.”107 Marion describes this excessive phenomenon as “invisable” (cannot be intended, aimed at, ne peut se viser), “unforeseeable,” “unbearable,” “absolute according to relation,” “unconditioned (absolved from any horizon),” “irreducible.”108 This again is the paradox of the horizon. According to Marion, Husserl’s principle of all principles has to be revised and rethought because it cannot cope with the condition of the absence of horizonality, as well as the absence of reference to a constituting I: “The ‘principle of principles’ presupposes the horizon and the constituting I as two unquestioned presuppositions of anything that would be constituted in general as a phenomenon; but the saturated phenomenon, inasmuch as it is unconditioned by a horizon and irreducible to an I, pretends to a possibility that is freed from these two conditions; it therefore contradicts and exceeds the ‘principle of all principles.’ ”109 Marion’s saturated phenomenon gives itself “without condition or restraint.”110 It is not the sum of its parts. It is experienced through a kind of nonobjectifying counterexperience. But can we abandon this horizonality? Can we really go beyond the horizons of the I? I think we have good reason for staying with Jaspers, Heidegger, Husserl, and Stein, against Marion, in thinking of transcendence as something related to the fractured nature of our selfexperience, not as something that either annihilates or cancels the self. Selfhood, subjectivity, and self-experience are the very space where the transcendent is experienced. As Jaspers puts it in Philosophie II: “I stand before transcendence, which does not occur to me as existing in the world of phenomenal beings but speaks to me as possible—speaks to
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me in the voice of whatever exists, and most decidedly in that of my self-being. The transcendence before which I stand is the measure of my own depth.”111
Notes An earlier version of this paper was presented as an address to the conference “Transcendence and Phenomenology” held by the Centre of Theology and Philosophy, University of Nottingham, September 2005. My thanks to John Milbank for his comments. A version has also been published as “Immanence, Self-Experience, and Transcendence in Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein and Karl Jaspers,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 82, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 265–91. 1. Jean-Luc Marion, Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), p. 1. 2. Husserl and Jaspers had a distant but professionally respectful relationship. Husserl had read Jaspers’ General Psychopathology and owned a copy of the three-volume Philosophie (although only the first showed signs of having been perused). Their correspondence is to be found in Edmund Husserl, Briefwechsel, ed. Karl Schuhmann with Elizabeth Schuhmann, 10 vols., Husserliana Dokumente 3 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), vol. 4. 3. For an examination of the relationship between Heidegger and Husserl with regard to transcendental philosophy, see Dermot Moran, “Heidegger’s Transcendental Phenomenology in the Light of Husserl’s Project of First Philosophy,” in Transcendental Heidegger, ed. Steven Crowell and Jeff Malpas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), pp. 135–50 and 261–64. 4. See Dan Zahavi, Self-Awareness and Alterity: A Phenomenological Investigation (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999). 5. See Natalie Depraz, Transcendance et incarnation (Paris: Vrin, 1995). 6. See Edmund Husserl, Méditations cartésiennes: Introduction à la phénoménologie, trans. G. Peiffer and E. Levinas (Paris: Armand Colin, 1931). The German text was not published until 1950 as Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, ed. Stephan Strasser, Husserliana 1 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1950), hereafter cited as Hua 1. English translation: Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. D. Cairns (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1960), hereafter cited as CM.
462 Dermot Moran 7. See Edith Stein, Endliches und ewiges Sein: Versuch eines Aufstiegs zum Sinn des Seins, vol. 2 of Werke (Freiburg: Herder, 1949). English translation: Finite and Eternal Being, trans. Kurt F. Reinhart (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002), hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as FEB. The quote here is from FEB, p. xxvii. 8. The critical edition of Ideas I is published as Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, pt. 1, Text der 1.– 3. Auflage, ed. Karl Schuhmann, Husserliana 3/1 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977), hereafter cited as Hua 3/1. English translation: Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, trans. F. Kersten (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1983), hereafter cited as Ideas I. The quotation here is from Ideas I, § 86, p. 209 (Hua 3/1, p. 178). 9. Edmund Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik: Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft. Mit ergänzenden Texten, ed. Paul Janssen, Husserliana 17 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974), hereafter cited as Hua 17. English translation: Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. D. Cairns (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1969), hereafter cited as FTL. The quotation here is from FTL, § 93c, p. 230 (Hua 17, p. 237). 10. Edith Stein, “Husserl and Aquinas: A Comparison,” in Knowledge and Faith, trans. Walter Redmond, Collected Works of Edith Stein 8 (Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 2000), p. 23. 11. For Kant’s letter to Markus Herz of 21 February 1772, see Immanuel Kant, Philosophical Correspondence, 1759–1799, ed. and trans. Arnulf Zweig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), pp. 70–76, esp. 71–72. The German text is “Brief 70” in Immanuel Kant, Briefwechsel, vol. 1, 1747–1788, Akademie ed., Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften 2/10 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1922), pp. 129–35, quotation on p. 130. 12. G. W. F. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge / Glauben und Wissen, bilingual ed., ed. and trans. Walter Cerf and H. S. Harris (Albany: SUNY Press, 1977), pp. 55–56; italics in original. Originally published in Kritische Journal der Philosophie 2, pt. 1 (1802). 13. See Edmund Husserl, Die Idee der Phänomenologie: Fünf Vorlesungen, ed. W. Biemel, Husserliana 2 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973), hereafter cited as Hua 2. English translation: The Idea of Phenomenology, trans. Lee Hardy, Husserl Collected Works 8 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999), hereafter cited as IP. 14. Stein, “Husserl and Aquinas,” p. 61. 15. See Michel Henry, Phénoménologie matérielle (Paris: Presses universi taires de France, 1990).
Immanence, Self-Experience, and Transcendence 463 16. See IP, p. 28 (Hua 2, p. 36). 17. IP, p. 33 (Hua 2, p. 43). 18. IP, p. 38 (Hua 2, p. 49). 19. IP, p. 24 (Hua 2, p. 31); Husserl’s italics. 20. IP, p. 27 (Hua 2, p. 35). 21. IP, p. 27 (Hua 2, p. 35). 22. IP, p. 34 (Hua 2, p. 44). 23. IP, p. 34 (Hua 2, p. 45). 24. IP, p. 34 (Hua 2, p. 45). 25. IP, p. 35 (Hua 2, p. 46). 26. IP, p. 36 (Hua 2, p. 47). 27. See CM, § 28 (Hua 1, pp. 61–62). 28. See Ideas I, § 42, p. 89 (Hua 3/1, p. 76). 29. Ideas I, § 42, p. 90 (Hua 3/1, p. 77). 30. See Ideas I, § 44, p. 94 (Hua 3/1, p. 80). 31. Ideas I, § 44, p. 95 (Hua 3/1, p. 81). 32. Ideas I, § 143, p. 342 (Hua 3/1, pp. 297–98). 33. Ideas I, § 143, p. 360 (Hua 3/1, p. 313). 34. Christian Lotz, “Husserl and Kant: A Response to Abe Stone,” paper presented at the Husserl Circle conference, Dublin, 2005, in response to Abraham Stone’s paper, “The Object as Indeterminable X: Husserl vs. Natorp, Carnap, and Levinas.” Regarding Husserl’s application of regulative ideas to the unity of the Erlebnisstrom, see Ideas I, § 83, p. 197 (Hua 3/1, p. 166); to the world as such, see Erste Philosophie (1923/4). Erster Teil: Kritische Ideengeschichte, ed. Rudolf Boehm, Husserliana 7 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1956), p. 276; to essences of exact types, see Ideas I, § 74, p. 166 (Hua 3/1, p. 138). 35. See Ideas I, § 149. 36. See Ideas I, § 142. 37. Edmund Husserl, Einleitung in die Philosophie: Vorlesungen 1922/23, ed. Berndt Goossens, Husserliana 35 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002), p. 261. 38. CM, § 35, 73 (Hua 1, p. 107). For absolute phenomenology as the ultimate science, see FTL, § 103. 39. Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass. Zweiter Teil. 1921-28, ed. Iso Kern, Husserliana 14 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973); my translation. Hereafter cited as Hua 14. 40. “Communalization” of the self, Hua 1, p. 149; “open plurality of other egos,” FTL, § 104, p. 274 (Hua 17, p. 280); “intersubjective cognitive
464 Dermot Moran community,” FTL, § 96, p. 240 (Hua 17, p. 247); “reconstruction,” Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass. Dritter Teil. 1929–35, ed. Iso Kern, Husserliana 15 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), p. 609; “monadology,” CM, § 55, pp. 120–28 (Hua 1, pp. 149–56). 41. See, for instance, the characterization of the ego in Edmund Husserl, Ideen zur einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, ed. Marly Biemel, Husserliana 4 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952), p. 105; hereafter cited as Hua 4. English translation: R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book, Husserl Collected Works 3 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), p. 112; hereafter cited as Ideas II. 42. These quotations are from CM, § 34, 69 (Hua 1, p. 103), with the exception of “substrate of the totality of capacities” (Substrat der Allheit der Vermögen), from Edmund Husserl, Zur phänomenologischen Reduktion: Texte aus dem Nachlass (1926-1935), ed. Sebastian Luft, Husserliana 34 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002), p. 200; hereafter cited as Hua 34. 43. “Governs,” “I holding sway,” Hua 14, p. 457; in waking, conscious life, Ideas II, p. 114 (Hua 4, § 26, p. 108); “passively affected,” Hua 14, p. 26. 44. Hua 14, p. 26; CM, § 37, p. 75 (Hua 1, p. 109). 45. CM, § 36, 73 (Hua 1, p. 107). 46. Hua 34, p. 228; CM, § 29, p. 62 (Hua 1, p. 97). 47. Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die trans zendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, ed. Walter Biemel, Husserliana 6 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1962), § 54b, p. 188; hereafter cited as Hua 6. English translation: David Carr, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 184; hereafter cited as Crisis. 48. For example, Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivi tät: Texte aus dem Nachlass. Erster Teil. 1905–1920, ed. Iso Kern, Husserliana 13 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973). p. 184; hereafter cited as Hua 13. 49. Edmund Husserl, Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927–31), The Encyclopaedia Britannica Article, The Amsterdam Lectures “Phenomenology and Anthropology,” and Husserl’s Marginal Notes in “Being and Time” and “Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics,” trans. T. Sheehan and R. E. Palmer, vol. 6 of Collected Works (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), 249. German edition: Phänomenologische Psychologie: Vorlesungen Sommersemester, 1925, ed. Walter Biemel, Husserliana 9 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968), 344.
Immanence, Self-Experience, and Transcendence 465 50. See Edmund Husserl, “Naturwissenschaftliche Psychologie, Geis teswissenschaft und Metaphysik (1919),” in Issues in Husserl’s Ideas II, ed. T. Nenon and L. Embree (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996, pp. 1–7). English translation: “Natural Scientific Psychology, Human Sciences and Metaphysics,” trans. Paul Crowe, in Nenon and Embree, Issues in Husserl’s Ideas II, pp. 8–13. 51. Edmund Husserl, Erste Philosophie (1923/4). Zweiter Teil: Theorie der phänomenologischen Reduktion, ed. Rudolf Boehm, Husserliana 8 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959), p. 123, hereafter cited as Hua 8; Hua 34, p. 12. 52. Hua 34, pp. 16–17. 53. See Hua 8, p. 122. 54. Hua 8, p. 123. 55. CM, § 47, pp. 104–5 (Hua 1, p. 135); Husserl’s italics. 56. FTL, § 93c, p. 230 (Hua 17, p. 237). 57. FTL, § 94, p. 233 (Hua 17, p. 240). 58. FTL, § 99, p. 250 (Hua 17, p. 257). 59. See Crisis, § 53, p. 180 (Hua 6, p. 184). 60. See Ideas I, § 51, Anmerkung. 61. FTL, § 99, p. 251 (Hua 17, p. 258). 62. Hua 17, p. 258. 63. Crisis, § 14, p. 69 (Hua 6, p. 70). 64. See CM, § 40, p. 81 (Hua 1, 115). 65. See CM, § 40, p. 82 (Hua 1, p. 116). 66. CM § 41, pp. 83–84 (Hua 1, p. 117), trans. modified. Cairns translates the sentence as “Transcendency in every form is an immanent existential characteristic, constituted within the ego.” 67. CM, § 41, p. 84 (Hua 1, p. 117). 68. See Karl Jaspers, Philosophie (Berlin: Springer, 1932). English trans lation: Philosophy, trans. E. B. Ashton, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969–71). 69. See Karl Jaspers, “Philosophical Autobiography,” in The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers, ed. Paul A. Schilpp, Library of Living Philosophers (New York: Tudor, 1957), pp. 5–94, esp. p. 40. 70. See Jaspers, Philosophy, vol. 3, p. 6. 71. Karl Jaspers, Philosophy of Existence, trans. Richard F. Grabau (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), pp. 3–4. 72. See Kurt Hoffman, “Basic Concepts of Jaspers’ Philosophy,” in Schilpp, Philosophy of Karl Jaspers, pp. 95–114, esp. p. 99. 73. Jaspers, Philosophy, vol. 2, p. 45.
466 Dermot Moran 74. Jaspers, Philosophy of Existence, p. 21. 75. See ibid., p. 25. 76. See Gerhard Knauss, “The Concept of the ‘Encompassing,’ ” in Schilpp, Philosophy of Karl Jaspers, 149. Jaspers links the notion of the encompassing with Kant’s recognition that we never grasp the world but only things in the world. Hence the world is an idea for Kant; see Jaspers, Philosophy of Existence, p. 20. 77. Jaspers, Philosophy of Existence, p. 23. 78. Ibid., p. 18. 79. Ibid., p. 19. 80. Ibid., p. 26. 81. See Jaspers, Philosophy, vol. 3, p. 219. 82. Jaspers, Philosophy of Existence, p. 74. 83. Jaspers, ibid., p. 76. 84. Jaspers, Philosophy, vol. 3, p. 204. 85. Karl Jaspers, “On My Philosophy,” in Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre, ed. Walter Kaufmann (Cleveland: Meridian, 1970), p. 153. 86. Jaspers, Philosophy, vol. 3, p. 694. 87. Karl Jaspers, Von der Wahrheit, vol. 1 of Philosophische Logik (Munich: Piper, 1958), p. 632. 88. Jaspers, Philosophy, vol. 3, p. 7. 89. Ibid., vol. 3, p. 6. 90. See Karl Jaspers, The Perennial Scope of Philosophy, trans. R. Manheim (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949), p. 17. 91. Jaspers, Philosophy, vol. 3, p. 13. 92. Erich Przywara was a personal friend of both Husserl and Stein. For more on his life and influence, see Thomas F. O’Meara, O.P., Erich Przywara, S.J.: His Theology and His World (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), esp. pp. 90–94 and 119–39. 93. Edith Stein, “Husserl and Aquinas,” p. 27. 94. Ibid., p. 14. 95. Ibid., p. 19. 96. See ibid., p. 18. 97. See Festschrift Edmund Husserl zum 70. Geburstag gewidmet: Ergängzungsband zum Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung (Halle: Niemeyer, 1929). 98. Stein, “Husserl and Aquinas,” p. 9. 99. Ibid., p. 10.
Immanence, Self-Experience, and Transcendence 467 100. Ibid., p. 11. 101. Ibid., p. 12. 102. Ibid. 103. Edith Stein cites Augustine, De Trinitate 15.12.21, a passage that discusses Augustine’s version of the cogito. In rejecting the arguments of the Academic skeptics, Augustine insists that even if we are in error, we know we exist. 104. See Jaspers, Philosophy, vol. 2, p. 33. 105. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 45. 106. See Jean-Luc Marion, “Le phénomène saturé,” in Phénoménologie et théologie, ed. Jean-François Courtine (Paris: Criterion, 1992), pp. 79–128. English translation: “The Saturated Phenomenon,” in Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate, ed. Dominique Janicaud et al., trans. Bernard G. Prusak (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), pp. 176–215; see esp. p. 209. 107. Jean-Luc Marion, “Le phénomène saturé,” p. 210. 108. “Invisable” is from Jean-Luc Marion, “Sketch of the Saturated Phenomenon,” in his Being Given: Towards a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002,) pp. 199–221; the other terms are from Marion, “Sketch of the Saturated Phenomenon,” in his Being Given: Towards a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 211. 109. Marion, “Saturated Phenomenon,” p. 212. 110. Ibid. 111. Jaspers, Philosophy, vol. 2, p. 45.
n i n e t e e n
Presuming the Other from Stein to Husserl Empathy and the Margins of Experience
Belinda McKeon
Habent sua fata libelli. “Books have their fate.” With this time-honored maxim begins Erwin Straus’ eloquent foreword to the English translation of Edith Stein’s work from 1917, Zum Problem der Einfühlung.1 Rendered into English by Waltraut Stein, a grand-niece of the author, that 1964 edition comprised an account of the problems of intersubjective experience that was as full of poise as of provocation, as Stein turned her gaze on the question of empathy between human beings and of its possibilities and limitations, given the conditions of human consciousness. Books have their fate—or, it might be said, their destiny—and such was the achievement of the doctoral dissertation which Stein presented at the University of Freiburg in 1916, under the supervision of Edmund Husserl, that this book, which emerged out of that dissertation, was bound to come into existence, and bound to make an impact 468
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on the phenomenological scene. Its power stemmed not just from the depth and the intelligence of its engagement with the very core of Husserlian phenomenology, and with the intricate problems converging on that core, but from the unique intimacy of its understanding where that phenomenology and those problems were concerned. Here, it was clear immediately, was a thinker on Husserlian phenomenology, writing literally from within Husserlian phenomenology itself. Here was a thinker on the inside track. Stein had been preoccupied— in fact, obsessed—with Husserl’s phenomenology since her teens, had studied with Husserl at Göttingen, and, at Freiburg, had written her dissertation under him while working as his private assistant. Her work as Husserl’s assistant fed enormously into her work on her dissertation; most crucially where her formulation of the problem of empathy was concerned, it gave her a clear window onto the complexity of Husserl’s thought as he developed the manuscript that would, many years later, become his Ideen II. Stein assisted Husserl on the organization and reworking (indeed, very possibly on the rewriting) of the Ideen II manuscripts, and her own manuscript on empathy reflected her access and her intimacy with the complexity of Husserl’s thought. In Zum Problem der Einfühlung, Stein was able to consider and to respond to the emerging shape of Husserl’s changing perspective on phenomenological intersubjectivity and on empathy, long before that perspective would be published (posthumously) under Husserl’s own name. Books have their fate. As a graduate student in the philosophy department at University College Dublin working on a thesis about Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity, and about the problems encountered by Husserl over the course of his career as he reworked and reconsidered that theory, I met with the thorny question of empathy early on in my research. What was this Einfühlung, and how was it different from sympathy, and from compassion, and from less positive interpersonal experiences like projection and presumption—from what might be called pigeonholing? How could Husserlian phenomenology, which accounted so intricately and so compellingly for the intersubjective nature of our experience of the world, and of objects in that world, account also for our intersubjective experience of other subjects—our
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intersubjective nature of intersubjectivity itself—in a manner which both recognized and described the experience of the other subject as other? How, that is, could Husserlian phenomenology account for the other as subject rather than as an object with a horizon, an object containing an open referentiality to other subjects? Was Einfühlung enough? Knowing that I was circling around the question of empathy, and knowing that I was searching for another perspective on the phenomenological problem of otherness, Dr. Gerald Hanratty introduced me to the work of Edith Stein. One day after class—at UCD, he taught a graduate seminar on the philosophy of religion—he beckoned me to step into his office and gave me his copy of Zum Problem der Einfühlung. “Read this,” he said, “and come back to me.” Stein wouldn’t make Husserl easier to grapple with, he warned me; in fact, her thesis would cast light on new complications, new densities in the relation between self and other, and with how that relation could be understood in terms of consciousness and in terms of objects in the world. But those were the complications and the densities worth facing up to, Gerald Hanratty showed me, and Stein’s book was the pathway right into their hub. One morning in 2003, in the library at UCD, I was reading again the first chapter of Stein’s book, photocopies of the copy I had borrowed from Dr. Hanratty. The quality was poor, the ink much fainter than on the original, but I could still make out the marks of Dr Han ratty’s notations, his underlining and his interrogation of Stein’s phenomenological stance. I was reading Stein, but I was reading, too, the shadows of my teacher’s presence, the traces of his thought, the lines and the notes and the question marks where his mind had come up against the mind of Edith Stein. These had been pages from his book, and now, layered over with my own annotations, two years’ worth of annotations at this stage, they were becoming mine; and underneath all of this, of course, they were Stein’s. An intersubjective encounter, in inked and annotated layers: layers of attempted understandings, of attempted Einfühlung. I was looking at that handwriting in the margins, handwriting perhaps thirty years old, and trying to decipher it, trying to put myself in the place of its owner, to understand
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what he had been trying to decipher in Stein, in her paragraphs on primordiality and nonprimordiality, on empathy and fellow feeling, on analogy and association. Marginalia give a snapshot of a mind as it moves, of consciousness meeting and making sense of the objects of its perception. As I read that morning, I became, for a time, focused less on those objects—Stein’s words—than on that subject, that mind which was manifest in the margins. Here on the page, it seemed, was another “I,” another human presence. “In my non-primordial experience I feel, as it were, led by a primordial one not experienced by me but still there, manifesting itself in my non-primordial experience.”2 Those were Stein’s words, interlaced with Gerald Hanratty’s words, overlaid with his emphasis, underscored with his comments. Immersed as I was in Stein’s thesis on the problem of empathy, on the problem of how one “I” grasps the psychic life of a fellow “I,” I found myself using those marginalia as a test case for empathy, as an experiment in how the experience of empathy combines a primordiality of form and a nonprimordiality of content. Habent sua fata libelli. That same morning, I looked up from my reading to check my e-mail and learned the news of Dr. Hanratty’s sudden death. Those notations took on new meaning. New poignancy, yes, but new value, phenomenological value, too. For as distant as they might have been (and were now so much more so, irreversibly so) from a Leib, from that lived-body in which, Stein had insisted, empathy had to be grounded, embodied, for it to have any meaning for the conscious individual, yet they seemed to express more acutely than anything else I had read the tension between the primordial and the nonprimordial, between the keenly felt and the distant, between that which is intensely known and that which can only be guessed at. Unsurprising, perhaps, given that Stein, in her book, frequently used the act of reading as a metaphor for empathy—the act of reading sadness in another’s face, the communal joy that might stem from reading in a newspaper about the fall of a fortress, the young girl reading Shakespeare who thinks she feels Juliet’s love.3 If the act of reading the words, and the world, of another is tangled and complicated, so too is the act of empathizing with another, of meeting with the experience of
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another and accepting it on its own terms—not as a version of one’s own experience, not through the lens of one’s own subjectivity. To know one another, to understand one another, to connect and to get along; with all who knew him, Gerry Hanratty did this much, effortlessly. When I completed my thesis, two years after his death, it seemed apt to dedicate it to his memory. By then, I had moved from a consideration of Stein back to a grappling with her mentor and master, Husserl, for whom the question of empathy persisted as a serious challenge throughout his career. The Cartesian Meditations (1931) represent a departure, on the question of empathy, from the manuscripts and research notes on which Edith Stein would have worked with Husserl at Freiburg. But, in that it was Stein’s editing and reworking of those manuscripts (and, some argue, her writing of some sections) which gave shape and focus to the sections of Ideen II which reckon with the question of empathy, Stein’s shadow—her pencil marks, so to speak, in the margin—can be seen, too, in the work which is regarded as Husserl’s mature work on intersubjectivity, the fifth Cartesian Meditation, which dates from 1928. Like Stein, Husserl argues in the Fifth Meditation that empathy is a specific mode of consciousness which puts us in touch with the feelings and beliefs of others in a manner that is not direct but still highly reliable. But, like Stein, he struggles with the problem of presumption—the presuming of the other, which comes as an unavoidable corollary of the kind of empathic understanding traced and described by them both. — The importance to Husserl of tackling the topic of intersubjectivity is indicated by the length of the Fifth Meditation; it is as long as the other four meditations put together. The Fifth Meditation also possesses a greater sense of undertaking; in fact, as I will show, Husserl develops its argument with a sense of philosophical urgency. Across his extraordinarily prolific body of work, both in his published texts and in the unpublished manuscripts of his Nachlass, it is rare to find Husserl arguing a point with anyone other than himself; it is more usual to find himself referring to himself as being alone in his re-
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searches, as solus ipse.4 As Stein knew from working closely with him in Freiburg, Husserl thought through his writing and was wary of collaboration; to find him arguing with the point of another philosopher is rare, at least until the Crisis, published in 1936. However, in the Fifth Meditation, Husserl sets out to prove a point not to himself but to another: to an imaginary detractor, a shadow across his page, to a questioner who scribbles in the margins of his transcendental phenomenology, challenging its ultimate concern: the possibility of Objective being. Husserl does not evade this challenge; rather, he sets out from it. The Fifth Meditation begins, then, with an acknowledgment that his phenomenology faces a serious philosophical challenge. This challenge is one which must be overcome if phenomenology is truly to merit that status claimed for it in Ideen I: the status of a transcendental philosophy. If it is the case, as he here allows himself to speculate, that the phenomenologist who carries out the epoché and reduces himself to his absolute transcendental ego can become only solus ipse, then phenomenology itself is reduced to a transcendental solipsism. The phenomenologist in that situation may grasp certain knowledge of experience, may intuit the essence of the phenomena he encounters, but that certainty and that intuition extend no further than the limited realm of his own experience and provide no knowledge of the Objective world. To such a phenomenology, which would remain locked in the subjective, the name transcendental could not even be given. To show otherwise is the task with which Husserl presents himself in the Fifth Meditation. And to do so Husserl must face the challenge which was contained in the very idea of an imaginary detractor: the challenge to his phenomenology from the other subject. To secure objectivity, Husserl has first to illustrate that his philosophy is not solipsistic but the very opposite: grounded in, and vitally concerned with, the fact of transcendental intersubjectivity. However, in speaking of the way in which Husserl acknowledges the potential gravity for his transcendental phenomenology of the challenge from solipsism, potential is the word to note. In introducing this challenge as one which “may seem . . . a grave objection,” Husserl
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signals his underlying conviction that the test at hand is one which transcendental phenomenology can pass—that the epoché to the transcendental ego is not, after all, a reduction to solus ipse.5 Husserl’s confidence, then, in the importance of others for phenomenology is manifest even as he allows himself to entertain doubts about its possibility. Nor does he shirk from the seriousness of these doubts. Of the epoché, he states that it “restricts me to the stream of my pure conscious processes.” Such a restriction, he goes on, allows me to know nothing more than what those conscious processes themselves constitute, that is, “the unities” of my experience. And these unities, Husserl reminds us, “are inseparable from my ego and therefore belong to his concreteness itself.”6 At this point, before explicating how the epoché to “pure conscious processes” and the challenge from intersubjectivity threaten, once combined, to institute a fatal incompatibility at the heart of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, it is useful to refer back to the first book of Ideas for an illustration of the epoché just described. Husserl introduces the epoché to bring the subject beyond the natural attitude of mundane experience, beyond worldly objects, toward knowledge of how the world and its meanings are constituted for that subject. For such was the aim of transcendental phenomenology as introduced in Ideas I, and the epoché was the procedure by which that aim would be achieved. Husserl introduced the epoché as an act of “changing the value” of conscious acts; by the epoché’s process of “bracketing,” the character by which these acts posited the world and its objects, their thetic character, could be, not switched off, but turned away from in the direction of the positing itself, to focus, instead, on its structure as an act with an intentional correlate. What was retained, but what never mattered, in bracketing, was the fact of the existent world.7 When we focus on an object of experience in the natural attitude, explains Husserl, our focus is directly on the object—on the tree, to use his example from Ideas I.8 The purpose of the epoché is to suspend this natural standpoint in order to focus on the noema of the object,
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that structural component of my intentional process—in this case, my perception—which allows me to experience that object, through which my perception is directed to that object. When I perform the epoché upon the process of seeing a tree, I am no longer depending on reference to the outside world to understand what this tree means for me; that “real relation . . . is destroyed.”9 And indeed the tree itself could, even while I am perceiving it, be destroyed. But what remains— the noematic structure of my experience—cannot. Reduced to its noematic content, Husserl argues, “the physical thing belonging to Nature” belongs, rather, to the subject; it is reduced to being merely “this perceived tree as perceived which, as perceptual sense, inseparably belongs to the perception.”10 The tree may burn, he goes on, but “the sense—the sense of this perception, something belonging necessarily to its essence—cannot burn up.” It survives for the subject, perceived only as what appears, as it appears. It has, says Husserl, “no chemical elements, no forces, no real properties.”11 In this example from Ideas I, the gift of the epoché to the subject who performs it is certainty—indisputable and indestructible. The language of this passage sketches the epoché in strict terms; it reduces, from the “real relation,” that which previously “belong[ed] to nature,” to the perceived-as-perceived, which “inseparably belongs to the perception.” And this perceived-as-perceived has “no real properties.”12 If we turn back to the Fifth Meditation, it is immediately clear that the language Husserl uses to characterize the reduced experience of an inanimate object like a tree becomes problematic if applied to the ego’s experience, in the epoché, of the Other subject. Husserl himself draws attention to the fact that it is the very words central to the description of the tree-experience which are controversial where the experience of the Other is concerned. Once more adopting the perspective of the critic, Husserl brings up the problem of “other egos,” asking if they are “surely . . . not a mere intending and intended in me, merely synthetic unities of possible verification in me, but, according to their sense, precisely others? ”13 The problem which the Other represents for transcendental phenomenology is, then, a problem of the unities of experience, and of
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their inseparable belonging to, their being a part of, the transcendental ego. Husserl raises the question of whether other egos, as others, can ever belong to the ego so inseparably, as such unities of experience. And he points to the doctrine that will triumph over transcendental phenomenology, if such a belonging cannot be secured: transcendental realism, which makes a fixed distinction between the “immanency of the ego” and “the transcendency of the Other,” and, indeed, of the entire world external to the ego. Transcendental realism allows to the ego his “ideas” of the world, constituted “immanently” by him, but insists that beyond these ideas remains “the world that exists in itself,” which “must still be sought.” It prescribes, then, a bridge between internal and external worlds which must be crossed if the ego is to secure any sort of Objective truth; in fact, it reduces the subjectivity-objectivity divide to the divide between appearance and reality. Husserl is here framing the challenge at hand in stark terms. Nowhere in this meditation does Husserl name the imaginary detractor whose accusation of solipsism he is so determined to disprove. However, he does name the other who has caused him to undertake the enormous task of phenomenological explication ahead, and when he does so his choice of terminology is telling. This task of explication has been necessitated, writes Husserl, by the “alter ego.” This introduces a distinction maintained so strictly in the Fifth Meditation that Husserl only uses its first term to stress that it is not his concern: the distinction between other and alter ego. As he points out in a footnote, the Fifth Meditation concerns itself not with “other men” but with “the manner in which the ego (as the transcendental onlooker experiences him transcendentally) constitutes within himself the distinction between Ego and Other Ego.” This may look like the everyday difference “that presents itself first of all in the phenomenon, ‘world,’ ” writes Husserl, but it is not. This footnote is perhaps the most crucial part of Husserl’s meditation because it sets out what he is, and is not, concerned with. The ego, as alter ego, is not the person but the phenomenon experienced by the person when he has become the “transcendental onlooker” who experiences phenomena transcendentally. Husserl is concerned with the person after he has entered the transcendental realm—not before.
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He does not become a different person; rather, he comes into focus in a new way. It was Husserl’s philosophical ambition to enable this shift of focus by disconnecting the natural standpoint, to “inhibit the acceptance of the Objective world.”14 In terms of the ego’s experience of the Other, this means inhibiting the relationship, the way in which one person accepts another in the Objective world, the world of the natural attitude. It means deliberately changing focus to gain access to the structures of consciousness of which that relationship is made. Only by bearing this strict distinction in mind is it possible to understand Husserl’s stance on the Other. The parameters set by Husserl in this meditation for the encounter with the existence of the other as alter ego are precise. The task is not to concern himself with the explanation or investigation of human relationships but to obtain “insight into the explicit and implicit intentionality wherein the alter ego becomes evinced and verified in the realm of our transcendental ego.”15 The phenomenologist must, he goes on, “discover in what intentionalities, syntheses, motivations, the sense ‘other ego’ becomes fashioned in me and, under the title, harmonious experience of someone else, becomes verified as existing and even as itself there in its own manner.”16 The task ahead for Husserl, then, is one of phenomenological explication: thorough explication of a sense which is part of the realm of transcendental experience. But Husserl acknowledges that this will not be a straightforward explication. Reintroducing the terminology which was first used in Ideas I—the noema and noesis as correlative parts of the structure of the mental process—he indicates that, as ever, it is by examining “the noematic-ontic content” of an object of experience as a “correlate of my cogito” that the phenomenologist can set out on his quest to secure pure meaning. However, when the noematic-ontic content in question is that of the Other, that task takes on a new “many-sidedness and difficulty,” admits Husserl. When the task of phenomenology is to explicate a “noematic-ontic content” of such “remarkableness and multiplicity” as that of the alter ego, no easy path to understanding can be expected.17
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It is vital to emphasize the role which the lack of discordance or “incompatibilities” in the experience of the other plays in Husserl’s account of the Fifth Meditation and associatively, in his account of the constitution of an Objective world. The condition for experience of the other as other is the harmonious appearance of the other’s bodily being, which allows me to apperceive him as animate organism, followed by the harmonious unfolding of his being as an animate organism, which triggers a further pairing, to the level of a monad, with a primordial world and with a concrete ego that constitutes and intends just like mine. And it is this “just like mine” which is the harmony effecting the final pairing, of monadic subjectivity with existence as an ego, as an alter ego. All of this happens by virtue of varying degrees of associative pairing, which Husserl describes as “an assimilation” and an “accommodation of the sense of one member to that of the other.”18 All of this unfolds toward the verification of Objective being and of the possibility of Objective knowledge; the institution of the alter ego is the “primal institution” for what Husserl speaks of as a “community” of intersubjectivity, a community produced by virtue of experiencing someone else.19 This notion of community is vital if the phenomenologist is to be able to speak of the ego who perceives the other as simultaneously perceiving that the other and himself are looking at the same world, even though this perceiving goes on exclusively within the sphere of my ownness.20 Only by virtue of the absence in experience of the other of what Husserl calls the interference of incompatibilities (Unverträglichkeiten) can this phenomenological analysis proceed to the assertion of the Objective world. As Husserl describes it, the Objective world is the world existing for us and only by virtue of our own sense-producing sources—a world that can have neither sense nor existence for us otherwise. That is, it has existence by virtue of a harmonious confirmation of the apperceptive constitution; this harmony between the experiences of diverse egos produces the intersubjective agreement on the world which Husserl argues to be the basis of Objective being.21 Only the “essentially unique connectedness” between experiencing egos gives rise to an actual community, and precisely the one that
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“makes transcendentally possible the being of a world, a world of men and of things”: that is, of Objective being. This is why Husserl, at the close of his meditation, describes it as “essentially necessary” that the world constituted in me, and “in any community of monads that is imaginable by me,” be a world of men and that, in each particular man, “it be more or less perfectly constituted intrapsychically.”22 And that “more or less” perfect intrapsychic constitution of the world takes place in intentional processes and systems of intentionality, as has been seen in the ego’s tenuous journey toward apperceiving the other as a full alter ego. But, as also seen in that account, those intentional processes and systems of intentionality, in the experience of the other, are triggered only by the normal unfolding of behavior and by the confirmation in that other of a degree of similarity to the ego, and hence to all members of the constituting community. It is apt that Husserl uses the phrase “more or less perfectly” as he talks about this intrapsychic constitution of the world which gives it to us as intersubjectively agreed upon and hence as Objective in its validity. For this intrapsychic constitution as he sets it out through the account of empathy given in his Fifth Meditation is far from perfect. My quarrel is not with the notion that meaning, to be Objective, must be intersubjective; on the contrary, what renders this Meditation such a perceptive and absorbing account of the constitution of intersubjective meaning is Husserl’s description of a community of others as, together, constituting a world of meaningful experience. As participants in what Husserl calls that “open community of monads” that is transcendental intersubjectivity, each experiencing subject is apperceivable by his fellow subject not just as an other but as an other among others. Here is Husserl’s wonderful description which conjures up the image of a diverse and ever-transforming world of experience: “It is . . . clear that men become apperceivable only as finding Others and still more Others, not just in the realm of actuality but likewise in the realm of possibility, at their own pleasure. Nature then becomes a Nature that includes an open plurality of men . . . distributed one knows not how in infinite space, as subjects of possible intercommunion.”23
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This idea of an intersubjective indeterminacy of possibility in intersubjective community, of the intersubjective community unfolding in its different permutations “one knows not how,” of the members of that community living in an open field of potentiality, “finding Others and still more Others” with whom to generate and re-generate the meaning of their shared world, is one of the richest accounts of phenomenological intersubjectivity to be found in the literature. Rich too is Husserl’s investigation into the layers by which I come to regard the other as other, in the course of which the ego is led to see that he has lived with regard to coexisting others always, at the deepest level of his constitution of experience; this investigation illustrates the unconscious harmony in which, in most circumstances, we coexist with others, at a level before disagreement is constituted. This description goes back to Stein’s description of intersubjective oneness, which, she stresses, can come about only when the fundamental intersubjective relationship is already at work: “Not through the feeling of oneness, but through empathizing, do we experience others. The feeling of oneness and the enrichment of our own experience become possible through empathy.”24 As for oneness, so it is for strife. That preexistent commonality, that intrapsychic constitution of experience, that apperception of the other as another, rather than as a thing, precedes any breakdowns in mundane life in which we fall into modes of disharmonious constitution positing the other as just that thing, the depersonalization involved in war and in genocide being the most obvious example. But these disharmonious modes, Husserl shows, have meaning only on the basis of a much more fundamental shared agreement about worldmeanings; it is only out of unity that we can make sense of the world, and of one another, sufficiently to hate, to abuse, to destroy. Even those who cannot see the others whom they destroy, who kill by night from machines which obliterate the full reality of what has been done, must reckon with the notion of a community of all, elaborated, once again with almost poetic force, by Husserl: “For each man, every other is implicit in this horizon [the open, undetermined horizon of experience]—physically, psychophysically, in respect of what is inter-
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nal to the other’s psyche—and is thus in principle a realm of endless accessibilities, though in fact most other men remain horizonal.”25 And in less eventful everyday existence, too, there are many situations in which the “continuously harmonious behaviour” of the other is experienced unobtrusively and can be expected to unfold in an ongoing synthesis. There is, for example, the other in the oncoming car at night who, at a fundamental level, fulfills my expectation of him as other by stopping at a red light, rather than proceeding unwittingly, as would happen if the car were not in the control of an other who shares with me, at a foundational level, the ways of making sense of the world. At a more sophisticated level, the level that Husserl characterizes in the Fifth Meditation as Einfühlung, there is the other in the oncoming car who dips his headlights because he, like me, has experienced the discomfort of the alternative and because, as an other, he regards me as desiring to avoid the same discomfort again. These are simple examples, but they illustrate the degree to which Husserl’s explication of other-experience exposes and interrogates in a positive way all that we take for granted in our experience of what is, fundamentally, an intersubjective world. There remains a problem, however, with this account of intersubjectivity. In Husserl’s determination to prove the possibility of Objective being, he reroutes his path toward that achievement to avoid— within this explication at least—the possibilities of discordance and disharmony which exist not at the mundane level but at the very level at which the intersubjective constitution of meaning takes place. Certain human states and conditions—schizophrenia, for example, and other mental illnesses, can be said to arise out of just such a difference from “normal” appearance-systems and through the decisive lack of “continuously harmonious behaviour.” In the account of the Fifth Meditation, however, that lack of harmony in the outward behavior of the body of the other—seen from the perspective of the sphere of ownness to which the abstractive reduction, the extreme form of epoché, has taken the ego—is described by Husserl as justification for this experiencing of the other as a “pseudo-organism, precisely if there is something discordant about his behaviour.”26
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It is not the ethical implications of such an exclusion with which I am concerned here; on the basis of the articles which had already been published in the Kaizo by the time of the Paris lectures constituting the Cartesian Meditations, it is obvious that Husserl considers his phenomenology as an ethical task concerned with the intersubjective renewal and transformation of culture, to yield unity through difference, rather than merely to rely upon preexisting unity. “We are human beings,” Husserl writes in one of the Kaizo articles, “freely willing subjects who together actively intervene in our [own] environing world, constantly shaping it along with others. We do so whether we want to or not, whether for better or for worse. Can we not also do it reasonably; is reasonability and excellence of ability not within our power?”27 This plea indicates quite clearly, I think, that if Husserl had thought concretely about the problem of mental illness within his Meditation he would have conceived of the concept of intersubjective experience differently. Certainly, the Husserl of the 1920s is a phenomenologist of inclusivity. For he speaks, within the Fifth Meditation, of intersubjectivity and Objective being as “a world of men and culture,”28 as an everchanging, ever-renewable way of life, from which no human being, in principle, need be excluded. Despite this inclusivity, however, Husserl’s methodological approach to the other in this meditation bears a fundamental flaw, one which may well have ethical implications. The abstractive reduction of this Meditation is to a “sphere of ownness” from which the ego is incapable of discerning, through anything other than perfectly harmonious and typical behavior, the existence of another ego, of another human subject, and—to bring the movement of the reduction back up to the level of mundanization from which it descends—from which the ego is capable of making an error which designates a fellow man as a “pseudo-organism” simply because his behavior cannot be accounted for within a supposedly “universal” phenomenon of pairing which teams a “primal institution” of human subjectivity within the ego’s sphere of ownness with a “new case” of bodiliness in the perceptual sphere. If that bodiliness appears with “incompatibilities” with the sense of that “primal instituting,” an error may arise about whether a
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body is, in fact, merely a body or actually an animate organism and therefore an alter ego. Husserl does allow, in his description of this process of apperception through pairing, and through the implicit call on the “primal institution” of existence as an animate organism, for the possibility of error. The ego can be mistaken in its apprehension of a bodily form as another animate organism, as many visitors to Madame Tussaud’s will attest. In fact, Husserl discloses such an error in his Analysen zur Passiven Synthesis, claiming that the conflict exists not at the level of perception but at the level of apprehension; Husserl’s thinking on perception at this stage is that it cannot be mistaken but has validity in adequation—that is, in its being intended by a subject. Only when the intention clashes with the object “as it actually looks” does error truly arise, as Husserl states in a lecture on perception from 1904/5.29 Which is to say, the mistake happens in the interpretation of what is seen (a body) as that which does not exist (a person). And if such a mistake occurs, it can easily be corrected in a withdrawal of the pairing act and in a revision of the primal institution. Husserl, in fact, accounts for the possibility of the Objective world by virtue of the possibility of such corrections; it has existence, he says, by virtue of “a harmonious confirmation of the apperceptive constitution, once this has succeeded; a confirmation thereof by the continuance of experiencing life with a consistent harmoniousness, which always becomes re-established as extending through ‘corrections.’ ”30 “Once this has succeeded”: the emphasis here is mine. I have commented upon the particular urgency with which Husserl writes in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation, and perhaps nowhere is that urgency more apparent than in this line. For whereas Husserl goes on to show that the Objective world is constituted through, and not after, the harmonious confirmation of experiences and of meanings at an intersubjective level, he writes here as though this confirmation is a task to be got quickly out of the way, its success a formality with which to hurriedly dispense, so that the real business of the Objective world can be hastened along in its place. And it can be seen, too, from this passage that the conditions for the existence of the Objective world and of the
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existence of the other as other are mirror images of one another, on the methodological level. Both are required to provide “harmonious confirmation” of the apperception of the ego, and at a higher level of the egoic community, in order to be regarded just as they are. The “corrections” through which the harmoniousness necessary for the Objective world to be verified as actually existing can be secured are also mirrored at the level of experience of the other: when, in a mistaken perception, a wax figurine is taken for a body—or, to go to the opposite pole, when a mime artist is taken as a statue—the “primal institution” of subjectivity is simply held back or unfolded, depending on what the realization of the mistake requires, and intersubjective experience continues to unfold concordantly, or, from the point of view of Husserl’s explicit purposes in this text, continues to verify the existence of objectivity. Doubtlessly, perception may be mistaken and may correct itself and recommence as concordant. In the normal course of experience, mistakes can be made about the physical institution of human beings which require correction by means of an institutive process just like that described by Husserl. However—and it is on this point specifically that I contest Husserl’s account of intersubjective experience—it is also the case that, in the “normal” course of experience, it is possible to encounter a being whose behavior, in his physical embodiment or in his animate organism (or both) does not strike the perceiving ego as harmonious, does not present to me a physical coherence, and does not, as a direct presentation, guide my appresentations of him as another human “in a synthetically harmonious fashion.”31 All the same, this being is an alter ego, another human subject, a fellow man—and to deny this reality simply on the basis of his failure to behave in a way that harmonizes with my own primal institution of subjectivity, one which may have been instituted without even the trace of experience of such disharmony, is absurd. Take the example of a schizophrenic who sits perfectly still, who dares not move a muscle out of terror at the auditory hallucinations that plague him. Take the example of the severely physically disabled person whose limbs are twisted into a paralysis, who cannot speak and who types with his nose or his tongue.
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Take the example of the child born in Chernobyl whose body is so badly disfigured that it is frightening to regard. My argument is not that Husserl’s Fifth Cartesian Meditation has no place for these human subjects but rather that the nature of the reduction, and of Husserl’s subsequent account of the layers of otherexperience by which his Meditation proceeds, holds it back from a realization of such subjects and from the possibility of their accommodation. The reduction to the sphere of ownness is a reduction to a level at which the experience of the other unfolds, not in the “open” and “free” horizonality of which Husserl speaks so eloquently in parts of the Meditation quoted above, but in a limited, egological sphere which makes a normative decision about the existence or nonexistence of the other as other, on the basis of a normative dimension which has been narrowed to the dimension of egology—in fact, not even that, but a dimension of hyperegology, in which every reference to anything other than the ego has been bracketed. The “I” constitutes the sphere of his own experience, but in the absence of any trace of otherness in this sphere of ownness he must also constitute his own standards of normality and abnormality. This means that when it comes to the encounter with the other, the first decision on who is other and who is not, who is an animate organism and who merely a “pseudo-organism,” is backed only by the standards the ego has himself constituted. As for the possibility of “correction” in the mistaken attribution to an experienced body of otherness or existence as a “pseudo- organism,” whichever the case may be: this, too, rests on the assumption that all instances of disharmony or discordance can be corrected from the perspective of the ego, can be accounted for concordantly with the ego’s “primal institution” of subjectivity, so that the “universally” effective phenomenon of pairing can enter the scene to make sense of the previously disharmonious-seeming other as, after all, an Other just like me. The problem, however, is that some disharmonies simply do not go away. Some discordances do not melt into the past like the momentary confusion of a wax figurine with a real human being. For the schizophrenic and the disabled person, this disharmony is long term and may well be permanent. There is no change in such
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people’s state, in the moment, or the week, or the year after the mistaken judgment of them as something other than an animate organism has been made—no change against which to correct that judgment and by which to incorporate them into experience by virtue of the “primal institution.”32 Obviously, to the ego who apperceives otherness on the basis of his own standards of what subjectivity comprises, this is of no help. Within Husserl’s methodology, only “changing but incessantly harmonious behaviour” can prove otherness, can enable apperception of the other as other, rather than as a thing. That it may be possible, within everyday experience, to recognize these limit-others as others despite their disfigurement, their incoherent babbling, their inability to speak, is, unfortunately for Husserl, entirely beside the point here. The point is that in his purportedly comprehensive description of the experience of otherness, and, through that, of intersubjective community, and, through that again, to objectivity, Husserl fails to account for this possibility. His method does not allow for it. What is in question in the example of the schizophrenic or of the physically disfigured or disabled person is a lack of harmonious confirmation on the level at which Husserl addresses the problem of meaningful experience in the Fifth Meditation—that of constitution— and not on one of the levels that he, rightly, deems relevant to this investigation. Such levels would include the level of social prejudice, for example, or the level at which more minor or less profound strangenesses of physical or psychic makeup manifest themselves. When I argue that the behavior of these others is disharmonious, I mean, particularly in the case of the schizophrenic, that it makes no sense, not only to the “normal” ego, but to the schizophrenic himself. The same can be said of the severely intellectually disabled person. There certainly exists the argument that, for this reason, such subjects cannot truly participate in intersubjectivity. With this argument I disagree. The structure of intersubjectivity as horizonal, as set out by Husserl in this text, does not preclude the possibility of participants in intersubjectivity whose participation consists solely of their very existence and of the impact they have upon others. In the Fifth Meditation, however, this is a potential left unrealized.
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As a result, the “transcendental intersubjectivity” of which Husserl speaks, the “community of monads,” must be viewed as either exclusionary of these limit-others or as fundamentally flawed. Unfortunately, that rich phrase from the Meditation—that phrase about the intersubjective horizon being, “in principle, a realm of endless accessibility, though in fact most other men remain horizonal”—must be denied as it stands within this text.33 For, without an account of these limit-others which present such a challenge to the ability of Husserl’s transcendental ego to account for otherness, “every other” is not implicit in the horizon of community. Community is not, therefore, “a realm of endless accessibility” but a half-truth of general accessibility and occasional, and untreated, inaccessibility. And while “most other men remain horizonal” in the account of the Fifth Meditation, some don’t even make it that far. Some, in the scheme of experience set out by Husserl, in an account of empathy, no less, can be regarded only as “pseudo-organisms” because they fail to harmonize with the expectation of the norm. “What I can re-understand, to what extent I can empathize,” writes Husserl in another text on intersubjectivity, “is determined by the ideal variations of the archetypal human being.”34 The ego is this human being, and the other body resembling the primordial subject is, he writes, “supplemented with the same supplementary meaning context,” or Sinnesbestand, that belongs to the subject’s body “under corresponding circumstances and with the possible variations which belong to mine.”35 My own body, argues Husserl, “as given to inwardly directed or solipsistic experience,” is thus the norm, “the archetypal apperception.” Everything else is a variation upon this norm.36 If the self, through Husserlian empathy, can apprehend knowingly only what is typical or familiar in others, only what makes sense on the self ’s own terms, then that self, while it may appear to be in an intersubjective community, is still rooted in a subjective realm. The shadows in the margin, to the Husserlian ego, make sense only if they bear strong resemblance to the shadows of the self. But this is not intersubjectivity. Neither is it solipsism, but in terms of Husserl’s determination to secure objectivity, it is scarcely much better. And as far as the Fifth Cartesian Meditation is concerned, that very determination on Husserl’s part to secure the prize of objectivity, of clear and certain
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knowledge of the Objective world, may be the underlying problem. Husserl’s methodological blindness in this work toward the possibility of continuously nonharmonious otherness is arguably the direct consequence of his urgent need to progress in explication, through the layers of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, toward the home stretch of the verification of the objective world and of the possibility of objective knowledge. Husserl has always argued that Objectivity is constituted intersubjectively, so it is no surprise—and no problem, methodologically speaking—to find him arguing that objectivity can be shown to exist only through a “harmonious confirmation of the apperceptive constitution” of the experience of intersubjectivity.37 However, when Husserl imposes exactly the same requirement on the experience of the individual other, he inadvertently stymies the possibility of such a harmonious confirmation at the level of intersubjectivity. Intersubjectivity which excludes those incapable of harmonious confirmation of apperception at the level of individual encounters is not full intersubjectivity. This seems, where the Husserl of the Fifth Meditation is concerned, to be methodological error born out of haste in the quest for objectivity. The latter after all is his priority in this meditation. The evidence, on the other hand, suggests that his priority should lie elsewhere: in the development of a rigorous and dynamic method of accounting for, and explicating, all intersubjective experience—even that experience on the very farthest edges of the shared and shadowy horizon. Notes 1. Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, trans. Waltraut Stein (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964). 2. Ibid., p. 11. 3. Ibid., pp. 10, 17, 30. 4. Edmund Husserl, Briefwechsel, ed. Karl and Elizabeth Schuhmann (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), vol. 5, p. 137. 5. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditation V, in The Essential Husserl: Basic Writings in Transcendental Phenomenology, ed. Donn Welton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), § 42, p. 135, italics mine; hereafter cited as CM.
Presuming the Other from Stein to Husserl 489 6. CM, § 42, p. 135. 7. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch, ed. Walter Biemel, Husserliana 3 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950), § 31, p. 59. 8. Ibid., §§ 87–96. 9. Ibid., § 88, p. 215. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., § 89, p. 216. What Husserl wants to account for, with the epoché, is the manner in which the object of perception, here the tree-object, as perceived, appears in consciousness. The “perceived” tree contains nothing in itself but what appears, exactly as it appears. 12. Ibid. 13. CM, § 42, p. 135. 14. CM, § 44 n., p. 137. 15. CM, § 42, p. 136. 16. CM, § 42, p. 136. 17. CM, § 43, p. 136. 18. CM, § 54, p. 151. 19. CM, § 55, p. 152. 20. CM, § 55, p. 155. 21. CM, § 56, p. 157. 22. CM, § 56, p. 158. 23. CM, § 56, p. 158. 24. Stein, On the Problem, p. 17. 25. CM, § 56, p. 158. 26. CM, § 52, p. 149. 27. Edmund Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge, 1922–1937, ed. T. Nenon and H. R. Sepp, Husserliana 27 (The Hague: Kluwer, 1988), p. 4. English translation: Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology after Husserl, trans. Anthony Steinbock (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1995), p. 205. 28. CM, § 55. 29. Edmund Husserl, Ms. F 1 9, 69a/66b (1898/1904–5), Husserl- Archief Leuven, cited in Steinbock, Home and Beyond, pp. 129, 290. 30. CM, § 55, p. 155; italics mine. 31. CM, § 52, p. 149. 32. When Husserl comments (CM, § 55, p. 152) that harmoniousness is also preserved “by virtue of a recasting of apperceptions through distinguishing between normality and abnormalities (as modifications thereof), or by virtue of the constitution of new unities throughout the changes involved in
490 Belinda McKeon abnormalities,” he hints at the possibility of a way of incorporating the limitor extreme-other into the account of intersubjective experience, as a “new unity,” a new meaningfulness. However, within the framework established by the reduction to the sphere of ownness, “new unities” will simply not be constructed out of the experience of the limit-other. This is because their construction would require, first, the possibility of a recognition of otherness on the basis of something other than harmony. Only then could begin the construction of a “new unity” of how otherness experiences the world, constitutionally speaking, in a radically different way from me. 33. CM, § 56, p. 158. 34. Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjectivität: Texte aus dem Nachlaß, Zweiter Teil: 1921–28, ed. Iso Kern, Husserliana 13 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), p. 126. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. CM, § 55, p. 155.
t w e n t y
The Unity of Thought in Aristotle, Kant, and Heidegger Brian Elliott
At the end of the spirited “theological” book (XII) of his Metaphysics, Aristotle cites the words of Athena from the Iliad: “A multitude of leaders is not good—let there be one leader!”1 Within its immediate theoretical context the purpose of Aristotle’s citation is to underscore his insistence on the necessity of positing a single ultimate cause for all that exists. For Aristotle, any division or multiplication of this ultimate cause would imply cosmological imperfection and so compromise the principle of optimal goodness that he presupposes. At first glance, the Aristotelian assertion of a single, indivisible originating cause of existence in the form of the “unmoved mover” appears to be of little consequence for the subsequent development of philosophical ontology. Yet, given the indissoluble binding of the theological and ontological within Aristotle’s thinking, the basic theological posit had profound consequences for his conception of thinking and human understanding, a conception which in one form or another came to dominate Western thought. 491
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This essay attempts to throw light on one particular intellectual confluence that exhibits the asserted concern within Western thought to discover a single ultimate principle of ontological or cognitive unity. Admittedly, the nature of such an investigation involves broad historical brushstrokes. To draw out the philosophical development in question, the theme of the unity of thought will be examined with reference to two further thinkers in addition to Aristotle, namely Kant and Heidegger. The former is chosen in light of his generally acknowledged championing of antimetaphysical thinking. The early Heidegger, despite inaugurating a program of “fundamental ontology,” understands his efforts as a continuation of Kant’s antimetaphysical program, efforts which endeavor to point toward a truly postmetaphysical manner of thinking. What I hope to show through the following discussion is that all three thinkers hold true to the overriding concern for a singular source of unity in thinking. In addition to this basic common concern, however, I wish to adduce evidence of a shift in the conception of this unity from a self-identical and circular thought process (Aristotle’s idea of pure nous as purely self-reflective thought) to a movement of imaginative conception. Finally, this shift, which is charted through following key motifs in the thinkers in question, develops in parallel with a gradually consolidated recognition of time as the basis of unity within human understanding and thought. Aristotle’s Psychological Account of Unity in De Anima Aristotle’s writings permit two principal ways of elucidating his conception of unity: first, via his analysis of primary substance (ousia) in the central books of the Metaphysics and second, through the theoretical psychology of De Anima. To maintain focus and to provide a plausible linkage to Kant, I shall limit my comments to Aristotle’s theory of unity within De Anima.2 Sensibility as the Basic Function of the Human Mind Of all writings within the Aristotelian corpus, De Anima comes closest to representing what can be considered a sketch for a general anthro-
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pology. Not that Aristotle considers the soul uniquely human. Following Plato he recognizes a tripartite division of faculties within the soul: the nutritive, sensible, and rational or logical (413a22–b32). Of these it is the logical faculty which is deemed uniquely human (414b16–19). In the first book of De Anima Aristotle articulates a key insight which is also to be found within the Metaphysics: “Unity and being are said in many ways; the proper sense is being-at-an-end [entelecheia]” (412b8– 9).3 What I translate here somewhat literally as “being-at-an-end” (more usually rendered as “actuality”) constitutes Aristotle’s dynamic conception of being proper. With a view to the current task of explicating the unity of thought in Aristotle, this conception can be taken as a point of departure: unity is being-in-actuality. But how is this related to Aristotle’s account of thinking? Aristotle remarks that “the ancients asserted that thinking [phronein] and perceiving [aisthanesthai] are the same” (427a21–22). Though this claim is rejected, Aristotle goes to great lengths to demonstrate the profound parallel between these two fundamental capacities of the soul. Here two determinations strike me as most telling. First, perception is said to be a “mean of opposition in that which is perceptible” (424a4–5). Aristotle uses the same word to explicate perception as he chooses to designate the key regulative principle of action in the Nicomachean Ethics: meson or mesotes, the mean (NE 1106b35–1107a9). Just as the effective moral agent is thought of as arriving at the central position between the extremes of action, so too here the movement of the perceptive faculty is drawn toward a center of equilibrium. The mean is further determined to be a capacity for differentiation (to kritikon) that “relates to each of the extremes in turn” (De An. 424a6–7). I take this mental act of differentiation to indicate that perceptual acts involve repeated apprehension of sensible extremes, so that the actual sensible properties of the object of current perception can be placed at some point on a spectrum between these extremes. If the analogy with Aristotle’s account of ethical virtues is valid, it can be further assumed that what counts as a perceptual mean will be relative to a particular subject’s sense organs. Aristotle’s second basic determination grasps perception as “the receptive capacity of sensible forms without matter” (De An. 424a17– 19). What prompts him to speak here of a reception of forms without
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matter? The difficulty he is attempting to address consists in the absurdity of supposing that what is perceived resides as a concrete individual literally in the perceptive faculty. Aristotle’s account of perception is distinct both from an idealism that accords the formation of perceptual experience to acts of the perceiving subject and a fortiori from a skepticism that questions that subject’s genuine access to things themselves. Aristotle’s concern when attempting a theoretical explication of perception is not with whether our perceptive faculty actually reaches what is perceived but with how a perceptual overreaching on our part is best to be elucidated.4 By overreaching I refer to what is added to the perceptual experience on the part of the perceiving subject. Expressing it this way immediately suggests, despite my earlier remark, some sort of transcendental idealism of a Kantian kind. Aristotle’s idea of the perceptive capacity as a critical movement oscillating from one extreme of the perceived to the other offers a preliminary hint as to the nature of the overreaching referred to above. The ontological articulation of the oscillation is grounded in Aristotelian terms in the conceptual pairing of actuality and potentiality (energeia and dunamis). According to this theoretical opposition, the “actuality of the perceived and of that which perceives are one in the perceptive faculty” itself (De An. 426a9–10). In this way we find that in Aristotle the “essence” of perception takes the form of a unity or coincidence of the perceptual agent and object. If the account of unity initially discussed is posited, then perceptual unity signifies the actu alizing operation of the perceptual faculty with respect to its proper object. This rather opaque formula obviously requires further clari fication. For Aristotle anything that can be perceived admits of the general characterization of being changeable and contingent, that is, “what can be otherwise.” This is so because he takes all possible objects of perception to contain a constitutive material element or principle, in virtue of which it possesses the capacity for change and movement (e.g., Met. 1069b3–27). Given this general characterization of the objects of perception as constantly subject to change, the central question which arises might be formulated in the following manner: How is it that we
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perceive, not merely a succession of seemingly unrelated sensible variations, but objects of apparently relatively stable identity, which while undergoing change yet remain in each case one? As already noted, Aristotle’s proposed answer to this question is that perception itself is to be understood as a “critical” apprehension of the sensible. It follows from this that any theory which grasps perception as devoid of the putative “critical function” and as a largely passive reception of a constantly chaotic multiplicity of impressions must be rejected as basically false. In calling perception a mean, a critical capacity, or, elsewhere in De Anima, a logos or proportion, Aristotle accords an essential function of ordering and unification to our perceptual faculty. With this in mind, the Aristotelian position allows for an alternative formulation: moving between sensible extremes, perception registers the differences exhibited by this or that perceptual object and by doing so abstracts the stable forms and features that inhere within it. This registration of difference can be considered a “reading” or selecting (legein) out of what is unitary within immediate sensible difference. It appears that for Aristotle it is through this act of abstractive selection that human cognition arrives at unity with respect to the objects of experience: “Yet what asserts that there is difference must be one” (De An. 426b20–21). Finally, if according to the Aristotelian analysis the essence of perception consists in the unification of the object and the mental power of perception, and if the former is subject to continuous change, then the ultimate source of unity must reside in the first instance within the cognizing agent or subject in and through the perceptual act.5 The Imagination as the Mediating Faculty of Sensibility and Intellect Aristotle’s treatise on the soul is organized in such a way that the ex position of the intellect (dianoia) is arrived at by means of a foregoing account of sensibility. In attributing to the soul’s sensibility a critical or logical capacity, Aristotle is concerned to avoid the potential impasse that would result if sensibility and the intellect were considered
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as lacking any common features or functions. If on the contrary there is an essential affinity between these two basic constituents of the rational soul, then this means, among other things, that within sensibility itself there lies a principle of cognitive autonomy with respect to what is perceived. Recalling the Aristotelian account of perception initially cited, this freedom of sensibility may be identified with the repeated oscillation between perceptual extremes, a movement that abstracts or draws stable, unitary forms out from the material element of the perceived object. A repeated mental act that traverses the extremes of the perceived object can accordingly be understood as an act of abstraction that identifies formal features of an object which are grasped as independent of its material presence. It can be further posited that it is through such a cognitive process of identification that what Aristotle calls “mental images” (phantasiai) originate with the mind: “For each sense organ is receptive of the perceived object, but without its matter. This is why, even when the objects of perception are gone, sensations and mental images are still present in the sense organ.”6 Closer inspection makes it clear that it is the imaginative faculty which for Aristotle acts as the principal cognitive mediator between sensibility and the intellect. According to De Anima the imagination, while acting to connect sensibility and the intellect, differs essentially from them both (427b14–15). Clearly operating within the context of the psychological hierarchy of mental faculties present within the Metaphysics and the Nicomachean Ethics, in De Anima Aristotle places phantasia between perception and “conception” (hypolepsis). Antici pating the subsequent determination of thinking (noein) as a combination of imagination and conception, Aristotle shows an interest in the imaginative capacity of the soul that is motivated by his ultimate concern with arriving at an adequate account of the intellect. According to Aristotle there can be no imagination without sensibility, such that the former is to be understood as a movement “in what perceives and in relation to which perception exists” (De An. 428b13–14). The cognitive process or movement of the imagination is further said to issue from perception in the sense of actuality (kat’ energeian).7 Bearing in mind the “logical” function of the perceptual
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act discussed earlier, it follows that the imagination represents for Aristotle a manner of cognitive unification. This must be taken to mean that there can be no act of imagination that is not in some sense grounded in a prior act of perception. As noted above, however, for Aristotle the perceptual act results in a unification of the mental power and object of perception (De An. 425b26–426a1). It would appear to follow from this that an imagining cannot be thought of as a “mere representation” of perceptual objects, as an “idea” or “impression” which may turn out to bear no positive resemblance to the perceived. Rather, insofar as acts of imagination are taken to be grounded in or derivative of acts of perception, they must be taken by Aristotle to relate to the “things in themselves.”8 If the imagination shares with perception such a “cognitive relation” to reality, however, how is it taken to differ from the latter? In view of the fact that Aristotle throughout his writings regards the intellect as the ultimate source of cognitive unity, his positioning of the imagination between perception and conception implies that it realizes a greater degree of unification than that possible for sensibility alone. Although, as indicated above, in my view all explications in De Anima are carried out with a view to an eventual elucidation of the intellect (nous), the imagination’s place within Aristotle’s mental economy remains essentially ambiguous and problematic. As he remarks toward the end of his treatise when he has been drawn back to the imagination, the imaginative faculty (to phantastikon) “contains a great difficulty [aporia]” (432b1). Here he is led to distinguish a sensible from an intellectual form or function of the imagination (433b25–434a21), which, far from solving the difficulty, would merely appear to throw us back upon the very duality the imagination was originally called upon to mediate and so unify. The question as to the imagination’s relation to conception now arises. Aristotle’s response to this question is that, while imagination exists as an “affection that depends on us” (i.e., is in our power), conception is a “judging which does not depend on us: for it necessarily determines what is false or true” (427b17–21).9 By way of further explanation he offers an example: in imaginative apprehension “we are
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like spectators observing something fearful or emboldening in a picture,” whereas if we judge something to be dreadful or fearful “we are affected immediately” (427b21–24). According to this way of distinguishing it from conception, the imagination appears to lie at one remove from what we perceive, and by virtue of this distance from the perceived we enjoy a certain liberty with respect to how we relate to it. What is the nature of this liberty accorded to the imagination? Crucially it must be borne in mind that for Aristotle conception represents a “higher” mental power than the imagination. It would appear to follow from this that the freedom of the imaginative act must be essentially negative, in the sense of a freedom from the immediacy of the perceived. Only when Aristotle turns to conception and the intellect in his analysis of cognition is this negative characterization of the imagination reinterpreted as its crucial positive power to abstract formal features of the perceived object from its immediate material presence. Intellect and Reason as the Ultimate Sources of Cognitive Unification In the Metaphysics Aristotle states in several places that being and unity are said in many ways (1030b7–14, 1040b16–27) and that being in its most proper sense of ousia or “essence” constitutes true unity. To these two determinations of true being Aristotle adds a further one of “being composed or set together [sunkeisthai]” (1051b11–12), so it may be said in shorthand that for Aristotle all true being is “synthetic.” Within the framework of Aristotle’s treatise on the soul what is called thinking (noein) is defined as a combination of imagination and conception (De An. 427b27–28). On this basis rests his well-known assertion that “the soul never thinks without a mental image” (432b8–9). Since the imagination is here conceived of as a mental act originating from perception, and since this act is grasped as an abstraction of stable forms from sensible change and difference, thinking for Aristotle must in essence come down to a mental act of unifying synthesis. It is this assertion of the crucial mental function of the imagination which leads him to remark that “the cognitive faculty thinks the forms in mental images” and that thinking consists in a construction of synthetic unity out of many images (431b2–5).
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While the synthetic operation lies at the heart of cognition for Aristotle, it is crucial not to misinterpret this as meaning that the unity of thought intended consists in an act of the thinking subject that imposes forms upon the otherwise disordered phenomena of sense perception. In my view, we may accurately understand the Aristotelian conception by reversing this construal and stating that the synthetic unity of human cognition issues from the structured integrity of what is cognized. According to this interpretation, it is ultimately in virtue of the unity of the things themselves that a mental act is able to abstract unity in relation to the object of cognition. This means that the mental recognition of identity through repeated apprehension of the objects of perception and conception is achieved only through a preceding intuition of these objects revealing a more basic pre- or extra-mental unity.10
Kant and the Transcendental Unity of Apperception In my view too little attention has been paid to certain key affinities between the accounts of cognition offered by Aristotle and Kant. These affinities are particularly evident in relation to their respective analyses of the imagination (each construing it as the crucial mediating mental power), though closer inspection reveals that a general account of mental acts as operations of synthetic unification is also basic to both thinkers. This supposition of common ground is well expressed by Derrida in his essay “Ousia and Gramme” when he remarks: “The Kantian revolution did not displace what Aristotle had set down but, on the contrary, settled down there itself, changing its locale and then refurbishing it.”11 Although Derrida makes this comment with respect to the Kantian concept of time, I shall attempt to show here that the basic preservation of Aristotelian thinking is also evident in Kant’s account of the understanding (Verstand) and its key function of unification. Here my analysis will focus, following Heidegger’s interpretation, on what Kant terms the “transcendental imagination” as that faculty of the mind taken to mediate between sensibility and understanding. To make sense of Kant’s conception of the transcendental imagination, however, an initial account of his crucial idea of synthesis as set
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out in the “Transcendental Deduction of the Categories” of the Critique of Pure Reason is necessary. Having offered evidence for my assertion of a shared conception of synthetic unity in Aristotle and Kant, the final part of this essay examines Heidegger’s early analysis of temporality to assess to what degree it constitutes a genuine challenge to the demonstrated concern for unity in the earlier thinkers. Apprehension: The Synthesis of Sensibility Kant’s first move in the Deduction of the A-Edition of the Critique of Pure Reason is to assert a “three-fold synthesis which arises necessarily in all knowledge.”12 This threefold synthesis consists in an apprehension of representations in intuition; a reproduction of presentations in the imagination; and a recognition of representations in the concepts of the understanding. The synthesis in question is then said to constitute the condition of the possibility of the understanding (A98). As is well known, all intuition is for Kant sensible intuition, space and time being asserted in the “Transcendental Aesthetic” as the basic essential forms of all possible sensible intuition (A22). When Kant arrives in the First Critique at his attempted “deduction” of the most basic concepts of human understanding, however, the account of intuition offered earlier in the Transcendental Aesthetic proves to have been in a sense an abstract account, insofar as the active principle at work in the sensibility is initially bracketed or removed from the sphere of thematization.13 This active principle is, according to Kant, precisely the synthesis of the manifold of perception in sensibility, as opposed to the purely “passive” synthesis or receptive form of combination, which he calls “synopsis” (A97), that is, a “viewing together.”14 Kant elaborates on the active principle, or “synthesis of apprehension,” as he calls it, at work in sensibility as a twofold operation: first, “traversing of the manifold” (Durchlaufen der Mannigfaltigkeit), and second, “combination of the traversing” (die Zusammennehmung desselben) (A99). It would appear to follow from this that sensible apprehension is of itself informed by a transcendental principle of comprehension
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and, accordingly, that it exhibits on Kant’s account a form of synthetic ordering or unification within this most “basic” of the structures of the human mind. As Kant expresses it: “Synthetic unity of the manifold of intuitions, as given a priori, is thus the foundation of the identity of apperception itself.”15 What leads to confusion, however, is Kant’s further assertion that the putative synthetic structure of sensible intuition constitutes, again according to the second edition of the Critique, an operation of the understanding (Verstand) at work within sensibility itself. This follows from his general definition of the understanding as a capacity “to combine a priori and to bring the manifold of given representations under the unity of apperception, this basic principle being the highest in the whole of human knowledge.”16 This assertion of a basic mental act of synthesis with respect to simple perceptions offers in my view a further striking parallel between the two thinkers in question. For just as Aristotle grasps perception as an act of ordering and differentiation, so for Kant sensible apprehension essentially involves a mental act of unification transcendentally formative (i.e., preceding any concrete act of perception) in kind.17 Reproduction: The Synthesis of the Imagination The second moment identified by Kant within his analysis of primary cognitive acts of synthesis is reproduction through the power of imagination. It was noted above that Aristotle’s analysis of the imagination involves a significant ambiguity. In De Anima he seeks to resolve this ambiguity by positing basic functions of the imaginative faculty, one sensible and the other intellectual. In a similar fashion Kant famously distinguishes two basic kinds of imaginative synthesis: on the one hand “the empirical synthesis of reproduction” and on the other a “transcendental synthesis” of the imagination, the latter said to constitute the “foundation a priori of the necessary, synthetic unity [of reproduction]” (CPR, A101–2). This latter mental act of combination is grasped in the B-Edition as the productive imagination and held by Kant to be spontaneous and active as opposed to the passive receptivity of the empirical synthesis (CPR, B152). With respect to this active principle
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of imagination, Kant comments in a footnote: “It is one and the same spontaneity, which there, under the name of the imagination, here under that of the understanding, brings combination to the manifold of intuition” (B162). In the statement just cited Kant appears to assert emphatically that the transcendental, productive mode of imagination is essentially intellectual in character. In accordance with this view, he determines the transcendental synthesis of the imagination to be “an action of the understanding upon the sensibility and an initial application of the former” (B152). In apparent explicit contradiction of this definition of the imaginative synthesis, however, Kant had asserted in the earlier A-Edition of the Deduction the essentially sensible nature of the transcendental operation of the imagination: “For in itself the synthesis of the imagination, although exercised a priori, is nevertheless at all times sensible” (A124).18 Primarily in light of this seeming contradiction, Heidegger remarks of Kant’s analysis that it renders the transcendental imagination epistemologically “homeless.”19 In dramatic fashion Heidegger further claims that this putative homelessness of the imagination is due to Kant’s having “shrunk back before this unfamiliar root” of the human mind (KPM, p. 160). An alternative, less dramatic manner of expressing Heidegger’s thought might be to say that the difficulty in locating the imagination within a cognitive economy stems from the inherent inadequacies of any faculty psychology. If the imagination is understood more as a mental action than as a localized cognitive power, then the apparent contradiction involved in the imaginative function being simultaneously sensible and intellectual can be resolved. It would follow from this that the lack of localization of the imagination should be seen not as an inadequacy but rather as an inherent feature of this mental power. What appears to be clear within the Kantian analysis is that imagination is identified as the key power of cognitive unity. This is borne out by his remark, in the earlier version of the Transcendental De duction, that the imaginative synthesis constitutes the active root and unifying principle of the human mind: “Both extreme ends, namely sensibility and understanding, must by means of the transcendental
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function of the imagination necessarily relate to one another” (CPR, A124). Here a further sense of the “homelessness” of the transcendental imagination comes to light when Kant’s earlier definition of “synthesis” as a “mere action of the imagination, a blind, though indispensable function of the soul” (A78), is recalled. As is well known, Kant refers to mental acts as “blind” when they lack conceptual content. In line with an earlier citation taken from the A-Edition, Kant seems to be asserting the essentially sensible nature of the imagination. It would appear to follow from this that the transcendental imagination is taken to operate prior to any conceptual formation on the part of the understanding. The seemingly contradictory assertion of the basic intellectual character of the imagination is again underscored by a supplementary comment which adds that the imagination is equally “a function of the understanding” (A78). While Heidegger interprets the shift from Kant’s A- to B-Edition analysis of the imagination as some sort of intellectual capitulation in the face of the “abyss” of metaphysical thinking, I believe that the more substantive issue raised here relates to the elusive nature of the cognitive function of the imagination. The broader question broached here is how this analysis of the imagination relates to an underlying concern for unity equally at work in the accounts of cognition offered by Aristotle and Kant respectively. Apperception: The Synthesis of the Understanding Kant’s account of the first two aspects of the threefold synthesis within the Transcendental Deduction appears to involve numerous contradictions that relate principally to his account of the transcendental imagination. These contradictions, I propose, arise largely on account of an overriding concern to identify a unitary power or function within human cognition. Close examination of the First Critique reveals that, having introduced the notion of an a priori operation of the imagination to mediate between the basic mental powers of sensibility and the understanding, Kant is faced with the problem of articulating the relative cognitive significance of the imagination and the
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understanding. My further contention is that he then attempts to smooth out the difficulties involved in simultaneously recognizing a twofold root of cognitive unity in the understanding and in the imagination by analyzing cognition according to two different measures of priority. When Kant remarks that “the principle of the necessary unity of the pure (productive) synthesis of the imagination is the foundation of the possibility of all knowledge, in particular of experience, before apperception” (CPR, A118, my italics), “before” here can be understood as priority in time, that is, empirical priority. When, on the other hand, he says that “the synthetic statement: that all various empirical consciousness must be combined in a unitary self-consciousness, is the absolutely primary and synthetic principle of our thought in entirety” (A118), this priority may be grasped in a conceptual or logical rather than empirical or factual sense. It follows from this distinction of two concepts of priority employed in the Transcendental Deduction that the imaginative synthesis precedes in time and actual experience that of the understanding, whereas the intellectual synthesis (ultimately apperception or self-consciousness) is logically and ontologically prior. It must be admitted, however, that this distinction of two concepts of priority is at odds with the letter of Kant’s own account. For temporal precedence can have no place in transcendental analysis, which deals exclusively with a priori forms of representation and knowledge, and not with “genetic” explanations essentially empirical in nature. The proposed characterization of the imagination as empirically antecedent but logically subordinate can have a strictly Kantian sense only when the imagination is understood according to its empirical, reproductive function as a mechanical association of representations. When Kant speaks of the transcendental operation of the imagination, by contrast, it becomes possible to speak of its common primacy with the understanding. The distinct concepts of priority proposed, however, cannot be accounted for within the Kantian conceptual framework itself. At this point a more detailed account of the exact nature of the relationship between the understanding and imagination within the Kantian transcendental analysis is needed.
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Pure Reason as the Ultimate Source of Cognitive Unity in Kant In a transitional section in the Critique of Judgment Kant is at pains to make clear that the radical freedom that pertains to the transcendental imagination does not take the form of an unprincipled arbitrariness but is essentially regulated by the understanding in its manifestation as pure reason. Accordingly he remarks: “However, that the imagination be free and yet in itself lawful, i.e., that it involve in itself an autonomy, is a contradiction. The understanding alone gives the law.”20 It is clear that Kant is anxious here to avoid any suggestion that the recognized freedom of the transcendental imagination may present a genuine challenge to the authority of human reason. On this issue I would contest Heidegger’s claim that Kant affirms a basic cognitive priority of the transcendental imagination in the A-Edition of the First Critique only to renounce it in the later B-Edition. In my view, Kant maintains a carefully balanced two-sided concept of the transcendental imagination by considering it on the one hand in relation to the understanding in the sense of discursive reasoning (Aristotle’s dianoia) and on the other in relation to pure reason (nous) grasped as the faculty of ethical ideation. This leads Kant to recognize two basic modes of operation of a priori synthetic imagination: schematism of pure concepts and systematization of ideas. The schematism is described as “a general procedure of the imagination, whereby a concept is provided with its image” and is understood to constitute simultaneously a restriction and realization of the concepts of pure reason with respect to the basic form of intuition (i.e., time) (see CPR, A147).21 In this sense Kant’s notion of the schematism may be understood as akin to the Hegelian notion of Entäu ßerung, in the sense of an expression of the pure concepts of understanding in relation to the objects of experience. Whereas this restriction of the transcendental imagination within the bounds of possible experience results for Kant from its relation to pure understanding, the mental act of “systematization” involves the imagination’s relation to inherently unpresentable, purely rational ideas. Systematization may be identified as the cognitive process Kant describes in the Critique of Judgment where human cognition is stretched
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to the limit of its powers when attempting to represent the aesthetic idea or ideal (see CJ, A93). This mental process relating to the ideal and empirically unrealizable is characterized by Kant toward the end of the First Critique as one that does not, in contrast to schematism, remain within the bounds of possible experience, since “human reason has a natural tendency to transgress these limits.”22 Finally, and most tellingly, Kant makes clear at a much earlier point in the same text that his general analysis of cognition is structured according to a strictly rationalist teleology: “All our knowledge sets off from the senses, goes from there to the understanding, and ends with reason, above which nothing higher is to be met with in us to work the material of intuition and to bring it under the highest unity of thought.”23 For Kant the imagination understood as an a priori function of cognition must ultimately designate a kind of operation of pure reason. It is this exclusively rational characterization of cognitive unity that Heidegger seeks to challenge in his interpretation of Kant and not, as sometimes appears, the concern for cognitive unity itself.
Heidegger’s Fundamental-Ontological Idea of Unity Having brought to light various points of formal agreement within the analyses of cognition in Aristotle and Kant, and having traced the source of this agreement back to common recognition of the ultimate and absolute authority of reason, I conclude by considering briefly how Heidegger articulates his challenge to the concern for cognitive unity within the Western philosophical tradition. It was pointed out in the first part of this essay that for Aristotle the unity of thought ultimately derives from the integrity of the substance in relation to which the thinking act takes place. Avoiding this ontological underpinning within this approach to cognition, Kant’s transcendental perspective is concerned with the identification of a priori forms of experience whose validity is presumed to be free of ontological posits. In accord with this perspective, systematization is grasped by the later Kant of the Opus Postumum as a production of ideas (notions without possible
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material reference), a cognitive act he claims becomes explicit in transcendental philosophy: “Transcendental philosophy is the self-creation (autocracy) of ideas into a complete system of the objects of pure reason.”24 In this late period Kant appears to move far beyond the carefully maintained skepticism in relation to self-knowledge found within the First Critique, in proclaiming this cognitive act to be the subject’s explicit operation of self-creation: “Transcendental philosophy is the capacity of the self-determining subject to constitute itself as given in intuition, through the systematic complex of the ideas which, a priori, make the thoroughgoing determination of the subject as object (its existence) into a problem. To make oneself, as it were” (OP, p. 254). This startling account of rational systematization as equivalent to the thinking subject’s autopoiesis shows that Kant’s apparent skepticism in relation to self-knowledge within the critical writings did not rule out a radical claim to cognitive self-creation. Such a self-creative act presupposes that the ideal of unity transcends any phenomenal sphere and indicates a quite separate domain of absolute reflective self- givenness. At the same time this act seems to conflict with the underlying idea of Kant’s critical philosophy according to which human understanding is intrinsically limited in scope. Alternatively, it might be said that this transcending of limits is due to the fact that the cognitive act involves not a subject-object relation but one that is purely subject to subject, that is, a matter of the realization of rational thought through itself. 25 Kant arrives at this quite extreme position of rational self-creation when his attempt to accommodate the Cartesian cogito leads his transcendental analysis into an impasse. Whereas for Kant the ultimate source of cognitive unity is taken to be at once the essentially and distinctively human power that precludes all access to anything like an infinite intellect, Aristotle holds that pure reason (nous) is distinct from human rationality (dianoia) only in degree of perfection or “divinity” (theion) and not in kind.26 According to Aristotle’s understanding, the distinction between pure and discursive reason can be accounted for through the conceptual pair of the active/actual and passive/potential. In its productive mode he, like Kant, posits a fundamental connection
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between human rationality and self-creation: “Whereas passive reason is such that it becomes all things, productive reason is such that it makes all things” (De An. 430a14–15). Initial appearances to the contrary, however, there is no strict parallel here between the two thinkers. What is for Kant an exceptional and singular instance of the coin cidence of reason and self-creation is of universal applicability for Aristotle. Such universal scope of rational self-identification is merely taken to be potential for human reason, and actual in the case of divine cognition. What does constitute genuinely common ground between Aristotle and Kant, I believe, is the view that cognition reaches its highest manifestation in an absolute self-identity between the act and object of thought. It was this postulate or basic idea common to such otherwise disparate thinkers as Aristotle and Kant that the early Heidegger strove to challenge. Beginning with a youthful fascination for Brentano’s treatise On the Many Senses of Being in Aristotle, Heidegger at first attempted to reaffirm the notion of singularity or haecceitas in his early study of Duns Scotus.27 From the time of the seminal 1923 lectures on the “hermeneutics of facticity,” the principle of singularity is referred to as Jeweiligkeit (a term that can be only clumsily rendered in English as “what is so in each case”).28 In the following period leading up to the publication of Being and Time in 1927 and beyond, Heidegger came to call the underlying tendency to prioritize unity over multiplicity a forgetfulness of the “ontological difference.” This is a complex Heideggerian notion, but at its heart lies the assertion that the human capacity for rational comprehension does not warrant the supposition that such a rationally endowed being is in some way the ontological ground of what it comprehends. Accordingly, an important strand of Heidegger’s early thinking involves critiquing the conception of rational comprehension as an act of ontological appropriation on the part of the thinking “subject,” a notion he sees as a basic prejudice of Western thinking. In opposition to this tendency, Heidegger offers an alternative concept of human understanding as in essence a “letting be” of diversity or singularity among those things cognized. This account emerges most strikingly within Heidegger’s interpretation of phenomenological re-
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flection in terms of letting “that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself.”29 This tortuous formulation signals the distance Heidegger wishes to take from the Kantian underpinning of Husserl’s interpretation of phenomenology. With respect to the Western tradition more generally, Heidegger attempts here to move away from the dominant metaphor of cognition as an act of formation (something that characterizes both ancient and modern forms of rationalism) toward a view of human comprehension as something akin to an illuminating or clearing (Lichtung). However, despite his early concern to offer a consciously countertraditional account of cognition, Heidegger soon succumbs to the same overriding concern for an ultimate source of cognitive unity that he originally rejected as a source of fatal distortion in Western thought. This failure of Heidegger’s thinking appears already with his conception of time worked out in the mid-1920s. Heidegger’s principal thesis within his program of “fundamental ontology”—the preliminary part of which is set out in Being and Time— is that time, or more precisely “temporality” (for Heidegger, time understood within a coherent and adequate theoretical framework), constitutes what he calls the enabling ground (ermöglichender Grund) of all human understanding. This for Heidegger persistently hidden or concealed basis of cognition is not, at least in one important respect, as radical as he is apt to suggest. It is telling, namely, that time understood as the ultimate source of human comprehension is taken to be that from which all theoretical and ontological unity ultimately derives. Heidegger succeeds in overcoming what he takes to be the metaphysical bias of Western philosophy only by the force of a certain rhetoric that substitutes the traditionally dominant concept of unchanging substance with that of movement. In the 1920s his preferred term for the fundamentally temporal character of human understanding is “projection” (Entwurf ), something he characterizes as “ecstatic” on account of a putative link with the Greek root verb from which the Latin term existentia is derived. What is arguably Heidegger’s most radical account of time in this early period is found in his 1928 Leibniz lectures, where it is described as the fundamental dynamic of human understanding:
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“Time is itself the ecstatic unity which unifies itself in ecstatic production.”30 Heidegger attempts to downplay his apparent agreement here with the traditional supposition of a unitary source of cognition by insisting that the unity in question is to be grasped dynamically rather than substantially. Accordingly he remarks: “The essence of time resides in the ecstatic, unified oscillation.”31 However, in light of the fact that both Aristotle and Kant also attempt to grasp cognitive unity in terms of mental acts rather than substantive faculties, it remains highly doubtful whether Heidegger’s concern for cognitive unity really stands, as he insists, in opposition to the Western tradition of thought. Heidegger’s “overcoming” of what he terms Western metaphysics (which for him refers to all Western thought up to and including Nietzsche) is, in this respect at least, merely specious and ultimately rests on little more than a semantic or rhetorical transposition. In another respect, however, Heidegger’s account of human understanding does present a genuine challenge to the traditional model, thanks to his novel account of cognition as a “letting be” of the cognized object. This interpretation of phenomenological reflection genuinely parts company with what was called above the appropriative or productive understanding of human cognition. As Heidegger develops his account of comprehension, his initial emphasis on the active principle of projection is gradually balanced by, and then subordinated to, a complementary notion of reception. This notion is initially referred to in the 1920s as “thrownness” (Geworfenheit) and “displacement” (Entrückung), both terms indicating a certain passivity on the part of the human subject. In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics from 1929, Heidegger’s basic thesis is that Kant’s critical philosophy at once discovers and conceals an ultimate unifying function of cognition in the form of the transcendental imagination. As indicated above, Heidegger misrepresents what is an inherent and coherent duality within the Kantian notion of the transcendental imagination as some kind of self-contradictory ambiguity. What is telling about Heidegger’s overall approach to Kant, however, is that he relentlessly seeks to undo Kantian dualities and resolve them into what he grasps as the unitary root of human understanding. Thus, whereas Kant introduces the
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transcendental imagination precisely to account for the irresolvable two-sidedness of cognition (the empirical and transcendental), Heidegger seeks to collapse this divide into a single cognitive power. At the time of his book on Kant, Heidegger’s thinking is still dominated by his concern to account for this putative cognitive unity in terms of temporality. However, in his 1929 study it is already apparent that this concern is significantly modified by a new theme—that of human freedom, which Heidegger grasped in terms of “finitude” (Endlichkeit). More precisely, the notion of finitude is not a new but rather a rediscovered motif of Heidegger’s thinking. It is, in fact, closely related to the problem of singularity first encountered in the 1916 work on Scotus. In the context of his interpretation of Kant, the notion of finitude is related to the Kantian understanding of human freedom, an understanding that Heidegger dramatically terms an uncovering of the “abyss” that stands at the heart of Western metaphysics. In a characteristically paradoxical formulation, Heidegger identifies this abyss with the ground of cognitive unity putatively covered over by the Western tradition. Accordingly, one is said to find in Kant “that movement of philosophizing which reveals the bursting in of the ground and thereby the abyss of metaphysics.”32 Following the 1929 appearance of the Kant book, Heidegger’s lectures continued to focus on the theme of human freedom, now shifting attention from Kant to the reactions to Kantian philosophy found in the early German Idealism of Schelling, Fichte, and Hegel. Charting the development of Heidegger’s thinking through these studies would, however, go beyond the scope of the present essay. Instead, let me summarize the key points made and offer a few indications about how these might be further developed. The two main parts of this essay attempted to demonstrate two contentions: first, that grounding cognitive unity in intellectual activity is a fundamental concern in the philosophy of mind of both Aristotle and Kant; and second, that the analysis of mental powers in the two cases evinces striking similarities. The third, significantly shorter section, by contrast, considered Heidegger’s challenge to the legitimacy of the concern for cognitive unity. Heidegger’s position was shown to be
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at odds with itself: on the one hand, it insists on an understanding of cognition in terms of both act and object as manifold rather than unitary; on the other hand, Heidegger accords with the traditional insistence on a need for cognitive unity in view of his concept of temporality as the source of all comprehension. Once the novelty of Heidegger’s early terminology is stripped away, it is questionable whether this connection between time and cognition represents a genuine move beyond Kant’s Critical Philosophy. One aspect of the line of thinking that seems to run through all three thinkers is the role played by imagination in cognition. As I have argued at length in my study Phenomenology and Imagination in Husserl and Heidegger, Husserl’s development of phenomenology in the early twentieth century is best seen as a particular extension of Kantian thinking. More specifically, Husserl’s analyses of consciousness as intentional in nature appear to rest on an implicit claim that the basic way a conscious subject relates to any object of cognition is imaginative in character. A more comprehensive survey of the way the imagination has tended to be understood in the Western intellectual tradition reveals a crucial ambivalence. In such seminal thinkers as Plato, Augustine, Descartes, and Hume, time and again the imagination has been both recognized as an essential human power and reviled as somehow at odds with the drive for truth and virtue. By way of a concluding conjecture, let me suggest the following: only when the cognitive function of imagination has been satisfactorily explained will an adequate account of cognition itself be possible. Until then, the long history of rival realisms, antirealisms, and constructivisms will continue unabated. Notes Abbreviations: AA: Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften, Akademie Ausgabe (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1900–). GA: Heidegger Gesamtausgabe, ed. F.-W. von Herrmann (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1976-). 1. All translations from the Metaphysics (Met.) are my own.
The Unity of Thought in Aristotle, Kant, and Heidegger 513 2. Aristotle offers an explicit theoretical and logical account of unity in Metaphysics, where he significantly cites reflective thought as a paradigm case exemplifying unity in the strictest sense: “On the whole, however, unity pertains to that whose quiddity is an indivisible concept, such as a thought which thinks and can be separated neither in time nor space nor concept” (V, 6, 1016b1–2). 3. All translations from De Anima (De An.) are my own. 4. It will become apparent in the course of the discussion that this overreaching on the part of the mind’s faculty of perception must be posited primarily to account for what Plato and Aristotle after him termed the “common objects” (koina) of apprehension. The identification of such objects in Plato laid the foundations of what Aristotle subsequently referred to as the “schemes of the categories.” Kant’s description of the schematism as the basic act of transcendental imagination exhibits certain striking parallels with the Aristotelian account of the imagination found in De Anima. This parallel, I believe, may be extended in certain respects to Husserl’s early phenomenological notion of “categorial intuition.” As an instance of this, in the Logical Investigations Husserl speaks of an “overreaching” of perceptual consciousness involved in the affirmation relating to the mental act of perceiving a white object. He remarks: “The intention of the word white is only partially identical with the colour-moment of the appearing object; there remains a surplus in the meaning [Überschuß in der Bedeutung], a form, which finds nothing in the appearance itself through which it is confirmed. White, i.e. paper being white [Weißes, d.h. weiß seiendes Papier ].” Logischen Untersuchungen, vol. II/2, p. 131, translated by D. Moran as Logical Investigations, vol. 2 (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 273. Husserl is here drawing attention to the supersensible “category” of being, something which caught the attention of Heidegger in his repeated readings of the Investigations in the 1910s and 1920s. 5. To admit this interpretation of the Aristotelian account of perception is at once to cast in doubt the extent of Aristotle’s “realism,” which is generally taken to be essentially distinct from either Platonic or Kantian idealism. 6. De Anima III, 2, 425b23–25. 7. John Llewelyn draws attention to Aristotle’s “kinetic” characterization of the imagination in his insightful essay “Imagination as a Connecting Middle in Schelling’s Reconstruction of Kant,” in Kant and His Influence (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1990), pp. 170–201. He comments: “This idea of movement is implied in the etymology of pha which conveys the idea of emerging or coming to light, phainesthai” (p. 191). David Ross makes the same
514 Brian Elliott link: “Phantasia is in its original meaning closely related to phainesthai, ‘to appear,’ and stands for either the appearance of an object or the mental act which is to appearing as hearing is to sounding.” David Ross, Aristotle (London: Methuen, 1956), p. 142. 8. This Aristotelian concept of the imagination as a mode of operation of perception and thus as constituting a direct givenness of the objects of experience may be compared with Husserl’s notion of “primary memory” (primäre Erinnerung) or “retention,” as opposed to what he calls “secondary memory,” which he takes to be reproductive or re-presentative (vergegenwärtigend), rather than an operation of originary presentification. See Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1980), § 13, translated by J. B. Brough as On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917) (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990). Husserl’s writings at the time of his lectures on time consciousness draw an essential distinction between “pictoriality” (Bildlichkeit) and phantasy (Phantasie). The latter is designated originary and authentic (eigentlich) and seen as equiprimordial with perception insofar as it relates directly to the intended object: “The simple phantasy-appearance which is unburdened by supervening pictoriality relates to the object, just as perception does, in a simple manner” (Die Phantasieerscheinung, die schlichte, mit keiner daraufgebauten Bildlichkeit beschwerte, bezieht sich ebenso einfältig auf den Gegenstand wie die Wahrnehmung). Edmund Husserl, Phäntasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung: Zur Phänomenologie der anschaulichen Vergegenwartigungen. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1898-1925), ed. Eduard Marbach, Husserliana 23 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1980), p. 85. Thus for Husserl there are two basic modes of originary intentional givenness: the presentation of perception and representation of phantasy (see pp. 86–89). For an extensive analysis of the concept of imagination in Husserl’s thought, see Brian Elliott, Phenomenology and Imagination in Husserl and Heidegger (New York: Routledge, 2005). 9. The idea of an action “depending on us” is used by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics to designate the proper sphere of choice and free deliberation concerning human action (III, 2, 1111b30). Accordingly, the question as to the ethical function of imagination arises in Aristotle, although this question is never explicitly addressed in any of the Aristotelian writings that have come down to us. Given that Aristotle speaks of a kind of ethical intuition (for phronesis as an aisthesis, see NE VI, 8, 1142a23–30), it is tempting to assume that phantasia could function as a possible basis or at least auxiliary of such practical insight. Another aspect of the Aristotelian outlook preserved
The Unity of Thought in Aristotle, Kant, and Heidegger 515 in Kant, I believe, is precisely the idea that freedom constitutes the ultimate principle of ethics. 10. This account appears to contradict the earlier interpretation that unity is grounded in the perceiving agent. I think, however, that one can avoid this apparent contradiction by distinguishing three basic instances of unity in Aristotle: unity in relation to the object apprehended, in relation to the act of apprehension, and with respect to the apprehending faculty. In my view, Aristotle accords unifying power to the apprehending mind solely with respect to the act of apprehension and not to its object. In this his position is clearly distinct from certain tendencies in Kantian thought in denying that the unity of the objects of knowledge is somehow realized or constituted by the cognizing mind. Aristotle appears to hold, by contrast, that all apprehended objects directly exhibit unity, a unity that is at once understood to be independent of the mental act of apprehension. However, given that for Aristotle the highest type of being or nature is nothing other than an agent of pure thought, it becomes extremely difficult to avoid the inherent ambiguity of Aristotelian epistemology. 11. Jacques Derrida, “Ousia and Gramme: Note on a Note from Being and Time,” in Margins, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 44. 12. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft [Critique of Pure Reason], A edition, vol. 4 of AA, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as CPR with “A” before page number. All translations from this work are my own. 13. As I indicate below, the necessity for a repeated articulation of sensibility can be accounted for with reference to Kant’s employment of a twofold concept of priority: empirical priority, where sensible impression or the material precedes, and transcendental priority, where the formal precedes. 14. Kemp Smith denies that what Kant calls “synopsis” can represent a genuine operation of combination or synthesis: “The term synopsis, as used by Kant, is, however, decidedly misleading. His invariable teaching is that all connection is due to synthesis. By synopsis, therefore, which he certainly does not employ as synonymous with synthesis, can be meant only apprehension of external side-by-sideness. It never signifies anything except apprehension of the lowest possible order.” Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” (London: Macmillan, 1918), p. 226. However, if Kant had wished to posit a form of sensible apprehension which lacked all power of combination, why would he choose a word which suggests so obviously an
516 Brian Elliott affinity with synthesis? Although Kemp Smith is willing to grant the notion of a nonconscious though still active mode of synthesis in Kant in the form of the transcendental imagination, he appears to reject the possibility of synopsis constituting for Kant something along the lines of Husserl’s notion of a “passive synthesis” of the sensibility (see p. 264). 15. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft [Critique of Pure Reason], B edition, vol. 3 of AA, p. 134, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as CPR with “B” before page number. All translations from this work are my own. 16. CPR, B135: “das Vermögen, a priori zu verbinden, und das Mannigfaltige gegebener Vorstellungen unter Einheit der Apperzeption zu bringen, welcher Grundsatz der oberste im ganzen menschlichen Erkenntnis ist.” 17. The crucial difference is, to repeat, that the structuring which “precedes” actual experience is not for Aristotle a transcendental operation of the human mind; rather, it is immanent within the essences which manifest themselves in perception. 18. Kemp Smith would appear to favor the tendency of the A-Edition, which indicates that the transcendental imagination comes before the understanding with respect to the ultimate source of the unification of experience: “Only on one point is Kant clear and definite, namely, that it is to productive imagination that the generation of unified experience is primarily due. In it something of the fruitful and inexhaustible character of noumenal reality is traceable” (Commentary, p. 265). Regardless of whether this putative priority of the imagination is the more plausible account, it may be questioned whether Kemp Smith is not here ascribing an idea of the imaginative faculty to Kant which is more akin to the notion developed after him by the German Idealists. 19. Martin Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1991), p. 136, translated by R. Taft as Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997) (with page numbers from the German edition provided in brackets), hereafter cited as KPM with German edition page numbers. For a detailed analysis of Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant, see ch. 6 of Elliott, Phenomenology and Imagination, pp. 101–17. 20. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft [Critique of Judgment], A edition, in vol. 5 of AA, p. 68, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as CJ with “A” before page number: “Allein daß die Einbildungskraft frei und doch von selbst gesetzmäßig sei, d.i. daß sie eine Autonomie bei sich führe, ist ein Wider-
The Unity of Thought in Aristotle, Kant, and Heidegger 517 spruch. Der Verstand allein gibt das Gesetz.” All translations from this work are my own. 21. CPR, A140: “allgemeines Verfahren der Einbildungskraft, einem Begriff sein Bild zu verschaffen.” 22. CPR, A642: “daß die menschliche Vernunft dabei einen natürlichen Hang habe, diese Grenze [möglicher Erfahrung] zu überschreiten.” 23. CPR, A298–99: “Alle unsere Erkenntnis hebt von den Sinnen an, geht von da zum Verstande, und endigt bei der Vernunft, über welches es nichts Höheres in uns getroffen wird, den Stoff der Anschauung zu bearbeiten und unter die höchste Einheit des Denkens zu bringen.” 24. Immanuel Kant, Opus Postumum, ed. and trans. E. Förster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), hereafter cited parenthetically in text as OP. 25. More precisely, this notion of unity at the heart of Kantian thinking relates, on the one hand, to the actual empirical individual and, on the other, to an individual’s potential as a human being. This distinction is conceived by Kant teleologically on the basis of his Enlightenment ideal, namely that each person represents the possibility of moral improvement in accord with the general rational nature of humanity. As, however, the direction of the individual’s self-realization is for Kant dictated a priori by human reason, which is taken to constitute the unchanging essence of the human, we are ultimately confronted with a repetition of the problematic ambiguity we located in the Kantian notion of precedence: each individual is to realize the rational being which he or she already is. This conflation of actuality and potentiality in relation to each actual rational agent leaves Kant’s notion of reason open to the suspicion that it is ultimately an ungrounded, or at best historically conditioned, prejudice. It is certainly Heidegger’s basic assumption that Kant’s concept of rationality crucially distorted what he considers an otherwise truly revolutionary account of human cognition. 26. This is not the place to consider these discussions or to go into detail concerning the Aristotelian understanding of the divine. In basic terms I tend to agree with Heidegger’s contention that the notion of theion in Aristotle is of universal applicability and refers in the first instance to the degree to which a particular being or substance has realized its inherent potential perfection. 27. It should be noted that Heidegger’s 1915 Habititationsschrift, “On the Doctrine of the Categories in Duns Scotus,” rested in large part on a text that
518 Brian Elliott was erroneously accredited to the medieval thinker. On the background to Heidegger’s study, see Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of “Being and Time” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 25–36. A recent comprehensive analysis is offered by Philip Tonner in Heidegger, Metaphysics and the Univocity of Being (London: Continuum, 2010). 28. See Martin Heidegger, Ontologie: Hermeneutik der Faktizität [1923], vol. 63 of GA, translated by J. van Buren as Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). 29. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973), p. 58. 30. Martin Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. M. Heim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 205; translation of Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz [1928], vol. 26 of GA, p. 266: “Die Zeit ist selbst die in der ekstatischen Zeitigung sich einigende ekstatische Einheit.” 31. Ibid., p. 208, translation of Metaphysische Anfangsgründe, vol. 26 of GA, p. 269: “Das Wesen der Zeit liegt in der ekstatischen einheitlichen Schwingung.” 32. KPM, p. 215: “jene Bewegung, die das Einbrechen des Bodens und damit den Abgrund der Metaphysik offenbart.”
t w e n t y - o n e
Communication, Struggle, and Human Destiny Ricoeur’s Judicial Praxis and Heidegger’s “Power of Destiny”
Eileen Brennan
In an essay entitled “Urbanisation et confrontations culturelles,” Thierry Paquot observes that philosophy is a part of the city as the city is a part of philosophy. He illustrates the paradox with reference to ancient philosophy and the city of Athens: “It is in Athens that the philosopher strolls with his students and disciples, and it is while walking that they think out loud, argue, and reason. This time, which is given over to nothing else but knowledge of oneself and of others is called scholé—‘leisure’—it will be the source of schola, école, school, and Schule.”1 Paquot notes that Athens-based philosophers like Plato and Aristotle explicitly “examine the relationships that human beings maintain with the city.” And so, he holds that just as animated philosophical discussion is a part of city life in ancient Athens, so too is the city a part of ancient philosophy’s domain of inquiry. Paquot thinks that it is also possible to view Paul Ricoeur as a philosopher of the city, at least to 519
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the extent that he taught philosophy in “Strasbourg, Nanterre, and Chicago, three ‘emblematic’ cities, each one with its history and its distinctive characteristics testifying to the ‘urban phenomenon.’ ”2 And one is tempted to add that, in circumstances reminiscent of the scholé of his predecessors, Ricoeur pursued knowledge of oneself and of others from the perspective of what he had once termed “the Phenomenological School.”3 But Paquot sees little continuity between Ricoeur and the ancient Greek philosophers when it comes to the importance attached to maintaining relationships between human beings and the city. He notes that, just like Jean-Paul Sartre and Emmanuel Levinas, Ricoeur did not protest against the construction of high-rise social housing when it was still possible to do something to halt that project. Nonetheless, he acknowledges that works by Levinas and Ricoeur dealing with hospitality and otherness are valuable resources for a philosophical reflection on the city: “[Hospitality and otherness] are there in the city like a fish in water.”4 Paquot is not alone in linking Ricoeur’s work to certain aspects of city life, although most commentators would reject any suggestion that Ricoeur was ever indifferent to the plight of the disadvantaged in society. Take Joseph Bien’s assessment of Ricoeur, for example: “This often engaged philosopher (Dean at Nanterre following the 1968 student uprising and long standing member of the Amnesty International group for Czechoslovakia) continually published both professional and newspaper pieces dealing with a variety of social questions and topics.”5 Similarly, the Musée Virtuel du Protestantisme Français refers to Ricoeur’s “political ethics” of the 1980s and early 1990s, which arguably contributed to the transformation of French society.6 For instance, it credits Ricoeur with having inspired Michel Rocard to lead the negotiations for the 1988 Matignon Accords on the status of New Caledonia, thereby bringing an end to the violence in that overseas territory of France. It also notes that Ricoeur was a “witness”—in his capacity as a philosopher—at a trial concerning the use of HIV- contaminated blood for blood transfusions.7 The increasingly influential Fonds Ricoeur mentions these and other examples of Ricoeur’s engagement with social and political realities, arguing that his motiva-
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tion throughout was the desire for justice.8 Indeed, such was Ricoeur’s passion for justice that he was seen as the obvious choice to give the inaugural speech of the Institut des Hautes Études sur la Justice (IHEJ), which was established in Paris in 1990. In Les sens d’une vie, François Dosse cites Ricoeur’s work with this institute as precisely the type of work that earns him the title “philosopher of the city.”9 There is certainly a difference of emphasis in the interpretations of the term la cité offered by Paquot and Dosse. For Paquot, the city includes the physical environment—he points to the disquieting effects of buildings that dwarf human beings—and it also includes less tangible elements like “otherness” and “hospitality.” For Dosse, the city comprises distinctive social practices, among them government ministries and courts of arbitration. Now, given that Ricoeur does not propose any critique of the built environment, Paquot is prepared to describe him as a “philosopher of the city” only in a restricted sense. As I have already indicated, he treats Ricoeur’s work on hospitality and otherness more as a resource for his own reflections on the city than as anything like elements for a Ricoeurian philosophy of the city. However, given that Ricoeur does propose a critique of social practices that are usually found only in our larger cities, Dosse is free to describe him as a “philosopher of the city” in what for him is the full sense of the term. This is because he views city life as comprising a range of distinctive social practices. Inspired by Dosse’s interpretation of the phrase “philosopher of the city,” I propose to examine Ricoeur’s views on the social practice of arbitration. I aim to show that Ricoeur is interested only in ethical arbitration, by which he means arbitration that is governed by “a dialectical conception of justice.” Such a conception synthesizes an Aristotle-inspired principle of equality and a deontological principle of fairness. I will focus on two features of this ethical social practice: communication and struggle. Ricoeur describes the trial as “a segment of the communication activity of a society.”10 And ethical arbitration clearly involves an element of struggle for both judge and litigants. Now, in § 74 of Being and Time Heidegger famously declared: “Only in communicating and in struggling does the power of destiny become
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free.”11 However, my objective in focusing on communication and struggle is to show that far from liberating “the power of destiny,” as Martin Heidegger would have it, these two features of ethical arbitration provide the conditions for the liberation of a very different kind of force: the power of persuasion. According to Ricoeur, the argumentation at the heart of ethical arbitration has its own “logic and ethics” (p. 195). And the court must determine which of the arguments is more successful in forging a connection between the two. He claims that “the better argument” has a “probabilistic logic” (logique du probable) (p. 194). It also incorporates an “ethics of argumentation,” namely Audi alteram partem (“Hear the other side,” p. 195). I shall conclude by suggesting that while the “the power of destiny” does not “become free” in the communication and struggle that lie at the heart of ethical arbitration, matters are very different when it comes to the communication and struggle that marked Ricoeur’s own generation. This generation of French intellectuals, jurists, and politicians faced up to one of the most pressing problems of its time—the dysfunctional justice system—in a manner that recalls Heidegger’s reflections on the “power of destiny.”
Between the “Good” and the “Lawful”: A Dialectical Conception of Justice In 1990 the French prime minister, Michel Rocard, publicly acknowledged that the French legal system had become dysfunctional and that the number of “sensational trials” had increased significantly.12 Placing justice at the top of his agenda for 1991—he even named that year “L’année de la justice”—Rocard announced an increase of 12 percent in the justice budget. But to the dismay of the French public, this increase was largely offset by cuts made elsewhere, and the Ministry of Justice ended up with a modest increase of 5 percent. There was a huge public outcry. However, the embattled Rocard was very slow to respond to his critics. When eventually he did offer a defense of his actions it was at a colloquium on justice that numbered politicians, law-
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yers, sociologists, and at least one philosopher among its participants. The philosopher in question was Paul Ricoeur; and Rocard himself is said to have described Ricoeur’s performance at that colloquium as “dazzling.” Contrary to what one might think, there was nothing unusual about the setting for Ricoeur’s speech on justice. As Dosse points out, he had not adopted the “Anglo-Saxon model” whereby the philosopher is “a scholar, an expert confined to his circle, and driven by a single ethic of responsibility.”13 Nor was he a “militant intellectual” in the style of Jean-Paul Sartre. Instead, Ricoeur tried to take up a position midway between these alternatives, offering “a clarification of concepts” that was designed to meet the needs of the present age. And in 1991, in the beautiful city of Paris, the concept most in need of clarification was that of justice. Ricoeur found himself called upon to clarify the meaning of justice because, at the time, few people in France had ever studied philosophy of law. Even law students, barristers, and judges were ignorant of “the great international debates” in the philosophy of law, as is evidenced by the fact that it took almost twenty years for French translations of Dworkin and Rawls to appear.14 This unusual situation arose because legal studies in France were resolutely empirical, as indeed were most of the French legal profession. However, things were about to change. A retired judge named Antoine Garapon had recently established the IHEJ. The IHEJ is still in existence today, and its mission is to be a center for the study of law and justice, which promotes public debate in these areas while also encouraging members of the legal profession to assume a reflective practice. From the beginning, one of the activities planned for this organization was an annual seminar on the philosophy of law; and Garapon was very keen to have Ricoeur give the inaugural lecture. Ricoeur accepted Garapon’s invitation, and this important lecture was delivered on 21 March 1991. Entitled “Le juste entre le légal et le bon,” the lecture focused on the social practice of arbitration as seen through the eyes of Garapon. The now retired judge had told Ricoeur that, in his legal practice, he had sought to discover “the just distance” between creditor and debtor, between employer and employee, and between estranged spouses. But
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there were, he said, huge difficulties in establishing such a distance between the parties.15 Ricoeur saw that there was something characteristically ethical about the social practice thus described, and in his lecture he set out to explain the two opposing senses of justice that had informed Garapon’s work in the courtroom. Unfortunately, there is no English translation of this lecture currently available, so I will give a detailed summary of the lecture before turning, in the next section, to isolate the key themes of communication and struggle that will allow me to draw a distinction between Ricoeur’s ethical social practice and Heidegger’s authentic Being-with-Others. In the opening paragraph of his lecture to the IHEJ, Ricoeur offers a succinct account of what he unequivocally terms “a social practice” and in so doing brings to mind Dosse’s interpretation of the phrase “philosopher of the city.” As I mentioned in my introductory comments, Dosse uses the phrase “philosopher of the city” to describe someone who offers a critique of social practices. Ricoeur states that the “social practice” he wishes to discuss is one called for only on certain occasions, namely, “when a higher authority is asked to make a ruling on the claims brought by opposing interests or rights” (p. 176). He then notes that the practice operates via a number of channels, namely, “a body of written laws; courts or tribunals that have the power to enounce the law; judges, i.e., individuals like us who are said to be independent and responsible for delivering a verdict, which is said to be just in specific circumstances; and . . . a coercion cartel with the power to have the police impose a court ruling” (p. 176). Having noted the occasions on which arbitration is called for, together with the channels through which it operates, Ricoeur turns to consider the arguments that play a key role in this particular social practice. He claims that exchanging arguments before a court is an ethically motivated “communication activity” and “a remarkable example of the dialogical employment of language.” This is a very important statement for the purposes of my inquiry in that it names one of two conditions for the liberation of “the power of destiny” mentioned in § 74 of Being and Time, namely, communication. The other condition is, of course, struggle.
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Many readers will want to challenge the claim that exchanging arguments before a court is an ethically motivated practice. But in Ricoeur’s defense it should be remembered that he was describing an altogether uncommon social practice, one “governed” or “regulated” by certain principles of justice. As I have already mentioned, he had learned of this ethical arbitration from the now retired judge Antoine Garapon; Ricoeur’s original audience at the IHEJ would have understood this. They knew that he was an outspoken—and very eloquent— critic of the dysfunctional French legal system of the early 1990s. And they would not have assumed that his description of exchanging arguments in court was meant to capture something that happens in every courtroom. However, where controversy might have arisen for this original audience—and indeed for readers subsequently—was with regard to Ricoeur’s account of the conception of justice that was said to guide the revolutionary social practice that he wanted to promote. Ricoeur reported, very early on in the lecture, that this social practice was “regulated” by an idea that encompassed two opposing senses of justice: the teleological notion of the “good” and the deontological notion of the “lawful.” As is well known, the former was first proposed by Aristotle, the latter by Immanuel Kant. Ricoeur fully expected that some commentators might have concerns about a “regulating idea” of this kind (p. 178). He thought that they would interpret the unstable meaning of the predicate “just”—it appears to be pulled alternately toward the “good” and toward the “lawful”—as an indicator of “the weakness of a concept.” But he was keen to stress that theirs was not the only possible interpretation: alternatively, one could view this “regulating idea,” with its constituent opposing senses of justice, as an idea that has a “dialectical structure, which one ought to respect.” He then acknowledged that he favored this second interpretation. And he announced a plan to adopt it as his “working hypothesis.” That is to say, he signaled his intention to treat it as a thesis to be defended in the course of his lecture. Ricoeur’s defense of this thesis begins with two rather lengthy critical analyses. The first analysis focuses on the teleological approach
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to justice found in the ancient and medieval worlds, notably in works by Aristotle; the second examines the deontological approach to justice. This second critical analysis is itself subdivided into two sections: (a) an examination of justice in Immanuel Kant; and (b) an examination of John Rawls’ theory of justice. As one would expect, given what is at stake for Ricoeur, these two sets of analyses do not serve to demonstrate that one approach to justice is simply better, or more adequate, than the other. Rather, in naming the significant problems connected with each approach, they manage to convince us that neither approach is wholly adequate as it stands. And in also naming the valuable aspects of the two approaches, the analyses encourage us to find some way of working with both of them. Throughout the course of these detailed analyses of the two contrasting theories of justice, Ricoeur makes no explicit reference to the constituent elements of ethical arbitration that he named and described in his opening comments, namely occasions, channels, and arguments. But it would be a mistake to take this as evidence that he has strayed from his original theme of the social practice of justice. That he remains focused on this theme becomes clear once we stop to reflect on the type of problems that he associates with both theories of justice. He suggests that Aristotelian teleology has problems when it comes down to practicability. And he complains that there is a problematic “gap,” in Rawlsian deontology between formal principles of justice and the concrete context of social practice. Let us turn now to consider something of the detail of these all-important critical reflections on the teleological and deontological approaches before examining Ricoeur’s proposed solution, which, as I have already mentioned, comes in the form of a dialectical conception of justice. Ricoeur begins by noting that, for Aristotle, justice is a virtue (areté) and that as such it helps orient human action toward fulfillment or perfection (p. 178). He suggests that “the popular notion of happiness” expresses an idea that comes close to what Aristotle had in mind here. Now, it is precisely because it orients action toward this end (telos) of “a good life” that the Aristotelian version of justice is labeled teleological. But as far as Ricoeur is concerned, this teleological version of justice is not without its problems. The most serious among them is its
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“imperfect formalism” (p. 179). Explaining what he means by this phrase, Ricoeur recalls that Aristotle defined all of the virtues, including justice, in terms of the “delicate balance” that they establish between excess and deficiency. In the case of the virtue of justice, he says, this point of equilibrium is “the famous isotês, extolled by Solon and Pericles, namely, that ‘equality’ which reigns midway between the excess of taking-too-much, of always-wanting-to-have-more—the famous pleonexia, the vice of greed or envy—and the deficiency of not contributing enough to the expenditure of the city state” (p. 179). The problematic character of this “imperfect formalism” is brought into sharp relief once Ricoeur begins to discuss the practicalities of decision making at the political level. Here we find problems associated with the scale of the undertaking. For Aristotle, a just society would be one where there is an equal distribution of “all the kinds of goods” that there are. But as Ricoeur points out, Aristotle’s “imperfect formalism” has difficulty defining “the goods in play,” and it is not entirely certain that “a formal procedure of sharing out” can do without such a definition (p. 181). There are additional problems associated with the choice of modality for this planned equal distribution of goods. One modality open to Aristotle was that of “an arithmetical equality,” whereby all members of society would receive exactly the same number of goods. But experience had shown that it was impossible to establish an efficient program of wealth creation on the basis of such an arithmetical equality; and wealth was one of the goods that society wanted to be in a position to distribute. Aristotle thought the solution lay with a “proportional equality,” whereby what one received and what one was asked to give would stand in a relationship of proportionality to one’s needs and merits. The problem now facing him was “that of justifying a certain idea of equality without lending support to an all out egalitarianism” (p. 182).16 These difficulties notwithstanding, Ricoeur recommends that we value “the credible and lasting strength of the connection between justice and equality” that the teleo logical version of justice makes. According to Ricoeur, the deontological version of justice has its origins in Kant’s philosophy. Here “all moral, juridical, and political relationships are placed under the idea of legality, of conformity to the
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law.” But this conception is, he says, far from being homogeneous (p. 183). According to the Kantian orthodoxy, “Only those juridical arrangements that allow themselves to be derived from a wholly a priori supreme imperative merit the name of ‘law.’ ” Other deontologists understand “conformity to the law” to mean conformity to laws made by the legislature of “the body politic.” These “two branches of juridical legalism” do have something in common, however. They make the transition from “the imperfect formalism characteristic of the teleological conception to a complete formalism.” This Kant-inspired complete formalism makes no room for any discussion of two of the ideas found in Aristotle’s imperfect formalism: the idea of the common good and that of substantial goods, that is, the “content” to be distributed according to the idea of “proportional equality.” It is clear from the outset that Ricoeur finds considerable merit in the deontological version of justice. But just as he finds problems with the teleological version of justice, so too will he find that the deontological version is open to criticism. Ricoeur’s analysis of the deontological version of justice focuses on the union that it formed with the Contractarian tradition, or “more precisely with the fiction of a social contract thanks to which a certain collection of individuals succeed in surmounting a supposed state of nature in order to access a state of law.” Ricoeur notes that “the goal and function” of the fictional contract is “to separate the just from the good, substituting the procedure of an imaginary deliberation for every previous commitment regarding an alleged common good.” “According to this hypothesis,” he explains, “it is the contractual procedure that is supposed to generate the principle or principles of justice.” Now, as Ricoeur sees it, the fictional contract does for institutions what moral autonomy does for individuals. In both cases, “a freedom, sufficiently extricated from the straitjacket of inclinations, gives itself a law that is the very law of freedom.” Having said that, there is an important distinction to be drawn between self-legislation at the two levels: “But whereas the autonomy of the individual can be termed a ‘fact of reason,’ vouched for by consciousness, the contract can be only a fiction—a founding fiction admittedly, but a fiction nevertheless—because the republic is not a fact as consciousness
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is a fact. . . . It always remains to be founded, and probably never will be founded in a definitive manner.” Ricoeur notes that the unsolved puzzle of the foundation of the republic emerges in Rousseau’s formulation of the contract as well as Kant’s. There is, Ricoeur thinks, one example of the deontological-Contractarian approach which, had it been more successful in bridging the gap between the real world of lawsuits and the fictional world of the social contract, would almost certainly have liberated “the just from the tutelage of the good” (p. 185). The case in point is Rawls’ theory of justice. Like Rousseau before him, Rawls takes up the idea that the principles of justice are the fruits of a deliberation that occurs in “an unreal, imaginary, ahistorical, so-called ‘original’ situation.” The main distinguishing feature of the conditions under which these deliberations take place is the socalled “veil of ignorance”: none of those who set out to jointly agree upon and commit themselves to certain principles of justice are allowed to know anything about their own personal characteristics and social and historical circumstances in the resultant just society. Working on the assumption that all of those deliberating want to promote their own individual interests, Rawls argues that the participants will choose principles of justice that are characterized by fairness. Ricoeur’s assessment of Rawls’ theory of justice is complex. On the one hand, he acknowledges the significant advance that it represents vis-à-vis Kant’s theory: “I do not doubt that this imaginary deliberation, conducted under the veil of ignorance, leads to principles that are more precise, and therefore more socially fecund, than the empty imperative of respect for persons.” But he criticizes the theory for the “gap” that it leaves between “these still very formal principles of justice” and the judicial practice referred to at the beginning of his talk and soon to be discussed in some detail. He thinks that this problematic gap calls for what he terms “relays” whose function is to “entrench the idea of justice in a real judicial practice.” However, he immediately acknowledges that working at the level of these “relays” runs counter to “the asceticism of a purely procedural conception of justice” (p. 186). This is because it will mean having recourse to “a transformed idea of the good or of goods.”
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By the close of his critical analyses of the teleological and deontological approaches to justice, it is clear that Ricoeur finds that if the approaches are taken in their current forms, neither is wholly capable of operating within the practical context of occasions, channels, and arguments that he described in his opening remarks. However, it is also evident that he thinks he has found a way to bridge the “gap” between theory and practice. This solution lies, not in any immanent critique of one of the alternatives, but rather in bringing the two theories of justice together to form a unity. Thus Rawls’ “still very formal principles of justice” can be relayed to “a real judicial practice”—such as Garapon’s ethical arbitration—thanks to a “transformed [Aristotelian] idea of the good or of goods” (pp. 185–86). This unity of opposites has the appearance of a Marxian dialectic, although Ricoeur does not describe it in these terms. He simply notes that this new concept of justice is “dialectically structured.”
Communication and Struggle in Ethical Arbitration The inaugural lecture of the IHEJ was not the first occasion on which Ricoeur had spoken about opposing senses of justice, the one teleological and the other deontological. In Oneself as Another, a work published exactly one year before that lecture, he had declared: “The just, it seems to me, faces in two directions: toward the good, with respect to which it marks the extension of interpersonal relationships to institutions; and toward the legal, the judicial system conferring upon the law coherence and the right of constraint.”17 But on that earlier occasion there had been no talk of any dialectical relationship between the two senses of justice. Indeed, Ricoeur had announced that at least one of his studies would “remain exclusively on the first side [i.e., the teleological side] of the issue.” However, some years later he would protest that in Oneself as Another he had really meant to suggest that the relationship between the teleological and deontological senses of justice is dialectical, and he regretted that the approach taken there had given rise to “the impression of a juxtaposition and of a weakly arbitrated
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conflict of positions”; he would describe that regrettable approach as “a categorization modeled on the history of doctrines.”18 However, the difficulty with this explanation is that he had also adopted “a categorization modeled on the history of doctrines” in the inaugural lecture of the IHEJ, yet on that occasion his audience had been left in no doubt about his intentions. So the problem with Oneself as Another was probably not so much the approach taken as Ricoeur’s failure to explicitly state his position on the concept of justice. There were, of course, no problems with the IHEJ lecture in this regard. That lecture unequivocally stated as Ricoeur’s “working hypothesis” that the social practice of arbitration is regulated or governed by an idea of justice which has a distinctly “dialectical structure” (p. 178). In the third and final part of the IHEJ lecture Ricoeur sets out to fulfill a promise, made at the outset, to provide a more detailed analysis of the “occasions of justice—channels of justice—arguments of justice” that constitute the type of social practice he endorses (p. 176). Not surprisingly, this more detailed analysis focuses on the ethical character of these constituent elements. Ricoeur wants to show that the decidedly concrete occasions, channels, and arguments of justice that go to make up “judicial praxis” are all “regulated” or “governed” by the dialectical idea of justice already discussed in the second part of his lecture. Borrowing a phrase coined by Antoine Garapon, former judge and founder of the IHEJ, he thus discerns a “just distance” template in each of the constituent elements of what he has just begun to term “judicial praxis.” To be strictly accurate, he discerns this template in all but one of the elements listed in his opening remarks. In what appears to be an oversight, he does not return to consider the channel of justice that he earlier termed “a coercion cartel with the power to have the police impose a court ruling” (p. 176). In the third part of his lecture, then, Ricoeur lists the channels of justice as “laws—courts and tribunals—sentence and judges” (p. 192). He goes on to say that when these channels are governed by a dialectical conception of justice they serve to regulate and adjust “proximity and distance in the public space” (p. 193). Thus, in ethical arbitration, laws place conflicts “at a good distance from passions,
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interests, and fanaticisms” (p. 192); the courts position litigants “halfway between a clash [la collision], which is a form of confusion, and contempt, which forestalls discussion” (pp. 192–93); and the sentence “can be interpreted as a way of putting the parties themselves in their just place, principally in the unequal divisions of all sorts that are finally the rule” (p. 193). As for the judge, he or she is “the appointed figure of all these distances: between the judiciary and politics, between the judiciary and open conflict, between the parties themselves.” It soon emerges that much of this “regulation and adjustment of proximity and distance in the public space” is meant to facilitate “an instance of the dialogical use of language” (p. 194). This particular form of dialogue is not so much an exchange of ideas as an “exchange of arguments.” Ricoeur describes it as a “controlled exchange of arguments, i.e., of reasons for or against, assumed plausible and worthy of being considered by the other litigant.” It can be instructive to contrast this “exchange of arguments” with the type of exchange that occurs in the practice of translation. In a late work, entitled On Translation, Ricoeur suggests that translation facilitates an “exchange of signs” that is of particular benefit to the one who is doing the translating.19 Thus he claims that translating entails two distinct forms of therapeutic work: “the work of remembering” and “the work of mourning.”20 “The work of remembering” is meant to lead to a decisive change of attitude on the part of the translator when it comes both to his “mother tongue” and to the foreign text. Specifically, therapeutic work enables him to move from an initial mistaken assumption that his native language has “cultural hegemony” to a later unprejudiced insight that it is merely one language among others.21 Similarly, “the work of remembering” enables the translator to overcome debilitating fears about the foreign text, which initially “towers up like a lifeless block of resistance to translation.”22 As to “the work of mourning,” it allows the translator to “give up the ideal of the perfect translation,” accepting that no translation is ever a wholly adequate rendition of the foreign original.23 As Ricoeur points out, the best one can hope for, in translation, is “equivalence without adequacy.”24 Ricoeur maintains that once “the work of remembering”
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and “the work of mourning” have been successfully completed, the translator will experience “the happiness associated with translating.” But what precisely is “the happiness associated with translating”? In a later chapter he suggests that, for the translator, happiness means “discovering” his native language, particularly those “of its resources that have been left to lie fallow.”25 These newly discovered resources of the target language clearly provide the translator with sought-after equivalents for foreign words, phrases, constructions, and so on, thus enabling him to produce the translation. To capture the sense of “joy” that language sometimes brings to a translator, Ricoeur turns to the idea of hospitality, announcing that “[the translator] can find his happiness in what I would like to call linguistic hospitality.”26 There are telling differences between “the exchange of arguments” referred to in the IHEJ inaugural lecture and the “exchange of signs” examined in On Translation. First, the “exchange of arguments” does not require anything like “the work of remembering” or “the work of mourning” that prepares the ground for translation’s “exchange of signs.” This is because judicial praxis does not require anyone to question the hegemony of Western rationality or to view the exchanged arguments as equivalent. As we have already seen, the practice of translation requires the translator to renounce his native language’s claim to “cultural hegemony” and to view the exchanged signs as equivalent. The second significant difference between the “exchange of arguments” and the “exchange of signs” concerns the manner in which the various practitioners use language. Thus, where the practice of translation exploits the hospitality of language, approaching it as a bountiful source of equivalent terms, judicial praxis uses language for the purposes of argumentation. According to Ricoeur, what the court wants to determine is which of the litigants has “the better argument” (p. 195). He notes that the court arrives at this determination by setting the arguments in opposition to one another. The court then uses the result of this contest as a basis for deciding which of the litigants is to receive the larger share of disputed goods. It is clear that if the court is to be in a position to judge which of the two arguments is better, ethical arbitration must involve the
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a ctivities of communicating and struggling. Let us deal first with the necessity of communication. As I have already mentioned, the court is in a position to determine which of the litigants has the “better argument” only when it has observed a confrontation, or exchange of arguments. But does it make sense to describe an exchange of arguments as a form of communication? Ricoeur certainly thinks so. He claims that “the trial is a segment of the communication activity of a society, the confrontation of arguments before a court constituting a remarkable instance of the dialogical employment of language” (p. 194). Now, if communicating is a prerequisite for determining which of the litigants has the “better argument,” so too is struggling. Long before the litigants are able to participate in a “controlled exchange of arguments,” the judge has had to struggle to find the “just distance” between them. That is to say, he has had to make a great effort to position the litigants “halfway between a clash [la collision], which is a form of confusion, and contempt, which forestalls discussion” (pp. 192–93). As already noted, Antoine Garapon told Ricoeur that during his time as a judge he always had great difficulty establishing this “just distance” between the parties to a conflict.27
“The Power of Destiny” Martin Heidegger wrote about struggling and communicating in § 74 of Being and Time, a work that has had a huge impact on French intellectual life since the mid-1940s. As noted earlier, he declared that it is “only in communicating and in struggling” that “the power of destiny becomes free.” Before quoting the dense passage from which this line is taken, I should like to note that the interpretation of this and other passages from Heidegger’s work is an area of controversy for philosophers. Take, for example, the recent debate between Emmanuel Faye and François Fédier.28 In 2005, Faye published a book entitled Heidegger: L’introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie.29 Reflecting in particular on the significance of Heidegger’s unpublished work from Winter Semester 1933–34, Faye claims that Heidegger presented him-
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self as the “spiritual guide” of Nazism, using philosophy as a means of destroying “all thought and all humanity.” Then in 2007 Massimo Amato, François Fédier, and a number of other Heidegger scholars published “a retort” entitled Heidegger à plus forte raison.30 This group of Heideggerians dismissed Faye’s work as a “jumble of guesses, errors, and misinterpretations,” arguing that Heidegger’s legacy was “the task of thinking” that has allowed successive generations to face the nihilism which continues to beset humanity long after the collapse of Nazism. Although the main focus of Faye’s book is Heidegger’s seminar of Winter Semester 1933–34, it also alleges that § 74 of Being and Time prefigures two ideas that “lie at the very foundations of the doctrine of National Socialism”: a “community of fate” (Schicksalsgemeinschaft) and a “people’s community” (Volksgemeinschaft).31 In line with Amato and Fédier, I consider this reading of § 74 to be a misinterpretation, which could have been avoided had Faye properly investigated Being and Time’s primary sources. As is clearly demonstrated in a work such as that of Christian Sommer, Heidegger, Aristote, Luther: Les sources aristotéli ciennes et néo-testamentaires d’“Être et Temps,” those sources include a New Testament account of fundamental human experiences.32 So a good place to begin trying to understand what Heidegger is really saying in § 74 of Being and Time is Heidegger’s religious heritage. As it happens, Benjamin D. Crowe has done exactly that in a book entitled Heidegger’s Religious Origins: Destruction and Authenticity.33 In the following analysis I shall be guided by what he has to say about Heideggerian destiny. Here, then, is the relevant passage from § 74 of Being and Time: But if fateful Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, exists essentially in Being-with-Others, its historizing is a co-historizing and is determinative for it as destiny [Geschick]. This is how we designate the historizing of the community, of a people. Destiny is not something that puts itself together out of individual fates, any more than Beingwith-one-another can be conceived as the occurring together of several Subjects. Our fates have already been guided in advance, in our Being with one another in the same world and in our resoluteness for
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definite possibilities. Only in communicating and in struggling does the power of destiny become free. Dasein’s fateful destiny in and with its “generation” goes to make up the full authentic historizing of Dasein.34
Crowe reads this passage against the background of Heidegger’s commitment to the ideal of an authentic human life “that ‘owns up (eigen)’ to itself as a finite, individual process of self-identification.”35 He argues that “Heidegger’s emphasis on life’s being ‘in each case my own’ is not meant to come at the expense of a realistic recognition of the social aspects of human life.” And he bases this argument on evidence drawn from Heidegger’s early lectures—especially from Winter Semester 1919–20—as well as Being and Time. Crowe accepts that Heidegger needs “to give some account of how an authentic individual stands with respect to these inalienable social relations.”36 But he warns his reader that Heidegger offers “only a brief account,” which is scattered throughout his lectures, essays, and correspondence from the period, so that “a good bit of reconstruction is required.” Crowe announces that Being and Time § 74 only “cryptically intimates the total phenomenon that Heidegger has in mind.” And so he undertakes to reconstruct Heidegger’s account, starting with an interpretation of the last line of the above-quoted passage: “Dasein’s fateful destiny in and with its ‘generation’ goes to make up the full authentic historizing of Dasein.” Crowe notes that Heidegger attributes the term generation to Wilhelm Dilthey, who used it to mean “a ‘close circle’ of individuals, the identity of each of whom has been shaped by common experiences and a shared cultural and intellectual milieu.”37 He suggests that, “following Dilthey, Heidegger was also committed to the notion that individuals always belong to a generation that has been shaped by a common heritage and by other decisive events.”38 He notes, in passing, that “Heidegger’s own generation had inherited the legacy of nineteenth-century philosophy and had been deeply shaped by the First World War, the collapse of the Wilhelmine state, and the Russian revolution.” Now, there was an obvious challenge for Heidegger in reconciling the Dilthey-inspired idea “that individuals always
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belong to a generation that has been shaped by a common heritage” with the early Christian-inspired idea that an individual can lead an authentic human life which is “in each case his or her own.”39 Crowe suggests that Heidegger met that challenge by interpreting a “generation” in such a way that it is both the situation in which a person tries to live an authentic life and the source of the existential possibilities and shared tasks which that individual will endeavor to make his own. According to Crowe, Heidegger holds that a “generation” “forms the unique context or situation within which individuals find themselves faced with the universally human predicament of having to live their own lives in their own way.”40 And at the same time, says Crowe, Heidegger maintains that a “generation” both “comprises the specific possibilities that are available to a person at the time” and “defines the range of tasks, problems, and conflicts that face a particular member of a generation.” Crowe notes, in passing, that the range of tasks facing members of Heidegger’s generation included “the recreation of German culture and civil society in the open-ended and tumultuous environment of the Weimar Republic.” Even the most superficial account of Heideggerian authenticity would acknowledge that authentic Dasein chooses its identity from a range of possibilities that are specific to his or her epoch. But what Crowe’s reconstructive account establishes is that choosing from “the specific possibilities that are available to a person at the time” is only one part of the meaning of authenticity. What Heidegger describes as “the full authentic historizing of Dasein”—and Crowe terms “the total phenomenon”—is something that also entails taking on the “tasks, problems, and conflicts” that are defined by one’s generation. As Crowe observes, Heidegger thought that “part of what it means to be an authentic individual is to take hold of these sorts of challenges as part of one’s overall commitment to living a certain kind of life.” The question arises as to what empowers Dasein to live authentically, choosing from the available possibilities and taking on the defined tasks and problems. Heidegger’s answer, though indirectly given, is relatively easy to understand. Dasein is empowered to live an authentic life simply by virtue of having a “destiny” (Geschick). Having a destiny
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means living alongside other authentic individuals. As Heidegger states in § 74 of Being and Time, fateful, or authentic Dasein’s historizing “is a co-historizing and is determinative for it as destiny.” But what is it about living alongside other authentic individuals that gives Daseins the power to live as they do? Heidegger suggests that authentic Daseins communicate the available possibilities to other members of their generation together with the tasks and problems of the age. Further, authentic Daseins struggle with their contemporaries, challenging them to live an authentic life. Contrary to what Emmanuel Faye claims, the activity of struggling, named here, has nothing to do with the doctrines or savagery of National Socialism. As Crowe points out, the best guide to what Heidegger means by “struggling” is to be found in his lecture course of Winter Semester 1920–21, “Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion.” In those early lectures Heidegger first used the term struggle (Kampf ), and he did so in an effort to capture what Crowe describes as the sense of “the concrete context” of St. Paul’s epistles to the Galatians and the Thessalonians. Guided by this original use of the term, Crowe interprets Heidegger’s reference to “struggling” as “a polemical dialogue aimed at challenging the other person to uphold her own way of being true to herself.”41 Following Crowe’s interpretation, then, one could say that Heidegger’s “power of destiny” enables a “person to take hold of her own life in her own way.”42 Destiny’s enabling power stems from communication and struggle, that is, a polemical dialogue “with one’s generation.” Now, Heidegger’s polemical dialogue is structurally similar to the form of dialogue that Ricoeur discusses in the IHEJ lecture. As Ricoeur states, “Legal proceedings are a segment of the communication activity of a society, the confrontation of arguments before a court constituting a noteworthy instance of the dialogical employment of language” (p. 194). Thus, where Heidegger spoke of Daseins communicating with their generation through polemical dialogue, Ricoeur speaks, more abstractly perhaps, of the dialogical “communication of a society.” Of course, the Ricoeurian and Heideggerian dialogues differ with regard to their purpose. Authentic Dasein is said to engage in polemical dialogue with others in order to challenge them to uphold
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their own ways of being true to themselves, whereas Ricoeur’s litigants are said to engage in dialogue in order to arrive at a just resolution of their conflict. Accordingly, there is no reference to any ethical dimension of dialogue in Heidegger, whereas Ricoeur’s “confrontation of arguments” is said to have both a “logic ” and an “ethics ” (p. 195). One has to assume that Heidegger’s version of dialogue has a logic of some kind, yet as Crowe points out, no principle or imperative issues from this “polemical dialogue.”43 Indeed, Crowe notes that, in Being and Time, “the authentic individual does not tell another person how to run her own life.” And he argues that Heidegger’s commitment to polemical dialogue “seems to entail the rejection of paternalistic relationships of the sort that ultimately subjugate other people by encouraging the innate drive to self-abdication.” There is, of course, a similar rejection of paternalistic relationships implicit in Ricoeur’s account of judicial praxis. Far from usurping individual responsibility, the judge positions himself “between the parties,” encouraging them to debate the issue or issues that divide them. Yet at the end of the argumentation process one of the litigants will find herself subjugated. As Ricoeur states, “The other can understand” that her interlocutor has “the better argument” (p. 195). The superior “quality” of the winning argument is evident in its ability to unite a “probabilistic logic” (logique du probable) and an “ethics of argumentation” (pp. 194–95). As I have already noted, Ricoeur suggests that the “ethics of argumentation” is best summed up in the legal maxim Audi alteram partem (“Hear the other side”) (p. 195). The question arises as to the relationship between the “better argument” and the decision handed down by the court. Ricoeur states that, “in order not to be arbitrary, the judgment must draw its justification from the debate, which it brings to a close” (p. 195). Thus one could say that, in an ethical judicial praxis, the ju diciary will find itself under a rational and moral obligation to find in favor of litigants who make the winning argument. There is, then, a clear distinction between Heidegger’s “power of destiny,” which knows nothing of subjugation and imperatives, and the power of persuasion attaching to Ricoeur’s “better argument,” which subjugates opponents and sees judges accede to a rational and moral imperative in order to
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arrive at a certain decision on the distribution of goods. Of course, as we have seen, these very different powers have a common origin in communication and in struggle. For all the differences between Heidegger and Ricoeur, the “power of destiny” does have a certain resonance when applied to the spirit shown by Ricoeur’s generation. As I mentioned at the outset, one of the tasks facing French society in the 1990s was the reform of the then dysfunctional legal system. This task was taken up, not only by politicians and lawyers, but also by sociologists and philosophers. A Heideggerian might venture to suggest that when Michel Rocard, Antoine Garapon, Paul Ricoeur, and others took up this generationally defined task, they provided a fine illustration of an often neglected aspect of “the full authentic historizing of Dasein.” Ricoeur scholars might prefer to say that Ricoeur’s collaboration with politicians, lawyers, and sociologists in the 1990s was just one more example of his willingness to engage with social and political realities. He was, after all, “a philosopher of the city.” But however one describes the situation, it is clear that the interdisciplinary exchanges of the period energized the partici pants and led to a series of innovations in the legal sphere. Thus Ricoeur’s generation saw the setting up of the IHEJ, together with a growing awareness among French lawyers of the international debates in the philosophy of law. That generation also introduced a form of judicial praxis that is governed by dialectically opposed principles of justice. A Heideggerian would say that these extraordinary achievements can be put down to “the power of destiny.” Notes 1. Thierry Paquot, “Urbanisation et confrontations culturelles,” in Paul Ricoeur et les sciences humaines, ed. Christian Delacroix, François Dosse, and Patrick Garcia (Paris: La Découverte, 2007), p. 167. 2. Ibid., p. 168. 3. Paul Ricoeur, À l’école de la phénoménologie (Paris: Vrin, 1986). 4. Paquot, “Urbanisation,” p. 168. 5. Joseph Bien, review of Lectures 1: Autour du politique, by Paul Ricoeur, Review of Metaphysics 49 (1995): 155–56.
Communication, Struggle, and Human Destiny 541 6. See Virtual Museum of French Protestantism, “Paul Ricoeur (1913– 2005),” n.d., www.museeprotestant.org. 7. A corrected version of the court reporter’s transcript forms the “Epilogue” to Paul Ricoeur, Reflections on the Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 249–56. 8. See Fonds Ricoeur, “Paul Ricoeur: Biography,” n.d., www.fonds ricoeur.fr/index.php?m=21&dev=&lang=en&rub=2&ssrub= (accessed 31 December 2011), especially for the period 1981–2001. 9. François Dosse, Les sens d’une vie (Paris: La Découverte, 1997). 10. Paul Ricoeur, Lectures 1: Autour du politique (Paris: Seuil, 1991), p. 194. Page numbers in parentheses refer to this work; all translations are mine. 11. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 8th ed. (Tubingen: M. Niemeyer, 1957), pp. 384–85, translated by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson as Being and Time (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1962), p. 436. 12. Dosse, Les sens, p. 718. 13. Ibid., p. 699. 14. Ibid., p. 720. 15. Ibid., p.721. 16. Ricoeur notes that this same problem will be taken up again by Rawls and the Contractarians. 17. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 197. The French original, Soi-même comme un autre, was published in 1990. 18. Paul Ricoeur, Reflections on the Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 2. The French original, Le Juste 2, was published in 2001. 19. Paul Ricoeur, On Translation, trans. Eileen Brennan (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006). 20. Ibid., p. 4. 21. Ibid., pp. 4–5. 22. Ibid., p. 5. 23. Ibid., pp. 8–10. 24. Ibid., p. 10. 25. Ibid., p. 21. 26. Ibid., p. 10. 27. Dosse, Les sens, p. 721. 28. Emmanuel Faye and François Fédier met to debate the meaning of Heidegger’s work on 25 February 2007. A video recording of this debate is available at www.dailymotion.com/video/x1asyb_heidegger-1-4_news.
542 Eileen Brennan 29. Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger: L’introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie (Paris: Albin Michel, 2005). 30. Massimo Amato et al., Heidegger à plus forte raison (Paris: Fayard, 2007). 31. Faye, Heidegger, p. 31. 32. Christian Sommer, Heidegger, Aristote, Luther: Les sources aristotéliciennes et néo-testamentaires d’“Être et Temps” (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2005). 33. Benjamin D. Crowe, Heidegger’s Religious Origins: Destruction and Authenticity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). 34. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, pp. 384–85, trans. p. 436. 35. Crowe, Heidegger’s Religious Origins, p. 195. 36. Ibid., p. 196. 37. Ibid., p. 197. 38. Ibid., p. 198. 39. Crowe argues that “the ideal of authenticity has its roots in Heidegger’s attempt to appropriate the primitive Christian origins of Romantic personalism” (ibid., p. 195). 40. Ibid., p. 198. 41. Ibid., p. 199. 42. Ibid., p. 202. 43. See ibid.
t w e n t y - t w o
Forgetting Aristotle? Heidegger’s Reflections on Mimesis
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Philosophers are worth reading also when they do not get it quite right. For even then they set us on the path to further interrogation. To this purpose, arguably there are few as inspiring as Aristotle and Heidegger: veritable masters of probing heuristic. It is ironic that the philosopher who indicted his contemporaries and his predecessors since the preSocratics with forgetfulness, Seinsvergessenheit, seems alarmingly afflicted by his own lack of memory—or was it, perhaps, a blind spot?—when it came to a convincing understanding of mime¯sis. In Heidegger we seem to encounter a spectacular case of Mime¯sis-vergessenheit. One may suspect, without exercising excessive hermeneutical violence, that the lapse of memory had a reason. Perhaps he feared that a careful and comprehensive account of mime¯sis would condemn some of his ideas to the wastepaper basket. Other probable explanations would prove to be more severe. In order to diagnose, with some degree of accuracy, Heidegger’s suspected inclination to forgetfulness, we will first consider Aristotle’s 543
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understanding of mime¯sis and of correlated concepts such as techne¯, poie¯sis, physis, praxis.1 The analysis will highlight the fundamentally Aristotelian character of Heidegger’s reflections on art or, rather, techne¯ in the most generic sense of production, skill, craft. However, it also hopes to fill a surprising lacuna in Heidegger’s thinking by suggesting ways in which mime¯sis carries resonances which shed light on the general meaning of techne¯ and poie¯sis and the specific nature of the work of art.
Mime¯sis According to Aristotle The brief analyses that follow will show that Aristotle understood the concept of mime¯sis in a novel and seminal manner that went beyond the meaning, predominantly held by his predecessors, of copying and reproducing. He conceived it as a particular activity or, more precisely, as a specific type of techne¯/poie¯sis, namely the poie¯sis of poets and artists in general. And this is seen in function of the specific objects it “imitates,” namely physis and praxis, where these “objects” are—unlike Plato’s ideas—not transcendent and separate, and actually not “objects” at all. The discussion of our problem could aptly begin by paraphrasing an expression particularly dear to Aristotle. Mime¯sis, not unlike being, is thought and spoken of in many ways. Indeed, the polysemy of the word reminds us of the difficulty of the problem at hand. “Since the poet represents life, as a painter does or any other maker of likenesses, he must always represent one of three things— either things as they were or are; or things as they are said and seem to be; or things as they should be.”2 It would be difficult to deny that Aristotle understood mime¯sis also in the sense of imitation, copying, and miming: as actually re‑presenting or picturing and reenacting a given state of affairs. The reference to the human propensity and natural instinct for miming and copying is clearly made, particularly in the Poetics, 1448b2–6, and frequent references to stage acting and actors can be found throughout the text. So the minimal meaning of mime¯sis under-
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stood as imitation is not ignored by Aristotle. It would, however, be equally difficult—if not even more difficult—to reduce the concept of mime¯sis to the mere notion of servile copying. It will become clear that the primary and essential meaning of mime¯sis, particularly in the context of the Poetics and Rhetoric, is other, richer, and considerably more refined than that of copy and imitation. It will also become clear that mime¯sis stood, for Aristotle, as the distinctive property and feature of the fine arts—as we understand art—apart from and beyond the generic productive activity of making any kind of artifact. In the Nicomachean Ethics the philosopher draws the distinction between techne¯/poie¯sis and praxis, between making and doing. Aristotle explains more clearly and more comprehensively this distinction, which was not unknown to his predecessors, just as he explains— better than his predecessors—the distinction between primarily useful and primarily “aesthetic” or beautiful artifacts. “Making is different from doing. . . . All art [making] deals with bringing something into existence; and to pursue an art means to study how to bring into existence a thing which may either exist or not, and the efficient cause of which lies in the maker and not in the thing made; for art does not deal with things that exist or come into existence of necessity, or according to nature, since these have their efficient cause in themselves.”3 Making is a transient, transitive, and extrinsic activity: its arche¯ lies in the maker, its telos stands outside the activity of making. Techne¯ and poie¯sis work from without, according to a transitive activity which aims at producing artifacts that abide outside the maker. We manufacture things, and none of them has within itself the principle of its own making. “Generally this principle resides in some external agent, as in the case of the house and its builder, and so with all hand‑made things.”4 In the case of praxis, on the contrary, the arche¯, the telos, and the activity of doing are immanent: indwelling within each other and within the agent’s soul/mind. Praxis is indeed, first and foremost, psyche¯s energeia: the inner activity of the human soul/mind, or principle of human life. And we should add that, in the context of the Nicomachean Ethics, praxis is fundamentally understood as praxis teleia: activity
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that is a goal unto itself. It is human doing, acting and in‑acting, according to excellence of virtue. It is acting fully, acting perfectly according to the teleological order of our own being, inscribed and encoded in our psyche: mind/soul, which is our very substance. Praxis has no end outside itself and acts “energetically”: from within itself. In this respect, action is like physis, for praxis is the activity that qualifies the psyche¯; and the soul is the “natural substance” of the rational speaking political animal capable of laughing. In the Physics, 192b11–15, Aristotle announces that natural beings are those beings that “have within themselves a principle of motion and rest.” So physis is clearly understood as “the principle and cause of motion and rest to those things, and those things only, in which it inheres as according to the same constitution of the things and not accidentally.” Unlike handmade artifacts, physis is at once its own origin and arche¯, and its own telos. It is the self‑unfolding activity, from itself to itself, which constitutes the being of physical beings. Physis is the universal process that grounds and produces the manifold activities of natural beings: generation, nutrition, growth, movement, change, selfpreservation. It is the activity of self‑production, of self‑bringing‑forth, out of itself, according to itself, toward itself. Natural beings generate or produce other natural beings. Physis produces and generates itself. It produces motion (kinesis), according to oppositions, in natural beings. Itself is free of oppositions. As immanent self‑unfolding and as one of the fundamental ways in which being comes to light, physis is the activity of self-forth-bringing, self-unfolding, self-revealing, self‑ presenting, from itself aiming at itself. Heidegger’s interpretation of physis is worth quoting: “What does the word physis denote? It denotes self-blossoming emergence from itself (e.g. the blossoming of a rose), opening up, unfolding, that which manifests itself in such unfolding and perseveres and endures in it: in short, the realm of things that emerge and linger on.”5 Having established the difference obtaining between techne¯/poie¯sis and praxis, on the one hand, and techne¯/poie¯sis and physis, on the other, we read: “He¯ techne¯ mimeitai te¯n physin.”6 This is usually translated as “Art imitates nature.” With this statement, and in the light of what we have
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found so far, we can now attempt to interpret more adequately the meaning of mime¯sis, also as a distinguishing trait of artistic production. Let us remark, first of all, that Aristotle does not say that art “mimetizes” natural beings, living things that have in themselves the source of motion and rest. The philosopher, quite unambiguously, states that “he¯ techne¯ mimeitai te¯n physin”: that is, the very same universal process of unfolding and of self‑unfolding from itself to itself. But obviously, understood as such, physis is not a thing or a complex of things; it is not a datum and it is not an object. And it is not “nature” as we understand the word in modern times, either. If this is the case, nature/ physis cannot be copied, represented, and imitated, in the sense of being re-produced in some sort of specular mirroring fashion.7 Having stated that “art mimetizes nature,” Aristotle speaks of physis in the light of the final cause or telos and suggests a strong analogy between nature and art: “Physis is the goal for the sake of which the rest exist, for if any systematic and continuous movement is directed to a goal, this goal is an end in the sense of the purpose to which the movement is a means. . . . In the arts, too, it is in view of the end that the materials are either made or suitably prepared, and we make use of all things that we have at our command as though they existed for our sake; for we are, in a way, a goal ourselves.”8 Natural processes are autotelic: a goal to themselves. On the contrary, artificial processes emerging from and guided by an idea in the mind (Metaphysics, 1032b1) have us humans as their goal and aim. This first analogy is further developed when Aristotle clearly suggests one of the meanings of the mimetic relationship obtaining between art and nature: Further, in any operation of human art, where there is an end to be achieved, the earlier and successive stages of the operation are performed for the purpose of realizing that end. Now, when a thing is produced by nature, the earlier stages in every case lead up to the final development in the same way as in the operation of art. . . . The operation, as well as the natural process, is directed by a purpose. Thus, if a house were a natural product, the process would go
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through the same stages that it in fact undergoes when it is produced by art; and if natural products could also be produced by art, they would move along the same line that the natural process actually takes. If, then, artificial processes are purposeful, so are natural processes too.9
This passage establishes unequivocally the very strict parallelism, the close analogy, and what may be called the structural and dynamic isomorphism obtaining between art and nature. The very same circular and specular formulation of the argument emphasizes the analogy between the two processes: the natural and the technical/artistic. In the light of the extensively quoted section from the Physics, we could translate the sentence “He¯ techne¯ mimeitai te¯n physin” not as “Art imitates nature” but rather as “Art produces by making‑as‑nature-does.” The artistic making is mimetic of nature, for it proceeds toward a goal according to the organic and ordered process which constitutes nature’s doing: its self‑unfolding toward its goal. Art produces according to the ordered process that aims at a purpose and that originates from a disposition in the soul. Art, again, does not “imitate” in the sense of copying, representing, or portraying nature; it simply proceeds— through making and not doing—in view of a goal, starting from a material principle (éx ou) and the eîdos in the soul, according to an ordered process.10 That mime¯sis does not mean, mainly and exclusively, copy and imitation, should be seen more sharply in the light of the well-known passage where Aristotle contrasts poie¯sis and historia, poetry/art and historiography: “What we have said already makes it further clear that a poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could and would happen either probably or inevitably. The difference between a historian and a poet is not that one writes in prose and the other in verse. . . . The real difference is this, that one tells what happened and the other what might happen. For this reason poetry is more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”11 Although the word mime¯sis does not appear in this text, the passage is nonetheless quite revealing. It tells us that the content, as it were, of
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poetry differs radically from that of historiography. The latter gathers and reconstructs past, given, happened events, embedded as they are in the particularity of the factual occurrence and of the particular agent. Historiography presents us with facts, data, as objectively documented as possible. Poetry, on the other hand, gathers and grasps what could be according to probability and what ought to be according to necessity. It does not collate and refer data from past events. It rather builds and projects the sequence, the meaning, the process of actions as they could and as they should be, according to necessary probabilities. Insofar as the poet does not deal with given facts and events, with what has happened, his activity of “mimetizing” cannot be understood as a kind of copying, for the possible, the probable, the necessary, what could be, and what ought to be are not empirically given facts, so they are not reproducible by means of representational copy. More generally, the ancient Greeks, and Aristotle in particular, did not conceive reality as a collection and bundle of static things. Being, the totality of reality, was understood not as a given object but as the activity of self-presenting and self-indwelling. The strenuous insistence on this point remains perhaps Heidegger’s most valuable contribution to our better understanding of ancient Greek philosophy. Finally, what precisely does the poet, specifically as artist rather than generic craftsman, “mimetize”? “The poet is a poet by virtue of his mime¯sis, and the thing he ‘mimetizes’ is praxis.”12 Once again, to understand mime¯sis as “imitation” would be misleading, to say the least, and inadequate. Poetry brings‑forth actions. More precisely, it brings‑forth action as one action, perfectly unified within itself. The long quotation that follows makes amply clear Aristotle’s insight: A plot does not have unity, as some people think, simply because it deals with a single hero. Many and indeed innumerable things happen to an individual, some of which do not go to make up any unity, and similarly an individual is concerned in many actions which do not combine into a single piece of action. It seems therefore that all those poets are wrong who have written a Heracleid or Theseid or other such poems. They think that because Heracles was a single individual the plot must for that reason have unity. But Homer, supreme also in
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all other respects, was apparently well aware of this truth either by instinct or from knowledge of his art. For in writing an Odyssey he did not put in all that ever happened to Odysseus, his being wounded on Parnassus, for instance, or his feigned madness when the host was gathered (these being events neither of which necessarily or probably led to the other), but he constructed his Odyssey round a single action in our sense of the phrase. And the Iliad the same.13
This long passage should resolve the ambiguity—sometimes real, sometimes apparent—in Aristotle’s employment of the words praxis and praxeis in the singular and plural form and should alert us also to the intended difference obtaining between the meaning of praxis and that of pragmata. The difference between action/doing and particular behavioral incidents should also illumine the metaphysical meaning of “action.” Aristotle was not primarily concerned with individual, isolated, accidental actions or behavior. Nor was he solely thinking, in the context of the Poëtica, of the dramatic action or plot to be represented theatrically, to be acted out, on the stage.14 And when, as in the quoted passage, the plural form “actions” suggests the meaning of accidental, uneventful behavioral occurrence, Aristotle emphatically remarks that poetry—even when given in the form of a manifold and labyrinthine epic saga—“mimetizes” one single action. And praxis, as we stated at the beginning, with reference to the Nicomachean Ethics—whose theme is precisely “action”— is the unfolding of the immanent “doing” or activity of the soul and of the soul’s energeia. This, obviously, cannot be imitated or copied. Aristotle did not hold a representational conception of art and did not, therefore, follow Plato’s understanding of art as heteronomous copy and imitation. This is brought to light by his insistence on the idea that artists deal with probability, possibility, and inner—ontological and poetic or textual—necessity. Artists rather create metaphorical verisimilitudes: imaginative, aesthetically informative, fictional constructions of symbolic, ideal, possible worlds: universes of co-reality (Mit-realität), as Max Bense would put it. Otherwise, we could be
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inclined to think of mime¯sis, and of art’s mimetic alchemy, as “metamorphosis into form” (Verwandlung ins Gebilde), to borrow Gadamer’s felicitous expression.15 In this is to be found the richer meaning of mime¯sis. It is the power to form and produce an ideal state of affairs. And through the power of mime¯sis we encounter metaphors and epiphanies of probable and possible worlds—if not of Being. This is what is meant by art’s verisimilitude: that it follows the laws of ideal probability and necessity. Aristotle’s conception of mime¯sis can, therefore, be seen as an answer to the problem of the truth of fiction and of the ontological status of art: the existence of imaginary characters in literary and mythical worlds. From our own point of view, those other worlds lack actual existence but are perfectly possible, eminently credible, nonetheless. Perhaps Borges was right when he wrote that universal history is the history of a handful of metaphors or the different intonation given a handful of metaphors. Penultimately, but not least, we must now note a point of grammar that—to my knowledge—seems to have eluded all the commentators of Aristotle or has not been explicitly mentioned, anyway. The infinitive verb that tells us what mime¯sis does is mimeisthai. The verb ends with what appears to be a passive inflection. It is not an active verb. It belongs to the medial—reflexive—mode, and it cannot therefore denote an activity in the active transitive mode. The Latin imitari preserves the Greek inflection. The medial and reflexive verbal diathesis warrants a further refined understanding of mime¯sis. We could say that the making of art mirrors itself in the doing of nature and of action. To conclude this section, let us repeat the formulation that art proceeds by making‑as‑nature‑does and by making‑as‑the‑psyche‑acts. In particular, art/poetry “mimetizes action”: it brings to light, manifests, presents, and represents the very nature of the soul in action. Mime¯sis is the activity of bringing‑forth or producing that which is essential to our being: the unfolding of the psyche¯s energeia, the inner energy of the soul. In Metaphysics 1032b 1, Aristotle states that “by the virtue of art and craft, things come to exist, things whose eidos resides in the soul.”16 Also, that which proceeds from the mimetic activity of techne¯ and poie¯sis
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has its eidos in our soul. Hence mime¯sis can produce the revelation of universal truths, the epiphanic manifestation of our being‑in‑action. In this light, if we interpret mime¯sis as manifestation of being and production of man’s being, tragedy and epic poetry stand as the creative celebration of the human world ruled as it is, according to the Greek mind, by immanent order, teleology, and destiny. Let us now turn to Heidegger and find some of the light he can shed on our understanding of art and of mime¯sis.
Heidegger’s Forgetfulness? The figure of Aristotle looms large on the landscape of Heidegger’s thought. Most of the philosophical key words repeatedly interpreted by Heidegger are to be found in Aristotle’s works, lexically and semantically richer than those of his predecessors. In particular, techne¯, poie¯sis, and physis are concepts ubiquitously present in Heidegger’s writings and are, more or less explicitly, discussed with reference to Aristotelian texts and contexts. In the light of Heidegger’s sensitive knowledge of the language of Greek philosophy (except when he indulges in dubious etymological experiments) and considering his emphatic assertion that “philosophy speaks Greek,” not to mention his reference to the ancient Greeks as “masters of thought and speech,” one cannot avoid being baffled by two particular lacunae in his thought.17 In the first place—also because of his interest in poetry in particular—it seems strange that, to my knowledge, Heidegger never mentions the Poetics in his voluminous writings, while three peripheral references to the Rhetoric are to be found in Being and Time: one dealing with the general concept of feeling or affect, the other two referring to fear as a manifestation of anxiety. The mentioned references, in other words, are not related to poetic strategies and artistic concerns, matters upon which the Rhetoric sheds considerable light. More strange perhaps is the fact that he nowhere discusses the meaning of mime¯sis (or of mythos and lexis, for that matter) according to Aristotle and dedicates only some twenty pages, in his
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ietzsche, to a discussion of Plato’s concept, which he understands N to mean only copy, imitation, reproduction, representation of appearances.18 Heidegger’s reflections on fine art, in some form or other, are fragmentary, scattered throughout his writings, generally peripheral and accidental.19 “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1935–36), which, to my mind, has received a degree of attention as considerable as undeserved, and the later essays on language, poetry, and Hölderlin may be regarded as an attempt at more coherent and focused reflection.20 The enlightening essay “The Question Concerning Technology” sheds some oblique light on poetic processes and the nature of art, as fine art.21 The lectures on Nietzsche—of 1936–40, and again 1940–46— deal with, among other themes, the relation obtaining between art and truth, and note analogies and differences in Plato’s and Nietzsche’s respective views. In particular, “Nietzsche says that art is worth more than truth. It must be that Plato decides that art is worth less than truth, that is, less than knowledge of true being as philosophy.”22 In the lectures on Nietzsche, the meaning of mime¯sis is gleaned from Plato’s writings only, especially the Republic. Finally, we have the very short “Denken und Kunst” and a few scattered remarks on Rilke, Klee, and Cézanne that do not amount to much, also because (for all the alleged “turns” in his thought) they issue from, and remain tied to, Heidegger’s early critique of metaphysics, of aesthetics, of the subject-object preemptive opposition, of the matter-form model, and of his critique of “representation” which he believes to be the overall mark of Western art.23 But for a few terminological variations, and regardless of the inadequacies of “The Origin,” the premises, prejudices, and preoccupations of that essay remain fundamentally unchanged throughout the subsequent writings touching on the subject. What, in particular, stands unchanged is Heidegger’s conviction (following Hegel, to a certain extent) (1) that the artistic production of ancient Greece remains unsurpassed; (2) that the history of art, since classical Greece, has been a free-fall downhill journey of steady regression; (3) that the ancient considerations of art have increasingly been abandoned, to give way to aesthetics; (4) that the privileged attention focused on the “aesthetic”—
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the sense-perceptible, appearance, and feeling—has failed to bring to light “reality” or Being in its fullness. So even art—its creations and its understanding—has fallen prey to the metaphysical destiny marked by the Seinsvergessenheit.24 The central idea of “The Origin of the Work of Art” is quite familiar. Commenting on Van Gogh’s Peasant’s Shoes, Heidegger states: “The art work lets us know what shoes are in truth. . . . What is at work in the work? Van Gogh’s painting is the disclosure of what the equipment, the pair of peasant shoes, is in truth. This entity emerges into the unconcealedness of its being. The Greeks called the unconcealedness of beings ale¯theia.”25 The reference to Van Gogh is quoted mainly because it exemplifies Heidegger’s preconceptions about what art should do and his misconceptions regarding what art is about. Heidegger— not unlike his fiercest critic, Adorno—holds the misguided assumption that art is in the service of philosophy. Both, Adorno and Heidegger, consider the essence of art to be a vehicle of philosophical ideas and in function of philosophical ideology. Hence, in the end, they ask too much and too little of the work of art, and of fine art as we understand and enjoy it, and as our predecessors ever understood and enjoyed it. More in general, Heidegger adds: “In the work of art the truth of an entity has set itself to work. . . . The being of the being comes into the steadiness of its shining. . . . The nature of art would then be this: the truth of beings setting itself to work. But until now art presumably has had to do with the beautiful and beauty, and not with truth.”26 The last observation clearly ignores that the connection between art and truth was not unknown to many philosophers and artists before Heidegger. I shall limit myself to mention Aquinas, as representative of the golden Middle Ages, and Hegel—the giant champion of modern thought—who repeatedly stated, as a veritable leitmotif of his monumental Lectures on Aesthetics, that “art is an unfolding of truth.” There is, then, Leonardo da Vinci with many other Renaissance artists, not least Dürer, Giovanni Bellini, Piero della Francesca, Michelangelo, and many others, who elevated painting to the rank of science. Then— to make a long story short—came Keats with his “Beauty is truth,
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truth beauty,” whatever he precisely meant by that. And let us also recollect James Joyce’s idea—quite modern, even though inspired by Aquinas and already announced by Pater and the aesthetic movement of the late nineteenth century—of “epiphany”: the aesthetic experience of insight granted by the revelatory character of the work of art. One has the unsettling feeling that, in the end, Heidegger is not so much interested in art as he is in retrieving the original Greek meaning of truth as ale¯theia: disclosure and epiphany of the hidden/hiding ontological core and ground of beings. Otherwise, he is interested in art—in the original sense of techne¯, which denotes also knowledge, knowing how to produce and bring forth an artifact, “recta ratio factibilium”—mainly because it can illustrate the meaning of ale¯theia in an eminent way. “In Aristotle techne¯ is still a mode of knowing, if only one among others. . . . If we understand the word ‘art’ quite generally to mean every capacity to bring forth, and if in addition we grasp the capacity and ability more originally as a knowing, then the word ‘art’ corresponds to the Greek concept of techne¯ also in its broad significance.”27 So Heidegger underlines and foregrounds the idea that art, in its generic sense of production, is linked to ale¯theia in its allegedly original sense. As a result, the specific and derivative idea of fine art is absorbed and downgraded, as it were, in his search for “original” and authentic meanings. This would explain Heidegger’s animosity toward aesthetics, his total forgetfulness of poetic processes, and his consistent lack of interest in formal properties and in beauty. To his mind, these belong to the realm of appearance, sense-perception, falsification. They fall outside the bounds of the ontological realm of self- revealing Being. In “The Origin,” as elsewhere, Heidegger seems particularly concerned with distinguishing his conception of truth (which he claims to derive from pre-Socratic philosophy, for—to his mind—even Plato and Aristotle had already become forgetful of truth) as “unconcealedness of beings,” from the concept of truth understood as “correspondence”: “Agreement with what is has long been taken to be the essence of truth.” “The Middle Ages called it adaequatio; Aristotle already spoke of homoio¯sis.” Curiously, and quite oddly, in An Introduction to Metaphysics
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Heidegger equates homoio¯sis with mime¯sis: “The truth of physis, ale¯theia as the unconcealment that is the essence of the emerging power, now becomes homoio¯sis and mime¯sis, assimilation and accommodation, orientation by . . . it becomes a correctness of vision, of apprehension as representation.”28 From this conception of truth, understood as correspondence of mind and reality/being, would stem “the obsolete view that art is an imitation and depiction of reality.” To further show the obsolescence of that view, Heidegger offers another example: “It is necessary to make visible once more the happening of truth in the work. For this attempt let us deliberately select a work that cannot be ranked as representational art. A building, a Greek temple, portrays nothing.”29 In the light of the last statement (not very profound, actually naive, perhaps silly, for no mildly knowledgeable person would ever claim that architecture should portray anything), one is tempted to suspect that Heidegger had his own very obsolete notion of what has been generally held to be the essence of art, since the days of Plato and Aristotle. More in general, and from a purely cultural and contextual point of view, should we not be surprised that nearly a century of revolutionary experiments in the visual arts, in particular, not to mention the late stages of that era, which witnessed the heroic years of the avant-garde, passed unnoticed by Heidegger? We find mentions of Braque, Klee, le Corbusier, Cézanne “in the final decades of his life,” as Julian Young correctly notes.30 And that is precisely what they are: peripheral mentions quite void of any focused and competent concern for the poetic and formal strategies deployed by the mentioned artists. The same goes for the scanty references to Stravinsky and Carl Orff. Let us return to Heidegger’s forgetfulness of Aristotle’s conception of mime¯sis. An effort, as laborious as futile, has been made by John Sallis to retrieve a hidden mimetological strain in Heidegger’s thought. My main, though not sole, concern with Sallis’ arguments is that, to begin, he fails to provide us with a clear account of his—or Heidegger’s, for that matter—understanding of Aristotle’s concept of mime¯sis.31 Furthermore, in his fervent devotion to Heidegger, Sallis overinterprets and ascribes to the philosopher ideas he never articu-
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lated. In my opinion, the essay in question is probably Sallis’ most strained piece of writing. As already indicated, there is no mention, to my knowledge, of Aristotle’s Poetics in Heidegger’s writings, while scanty reference to the Rhetoric can be found in Being and Time. More pointedly, Heidegger’s comments on the concept of mime¯sis refer exclusively to Plato. One could suspect an intentional negligence, or even a phobic reaction, if we note that, in his otherwise philologically robust and hermeneutically enlightening commentary on Aristotle’s Physics B, 1, Heidegger “quotes a long passage from Aristotle’s Physics and abruptly breaks off the quotation precisely where Aristotle begins to speak about mime¯sis (GA 9: 239–40).”32 Heidegger shows a baffling lack of interest in what Aristotle had to say about mime¯sis and art, while devoting much attention to Plato’s reflections on the same subjects. A few chosen comments from Heidegger’s Nietzsche sound particularly interesting and crucial, also because they make clear Heidegger’s hermeneutic presuppositions and prejudgments: “In Book Three [Republic] . . . Plato shows in a preliminary way that what art conveys and provides is always a portrayal of beings; although it is not inactive, its producing and making, poiein, remain mime¯sis, imitation, copying and transforming, poetizing in the sense of inventing. Thus art in itself is exposed to the danger of continual deception and falsehood.”33 In the tenth and final book, “Plato shows first of all what it means to say that art is mime¯sis, and then why, granting that characteristic, art can only occupy a subordinate position.” “One presupposition remains unchallenged: all art is mime¯sis. We translate that word as ‘imitation.’ . . . Quite likely we are inclined to assume that here we are encountering a ‘primitivistic’ notion of art, or a one-sided view of it, in the sense of a particular artistic style called ‘naturalism,’ which copies things that are at hand.”34 Again, “Mime¯sis means copying, that is, presenting and producing something in a manner which is typical of something else.”35 In the end, one has the uncomfortable feeling that Heidegger shares Plato’s conception of mime¯sis—a much simplified and impoverished version thereof, to be precise—and seems to imply that “copying” was the prevalent conception of art in the Western tradition until
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he arrived on the scene. “Die Mimesis ist aber das Wesen aller Kunst.” “But mime¯sis is the essence of all art. Hence art holds a place of distance with respect to Being, to immediate and undistorted outward appearance, to the idea. This distance would, therefore, be the proprium of art. In regard to the opening up of Being, that is, to the display of Being in the unconcealed, ale¯theia, art is subordinate.”36 To make a long and occasionally tedious story short, let us be mindful of the fact that, for Heidegger, art is copying understood also as reproduction of the idea/eidos. The final passage of the section in the Nietzsche book to which we have referred is as intriguing as it is interesting: A statement by Erasmus which has been handed down to us is supposed to characterize the art of Albrecht Dürer. . . . The statement runs: ex situ rei minus, non unam speciem sese oculis offerentem exprimit: by showing a particular thing from any given angle, he, Dürer the painter, brings to the fore not only one single isolated view which offers itself to the eye. Rather—we may complete the thought in the following way—by showing any given individual thing as this particular thing, in its singularity, he makes Being itself visible: in a particular hare, the Being of the Hare; in a particular animal, the animality. It is clear that Erasmus here is speaking against Plato. We may presume that the humanist Erasmus knew the dialogue we have been discussing and its passages on art. That Erasmus and Dürer could speak in such a fashion presupposes that a transformation of the understanding of Being was taking place.37
We can now sum up the situation. Heidegger’s reflections on art are disconcertingly unoriginal. What he has to say about techne¯ he owes entirely to Aristotle. His idea of the work of art creating a world that rests on and beckons the powers of earth sounds familiarly Hegelian. As Hegel would put it: art spiritualizes matter and materializes mind/Geist. Heidegger’s understanding of mime¯sis remains framed within reference to Plato’s idealism and is actually poorer than Plato’s own conception, also because it is selectively gleaned from the Republic and makes
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no reference to other writings. One could say that his reading of Plato is once again colored by his own prejudices and that, as a result, it generates and spins pseudoarguments, yielding partial and misleading results. Even leaving aside Aristotle for a moment, Heidegger’s presentation of Plato’s concept of art remains untroubled by the complexity of the issue and blissfully unaware, or conveniently forgetful, of other texts—such as the Ion, the Symposium, or the Phaedrus, in particular— where Plato is prepared to grant a certain value and virtue to the arts as a path to wisdom and truth. Anyway, a careful reading—more careful than the one provided by Heidegger—of book 3 of the Republic yields much information that the philosopher from Messkirch seems to have overlooked or chosen to ignore. In the mentioned book 3, Plato suggests that an education in literature and music is essential in the initial stages of mental preparation to the mature life of reason. Art is, therefore, understood as a propaedeutic to philosophy and, hence, already part of the grand utopian project of truth seeking within the ideal city. We must also note, with due emphasis, that to say with Plato that the work of art imitates the copies of ideas—useful artifacts or natural beings—means also to say, at once, that the idea illumines, informs, and comes to light in the mimetic work.38 Mime¯sis, therefore, has to be understood as the dialectical interaction between the copy and the model, the phenomenon and truth, the manifested and the manifesting ale¯theia. The work of art remains a manifestation of ideal truth, no matter how weak. It belongs to the idea. Consequently, not even in Plato can mime¯sis be understood, totally and exclusively, as the mere act of copying or the passive “holding the mirror up to nature.” Clearly, Plato’s metaphysical conception of truth and reality implies that mime¯sis signifies a rapport of dependence of nature and useful artifacts upon the eternal ideas, and of artistic artifacts upon the former. So, according to Plato, mime¯sis relates the human arts to the metaphysical idea undertood as Vorbild, model, and prototype. Consequently, mime¯sis is conceived as in function of the transcendent paradigm. To conclude, the paradox must be recalled, whereby the deceitful and lying mimetic arts must, for the Greeks and particularly according
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to Plato, educate, which means to say that the artist/poet must bring to light the ideal dimension of what lies beyond the given empirical reality. Heidegger seems to have resolved the paradox by ignoring it. Notes 1. For a more developed and extensively documented analysis of the theme, see Liberato Santoro-Brienza, “Some Remarks on Aristotle’s Concept of Mimesis,” Revue des Études Anciennes 82 (1980): 31–40; also H. Bredin and L. Santoro-Brienza, Philosophies of Art and Beauty (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), pp. 28–42. To avoid the confusion and ambiguity generated by verbs such as to copy, to imitate, and to reproduce, I have chosen the expression to mimetize to signify what mime¯sis does. 2. Aristotle, Poetics 1460b7–11, trans. W. Hamilton Fyfe, Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann, 1973), p. 101. 3. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (NE) VI, 4, 1140a2–16, trans. H. Rackham, The Nicomachean Ethics, Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann, 1968), p. 335. 4. Aristotle, Physics II, 1, 192b28–30, trans. P. H. Wicksteed and F. M. Cornford, The Physics, Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann, 1970), p. 109. 5. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. R. Manheim (New York: Doubleday, 1961), pp. 11–12. 6. Physics II, 2, 194a22. 7. In the light of Metaphysics VII—particularly ch. 3—where Aristotle rejects the understanding of ousia as either katholou or genos, thus rejecting Plato’s conception of ideas, we can stress the point even further. Understood as substance, process, and activity—and not as a generic universal—phýsis cannot be conceived as a transcendent paradigm upon which poiêsis depends by imitating it. The rapport between nature and art is not one of dependence but of analogy. 8. Physics II, 2, 194a28–30, 33–35, trans. P. H. Wicksteed and F. M. Cornford, p. 123, slightly modified. 9. Physics II, 8, 199a 8–19, trans. P. H. Wicksteed and F. M. Cornford, p. 173. 10. Aquinas’ commentary is worth quoting: “Ars imitatur naturam; . . . in operando ars imitatur.” In Physicam Aristotelis II, 4, 171. This idea, which has
Forgetting Aristotle? 561 echoed down the centuries for the benefit of listening ears, is well put by Erwin Panofsky: “Art does not imitate what nature creates, but it works in the same way as nature creates.” Idea: A Concept in Art Theory (1924; repr., Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1968), p. 42; emphasis in original. 11. Poetics 1451a36–1451b7, trans. Fyfe, p. 35. 12. Poetics 1451b27. See also 1449b24 and 36; 1450a2; 1450b3 and 21; 1451a31; 1452a2. 13. Poetics 1451a 16–29. 14. G. F. Else understands praxis as dramatic action enacted on the stage, or as representation of a plot. See his Aristotle’s Poetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), esp. pp. 221, 241. F. Fergusson, in The Idea of a Theater (New York: Hill and Wang, 1953), leaned in the same direction. 15. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, ed. and trans. G. Barden and J. Cumming (New York: Crossroad, 1984), p. 99. The translators have translated as “transformation into structure.” 16. Aristotle, Metaphysics, my translation. 17. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 1, trans. D. Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), p. 164. See also Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 47: “For along with German the Greek language is (in regard to its possibilities for thought) at once the most powerful and most spiritual of all languages.” 18. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961), vol. 1, pp. 198–217, trans., pp. 162–87. Nachhahmung, Nachmachen, Nach-machen, “Nachmachen ist: nachgeordnetes Her-stellen” (p. 215); “Imitation is subordinate production” (p. 185). 19. Julian Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), is an admirable tour de force, bordering on the heroic, and a valuable attempt at lending quasi-systematic cohesion to Heidegger’s reflections. Young’s analyses are enlightening and his overview of the landscape is quite comprehensive. His stance, however, may perhaps be considered too generous and benevolent. In his Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1967), pp. 402–12, William J. Richardson is considerably more cautious and less rhapsodic than Julian Young. 20. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” trans. A. Hofstadter, in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper Collins, 2001), pp. 15– 86. Young notes that “The Origin” has received a degree of attention which can be described as inordinate and obsessive; see Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, p. 17.
562 Liberato Santoro-Brienza 21. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977). 22. Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans., vol. 1, p. 163. 23. Martin Heidegger, “Denken und Kunst,” in Japan und Heidegger: Gedenkschrift der Stadt Messkirch zum hundertsten Geburtstag Martin Heideggers (Sigmarinen: J. Thorbecke, 1989), pp. 211–15. 24. Heidegger, “Origin,” pp. 26–27 et passim; Nietzsche, vol. 1, pp. 77–88. 25. Heidegger, “Origin,” p. 35. 26. Ibid. 27. Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 1, p. 82. On techne¯, see Heidegger, “Origin,” p. 57, “Question Concerning Technology,” and “On the Essence and Concept of Phýsis in Aristotle’s Physics B, I,” in Pathmarks, ed. W. McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 183–230. 28. Heidegger, “Origin,” p. 36, and Introduction to Metaphysics, pp. 154–55. 29. Heidegger, “Origin,” p. 40. 30. Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, p. 1. 31. John Sallis, “Heidegger’s Poetics: The Question of Mimesis,” in Kunst und Technik, ed. Walter Biemel and F.-W. von Herrmann (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1989), pp. 175–88. 32. S. Ijsseling, “Mimesis and Translation,” in Reading Heidegger, ed. John Sallis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 348. 33. Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 1, p. 168. 34. Ibid., p. 169. 35. Ibid., p. 173. 36. Ibid., p. 186. That mime¯sis is central to art had been amply noted by Aristotle, to begin. 37. Ibid., pp. 186–87. 38. H.-G. Gadamer has particularly insisted on the epistemic function of Plato’s concept of imitation, which, in so far as re-presentation is concerned, absolves an eminent cognitive function. It is a form of re-cognition. This is one of the central ideas in Truth and Method. See in particular pt. 1, ch. 11. See also Gadamer’s “Kunst und Nachahmung,” in Kleine Schriften (Tübingen: Paul Siebeck, 1967), vol. 2, pp. 16–26.
t w e n t y - t h r e e
Immanent Transcendence? Adorno’s Reconception of Metaphysics
Brian O’Connor
Contemporary philosophy generally sees itself as decisively postmetaphysical. It consciously avoids seeking to justify its explanations of the world or its phenomena in terms, concepts, or principles that might be understood to be in some sense “world transcending,” that is, metaphysical. In this respect it breaks quite deliberately with an explanatory procedure which sustained mainstream philosophical inquiry since its Western inception, yielding up, for instance, the Forms, the Cogito, transcendental categories, and Geist. This procedure has the disconcerting tendency to generate concepts which stand in dualistic opposition to the world they supposedly explain. In its understanding of explanations as necessarily world transcending, metaphysical philosophy is quite incompatible with an influential strand of modern philosophy, naturalism. Naturalism holds that there is no feature of the world which philosophers seek to understand which cannot in principle be explained through the intraworldly business of science. Insofar as metaphysics understands itself to be a unique kind of 563
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activity necessarily different from the character or methodologies of those disciplines which yield empirical knowledge or logical-deductive propositions, it simply cannot be accommodated within this regulative framework. Metaphysics is not assailed exclusively by naturalism. In another major tradition of contemporary Western philosophy—Continental philosophy—there is a pointed hostility to the otherworldliness into which metaphysics allegedly falls, an otherworldliness that shifts the foundations of the various normative and historical enterprises of our lives—our ethics, our politics—outside the human realm. This antimetaphysical position is historical materialism. The apparent convergence here between core commitments of analytic philosophy to naturalism and Continental philosophy to the materialist rejection of otherworldliness surely spells the end of metaphysics. Even though materialism and naturalism diverge significantly on the role of scientific explanation in philosophy, they seem, between them, to deny any conceivable space for the kind of speculative concepts produced by metaphysical philosophy. Can metaphysics be rescued? Should metaphysics be rescued? To answer the latter question first: it ought to be rescued if it can be shown that there is some valuable dimension of human experience which cannot be explained by either naturalism or historical materialism, at least in their current forms. How that is to be done is the other question. Naturalism and historical materialism have, in principle, undermined the very possibility of metaphysical philosophy. That means that should we posit a realm of human experience which might be characterized metaphysically, as “transcending” given experience, we cannot seek to provide a philosophical account of it through the metaphysical arguments of the past. So either a new form of philosophy will need to emerge to accommodate these supposedly unexplained dimensions of human experience, or metaphysics will have to come from within the traditions which are critical of metaphysics. In spite of the apparent contradictoriness of the latter program, it is, in fact, the direction taken by a number of philosophers from within the Continental tradition.
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One such effort—the subject of this essay—is proposed by Theodor Adorno. He is no doubt an unlikely proponent of metaphysics in that the fundamental principles of his philosophy are historical materialist. Adorno himself speaks of materialism rather than historical materialism, which he associates with Marx. However, it is a useful term which distinguishes the general framework of critical theory from the forms of materialism that emerged during the Enlightenment and that are related in twentieth-century philosophy to physicalism. The theory of experience Adorno develops emphasizes the need for philosophy to come to terms with particularity, the very opposite of what metaphysics, Adorno himself alleges, has appeared ever to consider the proper business of philosophy. The sense of the particular here is not what sense-data theorists hold to be the primitive components of experience but the vast regions of life—of other people especially—that cannot be encapsulated within universal judgments. Adorno’s desire to turn philosophy toward a theory of particularity informs his critical engagement with metaphysics: “The matters of true philosophical interest at this point in history are those in which Hegel, agreeing with tradition, expressed his disinterest. They are non-conceptuality, individuality [Einzelnen], and particularity [Besonderen]—things which ever since Plato used to be dismissed as transitory and insignificant, and which Hegel labeled ‘lazy Existenz.’ ”1 The point is not simply epistemological: it refers to the condition of particularity in a world conditioned by reified reason with all the destructiveness toward particularity that reification has apparently produced. For Adorno, the image of Auschwitz carries with it a challenge to the antiparticularism of an array of philosophical systems, including traditional metaphysics. As Espen Hammer puts this: “In its destruction of every individuating feature of individuals, it subordinates particularity and transience to universality and immutability.”2 Adorno’s repudiation of metaphysics is not founded on arguments that would be compatible with naturalism (a perspective which in its earlier positivist forms he denigrated as scientism). But historical materialism rejects the foundations of metaphysics no less comprehensively than naturalism and often on similar grounds. An important
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point of departure between the two critical perspectives, however, is that historical materialism, unlike naturalism, takes sociality—not causality—as the fundamental explanatory dimension. Marx established this paradigm through his exemplary critique of what he took to be the otherworldliness of metaphysical idealism, of Hegelianism in particular. He claimed that society, the concrete activities of material beings and the forces that make up our social reality, is misidentified as (metaphysical) Geist. Adorno, nevertheless, tries from within historical materialism to offer a complex reconception of metaphysics and transcendence. He aims specifically to regenerate a metaphysics which opposes “positivism” in an effort to resist the reification of experience. It is therefore, in significant ways, an antinaturalistic defense of metaphysics. But in actuality it targets any of the philosophical constructions of experience which, according to Adorno, constrain its possibilities within sheer givenness. Anke Thyen notes that Adorno’s “metaphysics is directed against the stop signals set before the experience of thinking.”3 At the same time Adorno’s position also opposes metaphysical notions of transcendence in the dualistic sense (that is, transcendence referring to what is allegedly above, beyond, or outside materiality). For this reason Adorno’s conception is sometimes labeled as “negative metaphysics.” In this paper I want to disentangle its seemingly conflicting objectives. I will begin by setting out the framework within which Adorno’s reconception will have to work. That means understanding Adorno’s central notions of experience and nonidentity. I will turn then to the ways these notions inform his critique of metaphysics. Finally I will look at how, from within this framework, Adorno moves toward a new conception of metaphysics. As we shall see, nonidentical thinking—thinking in particularity—turns out, for Adorno, to be the location for his reconception. It is here, as he puts it, that we might find “solidarity between such thinking and meta physics at the time of its fall” (p. 408). The idea of immanent transcendence emerges from this engagement of the theory of experience with metaphysics. This is no paradox: it is a position based on a radical rereading, reconstruction, and modification of the traditional terms of
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metaphysics. And as we shall see, Adorno develops a revised set of meanings for terminology developed in the tradition of metaphysics, often, in fact, using terminology against its traditional senses.
Experience and Nonidentity Although some of the central analyses of Adorno’s philosophy—of the subject-object relation, the role of concepts, identity in knowledge— operate within terminology familiar from the modern epistemological tradition, his position cannot be subsumed under any conventional epistemology. Adorno’s philosophical enterprise—his negative dialectics—is in fact an effort to understand the current condition and possibilities of experience. It is a normative analysis in that it is concerned with what experience should be. It is therefore not a descriptive analysis of the functioning of experience which takes this functioning as given and, in effect, natural. Adorno contends that the capacity to experience has weakened under the conditions of modernity. Although this is a claim with sociological dimensions, Adorno gives it philosophical substance by arguing that the inadequacies of philosophical theories of experience are theoretical versions of actual social experience. That is, the alleged failure of philosophical theories to offer an account of the fullest possible experience is attributable not to bad reasoning but to the fact that they take as their starting point given experience, that is experience which is supposedly, for Adorno, dysfunctional. He subjects phenomenology and the empiricist tradition to particularly sharp critiques as he aims to demonstrate that these positions, in a number of their articulations, in some way misconstrue the dynamic relations which are constitutive of experience. They render the relation of subject and object static, reifying each side as though they were not historical and conditioned. These positions are the products of a reified consciousness, which Adorno describes as follows: “Above all this is a consciousness blinded to all historical past, all insight into one’s own conditionedness, and posits as absolute what exists contingently.”4
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From this critical perspective a positive theory of experience which might somehow surpass the reified conceptions is developed. This theory purports to provide a far more complex understanding of human action than that which the modern philosophical tradition provides. We will turn to the details of that theory below. What we need to note at this stage, though, is that Adorno understands his theory of experience as a fundamental contribution to critical theory in that it sets out an analysis of the variety of ways in which human action has come to be constrained and deformed in modernity. And for critical theory the key determining element of modernity is capitalism, a form of consciousness that allegedly gives rise to the predominance of instrumental rationality. Instrumental rationality is an environmentally manipulative form of reason ideally suited to the procedural imperatives of capitalism. As instrumental rationality becomes ever more predominant, however, critical rationality—the capacity to reflect on purposes and reason itself—is lost. The result of this is that capitalism comes to be seen as a natural and as an unalterable feature of our world, as “second nature” simply because there is no means of thinking about it critically. In this world of second nature, social arrangements are supposedly structured by the principles of exchange developed by capitalism. The exchange relationship is one in which a determinate object—a good of some kind—is given an abstract value for which it is exchanged. If this contention is valid, it is clear that human experience is in some way compromised. It represents a one-dimensional form of reacting to the world. The theory of consciousness required to validate this claim, however, has never been successfully provided by critical theory. It remains, nevertheless, an alluring and perhaps not altogether counterintuitively plausible claim. Adorno, influenced by the Georg Lukács of History and Class Consciousness, contends that the norms of capitalism have generated reified experience. Reified experience is experience which is reduced to calculation, manipulation, and categorization. Overcoming reification is characterized by Adorno as the project of reconciliation (Versöhnung), in which the complex of antagonisms which characterize modern so-
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ciety are resolved. What Adorno names as “the hope for reconciliation” (p. 19) will be realized when experience becomes the process in which subjects are related nondominationally to objects, that is, through neither calculation nor categorization but through responsivity. In the philosophical terms of Adorno’s philosophy—negative dialectics—this would involve a more complex understanding of what we do when we conceptualize objects, since in the reconciled condition, Adorno believes, conceptualization is a form of behavior in which the object is overwhelmed by concepts. It is instrumentalized by the subject. Insofar as negative dialectics contributes to diagnosing this instrumentalization, it does so, Adorno believes, “in the service of reconciliation” (p. 6). It is easy to see from this that the concept of possible experience which Adorno articulates owes nothing to the various theories articulated by modern epistemology. It is not a consideration of the mechanism in which discrete bits of the material world come to be represented in the mind. It is, rather, an account of the possibility of a dynamic interaction between subject and object that, in differing ways, transforms both. The basis of this dynamic theory can, according to Adorno himself, be found in Hegel’s groundbreaking philosophy. Indeed, as Adorno notes, “These days it is hardly possible for a the oretical idea of any scope to do justice to the experience of consciousness, and in fact not only the experience of consciousness but the embodied experience of human beings, without having incorporated something of Hegel’s philosophy.”5 Reified experience stands in contrast to the conception of possible dynamic, revisable relationships which Adorno takes from Hegel’s notion of dialectical experience. Hegel thinks of experience as a process of intellectual development in which the basis of our commitments to the concepts we employ to understand various objects—such as freedom, history, being—is tested. Unlike other theories which explain experience either as the passive registering by human beings of the world outside us or as the generation of reality out of concepts, Hegel understands experience to be an intellectually active process, replete with decisions and self-scrutiny of our commitments. Experience, for Hegel, is the process in which we
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move into a deeper understanding of the adequacy, or otherwise, of the concepts we employ. This process is driven by the rational response to contradiction. Adorno describes this as “the animating contradiction” that erodes any apparently final viewpoint.6 Finality is not a characteristic of experience precisely in that it fixes—contrary to this “animation”—relations between the knowing subject and what it is trying to understand. Experience, with its dynamic of self-correction, has implications for more than the knowing subject and its inventory of beliefs and concepts. The “negative” which is the moment of insight into our failure to encapsulate an object cannot be converted into a positive. The experience of negativity is not simply a moment we necessarily pass through as we move to an ever greater grasp of an object, a grasp which is fully achieved when we deduce the complete system of concepts that define that object. This system would be identical with the object, since it would no longer be at odds with it: there would be no nonidentity, no gap between our concepts and the object. For Adorno, however, “Negation is not an affirmation itself as it is to Hegel” (p. 158). Adorno’s claim is really that his position is more consistent with the idea of “determinate negation” than Hegel’s. The negation arises in the experience of objects. This, in fact, is the experience of nonidentity, the experience of the limitations of one’s conceptual reach. For this reason there can be no assurance that anything more than a consciousness of our failure to encapsulate the object is p ossible. Adorno describes the subject-object relation—in its possible dynamic form—as one of mediation. The content of experience may be subject and object, but mediation is the process of that experience. This process is motivated by the desire of the subject to relate objectively to an object: “What we may call the thing itself is not positively and immediately at hand. He who wants to know it must think more, not less. . . . The experiencing subject strives to disappear in it” (p. 189). What, however, is quite different in his account of this “striving” is that Adorno describes it as one of nonidentity: “It is nonidentity through identity” (p. 189). This may seem odd when the term nonidentity suggests the absence of contact between subject and object. How
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can the effort of the subject to “disappear” in its experience of objects be characterized as nonidentity, a term which seems to suggest the impossibility of that disappearing? What is involved, however, is that the experience of nonidentity intimates the failure to connect, which thereby stimulates the sort of reflection and revision that will push the subject closer to the object. The experience of nonidentity is not, therefore, an experience of alienation from the object. For Adorno it represents an ever more complex appreciation of the object. There is much discussion about what Adorno actually means by nonidentity. The challenge to interpretation is that Adorno states the process of nonidentity in a great many ways. It is worth dwelling on this complexity, as it is on this theory of nonidentity that a retrieval of metaphysics will be constructed. The following are some representative statements from Negative Dialectics: (i) Nonidentity as an experience of repression: “In the unreconciled condition, nonidentity is experienced as negativity” (p. 31). (ii) Nonidentity as another name for contradiction: “Contradiction is nonidentity under the rule of a law that affects the nonidentical as well” (p. 6). (iii) Nonidentity as the irreducible object, “something,” of a judgment: “By itself, the logically abstract form of ‘something’, something that is meant or judged, does not claim to posit a being; and yet, surviving in it— indelible for a thinking that would delete it—is that which is not identical with thinking, which is not thinking at all” (p. 34). (iv) Nonidentity as the nonfit of concept and particular: “Reciprocal criticism of the universal and of the particular; identifying acts of judgment whether the concept does justice to what it covers, and whether the particular fulfills its concept—these constitute the medium of thinking about the nonidentity of particular and concept” (p. 146). (v) Nonidentity as the nonfit of subject and object (not precisely equivalent to concept and particular): “Irrationality is the scar which the irremovable nonidentity of subject and object leaves on cogitation—whose mere form of predicative judgment postulates identity; it is also the hope of withstanding the omnipotence of the subjective concept” (p. 85).
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(vi) Nonidentity as the contradiction revealed through immanent critique: “Totality is to be opposed by convicting it of non-identity with itself, of the non-identity it denies according to its own concept” (p. 320). (vii) Nonidentity as an ideal of freedom: “Upon reflection, causality points to the idea of freedom as the possibility of nonidentity” (p. 269).
These various definitions effectively indicate that Adorno’s use of the idea of nonidentity does not stem from a unitary theory. At the same time, the various uses are not simply equivocal. What connects the various senses is that each instances some form of opposition to a specific type of identity. In Adorno’s work the term identity is equally associative, though not quite equivocal. Adorno contends that identity thinking—in its various forms—is a distortion of experience, one which is uncritically adopted by epistemological misconceptions of experience. Identity thinking understands experience to be a process in which the subject can effectively identify objects in the sense of fully determining them through the concepts which are applied to them: identity thinking “says what something comes under, what it exemplifies or represents and what, accordingly, it is not itself. The more relentlessly our identity thinking besets its object, the farther will it take us from the identity of the object” (p. 149). He sees it as a form of behavior which in each of the regions in which it operates cuts the experience of the object down to one of the supposedly all-encompassing concepts or categories supplied by the subject. This is to be rejected: “To define identity as the correspondence of the thing-in-itself (or object) to its concept is hubris” (p. 149). This hubristic tendency, however, marks the history of modern philosophy.
Against Metaphysics In view of what we have just seen of the core critical ideas of Adorno’s philosophy, it is clear that it operates from within a quite nonmetaphysical set of commitments and ideas of what philosophy needs to
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explain. The theory of nonidentical experience is, in fact, the basis from which Adorno launches his critique of metaphysics. A point worth noting is Adorno’s competence to act as a critic. It is fair to say that a great deal of the reaction against metaphysics in contemporary philosophy is not always based on an especially rich understanding of the specific claims of metaphysical philosophers. This is not at all true of Adorno. His 1965 lecture series, Metaphysics: Concepts and Categories, shows us his efforts to analyze deeply many of the major metaphysical concepts of Western philosophy from the Greeks through to rationalism and idealism. Texts such as Plato’s Parmenides and Theaetetus and Aristotle’s Metaphysics especially, as well as the canonical works of the German Idealists, are considered in some detail. This lecture course forms the background for the analysis of metaphysics that will be presented in a more compressed form in Negative Dialectics, the core text for the analysis of Adorno’s relation to metaphysics. To begin, it is clear enough that Adorno is a critic of all extant systems of metaphysics. His philosophical standpoint—his historical materialism—cannot accept the fundamental theses of a philosophical enterprise which seems to him to represent a closed, systematic framing of reality: “Metaphysical systems in the precise sense are doctrines according to which concepts form a kind of objective, constitutive support on which what is naively called ‘the objective world,’ that is scattered, individual, existing things, is founded and finally depends.”7 We can group Adorno’s criticisms under three main lines of argument: (1) metaphysics is committed to the fundamental invariance of the world; (2) it develops a constricted conception of subjectivity, leading to what Adorno describes as “peephole” metaphysics; (3) it seeks an extraworldly transcendent source of meaning cum consolation or reconciliation and is therefore ideological. Let us look at each of these concerns in turn. Invariance Metaphysics, Adorno alleges, “is nothing more than a doctrine of invariants” (p. 96). It hypostatizes features or elements of reality and
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thereby locates those elements outside reality. As Adorno alleges of idealism, it “turns the character of thought, the historic evolution of its independence, into metaphysics” (p. 26). That is, ideas of vital historical significance are misidentified as eternally valid ideas. This type of criticism has an obvious Nietzschean background in its suspicion of metaphysics as the tendency to abstract from living processes. And indeed Adorno refers to Nietzsche as the “irreconcilable adversary of our theological heritage in metaphysics” (p. 169). In essence, then, Adorno’s charge is that metaphysical conceptions with supramaterial forms, categories, or nontemporal a priori structures separate philosophy from the realm of experience. As “invariance,” metaphysics stands in opposition to a historical materialism which understands the key organizing principles of our experience to be produced by ideas developed within the array of social forms that human beings have themselves created. Adorno regards invariance as a form of reification: it fits or reduces reality into invariant structures. Invariance as a product of reification—of reified reason—evinces a key characteristic of the age of capitalism and exchange (as we saw above). Is there a risk of anachronism here, though? Invariant structures in Greek metaphysics are hardly to be attributed to the consciousness-determining business of capitalism. Nor could Adorno for reasons from within his own theory claim the presence of reification, in his sense, in ancient philosophy. A transhistorical notion of reification would actually undermine Adorno’s critical-theoretical effort to analyze the alleged destruction experience through the specific pathologies of capitalism. Although he never explicitly states it, Adorno’s own interest in forming a philosophical assessment of metaphysics is largely an answer to the “neo-metaphysics” of Heidegger. He takes Heidegger’s position to embody contemporary rationality, in spite of its seemingly antimodernist objectives. Neo-metaphysics is presented as a product of a reified consciousness, a consciousness which cannot (as explained above) operate responsively to the world. Instead it reaches toward “Being.” This is a complex charge which comes down to the idea that “Being” is not part of the process of experience: “Weary of the subjec-
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tive jail of cognition, he becomes convinced that what is transcendent to subjectivity is immediate for subjectivity, without being conceptually stained by subjectivity” (p. 79). “Being” is a reified concept, supposedly because it is nonmediated: it is simply given. It is, Adorno proposes, an invariant which is not part of the transformative dynamic of the subject-object relation. This notion of “Being” therefore, according to Adorno, reflects the consciousness of the age: “The reified consciousness is a moment in the totality of the reified world. The ontological need is the metaphysics of that consciousness. . . . The form of invariance as such is the projection of what has congealed in the reified consciousness” (p. 95). What sort of mistake does Adorno believe to be at issue here: (i) the hypostatization of dimensions of experience or (ii) the violation of history, in that invariance is transhistorical? Clearly both, which Adorno thinks of as of a piece: “Transcendence, both beyond (a) thinking and (b) beyond facts, is derived by this ontology from the undialectical expression and hypostasis of dialectic structures” (p. 108 n). Should critical theory take any special interest in the fallacy identified in (i)? We might ask, for instance, whether the charge of hypostatization is, in a way, beside the point or at the very least too broad a complaint. Are there not metaphysical ideas which, although certainly committed to invariance, do not impinge on social reality? Take, for example, Kant’s transcendentalism. In that theory the a priori categories of the understanding are invariant components of any epistemic experience. (The allegation of abstraction is as old as the theory itself.) Their scope, however, is limited to the form of spatio-temporal objects. Could one not be both a transcendental idealist about our experience of objects (entailing all a priori rules) and a historical materialist about the normative forces of our social world? The answer must surely be yes, but what, I think, drives Adorno’s rejection of the invariance thesis, even in transcendental idealism, is its lack of interest in transformative experience. Transcendental theses, for instance, seek explanations which leave experience at the social level untouched, and that, within the Adornian philosophy, is precisely to seek the explanation in the wrong place.8
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Peephole Metaphysics Modern philosophy continued with the classical metaphysical project of understanding the fundamental structure of reality. The theories developed by, for example, Spinoza, Leibniz, and even Hegel can be understood as part of a tradition which reaches back at least as far as the pre-Socratics. Modern metaphysics is also marked, however, by the innovative concern with subjectivity, a concern which takes metaphysics in a different direction of analysis. This distinctive analysis contends, in essence, that the structure of reality is to be explained through an examination and elaboration of the way in which subjectivity or consciousness or the “I” functions. And this produces the metaphysics of the subject. It is metaphysical because the subject which is now understood to have the critical role in the structure of reality as we experience it cannot be part of the empirical world. Were it part of the empirical world, it would belong to the very domain it allegedly structures. The constructions of the subject by Descartes, Fichte, and early Schelling are, in different ways, instances of this position. Adorno characterizes the metaphysics of the subject with an unusual term. He claims that the situation of subjectivity in this situation is “peephole metaphysics” (Guckkastenmetaphysik) (p. 139). The argument is that the metaphysical subject is, in the end, an invariant with a seemingly fixed relation toward the world. It is the founding, pregiven agency of all reality. As that which gives structure to the world of experience, it is not determined by the conditions of experience. In that case it can only—in Adorno’s metaphor—“peep” at the world which supposedly does not in any sense constitute it. Adorno writes: “The subject—a mere limited moment—was locked up in its own self by that metaphysics, imprisoned for all eternity to punish it for its deification” (p. 139). The metaphysical subject, according to Adorno, is, in other words, a self-standing, ontologically separate sphere of the world which it understands to be essentially distinct from itself. What we have seen, in the notions of mediation and nonidentity, points us directly to the source of Adorno’s rejection of this metaphysical thesis. First of all, for the thesis to hold good, the metaphysical
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subject must be intelligible in separation from the conditions to which it relates if experience is to arise. In this sense it is “unmediated” and not in any sense constituted through the subject-object relation. Second, it excludes nonidentity in that it is, again, a fully self-constituted— that is, self-identical—something. In these two ways, however, the metaphysical self is seen to be operating outside the realm of material reality, as explained by Adorno. It is thereby an indefensible hypothesis. Indeed—though we cannot develop the idea here—Adorno points out the irony of this metaphysical subject. The “deification” of the subject is ultimately a weakening of that subject in that it takes on a fixed essence and relates according to its own determinate structures to the world. The contrasting notion of the subject—Adorno’s—is as agency dynamically contributing and responding to the world. Extraworldly Meaning Perhaps the most ambitious version of metaphysics is that which is marked by its theological heritage. It says more than that the structure of experience is a priori or irreducible to the conditions of materiality. Its claim rather is that the sources of meaning are not reducible to the material world, that there is something outside what we actually experience which underpins it all. Adorno, like Marx, takes the Hegelian notion of Geist as the prime modern example of this thesis. In Negative Dialectics he subjects the Hegelian notion to critique in a way that is familiar as the historical materialist critique of idealism. Its essential mistake, according to Adorno, is that it seeks in Geist what can be explained only through the labors of human beings. The contention of Hegel’s philosophy of history, that Geist invisibly guides the course of human history, is extremely vulnerable to the historical materialist critique given its proximity to the theological perspective. The infamous notion of the “cunning of reason” is in all but name an agency independent of the material world. But Adorno also criticizes Heidegger’s metaphysics of Being, which, he alleges, simply gives the sheen of dignity to a distorted social world by positing a somehow reassuring “meaning of Being.” This meaning, should we
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encounter it, reconciles us with our condition. This is difficult criticism to level definitively at Heidegger because of the variety of ways in which Heidegger’s philosophy grounds itself in an ontology of beingin-the-world: it appears to be solidly materialist. However, the critique is not without purchase. To speak about the meaning of Being, as Heidegger’s—we should say—attenuated metaphysical philosophy does is to miss the historical materialist conditions which, according to historical materialism, shape existence through and through. The problematic society cannot be translated into a metaphysical problem, therefore. In such a world, a philosophy which would seek to give transcendent meaning to life (p. 376) or indeed death (p. 369) must be suspect. Adorno claims that Heidegger’s metaphysics “degenerates into a kind of propaganda for death, elevating it to something meaningful, and thus, in the end, preparing people to receive the death intended for them by their societies and states as joyfully as possible.”9 What metaphysics of this variety actually does, Adorno claims, is to translate the problems of our social reality into a metaphysical question. This, however, has the effect of taking us from a materialist perspective—in which we recognize that the world as we experience it is the product of human action—to one in which our condition seems like a kind of fate. There are ways in which Heidegger might be extricated from this charge. There are parts of his philosophy to which it also sticks. And it is these parts which provoke Adorno’s critique. Heidegger identifies existentialia or categories of human existence such as fallenness and thrownness which seem to circumscribe, in theological resonant ter minology, the human condition. This is ultimately an ideology—an unacknowledged normatively infused view of the world—in that its analyses tie human beings to a specific set of embedding conditions. It does not seek to accommodate the idea that human beings can fundamentally alter the world in which they live. And it therefore lends itself to an endorsement of the ways things are as somehow metaphysically grounded. As Adorno writes: “Anyone who traces deformation to metaphysical processes is a purveyor of ideology” (p. 284). There is a very significant entailment in this criticism, one which points toward Adorno’s reconception. The point is that metaphysics has a social con-
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tent: even when it looks toward invariance or transcendent meaning, it is setting out a view of the world.
The Defense of Metaphysics The materialist critique of metaphysics seems to exclude any possibility for its defense or reconstruction. The key concepts of metaphysics, as Adorno presents them, are, after all, based on exactly those philosophical principles which his own version of historical materialism rejects. Yet Negative Dialectics culminates with the section “Meditations on Metaphysics,” a reflection on the possibility of metaphysics. The considerable critical analyses that precede this section are, in fact, preparatory to a new account of metaphysics, a preparation in which Adorno carefully peels away what he regards as the false constructions— those we have just examined—that the philosophical tradition, right up to Heidegger, have placed on it. Adorno’s critique emerges, then, as anything but a repudiation of the very notion of metaphysics. What he tries to establish ultimately, once the critique has set aside the problematic constructions of the philosophical tradition, is the truth in metaphysics. For Adorno this truth is not to be found in any of its traditional objects, the variety of transtemporal nonmaterial objects which metaphysics at various times has sought to verify. Nor is it the search for transcendent meaning. Rather, its truth is its efforts to articulate our desire for a kind of experience which transcends sheer givenness. It is this which Adorno names as metaphysical experience: “Kant’s epistemological question, ‘How is metaphysics still possible’ yields to a question from the philosophy of history: ‘Is it still possible to have a metaphysical experience?’ That experience was never located so far beyond the temporal as the academic use of the word metaphysics suggests” (p. 372). Adorno’s reconception of the metaphysical enterprise presents quite a challenge to the reader in that its terminological employments are often flatly at odds with their usage in traditional metaphysics. This complexity arises as Adorno tries to rescue certain terms from the
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a llegedly reified versions of metaphysics in his effort to develop a postmetaphysical reconception of the metaphysical project. That means, in actuality, reframing the core metaphysical notion of transcendence—of going beyond what is immediately given—within a material philosophy. In contrast to what traditional metaphysics seeks to explain through the notion of transcendence, Adorno’s proposal is that we can go beyond the given without reaching toward a realm lying outside the spatiotemporal sphere. As Simon Jarvis writes, “The impulse to thematize an ineliminably metaphysical moment in thinking is not the impulse once and for all to liberate spirit from its body.”10 Adorno puts it this way: “The intramundane and historic is relevant to what traditional metaphysics distinguished as transcendence” (p. 361). This idea of transcendence as immanent or intramundane is radical. Is it not contradictory? We can begin to make sense of it by examining an approving comment Adorno makes about Kant’s notion of noumenality: “Kant on his part in defining the thing in itself as the intelligible being had indeed conceived transcendence as nonidentical” (p. 406). It is nonidentical in that it is never directly given, yet it somehow stands behind the things as they appear, an ever-present image of what cannot be reduced to the intentions or concepts of the subject. It is therefore, in a sense, immanent to the experience. It should be pointed out, though, that the Kantian notion of the thing-in-itself is a poor model for what Adorno wants to explain as his materialist metaphysics. The thing-in-itself cannot be encountered in experience and in that way cannot be part of the subject-object dynamic which underpins the theory of nonidentity. It is a philosophical conception of what is not directly given and therefore does not stimulate experience understood as a subject reacting to an object. Despite this misleading enlistment of Kant, the passage itself points toward the connection between Adorno’s notion of metaphysics and his theory of experience. The connecting thesis is the notion of intramundane possibility. As we saw, Adorno thinks of experience as responsivity, as the process in which subjectivity goes beyond itself, a process of nonidentity. This means, no less, that nonidentity is a fundamental characteristic of full experience: it is the experience of the
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subject transcending itself. As Adorno puts it: “Nothing could be experienced as truly alive if something that transcends life were not provided also. . . . The transcendent is, and it is not” (p. 375). Nonidentical experience transcends reification, but it is not an encounter with absolute otherness. The objective of negative dialectics is to provide us with ways of reflecting on the limitations of our experience of objects. As we have seen, Adorno contends that the prevailing canons of reason narrow the possibilities of experience. In a variety of ways, philosophy, which embodies the prevailing reason, is committed to an identity theory of experience in which there is no account of a possible surplus in the relation of subject to object. And it is here that the proposal for a revised metaphysics meets the dialectical theory of experience: “The interpretative eye which sees more in a phenomenon than it is—and solely because of what it is—secularizes metaphysics” (p. 29). This is what underpins the very idea of immanent transcendence. This reframing of metaphysics substantially alters the account of the role of the subject in the business of metaphysics. The transcendent notion of metaphysics places objectivity in the metaphysical phenomena themselves, such as the Platonic Forms, or the God of the philosophers: our task is supposedly to get to these phenomena through forms of philosophical discovery which we might describe as “doing metaphysics.” In the material version proposed by Adorno, however, there is the subjective dimension (contra Heidegger most pointedly) which is none other than the agency of the subject responding to the particularity of the object, a particularity which transcends the variety of ways in which the subject tries to encapsulate it through its concepts. Yet this particularity is only recognized as such when the subject is responsive to the nonidentity of its concepts and interactions with the object. As we saw above, this is precisely what Adorno means by freedom, the capacity to respond and revise. He sees this as sharply distinguishing his conception of metaphysics from those which fix the human position, representing us as having a particular place in being: “The possibility of metaphysical experience is akin to the possibility of freedom, and it takes an unfolded subject, one that has torn the bonds
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advertised as salutary, to be capable of freedom” (pp. 396–97). As he also puts it, “Subjectively liberated experience and metaphysical experience converge in humanity” (p. 397). An interesting implication of this is that deobjectivizing the concern of metaphysics opens it to “fallibility and relativity” (p. 374). But this is precisely what rationality consists in: the ongoing effort to respond, in contrast to a set of limiting schemas which we apply to a straightforward reality. In light of this immanentization or materialization of metaphysics, it is striking that Adorno ultimately associates the notion of metaphysical experience qua experience of the nonidentical with the very idea of the “absolute.” This is actually a key move in Adorno’s reconception of metaphysics. He formulates the connection between the absolute and nonidentity in the following way: “The absolute, as it hovers before metaphysics, would be the non-identical that refuses to emerge until the compulsion of identity has dissolved” (p. 406). This seems a stretch: how can nonidentity be conceived alongside the absolute, given the latter’s connection with the speculative theological- philosophical tradition as the name of “the unconditioned” (Kant’s definition of the absolute) which is understood to be certain and above all materiality? The way we can start to clarify this issue is, once again, to see that Adorno’s project is to retrieve from the philosophical tra dition experiences that have been hypostatized rather than properly understood as part of materiality. The concept of the absolute is a hypostatization, yet it can be retrieved materialistically. In its hypostatized form the absolute is the end point of philosophical inquiry: absolute in the sense of in need of no further experience. This is the “unconditioned” which modern philosophy has largely rejected on the basis that it lies outside the conditions of experience. Although Adorno is also a critic of the notion of the absolute as the unconditioned, he points to the irony of modern philosophy’s critical standpoint: “It is precisely through its denial of objectively valid cognition of the absolute that the critique of reason makes an absolute judgment” (p. 382). The absolute, for Adorno, however, names nothing less than a desire for something which is not coextensive with current experience. Of course, this very interest has projected philosophy toward spirit and
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the heavens. But that, in Adorno’s view, is a misdirection of the interest. “No absolute can be expressed otherwise than in topics and categories of immanence” (p. 407). Its direction is legitimate when we understand that metaphysical experience—desire for the absolute—is expressed as the desire for nonidentity within the plane of experience, wherever that is possible. In this way Adorno aligns the interest in particularity and nonidentity with a possible metaphysics. It should be clear that Adorno’s philosophy of experience allows him plausibly to reconceive metaphysics without its traditional commitment to the atemporal and nonmaterial. Does it avoid also what Adorno criticizes as the “search for meaning”? This is a more complex challenge in that what Adorno is developing both brings metaphysics into the space of history and represents metaphysical experience as somehow more meaningful (i.e., not reified). As we saw, though, Adorno is critical of the “search for meaning” on the grounds that it has an ideological dimension insofar as it promises to legitimate the world and our place in it: it therefore contains no critical attitude to the world in which meaning is sought. The search for meaning is not metaphysics in the sense of scientifically identifying the transcendental structures of experience; it is metaphysics with existential entailments, one which seeks to understand the true meaning of life which is not apparent to ordinary experience. On this very issue philosophy, Adorno claims, faces a core challenge: “On the one hand, any construction of a meaning, however constituted, is forbidden to us, but . . . on the other, the task of philosophy is precisely to understand, not simply to reflect, what happens to be, or to copy it. . . . This has placed philosophy in a true quandary.”11 Adorno’s way through this quandary distinguishes his position from that which motivates, let us call it, the “metaphysics of meaning.” Adorno’s metaphysics is precisely the effort to understand, to engage with the particulars that conventional rationality does not remember. At the center of the difference with the metaphysics of meaning is the relation to history that each of these options seeks to develop. According to Adorno, the metaphysics of meaning is an effort to reconcile us with history, that is, to submit ourselves to the order of things.
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It does so, however, without understanding that meaning is socially and historically mediated. Exemplifying this effort is Heidegger, who, Adorno claims, seeks the meaning of Being while eschewing a normative critique of the society in which individuals find themselves: “If it is the case that no metaphysical thought was ever created which has not been a constellation of elements of experience, then, in the present instance, the seminal experiences of metaphysics are simply diminished by a habit of thought which sublimates them into metaphysical pain and splits them off from the real pain which gave rise to them.”12 In this noncritical attitude it is ultimately a failure: it does not change the conditions which lead us to search for meaning: “Metaphysics ends in a miserable consolation: after all, one still remains what one is.”13 This tendency is entirely undermined, however, by the course of history. Adorno writes: “Our metaphysical faculty is paralyzed because actual events have shattered the basis on which speculative metaphysical thought could be reconciled with experience” (p. 362). Central to Adorno’s sense of the shattering effect of “actual events” is the horror of Auschwitz, which is, for him, the symbol of the period of the atrocities of National Socialism. It is, indeed, “the diremption of subject and object.”14 A metaphysics of meaning might seek to find an explanation which would console us in the face of this reality. In order to do so, however, it fails to confront history in any sense: it pins its hope on something that transcends history. By contrast Adorno’s project involves the immanent move. The task of metaphysics should be one which is immersed in particularity, one which allows particularity to be fully experienced and expressed. It does not seek consolatory meaning or “truth” which might explain away painful experience. Rather, the experience of the nonidentical and of the particular if it is possible, the experience which reified consciousness obstructs, is the immersion in things as they are, seeking to articulate things as they are without prejudice and absolutely: “This is the transmutation of metaphysics into history. It secularizes metaphysics in the secular category pure and simple, the category of decay” (p. 360). The phenomenon of Auschwitz, Adorno contends, pushes metaphysics toward the “somatic, unmeaningful stratum of life . . . the stage of suffering” (p. 365). To seek to transcend this, in the traditional
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sense, would be to ignore it. Ignoring history reveals, though, the degree to which metaphysics has a social content. According to Adorno, metaphysics as the activity of human beings at a particular time in a particular place to make sense of the world in which they live is cultural through and through: “Metaphysical reflections that seek to get rid of their cultural, indirect elements deny the relation of their allegedly pure categories to their social substance” (p. 368). This opens up a space, nevertheless, for a historically conscious version, one which realizes that metaphysics is a historical enterprise, driven by a concern with the limitations of experience of its times. And it understands too that the answers to those limitations are immanent: we do not step outside history or transcend material reality as we seek to overcome those limitations. For Adorno metaphysics is not a matter of reclaiming some original experience or meaning which came to be suppressed by modernity. It is on these grounds that Adorno sees metaphysics as having to operate within the reality in which a phenomenon such as Ausch witz could occur. Adorno writes: “The course of history forces materialism upon metaphysics, traditionally the direct antithesis of materialism” (p. 365). It might be thought that a materialism would see Auschwitz as an argument against metaphysics in that what led to the cruelty is empirically explicable. The danger of metaphysics here is that it could seem to offer a “meaning” to Auschwitz. It is, however, the very opposite that Adorno intends: not consolation but the effort to do justice to the suffering (to understand without giving meaning). He writes: “The need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject” (p. 18).15 Reified consciousness, however, cannot recognize “substance and quality, activity and suffering, being and existence.”16 To engage with suffering is to think nonidentically against a reified system that no longer understands its own reification: “It is part of the mechanism of domination to forbid recognition of the suffering it produces.”17 In a sense this engagement with suffering is nonidentity in a different sense from nonidentity as experience of the subject’s responsivity to a nonuniversalizable individual. The latter pertains to the subject’s decreasing difference with the object as it mimetically follows the object: it is the
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ideal of free experience. The former is the subject’s effort to capture what W. G. Sebald called history’s “marks of pain” (Schmerzensspuren der Geschichte), to overcome thereby what Adorno describes as the “ef facement of memory” (Zerstörung von Erinnerung).18 It is a historically specific effort. J. M. Bernstein encapsulates this thought sharply: “Minimally, metaphysics is necessary if I am not to deny my own consciousness because my own consciousness contains a transcending impulse, the very impulse that is abrogated in identity thinking; the transcending impulse of consciousness is the orientation of the material axis of the concept, the impulse to name, the impulse toward truth as opposed to communication.”19 Both instances of nonidentical experience are stimulated by particularity, by the need to do justice to the particular in the face of generalized forms of reaction: “The smallest intramundane traits would be of relevance to the absolute” (p. 408). In this way, metaphysics not only meets the critical demands of historical materialism but brings it to a more comprehensive engagement with particular material of experience. Through engagement with forgotten particularity, thinking transcends its given constraints. It is as this activity alone that metaphysical experience, Adorno holds, has historical legitimacy. Notes A version of this essay is included in my Adorno, The Routledge Philosophers (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012). 1. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 8; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 2. Espen Hammer, “Metaphysics,” in Adorno: Key Concepts, ed. Deborah Cook (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008), p. 66. 3. Anke Thyen, Negative Dialektik und Erfahrung: Zur Rationalität des Nichtidentischen bei Adorno (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), p. 284; my translation. 4. Theodor W. Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 200.
Immanent Transcendence? 587 5. Theodor W. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (1963; repr., Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 2. 6. Ibid., p. 53. 7. Theodor W. Adorno, Metaphysics: Concept and Problems, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), p. 8. 8. Adorno’s critique of Kant’s moral philosophy substantiates the idea that there is this tendency. 9. Adorno, Metaphysics, p. 131. 10. Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), p. 216. 11. Adorno, Metaphysics, p. 114. 12. Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (1964; repr., London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 38. 13. Ibid., p. 116. 14. Roger Foster, Adorno: The Recovery of Experience (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), p. 105. 15. See Lambert Zuidervaart, Social Philosophy after Adorno (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 61–76. 16. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (1947; repr., London: Verso, 1979), p. 5. 17. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. Edmund Jephcott (1951; repr., London: NLB, 1974), p. 63, § 38. 18. W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2001), p. 14; Theodor W. Adorno, “The Meaning of Working Through the Past” [1959], trans. Henry W. Pickford, in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 19. J. M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 426.
t w e n t y - f o u r
On Losing Uniqueness Singularity and Its Effacement in Derrida
Timothy Mooney
It is my hope in the following essay that something of the spirit of Gerry Hanratty’s view of philosophical explication will be discernible. I recall his remarking that, in its operation, the ideal of economy can result in theses that are inadequate to lived experience. Ockham’s razor is sometimes employed, as it were, in shaping Procrustean beds. Gerry would also say that in much contemporary philosophy other and better ideas are current that, while not quite ever ancient, possess a long and hidden lineage. These are views shared by Jacques Derrida, for all his reputation as a postmodern gadfly dismissive of the philosophical tradition. Misinterpretation looms large in Derrida’s view of things. It is a permanent possibility of communication, he contends, that what one actually delivers to others may not be quite what one intended, and there are some infelicitous cases where the intended message breaks down from the outset. Where written communications are open to deconstructive readings, such readings should merely report what has al588
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ready happened in the workings of these texts to subvert the intentions of their authors. Following in the tradition of phenomenology, Derrida posits a mode of reading that will find rather than make. One could say that the attempt to isolate “forces of rupture that are localizable in the discourse to be deconstructed” constitutes his version of returning to the things themselves.1 One of Derrida’s earliest targets was the view that a speaker enjoys a comprehensive control of the meanings that he or she expresses, a form of control that in fact and in principle is not possessed by the writer over the text. Phonocentrism is his preferred term for this privileging of speaking over writing. In many of his readings from the 1960s onwards, Derrida seeks to show that the meanings expressed in speech acts can readily transcend the self-present subject’s intentions. Comprehensive loss of control does not have to wait on graphic writing, his phrase for meaningful inscription on a material surface. My main concern in this study is with something whose loss is held to wait on writing. This is the singularity or irreplaceable uniqueness of each person, which can be conveyed, on Derrida’s account, only in acts of speaking, gesturing, and moving. Graphic writing leaves at best a trace of singularity that is estranged from the awareness and agency of its author. My other concern is with whether Derrida unduly privileges the singularity that is conveyed in the perception of the other’s living body, given that he seems to accord a quality of certainty to the experience of someone present in person. I begin with Derrida’s most familiar treatment of singularity, showing its place in his critique of phonocentrism, and also the way in which he gives a significant role to bodily presence in the indication of uniqueness, being close in this regard to the early Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. I proceed to show that the be ginnings of Derrida’s position can be found in one of his early commentaries on the later Husserl. Turning then to his interpretation of Rousseau, I ask whether his worked-out account is insensitive to exceptions in failing to admit the possibility that certain voluntary written productions can communicate singularity. I contend that his stance is defensible in this regard but note that the difficulties pertaining to graphic writing can be extended to bodily presence. Derrida is aware
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of this, and I conclude by arguing that the putative certainty he attributes to the experience of the other does not in fact pertain to his or her singularity.
The Singularity of the Present Speaker Derrida’s most extensive and best-known critique of the phonocentric privileging of speaking over writing is to be found in Speech and Phenomena (1967). Phonocentrism is founded on the thesis that spoken words are the primary symbols of consciously lived experiences. They are the tools we use to make the thoughts to which we have privileged access available to others. This thesis is an extrapolation from the experience that people with communicative competence and fully functional hearing have of themselves in their speech acts. Part of the phenomenon of deliberate acts of communication is that I hear myself as I speak. I perceive the meaningful sounds that I have uttered, understand my own expressive intention, and can compare the two. For the speaker, effective speech can involve the awareness, not just of the things or states of affairs that are referred to, but of how well the relevant utterances match up to what she wanted to express. She can check for a fit between what she has just said and what she wanted to say. Hence the cases of utterances in which we qualify or annul earlier ones—“What I really meant was such and such.”2 Frequently we monitor whether our words sound convincing to the hearer, or appropriate in the relevant context. Derrida draws explicitly on the three main functions that the early Husserl identifies in effective communicative speech—the expression of a meaning, the reference to an object, and the intimation of the speaker’s lived experiences. The distinction between meaning and in timation corresponds roughly to the Fregean distinction between thoughts and ideas. In everyday language, according to Husserl, it is found in the difference between what I say and the way that I say it. The latter can militate against the meaning of a written propositional attitude. We hear this when someone expresses something in a tone of
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incredulity or hopes very loudly that an adversary will never have a nasty accident. Husserl does not consider involuntary facial and bodily gestures to be expressions, since they do not involve an intention to convey the way that the words are meant. Derrida by contrast is concerned with precisely these movements, which are not “worked over by Geist, by the will.”3 For Derrida as for the phonocentrist, graphic writing lies at a greater distance than speaking from the experience of the subject. From the first-person perspective, claims Derrida, seeing oneself write does not have the immediacy of hearing oneself speak.4 And once I have set something down in writing, it escapes my control; the written message can survive my absence and even my death. This leaves the written text open to misinterpretations and loss of sense, whether these eventualities are innocent or the outcomes of deliberate, selective quotation. Sooner or later I will be unable to clarify what I meant or give replies to my critics. The written text is the most obvious case of what Husserl calls the ideality of meaning, that is, its universal and repeatable character. I can understand the text, not just in the absence of its author, but without knowing anything at all about him or her.5 Derrida’s deconstruction of phonocentrism proceeds in several ways. One he borrows from the early Husserl: even if we were to grant that we have prelinguistic acquaintance with our thoughts, the temporality of consciousness with its ongoing retentional modifications of each immediate past would still preclude perfect self-acquaintance. 6 But Derrida does not grant this; on his view, language is not added on to a consciousness that is already present to itself.7 Here he is in agreement with the later Husserl, who contends that we do not first form thoughts and then look for words, since “thinking is carried out from the very outset as linguistic. . . . What resides in our practical horizon as something to be shaped is the still indeterminate idea of a formation that is already a linguistic one.”8 Derrida is not denying any more than Husserl that we have the capacity to compare our meaning-intention with our actual utterance. But when we do actually accomplish such a comparison, it is between a lived experience already constituted linguistically and an alternative that will refine it.
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Derrida does not make much of the fact that a speaker cannot be aware of all the connotations of the expressions that he or she uses. It is hardly a stunning insight that monitoring utterances and qualifying or annulling them cannot guarantee that meanings will be taken up by our auditors in just the ways we want them to be. This is acutely evident to anyone who has had the experience of making things worse with their qualifications, or who has suffered from l’esprit d’escalier. Derrida’s interest is rather in the capacity of our utterances to be repeated in new and different contexts. This leaves them as vulnerable to misinterpretation as anything we may write.9 Because the meanings of spoken expressions share the ideality of written ones, furthermore, others can take them up without knowing anything about the speaker. It is a truism that we learn about someone’s hopes and accomplishments, and so on, from speech as readily as from writing, but for Derrida nothing in expressions themselves conveys the unrepeatable character of singularity.10 Neither does Derrida see singularity as being caught in the deliberate way a speaker says things or gestures in order to produce a certain effect in auditors. As we noted above, Husserl is interested in such aural and bodily expressions, which have significance for the speaker as well as the hearer. As we also noted, involuntary facial and bodily gestures are not his concern, at least in his early work, whereas they are exactly what occupy Derrida. It is the latter’s contention that someone’s singularity is marked out by what is not under his or her intentional control. The unique timbre of my voice, remarks Derrida in “Qual Quelle” (1971), is what is most spontaneous in speaking, while never being present to me. I neither recognize it nor hear it. My uniqueness can also be marked by my style of writing, which remains invisible and illegible to me, unlike my handwriting.11 Blindness to my style of writing is the analogue of deafness to my timbre of voice. In both cases, what is spontaneous cannot be presented to the self.12 Derrida adds that my singularity, that which is idiomatic, is not merely of the phonic or graphic orders but can involve a certain gesture or “scent” associated with me. But it is never pure or determinable from my point of view.13
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Much of what Derrida treats of here was broached elsewhere by Husserl and by Merleau-Ponty. For the earlier thinkers, people’s ways of being have their own styles. This is given in their ways of walking, looking, smiling, and speaking. Even the stranger is more than a man or a woman with a societal role—he or she is the emblem of a once-off relationship to being.14 Such unique actions and movements can show forth characteristics of which one is unaware—elements, as MerleauPonty puts it, of one’s “secret history” or “most secret life” which are only apprehended by the other.15 Derrida’s proximity to Merleau-Ponty can again be discerned in an interview given to Catherine David, in a passage that was first adverted to by Peter Dews.16 Here Derrida again refers to the uniqueness that marks someone out without appearing to that person, though he no longer associates it with a style: With destiny, which is a singular way of not being free, what interests me, precisely, is this intersection of chance and necessity, the “life line,” the very language of one’s life, even if it is never pure. . . . I feel as if I’ve been involved, for twenty years, in a long detour, in order to get back to this something, this idiomatic writing whose purity I know to be inaccessible, but which I continue, nonetheless, to dream about. . . . [It is a] property you cannot appropriate; it somehow marks you without belonging to you. It appears only to others, never to you—except in flashes of madness which draw together life and death, which render you at once alive and dead. It’s fatal to dream of inventing a language or a song which would be yours—not the attributes of an “ego,” but rather, the accentuated flourish, that is, the musical flourish of your own most unreadable history. I’m not speaking about a style, but of an intersection of singularities, of manners of living, voices, writing, of what you carry with you, what you can never leave behind.17
The idiomatic writing or intersection of singularities that Derrida refers to here is not writing in the ordinary graphic sense. He states that it resembles a book to be written that would be not only his story
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but also that of culture and language and families.18 Since the intersection of singularities or manners of living is always carried with oneself, it seems fair to assume that some of these are always somehow available to others. Derrida refuses to characterize this intersection in terms of a style because this term is suggestive of something that is determinable enough to be replicated by others, something that can become stereotypical in serving as the first token of a prospective type.19 The possibility of the replication of a style will be set out in greater detail below. Derrida had of course already remarked in 1971 that aspects of one’s uniqueness can be conveyed to others by one’s style of graphic writing, invisible and illegible though it is to oneself. But those aspects that are manifested by my writing style alone are conspicuous by their poverty. In an interview following closely on the one with David, he states that what we do and think and speak “is immeasurably richer and finer, more pertinent and inventive than anything we can inscribe with our typewriters, tape recorders, papers, in books, interviews and elsewhere.”20 It is not just that seeing someone write is not as revealing as hearing them speak. In Derrida’s view, hearing a voice that has been recorded or that is being transmitted “live” through cables or radio waves renders defeasible one’s knowledge of the other. “When you hear a voice over the telephone, on the radio,” he says, “you don’t see where it comes from; as for the one who seems to be the bearer of the voice, you don’t know with a certain knowledge either where or who he or she is.”21 He seems to imply that the other person can be apprehended properly only through experiential or perceptual acquaintance.
The Effacement of Singularity in Writing Derrida’s radical downplaying of singularity in writing might be dismissed as an empirical hypothesis thrown out in the course of interviews he has given, one that bears little relation to his more considered works in philosophy and literature. He himself is somewhat skeptical about the value of interviews, seeing them as highly improvised and
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artificial devices. They are never an adequate substitute or supplement, he tells us, for careful textual work.22 It can be shown, nonetheless, that the remarks made in them cohere with his understanding of singularity and writing in his various texts, going right back to his earliest published book of 1962. This is both a translation of and an extended introduction to Edmund Husserl’s late essay “The Origin of Geometry as an Intentional-Historical Problem.” In his essay, Husserl is concerned with writing rather than speech, and more specifically with the historical transmission of certain ideal objects. An ideal object has a self-identical and invariant meaning and is distinct from the ideality of expressive words and phrases in that it is ordinarily an explicit object rather than an implicit content. If it is meaningful only for a particular community or epoch it is bound, but if it is meaningful for conscious beings supertemporally, then it is free, an ideal object in the highest sense. Included in Husserl’s list of ideal objects are scientific truths and what he calls the constructions of fine literature. The former are his chief concern, and it is in geometrical truths that invariant self-identity shows itself most clearly. He remarks that the Pythagorean theorem preserves its absolute sameness in the language of Euclid and in every translation.23 Knowing nothing of geometry’s first creators, Husserl makes it clear that he is not asking after them. His interest is in the original sense of geometry and its meaning in the scientific tradition. The first theorem emerged in the conscious space of the proto-geometer, and only in being written does it become fully intersubjective. The ideal object is now constituted completely; it can retain its worldly existence when the inventor is no longer awake or even alive. Writing is “communication become virtual,” requiring no form of personal address. When others come upon a written theorem, they can traverse the steps of the deduction, reactivating the self-evident truths for themselves. Following original theorems, further ones can be formulated as the science of Euclidean space develops. Each stage of advance is sedimented under a later one, like the strata in an exposed rock face.24 As the science advances, students go through deductions that have been fully formalized in textbook fashion, and they become further
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removed, experientially as well as temporally, from the prescientific lifeworld in which geometry began. With the introduction of algebra, geometrical formations were translated into the numerical configurations that are so useful to the physicist, with the role of sense experience receding still further into the background. It is constitutive of the crisis of contemporary science, according to Husserl, that its constructions are regarded as more real than the lifeworld of ordinary perception. The role of prescientific experience in its earlier and more deeply sedimented formations has been forgotten.25 Part of the antidote proposed by Husserl consists of a return inquiry, which will trace modern science back to its origins in the geometry and mathematics of antiquity. It will show how these sciences began in prescientific techniques of measurement, and these in their turn in primitive activities of polishing, leveling, and sharpening.26 Return inquiry is the province of the philosopher, not of the physicist or geometer. The scientific researcher who wants to add to or revise the information that he or she has inherited will not typically consider it beyond logical consistency and predictive worth. Bodily needs and the comparative brevity of waking life do not provide enough time for looking backwards as well as forwards. Husserl’s insight is that a modicum of forgetfulness is the prerequisite for advancing a tradition, for keeping it living. This is our situation, he adds, and unfortunately that of the whole modern age.27 The return inquirer is also caught in the same situation and can only reconstruct the prescientific lifeworld in its broad outline. But this is no great problem. What Husserl seeks to uncover in going back to the primitive activities referred to above are the material “a prioris” of geometry and natural science. He contends that such conditions of possibility can come to be known “with truly apodictic certainty.”28 Derrida has not been slow to acknowledge the influence of Husserl’s work in general, and of “The Origin of Geometry” in particular, on his own intellectual development. All of the problems treated in his Introduction à L’Origine de la géométrie par Edmund Husserl, he remarks, “have continued to organize the work I have subsequently attempted in connection with philosophical, literary, and even non-discursive
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corpora.”29 Around 1957, Derrida had registered the title of his prospective doctoral thesis as “The Ideality of the Literary Object.” His interest was in one of the types of ideal object that Husserl only mentions in passing in the “Origin” article, one that is not mathematical or geometrical.30 The doctoral thesis was never written, with Derrida’s interest in problems that lie at the margins of academic philosophy having won the day. Themes that emerge in his later work, however, are already found in his Introduction. In one of the footnotes to this work, Derrida quotes from Experience and Judgment, where Husserl treats of ideal objects that are not merely bound but factually incapable of having their ideal content preserved in multiple instantiations.31 A painting like Raphael’s Madonna exists factually in only one instance. Only similarity can be attained with further paintings, though the ideal that Raphael’s painting embodies is repeatable in principle. This is because embodiment does not in dividualize the ideal content, which may be embodied just as well elsewhere, yet still imperfectly. The same is true of adaptations of Goethe’s Faust, and indeed for all cultural objectivities. By contrast with these ideal objects, however, the ideality of a geometrical for mation can be repeated factually. It can always be embodied precisely, preserving its adequate identity over and over again.32 In this account, contends Derrida, Husserl is not merely taking the mathematical or geometrical object as the most univocal of objects but as the model for every other cultural object whatsoever. What counts is the perfect and ideal identity that is found throughout its material instantiations. Its existence, in Derrida’s glossing of Husserl, “is thoroughly transparent and exhausted by its phenomenality.” It is absolutely objective, being “totally rid of empirical subjectivity.”33 Anything that is relative to an empirical, unrepeatable subject falls short of the scientific and transcendental character of Husserl’s phenomenology. We will remember that he has no interest in the factual individuals who were geometry’s first creators. Nor does he have an abiding interest in the individuals who paint or write books, his insightful remarks about someone’s unique style of life being rare. This is his consistent position throughout his career. Already in “Philosophy as a
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Rigorous Science,” he states that phenomenology can recognize only what it can subsume under essential concepts. The uniqueness of the individual is incapable of subsumption, so that “the singular is eternally the apeiron [the unbounded or undetermined].”34 Singularity, in summary, is of no great consequence in the analysis of books or other artworks or of their creators. Husserl as scientist is not overly concerned with singular styles of writing or painting, or with written reports of singular lives. Neither is Derrida in his Introduction, and he concurs that uniqueness is incapable of conceptual and linguistic subsumption. We will recall that nothing in expressions themselves conveys the unrepeatable character of singularity. But it might then be objected that Derrida, influenced as he is by Husserl, underplays our ability to communicate singularity in writing, granting that we lack complete and undivided self-identity and self-transparency, not to mention complete control of many of our linguistic performances. On this line of argument, Derrida blurs or even collapses the distinction between biographical and scientific writings. If one regards the individual as the aforementioned “intersection of singularities, manners of living, voices, writing, of what you carry with you,” the peculiar arrangements and outcomes of the evolving intersection over time might not be totally alien to nar ration. Unlike its component expressions, a narrative could convey something of its author’s singularity. It is a commonplace that biographical and autobiographical writings are aimed at precisely what scientific works avoid, that is, at reports of singular, unrepeatable lives. Now Derrida could retort that the very language of aiming at something, that is, of deliberate intent, misses the phenomenon of intersections of singularities or idioms, which do not appear to speakers or writers, though he is careful not to separate a body of work from a life and adverts to the difficulty of sundering the unconscious from deliberate intent.35 But one can then demand a justification for confining the singularity experienced by others to the involuntary. Why is the voluntary less capable of manifesting someone’s singularity, quite apart from the problem of how it is to be isolated from the involuntary?
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Like my look and the narrative of my life, the style of my writing could have been largely chosen by me at some juncture and sedimented as a habit, even if the other interprets it as invisible and illegible to me. It could even be the product of a life that became so devoted to a singular written performance that the latter constitutes the best possible report of the singularity of its author. And this is what Derrida does not admit. What we do and think and speak, as we saw, is immeasurably richer than anything we can inscribe, and reading the work of a stranger or hearing someone speak without his or her being present stops our knowing who he or she is with certain knowledge. We cannot seem to identify properly who someone is without personal acquaintance, however limited and imperfect it may be. But perhaps such identification has other sources. On a regular basis we embark on books by—or telephone conversations with— people whom we have never met. We do not always leave a book or conversation, however, without learning much about the writer or speaker, perhaps including something of his or her singularity. There may even be writings or recordings that provide more singularity than personal acquaintance. Arguing in this way, one could lean on remarks from Rousseau’s Confessions cited by Derrida himself. Rousseau informs us that he would love the society of others “if I were not certain to display myself, not only at a disadvantage, but as completely different from what I am.” He adds that the role of hiding away and writing is perfectly suitable to his temperament, for “if I had been present, people would not have known what I was worth.”36 Admitting their presumptuousness, these observations will strike a chord of sympathy with the shy and retiring. Derrida quotes it to illustrate the conflicting views of writing held by Rousseau. Presence in person is sacrificed to the value brought out by writing. Yet Rousseau also laments that, as civilizations advance, there is more and more communication at a distance through the written message, and less and less of the presence of speakers to each other. Even presence has lost its innocence: through the development of etiquette, it has been contaminated systematically by dissimulation.37 Rousseau must rely on writing to compensate for a situation that writing helped to produce.
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When the living presence of speech no longer guarantees veracity, writing supplements the deficiency.38 Derrida’s interpretation of Rousseau’s texts is intriguing so far as it goes, helping to show the difficulty of separating the putatively natural from the conventional. But he may neglect the possibility that in some cases Rousseau is right about the power of writing over and above speech, whatever the links between nature and convention. As well as those who are practised in dissimulation and those who are genuinely shy and retiring in public, there are those who fall down in any company whatsoever. Even at home, their bodily presence and movements and speech are quite uninformative. And they can be quite uninformative in a commonplace way, not even rising to the modest heights of being singularly undemonstrative in their respective comportments. Without reading what some of them managed to write, we could have no idea of their talents or skills. We might accept their moral worth as persons but nonetheless dismiss them quite wrongly as singular creators, reading our knowledge under certain perceived aspects into other and unperceived ones. I think that Derrida would accept some of the above but would qualify it carefully. A body of writings can of course tell us a lot about somebody’s abilities, education, sociocultural world, and so on. But he could reiterate that writing does not thereby convey that person’s singularity. What is significant here is not the supposed failure of writing to let me pick out someone from an identity parade, as it were, for it can often perform this function quite successfully, since it is capable of determining imaginative pictures in considerable detail. It is rather the inability of writing to let me know who she or he is with certainty. Here there is no substitute for a face-to-face encounter. But it can be asked whether such certainty ever pertains to singularities or idioms already communicated in writing. In “Psyche: Inventions of the Other” (1986), Derrida addresses the objection that he misses the supposed capacity of a narrative to convey something of the intersection of singularities of an individual. He states that two forms of invention are legally recognized in Western society: on the one hand there are stories (narrative fictions and
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historical reconstructions), on the other there are technical innovations (methods, techniques, and machines). His aim is to grasp the “unity” or “invisible harmony” between these examples.39 Derrida observes that in all inventions a certain condition of generality must be met, that of iterability or repeatability. To invent is to produce something that can be replicated: The two extreme types of invented things, the mechanical apparatus on the one hand, the fictional or poetic narrative on the other, imply both a first time and every time, the inaugural event and iterability. Once invented, so to speak, invention is invented only if repetition, generality, common availability, and thus publicity are introduced or promised in the structure of the first time. Hence the problem of institutional status. If we could first think that invention put all status back into question, we could also see that there would be no invention without status. To invent is to produce iterability and the machine for reproduction and simulation, in an indefinite number of copies, utilisable outside of the place of invention, available to multiple subjects in various contexts. These mechanisms can be simple or complex instruments, but just as well can be discursive procedures, rhetorical forms, poetic genres, artistic styles and so forth.40
The style and sequentiality of stories or narratives, stresses Derrida, are themselves subject to iteration. The recurrence lodged in a unique occurrence blurs the signature of inventors, such that “the name of an individual or of a unique empirical entity cannot be associated with it [what is narrated or invented] except in an inessential, extrinsic, accidental way. We should even say aleatory.”41 This has given rise, he adds, to the enormous problems of patents and property rights in recent history. One contention being made here is that a name does not of itself prevent a radical diminution of singularity. Proper names can of themselves tell us nothing peculiar to their bearers, for they are really common names that have been borrowed for this or that individual, functioning as disguised indexicals.42
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Derrida’s main contention is that nothing in a written text is shut off finally from iteration. The recurrence lodged in the putatively unique occurrence has universal extension, such that nothing escapes it. Once a narrative devoted to an intersection of singularities is formulated, uniqueness is lost in generality. Or to put it another way, as soon as a biographical or autobiographical subject is inscribed in the style and sequence of expressions constituting his or her narrative, the style and sequentiality are prey to repeatability, which effaces the onceoff and unrepeatable singularity that the narrative was to convey. It can be replicated by someone else with his or her own intersection of singularities. In line with the Husserlian account of ideality, the unique or the singular is lost in the iterable medium of inscription.43 Quite apart from all this, Derrida would readily admit that there are some people whose bodily presences are relatively uninformative and who have decided to devote much of their lives to various forms of inscription. Yet he could make the point that the supposed singularity shown in such voluntary productions is already qualified by the fact that reasons or purposes can be adduced to explain their creation, their construction, and their content. Whether discoverable in a scientific or a biographical work, reasons or purposes are universalizable. They are intrinsically shareable, even if not yet shared, and could have been those of some other writer from a similar sociocultural situation. This is one good reason why a voluntary production effaces someone’s intersection of singularities, again setting aside the ideality and iterability of its expressions, style, and sequentiality. Now all of the above might seem to clash quite starkly and immediately with an earlier essay by Derrida which is addressed to Em manuel Levinas, bearing the provocative title “At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am” (1980). Like Derrida, Levinas builds on the Husserlian contrast between what is said and the way one says it. Sentences and propositions constitute the said, whereas the context of saying exposes us to the living other as a speaker or hearer whose richness exceeds any conception one might have of him or her.44 One of Derrida’s questions is whether a written text like a letter responding to someone can in any way show the excess of the other who is writing
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over what is written.45 His answer is that it can. In this sequentiality here one can discern the “here I am for the other” of the other. It is possible to glimpse in the pages his or her manner of writing a response.46 Derrida emphasizes that the singular, irreplaceable other in this work here is not marked out as a voluntary, self-present agent. What is signified instead, he states, is a radical passivity, a singularity left as a “trace” in the passing by of the other who responded. The trace reports a past that was never present, a past of which the respondent was not and could not have been aware. Derrida is here appropriating Levinas’ notion of the trace of the Other as set out in the latter’s essay of that name and influenced in its turn by Merleau-Ponty.47 A trace signifies, according to Levinas, but it is an exceptional sign, for it lies outside every intention to signify. Someone who left fingerprints in spite of all his efforts to commit a perfect crime provides a ready if not edifying illustration. An expert may trace the prints back to the culprit, but what remains is not something that was intended in any way.48 When we go back to Derrida, the style of my writing that is invisible and illegible to me seems to be nothing other than my trace for the other. The difficulty, however, is that of how he can claim credibly in this essay that writing conveys singularity when his general account of iterability excludes such a possibility. His response would be that the text is evocative in this particular instance of personal experiences of its author. Preceding the text, these experiences let the reader distinguish between the writing and the written, as it were. As soon as that writer goes beyond the reach of acquaintance and living memory, singularity inevitably fades out of his or her pages. A distinctive yet iterable manner of writing enters the realm of anonymity. Hence the relevant texts can only ever reawaken the excess of the writer over the written when he or she is already known from personal acquaintance.49
The Question of Singularity in Presence The loss entailed in writing silhouettes the apparent capacity of perceptual experience to convey with certainty just who someone is. We
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saw that Derrida seems to imply that the Other can be apprehended properly only through perceptual acquaintance. Here alone, if we interpret rightly, can part of their intersection of singularities be apprehended reliably. It is worth noting here that Husserl and Merleau-Ponty would have seen any claims to certainty in such perceptions as exorbitant. We may alight on something of the Other’s personal identity and uniqueness in perceiving him or her, for the former, but every such experience is intrinsically defeasible, depending on further experiences to confirm it. It is always possible that some future perception will nullify the meaning it has for me currently.50 Merleau-Ponty follows Husserl in emphasizing that I only experience at a distance what others actually live firsthand and that our situations can never be superimposed. I may state that I know someone and like him, but I am aiming beyond perception “at an inexhaustible ground which may one day shatter the image that I have formed of him.”51 If Derrida is in fact making such a claim, this is all the more strange in view of his own account of sensuous perception, which develops on the phenomenological themes of inadequacy and defeasibility and quite explicitly rejects any notion of pure and simple presence or givenness. Every perceptual experience of a being presupposes an inner horizon of meanings and associational expectations that can never be fully objectified.52 The mode of presentation of an existent is also colored by the wider worldly background or outer horizon within which it must appear. Hence the claim “There is nothing outside the text,” where “text” does not have to be inscribed or bound within covers or encoded digitally. It denotes the intrinsic context sensitivity and fallibility of appearance in general, extending over everything that is economic, historical, social, and institutional, as Derrida puts it.53 One does not have to be very familiar with the work of Derrida to be aware of the possibility that the perceptual presence of the Other is open, not just to iterability, but to the voluntary assumption of disguises that can efface singularity as thoroughly as written productions. A person may decide for comprehensible reasons to blend in with others to the extent of appearing unremarkable in every respect. Derrida does not address Rousseau’s second major claim—that we can
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hide ourselves quite successfully in company—after having cited it. Dissimulation in modern society has been made all the easier, we will remember from Rousseau, because of the codes of manners in which we live and breathe and have our being. These codes allow for forms of deceit unknown of in simpler times. Timbre of voice, facial expressions, and other movements can be framed quite brilliantly to appear involuntary and profoundly average and also to convey sincerity and truthfulness. One may of course reveal more in a failed act of deceit, showing much of oneself in the act and the content of the deception. But we do not see the deceiver as such if we do not see the deceit.54 Unhappily, lives of successful deceit are witnessed every other day by the surprises visited on relatives and friends on the occasions of funerals and the readings of last wills and testaments. In their own novel ways, acts of deceit can amount to remarkable if not admirable achievements, as well as marking the inseparability of lives from their works, works that are not interred with their agents’ bones (whether or not others ever come to find out about such deeds).55 Unfortunately for the perceiver, his or her being misled is also possible in the absence of any intention to deceive. Even here the isolation of someone’s singularity offers its own difficulties. While it might be precipitous to compare intersecting singularities to the dispositional patterns posited by behaviorists, at least some of the former resemble the latter in that they are displayed to others outside conscious, reflective ownership. But the grouping of these singularities may nonetheless vary in response to different audiences or interlocutors. Someone’s adjustment to what these people would expect or find acceptable can involve the unreflective or unconscious bringing of certain facets of his or her range of comportment to the fore, with other facets receding into the background. It is possible that much of what one “carries with oneself,” to paraphrase Derrida, can be left beneath if not behind, remaining within the dwelling but consigned for the moment to the cellars. There is the further problem of understanding a person from another culture from within the relative comforts of our homeworld. Forms of comportment common to the various members of that
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c ulture may look unique if we only have one individual to go on. Discrimination can be hard enough within one’s homeworld, with a once-off experience of the other in flesh and blood being insufficient to apprehend anything of him or her. And his or her singularity is of course borrowed from others, since all of us take up or react to the peculiarities of family members and companions. Here also it is appropriate to speak of an intersection of singularities in each case. But the point is that we often require opportunities to see others again and again, to be able to return to them as we can to graphic texts, in order to discern to some degree at least what is not peculiar or unique to them. Jumbling clichés, we must come and live with people to read them like books, though doing so does not forestall even innocent surprises visited on us before as well as after their deaths. As was remarked above, Derrida does advert to the culture, language, and families that contribute to his (and every) public way of being in the world, and he notes the difficulty of sundering the involuntary from deliberate intent. We have seen that, in written productions, there is a commonality of the voluntary and the involuntary insofar as they are susceptible to iteration and universalizable explanation. Derrida refuses to characterize an intersection of singularities in terms of a style because this suggests something that is determinable enough to be replicated, something that can serve as the first token of a prospective type. The style of a person, furthermore, would not be completely alien to causal and motivational accounts. Derrida is hardly unaware that modes of comportment revealed in perceptual experience can be as susceptible to explanations as productions on a page. As partial as they may be, the explanations of the former can be equally applicable to their relevant subject. If the intersection of singularities to which Derrida adverts is not determinable enough to be susceptible to iteration or explanation, can part of it still be communicated in some way after extended personal acquaintance with another within the homeworld? Could such a perceiver, while unable to describe or replicate it, still know it in some incorrigible fashion? Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas would all be chary of such claims, and I have suggested that Derrida’s own view of
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the context sensitivity and fallibility of appearance should lead him to side with them. But in his interview with David, once again, he seems to imply that personal acquaintance can let me know who someone is with certainty—here I can have and hold part of his or her intersection of singularities. But it remains to be established just what is meant by this “who.” I want to contend that Derrida is in fact internally consistent and ultimately in agreement with his predecessors, for he is not referring to singularity or singularities in speaking of who someone is. As is frequently the case, one must look to his other writings to discern how this word is employed. Now, when we ask who someone is, we may occasionally be inquiring into that person’s singularity or personal identity, but for Derrida in Of Grammatology, we are effectively asking after his or her name and occupation or relation to others, one or other of which we will be informed of in any event. The “who” that is identified iterably by a proper name or disguised indexical and filled out by a description is precisely a person assigned a certain sociocultural place in one’s homeworld, or else in an exotic lifeworld that is being translated into the terms of the former.56 In Politics of Friendship, furthermore, Derrida states that whenever some “who” is asked after, he or she is being taken as a moral agent responsible to others before the law, with his or her proper name serving as an unavoidable codification of responsibility (in the state of healthy adulthood at the very least).57 If Derrida is indeed implying the necessity of perceptual acquaintance to know who someone is with certainty, such knowledge applies at the most, I suggest, to the foregoing senses of a named, placed, and responsible person. Such a claim would still set the stakes very high, since there is a possibility, however remote, of misidentification in multiple instances due to impersonation or the phenomenon of a double or identical twin.58 But the moot point is that he never claims that one can apprehend anything of an intersection of singularities with certainty. I remarked in the first section above that, since an intersection of singularities is always carried with oneself, it is reasonable to assume that some of them are always somehow available to others. Derrida would add that these might still fail to be apprehended. It is a
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consistent theme in his work that anything communicable—with or without the intent to communicate—can fail to reach its destination.59 He states that this holds with perceptible characteristics or traits or marks as well as with oral and written messages.60 Crucially, when something of my intersection of singularities does appear to another, according to Derrida, this does not mean that the other can be sure of having grasped it. We saw that the idiomatic writing or intersection of singularities that he refers to is not something that one can appropriate. It constitutes an unreadable history, one also characterized by what he calls “exappropriation.” Nor can someone else appropriate it: How does exappropriation . . . intersect at a point of minimal adherence . . . with the singularity of the “style,” of the “phantasmatic,” of the idiom in general? This question besieges the texts I have published recently. Even if I could, up to a certain point, elaborate such a question elsewhere, put it in the form of general propositions, something would remain inaccessible to me, inaccessible in any case to these approaches, eluding any becoming for itself—and that would be, precisely, “my” idiom. The fact that this singularity is always for the other does not mean that the latter accedes to something like its truth. What is more, the idiom is not an essence, merely a process, the effect of a process of exappropriation that “produces” only perspectives, readings without truth, differences, intersections of affect, a whole history whose very possibility has to be disinscribed or reinscribed.61
This is a somewhat roundabout way of stating that singularity may be experienced but is never apprehended with surety or held onto with security. Interestingly, Derrida already touches on the difficulty of communicating singularity through perceptual acquaintance in an article on Artaud from 1965, “The Word Spirited Away.” In his theory of the theater, Artaud had decried the subservience of dramatic performances to written texts with their abstract significations. He wanted to make more of light and movement and gesture so as to return to a primal theater that would be experienced without the mediation of words.
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He also protested against exemplification, attempting to think of an artistic work that would be unrepeatable and inseparable from the life that created it. He did so with the view that any text either taken from or taken up by others is—in its very significations—spirited away or stolen from one’s living body. The only work inseparable from its creator, in Artaud’s eyes, would be a dramatic performance of such particularity as to have no antecedents or subsequents.62 But how might it be possible to describe such a work, or even to understand that such a performance had occurred in the first place? If there were such a genuine work, the point is that it would be indissociable from its particular context. And if it were to be recognized, remarks Derrida, it would create an example, a case of meaning and value. An essence could be read into the example insofar as the latter bears witness to Artaud’s thesis.63 In any event, the life that spontaneously created a work inseparable from its living body would be capable of a strange self-proximity. Producing what was intrinsic to itself, it would maintain total ownership of certain physical manifestations. Its creations, moreover, would be causa sui, inspired from within and drawing from no one else. For Derrida, the critique of signification on Artaud’s part involves the metaphysics of a proper subjectivity, that is, of an existence that does not deviate from or relinquish what is proper to itself alone.64 What we find early on in Derrida’s own and doubtlessly separable work, then, is the recognition of the problems attending the perceptual experience of singularity, of what is unique to oneself and yet marked by others. Wherever and whenever such an experience takes place, as stated above, it cannot be apprehended surely or held onto securely. The dream of a pure and undivided idiomatic writing, adds Derrida, is a desire that is more than a fantasy or illusion, yet it “is forever destined to disappointment; this unity remains inaccessible.”65 For oneself as another, for oneself and the other, singularity is something both ineffable and corrigible. This brings Derrida into the fold of a traditional phenomenology in the Husserlian sense, according to which, as we saw, the singular is eternally the apeiron. Needless to say, this is no bad thing, and is quite consistent with his denial of having broken clearly with the philosophical tradition so as to operate on a new terrain.66
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Notes 1. Jacques Derrida, Positions (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1972), p. 109, translated by Alan Bass as Positions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 82; hereafter P. It will be recalled that, for Husserl, “we can absolutely not rest content with ‘mere words,’ i.e. with a merely symbolic understanding of words, such as we first have when we reflect on the sense of the laws for ‘concepts,’ ‘judgements,’ ‘truths’ etc. . . . meanings inspired only by remote, confused, inauthentic intuitions—if by any intuitions at all—are not enough: we must go back to the ‘things themselves.’ We desire to render selfevident in fully-fledged intuitions that what is here given in actually performed abstractions is what the word-meanings in our expression of the law really and truly stand for.” Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, Zweiter Band: Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis, Erster Teil, ed. Ursula Panzer, Husserliana 19/1 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984), p. 10, translated by J. N. Findlay as Logical Investigations, ed. Dermot Moran (London: Routledge, 2001), vol. 1, p. 168; hereafter cited as Hua 19/1. 2. Jacques Derrida, La voix et le phénomène: Introduction au problème du signe dans la phénoménologie de Husserl (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967), pp. 87–88, translated by David Allison as Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 78; hereafter VP. 3. Hua 19/1, pp. 37–38, trans. pp. 187–88; VP, p. 37, trans. p. 35. 4. VP, pp. 89–90, trans. p. 80. 5. VP, pp. 107–8, trans. p. 96. 6. VP, pp. 72–74, trans. pp. 64–66. 7. VP, pp. 14–15, 63–65, trans. pp. 15, 57–58. 8. Edmund Husserl, Formale und Transzendentale Logik, ed. Paul Janssen, Husserliana 17 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), p. 359, translated by Anthony Steinbock as Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001), p. 12. 9. Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1990), pp. 31–32, translated by Jeffrey Mehlmann and Samuel Weber as Limited Inc, ed. Gerald Graff (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 10; hereafter LI. 10. VP, pp. 106, 108, trans. pp. 95, 97. 11. Elsewhere, Derrida draws attention to the privileging by Martin Heidegger of the human hand that creates artifacts and writes. Animals’ paws, claws, and fangs are relegated to bare, unthinking activities of grasping, ma-
On Losing Uniqueness 611 nipulating, and tearing. See “Geschlecht II: La main de Heidegger,” in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1987), pp. 415–51, translated by John P. Leavey Jr. as “Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand,” in Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida, ed. John Sallis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 161–96. 12. Jacques Derrida, Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1972), pp. 352–53, translated by Alan Bass as Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 296; hereafter M. 13. Jacques Derrida, L’oreille de l’autre: Otobiographies, transferts, traductions: Textes et débats avec Jacques Derrida, ed. C. Lévesque and C. McDonald (Montreal: VLB Éditions, 1982), p. 141, translated by P. Kamuf and A. Ronell as The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation: Texts and Discussions with Jacques Derrida (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), p. 106; hereafter OA. 14. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie: Zweites Buch, ed. Marly Biemel, Husserliana 4 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952), p. 270, translated by Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), pp. 282–83; hereafter Hua 4. See also Merleau-Ponty, Signes (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1960), pp. 67–68, translated by Richard McCleary as Signs (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 54. 15. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, suivi de notes de travail, ed. Claude Lefort (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1964), pp. 26–27, 159, translated by Alphonso Lingis as The Visible and the Invisible, Followed by Working Notes (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), pp. 10–11, 119. 16. Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory (New York: Verso, 1987), pp. 101–2. 17. Jacques Derrida, “Derrida l’insoumis,” interview with Catherine David in Le nouvel observateur, 9 September 1983, p. 85, translated by David Allison et al. as “An Interview with Derrida,” in Derrida and Différance, ed. David Wood and Robert Bernasconi (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 73. 18. Ibid., p. 85, trans. p. 74. 19. Ibid., p. 175, trans. p. 165. This is already recognized by Husserl. Every person has his or her particular character and can manifest a unitary style through the stages of life. A certain endearing man has ways of talking that “bear all the while the stamp of his style; but that does not mean that we
612 Timothy Mooney could guess his precise wording with the quite definite nuances he has in mind. If we are able to do that, then we say the man is a stereotype; once we know him, we soon know the whole arsenal of his endearments.” Hua 4, pp. 270–71, trans. p. 283. 20. Jacques Derrida, Points de suspension: Entretiens (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1992), p. 153, translated by Peggy Kamuf et al. as Points: Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 144; hereafter PDS. 21. Derrida, PDS, p. 145, trans. p. 135. 22. Derrida, P, p. 91, trans. p. 67; Derrida, PDS, pp. 17, 18–19, 142, trans. pp. 8, 10, 133. 23. Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, ed. Walter Biemel, Husserliana 6 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), p. 368, translated by David Carr as The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp. 356–57; hereafter Hua 6. 24. Hua 6, pp. 371–73, trans. pp. 360–63. One of Derrida’s early accusations against Husserl is that he determines being in the highest sense as ideality without due justification, taking it to denote the permanence of the same as the identical. He thus revives the decision that founded philosophy in its Platonic form (VP, pp. 58–59, trans. pp. 52–53). With respect to ordinary language at least, Derrida disputes the absolute identities of bound idealities, holding that their identities can undergo alteration through repetition. We see this in the way that words in everyday usage can take on new connotations that gradually alter older meanings within a cultural community or depose them altogether (LI, pp. 215–16, trans. p. 119). In this essay I do not broach the question of whether the Husserlian account of meaning is actually susceptible to nominalist or pragmatist critiques. 25. Hua 6, pp. 43–52, 376, trans. pp. 44–52, 366–67. 26. Hua 6, pp. 383–85, trans. pp. 375–77. See also Appendix II of The Crisis, “Idealization and the Science of Reality: The Mathematization of Nature,” esp. pp. 285–92, trans. pp. 307–14. 27. Hua 6, pp. 373, 375–76, trans. pp. 363, 365–66. 28. Hua 6, p. 383, trans. p. 375. 29. Jacques Derrida, “Ponctuations: le temps de la thèse,” in Du droit à la philosophie (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1990), p. 446, translated by Kathleen McLaughlin as “The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations,” in Philosophy in France Today, ed. Alan Montefiore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 39.
On Losing Uniqueness 613 30. Ibid., pp. 442–43, trans. pp. 36–37. 31. Jacques Derrida, Introduction à L’Origine de la géométrie par Edmund Husserl (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1974), pp. 88–89 n. 1, translated by John P. Leavey Jr. as Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), pp. 90–91 n. 93; hereafter Intro. 32. Edmund Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil: Untersuchungen zur Genealogie der Logik, ed. Ludwig Landgrebe (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1999), p. 320, translated by James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks as Experience and Judgement: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 266. It is curious that Derrida does not refer here to Husserl’s earlier and far more extensive treatment of normative and aesthetic ideality, which was available to him in the archive at Leuven. Cf. Edmund Husserl, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung: Zur Phänomenologie der anschaulichen Vergegenwärtigungen. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1898–1925), ed. E. Marbach, Husserliana 23 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980), translated by John Barnet Brough as Fantasy, Image-Consciousness, Memory (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005). 33. Intro, pp. 6, 57, trans. pp. 27, 66–67. 34. Edmund Husserl, Philosophie als Strenge Wissenschaft (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1981), p. 43, translated by Quentin Lauer as “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science,” in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), p. 116. 35. It is not just that a text or body of texts is inseparable from a life. For Derrida, it is insufficient to say that someone did not intend a certain interpretation of his or her work. When we consider the writings of Nietzsche, for example, we have to ask what in the language of his texts lent itself so readily to the spectacular perversions of Nazism and whether he took enough care to guard against such an eventuality (OA, pp. 44–46, trans. pp. 28–31). Derrida contends that we are responsible for everything that can be imputed to our proper names. The ideality of the name has no intrinsic relation to its bearer, but once someone has been given a name, it serves to codify personal responsibility. Politiques de l’amitié (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1994), pp. 258–59, 280–82, translated by George Collins as Politics of Friendship (London: Verso, 1997), pp. 231–32, 250–52; hereafter PA. See also the close of the preceding section. 36. J.-J. Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, Les Confessions, autres textes autobiographiques, ed. Bernard Gagnebin et al. (Paris: Pléiade, 1959), p. 116, translated by J. M. Cohen as The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1953), p. 116.
614 Timothy Mooney 37. Rousseau’s first indictment of the ills consequent on etiquette is found in the Discours sur les sciences et les arts. See Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3, Du contrat social, Écrits politiques, ed. Marcel Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), pp. 8–9, translated by G. D. H. Cole as “Discourse on the Arts and Sciences,” in The Social Contract and Discourses, ed. P. D. Jimack (London: Dent, 1993), pp. 6–7. 38. Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1967), pp. 204–8, translated by Gayatri Spivak as Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), pp. 142–45; hereafter Gr. 39. Jacques Derrida, “Psyché: Invention de l’autre,” in Psyché, pp. 21–22, 37, translated by Catherine Porter as “Psyche: Inventions of the Other,” in Reading de Man Reading, ed. Wlad Godzich and Lindsay Waters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 32, 44. 40. Ibid., p. 47, trans. p. 51. 41. Ibid., pp. 47, 50, trans. pp. 51, 53. The course of Derrida’s piece finds the invisible harmony between literary and scientific writings illustrated by various examples. Thus he refers to Schelling’s notion of originality and “artistic drive” in a philosopher and goes on to observe that it is understood by the latter as the filling out of a formal program, analogous to those who repeat or succeed the proto-geometer. See pp. 56–58, trans. pp. 57–59, and F. W. J. Schelling, Studium Generale: Vorlesungen über die Methode des akademischen Studiums (Stuttgart: Alfred Kroner, 1954), pp. 49–50, 79. Beyond “The Origin of Geometry,” Derrida’s discussion appears to show the influence of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936). Benjamin is ultimately undisturbed by the destruction of an artwork’s aura (its inviolability, sacredness, and distance) and its authenticity (its onceoff existence in space and time) through modern techniques of reproduction, since this allows for a new mass consciousness that has a “sense of the universal equality of all things.” See Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1973), p. 225. For Derrida, by contrast, the loss of uniqueness in the iterable work of art or form of comportment (and the two can sometimes come together) is an occasion for regret. See PDS, pp. 391–92, trans. p. 378. 42. Gr, pp. 162–65, trans. pp. 110–12. 43. There seems to be at least one exception to the idea that, outside handwriting, someone’s singularity cannot be properly marked in inscription. Derrida states elsewhere that “This you, which may be an I, like the Er, als ein Ich of a moment ago, always figures an irreplaceable singularity. . . . This you is addressed as one addresses a date, as the here and now of a commemorable provenance.” Schibboleth, pour Paul Celan (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1986), pp.
On Losing Uniqueness 615 30–31, translated by Joshua Wilner as “Shibboleth,” in Midrash and Literature, ed. Geoffrey Hartman and Sanford Budick (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 314. Peter Dews has argued that, once the individual addressed in language is related to a particular date or event, language becomes seen as a place of encounter between singularities rather than a medium erasing singularity (Logics, p. 102). But this is not something that Derrida will admit. He claims subsequently that, as soon as it is inscribed, an event or a date loses its singularity, at least for those who are not familiar with the original circumstances to which it refers. Derrida, PDS, pp. 391–93, trans. pp. 378–79. 44. Emmanuel Levinas, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), pp. 78–82, translated by Alphonso Lingis as Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), pp. 45–48. 45. Jacques Derrida, “En ce moment même dans cet ouvrage me voici,” in Psyché, pp. 160–62, translated by Ruben Berezdivin as “At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am,” in Re-Reading Levinas, ed. Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 12–13. 46. Ibid., pp. 184–85, 191, trans. pp. 32, 38. 47. Ibid., pp. 172–73, 180, 185, 191, trans. pp. 22, 28, 32, 38. Apart from his idea of a secret history, Merleau-Ponty refers to a past that was never a present in Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1945), pp. 279–80, translated by Colin Smith as Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 242. On this point, see Françoise Dastur’s “Perceptual Faith and the Invisible,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 25, no. 1 (1994): 51 n. 21. 48. Emmanuel Lévinas, “La trace de l’autre,” in En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris: Librairie Vrin, 1967), pp. 199–200, translated by Alphonso Lingis as “The Trace of the Other,” in Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 356–57. 49. As noted above, an inscribed event or date loses its singularity for those who are unfamiliar with its original circumstances. In this regard, Manfred Frank’s summary of Derrida’s understanding of idealization in speaking is also applicable to styles of writing: “Whoever speaks has to use words that show the same face to all speakers: their transindividual understandability is founded on this. Even the expressions with which I designate myself must, as expressions, be severable from the idiosyncratic consciousness that is proper
616 Timothy Mooney only to me and that is not communicable. What Derrida calls idealization (or repetition, signification, and the death of the subject) means nothing other than that the sign, in order to open itself up to communicability with Others, has to free itself from the signifying intentions of only One (singular) s ubject.” Was ist Neostrukturalismus? (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984), p. 532, translated by Richard Gray and Sabine Wilke as What Is Neostructuralism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 420. 50. Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, ed. Stephen Strasser, Husserliana 1 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1963), p. 144, translated by Dorion Cairns as Cartesian Meditations (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1960), p. 114. 51. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), p. 415, translated by Colin Smith as Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 361. 52. Jacques Derrida, L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967), pp. 176–77, translated by Alan Bass as Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 120–21; hereafter ED. 53. LI, pp. 252, 273, trans. pp. 136, 148. 54. In our implicit understanding of others, they are not mysteriously behind appearances but beyond them. What they are thinking beyond their current presence to us need not be shared, though it is shareable. Even the deceiver does not have a “true self ” behind the acts of deceit, since the duplicitous aspects of that self are to be found in and through these public acts when they are correlated with further ones. As Gilbert Ryle contends, we recognize the deceiver and the deception through observable discrepancies in his or her comportment. The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1949), p. 166. 55. For Derrida, deceit is remarkable in showing the internal differentiation of the self but is never guaranteed against discovery: “A conscious being is a being capable of lying, of not presenting in speech that of which it yet has an articulated representation: a being that can avoid speaking. But in order to be able to lie—a second and already mediated possibility—it is first and more essentially necessary to be able to keep for (and say to) oneself what one already knows. To keep something to oneself is the most incredible and thought-provoking power. But this keeping-for-oneself—this dissimulation for which it is already necessary to be multiple and to differ from oneself— also presupposes the space of a promised speech, that is to say, a trace to which the affirmation is not symmetrical. How to ascertain absolute dissimulation? Does one ever have at one’s disposal either sufficient criteria or an apodictic certainty that allows one to say: the secret has been kept, the dis-
On Losing Uniqueness 617 simulation has taken place, one has avoided speaking? Not to mention the secret that is wrested by physical or mental torture, uncontrolled manifestations that are direct or symbolic, somatic or figurative, may leave in reserve a possible betrayal or avowal. Not because everything manifests itself. Simply, the non-manifestation is never assured.” “Comment ne pas parler: Dénégations,” in Psyché, p. 550, translated by Ken Frieden as “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” in Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), pp. 17–18, slightly modified. 56. Gr, pp. 162–65, trans. pp. 110–12. 57. PA, p. 281, trans. pp. 250–51. 58. The possibility of identification is remote if one accepts that there is something ineffable yet somehow communicable in experiencing the other beyond an effectively identical physique and physiognomy. Simon Critchley treats of this question well in his not entirely unserious discussion of John Woo’s film Face Off, where the characters played by Nicholas Cage and John Travolta exchange faces. See The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), p. 286. 59. Jacques Derrida, La carte postale: De Socrate à Freud et au-delà (Paris: Flammarion, 1980), pp. 492–94, translated by Alan Bass as The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 464–66. 60. Jacques Derrida, “Mes chances: Au rendez-vous de quelques stéré ophonies épicuriennes,” Cahiers Confrontation 9 (1988): 26–27, translated by Irene Harvey and Avital Ronell as “My Chances/Mes chances: A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean Stereophonies,” in Taking Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis, and Literature, ed. Joseph Smith and William Kerrigan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), p. 10. 61. Derrida, PDS, pp. 58–59, trans. pp. 52–53, slightly modified. 62. Derrida, ED, pp. 261, 264–65, trans. pp. 175, 177–78. See Artaud’s Le théâtre et son double, in Œuvres complètes, vol. 4 (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1970), p. 91, translated by Mary Caroline Richards as The Theatre and Its Double (New York: Grove Press, 1958), p. 82. I am indebted to Steven Connor’s succinct account of Artaud’s theory of theater in Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 135–40. 63. ED, pp. 254–55, trans. p. 170. 64. ED, pp. 261–63, 272, trans. pp. 175–76, 183. 65. PDS, p. 145, trans. p. 136. 66. M, pp. 162–63, trans. p. 135.
t w e n t y - f i v e
The Person and the Common Good Toward a Language of Paradox
David Walsh
The title has been chosen to recall the masterpiece of concision published by Jacques Maritain under the same name over forty years ago.1 He too had concluded that the political language by which we juxtapose the “individual” and the “common good” had doomed the possibility of recomposing them. Confident that we know what we are talking about when we envisage individuals coming together for the sake of a common good, we fail to see that we have really confused two different orders of reality. The common good is something external to the individuals who constitute it, but the individuals themselves are not externalities at all. Not even the distinction between the public and the private can capture this incommensurability, or rather it captures it by way of obscuring the radical incommensurability involved. This was the contribution of Maritain’s short book. He understood, almost as the culmination of his efforts to preserve and defend the mod618
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ern heightening of respect for the individual, that the language by which it was conventionally expressed had to be disrupted. This is why he invoked the tension between the person and the common good. As with much of the incomplete project of “personalism,” Maritain saw the need to at least make a beginning by insisting on the unbridge ability between every single human being and the political aggregation of the many. He understood that the politics he advocated, liberal democratic politics, revolved around the very recognition of that incommensurability. The difficulty was that the liberal democratic language had never managed to achieve the transparence it sought to express. While straining to relate the individual to the whole in such a way that the individual could never be subordinated to the whole, it had never found a way of capturing the uniqueness of the relationship. That is, as Maritain suggested, the liberal democratic achievement is to have created “a whole composed of wholes.”2 No prescription of the common good, no matter how extensive the anticipated social rewards might be, can justify the abolition of the rights of a single individual along the way. The calculation of costs and benefits cannot be extended to human beings. Only the defense of particular rights can subtend the diminution of particular rights. Mere advancement of the collective welfare never provides a basis for a subordination that is tantamount to the devaluation of the single individual. This is the meaning of the liberal guarantee of the rights of equal dignity and respect. Only the rights of one can trump the rights of another. Nothing of merely collective significance, even their happiness or welfare, occupies such a primary position. In weighing the rights of one against the rights of another, we are engaged in weighing two infinities, so that the result is always the same. It is not that the result cannot be calculated but that the calculation cannot be resolved in anything less than equality. When considerations of the common or collective welfare enter in, we are immediately transferred to the realm of the finite, the calculable as such, and that is precisely what is forbidden. Measurement of the individual and the common good in terms of anything other than their incommensurability is foreclosed. That is the innermost core of liberal democracy.
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Yet it must remain inaccessible to the publicly available language even in the practical acknowledgment of its imperative.
Personalist Philosophy Has Yet to Be Developed The Incomplete Revolution of Personalism Maritain had a profound intuition of the paradox of liberal democracy, and he struggled, if not to resolve it, at least to render it more perspicuous. That was his achievement, especially in The Person and the Common Good, where he introduced a more powerfully personalist language. The project can be seen as a first step beyond the philosophical language of substance. Maritain understood that the traditional understanding of man as imago Dei, even as that reached its culminating affirmation in the incarnation of Christ and his redemptive outpouring for all, could no longer function as the authoritative source for the public evocation of human dignity and respect. Not only was it a language tied to Judaic and Christian faith, but, even for believers, there remained the problem of translating it into the concrete. The faithful witness of love in action still remained a powerful testament, but its source could not easily be articulated. Mother Teresa lived the imperative of the infinite dignity of every human being, but is it a principle founded on anything more than such unique personal commitment? This is the question confronting all Christian reflection on the political today, especially in light of the threat of instrumentalization confronting human dignity and the heightened awareness that Christians are the carriers of the unique divine affirmation of every human being. It is this challenge that shaped the profound nexus John Paul II sought to forge in his writings between the Christian truth about man and the contemporary affirmation of human rights. He was confident that Christianity contained a deeper justification for human rights than any purely secular perspective. Like Maritain he turned to the realm of the person, in his case the “acting person,” to uncover the horizon within which our most powerful moral intuitions might become transparent
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for the source that lay beyond them. In other words, the turn toward the person as the region in which the mystery of the individual can be more perspicuously expressed has by now become an axiom of Catholic thought. Yet the impact has been relatively slight. Readers of this personalist literature can discern that something new has begun, but they are unsure what to make of it. Personalism may simply be a concession to the dominant motif of autonomy, or it may initiate the descent into the morass of subjectivism that lurks behind the appeal to human rights. Is there a genuinely Christian retrieval of the respect for human dignity that has characterized the modern project? The inconclusiveness of the results, especially in light of the abandonment of a more rigorously natural-law approach, may arise from the relative recency of the experiment. Even in the case of Maritain the turn toward more personalist modes was a late development in his thought, while the earlier efforts of Scheler, Mounier, and others never seem to have delivered on their promise, at least not in the realm of moral and political language.3 Karol Wojtyla’s ambitious efforts were necessarily abbreviated through the genres of expression available to John Paul II, although taken as a whole his twenty-seven-year pontificate yielded a remarkable body of reflection.4 The challenge is to find the intellectual center from which they must be understood. The fact that admiration has so often substituted for understanding is an indication of the difficulty. A truly personalist mode of discourse requires a very different kind of thinking from the prevailing objectivist patterns. Correlatively, if we are to think about human beings in a different way, then we must develop the appropriate linguistic means, not simply make an alternative selection of terminology from the available possibilities. The inconclusiveness of the Catholic experiment with personalism, I suggest, has much to do with the failure to pay adequate attention to the philosophical and linguistic revolution it entailed. New wine cannot be put into old wineskins. The tendency has been to assume that the shift to the perspective of the acting person would merely be a different way of doing philosophical anthropology. Personal and individual were simply alternate
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terms. What was overlooked is that the person is precisely what cannot be comprehended, what cannot be captured as an “anthropology” or “psychology” by which explanation is reached. The perspective of the person is not one that can be reached by assuming an external vantage point but rather one that is available to us only by virtue of our own reality as persons. It is a luminosity that is constitutive of what persons are, but it cannot extend beyond the perspective of our participation within its meaningful horizon. The more we talk about persons as if they were another species of objects, the further we recede from the only perspective on personal reality available to us. It is a common problem within the human sciences and goes a long way toward explaining why they are essentially sciences of the peripherally human. But in relation to the intended effort of fidelity to the personal reality of human beings, it is indispensable that it guard against the tendency to slide back into objectivist modes of analysis. The only effective means of resisting that undertow is to root the reflection firmly in the realization that we are ourselves the reality on which we seek to reflect. What this means is that our language does not refer to any preexisting entities but rather to the parameters of an existence that unfolds only through its own conscious self-enactment. Our best access to the acting person is through our own acting personhood, and this is also the limit of our access to what is emergent within the personal reality. Just as we can give reasons for our actions, we cannot penetrate beyond the reasons that would be given by such a person. A New Understanding of Language Required Language is, in other words, not the means by which we define a reality that stands over against us. It is rather the means by which the interpersonal reality within which we find ourselves is constituted. Words themselves do not identify entities that are present before us, for they are part of the very process in which we aim at making present what can never really be present. Without that gap between the intention and its intended there could not be the space of the movement by which our existence is constituted. It is because the saying never over-
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laps with the said that our conversation can continue, endlessly, but not without the direction imparted by aspiration. Indeed, we might say that it is this impossibility of self-disclosure that above all marks the communication of persons. Over and above the nonpresence of the signified from which all our signifiers recede there is the special case of the nonpresence of the signified person. We might say that in the case of persons the signified conspires to elude the capture of the present toward which our intentionality drives. Not only is each person a mystery, an abyss so deep as “to be hid from him in whom it is,” in the words of St. Augustine, but even in the moment of self-disclosure what is most profoundly disclosed is that no disclosure has taken place.5 When a person expresses him- or herself, the uppermost meaning is that of the person who exceeds what has been expressed. The only thing we can know is that he or she is not present in the expressed. We might say that it is possible for human beings to express themselves because they never express themselves. Like God they remain hidden behind, yet present within, their creation. That incommunicability that ultimately characterizes the person can be known only through the capacity of persons to recognize what cannot be recognized in each of them. Only persons can know persons. The problem with a language that talks “about” persons as if they were alternative entities to essences or souls is that we recede further from the source of our discourse. Classical and Christian accounts of philosophical anthropology are not incorrect, they are simply opaque. What they neglect is their own awareness that the personal knowledge available to us arises because we ourselves are persons. Or, as is often the case, traditional anthropologies are prepared to concede the perspective of participation, but then they immediately ignore their own admission. Treating the individual as a specimen of a universal nature, they fail to acknowledge that the person in every instance exceeds the category of which it is an instance. This is the danger that arises when we forget that even the language we are using derives from the same participatory perspective as what we seek to articulate. Linguistic amnesia is not only a literary flaw, for it strikes at the very possibility of thinking through the issues that matter most to us. Thinking we have
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captured the mystery of the individual, the person, by naming it, we are soon confused by the incomprehensible assertion that infinity can be contained in so little. Is it not strange that the rights of a single human being can outweigh the pressure of the entire world? We already know that it is impossible to kill a human being unless he or she has first been depersonalized. Are we not moving in that same direction when we take the “person” as a marker for the generically impersonal and forget that its very meaning arises out of the encounter by which the unique one surpasses all others in existence? There is no way to discourse generally about the personal without obscuring what the personal really is, and if we are to remain true to the presentiments that guide our discourse then we must be prepared to guard against the tendency of our language to betray itself. Naming is in general fraught with difficulty, but the difficulty is insuperable when it seeks to name a person. Only by letting the name overwhelm itself can naming take place.6 Abortion as a Misunderstanding of the Person A good example of the problems generated when the language of persons is transposed into the language of entities is seen in the abortion debate. The more linguistically aware formulations ask, not when life begins, since the aborting of life is precisely what is at issue, but when the fetus becomes a person. This is also the point of engagement from the legally relevant perspective. So the endorsement of a personalist terminology seems to submit to the overseers who would render judgment on when a person is actually present. The difficulty, as we have tried to suggest, is that the language of personhood is precisely the language of what is not present. Persons disclose themselves through the impossibility of any of the manifestations of their existence adequately containing them. If the person is what is signified, then it is just what escapes its signifier. How then can we know when the fetus becomes a person? The answer is that we cannot. No more than with the comatose can we tell whether a conscious other is there. This inaccessibility arises, not because we lack evidence in the particular cases, but because
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the relationship with persons is one that always goes beyond the evidence available. We do not love human beings because they have given us good reasons for doing so but beyond all the reasons for doing so. Our relationship to others is unconditioned in the sense that it lies radically outside the meeting of conditions. Emmanuel Levinas has sought to articulate this priority of the other by saying that I am responsible for the other before I am even aware of myself.7 I become a self in light of my responsibility for the other. Even our relationship to the corpse, from which we know the person is now definitively absent, is marked by reverence for what the body formerly invisibly contained. Of all the epiphanies of the person we might say that the vulnerability of the fetus is the one in which otherness is most deeply invoked. It is after all the beginning, or as close as we can get, to the beginning of the other. The issue is not when personhood begins but the realization that personhood is what provides the possibility of beginning. This is not simply in the conventional sense that birth is the beginning of everything in human life, but in the more deeply metaphysical sense that each birth is somehow the beginning of being itself. The person is there even before he begins to be, for this is the very meaning of what it is to be a person. In thinking through the logic of what it means to be a person, to know one another as persons, we must be prepared to follow the implications that exceed our ordinary logic. This has been the great shortcoming of personalist reflection. It has not had the temerity to pursue its intimations. Instead it has fallen back into more familiar patterns of thought by which thinking gives us mastery over the objects of our thought. As a consequence it is not surprising that the personalist turn is diverted into irresolvable debates about when a person begins, or even when human life begins, debates that always suggest that we have somehow stepped outside all such parameters ourselves and can sit in judgment on what constitutes humanity. At this point it must be conceded that a large part of the philosophical tradition with its tendency toward definitional statement has encouraged such illusions. But what has always saved the tradition has been the inevitably unspoken awareness that such definitions were no more
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than derivative. Humanity can be known only from within, by becoming ourselves more human. This is why the status of the fetus can be answered only by the one who is in touch with it, one whose inwardness can respond to the inwardness that rises from the darkness itself. Only the mother can tell who the fetus is because it is in love that the otherness of the other is known. Outside of that, the other can be known only as another, an indifferent clump of tissue. Only the latter can be aborted, for it is impossible (on all levels) to abort a person. But what might we say when the mother no longer loves the child within, when she asserts a right to abort the other? Surely the same situation holds, that the fetus can be recognized only through the love of the mother, even if it is not always actual in the love of the “mother.” We are each called to step into the place of the mother when mothers turn their backs on the others who make them who they are.8 The only access available to us is the perspective of love, a love that is not conditioned by the attainments of the earliest zygote. We might even say that it is its incapacity to return the love that is lavished on it that is the greatest gift the embryo already offers toward the world. None of its potential achievements can surpass the pure gift of itself that it radiates from the very beginning. Children are loved and make it possible for us to love before they are even known. Only after they are born do they enter the world of visibility, the world of measuring and comparing in which even love can be tainted by the weight of tangibilities. Their lives as human beings entering a finite social universe are then one long series of assessments. The fate would be insupportable if there was not at some point, at the very beginning, the one pure moment of unalloyed love for their own sake. Parental love, like all love, is only truly love if it is unconditioned. But when is it possible for us to affirm unconditioned love unconditionally? To answer truthfully we would have to say when there is no possibility of our knowledge of the other not introducing an element of judgment. Before we know who the other is, love must be called forth. This can only be when the other is present without being present. The unborn is in that sense the purest possibility of the person, of that which is without visible manifestation. The inwardness by which the child is
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known by the mother is the most elemental form of the inwardness by which every other is disclosed to us. Without the otherness of the fetus there would be no possibility of the purely other, the one who simply is apart from every characteristic that can finitize the relationship. It is not therefore for us to determine the status of the fetus, for our own status as persons is determined by the fetus. Dehumanization has long been understood to be the main danger of the widespread practice of abortion. This is clearly the reason why it is not a mainstream procedure within medical schools or the profession. Even without back-alley abortions it is still a largely backdoor operation. By any stretch of the imagination this is surely a strange state of affairs for a procedure that has been widely hailed as a source of liberation. Not even its installation within the grandeur of constitutional rights has been able to rub out the taint of illegitimacy. Revulsion persists, not because of moral arguments, but because of the more elementary sense that our very humanity is implicated in the outcome. If we cannot love the unborn child, is it possible for us to love the born? Is love itself even a possibility? If the fetus is not a person, or is discounted as a person, is it possible for us to be persons, to be defined by the pure possibility of love? In light of such reflections we begin to discern the real status of the fetus as the most inestimable gift bestowed upon us. New life is the unmerited gift of otherness that can arise in no other way, for the other cannot be other if he or she arises from our own deliberate action. Everything about us, including the possibility of intentional action, is conditioned by the priority of the other. We are not first of all responsible for the other; rather, it is the other that provides us with the possibility of responsibility. The Other Defines Me as a Person To the extent that we turn our back on the other in his or her most elemental state, at the very beginning, we have not simply failed in our responsibility for the other. We have undermined the very possibility of responsibility. If our responsibility toward the other precedes any knowledge we have of him or her, since it cannot depend on the
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v erification of any particular conditions, then the pure precedence of the fetus is the ultimate case of our responsibility. The other at the moment of conception is the point from which responsibility must take its beginning. Prior to that there is no other. Through its status as pure otherness the fetus evokes responsibility in its most primordial form. We are responsible for responsibility. If we have in that moment foreclosed the possibility of responsibility, if we have placed preconditions on otherness, then we have abrogated the responsibility for the other who exceeds limits we have imposed on him or her. A conditional responsibility is irresponsible. Its lack of seriousness is indicated by the conditioning of a response on our capacity or inclination to respond, rather than on the need with which the other stands before us. Responsibility cannot be conditional because we cannot determine in advance what may be asked of us. And who could ask more or need more than the fetus, who depends on others for everything? The asymmetry of the relationship cannot be captured through the weighing of rights. Indeed, the utter imbalance calls into question the notion of rights whose claims must be calibrated and adjusted. Vulnerability as sheer vulnerability upends the accommodation of equal claims, for it exposes the grounds of such entitlements within essential humanity. What is owed to human beings by virtue of no other reason than their humanity is not in this sense a marginal or occasional issue. It is the bedrock of all human relationships and of all human discourse. Often we are inclined to think that our relationship to others is based on what we know of them, that there is a solidity of content that gives substance to the relationship. But this is to overlook that no relationship, even of the most superficial kind, is reducible to its tangible components. We might even say that it is the intangibility of relationships that furnishes the condition of their possibility. Anything can happen, as is the very nature of the encounter between infinities, for it is the openness to the unforeseeable that is the possibility of meeting. It is in that sense a meeting that never manages to enclose itself. Uncontained by the material, with its finitely visible dimensions, a genuine meeting of persons can take place: that is, a meeting in which the meeting is never fully achieved. We never actually meet the other whose self-
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expression can never include the self undertaking the expression. Yet we meet and greet one another. Glancing back at the event, however, we realize that we have met because we have never really met, or rather that we have already met before the nonmeeting took place. In either case we recognize that what exceeds the meeting is the most decisive. Invocations of a “bond” or of “intersubjectivity” are frequently made in this context, but all such terminology merely conceals the extent to which language fails us, as it must, on such occasions. Instead we are left with the irreducibility of the other, the sheerly other, that is no different in the case of the fetus from any walking, talking person we may care to name. The work of Levinas and Derrida on the impossibility of naming is a fascinating avenue on the eschatology of the person.9 We can name the child only because we cannot name him or her in any adequate sense, for even proper names are not unique. Prior to the name is the other.
Toward a Personalist Account of the Common Good The Challenge: To Specify the Common Good as the Good of Persons Who Exceed It The great difficulty with all such reference to the other is that it easily slips into the assumption that we know what we are talking about. We have specified otherness, forgetting that we have been specified by the other. No more than the name gives us access to the innerness of the person does the generic designation of the “other” provide us with any apprehension of what it means. The other is not a term we understand, for it is a term we stand under. As an irreducible, the other cannot be made a reference point of our thought. All our thinking takes place within the horizon opened to us by the other. This is the challenge of a personalist language of the person. It is nothing less than accepting the logic of its content and applying it to the form of its expression. If the other is primary, then he or she is prior even to our own consciousness, and what is prior to consciousness cannot be
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i ncluded within it. The container can never contain itself, for that is the possibility of containing anything else. How, then, can we talk about the other as what always exceeds our capacity to talk about it? The answer, as our reflection already suggests, is obliquely. Simply because the irreducibles of our thinking and speaking cannot be made the focus of our consciousness does not mean that they lie outside all awareness. A sideways glance at what is not included within the horizon makes even the horizon itself visible. This is the very meaning of human thought and expression, that it somehow contains itself in the sense of containing the possibility of the enlargement that can include itself, but this is never the same as actually possessing itself. Only God contains the source of his own being. We are merely like God in the sense of possessing and yet not possessing ourselves. This is of course what makes it possible to be most God-like of all in giving ourselves to an other, although even this we know is never fully accomplished. Instead we need a lifetime of giving of self, which is the only way we can express what we intend, even while we recognize that it cannot be accomplished. The giving of self exceeds even time as that which makes time itself possible. It is the same transcendence in relation to the person and the common good. Not only is the common good the means by which the person enacts the meaning of his or her existence, but that outpouring of service can never be completed within the finitude of the common good. The individual always exceeds the common good in the sense in which everything that is the source remains outside that of which it is the source. No matter how the common good is defined, the person always remains more than the service he or she extends toward it. Of course the individual may be used, may even be used up, by a political instrumentalization of his or her role within it. But that does not abolish the reality, the injustice of the part subsuming the whole. We talk of moral resistance to the deformation of humanity in such instances. It is always possible for the collective to emerge as a power over against the individual, to take the gift of self that is offered to the community and treat it as a mere expendability. What is of most interest in such instances is not that the injustice is condemned or resisted but the source
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of such resistance. Whence does it spring? We can hardly think of the possibility of moral revolt except by virtue of the impossibility of the public force obliterating the transcendence of the personal it can never contain. What is most galling to every tyrant is that he cannot kill human beings. He may put them to death, but that is merely to put them out of sight. The dead haunt us, not because we see ghosts, as Macbeth encountered Banquo, but because the person as such can never be eliminated. Ghosts remain a possibility only because persons are encountered as more than themselves, more than the tangibilities of their lives. It is what makes them persons that cannot be killed, for it is ever what remains outside all that they are. The common good of persons whose good always exceeds the common good consists therefore of the recognition that they constitute what Kant called a “kingdom of ends.”10 If each is an end in himor herself, then no social or political necessity justifies the violation of their inviolability. Only the equal dignity and respect owed to an other could underpin such abrogation. No merely common enterprise, defined by the attainment of immanent historical goods, is sufficient.11 We are familiar with such formulations in light of the invocation of rights in the tradition of liberal democracy. Yet the audacity of this recognition never ceases to astonish. Such a public order acknowledges, indeed is built on the acknowledgment, that its interests are outweighed by the priority of rights owed to its least significant member. Even projects that might hold untold benefits for millions do not allow us to set aside the fundamental rights of a single one. Human progress cannot be bought at the cost of the slightest inhumanity. By reflecting on this most basic principle of politics we begin to gain a sense of what the good of a community of persons must be: that is, the clear understanding that there is no commonality beyond the good of individual persons themselves. To the extent that persons are constitutive of the common good between them, they cannot be reduced to their respective contributions. Over and above whatever they create between them there is the unsurpassable depth of persons who are its source. The situation is familiar to us as we reflect on any of the common enterprises in which we find ourselves engaged, whether it is building
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something, playing a game, or competing against one another. Even in war the uneliminable humanity of the other calls forth our respect. All adumbrations of a just war are derived from this. The other who must be killed is nevertheless an other. The common task has its imperatives built into it, but it can never include the abrogation of the persons who carry its imperative within them. The worker, as John Paul II formulated it, is always more than the work.12 Distinction between Individualist and Personalist Conceptions of the Common Good Part of the problem in maintaining this distinction, the personalist distinction, is that our publicly available language has not yet managed to find its stable formulation, if indeed such a thing is possible. After all, we have to remain open to the possibility that our language best serves us through its instability at such junctures. However, we have made considerable progress. Over more than five centuries we have hammered out a language of individual rights, and we have anchored our political constitutions within it. The inviolability of individual liberty, with its extension into the political liberty of self-government, is the very pivot of the emergent modern political form of liberal democracy. Nor should we regard this as a wholly modern achievement, however regnant such a perception may be, for the language of rights is embedded in the idea of law and acquires its momentum once the transcendence of the individual is differentiated.13 The challenge of explaining such convictions even to ourselves, however, should not be underestimated. This is the difficulty that has lain at the heart of the entire liberal project with its focus on the definition and defense of rights occupying the center of attention. The question of why such rights or such a view of human nature is worthy of defense has remained largely in the background. Now that the liberal assertion of rights has been so successful that no historical competitors remain, the problems generated by the obscurity of the source of rights can no longer be avoided. We simply have to explain, however linguistically vertiginous the effort, how it is that one can count for more than all.
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That is where we stand today, on the threshold of a conversation to which Christians and Jews with their historic understanding of man as imago Dei have much to contribute. But the anchor of faith, an abiding intuition, is not yet the same as a teaching for the nations. Even Christians have to struggle to find the linguistic means to render their convictions more transparent. It must be possible to distinguish between the dual roles that human beings are called to perform within a world that is simultaneously engaged in the instrumentalization of everything and everyone, and also committed to the recognition that every individual at his or her core escapes such calculation. Our political language struggles to maintain such distinctions as we find our way toward them in practice while never quite managing to articulate them conceptually. Few observers have the acuteness of Michael Oakeshott, who insisted that the “nation-state” is a contradiction in terms. The goal of the nation is the pursuit of its historical identity and destiny, for which it is prepared to call on individuals to subordinate not only their interests but even themselves should it become necessary. By contrast, the state emerged as a realm of order between conflicting individuals and groups, drawing its raison d’être from the guarantee of equal liberty it provides for all. It is the difference between what Oakeshott calls an “enterprise association” and a “civil association.”14 The former is defined by its common purpose, that common good for which individuals have expressly subordinated their individual liberties. Within the organized world of work, this is exactly how the common wealth is secured through that division of labor by which everyone does his part within the whole. But this is not how we wish to think of the political community. It is not an enterprise association serving a purpose beyond itself; its members are not a mere means to the attainment of its goals. Rather, the civil association has the freedom of its members as its purpose. In other words, the political community is what makes possible the attainment of the good of the individuals composing it, without bending them toward any end beyond their own self-direction. The rules of the civil association are like the rules of a language: they enable us to converse, but they do not tell us what to say. Only such a conception of the common good as
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borne in every instance by the individuals who carry it within themselves is capable of defining a community of persons. The organic analogy, invoked by the whole tradition from Aristotle on, carries us only a certain distance, for, like every metaphor, it also obscures what it claims to reveal. There is a sense in which the individuals depend on the whole and the whole on its members in the manner of a living organism. Yet even when the connection is severed between the citizen and the state there is still a sense in which it also remains. The “king’s two bodies,” his individual mortality and his political immortality, remind us of the limits of the organic metaphor. With difficulty we cast around for an alternative conception but find that none quite satisfies. It is simply not possible to understand the spiritual reality of the politically ordered community in terms of any other process but its own. How else are we to understand a social reality constituted by agreement that can be wholly present within individuals to such an extent that, even when it breaks down, they may be said to still carry it inwardly within them? The correlative side to this, as we have seen, is the recognition that the publicly constituted order has no other destiny than the preservation of its members whose rights exceed it. Where in nature do we find any suggestion that the whole must be subordinate to the part? The reason why we struggle so hard to find a way of comprehending this event is that the implication of individual priority over the common seems to overturn the possibility of a politically stable whole. Is individualism the consequence of liberal rights? How can such an order sustain itself ? Is it not destined to disintegrate into a multiplicity of centers of desire, especially if there is no common good higher than the good of individuals? We have a fairly clear conception of what the common good of a civil association is. Kant has formulated it as the “kingdom of ends” in which each individual is treated as an end-in-him- or herself and never as a means. What needs to be explained is how this common good is sustained within the individuals who constitute it. This is the conception of the whole that has proved so elusive in the history of reflection on it. Somehow the principle of unity must be carried within the individual human beings who realize it in their lives together. Recourse to the acting person or the dynamics of a practice have intimated what
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conceptually escapes us, and that may be the limit of what can be said on the subject. Yet even the acknowledgment of a limit suggests the possibility that it might yield more than a sheer limit. At the very mini mum the situation calls our attention to the existential force of the common good in action. Like Tocqueville on the exercise of freedom in cooperative action with others, we must be prepared to find in such climactic instances the wellspring of communal action. He referred to it as the point at which the heart was enlarged beyond the boundaries of its own particular concerns, and he concluded that what made democracy work in the American case was that it recurrently called forth such possibilities.15 In other words, the common good was evoked when individuals ceased to act merely as individuals but instead stepped out of their private sphere to take upon themselves responsibility for the common. Tocqueville’s insight, which points all the way back to the Greek insistence that the political was the only meaningful realm of human action, was that the public good was sustained through the transformation its pursuit effected within individuals. From their perspective they no longer acted merely as individuals. Through the growth of the soul by which they acted on behalf of all, they now participated in an existence more real than the purely private. The capacity of human beings to be carried beyond themselves through self- transcendence is well known in many spheres. Tocqueville had simply recognized its crucial political significance. Yet despite the brilliance with which he elaborated his insight in terms of the role of intermediate and voluntary associations, by which the transition from the individual to the common good is accomplished, there is still a remarkable silence concerning the mysterious nexus that is thereby forged. It is almost as if the process by which we become more than we are through service toward the common good must remain a mystery to us. Incomprehensibility of Self-Transcendence of Persons The impenetrability is not all the fault of the abbreviated language of liberal politics. Instead we are confronted with the limits of words themselves when they are the very words that make our lives together possible. For we are here discoursing, not about objects or processes
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outside ourselves, but about the very actions by which we enact our existence in common. Impenetrability is virtually a condition of such expressions, for if we were to penetrate their meaning from a viewpoint outside them we would no longer be engaged in their realization. The individual’s relation to the common good cannot be encompassed from the individual perspective without abolishing the very enlargement of the individual heart that is required. We have already glimpsed this insight in admitting the limitation of the organic analogy. The real application of the organic analogy would ask how it is possible for the blood vessels to understand the role that they play in the whole organism. To the extent that the sacrifice the individual makes on behalf of the common good is not an incidental or optional aspect of his existence but the most indispensable means by which he becomes who he is, indeed becomes more than he is, then it can never be fully comprehended from his perspective. Even the most clear-sighted analysis cannot grasp the whole by which the analyst himself is sustained. The reciprocal relationship by which the individual supports the common good, and the common good supports the individual, can be known only from within its dynamics. To turn it into an object of contemplation would be to step outside the process, an act that not only would be politically irresponsible but would fail to arrive at any higher insight than objectification permits. Spiritual reality can be known only from within it. Spirit alone can know spirit. This was an insight that was being pursued far more philosophically by Hegel at almost the same time as Tocqueville was working on his Democracy in America (1835). Hegel’s text is the Philosophy of Right (1821), which really was an expanded excerpt from his Philosophy of Spirit, the account of what the mind can know of itself from within its own self-unfolding within history. The Philosophy of Right is what Hegel called “Objective Mind” or mind/spirit expressed in the constitution of a publicly ordered liberty. His problem was the one we have been considering here, namely how it is possible for individuals to find themselves within a legally constituted whole that is at the same time defined by its preservation of individual liberty. A merely formal relationship, a neutral framework that protected the satisfaction of private
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desires and interests, Hegel, like Tocqueville, understood would not work. There must be a substantial bond between the individual and the whole; otherwise the relationship will easily fall apart. The difference was that Hegel sought to describe its dynamics from within. He understood that political reality is ultimately a spiritual relationship and, as such, no more accessible than it is to the persons who live within it. The difficulty of conveying Hegel’s project is perhaps best demonstrated by the widespread underestimation of the Philosophy of Right as a book about the reciprocity of the individual and the political, just as Tocqueville can be readily encapsulated in a reference to the role of intermediate institutions. In each case it is not what we can so easily grasp about them that counts but what we find ungraspable, what perhaps escaped Hegel and Tocqueville as they strained toward what pulled their thought forward. Thus what we need to know is not reciprocity or intermediate associations but how they work. What is their inner life? This is what is so difficult to get hold of, although Hegel made an impressive start on it in the third section of his book called “The Ethical Life” (Sittlichkeit). This was his term for the concrete living whole of a way of life. This is not the place to go into the details of its three dimensions of the family, civil society, and the state but merely to select the first of them by way of illustration. All three constitute a way of life integrating the individual and the common at successively more self-conscious levels. The analysis of the family is sufficient to gain a sense of the approach. Perhaps the most notable aspect is that the family is featured so prominently in an analysis of the state, and not as one of its preconditions but in many ways as its first stage. Certainly the family is not located within the private realm, although neither is it subsumed into the state. No, it is definitely placed between the public and the private in a way that seems to point toward the intermediate status even of the state itself. The significance of the family for Hegel is that it is the state in miniature, or more accurately, in its prereflective phase. What strikes him is that the family is based on freedom, the marriage between man and woman, but that it generates a bond in which the freedom of each has disappeared. Freely they submit their freedom and
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thereby preserve it. Neither partner calculates the return on contribution or considers the nurturing of offspring as accrual of debt. Private property, the very basis of individual claims, has been submerged. The reason is that the family is a real unity of persons. They no longer need to assert or defend their rights because they are fully protected, and more, within the whole in which each is valued as the whole. Conversely, the reciprocation of trust and love is never in doubt, since the individual persons no longer look on themselves as such but as members of the whole, the family. It is the most complete integration of the individual and the common good because it is the most complete identification of the individual with the whole. No one knows where the interests, joys, and sorrows of one end and those of another begin, for they revolve in a continuous round of life. It is that integration in a living unity that points Hegel toward what sustains the common good in the more explicitly agonistic arenas of civil society and the state. He understood that the latter were not by any means comparable to the intense unity of the family, but he also saw that they shared an indispensable ingredient: love. If we want to understand even in part what makes it possible for individuals to subordinate themselves to the common good, we must begin at the point where it is most inwardly present. We still may not have penetrated its source, but we at least know the mystery within which every union of persons must stand. It must be a union that has no other good beyond that of the persons involved. By entering into the family, just as in civil society and the state, we have not “given hostages” to a future that no longer consults our interests as persons. Rather, it is by yielding our personal prerogatives that we gain them more securely. This is of course the very pattern of the reciprocal grant of liberty that has been advanced by all the social contract conceptualizations of the common good. The difference is that Hegel has envisaged it as a living reality. Where his predecessors, Locke or Rousseau, envisaged an agreement that took place in time as founding civil society, Hegel has made the social agreement the very basis of the time of civil society. As with so much of his philosophy, he has put the concepts in motion. This is the source of his notorious difficulty for readers. Having become accustomed to think-
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ing in fixed categories, we are ill prepared to make the transition to the dynamic of living categories. Yet if we want to catch a glimpse of what sustains the world of meaning by which we are ourselves sustained, that is what we have to do. It is the nature of a common good that is borne within the persons who realize it in life that it can be known in no other way than through our participation within it. Any attempt to relegate its source to an event outside the persons whose lives it makes possible simply misses the reality. That has been the major failure of all contractual “explanations” of civil society. Such accounts are themselves as much in need of explanation, since they do not make transparent how it is that human beings can experience the loss of liberty as their ultimate gain. Contracting parties must view themselves as fixed entities within a zero-sum game. It is quite different when the whole dynamic of their lives together is engaged. Then what might appear as a loss from one perspective is in the immediately following moment regained sevenfold in the enlargement of life together. No beginning of the process can be found, for that would be to step outside it. The parallel would be in thinking that the husband or wife could better understand the marriage by reducing it to the objective factors that went into it. This would strike us as a peculiar project, for it would withdraw such a person from the only source of meaning within the living relationship itself. Persons can be understood only from within the interiority by which their existence is borne. The same is true of their social and political unions. Hegel’s remarkable innovation in the history of philosophy was, even if it has hitherto not been widely acknowledged, to make this necessity explicit. He understood that it inverted the meaning of most of the conventional terminology by which we discuss such matters. Where previously we had been inclined to assume that the concepts we used had originated within ourselves as a means of mastering the reality confronting us, now we are forced to acknowledge that such concepts constitute the reality within which we exist and that we can never hope to master in the slightest. The common good, a term that goes all the way back to the res publica, is one such instance. We do not possess the concept of the common good, it is rather the common good that possesses us. What does this
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mean? It means that the common good is what defines our existence. It is not up to us to define it. No one can claim to have superior knowledge of the common good but the person who bends him- or herself to realize it most completely. This is not a question of technique in which matters of greater or less might be judged. Ultimately there is no special expertise that secures the common good other than the giving of self that is possible for every single one of us. No unique qualities are required beyond the uniqueness that is every person. The Common Good as Actualized by Every Person In many ways this community-forming role of virtue has been recognized in the tradition of political thought from the classical beginning. The problem is that it was no sooner recognized than it was promptly forgotten. Virtue began its meandering odyssey through all forms of instrumentality by which it became the basis for the assertion of one person’s superiority over another. Little attention was devoted to how impossible such claims rendered a community of persons. Even Aristotle, who thought more profoundly about the nature of friendship than anyone and understood that it turned on the possibility of equality between human beings, promptly forgot about such implications when he turned his attention to political friendship. This is one of the reasons why being faithful to the Greek beginnings often requires us to be more faithful than the Greeks themselves.16 The modern challenge to the hierarchical conception of classical political thought is driven in considerable measure by this logic. It recognizes that the core of virtue is always more than the specification of virtue. Nothing that we do can outweigh the person who does it, nor can it accomplish more than what the person seeks to achieve in the giving of self. Virtue is not a part of us, it is the whole. In that regard we are all equally situated. Our capacities may vary but not the self from which they spring. Even the lowliest, least effectual member of a society can give the incomparable gift of self by which the common good is founded. This is the element of unpredictability that exceeds all rational organization. The latter remains indispensable, for there must be a routinization of our lives to-
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gether, but it can never preclude the eschatological flash of generosity by which every scale of value is transcended. What makes it possible for the authority of virtue to be recognized is this giving and receiving of self beyond all variations of attainment. The Greeks sought to designate this innermost by the term nous, as distinct from the mere application of logos. Christianity was of course the beginning of a wider awareness of the inexpressible depth of each human being. All were equal in their fallenness and their openness to grace. It was not simply that Christianity focuses on the transcendent destiny of each person but that it already lives within immeasurability. We are told not just to give our coats but to give ourselves to those in need. A fully personalist mode of discourse is already in evidence. Yet even Christianity did not follow out its implications for the world of politics, or even for the revised understanding of language that it contained. All communication between human beings exceeds what is said, for it involves the giving and receiving of selves, precisely what can never be given. The translation of this insight into political terms was the work of the modern liberal democratic development, which is, at its core, the most quixotic of all political forms. Liberal democracy takes its stand on a principle that departs utterly from any judgment of mundane success. Instead of focusing first on the pragmatic outcomes, it insists that despite the consequences human beings must be entrusted with their own responsibility. This does not mean that liberal democracy is utopian or unconcerned about adjusting to real conditions, even with ensuring its own survival. It is simply that that is not its core and it is willing to endure considerable risks, even the risk of political suicide, in embracing free elections. This is not simply because liberal democracy has faith in the likelihood of successful outcomes, that people will be better off if they themselves make the decisions affecting their lives. It is rather the conviction that such decisions are properly made by the individuals involved, not because they are likely to decide best, but simply because to be human is to live in such a way.17 Liberal democracy is the political expression of the common good of persons, even if it still has a way to
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go to understand and develop a language of corresponding transparency. That is a language of paradox. Not only is the liberal democratic form one in which the collective defers to the individual, “a whole composed of wholes,” as Maritain suggested, but it is one in which the individual really is the whole. Even while insisting that the individual must play his or her part in sustaining the whole, we know that the individual is always more than the part he or she plays within the whole. He or she is the end of the whole. The paradox of a community of persons is that it surpasses all mathematical rationality. The individual is sustained by the common good while the common good is sustained by the individual. But it is a relation not of mutual dependence but of independent mutuality. Persons cannot exchange a part of themselves; they can only give themselves wholly to one another. This is why no economy can apply. In each instance the limits of reciprocation are exceeded. The consequence is that the common good of persons is always achieved and yet never achieved. To the extent that nothing over and above the mutual giving of selves remains to be accomplished, nothing more is needed. To the extent that the mutual giving of selves is never accomplished in the giving of tokens that is the only means of conveyance, the community of persons is never achieved. The status is eschatological. This should not, however, be taken in the sense of what is not real or not yet or somehow future. It is that existence occurs within the eschatological openness that can never be closed, a nonclosure that is the only surety of the openness of existence. The genius of liberal democracy has been to intuit this even if it has so far lacked the philosophic articulation of its intuition. It is not that liberal polities constitute a neutral framework within which the pluralist variety of private satisfactions can be pursued. That is only the most superficial appearance of liberal democracy. Its deepest truth is the realization that the only common good worthy of the name is the common good that involves the mutual giving and receiving of persons. It is not that one counts more than all but that only such a scale can adequately respect what is always owed in relation to persons. We become persons by giving ourselves.
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The political community simply announces and invites that possibility as its own deepest realization. It is not, however, an invitation that is issued primarily through the medium of official pronouncements. We know that the U.S. Constitution exists, not in the document sealed under glass, but in the hearts and minds of the citizens. What, then, of the political community as such? Does it have an existence beyond the inwardness by which it is carried? The logic of a community of persons, by which all are bound up in one, is fully reversible. The one is also somehow all as well. This is why the initiative and responsibility of every single member are so crucial, for each one bears the whole community within him or her. Each one literally is the whole. Obviously the articulated unity of all through effective representation is what makes it possible for the political community to act, to exist in the full sense. The United States is an actor on the world scene only because of that awesome unity of its members. Yet when we search for the beginning of that union we search in vain to find a point from which it took root, a beginning in time before which the union was not. In some sense it could not have occurred unless it was already there, a notorious source of difficulty for all historical and philosophical speculations on the origin of human societies. The process is mysterious because we can never find an absolute beginning but rather a slowly emergent recognition of what had been there before there was a there. No community between us is possible unless we are already in community with one another before the possibility arises. The question is not why community arises between human beings but rather why it gets restricted within such a narrow range. That is of course a question that lasts only until we realize that it undermines its own presupposition, for we are at least potentially open to all others as well. Persons bear community within them because they can communicate only through the giving of selves that constitutes community. In doing so, they have already realized the common good. It does not await us in the future, since there is nothing more that can be given than ourselves, our all. In every action, to the extent that it is a fully human action, the whole of existence, eternity itself, is implicated.
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There is no founding in the past or fulfillment in the future that outweighs in seriousness the justice that must be respected in the present. “Everyone is responsible for all” is a saying of Dostoevsky that can be received on many different levels. But surely its deepest is that all of goodness is gained or lost in the action of every individual. We each bear ultimate responsibility for all, not in the sense that we can effectively secure the welfare of all, but that the maxim, as Kant would say, of love toward all can be enacted in no other way. Organizations and states do not act, only individuals do. In our actions each one of us determines the good or evil of the whole universe, for in choosing we choose with whole selves that reach as far as the limits of all reality. This is the meaning of our God-given freedom, that we are free to turn away even from God himself. Good and evil are not decided at a particular point in time. Rather, they are decided eternally at every point in time. This is what it means to act as a person, to occupy the point of eternity from which all time is contained. Responsibility for the common good falls therefore to every individual, yet the power of realization lies within the capacity of every individual. When we have given ourselves there is nothing more to be given. It is accomplished. What the efficacy in time may be is not up to us to control, although we must bend our efforts to the utmost. It is simply that nothing more can be added to the essential. In action from eternity the goal is already reached, while the unfolding over time remains to be determined. This is why the founding of a state is not necessarily the work just of its founders. Often those who come later may found it more profoundly. This is the insight that is the secret of Lincoln’s rhetoric in the Gettysburg Address. No honor can be bestowed on those whose own selflessness has surpassed all honors we might bestow.
Notes 1. Jacques Maritain, The Person and the Common Good, trans. John J. Fitzgerald (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966). 2. Ibid., pp. 56–57.
The Person and the Common Good 645 3. See Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, trans. Peter Heath (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1970); Emmanuel Mounier, Personalism, trans. Philip Mairet (New York: Grove, 1952). 4. Karol Wojtyla, The Acting Person, trans. Andrej Potocki (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979). 5. Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, XLI, para. 13, ed. D. Dekkers and J. Fraipont, Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina (Turnhout: Brepols, 1956), vol. 38, p. 470: “Tantamne profunditatem creditis esse in homine, quae lateat ipsum hominem in quo est?” Augustine is commenting on the line “Deep calls to deep at the noise of thy waterfalls” (Psalm 42:7 of the Revised Standard Version). 6. “Thou art thyself,” says Juliet, “though not a Montague. . . . Romeo, doff thy name, and for thy name, which is not part of thee, take all myself.” Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet II, 2. Quoted in Maritain, Person, p. 39. 7. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969). 8. “If we accept,” Mother Teresa asked at a prayer breakfast in Washington attended by President Clinton and cabinet secretaries, “that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?” Crisis, March 1994, 18. 9. Jacques Derrida, On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). 10. Kant’s formulation of a kingdom of ends arises from the recognition that “all rational beings stand under the law that each of them should treat himself and all others never merely as means but always at the same time as an end in himself.” Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), p. 39. 11. John Rawls formulates the principle in his Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 3: “Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override.” 12. John Paul II, Laborem Exercens, § 6: “As a person, man is therefore the subject of work.” 13. Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law, and Church Law, 1150–1625 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997). 14. Michael Oakeshott, On Human Conduct (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976). 15. “Thus it is by the enjoyment of a dangerous freedom that the Americans learn the art of rendering the dangers of freedom less formidable.”
646 David Walsh Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve (New York: Vintage, 1956–58), vol. 2, p. 127. 16. See Søren Kierkegaard on this in Philosophical Fragments, trans. Howard and Edna Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 111. 17. An often quoted passage from Chesterton puts this best while also illustrating how the thoroughly personalist cast of his thought gave it its peculiar vigor: “In short, the democratic faith is this: that the most terribly important things must be left to ordinary men themselves—the mating of the sexes, the rearing of the young, the laws of the state. This is democracy; and in this I have always believed.” G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London: Fontana, 1961), p. 46.
t w e n t y - s i x
Ethics and Economics Friends or Foes?
Gerard Casey
In the film Heavens Above! (1963), Peter Sellers plays a Church of England prison chaplain who is mistakenly appointed to an affluent rural area. He has ill-digested notions of social justice which he attempts to put into effect in his new parish with comically disastrous results for all concerned, including the targets of his charitable but misguided efforts. His free food scheme, for example, is economically unsustainable and, at the same time, threatens to put the local grocer out of business. It would be taking a spade to a soufflé to subject what is after all a comedy to a serious analysis, but the film makes the point—and does so perhaps more memorably than many a weighty treatise—that utopian schemes sit ill with real people in the real world and that good intentions cannot overturn the technical economic necessities that must underlie any functioning economy. But perhaps the theme of the film begs the question at issue. Are there in fact such necessities, and, if so, are they incapable of being overturned by ethical concerns? Just what is the relationship of ethics to economics? 647
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One explanation of their relationship is that these two disciplines simply do not connect at all. Reviewing Leland B. Yeager’s Ethics as Social Science, Roderick T. Long attributes to the author the view that “economists and moral philosophers often like to pretend they have nothing to do with each other. Economists pose as value-neutral scientists who have no need for airy-fairy moral theory; yet they regularly dispense the sorts of prescription and advice that cry out for ethical analysis. Philosophers likewise view themselves as having loftier concerns than vulgar economics; but by conducting their ethical and political theorizing in ignorance of economic principles, they are unable to avoid recommending policies that would be unworkable or disastrous in practice.”1 This position, however, is perhaps not so widespread as Yeager thinks; if it were, the conjunction of the terms ethics and economics in the title of this essay would appear peculiar, much as the conjunction of the terms ethics and physics would appear peculiar. The reason the conjunction of the terms ethics and economics would not be regarded by most people as peculiar is that we seem to have a prereflective belief that ethics and economics could, in principle at least, engage with each other and that their relative fields of inquiry, topics, and judgments may coincide. Whether or not in fact they overlap— and how—is, of course, another question. There are, then, five possible mutually exclusive and universally exhaustive relationships that might obtain between the fields of ethics and economics: (1) they are completely unrelated; or (2) they are exactly coterminous; or (3) ethics is a proper subset of economics; or (4) economics is a proper subset of ethics; or (5) they overlap noncoterminously.
Economics and Ethics Generally, if we want to know whether and to what extent one thing relates to another, we need to be able to delineate both items clearly as a necessary condition of such determination. And this is where the problem of the relationship of economics to ethics starts—there are no uncontested definitions of either field.
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Alfred Marshall thinks of economics as “a study of men as they live and move and breathe in the ordinary business of life,” while Lionel Robbins, in his classic An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science, conceives of economics as a science that studies human behavior as “a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.”2 The Encyclopaedia Britannica, while boldly proffering the definition that economics is a social science that seeks to analyze and describe the production, distribution, and consumption of wealth, simultaneously concedes that no one has ever succeeded in neatly defining the scope of economics.3 Surely we can find a definition of “economics” in a dictionary of economics? Perhaps not. Having reviewed and dismissed one or two would-be definitions, and proffered, halfheartedly, one of their own, the authors of The Penguin Dictionary of Economics concede that it may well be that a wholly acceptable definition of the term does not exist.4 And however difficult it may be to define economics, when we turn to consider ethics we discover that it is even more difficult to choose which of the three dominant ethical paradigms to endorse—consequentialism, deontologism, or virtue ethics—not to mention their many and varied subspecies. Whatever the precise definition of economics, and whichever ethical system one considers to be most defensible, the key point on which economics and ethics are supposed to differ (according to those moral philosophers and economists who, as Yeager writes, like to pretend they have nothing to do with each other) is that economics is descriptive, ethics prescriptive: one tells us the way things are; the other, the way things ought to be. As such, then, while their interests may coincide materially, their formal perspectives are ineluctably diverse. I have suggested that our intuitions differ on the possible relation of ethics to physics and ethics to economics. At least part of the difficulty in understanding why someone would offer reflections on the relationship of physics and ethics is that we understand physics to be a science, with its own subject matter, methods of inquiry, and results. Where does ethics fit into all this? Of course, physicists are human beings, and human beings, even physicists, can act unethically (or even ethically), but physics, just as such, does not appear to come within the
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range or scope of ethics. Prescinding from disputed issues in the philosophy of science, we could say that the reason for this is that physics as a science attempts to describe, explain, and predict a realm of reality that in its essential operation is completely independent of human needs, desires, and interests. Economics, on the other hand, is manifestly concerned with human action and its consequences. The objects of economic analysis—prices, wages, supply, demand, interest, money, production, and distribution—are all socially constituted objects and exist only in a nexus of human activity. Does that imply that economics, contrary to the tenet of the nothing-to-do-with-each-other school of thought, has an ineluctably normative element?5 A further question that is pertinent to the relation between ethics and economics is whether economics is a science—a science, for our present purposes, being the intellectual possession of and/or articulation of discerned recurring explanatory or predictive structures within a theoretical framework of laws and principles.6 If economics were a science, then it would seem that it should have its own intrinsic order independent of ethics. Like all human enterprises, economics may be (accidentally) contaminated by the usual factors of human bias, ignorance, and self-interest, but as a rational investigation the process is intrinsically self-correcting.7 The subject matter of economics is precisely constituted by meaningful acts that have intrinsic intelligibility and can be materially embodied. The subject matter of physics, on the other hand, is not constituted by meaningful acts. It would be a mistake— one that was made by some medieval physicists—to adopt Aristotelian methods in attempting to develop the science of physics. Might it not be equally mistaken to adopt the methods of the so-called hard sciences in attempting to develop the science of economics?
Controversy An interesting discussion on this topic took place in the pages of the Journal of Markets and Morality in 1998. Ricardo Crespo holds unequivocally that economics is a moral science, where moral science is under-
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stood in its classical Aristotelian sense. As an Aristotelian-type practical science, economics can be expected to be inexact, concrete, and pragmatic, since it is concerned with praxis, with human action. This claim is to be understood, not as the attenuated thesis that morality should have some purchase on what economists or economic actors do, but as the stronger thesis that “the correct epistemological framework for economics is that of a classical practical science.”8 Such a claim does not involve the reduction of economics to ethics; rather, it denies that economics is value-free. “Economics is a moral science in so far as it is a practical science. While ethics studies the ethical problem in itself, economics studies the economic problem: but this problem cannot be isolated from its ethical aspects. Aristotle distinguished between ethics, which is a science, and the practical sciences, which are ethical in so far as they consider ethical aspects of the analysed subject. Value-neutrality is an Enlightenment concept that originates in gnosiological and metaphysical agnosticism.”9 Peter Boettke, responding to Crespo, focuses on the issue of value neutrality. As he puts it, the question is “whether knowledge gleaned in the disciplines of economics and political economy can be both valuefree and value-neutral.”10 Boettke argues for the value-free role of economics as something that provides “the basis for our rational dis cussion of alternative visions of the good.”11 Distinguishing between political economy and economics, Boettke claims: “It is only a valueneutral economics that enables economics and social thinkers to practice a value-relevant political economy.”12 On his analysis, economics does not concern itself with ends but only with the effectiveness of the relationship of means to ends: The knowledge that economics provides can be separated from ethical questions. Moreover, it is precisely because economics can provide value-neutral knowledge of the logical consequences of different ethical systems that [it] is an essential input to a value-relevant discipline of political economy. . . . Knowledge of the choice of alternative social arrangements is vital to making the choice among those arrangements. If we deny that this knowledge is obtainable in
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any manner that allows for interpersonal assessment, then we deny from the moral science of political economy the ability to adjudicate between different conceptions of social organization. On the other hand, if we restrict our analytical attention to the relationship between means and ends, and thus treat ends as given, then we can obtain the necessary critical information that eventually makes valuerelevant statements move beyond mere opinions reflecting the political and social preferences of the analyst.13
Reflecting on Boettke’s arguments, Crespo adverts to the Aristotelian distinction between the theoretical, the practical, and the technical. Practical sciences bear on purposive action and are therefore moral or value-relevant sciences. The technical sciences, on the other hand, determine the most adequate way of attaining a desired goal or making a product. Taking up and accepting Boettke’s distinction between political economy and economics, Crespo remarks that political science must be a practical science whereas economics must be a technical one. “In Aristotle’s schema, óikonomiké broadly corresponds to political economy, the practical science, and chrematistics to economics, the technical science.”14 In light of this distinction he agrees with Boettke on the value-free character of economics but cautions: “For technical theory to be operational, it must have content. A continuous dialectical flow oscillating between practical and technical considerations ought to be followed. That would be the real economic science—one that involves both economics and political economy.”15 While aware of the complexities involved, Kurt Rothschild would be prepared to maintain the scientific/normative distinction. The science of economics analyzes and explains the economic process but does not necessarily evaluate the process as either good or bad. Rothschild, however, admits that in practice it can be difficult for economists to engage in their studies without raising some ethical questions. “The ‘mainstream economics’ of the twentieth century fully accepts [the separation of economics from its ethical roots]. . . . Economic theory is seen as a positive science which has to analyse and to explain the mechanisms of economic processes. . . . Important as ethical valu-
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ations (‘ought’ statements) may be, they should not form part of the economist’s research programme.”16 L. D. Keita, on the other hand, is skeptical of the pretensions of economics, at least in its neoclassical variety, to scientific status. Given that the whole theoretical structure of economics rests on the postulate of rationality (which for him is through and through normative), he believes that this is enough to make economics, just as such, a normative discipline. “The ontological divide between positive economics and normative economics is a modernist chimera founded on the rigid dogmas of positivism. . . . The total structure of neoclassical economics is normative in nature on account of the special role it ascribes to the postulate of rationality.”17 In fact, Keita goes so far as to argue that rather than economics being, as it were, a branch of applied mathematics (as it appears to be in some varieties of neoclassical theory), it is better conceived of as a branch of applied ethics. To meet Keita’s claim regarding the intrinsic normativity of economics, we must, I think, distinguish between internal or constitutive normativity and external or extrinsic normativity. As indicated above, economics is internally normative, and necessarily so, for the data with which it deals are constituted by human action and its manifestations. But that kind of normativity is not enough to settle the question of whether the distinction between a normative and a non-normative economics is viable. I suggest that it is still an open question whether economics, thus normatively constituted, is denuded of its amoral technical dimension. I believe that the answer to this question is that it is not. While economics, constitutively or internally normative, is further contextualized within ethics and politics, their particular brands of normativity are external to the technical body of economic theory. Two extremes are therefore to be avoided: on the one hand, the subsumption of economics completely into praxis would denude it of its technical dimension, with economics becoming a parochial form of political theory; on the other hand, the subsumption of economics completely into techne would decontextualize economics unrealistically from the broader social and political world in which it subsists and without which it has no ultimate meaning.18
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A Case in Point To focus the discussion a little more sharply, I should like to consider the place of economics in the body of Catholic social teaching that emerged into public consciousness with the promulgation of Rerum Novarum in 1891.19 Of course, the Church has always had something to say on moral matters connected to the world of commerce, notoriously, for example, in connection with the notion of usury, but I think it can fairly be said that a systematic vein of social reflection began with Rerum Novarum that continues to the present. This body of social teaching has the capacity to divide Catholics of various political hues. Some find the teachings on, say, the just wage and the original gift of the world to the whole of mankind to be a wholly appropriate criticism of the manifold deficiencies of capitalism, while others find such teaching to be economically naive. Some are heartened by the assertion of the right to private property and the ringing condemnation of socialism as a system; others are equally appalled by this. Some applaud one encyclical and disparage another. Murray Rothbard, for example, remarks acidly that “Rerum Novarum . . . is fundamentally libertarian and pro-capitalist. Quadragesimo Anno, on the other hand, is virulently anti-capitalist and, in fact, pro-fascist.”20 Others, perhaps more moderately, discern a certain unresolved tension in the papal pronouncements. John Médaille remarks that “when we confront the Papal teachings, we are immediately faced with a conundrum. On the one hand, they command the freedom of the market and, on the other, they command the payment of a living wage. Yet a free market sets its prices, even the price for labor, according to the laws of supply and demand, not according to the law of needs and certainly not according to Papal command.”21 A lively dispute on the relationship between Catholic social teaching and economics has broken out on the Internet, the intellectual marketplace of the twenty-first century. Thomas Woods, in his article “Catholic Social Teaching and Economic Law” (2002), remarks that “the primary difficulty with much of what has fallen under the heading of Catholic social teaching since Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum
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(1891) is that it assumes without argument that the force of human will suffices to resolve economic questions, and that reason and the conclusions of economic law can be safely neglected, even scorned. In fact . . . proponents of Catholic social teaching effectively deny the very existence of economic law.”22 Woods appears to accuse the authors of the encyclicals of a certain kind of economic voluntarism. “The clear implication of all this is that will, desire, and good intention suffice to bring about high wages, vacation time, free health care, and the like. Indeed much of Catholic social thought suggests that the problem of economics and wealth is to a significant degree a matter of human manipulation and contrivance rather than a rational and sober reckoning with the constraints and scarcities with which man is naturally confronted.”23 Woods notes that Pius XI makes what he calls “a significant concession” to economic reality in Quadragesimo Anno but does not provide much analysis or commentary on this passage, which I consider to be not just a concession but extraordinarily significant in itself. In at least partial sympathy with Woods’ views, William R. Luckey argues that Catholic social teaching has its roots in the German historical school, which was radically opposed to the view that economics was a science: “The intellectual origins of Catholic social teaching on economics are a very clear reflection of the thought of the German historical school. . . . The acceptance of some market ideas by Pope John Paul II does show the irrelevance of the previous economic teaching, but there still remains at least a partial adherence to the denial of economics as a science inherent in the German historical school’s approach, which treats the classical liberal approach as a mere ideology motivated by the economic greed of the capitalists, despite the facts.”24 Scott Richert objects to Woods’ thesis, and his objection, it seems to me, is extremely pertinent: “[Woods’] use of phrases as ‘economic law, economic science,’ ‘the very nature of economics,’ ‘value-neutral, scientific discipline’ . . . goes straight to the heart of the matter. Catholic social thought does not regard economics as a hard science, like mathematics; at best, it is a science in the sense that Latin and all European language other than English
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can use the term—knowledge as an object of study. Thus history can be a science without there being a science of history, in the sense of immutable laws that govern history.”25 He notes Woods’ citation of the pertinent paragraphs from Quadragesimo Anno and remarks: Pius XI did not concede that “economics is a bona fide science” in the sense of mathematics, as [Woods] implies. Pius does not refer to “economic science,” and his very use of the term moral science . . . makes it clear that he is writing . . . within the context of the broader understanding of scientia. . . . The question, then, comes down to the nature of economic science. If [Woods’] assumption is incorrect, and “economic laws” aren’t the equivalent of mathematical laws, then the Church is well within Her authority to instruct Christians to act outside of such “laws”—or, indeed, even to act against them.26
Woods responded in a short paper in June 2004. The key point in this paper is to distinguish between moral and technical matters in economics. Where a policy or procedure is intrinsically immoral, no instrumental considerations come into play. If abortion, for example, is intrinsically immoral, its alleged efficiency as a method of population control is irrelevant. But where policies or procedures are morally indifferent, then technical considerations come into play in considering which to choose. As Woods puts it, “If things work in a certain way, no Church pronouncement can make them work another way.”27 Woods is not claiming that the sciences, including economics, are exempt from moral critique, merely that they are exempt from technical critique by moralists. In this claim he is, I believe, fundamentally correct. Both Woods and Richert advert to paragraphs 41–43 of Quad ragesimo Anno. I believe, however, that Richert seriously underestimates the significance of this passage and that even Woods, who appreciates it, does not exploit its full potential. It is worth citing these paragraphs in full, before noting their relevance to our present topic: § 41. There resides in us the right and duty to pronounce with supreme authority upon social and economic matters. Certainly the
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Church was not given the commission to guide men to an only fleeting and perishable happiness but to that which is eternal. Indeed “the Church holds that it is unlawful for her to mix without cause in these temporal concerns”;28 however, she can in no wise renounce the duty God entrusted to her to interpose her authority, not of course in matters of technique for which she is neither suitably equipped nor endowed by office, but in all things that are connected with the moral law. For as to these, the deposit of truth that God committed to us and the grave duty of disseminating and interpreting the whole moral law, and of urging it in season and out of season, bring under and subject to our supreme jurisdiction not only social order but economic activities themselves. § 42. Even though economics [oeconomica res] and moral science [moralis disciplina] 29 employs each its own principles in its own sphere, it is, nevertheless, an error to say that the economic and moral orders are so distinct from and alien to each other that the former depends in no way on the latter. Certainly the laws of economics, as they are termed, being based on the very nature of material things and on the capacities of the human body and mind, determine the limits of what productive effort cannot, and of what it can, attain in the economic field and by what means. Yet it is reason itself that clearly shows, on the basis of the individual and social nature of things and of men, the purpose that God ordained for all economic life. § 43. But it is only the moral law which, just as it commands us to seek our supreme and last end in the whole scheme of our activity, so likewise commands us to seek directly in each kind of activity those purposes which we know that nature, or rather God the Author of nature, established for that kind of action, and in orderly relationship to subordinate such immediate purposes to our supreme and last end. If we faithfully observe this law, then it will follow that the particular purposes, both individual and social, that are sought in the economic field will fall in their proper place in the universal order of purposes and we, in ascending through them, as it were by steps, shall attain the final end of all things, that is God, to Himself and to us, the supreme and inexhaustible Good.30
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Summarizing this passage, we see that the pope concedes that it is unlawful for the Church to involve itself without cause in the purely temporal aspects of social and economic concerns. Specifically, authoritative pronouncements may not be made in matters of economic technique—the Church is not suitably equipped to evaluate such technical matters, nor, indeed, does it have the authority to do so. However, the pope considers that the Church has the right and duty to pronounce with supreme authority upon social and economic matters inasmuch as they fall under the moral law. This is so because, while economics has its own principles which operate in its own sphere, and morality likewise, it would be a mistake to hold that economics and morality are so distinct that economics depends in no way at all upon morality. The laws of economics are jointly determined by the nature of material things and by the capacities of the human body and mind; together, these determine the limits of what productive human effort can and cannot attain and by what means. The divinely ordained purpose of all human life, economic life included, is given by reason. The moral law, upon which the Church can authoritatively pronounce, commands us to seek our supreme and last end in all that we do and commands us to seek directly in each kind of human activity (including economic activity) those purposes that nature (or rather God, the author of nature) established for that activity, subordinating all our actions to our supreme end. The passage from Quadragesimo Anno to which I have referred is only one section from a document of one specific religious tradition. However, I believe that without in any way contradicting the content of the other major social encyclicals of the twentieth century, up to and including Centesimus Annus, this central passage expresses in its principles the kernel of the correct account of the relation between ethics and economics, one that broadly agrees with the account given by Woods with which I concur. In summary, while situating all human activity within the scope of morality (how could it be located elsewhere?), Pius XI recognizes that economics has its own principles and laws that operate in their own sphere and that, in technical matters, the
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Church (and, by extension, the proponent of any moral theory) has nothing to say to economics. Of course, which matters are technical and what the laws of economics are—these are questions not easily answered. With the emergence of economics in its recognizably modern form in the eighteenth century, the battle between ethics and economics was joined, with its earliest and most famous protagonists perhaps being Rousseau and Adam Smith. Yet, as Michael Ignatieff notes, “We would be mistaken if we thought that Rousseau used only the language of morals and virtue, and Smith only that of commerce and money.”31 While they differed in their specific recommendations and in their respective foundational myths, “Both writers insisted that the drama of human progress must be understood in its historical, moral and economic dimension.”32 Two recurrent temptations, then, must be resisted: the first and more historically prevalent one is to fail to recognize the intrinsic constitutive order of economics and to take it to be merely a branch of ethics: the second, more recent and more potent temptation is to fail to recognize the limits of economics and to attempt to make ethics a province of economics’ empire. Which of the two temptations one is more susceptible to is a matter of one’s specific nature and inclinations. At the beginning of this paper I outlined five possible relationships that might obtain between ethics and economics. Either (1) ethics and economics are completely unrelated or (2) they are exactly coterminous; or (3) ethics is a proper subset of economics; or (4) economics is a proper subset of ethics; or (5) they overlap noncoterminously. The last paragraph is, in effect, a denial of possibilities 3 and 4 (i.e., that ethics is a proper subset of economics or that economics is a proper subset of ethics). Which of the three remaining possibilities—1, 2, or 5—best captures the essence of the relationship? The answer to this question, as to many other questions, is, “It depends.” Looked at materially, ethics and economics both take human action as their subject matter. To this extent, they are either completely coincident (possibility 2) or, if one wishes to make further distinctions within the field of human action, partially coincident (possibility 5). Looked at
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formally, however, ethics and economics are completely diverse. Economics as a science is purely descriptive. It makes no positive recommendations, enjoins or reprehends no actions categorically, and prescribes no end or ends at which man, individually or collectively, should aim. By contrast, ethics as a science is necessarily prescriptive, attempting to determine the ends of human action and the appropriate means thereto. As pure sciences, ethics and economics have and can have no theoretical quarrel, and so there is no insuperable barrier to their friendship.
Notes This essay is based on a paper given in the lecture series “Conscience, Values and Belief in Public Life” at the Thomas More Institute (London, January 2005). I express my thanks to Dr. Andrew Hegarty for his invitation, and to the audience for their postlecture contributions. 1. Roderick T. Long, “Review of Leland B. Yeager’s Ethics as Social Science: The Moral Philosophy of Social Cooperation,” in Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 6, no. 1 (2003): 89. 2. Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics, 8th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1920), p. 14; Lionel Robbins, The Nature and Significance of Economic Science, 2nd rev. and extended ed. (London: Macmillan, 1952), p. 16. 3. Mark Blaug, “Economics,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica, Academic Edition (online), www.britannica.com/Ebchecked/topic/178548/economics/ 38847/Definition (accessed 6 January 2012). 4. Graham Bannock, R. E. Baxter, and Ray Rees, eds., The Penguin Dictionary of Economics (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972). 5. This is an important question which will be considered in the next section. 6. Two schools of economics hold that economics is a science: the Austro-Aristotelian school and the neoclassical school. For the Austro- Aristotelians, economics as a science consists, at least in part, in the grasp of essences. For the neoclassical school, economics is a science whose method comprises the construction of models and their testing by experiment, its method being broadly similar to that employed by the so-called “hard” sciences.
Ethics and Economics 661 7. For more on this, see Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 8. Ricardo F. Crespo, “Controversy: Is Economics a Moral Science?,” Journal of Markets and Morality 1, no. 2 (1998): 201–11. 9. Ibid., 204. 10. Peter J. Boettke, “Controversy: Is Economics a Moral Science? A Response to Ricardo E. Crespo,” Journal of Markets and Morality 1, no. 2 (1998): 212. 11. Ibid., 213. 12. Ibid., 214. 13. Ibid., 214–15. 14. Ricardo F. Crespo, “Controversy: Is Economics a Moral Science? A Response to Peter J. Boettke,” Journal of Markets and Morality 1, no. 2 (1998): 221. David Ricardo came down on the technical side in this dispute: “It is not the province of the Political Economist to advise: He is to tell you how to become rich, but he is not to advise you to prefer riches to indolence, or indolence to riches.” The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, ed. Piero Sraffa and M. H. Dobb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), vol. 2, p. 338. 15. Crespo, “Controversy” [Response], 223. 16. Kurt W. Rothschild, Ethics and Economic Theory: Ideas, Models and Dilemmas (Aldershot: Elgar, 1993), p. 16. 17. L. D. Keita, “Neoclassical Economics and the Last Dogma of Positivism: Is the Normative-Positive Distinction Justified?,” Metaphilosophy 28, nos. 1–2 (1997): 82. 18. It would seem that it was concern such as this about the functional detachment of economics as a technical science from economics as a moral science that motivated Amitai Etzione to develop in his book The Moral Dimension, an economic theory based on deontological principles. His point appears to be that human actors are not freestanding individuals but embedded in social groups constituted by a culture and history and that, similarly, markets should not be treated as if they were freestanding and self-regulating systems but should be recognized as encapsulated by normative and political systems. The Moral Dimension: Towards a New Economics (New York: Free Press, 1988). 19. The social teaching of the Church is to be found primarily in Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical letter Rerum Novarum (15 May 1891); Pope Pius XI’s encyclical letter Quadragesimo Anno (15 May 1931); Pope John XXIII’s encyclical
662 Gerard Casey letters Mater et Magistra (15 May 1961) and Pacem in Terris (11 April 1963); Pope Paul VI’s encyclical letter Populorum Progressio (26 March 1967); Pope John Paul II’s encyclical letters Laborem Exercens (14 September 1981), Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (30 December 1987), and Centesimus Annus (1 May 1991); the Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes; and Catechism of the Catholic Church (1993), paras. 2401–48. 20. Murray Rothbard, “Catholicism and Capitalism,” 1960, www .lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard59.html. 21. John C. Médaille, “Practical Distributivism: The Just Wage vs. The Just Income,” 1999, www.medaille.com/pracdist.htm. 22. Thomas E. Woods Jr., “Catholic Social Teaching and Economic Law: An Unresolved Tension,” March 2002, www.lewrockwell.com/woods/ woods8.html. Professor Woods has since developed his ideas at greater length in The Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005). 23. Woods, Church and the Market, p. 10. 24. William R. Luckey, “Does John Courtney Murray’s Defense of Freedom Extend to Economics? An Austrian Perspective,” Journal of Markets and Morality 5, no. 2 (2002): 425–38. 25. Scott P. Richert, “‘Economic Law’ versus Catholic Social Teaching,” Chronicles Magazine, 22 March 2004, www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2004/03/ 22/economic-law-versus-catholic-social-teaching/ (emphasis added). 26. Ibid. 27. Thomas E. Woods Jr., “On the Actual Progress of Peoples,” 22 June 2004, www.lewrockwell.com/woods/woods26.html. 28. The reference is to Pius XI’s Ubi Arcano (1922). 29. It might be better to translate moralis disciplina as “moral education” rather than “moral science.” In any event, the term used in the original is not scientia; thus Richert’s contrast between economics as strict science and as general study misses the mark. 30. Quadragesimo Anno, paras. 41–43. The Latin text can be found in Acta Apostolicae Sedis, vol. 23 (Rome: Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, 1931). Official Vatican translation available at www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xi/encyclicals/ documents/hf_p-xi_enc_19310515_quadragesimo-anno_en.html. 31. Michael Ignatieff, The Needs of Strangers: An Essay on Privacy, Solidarity, and the Politics of Being Human (London: Penguin, 1984), p. 109. 32. Ibid.
c o n t r i b u t o r s
Maria Baghramian is Associate Professor of Philosophy at University College Dublin. Her degrees in philosophy are from Queen’s University Belfast and Trinity College Dublin. She has also studied in Tehran and Paris. Her books include Modern Philosophy of Language (Counterpoint, 1999), Pluralism (coedited with Attracta Ingram, Routledge, 2001), Relativism (Routledge, 2004), and Reading Putnam (Routledge, 2012). She is editor of the International Journal of Philosophical Studies and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. She was a visiting fellow at Harvard and MIT, a Visiting Expert to the U.S. National Endowment for Humanities, an advisor to the China Association for the Philosophy of Language, and a founding member of the editorial board of the Journal of China Association for the Philosophy of Language. Ciarán Benson is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at University College Dublin, where he held the Chair of Psychology (1992–2009). He also held the Royden Davis Chair in Interdisciplinary Studies at Georgetown University in 2007. He was the first Chairman of the Irish Film Institute, and Chairman of An Chomhairle Ealaíon / The Arts Council of Ireland (1993–98). His publications include The Place of the Arts in Irish Education (1979), The Absorbed Self: Pragmatism, Psychology and Aesthetic Experience (1993), and The Cultural Psychology of Self: Place, Morality and Art in Human Worlds (2001). Eileen Brennan is Lecturer in Philosophy of Education at Dublin City University (St. Patrick’s College). She received her MA from 663
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niversity College Dublin and her PhD from the Institut Catholique U de Paris. Formerly a lecturer in philosophy at Trinity College Dublin, she has written papers on Ricoeur’s theories of translation and of justice. She has translated Ricoeur’s Sur la traduction and Dominique Janicaud’s L’homme va-t-il dépasser l’humain? as well as papers by Julia Kristeva, Jean Greisch, and Paul Ricoeur. Gerard Casey is Associate Professor of Philosophy at University College Dublin, Adjunct Professor at the Maryvale Institute (Birmingham, U.K.), and Adjunct Scholar at the Ludwig von Mises Institute (Alabama). A graduate of University College Cork, he received his MA and PhD from the University of Notre Dame. He has a Bachelor of Laws (LLB) from the University of London and a Master of Laws (LLM) from University College Dublin. He has taught at the University of Notre Dame and the Catholic University of America. He has been a member of University College Dublin’s Governing Authority. He serves on the editorial boards of Geopolitics, History and International Relations, Contemporary Readings in Law and Social Justice, and Libertarian Papers and is a member of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, the Association for Political Theory, the American Philosophical Association, and the Aristotelian Society. His latest book is Murray Rothbard (vol. 15 in the Continuum series Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers). Eoin G. Cassidy is Head of the Philosophy Department at Mater Dei Institute, Dublin City University. He has published The Search for Meaning and Values (Veritas, 2004) and has edited the following: The Taylor Effect: Responding to a Secular Age (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010), Who Is My Neighbour? Deus Caritas Est: An Encyclical for Our Times (Veritas, 2009), Community, Constitution and Ethos: Democratic Values and Citizenship in the Face of Globalization (Otior Press, 2008), The Common Good in an Unequal World (Veritas, 2007), and Givenness and God: Questions of JeanLuc Marion (Fordham University Press, 2005). Mark Dooley has held lectureships in philosophy at National University of Ireland, Maynooth, and at University College Dublin, where he
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was also Newman Scholar in Theology, from 1999 to 2002. He is currently a columnist for the Irish Daily Mail. He is author of The Politics of Exodus: Kierkegaard’s Ethics of Responsibility (Fordham University Press, 2001), The Philosophy of Jacques Derrida (Acumen, 2007), Roger Scruton: The Philosopher on Dover Beach (Continuum, 2009), and Why Be a Catholic? (Continuum, 2011). His edited volumes include Questioning Ethics (Routledge, 1999), Questioning God (Indiana University Press, 2001), A Passion for the Impossible (SUNY Press, 2003), and The Roger Scruton Reader (Continuum, 2009). Brian Elliott currently teaches at Portland State University and Oregon State University; he lectured previously at University College Dublin. His early research was on Heidegger’s early appropriation of Aristotle (published as Anfang und Ende in der Philosophie Duncker und Humblot, 2002]). Other publications include Phenomenology and Imagination in Husserl and Heidegger (Routledge, 2005) and two recent books exploring themes common to modern philosophy, architecture, and urbanism: Constructing Community (Lexington, 2010) and Benjamin for Architects (Routledge, 2011). Richard Kearney holds the Charles B. Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston College; he was formerly Professor of Philosophy at University College Dublin and Visiting Professor at the University of Paris (Sorbonne) and the University of Nice. He is the author of over twenty books on European philosophy and literature (including two novels and a volume of poetry) and has edited or coedited eighteen more. He is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy and was formerly a member of the Arts Council of Ireland, a member of the Higher Education Authority of Ireland, and Chairman of the Irish School of Film at University College Dublin. Recent publications include a trilogy entitled Philosophy at the Limit. The three volumes are On Stories (Routledge, 2002), The God Who May Be (Indiana University Press, 2001), and Strangers, Gods, and Monsters (Routledge, 2003). He has also published Debates in Continental Philosophy (Fordham University Press, 2004), The Owl of Minerva (Ashgate, 2005), Navigations (Syracuse University Press, 2007),
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and Anatheism (Columbia University Press, 2009). He is international director of the Guestbook Project—Hosting the Stranger: Between Hostility and Hospitality. Tim Lynch, whose doctorate traced continuities between the work of Aquinas and Lonergan, was appointed Lecturer in Scholastic Philosophy at Queen’s University Belfast in 1975. He taught courses in logic, epistemology, and philosophy of religion. He was Visiting Research Professor at Boston College during 1982–83 and held a Lonergan Fellowship there in 1988–89. His published work focused primarily on consciousness, a priori knowledge, and the notion of being. He retired from Queen’s, though not from philosophy, in 2004. Patrick Masterson is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University College Dublin (UCD). He is former President of UCD, as well as former President of the European University Institute, Florence. He has been Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and Sociology at UCD. He received his PhD from the University of Louvain and honorary doctorates from the University of Caen, Trinity College Dublin, and New York University. His academic publications include Atheism and Alienation (University of Notre Dame Press, 1971), Articulations: Poetry, Philosophy and the Shaping of Culture (with Seamus Heaney, Royal Irish Academy, 2008), and The Sense of Creation: Experience and the God Beyond (Ashgate, 2008). Ciarán McGlynn did his undergraduate and postgraduate work at University College Dublin. He has lectured in various colleges, including Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin, and the Milltown Institute. His teaching has covered many areas of philosophy, in particular ancient and medieval philosophy, pragmatism, and the philosophy of religion. His current research is on Enlightenment thought, especially the writings of Edmund Burke. Belinda McKeon was born in Longford, Ireland, in 1979. She holds an MLitt in European philosophy from University College Dublin and a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University. She is an arts journal-
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ist with the Irish Times. Her award-winning plays have been produced in Dublin and New York, and her debut novel, Solace, was published in 2011 by Scribner (U.S.) and Picador (U.K.). Timothy Mooney is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at University College Dublin. He received his BA and MA from University College Dublin and his PhD from the University of Essex. He has coedited The Phenomenology Reader with Dermot Moran (Routledge, 2002) and is the author of several articles on phenomenology, deconstruction, and process philosophy. Dermot Moran holds the Chair of Philosophy (Metaphysics and Logic) at University College Dublin and is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. A graduate of University College Dublin, he received his PhD from Yale University. He has held lecturing positions at Queen’s University Belfast and National University of Ireland, Maynooth, as well as visiting professorships at Yale University, Connecticut College, Rice University, and Northwestern University. He has published widely on medieval philosophy (especially Christian Neoplatonism from Augustine to Nicholas of Cusa) and contemporary European philosophy (especially phenomenology). His books include The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena (Cambridge University Press, 1989/2004), Introduction to Phenomenology (Routledge, 2000), and Edmund Husserl: Founder of Phenomenology (Polity, 2005). He has edited Husserl’s Logical Investigations, 2 vols., and The Shorter Logical Investigations (both Routledge, 2001), The Phenomenology Reader, coedited with Tim Mooney (Routledge, 2002), Phenomenology: Critical Concepts in Philosophy, 5 vols., coedited with Lester E. Embree (Routledge, 2004), Eriugena, Berkeley and the Idealist Tradition, coedited with Stephen Gersh (University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), and The Routledge Companion to Twentieth-Century Philosophy (Routledge, 2008). He is the Founding Editor (1993) of the International Journal of Philosophical Studies. † Michael Nolan (1926–2009) was the last holder of the Chair of Logic and Psychology at University College Dublin. He is fondly remembered by generations of students as a lecturer of keen acumen
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who surprised and delighted with his original approach to questions of human behavior. A graduate of University College Dublin, he studied theology in Rome and psychology at Cambridge, where he was Scholar of Downing College. Ordained a priest in 1951, he was dedicated to his pastoral ministry. He contributed widely to professional and academic journals in Ireland and abroad. In recent years he published a series of perceptive articles on what he considered common misconceptions of Aquinas on human nature. He was President of the Mater Dei Institute of Education. Brian O’Connor is Associate Professor of Philosophy at University College Dublin. He graduated from University College Dublin with BA and MA degrees before completing his studies at the University of Oxford with a DPhil in Philosophy. He is author of Adorno’s Negative Dialectic (2004), Adorno: Routledge Philosophers (2011), and papers on the German Idealist and critical theory traditions. He is editor of both the Adorno Reader (2000) and (with Georg Mohr) German Idealism: An Anthology and Guide (2007). Cyril O’Regan is Huisking Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. He received an MA in philosophy from University College Dublin and his PhD from Yale University in philosophy of religion. He works at the intersection of theology and philosophy. He is the author of The Heterodox Hegel (SUNY Press, 1994), Gnostic Return in Modernity (SUNY Press, 2001), Gnostic Apocalypse (SUNY Press, 2002), and Theology and the Spaces of Apocalyptic (Marquette University Press, 2009). His two-volume study of the relation between the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar and Hegel and Heidegger respectively will shortly be published by Crossroad. Fran O’Rourke is Associate Professor of Philosophy at University College Dublin. He received his MA from University College Galway and studied at the universities of Vienna, Köln, Louvain, and Leuven, where he received his PhD. He has held Fulbright and Onassis fellowships, and in 2003 was Visiting Research Professor at Marquette Uni-
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versity. He is primarily interested in the tradition of classical metaphysics and has published widely on Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Heidegger. His book Pseudo-Dionysius and the Metaphysics of Aquinas was reissued by University of Notre Dame Press (2005). Allwisest Stagyrite: Joyce’s Quotations from Aristotle was published by the National Library of Ireland in 2005. He is preparing for publication a collection of essays entitled Aristotelian Interpretations, already published in Greek by the Academy of Athens, and is completing a book on James Joyce, Aristotle, and Aquinas. He has lectured widely both on philosophical in fluences in James Joyce and on Joyce’s use of song, and he has performed recitals of traditional Irish songs featured in Joyce’s work in the National Concert Hall, Dublin (2004), and the Conservatorio, Trieste (2008). James R. O’Shea is Senior Lecturer in the School of Philosophy at University College Dublin. He received his BA from Georgetown University in 1985 and his PhD on Hume and Kant from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1992. He is the author of Wilfrid Sellars: Naturalism with a Normative Turn (Polity, 2007); Self, Language, and World: Problems from Kant, Sellars, and Rosenberg (Ridgeview, 2010, co edited with Eric Rubenstein); and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: An Introduction (Acumen, 2011). He has published articles on Hume, Kant, Sellars, the history of American philosophy, and neopragmatism. Brendan Purcell is Emeritus Senior Lecturer of the School of Philosophy, University College Dublin, and is currently Adjunct Professor at Notre Dame University in Sydney. His publications include The Drama of Humanity: Towards a Philosophy of Humanity in History (Peter Lang, 1996), Hitler and the Germans (edited and translated with Detlev Clemens, vol. 31 of Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, University of Missouri Press, 1999), and From Big Bang to Big Mystery: Human Origins in the Light of Creation and Evolution (Veritas, 2011). Liberato Santoro-Brienza was born and educated in Italy. He taught philosophy at University College Dublin, the Milltown Institute of
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Philosophy, and other academic institutions in Italy, Europe, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. He is a Fellow at the University of Melbourne, Honorary Research Associate at the University of Auckland, and Honorary Member and Professor of Philosophy at the Royal Hibernian Academy. He is a registered psychotherapist. With essays on the history of ideas, aesthetics, art criticism, psychoanalysis, and semiotics, his publications include La filosofia della musica nel pensiero di Th. W. Adorno (Rome, 1972), Presupposti filosofici dell’arte moderna (Urbino, 1978), Essays on Aesthetics (Dublin, 1979), The Tortoise and the Lyre: Aesthetic Reconstructions (Dublin, 1993), The Dialectics of Desire (Ferrara, 1995), Philosophy of Values: Aesthetics (Dublin, 1995), Talking of Joyce (with Umberto Eco, Dublin, 1998), Philosophies of Art and Beauty (with Hugh Bredin, Edinburgh, 2000), Some Reflections on the Meanings of Work and Labour (Rome, 2008), and A Philosophical Reading of Labour Administration (Rome, 2010). Peter L. P. Simpson is Professor of Philosophy and Classics at the City University of New York, Graduate Center and College of Staten Island. He graduated with an MA in classics from Oxford and an MA and PhD in philosophy from Victoria University of Manchester. His main interests are ancient and medieval philosophy and moral and political philosophy. His publications include a translation of the Politics of Aristotle and A Philosophical Commentary on the Politics of Aristotle (both University of North Carolina Press), On Karol Wojtyla (Wads worth, 2001), and Vices, Virtues, and Consequences (Catholic University of America Press, 2001). He has published an online translation of John Case’s Latin commentary (1596) on Aristotle’s Magna Moralia; for this and a selection of articles, see www.aristotelophile.com. Andrew Smith was Professor of Classics at University College Dublin (1992–2010) and is now Associate Director of the Centre for Platonic Studies at Trinity College Dublin. His publications include Porphyry’s Place in the Neoplatonic Tradition (1974), Philosophy in Late Antiquity (2004), and the Teubner edition of Porphyry’s fragments (1993). A selection of his published papers, Plotinus, Porphyry and Iamblichus: Philosophy and Religion in Neoplatonism, was published by Ashgate in 2011.
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Rowland Stout is Associate Professor of Philosophy at University College Dublin. He works on the philosophy of mind and action; recent books include Action (Acumen, 2005) and The Inner Life of a Rational Agent (Edinburgh, 2006). He was educated at Oxford and worked subsequently as a Fellow of Oriel College Oxford and as Senior Lecturer at Manchester University. He is currently working simultaneously on the metaphysics of processes and the philosophy of emotions. Brendan Sweetman is a graduate of University College Dublin. He is Professor of Philosophy at Rockhurst University, Kansas City. He is the author or editor of nine books, including The Vision of Gabriel Marcel (Rodopi, 2008), A Gabriel Marcel Reader (St. Augustine’s Press, 2011), Why Politics Needs Religion: The Place of Religious Arguments in the Public Square (InterVarsity, 2006), Contemporary Perspectives on Religious Epistemology (Oxford University Press, 1992), and Religion and Science: An Introduction (Continuum, 2010). He has published more than seventy articles and reviews in a variety of journals and collections, including International Philosophical Quarterly, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Faith and Philosophy, Philosophia Christi, and the Review of Metaphysics. He is the current President of the Gabriel Marcel Society. David Walsh is Professor of Politics at the Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. He is the author of a three-volume study of modernity addressing the totalitarian catharsis, the resurgence of liberal democracy, and the philosophical revolution of the modern world. Intended as a guide to the multiple facets of the age in which we live, the volumes appeared as After Ideology: Recovering the Spiritual Foundations of Freedom (1990), The Growth of the Liberal Soul (1997), and The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence (2008). Three other books provide tangential perspectives on this modernity project: The Mysticism of Innerworldly Fulfillment: A Study of Jacob Boehme (1983), Guarded by Mystery: Meaning in a Postmodern Age (1999), and The Third Millennium: Reflections on Faith and Reason (1999). He is currently working on an account of the person that will appear as Politics of the Person.
i n d e x
Adorno, Theodor, 554, 563–87 Alston, William, 379 Amato, Massimo, 535 Ambrose, Saint, 127 Anaxagoras, 31 Anderson, Thomas, 375 Angelus Silesius, 148, 179 Anselm, Saint, 206, 211–15, 357 Aquinas, 33, 142, 150, 185–98, 201–7, 209–11, 214–23, 228, 232, 241, 249–50, 257, 260, 318, 352, 357, 371, 435–37, 453, 455–56, 554–55, 560 Arendt, Hannah, 452 Aristotle, 19–47, 50–51, 53, 56–57, 64–81, 89, 91, 157, 186, 201–5, 209, 211, 215–17, 225, 242, 255–57, 262, 265, 287, 318, 341, 345, 353, 359, 425, 446, 491–501, 507–8, 510, 513–15, 517, 519, 525–27, 543–52, 555–62, 573, 640, 651–52, 660 Arnold, Matthew, 312–13 Artaud, Antonin, 608 Augustine, Saint, 112–13, 115–29, 131–44, 146–49, 152–75, 177,
181– 83, 207–9, 212, 228, 231, 249, 318, 395, 411, 436, 457–58 Averroes, 186, 216 Avicenna, 215–16 Ayer, A. J., 339 Bachelard, Gaston, 428 Bacon, Francis, 234 Baldry, H. C., 47 Barnes, Barry, 304 Beards, Andrew, 237, 248 Beckett, Samuel, 409 Bell, Marvin, 402 Bellow, Saul, 346 Benedict XVI ( Joseph Ratzinger), 297, 309, 360 Benjamin, Walter, 423, 614 Bense, Max, 550 Berg, Leo, 350 Bergson, Henri, 356, 367, 425 Berlin, Isaiah, 275 Berlinski, David, 363–64 Bernstein, J. M., 586 Berti, Enrico, 51, 248 Bien, Joseph, 520 Bloor, David, 304 Boehme, Jacob, 179 Boethius, 211 672
Index 673 Boettke, Peter, 651–52 Bonnefoy, Yves, 402 Borges, Jorge Luis, 551 Boyer, Pascal, 355 Brentano, Franz, 508 Brodsky, Joseph, 402 Buber, Martin, 367 Bultmann, Rudolf, 137, 176 Cabanais, Pierre, 276, 281 Calvin, John, 379 Campbell, Peter, 399 Camus, Albert, 417 Caputo, John D., 171, 175, 298 Casey, Gerard, 245 Casterton, Julia, 413 Cézanne, Paul, 428 Chang, Jung, 399 Chesterton, G. K., 646 Chisholm, Roderick, 97 Chrétien, Jean-Louis, 420, 428 Chuang Tzu, 394 Churchland, Patricia A., 227 Churchland, Paul M., 227 Cicero, 122 Cohen, Sheldon M., 78 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 428 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, 276 Connell, Desmond, 78 Conrad Martius, Hedwig, 455 Conway Morris, Simon, 350–51 Coope, Ursula, 96 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 319 Cornwell, John, 338, 351–54 Cottier, Georges, 226, 228 Crean, Thomas, 348 Crespo, Ricardo, 650–52 Critchley, Simon, 617 Crowe, Benjamin D., 535–37 Cunningham, Valentine, 431 Cupitt, Don, 298, 311
D’Alembert, Jean le Rond, 273 Darwin, Charles, 254, 260, 264, 280–81, 283, 313, 318–20, 324, 326–27, 330–31, 355 David, Catherine, 593–94, 607 Davidson, Donald, 282, 303–4 Davies, Paul, 363 da Vinci, Leonardo, 418 Dawkins, Richard, 275, 280–81, 324, 332, 337–43, 345–49, 351–60, 364–65, 388–89, 391–94, 396, 404, 406 de Beauvoir, Simone, 417 de Chardin, Teilhard, 420 Dennett, Daniel, 252, 254–56, 260–70, 275, 355, 360, 388, 391, 393–96, 408 Denton, Michael, 350 Depraz, Natalie, 436 De Raeymaeker, Louis, 225 Derrida, Jacques, 136, 160–61, 171, 175, 298, 424, 426, 499, 588–94, 596–610, 612–17, 629 Descartes, 56–60, 67, 70–71, 74, 135, 138, 142–44, 146–47, 155, 165, 174–75, 229, 276–77, 281, 286, 320–21, 325, 379, 416, 438, 449, 457, 507, 576 Dewey, John, 235, 326, 397, 399, 407–8 Dews, Peter, 593, 615 Diderot, Denis, 273 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 138, 177, 389–90, 392, 536 Donald, Merlin, 396–97, 405–6 Dosse, François, 521, 523–24 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 644 Dumarsais, César Chesneau, 275 Duns Scotus, 141, 178, 508 Durkheim, Émile, 279 Dworkin, Ronald, 523
674 Index
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 397, 562 Galileo Galilei, 256, 319 Garapon, Antoine, 523–25, 530–31, 534, 540 Geertz, Clifford, 400, 404–5 Gilbert, Maurice, 226 Gilson, Etienne, 209, 416 Gnostics, 82, 112–13, 115–16, 124 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 597 Goodman, Nelson, 321 Gopnik, Alison, 406 Gould, Stephen Jay, 406
Hampson, Peter, 411 Hanratty, Gerald, 81–82, 113–15, 129–30, 253, 271–72, 274, 366, 372, 470–71 Harris, Sam, 338–39, 360 Haught, John, 348, 351, 356 Heaney, Seamus, 403 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 47, 82, 142, 145–47, 395, 426, 439, 511, 553–54, 558, 565, 569–70, 576–77, 636–39 Heidegger, Martin, 134–62, 164–66, 168–82, 230, 344, 354, 367, 416, 428, 435, 449, 454, 457, 459–60, 491–92, 505, 508–13, 517, 519, 521–22, 524, 534–44, 549, 552–61, 574, 577–78, 581, 584, 610 Hemming, Laurence Paul, 176, 178 Henry, Michel, 428, 439–40 Heraclitus, 49, 394 Hesiod, 343 Hick, John, 294–95, 379 Hildegard of Bingen, 419 Hitchens, Christopher, 324, 360 Hobbes, Thomas, 60–61 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 145, 147–51, 171, 179 Homer, 343 Hornsby, Jennifer, 87 Hoyle, Fred, 347, 363 Hume, David, 62, 66–67, 75, 395, 404, 440 Husserl, Edmund, 140, 321, 324, 395, 399, 415–16, 420, 427–28, 434–50, 452–61, 468–70, 472–90, 589–91, 593, 595–96, 604, 606, 609–13
Habermas, Jürgen, 317 Hammer, Espen, 565
Ibn’Arabi, 420 Ignatieff, Michael, 659
Ebeling, Gerhard, 176 Eckhart, Meister, 137, 141, 145, 147–50, 168, 175, 178–79, 419 Einstein, Albert, 351, 392, 398 Eliade, Mircea, 229 Else, G. F., 561 Epicureans, 98, 100 Etzione, Amitai, 661 Farabi, al-, 215 Faye, Emmanuel, 534–35 Fédier, François, 534–35 Feinstein, Elaine, 403 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 449, 511, 576 Fischer, John, 84, 95 Flakne, April, 79 Flew, Antony, 363 Foucault, Michel, 313 Frank, Manfred, 615 Frankfurt, Harry, 92–93 Frege, Gottlob, 590 Freud, Sigmund, 281–82, 286, 313, 319 Friedländer, Paul, 179
Index 675 James, William, 235, 292, 388–414 Jarvis, Simon, 580 Jaspers, Karl, 226, 434–66 John of the Cross, 411, 419 John Paul II, 224–51, 620–21, 632, 655, 662 John XXIII, 661 Jonas, Hans, 184 Joyce, James, 415–33, 555 Julian of Norwich, 421 Kant, Immanuel, 67, 81–83, 93, 145, 147, 155, 252–60, 264–69, 294, 303, 318, 326–28, 416, 437–38, 445, 455–56, 466, 491–92, 494, 499–513, 515–17, 525–29, 575, 580, 631, 634, 644 Keats, John, 554 Keita, L. D., 653 Kemp Smith, Norman, 515–16 Kierkegaard, Søren, 137, 357, 435, 450 Kisiel, Theodore, 137 Klee, Paul, 428 Kovacs, George, 178 Kristeva, Julia, 429 Kuhl, Patricia K., 406 la Mettrie, Julien Offray de, 272, 276, 281 Lao-Tzu, 145 Larkin, Philip, 408 Latour, Bruno, 306 LeBlanc, Roger, 297 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 146, 444, 576 Lenin, Vladimir, 316 Lennox, James G., 48 Lennox, John, 365 Leo XIII, 654, 661
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 233–34 Levertov, Denise, 433 Levinas, Emmanuel, 136, 160, 171, 439, 459, 520, 602–3, 606, 625, 629 Lewis, H. D., 243 Little, Arthur, 202 Locke, John, 65, 165, 272, 276, 379, 638 Lonergan, Bernard, 230, 349–50, 357, 359 Long, Roderick T., 648 Longley, Michael, 391 Lotz, Christian, 443 Löwith, Karl, 175, 178 Luckey, William R., 655 Lucretius, 98, 316 Lukács, Georg, 568 Luria, Isaac, 419 Luther, Martin, 35, 137, 141, 169, 178, 319 Mandelstam, Osip, 346 Manichaeans, 112–13, 115–23, 125–29, 131–33, 157, 164, 172, 185–96 Marcel, Gabriel, 366–87 Marion, Jean-Luc, 171, 178, 420, 434, 439, 460 Maritain, Jacques, 237–38, 618–21, 642 Marshall, Alfred, 649 Marx, Karl, 235, 279, 313–14, 316–17, 332, 530, 577 Masterson, Patrick, 308 Mathews, William A., 249 McGinn, Colin, 286 McInerny, Ralph, 230 McPartland, Thomas, 229 Médaille, John, 654 Meltzoff, Andrew N., 406
676 Index Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 367, 415–21, 428, 589, 593, 603–4, 606 Mesbah-Yazdi, Mohammad Taghi, 298 Milbank, John, 158, 171 Mill, John Stuart, 279 Milosz, Czeslaw, 403 More, Saint Thomas, 358 Mother Teresa, 433, 620, 645 Murray, Les, 403 Nagel, Thomas, 281–82, 286, 318, 322, 337–38, 351–54 Neoplatonism, 155, 201, 209, 212, 215, 449 Newman, John Henry, 400 Newton, Isaac, 255–56, 267 Nicholas of Cusa, 421 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 139, 145, 151, 155, 158, 174, 181, 313–14, 553, 574, 613 Nuri Hamadani, Hossein, 298 Nygren, Anders, 169 Oakeshott, Michael, 633 Ockham, William of, 276, 287, 588 O’Connell, Robert J., 183 O’Driscoll, Denis, 413 Orff, Carl, 556 O’Rourke, Fran, 180 Ott, Heinrich, 176 Otto, Rudolf, 355 Owens, Joseph, 38 Paley, William, 348 Panofsky, Erwin, 561 Paquot, Thierry, 519–21 Parfit, David, 77 Parmenides, 345–46, 364 Pascal, Blaise, 407
Pater, Walter, 555 Paterson, Don, 402 Paul (the apostle), 137, 141, 538 Paul VI, 662 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 235 Phillips, D. Z., 298 Pickstock, Catherine, 136, 161 Pindar, 44, 147 Pius XI, 655–57, 658, 661 Plantinga, Alvin, 250, 366–87 Plato, 33, 35–36, 48, 64, 101–3, 105, 135, 139–40, 143, 145–47, 152, 156–59, 162–64, 168, 172, 174, 183, 198–201, 205, 208–9, 211, 215–16, 244, 287, 318, 342, 364, 415, 417, 446, 493, 513, 519, 553, 555–60, 573, 581 Plotinus, 98–111, 128, 157, 163, 205–6, 209–10, 215, 395 Priest, Graham, 309 Proust, Marcel, 428 Przywara, Erich, 454 Pseudo-Dionysius, 187, 206, 209–11 Puech, Henri-Charles, 115 Putnam, Hilary, 303 Quine, Willard Van Orman, 231 Rahner, Karl, 176 Ratcliffe, Matthew, 269 Ratzinger, Joseph. See Benedict XVI Ravizza, Mark, 84, 95 Rawls, John, 61, 523, 526, 529, 645 Ricardo, David, 661 Richardson, William J., 175 Richert, Scott, 655–56 Ricoeur, Paul, 136, 152–56, 159, 428, 519–34, 538–41 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 145, 179 Robbins, Lionel, 649 Robinson, H. M., 31, 50
Index 677 Rocard, Michel, 520, 522, 540 Rogers, Carl, 411 Rorty, Richard, 273, 278, 283, 285, 300, 312, 315–28, 331, 334, 398, 400 Rosenzweig, Franz, 419 Rothbard, Murray, 654 Rothko, Mark, 398 Rothschild, Kurt, 652 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 529–30, 589, 599–600, 605, 638, 659 Rublev, Andrei, 426 Rumi, Jalal al-Din, 420 Runzo, Joseph, 302 Ruse, Michael, 348 Russell, Bertrand, 230 Ryle, Gilbert, 616 Sallis, John, 556–57 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 155, 416–17, 520, 523 Scheler, Max, 416 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 511, 576, 614 Scruton, Roger, 312–17, 320–33 Sebald, W. G., 586 Sellars, Wilfrid, 228, 231, 315 Seneca, 190 Sextus Empiricus, 346 Shakespeare, William, 645 Shermer, Michael, 358 Shields, Christopher, 31 Simplicius, 202 Smart, Ninian, 292 Smith, Adam, 659 Smith, John E., 292 Snyder, Gary, 402 Socrates, 147, 244 Sokal, Alan, 311 Sommer, Christian, 535 Sophocles, 145, 147
Sorabji, Richard, 394 Spinoza, Baruch, 576 Stein, Edith, 434–90 Stendhal, 428 Stern-Gillet, Suzanne, 78–79 Stoics, 99–100, 168, 394–95 Strabo, 346 Strand, Mark, 403 Stravinsky, Igor, 556 Strawson, Peter F., 303 Suarez, Francisco, 142 Taylor, Charles, 93, 400, 407 Thales, 150 Theophrastus, 345–46 Thomas à Kempis, 399, 408 Thyen, Anke, 566 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 635–37 Trakl, Georg, 145, 179 Troeltsch, Ernst, 140, 294, 355 van Buren, Paul, 137 van Till, Howard, 350 Verbeke, Gérard, 34 Voegelin, Eric, 229, 339–41, 343, 345, 347, 355, 364 von Balthasar, Hans Urs, 171 von Harnack, Adolph, 139 von Heyking, John, 79 Wallace, Arthur, 363 Walsh, David, 77 Welte, Bernhard, 176 Whitehead, Alfred North, 271–72, 274, 285, 319 Whitman, Walt, 319, 398 Wilde, Oscar, 388 Wilson, Edmund O., 273, 280–81, 283, 348 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 165, 294, 298, 315, 317, 320–21, 339, 404
678 Index Wojtyla, Karol, 621. See also John Paul II Wolterstorff, Nicholas, 379 Woods, Thomas, 654–56, 658 Wordsworth, William, 398 Xenophanes, 344
Yeager, Leland B., 648 Young, Julian, 556, 561 Zammito, John, 254