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On Nature and the Artificial

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A Philosophical Happy Hour against the Inversion of our Knowledge

What does it mean for something to be natural?  We find the word ubiquitous in today’s marketing: all natural bug spray, dog treats, body wash, shampoo, deodorant, laundry detergent, toothpaste, sunscreen.  Ironically, of course, none of these products occur by nature.  Each is a product of human agency, created through artifice.  Likewise, we will see food products advertise all natural flavors, while others admit their flavors to be artificial.  What, in truth, is the difference?  And why have we come to view nature vs. artifice through the lens of production?

Artificiality and the Operative Imperative

When was the last time you found yourself entirely removed from all products of human artifice?  In all likelihood: you never have.  Even trekking through the most-remote wilderness, it seems highly unlikely that you were entirely nude.  On the typical day, your activities—it seems highly likely—are positively saturated in the artificial, from the beds in which we sleep, to the computers and phones we use (all too often), to at-the-very-least the packaging containing our food, to the books we read: the “all natural” seems, in fact, something we never encounter.

This artificial saturation both shapes our own thinking and reflects the thinking that has become increasingly prevalent over the past several centuries: what Martin Heidegger called the “Enframing” (die Gestell) of technological thinking, or the technique of Jacques Ellul (“the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency… in every field of human activity”).  Within these frames of thinking, nature disappears; the lens of technology or technique makes objects appear in terms of their productive potential, and obscures the beings themselves.

Edward Engelmann describes the emergence of this thinking as a shift away, begun in early modernity, from purely theoretical knowledge towards “operative knowledge”.  This form of knowledge principally takes on a kind of imperative mood: the knowability of an object is evaluated in terms of its operative functionality.  This inverts the relationship between our technical art (techne) and nature (physis).  As Engelmann writes:

with the rise of [the] operative imperative, the Aristotelian schema of techne and nature becomes, in a way, inverted: with operativism, it is nature that imitates techne.  Indeed, this was always a possibility, insofar as techne and nature are understood in terms of one another.  The theoretical inversion whereby techne becomes the schema for nature is not of course a simple substitution; rather, it is a transition involving fundamental changes in the very meanings of “techne” and “nature.” … With the artificial, the deep suppositions that nature is fundamentally operative and so knowledge of nature must also be so are revealed most fully.

Edward Engelmann 2017: Nature and the Artificial: Aristotelian Reflections on the Operative Imperative, 7 & 8.

Can we learn again to see the natural, in this age blinded by the operative imperative of artificial thinking?

The Meaning of Nature

It does not prove difficult to give an articulation of nature by which it may be contrasted against the artificial.  Nevertheless, it may prove difficult to understand (to which end, check out this upcoming seminar!).  Aristotle, the father of all Western science, writes the following:

Of the things that are, some are by nature, others through other causes: by nature are animals and their parts, plants, and the simple bodies, such as earth, fire, air, and water (for these things and such things we say to be by nature), and all of them obviously differ from the things not put together by nature.  For each of these has in itself a source of motion and rest, either in place, or by growth and shrinkage, or by alteration; but a bed or a cloak, or any other such kind of thing there is, in the respect in which it has happened upon each designation [i.e., that we call it a “bed” or a “cloak” instead of “wood” or “sheep’s wool”] and to the extent that it is from art, has no innate impulse of change at all.

Aristotle 330bc: Physics, II.1 (192b 8–20) in Sachs’ translation.

As often the case with Aristotle, what he writes makes a kind of obvious sense: we call natural those things having their own source of motion and rest, and artificial those which do not, but receive their proper ordination from an extrinsic source.  But many challenges have been and continue to be levelled against the common-sense answer of Aristotelian wisdom: what do we mean by motion and rest?  What are the causes by which things are?  Does it not, often, seem as though even natural things are by extrinsic causes?

We know and without needing rigorous discursive reflection that there exists a real difference between the natural and the artificial.  But the lines of their distinction have been blurred by the inverted thinking of the operative imperative.

Retrieving Knowledge

To bring clarity to the distinction, please join us this Wednesday (15 May 2024) for our Philosophical Happy Hour (5:45–7:15pm ET; latecomers welcome!) as we discuss the differences between the artificial and the natural!  For those wishing to dig a little deeper, we will be reading this article by Edward Engelmann—even if you cannot read the whole thing, it may help to orient our conversation.

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On Arguing God’s Existence

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A Philosophical Happy Hour on the Unseriousness of Modern Objectors

It has become fashionable for analytic philosophers in recent years[1] to attack arguments for the existence of God.  These attacks, though their permutations are quite numerous, ordinarily attempt to show that the conception of God somehow entails a contradiction.  These might include some form of the problem of evil: namely, that if there is an infinitely good God, how can there be evil—or at least, “gratuitous” evils?  Another popular claim is that God’s omnipotence would contradict our freedom.  Others still might say that arguments for God fail because they presume a premise which is unproven or indemonstrable, against which some alternative can or might be proposed.

But are these objections serious?

To clarify the question, by “serious” I mean: consistently seeking an understanding of the truth in a way befitting our capacities as human beings.

Thus, to answer the question: no, I do not think so.  Why not?

Serious Inquiry

What makes an inquiry serious?  For a difficult and important question—one where belief in the answer not only has significant consequences for our behavior but which lacks an easy resolution—seriousness begins in humility.  To undertake an inquiry with humility requires a recognition of what one does not know and that it might influence the arguments at stake.

For instance, take the average person of today and ask him or her to read St. Thomas Aquinas’ five ways arguing for the existence of God.  Even most skeptics will doubtless admit that, absent prior extensive experience in philosophy and terminological clarifications, the arguments are not likely to be understood very well.  But just what does one have to know in order rightly to interpret Aquinas’ arguments?  Is it merely a matter of reading all of Aquinas’ works (no small feat)?  Of all of Aristotle’s works?  Augustine’s?  Albertus Magnus’?  Do we need the disputations of Scotus, the clarifications of Cajetan, the Iberian schools?  What of 20th century Thomism?

The point here is not that one need to read all of these thinkers to take seriously Aquinas’ arguments—but it is to say that the seriousness of the argument is manifestly indicated by the wide range of thinkers who have engaged with Aquinas’ thought.  These engagements, further—if examined closely in themselves—reveal that interpretation of Aquinas himself seldom proves straightforward.  Time, language, circumstance, and myriad other factors alter one’s interpretive disposition.  Absent careful and thoughtful consideration of these factors, we invariably import meanings into the argument that the argument does not itself contain and thereby turn it into a strawman.

No serious inquiry does this. 

Unserious Arguments

That modern objectors to the existence of God commonly (which is not to say universally) lack the requisite humility and therefore seriousness to undertake a serious inquiry can be seen through some common characteristics of these arguments.  Allow me to draw attention to five of these.

First, it does seem almost universally the case that modern analytic philosophers, to attempt handling such arguments, always translate them not only into anachronistic language (i.e., using modern terms with modern meanings for ancient or scholastic concepts) but further translate these into the artificial languages of symbolic logic.  While symbolic logic proves very useful for grasping the form and validity of arguments, it actively detracts from grasping the soundness and the significance of the terms.

Second, it is common for these arguments to rely upon presuppositions concerning time, matter, and causality, often deflecting responsibility for answering these questions onto idioscopic science or simply ignoring the necessity of their explicit investigation.  These presuppositions, being erroneous, lead naturally to erroneous conclusions.  This becomes doubly-problematic when these erroneous presuppositions are used to interpret arguments from antiquity—torturing their meaning by a Procrustean framework.

Third, many of the arguments against the necessity of a first cause affect their conclusions by subtly shifting claims’ intended significance—a kind of equivocation—to focus on parts rather than wholes.  For instance, in objecting to the first way, Schmid and Linford (2023: Existential Inertia and Classical Theistic Proofs, 22) read “everything” (or “whatever”; in Latin, omne) in Aquinas’ first way to signify “each and every single thing”, when it is said that everything moved is moved by another and that, since this cannot go on to infinity, there must be some first mover.  But had Aquinas intended “each and every single thing”, he would not have used the word omne, but, rather, quodcumque, quilibet, or the like, as he does seemingly everywhere.  Put otherwise, omne is not here used distributively but collectively.[2]

This leads to the fourth point of unseriousness: the objectors seem, by and large, not to themselves ask with intent to answer the questions put forward by defenders of God’s existence, but, rather, only to find possible refutations of them.  Subsequently, their intent seems not to be conviction but rather persuasion, whether or not conviction is a part of that persuasion.  Thus, one will often find a kind of moral outrage—“how dare your God commit such atrocities!”—without any consideration that it could be our understanding which is wrong, and not God.

Fifth and finally, though hard to notice or accurately summarize them, certain noetic presuppositions stand behind and shape the objections.  Because the objectors themselves do not state explicitly their presuppositions (and perhaps are not even consciously aware of them), they make themselves known primarily by a kind of absence.  Nominalism,[3] for example, or an effete empiricism[4] being quite common.  By such presuppositions, and by maintaining them as necessary conditions for any debate, a skeptical objector establishes the impossibility of any argument for God’s existence.

Conversation and Disputation

In describing why thinkers may adopt an absurd conclusion (and specifically in this case, those who deny the principle of non-contradiction), Aquinas writes the following:[5]

Some of these thinkers lapse into this position on account of doubt: for, since certain sophistical rationales occur to them, from which the aforesaid positions seem to follow, and they do not know how to solve these, they concede the conclusions.  Hence their ignorance is easily cured.  For one must not strive to meet or attack the rationales which they posit, but rather make appeal to their minds, so as to resolve the doubts through which their minds have fallen into such opinions.  And thus, from this, they will withdraw from those positions.

Others, however, pursue the aforesaid positions not because some doubt induces them to these opinions, but only for the sake of expression, that is, from a certain impudence, wishing to sustain these impossible arguments on account of their own sakes—because the contraries of these positions cannot be demonstrated.  And the treatment for these thinkers is argumentation or rejection of that which is expressed in speech and in words, that is, from the fact that the expressions of speech signify something.  For the signification of speech depends upon the signification of words.  And thus it is necessary to have recourse to the principle that words signify something.

Thomas Aquinas 1270/71: Super Sententiam Metaphysicae, lib.4, lec.10, n.663-664. Translation my own.

Now… I do not mean to suggest that the objectors here being identified are as sophistical and egotistical as those who would deny the principle of non-contradiction.  Nonetheless, it bears asking: what is it that truly they are expressing in speech and words?  Do they maintain their objections from a certain impudence?  Are they befuddled by sophistical rationalizations?

Join us this Wednesday to think and discuss (not to debate) how one seriously inquires into the existence of God. [Note: this Happy Hour will be recorded, but this recording will be kept strictly within the Lyceum Institute.]

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[1] I suppose this is true in much of the history of analytic philosophy, but the internet has renewed the trend’s interest and vigor.

[2] Oppy 2023: “Validity and Soundness in the First Way” in Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia, 79.1-2: 148-49 makes precisely the same mistake.  To be fair to Schmid and Linford, they are responding more directly to an interpretation of Aquinas—that by McNabb and DeVito—than to Aquinas himself.  But this in itself is a problem.  Reliance upon interpretations of translations (in this case, by those of Fr. Lawrence Shapcote OP and Anton Pegis), rather than directly addressing the proper signification of the Latin as used by Aquinas, will always be like fighting a shadow with a flashlight.

[3] We can identify both a positive and a negative form of nominalism: positively, as the belief that only individuals exist; negatively, as the denial that mind-independent relations exist or, what is functionally the same, that they can be known by us.

[4] That is, the belief that for a statement to be meaningful there has to be a concrete empirical object which fully instantiates that statement’s meaning.

[5] 1270/71: Super Sententiam Metaphysicae, lib.4, lec.10, n.663-664: “Quidam enim [aliqui incidunt in praedicas positiones] ex dubitatione.  Cum enim eis occurrunt aliquae sophisticae rationes, ex quibus videantur sequi praedictae positiones, et eas nesciunt solvere, concedunt conclusionem.  Unde eorum ignorantia est facile curabilis.  Non enim obviandum est eis vel occurrendum ad rationes quas ponunt, sed ad mentem, ut scilicet solvatur dubitatio de mentibus, per quam in huiusmodi opinions inciderunt.  Et tunc ab istis positionibus recedunt.

“Alii vero praedictas positiones prosequuntur non protper aliquam dubitatoinem eos ad hiuismodi inducentm, sed solum causa orationis, idest ex quaedam protervia, volentes huiusmodi rationes impossibiles sustinere propter seipsa, quia contraria earum demonstrari non possunt.  Et horum medela est argumentatio vel arguitio quae est in voce orationis et in nominibus, idest per hoc quod ipsa vox orationis aliquid significat.  Significatio autem orationis a significatione nomun dependet.  Et sic oportet ad hoc principium redire, quod nomina aliquid significant”.

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On Listening

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What immediate irony!  Reading about listening.  Indeed, we all tend to do far more reading, I suspect, than we do listening.  That often we read poorly does not take away from the fact that we read continually.  For a great many of us, the nature of work, study, and even distraction often involves a discernment of visual signs, and for most of that “great many”, the visual signs are written words.  We live primarily through our eyes—evidenced, even by the very fact of your reading this, and my announcing it to you in the written word, rather than my speaking and your listening.  As Aristotle writes in his Metaphysics, “even if we are not going to do anything else, we prefer, as one might say, seeing to the other sensations.” (980a 25-26).  He adds that sight, more so than the other senses, makes know “in the highest degree and makes clear many differences in things.”

But though sight truly is a wonderful gift, it may in a world of endless stimuli be greedily indulged.  We may see countless things, at truly mind-numbing speed.  In the words of Cardinal Sarah, “Images are drugs that we can no longer do without, because they are present everywhere and at every moment.”[1]  Rapacious addiction to visual novelty degrades our vision itself.

Simultaneously, I believe, it has atrophied our capacity for listening.

What is Listening?

Perhaps because we have adopted poor, mechanical metaphors, I believe we often misunderstand our senses: we tend to think of them as sensing or not; as “on” or “off”.  A little reflection, however, shows that our senses are, in fact, always active, so long as the organs are intact.  Right now, doubtless, you are touching several objects: clothing, the floor, your chair, your phone—and even if you were somehow to be suspended, floating naked in midair, you’d still be in contact with that air itself, even if the ambient temperature is so perfectly attuned to your own that you cannot detect it.  So too, you may shut your eyes, but even then, you have succeeded only in removing the object, light; you have not “turned off” the sense.

Hearing, too, is always present.  So common, in fact, are the ubiquitous noises of our world today that we remark mostly on their absence—“it’s so [too] quiet in here”.  But even in the quietest of rooms, in the quietest of homes, on the most noiseless property in all the world, one is very likely to hear something; even if naught else but one’s own breathing.  The volume of small noises (inhale-exhale; a ticking watch; a light breeze) grows conspicuous against the lack of anything louder.  It was just this point—the omnipresence of sound—that motivated John Cage’s (in)famous piece of “music”, 4’33”, during which a pianist sits at his piano and plays not a single note.  In the absence of music, one hears countless other sounds: creaks of chairs, rustling of clothes, passing vehicles, gusts of wind, yelling on the street—and so on.  We hear such things all the time.  Many, Cage included, have interpreted this to mean there is no such thing as silence.

Just as images have become drugs without which we cannot do, so too, for many, has sound: endlessly filling one’s ears with music as naught but background, or the dialogue of a television show, or a podcast, or anything which might keep our minds from roaming too far from whatever menial tasks we have before us.[2]  Oftener than not, such blasé auditory stimulation, rather than informing our minds of meaningful distinctions, provides us only an uncritical emotional response.  We listen to music to get into (or out of) moods.  The television show comforts us with its familiarity and lack of personal threat.  The podcast alleviates the boredom of a humdrum daily task.

That is, we do not listen because we do not attend to the objects signified through sound but acknowledge (or ignore) them only as received into (or rejected by) our own egotistical subjectivity.  And this egotism, I believe, reflects the noise of our own hearts and minds more than the ambient sounds of our environments.

Silence and Music

“Uncontrollable rivers flow through the heart,” says Cardinal Sarah, “and it is all a man can do to find interior silence.”[3]  We might believe these auditory stimuli, which “speak to us”, to calm the uncontrollable rivers.  In truth, they are naught but anesthetics, numbing us to the torrent.  We drown our ears and flood our hearts with noise: “Noise,” writes C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape, “the grand dynamism, the audible expression of all that is exultant, ruthless, and virile—Noise which alone defends us from silly qualms, despairing scruples and impossible desires.  We will make the whole universe a noise in the end.  We have already made great stride in this direction as regards the Earth.”[4]

Conversely, truly listening to anything requires that we first attain silence.  Indeed, the necessity of silence grows the more abundant noise has become.  In the words of Pope Benedict XVI:[5]

Silence is an integral element of communication; in its absence, words rich in content cannot exist… When messages and information are plentiful, silence becomes essential if we are to distinguish what is important from what is insignificant or secondary.  Deeper reflection helps us to discover the links between events that at first sight seem unconnected, to make evaluations, to analyze messages; this makes it possible to share thoughtful and relevant opinions, giving rise to an authentic body of shared knowledge.  For this to happen, it is necessary to develop an appropriate environment, a kind of ‘eco-system’ that maintains a just equilibrium between silence, words, images, and sounds.

How do we develop and maintain this “equilibrium”—that interior silence?  The corollary to the peace of silence is the joy of music—true music, that is, heard not as background but to which we listen and in which we move beyond and outside ourselves into something more.  It is a Scholastic adage that nihil est in intellectu quin prius fuerit in sensu: nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses.  Perhaps that our hearts have music and silence, we need first to unblock our ears.

Recovering the Art of Listening

That is, listening is a kind of work, an art, and one that we have lost.  We lack the cognitive endurance today, it seems, for the art of truly listening—as Christopher Blum and Joshua Hochschild note in their Mind at Peace: “The eye can take in a vast scene almost at once, but one must have patience to receive the fullness of a song or of a speech.”[6]  What then are the practical steps that we can take to recover this art?

I would challenge you all, before attending our Philosophical Happy Hour this Wednesday (1 May 2024) to listen to something—a symphony, an album, a lengthy speech—without other distraction.  Do naught but listen.  What do you find in the experience?  How did you attend differently to the songs or sounds, the words or thoughts?  What merit do you see in this focused listening?

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[1] 2016: The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise, §46.

[2] This accusation is not meant to be strictly universal, but to help us recognize a trend, whether one present in ourselves or those we know.

[3] 2016: Power of Silence, §48.

[4] 1942: Screwtape Letters, 120 (Letter 23).

[5] 20 May 2012: “Silence and Word: Path of Evangelization”.  The whole message is worth contemplation.

[6] 2017: A Mind at Peace: Reclaiming an Ordered Soul in the Age of Distraction, 72.

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Evolution: Science, Religion, and the Truth

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Questions concerning the nature of evolution—questions which find their way into discourse time and again—have cropped up yet again. This post will make an effort to outline some of these issues, with view to fostering a fruitful discussion for our Philosophical Happy Hour (24 April 2024) on how we ought to think of evolution. It is probably best, however, if we begin with a definition of evolution.

While the theory of evolution finds itself applied most often and most successfully within the field of biology, it has been extended to describe the advent of any new form or diversity of being arising by a gradual process of change throughout the entire cosmos. As described by experts during the 1959 Darwin Centennial Celebration:

Evolution is definable in general terms as a one-way irreversible process in time, which during its course generates novelty, diversity, and higher levels of organization. It operates in all sectors of the phenomenal universe but has been most fully described and analyzed in the biological sector.

1960: Evolution after Darwin, 107; cited in Nogar 1963: The Wisdom of Evolution, 30.

Thus, “evolution” so-understood signifies not only the unfolding of life’s variation, but of the whole cosmos.

In a way, this turn in terminology—a century after Darwin’s Origin of Species—returns the word “evolution” to the broader (if yet-more-specifically-applied) meaning that it had prior to the 18th century: for the word, from Latin ex- (out, from) and volvere (to roll, and thus, a rolling-out or unrolling, unfolding), can be conceived as a general description. Yet this return obscures a certain confusion. For the most difficult problem of biological evolution—considered precisely as a scientific theory—consists in identifying the means by which evolution occurs. But presumably, the biological mechanisms affecting a diversity of species will not apply to the differentiation of gasses, solids, galaxies, stars and planets, and so on.

The following sections elaborate on some of the particularly controversial issues.

Evolution, Science, and Scientism

To attain clarity in our understanding of evolution, therefore, let us ask a few further questions. First: is biological evolution scientifically decided? Many today treat it as a given. (It has always struck me that the philosopher John Searle, in his 2009: Making the Social World on p.4 writes “We need to show how all the other parts of reality are dependent on, and in various ways derive from, the basic facts. For our purposes the two most fundamental sets of basic facts are the atomic theory of matter and the evolutionary theory of biology.”) This treatment, combined with ignorance of the actual mechanisms or complexities involved, situates evolution as a matter of ideology. It takes little thought to comprehend the significance of the progression of figures in the image below. It takes far more to grasp the supposed explanatory principles at work, as it were, in the gaps.

The Science of Evolution

That said, scientists across multiple disciplines have collected much evidence in support of the theory of evolution. For instance: the fossil record, genetic similarities across species (common ancestors); biogeographical differentiation (variation between species in Africa and the Galapagos, for instance); adaptive homologous structures (comparable structures like arms and wings adapted to diverse functions in different species), embryological similarities (there being, e.g., aquatic-functioning structures such as gill-slits in land-bound vertebrate creatures while in an embryonic state); and adaptive organistic responses (bacterial antibiotic resistance, finch beak sizes). Some of these are clear indications of genetic variation in DNA across generations (genotypic variation that is evolution proper); others of epigenetic differentiation in how species behave (phenotypic variation). The relations between these two forms of differentiation remain unclear.

Put otherwise, strong evidence for biological evolution exists. Yet the mechanisms of how it actually unfolds remain in hypotheses far from verification. We know that genotypic variation occurs through mutations in the DNA sequence during replication or through environmental factors. Sexual reproduction shuffles genetic material (“recombination”), especially notable when migrating populations become intermingled (“genetic flow”). The greater heterogeneity in the genetic constitution of a population, the more likely that population is to develop adaptively to the environment, and vice versa (“genetic drift”). Yet the precise interplay of these factors hides from our view.

The Ideological Appropriation of Evolution

Throughout the 20th century and into the first quarter of the 21st, anti-religious thinkers have used evolution as a cudgel against faith. To exemplify this ideological appropriation, we can consider the works of Richard Dawkins and (may he rest in peace), Daniel Dennett—two figures prominent in the so-called “New Atheism” movement.

Dawkins, most famous for his 2006 book, The God Delusion, extensively employs evolution within this work as an argument against belief in God. At the heart of this argument, one finds the idea of “natural selection”. Succinctly defined, natural selection is held as the process by which organisms having traits better suited to their environments are more likely to survive and reproduce, leading to gradual evolutionary adaptation over long stretches of time. For Dawkins, natural explanation functions as a narrative device explaining the complexity and diversity of the universe, and that, through this principle, small changes over a long enough time can lead to improbable conclusions.

Dennett in his 1995 Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, comparably, considers natural selection as a kind of “background algorithm” to life as a whole, explanatory not only of biological evolution but cultural development. The random variation of genetic differentiation, given enough iterations, leads to greater successes over time.

In both thinkers, we see an explanation of complex phenomena by the interaction of mere vires a tergo: in other words, “forces from the past”. As I will explain below, this relies upon a Procrustean limitation of causality. But for now, we can say that the vis a tergo evolutionary conception posits the universe as deterministic. Armed with a deterministic theory, these ideologues hammer away at the uniqueness and specialness of human beings and religious belief as efforts at escaping the inevitable material strictures of our existence.

Evolution, Religion, and Opposition

Dennett and Dawkins, along with their atheistic cohorts and followers, realize an old opposition and exacerbate a reactionary posture already present in those opposed to the idea of evolution.  That is, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as Theodosius Dobzhansky put it, “Darwin’s theory of evolution seemed to many… offensive to human dignity and incompatible with their religious faith.” (Foreword to Nogar 1963: The Wisdom of Evolution, 12.) The idea of a universal evolution, as applied in denial that the human being possesses a unique spiritual soul, denies that the human being is made in the image and likeness of God.

It is important to realize, however, that the scientific theory of evolution itself unfolded within what could be called a philosophically bankrupt time.  Between the dominance of modern nominalistic theories of knowledge and the 18th and 19th century rejections of Scholastic thinking in the university generally (and specifically among Protestants), reconciling the idea of evolution with religious faith seemed not only problematic, but near-impossible.  Faith and its practice, in other words, became increasingly constrained to a position of supposed “subjective” opinion. 

Because truth cannot contradict truth, the apparent irreconcilability of belief in the literal truth of revelation and the theory of evolution led to believers outright denying the latter.  Some, such as Ken Ham or Henry Morris, adhere to the position that any purported science in contradiction to literal interpretations of scripture are, de facto, inaccurate.  Others, such as Michael Behe or William Dembski, advocate for intelligent design as an alternative, claiming that the evident complexity of the cosmos requires a cause independent of that cosmos itself. 

Within the Catholic tradition, Fr. Chad Ripperger authored a treatise on The Matphysics of Evolution: Evolutionary Theory in Light of First Principles which, taking up Aristotelian principles (see more below) argues that not only theological considerations but also philosophical ones contradict the theory of evolution.  For decades, the Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation has dedicated itself to dismantling evolution as a theory inimical to faith.

The Origins of Man

As aforementioned, the central difficulty concerns the development of the human being.  Long has it been the orthodox view of all Christian believers that God directly infuses the spiritual soul of the human person at conception, and that this infusion alone suffices to explain our uniquely spiritual mode of existence.  The theory of evolution, which explains the development of the human as a consequence of genetic mutations from simpler to more complex forms of life, proceeding through the line of primates and eventually resulting in homo sapiens, seems to contradict this Christian understanding.

Even the most ardent students of evolution must admit (so long as they are not caught in a converse ideology) that the evidence heretofore collected does not demonstrate such a development to have happened.  At best, it indicates its possibility.  That many of the remains purportedly demonstrating links between lower primates and advanced forms of human bodies have been proven hoaxes or mistakes undermines confidence in the theory as well.  Indeed, the empirical evidence—as is always the case—never demonstrates its own meaning, but always requires interpretation.  Under or through what narratives are we to understand the things we see and discover?

Interpretation and the Weaponization of Theory

On the one hand, we touch here upon matters clearly beyond our scope—such as, “how may one interpret the creation narratives of Sacred Scripture?”  On the other hand, we ought to note that opposition to theories proposed by modern science stemming from their contradiction to faith is to put the sources of revelation at odds with one another.  Thinkers like Dawkins and Dennett posit the same opposition, from the other side: opposing faith because it contradicts their senses.  If we accept the terms of this opposition we are condemned to choose a side, and, choosing a side, to divide and fragment our cosmos.

Others who have attempted to affect a cohesion between the science of evolution and faith in creation—including controversial figures like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ or Raymond Nogar, OP—have been met with criticism from both sides.  A figure seen as heterodox by either force will be grouped by them with the opposition and therefore seldom heard.  Those proposing a third way, most often, are challenging figures.

But such a challenge proves today most necessary.  So easily do many become seized in ideological commitments without realization.  Those held by opposed ideologies do naught to break this grasp, but, rather—for the most part—only strengthen it.

Evolution, Truth, and Aristotelian Philosophy

The resolution of this difficulty, it seems to me, can only be attained through a genuine philosophical habit.  (Note that a resolution of the difficulty is not the same as the solution to a problem.)  Most especially, we appear in want of a deeper and improved understanding of causality.  Those who weaponize evolution against faith do so with a Procrustean notion of causality: accepting only one kind of causal relation, namely, that between the efficient and the material.  Evacuating causality of the formal and final sets the debate in terms inescapably in their favor. But our understanding of any phenomenon, bereft of a full causal schema, proves incomplete.

By contrast, some—such as Fr. Ripperger—attempt rigorously to employ an Aristotelian causal model in denying the possibility of evolution.  Invoking principles of sufficient reason, proportionate causality, and finality, Fr. Ripperger argues that the notion is philosophically inadmissible from the Aristotelian-Thomistic perspective.  The first two—sufficient reason and proportionate causality—appear most central to his objection. 

Succinctly stated, these are, first, the principle that a sufficient reason must be established to explain how any thing (whether a separate being or an intrinsic principle) is responsible for another.  For instance, if a weak tap against a wooden wall results in the collapse of the wall, one will look for another cause—the tap being insufficiently forceful—and thus discover termite damage.  Second, proportionate causality holds that an effect cannot be greater than its cause.  If I throw a ball and it moves at a velocity greater than the force transferred to it by my arm, we would have to discover some other cause responsible for this.

Principles of Causality

Applying these two principles in argument against evolution does not prove difficult: how can a lesser prior generation give rise to a posterior generation which is greater (i.e., evolutionary development denied by proportionate causality)?  And how can a specifying form not in a prior generation come to arise in a later (i.e., speciation denied by sufficient reason)?

But this opinion, too, consists in a certain interpretation: not only of what Aristotle and St. Thomas mean in their conceptions of essence, existence, substance, accident, species, form, final cause, and so on, but also of the realities signified by these conceptions.  More poignantly, his conception of causality appears rather narrow: not only with respect to the specification of form but also with respect to the force of the final.  Put in other words, Fr. Ripperger no less than Dawkins or Dennett considers the theory of evolution solely on grounds of the vires a tergo.  He limits final causality to a thing’s pursuit of formal perfection. Likewise, he limits formal causality to the intrinsic and primarily substantial essence of things.

Questions to Pursue

This post could be expanded a hundredfold quite easily (but for the constraints of time).  But hopefully it has illustrated some of the difficulty that stands in need of resolution.  As such, we would like to propose the following questions for discussion:

  1. Does Aristotelian philosophy necessarily oppose the theory of evolution?  Are the principles of sufficient reason or proportionate causality genuinely opposed to the theory?
  2. Can facts definitively establish the truth or falsity of evolutionary theory?
  3. What is form as a principle of life?  How is form transferred from one generation to the next?  In what ways does material receptivity affect this generational transference of form?
  4. Do we need a more robust understanding of causality to interpret the proposed mechanisms of evolutionary development in light of Aristotelian philosophical principles?

We are open to these questions branching out into other areas!  Please join us this Wednesday.

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Science and Philosophy: In Dialogue?

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Positivism and Science

A difficult and complex question in philosophy today concerns the discussion regarding the intersection and “boundaries” of the harder empirical sciences and the distinct activity of philosophical enquiry.  Given the success of scientific discovery, one temptation in the early 20th century was to claim that disciplines such as biology, chemistry, physics, and the like were (or would eventually become) exhaustive for understanding the world and nature.  This position, known as “positivism”, claimed that genuine inquiry into the world of nature either had to be reducible to empirical testing and measuring or was known to be true tautologically.[1]  Anything that did not conform to these modes of inquiry, such as classical metaphysics and theology, were considered pseudo-scientific in their mode of enquiry.  

Standing in contrast to this reductive position, the French Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain argues in his Degrees of Knowledge that a bifurcation can be made between sciences as affirmative, to which he ascribes the empirical “hard” sciences and studies, and the more deductive science of proper “explication” or knowledge of and from first principles:[2]

Briefly, we can say that science in general deals with the necessities immanent in natures, with the universal essences realized in individuals in the concrete and sensible world.  The distinction has been drawn between the explicatory or deductive sciences, which attain to these natures by discovery (constructively in mathematics, and from without to what is within in the case of philosophy), and the affirmative or inductive sciences, which only attain these natures as signs and substitutes, blindly so to say.  These latter have assuredly a certain explicative value, without which they would not be sciences, but which consists in indicating the necessities of things by way of sensible experiment, not by assigning their intelligible reasons.

Maritain’s distinction between the two sciences of the “explicatory” and the “affirmative” does not distinguish entities as they exist in the world, but rather between different ways of grasping entities in the world.  It is this distinction that forms the basis of Maritain’s own investigation and his defense against positivism: namely, the three degrees of abstraction (by which we attain the natures of physical objects, mathematical objects, and metaphysical objects).  Even so, if all Maritain has done here is provide room for a study of metaphysics or a natural philosophy based upon principles, there remains the question as to how the two modes of enquiry interact with one another—if at all.  Are the affirmative sciences corrective of the explicatory?  Do the explicatory sciences have their own interpretive autonomy in relation to what can be measured and analyzed empirically?

The Cenoscopic and Idioscopic

Another distinction made in philosophy, taken first from Jeremy Bentham, but developed by C. S. Peirce is the distinction between cenoscopic and idioscopic sciences. The cenoscopic sciences are characterized by their study of what is common among the many and divergent, and the idioscopic is characterized by the specializing or the breaking apart of inquiry:[3]

In cenoscopy, things escape the eye not by being hidden by virtue of their tininess or hugeness, or their extension over eons of time or involvement in hyper-complexities of culture, but simply by their commonness. Their very obviousness requires a conscious direction of our attention, like that needed to notice the ticking of a clock that your ears were hearing all the while you conversed with someone, but which remained unperceived because you were otherwise occupied…The “idioscopic,” by contrast, is a “look” that is idios – “singular, special(ized)” – and that began to be cultivated in earnest only in modern times. It has become the very glory of modern science, and has brought countless blessings and maledictions into our contemporary biosphere.

Whereas cenoscopy offers us a “grand theory of everything” and seeks to unite the divergent modes of enquiry, idioscopic enquiry by its nature seeks to break apart, to isolate, to experiment upon, and to measure.  Neither science is necessarily wrongheaded in what it seeks to inquire, but both are deficient with regards to understanding the world and how we relate to it:[4]

In summary, these four areas of human knowing – the astronomically big and the microscopically small, the biologically compounded and the culturally complex – invite idioscopic science to don its instruments, mount its experiments, measure and hypothesize about the objects in question, and finally to fashion technologies that will hopefully more deeply integrate humankind with its environment, solve problems and cure diseases.  Still, the great ideal at the heart of all knowledge, namely, the desire to unify data and bring synthesis to multiplicity, floats temptingly over these four areas as it does over the divisions within each of them.  Knowledge by definition tends toward unity.

What philosophy offers the idioscopic (here I’m grafting roughly onto Maritain’s affirmative as roughly equivalent) is a unified whole of the diversity in the hard sciences.  While idioscopic science by its nature compartmentalizes and divides the study of the world, rightfully so within its respective subject-matter, it is at a loss in attempting to find unity within the multitude.  By contrast, the cenoscopic, in providing its own accounts and studies of the world based upon shared commonness, oftentimes misses the mark in its enquiry—one could think of the Eleatic philosophers and their cenoscopic inquiry concluding the impossibility of change and mutation and the eternal permanence to being.

A Habit Formed

Famously in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle quipped that among the commonly identified virtutes, many of them go unnamed.  A virtue famously for Aristotle is taken to be a mean between two vicious extremes, being informed by the goods sought after deficiently or in excess in both vices:[5]

So, virtue, is a purposive disposition, lying in a mean that is relative to us and determined by a rational principle, and by that which a prudent man would use to determine it.  It is a mean between two kinds of vices, one of excess and the other of deficiency; and also, for this reason, that whereas these vices fall short of or exceeding the right measure in both feelings and actions, virtue discovers the mean and chooses it.

The question I would like to ask is: what sort of “unnamed” virtue must a person be formed in today if both the cenoscopic and ideoscopic sciences are to be retained?  Is it healthy to siphon off one habit of cognizing the world in the absence of the other?  Are there points where both scientific inquiries intersect, or one ought to claim priority, and if so, is there a habit needed to secure this intersection?  If there can be found such a habit, what kind of vicious extremes could be seen to impede the exercise of such a virtuous inquiry?

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We’ll be discussing these and more conversations in our Philosophical Happy Hour this Wednesday (17 April 2024) and we’d love for you to join. Use the links below!

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[1] Creath 2022: “Logical Empiricism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.).

[2] Maritain 1937: Distinguer pour unir ou Les degrés du savoir. Reference to the English translation by Bernard Wall, Degrees of Knowledge, 43

[3] Paine 2021: “On the Cenoscopic and Idioscopic and Why They Matter”, in Reality: a journal for philosophical discourse, online [PDF]: 5-6.

[4] Ibid, 12.

[5] c.335/34bc: Ἠθικὰ nικοάχεια in the English translation by J. Thomson, The Nicomachean Ethics, 42.

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Being Realists

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The first step on the realist path is to recognize that one has always been a realist; the second is to recognize that, however hard one tries to think differently, one will never manage to; the third is to realize that those who claim they think differently, think as realists as soon as they forget to act a part.  If one then asks oneself why, one’s conversion to realism is all but complete.[1]

Philosophical ideas have a way of winding themselves into the background of our conscious cognition without that conscious awareness itself recognizing the influences of those ideas.  Today, many of us still are possessed by implicitly idealist beliefs: that is, those beliefs which emerged consequent to René Descartes seventeenth-century philosophical revolution.  For instance, we tend to think of ideas as “in our minds”.  We use expressions like “thinking out loud” (when the truth is that most of our thinking is, in fact, “speaking silently”).  And yet, as the above quote from Étienne Gilson’s “Handbook for Beginning Realists” asserts, we cannot but act as though our cognition really is of things that really are.

Realism vs. Idealism

It has sometimes been claimed that the entire history of Western philosophy—or at least, going back to its two earliest systematic thinkers, Plato and Aristotle—has been one long debate between the positions of realism and idealism.  This claim, however, seems to make a fundamental mistake.  Plato seemingly believed in the reality of the Ideas.  But whatever the Ideas were, they did not exist within the mind.  Contrariwise, the idealism of modernity posits, in Gilson’s terminology, that our “thoughts” are the objects of our thinking.  In the expression of Leibniz, modernity follows the way of “ideas”.

By contrast, from antiquity (including Plato) through Latin Scholasticism, most philosophers held that things are our thoughts’ objects.  The English word “real” derives from the Latin reale, itself an adjective derived from the noun res: which we translate as “thing”.  A “thing” is what it is regardless of what we may think about it.  Thus, for the realist, all our knowledge is measured against things.

An Argument for Idealism

But idealism, counter-intuitive though it may seem, has a kind of argumentative advantage.  As Gilson writes:[2]

Most people who say and think they are idealists would like, if they could, not to be, but believe that is impossible.  They are told they will never get outside their thought and that a something beyond thought is unthinkable.  If they listen to this objection and look for an answer to it, they are lost from the start, because all idealist objections to the realist position are formulated in idealist terms.  So it is hardly surprising that the idealist always wins.  His questions invariably imply an idealist solution to problems.

Indeed, the idealist’s strongest argument against realism, it would seem, is to trap the realist in presupposing an idealist premise.  As Patrick Lee Miller begins his own argument, “If Idealism is not true, then there must be a gap between the subject and object of knowledge.”  This consequent—the claimed gap between subject and object—would indeed condemn us to no solution but idealism.  But do we have to accept this conditional premise?  If the object known is not within the subject (i.e., if it is not an idea), does that mean there exists a gap?

Gilson’s Critique

Throughout the “Handbook”, Gilson presents a multifaceted critique of idealist belief.  In many sections, he delivers concise and punchy objections.  But the most fundamental point, on which turns not only the critique of idealism but also Gilson’s advocacy for realism, concerns a distinction between thought and knowledge.  We will turn to this notion of knowledge momentarily.  In the meantime, let us note that thought, as customarily said even to this day, signifies something believed to belongs to a person.  I have my thoughts.  You have your thoughts.  My thoughts are not your thoughts, and vice versa.  To start with thoughts, therefore, is to start with one’s own thoughts; with thoughts belonging to the self.  Thus, Gilson:[3]

For the idealist, who starts from the self, this [namely, asking how he can prove the existence of a non-self] is the normal and, indeed, the only possible way of putting the question.  The realist should be doubly distrustful: first, because he does not start from the self; secondly, because for him the world is not a non-self (which is a nothing), but an in-itself.  A thing-in-itself can be given through an act of knowledge.  A non-self is what reality is reduced to by the idealist and can neither be grasped by knowledge nor proved by thought.

Put succinctly, Gilson here accuses the idealist of a vicious circle, stuck forever in himself.  Or, to paraphrase John Deely, “you cannot accept ideas as the base of knowledge and escape solipsism by any means.”[4]

Being Realists

But what does it really mean, “to be a realist”?  Does Gilson’s argument for realism persuade us that we should, indeed, be realists?  Does his distinction of knowing against thinking prove solid and true?  This lattermost might prove, in the final analysis of his “Handbook”, to be most problematic.  He defines knowledge as “an act of the intellect which consists essentially in grasping an object”.[5]  Does this seem sufficient to us?  Is it sufficiently distinguished from “thought”?

Join us this Wednesday (10 April 2024) as we discuss the entirety of Gilson’s “Handbook” [12 pages here in PDF] and whether we are or ought indeed to be realists—and, if we are, just what that means.

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[1] Gilson 1935: “A Handbook for Beginning Realists”, §1.

[2] Ibid, §2.

[3] Ibid, §7.

[4] Cf. 2007: Intentionality and Semiotics, xxiv.

[5] Gilson 1935, §3.

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Art to What End

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For this week’s Philosophical Happy Hour, we are discussing the proper attitude towards art. What is art’s end? To how should we comport ourselves with respect to art? A Lyceum Member writes:

What is the proper relation that one should have toward art? It is common today for people to speak about art as a form of escapism but something about this understanding seems quite troubling. Escapism, it seems, is a response to the drudgery and depression people face in their day to day existence. This form of escapism is very much connected to consumerist culture and so it seems as though escapism in this sense is just a distraction. However, there is another form of escapism that I have come across from Tolkien in his essay “On Fairy Stories”. In that essay he describes escapism as a way of going to the real which is found in the stories and our day to day lives actually lack the real. I was interested in what others thought about this topic, especially those with an artistic background.

We may find questions concerning art’s purpose to have been asked not long after the art of writing itself came into existence. Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Longinus, Plotinus, and many others of antiquity ventured on such enquiries. Such questions carried through the Latin Age, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and continue to this day. Couched always in consideration of humankind, theories of art’s purpose, and how we ought ourselves to engage with it, have varied as much as the philosophical anthropologies in which their authors believed. Those who cannot raise their eyes from the world of men to heavens of truth, it seems to me, serve as poor guides. Therefore…

Horace’s Ars Poetica

Quintius Haratius Flaccus (65–8 BC)—better known as Horace—wrote a poem in his later years under the title Ars Poetica. He wrote this brief but influential work to illustrate the purpose of art, which he proposed as twofold: to instruct and delight. To quote a few lines:

The principal source of all good writing is wisdom.
The Socratic pages will offer you ample material,
And with the matter in hand, the words will be quick to follow.
A man who has learned what is owning to country and friends,
The love that is due a parent, a brother, a guest,
What the role of a judge or senator chiefly requires,
What partis played by the general sent off to war,
Will surely know how to write the appropriate lines
For each of his players. I will bid the intelligent student
Of the imitative art to look to the model of life
And see how men act, to bring his speeches alive.
At times a play of no particular merit,
Artistically lacking in strength and smoothness of finish
But with vivid examples of character drawn true to life,
Will please the audience and hold their attention better
Than tuneful trifles and verses empty of thought…

Poets would either delight or enlighten the reader,
Or say what is both amusing and really worth using.
But when you instruct, be brief, so the mind can clearly
Perceive and firmly retain. When the mind is full,
Everything else that you say just trickles away.
Fictions that border on truth will generate pleasure,
So your play is not to expect automatic assent
To whatever comes into its head…

Translation by Smith Palmer Bovie; a prose translation by Smart and Blakeney is available here.

Much has been said about this twofold aim: its balance or proportion, the manner of instruction, the question of moralizing and the compromise of artistic or mimetic integrity, and so on. Can the didactic truly be art? Conversely, we might ask: can the vulgar? Does art lack something absent a moral core? And what should we make of Horace’s claim that “Fictions that border on truth will generate pleasure”? To what extent can we depart from the “real” in our fictive creations?

On the Sublime

Often attributed to Cassius Longinus, sometimes to Dionysius of Halicamassus, this ambiguously-authored work nevertheless highlights a point seemingly contrary to that of Horace: its titular sublimity.

As I am writing to you, my good friend, who are well versed in literary studies, I feel almost absolved from the necessity of premising at any length that sublimity is a certain distinction and excellence in expression, and that it is from no other source than this that the greatest poets and writers have derived their eminence and gained an immortality of renown. The effect of elevated language upon an audience is not persuasion but transport. At every time and in every way imposing speech, with the spell it throws over us, prevails over that which aims at persuasion and gratification. Our persuasions we can usually control, but the influences of the sublime bring power and irresistible might to bear, and reign supreme over every hearer. Similarly, we see skill in invention, and due order and arrangement of matter, emerging as the hard-won result not of one thing nor of two, but of the whole texture of the composition, whereas Sublimity flashing forth at the right moment scatters everything before it like a thunderbolt, and at once displays the power of the orator in all its plenitude.

Translation by W. Rhys Roberts. Havell’s translation available here.

To be carried away by well-wrought words—or indeed, by screen and score and all manner of artistic comportment: who has not taken pleasure at this? Fantastic worlds, be they wrought by Tolkien or Milton, Dante or Lewis, have a way of enrapturing us. So too, great song and poetry. The sublime (which seemingly yet defies definition) transports us beyond ourselves. But is this transportation always good? Can we become addicts of the sublime? Does such addiction undermine its quality?

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Can we use art to escape the hum-drum drudgery of our lives? Should it be such an escape? Or must it be closer to reality—must it not transport us to “secondary worlds”, as Tolkien would have it? Should it be didactic? Come share your thoughts this Wednesday (4/3)!

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On the Execution of Philosophy

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The most well-known exemplar of the philosophical attitude, Socrates, was put to death for his habits of questioning.  On different occasions, Socrates described himself as a “midwife”—assisting his interlocutors through the difficult and painful process of giving birth to thought—and as a “gadfly” (an annoying, biting insect, difficult to shoo away).  This latter attribute, in particular, led to the accusations against Socrates—that he corrupted the youth and denied the gods—for which he was convicted and sentenced to drink poisonous hemlock.

But is Socrates’ incessant, unending, often somewhat incendiary questioning the only way we can be philosophers?  Can we not find ways to think and behave in society that employ our philosophical habits—without irritating our interlocutors so much they would rather we die?

Barthes’ “Death of the Author”

Why is the philosopher so often found to be such an irritant?  Let me draw a comparison to the infamous 1967 essay of Roland Barthes, “La mort de l’auteur”—in English, “The Death of the Author”—Barthes proposes a change in how we view the meaning of written works.  The author (as we might infer from the title) is mitigated in importance; it is the reader who constitutes “the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.”  Meaning is accomplished in the interpreter, rather than the text itself, rather than in the author’s interpretation.

While it is certainly true that the interpreter has an essential role to play in the signification of the written word—indeed, of any communicated word—it is false that the meaning reduces or can reduce to the reader’s coalescence of a text’s diverse layers of signification.  Barthes concludes his essay by saying “that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”

Barthes’ author, that is, dies in the poststructuralist approach, for the author is nourished by the hope of an audience—of someone to share in his vision.  Stealing the meaning, denying that the vision is his, starves the artist more than any financial penury could.  (Perhaps this threat is why art today suffers so much.)

But by contrast, the philosopher cannot die the author’s death.  His sustenance consists not in the audience that hears him, but the question that unveils—either the truth of what is or the ignorance, and stupidity, of those who believe themselves to know, but do not.  The author may be starved by subjectivistic interpretation; the philosopher will only reveal the untenability, the incoherence, the inconsistency, the illogicality of living in such an intellectually inauthentic manner.

Philosophy and the Habit of Charm

 But does the philosopher have to be a nuisance?  It is a curious thing, when we truly stop and consider the person of Socrates.  Though victim of ill-repute granted by underhanded rhetorical manipulations by his enemies, he was also lauded and loved by many; those who knew him best loved him most, and sought to protect him from the fate to which he was condemned.

Is it, perhaps, that Socrates’ analogy of the gadfly was not meant to be taken as so many have—such that the philosopher’s task in life is to gall with his inquiries and insistence?  Doubtless, the complacent and unthinking will always find the habits of philosophy an irritant to their ways of living.  Those who would reduce the author to his own opinions will unlikely tolerate an incessantly questioning interlocutor who refuses to accept the evacuation of meaning.

But it seems that—just as Socrates himself—we must, to imitate his way of thinking and being, to echo his habits of the philosophical attitude, be also charming.

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How can we integrate a habit of philosophical reflection into our daily habits?  What about our daily conversations?  When we find ourselves confronted with an average, everyday question, how do we approach it philosophically without irritating all others involved?  What can we do to bring philosophy into our way of living—and share it with others?

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Obeying Unjust Laws

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St. Thomas defines law in Summa Theologiae I-II q. 90 aa. 1-4. It is an ordinance of reason for the sake of the common good made by someone bestowed with the care of the common good and promulgated. Hence, human law, which St. Thomas treats in I-II q. 95, must share the above definition in addition to being derived from the natural law. The corpus of article two brings us to our topic:

As Augustine says in De Libero Arbitrio 1, “A law that is not just does not seem to be a law at all.”  Hence, something has the force of law to the extent that it shares in justice. Now in human affairs something is called just by virtue of its being right (rectum) according to the rule of reason.  But as is clear from what was said above (q. 91, a. 2), the first rule of reason is the law of nature.  Hence, every humanly made law has the character of law to the extent that it stems from the law of nature.  On the other hand, if a humanly made law conflicts with the natural law, then it is no longer a law, but a corruption of law.

Summa theologiae, Ia-IIae, q.95, a.2, c.

In brief, any law that is unjust or is at odds with the natural law is a corruption or perversion of law. We might then ask whether and to what extent do “laws” of this kind indict the legitimacy of the ruler(s) who wrote them and then whether and to what extent the people must oppose and disobey them. We have some guidance from ST I-II q. 96 a. 4:

On the other hand, there are two ways in which laws are unjust. First, in counterpoint to what was said above, they are unjust when they are contrary to the human good either (a) because of their end, as when the lawmaker imposes burdens on his subjects that contribute not to the common welfare but to his own greed or glory, or (b) because of their author, as when someone makes laws that go beyond the authority entrusted to him, or (c) because of their form, as when burdens are distributed unequally over the multitude, even if those burdens are ordered toward the common good.  Laws of this sort are outrages (violentiae) rather than laws, since, as Augustine puts it in De Libero Arbitrio, “What is not just does not seem to be a law.”  Hence, laws of this sort do not bind in conscience (non obligant in foro conscientiae)—except perhaps for the sake of preventing scandal or social unrest (turbatio), in which case a man should cede his right, in accord with Matthew 5:40-41 (“If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him another two …… and if someone takes away your coat, give him your cloak as well”). The second way in which laws can be unjust is by being contrary to the divine good, as are tyrannical laws that induce men to idolatry or to doing anything else that is contrary to divine law.  It is not permissible to obey such laws in any way at all, since as Acts 5:29 says, “We must obey God rather than men.”

Summa theologiae, Ia-IIae, q.96, a.4, c.

There do appear to be instances that one ought not to resist an unjust law to avoid ‘scandal’ or ‘social unrest’ even though the law is an outrage against the human good. However, if the authority does something contrary to divine law, it must not be obeyed at all neither outwardly or inwardly.

Discussion Questions

  1. Is St Thomas consistent in saying there are some outrageous laws that it might be better to permit, but outrageous laws against the divine good ought never be permitted? For instance, if the state passes a law that steals from its citizens, is that not against divine law (sc., the Ten Commandments)? Furthermore, is it not a consequentialist argument that we ought to go along with x, y, or z evil to avoid a worse evil?
  2. St Thomas does seem to be treading lightly here with his “except perhaps” clause. Matthew 5:40-1 concerns, perhaps, private rather than public virtue. If we take the ‘maybe’ here as a ‘no’ and these outrages are not morally binding—which is essentially what the entire article claims—what exactly are we supposed to do?   

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Free Speech and Censorship

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In the United States of America, we already know the common limits placed upon the ‘right to free speech’, though their breadth and scope leave much ambiguity. For instance, we cannot yell fire (falsely) in a theatre, cannot incite a riot or other specific acts of violence, and the formerly rarely enforced but soon to be explosive “seditious speech”. But recently, we have increasingly become aware and, at this point, perhaps have some experience of a more difficult case of first amendment rights: free speech on the internet—specifically on social media platforms.

The difficulty arises from the fact that all social media platforms are ostensibly private entities and as such users and employees are arguably not protected by the first amendment but it is also the case that these digital platforms have largely replaced the public square which is the very arena of politics. We know that these platforms play a deciding role in public elections, and we now know that government agencies have pressured all of them to censor specific stories, persons, and even entire political classifications.

Amendment the first:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

U.S. Constitution, 1791 (Amendment)

I think we ought to try to answer some interesting questions about the ‘right to free speech’:

  1. Is such a right intrinsically good, evil, neutral? (An entire taxonomy of perversion and its adherents has been the result of protecting the first amendment. However, we might also note that a great many abuses have been avoided and hence, tyranny has been prevented.)
  2. How should ‘free speech’ be defined and what ought its limits be?
  3. How can we consistently maintain that not only the first amendment but most of the bill of rights do not necessarily apply to the employees and customers of private companies?    

Philosophical Happy Hour

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Come join us for drinks (adult or otherwise) and a meaningful conversation. Open to the public! Held every Wednesday from 5:45–7:15pm ET.

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