On 20 May at 10am ET (see times around the world here), Dr. Victor Salas (Sacred Heart Major Seminary, Detroit MI) will present on “Where Philosophy and Sacred Theology Meet: The Case of John of St. Thomas (Poinsot)”. This presentation will be accessible via Zoom (details on recording availability forthcoming). Add it to your calendars!
This event is organized by our affiliates at the Institute for Philosophical Studies of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra.
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.
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.
“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.
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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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.
[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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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:
We are open to these questions branching out into other areas! Please join us this Wednesday.
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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.
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?
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.
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?
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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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.
[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.
Our friends from the Deely Project at Saint Vincent College announce that Fr. Christopher Cullen, SJ (Fordham University) will present the 2024 annual John Deely Lecture on April 20 at 7pm, ET, entitled: “The World as Sign: The Semiotic Metaphysics of St. Bonaventure”. Members of the public are free to attend the lecture or watch via Zoom (link below).
Watch this lecture live via Zoom
The Deely Project provides a site where leading figures foster exploration of the semiotic perspective for the coming generations. Faculty and students, undergraduate and graduate, drawn from across the disciplines, engage each other in vigorous, critical and fertile dialogue. The lively interchange in colloquia, seminars and tutorials intrinsically integrates knowledge across methodologies that have perennially taken themselves to be essential.
To date, the Deely Project ahs established its annual lecture series, a reading room in the Dale P. Latimer Library at Saint Vincent College, the Endowed John Deely/Jacques Maritain Academic Chair, and participated in the International Open Seminar on Semiotics: a Tribute to John Deely on the Fifth Anniversary of His Passing.
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.
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.
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?
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]
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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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.
[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.
Today we introduce another of our Columbanus Fellows—who are demonstrating their commitment and desire to grow in knowledge, wisdom, and understanding through a creative retrieval of the classic Western tradition and participation in genuine dialogical inquiry.
Bea Cuasay is an alumna of Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame. She received a B.A. in Philosophy with a minor in Humanistic Studies (History and Literature). She was a few credits short of a Music minor in voice and organ. In addition to her studies at Saint Mary’s, she completed a minor in Constitutional Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her academic interests, which are varied, include: relational and Trinitarian ontology; ancient, late antique, and medieval philosophy; the history of philosophy; philosophical anthropology; virtue ethics; political philosophy; patristics; and Byzantine and Roman liturgical, mystical, and historical theology.
Bea’s interests at the Lyceum Institute are everything St. Thomas Aquinas, Latin and Greek, and gaining a deeper understanding of the Trivium, linguistics, philology, semiotics, and phenomenology. As a Columbanus Fellow, she enjoys the warm camaraderie of pursuing wisdom and truth in love. By practicing the virtue of studiositas in the contemplation afforded by true leisure, in both the hēsychia and scholē senses of the term, through her studies at the Lyceum Institute, she hopes, in the words of St. Thomas (and Josef Pieper), to become more capax universi… et in vivendum vita contemplativa contemplere et contemplata aliis tradere.
If you are able, please support Bea and the other Fellows with a donation to our Columbanus Fellowship fund.
The Columbanus Fellowship offers a small group of deserving, dedicated students a free two-year education in the Trivium, Latin/Greek, and philosophy.
All donations go directly to supporting the Fellows in their studies. As a non-profit public charity, we are reliant upon donations from the public—even small amounts go a long way to building our total! Your gift is greatly appreciated. Learn more about the Fellowship here.
Prospective major gift donors ($2500+) are encouraged to use our contact form to arrange donations.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, a fever for scientific explanation of all phenomena gripped many an intellectual. Language, however, has proved resistant to the methods of modern science. Too many aspects of our experience prove irreducible to the empiriometric approach successful in disciplines such as chemistry or biology. This resistance vexes the reductionist’s mind. Most especially have non-existent objectivities—that is, the various ways in which we can talk about objects that do not exist as things—proved a great source of this vexation.
For natural languages, those we use in our everyday efforts at communication, cannot be conformed to precisely denotative maps of conceptual correspondence. As such, many attempted invention of artificial languages. But these artificial languages—although they have proved useful in development of technical apparatus—cannot convey the richness of experience found in our natural languages. They cannot, therefore, “explain scientifically” what those languages accomplish in our experience.
By contrast, let us hear what John Deely has to say about the relationship between language, non-existent objects, and semiotics:
Language Reconceived Semiotically
I hope to show how the semiotic point of view naturally expands… to include the whole phenomenon of human communication—not only language—and, both after and as a consequence of that, cultural phenomena as incorporative of, as well as in their difference from, the phenomena of nature. The comprehensive integrity of this expansion is utterly dependent upon the inclusion of linguistic phenomena within the scheme of experience in a way that does not conceal or find paradoxical or embarrassing the single most decisive and striking feature of human language, which is, namely, its power to convey the nonexistent with a facility every bit equal to its power to convey thought about what is existent.
Let me make an obiter dictum on this point. When I was working at the Institute for Philosophical Research with Mortimer Adler on a book about language (i.1969–1974, a collaboration which did not work out), I was reading exclusively contemporary authors—all the logical positivist literature, the analytic philosophy literature, all of Chomsky that had been written to that date—in a word, the then-contemporary literature on language. And what I found in the central authors of the modern logico-linguistic developments—I may mention notably Frege, Wittgenstein, Russell, Carnap, Ayer, and even Brentano with regard to the use of intentionality as a tool of debate—was that they were mainly intent on finding a way to assert a one-to-one correspondence between language and mind-independent reality and to say that the only time that language is really working is when it conveys that correspondence. In fact, however, much of what we talk about and think about in everyday experience is irreducible to some kind of a prejacent physical reality in that sense. There is no atomic structure to the world such that words can be made to correspond to it point-by-point. Nor is there any structure at all to which words correspond point-by-point except the structure of discourse itself, which is hardly fixed, and which needs no such prejacent structure in order to be what it is and to signify as it does.
It is wonderful to look at the history of science and culture generally from this point of view, which is, moreover, essential for a true anthropology. The celestial spheres believed to be real for some two thousand years occupied huge treatises written to explain their functioning within the physical environment. Other examples include more simple and short-lived creatures that populate the development of the strictest science, such as phlogiston, the ether, the planet Vulcan; and examples can be multiplied from every sphere. The complete history of human discourse, including the hard sciences, is woven around unrealities that functioned once as real in the thinking and theorizing and experience of some peoples. The planet Vulcan (my own favorite example alongside the canals of Mars) thus briefly but embarrassingly turned up as interior to the orbit of Mercury in some astronomy work at the turn of the last century. But Vulcan then proved not to exist outside those reports at all. The objective notion of ether played a long and distinguished role in post-Newtonian physical science—as central in its own way as the celestial spheres were in the Ptolemaic phase of astronomy’s development—before proving similarly to be a chimera.
So the problem of how we talk about nonexistent things, where nonexistent means nonexistent in the physical sense, is a fundamental positive problem with which the whole movement of so-called linguistic philosophy fails to come to terms. This is not just a matter of confusion, nor just a matter of language gone on holiday, but of the essence, as we will see, of human language.
To understand this fundamental insouciance of language, whereby it imports literary elements of nonbeing and fictional characters even into the sternest science and most realistic concerns of philosophy, we will find it necessary to reinterpret language from the semiotic point of view.
John Deely 2015: Basics of Semiotics, 8th edition, 19-20 (all emphasis added).
While there are many points worthy of expansion in this brief text, I wish to highlight only three: namely, the three points in bold.
First allow me to pick up the last, namely, that “how we talk about nonexistent things, where nonexistent means nonexistent in the physical sense, is a fundamental positive problem with which the whole movement of so-called linguistic philosophy fails to come to terms.” It is a failure, indeed, in a presupposed principle—what we might term the positive formulation of nominalism—namely, that only individuals exist independently of the mind. This nominalist presupposition condemns any believer in it to incoherence. As Deely here hints, language and indeed all communication require a reality of the relation in order to function. If only individuals exist, relations must either be fictions of the mind or themselves individuals. But if relations are individuals, they would be individuals unlike all others—to the point that we would be predicating the term, “individual” equivocally.
Nominalism will prove a ripe topic for another day, however. Instead, let us simply say that its presupposition leaves one unable to draw meaningful connections between existent and nonexistent objects. If one’s theory of language struggles to account for the latter—except to posit them as meaningless—one will be forced, ultimately, to evict all meaning from language, for that theory has failed to recognize the essence of language itself.
Second, let us consider Deely’s statement that “Nor is there any structure at all to which words correspond point-by-point except the structure of discourse itself, which is hardly fixed, and which needs no such prejacent structure in order to be what it is and to signify as it does.” Within this, I wish to focus on the except clause—that is, the structure of discourse. What is this structure? We might alternatively name it the structure of thought’s expression. Consider a common problem: finding the right words to express yourself. We all experience this from time to time. We fumble in vagueness for not only the right semantic signifiers, but even the right structure in which to array them. Perhaps, we might even feel pressured to creative linguistic expression: coming up with new words or structures in the effort to convey our meaning.
This occasional creative necessity exhibits the lack of fixity characteristic of the structure of discourse. To complete the conception of any given idea, we must bring it forward into expression. If we cannot express it, it remains incomplete. While every concept may be derivative of prior experience and thinking, this dependence does not preclude the new idea. Were that the case, we would have no inventions, no fictional stories. And this brings us to…
Third, what Deely calls language’s “power to convey the nonexistent with a facility every bit equal to its power to convey thought about what is existent.” This equal power of conveyance bears enormous importance for understanding the psychology of the human person. That we constitute in linguistic objectivity both ‘what is’ and ‘what is not’ alone explains the constitution of all culture. Moreover, it explains how that cultural being can grow up at odds with human nature. It can also explain why some hold the profane as sacred, and why the distinction between fact and opinion (as well as value) are not so absolute as often presupposed.
Fully explaining this power of language takes much more background and exposition than can be provided here. Suffice it only to say that, if we are to understand the functioning of language, we must do so from a perspective which grasps the true breadth comprised within the structure of discourse.
As a final way of articulating the importance, the semiotic point of view, illuminates the development of linguistically-signified meaning from out of the indeterminacy of pre-linguistic experience.
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?
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.
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.
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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Today we continue highlighting some of our Columbanus Fellows, demonstrating the quality of our endeavors! These fellows are engaged in a rigorous and deep inquiry into the Western intellectual tradition, seeking both to retrieve lost wisdom and to further its presence in our society today.
Joshua A. Streeter is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Theatre, Film, and Media Arts at the Ohio State University in Columbus. He received his M.A. in Theatre from OSU and his B.A. in Theatre with Secondary English Education Licensure from Adams State University in Colorado. Josh’s dissertation (which he is defending or will have defended soon) traces the creative interventions used by theater artists and classics scholars to restore, reconstruct, and reseed the fragments of Greek comedy and satyr play for performance. His academic and artistic expertise includes premodern theater (particularly that of Classical Athens), translation and adaptation, the reception of the ancient world, and pedagogy.
Josh’s interests in the Lyceum Institute lie in the classical languages of Greek and Latin, the historical foundations of higher education, and the position of theater within the intellectual tradition. As a Columbanus Fellow, Josh is delighted to learn alongside his colleagues to remediate the gaps in his own knowledge and to put the scholē, “leisure,” back into scholarship.
If you are at all able, please make a small donation to support Joshua and the rest of the Fellows in their dedication and desire to learn and share their knowledge with the rest of the world.
The Columbanus Fellowship offers a small group of deserving, dedicated students a free two-year education in the Trivium, Latin/Greek, and philosophy.
All donations go directly to supporting the Fellows in their studies. As a non-profit public charity, we are reliant upon donations from the public—even small amounts go a long way to building our total! Your gift is greatly appreciated. Learn more about the Fellowship here.
Prospective major gift donors ($2500+) are encouraged to use our contact form to arrange donations.
