On Medium: Edward Feser’s Casuistic Word Games and Bigotries
Join me on a tour of Edward Feser’s casuistic word games and bigotries as we sort through his circular proofs for theism and his condemnation of homosexuality.
I think neo atheist gurus want to explain their "point of view" as inherently good, without explaining from an existential perspective why mythology is intellectually and morally bankrupt.
Why is social justice better than the scatological conservative arguments against it?
Because social justice is inherently good ...
But the best way to attack conservative mythological fantasies is precisely for the truths that they hide or distort, the existential ones.
Why social justice and not mythological animalism?
Because we are really the same, essentially speaking.
Another problem with the scientism is that, with this ideology, scientists start to think that everything can always be improved, believing in the inaccessible concept of perfection.
Uncontrollable eugenics is a real possibility and is worsened by the short thermist capitalism
Many things that we believe to be just "scientific truth" are conservative ideology.
''Likewise, if we deny that morality has an objective, natural basis, we might be inclined to embrace libertinism or the acceptance of gay marriage, in which case our societies might fall apart because of our lack of respect shown to the traditional family structure.''
Always the same problem here, your difficulty in differentiating objectivity from naturalness and specially human naturalness.
If the human destiny is to deal with the inherent lack of an absolute goal for everything... Mythology is like a 'meme-virus' that corrupts our ''ultimate understanding''.
Remember that sexual diversity is present in many other species.
Morality is based on reality, but you know ''conservatives'' are 'animalists'.
Racism is not only based on subjective perspectives. Racism is basically objective injustice, if I attack you for no logical reason using stupid arguments like blaming your race for your behavior.
Objective or universal morality is the correct analysis of the interactions, behaviors, actions, reactions, consequences and/used justifications or criteria.
That is
see to believe
and not the primitive conservative morality
believe to see
And accepting gay marriage has nothing to do with libertinism, otherwise it means trying to inject some monogamous vibrations into the lgbt ''community'', especially among gay men.
I'm not sure you're following the argument. You quoted me summarizing Feser's view which I criticized throughout the rest of the long article.
Feser's view is that new atheism depends on scientistic philosophy, but as I show, science itself dealt a mortal blow to Christendom and to medieval Christian apologetics.
You've said so much here that I'm at a loss as to where to start, though I don't think I could really contribute much anyways. Aquinas aped Aristotle but Ockham & his ilk advanced logic farther than any extant Greek. Science killed scholasticism, but without scholasticism, the scientists would have lacked one of the instruments needed to dissect nature. The irony is that the scalpel of reason that they sharpened so patiently through all those centuries was turned against them in the end.
Feser, as rigidly rational as he must be, would probably dismiss your deconstruction of scholastic logic out of hand, but it should be noted that most of the scholastic's arguments for God (including the ontological one) have been thoroughly refuted on their own terms. There is a anthology of such refutations sitting on my shelf, The Impossibility of God, that Feser obviously hasn't read but would be very dismayed if he did since it, among other things, explains how his God actually can't exist by definition & with nary a hint of scientism, but rather in purely Aristotelian terms only a trained scholastic like him would be able to make heads or tails of.
I probably said too much for Medium. My longer articles don't often get as much traction there.
But do I deconstruct scholasticism? The logic is one thing, the metaphysics another, and my main point about the metaphysics is that it's anthropocentric, meaning that it's too intuitive: it project human qualities onto everything else. That move ends up being circular in a theistic argument. And on top of that logical problem, indeed scientific discoveries rather than just scientistic philosophy undermined that intuition by effectively promoting cosmicism (the opposite of anthropocentrism). I don't see how Feser could dismiss any of that.
My point about the word games isn't so much about the logic as the pseudo-sophisticated, intuitive and anthropocentric metaphysical categories. The arcane complexities of the metaphysics just hide the intuitiveness and thus the circularity of the arguments for God's existence.
I think that your article does do a fair job at deconstructing scholasticism if by scholasticism is meant a form of dialectic that takes as granted bi-valent (Aristotelian) logic, final causes, & essences. You address each of these concepts in turn in your essay: bivalent logic is criticized when you mention the wave-particle duality of sub-atomic particles; you point out how final causes presuppose God rather than proving His existence because they make natural objects artifacts of God; you criticize essences when you point out that some phenomena (like personhood) are better understood as emergent rather than essential.
Aristotle's metaphysics is intrinsically anthropocentric because it ultimately is an analysis of language (syntax, grammer) & language is a human construct. Aristotle posits essences because Indo-European languages are predominantly noun-based. This is why scientists once believed in 'phlogiston'. Since 'heat' is a noun, they supposed that it was some kind of fluid, an essence, rather than something that emerges from the motion of molecules. Bivalent logic in the form of yes/no, either/or is obviously language-based. Aristotle's 4-fold causation is also just an analysis of the different connotations for which that word (or in his case the Greek equivalent to it) is used in conversation.
I appreciate that you aren't trying to deconstruct logic in the broadest & truest sense of the word, but I think Feser would probably see it that way because his grasp of logic is limited to what he calls 'common sense', which is just another way of stating his commitment to the anthropocentric intuitions you mention. I haven't read any of his books, but from what I have read I gather that his philosophical literacy is very specialized. He seems to be unaware of alternative systems of logic & metaphysics such as Nagarjuna's or Korzybski's. He'd probably see any critique of Aristotle as an attack on logic itself. I could be wrong, but that's the impression I get.
That's a good way of putting the problem with Aristotle, which is that he was basing his metaphysics on an analysis of ordinary language. The most relevant alternative to Aristotelian logic would be Frege.
I think the main problem with these medieval "proofs" is the one I presented in the article: the abstractness of these deductive arguments turns them into word games where the force of the argument rests on the definition of the technical terms. Once those terms are defined anthropocentrically, the arguments become circular.
As Leibniz said, all deductive arguments are circular in that sense. Contrary to Leibniz, the circularity is problematic when we're over-extending our intuitions or when we're dealing with empirical rather than analytical matters. Feser and Aquinas were essentially offering variations on the ontological argument, which defines God into existence. The question is whether the definition is arbitrary or whether we should assume our intuitive definitions necessarily apply to reality. Anthropocentrism and religious faith say they do, cosmicist science says they don't
The scholastic's recourse to Aristotle is funny, because he himself said in the Posterior Analytics: "esse autem nullius rei essentia est, quandoquidem ens non est genus" which in my edition is translated as: "the definition of a thing doesn't belong to the existence of the thing".
Indeed, god "exists" only as a logical proposition, that's all.
Yeah, while it's true that all of our concepts are abstracted from empirical observations, some are certainly more founded upon observation than others. Moreover, our senses, while adequate for survival, are fairly limited & crude even by the standards of other animals, which warrants a degree of skepticism over any concepts we might derive from them.
Anselm's argument is particularly egregious when it comes to anthropocentrism because he never really specifies what he means by 'greatest'. John Michael Greer, in his book A World Full of Gods makes a powerful point on this matter:
What qualities belong in definitions of “greater” and the greatest conceivable being? What is it better to be than not to be? Anselm has one set of answers, but a medieval Hindu saint would have a very different one. A Theravadin Buddhist of the same period would argue that existence is imperfect by its nature and “not to be” is the better option. None of these mutually exclusive judgments is better founded than the others, since “greater” and “better” are subjective judgments, not objective qualities.
Greer then goes on at some length to rebut all the modern attempts to resurrect the ontological argument & then some.
Aquinas was wise enough to see the hubris in Anselm's argument -- that we could imagine God -- & go for more humble proofs; but those proofs of his are more rhetorical than logical since they aren't formal demonstrations like Anselm's & so can never definitively prove that God must exist, they only suggest that He might exist. The first 3 of his 5 ways are based the impossibility of an infinite regress, an impossibility that he never bothers to demonstrate. The 4th presupposes that superlatives like 'hottest', 'brightest', etc must have some ontological corollary (God) simply because there are evidently hot & bright objects -- a non sequitur since why should there be some arbitrary limit to how hot or bright a star might be other than the kind & quantity of matter that fuels it? His 5th proof just begs the question by presupposing every natural object has a purpose which only God could endow it with.
Whether or not intuitive definitions can apply to reality all depends on the definition of reality & also how intuitive the definition is. I think I said somewhere else that if there were some inhuman reality out there, its very inhumanity would render it totally inaccessible to us & so, for pragmatic purposes, we may as well assume reality is intelligible & our intuitions about it aren't very far from the mark because that's the only reality we can know. There are really degrees of anthropocentricity here. Ptolemy's model of the cosmos is on the extreme end because it places us at the center of a finite universe. Giordano Bruno's is far less anthropocentric than the Ptolemy's, but it still rests on human assumptions like an infinite God expressing Himself with an infinite universe, a universe that has a beginning & presumably an end just like us. There are cosmologies even more outré than Bruno's such as Leonard Susskind's & Terence Witt's, but they will all be anthropocentric because their creators are human beings, not gods.
Concerning Leibniz. Analytic statements about empirical matters are sometimes the best we can do when the empirical matter in question is something that could never be known inductively due to technical or temporal constraints, & these are the types of things that Leibniz mostly addressed. His Monadology is unfalsifiable in scientific terms, not because his monads are pure abstractions, but because scientists will never be able to study matter at an infinitesimal level. They can't even study it at the subatomic level without becoming part of the experiment.
I suppose there are degrees of human-centered projections, depending on how attached we are to our intuitions and to our self-image. I think I made clear how Aristotle, Aquinas, and Feser stand on the anthropocentric side of the divide between anthropocentrism and cosmicism.
An inhuman reality would be noumenal in certain respects, which would be the source of the horror and disgust we'd feel towards it. Hence the basis for existentialism, for noble lies, myths, bad faith religions, and so on. Nature's regularities can be explained, but its living deadness (its mindless, godless creativity and predictability) in general is as inhuman and monstrous as a zombie's.
As I recall, Leibniz says all truths are essentially analytic. There are no empirical truths since truth is conceptual containment and thus conceptually necessary. He makes this work by presupposing theism and the possibility of omniscience.
Leibniz thought all truths were analytic because he didn't believe in causation as we would understand it. For some bizarre reason he made his monads 'windowless', that is unable to perceive & thus interact with each other, which necessitates that God govern all of their movements according to some contrived plan, his 'pre-established harmony', that Voltaire took such pleasure in ridiculing in his Candide. I guess this was the only way Leibniz could shoehorn his God in to what otherwise would have been a form of atomism that took that philosophy to its logical conclusion. I sometimes wonder if Leibniz was really being sincere here or he was just trying to placate the church while hoping his more astute readers would understand that monads made God redundant to an infinite degree.
I find the idea of a noumenal level to reality not so much horrifying as superfluous. I suppose it could exist; but then gremlins might exist as well. Nietzsche dismissed the idea on pragmatic grounds when he asked what would we do with that knowledge even if we had it; but for me it goes beyond that question. Noumenal reality is, almost by definition, something not only imperceptible, but inconceivable. If we have no way of experiencing it then how do we know whether or not it exists? Wittgenstein wrote at the end of his Tractetus: "Of what we cannot speak of, we must remain silent." I would say: The unthinkable is not worth thinking about.
Nature's mindless, purposeless creativity is indeed awful to contemplate if you've spent your life steeped in theistic fantasies. When I really buckled down & read Darwin & began to grasp what he was saying it was quite depressing because I saw that compared to creation & even Lamarkianism, his theory was unimpeachable in its simplicity. Darwin only asks us to think through the logical implications of what we've known to be true for centuries. But is theism really so consoling? At least this way all the tragedies of life were necessary & unavoidable, not contrived by some God for dubious reasons that we have to convince ourselves are for the best as Leibniz would have it, but simply another thread in the grand tapestry which we must accept right along with the good. Believing in God just makes life more painful than it has to be.
Yes, Leibniz extreme form of rationalism contributed, in part, to an extreme kind of material skepticism where every empirical truth was disregarded in favor of mental abstractions. This gave the rationalist the freedom to posit as real the most abstruse mental elaborations.
I think that kind of extreme empirical skepticism is alive today in the form of conspiracy theories and "alternative" facts.
I don't think the monads make God redundant. They're windowless so they only unfold God's plan. Were the monads to interact, they'd have independent power which would threaten to usurp God's sovereignty. The monads would appear to be acting themselves rather than being instruments enslaved to their sole user. So I think Leibniz's system is essentially theistic, but I could be wrong. I haven't read Leibniz much in twenty years.
I wasn't thinking of noumena in Kant's way. I'm talking about things in themselves prior to their humanization. So it's "noumenal" in a loose sense that includes the subjects of objective, scientific or philosophical knowledge. The noumenal qualities shine through, then, in the alien inhumanity of the wilderness, of the natural as opposed to the artificial/humanized.
We can look on the bright side of an atheistic or of a theistic worldview. It's up for grabs which is the more horrifying scenario.
Kevin, that's an interesting line to draw, from rationalism to American paranoia and conspiracy mindedness. Might be a stretch, though. At least, another line would be from Christianity or theism in general to such paranoia. The paranormal looks like a secularization of theistic posits (UFOs and aliens instead of angels and demons, all-powerful governments instead of a sovereign deity, bureaucratic efficiency instead of supernatural miracles)
I know it's a long stretch, but the whole climate of political discussion about the value of truth vs. the "post truth" stance that's been on the forefront since Trump got elected, made me think that you could play devil's advocate with a rationalist mindset akin to Leibniz's or Descartes'.
For, if we define truth only on analytic grounds and we completely disregard the empirical grounds, then every statement you utter is true as long as it's not self-contradictory. That, in a nutshell, is the basis for the ontological argument, I think.
But it can serve you to posit the existence of a myriad of other imaginary things! Jewish space lasers included.
Theoretically, a conspiracy theorist could claim that his disdain for objective truth is justified by the radical empirical skepticism that the philosophies of the early Enlightenment of Descartes and Leibniz defended. But I know it's a long shot, and I don't want to indulge the conspiracist's paranoia even further.
Kevin, it wasn't just Leibniz who contributed to that skepticism, but the empiricist David Hume. William Walker Atkinson summarized Hume's skepticism in his The Crucible of Modern Thought
''Hume taught that we cannot prove the existence of God, of self, or of matter—all of which ideas are the illusions of imagination, having no basis in actual experience. He carried empiricism to the realm of pure skepticism.''
Empiricism, if taken far enough, inevitably leads to idealism since matter itself is just another concept & is hence an epiphenomenon of mental activity - which is essentially what the idealists are saying. This is ironic, because most people who identify as idealists profess to believe in innate ideas & deny that the senses can ever be a source of true knowledge. But whereas the rationalist idealist takes his ideas as true, the empiricist idealist is often more inclined to resign himself to skepticism - he's given up all hope of ever knowing anything for certain.
Yes, there is definitely a lack of empirical evidence for many of these conspiracy theories, but there also seems to be a great lack of rigorous deduction in them as well (why would elites harvest adrenochrome from torture victims when they could synthesize it in a lab?). I think the appeal of conspiracy theories might boil down to the Joker's observation in The Dark Knight: "Nobody panics when things go according to plan, even if the plan is horrifying.
Ben, that was my point about Leibniz: windowless monads are safe because they don't make God redundant -- I can't think of any sufficient reason for making them windowless other than Leibniz's fear of being persecuted for atheism. But I understand this to be nothing but a supposition since I have no evidence -- call it my own pet conspiracy theory.
A noumenal side to reality in the sense of pre-human is certainly much more plausible since we know for a fact that the world is a lot older than us. Though even before humanity, there were animal species with nervous systems similarly organized to our own who would have experienced the world, at least on a raw perceptual level, much as we do. Are you speaking then of the uniquely human proclivity to assign causes to natural phenomena, to look for essences behind the accidents & to personify things that a less social species might see as non-persons? The problem I see with noumenal knowledge, even in your broader sense, is that any sapient species would most likely be social & thus predisposed to see personal agency behind natural phenomena & natural objects as artifacts of higher beings like gods. Our brains evolved to look for these things whether they really exist or not & so they become a prerequisite for any knowledge at all.
As for whether or not theism is scarier than atheism I suppose it is somewhat subjective. Some Christians choose to focus on Heaven rather than on Hell.
Sybok, we do tend to project our purposes and preoccupations onto the world. Even objective knowledge is part of an instrumental, progressive project.
The noumenal aspect, though, is the upshot of objectivity, the suspicion we have when we recognize our cognitive biases, that nature's universal character doesn't align with our preferences and intuitions. This noumenal character falls out of the rejection of anthropocentrism. The question is what nature is like when we doubt our mental projections and reassuring myths. So the noumenal aspect lines up, rather, with existential principles, the cosmic horror genre, and some mystical philosophy and religion.
That's the closest we can get to natural reality, when we confront the monstrousness that's all along driven us to flee to our humanized alternatives to the wilderness. Indeed, the spooky connotations of "wilderness" alone provide much of the content of noumenal knowledge.
Sybok, you're right. Empiricism also leads to skepticism, perhaps even more so than rationalism. But I think they're different kinds of skepticism.
An empiricist tends to be more skeptic toward the reality of certain abstract concepts (self, soul, god, etc.) on the basis that those concepts don't have a correspondence with empirical reality. That's why they put such an emphasis on the origin of concepts (experience), and hence their critique to the consideration of such concepts as "innate ideas". An empiricist doesn't think innate ideas exist, he thinks that every idea finds its origin in experience.
A rationalist' skepticism, however, is directed toward experience, on the basis that every truth must only be analytical. This type of skepticism is older, I think. It goes back to the eleatics, it is in Plato, and it is found in Descartes' Meditations in another form.
They both become unreasonable and dogmatic in the end.
I think idealism, understood as empirical realism, keeps the best of rationalism and empiricism, because it posits a necessary balance between reason and experience. Not one above the other. And hence avoids an unreasonable kind of skepticism.
Religions and conspiracy theories would find a rationalist's skepticism more useful, in my opinion, because they don't care if their narratives don't fit with the world. In your example, they don't see a problem with elites harvesting adrenochrome because they don't take into consideration real psychological motives, of real people, in real settings. It is just an abstract utterance, with no contact with reality, despite the fact that the people in those fantasies are supposed to be people in our reality.
Ben, so then perhaps King Solomon was on to something when he said that fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, if by "God" he meant the inhuman reality that can't be represented in an image or idol. That wisdom, unlike our scientific knowledge, would humble us through its very unknowableness. So we can't know anything about the noumenal, anymore than we can see the face of God, but we can experience it through the emotions of fear & awe.
Kevin, I've arrived at largely the same conclusion with respect to rationalism vs empiricism. It's tempting to go with one & exclude the other, but that road can only lead to madness in the end. Sanity is a sweet spot between believing everything & doubting everything. Even if Leibniz was right about all truth being analytic because it exists in God's mind, I have no access to the mind of God which means I have to take everything in through my senses, abstract it & then go from there. This is why I see the whole rationalist/empiricist debate as fruitless. It ultimately doesn't matter whether our fundamental ideas are analytic or or not, innate or acquired. The only important question is whether or not we should trust them. That trust can't hang on something as one sided as whether or not its consistent with what we think we know (rationalism) or what our senses can register (empiricism). Our knowledge is always outweighed by our ignorance & our sight is limited to what may be an infinitesimal point of the electromagnetic spectrum. But each faculty can compensate (to some degree) for the defects of the other.
Sybok, I think we also have some indirect knowledge of natural reality. Scientific knowledge is close to being noumenal, especially when combined with a philosophical synopsis.
I have an article coming out within a couple of weeks that will go over this, called "Transhuman Epistemology: Knowledge in the Greater Scheme." There I say that science humanizes the world, applying our least parochial filter to objective reality. Scientific knowledge is virtually noumenal.
What we learn, then, is that the real world includes this phenomenal, emergent level of changing states the patterns of which can be explained by creatures that likewise evolve within that natural order. This knowledge of noumena is incomplete, but it's not wholly subjective or arbitrary.
It's just that knowledge generally is pragmatic in that it prepares us for action. Deeper "knowledge" or revelation might entail an acceptance of the futility of all action. This is the melancholy mystical realization that the philosophical upshot of science is that the natural order is absurd and monstrous. As I put it in that article, either we assimilate nature with our cognitive nets, or the world swallows us in an existential grasp of the smallness of all our projects (and thus of the pragmatic underpinnings of objective/instrumental knowledge).
I think you will also like my criticism of Feser, which I have put together in a short or not too long text. In my opinion, you only need to criticize the proof of God from movement and the sexual morality of natural law.
I think neo atheist gurus want to explain their "point of view" as inherently good, without explaining from an existential perspective why mythology is intellectually and morally bankrupt.
ReplyDeleteWhy is social justice better than the scatological conservative arguments against it?
Because social justice is inherently good ...
But the best way to attack conservative mythological fantasies is precisely for the truths that they hide or distort, the existential ones.
Why social justice and not mythological animalism?
Because we are really the same, essentially speaking.
Another problem with the scientism is that, with this ideology, scientists start to think that everything can always be improved, believing in the inaccessible concept of perfection.
Uncontrollable eugenics is a real possibility and is worsened by the short thermist capitalism
Many things that we believe to be just "scientific truth" are conservative ideology.
''Likewise, if we deny that morality has an objective, natural basis, we might be inclined to embrace libertinism or the acceptance of gay marriage, in which case our societies might fall apart because of our lack of respect shown to the traditional family structure.''
ReplyDeleteAlways the same problem here, your difficulty in differentiating objectivity from naturalness and specially human naturalness.
If the human destiny is to deal with the inherent lack of an absolute goal for everything...
Mythology is like a 'meme-virus' that corrupts our ''ultimate understanding''.
Remember that sexual diversity is present in many other species.
Morality is based on reality, but you know ''conservatives'' are 'animalists'.
Racism is not only based on subjective perspectives.
Racism is basically objective injustice, if I attack you for no logical reason using stupid arguments like blaming your race for your behavior.
Objective or universal morality is the correct analysis of the interactions, behaviors, actions, reactions, consequences and/used justifications or criteria.
That is
see to believe
and not the primitive conservative morality
believe to see
And accepting gay marriage has nothing to do with libertinism, otherwise it means trying to inject some monogamous vibrations into the lgbt ''community'', especially among gay men.
I'm not sure you're following the argument. You quoted me summarizing Feser's view which I criticized throughout the rest of the long article.
DeleteFeser's view is that new atheism depends on scientistic philosophy, but as I show, science itself dealt a mortal blow to Christendom and to medieval Christian apologetics.
You've said so much here that I'm at a loss as to where to start, though I don't think I could really contribute much anyways. Aquinas aped Aristotle but Ockham & his ilk advanced logic farther than any extant Greek. Science killed scholasticism, but without scholasticism, the scientists would have lacked one of the instruments needed to dissect nature. The irony is that the scalpel of reason that they sharpened so patiently through all those centuries was turned against them in the end.
ReplyDeleteFeser, as rigidly rational as he must be, would probably dismiss your deconstruction of scholastic logic out of hand, but it should be noted that most of the scholastic's arguments for God (including the ontological one) have been thoroughly refuted on their own terms. There is a anthology of such refutations sitting on my shelf, The Impossibility of God, that Feser obviously hasn't read but would be very dismayed if he did since it, among other things, explains how his God actually can't exist by definition & with nary a hint of scientism, but rather in purely Aristotelian terms only a trained scholastic like him would be able to make heads or tails of.
I probably said too much for Medium. My longer articles don't often get as much traction there.
DeleteBut do I deconstruct scholasticism? The logic is one thing, the metaphysics another, and my main point about the metaphysics is that it's anthropocentric, meaning that it's too intuitive: it project human qualities onto everything else. That move ends up being circular in a theistic argument. And on top of that logical problem, indeed scientific discoveries rather than just scientistic philosophy undermined that intuition by effectively promoting cosmicism (the opposite of anthropocentrism). I don't see how Feser could dismiss any of that.
My point about the word games isn't so much about the logic as the pseudo-sophisticated, intuitive and anthropocentric metaphysical categories. The arcane complexities of the metaphysics just hide the intuitiveness and thus the circularity of the arguments for God's existence.
I think that your article does do a fair job at deconstructing scholasticism if by scholasticism is meant a form of dialectic that takes as granted bi-valent (Aristotelian) logic, final causes, & essences. You address each of these concepts in turn in your essay: bivalent logic is criticized when you mention the wave-particle duality of sub-atomic particles; you point out how final causes presuppose God rather than proving His existence because they make natural objects artifacts of God; you criticize essences when you point out that some phenomena (like personhood) are better understood as emergent rather than essential.
DeleteAristotle's metaphysics is intrinsically anthropocentric because it ultimately is an analysis of language (syntax, grammer) & language is a human construct. Aristotle posits essences because Indo-European languages are predominantly noun-based. This is why scientists once believed in 'phlogiston'. Since 'heat' is a noun, they supposed that it was some kind of fluid, an essence, rather than something that emerges from the motion of molecules. Bivalent logic in the form of yes/no, either/or is obviously language-based. Aristotle's 4-fold causation is also just an analysis of the different connotations for which that word (or in his case the Greek equivalent to it) is used in conversation.
I appreciate that you aren't trying to deconstruct logic in the broadest & truest sense of the word, but I think Feser would probably see it that way because his grasp of logic is limited to what he calls 'common sense', which is just another way of stating his commitment to the anthropocentric intuitions you mention. I haven't read any of his books, but from what I have read I gather that his philosophical literacy is very specialized. He seems to be unaware of alternative systems of logic & metaphysics such as Nagarjuna's or Korzybski's. He'd probably see any critique of Aristotle as an attack on logic itself. I could be wrong, but that's the impression I get.
That's a good way of putting the problem with Aristotle, which is that he was basing his metaphysics on an analysis of ordinary language. The most relevant alternative to Aristotelian logic would be Frege.
DeleteI think the main problem with these medieval "proofs" is the one I presented in the article: the abstractness of these deductive arguments turns them into word games where the force of the argument rests on the definition of the technical terms. Once those terms are defined anthropocentrically, the arguments become circular.
As Leibniz said, all deductive arguments are circular in that sense. Contrary to Leibniz, the circularity is problematic when we're over-extending our intuitions or when we're dealing with empirical rather than analytical matters. Feser and Aquinas were essentially offering variations on the ontological argument, which defines God into existence. The question is whether the definition is arbitrary or whether we should assume our intuitive definitions necessarily apply to reality. Anthropocentrism and religious faith say they do, cosmicist science says they don't
The scholastic's recourse to Aristotle is funny, because he himself said in the Posterior Analytics: "esse autem nullius rei essentia est, quandoquidem ens non est genus" which in my edition is translated as: "the definition of a thing doesn't belong to the existence of the thing".
DeleteIndeed, god "exists" only as a logical proposition, that's all.
Yeah, while it's true that all of our concepts are abstracted from empirical observations, some are certainly more founded upon observation than others. Moreover, our senses, while adequate for survival, are fairly limited & crude even by the standards of other animals, which warrants a degree of skepticism over any concepts we might derive from them.
DeleteAnselm's argument is particularly egregious when it comes to anthropocentrism because he never really specifies what he means by 'greatest'. John Michael Greer, in his book A World Full of Gods makes a powerful point on this matter:
What qualities belong in definitions of “greater” and the greatest conceivable being? What is it better to be than not to be? Anselm has one set of answers, but a medieval Hindu saint would have a very different one. A Theravadin Buddhist of the same period would argue that existence is imperfect by its nature and “not to be” is the better option. None of these mutually exclusive judgments is better founded than the others, since “greater” and “better” are subjective judgments, not objective qualities.
Greer then goes on at some length to rebut all the modern attempts to resurrect the ontological argument & then some.
Aquinas was wise enough to see the hubris in Anselm's argument -- that we could imagine God -- & go for more humble proofs; but those proofs of his are more rhetorical than logical since they aren't formal demonstrations like Anselm's & so can never definitively prove that God must exist, they only suggest that He might exist. The first 3 of his 5 ways are based the impossibility of an infinite regress, an impossibility that he never bothers to demonstrate. The 4th presupposes that superlatives like 'hottest', 'brightest', etc must have some ontological corollary (God) simply because there are evidently hot & bright objects -- a non sequitur since why should there be some arbitrary limit to how hot or bright a star might be other than the kind & quantity of matter that fuels it? His 5th proof just begs the question by presupposing every natural object has a purpose which only God could endow it with.
Whether or not intuitive definitions can apply to reality all depends on the definition of reality & also how intuitive the definition is. I think I said somewhere else that if there were some inhuman reality out there, its very inhumanity would render it totally inaccessible to us & so, for pragmatic purposes, we may as well assume reality is intelligible & our intuitions about it aren't very far from the mark because that's the only reality we can know. There are really degrees of anthropocentricity here. Ptolemy's model of the cosmos is on the extreme end because it places us at the center of a finite universe. Giordano Bruno's is far less anthropocentric than the Ptolemy's, but it still rests on human assumptions like an infinite God expressing Himself with an infinite universe, a universe that has a beginning & presumably an end just like us. There are cosmologies even more outré than Bruno's such as Leonard Susskind's & Terence Witt's, but they will all be anthropocentric because their creators are human beings, not gods.
Concerning Leibniz. Analytic statements about empirical matters are sometimes the best we can do when the empirical matter in question is something that could never be known inductively due to technical or temporal constraints, & these are the types of things that Leibniz mostly addressed. His Monadology is unfalsifiable in scientific terms, not because his monads are pure abstractions, but because scientists will never be able to study matter at an infinitesimal level. They can't even study it at the subatomic level without becoming part of the experiment.
I suppose there are degrees of human-centered projections, depending on how attached we are to our intuitions and to our self-image. I think I made clear how Aristotle, Aquinas, and Feser stand on the anthropocentric side of the divide between anthropocentrism and cosmicism.
DeleteAn inhuman reality would be noumenal in certain respects, which would be the source of the horror and disgust we'd feel towards it. Hence the basis for existentialism, for noble lies, myths, bad faith religions, and so on. Nature's regularities can be explained, but its living deadness (its mindless, godless creativity and predictability) in general is as inhuman and monstrous as a zombie's.
As I recall, Leibniz says all truths are essentially analytic. There are no empirical truths since truth is conceptual containment and thus conceptually necessary. He makes this work by presupposing theism and the possibility of omniscience.
Leibniz thought all truths were analytic because he didn't believe in causation as we would understand it. For some bizarre reason he made his monads 'windowless', that is unable to perceive & thus interact with each other, which necessitates that God govern all of their movements according to some contrived plan, his 'pre-established harmony', that Voltaire took such pleasure in ridiculing in his Candide. I guess this was the only way Leibniz could shoehorn his God in to what otherwise would have been a form of atomism that took that philosophy to its logical conclusion. I sometimes wonder if Leibniz was really being sincere here or he was just trying to placate the church while hoping his more astute readers would understand that monads made God redundant to an infinite degree.
DeleteI find the idea of a noumenal level to reality not so much horrifying as superfluous. I suppose it could exist; but then gremlins might exist as well. Nietzsche dismissed the idea on pragmatic grounds when he asked what would we do with that knowledge even if we had it; but for me it goes beyond that question. Noumenal reality is, almost by definition, something not only imperceptible, but inconceivable. If we have no way of experiencing it then how do we know whether or not it exists? Wittgenstein wrote at the end of his Tractetus: "Of what we cannot speak of, we must remain silent." I would say: The unthinkable is not worth thinking about.
Nature's mindless, purposeless creativity is indeed awful to contemplate if you've spent your life steeped in theistic fantasies. When I really buckled down & read Darwin & began to grasp what he was saying it was quite depressing because I saw that compared to creation & even Lamarkianism, his theory was unimpeachable in its simplicity. Darwin only asks us to think through the logical implications of what we've known to be true for centuries. But is theism really so consoling? At least this way all the tragedies of life were necessary & unavoidable, not contrived by some God for dubious reasons that we have to convince ourselves are for the best as Leibniz would have it, but simply another thread in the grand tapestry which we must accept right along with the good. Believing in God just makes life more painful than it has to be.
Yes, Leibniz extreme form of rationalism contributed, in part, to an extreme kind of material skepticism where every empirical truth was disregarded in favor of mental abstractions. This gave the rationalist the freedom to posit as real the most abstruse mental elaborations.
DeleteI think that kind of extreme empirical skepticism is alive today in the form of conspiracy theories and "alternative" facts.
I don't think the monads make God redundant. They're windowless so they only unfold God's plan. Were the monads to interact, they'd have independent power which would threaten to usurp God's sovereignty. The monads would appear to be acting themselves rather than being instruments enslaved to their sole user. So I think Leibniz's system is essentially theistic, but I could be wrong. I haven't read Leibniz much in twenty years.
DeleteI wasn't thinking of noumena in Kant's way. I'm talking about things in themselves prior to their humanization. So it's "noumenal" in a loose sense that includes the subjects of objective, scientific or philosophical knowledge. The noumenal qualities shine through, then, in the alien inhumanity of the wilderness, of the natural as opposed to the artificial/humanized.
We can look on the bright side of an atheistic or of a theistic worldview. It's up for grabs which is the more horrifying scenario.
Kevin, that's an interesting line to draw, from rationalism to American paranoia and conspiracy mindedness. Might be a stretch, though. At least, another line would be from Christianity or theism in general to such paranoia. The paranormal looks like a secularization of theistic posits (UFOs and aliens instead of angels and demons, all-powerful governments instead of a sovereign deity, bureaucratic efficiency instead of supernatural miracles)
DeleteI know it's a long stretch, but the whole climate of political discussion about the value of truth vs. the "post truth" stance that's been on the forefront since Trump got elected, made me think that you could play devil's advocate with a rationalist mindset akin to Leibniz's or Descartes'.
DeleteFor, if we define truth only on analytic grounds and we completely disregard the empirical grounds, then every statement you utter is true as long as it's not self-contradictory. That, in a nutshell, is the basis for the ontological argument, I think.
But it can serve you to posit the existence of a myriad of other imaginary things! Jewish space lasers included.
Theoretically, a conspiracy theorist could claim that his disdain for objective truth is justified by the radical empirical skepticism that the philosophies of the early Enlightenment of Descartes and Leibniz defended. But I know it's a long shot, and I don't want to indulge the conspiracist's paranoia even further.
Kevin, it wasn't just Leibniz who contributed to that skepticism, but the empiricist David Hume. William Walker Atkinson summarized Hume's skepticism in his The Crucible of Modern Thought
Delete''Hume taught that we cannot prove the existence of God, of self, or of matter—all of which ideas are the illusions of imagination, having no basis in actual experience. He carried empiricism to the realm of pure skepticism.''
Empiricism, if taken far enough, inevitably leads to idealism since matter itself is just another concept & is hence an epiphenomenon of mental activity - which is essentially what the idealists are saying. This is ironic, because most people who identify as idealists profess to believe in innate ideas & deny that the senses can ever be a source of true knowledge. But whereas the rationalist idealist takes his ideas as true, the empiricist idealist is often more inclined to resign himself to skepticism - he's given up all hope of ever knowing anything for certain.
Yes, there is definitely a lack of empirical evidence for many of these conspiracy theories, but there also seems to be a great lack of rigorous deduction in them as well (why would elites harvest adrenochrome from torture victims when they could synthesize it in a lab?). I think the appeal of conspiracy theories might boil down to the Joker's observation in The Dark Knight: "Nobody panics when things go according to
plan, even if the plan is horrifying.
Ben, that was my point about Leibniz: windowless monads are safe because they don't make God redundant -- I can't think of any sufficient reason for making them windowless other than Leibniz's fear of being persecuted for atheism. But I understand this to be nothing but a supposition since I have no evidence -- call it my own pet conspiracy theory.
DeleteA noumenal side to reality in the sense of pre-human is certainly much more plausible since we know for a fact that the world is a lot older than us. Though even before humanity, there were animal species with nervous systems similarly organized to our own who would have experienced the world, at least on a raw perceptual level, much as we do. Are you speaking then of the uniquely human proclivity to assign causes to natural phenomena, to look for essences behind the accidents & to personify things that a less social species might see as non-persons? The problem I see with noumenal knowledge, even in your broader sense, is that any sapient species would most likely be social & thus predisposed to see personal agency behind natural phenomena & natural objects as artifacts of higher beings like gods. Our brains evolved to look for these things whether they really exist or not & so they become a prerequisite for any knowledge at all.
As for whether or not theism is scarier than atheism I suppose it is somewhat subjective. Some Christians choose to focus on Heaven rather than on Hell.
Sybok, we do tend to project our purposes and preoccupations onto the world. Even objective knowledge is part of an instrumental, progressive project.
DeleteThe noumenal aspect, though, is the upshot of objectivity, the suspicion we have when we recognize our cognitive biases, that nature's universal character doesn't align with our preferences and intuitions. This noumenal character falls out of the rejection of anthropocentrism. The question is what nature is like when we doubt our mental projections and reassuring myths. So the noumenal aspect lines up, rather, with existential principles, the cosmic horror genre, and some mystical philosophy and religion.
That's the closest we can get to natural reality, when we confront the monstrousness that's all along driven us to flee to our humanized alternatives to the wilderness. Indeed, the spooky connotations of "wilderness" alone provide much of the content of noumenal knowledge.
Sybok, you're right. Empiricism also leads to skepticism, perhaps even more so than rationalism. But I think they're different kinds of skepticism.
DeleteAn empiricist tends to be more skeptic toward the reality of certain abstract concepts (self, soul, god, etc.) on the basis that those concepts don't have a correspondence with empirical reality. That's why they put such an emphasis on the origin of concepts (experience), and hence their critique to the consideration of such concepts as "innate ideas". An empiricist doesn't think innate ideas exist, he thinks that every idea finds its origin in experience.
A rationalist' skepticism, however, is directed toward experience, on the basis that every truth must only be analytical. This type of skepticism is older, I think. It goes back to the eleatics, it is in Plato, and it is found in Descartes' Meditations in another form.
They both become unreasonable and dogmatic in the end.
I think idealism, understood as empirical realism, keeps the best of rationalism and empiricism, because it posits a necessary balance between reason and experience. Not one above the other. And hence avoids an unreasonable kind of skepticism.
Religions and conspiracy theories would find a rationalist's skepticism more useful, in my opinion, because they don't care if their narratives don't fit with the world. In your example, they don't see a problem with elites harvesting adrenochrome because they don't take into consideration real psychological motives, of real people, in real settings. It is just an abstract utterance, with no contact with reality, despite the fact that the people in those fantasies are supposed to be people in our reality.
Ben, so then perhaps King Solomon was on to something when he said that fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, if by "God" he meant the inhuman reality that can't be represented in an image or idol. That wisdom, unlike our scientific knowledge, would humble us through its very unknowableness. So we can't know anything about the noumenal, anymore than we can see the face of God, but we can experience it through the emotions of fear & awe.
DeleteKevin, I've arrived at largely the same conclusion with respect to rationalism vs empiricism. It's tempting to go with one & exclude the other, but that road can only lead to madness in the end. Sanity is a sweet spot between believing everything & doubting everything. Even if Leibniz was right about all truth being analytic because it exists in God's mind, I have no access to the mind of God which means I have to take everything in through my senses, abstract it & then go from there. This is why I see the whole rationalist/empiricist debate as fruitless. It ultimately doesn't matter whether our fundamental ideas are analytic or or not, innate or acquired. The only important question is whether or not we should trust them. That trust can't hang on something as one sided as whether or not its consistent with what we think we know (rationalism) or what our senses can register (empiricism). Our knowledge is always outweighed by our ignorance & our sight is limited to what may be an infinitesimal point of the electromagnetic spectrum. But each faculty can compensate (to some degree) for the defects of the other.
DeleteSybok, I think we also have some indirect knowledge of natural reality. Scientific knowledge is close to being noumenal, especially when combined with a philosophical synopsis.
DeleteI have an article coming out within a couple of weeks that will go over this, called "Transhuman Epistemology: Knowledge in the Greater Scheme." There I say that science humanizes the world, applying our least parochial filter to objective reality. Scientific knowledge is virtually noumenal.
What we learn, then, is that the real world includes this phenomenal, emergent level of changing states the patterns of which can be explained by creatures that likewise evolve within that natural order. This knowledge of noumena is incomplete, but it's not wholly subjective or arbitrary.
It's just that knowledge generally is pragmatic in that it prepares us for action. Deeper "knowledge" or revelation might entail an acceptance of the futility of all action. This is the melancholy mystical realization that the philosophical upshot of science is that the natural order is absurd and monstrous. As I put it in that article, either we assimilate nature with our cognitive nets, or the world swallows us in an existential grasp of the smallness of all our projects (and thus of the pragmatic underpinnings of objective/instrumental knowledge).
Good article,
ReplyDeleteI think you will also like my criticism of Feser, which I have put together in a short or not too long text. In my opinion, you only need to criticize the proof of God from movement and the sexual morality of natural law.
https://spirit-salamander.blogspot.com/2021/04/feser-criticism-in-nutshell-short.html
That's certainly an arsenal of quotations.
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