According to Aquinas, religion is a moral virtue by which one does well in rendering what is due to God. However, all moral virtues are described by the doctrine of the mean: they are means between extremes of defect and excess. The vice of excess that is opposed to religion is called 'superstition'.
However, there is an initial problem here. By its very nature, we cannot render what is due to God in such a way as to equal what God deserves. How then can we have an excess here? It's possible to have an excess because of an important feature of the doctrine of the mean that is overlooked. It is true that the golden mean lies between extremes, but these extremes can be extremes of conditions or circumstances of the act as well as extremes of the basic act. In this case, while the act of religion can never itself be 'too much' if properly directed, one can be excessive in religious devotion by rendering it to things other than God, or by failing to use appropriate means.
The virtue of religion has three primary ends, and these ends structure how Aquinas sees superstition.
(1) The first end of religious acts is to give reverence to God. Failing to do so is a sin of defect, but giving the reverence appropriate to God to something that is not God is a sin of excess and called idolatry. On Aquinas's view this is the most grievous kind of sin possible, although, as always, in particular cases it may be more or less bad due to circumstances, and the less bad cases of idolatry may sometiems be less bad than particular cases of other vices. Idolatry arises for a number of different reasons -- excessive attachment to non-divine things, perversion of our natural inclination to make representations of things, and ignorance of the difference between great creaturely power and truly divine power.
(2) The second end of religious acts is to be taught by God. When we engage in religious acts in order to be taught by something other than God, this is called divination. Aquinas thinks that this often arises through a pathological twist on a natural inclination: we have a natural inclination to know the future by human means (study of causes and the like). But we either get impatient or greedy and want to know the future by more than human means, or to know more of the future than human means (confined to things that happen always or for the most part) allow.
(3) The third end of religious acts is to direct human acts to God. When we adapt these religious acts so that our human acts are directed by them to things other than God, this is superstitious observance or magic. We fall into this vice through using inappropriate means to satisfy our natural inclination to learn things -- hence the longstanding links between the vice of magic and the vice of curiosity (which has to do with trying to learn things we are either not ready or not able to learn without detriment to ourselves or others) -- and through attempting to do things by using mere signs as if they were causes.
All of these are miscarriages of religious actions -- they render religious honor to things other than God. In addition, there is a fourth kind of superstition:
(4) When we really render religious honor to God, but in an inappropriate way, this is undue or inappropriate worship. Aquinas sees these as being a sort of religious lie. Thus someone who insisted on practices contrary to Christian principles or worship (e.g., demanding Jewish circumcision for entrance into the Church), or a priest who insisted on deviating from ecclesiastical requirements and customs in liturgy, is presenting a false sort of worship due to the mismatch between the means he is using and what it is supposed to represent.
All four of these involve a focus on various external features of religious acts, and thus neglect the heart of religious worship.
Thursday, April 07, 2011
March's Virtue/Vice Posts
March was a busy month for me, so there are only two:
Virtue
Religion
Vice
Craftiness, Guile, and Fraud
---
February's Virtue/Vice Posts
Virtue
Religion
Vice
Craftiness, Guile, and Fraud
---
February's Virtue/Vice Posts
Wednesday, April 06, 2011
There Comes a Point Beyond Which It's All Icing on the Cake Anyway
Martin Rees was recently given some Templeton prize or other; Templeton, of course, gives prizes and grants to scientists whose work has something or other to do with spirituality. There are people who are very critical of Templeton's work for encouraging the mixing of science and religion. (Rees is explicitly an atheist, but has been pretty vocal for the claim that science and religious belief are not inconsistent, and in arguing that the Church of England is valuable for cultural reasons). I wouldn't mention it at all, but I was extraordinarily amused by this:
Looking at the short version of Martin Rees's CV, which doesn't even list his many, many papers in peer-reviewed journals, I really think he can take the hit.
Professor Richard Dawkins, the Oxford evolutionary biologist and atheist, said, "This will look great on Templeton's CV. Not so good on Martin's."
Looking at the short version of Martin Rees's CV, which doesn't even list his many, many papers in peer-reviewed journals, I really think he can take the hit.
An Everlasting Night
A Hymn To Christ
by John Donne
In what torn ship soever I embark,
That ship shall be my emblem of thy Ark;
What sea soever swallow me, that flood
Shall be to me an emblem of thy blood;
Though thou with clouds of anger do disguise
Thy face, yet through that mask I know those eyes,
Which, though they turn away sometimes,
They never will despise.
I sacrifice this Island unto thee,
And all whom I loved there, and who loved me;
When I have put our seas 'twixt them and me,
Put thou thy sea betwixt my sins and thee.
As the tree's sap doth seek the root below
In winter, in my winter now I go,
Where none but thee, th' Eternal root
Of true Love, I may know.
Nor thou nor thy religion dost control
The amorousness of an harmonious Soul,
But thou wouldst have that love thyself: as thou
Art jealous, Lord, so I am jealous now,
Thou lov'st not, till from loving more, Thou free
My soul: who ever gives, takes liberty:
O, if thou car'st not whom I love
Alas, thou lov'st not me.
Seal then this bill of my Divorce to All,
On whom those fainter beams of love did fall;
Marry those loves, which in youth scattered be
On Fame, Wit, Hopes (false mistresses) to thee.
Churches are best for Prayer, that have least light:
To see God only, I go out of sight:
And to 'scape stormy days, I choose
An Everlasting night.
Tuesday, April 05, 2011
Some Jottings on Analogy and Via Triplex in Philosophical and Theological Lights
When reading Erin Kidd's defense of Sister Elizabeth Johnson in response to the USCCB's criticism of her recent book on theology (Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV), and in particular a passage from Johnson's book, I was reminded of how far away from contemporary theologians philosophers are. (It should be noted in what follows that I'm not attempting any sort of commentary on the USCCB's criticism or on the defense itself, only giving an example of how alien contemporary theology is from contemporary philosophy, at least as I see it.) The passage in question:
And then Kidd comments that this is simply a standard account of analogy. Perhaps in theology departments, but I think those of us in philosophy departments who deal on occasion with the theory of analogy would find some questions raised almost immediately, since our discipline requires recognition of issues that are not really found here. Some points:
(A) As a matter of technicality, the doctrine of analogy is conflated with the via triplex. The via triplex is an account of our knowledge of God, and is derived largely from an interpretation of the Dionysian (Pseudo-Dionysus). It's usually put in terms of eminence (or excellence), negation (or remotion), and causality (or affirmation), or some such, and the last sentence of Sister Johnson's first paragraph in the quotation above more or less captures it for the case of God and goodness: (1) we know by causal reasoning that the goodness of creatures can only be a participation in divine goodness, which is then the principle of goodness for creatures (causality); (2) however, because the effect is not commensurate with the cause in this case, we know God has goodness in a more eminent way than any creature can (eminence); (3) but our knowledge of this pre-eminent goodness necessarily falls short of what is actually in God because it is derived from creatures (negation or remotion).
The doctrine of analogy, on the other hand, is an account of the way things can be named or can take predicates, and is derived largely from an interpretation of Aristotle. When two things are given the same name, but the meaning is different from each, the names are predicated equivocally; when two things are given the same name, but the meaning is the same in each, the names are predicated univocally. The doctrine of analogy is the position that there is something between these two, in which the meaning is not wholly the same nor wholly different. As Aquinas puts it, "a term which is thus used in a multiple sense signifies various proportions to some one thing." 'Healthy' applies to diets, urine samples, and bodies; this is not univocal, because diets are not healthy in the same way bodies are. But neither is it purely equivocal, either, because healthiness in diets obviously has some close relation to healthiness in bodies -- to be more exact, healthy diets are those diets that have something to do with health in bodies (they are contributing causes), and healthy bodies are those bodies that are healthy. And similarly, mutatis mutandis, with urine samples.
Thus the two aren't simply the same. This need not be a problem, however; Thomists will often say that the via triplex is the reason for saying that terms are predicated of God and creatures analogically: because God is good (which we know by causality and eminence), 'good' can't be equivocal when applied to both God and creatures; but because God's goodness transcends all creaturely good in such a way that we know that the term 'good' does not adequately describe God (which we know by eminence and remotion), 'good' can't be univocal when applied to both God and creatures. This is not an argument that has convinced all non-Thomists, and you can find plenty of people who accept the via triplex without accepting the doctrine of analogy, and would not be happy with the conflation. On the other hand, perhaps Sr. Johnson was simply speaking loosely because of the occasion (because of other things she says, I don't think she was, but it's possible); and, in any case, non-Thomists are used to not being happy with these sorts of discussions.
(B) The "negating the negation" characterization of eminence, by the way, I have seen often among twentieth-century theologians; it seems to me to be one of those things theologians say without thinking. I don't know who started this fundamentally useless way of talking about it (one suspects some misguided attempt to conflate it with Hegelian dialectic), but in recent times it seems to trace back to Walter Kasper. Negation of negation in any strict sense just puts you back where you started; Kasper claimed that negating the negation posited something higher, but always seemed to leave it rather mysterious how it could possibly do so. This characterization of eminence also requires that eminence always succeeds negation; but in fact it's clear from classical texts that this cannot be taken as definitive: in the tradition you can find plenty of passages in which eminence flows directly from causation and remotion is treated as the pinnacle of our knowledge of God. Aquinas, for instance, sticks to no particular order: not counting any other works, Aquinas uses the order {causality, remotion, eminence} in Sent. (3x), SCG (1x), and ST (1x); the order {negation, causality, eminence} in Sent. (1x), SCG (1x), and ST (1x); the order {eminence, causality,negation} in ST (1x); and the order {causality, eminence, negation} in SCG (1x) and ST (3x). (The only order that seems not ever to be found in Aquinas is {eminence, negation, causality}, and this seems purely a matter of accident.) This is not at all uncommon. The three are traditionally based on nothing other than three aspects of our knowledge of causes when we reason from effects to causes; there's no particular reason why it should only go in one order -- you can have them in any order you please, or all separately, or all at once, depending on what you are doing. This has always struck me as an example of the way in which originally sophisticated accounts degenerate in contemporary theology -- Kasper gives one particular account of it, and it is repeated as a formula over and over again without critical examination, as if it were a magical method with self-evident grounds.
(C) As I mentioned, the point in (A) is mostly a technicality, and could be regarded as simply a result of writing in a popular manner. But most of what Sister Johnson says here about analogy is most naturally read as saying that we are really in the realm of equivocation, unless she is engaging in a much more massive set of conflations than suggested above. If it's predicated analogically of God and creatures, in what sense can we say that "our concept of goodness cracks open" when we are talking about God? What is the metaphor here supposed to imply? In what way does it follow that we "literally do not understand what we are saying"? If we literally didn't understand what we were saying, we would have no way of telling whether the terms are predicated analogically or not! Precisely the point of the doctrine of analogy is that we know very well what we are saying in both cases, and there is a clear link between the two, despite the fact that we are not saying exactly the same thing in both cases. All three of those points (we find the uses of the term intelligible, we see that the uses are not the same, and we see the link between them) require that we understand what we are saying. Possibly this is a problem arising from the conflation of the triplex via (which is about what we can know about God) with analogy (which in this context is about how we use terms applying to both God and creatures); our knowledge of God may fall short of all God is, but nothing about this implies that we don't know what our words mean or why it's right to use them. It's not at all clear how one can pull out of the doctrine of analogy the idea that "human comprehension of the meaning of 'good' is lost" when we apply it to God. God, who is good, evades our comprehension because the word 'good' doesn't cover His excellence, being limited by the fact that we apply it to him by seeing good in creatures and realizing that this is just a participation of divine good; but the word 'good' and the concept good themselves are not so elusive, and our intellects are quite able to handle them throughout. There seems to be an intrusion foreign to the doctrine of analogy here, leading to analogy being described in exactly opposite terms to those with which it is usually described.
UPDATE: James has a better discussion of this point.
(D) When I read something like, "Yet the very saying of it ushers our spirit toward the presence of God who is good" I begin to suspect that the theologian in question is merely playing with words. The saying of things we literally do not understand, of which we have lost all human comprehension, "ushers our spirit toward the presence of God who is good"; how, one scarcely can conceive. Sober minds that are not apt to be spirited away by characteristics of names and predications may well marvel at the ease with which theologians are ushered toward the presence of God; it is only slightly less wonderful than being ushered toward the presence of God by exclamation points and question marks or by modes of supposition. Even the triplex via is just about causal reasoning, or about participation in matters of cause and effect. Of course, Johnson is probably only being florid here in the bad-high-school-poetry style modern theologians seem more and more to love, in which incoherent effusion takes the place of coherent thought, but I prefer to think that this is really performative, and that Sister Elizabeth Johnson is actually demonstrating the account she has just laid out by saying something we literally cannot understand, and of which all human comprehension is lost. It indeed shares the most famous feature of the peace of God: it surpasses all understanding. The Holy Spirit ushers our spirit toward God; perhaps you can say that creatures from whom we begin to reason usher our spirit toward God; but saying things we literally don't understand doesn't in any comprehensible usher our spirits toward God -- it just leaves us literally not understanding. And while it may be true that "the play of analogy brings us to our knees in adoration," one suspects there are a few steps left out between the cause and effect here; I, for one, know of nobody who, recognizing the play of analogy in talking about healthy bodies and healthy urine samples, was brought to their knees in adoration because of it. Something would have to be going on beyond analogy itself, indeed beyond the threefold way itself. All we seem to have here is the sort of useless and florid rhetoric contemporary theologians like to think is profound. I don't mind florid rhetoric, of course; but the thing about it is that its proper place is as flourish, not as substance. Try to make it substance and it becomes mere wild handwaving.
What once was theology is now scattered over at least three disciplines, biblical studies, philosophy, and theology. This has been to the detriment of all three, but I think theology is the scion that has most lost its robustness, and the above is an example of the problem. Johnson's account is, as Kidd notes, fairly standard for theology departments. But it seems to me to be clearly a degeneration of the original -- it's what happens when sophisticated and difficult philosophical discussions become treated in a formulaic or talismanic manner. This is not the only case I've ever seen. (Every work I've read by Johnson, all of which are actually quite good in comparison with most theological work done these days, suffers from analogous problems: vague methodology with at best loose foundations, inconsistent applications of principles, uncritical reiteration of things, rhetoric doing the work of reasoning, extraordinary imprecisions, and in short the whole kaleidoscope that makes modern-day theology a mere bagatelle constructed of phrases people find striking rather than a genuinely creative and intellectually powerful discipline.) There are lots of intelligent people in theology; but I worry about the habits of thought they are being taught to inculcate in themselves.
Take, for example, the term “good.” Inevitably, our understanding of what “good” means arises from our experience of goodness in the world. We experience good persons, good satisfactions, good weather, and so on. From these we derive a concept of goodness that we then affirm of God who created all these good things. But God is infinite, so we need to remove anything that smacks of restriction. Thus we negate the finite way goodness exists in the world, shot through with limitation. But still we think God is good, so we negate that particular negation and judge that God is good in a supremely excellent way that surpasses all understanding. According to analogy, when we attribute goodness to God the theological meaning is this: God is good; but God is not good the way creatures are good; but God is good in a supereminent way as Source of all that is good.
At this point our concept of goodness cracks open. We literally do not understand what we are saying. Human comprehension of the meaning of “good” is lost, for we have no direct early experience of anything that is the Source of all goodnesss. Yet the very saying of it ushers or spirit toward the presence of God who is good, a reality so bright that it is darkness to our mind. In the end, the play of analogy brings us to our knees in adoration (Quest 18-19).
And then Kidd comments that this is simply a standard account of analogy. Perhaps in theology departments, but I think those of us in philosophy departments who deal on occasion with the theory of analogy would find some questions raised almost immediately, since our discipline requires recognition of issues that are not really found here. Some points:
(A) As a matter of technicality, the doctrine of analogy is conflated with the via triplex. The via triplex is an account of our knowledge of God, and is derived largely from an interpretation of the Dionysian (Pseudo-Dionysus). It's usually put in terms of eminence (or excellence), negation (or remotion), and causality (or affirmation), or some such, and the last sentence of Sister Johnson's first paragraph in the quotation above more or less captures it for the case of God and goodness: (1) we know by causal reasoning that the goodness of creatures can only be a participation in divine goodness, which is then the principle of goodness for creatures (causality); (2) however, because the effect is not commensurate with the cause in this case, we know God has goodness in a more eminent way than any creature can (eminence); (3) but our knowledge of this pre-eminent goodness necessarily falls short of what is actually in God because it is derived from creatures (negation or remotion).
The doctrine of analogy, on the other hand, is an account of the way things can be named or can take predicates, and is derived largely from an interpretation of Aristotle. When two things are given the same name, but the meaning is different from each, the names are predicated equivocally; when two things are given the same name, but the meaning is the same in each, the names are predicated univocally. The doctrine of analogy is the position that there is something between these two, in which the meaning is not wholly the same nor wholly different. As Aquinas puts it, "a term which is thus used in a multiple sense signifies various proportions to some one thing." 'Healthy' applies to diets, urine samples, and bodies; this is not univocal, because diets are not healthy in the same way bodies are. But neither is it purely equivocal, either, because healthiness in diets obviously has some close relation to healthiness in bodies -- to be more exact, healthy diets are those diets that have something to do with health in bodies (they are contributing causes), and healthy bodies are those bodies that are healthy. And similarly, mutatis mutandis, with urine samples.
Thus the two aren't simply the same. This need not be a problem, however; Thomists will often say that the via triplex is the reason for saying that terms are predicated of God and creatures analogically: because God is good (which we know by causality and eminence), 'good' can't be equivocal when applied to both God and creatures; but because God's goodness transcends all creaturely good in such a way that we know that the term 'good' does not adequately describe God (which we know by eminence and remotion), 'good' can't be univocal when applied to both God and creatures. This is not an argument that has convinced all non-Thomists, and you can find plenty of people who accept the via triplex without accepting the doctrine of analogy, and would not be happy with the conflation. On the other hand, perhaps Sr. Johnson was simply speaking loosely because of the occasion (because of other things she says, I don't think she was, but it's possible); and, in any case, non-Thomists are used to not being happy with these sorts of discussions.
(B) The "negating the negation" characterization of eminence, by the way, I have seen often among twentieth-century theologians; it seems to me to be one of those things theologians say without thinking. I don't know who started this fundamentally useless way of talking about it (one suspects some misguided attempt to conflate it with Hegelian dialectic), but in recent times it seems to trace back to Walter Kasper. Negation of negation in any strict sense just puts you back where you started; Kasper claimed that negating the negation posited something higher, but always seemed to leave it rather mysterious how it could possibly do so. This characterization of eminence also requires that eminence always succeeds negation; but in fact it's clear from classical texts that this cannot be taken as definitive: in the tradition you can find plenty of passages in which eminence flows directly from causation and remotion is treated as the pinnacle of our knowledge of God. Aquinas, for instance, sticks to no particular order: not counting any other works, Aquinas uses the order {causality, remotion, eminence} in Sent. (3x), SCG (1x), and ST (1x); the order {negation, causality, eminence} in Sent. (1x), SCG (1x), and ST (1x); the order {eminence, causality,negation} in ST (1x); and the order {causality, eminence, negation} in SCG (1x) and ST (3x). (The only order that seems not ever to be found in Aquinas is {eminence, negation, causality}, and this seems purely a matter of accident.) This is not at all uncommon. The three are traditionally based on nothing other than three aspects of our knowledge of causes when we reason from effects to causes; there's no particular reason why it should only go in one order -- you can have them in any order you please, or all separately, or all at once, depending on what you are doing. This has always struck me as an example of the way in which originally sophisticated accounts degenerate in contemporary theology -- Kasper gives one particular account of it, and it is repeated as a formula over and over again without critical examination, as if it were a magical method with self-evident grounds.
(C) As I mentioned, the point in (A) is mostly a technicality, and could be regarded as simply a result of writing in a popular manner. But most of what Sister Johnson says here about analogy is most naturally read as saying that we are really in the realm of equivocation, unless she is engaging in a much more massive set of conflations than suggested above. If it's predicated analogically of God and creatures, in what sense can we say that "our concept of goodness cracks open" when we are talking about God? What is the metaphor here supposed to imply? In what way does it follow that we "literally do not understand what we are saying"? If we literally didn't understand what we were saying, we would have no way of telling whether the terms are predicated analogically or not! Precisely the point of the doctrine of analogy is that we know very well what we are saying in both cases, and there is a clear link between the two, despite the fact that we are not saying exactly the same thing in both cases. All three of those points (we find the uses of the term intelligible, we see that the uses are not the same, and we see the link between them) require that we understand what we are saying. Possibly this is a problem arising from the conflation of the triplex via (which is about what we can know about God) with analogy (which in this context is about how we use terms applying to both God and creatures); our knowledge of God may fall short of all God is, but nothing about this implies that we don't know what our words mean or why it's right to use them. It's not at all clear how one can pull out of the doctrine of analogy the idea that "human comprehension of the meaning of 'good' is lost" when we apply it to God. God, who is good, evades our comprehension because the word 'good' doesn't cover His excellence, being limited by the fact that we apply it to him by seeing good in creatures and realizing that this is just a participation of divine good; but the word 'good' and the concept good themselves are not so elusive, and our intellects are quite able to handle them throughout. There seems to be an intrusion foreign to the doctrine of analogy here, leading to analogy being described in exactly opposite terms to those with which it is usually described.
UPDATE: James has a better discussion of this point.
(D) When I read something like, "Yet the very saying of it ushers our spirit toward the presence of God who is good" I begin to suspect that the theologian in question is merely playing with words. The saying of things we literally do not understand, of which we have lost all human comprehension, "ushers our spirit toward the presence of God who is good"; how, one scarcely can conceive. Sober minds that are not apt to be spirited away by characteristics of names and predications may well marvel at the ease with which theologians are ushered toward the presence of God; it is only slightly less wonderful than being ushered toward the presence of God by exclamation points and question marks or by modes of supposition. Even the triplex via is just about causal reasoning, or about participation in matters of cause and effect. Of course, Johnson is probably only being florid here in the bad-high-school-poetry style modern theologians seem more and more to love, in which incoherent effusion takes the place of coherent thought, but I prefer to think that this is really performative, and that Sister Elizabeth Johnson is actually demonstrating the account she has just laid out by saying something we literally cannot understand, and of which all human comprehension is lost. It indeed shares the most famous feature of the peace of God: it surpasses all understanding. The Holy Spirit ushers our spirit toward God; perhaps you can say that creatures from whom we begin to reason usher our spirit toward God; but saying things we literally don't understand doesn't in any comprehensible usher our spirits toward God -- it just leaves us literally not understanding. And while it may be true that "the play of analogy brings us to our knees in adoration," one suspects there are a few steps left out between the cause and effect here; I, for one, know of nobody who, recognizing the play of analogy in talking about healthy bodies and healthy urine samples, was brought to their knees in adoration because of it. Something would have to be going on beyond analogy itself, indeed beyond the threefold way itself. All we seem to have here is the sort of useless and florid rhetoric contemporary theologians like to think is profound. I don't mind florid rhetoric, of course; but the thing about it is that its proper place is as flourish, not as substance. Try to make it substance and it becomes mere wild handwaving.
What once was theology is now scattered over at least three disciplines, biblical studies, philosophy, and theology. This has been to the detriment of all three, but I think theology is the scion that has most lost its robustness, and the above is an example of the problem. Johnson's account is, as Kidd notes, fairly standard for theology departments. But it seems to me to be clearly a degeneration of the original -- it's what happens when sophisticated and difficult philosophical discussions become treated in a formulaic or talismanic manner. This is not the only case I've ever seen. (Every work I've read by Johnson, all of which are actually quite good in comparison with most theological work done these days, suffers from analogous problems: vague methodology with at best loose foundations, inconsistent applications of principles, uncritical reiteration of things, rhetoric doing the work of reasoning, extraordinary imprecisions, and in short the whole kaleidoscope that makes modern-day theology a mere bagatelle constructed of phrases people find striking rather than a genuinely creative and intellectually powerful discipline.) There are lots of intelligent people in theology; but I worry about the habits of thought they are being taught to inculcate in themselves.
Monday, April 04, 2011
S. K. S. Perry
S.K.S. Perry is a writer who put a novel, called Darkside, up on his website as a free online novel. He decided eventually to make a Kindle version because a number of his readers had expressed an interest in having one. When he did so, however, he found that someone was already selling a pirated Kindle version, without any permission. He contacted Amazon.com about it and...nothing has happened (by U.S. law they are supposed to take down the work immediately and verify the identity of the person who was selling it). You can read about his struggle to get Amazon.com even to acknowledge the problem on his LiveJournal. Amazon.com has a famously bad reputation (e.g., inconsistent on good days, outright useless on bad) when it comes to customer service in matters that can't be handled by automation; but this is an especially serious issue -- more than a mere mistake, they seem currently to be in violation of the law.
The free online version of Darkside, if you're interested in the book.
The Kindle version of Darkside -- the authorized version, that is, if you want to support the author. The handy thing here is that you can actually read the book first to see if you like it enough to download it to a Kindle.
The free online version of Darkside, if you're interested in the book.
The Kindle version of Darkside -- the authorized version, that is, if you want to support the author. The handy thing here is that you can actually read the book first to see if you like it enough to download it to a Kindle.
The Medieval Cram Text
Today is the feast day of St. Isidore of Seville, Doctor of the Church and widely regarded as the patron saint of the Internet. Why is he the patron saint of the Internet? (Besides the fact that John Paul II mentioned him in this connection once.) Because his most famous work, the Etymologies, is a collection of odds and ends on all sorts of different subjects. It is, in fact a set of quotations, paraphrases, and the like patched together and arranged under different headings; it was a quick resource for knowledge of grammar, science, legends, law, figures of speech, medicine, architecture, theology, and more. The full thing consists of 448 chapters, which is said at the time to have filled about 20 volumes; thus it is often called the first encyclopedia.
He is the most famous and influential of a family of saints; his brothers Leander and Fulgentius and his sister Florentina were all canonized; Leander became bishop of Seville, and Isidore took his place after Leander's death.
He is the most famous and influential of a family of saints; his brothers Leander and Fulgentius and his sister Florentina were all canonized; Leander became bishop of Seville, and Isidore took his place after Leander's death.
Road from Earth to Sky
The Rainbow
by Christina Rossetti
Boats sail on the rivers,
And ships sail on the seas;
But clouds that sail across the sky
Are prettier than these.
There are bridges on the rivers,
As pretty as you please;
But the bow that bridges heaven,
And overtops the trees,
And builds a road from earth to sky,
Is prettier far than these.
Sunday, April 03, 2011
Ladder
Byzantine Catholics celebrate the Sunday of John Climacus today, which I've always thought one of the more sobering ecclesiastical traditions in Lent. St. John Climacus receives his name because of his famous work, The Ladder of Divine Ascent (Klimax = "Ladder"), one of the great classics of ascetic life. The central image of the work is that of Jacob's Ladder; St. John, who lived from the late sixth century to the middle of the seventh century, uses this as an image for teaching monks about stages of spiritual discipline; he gives no less than thirty stages, beginning with renunciation of the world and ending with the high trinity of virtues (faith, hope, and love). In effect it can be seen as a discussion of thirty types of spiritual practice, arranged roughly in order of difficulty.
Climacus was a monk living in the Sinai region, and eventually became abbot of St. Catherin's Monastery; the monastery has in its possession a famous icon related to the work, dating from (I believe) the 12th century. The one above is the version of it available at Wikimedia Commons. It's quite the picture: demons are dragging monks down to hell by means of their passions, as they struggle upward to Christ under the encouragement of the angels and the saints.
So Still and Secret Is Her Growth
Fourth Sunday In Lent
by John Keble
When Nature tries her finest touch,
Weaving her vernal wreath,
Mark ye, how close she veils her round,
Not to be traced by sight or sound,
Nor soiled by ruder breath?
Who ever saw the earliest rose
First open her sweet breast?
Or, when the summer sun goes down,
The first soft star in evening's crown
Light up her gleaming crest?
Fondly we seek the dawning bloom
On features wan and fair,
The gazing eye no change can trace,
But look away a little space,
Then turn, and lo! 'tis there.
But there's a sweeter flower than e'er
Blushed on the rosy spray -
A brighter star, a richer bloom
Than e'er did western heaven illume
At close of summer day.
'Tis Love, the last best gift of Heaven;
Love gentle, holy, pure;
But tenderer than a dove's soft eye,
The searching sun, the open sky,
She never could endure.
E'en human Love will shrink from sight
Here in the coarse rude earth:
How then should rash intruding glance
Break in upon HER sacred trance
Who boasts a heavenly birth?
So still and secret is her growth,
Ever the truest heart,
Where deepest strikes her kindly root
For hope or joy, for flower or fruit,
Least knows its happy part.
God only, and good angels, look
Behind the blissful screen -
As when, triumphant o'er His woes,
The Son of God by moonlight rose,
By all but Heaven unseen:
As when the holy Maid beheld
Her risen Son and Lord:
Thought has not colours half so fair
That she to paint that hour may dare,
In silence best adored.
The gracious Dove, that brought from Heaven
The earnest of our bliss,
Of many a chosen witness telling,
On many a happy vision dwelling,
Sings not a note of this.
So, truest image of the Christ,
Old Israel's long-lost son,
What time, with sweet forgiving cheer,
He called his conscious brethren near,
Would weep with them alone.
He could not trust his melting soul
But in his Maker's sight -
Then why should gentle hearts and true
Bare to the rude world's withering view
Their treasure of delight!
No--let the dainty rose awhile
Her bashful fragrance hide -
Rend not her silken veil too soon,
But leave her, in her own soft noon,
To flourish and abide.
God and Obligations
Leah at "Unequally Yoked" had an interesting post a while back in which she was collecting challenging questions by atheists for Christians. A few of the questions that people came up with are genuinely of interest, and so I've been thinking of taking a few here or there and giving some responses to them. I don't know how many I'll do, but here is the first.
Do you believe that God has moral obligations? Why or why not?
Obviously this question will depend very much on one's theory of obligation (by which I mean not a theory yielding specific obligations but a theory of what obligations are and why we have any at all), and as it happens there are a very great many different theories of obligation. Because of this, everything I can manage to say in a single post will be rough and merely sketched-out. Interestingly enough, however, on most commonly accepted theories of obligation it's difficult to make sense of the claim that God has obligations in a non-metaphorical sense of the term, at least any that we could know about. (Of course, anything can have obligations in some metaphorical sense of the term, and the question in such a case would be what that particular metaphor is trying to convey; and while one could hold that God has obligations but we don't know anything about what they are, that is, for practical purposes, not really much different from saying that he has no obligations of any sort we can recognize.)
Roughly speaking, there are three major families of theories of obligation (not strictly exhaustive, although genuine alternatives seem fairly rare, and not mutually exclusive, although full-fledged hybrids seem fairly rare): those based on the claim that there is some kind of obligating authority (two major kinds of these); and those based on the claim that there is some kind of obligating sentiment. In the first obligation tends to be seen as a sort of legislation; the second obligation tends to be seen as a sort of drive or impulse (at least in the mentally healthy).
The sentiment-group tends not to have strong reasons to regard any obligations universal: if obligation is based on sentiment, then it depends at the very least on the nature of what has the obligation. Human beings can share obligations, because healthy and thriving human beings have the same nature, and so the same basic impulses and drives. If, for instance, as Hume posited, there are particularly moral sentiments, then these sentiments can obligate. As he says in talking about promises (Treatise of Human Nature, Book III, Part V, Section V):
As Hume himself recognized, however, an implication of this is that any clear understanding of obligations that we might have is confined to the human species as it exists now. If human nature were to change fundamentally, our obligations would change. And if we do not know the natural sentiments of a being, say, God, we do not know what obligations, if any, that being might have. This is a point Hume explicitly makes in a letter to Francis Hutcheson, whom he criticizes for ignoring it. Obviously not every sentiment-based account of obligation need be Humean; but Hume's problem will arise as a challenge to anyone who accepts such an account and holds both that God has obligations and that we can know anything about them. What one would seemingly have to do to answer the challenge is argue that God has to have sentiments sufficiently analogous to our own to allow us to talk about them. But this is not really consistent with most accounts of how we know anything about God.
Hume and a few others aside, most people ground obligation on authority rather than sentiment. They can be divided into two groups: those who hold that all obligating authority is extrinsic to the obligation itself and those who hold that in at least some cases the obligation itself can carry intrinsic obligating authority. The first group is arguably the largest family of theories of obligations, so let's take it first.
Extrinsic-authority theories of obligation can be of almost as many types as there are candidates for sources of authority, but in a sense they all depend on the imposition of will by means of some kind of sanction. One of the primary advantages of pinning obligation itself on an extrinsic authority is that pretty much everyone agrees that at least some extrinsic authorities can impose at least some obligations -- most people agree that the legislature can impose obligations on people, for instance. So the extrinsic-authority theorist is taking a phenomenon we all know well and generalizing it. Two versions in particular have been extraordinarily popular throughout history: divine command theories of obligation and social demand theories of obligations.
In divine command theories, say that of William Warburton in the Divine Legation of Moses, all obligation presupposes an extrinsic obligating authority. This need not strictly be God, but the obligations imposed by an authority are limited to the extent of power that authority wields: to find any universal obligations, one has to go to an authority with genuinely universal power. And obviously, God's the candidate who springs to mind for most people. On such a view God can only have obligations if He can obligate Himself. But as Warburton (if I recall correctly) argues at some length, the sense in which anyone can obligate themselves is a figurative sense of the word: if an obligation depends on your will, and there is no will higher countervailing you, then you can abolish the obligation as easily as you can impose it -- and an obligation that you can do away with as you please is not an obligation in the strict sense. This raises a serious challenge to anyone who holds a divine command theory of obligation and wants to say that God has obligations.
The other very popular extrinsic-authority theory is that obligation is established by the demands of society. Obviously when talking about divine obligations, the question immediately becomes, what society would have the ability to impose sanctions on God? And it's at the very least not clear, unless we are polytheists, that it is even coherent to talk about a society that can impose sanctions on God. But even if it is, how do we know anything about such a society? This, at least, would be a significant challenge for anyone who holds a social demand theory of obligation and wants to say that God has obligations we can know about.
So it would seem that the only hope for someone who wants to say that God has recognizable obligations is some kind of intrinsic-authority theory, in which at least some obligations obligate simply by being what they are. And indeed all the intellectually respectable accounts of divine obligations I can think of are intrinsic-authority theories; in general, they are the only theories that can easily handle the problem of how we can know anything about divine obligations (assuming that they present an account on which God could have obligations); although this is not strictly an advantage all of them share. The trick, then, would be to give an account of obligations in which it would be clear both (1) that this is a plausible account of the authority carried by obligations; and (2) that this account implies that even God would have obligations.
It is important to keep in mind, however, that not all intrinsic-authority theories of obligation do meet this second condition. An initially promising account of obligation for the believer in divine obligations, for instance, would be that of Kant, who holds that human obligations arise from features of human reason that necessarily and universally apply to anything that can genuinely be called rational. But Kant actually denies that God has any obligations. To have an obligation, there must be some constraint on will: that is, obligation or duty does not arise merely from the necessity of reason but from the fact that the necessity of reason would, if applied, restrict desires we have that would lead us away from doing what reason requires. But, says Kant, if there were a holy will, this latter condition would never be met. If God did have duties, we know what they would be, because God has divine reason, and duties in the strictest and most basic sense are necessary constraints of reason; likewise, on Kant's view we know something about God's moral life because God always acts according to divine reason. But nothing constrains God to do so: God, so to speak, acts as if he did have obligations, but God in fact does spontaneously and without obligation what we do only under constraint of obligation. Kant actually leaves open the possibility that this field of agents who act in harmony with moral law but not in any way obligated by it extends beyond God; if anything other than God has a holy will, it too acts completely in conformity with reason but without any obligation.
Likewise, natural law theories of obligation, the other major family of intrinsic-authority theory, hold that some things can, as law, have authority in and of themselves, namely, the first principles of practical reason. However, the most natural explanation for why these things have intrinsic authority is that they have been promulgated as law insofar as God has made beings that participate in eternal reason; and then the person who wants to accept this view but hold that God has obligations runs into self-obligation problems roughly analogous to those we saw with divine command theory.
These are by no means the only theories of obligation (Malebranche's theory of obligation, for instance, on which God does have obligations, fits none of these very well, although I suppose it's strictly speaking an intrinsic-authority view very different from either Kantianism or natural law theory), and obviously one could do some mixing and matching (holding that, for instance, sentiment is the foundation of obligation but that certain authorities can also, as a result, obligate externally) -- and, indeed, to account for many of the things we call obligations, one would arguably have to do some mixing and matching. And it could very well be that, for instance, one could have a divine command theory with a plausible answer to the challenge I raised above with regard to divine command theories of obligation. But (1) these seem to be far and away the most popular kinds of account historically, and (2) there are reasons in each case at least to worry about the claim that God has recognizable obligations.
For myself, I tend strongly toward an intrinsic-authority theory of natural law type, and I don't think we can make much sense of divine obligations in a strict and proper sense. I find, though, that people usually raise this kind of question as a challenge for Christians (or theists of any stripe) because they are assuming that if God has no obligations then anything goes and God could just as easily be a monster as otherwise. The brief discussion of Kant above at least shows that this cannot always be assumed; and there are good reasons in general for thinking that something can be good, and known to be good, without being obligatory, or known to be obligatory. Thus the question is not really relevant to whether God is good, except on the debatable assumption that God can only be good if He acts according to divine obligations.
So I don't think this is a hugely challenging question for Christians (or theists) in general. The really challenging question here is the nature of obligation, which has for literally centuries been a very contentious and controversial debate. Given an answer to that question, one's answer to the question of divine obligations falls out immediately. But the question of the nature of obligation is a question that arises for everyone.
Do you believe that God has moral obligations? Why or why not?
Obviously this question will depend very much on one's theory of obligation (by which I mean not a theory yielding specific obligations but a theory of what obligations are and why we have any at all), and as it happens there are a very great many different theories of obligation. Because of this, everything I can manage to say in a single post will be rough and merely sketched-out. Interestingly enough, however, on most commonly accepted theories of obligation it's difficult to make sense of the claim that God has obligations in a non-metaphorical sense of the term, at least any that we could know about. (Of course, anything can have obligations in some metaphorical sense of the term, and the question in such a case would be what that particular metaphor is trying to convey; and while one could hold that God has obligations but we don't know anything about what they are, that is, for practical purposes, not really much different from saying that he has no obligations of any sort we can recognize.)
Roughly speaking, there are three major families of theories of obligation (not strictly exhaustive, although genuine alternatives seem fairly rare, and not mutually exclusive, although full-fledged hybrids seem fairly rare): those based on the claim that there is some kind of obligating authority (two major kinds of these); and those based on the claim that there is some kind of obligating sentiment. In the first obligation tends to be seen as a sort of legislation; the second obligation tends to be seen as a sort of drive or impulse (at least in the mentally healthy).
The sentiment-group tends not to have strong reasons to regard any obligations universal: if obligation is based on sentiment, then it depends at the very least on the nature of what has the obligation. Human beings can share obligations, because healthy and thriving human beings have the same nature, and so the same basic impulses and drives. If, for instance, as Hume posited, there are particularly moral sentiments, then these sentiments can obligate. As he says in talking about promises (Treatise of Human Nature, Book III, Part V, Section V):
All morality depends upon our sentiments; and when any action, or quality of the mind, pleases us after a certain manner, we say it is virtuous; and when the neglect, or nonperformance of it, displeases us after a like manner, we say that we lie under an obligation to perform it.
As Hume himself recognized, however, an implication of this is that any clear understanding of obligations that we might have is confined to the human species as it exists now. If human nature were to change fundamentally, our obligations would change. And if we do not know the natural sentiments of a being, say, God, we do not know what obligations, if any, that being might have. This is a point Hume explicitly makes in a letter to Francis Hutcheson, whom he criticizes for ignoring it. Obviously not every sentiment-based account of obligation need be Humean; but Hume's problem will arise as a challenge to anyone who accepts such an account and holds both that God has obligations and that we can know anything about them. What one would seemingly have to do to answer the challenge is argue that God has to have sentiments sufficiently analogous to our own to allow us to talk about them. But this is not really consistent with most accounts of how we know anything about God.
Hume and a few others aside, most people ground obligation on authority rather than sentiment. They can be divided into two groups: those who hold that all obligating authority is extrinsic to the obligation itself and those who hold that in at least some cases the obligation itself can carry intrinsic obligating authority. The first group is arguably the largest family of theories of obligations, so let's take it first.
Extrinsic-authority theories of obligation can be of almost as many types as there are candidates for sources of authority, but in a sense they all depend on the imposition of will by means of some kind of sanction. One of the primary advantages of pinning obligation itself on an extrinsic authority is that pretty much everyone agrees that at least some extrinsic authorities can impose at least some obligations -- most people agree that the legislature can impose obligations on people, for instance. So the extrinsic-authority theorist is taking a phenomenon we all know well and generalizing it. Two versions in particular have been extraordinarily popular throughout history: divine command theories of obligation and social demand theories of obligations.
In divine command theories, say that of William Warburton in the Divine Legation of Moses, all obligation presupposes an extrinsic obligating authority. This need not strictly be God, but the obligations imposed by an authority are limited to the extent of power that authority wields: to find any universal obligations, one has to go to an authority with genuinely universal power. And obviously, God's the candidate who springs to mind for most people. On such a view God can only have obligations if He can obligate Himself. But as Warburton (if I recall correctly) argues at some length, the sense in which anyone can obligate themselves is a figurative sense of the word: if an obligation depends on your will, and there is no will higher countervailing you, then you can abolish the obligation as easily as you can impose it -- and an obligation that you can do away with as you please is not an obligation in the strict sense. This raises a serious challenge to anyone who holds a divine command theory of obligation and wants to say that God has obligations.
The other very popular extrinsic-authority theory is that obligation is established by the demands of society. Obviously when talking about divine obligations, the question immediately becomes, what society would have the ability to impose sanctions on God? And it's at the very least not clear, unless we are polytheists, that it is even coherent to talk about a society that can impose sanctions on God. But even if it is, how do we know anything about such a society? This, at least, would be a significant challenge for anyone who holds a social demand theory of obligation and wants to say that God has obligations we can know about.
So it would seem that the only hope for someone who wants to say that God has recognizable obligations is some kind of intrinsic-authority theory, in which at least some obligations obligate simply by being what they are. And indeed all the intellectually respectable accounts of divine obligations I can think of are intrinsic-authority theories; in general, they are the only theories that can easily handle the problem of how we can know anything about divine obligations (assuming that they present an account on which God could have obligations); although this is not strictly an advantage all of them share. The trick, then, would be to give an account of obligations in which it would be clear both (1) that this is a plausible account of the authority carried by obligations; and (2) that this account implies that even God would have obligations.
It is important to keep in mind, however, that not all intrinsic-authority theories of obligation do meet this second condition. An initially promising account of obligation for the believer in divine obligations, for instance, would be that of Kant, who holds that human obligations arise from features of human reason that necessarily and universally apply to anything that can genuinely be called rational. But Kant actually denies that God has any obligations. To have an obligation, there must be some constraint on will: that is, obligation or duty does not arise merely from the necessity of reason but from the fact that the necessity of reason would, if applied, restrict desires we have that would lead us away from doing what reason requires. But, says Kant, if there were a holy will, this latter condition would never be met. If God did have duties, we know what they would be, because God has divine reason, and duties in the strictest and most basic sense are necessary constraints of reason; likewise, on Kant's view we know something about God's moral life because God always acts according to divine reason. But nothing constrains God to do so: God, so to speak, acts as if he did have obligations, but God in fact does spontaneously and without obligation what we do only under constraint of obligation. Kant actually leaves open the possibility that this field of agents who act in harmony with moral law but not in any way obligated by it extends beyond God; if anything other than God has a holy will, it too acts completely in conformity with reason but without any obligation.
Likewise, natural law theories of obligation, the other major family of intrinsic-authority theory, hold that some things can, as law, have authority in and of themselves, namely, the first principles of practical reason. However, the most natural explanation for why these things have intrinsic authority is that they have been promulgated as law insofar as God has made beings that participate in eternal reason; and then the person who wants to accept this view but hold that God has obligations runs into self-obligation problems roughly analogous to those we saw with divine command theory.
These are by no means the only theories of obligation (Malebranche's theory of obligation, for instance, on which God does have obligations, fits none of these very well, although I suppose it's strictly speaking an intrinsic-authority view very different from either Kantianism or natural law theory), and obviously one could do some mixing and matching (holding that, for instance, sentiment is the foundation of obligation but that certain authorities can also, as a result, obligate externally) -- and, indeed, to account for many of the things we call obligations, one would arguably have to do some mixing and matching. And it could very well be that, for instance, one could have a divine command theory with a plausible answer to the challenge I raised above with regard to divine command theories of obligation. But (1) these seem to be far and away the most popular kinds of account historically, and (2) there are reasons in each case at least to worry about the claim that God has recognizable obligations.
For myself, I tend strongly toward an intrinsic-authority theory of natural law type, and I don't think we can make much sense of divine obligations in a strict and proper sense. I find, though, that people usually raise this kind of question as a challenge for Christians (or theists of any stripe) because they are assuming that if God has no obligations then anything goes and God could just as easily be a monster as otherwise. The brief discussion of Kant above at least shows that this cannot always be assumed; and there are good reasons in general for thinking that something can be good, and known to be good, without being obligatory, or known to be obligatory. Thus the question is not really relevant to whether God is good, except on the debatable assumption that God can only be good if He acts according to divine obligations.
So I don't think this is a hugely challenging question for Christians (or theists) in general. The really challenging question here is the nature of obligation, which has for literally centuries been a very contentious and controversial debate. Given an answer to that question, one's answer to the question of divine obligations falls out immediately. But the question of the nature of obligation is a question that arises for everyone.
Saturday, April 02, 2011
Diversity of Illustration and Variety in Method
Philosophical thought and knowledge, with that diversity of illustration and variety in method which follows from its universality, is in this respect somewhat in the same case with poetry. Of all the imitative arts poetry alone embraces and by its nature is intended to embrace the whole man. It is therefore free to borrow its similes or colours and manifold figurative expressions from every sphere of life and nature, and to take them now from this now from that object, as on each occasion appears most striking and appropriate....In the same way, philosophy is not confined to any one invariable and immutable form. At one time it may come forward in the guise of a moral, legislative, or a judicial discussion; at another, as a description of natural history. Or, perhaps, it may assume the method of an historical and genealogical development and derivation of ideas as best fitted to exhibit the thoughts which it aims at illustrating in their mutual coherence and connexion.....Every method and every scientific form is good; or at least, when rightly employed, is good. But no one ought to be exclusive. No one must be carried out with painful uniformity, and with wearying monotony be invariably followed throughout.
Friedrich von Schlegel, Philosophy of Life, pp. 188-189.
Friday, April 01, 2011
On Liberal Artisanship as a Precondition for Good Philosophy
I've mentioned before that the phrase 'liberal art' used not to be so gooey as it is today. If you go around asking academics to describe what people get out of liberal arts today, you'll find claims like the following:
Which is either mere academic gibberish to hide the fact that they are saying nothing or a sign that the people saying it have some severe mental problems. In actual fact, nobody who is truly passionate about liberal arts as liberal arts, rather than as propagandizing instruments or spaces to say and do any stupid thing one pleases, puts much emphasis on "disorientation" and "re-orientation". And that is because when you pierce through all this jargonistic fog, what people really love about liberal arts, and the reason why liberal arts are absolutely ineliminable from education, is closer to what the term 'liberal art' originally meant.
The word indicates a kind of craft; it's a productive skill, and one who learns a liberal art becomes an artisan, shaping, and making, and adapting things to good and useful and beautiful ends. Liberal arts are distinguished in one way from servile arts, which are devoted to making oneself useful to other people, and in another way from the manual arts, which make material products (handiworks, things that can be manufactured, things made and shaped by hand). Thus liberal arts are the crafts that involve making those intellectual and imaginative constructions that assist each person in thinking and determining his or her own ends as a free individual. The liberal arts in this sense are literally the arts of free reason.
And it cannot be emphasized enough: they make things, and these things, along with the products of all the other arts, are what make up the material of civilization.
The traditional list of the liberal arts, of course, mention seven pure liberal arts, divided into three (the trivium) and four (the quadrivium). The trivium consists of arts that are concerned in some way with verbal constructions:
grammar
rhetoric
logic
These are ordered in the list from the less abstract (and thus more directly concerned with words as such) to the more abstract (and thus more concerned with adapting words to the use of intellectual life as such). What things do these arts allow you to make? Putting it very roughly, meaningful and useful sentences (enunciations), well-constructed compositions (discourses), and well-structured arguments (syllogisms).
The quadrivium consists of arts that are in some way concerned with mathematical constructions:
arithmetic
geometry
music
astronomy
The first two in the list have the more abstract constructions; what they produce are mathematical constructions precisely as such. What they produce are, respectively, enumerations and measurements. The second two are less abstract: what they produce are mathematical constructions as applicable to certain kinds of domain. Both of these terms were broader than they are today. The medievals held that everything, not just sound, had a sort of music to it: there was a sort of music to the spheres and a sort of music to the human body, and so forth. When they said these things they meant that there was an implicit mathematics to these things, one involving proportions and ratios. This is what the liberal art of music concerned itself with: patterns involving proportions and ratios (harmonies and disharmonies, consonances and dissonances, non-verbal analogies). (Music in our sense involves manual art as well as liberal art.) Astronomy, too, was not confined to the heavens; surveying and navigation used astronomy all the time to make calculations based on stable phenomena. And that's what the liberal art of astronomy concerned itself: calculations involving measurements of phenomena. You can see immediately that music in this sense is a particular sort of applied arithmetic, while astronomy in this sense is a particular sort of applied geometry.
If one does not wish to stretch the terms so far as to keep the liberal arts to seven, one does not need to do so. But the fact of the matter is that the liberal arts in this sense are all the crafts that make rational artifacts for rational life. A liberal art in this sense needs no defending; anyone who rejects liberal art in this sense is effectively rejecting education itself. A liberal art in this sense is obviously useful: its whole raison d'etre is to make things useful for the mind. And there's nothing so fuzzy or vague or useless as "disorientation and re-orientation" here.
These liberal arts play a crucial role in serious philosophical thought. From logic, arithmetic, and geometry we learn rational method. And all of the liberal arts fashion the tools and instruments all good philosophers use to think: literary constructions and compositions, rhetorical discourses and tropes, deductive and inductive arguments, tallies and equations, comparative measurements, patterns and proportions, and computations involving phenomena. These are the products of liberal craftsmanship; these are the works of the liberal artisan. Because the mind uses these things to make itself more fit for discovering and understanding the truth, whoever can make these things well can in principle think more clearly, reason more fully, and understand more deeply than one who cannot. (In practice it is a little more complicated than this, because one needs not only the skill to make these things well but also the good sense -- the prudence -- to apply them properly.)
To make good philosophers, then, you need to teach them liberal arts first, because it is the liberal arts that give them the intellectual tools to reason and understand on a far greater scale than they can manage on their own. Good philosophy begins in the workshop of thought, where one manufactures what one needs to reason well and understand fully. People who have no such workshop-skills will be limited by the tools they have available.
Needless to say, it follows from this that we currently educate people very poorly; it's not that people don't get these skills, but they must either be drawing on natural talents or actively seeking them out on their own. What they do get of them is largely slapdash and piecemeal (and this is true even of logic, which is where our current philosophical curricula fall down least). I know mine was. Ideally, philosophy students should be explicitly and actively encouraged to learn languages, study literature, work on their writing and speaking skills, do archival research with historians, do ethnographic studies with anthropologists, do field work and laboratory work (even if only minor things) with natural scientists, study mathematics as far as they can. In practice, we could probably do a great deal to improve philosophical education simply by adding to the requirements interdisciplinary courses in undergraduate and an interdisciplinary year in graduate, so that they can do more to hone the intellectual tools they have available.
But in the larger view, what's really needed is closer focus on liberal arts in the educational system generally. After all, not all good philosophical minds go into academic philosophy; you can find true philosophers in other professions and trades. Further, since the liberal arts produce works essential for a thriving civilization, we are all better off if everyone picks up as many such skills as they can. And, perhaps most importantly of all, since they are the arts above all else that assist us in living lives that are genuinely free and rational, we have a moral responsibility to insist that they be taught. It is the liberal arts that make us more than slaves.
the aim of a liberal education is to unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what is going on beneath and behind appearances, to disorient young people and to help them to find ways to re-orient themselves
Which is either mere academic gibberish to hide the fact that they are saying nothing or a sign that the people saying it have some severe mental problems. In actual fact, nobody who is truly passionate about liberal arts as liberal arts, rather than as propagandizing instruments or spaces to say and do any stupid thing one pleases, puts much emphasis on "disorientation" and "re-orientation". And that is because when you pierce through all this jargonistic fog, what people really love about liberal arts, and the reason why liberal arts are absolutely ineliminable from education, is closer to what the term 'liberal art' originally meant.
The word indicates a kind of craft; it's a productive skill, and one who learns a liberal art becomes an artisan, shaping, and making, and adapting things to good and useful and beautiful ends. Liberal arts are distinguished in one way from servile arts, which are devoted to making oneself useful to other people, and in another way from the manual arts, which make material products (handiworks, things that can be manufactured, things made and shaped by hand). Thus liberal arts are the crafts that involve making those intellectual and imaginative constructions that assist each person in thinking and determining his or her own ends as a free individual. The liberal arts in this sense are literally the arts of free reason.
And it cannot be emphasized enough: they make things, and these things, along with the products of all the other arts, are what make up the material of civilization.
The traditional list of the liberal arts, of course, mention seven pure liberal arts, divided into three (the trivium) and four (the quadrivium). The trivium consists of arts that are concerned in some way with verbal constructions:
grammar
rhetoric
logic
These are ordered in the list from the less abstract (and thus more directly concerned with words as such) to the more abstract (and thus more concerned with adapting words to the use of intellectual life as such). What things do these arts allow you to make? Putting it very roughly, meaningful and useful sentences (enunciations), well-constructed compositions (discourses), and well-structured arguments (syllogisms).
The quadrivium consists of arts that are in some way concerned with mathematical constructions:
arithmetic
geometry
music
astronomy
The first two in the list have the more abstract constructions; what they produce are mathematical constructions precisely as such. What they produce are, respectively, enumerations and measurements. The second two are less abstract: what they produce are mathematical constructions as applicable to certain kinds of domain. Both of these terms were broader than they are today. The medievals held that everything, not just sound, had a sort of music to it: there was a sort of music to the spheres and a sort of music to the human body, and so forth. When they said these things they meant that there was an implicit mathematics to these things, one involving proportions and ratios. This is what the liberal art of music concerned itself with: patterns involving proportions and ratios (harmonies and disharmonies, consonances and dissonances, non-verbal analogies). (Music in our sense involves manual art as well as liberal art.) Astronomy, too, was not confined to the heavens; surveying and navigation used astronomy all the time to make calculations based on stable phenomena. And that's what the liberal art of astronomy concerned itself: calculations involving measurements of phenomena. You can see immediately that music in this sense is a particular sort of applied arithmetic, while astronomy in this sense is a particular sort of applied geometry.
If one does not wish to stretch the terms so far as to keep the liberal arts to seven, one does not need to do so. But the fact of the matter is that the liberal arts in this sense are all the crafts that make rational artifacts for rational life. A liberal art in this sense needs no defending; anyone who rejects liberal art in this sense is effectively rejecting education itself. A liberal art in this sense is obviously useful: its whole raison d'etre is to make things useful for the mind. And there's nothing so fuzzy or vague or useless as "disorientation and re-orientation" here.
These liberal arts play a crucial role in serious philosophical thought. From logic, arithmetic, and geometry we learn rational method. And all of the liberal arts fashion the tools and instruments all good philosophers use to think: literary constructions and compositions, rhetorical discourses and tropes, deductive and inductive arguments, tallies and equations, comparative measurements, patterns and proportions, and computations involving phenomena. These are the products of liberal craftsmanship; these are the works of the liberal artisan. Because the mind uses these things to make itself more fit for discovering and understanding the truth, whoever can make these things well can in principle think more clearly, reason more fully, and understand more deeply than one who cannot. (In practice it is a little more complicated than this, because one needs not only the skill to make these things well but also the good sense -- the prudence -- to apply them properly.)
To make good philosophers, then, you need to teach them liberal arts first, because it is the liberal arts that give them the intellectual tools to reason and understand on a far greater scale than they can manage on their own. Good philosophy begins in the workshop of thought, where one manufactures what one needs to reason well and understand fully. People who have no such workshop-skills will be limited by the tools they have available.
Needless to say, it follows from this that we currently educate people very poorly; it's not that people don't get these skills, but they must either be drawing on natural talents or actively seeking them out on their own. What they do get of them is largely slapdash and piecemeal (and this is true even of logic, which is where our current philosophical curricula fall down least). I know mine was. Ideally, philosophy students should be explicitly and actively encouraged to learn languages, study literature, work on their writing and speaking skills, do archival research with historians, do ethnographic studies with anthropologists, do field work and laboratory work (even if only minor things) with natural scientists, study mathematics as far as they can. In practice, we could probably do a great deal to improve philosophical education simply by adding to the requirements interdisciplinary courses in undergraduate and an interdisciplinary year in graduate, so that they can do more to hone the intellectual tools they have available.
But in the larger view, what's really needed is closer focus on liberal arts in the educational system generally. After all, not all good philosophical minds go into academic philosophy; you can find true philosophers in other professions and trades. Further, since the liberal arts produce works essential for a thriving civilization, we are all better off if everyone picks up as many such skills as they can. And, perhaps most importantly of all, since they are the arts above all else that assist us in living lives that are genuinely free and rational, we have a moral responsibility to insist that they be taught. It is the liberal arts that make us more than slaves.
Two Poem Drafts
Ache
The heart that cannot ache no love can know:
the strain of pinion-wing to rise above
and look upon the green of fields below
alone can teach us flight -- and that is love.
When wings unused for long are stretched to fly,
the muscles, moved and stressed, will feel the pain,
but oh! to soar and swoop with wing on high
will make such minor ache a kind of gain!
Thus proud the athlete feels the burn within,
resistance overcome and well endured,
as flame that ripples underneath the skin
to prove all challenge met, and prowess pure.
So let your heart from drowsy slumber wake
and seek out things so great, so pure, so fair,
so sad, your heart will at the vision ache
and thus grow strong, and heaven's glories dare.
Willow
The hollow-laden willow waves the leaflets of its limbs
in the winds that whip around it in the shadowed evendim;
my heart is hale and singing with a hymn of hope and praise,
a hymn of hope and praise that I have learned from summer rain,
a healing psalm so soulful that it saves from fear and pain
and lengthens out like prayer all the wonder of my days.
With the waving willow I with spirit rise and sway
as the raindrops, kissed by moonlight, on my eyelids leap and play.
The heart that cannot ache no love can know:
the strain of pinion-wing to rise above
and look upon the green of fields below
alone can teach us flight -- and that is love.
When wings unused for long are stretched to fly,
the muscles, moved and stressed, will feel the pain,
but oh! to soar and swoop with wing on high
will make such minor ache a kind of gain!
Thus proud the athlete feels the burn within,
resistance overcome and well endured,
as flame that ripples underneath the skin
to prove all challenge met, and prowess pure.
So let your heart from drowsy slumber wake
and seek out things so great, so pure, so fair,
so sad, your heart will at the vision ache
and thus grow strong, and heaven's glories dare.
Willow
The hollow-laden willow waves the leaflets of its limbs
in the winds that whip around it in the shadowed evendim;
my heart is hale and singing with a hymn of hope and praise,
a hymn of hope and praise that I have learned from summer rain,
a healing psalm so soulful that it saves from fear and pain
and lengthens out like prayer all the wonder of my days.
With the waving willow I with spirit rise and sway
as the raindrops, kissed by moonlight, on my eyelids leap and play.
Like a Vast Shadow
For whatever reason (perhaps because teaching Plato's Republic and Boethius's Consolation in succession really brings out the Neoplatonist elements of the latter), this poem has been much on my mind recently.
The World
by Henry Vaughan
I saw Eternity the other night
Like a great Ring of pure and endless light
All calm as it was bright;
And round beneath it, Time, in hours, days, years,
Driven by the spheres,
Like a vast shadow moved, in which the world
And all her train were hurled.
The doting Lover in his quaintest strain
Did there complain;
Near him, his lute, his fancy, and his flights,
Wit's sour delights;
With gloves and knots, the silly snares of pleasure;
Yet his dear treasure
All scattered lay, while he his eyes did pour
Upon a flower.
The darksome Statesman hung with weights and woe,
Like a thick midnight fog, moved there so slow
He did nor stay nor go;
Condemning thoughts, like sad eclipses, scowl
Upon his soul,
And clouds of crying witnesses without
Pursued him with one shout.
Yet digged the mole, and, lest his ways be found,
Worked under ground,
Where he did clutch his prey; but One did see
That policy.
Churches and altars fed him, perjuries
Were gnats and flies;
It rained about him blood and tears, but he
Drank them as free.
The fearful Miser on a heap of rust
Sat pining all his life there, did scarce trust
His own hands with the dust;
Yet would not place one piece above, but lives
In fear of thieves.
Thousands there were as frantic as himself,
And hugged each one his pelf.
The downright Epicure placed heaven in sense
And scorned pretence;
While others, slipped into a wide excess,
Said little less;
The weaker sort, slight, trivial wares enslave,
Who think them brave;
And poor despisèd Truth sat counting by
Their victory.
Yet some, who all this while did weep and sing,
And sing and weep, soared up into the Ring;
But most would use no wing.
'Oh, fools,' said I, 'thus to prefer dark night
Before true light,
To live in grots and caves, and hate the day
Because it shows the way,
The way which from this dead and dark abode
Leaps up to God,
A way where you might tread the sun, and be
More bright than he.'
But as I did their madness so discuss,
One whispered thus,
This Ring the Bridegroom did for none provide
But for his Bride.
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