Last of the Church Fathers

I had intended to put up something for the feast of Damscene yesterday, but forgot. December 4 is the memorial for St. Yanah ibn Mansur ibn Sarjun, better known as St. John Damascene, Doctor of the Church. 

The body which is born of the holy Virgin is in truth body united with divinity, not that the body which was received up into the heavens descends, but that the bread itself and the wine are changed into God's body and blood. But if you enquire how this happens, it is enough for you to learn that it was through the Holy Spirit, just as the Lord took on Himself flesh that subsisted in Him and was born of the holy Mother of God through the Spirit. And we know nothing further save that the Word of God is true and energises and is omnipotent, but the manner of this cannot be searched out. But one can put it well thus, that just as in nature the bread by the eating and the wine and the water by the drinking are changed into the body and blood of the eater and drinker, and do not become a different body from the former one, so the bread of the table and the wine and water are supernaturally changed by the invocation and presence of the Holy Spirit into the body and blood of Christ, and are not two but one and the same.

[St. John Damascene, An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, Book IV, Chapter 13.]

Soria Moria

 "Soria Moria Castle" is a Norwegian fairy tale, probably the most culturally important fairy tale in Norway itself, despite not being as world-famous as "East of the Sun and West of the Moon". It tells the tale of a talentless and good-for-nothing lad, Halvor. His fortunes change when he decides to go to sea (notably a life he can't easily run back home from); a storm drives him to strange shores, where he walks until he sees in the distance a castle shining in the sun. Inside he finds a princess at the spinning wheel, who warns him that it is no place for Christian folk, as the castle belongs to a troll with three heads. The princess schemes to have Halvor kill the three-headed troll, and then convinces him to rescue her three sisters, held by trolls in other castles. Then Halvor and the three princesses live happily together in Soria Moria Castle, but it almost comes to ruin when Halvor becomes homesick. The princesses give him a magic wishing ring that can take him home, and he really impresses everyone with his fine clothes, but he fails to follow their instructions in using it, so he loses it and the princesses as well, and has no idea where Soria Moria Castle is. He sets out to try to find it again, asking the advice of the Moon and the West Wind, and finally returns to discover that the youngest princess, the one he likes most, is having her wedding. But seeing Halvor, the princesses agree that he is more worthy to wed her, so the youngest princess throws the unfortunate bridegroom out the window and marries Halvor instead.

The story generally tends to be a symbol of the search for happiness and gives its name to one of the most famous paintings in Norway:

Theodor Kittelson, Soria Moria

It also gives the symbolism of Sissel's song, "Soria Moria":

Outside of Norway, it is much less known, but it has its occasional influence. "Soria Moria Castle" is the source of the name for Tolkien's Mines of Moria (Tolkien himself explicitly notes this in a letter somewhere). Most of the other associations that Tolkien's Moria has arise from what the name 'Moria' suggests in the context of his languages, but it's possible that the tones of longing and the Fellowship's finding that the Orcs have a troll with them might also be due to the fairytale.

Poetry and Philosophy

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. Now, no one would think of prescribing unconditionally to poetry, and compelling her to take all her similes and figures either from flowers and plants, or from the animal world, or exclusively from any one of the several pursuits of man,from the sailor's life, for instance, or the shepherd's, or the huntsman's, or from any of his handicrafts or mechanical arts. For although all such similes, and colours, and expressions, appropriately introduced, are equally allowable in every poetical composition, and none of them need be rejected, still the exclusive use of any one class of them as a law would hamper the free poetic spirit and extinguish the living fancy. 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 Schlegel, Philosophy of Life, Morrison, tr., pp. 188-189.

Two Poem Drafts

Boundlessness

The world is smaller than you know, my friend;
from vantage of our cramped and little souls
it seems to go forever without end,
as hill on hill in endless series rolls,
but no! it turns upon itself and curves
around so that you meet yourself again.
Instead of onward pace, the highway swerves,
you've met the end as soon as you begin.
So too our souls curve inward like a sphere;
with bounded surface touching outer world
our smallness makes a wall against our pride;
and yet we also hold a vastness dear,
true boundlessness within our sphere is curled--
but not ourselves, no! we hold God inside.

The Craft of Reason

The craft of reason none attain
except by matching wit and skill
against the sharpest minds before,

except by asking why and how,
by finding puzzles in the kinds
of things too easy to accept,

except by wonder reaching out,
except by patience hunting long,
except by musement, care, and hope.

Yet I Live, I Live

He Loves Me
by Mark Van Doren

That God should love me is more wonderful
Than that I so imperfectly love him.
My reason is mortality, and dim
Senses; his--oh, insupportable--
Is that he sees me. Even when I pull
Dark thoughts about my head, each vein and limb
Delights him, though remembrance in him, grim
With my worst crimes, should prove me horrible.

And he has terrors that he can release.
But when he looks he loves me; which is why
I wonder; and my wonder must increase
Till more of it shall slay me. Yet I live,
I live; and he has never ceased to give
This glance at me that sweetens the whole sky.

Andrew Wilson's Traditionary Argument

 Andrew Wilson (1718-1792) was a Scottish physician and philosopher, who lived most of his life in Newcastle and London. He wrote a fair number of works; all of his philosophical works were published anonymously, although he doesn't seem to have made any rigorous effort to keep his authorship secret -- my impression, just from his scattered comments, he published mostly for circulating among friends and just kept his name off the works to reduce any scandal that might arise from his often unconventional philosophical views, or at least to reduce the chances of that side of his intellectual interest interfere with his medical career. For instance, he was a sharp critic of Newtonian physics at a time when it was increasingly held as the gold standard of scientific progress.

Many of his philosophical works are on natural philosophy, and one could easily get the impression that he was a materialist. Indeed, this seems to have been the impression created among his friends from an early little book on the matter; to correct this, he wrote another, and packaged them together as Human Nature Surveyed by Philosophy and Revelation, which was published in 1758. One of the things that is interesting about this work is that it is an early example of the traditionary argument for God's existence.

I've talked some before about the traditionary argument, which had a particular vogue in France in the first part of the nineteenth century, after which it largely vanished. It is most associated with Maistre, Bonald, and Lamennais, and can be seen as something that arose out of conflicts between empiricists and rationalists and the attempt to find a third way. The most common form of the argument is fairly easy to understand:

(1) The senses cannot convey a number of ideas we clearly have (infinity, necessity, obligation, etc.).
:: :: :: This is the anti-empiricist premise, and is common among rationalists.

(2) Human beings are only able to think of these things with the aid of language.
:: :: :: This differentiates the weak rationalism of the traditionalists from the strong rationalism of more typical rationalists like Malebranche, and generally involves some concession to the empiricists of the necessity of sensible symbolism.

(3) Language is something that human beings only have through learning from another.
:: :: :: This is the traditionary part of the traditionary argument, and what gave the traditionalist movement its name.

(4) It is impossible to have an infinite regress of people learning language from teachers who learned language from teachers.

(5) Therefore there is a first teacher of language who was not taught language, which all call God.
:: :: ::  By (3), of course, this first teacher at least cannot be human, and by (1) would have to be able to communicate things like necessity, infinity, etc.

Andew Wilson's version is found in the the second essay in Human Nature, the Essay on the Dignity of Human Nature. The essay depicts human nature as a sort of continual interaction between mind and body, one in which the mind cannot even recognize its own existence except by interacting with the physical world. The highest expression of human nature is our faculty of language, for which our body is clearly adapted. Language, of course, has to be distinguished from vocalization (vociferation, Wilson calls it), which can only convey passions; language, however, communicates the operations of the mind. This, like much else in human nature, appears to subserve the end of knowing, and our capacity to understand the world is our most remarkable one. This capacity, though, is limited; our body is only partly subservient to knowledge, our capability for knowing vastly exceeds any actual opportunity we will have to know (due, e.g., to the shortness of our lives), and human beings seem to live rather erratically.

Our knowledge is based on the senses and on testimony, which gives us ideas of things not present to our senses. These foundations are extended through calculation (which Wilson takes to be analysis of sensible things) and analogy, by which we transfer ideas about sensible objects to nonsensible things; these extensions are part of that interaction that makes up human nature, as Wilson calls the former an appeal of the senses to understanding and the latter an appeal of our understanding to the senses. 

One of Wilson's major steps in reasoning toward a traditionary argument is his claim that "Man is born not a rational creature, but a creature capable of rationality"(p. 59). We cannot actually be rational without proper development. In order to be rational beings, then, we need to things to sense and language to go beyond them; we also need education and social relationships that give us what is necessary to our coming to know. (This effectively involves a rejection of strong rationalism.)

Given everything that has been said so far, it is therefore unsurprising that Wilson concludes that human beings are incapable of thinking about spiritual objects at all unless they are within a society that communicates them to us. Then how does any human being have these ideas at all?

It must be a Being of another and superior nature who only can discover and exemplify that kind of Knowledge to us. He must be one who is thoroughly acquainted, 1. with the frame and energy of our intellectuals; 2. with the extent and efficacy of the objects formed for impressing our senses; and 3. with the propriety of the analogy between what is mechanically obtruded upon our minds by Nature, and the things we are capable of being taught: in short, he must be God. None inferior to the Creator is equal for the administration of such Knowledge. (pp. 60-61)

To emphasize this, Wilson argues that it is impossible for Deists to prove on the basis of pure reason that God exists (emphasizing the weak rationalism component of the argument), and it is impossible for Skeptics to explain how anyone is able to think about something like God at all (emphasizing the anti-empiricism component of the argument). The key point in Wilson's argument against the Deists, one which he find him arguing elsewhere in other works, is his argument that you can't prove that the universe was the sort of thing that could begin to exist unless you can already prove that there is a cause capable of beginning the universe, and you can't prove there is a cause capable of beginning the universe unless you can already establish the universe is the sort of thing that could have a beginning. Nothing we know of through the senses gives us any reason to think that the universe was once nothing, so it would have to be something we get from testimony -- but on what testimony could pure reason rely in this case? It would have to be a revelation from the source. If we try instead to argue by some other route, like a governing mind giving order to the universe, the senses give us no reason to regard such a mind as separate from the universe. Again, we would need a testimony. Thus the Deist cause is hopeless: "...Man cannot discover God, tho' God can discover himself to Man" (p. 64).

The freethinkers are in no better position than the Deists, however. If Atheism were true, it is inexplicable how human beings ever got the idea of God to begin with. The senses, again, don't convey to us anything that suggests that the universe had a beginning or that there is a God; if they don't have testimony of such things, then, human beings could never conceive of them. And yet conceive of them we have, and, while not universal, they are in fact very common. How did we get a very common idea of something about which we can apparently form no ideas? Wilson gives the Skeptics credit for recognizing this themselves, and for seeing that their big challenge is not to find objections to theistic arguments but to find an explanation for the rise of religion. However, the attempts in this direction, Wilson does not find adequate; the common early modern explanation that religion arises from fear, Wilson thinks, explains exactly nothing that actually needs to be explained about religion.

If this is all true, the conclusion is unavoidable:

If the Mind of Man cannot discover God, and cannot out of its fund of thought yield what we know of his works and perfections; then the discovery must inevitably come from himself. (p. 68)

We are capable of believing or disbelieving the existence of God only because we are able to think about God; but we are able to think about God only because God communicated the idea of God to us, and therefore had to exist. Thus we have all the components of the traditionary argument.

One of the interesting things about Wilson's argument is that it is very early; he is writing well before Bonald, with whom the traditionary argument is most closely associated. Another is that the argument is generally found in a Catholic milieu, and in particular at a point where Catholicism mixes with skepticism (one reason why it did so well in France, but tended to be doubted by Catholic intellectuals at large despite the eminence of the intellectuals who defended it). Wilson is not Catholic. It's hard to say, beyond general terms, what his own religious views were, but he was Scottish and his son became a Presbyterian minister, there's no room for doubt whatsoever that here we have an example of the traditionary argument arising in a Presbyterian context. Catholic intellectuals tended to criticize traditionalism, which flourished in very skeptical environments, for being too much like fideism and for being too pessimistic about the powers of reason; there's a lot more room in Scottish presbyterianism for both fideism and pessimism about reason when it comes to discovering God, so one common link may be similarly skeptical environments.

Other posts on traditionary arguments (Brownson and Bonald are supporters, Rosmini a critic who nonetheless partly agrees with it):

* Brownson's Traditionary Argument for God's Existence
* Bonald and the Traditionary Argument
* Rosmini and the Traditionary Argument

The Straining of Hume's Chair

 In surveying, in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, several different possible candidates for the original impression from which our idea of power or causal connection is derived, Hume considers the suggestion that it could be do to our sense of effort (7.15n):

It may be pretended, that the resistance which we meet with in bodies, obliging us frequently to exert our force, and call up all our power, this gives us the idea of force and power. It is this nisus, or strong endeavour, of which we are conscious, that is the original impression from which this idea is copied.

He rejects this proposal for two reasons, only the first of which I want to consider here. This first reason is that we apply the idea of power to things we don't think have experiences of effort or endeavor, namely, God, minds in control of their own thoughts, and inanimate objects:

But, first, we attribute power to a vast number of objects, where we never can suppose this resistance or exertion of force to take place; to the Supreme Being, who never meets with any resistance; to the mind in its command over its ideas and limbs, in common thinking and motion, where the effect follows immediately upon the will, without any exertion or summoning up of force; to inanimate matter, which is not capable of this sentiment.

How much of a problem is this, though? Take a famous case: Hume visiting a friend once sat in a chair (I think the friend was Ambassador Keith), which then collapsed under his weight. (He remarked, I think to the friend's daughters, who were the other people in the room, that their father should keep stronger chairs for heavy philosophers.) Unless we are panpsychists, we can take as given that the chair did not have an experience of trying to hold Hume up, that it did not feel any straining of its parts as it collapsed. Given that Hume doesn't think that there's any contradiction in having an experience without a mind (he takes minds just to be bundles of ideas and impressions and thus not more fundamental than they are), it's unclear that he himself can actually assume this to be true, but let's take it as granted. There is still more to be said here.

One of the most important inferential patterns is analogy. Analogy plays a significant role in Hume's account; he thinks, for instance, that most of our understanding of mental operations depends on analogy. And Hume is, as I've noted before, a maximalist about analogical inference: he thinks analogy has at least some force as long as at least some resemblance exists. As he puts it in the Treatise (SBN 142):

Without some degree of resemblance, as well as union, it is impossible there can be any reasoning: but as this resemblance admits of many different degrees, the reasoning becomes proportionably more or less firm and certain. An experiment loses of its force, when transferred to instances, which are not exactly resembling; though it is evident it may still retain as much as may be the foundation of probability, as long as there is any resemblance remaining.

This account is reaffirmed in the Enquiry (9.1):

Where the causes are entirely similar, the analogy is perfect, and the inference, drawn from it, is regarded as certain and conclusive: nor does any man ever entertain a doubt, where he sees a piece of iron, that it will have weight and cohesion of parts; as in all other instances, which have ever fallen under his observation. But where the objects have not so exact a similarity, the analogy is less perfect, and the inference is less conclusive; though still it has some force, in proportion to the degree of similarity and resemblance.

Now, an important point here is that analogy already has to be involved when we are talking about nisus or endeavor, because we attribute to animals, and indeed to animals very different from us. We only experience our own. But due to the resemblance of animals to us, we have no problem taking them to have something like our experience of endeavor, even though we may well admit that we don't know exactly how they experience it. And if we turn our eyes to inanimate objects, can we say that there is no resemblance to exactly the kinds of situations in which we attribute effort to animals?

Consider our language, for instance. If I say that the chair tried to hold Hume up but failed, or say that the chair strained or struggled to hold him up, you all know exactly what that means. If you see an automobile struggling to get up a hill, and remark, "It's trying so hard!", I know exactly what you mean. And Hume himself recognizes that when we talk about power and causation colloquially, endeavor is often involved:

As to the frequent use of the words, Force, Power, Energy, &c., which every where occur in common conversation, as well as in philosophy; that is no proof, that we are acquainted, in any instance, with the connecting principle between cause and effect, or can account ultimately for the production of one thing to another. These words, as commonly used, have very loose meanings annexed to them; and their ideas are very uncertain and confused. No animal can put external bodies in motion without the sentiment of a nisus or endeavour; and every animal has a sentiment or feeling from the stroke or blow of an external object, that is in motion. These sensations, which are merely animal, and from which we can a priori draw no inference, we are apt to transfer to inanimate objects, and to suppose, that they have some such feelings, whenever they transfer or receive motion.

In this comment we have again the two reasons for rejecting it mentioned ("which are merely animal, and from which we can a priori draw no inference"), but it is, first, not really clear that people are actually supposing that inanimate objects have feelings when they say that an object is straining under the weight of a heavier object, and, second, since we are already having to analogize to attribute endeavor to animals, it's not really clear that we can't just keep analogizing and say that, to the extent that the behavior of inanimate objects is like that of animate objects, we can attribute to them something like what we experience as effort or endeavor. We don't even have to say that we know exactly what it is; the question at hand is not "What is it like to be a chair?" but "Is being a chair straining under Hume's weight in some way like being a human being straining under a heavy load?" If it is, the likeness gives some force to the attribution. If we get the idea of power from the experience of endeavor, then we can attribute something at least like it to the chair.

We can get out of this if we can break the likeness, and say that a chair's straining is, despite the similar language, actually nothing like our straining, so there is no resemblance. But this is not easy -- as Hume notes, the effects (transfer or reception of motion) are similar, so by analogy, one can conclude there is similar endeavor. You could get out of it by the Berkeleyan notion that nothing is like a perception except a perception, but then, if inanimate bodies are just bundles of perceptions (which that notion inevitably requires), it's not clear why it's impossible to say that one of those perception is an idea or impression of endeavor.

So we have the similarity. Analogy falls off as the resemblance falls off, but for a lot of physical actions, there isn't much difference, for that obvious reason that our body itself is engaged in physical actions. If I stoop under a heavy load, in physical terms, it's not actually all that different from a chair sagging under a heavy load. Why would it be? If we can separate off the feeling of effort in the former case, we can block the analogy despite the resemblance. This is what Descartes would do: the feeling of endeavor is a modification of thinking thing, the sagging is a modification of extended thing, and in our case they are causally connected, but they do not themselves have anything to do with each other, so we cannot attribute anything like the endeavor to the purely physical chair. (Descartes would regard that as a mistake like an Aristotelian might make.) But Hume is not a Cartesian; he can't separate off the endeavor as having to do with a different kind of substance.

Hume also says that the idea we get from the impression of endeavor can't be attributed to God or to minds doing things with their own ideas. It's not very plausible to say that we never experience endeavor of will or thought; again, we use language suggesting otherwise all the time. The same argument would seem to imply in the mind case. It would be, to say the least, a remarkable irony if a Humean were to reject endeavor as the original source of our idea of power on the grounds that it does not give us an adequate account of divine omnipotence, but in any case, Hume's own view of the idea of God is Lockean, which is to say, he takes it to be based on our ideas of our own mental operations, so on Humean principles the case of God would stand or fall with the case of the mind's internal operations.

There are reasons indeed not to tie the idea of causal power too closely to the experience of effort, but in the context of Hume's own positions, the claim that one can't be derived from the other because only animals experience effort seems inadequate to the conclusion that he wants to draw. Indeed, it seems to fail entirely. On Hume's account we get the idea of shape from impressions of shape, but nobody thinks that physical objects have the experience of shape, which is something we only attribute to animals, despite the fact that everyone, even Hume, attributes shapes to inanimate objects; and any skepticism about whether a physical object really has shape is irrelevant to the question of whether we get the idea of the shape attributed to physical objects from our experience of shape.

Thus there seems no reason not to recognize the straining of Hume's chair, even allowing that this straining is only analogous to the straining we experience under a heavy weight.