Introduction to this post can be found here.
Please note the text that appears in black below is not meant to be highlighted. Also, apologies regarding the lack of breaks in the text below.
++++++++++++
Theses – set 1 (the proper context, per Christianity):
-“God is love,
and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him.” (I John 4:16)*
*This is
truly what it means to start on a high note, rightly praising and exalting
love, and strongly exhorting and enticing with the highest and most perfect
example. If you talk all day about love being the most precious and most
perfect virtue, it is as nothing compared to what John says: “God himself is
love.” Accordingly, if you wanted to give a fitting depiction of God, you would
have to come up with a picture that is sheer love, as if the divine nature is
nothing but a fiery furnace and heat of such a love that fills heaven and
earth. Conversely, if you could draw and depict love, you would have to come up
with such a picture that would not be artful or human, not even angelic or
heavenly, but that would be God himself. (Vol. I, Wittenberg ed., on 1 John)
Luther’s
Bible Treasures, Lutheran Press, Minneapolis, 2015
-“In this is love, not that we have
loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our
sins.” (I John 4:10)
-“For the word of the cross is folly
to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of
God.” (I Cor. 1:18)
-Language – communication with those
who address us or whom we address in order to talk to or about one another, the
world, the variety of goals therein, etc. – is from God and is a great gift of
His love.
-Operating under the assumption that
there is a Divine Being who is responsible for the cosmos, it makes perfect
sense to think that this Divine Being would take appropriate measures to
clearly communicate with His creatures.
-Communication exists primarily for
the sake of love between persons, particularly the Creator and the crown of His
creatures, man.
-Johann Gerhard’s statement, “God
has communicated his entire self to you. Communicate also your entire self to
your neighbor”, is well said.
-While we communicate by a variety
of largely non-oral means, God chooses to give us certainty of His gracious
presence for us through simple and humble things like His words to us (also
bread and wine).
-Not only are appointed ministers of
the Gospel told that “he who hears you hears me”, but “if anyone speaks, let
him speak the oracles of God”, that is, words, which are “at work in you
believers”. (I Thes. 2:13)
-In fact, “The word… is a living and
life-giving instrument of the Spirit; it is in and of itself light, life,
power, as many, many Scripture passages explicitly and implicitly make clear”.
(Wenz, Armin)
-At work in us, words shape and
change us, either in the direction of maturity, as God desires, or immaturity,
as His enemy the devil desires. It is through language that God reveals
Himself to us and calls us by name.*
*Some
quotes from non-theologians exploring this more from a simple human
perspective:
“Out
of a thousand cares, impressions, and influences which surround, flow around,
and beset it, a child gradually stakes out its borders as an independent
entity. Its first discovery on its own, therefore, is that it is neither world,
nor mother or father, nor God, but something else. The first thing that happens
to the child--to every person--is that it is spoken to. It is smiled at,
entreated, rocked, comforted, punished, given presents, or nourished. It is
first a "you" to a powerful being outside itself--above all to its
parents. ...Hearing others say that we exist and mean something to them, and
that they want something from us, precedes our articulating that we ourselves exist
and our articulating what we ourselves are. We develop self-consciousness by
receiving commands and by being judged from outside.” (Rosenstock-Huessy 1988: Practical
Knowledge of the Soul. Norwich, Vermont: Argo Books, p. 16)
The
linguist David Bade comments: “[in] Rosenstock-Huessy's insistence that
language is in its origin and [sic?] always the call of one to another, then
rather than referring to language as a thing out there he is always referring
to a community of speakers teaching us their language that we might make it our
own, voices not within our brain but from the world around us who guide us into
the world we make together "towards an unknown future." It is the
speaking community, not a linguistic system, that teaches us and guides us…
For
Rosenstock-Huessy, our language is always a response to a prior call from
another: we listen to the past and speak now towards the future. His
understanding is also in marked contrast with the "scientific"
linguistics of Max Müller who argued that "Languages can be analysed and
classified on their own evidence ... without any reference to the individuals,
families, clans, tribes, nations or races by whom they are or have been
spoken" (Müller 1861: 76; quoted in Harris 2005: 86).” (p. 16, Bade R-H
paper)
Rosenstock-Huessy
again: "Nature" is an abstraction from the
saturated-with-language-world, the world minus speech. "Nature" is
the result of a subtraction. It is a misleading word, because it seems
innocent, a primordial sound, an "a priori." Yet this is to get
everything upside-down for in our actual experience voices call us into life
first of all, and water, earth, and windmay concern us only after membership in
society and participation in language securely lash us above the abyss of
nature. (Rosenstock-Huessy 1962: 43-44)
-More specifically, the key purpose
of communication, specifically but not limited to oral language, is that it
enables us to share, intelligently navigate, pursue goals in, and enjoy the
world and with other persons, present as well as past (i.e. remembering).
-Such is God’s design: all
things were created first and foremost for us human beings to inhabit and share
together in communion with Him.
-This is not to say that truth in
language is unimportant – it is always important, even as technical accuracy is
not always needed nor even desirable. To say “the sun rises” today still,
post-Galileo, still does not strike us as wrong or in need of adjustment.
This holds true for both oral and written communication, for example.
-What is more important – the basis
for beneficial communication – is that persons be true, hence acting
truly.*
*“true”
can also mean good things like being genuine, authentic, sincere, caring, firm
in allegiance, loyal, steadfast as well. For example, we speak of true
feelings, having a true interest in another’s welfare, or being a true friend.
Here, in this sense, it seems to me that “real” could serve as a synonym of
true. See http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/true
-Providentially, speech and the
written word are especially critical for making clear to human beings what
may be known about God, humanity, and God’s creation – as well as knowledge of
our salvation: what it means to be justified before God and to live as His
people.
-Usually
– and sadly – when one hears about how we must articulate the “living reality”
of Christian faith and an “organic-historical view” of the same, the real and
substantial core of historic Christian proclamation is in the process of being
removed.
-As regards the matter of proper
interpretation of God’s word, man cannot avoid being an interpreter of what he
hears, and yet, by the Spirit, he gladly acknowledges that the criterion of
God’s word is not himself but God’s self.*
*For
example, these statements from Fowl, in his book “Engaging Scripture”, are
problematic: “…theological convictions, ecclesial practices, and communal and
social concerns should shape and be shaped by biblical interpretation” and
“Biblical interpretation will be the occasion of a complex interaction between
the biblical text and the varieties of theological, moral, material, political,
and ecclesial concerns that are part of the contexts in which they find
themselves.” (60).
As
an alternative to this way of putting it, I recommend something like the
following:
In
the midst of the regular human act of listening (or reading), proper
interpretation of the Christian Scriptures in man’s
imagination in these last days is a gift of God given by the Holy Spirit, has
Christ as its focus, and no longer interprets particular books of the
Scriptures in, to some degree, the light of the contemporary circumstances of
the church within the world, but now interprets
contemporary circumstances in the church within the world primarily in light of
the whole of the Scriptures, as the Holy Spirit uses Scripture to interpret
Scripture, in line with the legitimate oral tradition bound by the rule of
faith (i.e. interpretation is conformed to the articles of faith, the loci, or
“seats of doctrine”) and attested to by miracles, i.e. those performed among
men by the Triune God
-Passages
like Rom. 3:19-20 instruct us that when we hear God’s word it is not the time
for us to be emphasizing how we are inevitably interpreters of the words of
others (perhaps even testing them against
other things we know and are confident are true).
-The
“validation” of God’s word is never subject to our evaluation of its
truthfulness to any degree whatsoever.
Nor is the establishment of God’s word
in any degree based on our critical evaluation of it.
-Re: most modern theological
hermeneutical approaches: “By principally making the interpretation [of the
Christian Scriptures] dependent on an existentialist preunderstanding, which is
supposedly “universal” to modern man, the result is not communication with the
author of the message. Instead the result is nothing but a monologue with
the reader.” (Wenz, Armin)*
*And
in the context of an scientifically naturalistic understanding of the world,
even infused with some kind of pantheism or soft theism, doing theology from an
existential framework is simply a stepping stone towards shifting or adapting
“universal” understandings – antithetical to God’s eternal law and
gospel.
-As God unfolds the Christian
message before us, particularly from the Holy Scriptures (not a “dead letter in
need of an external light”*), much can be learned about the specific nature of
the world He has created, including the crown of His creation, humanity.
*Because
of God’s providence and the personal power of the Holy Spirit who is always
ready to speak to mankind, we cannot responsibly say otherwise than that God’s
Word is like bread, intrinsically possessing nutritious power that does not
depend on whether it is eaten or not (Calov) – this means that the Scriptures
as well must always be seen as a spiritual, effective and sacramental power
(Wenz, Armin)…
-As regards the Christian Scriptures
in particular, “Truths that might not be understandable or plausible, when seen
in the light of preunderstanding [i.e. something like Plato’s anamnesis],
receive their plausibility when seen in the light of their specific, that is,
canonical context.” (Wenz, Armin)
-“It ain’t those parts of the Bible
that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.”
(Mark Twain)
-“…when [the Holy Spirit] comes, he
will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment: concerning
sin, because they do not believe in me…” (John 16: 8, 9)
-“[God] has fixed a day in which He
will judge the world in righteousness through a Man whom He has appointed,
having furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead.”
(Acts 17:30)
-“To join the human race is not
merely a consequence of our biological birth; to become human is to answer, to
become a language-maker ourselves, an activity that presupposes an
interlocutor.” (Bade, David, linguist)
-We have no right to assert when
that answering begins or has not begun. We should always error on the side of
caution, assuming that it begins, in some real sense, when biological life
begins.
-We can responsibly speak about the
meaning of the words persons speak to us. For example, “what do you mean
by that?”
-Related to this, as regards the
idea of “dialectic”, Abelard’s teacher Rosylyn was wrong to insist on what some
have called “vocalism”: the idea that dialectic deals with words and not
things.
-And yet, in addition to saying
“…mean by that?” we also say “What do you mean?”, rightly putting
the focus on the person and his intended meaning.* And it is even more
important to recognize and understand the persons involved – the wider context
of the relationship, and, in fact, the meaning of the relationship.
*“When we
answer, we neither repeat merely what the first speaker has said nor do we
start in our own language. ... To articulate, then, is a highly
complicated act that implies both: identity and variation. Without identifying
ourselves with the language as it stands, and as we find it, we cannot say our
word, and without varying and deflecting this material in a specific direction
that is constituting a new situation created by our own choosing, our entering
the ring of the speaking folks would be useless. ... the irresponsible
way of using ready-made slogans and judgments in mere repetition without making
them ourselves here and now, under our own name, is a vilification of
language.” (Rosenstock-Huessy 1970a: 49)….
The
linguist David Bade comments again: “Barthes, Harris and Rosenstock-Huessy
might all have agreed that the unsponsored language of slogans was politically
irresponsible and destructive of human relationships, but Rosenstock-Huessy
went so far as to insist that in authentic speech there are not only no
repetitions but "Es gibt keine Synonyme. [There are no synonyms.]"
(Rosenstock-Huessy 1956-1958: II, 77).”
My
note: all interesting thoughts worthy of
reflection: but to avoid an infinite regress here, we must assume some common
ground somewhere – where we can, in a very real sense, begin to understand one
another and the things we choose to speak about because we understand the words
that are being used.
-To say this is not to say that the
world of non-persons – perceptible but uncommunicative or less communicative
objects – is unimportant. It, of course, is critical.
+++++++++++
(the following theses, which I
am arguing are important for reflective Christians to embrace, deal in part
with matters of classical philosophy and epistemology and should largely be
able to be realized and adopted by reasonable persons of good will)
Introduction
-“They
love the truth when it enlightens them, they hate it when it accuses them” –
St. Augustine
Theses – set 2 (the irretractable human urge to state what is true)
-Despite modern viewpoints which
might suggest otherwise, all persons are interested in discovering what is real
and true to some degree.
-Again, “They
love the truth when it enlightens them, they hate it when it accuses them” –
St. Augustine
-First and foremost, this means
discovering what is real and true about themselves, other living beings, and
their relationships. Who am I? Who are you? Where did we come
from? Where are we going? Why are we here? How can we live together
in peace? Who is responsible for us? What is the meaning of human
language?
The words of Leonard Sussking may
resonate with some: “There is a philosophy that says that if something is
unobservable – unobservable in principle – it is not part of science.
If there is no way to falsify or confirm a hypothesis, it belongs to
the realm of metaphysical speculation, together with astrology and
spiritualism. By that standard, most of the universe has no scientific
reality – it’s just a figment of our imaginations.” (in Curtis White, The
Science Delusion, p. 151)
-….but I submit the searching words
of the late Christian philosopher Arthur Holmes should really resonate:
“Unconvinced that we live a value-free universe, that fact and value are
ultimately unrelated, or that we have to create all our own values rather than
discovering the good, I wanted to explore the fact-value connection in the
larger context of metaphysical and theological views.” (vii, Fact, Value,
and God)
-Second, this (all persons are
interested in discovering what is real and true to some degree) means
discovering what is real and true about the world in which we live – not only
as regards the truth about particular circumstances but also as regards larger
questions about everything that really exists, and what this means for us as
human beings in particular.
-Whatever view of the world a person
says that they have, in practice they assume, without fail, that there
are some certain aspects about the world/cosmos in general and human nature in
particular that remain the same.
-“…even Nietzsche and
post-structuralist historians involve themselves in ‘totalizing’ discourse and
the formation of meta-narratives…” (Becker, Matthew)
-While this may not immediately be
obvious to some, it is indeed a fact, for example, that all colleges
and universities – not just private or religious ones – are more or less
consciously taking deliberate steps to indoctrinate students into a
specific and limited range of acceptable ways of understanding the world.
-“Consistent principles” and “permanent
axioms” (whether unreflected-on assumptions or reflected-on presuppositions),
particularly about what we call human nature*, also make their ways into all
their theories of life in one way or another.
*For
example, in both postmodern hermeneutics (“everyday worlds”, “lifeworlds”) and
modern hermeneutics (“the existential situation of man”), a “universal human
consciousness is presupposed and made normative for interpretation” – the
“transcendental subject” (Wenz, Armin). E.g., for Kant, the laws of
morality are “freely self-imposed rather than subject to natural causes”
because they are founded on the reason of the rational self that
“belongs
to a real, supersensible world, rather than the [phenomenal] world of sense and
appearance[, which features “natural causality under the laws of
nature”]. Freedom of will is thus supersensible, noumenal. On the other hand, we do not know the ground of
natural causation; our knowledge of it is merely phenomenal. It is in
moral choice and action that the reality of the supersensible world is
revealed. For unless such a supersensible world exists, no moral
incentive is conceivable; there would be no causal connection between virtue
and happiness, and we could not explain pangs of conscience about past actions
that could have been avoided.” (Holmes, Arthur, 123)
-Further, to talk about
"objective reality" means that at the very least we, being personal
subjects, can "subjectively" agree that there are certain aspects of
reality (i.e. ideas, things, regularities, etc.) – considered both locally and
more broadly, considered both inside and outside our bodies, considered both
more particularly and more generally – that neither one of us should try to –
and in fact many times cannot – alter by our interpretation and
imaginative response to it.*
*And
if this is the case, what we debate – based on both the various kinds of
evidence that “find us” and that we seek to find – is simply where the lines
are on our imperfect “maps” of reality (to use what I think is a good metaphor)
– scrupulously created as “objectively” as we feel we can manage – should be
drawn and why. We cannot disagree with Plato and insist there are no
"joints" to reality whatsoever – that it can be "carved up"
in any way we like. In other words, we cannot say that there are no
limits to our interpretations of reality or to what our imaginations can
construct and build.
-One might embrace the insights and
partial truths that were, it seems, arrived at by means of certain
philosophical systems without embracing the system as a whole.*
*For
example, in order for a person to “[abandon] the old idea that whereas
knowledge may make a great deal of difference to the knower, it makes no
difference to what is known” or to appreciate/assert with confidence the truths
that “[nothing] can be known without involving a knower, and knowledge makes a
difference to people’s lives” or that “[Knowledge comes before data and
information because] ‘reasoning about the world is based on knowledge of the
world, not vice versa’” one need not become an adherant of the linguistic school
known as integrationism.
-Descartes was simply foolish when
he “…declared that all past beliefs, all ideas inherited from family or state,
or indoctrinated from infancy onwards by ‘authorities’ (masters, priests) must
be cast into doubt, and examined in complete freedom by the individual
subject.” (Ferry, Luc)
-In many circumstances, it makes
sense to assert, as did Robert McHenry, a former editor of the Encyclopedia
Britannnica “What I know is what I have yet to be shown is false”. Or, to
say along with Michael Polanyi, “we know more than we can tell”.*
*In
other words, some would say that this is contra Aristotle (in his “Posterior
Analytics”), who is presumed to say we can only have knowledge of something
when we are able to demonstrate it through a valid argument (Prior Analytics)**
**That
is, explain why something is the case (and the demonstrative chain explaining
the “whys” must, of course, come to an end, with “fundamental principles” laying
at the foundation***… and we come to these by sensation****, only after
repeated experiences…. then we will grasp the “universal features of things”),
where the premises of the argument must mention essential (not accidental)
features of the things being explained, and be “eternally necessary” as well
(HoP 36)
***
According to Hugh Benson, to get started in using these to assist in further
inquiry, these need not, as with Descarte’s “foundationalism” be
indubitable (HoP 37)
****According
to Hugh Benson, Aristotle thought that we could get started in inquiry by
things that were “more knowable in nature” (or sensation?) and things that were
“more knowable to us”. Aristotle was not a pure empiricist, akin to
someone like Hume. For example, he also believed that we get started in
our inquiry with “commonly held or reputable opinions”, and that these should
be carefully considered (though it seems to me, in Aristotle’s view, in order
for something like reliable historical testimony for example to finally be
considered knowledge, that sensation must somehow have a role in confirming it)
(HoP 36, 37)
Michael
Hanby is helpful here as well:
“As
obvious as it may seem, we need to be (continually) reminded that all science
is undertaken by human beings from within the world. Because all
science is commenced by us from within the world that encompasses us, no
science really commences, as our intractable Cartesianism should have it, in
“an Archimedean freedom outside nature” (Grant 1969: 32). This is why
Aristotle judged that no science established its own subject matter and no
science was ultimately self-generating or capable of establishing its own first
principles. It receives the former from the world – there could be no
biology without living things, for example – and it receives the latter on
loan, as it were, from a more fundamental or comprehensive science: with the
“laws of biology,” in modern parlance, being irreducible to but dependent upon
the laws of physics, and so on.
Precisely
because this Archimedean point is an illusion, because there is no outside
nature, the entire edifice is groundless in the sense that the first principles
(the source) of demonstration – ultimately being itself – are not demonstrable
on the basis of anything more basic. This is why Aristotle makes the
remarkable “concession” that the indemonstrable first principles of being qua
being which are at the ontological root of every science command faith (pistein).
This “faith” is understood not as a “decision to believe” this untestable
hypothesis rather than another – indeed he claims that in the “interior
discourse within the soul,” the truth of axioms (as distinct from hypotheses or
postulates) cannot be disbelieved – but in the sense of the “yes” implicit in
our reception of the world as it “communicates itself” immediately to our
understanding (nous) (Airstole, Topica, I, 100b20; Post. An.,
I,2, 72a39ff, 76ba21ff, 99b15-100b18). Aristotelian pistis is a
kind of trust, a willingness to receive the world on its own terms that is
constituitive of cognition as such. It is analogous to the relation between
perception and the lebenswelt in phenomenology, prior to the
“phenomenological attitude” or to its subsequent objectification by
science. To discover a “decisions to believe” is to have arrived too
late. It is rather like the faith praised by God in The Portal of the
Mystery of Hope, the masterpiece by the French poet Charles Peguy. “Faith”
in this sense is “easy,” and disbelieving is hard. It follows naturally
from a creation so resplendent that God declares, “in order really not to see
these poor people would have to be blind (Peguy 1996:6). (Hanby, No
Science, No God?, pp. 14-15)
-Sadly, “the
idea that one must accept an opinion because it is maintained by external
authority, of whatever kind, became so repugnant to the Modern Spirit as to
define Modernity.” (Ferry, Luc)
-While all of this was foolish on
Descarte’s part, all of the ills of modernity cannot be laid at his feet.
Theses – set 3 (universals, little
u)
-Contra the currents of modern
thinking, one cannot but assume the existence of what have been called
“universals” – or something akin to universals – that is, things or
entities which are or are potentially trans-cultural and
trans-historical, i.e. they possess certain forms, characteristics and
relations which, as best we can tell from our direct observations* do
not essentially change.**
*Or
from the direct observations of those we or others we trust have found to be
trustworthy authorities, living or dead.
**For
the theist, to say that there are universals does not mean to say that
universals other than God exist necessarily. It is totally reasonable to
believe that God chose to create some universals and not others which could
potentially exist, so long as they are in accordance with His
character.
-Please note that this definition of
universal, while it has things in common with past definitions, has an element
of nuance: consideration of one’s empirical experience and the experiences of
other human beings is “in the mix”.
-One might also associate something
“universal” with a term like “presence” – that is, having some relation to the
things that we sense and experience: surrounding us, having their own being and
meaning, and exercising influence over us – even as we might try, as regards
these or those things, to “demythologize”, “demystify”, and “disenchant them”.
-One can make a distinction between
“first order ‘universals’”, or things which can begin to be known, in time, by
all – the “human community of practice” – without qualification (things like
food, water, sky, mother, arms, ears, food, tears, sadness, running, sitting,
etc.) and “second order ‘universals’”, which have the potential, given certain
opportunities and circumstances, to be known by all (certain kinds of plants
and animals, certain kinds of earth, certain kinds of weather, etc.)
-Assuming that these “universals”
exist, we also can’t not avoid speaking in a way that reflects this – even if
there is, at times, strong disagreement over what are, in fact, “universals”.
-Some “universals”, such as of
justice*, goodness and love, while being known to be real and true, often seem
hopelessly fuzzy and/or multi-faceted.
*Re:
justice, for example, it is not necessarily the case that no sense of clarity
at all can be obtained: “Moral indignation is evident even among those, who,
like robbers, have little active regard for the common good. Gratitude
for favors only makes sense because a favor goes beyond what is just, and
resentment for injury only because it falls short of justice. All these
natural sentiments presuppose the idea of justice. Property rights
likewise depend on it.” (arguments and insights from Thomas Reid, per Holmes,
Arthur, 117)
-The “universal” of love, for
example – genuine concern for, and action on behalf of, the good of another –
is not known primarily in an abstract way in the human mind, but rather is
known largely by practice in the life of human beings (the Christian notes that
things like the Ten Commandments are also not only helpful here, but
necessary). It is from here that idealizations of the same arise.
-It is also the case that even if we
had the strength of will to fulfill these things in our own lives, they can
only be known and enacted in an approximate and imperfect way.
-The description of “universals”
above cannot apply to particular words or terms – these, varying here and
there, are not trans-cultural and trans-historical – and therefore, contra
Ockham, words should not be called universals (he thought words could be
universal because they are attached to “concepts”*, which are those things that
Aquinas believed are universal**). More on why this is the case and the
importance of language here below.
*The
endgame of Ockham’s approach where universals are not connected to things, but
concepts: “Ontological individualism undermines not only realism but also
syllogistic logic and science, for in the absence of real universals, names
become no more than signs or signs of signs. Language thus does not reveal
being but conceals the truth by fostering a belief in universals. In fact, all
universals are merely second or higher-order signs that we, as finite beings,
use to aggregate individual entities into categories. These categories,
however, do not denote real things. They are only useful fictions that help
us make sense out of the radically individualized world. They also, however,
distort reality. Thus, the guiding principle of nominalist logic is Ockham's
famous razor: do not multiply universals needlessly. Every generalization takes
us one more step away from the real, so the fewer we employ, the closer we
remain to the truth.” (Michael, Allen Gillespie. "The Theological Origins
of Modernity." Critical Review 13.1 (1999): 1-30. ProQuest.
20 Apr. 2015)
**for
more see the article “What’s wrong with Ockham…” (Hochschild, here)
-For our purposes, we can say that
the idea of form in particular (contained above in the definition of universal)
is basically of one cloth with the classical philosophical idea of “nature” (or
essence, “what it is” ; form basically makes it possible for substance, often
thought to be something that takes up space, to be perceived).
-If Rebecca Goldstein is correct
that Spinoza was correct to say that Plato’s mathematical standard of truth
made final causes of forms/natures (teleology) superfluous*, than Plato’s
unrefined thinking is certainly harmful to humanity in general and Christianity
in particular (Plato at the Googleplex, 53)
*Spinoza:
“Such a doctrine (teleology) might well have sufficed to conceal the truth from
the human race for all eternity, if mathematics had not furnished another
standard of truth… without regard to… final causes.”
-But Goldstein and Spinoza are
incorrect: the idea of form or nature brings with it the idea of causal powers
and teleology – i.e. predetermined conditions which things conform to:
“the ends or purposes of things follow from what they are and what is in accord
with or capable of fulfilling their natures” (Hochschild)
-Ockham’s insistence, created by his
“razor” which says we should not multiply entities more than necessary, that
“all that exists is particular acts and particular substances with particular
qualities we can be directly aware of” can suggest a radically unstable, or
contingent, creation without inherent logical necessities… the same can then
hold true for ethics* (Holmes 73, 74, see more below)
*Abelard
contended that while intentions could be either good or bad, particular actions
could not. Then, Duns Scotus was the first to argue that “As Old
Testament moral practice was preparatory, our present moral understanding may
also be provisional, and for this reason God’s actual commands to us may differ
from the Decalogue” (Holmes, 71). Ockham argued that if the world was not
contingent, this would necessarily make God subject to the universal forms that
were posited.** Of course, one who is more “Neoplatonic” (or, perhaps,
simply Christian?) in their view of God and the world, for example, need not
insist that a) there is only one possible way of structuring the world, b) that
God could not freely choose to create universal forms (and some and not other
potential others) that were in accordance with his nature.***
**The
Roman Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor says that nominalism was adopted to
safeguard God’s power: so that He would not be limited by overly strict
conceptions of nature, particularly human nature. This new focus on
“voluntarism” and “nominalism” seems to re-capitulate the Stoic’s reasons for
shunning theories of forms while upholding some kind of creator God (though one
with the cosmos) and His divine power.
***“It is
no accident that Socrates propounds what has come to be called the “Euthyphro
argument” on the way to his trial. The pompous Euthyphro confidently tells
Socrates that the holy is to be defined as “what the gods love.” Socrates
points out that this gets things backward: The gods love the holy because it is
already holy, not because they regard it so. In other words, things are not
good because a supposed God approves of them; rather, God approves of what is
good in itself, quite independently of his will. This Socratic argument
undermines the entire idea that theology can provide a basis for morality and
opens up a quite secular way of thinking about the nature of virtue. As Ms.
Goldstein remarks, this was a seminal moment in the history of moral philosophy
and indeed in the development of human civilization; it showed the power of
pure rational thought.” (from the WSJ review of
Goldstein’s book, Plato at the Googleplex)
-As a related aside, one simply need
not – and in fact should not – insist that God created (or especially needed to
create) the best of all possible worlds, because one can posit an immature,
yet, pure “very good”, as well as a mature and pure “very good” (which would in
fact ultimately be more desirable).
-“For Ockham, all talk of nature
acting unconsciously for an end is pure metaphor… causal explanations of a
mechanist sort alone are possible…. [he] opens the way to the purely empirical
approach of Baconian science” (Holmes, 74)
-Teleology is rightly seen as being
connected with ethics. For example, the connection between “male”,
“female” and “offspring” is clearly more than linguistic. And one does
not require formal syllogisms – but only personal exerience perhaps bolstered
by historical knowledge – to determine that all children have a mother and a
father. Here, what we have learned to call the science of “biology”
counters the various kinds of “Gnosticism”, where the material is evil due to
its constricting nature.
-In the early days of scientific
inquiry, with men such as Roger (not Francis) Bacon, “confidence that there
were such causal powers [due to the idea of form or nature] helped to account
for the order of nature and the very possibility of successful scientific
inquiry” (i.e. “general belief in [the power of forms] was [not] supposed to
replace the empirical work of discovering and characterizing how they
operated”)* (Hochschild)
*”It is commonly said that modern
science neglects formal causes but attends to efficient and material causes; but
classically understood, efficient and material causes cannot function or even
be conceived without formal causes, for it is form which informs matter, giving
concrete objects their power to act on other objects….” (Hochschild)
-“…The loss of formal causality is
thus in a sense the loss of efficient and material causality as well—an
implication that is not quite fully realized until we see it brilliantly explored
in the philosophy of David Hume.” (Hochschild)
-“With forms as causes, there are
interconnections between different parts of an intelligible world, indeed there
are overlapping matrices of intelligibility in the world, making possible an
ascent from the more particular, posterior, and mundane to the more universal,
primary, and noble.” (Hochschild)
-“It was only a matter of time
before some philosopher exploited, as fully as Descartes did, the new
opportunity of skepticism made possible by the nominalist rejection of forms
and formal causality.” (Hochschild)
Theses – set 4 (responsible and
irresponsible doubt)
-Nevertheless, there are, at times,
good reasons for some skepticism, albeit not radical skepticism: in this way of
understanding universals and what constitutes them, it is possible that some
things considered to be universals might be shown - to a very high degree of
confidence - to not actually be universals.
*For
example, platypuses might not cause us to doubt that “mammal” is a universal,
but we might, based on more exceptions, more readily ponder whether it is more
responsible to say that there are five rather than six animal kingdoms.
-Per Aristotle “Lack of experience
diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts.
Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena are
more able to lay down principles such as to admit of a wide and coherent
development; while those whom devotion to abstract
discussions has rendered unobservant of facts are too ready to dogmatize on the
basis of a few observations”.*
*Opposing
the view that the will is free and can by nature perfectly conform to correct
precepts, Luther said that “no one can become a theologian unless he becomes
one without Aristotle”, but what Aristotle says here in particular is not
opposed to biblical wisdom.
-And yet, taking into account the
discoveries of modern science, it is not responsible to think of forms or
universals as being only things like: redness, squareness, number, the smallest
particles of which all things are made, the “laws of nature”, or mathematical
truths.*
*Prior
to [“theological predecisions] in the order in which we articulate things – are
judgments regarding what Aristotle called being qua being or Aquinas
called esse commune, the understanding of “being in general” presupposed
by and operative within any notion of nature. For example, the decision to
regard “being” (esse) as synonymous with brute facticity, which is the
metaphysical correlate to an extrinsicist [this is Hanby’s term for
philosophical naturalism] understanding of “creation,” exercises a profound
influence upon what will be regarded as relevant content in the analysis of
“nature” and what inherent feature of our being in the world are to be regarded
as nonevidentiary, giving ontological precedence to analytically separated
parts, for instance, over formal and integrated wholes. Metaphysical
judgments are inherent in what counts as empirical evidence, and these
judgments mediate between science and theology proper…. [U]nlike modern science
which commences in what Galileo approvingly called the “rape committed on [the]
senses” in order to get to the “real world” lurking objectively behind their
deceptive deliverances, there is a sense in which ordinary sense experience
does serve as a kind of rational criterion for Aristotle. This is why he
can claim that the indemonstrable first principles of demonstration are better
known than the conclusions (Post. An.,I, 72a25ff)…..Analysis and
synthesis are attempts to “unpack” the truth of being impressed upon this
immediate understanding. Since truth is not exhausted in appearance it
needs to be unpacked, not because the truth lurks obscurely “behind” appearances
(where it can never logically be reached), but because it overwhelms
appearances, as the light of the sun overwhelms the eye of the owl (Aristotle, Metaph.,
II 933b10)…. Irreducibly metaphysical judgments as to the nature of
being, form, time, space, matter, cause, truth, knowledge, explanation,
wholes, parts and the like are the starting point of science, not its
conclusions. Because they are apropos of being qua being, these judgments
are not merely presupposed at the origin as of scientific inquiry where they
may thereafter be bracketed out. Since what is true of the whole is by
definition true of every part, they permeate the entire enterprise and are
operative inside of every subsequent judgment (Hanby, No Science, No God?,
p. 14, 16, 17)
And
as regards the usefulness of logic, it should not to be thought of as dealing
with our ideas and cognitive faculties, or human psychology (Locke, DesCartes,
Hume, etc. ; this was an idea built on by Boole with his “laws of thought”) –
or to be thought of as an autonomously existing entity (Frege**, and then most
all subsequent analytical philosophers) – but rather as dealing with correctly
identifying the natures and actions of the things that exist outside of
us.
**Boole
believed that a system of algebraic laws governed logic (math > logic), and
Frege believed that arithmetic could be reduced to logic*** (logic > math) –
this could give secure foundations to mathematics (the system of “logicism”)
***…beginning
with creating a logical formula that gives you an understanding of “number”
that could purportedly be built on. This is where Bertrand Russell upset
Frege’s applecart, involving something like the following question (not an
exact parallel to the problem): “if the village barber shaves every man in the
village who does not shave himself, does the barber shave himself?” If he
does than he doesn’t and if he doesn’t than he does.
-Why is this irresponsible?
There is absolutely no reasonable basis for asserting such a thing and it goes
against all our better moral judgment. What we have here in this
assertion is an irresponsible extrapolation based on a scientifically
naturalistic method of inquiry and explanation, which, regarding life’s deeper
matters, will always be inadequate.*
*[Determining
what is Ultimate], “cannot be, without any further inquiry or justification, a
matter of simple correspondence to material conditions (i.e. matter and energy)
since the question of whether such conditions themselves are adequately
explanatory of all experience that needs to be accounted for is an important
part of the problem”. (librarian Thomas Mann)
-This would mean that, for example,
even granted the truth of the evolutionary theory (for the sake of argument),
that a “human being” cannot really be considered a vague term in the same way
that the words “heap” or “bald” can (surely it is ridiculous to think that one
hair can make a difference, but at what point can a person can be said to
become bald?).*
*That
said, I do not think it is realistic to expect persons who place a
disproportionate amount of stock and value in philosophical naturalism – or
even methodological naturalism – to be able to confidently affirm this without
doubt.
-Even if there are problems with
modern forms of philosophical realism (see upcoming review of James K.A.
Smith), why would we assume that the universals humanity senses and experiences
could or would not exist independently of humanity?
-While there is no good reason –
especially for Christians! – to not assume a world/cosmos that exists outside
of human beings - James K.A. Smith also notes, in regard to radical notions of
relativism, “the alternative to anything-goes-ism is not some absolute standpoint” (see 16, 30, 115, 180, Who’s
Afraid of Relativism?)
-And yet, this does not mean that we
cannot assume, with C.S. Lewis (Abolition of Man) that a waterfall
exists in itself and is rightfully said to be “sublime” in itself (exhibiting
sublimity) – that is, “intrinsically” (even if such a judgement, of course,
cannot be made without a personal being able to make such a judgement).
-Whether any particular human mind
realizes or thinks this to be the case, respectively, is not the issue.
The waterfall possesses certain qualities that, in general, evoke awe and
humility in human persons we know.
-Regarding our senses, unlike the
Stoic’s “ideal sage” you cannot always know when you are free from the
possibility of error – when you should “assent” to this or that “impression” –
but you can certainly know at certain times when you are free from the
possibility of error.
-While Bishop Berkeley was clearly
radical in suggesting that there was not a material world which formed the
perceptions/ideas in our minds, he did say “of these ideas that we perceive
their essence is to be perceived” which rightly takes into account and assumes
God’s design of the world and His purposes in the world (as opposed to
materialistic views of the world that do not presume this*). Other than
this, not much good can be said about Berkeley’s thoroughly modern and radical
conception of knowledge.
*Surprisingly
Berkeley, who never did say “to exist is to be perceived” was not seen as a
rationalist but a kind of empiricist [though a radical one] – see more here.
-Regarding this matter of ideas in
our minds: we must maintain that while it is the case that universals have some
sort of existence independent of our minds (and not just our minds, but our
bodies, our whole persons) this does not negate the necessity of talking about
ideas or concepts – that is, the fact that we form in our minds – whether these
occur for innate reasons or are mostly due to personal experience and education
– conceptions of these universals.
-“Concepts formed by the mind,
insofar as they are causally connected to things which are the foundation of
those concepts, necessarily retain some intrinsic connection to those things.
While we can be mistaken in particular judgments, we can be assured of the
basic soundness of the mind’s power, thanks to the intrinsic connection between
concept and object.”* (Hochschild)
*Quote
goes on: “The kind of radical skepticism Descartes proposed, even if only
methodologically, was simply never entertained through most of the middle ages.
More classical versions of skepticism, usually having to do with the
fallibility of the senses, were commonplace, but the possibility of a complete
incongruity between the mind and reality—such that even mathematical concepts
could be the product of some deceptive manipulation and have no connection to
the mathematical “realities” they seem to represent—this was not available in a
realist framework for which concepts are formally and so essentially related to
their objects.” (Hochschild)
-We use and rely on concepts from
memory either when we are identifying things present to us to others, e.g.
“that, son, is a pig”, or when we are using language to talk with other about
things that are not immediately present to us: “Giraffes have long necks” ;
“That’s just human nature”.
Theses – set 5 (the role of
language)
-Despite the variety of languages on
this earth, we all learn some concepts derived from universals, that, for all
practical purposes, should always be assumed to be shared (for example,
"thirsty", "clouds", "tears", "sad",
"food", "mother", "father", “child”, etc.).
-Of course, this is not the case
with all concepts though – here we think of "hammer" and
"bottle" (made famous by the movie "The Gods must be
Crazy"). The currency of these concepts varies in the world due to
their geographical reach – or today, because of modern technology,
telecommunicational reach – through other human beings.
-This further means that things like
hammers and bottles – which many of us, familiar with these items, certainly
have concepts of – cannot be thought of as universals, but are rather artifacts
that are formed from universals, the more fundamental elements.
-Furthermore, this does not mean
that these things, by virtue of their being man-made, are not able to be
considered as being “good” in themselves (that is, exhibiting goodness, and not
merely because of what they do for us), that is, intrinsically.
-Other man-made concepts are even
more complex – things such as models, theorms, strategies, forms of government,
works of literature, etc., and are based on a great deal of human creativity,
imagination, and activity.
-As this relates to language:
regarding the terms or words used to label all concepts, it is responsible to
talk about attributing meaning to the particular words being used –
attempting, rightly, to match our meaning with the meaning of the
speaker.
-This is because the meanings
attributed to particular words does in fact vary, because of context or
otherwise* (deliberate attempts, whether conscious or unconscious, performed
overtly or covertly, to shift the way that words are used)
*The
meaning of various words in this or that culture will sometimes unintendedly
change or drift due to inventions, a shifting “social imaginary” (Charles
Taylor), and/or all manner of contextual factors.
And yet,
the fact that we can, with some effort, begin to understand the earliest
written documents that we are aware of, should cause anyone to second-guess the
abandonment of essences and forms some of those promoting the evolutionary
theory urge is necessary.
-Therefore, it seems that the
comment from Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht that “The presence culture… [as opposed to
the “meaning culture”] resembles the Aristotelian sign-definition, according to
which ‘a sign is coupling between a substance… and a form…. Consequently, there
is no side in this sign-concept that will vanish once a meaning is
secured”, needs to be nuanced (italics mine).
-On the other hand, when it comes to
the concepts themselves – particularly when they are pinpointed with the help
of context in the give and take of two-way verbal communication – we do not
rightly speak about attributing meaning to the concepts, but rather identifying
meaning in the concepts, due to the fact that the “universals” lying behind
them possess forms or natures which have meaning.
-The meaning of some concepts can be
fuzzy or more concrete – fuzzy in the sense of certain man-made abstractions
and extrapolations and more concrete as regards particular objects and things
(physical or not), particularly those objects and things we have identified
with “universals”.
-While this is not always the case,
we can observe in the world certain utterances/words can often quite
effectively function as classifications, or labels, of tacitly or explicitly
recognized agreement between persons about the common things, actions,
characteristics, etc. of which they are familiar (and to say this is not to bar
more metaphorical or creative usages, but to uphold them).*
*For
example, if I utter a single word that can have more than one meaning (or
homonyms), in most cases there is a meaning – connected with a concept – that
is more commonly associated with that term.
-This does not mean, as regards our
theories of language, that we can therefore endlessly abstract, extrapolate,
reify, etc.* We also must be careful of the distinctions that we make
between this or that thing, making sure that our distinctions do not become
separations: breaking apart what is meant to stay together.
*In
like fashion, as regards scientific theories vis a vis general or ordinary
experiential knowledge, interpretation can become much more tenuous and “iffy”
as one moves up in levels of critical reflection and context while utilizing
extraction, generalization, extrapolation and abstraction.
For
example, George Hamann wisely noted “…human beings experience a regularity in
the world around them, which they then improperly abstract into a concept of
‘natural law’ that excludes from serious discourse, the mystical, and the
religious”.
Again,
it seems clear that some interpretation is simultaneously based on higher
levels of context (including touching on historical and other
cross-disciplinary studies) and of critical and abstract thinking than
others. In some ways, this may, given a dearth of sufficient background
experience and/or propositional knowledge in the case of the uneducated
layperson, seem to increasingly remove the interpretation from reality (not to
mention the certainty we feel about what is “really real”, i.e. what things are
really like). To better understand this consider this case: although it
may have sounded particularly strange to non-Western, if not Western ears, in
the 1930s to say that a car “is an object which hurls us around the planet”
(found here),
this puzzling abstraction would likely have been more widely understood later
on. After all, for example, at a later date a picture of the earth taken
from the moon had in fact spread throughout much of the world, and become
well-known. Is it not reasonable to suggest that after sharing with
others experiences such as “looking” from “out there” back towards their common
home (perhaps after demonstrating how photography worked to some!), what may
have before been a puzzling abstraction in the popular mind had the potential
to become more widely “concretized”? And is it not reasonable to suggest
that experiences such as these may have a great effect on a shared
consciousness of what it means to be human? And is it not possible that
there could be other interpretations, which though based on high levels of
context and abstract thinking, can become more readily concretized in a similar
fashion? One thinks of the STM or AFM images representing the “charge
density” of atoms for instance, that seem to give a sense of the “shape” of the
atoms! It seems to me that sometimes, interpretations that go beyond
stating the most elementary, readily observable, every-day, rough-and-ready
facts about things can be “concretized” to a greater or lesser extent – and to
do this is responsible – and other times they cannot.
-In performing actions similar to
these, for example, “Kant, so Hamann claims, with his philosophy divorces what
God has joined together: aesthetic and logic, history and reason, the empirical
and the rational, a priori and a posteriori….” (Wenz, 17)*
*Interestingly,
it seems Hamann himself is not exempt from this Scheidekunst, or “art of
divorce”: “He was greatly influenced by David Hume.
This is most evident in
Hamann’s conviction that faith and belief, rather than knowledge, determine
human actions.” (Wikipedia). Biblically, there is an undeniably close
connection between faith and knowledge.
-Speaking more philosophically now
in regard to language and communication: particular words in particular
contextual situations can, at times, be clearly discerned to point to concepts,
some universally shared by virtue of their derivation from “universals”, and
some (for example, the words “telephone”, “cell phone”, and “smart phone”)
shared more or less widely by virtue of their geographical reach through other
human beings (but facilitated more widely now by that very same modern
communication)
-One need not imagine that a word or
sign is a form which, as one linguist put it, “carries its own meaning
permanently around with it”. Neither when texts are examined must one
rivet on “the clear meaning of the words” at the expense of wider context,
including the discernible meaning, or nature of, the personal relationships
being attested to and revealed by those words.
-Linguist David Bade: our “’stubborn
forgetfulness of the obvious ... that the logic of the sentences of language is
based on responses between people’ (Rosenstock-Huessy 1981a: 62) leads
linguists to base their analysis on an inadequate appreciation of the temporal
and social dimensions of language, a theoretical blindness that
[Rosenstock-Huessy] attributes to literacy…”
-"The abstract sentence, we may
venture to suggest, is conditioned by its literary character. Speech, in its
origins, was unwilling and incapable of formulating sentences into which
speaker and listener did not enter" (Rosenstock-Huessy 1981a: 42).*
*Contra
Hobbes and Leibniz (who wanted a “universal logical language”), thinking cannot
be equated with calculation, as some who have noticed similarities between
algebra and logic, for example, have thought. In spite of using the cover
of purportedly non-physically/empirically-related-mathematical-truth, this is
nevertheless crass reductionism of the worst materialistic kind.
Theses – set 6 (common moral ground)
-What we these days call a person’s
worldview – shaped in part by language itself* – may certainly come to color
and affect one’s concepts of the universals that exist.
*To
some degree, it is true that “the forms of knowledge recognized and valued in
any society depend on the forms of communication practiced in that society”
(integrationist linguist Roy Harris). Analogously, the theologian Oswald
Bayer has a point when he says, speaking of God Himself, “Voices and letters,
language and Scripture constitute time and space for us humans” (Bayer than
goes on to point to the church’s liturgy, providing not only words, but
sacraments).
-It is noteworthy however, that
neither all facts nor concepts are hopelessly in dispute due to their being
"impregnated by culturally constricting conceptual schemata" born of
rivalry / power.*
*Perhaps
very young children, when such a disdain for “common-ground-facts” is asserted,
disinterested as they are in the power-preserving aspects of conceptual
constructions, will be the first to say that the emperor has no
clothes.
-The power and divinity of the
Divinity, Mind, Logos, etc. responsible for what we experience in the universe
can be clearly perceived. “The conscience is sufficiently discerning to deprive
us of any excuse of ignorance” (Holmes, 82).
-Generally speaking, a refusal to
recognize this results in a refusal to give thanks and increased moral
dissolution in man – in some cases, where intellectual justification for this
attitude is sought, concepts of “natural law” are no longer seen to be
intrinsic to a natural order that features stability and permanence.
-Viewpoints that deny all relativism
but flee from all form of philosophical realism as well are essentially more
“gnostic” in that they say knowledge of transcendent things comes exclusively
or primarily by way of internal and intuitive means.
-Again, this transcendent knowledge
cannot be separated from the extrinsic things around us however, which possess
their own instrinsic natures and properties. Likewise – and closely
related to the above – one must take into account that one’s conscience, while
innate, can also be formed rightly or wrongly.
-Again, this sense of “natural
teleology” is dulled by Ockham’s denial of forms and the purely mechanistic
science made thinkable by it.* “Being is not intrinsically good but is
value-free; fact and value are separated.” (Holmes, 100)
*Even
as Aristotle’s notion of teleology was largely abandoned by “forward-looking”
intellectuals, the desire to hold on to the form of his logic remained
(particularly utilized by Kant, who saw it as a “completed science”), which
went from being seen as a study of valid forms of deductive reasoning (which
Bacon said was uninteresting: it could demonstrate knowledge but did not give
us new knowledge) to the idea of logic as a “science of inquiry” (similar to
how geometric theorems are logically built up from axioms [Euclid proving there
are infinitely many primes, for example], utilizing induction, inference, probability,
etc).
-“Kant sums this up when, in
objecting to the ontological argument, he declares, seemingly vs. “I AM THAT I
AM”, (Ex. 3:14) that being is not a proper predicate.” (Holmes, 100)*
*Holmes
goes on to write here: “….The rejection of Scholasticism had striped being of
its transcendental attributes, and left only bare facts, purposeless and
dead. “Can I take a thing so dead?” asked Tennyson, “embrace it for my
mortal good?” (100) Holmes rightly assumes that order in the world
implies purpose, and purpose, a mind. Nevertheless, those with more
Eastern views of the world do not usually speak of transcendence, but immanence
– they tend to see the spiritual and physical as completely intertwined – i.e.
the idea of the “supernatural” is nonsensical. Those who practice Eastern
religions and inhabit the elite quarters of society also tend to see the “god”
behind the universe’s mind as impersonal. This seems to be a “halfway
house” between theism and atheism, much like deism. This can be seen in
spades in Rebecca Goldstein’s new book “Plato at the Googleplex”, where she
thoroughly shows her appreciation for Plato’s ideas.** The “atheist with
a soul”, she is also the wife of another famous “reasonable atheist”, Steven
Pinker.
**
For her, goodness, beauty, and truth (which she thinks of largely as
understandability) inevitably must be this way as we know them because of the
forms… these all simply have to be… and have to be the best… hence the
continued intellectual and moral progress of humanity in particular which her
husband has also propounded in his books (i.e. shunning slavery, focusing on
individuals and their rights, etc… all fruit not so much of Christianity, but
Hellenism). Interestingly, the order and beauty of the world is evidence
of an impersonal mind, conjoined with all, which, as it unfolds, makes for all
we see and know. It can’t be otherwise.
-On the contrary, because of the
intrinsic goodness of creation, Stoics like Cicero are basically correct,
“Nature and right reason command us. Right reason means understanding the
causes and consequences of human actions in a law-governed (logos-governed)
universe.” (Holmes, 81)*
*the
quote goes on: “Right reason thereby agrees with nature (jus naturale), and is
universally apparent in the laws that are common to all nations (jus gentium),
rather than in positive laws enacted in the interests of an individual rule or
particular state.”
-Re: natural law, it is not right to
set a “God-given inner telos” against “the authority of God-given right reason”
(Ockham and all “voluntarists”) – these go together.
-Likewise, Christian Neoplatonists
should not set an “inner light that guides to truth” (which can really be seen
as being somewhat analogous to the conscience, which God uses to convict us
about how to live*) vs “depend[ing] for truth and goodness on sense
experience”. (Holmes 101).
*This
does not mean that we have the power to do what we know we should do, that is
fear, love, and trust the One responsible for our being and our fellows.
Nor, again, does it mean that our conscience is incapable of being seared or
improperly formed.
-Likewise, Hegel noted that Kant
reduced duty to a “rational principle devoid of social or historical context”,
but his criticism led “to the contextualizing of duty and in due course to an
ethical relativism that denie[d] both teleology and moral law.” (Holmes, 130)
-Natural man does indeed have the
innate disposition, to some degree, to seek out that which is intrinsically
good, even “higher things” like virtue over “lower things” like pleasure and
power – and not even for merely “practical reasons” alone.
-That said, this seeking – and the
resultant choice to act in this or that way – is, without fail, always for
questionable – less than exemplary – reasons and motivations.*
*The
Christian can insist this means not only “questionable”, but flat-out wrong and
twisted reasons and motivations. The love of fallen man for neighbor, for
example, a) is severely deficient because it is not bolstered and informed by
an underlying love for the Triune God, and hence its ultimate hope and
expression is not the salvation of the whole world – i.e. people’s rescue and
growth in eternal life, that is, knowing God through His Son, Jesus Christ
(John 17:3), and b) is severely deficient due to a lack of purity or holiness
in fulfilling this love – which of course is supposed to flow through us
unhindered from God and for our neighbor.
Again,
man seeks out much of what is intrinsically good for his own purposes.
But the deepest and highest good – found in in humble, simple, weak and foolish
forms in this imperfect and fallen world – is not sought by fallen, or
“natural” man, conceived as he is in sin. Quite frankly, no one seeks
*the* answer that/who ends up on the bloody cross for the rebirth of the world.
They may be curious regarding ideas about Him or that resemble Him, but
until He takes a hold of them, they have no desire to take hold of Him.
As a whole, I think that human reason apart from such faith may readily
acknowledge (if they don’t suppress the truth in “atheism”) “creators” or idols
(strictly speaking, not “the Creator”) to its own ends (even something like
“Intelligent Design”), but not Jesus Christ to His ends. Further,
as indicated in all of our theses here, all of our “what” language is
intricately connected with “hows” and “whys” – purpose.
All
unbelievers seek truth (for practical reasons, out of curiosity and wonder,
sense of duty, as we note) and may also want a Truth (big T), but they also
want to be in control. With intellectuals I submit that this is simply
ratcheted up a lot higher. If Truth
seems to be pointing to Christ – if Truth means Christ – then many will simply
redefine the rules in the middle of the game. When they come dangerously close
to the truth, truth no longer becomes the goal – victory (over this God who
would “rule” them) does. This
is not to say that God does not break through sometimes with the power of His
Word, C.S. Lewis being a good example of this.
-Nevertheless, this should not
preclude the possibility of “activation” of this innate disposition from the
outside – particularly through the means of other human being perceived, in
part, by our regular sensory experience.*
*Here,
one thinks of Leibniz’s and then Hume’s and Kant’s sharp distinction between
things we know by definition (that is apart from experience!) and things that
we can only know by experience – going out and looking.
This
was at the root of the debate between more “rationalist” philosophers and more
“empiricist” philosophers. Things we know by definition would be that sisters
are female and bachelors are unmarried men. Whereas, we can only know by
going out and looking whether or some aunts, for example are younger than their
nieces and nephews.
-Just because one might say that
something “is true in itself or that it exists in itself” does not mean that we
should think we can pass over the question of how the human being comes to know
about such things – if we are going to presume to build intellectual
systems of thought like the rationalists did, that is.
Theses – set 7 (Universals, big “U”
– and the Christian faith)
-Porphyry asked - assuming
“universals” exist independently of the mind (I would say the human being) -
whether they are incorporeal, and if they are incorporeal, whether their
existence depends on corporeal things. Christians in particular need not
assume that “universals”, as they have been defined and discussed here, must be
incorporeal, but rather simply know that the One Universal, God – the Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit, that is, three incorporeal individuals, also “persons”,
One of who became corporeal – is responsible for all “universals”.
-Do “universals” exist only insofar
as “particular instances” exist? There is no need to dogmatize
about this, based on speculations concerning the mind of God, the provider of
all universals. After all, for example, before God created the giraffe,
need we assert that He necessarily had an “ideal” blueprint? Or was His
process more spontaneous and “on the fly”, albeit not apart from “order”?
-In like fashion, just because
consistent mathematical and geometrical patterns and regularities can be
identified in the living artwork of the creation*, does this mean
that God is best thought of as some kind of mathematician and engineer,
creating things step by step through the lifeless forms of shapes, colors,
numbers, equations and algorithms?
*Does the
form of beauty cause things to be beautiful? (Plato) Or does beauty only
exist because of things that are beautiful? (Aristotle) A Christian
can, literally with the help of God, say both statements are true.
Aristotle is right to suggest, for example, that without beautiful things there
is no such thing as beauty. But we can call God, in one sense, a “thing”
as well, though a Thing above and beyond all created things.
-“Humanity”, or “human”/“being
human” is an example of a true and necessary concept which derives from a true
universal.*
*It
exists in the forms of individual persons, which exemplify this
universal. Abelard’s argument that “being a human” is not a thing (i.e.
it is something about which we can have knowledge and by which we can explain
features of the world) but something he called a “status, i.e. the way that
something is (ways of being are not “things”) – arguing that it is like the
slave who is beaten because he refuses to go to the forum (his refusing to go
to the forum is not a thing [he himself is a thing] in its own right but is a
“status”**, which explains why he is beaten) – is a totally irrelevant analogy.
The
desires of transgender activists aside (who do not want to “pass” for being
their “chosen” gender, but simply be seen as “being” that gender) humans can
decide not to go here or there, to get married or not, etc. - but we cannot
decide not to be human, male, female, etc., although we may choose to be less
than fully human, male, female, etc.
**and
the “status” is just a word, like the tense of a verb….
-Likewise with the non-created,
Divinity, or the divine: God.
-That said, while we can rightly
speak of only one divine will among the three individual persons of Divinity,
because of the fall into sin we cannot rightly speak of one human will among
the persons of humanity.
-But Christ, through His
incarnation, life, death and resurrection, has come to unify all with Him – our
disparate wills included – in the Triune God. There is a reason why, as
Peter Leithart says, “Humans are the creatures capable of saying ‘we’”.*
*And
for the Christian on the ground, individual human beings, for example, are
recognized and valued in the world precisely because God provides loving
community, primarily in the mystical yet very real body of Christ - not to be
seen as a collection of like-minded individuals.**
**
For Aristotle, particular beings or substances – individuals – are more primary
or fundamental than species (even as regards individuals, the significance of
accidental properties is also not primary/fundamental), at least when it comes
to speaking about things philosophically.
-Somehow, all creation will be
included in this process as well (I Cor. 15).
-“…ever since the days of the Early
Church, the presence of God in the word has been understood as a realistic and
substantial local presence in the church, when the gospel book was enthroned in
the midst of the assembly”. (Wenz, Armin)
-“…the community of communication
constituted by the Scriptures* is truly universal in time and space, comprising
the past and the future, the living and the dead, heaven and earth, God and mankind”.
(Wenz, Armin)**
*Wenz
also says: “The clearer we perceive Christ’s divinity, the clearer is his
humanity and vice versa.
If
Christ is really present in Scripture, and if his Spirit is creatively working
through the biblical texts, we might apply the Christological paradoxes also to
the Scriptures by saying: The more human the texts, he more divine their truth
(and vice versa….); the stranger (and implausible at first glance) the message
appears, the more current (and plausible in the long run of faith) is its
meaning; the clearer it is in contents and truth, the more effective it is in
sound doctrine and faith; the more author-oriented our exegesis are (that is,
God-oriented), the more reader-response oriented they will be in a true sense;
the more passive and receptive the reader is, the richer, broader, and deeper
his understanding will be; and the less important the interpreter sees himself,
the more intensely he will take care of the autonomous integrity and truth of
the biblical text. True exegesis, therefore, has the task of making
itself superfluous in the process that the texts in their liberty and authority
can do their work as autonomous and powerful means of the triune God, and in
doing so draw us into the eternal communion and fellowship of Christ” (Wenz,
Armin, Biblical Hermeneutics in a Postmodern World: Sacramental Hermeneutics
versus Spiritualistic Constructivism, LOGIA, 2013)
**This
is not to say that we the new creation will not, in some sense, be continuous
with the old. Things can be said to remain permanent in a sense.
Man will be more fully man. Further, when Paul says there is no longer
“male or female” he is talking about how both male and female equally possess
the salvation that Jesus Christ brings, not an obliteration in heaven of the
difference.
Conclusion
-“There
is in everyone a quest for truth and also a rebellion against its demands, and
a doubting of the truth when it is discovered….there are many partial truths.
Jesus is the truth, the whole truth” – Richard Wurmbrand, founder of the
Christian organization, Voice of the Martyrs
