Just Thomism

Kant’s Grounding gives a deeply impressive and focused argument for the opposition between the empirical world and the world of freedom, where freedom can never be established empirically but has to be taken as a postulate of moral reasoning. But perhaps Kant could have been more ambitious and made the empirical itself rest on a postulate of freedom. Here’s the argument:

Any action performed by a person whose outcome could be otherwise is a free action

The empirical demands that a person perform an action that could be otherwise.

Major: This is the familiar account of libertarian free will, but if either it or determinism has any meaning we can’t require that we actually run the tape of life backwards and see if we can change the outcome. In other words, if the “action that can be otherwise” is numerically one thing, then we could never establish either free will or determinism. If either freedom or determinism is to mean anything, we have to be talking about two actions that are specifically the same or do not differ in any relevant characteristics.

Minor: the whole point of an experiment, or at least of the paradigm case of an experiment, is for a person to set up a control and an experimental condition that are specifically the same but whose outcomes differ. We simply can’t do experiments without assuming that the control group and the experimental group do not differ in any relevant characteristics except the one that the experimenter is changing. But the whole meaning of the empirical is found in just this sort of experiment, as is clear from experience and was made famous my Kant himself in the prologue to the first Critique. 

Therefore a condition for the existence of the empirical is the action of an agent with libertarian freedom. Q.E.D.

The pride we take in eliminating slavery can easily become not just morally vacuous but also morally blinding. Making this clear demands making what will look like a series of strawmen, but stick with me till the end.

One guy is obliged to work for another. Therefore, slavery is moral.

Examples: the prisoner has to make license plates, the child has to clean the bathroom that he just covered in crayon out of anger, the plumber has to fix the toilet I paid him to fix, the cashier has to give me my change, a father has to work to support his family.

So the initial inference must be crazy, but why? Sure, we can just define the word “slavery” as meaning “any gravely unjust or exploitive claim on the labor of another” but then our condemnations of it are perfectly circular. If we leave off the idea of slavery as punishment (which is already a major concession since morally evil acts can’t be used as punishments) then is slavery working without compensation? This can’t be right, since all slaves get housing and food, and even if persons on a plantation or in a gulag got some money in return for their work it wouldn’t ease the main objection we have to their state.

So is slavery bad for being involuntary?  But all sorts of slave contracts were voluntary, as David Graeber points out in Debt. Africans ran up credit debts they couldn’t pay and the bank offered to accept payment in labor (wink, wink). Say someone signed a slave contract to keep his family property from being seized.  So there he was, on the middle passage, getting whipped on a sugar plantation, with his offspring being born into his own state, all voluntarily. This is not okay either. True, all the cinematic tales of the slave story start with someone being abducted, but this muddles the moral problem. Everyone is against kidnapping, but aren’t we supposed to be against slavery? 

Let’s re-write Roots with only one difference: Kunta Kinte’s family gets into debt and he agrees to everything that happens to him in order to avoid property seizure. Isn’t it a problem that we somehow think this would (even slightly) justify what happened to him? What if he didn’t exactly agree to it, but was drafted into it by his tribe in order to pay back tribal debts? What if someone is conquered in a war and is made a slave instead of being killed? It’s hard to argue that this can’t be the more merciful and humane option, and it is historically how most slavery occurred.

No one is doing anything to stomp out prison labor so I can assume we all take it as moral to have forced labor as punishment. But then we rule out an in-principle objection to VISA using it as a penalty (and again, this is how slavery has actually happened.)

So let’s add an epicycle: slavery is bad because you can’t quit. But by now it’s clear what’s wrong with this. All that we have to do is set up a system where the consequences of quitting are worse than slave working conditions. Lo and behold no one ever wants to quit. It’s as cynical as saying that, in our re-write of Roots, KK could have just let the family farm get seized. The more fundamental problem is that all sorts of contracts don’t allow someone to quit. I just signed one. If I quit my job in the next year I can be compelled to return to it. So we have no in-principle objection to being unable to quit, and we might even prefer the security that comes from such a contract.

If what we mean by slavery is “I abduct whoever I feel like and sell him to another guy who beats him unless he works himself to death” then, sure, slavery is wrong as soon as I say “abduct”. But this is an account of slavery that even John Calhoun could condemn. If you mean that you condemn treating persons as property (which is supposedly what chattel slavery consists in) then Calhoun might very well respond that slavery he is defending consists in being morally entitled to someone’s labor. Who said anything about owning a person?

So when we condemn slavery or take pride in wiping it out we have to be clear that we’re not just condemning a black and white photo of whip marks on someone’s back or the use of a word that we’ve defined as meaning, with perfect circularity, “an unjust and exploitive claim on the labor of another person”. But I suspect this is all that most of us are doing when we congratulate ourselves for ending slavery or when we wring our hands over all the passages in Scripture which are really only guilty of using the taboo word “slavery” while seeking to advance justice for those who, like all of us, have someone who is morally entitled to our labor.

There is a long history of arguing that, in fact, no one can be entitled to our labor, and that to sell our labor is as morally wrong as slavery. I suspect this goes too far, and that the closest we can get to a short definition of slavery is labor without rights. There is a whiff of circularity about this since “right” is simply a claim one can make in justice, but this is perhaps being too picky. If there is some laborer who has no legal claim at all on the one demanding his labor, then he is certainly a slave. That said, to abolish slavery in this sense is, almost by definition, to open the discussion of just what rights labor does have. Assume that slave-owning Southern christians were horrified by the fact that breaking up slave families cheapened marriage and so gave the slaves legal rights to keep their families together while leaving everything else unchanged. Great. They are now no longer slaves in the sense of persons lacking any rights at all. Slavery has ended! TO be sure, we could congratulate ourselves at ending slavery in this sense (our hypothetical slaveowners would have too), but it is clearly the opening move in a much larger discussion about justice for laborers which, sadly, we don’t seem to care about as long as the laborers aren’t called “slaves”. We then fall into discussions about justice that are really just verbal, and can be won by anyone who manages to avoid taboo words or give his slaves new names like delinquent creditors, team members, members of the global economy, or adjuncts.

At the beginning of the Phaedrus Socrates mentions a rationalist account of a Greek myth – the sort of thing that now gets done by historical-critical accounts of old stories – and then claims to have no interest in giving such accounts of things:

Now I quite acknowledge that these allegories are very nice, but he is not to be envied who has to invent them; much labour and ingenuity will be required of him; and when he has once begun, he must go on and rehabilitate Hippocentaurs and chimeras, then the gorgons and winged steeds, and numberless other inconceivable and portentous natures. And if he is sceptical about them, and would fain reduce them one after another to the rules of probability, this sort of crude philosophy will take up a great deal of time.

But what kind of argument is this? Why can’t someone just pick and choose where he will apply criticism? Why think that to rationalize one religious story requires you to rationalize them all?

As always in Plato the example is working on many different levels, but the basic point is that rationalizing religious stories comes from a conviction that the world exists in a certain way. Any one rational account simply fills in a few details in a far more significant belief about the totality of things. There is, however, a massive disproportion between the few details we can actually rationalize and the totality of the claim that motivates us to rationalize them in the first place.

One of the secret-handshake teachings of Straussianism is that ancient gods followed political power. If your city was conquered the natural thing to do was to start worshipping the conquerer’s gods. This wasn’t out of fear or shallow piety (though these didn’t hurt) but because hoping that the gods would remain when a city fell would be like us thinking that the DMV would remain when the city fell. Religious and state functions were seen as part of the same civic reality. Religion was not “really political” any more than the political was really religious, but they were so tied up that one could not live without the other.

Political states demand some transcendent reality which cannot survive the death of the state. That I call it “a transcendent reality” reflects the gods of our own state, which are in fact wholly impersonal abstractions. In the (Western) world before the French revolution I would have said they need the church or Christ; in the would before the Reformation I would have said they needed the priests and sacraments; after the Revolution we needed “God” – that being who annuit coeptis of the novus ordo saeclorum.

Back to the wholly impersonal abstractions. The “God” of the age of Revolution was the source of rational self-interest, rugged individualism, national patriotism, and (let’s just say it) white male supremacy. All these things died off for different reasons: Rugged individualism demanded a whole lot of free land  (free of all but Indians, of course); national patriotism could never survive the wars of 1914-45, which convinced everyone that if nations could do this then we were better off without them; rational self-interest can’t survive an honest evaluation of how most persons collectively act (the death-drive of the wars made this clear, and was later backed up by the new economics, sciences of behavior, and cult of advertising). So we no longer believe in “God” and he has to make way for the new boss. At the moment “the transcendent reality” might be being born, or perhaps he’ll just remain a transcendent reality, but initial signs point to him being a dionysian god since his spiritual power is palpable and obvious whenever a question of sexual liberation comes up. Any time we consider how a court might rule or what policy a school board might institute or what a pop singer might sing about or what a company will give millions of dollars to advance it is a foregone conclusion that they will work to advance sexual liberation. All these gods or transcendent realities come with the sense of inevitability, and so open up new vistas of possibility and the active hope that we will finally get it all just right. The new gods have smiled on our efforts and give us real hope where everything else is just a wish or a daydream with, as we now put it, “no evidence” for its truth. The gods give you lots of money too.

In the face of all this the First Commandment comes as a shock and an almost impossible challenge. There can be no denial of “the other gods” – who could deny their spiritual power? The command is that this palpable spiritual power be secondary to us. But secondary to what? Turns out, to the god with no evidence, whose advance is not felt as inevitable, and whose church is a cult of inevitable failure and humiliation. Even its god has gone on record as being disgusted with it and leaving it to die.

The engine of Darwinist theory is the struggle for existence so far as it expresses itself in reproductive success, but as Lloyd Gerson points out, reproductive success does nothing to advance the struggle for the existence of the individual. If one is a male praying mantis or black widow spider, reproductive success is in fact demonstrably harmful to continued existence. The response to this is familiar and easy: it not the individual but the species that is seeking to preserve itself. This immediately raises the question of what account of species would allow this to be possible. A nominalist account of species is certainly out since a purely logical construction couldn’t struggle for anything in nature, and a Platonist account of species has its eternal existence assured and so has no can allow no meaning to preserving its existence. We are left with a hylomorphic account of a species as form in matter seeking to preserve itself by continued information, or a form that, while of itself general, can only exist by informing new parcels of matter. The nexus and arche of a struggle for existence seeking reproduction is the communicatio actualis that belongs to being as good.

The Fourth Way makes the claim that because things are more or less hot there is something maximally hot. This was based on STA’s idea that fire was a chemical released by burning, meaning that a campfire took fire out of logs just like a still takes alcohol out of fermented things. His example was incorrect but the principle remains as a valuable though unarticulated postulate for chemists, which is assumed in their long list of separation processes. If we wanted to update the fire example we could do so with any property of pure substances: e.g. given that some drinks are more and less intoxicating, there is something maximally intoxicating.

Digging deeper in the Fourth Way one finds STA’s reliance on the idea that every act communicates itself so far as possible. “Communicates” is a transliteration, not a translation – what he means by the term is the complementary description to participation. Participation is the dependence of a part on something that it common, the way players participate on teams or interlocutors participate in discussions. This generalizes to the fact that matter participates in form, and then further generalizes to potency participating in act. The reverse activity from act to potency is what STA calls communicatio, though there is no corresponding technical term in English.*

So why STA was wrong about fire being a chemical existing in either a pure or mixed state, he was right that heat is an act of some potency, and that this act communicates itself or diffuses itself as far as possible. The communicatio of heat is familiar from the phenomena that we label entropy, though we give an accidental description of it as a tendency to disorder. Nothing about the phenomena changes if you view nature as diffusive self-giving or dissipating tendency to disorder, but these are completely different views of what nature is and what it is up to. Our description is equivalent to describing a car as an exhaust-making tool, or breathing as a process that seeks to make carbon dioxide.

On the communicatio account of entropy the closest analogue to the Fourth Way, ironically enough, is Sean Carroll’s argument that the cascade of entropy is necessarily infinite. Reformulated in STA’s terms, this is nothing but an application of the principle that all finite diffusions or communications of act are participants in an infinite and unlimited act. I’d agree with Carroll, of course, and he might even have a whole shelf full of models that point to the need for some time with infinite energy, but I’m pretty sure that if we took the idea seriously then, just like Aristotle did in Physics VIII, we’d find that there’s a limit to how much energy we could hope to find in any given physical system. So what if your theory demands more actuality than a physical system can provide? That’s a pretty good account of what a cosmological argument is.

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*One synonym for communicatio is “diffusio” which is the term STA tends to apply to the communicatio of the good (cf. “the good is diffusive of itself”).

One puzzle of hylomorphism is that it needs to give some account of potential form, but it’s not clear how to do this.

Form only exists in matter or the composite, but it doesn’t exist from matter or the composite. That this in-existence sometimes is and sometimes isn’t requires that the form be somehow contingent, but this can’t be the contingency of the composite.

The parallel problem of matter does not arise, or at least not in the same way. It’s in the very nature of potency that it is not actual now and later is, and so calling matter potential suffices to explain motion from one thing to another.

Here’s another run at the same problem: as Dekoninck liked to point out, form exists only as a term of generation but it is not generated. So we have to find some account of how things exist always and only after a process and not before, but not because of the process.

Another: Aristotle addresses the Parmenidean problem, but not entirely. He does a very good job at explaining becoming as a continuous process between terms, but not becoming as “what was not and later is”. The two are not the same, even on Aristotle’s own account of things, since form was not actual and later is.

Aristotle seems to want to say that forms simply always are: circularity is the form of the bronze disc, but circularity does not arise. But this doesn’t address the problem. Maybe forms qua forms are abstract, but we need to account for how Circularity is in the o of this now, which, let’s not forget, is exactly what Aristotle is trying to explain.

This is why STA was right to say that we need to posit not just a participation of matter in the act of form, but also a participation of composite form in separated form. Whether we take forms as equivalent to existence, as A did, or take form as potency to existence but not to motion, as STA did, form arises in an act of creation.

How far can we get in an attempt to explain faith in God though the next closest modern-world analogue, faith in the nation?

Nations obviously exist in the sense that millions of people act as if they do, but the attempt to find a natural foundation for them turns out to be so difficult that many have concluded they don’t have one. What sort of foundation could we have hoped for, anyway? Nations don’t divide different species, and even if we could agree about the existence of races, different nations don’t map out racial differences.

Human families have a natural foundation in relations of birth and rearing, and along with this comes bonds of fidelity: a willingness to sacrifice for the good of others up to and including dying for them. The nation demands marriage meet state approval and that education follow its curriculum, and makes additional claims on us through culture and the Laws (I’m thinking of the speech of lady laws in Crito) and so lays claim to the same bonds of fidelity. The church, of course, can make the same claims. And so both the nation and church wrangle over the foundation of our existence with the church’s appeals for fidelity (faith) having a clear divine component while the nation seems more conflicted on this point, allowing a range of options from theocracy to hagiarchy to ceremonial deism to secularity to outright foundational criticism of all religion.

Fidelity in this sense is a sort of pietas or reverence due to the source of your being, or to the mother and father and its analogical developments. Nation or church seems to mark the outer-limit of this in numerical terms (which, contra Singer or Unger, gives a principled reason to think one’s positive ethical obligations are localized).

If this is right, you have an obligation to your church in much the same way that you have an obligation to your nation, and so it is reasonable for religious obligation to follow accidents of birth. This doesn’t make these accidents absolutely binding no matter what, but they seem to be reasonable to take them as prima facie binding until seriously undermined. That religious and scientific claims show different demographic distributions arises reasonably from the former being claims on fidelity.

One way to understand hylomorphism is as articulating the insight that you are now not all you were nor will be. This gives a kind of primacy to the present moment as a point of reference, that can be considered either

1.) relative to its past

2.) in itself with no relation

3.) relative to future.

1 and 2 involve some difference and some contingent being (though the degree of contingency can differ). With 2 there is no time to be otherwise and so the being is necessary.

This view does not assert the ontological priority of time. It is not necessary that time to be some background in which contingency can spread its legs. Time can simply be an abstraction of something common to all contingent and necessary beings in nature. It is also not the claim that only the present moment is real. Like presentism, this view prioritizes the present moment for being the indispensable first reference point (as it remains in Relativity by being the apex of the light cone) and, more importantly, it makes only the present moment of some observer actual, but unlike presentism it allows for both the future and past to be real by their relation to present existence (this is not a verbal distinction but an attempt to capture what we mean when we say that we are now not all we were or will be.) Hylomorphism is thus a middle ground between A and B theories, asserting that all times are real by reference to the present, which alone is actual.

From this angle, we see why potency (or matter) exists only by participation in form (or act), and why form is the culmination of some desire in matter. Everything starts by marking out a point that is here-now and then asking how one got here or what he could do, is obliged to do, could do to create a better or worse version of what he has, etc.

Hylomorphism does demand that time is real. It is true that your only knowledge of the past is in the present, and so, for all you know, there may be no past at all. This present moment has dinosaur fossils in it, perhaps another present will not. For all you know, or so the objection goes, there could be merely many  present moments, with no order among them. This is the radically simplifying view of Barbour’s Platonia. On this view, however, memory is not a cognitive function, and prudence and science (the first which plans, the second which predicts) are not intellectual activities. So such a world cannot be known by any of our faculties or methods, nor could such a hypothesis ever be tested or confirmed.

Hylomorphism demands a block universe so far as all times are real, but there is no time at which all times are actual. Nevertheless, it both allows for and seems to demand a perspective from which all times are totalized since no one temporal viewpoint suffices to explain the harmony and agreement between diverse viewpoints, either for one observer or for a multitude. This totalization for one observer is soul; for many world-soul; and any harmony between soul and world-soul in turn will have reference to another principle beyond abstractive or nature-ordering intelligence.

The clay-shape metaphor has some value for explaining hylomophism but it obscures as much as it reveals. Considered as here-now the whole statue is form. Considered as indefinitely extended into the future, the whole statue is matter (this is what we mean by saying it is contingent or, if it were living, mortal). Considered indefinitely extended into its past, the statue is the form of some matter (and so generated). Short of indefinite extension, it is possible for the statue to be the subject of accidental changes, and so to be form of some matter in a different way.

Creation is the denial of any intrinsic past-relation for a substance. This is what we mean by creation being “from nothing” (which is only clarification if not pleonasm). Said another way, creation means that something exists with a here-now that is not a terminus ad quem for anything else.

Freedom is like creation but is the denial of any intrinsic past-relation for an agent’s action in time. Freedom is absolute when the production of an action in time has absolutely no relevant past relation on the part of the agent; freedom is qualified to the degree that it falls away from this. Life has freedom to the extent that its actions are not exhausted by the temporal story that goes back indefinitely and is terminated more or less arbitrarily. Reason has freedom to the extent that individuals can be praised or blamed. God has freedom to the extent that nothing in time at all that conditions action or serves as an absolute motive of action.

STA says twice in the Fourth Way that the argument is taken from Metaphysics II. The specific text is pretty clearly 993b 24. The Greek text is garbled, but STA smooths it out and gives a commentary that concludes to the existence of a separate form who is the cause of existence. For another translation, see here, paragraphs 292-5.

Whatever is called supreme among other things is so in virtue of something being caused in those others that is predicated of them univocally, in the way that fire is the cause of heat in the elements. And so since heat is said univocally of fire and the thing that is composed of elements, it follows that fire is the hottest thing.

[Aristotle] mentions univocation because sometimes an effect is not similar to its cause in a way that makes it of the same species, due to the excellence of the cause. The sun, for example, is a cause of heat in lower things, but the inferior things cannot receive the effects of the sun or of other celestial bodies so as to be one species with them, since they share in matter. Because of this we do not say that the sun is the hottest thing in the way fire is, but that the sun is something more than even what is hottest.

Truth, however, is not limited to a species but relates to all that is, and because the cause of truth is one with its effect in both name and logos, it follows that what is a cause to things derived from it, so far as they are true, is the supreme truth.

Aristotle later concludes that the principles of things that always exist, sc. the celestial bodies, are necessarily supremely true. He gives two reasons: (1) they are not “sometimes true and sometimes not” and because of this they transcend what is generable and corruptible in truth, that sometimes exist and sometimes do not. (2) Nothing is a cause of the celestial bodies else unless it is a cause of their being. And because if this something transcends even the celestial bodies both in being and truth, since even if these are incorruptible they nevertheless have a cause of being moved and even of their being, as the Philosopher explicitly says.

This has to be the case since it is necessary that all things that are composite or exist by taking part in something else reduce, as to their causes, to things which exist by definition (quae sunt per essentiam). All corporeal things are actual beings only so far as they exist by taking part in forms. So there must be some separate substance which exists by definition which is the source of corporeal substance.