[TPF Essay] Dante and the Deflation of Reason
[b]Dante and the Deflation of Reason
Note: Because this paper has a large number of footnotes and end notes a PDF file has been made available. A longer version of the paper covering through the end of the Paradiso, with more discussion, can be found here.
Introduction: The Deflation of Reason[/b]
Note: This paper is a bit on the long side. If it seems like too much of a commitment, I recommend reading either just the first three introductory sections, for some interesting information on pre-modern notions of reason, or skipping right to Hell - Reason in Bondage: for the summary of Dante; both will hopefully prove interesting.
In The Discarded Image, C.S. Lewis notes the dramatic deflation of conceptualizations of reason in the modern era. In Guillaume de Lorris's Roman de la Rose (1230), we see: Reason the beautiful, a gracious lady, a humbled goddess plead[ing] with the lover as a celestial mistress, a rival to his earthly love.(1) Likewise, in his De Consolatione Philosophiae, Boethiuss Lady Philosophy seems semi-divine, her head effortlessly pierc[ing] within the very heavens.(2) This is Reason as intelligentia obumbrata the shadow of angelic nature in man.(3) Nor were these lofty notions confined to the Middle Ages. Aristotle saw mans rational soul as the most divine element in us.(4) Plato likewise saw the golden cord of reason as holy.(5)
By 1755 however, Samuel Johnson could define reason in his influential Dictionary of the English Language as merely the power by which man deduces one proposition from another, or proceeds from premises to consequences.(6) That is, reason had become a mere faculty of calculation. Such a faculty could obviously have no desires or ends of its own. Hence, in 1740, David Hume could note confidently that reason alone can never be a motive to any action of the will.(7) Reason might allow us to connect irrational sensations of pain and pleasure with different sense objects, but it [could not] be by [reasons] means that objects are able to affect us.(8) This is a far cry from Plato, whose understanding dominated pre-modern thought. For Plato thedesires of the rational part of the soul played a central role in mans freedom, and even his divinity.(9)
Yet despite this deflation of reasonand of mans intellect, which is often collapsed into reasonreason has nonetheless continued to play a dominant role in modern psychology. It could hardly be otherwise. Our rational thought processes and the phenomenology of understanding are both ostentatious elements of human experience. Hence, reason has to remain a defining element of the self, even as it is deflated. As a result, the modern epoch gave birth to what Charles Taylor calls the buffered self, a conception of the reasoning self as autonomous, self-contained, and insulated from external forces. This is a conception of the self that is, to varying degrees, estranged not only from the external world, but also from its own passions, appetites, and embodiment (e.g. the much criticized, but often subtly reproduced Cartesian Homunculus). In his A Secular Age, Taylor argues that this buffered self in turn helped to give rise to Max Webers disenchanted cosmos, a view of the world where meaning and identity arise from within the human mind.
As C.S. Lewis notes, this shift in meaning has tended to make the romantic appeals to Reason in pre-modern literature almost unintelligible. One can hardly rejoice in a calculator, much less see it as divine. However, the consequences of this shift go far deeper than our appreciation of classic literature. They paint a dramatically different picture of the human being, the human experience, and the proper role of rationality in human life. Of course, reason generally retains its role as our primary means of accessing truth.(10) Yet this no longer gives reason the proper authority it held over the appetites and passions in prior epochs, in part because it lacks its own rational ends. Instead, modern thought tends to follow Hume in seeing reason as chiefly an enabler of the passions (e.g., the image of Homo oeconomicus).(i)
This deflation plays an explanatory role in many of the seismic shifts that have come to define modern thought. For instance, the dominance of skepticism and epistemic concerns can themselves be seen as arising, at least in part, from this narrower view of reason. Likewise, conceptions of reasonand thus mans ability to knowthat leave it imprisoned in our heads, or trapped like a fly within the fly-bottles of discrete language games, rely on a picture of human knowing as entirely discursive. So too, Humes Guillotine (the is-ought gap), is based presupposition that man cannot possess rational appetites.(11) Perhaps nowhere is this shift more obvious than in the move to define freedom in terms of power, the ability to choose anything, as opposed to the earlier view of freedom as: the self-determining capacity to actualize the good.
Clearly, we will not have space to consider all the issues listed above. What I would like to do instead is paint a portrait of an earlier, richer view of reason. My goal is to lay out a less familiar vision of rationality, and to show where it intersects with the aforementioned fault lines in modern thought. Good philosophy requires us to question our presuppositions. A consideration of the earlier view of reason can bring to light some of the hidden assumptions that give modern thought its unique shape. To make this contrast all the more stark, we shall not use one of the great pre-modern philosophers of mind for our comparison. Rather, we shall look to the greatest poet of the Middle Agesand perhaps any ageto Dante Alighieri and hisDivine Comedy, following his pilgrimage through the afterlife as far as the top of Mount Purgatory.
Dante is a particularly apt choice for several reasons. First, he has an extremely wide role for rationality in human life. For Dante, mans rational soul, far from being a mere tool, is central to what man is and how he lives a good life. Second, reason plays a central role in Dantes conception of self-determination and human freedom. Finally, whereas today we are apt to see love as something irrational, and perhaps just one element of a good life, Dante sees love as the central thread running through the human experience (and indeed the entire cosmos). Dantes vision, which sees reason primarily engaged within the context of love, and finding its purpose in love, offers us the most vibrant possible contrast to highly deflationary views such as eliminitive materialism.
The Medieval View of Truth and Knowledge:
Before we delve into the narrative details of the Commedia, some preliminaries are in order. Dante is a poet, and while the Commedia has great philosophical depth, it is not a systematic treatise. Dante, like all thinkers, takes many of the assumptions of his era for granted. Key concepts related to reason do not receive specific elucidation in the poem. Hence, we must clarify exactly what Dante (and we ourselves) mean by truth and reason.
The modern period has seen a proliferation of different theories of truth (e.g. coherence, pragmatic, etc.). In Dantes context, truth was the adequacy of thought to being. It would be easy to label this a correspondence theory and move on, but there are crucial differences between the medieval understanding and most modern correspondence theories. Truth is primarily in the intellect for medieval thinkers.(12) Hence, truth is not primarily a property of propositions if this is to mean abstract objects existing outside the mind. Nor is truth primarily about language. Linguistic utterances are signs of truth in the intellect. Utterances are acts, yet it is substancesthingsthat primarily possess being, and so it is people (and God) who primarily possess truth. Since the human intellect is moved by things, it is measured by them. (13) There is an ontological truth in things (their correspondence to the divine intellect). In this context, concerns about truth being confined to disparate language games make little sense. Truth is not primarily about discursive justification; discursive justification is merely a means of attaining and communicating truth.(14),(ii)
Second, in both the Neo-Platonic and rediscovered Aristotelian traditions Dante was exposed to, there are elements of the conception of truth that hew closer to modern identity theories of truth. The human mind is capable of becoming all things.(15) When man comes to know something, the form of the thing known is present in his mind. This is not a representation of form. The intellect dematerializes the thing known, resulting in the mind becoming identical with the object of knowledge. Of course, this does not imply that when we know an apple our minds become apples, for the two exist in distinct modes.(16) However, it does mean that many of the epistemic issues that dominate modern thought and tend to impose a sense of unbridgeable distance between knower and known are absent from Dantes conception. Knowing involves a union of knower and known.
The importance of this sort of union in knowing, which is both a being penetrated by what is known and an ecstasis, a going out beyond the self to the known, for Dante cannot be overstated. Indeed, the antiquated term carnal knowledge, with all its erotic connotations, gets far closer to the older view than the sterile formulation of justified true belief.(17),(iii) The goal of Dantes pilgrimage, and of all mankind, is ultimately to know God, which is also to love and be in union with God.
Modern conceptions that make both love and knowledge an entirely internal affair cannot capture this erotic element of knowing the other as other. As Byung-Chul Han notes in The Agony of Eros, the modern crisis of love derives from the erosion of the Other... Eros concerns the Other in the strong sense, namely, what cannot be encompassed by the regime of the ego.(18) The beatific vision at the climax of the Commedia is fundamentally an encounter with the other, not the conquest of the other by the self. It is not the grasping and possession of the other that Han finds in the modern ethos, but rather a union, an offering of the self to the other as a gift.(iv) (v)
Yet this knowing does involve an internal dimension, a penetration of the self by the other. To know God requires knowing by becoming.(vi) As Dante rises higher into the Heavens in the Paradiso, and comes closer to God, he is increasingly able to bear the overwhelming brightness of Beatrices (revealed truths) smile, due to a continuous internal transformation (as opposed to cumulative acquisition). In this conception, the world is not held at arms length while we inspect our own mental representations of it. Rather, there is a sense in which we become what is known. Thus, to know God is to attain the very best, to become like onto God as much as we are ablethe theosis or deification that is mans ultimate telos in the Christian tradition.(vii)
The Medieval View of Reason and the Intellect:
Part of the deflation of reason has involved a dramatic synecdoche in which one of the faculties of mans intellect, ratio (through which we get the English reason) comes to be associated with the whole of mans rational faculties. By contrast, in Dantes context, ratio refers specifically to discursive reason, the step-by-step thinking by which we move through arguments, or plan future actions. In Humes Treatise for instance, it is obvious that this faculty is primarily what Hume takes as encompassing the whole of reason. It is perhaps instructive that this mode of the intellect, to which the whole of mans rationality is now often reduced, was the lower of two faculties.
The higher faculty is intellectus (noesis in Greek). Intellectus is the faculty of intuitive understanding; it is contemplative, receptive, and rooted in insight. For the medievals, reasoning must begin with this sort of understanding, otherwise it would simply be a sort of rule following divorced from intelligible content.(19) Ratio is the means by which we move from truth to truth and come to encircle new truths. The acquisition of human knowledge begins and ends in intellectus, but proceeds by discursive ratio. The difference between ratio and intellectus is thus the difference between motion towards some end and rest in that end, between acquisition and possession,(20) or as time is to eternity and circumference is to center.(21),(viii) Dante will play off this circular imagery in Cantos X-XIV of the Paradiso, in the Heaven of the Sun, where Dante meets the souls of the wise (e.g. St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventure). Here, the wise men move in a joyful, circular dance which has an immobile Beatrice (a symbol of revealed truth) as its center.
To be sure, some modern thinkers do still have a role for intuition and understanding in human reasoning, yet this generally falls far short of a direct grasp of truth.(ix) Indeed, as Mark Burgess documents in his Transcendent Apriorism: Pure Reason's Quest for the Noumenal, Kants arguments against the dogmatism of pre-critical metaphysics have tended to motivate a cursory dismissal any understanding of intuition as the direct apprehension of truth, much less as the co-identiy of knower and known. Yet he also argues that this move has been motivated by error, prejudice, and a lack of substantial engagement with the extremely wide tradition that is, quite often, being rejected in a perfunctory manner. We do not have space to engage this topic here, except to point out that differences on this issue lead to many key differences in how major epistemic problems are approached.(x)
Crucially, this transposition in modern thought goes further than ratio merely superseding (or in some cases swallowing up) intellectus. In the philosophy familiar to Dante, the intellect capable of both ratio and intellectus was itself just one of two components of the rational soul, which was composed of intellect and will. Modern English faces a challenge here in that reason and rationality are often used interchangeably to refer to this rational soul, the intellect (whereby we know), and reason as ratio, whereby we acquire discursive knowledge. This collapse of three distinct concepts into one word is itself a sign of the deflation we are investigating. Because Dante has this larger rational soul in focus, he sees reason playing an extremely rich and essential role in human life. Indeed, on the medieval view, the intellect plays an essential, rather than merely enabling role in human happiness. As St. Thomas writes: The essence of happiness consists in an act of the Intellect, but the delight that results from happiness pertains to the will.(22)
Whereas contemporary thought has often drawn no distinction between the sensible and rational appetites, such a distinction would have been obvious to Dante.(23) The animal hunger by which a starving man is impelled towards food was seen as distinct from the way in which a man self-consciously desires and acts towards some end because it is understood by him to be good. For both medieval Aristotelians and the moderns, man is an animal. Yet, for the Aristotelian, man is the rational animal, and this makes all the difference.
Hell - Reason in Bondage:
In his letter to Cangrande, Dante describes the core topic of the Commedia as mans progress from slavery in sin (spiritual Egypt) to freedom in the promised land.(24) Dantes pilgrimage in the Commedia begins in the Dark Wood of Error, where he has wandered off from the straight path.(25) His initial despair at finding himself lost is lifted when he spies the sun lit hill above him (a symbol of goodness). He knows where he needs to go. The Pilgrim possess synteresis, an innate knowledge that the good is preferable to evil (and truth to falsity). However, as he attempts to climb the hill under his own power he is forced back by the three beasts representing sin. His mounting terror only subsides when he is greeted by the great Roman poet Virgil, who tells the Pilgrim that he will be leading him on a tour through the afterlifethrough Hell and Purgatory, before Beatrice, the great love of Dantes life, leads Dante through Heaven.(26)
While we will learn in Canto II that Virgils rescue mission was set in motion through divine grace and the activity of the beatified souls in Paradise, it is important to note the Virgila symbol of human reason and classical philosophywill be able to lead Dante as far as the top of Mount Purgatory, a utopian heaven on Earth. That Virgil can get the Pilgrim so far (although not without divine aid (27)), is emblematic of the crucial role Dante sees for reason in human life.
The purpose of Dantes descent through Hell is to instruct him in the true nature of sin. Sin is the bondage of mans rational nature to the irrational passions and appetites.(xi) Sin is a misordering of loves. It is to fail to know things as they are, to be attracted to the worse over of the better. This condition arises when the rational soul (intellect and will)the part of man that can know and desire the Good as Good (28)is subjugated by mans lower faculties. Hence, as Dante enters the Gates of Hell, Virgil remarks that the Pilgrim will now observe the suffering race of souls who have lost the good of intellect.(29),(xii)
Throughout the early parts of the descent, Dante the Pilgrim is often sympathetic to the damned in Hell. He calls the words emblazoned on the Gates of Hell, which claim to be moved by highest wisdom and primal love, cruel.(30) He swoons in sympathy after Francesca explains how she was led into adultery by love, and oftentimes his expressions of pity or respect for the damned seem at odds with acceptance that their punishment is just.(31) This question of sympathy will come to a head in Canto XX, where the Dante addresses the reader directly: ask yourself how I could keep my eyes dry when, close by, the souls of diviners and sorcerers were being punished by having their heads grotesquely turned around backwards.(32) At first glance, this would seem to be Dante the Poet asking us to justify his own graphic depictions of divine justice. The question may seem to be: how can God be the author of such cruel punishments?
However, we must recall here that we are supposed to take the Infernos punishments seriously, but not as factual descriptions. The punishments of the Inferno are aligned to the nature of each sin. For instance, the lustful are blown about in an unending gale, as they themselves were blown about by their passions in life. Suicides are deprived of the bodies they rejected in life. Thieves who transgressed the boundaries of others property are condemned to spend eternity stealing each others bodies. Each contrapasso is meant to symbolize the nature of the sin itselfwhat it does to others, and even more what it does to the sinner themselves.
Hence, Dantes question is not so much about Gods role as an extrinsic actor executing punishments upon the damned, but is rather: how can God allow his image bearers to disfigure themselves in the ways we see dramatized and concretized in the Inferno? Dantes answer isnt fully revealed until the Paradiso. Free, rational beings, by their very nature, must possess a capacity to disfigure themselves in this way. Otherwise, they would lack agency. To be truly self-determining, they must turn themselves towards the Good, transcending their own finitude with the aid of grace, whereas a turn towards finite goods is a turn towards nothingness. Finite goods are nothing apart from God; all goodness is ultimately participation in the Divine Goodness.(33)
Hell is much more diverse than Purgatory and Paradise. It has more divisions and more unique settings. By contrast, it is revealed to Dante early in the Paradiso that all the blessed are actually in one place (indeed, within a single dimensionless point), and merely condescend to appear in different spheres of the heavens.(34) This is because the damned pursue multiplicity rather than the unifying First Cause and First Principle. Rather than seeking the Good on account of its goodness (because it is known by the intellect as good), the damned allow their desires for finite goods to triumph over the pursuit of the necessary telos of all rational creatures (the Good and the True, sought as such).(xiii)
The damned are also cut off from all communion with others. We see no sympathy or repentance in Hell. Indeed, the damned are often seen actively tormenting one another. This is not incidental to sin, but its very nature, the curvatus in se that disfigures the sinners soul. As the Pilgrim will learn from Guido Del Duca in the Canto XIV of the Purgatorio (on the terrace where the envious endure purgation), it could not be otherwise. To seek finite, material goods is to seek goods that diminish when they are shared. The pursuit of such goods sets up a dialectic of envy and competition between men. It is only as regards spiritual goods that our own good increases when others partake in them.(xiv)
Purgatory - Love and Reason:
If the core lesson of the Inferno is the true nature of sin, which drives us downward and dissolves the person in multiplicity, then the key lesson of the Purgatorio is the nature of love, which unifies the person, and ultimately the entire whole cosmos. During his ascent up Mount Purgatory, the Pilgrim learns that it is through the shedding of vice and attainment of virtue that we become free. Ultimately, this transformation comes down to possessing the proper loves. As Dante famously declares at the outset of the Paradiso:
[i]The glory of the One Who moves all things
penetrates all the universe, reflecting
in one part more and in another less. (35)[/i]
Every finite thing is a partial likeness of Gods eternal wisdom. Any good it possesses it possesses by participation in the Divine Goodness.(36) Finite things are good precisely to the extent that they reflect the divine light. Hence, finite things are all stepping stones, rungs on a ladder up to God. As St. Augustine says in De Doctrina Christiana, finite goods are meant to be used, not enjoyed for their own sake. To descend down the ladder in order to possess one of its rungs is thus a confusion of what is truly most worthy of love. This is a failure of the intellect to recognize worth, or of the will to follow the guidance of the intellect. That is, it is a failure of our rational nature to be rational.(xv)
Love runs throughout the Pilgrims entire journey, from the primeval love that erected the Gates of Hell (37), to the Love that moves the sun and the other stars at the end of the poem.(38) In the discourses on love that occupy the center of the poem, the Pilgrim comes to understand love, and so to understand loves relation to the rational soul and the role of reason in human life.
This explanation is given most explicitly in Canto XVII of the Purgatorio. For Dante, love is what motivates everything we do. Through Virgils teaching, the Pilgrim comes to understand how love must be the seed of every virtue growing in [us], and every deed that merits punishment.(39) Virgil begins this discourse with a distinction:
[i]Neither Creator nor his creatures ever,
my son, lacked love. There are, as you well know,
two kinds: the natural love, the rational.
Natural love may never be at fault;
the other may: by choosing the wrong goal,
by insufficient or excessive zeal.(40)[/i]
This natural love is wills natural inclination towards the Good and the intellects natural inclination towards Truth, or, ultimately, the orientation of both towards God (the Good and the True themselves). This is that innate and never-ending thirst, by which Dante and Beatrice will later be drawn up through the heavens.(41) As Virgil will point out in the next Canto:
The soul, which is created quick to love,
responds to everything that pleases, just
as soon as beauty wakens it to act.(42)
This beauty can lead us upwards, towards virtue and God. However, we can also fall prey to finite beauties and be led downwards, towards vice. Indeed, it is the very tendency to ascend itselfa habitin which virtue consists. Likewise, vice is a habitual orientation towards descent. Such habits involve both moral and epistemic virtues, virtues we can be trained in or intentionally habituate ourselves to. Since the will always desires what is truly better through its natural love, an attraction to the worse over the better, involves a projection of goodness onto what lacks it. This is a failure of the rational love that is conditioned by the intellect. It is to love things more or less than they are worthy of being loved. Of course, Dante does not subscribe to a simplistic notion where things are simply good or bad in themselves. The intellect must guide the person precisely because goodness is defined in terms of proper ends, ends which must ultimately be oriented towards mans final end, ascent.(xvi) This point is dramatized in the Pilgrims dream of the siren in Canto XIX of the Purgatorio, where a hideous siren is transformed into an alluring women by Dantes gaze.
This highlights another important element in the pre-modern vision of reason. For Dante, man cannot slip into a dispassionate state of buffered reason where he lets the facts speak whenever he chooses. We are either properly oriented towards Truth and Goodness or we are not; we cannot chose to pivot between finite and spiritual ends as suits us. Rather, mans intellect and will is subject to the pernicious influence of the unregenerated passions and appetites until the rule of reason has been positively established.
The rule of reason can only be attained through repentance and a transformation accomplished through purgation and penance (something the Pilgrim must accomplish during his ascent of Mount Purgatory). By contrast, if reason is merely something akin to computation, then we all have the same power of reason, albeit some of us may have access to more facts, or might be quicker thinkers than others. On the modern view, asceticism and penance aimed at freeing the mind from the control of sensible desires are unnecessary. Here, it is worth noting why repentance is a prerequisite for the health of reason. Repentance represents a self-aware reflection on our own thought processes and choices, the ways in which they fall short, and a renewed commitment towards the pursuit of what is really true and what is truly best for their own sake.
Since this healing relies on divine grace, we might suppose that this leaves a smaller role for reason in Dantes conception of freedom However, the opposite is true. Mans rationality is emancipatory in Dantes narrative. Throughout the Commedia, it is through questioning that Dante makes progress. It is only by questioning what is really true and truly good that man moves beyond his current beliefs and desires, and so transcends what he already is. Without this transcendent capacity of reason, man would be like the sinners at the bottom of Dantes Hell, frozen in place, unable to move beyond the finitude of what he already is. Without this capacity of reason, we cannot turn around to question if the ends we pursue are truly good, and so we cannot properly align our loves through a turn to repentance and healing.
Indeed, in the Commedia, it is precisely the damned who appear to possess something like the Humean notion of reason. The damned are motivated by inchoate desires, impulses they do not attempt to master or understand. Count Ugolino will gnaw his rivals brain for eternity, never questioning this act. The intellect of the damned has become a slave to the passions, and this is why we never see any gesture of repentance from them.
This is also what puts sinners in conflict with one another. The pursuit of what is truly good and really true unifies us with others. Knowledge of the true and the best is not something that diminishes when shared.(43) Rather, the more people share in this knowledge, the less they are attracted to finite goods for their own sake, and the more they are able to forgo their desires for those goods in order to pursue higher, common goods. It is better for everyone when this knowledge is attained by anyone.
For Dante, as for most pre-moderns, man has a natural desire to know the truth.Man's mind cannot be satisfied unless it be illumined by that Truth beyond which there exists no other truth.(44) This is another desire that unifies, just as it also purifies. As noted above, contemplation of this truth involves both a union and a becoming. Just as Plato thought that the whole person must be turned towards the Good before a person could properly know it, the Christian tradition sees asceticism, good works, the sacraments, and other aspects of the spiritual life as necessarily preceding such a contemplative vision.(45) Hence, it is precisely in pursuing his highest joy that a man will also be led to be a better father, neighbor, and citizen. First, because he is no longer ruled over by his appetites and passions, nor dependent on finite goods that diminish when shared. Second, because greater knowledge of the Good is transformative, such that the knower comes to love creatures as signs and manifestations of the Divine.(46)
Conclusion:
The modern tendency to make no distinction between the rational and sensible appetites obfuscates that Humes dictum that reason is, and ought only be, the slave of the passions,(47) is an inversion of Virgils last words to Dante: "now is your will upright, wholesome and free, and not to heed its pleasure would be wrong."(48) For Dante, our pursuit of our own pleasure only becomes good (and ultimately, properly good for us) after the souls faculties have been purified through repentance and purgation and the higher faculties have asserted their proper authority over the lower. Indeed, since the lower faculties are also regenerated through intentionally directed habituation, they no longer draw man towards vice in this state. Only once this is accomplished is pleasure a proper guide for human flourishing.
In the last book of the Commedia, the Pilgrim, his will and intellect now cleansed and aided by divine illumination, begins his ascent towards the ultimate goal of all willing and knowing. It is appropriate then that the Paradiso is the most philosophical of the three books, since it is only after this regeneration that Pilgrim is prepared to learn about the nature of man and the cosmos. Here, we see a marked contrast with the empiricist ideal, where there is only the evidence and the analysis one can derive from it. Yet, for the last leg of the journey, Dante must be led by Beatrice, by ecstatic eros and divine illumination. He must be drawn outside himself, beyond his finitude. He must, in a new term Dante coins for the poem, be transhumanized.(49) This is not a knowing we can strive for. We can only prepare ourselves to accept it as a gift. Thus, Dantes most important lesson to us might be that such a gift can only be accepted freely. That is, it is only when we acknowledge our rational appetites, our desire for Goodness and Truth, that a proper ordering of our loves and true freedom is possible.*
Note: Because this paper has a large number of footnotes and end notes a PDF file has been made available. A longer version of the paper covering through the end of the Paradiso, with more discussion, can be found here.
Introduction: The Deflation of Reason[/b]
Note: This paper is a bit on the long side. If it seems like too much of a commitment, I recommend reading either just the first three introductory sections, for some interesting information on pre-modern notions of reason, or skipping right to Hell - Reason in Bondage: for the summary of Dante; both will hopefully prove interesting.
In The Discarded Image, C.S. Lewis notes the dramatic deflation of conceptualizations of reason in the modern era. In Guillaume de Lorris's Roman de la Rose (1230), we see: Reason the beautiful, a gracious lady, a humbled goddess plead[ing] with the lover as a celestial mistress, a rival to his earthly love.(1) Likewise, in his De Consolatione Philosophiae, Boethiuss Lady Philosophy seems semi-divine, her head effortlessly pierc[ing] within the very heavens.(2) This is Reason as intelligentia obumbrata the shadow of angelic nature in man.(3) Nor were these lofty notions confined to the Middle Ages. Aristotle saw mans rational soul as the most divine element in us.(4) Plato likewise saw the golden cord of reason as holy.(5)
By 1755 however, Samuel Johnson could define reason in his influential Dictionary of the English Language as merely the power by which man deduces one proposition from another, or proceeds from premises to consequences.(6) That is, reason had become a mere faculty of calculation. Such a faculty could obviously have no desires or ends of its own. Hence, in 1740, David Hume could note confidently that reason alone can never be a motive to any action of the will.(7) Reason might allow us to connect irrational sensations of pain and pleasure with different sense objects, but it [could not] be by [reasons] means that objects are able to affect us.(8) This is a far cry from Plato, whose understanding dominated pre-modern thought. For Plato thedesires of the rational part of the soul played a central role in mans freedom, and even his divinity.(9)
Yet despite this deflation of reasonand of mans intellect, which is often collapsed into reasonreason has nonetheless continued to play a dominant role in modern psychology. It could hardly be otherwise. Our rational thought processes and the phenomenology of understanding are both ostentatious elements of human experience. Hence, reason has to remain a defining element of the self, even as it is deflated. As a result, the modern epoch gave birth to what Charles Taylor calls the buffered self, a conception of the reasoning self as autonomous, self-contained, and insulated from external forces. This is a conception of the self that is, to varying degrees, estranged not only from the external world, but also from its own passions, appetites, and embodiment (e.g. the much criticized, but often subtly reproduced Cartesian Homunculus). In his A Secular Age, Taylor argues that this buffered self in turn helped to give rise to Max Webers disenchanted cosmos, a view of the world where meaning and identity arise from within the human mind.
As C.S. Lewis notes, this shift in meaning has tended to make the romantic appeals to Reason in pre-modern literature almost unintelligible. One can hardly rejoice in a calculator, much less see it as divine. However, the consequences of this shift go far deeper than our appreciation of classic literature. They paint a dramatically different picture of the human being, the human experience, and the proper role of rationality in human life. Of course, reason generally retains its role as our primary means of accessing truth.(10) Yet this no longer gives reason the proper authority it held over the appetites and passions in prior epochs, in part because it lacks its own rational ends. Instead, modern thought tends to follow Hume in seeing reason as chiefly an enabler of the passions (e.g., the image of Homo oeconomicus).(i)
This deflation plays an explanatory role in many of the seismic shifts that have come to define modern thought. For instance, the dominance of skepticism and epistemic concerns can themselves be seen as arising, at least in part, from this narrower view of reason. Likewise, conceptions of reasonand thus mans ability to knowthat leave it imprisoned in our heads, or trapped like a fly within the fly-bottles of discrete language games, rely on a picture of human knowing as entirely discursive. So too, Humes Guillotine (the is-ought gap), is based presupposition that man cannot possess rational appetites.(11) Perhaps nowhere is this shift more obvious than in the move to define freedom in terms of power, the ability to choose anything, as opposed to the earlier view of freedom as: the self-determining capacity to actualize the good.
Clearly, we will not have space to consider all the issues listed above. What I would like to do instead is paint a portrait of an earlier, richer view of reason. My goal is to lay out a less familiar vision of rationality, and to show where it intersects with the aforementioned fault lines in modern thought. Good philosophy requires us to question our presuppositions. A consideration of the earlier view of reason can bring to light some of the hidden assumptions that give modern thought its unique shape. To make this contrast all the more stark, we shall not use one of the great pre-modern philosophers of mind for our comparison. Rather, we shall look to the greatest poet of the Middle Agesand perhaps any ageto Dante Alighieri and hisDivine Comedy, following his pilgrimage through the afterlife as far as the top of Mount Purgatory.
Dante is a particularly apt choice for several reasons. First, he has an extremely wide role for rationality in human life. For Dante, mans rational soul, far from being a mere tool, is central to what man is and how he lives a good life. Second, reason plays a central role in Dantes conception of self-determination and human freedom. Finally, whereas today we are apt to see love as something irrational, and perhaps just one element of a good life, Dante sees love as the central thread running through the human experience (and indeed the entire cosmos). Dantes vision, which sees reason primarily engaged within the context of love, and finding its purpose in love, offers us the most vibrant possible contrast to highly deflationary views such as eliminitive materialism.
The Medieval View of Truth and Knowledge:
Before we delve into the narrative details of the Commedia, some preliminaries are in order. Dante is a poet, and while the Commedia has great philosophical depth, it is not a systematic treatise. Dante, like all thinkers, takes many of the assumptions of his era for granted. Key concepts related to reason do not receive specific elucidation in the poem. Hence, we must clarify exactly what Dante (and we ourselves) mean by truth and reason.
The modern period has seen a proliferation of different theories of truth (e.g. coherence, pragmatic, etc.). In Dantes context, truth was the adequacy of thought to being. It would be easy to label this a correspondence theory and move on, but there are crucial differences between the medieval understanding and most modern correspondence theories. Truth is primarily in the intellect for medieval thinkers.(12) Hence, truth is not primarily a property of propositions if this is to mean abstract objects existing outside the mind. Nor is truth primarily about language. Linguistic utterances are signs of truth in the intellect. Utterances are acts, yet it is substancesthingsthat primarily possess being, and so it is people (and God) who primarily possess truth. Since the human intellect is moved by things, it is measured by them. (13) There is an ontological truth in things (their correspondence to the divine intellect). In this context, concerns about truth being confined to disparate language games make little sense. Truth is not primarily about discursive justification; discursive justification is merely a means of attaining and communicating truth.(14),(ii)
Second, in both the Neo-Platonic and rediscovered Aristotelian traditions Dante was exposed to, there are elements of the conception of truth that hew closer to modern identity theories of truth. The human mind is capable of becoming all things.(15) When man comes to know something, the form of the thing known is present in his mind. This is not a representation of form. The intellect dematerializes the thing known, resulting in the mind becoming identical with the object of knowledge. Of course, this does not imply that when we know an apple our minds become apples, for the two exist in distinct modes.(16) However, it does mean that many of the epistemic issues that dominate modern thought and tend to impose a sense of unbridgeable distance between knower and known are absent from Dantes conception. Knowing involves a union of knower and known.
The importance of this sort of union in knowing, which is both a being penetrated by what is known and an ecstasis, a going out beyond the self to the known, for Dante cannot be overstated. Indeed, the antiquated term carnal knowledge, with all its erotic connotations, gets far closer to the older view than the sterile formulation of justified true belief.(17),(iii) The goal of Dantes pilgrimage, and of all mankind, is ultimately to know God, which is also to love and be in union with God.
Modern conceptions that make both love and knowledge an entirely internal affair cannot capture this erotic element of knowing the other as other. As Byung-Chul Han notes in The Agony of Eros, the modern crisis of love derives from the erosion of the Other... Eros concerns the Other in the strong sense, namely, what cannot be encompassed by the regime of the ego.(18) The beatific vision at the climax of the Commedia is fundamentally an encounter with the other, not the conquest of the other by the self. It is not the grasping and possession of the other that Han finds in the modern ethos, but rather a union, an offering of the self to the other as a gift.(iv) (v)
Yet this knowing does involve an internal dimension, a penetration of the self by the other. To know God requires knowing by becoming.(vi) As Dante rises higher into the Heavens in the Paradiso, and comes closer to God, he is increasingly able to bear the overwhelming brightness of Beatrices (revealed truths) smile, due to a continuous internal transformation (as opposed to cumulative acquisition). In this conception, the world is not held at arms length while we inspect our own mental representations of it. Rather, there is a sense in which we become what is known. Thus, to know God is to attain the very best, to become like onto God as much as we are ablethe theosis or deification that is mans ultimate telos in the Christian tradition.(vii)
The Medieval View of Reason and the Intellect:
Part of the deflation of reason has involved a dramatic synecdoche in which one of the faculties of mans intellect, ratio (through which we get the English reason) comes to be associated with the whole of mans rational faculties. By contrast, in Dantes context, ratio refers specifically to discursive reason, the step-by-step thinking by which we move through arguments, or plan future actions. In Humes Treatise for instance, it is obvious that this faculty is primarily what Hume takes as encompassing the whole of reason. It is perhaps instructive that this mode of the intellect, to which the whole of mans rationality is now often reduced, was the lower of two faculties.
The higher faculty is intellectus (noesis in Greek). Intellectus is the faculty of intuitive understanding; it is contemplative, receptive, and rooted in insight. For the medievals, reasoning must begin with this sort of understanding, otherwise it would simply be a sort of rule following divorced from intelligible content.(19) Ratio is the means by which we move from truth to truth and come to encircle new truths. The acquisition of human knowledge begins and ends in intellectus, but proceeds by discursive ratio. The difference between ratio and intellectus is thus the difference between motion towards some end and rest in that end, between acquisition and possession,(20) or as time is to eternity and circumference is to center.(21),(viii) Dante will play off this circular imagery in Cantos X-XIV of the Paradiso, in the Heaven of the Sun, where Dante meets the souls of the wise (e.g. St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventure). Here, the wise men move in a joyful, circular dance which has an immobile Beatrice (a symbol of revealed truth) as its center.
To be sure, some modern thinkers do still have a role for intuition and understanding in human reasoning, yet this generally falls far short of a direct grasp of truth.(ix) Indeed, as Mark Burgess documents in his Transcendent Apriorism: Pure Reason's Quest for the Noumenal, Kants arguments against the dogmatism of pre-critical metaphysics have tended to motivate a cursory dismissal any understanding of intuition as the direct apprehension of truth, much less as the co-identiy of knower and known. Yet he also argues that this move has been motivated by error, prejudice, and a lack of substantial engagement with the extremely wide tradition that is, quite often, being rejected in a perfunctory manner. We do not have space to engage this topic here, except to point out that differences on this issue lead to many key differences in how major epistemic problems are approached.(x)
Crucially, this transposition in modern thought goes further than ratio merely superseding (or in some cases swallowing up) intellectus. In the philosophy familiar to Dante, the intellect capable of both ratio and intellectus was itself just one of two components of the rational soul, which was composed of intellect and will. Modern English faces a challenge here in that reason and rationality are often used interchangeably to refer to this rational soul, the intellect (whereby we know), and reason as ratio, whereby we acquire discursive knowledge. This collapse of three distinct concepts into one word is itself a sign of the deflation we are investigating. Because Dante has this larger rational soul in focus, he sees reason playing an extremely rich and essential role in human life. Indeed, on the medieval view, the intellect plays an essential, rather than merely enabling role in human happiness. As St. Thomas writes: The essence of happiness consists in an act of the Intellect, but the delight that results from happiness pertains to the will.(22)
Whereas contemporary thought has often drawn no distinction between the sensible and rational appetites, such a distinction would have been obvious to Dante.(23) The animal hunger by which a starving man is impelled towards food was seen as distinct from the way in which a man self-consciously desires and acts towards some end because it is understood by him to be good. For both medieval Aristotelians and the moderns, man is an animal. Yet, for the Aristotelian, man is the rational animal, and this makes all the difference.
Hell - Reason in Bondage:
In his letter to Cangrande, Dante describes the core topic of the Commedia as mans progress from slavery in sin (spiritual Egypt) to freedom in the promised land.(24) Dantes pilgrimage in the Commedia begins in the Dark Wood of Error, where he has wandered off from the straight path.(25) His initial despair at finding himself lost is lifted when he spies the sun lit hill above him (a symbol of goodness). He knows where he needs to go. The Pilgrim possess synteresis, an innate knowledge that the good is preferable to evil (and truth to falsity). However, as he attempts to climb the hill under his own power he is forced back by the three beasts representing sin. His mounting terror only subsides when he is greeted by the great Roman poet Virgil, who tells the Pilgrim that he will be leading him on a tour through the afterlifethrough Hell and Purgatory, before Beatrice, the great love of Dantes life, leads Dante through Heaven.(26)
While we will learn in Canto II that Virgils rescue mission was set in motion through divine grace and the activity of the beatified souls in Paradise, it is important to note the Virgila symbol of human reason and classical philosophywill be able to lead Dante as far as the top of Mount Purgatory, a utopian heaven on Earth. That Virgil can get the Pilgrim so far (although not without divine aid (27)), is emblematic of the crucial role Dante sees for reason in human life.
The purpose of Dantes descent through Hell is to instruct him in the true nature of sin. Sin is the bondage of mans rational nature to the irrational passions and appetites.(xi) Sin is a misordering of loves. It is to fail to know things as they are, to be attracted to the worse over of the better. This condition arises when the rational soul (intellect and will)the part of man that can know and desire the Good as Good (28)is subjugated by mans lower faculties. Hence, as Dante enters the Gates of Hell, Virgil remarks that the Pilgrim will now observe the suffering race of souls who have lost the good of intellect.(29),(xii)
Throughout the early parts of the descent, Dante the Pilgrim is often sympathetic to the damned in Hell. He calls the words emblazoned on the Gates of Hell, which claim to be moved by highest wisdom and primal love, cruel.(30) He swoons in sympathy after Francesca explains how she was led into adultery by love, and oftentimes his expressions of pity or respect for the damned seem at odds with acceptance that their punishment is just.(31) This question of sympathy will come to a head in Canto XX, where the Dante addresses the reader directly: ask yourself how I could keep my eyes dry when, close by, the souls of diviners and sorcerers were being punished by having their heads grotesquely turned around backwards.(32) At first glance, this would seem to be Dante the Poet asking us to justify his own graphic depictions of divine justice. The question may seem to be: how can God be the author of such cruel punishments?
However, we must recall here that we are supposed to take the Infernos punishments seriously, but not as factual descriptions. The punishments of the Inferno are aligned to the nature of each sin. For instance, the lustful are blown about in an unending gale, as they themselves were blown about by their passions in life. Suicides are deprived of the bodies they rejected in life. Thieves who transgressed the boundaries of others property are condemned to spend eternity stealing each others bodies. Each contrapasso is meant to symbolize the nature of the sin itselfwhat it does to others, and even more what it does to the sinner themselves.
Hence, Dantes question is not so much about Gods role as an extrinsic actor executing punishments upon the damned, but is rather: how can God allow his image bearers to disfigure themselves in the ways we see dramatized and concretized in the Inferno? Dantes answer isnt fully revealed until the Paradiso. Free, rational beings, by their very nature, must possess a capacity to disfigure themselves in this way. Otherwise, they would lack agency. To be truly self-determining, they must turn themselves towards the Good, transcending their own finitude with the aid of grace, whereas a turn towards finite goods is a turn towards nothingness. Finite goods are nothing apart from God; all goodness is ultimately participation in the Divine Goodness.(33)
Hell is much more diverse than Purgatory and Paradise. It has more divisions and more unique settings. By contrast, it is revealed to Dante early in the Paradiso that all the blessed are actually in one place (indeed, within a single dimensionless point), and merely condescend to appear in different spheres of the heavens.(34) This is because the damned pursue multiplicity rather than the unifying First Cause and First Principle. Rather than seeking the Good on account of its goodness (because it is known by the intellect as good), the damned allow their desires for finite goods to triumph over the pursuit of the necessary telos of all rational creatures (the Good and the True, sought as such).(xiii)
The damned are also cut off from all communion with others. We see no sympathy or repentance in Hell. Indeed, the damned are often seen actively tormenting one another. This is not incidental to sin, but its very nature, the curvatus in se that disfigures the sinners soul. As the Pilgrim will learn from Guido Del Duca in the Canto XIV of the Purgatorio (on the terrace where the envious endure purgation), it could not be otherwise. To seek finite, material goods is to seek goods that diminish when they are shared. The pursuit of such goods sets up a dialectic of envy and competition between men. It is only as regards spiritual goods that our own good increases when others partake in them.(xiv)
Purgatory - Love and Reason:
If the core lesson of the Inferno is the true nature of sin, which drives us downward and dissolves the person in multiplicity, then the key lesson of the Purgatorio is the nature of love, which unifies the person, and ultimately the entire whole cosmos. During his ascent up Mount Purgatory, the Pilgrim learns that it is through the shedding of vice and attainment of virtue that we become free. Ultimately, this transformation comes down to possessing the proper loves. As Dante famously declares at the outset of the Paradiso:
[i]The glory of the One Who moves all things
penetrates all the universe, reflecting
in one part more and in another less. (35)[/i]
Every finite thing is a partial likeness of Gods eternal wisdom. Any good it possesses it possesses by participation in the Divine Goodness.(36) Finite things are good precisely to the extent that they reflect the divine light. Hence, finite things are all stepping stones, rungs on a ladder up to God. As St. Augustine says in De Doctrina Christiana, finite goods are meant to be used, not enjoyed for their own sake. To descend down the ladder in order to possess one of its rungs is thus a confusion of what is truly most worthy of love. This is a failure of the intellect to recognize worth, or of the will to follow the guidance of the intellect. That is, it is a failure of our rational nature to be rational.(xv)
Love runs throughout the Pilgrims entire journey, from the primeval love that erected the Gates of Hell (37), to the Love that moves the sun and the other stars at the end of the poem.(38) In the discourses on love that occupy the center of the poem, the Pilgrim comes to understand love, and so to understand loves relation to the rational soul and the role of reason in human life.
This explanation is given most explicitly in Canto XVII of the Purgatorio. For Dante, love is what motivates everything we do. Through Virgils teaching, the Pilgrim comes to understand how love must be the seed of every virtue growing in [us], and every deed that merits punishment.(39) Virgil begins this discourse with a distinction:
[i]Neither Creator nor his creatures ever,
my son, lacked love. There are, as you well know,
two kinds: the natural love, the rational.
Natural love may never be at fault;
the other may: by choosing the wrong goal,
by insufficient or excessive zeal.(40)[/i]
This natural love is wills natural inclination towards the Good and the intellects natural inclination towards Truth, or, ultimately, the orientation of both towards God (the Good and the True themselves). This is that innate and never-ending thirst, by which Dante and Beatrice will later be drawn up through the heavens.(41) As Virgil will point out in the next Canto:
The soul, which is created quick to love,
responds to everything that pleases, just
as soon as beauty wakens it to act.(42)
This beauty can lead us upwards, towards virtue and God. However, we can also fall prey to finite beauties and be led downwards, towards vice. Indeed, it is the very tendency to ascend itselfa habitin which virtue consists. Likewise, vice is a habitual orientation towards descent. Such habits involve both moral and epistemic virtues, virtues we can be trained in or intentionally habituate ourselves to. Since the will always desires what is truly better through its natural love, an attraction to the worse over the better, involves a projection of goodness onto what lacks it. This is a failure of the rational love that is conditioned by the intellect. It is to love things more or less than they are worthy of being loved. Of course, Dante does not subscribe to a simplistic notion where things are simply good or bad in themselves. The intellect must guide the person precisely because goodness is defined in terms of proper ends, ends which must ultimately be oriented towards mans final end, ascent.(xvi) This point is dramatized in the Pilgrims dream of the siren in Canto XIX of the Purgatorio, where a hideous siren is transformed into an alluring women by Dantes gaze.
This highlights another important element in the pre-modern vision of reason. For Dante, man cannot slip into a dispassionate state of buffered reason where he lets the facts speak whenever he chooses. We are either properly oriented towards Truth and Goodness or we are not; we cannot chose to pivot between finite and spiritual ends as suits us. Rather, mans intellect and will is subject to the pernicious influence of the unregenerated passions and appetites until the rule of reason has been positively established.
The rule of reason can only be attained through repentance and a transformation accomplished through purgation and penance (something the Pilgrim must accomplish during his ascent of Mount Purgatory). By contrast, if reason is merely something akin to computation, then we all have the same power of reason, albeit some of us may have access to more facts, or might be quicker thinkers than others. On the modern view, asceticism and penance aimed at freeing the mind from the control of sensible desires are unnecessary. Here, it is worth noting why repentance is a prerequisite for the health of reason. Repentance represents a self-aware reflection on our own thought processes and choices, the ways in which they fall short, and a renewed commitment towards the pursuit of what is really true and what is truly best for their own sake.
Since this healing relies on divine grace, we might suppose that this leaves a smaller role for reason in Dantes conception of freedom However, the opposite is true. Mans rationality is emancipatory in Dantes narrative. Throughout the Commedia, it is through questioning that Dante makes progress. It is only by questioning what is really true and truly good that man moves beyond his current beliefs and desires, and so transcends what he already is. Without this transcendent capacity of reason, man would be like the sinners at the bottom of Dantes Hell, frozen in place, unable to move beyond the finitude of what he already is. Without this capacity of reason, we cannot turn around to question if the ends we pursue are truly good, and so we cannot properly align our loves through a turn to repentance and healing.
Indeed, in the Commedia, it is precisely the damned who appear to possess something like the Humean notion of reason. The damned are motivated by inchoate desires, impulses they do not attempt to master or understand. Count Ugolino will gnaw his rivals brain for eternity, never questioning this act. The intellect of the damned has become a slave to the passions, and this is why we never see any gesture of repentance from them.
This is also what puts sinners in conflict with one another. The pursuit of what is truly good and really true unifies us with others. Knowledge of the true and the best is not something that diminishes when shared.(43) Rather, the more people share in this knowledge, the less they are attracted to finite goods for their own sake, and the more they are able to forgo their desires for those goods in order to pursue higher, common goods. It is better for everyone when this knowledge is attained by anyone.
For Dante, as for most pre-moderns, man has a natural desire to know the truth.Man's mind cannot be satisfied unless it be illumined by that Truth beyond which there exists no other truth.(44) This is another desire that unifies, just as it also purifies. As noted above, contemplation of this truth involves both a union and a becoming. Just as Plato thought that the whole person must be turned towards the Good before a person could properly know it, the Christian tradition sees asceticism, good works, the sacraments, and other aspects of the spiritual life as necessarily preceding such a contemplative vision.(45) Hence, it is precisely in pursuing his highest joy that a man will also be led to be a better father, neighbor, and citizen. First, because he is no longer ruled over by his appetites and passions, nor dependent on finite goods that diminish when shared. Second, because greater knowledge of the Good is transformative, such that the knower comes to love creatures as signs and manifestations of the Divine.(46)
Conclusion:
The modern tendency to make no distinction between the rational and sensible appetites obfuscates that Humes dictum that reason is, and ought only be, the slave of the passions,(47) is an inversion of Virgils last words to Dante: "now is your will upright, wholesome and free, and not to heed its pleasure would be wrong."(48) For Dante, our pursuit of our own pleasure only becomes good (and ultimately, properly good for us) after the souls faculties have been purified through repentance and purgation and the higher faculties have asserted their proper authority over the lower. Indeed, since the lower faculties are also regenerated through intentionally directed habituation, they no longer draw man towards vice in this state. Only once this is accomplished is pleasure a proper guide for human flourishing.
In the last book of the Commedia, the Pilgrim, his will and intellect now cleansed and aided by divine illumination, begins his ascent towards the ultimate goal of all willing and knowing. It is appropriate then that the Paradiso is the most philosophical of the three books, since it is only after this regeneration that Pilgrim is prepared to learn about the nature of man and the cosmos. Here, we see a marked contrast with the empiricist ideal, where there is only the evidence and the analysis one can derive from it. Yet, for the last leg of the journey, Dante must be led by Beatrice, by ecstatic eros and divine illumination. He must be drawn outside himself, beyond his finitude. He must, in a new term Dante coins for the poem, be transhumanized.(49) This is not a knowing we can strive for. We can only prepare ourselves to accept it as a gift. Thus, Dantes most important lesson to us might be that such a gift can only be accepted freely. That is, it is only when we acknowledge our rational appetites, our desire for Goodness and Truth, that a proper ordering of our loves and true freedom is possible.*
Comments (40)
Quoting Moliere
This 'union of knower and known' is a theme which is found across many classical forms of philosophical spirituality. The way I've been seeking to frame it is in terms of union in the sense implied in the etymology of 'yoga', 'harnessing of the soul to the One.' So it's a state of being, participatory rather than propositional, and for that reason, also a radical shift in perspective.
I'm cautious about 'things possessing being', bearing in mind the term given here as 'thing' was originally 'ouisia', which is nearer in meaning to 'being' that what we think of as 'substance'. The expression in medieval philosophy was 'creatures' i.e. 'created beings', hardly synonymous with 'things'.
Quoting Moliere
Suggestive of Diotoma's ladder of divine ascent in the Symposium. But doesn't a distinction need to be made between the erotic and the (merely) carnal? After all, in Plato, reason is the faculty of the soul which harnesses and subordinates the appetites and spiritedness. While I appreciate the deployment of the term carnal knowledge to highlight the intimate, transformative aspect of knowing in Dante, in our cultural climate, the word 'carnal' carries associations that are far removed from Dantes theologically infused vision of eros.
So again, here is the vision of the older conception of knowledge as participation, being-with or being-in, rather than knowing about or representing. It is presented as a transformation, not an acquisition (a Taoist saying comes to mind, 'in learning the arts and sciences, every day something is acquired; in learning the Great Way, every day something is lost.' Oh, and that reference to transcendent apriorism is especially appreciated - it's something I've been intuitively groping for without knowing how to describe it. I've found the original PhD online.)
Philosophy meets Literature and marry in the most unique and fascinating manner. Well-structured with advice given to the reader on the important passages.
We follow the deflation of reason, from holy images of divine angels to calculation (premises to consequences) to Hume's well-known reason alone can never be a motive to any action of the will.
[The author provides reference numbers but there is no list or biography at the end.]
Reason, a defining aspect of the self, plays a role in psychology, even as the self is brought to its knees in eliminative materialism. Where is the joy?
The author observes:
We move from modern philosophy to the author painting a richer picture of reason. The author's goal is clearly stated:
Here, I raise my head in anticipation and bow in frustration. Dante. Poetry. Mount Purgatory.
All of this has intrigued me but I have never followed it through. For whatever reason or emotion.
The challenge presents itself again...
Why Dante?
The author gives reasons for the choice. The reader also catches a hint, a rosy tint of personal attraction.
Love. The different kinds, nature and duration. From foolish recklessness (irrationality) - a low kind of passion to the highest. Perhaps, they are all 'irrational 'in the sense of not being understood or analysed by reason. Love is a complex quality we can feel but not count.
Quoting Psychology Today - The Rationality of Love
Dante's love for Beatrice is central to his life experience and writings. How may it be described?
Rational or irrational? What matters is the feeling, the influence and inspiration. We catch a sense of it:
Quoting Florence Inferno - Beatrice and Dante
This paper is too full for me to follow in a single post. However, I need to share some of this beautifully sustained writing. To glimpse, to understand the images of love in the pilgrimage, even if I don't appreciate the role of God.
I enjoy being introduced to 'synteresis', briefly explained. Is this the same as natural intuition?
A practical morality? Without need for a process of reasoning?
Even with this internal 'power' - or perhaps because of it - terror can still take over our will. Do we, then, need recourse to external entities? Or immaterial ghost-like figures giving us reason to go on?
Do we need purification? Will and intellect cleansed?
In Conclusion:
Interesting to me is how the Beatrice of Dante's early life (now long deceased) continues to lead 'by ecstatic eros and divine illumination'. What kind of love is this? Imagined? Obsession?
I appreciate the drawing out from inner feelings to some kind of truth or knowledge. A transformation.
The author suggests that this is a divine gift.
Dante's word 'transhumanised', so very different from our current concerns re transhumanism, or is it?
Quoting Wiki - Transhumanism
If life is all about enhancing the human condition, to reach a state of wellbeing, then maybe future technologies will serve humanity better...than poetry and religion?
Perhaps. The joining of philosophy and literature, love and passion, wisdom and care - it all sounds pretty good. I'm not so sure that we all desire the absolute ideals of 'Goodness and Truth'.
Nor that such a 'proper ordering' is possible. And what is 'true freedom'?
An awesome essay from this author. I've only joined in some of it. Tripping and tripped, a delight.
I apologise for relying too much on quotes. A sign of a lazy mind, indeed. I will never get to heaven.
Quoting Amity
I agree. It's properly edifying. And the length shouldn't put anyone off. It's well worth reading it all. I'll come back and say more later.
I look forward to that. I barely touched this. It deserves more attention and discussion. So impressive.
The essay brings literature and its history to the forefront of philosophy when so much seems to be focused on science. This essay stands out as being fairly unique, as Dante's ideas are not discussed much, if at all on TPF.
Footnotes:
1. C.S. Lewis. The Discarded Image. Cambridge University Press. (1964) pg. 161
2. Boethius. De Consolatione Philosophiae. Trans H.R. James (1897) Book I, Prose I
3. C.S. Lewis. The Discarded Image. Cambridge University Press. (1964) pg. 161
4. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics. Book X, Ch. VII.
5. Plato, Laws (645a).
6. Samuel Johnson. A Dictionary of the English Language. (1755)
7. David Hume. A Treatise of Human Nature. (2.3.3.1) (1740)
8. David Hume. A Treatise of Human Nature. (2.3.3.3) (1740)
9. Plato. Timaeus. 90a
10. Although under deflationary theories of truth, where all that can be said about truth is exhausted by an account of the role of the term true in our language, it is now less clear what truth itself refers to.
11. That is, the desires Plato ascribes to the rational part of the soul, namely the desire for truth and goodness as such.
12. E.g., St. Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae. Part I, Q.16, A.1
13. St. Thomas Aquinas Questiones Disputatae de Veritate. Q1, A2. Trans. Robert W. Mulligan (1952)
14. Here, it is worth noting that the reduction of mans rational soul to merely the power of discursive ratio might be seen as a major cause (and presupposition) of views that confine truth to language or formal systems
15. Aristotle. De Anima. Book III, Ch. V
16. See: St. Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologia. Part I. Q. 85. A.1 R
17. The most erotic passage of the Commedia occurs at the end of Canto X of the Paradiso, in the Heaven of the Sun, where Dante meets the souls of the wise theologians who progressed furthest in knowledge of the divine (see endnote iii).
18. Byung-Chul Han. The Agony of Eros. Trans Erik Butler. MIT Press (2017) pg. 1
19. That is, something like the actions of the man in John Searles Chinese Room thought experiment, who follows the rules of the Chinese language in producing text, but understands none of it. Some of the most deflationary conceptions of the human intellect claim that there truly is nothing more to language and rationality than this sort of rule following.
20. St. Thomas Aquinas.Summa Theologia. Part I. Q. 79. A.8
21. Boethius. De Consolatione Philosophiae. Trans H.R. James (1987) Book IV, Prose VI
22. See: St. Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologia. Part II/I, Q.3, A.4
23.For an example of this distinction see St. Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologia. Part II/I, Q.8, A.1
24. Dante Alighieri. Epistle to Cangrande. Trans James Marchand. Georgetown University. §7
25.Mark Musa. Divine Comedy Volume I: Inferno. Penguin Classics. (1984) Canto I, 3
26.It is not incidental that an erotic other, rather than a teacher, must lead Dante on this last leg of his pilgrimage.
27.Virgil will require angelic assistance to get past the demons who block the pairs descent (Cantos VIII-IX).
28.See Paradiso Canto XXXIII, lines 103-104, where Dantes specifies the Good (God) as the goal of all willing.
29. Mark Musa. Divine Comedy Volume I: Inferno. Penguin Classics. (1984) Canto, III, 17-18
30. Mark Musa. Divine Comedy Volume I: Inferno Penguin Classics. (1984) Canto III, 6 & 12
31. See: Inferno, Canto V
32. Mark Musa. Divine Comedy Volume I: Inferno Penguin Classics. (1984) Canto XX, 20-21
33.That all goodness relates to the Divine Good is explained in St. Thomas Aquinass Summa Theologiae, Part I, Q6. Lucifer and Adams falls are recounted in Canto XIX and XVI of the Paradiso respectively. Lucifers fall and his current condition is also covered in Canto XXXIV of the Inferno.
34. See: Paradiso, Canto IV, line 33
35. Mark Musa. Divine Comedy Volume III: Paradise. Penguin Classics. (1984) Canto I, 1-3
36. See: St. Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae, Part I, Q6 on this point.
37. Mark Musa. The Divine Comedy Volume I: Inferno (1984) Canto III, line 6
38. Mark Musa. The Divine Comedy Volume III: Paradise. (1984) Canto XXXIII , line 145
39. Mark Musa. The Divine Comedy Volume II: Purgatory. (1981) Canto XVII, lines 103-105
40. Mark Musa. The Divine Comedy Volume II: Purgatory. (1981) Canto XVII, 91-96
41. Mark Musa. The Divine Comedy Volume III: Paradise (1984) Canto II, line 19
42. Mark Musa. The Divine Comedy Volume II: Purgatory. (1981) Canto XVIII, 25-27
43. See Purgatorio Cantos XIV and XV.
44. Mark Musa. The Divine Comedy Volume III: Paradise (1984) Canto IV, lines 124-126
45. Plato. Republic. (518c-518d)
46. It is worth noting here that on St. Bernard of Clairvaux (Dantes final guide in the Commedia)s Ladder of Love, the final step is the love of creatures for Gods sake.
47.David Hume. A Treatise of Human Nature. (2.3.3.415) (1740)
48. Mark Musa. The Divine Comedy Volume II: Purgatory (1984) XXVII lines 140-142
49.Mark Musa. Divine Comedy Volume III:Paradise. Penguin Classics. (1984) Canto I, line 70; see also pg.13 for Musas commentary on the use of this unique term.
Endnotes:
I. Indeed, the triumph of volanturist theories of liberty can be seen as stemming, at least in part, from the fact that the new conception of reason is incapable of ruling over a person because it is bereft of its own motivations (i.e., its desire for Goodness and Truth as such).
II. One need only consider likely modern challenges to St. John of Damascuss matter of fact claim that: neither are all things unutterable nor all utterable; neither all unknowable nor all knowable. But the knowable belongs to one order, and the utterable to another; just as it is one thing to speak and another thing to know, to see that labeling both modern and pre-modern views correspondence theories papers over a great deal of difference (St. John of Damascus. An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith. Book I, Ch. II)
III.
Then, as the tower-clock calls us to come
at the hour when God's Bride is roused from bed
to woo with matin song her Bridegroom's love,
with one part pulling thrusting in the other,
chiming, ting-ting, music so sweet the soul,
ready for love, swells with anticipation
Paradiso, Canto X, lines 139-142 (Musa translation)
IV. Much more could be said about how Hans recent influential critique in The Agony of Eros relates to Dantes conception of love and knowing. Its worth noting that Han covers ground that is very similar to Pope John Paul IIs Theology of the Body in Simple Language, with the latter drawing heavily from the tradition Dante represents.
Han quotes Emmanuel Levinass Time and the Other (pg. 11-12) approvingly, questioning if the erotic love must always be a failure if it is defined in terms of grasping, possessing, or knowing, since these presuppose the conquest (and so elimination) of the other, and are synonyms of power.
However, Levinass inclusion of knowing in the paradigm of power presupposes the modern notion of knowledge. This is not the knowing of ecstasis one finds in Plato and much of the pre-modern tradition, nor is it the "knowing by becoming" of the Neoplatonic ascent. Rather it is a knowing where a static self lays hold of the other and makes it a part of itself, consuming it. There is no "going out" or "being penetrated" in such a view, but merely "acquisition."
This shift in knowing makes certain a sort of sense when one considers the modern reduction of man's rationality to discursive ratio alone. Aquinas himself says that ratio is to acquisition (and movement) as intellectus is to possession (and rest). The latter is, of course, likened to "possession," but this is not Levinass possession as power. It is possession as respects rest in a goal, a rest in the other as an end, rather than a frenetic, never-ending movement, a need to extract from the other as means for the gratification of the self.
V. Such a view of knowing also goes along with Ferdinand Ulrichs conception of being as gift, which is heavily influenced by Aquinas and the medieval tradition.
VI. Christian Moevss excellent work The Metaphysics of Dantes Comedy explores these notions of knowing by becoming, and knowing as self-knowledge in depth.
VII. Understanding the role of love vis-à-vis reason is complicated by the fact that love has itself been subject to a sort of deflation. We can see this in the collapse of several unique concepts (i.e., philia, agape, pragma, stroge, eros, and ludus) into a single English word: love. Today, one finds the language of the buffered, atomized, discursively rational economic actor (the goal-driven consumer) even in the language of romantic relationships. Be it in guides on attracting "high value males," and not being a "pick-me," aimed women, or the "attraction through competition," and "peacocking" schemes of male-oriented advice writers (the self-described pick-up artists of the online Manosphere), Homo oeconomicus appears to have replaced Homo sapiens.
VIII. Another of Dantes sources, Dionysius the Areopagite uses similar circle imagery in De Divinis Nominibus (Book IV, Chapter IX):
Further, there is a movement of soul, circular indeed,----the entrance into itself from things without, and the unified convolution of its intellectual powers, bequeathing to it inerrancy, as it were, in a sort of circle, and turning and collecting itself, from the many things without, first to itself, then, as having become single, uniting with the uniquely unified powers, and thus conducting to the Beautiful and Good.
IX. For instance, in the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Kant stakes our ability to distinguish dreams from reality on connection according to [discursive] rules that determine the combination of representations in experience, rather than on any definite relation between the actuality of things and their appearances (4.290).
X. For instance, Wittgensteins influential On Certainty takes up many of the same questions about justification and knowledge addressed by Aristotles Posterior Analytics. Yet the two thinkers come to radically different conclusions on the nature of knowledge, in large part because intellectus is not considered as an option in the later work.
XI. In Christian terminology, this would be the rule of the Flesh. Yet it is important to note that the Flesh is not simply the body, nor is it the sensuous appetites or passions. These are to be purified and redirected towards what is truly good, not uprooted. The appetites and emotions are an important part of the person, and the human beings perfection in the age to come involves the restoration of their body. Rather the Flesh represents an orientation towards finite goods and away from God, the ultimate end of human existence. Because it is the intellect that knows the good as good, it is only when the intellect rules that man can be directed towards goodness itself, and so escape the allures of the World and Flesh.
XII. It is instructive that Virgil makes this pronouncement before Dante is led to Limbo, with its bucolic scenery and its brightly glowing seven walled castle (likely symbolizing the seven liberal arts by which men are made free and the light of intellect, as suggested by Musa pg.103). The imagery here recalls the Earthly Paradise atop Mount Purgatory, a heaven on Earth, that Virgil, human reason, was ultimately capable of directing the Pilgrim to. Indeed, as Gerald Walsh suggests, had Dante wished to write a Human Comedy, an ode to humanism, the story might have ended with Virgil bringing Dante to that summit, to a Limbo-like Heaven atop Mount Purgatory. In so doing, Walsh claims Dante would have advanced a view of mans telos in line with Condorcet, Kant, and Hegel (Gerald Groveland Walsh. Dantes Philosophy of History. The Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Jul., 1934), pp. 117-134).
Yet Canto IV begins with Virgil telling the Pilgrim that he is now descending into the sightless world (Canto IV line 13), and the air of Limbo is filled the sounds of sighs of untormented grief (line 28). Hence, we must not forget that for Dante, those in Limbo are still damned. These souls have lost the good of intellect in that intellect can no longer bring them to mans natural end. They are consigned to endless motion, never reaching satisfaction. They have seen the Beloved, but cannot reach Him.
Dantes narrative here, far from showcasing a secular semi-heaven, should rather be taken as a potent critique of ethical systems that take the Good to be the proper target of rational thought and will, but in the end merely an intentional object (ens rationis but not ens reale). Such a system supposes that, though we might become true self-movers, exercising a rational freedom, our movement is ultimately every bit as vain as Satans fruitless kicking (and so in some sense still irrational).
XIII. Such an association of multiplicity with sin is a foundational part of the Christian tradition. For instance, Origen of Alexandria, often regarded as the first systemic Christian theologian, writes in his On Prayer (Chapter XII. The Lords Prayer:: The Preface in Matthew):
There is no unity in matter and in bodily substances, but every such supposed unity is split up and divided and disintegrated into many units to the loss of its union. Good is one; many are the base. Truth is one; many are the false. True righteousness is one; many are the states that act it as a part. Gods wisdom is one; many are the wisdoms of this age and of the rulers of this age which come to nought. The word of God is one, but many are the words alien to God.
XIV. A look at how St. Thomas defines spirit, in contrast to soul might be helpful here. The spirit is the soul vis-a-vis its transcendence of the body (e.g. ST 1.97.3). When we consider the spirit, the agent of the operations of intellect and will is the soul considered in its distinction from the body (as opposed to its unity with the body). The sensible appetites, which attract us to finite goods that cannot be freely shared, are excluded from spiritual activities (ST 1.75.2).
Hence, we could think of envy, and all of our competition for status, wealth, etc., as in some sense a misordering, since it involves the lower part of the soul (i.e. sensible) ruling over the higher part (i.e. the rational). It is also a misuse of our body, if we consider the body to be primarily a vehicle for the spiritual life, that is, a conception of the body as sacramental (e.g. in Pope John Paul IIs Theology of the Body in Simple Language).
XV. St. Bonaventure, one of Dantes many sources (and a soul he encounters in the Heaven of the Sun), is instructive here:
The creatures of this sensible world signify the invisible things of God [Rom. 1:20], partly because God is of all creation the origin, exemplar, and end, and because every effect is the sign of its cause, the exemplification of the exemplar, and the way to the end to which it leads; partly from its proper representation; partly from prophetic prefiguration; partly from angelic operation; partly from further ordination. For every creature is by nature a sort of picture and likeness of that eternal wisdom (Itinerarium Mentis in Deum. Chapter 2.12)
XVI. Dantes conception here is in line with the classical Christian tradition. For example, we could consider the famous adage from St. Maximos the Confessor that:
Nothing created by God is evil. It is not food that is evil but gluttony, not the begetting of children but unchastity, not material things but avarice, not esteem but self-esteem. It is only the misuse of things that is evil, not the things themselves.
"Holy" and holistic. Reason is the proper mode of action in relation to the immediate quality of sense experience, which is in itself a relation that transcends subject and object (its pre-symbolic). The telos of reason then is to seek to maximize the quality of such experience in general through specific responses that actualize its quality. In this sense, conscious reasoning involves a detour through symbolic reality to mould the will into a shape fitting to an immediate and intuitive understanding of the ongoing quality of experience that has the potential to deepen and expand subjective experience. It's subjective experience finding itself gradually in and through the word (if we are to be Hegelian about it).
But if reason is posited as lacking its own ends, this, of course, leads to freedom lacking an end.
Nominal freedom, the right to respond to passions in varying ways---passions which themselves are provoked in ever more varying ways and to which we respond primarily in order to satisfy our sensuous appetites---takes precedence over ontological freedom, the space to respond according to reason, the telos of which is to increase the quality of subjectivitys relation to its worldto actualize the good.
This castration of reason and freedom is too a castration of subjectivity that tends to lead to self-instrumentalization and self-commodification (of course the Frankfurt school has a lot to say about this, but Im going to leave them aside here).
The idea of union in truth is important because truth can only be grasped in a relation that is pre-symbolized, that is, therein lies its justification and grounding. Without a unificatory relation of subject / object, there is no way to ground or justify propositions that join the two linguistically. Regardless of level of abstraction, including mathematical abstraction, the dissolving of subject and object in a relation at the direct edge of experience is crucial as a base on which to build rational understanding.
This is where an openness to that direct edge of experience comes in and where nominal freedom, the freedom to choose from sensual options becomes much less relevant than ontological freedom, which is first and foremost an intuitive divination of the quality of these options that lends us the power to reject those of them that lack quality, or do not fit with the telos of reason which again is to deepen subjectivitys access to the truth as direct intuitively accessed experience (wisdom) rather than mere second hand linguistic knoweldge.
I think the particular lower faculty we are predominantly directed to in contemporary life is novelty as a good in itself rather than a signal to be investigated and evaluated by the intellect. That is, novelty is presented as a means for the will to directly manifest the experience of pleasure in a bypassing of the intellect.
If we were to take seriously the idea of the intellect as a means to intuit the likely quality of potential behaviours instantiated by the will, or the ratio as a means to process the meaning of the possibilities of action in relation to a proper intuitive understanding of them, our contemporary milieu would look very different. In fact, in terms of power hierarchies and the accumulation of capital that largely determines them, it would be utterly transformed.
Thanks to the author and Moliere. I've now downloaded the short and the long of it. I note access is only for a week?
I now understand why they were not included in the original presentation.
The depth of reading and careful explanation is astounding. To share all of this in a TPF event is most generous and gracious. I expect it will be published elsewhere. Exceptional :100: :sparkle:
[quote=David Bentley Hart, 'The Illusionist']In the pre-modern vision of things, the cosmos had been seen as an inherently purposive structure of diverse but integrally inseparable rational relations for instance, the Aristotelian aitia, which are conventionally translated as causes, but which are nothing like the uniform material causes of the mechanistic philosophy. And so the natural order was seen as a reality already akin to intellect. Hence the mind, rather than an anomalous tenant of an alien universe, was instead the most concentrated and luminous expression of natures deepest essence. This is why it could pass with such wanton liberty through the veil of Isis and ever deeper into natures inner mysteries.[/quote]
I really like this if not only for the reason that I barely get in touch with this sort of subject. I think it's ambitious and maybe that is one of the only critiques I'd level against it; it might be too ambitious for the space afforded to it.
It's fun to approach Dante as a philosopher instead of just a Poet. At the same time, the Divine Comedy is not a systematic treatise. Is the author over interpreting what he/she sees as philosophical claims rather than poetic symbolism that have varying interpretations? I'm not knowledgeable enough to tell but I do wonder.
After dealing with Hume; shouldn't the writer have spent some time on Kant's practical reason that seems to be a reformist model of reason? There may be other more modern writers who made similar attempts.
It could be that reason within the modern era is less admirable than reason in the medieval world of Dante, and there has been a deflation of "reason". Or it could be that the meaning of the word "reason" has changed between the medieval period of Dante and the modern era, in which case it would not be appropriate to say that there has been a deflation of "reason".
As I understand the essay, the author argues that in the medieval period of Dante, reason is about the "will" (the faculty of the mind in enabling action), "ratio" (reason using inference) and "intellectus" (intuition), and in the modern era, reason is just about "ratio". There has therefore been a deflation of reason.
However, there cannot be a deflation of "reason" if the meaning of reason in medieval times is different to the meaning of reason in the modern era.
For example, "my universe" could mean 1) all of time, space and its contents or it could mean 2) my family, job and daily life. Even though meaning 2 is more limited than meaning 1, it doesn't mean that meaning 1 has been deflated into meaning 2, as they mean different things.
In the same way, the word "mountain" cannot be deflated into the word "river", as they mean different things.
As the word "reason" in the Dante of medieval times means one thing and the word "reason" in the modern era means a different thing, the one cannot be deflated into the other.
Still clinging to the narrow perspective of philosophy writing, then?
Stay in the windowless boxroom of the palace of philosophy, if that keeps you happy.
Others combine intelligence with imagination and a creative spirit. To share an expansive view.
Quoting Author
Still clinging to what was asked for in guideline 4) "Must fall under the broad category of a philosophical essay."
Still clinging to the meaning of the words "must" and "philosophical essay".
This has been explained to you before.*
If you don't understand it by this time, you are either an idiot, being deliberately obtuse (boneheaded) or have limited reading comprehension.
The middle one seems most likely.
[ Apologies if you have Autism Spectrum Disorder, or similar]
* First time, 2 months ago, during our discussion on p4: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/15749/philosophy-writing-challenge-june-2025-announcement/p4
This has come up in a few threads. I think the difficulty is that "substance" gets used in two different, but related ways in ancient and medieval logic and metaphysics/physics respectively (the two being deeply related at that point). "Being is said in many ways," as Aristotle says. It is predicated analogously in science, while it must be used univocally in logic, on pain of equivocation.
In metaphysics and natural philosophy, it is organisms (and intelligences) who are most properly beings. There is further the notion, developed through Plotinus and Proclus and on into the Middle Ages, of the "Great Chain of Being," or the notion in Islamic thought of Tashkik al-Wujud, by which we can speak of different beings' greater or lesser unity, freedom, and hence full reality or "perfection." The knowing intellect can reach the highest degree of perfection because it, in a way, can "become all things."
However, in logic, we are up against the fact that we should like to predicate terms of things with weak or even artificial principles of unity. "The cloak is red." "The rock is heavy." "This volume of water is boiling." Surely these can be true propositions, terms predicated of "cloak" and "rock" as if they were substances to which accidents can attach.
Yet only certain [I] things[/I] can be the bearers of predicates in a non-parasitic fashion. You cannot have just a "fast movement" with "nothing at all" moving. There is not redness without something to be red. We do not have just "roundness" with nothing that is round (at the very least, not in the physical world), but some thing that is round.
"Substance" here simply means "some thing (relative unity ) capable of bearing the predicates of the other categories (e.g. location, relation, etc.). There must be something for predicates to inhere in.
If one considers this from the perspective of a deflationary information theoretic process metaphysics, where all of the universe is a changing "code," it can be helpful. That this is too deflationary is no problem for the example. Within the universal code are subsections of "code" that are more or less intelligible in themselves and self-determining. These are beings/things. There are also accidents, actions preformed by things, properties like color, "being to the left of," etc. The accidents that are not "substance" and so cannot appear except as embedded in some other "thing-unit" of code. They need a substrate to inhere in. The thing-units more fully have essences, in that they do not have a wholly parasitic existence in the way the accidents do. But accidents still have some sort of "essence," in that all instances of roundness, redness, rapidity, etc. will share some sort of morphisms by which they are the same (on pain of equivocation).
"Essence" is another one of these terms. Organisms most properly have essences/natures, but there is a sort of "essence" to roundness, yellow, etc. recognized as well.
Just an interesting side note. Here is might not be fully relevant because if truth is primarily in the intellect then it is clear that sentences, which lack an intellect, cannot be the primary bearers of truth, although obviously true and false can be predicated of them by analogy.
In some sense, yes. The image of love reproduced above all others was the Madonna and Child. However, in defense of "carnal" I'll throw out Dante's verses at the climax on his visit to the Heaven of the Sun (wisdom):
[I]Then, as the tower-clock calls us to come
at the hour when God's Bride is roused from bed
to woo with matin song her Bridegroom's love,
with one part pulling thrusting in the other,
chiming, ting-ting, music so sweet the soul,
ready for love, swells with anticipation[/I]
We could also consider here the medievals (and ancients) great love of the Song of Songs (St. Bernard, Dante's last guide's main exegetical focus, but also a focus since Origen), which imagines the soul/search as the bride/lover of God.
But the sacred is the opposite of the profane, and there is nothing profane here. The idea that has to be kept in focus here is that nothing is evil in itself, it can only be used for evil. Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body actually draws a comparison between the Holy Trinity and marriage and the procreative act for instance. When "everything is sacramental," romantic love must also reveal God.
Everything created is a revelation of the creator. So the erotic (even in our modern sense) is not to be despised. Christians tended to be far more open to the goodness of the body and embodiment than their Pagan counterparts, and by the High Middle Ages this led to a fairly sensuous (and also cosmic) aesthetics.
@Benkeie
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yes, Benkei is right, I indeed love this essay. It is the only one I managed to read thus far, and I am sad for that. Work pulled me away from PF quite a bit and I must have missed some pearls. I am happy I caught this one, as it is a great read. Even though I read one, I think I know who wrote this piece. As Benkei knows, it does resonate with me and my own thinking about the erotic as unity. As it is deep at night, I cannot comment much. I do think that there may be one thing that deserves further deepening. That would be the attitude of the ancients towards the bodily. Indeed, the erotic took a more prominent place, but reason still was, as far as I understood the ancients, still a rather ethereal cerebral faculty. It was the higher passions leading the lower ones, love for the body of the lover was surpassed by the love of love itself, as in Plato's Diotima.
Likewise, Aristotle's God is devoid of matter and is essentially rational thought thinking itself. It is a unity and far more thick than the dry modern conception of rationality, but still matter was a subordinate category. To this extent the deflation of reason is an emancipatory move making space for the body. First in a rather contradictory way as 'will' in Schopenhauer and Will to Power in Nietzsche, but gradually as more nuanced and informed conceptions of the body in Merleau Ponty. So while I love the essay much and it is I think really a profound and deep read which I will study and if the author permits also use as a tool for reflection, the story remains one sided in the sense that it seems to yearn for a conception of reason that was more rich, more deep, more in tune also I think with an ethics of virtue and so praiseworthy, but still afflicted with a rejection of the 'carnal' as such. Carnality could redeem itself as carnal knowledge, but the rider 'knowledge' was necessary. The carnal in and of itself, devoid of rhyme or reason, the orgasmic, the 'pornographic' for lack of a better word, was still feared and subjugated.
In my conception, philosophy is fastened to the erotic, not as knowledge, but as a mode of carnality. Philosophy is lust by other means. The question is how to put that into words. For that, I will study this great piece of writing grapple with it and try to emulate it because it is way better than anything I have written so far on the subject, even though I might also disagree and take a different turn here and there. Thank you dear author!
Quoting RussellA
Why be so picky? Academics these days are taught how to write more creatively, more personally, and let to let go of their dry style. (Not that I myself manage, my papers are as dry as the plains of Spain in the summer heat...) And why not? Who cares if you wrote the gazillions well structured, dry and boring paper? Maybe the times they are a changin' :)
However, I presume (not having read it) that he would maintain sanctions against pre- or extra-marital sex.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I've had a long-running debate (sometimes very acrimonious) on the importance of maintaining the distinction between beings and things. I still believe that this is a basic ontological distinction, and precisely the distinction that materialism must erase.
Oh absolutely. This is couched in the language of marriage as a [I] sacrament[/I]. The famous St. Maximus quote to the effect of "food isn't evil, gluttony is; childbearing isn't evil, fornication isnothing is evil in itself, only in its misuse," is the sort of standard idea here.
Interestingly, marriage is a sort of "natural sacrament," in that it is recognized outside the Church. Previously married non-Christians have not needed to get remarried within the Church. Or at least, I've never heard of such a practice.
You might really like Byung-Chul Han's "The Agony of Eros" then. It is very much a "continental philosophy" text in its style, but I think it is a fairly straightforward read for the genre (and also not very long, which makes the style less of an issue).
It looks at a sort of "crisis of Eros" in modern culture, but its expressed very powerfully. It reminded me a lot of D.C. Schindler's "Love and the Postmodern Predicament," even though they are totally different "camps," Schindler being a Catholic philosopher who tends towards Thomism (although he is obviously deeply read in the continental tradition). That one gets pretty technical though and is a little dry.
I think this is generally true. The courtly love tradition that Dante is a part of actually tended to look down on the physical consummation of love (some exceptions not withstanding). A common motif is the lower born knight who pledges lifelong service to a lady who he knows he will never wed (or bed).
But the Christian tradition tended to have a more open view towards both the body and the irascible appetites (the spirited part of the soul, thymos). It saw all of these as good, if properly used and ordered. For instance, many of the Desert Fathers appeal to just anger having a proper use in chasing away the demons and other passions.
Early in the Inferno, Dante learns from Virgil how the beatitude of the blessed will increase once they have their bodies, and the punishment of suicides is to never return to the bodies they rejected (notably, Cato, a pagan suicide is seemingly among those destined for beatitude in Purgatory, so the sin seems to have more to do with the type of suicide then the act itself). That lust and gluttony must be purged on Mt. Purgatory suggests that the proper ordering of bodily appetites is essential to beatitude (and the explanation of the diaphanous bodies of the shades shows how the body has made itself part of the soul, like a wax imprint).
Virgil is sort of relevant here. Even in the Aeneid, we can see the idea of the cannibalistic thymos of the arete culture of the Greeks giving way (in the ideal hero) to pietas, i.e., thymos in service to logos, particularly the divine will and the unfolding of history (maybe even the telos of history embodied in Rome). But Virgil gives plenty of indications that he is skeptical of this working in the long run. I think Dante would probably agree, but for Christ acting as the physician of souls.
In some sense, yes, because there is definitely a "body-skeptic" thread in ancient and medieval Christian thought (although there is also a lot of sensual poetry, the focus on the Song of Songs, the cult of bodily relics, etc.). I think this is much more pronounced in ancient Christianity (e.g. Origen or Evagrius). However, in other ways, Charles Taylor's buffered self marks a further retreat of the body.
Yet I think some of the later thinkers who "bring the body back" are more a return towards appreciation of the body in early-antiquity (e.g. Homer) than the particular way in which medievals celebrated the body (bound up in the Incarnation, relics, etc.). Thymos too has been much reduced, particularly within the context of liberalism (Nietzsche is a trend bucker there too). The irascible appetites and the role of hope and fear get reduced in a lot of anthropology, which tends towards a dialectic of pleasure and pain alone, with reason as instrumental and procedural.
It's a fine line to walk. Health, strength, agilitythese are all devalued vis-á-vis classical culture, as is honor, wealth, etc. But these are never bad in themselves, except as temptations. I think Boethius would be a paradigmatic example here. And, the warrior cultures of the Middle Ages don't allow the body to disappear in the way it did for the aristocracy of the late-Empire, nor did the particular focus on the Eucharist as the center of religious life.
Indeed, the lustful are the first of the damned Dante meets in Hell proper. Interestingly though, the last sphere in heaven that lies "within the shadow of Earth," (which marks the blessed souls who suffered some deficits) is Venus, the heaven of redeemed lust. Cunizza da Romano's speech there is particularly interesting. It isn't a rejection of physical love so much as its sublimation to something better (we meet one of her former lovers in the Purgatorio too).
She says:
[I]and I shine here
for I was overcome by this stars light; [/I] [lust] [I]
but gladly I myself forgive in me
what causes my fate, [/I] [i.e. fornication] [I] it grieves me not at all
which might seem strange, indeed, to earthly minds...
But we do not repent, we smile instead:
not at the sinthis does not come to mind
but at the Power that orders and provides.[/I]
For the classical mind, evil is nothing, so that sort of makes sense. Nothing is positively evil.
Also interesting, Dante has it here that Rahab the Prostitute was the first of the blessed set free from Limbo during the Harrowing of Hell, not Adam or Moses.
I think this is a pretty major misunderstanding of the concept. Intellectus has nothing to do with the creative imagination, which is its own faculty in medieval psychology (and roughly parallels what we tend to mean by the term today). Perhaps you meant to say that you think the faculty of intellectus is just creative imagination? That would make more sense.
Although, this still has very large difficulties if it is to be a total rejection, because acknowledging nothing but ratio would essentially commit us to something like eliminitive materialism and behaviorism (i.e. understanding would be illusory, or at least "theoretically uninteresting" as Dennett put is re Nagel's "What is It Like be a Bat.") For anything more robust, ratio needs to take on some of the properties of intellectus vis-a-vis cognitive understanding, else reason would simply be rule following devoid of content.
C.S. Lewis explains this pretty well:
Lewis focuses on moral reasoning, but the same would hold true for theoretical reasoning. Ratio alone cannot justify any inference rules without already having decided on some inference rules. There are an infinite number of possible logics and one would have no way to pick between them without some starting point. Likewise, there is a qualitative, first-person experiential element to understanding, the grasp of the quiddity (whatness) of things, that must be moved over to ratio if intellectus is denied (or else one of the more narrow forms of eliminitivism will follow).
These problems have not been missed in contemporary philosophy. They represent some of the most significant theoretical puzzles occupying current thought. The Chinese Room gets at these issues, as does Mary's Room, the question of "what it is like to be a bat," and the Hard Problem, Symbol Grounding Problem, etc. The Chinese Room and Symbol Grounding Problem are more specific to intellectus, the Hard Problem encompasses a more general problem with first person experience, of which intellectual knowledge is particularly difficult for reductionist theories to explain.
This is not the case even in medieval thought. There are illuminative explanations of noesis, which Mark Burgess covers well in his dissertation, but there is also the Aristotlian conception of "natural" noesis, which is a biological function. It flows from the basic idea that:
1. Things exist as some definite actuality prior to preception.
2. For perception to be "of things" it must involve to communication of some of this actuality (form) through the senses (even through sensation is "of" the interaction between the sense organ and the surrounding media, form travels through the media in the form of light, sound waves, etc.)
3. The senses inform memory and intellect.
4. The active intellect is able to abstract the form communicated through the senses, and thus the form of what is known is partially in the knower.
This is given more semiotic explanations as well. Many medieval theorists subscribe to both these conceptions, and Aquinas and Dante would fall under this category. Now, God is involved in everything for them, but that does not mean all intellection is illumination.
Dante is most explicit about the philosophy in the Paradiso, but he has other texts and letters that give us a pretty good idea about his personal philosophy. He is not particularly innovative, but he is extremely well-educated on the philosophy and science of his era, and brings them in quite a bit. For instance, he has Virgil citing Aristotle to him in a number of places.
The longer version does address Kant a bit more in the section on Limbo at the end.
And yes, I know that isn't much. I didn't have room for Kant, except in a longer end note. IMO, this captures the main essence though. Knowing by becoming is essential for Dante. It's why the saint also has the greatest and most secure happiness (e.g. St. Francis happy in a hovel with nothing, St. Ireneus sublime facing a gruesome death; Socrates as well). Kant at least represents a move that is far from this sort of 'knowing as union.' Indeed, the mind seems to become a sort of barrier between the soul and being, like Aristophanes' myth in Plato's Symposium, we are forever separated from our other half by the mind, or more recently, "language." And he also represents the cleavage between a "moral good" of duty and all other goods, and a practical reason that is forever separated from aesthetic and theoretical reason, rather than ultimately being oriented towards one thing, like a light that has passed through a prism.
Yes, I was mixing up the jargon there. I did mean to say that I think intellectus or intellectual intuition is just creative imagination, at least when it posits metaphysical theses.
I don't deny that it is logically possible that intellectual intuitions may be revelatory, but I see no reason to believe that they are. Even if it is assumed for the sake of argument that intellectual intuitions are, at least sometimes, revelatory, the question as to just what they are revelatory of remains.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I think this gets it entirely wrong. Reasoning can indeed be, as is the case with abductive reasoning, an exercise of creative imagination. Reasoning is not rule-bound, other than the most basic rule that an exercise in reasoning should be internally consistent.
Reason alone tells us nothing beyond what we are capable of consistently and coherently imagining. There can be no purely logical proofs of metaphysical theses, and since they are also not amenable to empirical testing, they count as undecidable.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
The pattern recognition involved in the intelligibility of what we sense has nothing to do with intellectus, unless you want to include the animals as possessing intellectus. Cognition and re-cognition are enabled by memory and pattern, similarity and difference, that allow us, with the further aid of symbolic language, to generalize from particulars. The idea of intellectual intuition revealing transcendent, metaphysical truths is an entirely different matter. Conflating the two will only lead to confusion.
I finally got around to reading this. A beautiful (kalos) piece! I appreciated its wholeness and integrity as a beautiful piece of writing which was balanced between the reason of the philosophers and the insights of the poets. The piece itself transcended the reduction of human reason to ratio. This drawing up of methodology into content is reflective of great works of philosophy.
My very first impression when joining TPF was this reduction of reason to ratio, and I wrote some thread drafts on the topic but decided not to post them. The way you tackled the issue was excellent, especially the use of Dante. You achieved the thing that I felt inadequate to achieve.
As far as critiques go, I thought it began to trail off a bit towards the end, but I would have to compare it to the larger essay to see if this was caused by truncation. It is hard to perfectly balance the thesis about ratio with an explication of the Divine Comedy, but I really like the use of beatitude and participation as a lodestar for the piece and for intellectus.
Now nitpicking, this was the one invalid argument that jumped out at me:
"Substances primarily possess being, therefore people primarily possess truth." I don't think that follows, but to be fair, the sentences which follow upon this one iron out the difficulty a bit. What seems to follow is rather, "...therefore, substances are the primary object of truth." That people possess truth has to do with their intellectual nature.
This intersects with our disagreement in <this thread>, and what I would say is that the truth that humans possess is by and large related to ratiocination insofar as it involves comparison. It involves comparisons like, "This is that," or, "This exists (when it might not)." This isn't to say that we cannot extend truth to intellection, but there is a shift and difficulty in doing so. It remains to be argued that such a shift is analogical rather than equivocal.
Relatedly:
As I've said in the past, I tend to see ratio and intellectus as more closely intertwined. My thought is that inferential movement itself presupposes intellection insofar as one must see that the inference is appropriate and justified, even though seeing the validity of an inference is not a matter of ratiocination. So simplifying, if we have an argument with two premises, two intermediate inferences, and a conclusion, we have at minimum five "acts" of intellection, rather than three. What "begins and ends in intellectus" is each discrete inference, not just the entirety of the argument. So the five minimal "acts" of intellection are 1) seeing that premise 1 is true; 2) seeing that premise 2 is true; 3) seeing that the first intermediate inference is valid; 4) seeing that the second intermediate inference is valid; and 5) seeing that the conclusion is valid. Of course there will be many others besides these five, such as understanding the meaning of discrete terms within the argument.
The point here is not to gain precision over each quantitative "act" of intellection, but rather to note that there is a constant dance between stable understanding and moving ratiocination; between movement and rest. It is also crucial to understand that "formalistic" mindsets understand the manner and principles of rational movement, but not of intellection. This is precisely why they cannot move beyond "axiomatic" thinking, and why they cannot easily integrate their abstract formalizations into everyday life.
Interesting image!
Quoting Baden
Good. Also, I think it becomes important to distinguish nominal freedom into different kinds, one of which is a right to "respond primarily in order to satisfy our sensuous appetites." If that is right then we would say, "Not all nominal freedom is problematic, but this kind of nominal freedom is problematic."
Quoting Baden
True. :up:
Quoting Baden
I very much agree.
Quoting Baden
There are some goods with a great deal of potentiality, such as novelty and money. Indeed, such good are strictly speaking worthless in themselves, but they are also a door to an infinite realm of valuable things, and so we often mix ourselves up by seeking them in themselves.
Quoting Baden
In Book 1 of the Politics Aristotle argues that one who views wealth (or capital) qua accumulation does not understand (intellect) what wealth is, or what it is for. Wealth is for the sake of sufficiency, not for the sake of profit or mere increase. The "potentiality" of money (namely that it is capable of buying all manner of things), tricks one into valuing it in itself, apart from the end of sufficiency. Similarly, one involved in "business" can trick themselves into thinking that their goal is mere increase of property or wealth, rather than sufficient property or wealth (i.e. property or wealth with a limit).
@Wayfarer pointed out this too. I agree that it's the wrong way to put it. That's what I should have written, "sentences lack intellects," and the meaning of given sound waves, written symbols, etc. is wholly accidental and dependent on human beings. I have made a similar argument in the past that people (substance) not individual acts (not substance) primarily possess freedom, and I probably just recreated it on autopilot since it is quite similar.
This doesn't really address the old school analytic idea of propositions as abstract objects (which few seem to claim these days anyhow), but I think it applies to that as well, since that view assumes truth can be coherent outside any intellect. I would like to say though that the "set of all true propositions" is ens rationis, a hypothetical being of thought, the idea that "if I knew everything I could write it all down if I had an infinite list." It would take a while to unpack, but I think this is based on a deficient notion of truth, which maybe answers @Banno's question about Great Lists.
Agreed, or at the very least it is on reliant for intellectus for understanding the principles by which validity is understood, particularly the first principles.
Aristotle's distinction between the simple apprehension of wholes (whose opposite is ignorance) and of judgement (whose opposite of falsehood) is interesting here. I'd want to associate the former more with intellectus, but I see your point that it also seems to be present within judgement.
That's a good point.
Good. I would also think here about pros hen or analogical predication. We can say, "The man is healthy," and, "The urine is healthy," but the latter sense of health is dependent on the former sense. I want to say that the same thing happens with truth. We can say, "There is truth in the man," and, "There is truth in the man's sentence," and even, "There is truth in the sentence," but the latter senses are dependent on the former senses. The story about why we are now tempted to reify that latter sense is something that would be interesting to investigate. Surely there are many reasons.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yes. :up:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yes, good. And that we apprehend the whole before we apprehend the parts, which inevitably places discursion in a posterior position.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Cool. I've yet to read the other responses, but I will get around to it.
This essay is great to read. I don't have much that's worthwhile critically. I appreciate the method of having authors you reflect upon and then draw conclusions of contrast.
@Benkie captured my general feeling:
Quoting Benkei
And gave me a good lead in to mention the "something to think about"
I like the method of contrasting periods of philosophy. I'm reminded of our recently passed MacIntyre throughout your essay. I do think, were we able to find a middle ground of talking through it, your essay could be strengthened with comparisons that are not Hume. I think he has way less significant influence on the modern mind than you attribute to him.
But that may be for another day. Overall this essay was wonderful, and I know I wanted to respond in the same idiom as the authors -- but I'm starting to find that a bit too much and am settling for a bundle of coherent thoughts when I finally get around to it.
Re Kant, as mentioned before, I didn't have space to really take on many thinkers in depth. But here is why I think Hume is a good model:
- The anthropology of economics holds to this mold. To be sure, in theory the intellectual appetites and irascible appetites are contained in "utility," which encompasses all desire, but this tends towards a deflation towards pleasure/pain. Smith was, of course, a close friend of Hume. But economics has been massively influential in public policy and in the development of the established (now global) social order.
- Computational theory of mind suggests something very much like "all thought is ratio." The model of the Turing Machine does not include any notion of intellectus, quiddity, etc. Obviously, some proponents try to get around this with appeals to emergence. However, CTM tends in this direction and has been the dominant paradigm in cognitive science, etc., for a long time. Bayesian Brain theories would be another example; everything is mere induction. Eliminitive materialism would be another. Marxist anthropology shows some similarities here too.
-The dominant, now hegemonic political ideology of the West, and now the whole global order is liberalism. But liberal theorists tend towards very thin anthropologies that avoid the intellectual appetites (or "bracket them out"). Obviously, there are continental objections to this, I cite Han. Yet while perhaps more widely read, I think they are less influential. The Anglo-empiricist model is influential not through philosophy but through economics, liberal political theory, public policy, cognitive science, etc. Utilitarianism has also had huge influence, and makes similar suppositions.
Just for example, Rawls has a very procedural notion of reason, and his anthropology is still thicker than much earlier utilitarianism. Nozick had a slightly thicker anthropology, but it's still thin. Fukuyama brings in thymos, but not really the intellectual appetites, and arguably he brings it in hamstrung by his other commitments.
Another thing the paper is missing is an expansion on the idea that the more a particular participates in the universal "stream" (to use imagery from Dionysius the Areopagite) the more fully it is particular. The intellect's participation in universals, and intellectual knowledge, makes it more particular, because knowledge And understanding are required for self-determination, which is required for true unity (particularity). Consider that all amoebas are quite similar. All dogs are more similar than all men. Angels are more particular than men, being each an individual species (in Aquinas).
The same idea is in play with knowledge and virtue. All those plagued by vice and ignorance are in some ways similar. Dante is able to respect history and particularity in a way similar Sufi texts like The Conference of the Birds don't, because of the recognition that perfection makes people more fully persons. More perfected persons are more particular because they are more free, more self-determining, and more fully what they are and not a bundle of warring external causes (and idea going back to Plato's psychology). There is a sort of ascent of the particular in the stream of the universal.
This helps Dante's philosophy of history in that Providence is not at odds with freedom and particularity, but its full realization. Solovyov is useful here because he takes some of the insights of Hegel re the rational unfolding of history, and has a similar view to Dante on the telos of history, and yet he isn't committed to a sort of providential over-determination. History is the meeting ground of truth and falsehood, the stage of cosmic drama, and not merely a proving ground for individuals. There is an element of perfection and freedom that involves the communication of goodness to others (agape descending, eros ascending) that is realized in history, through human beings' mutual empowerment of one another in the ascent Dante lays out. This is clearest in the Commedia in the roles of Beatrice, St. Lucy, and Mary. But this can be more or less actualized in the polis, and obviously a thin anthropology would be a barrier to any notion like this, even a secularized one.
My thoughts:
1. I agree with Leon (and Wayfarer I think), and had to think around this idea to move past it: "Utterances are acts, yet it is substancesthingsthat primarily possess being, and so it is people (and God) who primarily possess truth." I think you addressed this in your reply to Leon, but I mention it again because I think it should not just be restated, but expounded upon. It gets at something that is essential to understanding what truth is, and that modern thinking avoids. Truth is being, known in the person. Things have being regardless of whether any person knows them (perhaps only because God knows them, but that may be another topic). But the truth of things is in the person who knows these things. (I don't know if I said this clearly, nor that I didn't get this idea from you anyway, but I think this one-liner deserves more attention.)
2. Here is another concept that I wished you spoke more about: "Hell is much more diverse than Purgatory and Paradise. It has more divisions This is because the damned pursue multiplicity rather than the unifying " and "sin, which drives us downward and dissolves the person in multiplicity." Driving this home with more analysis and concreteness seems would really hammer home the fact of the modern deflation and flattening of what we know and how we know. I don't have much to offer (which is why I wished you said more!) but this struck me as an important insight again, deserving more attention.
3. Last comment, and I have no idea how to accomplish what it asks, but if you could somehow secularize the language of the piece, I think more people could receive it, and even internalize the points and allow themselves to really challenge "modern" sensibilities and notions of reason. The piece needs the concept of sin. The piece needs the concept of God. But perhaps for sin it could refer to stunting one's own growth, or turning against one's self and self-defeating acts, or taking ignorance as if it was knowledge, or pride as something to be proud of... Instead of refering to "sin" refer to limit and the as yet unperfected (unpurged)... maybe? For God, my only thought is what you often said, which is "Good" or "Truth" and "Beauty" and "Love", so maybe just use them more.
It's not that such a revision would improve the piece, just essentially not turn away many who, I think, would benefit from really reading it.
Last point, just the other day my father and I were talking about dying and going to heaven, and discussing how precisely an individual is "called by name" by God and saved as that unique individual, and yet, perfected and made ready to be in the presence of God - how am I still "me" and yet "perfect as my heavenly father is perfect"? How is it that, in paradise, I will "sin no more" and yet still be me? Even the angels can sin, so why will I never again choose to do so, and yet still be me? You address this:
I'm going to print your piece out (in a large font for the old man's eyes) and share it with my father. He'll like it for many of its insights, but this great reference to transformation, Dante's "transhumanized," will be inspiring. Defeating vice, championing our appetites, and striving for virtue, with practice and much grace, will allow us to grow, and grow into a, God willing, perfected version of ourselves, that has no mind for vice, and humbly remains fixed on the Good and the True. So each of us remains the individual, particular person God loves and calls by name, but can become the person God intended us to be, the person that recognizes that our sins have only interrupted and stunted and defeated who we actually are. (See I don't know how not to say "sin" and "God" either, so good luck with that comment!)
Thanks for all of the good work you do around here. Your voice is important.
Agreed. I worried about the length of the introduction, but it would be a good place to introduce the similar argument for why freedom should primarily be thought of as possessed by persons, not actions.
Yeah, there is something I like to call the "Anna Karenina Principle," based on the opening of Tolstoy's novel: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in his own way." In terms of moral and intellectual virtues, there are many more ways to have bad habits than good habits, just as there are generally many more ways to do something wrong than correctly, e.g. many more ways to treat cancer in a way that is ineffective than cure it, to break a car than fix it, etc.
Both virtue and vice are habits, yet we do not tend to think of vices in terms of cultivation because:
A. It is not something we try to promote, although no doubt bad environments can promote it; and
B. Since there are many more ways to not act in accordance with reason than there are to act in accordance with it, it is much easier to enter a state of vice than virtue (and this goes along with the persistent theme in many of the Patristics, that mans nous has been darkened by the Fall and is in need of healing to achieve any move to a state of virtue).
Given B, man is in need of aides to help him attain to virtue instead of vice, e.g. laws, rewards, honors, education, ascetic labors, etc. (and we might add here the holy sacraments and repentance). We do not, as modern political and economic theory often seems to assume, just become free by avoiding great misfortune and turning 18. Rather, as the philosopher-slave Epictetus points out of his own era, most masters are slaves to their own passions, appetites, and ignorance. As Saint Augustine says in The City of God: "a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but what is worse, as many masters as he has vices" (note that Augustine is not here denying the need for political freedom in the way it might seem; he is quite concerned with it in the City, but also pessimistic about any true "commonwealth.")
We should note two caveats here. First, virtue as action in accordance with reason, can be read far too narrowly if we assume this is something like the Enlightenment project centered on the abstract rational agent for whom moral action consists in avoiding the violation of universal moral maxims suggested by procedural reason. Rather, to act in accordance with reason, is simply to act in accordance with what is known as good, to reach out towards the Good itself by attempting to actualize it in ones own being. In doing the right thing we are avoiding action that is ultimately unjustifiable, and so, in a sense, unintelligible. Moral action is a sort of tendency towards Being (the actuality known by reason), whereas vice is a slide towards unintelligibility and nothingness (evil being a privation of the Good that is known by reason).
Second, along with the point above re truth and freedom, it is primarily people, not actions, that possess virtue. A focus on action is isolation obscures an important element of freedom, that the virtuous person enjoys acting virtuously.
Being able to act in accordance with reason allows us to respond better in all situations. As Aristotle has it, a virtue is in a way the universal vis-a-vis right action (a principle). It transfigures the multitude we face in fortune into a unity. Likewise, virtue insulates us from bad fortune, by making our happiness less dependent on external goods, while also making us more able to attain and share those goods we do require. The virtuous person is more self-determining because they are able to unify themselves in pursuit of the ends they see as truly best, rather than being led around by diffuse passions.
The pursuit of virtue makes us free in another way as well. It allows us to have the desires we actually want to have, i.e., a second-order control over our own appetites and emotions. The eliminativist philosopher and writer R. Scott Bakker has a short story called Crash Space about a technology that allows people to have immediate control over their own emotions and desires through an app interface (using a cybernetic implant in the brain). The story, which is rather disturbing, shows how this capability could easily spin out of control into total disinhibition and violence, since what we desireand so how we would choose to manipulate our own nervous system with the appwould depend on our prior manipulations of the app, leading to a run-away process whereby we lose all contact with what we truly think is best.
As sci-fi as this scenario is, there seems to be a real world parallel between this and recreational drug use and the way vice leads to our desiring vice (or virtue to more virtue; "For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath - Matthew 13:12).
At any rate, what the story underscores is that there is some element of freedom in being able to desire what you want to desire and feel how you want to feel. However, this is only freedom if these choices are not limited by pre-existing ignorance and passions, but rather occur according to what we know as truly best. And indeed, this is exactly what habituation in the virtues accomplishes. The virtuous person comes to enjoy doing good. Their desires and emotions have become harmonized with their reason (making the person more fully one, and so more fully free).
Peter Thiel actually had a surprisingly insightful comment on this in an interview on transhumanism, that according to Orthodox Christianity, it doesn't go far enough: "transhumanism is just changing your body, but you also need to transform your soul and you need to transform your whole self." Dante agrees, hence his being the first in history to pose the question of "transhumanization." "Dispassion" is not the absence of feeling in the Patristic tradition, but their regeneration and right orientation, to be free of passions that force themselves on us from without, against our will, or as Bakker would put it: "to cease to be ruled by the darkness that comes before [the light of understanding]."
But a key point here is that the unity of virtue doesn't equate to a "lack of freedom." It's actually the perfection of freedom. The slide into multiplicity and potency offers 'more options,' but if it's something that is ultimately worse, and chosen out of weakness of will or ignorance, then it isn't freedom. Really, it's the exact opposite. Growth in virtue makes us more fully unified, more fully ourselves, and more fully persons; it is precisely the destruction of a sort of "false consciousness" in sin, a false individuality, that personhood is realized.
Yes, this is always a tension with Christian philosophy, and it's unfortunate. I could point out a bit more how much of what Dante says does not depend on explicitly Christian revelation. He has key Islamic commentators in Limbo with Aristotle and Plato because he read them and greatly appreciated them. What Dante is drawing on can be found, perhaps not as fully developed, in many strands of Pagan thought and certainly in Jewish and Islamic thought, and even to a surprising degree in Eastern thought.
Will that help a committed secularist? I am not sure. The move to privatize all such thought in the domain of politics seems to have followed on to philosophy. There are the secularists who will instantly dismiss it as "woo" for mentioning God, but there are also those who will simply take it as something that ought to be bracketed into the category of "taste," and which thus cannot ground any philosophical ethics. I think a different sort of paper is needed for that issue. Christian philosophy cannot really be expected to do without "sin" any more than Hindu or Buddhist thought should be expected to drop their own terms.
Great, I hope he likes it!
Right, and therefore a formal argument written out on a piece of paper is not true (or even valid) in the most primary sense. Truth primarily exists in the mind. The formal argument is just an aid to get truth into the mind.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Cf:
Quoting Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, II.6
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
:up:
Where did you come across it?
I agree. However, along the lines of some existentialists (ie. Camus and the "absurd animal"), I think there is a sort of non-sectarian way of viewing sin as a somehow less religiously off-putting brokenness. Human beings are something, but something that IS broken. We live, but with a certain festering wound. We have a nature, plus something unnatural (or better, minus something), and that is our nature.
In the end, it is sin, or sin causes this natural/unnatural condition that is man. And I wouldn't want to be asking you to hide this truth (and so, lie). So maybe this has to remain "Christian philosophy" (which I would also call theology, or under its umbrella). It would probably take significant effort to truly sterilize the theological from essays like yours, and may also impress relatively few additional admirers of its content.
I only mention it because in many parts you are walking this tightrope between the secular and theological already, and I think the thesis overall regarding the deflation of reason straddles the line completely intact (meaning, you don't need God or sin to demonstrate and compare reason as ratio only versus reason as intellectus that includes ratio, and will).
Yeah, another point that will stick. Good stuff.
That one concept is what I needed to flesh out that 'the damned dissolve into multiplicity' more.
It made me think of modern liberalism's knee-jerk forgiveness of sin by homogenizing multiplicity. There are more minorities or poor people in prison because they are all just victims of a system that is against them and not each in unique circumstances perpetrating unique vices and individual choices. So liberalism might agree with a sort of unifying Anna Kerenina Principle, but use the principle to misjudge individuals, misjudge what is good about these individuals and misidentify where the good comes from (ie. 'he only stole to care for his family and because he had no choice'), all to twist public policy.
This is on another level. Rowan knows his love. Love entangles desire, possession, non-possessing beholding, the wholly other, and a recognition of all of these going on in the beloved as well.
So if philosophy seeks 'thinking well, and what it is important to think about,' formal argument is a tool to confirm or aid thinking well, but it is the truth, in mind, where any import might arise. We don't ever find importance in a perfect tool, until the tool is being used and produces truth.
Oops, forgot that, it's in Looking East in Winter: Contemporary Thought and the Eastern Christian Tradition pg. 51-54
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- Thanks. :up: