The Underground Thomist
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Why Can’t Johnnie Reason?Friday, 04-03-2015
Why don’t our students learn logical reasoning? Maybe because their teachers don’t either. Case in point: The principle of non-contradiction declares that no meaningful statement can be both true and false in the same sense at the same time – or, in its ontological form, that nothing can both be and not be in the same sense at the same time. If the door is open, then it can’t be the case that it isn’t. That’s not difficult, is it? I can tell you the following story because the persons and places have been forgotten. But I assure you that it is true. Some years ago, a candidate who was being recruited vigorously for a full professorship in one of the social science departments of a certain great research university made the remarkable statement that the principle of non-contradiction was false. This wasn’t an offhand remark. It was a foundational assumption of her work. Let’s think about it. In saying that the principle of non-contradiction was false, she was saying it wasn’t true. In other words, she thought it had to be one or the other -- it couldn’t be both. But that is just what the principle declares to be true of all principles. So in the very act of denying the principle, she relied on it. Why then did she deny it? Her argument was that everything implies its opposite, and reality is incoherent. For good measure she threw in that God is a liar. But if this is the case, then nothing is the case. So it isn’t the case. In private conversation, I tried to explain this to her. So she tried to prove to me that she was right and I was wrong. (Yes, I know.) Her first proof was that “Convex and concave are opposites, but every curve is both convex and concave.” I tried to explain that this was a fallacy of equivocation. There is no inconsistency if a man standing on the inside of the curve says the wall curves toward him, and a woman standing on the other side of the wall says it curves away from her. Her second proof was that black and white are opposites, but if a ball were painted black on one side and white on the other, then it would be both black and white. I tried to explain that she was equivocating again. The ball would be half black and half white, and this description is perfectly consistent. No joy. I suggested to the people who were recruiting her that a person who cannot reason logically is unqualified to teach or do research. One of my colleagues responded that I was behind the times. “Lots of people are working on many-valued logics these days.” That was like answering the statement “The door is open” by saying, “No, the window is closed.” Many-valued logics don’t try to do without the principle of non-contradiction. They try to do without the principle of excluded middle, which is not the same thing. I should have answered that if it is all right to deny the principle of non-contradiction, then his view that the candidate was qualified left my view that she was not qualified still standing. But it probably wouldn’t have made any difference. Oh, I forgot to tell you. She was hired. Tomorrow: Dark Night of the Grad Student Soul
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Deicide Entails HomicideThursday, 04-02-2015
Some years ago, an essay of mine was chastised by some readers because I had dragged God into it. The incident wouldn’t be interesting except for the fact that I hadn’t dragged God into it. I hadn’t even mentioned Him. I think what set them off was that I had said human nature has a meaningful pattern. At some level they must have recognized that for contingent beings like us to mean anything, we must be borrowing meaning from something that isn’t contingent. Our meaning depends on a First Meaning, of which we are the reflections. Since this First Meaning is what we call God, I didn’t have to mention Him; I had implied Him. To please my chastisers, I would have had to avoid the very suggestion that human nature has any significance. Everyone knows that men offer sacrifices to their gods, but we do not reflect much on the sacrifices they offer to godlessness. Having to deny one’s own meaning is a pretty high price to pay for atheism. And the price gets higher still. For in much the same way that contingent meaning presupposes a First Meaning, we find that beauty presupposes a First Beauty, movement presupposes a First Mover, cause and effect presupposes a First Cause – in fact, being presupposes a First Being. So in order to deny God, it isn’t enough to deny just one of these things. Logically, you must deny all of them. To say that God does not exist, you must finally say nothing and nobody does. Tomorrow: Why Can’t Johnnie Reason?
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How to Raise PoltroonsWednesday, 04-01-2015
When we teach men to perfect their masculinity through the discipline of chivalry, two kinds of men result. The most spirited accept the discipline and become knights, but the least spirited refuse the discipline and become cads. Impatient with such failures, our age pursues a different ideal. Instead of encouraging men to become knights, it discourages them from becoming men at all. But this works no better; in fact it works worse. Again two kinds of men result, but the pattern is different. The most spirited reject the discipline and become cads, and the least spirited accept it and become poltroons. Thank God for saints and exceptions. Tomorrow: Deicide Entails Homicide
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What Can I Do? I’m in LoveTuesday, 03-31-2015
Bulletin: My Commentary on ThomasAquinas’s Treatise on Law is back in stock.Considering what a fetish people make these days of being able to do what they want, it’s amazing how helpless they think they are. “I know he’s bad for me, but what can I do? I’m in love.” The best thing is not to get into that situation in the first place. “But I can’t help who I fall in love with.” Of course you can. People fall in love with people they spend time with. So don’t associate with persons who are bad for you and then be surprised when you fall in love. Instead, associate with persons who are good for you. You will eventually fall in love with one of them. Here’s the catch. The sort of person who can be good for you is the sort who is good for other people in general. To attract that kind of person, you have to be one. In fact, even to be attracted to that kind of person, you have to be one. Becoming that kind of person takes a long time. So don’t wait until you meet one. Get started now. Tomorrow: How to Raise Poltroons
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Is and OughtMonday, 03-30-2015
Mondays, as always, are for questions from students. Question: I have been educated to take the naturalistic fallacy seriously, even though I thought it was a bit of bunk, because some smart and good men espouse it. You write in both popular and specialist venues. In one of your more popular articles, I notice you make short shrift of the fallacy. Do you treat it briefly because you consider it a simple, albeit serious, mistake, or just because of the audience? If it is really simple, then why do those smart and good men err? Reply: Like you, I was educated to believe that deriving an is from an ought is invalid. Just because so much has been written about why this “naturalistic fallacy” is not a fallacy, by thinkers like Peter Geach, Ralph McInerny, Anthony Lisska, and Robert Koons, I don’t think I need to explain at great length. I’ve also found that sometimes saying too much obscures the point rather than clarifying it, no matter what the venue. But I do think the error is simple. Yes, some smart and good thinkers espouse it. We all commit many errors; they would say I am committing one now. In general, to attain a single insight, one must unlearn a dozen mistakes. I say a dozen, but that’s if one is lucky. It seems to me that “Is does not entail ought” is a claim about ontology, disguised as a claim about logic. I can’t see why anyone should accept it unless he denies that things have real moral properties. In that case he will say that is statements describe facts, ought statements express attitudes toward facts, and nothing about the facts could ever make any attitudes unfitting. But this is absurd. “Seeing is the function of the eye” is an is statement. But to assert it is to hold that eyes that see well are good eyes, and eyes that see poorly are bad eyes. And since “good” means what ought to be furthered, we ought to help bad eyes see better. Again, “Arsenic is a poison” is an is statement. But to assert it is to hold that arsenic injures the natural good of health. And since evil means what ought to be avoided, we ought to keep arsenic off our tables. Christian Smith helpfully remarks, “the descriptive observation is first made that is and ought belong to different orders, from which is then derived the normative injunction that we should keep them separate. But if we really cannot get an ought from an is, where did that injunction come from?” Tomorrow: What Can I Do? I'm in Love
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Attempt at a DefinitionSunday, 03-29-2015 |
Natural Law and Original Sin, Part 3 of 3Saturday, 03-28-2015For new readers:Introduction to the blog (2013)
A purely ahistorical view of natural law is certainly possible. Christians, however, view our unchanging human nature in the light of salvation history – Creation, Fall, Redemption. How can something unchanging have a history? The answer is that although our nature does not change in itself, its condition can certainly change, and it does. Man was created in the condition of “original justice,” a condition of friendship with his Creator, in which he was also in harmony with his own nature, with his fellows, and with the rest of creation. Original sin is the loss of original justice – not friendship, but alienation from our Creator. The result of this loss is a habitual tendency to disorder, which afflicts human nature in much the same way that sickness afflicts the human body. Just as sickness makes the body a stranger to health, so original sin makes the soul a stranger to integrity; it destroys the original harmony and equilibrium that characterized our original condition. Once the harmony of original justice has been ruined, the various powers of the soul, which were formerly held in balance by reason, push us in different and even opposite ways. Each power of our nature turns away from the supreme and eternal good, God, toward lesser and changeable goods. At bottom, the disorder of our desires is nothing but this turning away. Specific disordered desires, such as lust, are only its manifestations. But this turning away manifests itself in other ways too. Because reason is no longer properly ordered toward truth, we suffer ignorance; because the will is no longer properly ordered toward the good, we suffer malice, which is the desire for what is evil because it seems to us good; because what is called the concupiscible appetite is no longer properly ordered toward “delectable” goods, we suffer concupiscence; and because what is called the irascible appetite is no longer properly ordered toward “arduous” goods, we suffer weakness. These consequences are called the “wounds” of sin. If reason is truly sovereign, then one might ask how it is possible for the appetites and emotions to be insubordinate to reason in the first place. The answer lies in how reason exercises its sovereignty. Borrowing an analogy from Aristotle, St. Thomas says reason commands the lower powers not by a “despotic sovereignty,” the way slaves are commanded by their master, but by a “royal and political sovereignty,” the way free men are ruled by their governor. Even though they are subject to his rule, they “have in some respects a will of their own,” so that they can resist his commands. Although the sin of our first parents did not take away our original nature and give us a different nature, a "sin nature," as some people mistakenly suppose, it is easy to see how this error arises. As we have said, original justice was a gift of grace to human nature, superadded to the principles that God built into it, and original sin is the deprivation of this gift. Although man has not literally lost his nature, the disharmony, dislocation, and disequilibrium that result from the deprivation of original justice are "like a second nature." Yet even so, St. Thomas comments, "sin cannot entirely take away from man the fact that he is a rational being, for then he would no longer be capable of sin. Wherefore it is not possible for this good of nature to be destroyed entirely.” The doctrine of original sin helps to understand a great many things about us that would otherwise be puzzling: For example, why is it so hard to do what we see that we ought to do, and avoid what we see we should avoid? It also reminds us of a fundamental difference between the way Christians reason about natural law, and the way pagans and secularists reason about it. Although the pagan can theorize about human nature and its laws, he is at a grave disadvantage in understanding them. Just because he does not know about original justice and original sin, he is apt to think that our disharmonious, dislocated, disequilibrated state is our normal state -- that original sin is our original condition. At the level of those deep intuitions that are expressed in myths of primal ruin, even he senses that something is wrong with us, that something is not as it should be. Yet at the level of theory, he does not know what to make of these intuitions. For though he may know all about the present human condition, he lacks the history of how its disorder came to be – and of how it can be remedied by grace. This concludes the series on natural law and original sin.Tomorrow: Attempt at a Definition (no, of something else)
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