When I was young, barbarian that I was, I used to think that although some intellects are smarter and some not so smart, at bottom there is only one kind of mind – my kind, of course.  The first shock to that cocky misconception was marriage.  The second was raising children.  My wife and daughters think beautifully, but they think differently.

My wife, for example, is extremely perceptive, beats the pants off me in games of strategy, and is the most penetrating and accurate judge of character and motive I have ever met.  But with a few striking exceptions -- such as trigonometry and number puzzles, where she is a blur, and mystery stories, where she always knows whodunnit and can account for all the clues – it is all intuition.  That means I haven’t the faintest idea how she is reaching her conclusions.  Nor can she usually tell me, because she doesn’t know either.

In the first few years of marriage, this drove me crazy.  Unfamiliar with intuition, poorly exercised in it, I thought there must be some hidden algorithm.  I judged character, for example, by testing my observations against hypotheses.  My wife found this most amusing, especially because my conclusions were almost always wrong.  After many years, a little bit of her intuition rubbed off on me, but two things about that process were equally astonishing.  First, I still didn’t really know how it worked.  Second, I didn’t know how it had rubbed off on me. 

One of the things philosophers do is provide arguments to test, ground, clarify, elevate, and connect the dots of intuitive knowledge or would-be knowledge.  This is a helpful thing to do, but it doesn’t show that argument is the way the knowledge was attained in the first place.  Moreover, for some of the things we know, no argument ever could be given, because they are first principles.  You can “motivate” or elicit them, but you cannot prove them, because they are the things by which other things are proven.  They are either known in themselves, or not at all.

So the intuitive mind is one kind of mind.  More likely it is eight or nine of them, because there are different kinds of intuition.  What other kinds are there? 

One of my former students is a ruminator.  He grinds up ideas in his crop, taking his time to chew the cud, until finally he can do something with them.  He speaks slowly, he writes slowly, he formulates questions slowly.  But what comes out of the process is quite remarkable.  Does the metaphor of a ruminator give the impression that this brilliant fellow is not very smart?  Then change the metaphor.  Think instead of the millstones of the gods, and how they turn:  Slowly, slowly, but very fine.

Another of my students is a leaper, or at least one kind of leaper.  He asks questions scarcely anyone else would think to ask; he takes soaring jumps from scattered hints, which could hardly be called premises, to speculative possibilities, which could hardly be called conclusions.  To find out what is on the other side of the mountain, the ruminator has to climb it, step by tiring step, but the leaper just knows what he will find.  Not that he knows it clearly or entirely; he has only flashes and visions.  Not that he is always right; sometimes what he just knows turns out to be dreadfully wrong.  But his guesses are right often enough to make it worth watching whenever he does make one of his death-defying springs. 

I myself am a teacher, or at least one kind of teacher.  This took me some years to find out, because I thought teaching was what I did, not what I am.  Please understand that I am not claiming to be a good teacher, but only explaining how my mind works.  I find it almost impossible to hear a lecturer explain something, for instance, without thinking “How would I explain it?”  I once feared that this character trait was a moral flaw.  How could I be so arrogant as to think I could explain everything better?  But I am not so arrogant as to think that I can.  I have merely discovered that asking how I would explain something is my way of learning it.

Even now this seems backwards.  In order to explain something correctly, wouldn’t one have to understand it already?  But that is not how it works for me.  If I cannot see how to explain it, I have difficulty learning it at all.  Teaching is therefore as much for me as it is for my students.  Sometimes my students apologize for what they consider stupid questions.  If only they understood what a gift such questions are!  They are so much more difficult to answer than smart ones -- consequently I learn so much more from trying to answer them. 

There are too many kinds of minds to list.  These few must do for all.  One crucial lesson is that in order to teach someone well, you must recognize what kind of mind he has.  A ruminator learns differently than a leaper, a leaper learns differently than a teacher, and so on.  Another is that each of these different kinds of minds balances and depends on all the others.  They are involved in one another, or they ought to be.  So marvelous!

These lessons came late to me.  If I had learned them younger, I might have been a better teacher now.  But it is better to have learned them late than not to have learned them, so I am glad.

A peculiar feature of our intellectual culture is that we don’t believe anything until we can describe it in a language which looks like physics.  The reason the social sciences have not advanced as far as physics is that they are trying to be the same sort of thing.

You won’t think much of the proposition “Justice is giving each person what is due to him” if your model is the proposition “Applied force is the product of mass and acceleration.”  As a chemist friend once asked me when we were talking about politics and justice, “Where are your variables?”

The irony is that there really is a variable in “Justice is giving each person what is due to him”:  The variable is what is due.  But it is not a physical quantity, there is no instrument to measure it but mind and conscience, and although there are principles to rely upon, they don’t work like algorithms.  You can’t use them unless you get them.

So in discipline after discipline, we ignore most of the classical traditions of inquiry and set out to reinvent the wheel.  Since we have strange conceptions of wheels, we have strange conceptions of progress.  “Behold, the triangular wheel.  See how much better it is than the square wheel, because it eliminates one bump.”

Take intelligence.  Psychologists are gradually beginning to recognize that intellect isn’t the sort of thing that can be described by the old-fashioned intelligence quotient, because it isn’t a single ability; now they are coming to view it as a set of different abilities.  To put it another way, if they spoke of an intelligence quotient at all, it would have be a vector:  Instead of saying “Your level of intelligence is 120,” they would say something like “Your levels of intelligence are 95, 150, 80, 120, and 155,” with 95 indicating your arithmetic intelligence, 150 indicating your spatial intelligence, 80 indicating what they oddly call your emotional intelligence, and so on.

Well, this is an advance, of sorts.  It is quite true that intelligence is not a single ability.  But viewing it instead as a set of abilities is like switching from square wheels to triangular:  It only eliminates one bump.  Rather than thinking of abilities, we should be thinking of dispositions which supervene upon abilities.  In the classical tradition -- for which the distinction between abilities and dispositions was fundamental -- these dispositions were called moral and intellectual virtues.

For example, what our own psychologists seem to be trying to get at with the clumsy new term “emotional intelligence” is what the classical tradition called the moral virtues, for example courage, frankness, temperance, justice, and generosity.  These are dispositions -- “habits of the heart” – to make choices in a particular way, according to a mean relative to us, determined by a rational principle recognized by persons of practical wisdom.

To see the difference between abilities on the one hand and dispositions or habits on the other, consider courage.  True, a certain ability is required for me to be courageous:  It must be possible to repress fear and to stir up confidence.  That sounds simple.  But it is not enough that the horse be broken; the rider must know how to ride.  I must learn to choose in just the right way, with neither too much fear nor too much confidence, just as the circumstances demand, and the habit of doing so must be settled in my bones.  How do I determine what the right way is?  By practical wisdom, which is also a virtue – not a moral but an intellectual virtue.  These two kinds of virtue interact.

What I am suggesting is that intelligence is not so much about abilities as about character – about moral and intellectual personality – about “habits of the heart” which supervene on abilities, for better or for worse.

Perhaps you think this is going too far.  I can imagine someone objecting, “What you’ve been saying is all well and good when applied to so-called emotional intelligence.  Perhaps that sort of thing really is about dispositions; moral virtues I can buy.  But surely the other facets of intelligence are mere abilities.  To be smart in a certain sort of way is nothing more than to be able to perform a certain kind of mental operation.  It isn’t about personality.”

I think it is about personality.  And I would go farther:  Just as there are many virtues, there are many kinds of intelligent minds.  I am not falling into relativism.  Just as the tuning of each kind of musical instrument depends on the same principles of harmony, so the tuning of each kind of mind depends on the same principles of virtue.  But just as different musical instruments are adapted for different parts in a symphony, so are different minds.  Some are flutes, some are cymbals, some are cellos, some are trumpets, some are harps.

In the next post I hope to say something about the kinds of minds one encounters as a teacher -- and what to do with them.

And so we must give up the project of mere natural law.  There is no such thing as natural law made easy.  There will never be a book entitled Natural Law for Dummies, unless it is written for dummies.  Natural law is as real as falling down the stairs, but that doesn’t make it as simple as falling down them.  We had better be ready for complications.

But professor, haven’t you written that there are certain foundational moral principles we “can’t not know”?  Have you changed your mind?  And didn’t St. Paul claim that the moral basics are inscribed on the conscience, “written on the heart”?

Not a bit.  The law really is written on the heart.  Our consciences really are inscribed with it.  There really are moral truths that we can’t not know.  These facts are permanent advantages of moral good.

But we are divided beings.  The inscription on our hearts is indelible, but we can read it badly.  We can’t not know the moral basics, but we can certainly pretend that we don’t know them.  We can even make use of our knowledge of what is right to contrive excuses for what is wrong.  These facts are permanent advantages of moral evil.

Case in point:  We can’t not know the wrong of deliberately taking innocent human life.  Even feminist attorney and abortion activist Eileen McDonaugh agrees with me about that.  But she says abortion is all right because the fetus isn’t innocent.

The evasions and confusions aren’t all on the other side.  I hear strange things from skeptics and semi-skeptics, but I also hear strange things from people sympathetic to the cause of natural law.

The former sometimes tell me things like this:  “Yes, I do have a conscience.  It really does stand in judgment on me.  But sometimes, to do the right thing, I just have to violate my conscience.”  The latter sometimes tell me things like this:  “It’s so wonderful that the law is written on our hearts.  If only I follow my feelings, I’ll always do the right thing.”

I hardly know which remark is more disturbing.

Of course there are good answers to both remarks, but they express errors about conscience.  One can’t answer them just by appealing to conscience; one has to discuss what kind of thing conscience is and isn’t.  More’s the pity, the people most likely to say such things are the ones who find the explanations most difficult and least intuitive.

Nor do the difficulties end with conscience.  Inevitably one has to discuss things like why our creational design is authoritative (why not change our nature?), natural teleology (what are our natural powers for?), and the natural consequences of things (if I could evade its natural consequences, could I make a wrong act right?)  Each discussion promises the possibility of lighting up a dark corridor and making it luminous.  But each opens more corridors to illuminate.

I am not complaining.  I am a teacher.  Whether or not I live up to it, explaining things is my vocation.  Having made a great many mistakes along the way, I think I have some qualification to talk about the making of them.

As in most things, there are two opposite ways to go wrong, and there is a mean between these extremes.  One way to go wrong is to oversimplify, to quarantine the topic of natural law from philosophical complications, to turn the law written on the heart into a glib set of formulae (“just read this tract and you’ll be convinced”).

The other way is to overcomplexify, to make the topic of natural law into something that only philosophers can understand, to forget that the theory must bow down before fact, and that we have some inside knowledge of the facts.  The law really is written on the heart.

People who think about natural law consider it in various ways.

Moral philosophers are interested in what it is -- political philosophers, in what light it might shed on law and government -- casuists, in how it might help them clear up difficult moral problems -- epistemologists, in how we know it -- historians, in how belief in it has moved individuals and nations -- moral apologists, in how the universal dim awareness of it can be cleansed, enlarged, and deepened -- psychologists, in how the attempt to deny it distorts personality -- metaphysicians, in what the structure of reality must be like for there to be such a thing in the first place -- theologians, in how its reality points to the reality of God.

If we suppose that each of these groups pays close attention to what the others are doing, we will be disappointed.  To a surprising degree, each group minds its own business, blithely assuming that its business and the others’ businesses are independent.  “To understand this, we don’t need to understand that too.”  Unfortunately, this assumption is wrong.

A historian, for instance, may think that he doesn’t need to know much about the thing believed in order to understand how believing in it has influenced people.  To understand how belief in natural law has moved nations, he may not even need to know whether it is real.  But this is not so.

Why not?  Consider how believing that natural law is real is different than believing, say, that the planet Jupiter is composed mostly of hydrogen.  We have no inside knowledge, no inner awareness, of the composition of Jupiter.  But through conscience, we do have a certain inside knowledge of natural law; the rational mind “participates” in its reality.  So to affirm or deny that Jupiter is mostly hydrogen is to affirm or deny something outside myself, but to affirm or deny conscience is to affirm or deny myself.  Wouldn’t a good historian see that this must make a difference to how people think and behave?

“To understand this, we don’t need to understand that too.”  Some moral thinkers make the same assumption, and I am more and more convinced that for them it is an even greater folly.  Despite his greatness, C.S. Lewis makes this mistake in his great work The Abolition of Man.  Just as an earlier book was about “mere” Christianity, so one might say this superb essay is about “mere” natural law, and it is much the same sort of splendid failure.  I do not bandy these adjectives lightly.  Though hardly noticed by most specialists, The Abolition of Man is one of the twentieth century’s most luminous brief works about natural law.   Now that the spirit of Nimrod has reawakened, and the voice of the transhumanist is heard in the land, it has more to teach than ever.  Yet just as in the former book, so in this one, the mere just doesn’t work.

Lewis was so intent to avoid the baggage of Western metaphysics that he would not even use the traditional term “natural law”; instead, seeking a term without associations, he called it the “Tao.”  Yet this merely entangled him in the unintended associations of Eastern metaphysics.  So determined was he not to discuss the great question of whether natural law presupposes God, he ended up giving the unintended impression that it doesn’t.

If the book succeeds in other ways – if it accurately diagnoses subjectivism about values, if it successfully show how every attempt to deny the natural law depends on such shreds of natural law as it retains, if it correctly forecasts what refashioning human nature would really mean -- it does so despite its failed minimalism, not because of it.

For a more recent example of failed minimalism in natural law, consider the so-called New Natural Law theory, or NNL.

According to the classical Western natural law tradition, human nature is richly endowed with inclinations which point toward God.  Even without knowing Him as He knows Himself, even without the unaided natural power to attain Him, even without understanding what it actually is that we long for, in fact we long for Him.  We long for Him not only as something good, but as our supreme good, more than we love our very selves.   This longing for God is not only supernatural but natural, and it is linked with other Godward leanings.  We are naturally inclined to worship, naturallyinclined even to offer sacrifice.  The thwarting or misdirection of such inclinations, under the influence of sin, has grave consequences, far greater than what Freud thought happens when libido is repressed.  Understanding them, then, is a matter of the first importance.

But the NNL rejects all of this.  Rather than supposing that we are naturally and spontaneously drawn to God, it views us as drawn to “religion.”  Rather than supposing that religion lies in the loving service of God, it views it as lying in a relationship with some source of meaning which we conceive as greater than ourselves.  And rather than supposing that this relationship is our supreme good, it views it as merely one “basic” good among others -- no more important than, say, the good of play.

One is reminded of a remark by a certain member of Alcoholics Anonymous, when asked by an interviewer what he took the second of the famous Twelve Steps to mean.  The second step declares. “We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”

“For me,” he said, “it’s electricity.”

Next:  Beyond the border of mere

The previous post concluded by finding that if “mere” Christianity means merely what all or almost all who call themselves Christians have believed, there is nothing left of it.  Lewis’s book would seem to be demolished.  But it isn’t.  It is a great book.

What saves the book is that although Lewis says he is defending what all or almost all who have called themselves Christians have believed, he isn’t really; he only thinks he is.  He is actually defending a particular conception of what is truly most central to the Church founded by Christ.  A very particular conception.

In fact, it is a high-church Anglican conception, of roughly the sort held by John Henry Newman before he became Catholic.  This type is rare among actual Anglicans, perhaps because so many of those who hold it end up joining Newman on the other side of the Tiber.  It looks remarkably like Catholicism with a few pieces missing -- just enough of them to allow putting off the decision to convert.  As Newman discovered, the difficulty is that these missing pieces want to be replaced; the holes cry out to them, “Return!”

For example, although Lewis stops short of a full-blown Catholic account of the sacraments, he clearly defends the Catholic view that they are more than mere symbols; they are symbols plus, symbols through which God is actually bringing about the thing symbolized.  Baptism is not just a symbol of new birth but a new birth, marriage is not just a symbol of joining but a joining, and so on.

Whatever Lewis thought it was, this view is far from mere.  Granted, one can hold it without being Catholic, but it is far more characteristic of Catholicism than of Protestantism.  It is especially alien to Evangelical Protestantism, which is curious, because Evangelicals are probably the book’s most enthusiastic readers.  If you wanted to draw Evangelicals to the Catholic Church, you could hardly do better than to have them read Mere Christianity, then point out how Catholic many of their favorite passages are.

But I wish to propose a larger point, which is not about Lewis’s book, and not about Protestantism and Catholicism, but about minimalism.

It is simply this:  Every minimalism is some minimalism.

Lewis’s minimalism turns out to be almost Catholic, but if it hadn’t been almost Catholic, it would have been almost something else.  The mere fact that one avoids certain questions does not make one neutral about their answers. 

Lewis closes his preface with the hope that no reader will take what he calls mere Christianity to be a kind of Christianity, as though someone could be a mere Christian rather than, say, Congregationalist or Greek Orthodox.  He says it is “more like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms,” emphasizing that “the hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in.”  For living in, he thinks, even the worst of the rooms would be preferable to the hall.

But if the hall is defined, not by what is truly most central to the Church founded by Christ, but only by what all or almost all who call themselves Christians have believed, then if the hall exists at all, it is tiny, and some of these doors may not open into rooms at all, but into the street.

Must we then oppose every sort of minimalism?  No.  Every conversation must begin somewhere.  Since one cannot talk about everything at once, one must begin with something that one’s conversational partner is willing to concede.

But this can never last for long.  The mind, like the stomach, desires a meal. Just as some foods are digestible and delicious only in combination with other foods, so also some beliefs are helpful and plausible only in combination with other ideas. In order to stand firm they must have context, as the single stone requires the arch.

Next:  Not so mere natural law