Lenten Reflection on Suffering

Posted on March 1, 2013

For most people throughout history, the fundamental existential question is about suffering: why is it, and what does it mean?

The answer to the first question is obvious. Rocks don’t suffer, but people do. People suffer because they have desires, and many of those desires are embodied in interests–things whose possession makes life go well. I use the term ‘things’ loosely here. Our interests can be in material objects, but our strongest needs are for relationships with other human beings, for immaterial goods like friendship, love, power and honor. If we did not care about such things, we could not suffer their loss. Thus some philosophers, such as Heidegger, go so far as to define man as the careful being, the being whose fundamental relationship with the world is one of concern.

This insight provides several suggestions about how to answer the second question about the meaning of suffering. If suffering is caused by concern, then the value of suffering depends on the value of our concerns. Suppose (as materialists do) we learn that the world is not ultimately inherently valuable? Then suffering is both meaningless and irrational, since the cause of suffering is our penchant for seeing in the world something that isn’t there. The rational cure for suffering will be to eliminate unnecessary desire, to live, so far as possible, without concern. The Epicurean or Stoic sage who does this will have achieved ataraxia, untroubledness, though the world breaks against him. As Anaxagoras replied when he learned of the death of his son, “I knew my child was mortal.”

Suppose, on the other hand, you believe that the world is inherently valuable. Then suffering is both meaningful and rational, since it marks the lack or loss of some real good. What we need to determine in this case is what the good is, and whether it can be possessed by us. (The former is an ontological question, the latter a metaphysical one.) If you’re an atheist, the goods of this world are all there are, but they are difficult to possess: the world fights us for possession of her goods. The solution to suffering, then, as Francis Bacon argued, is the ‘rape of Nature,’ to force her to give up what she so selfishly prizes. We do this through power, through our technological mastery of the world. The solution to suffering is the utilitarian application of empirical science.

If one is a theist, however, the atheist has answered the ontological question poorly. For how could the creation be a greater good than its Creator, a Being who is, by definition, perfect? The source of suffering for the theist isn’t illusory desire (as it is for Lucretius or Marcus Aurelius), or miserly nature (as it is for the technologist), but loving lower goods that are incapable of satisfying our infinite desire in place of higher goods that are. Suffering, as Augustine saw, is a mark of disordered love:

Late have I loved you, O beauty so ancient and so new;
late have I loved you.

For behold you were within me, and I outside;
and I sought you outside and in my ugliness fell
upon those lovely things that you have made.

You were with me and I was not with you.

I was kept from you by those things,

yet had they not been in you,

they would not have been at all.

You called and cried to me and broke upon my deafness;
and you sent forth your light and shone upon me,
and chased away my blindness;

You breathed fragrance upon me,
and I drew in my breath and do now pant for you:

I tasted you and I now hunger and thirst for you;
you touched me, and I have burned for your peace.

(Confessions X.27)

To borrow from another Augustinian, Søren Kierkegaard argued that “purity of heart is to will one thing,” God above all things. This is not to say that the world is bad. It is to say that the world’s goods can be a temptation to the purity of one’s love, as a rich woman’s wealth or beauty can be a temptation to a suitor who desires to love her well. The metaphysical question for the theist, then, is at bottom a moral question: how to be pleased and pained by real goods and real evils rather than their impostors.

False suffering is sin (it evinces disordered love), while sin is the occasion of true suffering. How to tell the difference? If only we had some guide, someone willing to descend into the darkness of sin and show us the way to truth. A suffering servant.

For this do we hope.

Categories: Ethics, Happiness

Tagged: Epicureanism, Francis Bacon, Lucretius, Marcus Aurelius, Søren Kierkegaard, Stoicism, Suffering, Suffering Servant

Against Contraception: The Argument from Chastity

Posted on February 10, 2013

In the Summa Theologica, Aquinas argues that as a maker of worlds, God can “signify his meaning, not by words only (as man also can do), but also by things themselves” (ST 1.1.10c). Nature is God’s first revelation; beings themselves, and indeed the whole order of creation, are natural (rather than conventional) signs of God’s love. Dorothy Sayers once used this idea to explain Dante’s use of Beatrice and Christ in the Divine Comedy thus:

Beatrice, a real and beloved woman, is, in the eyes of Dante, an instance and a symbol of all creation glorified by love. The Incarnate life of God on earth, because it is a historic fact, is at once the supreme instance and the unique natural symbol of the whole history of man, and the whole nature of God, and the relations between them. … If it is not historic, then it is either not symbolical at all, or else ‘merely’ a conventional symbol. If, on the contrary, it is a historic fact, then it is a natural symbol and by contemplating it we can really learn something about God and Man. … [A natural symbol] is itself an instance of what it symbolizes: and therefore, by simply being what it is, it tells us something about the true nature of that thing for which it stands. (Introductory Papers on Dante, p. 8)

In what follows, I would like to investigate this idea that a person can be “an instance and a symbol of all creation glorified by love” by showing how Blessed John Paul II makes use of it in Gratissumum Sane and its relevance for thinking about chastity and contraception.

A Polyvalent Theological Anthropology

What is the “natural,” that is, inherent significance of human sexuality? I take it that this is one of the questions John Paul II sets out to answer in his profound “Letter to Families” (Gratissumum Sane). Echoing Aquinas, John Paul opens his reflections by noting that “The universe … is inscribed in God’s Fatherhood, which is its source” (GS 6). As John Paul sees it, the world is mysterious in the positive sense that, like metaphors, beings mean more than themselves. For example, he argues, although all animals ‘multiply,’ the divine command to multiply given to Adam and Eve must be understood in the light of the divinity that called for their being: “Human fatherhood and motherhood,” he says,

while remaining biologically similar to that of other living beings in nature, contain in an essential and unique way a “likeness” to God which is the basis of the family as a community of human life, as a community of persons united in love (communio personarum). (GS 6)

As John Paul goes on to explain, we are to understand that the communio personarum is both interpersonal and genealogical in character. Sex is profoundly social; it is always for others. Furthermore, it is for others in many analogous ways, since it is of the nature of relationality that parts constantly transcend themselves by their relation to the whole of which they are parts. Biologically, male and female are reciprocally defined terms; trying to imagine a world of male without female is like trying to imagine a world of left with no right. But masculinity and femininity transcend themselves in the creation of a family. The family itself is a community of persons in which each member’s identity is given by his or her relation to others, e.g., as a spouse, father, mother, or child. This community of persons is also a “communion” of persons, in which by giving of oneself one receives in return a greater gift: the reciprocal love of that is the common good of the family, extending for generations. Furthermore, John Paul argues, by this emptying of oneself as an individual and pouring oneself out in love for another, one participates in the creation of persons who have a supernatural destiny. Marriage is thus mimetic of God’s Fatherhood: “Begetting is the continuation of Creation” (GS 9). In opening oneself to life, one opens oneself to eternity. This is what it means to be human, John Paul concludes: to ‘find oneself’ in truth and in love as a being whom God willed ‘for his own sake,’ by being for others in precisely this way.

Of course, in keeping with the traditional understanding of the Genesis text, John Paul notes that being made in the “image” and “likeness” of God indicates not just our capacities for knowledge, freedom, and genuine love, but that to become ‘like’ God through self-donation is the dynamic task of our lives, an achievement rather than a status.

Fatherhood and motherhood are themselves a particular proof of love; they make it possible to discover love’s extension and original depth. But this does not take place automatically. Rather, it is a task entrusted to both husband and wife. In the life of husband and wife together, fatherhood and motherhood represent such a sublime “novelty” and richness as can only be approached “on one’s knees.” (GS 7)

The imago dei is not simply what we are; it is also what we are called to do. Humanity is both our being and our vocation. One finds oneself by giving oneself away, since only in self-donation does one receive who one really is. As we saw above, this paradoxical statement of our Lord is made perfectly clear in the sacramentality–the (super)natural signification–of marriage and family life.

Chastity

So what does this have to do with sexual morality? Well, to begin with, it entails that sexual reality is “thick.” Sex has both a horizontal and vertical dimension. Horizontally, our sexuality is genealogical in the sense that it refers backwards to our parents (we are all someone’s son or daughter), presently towards our spouse, and forwards towards our children and future generations of families. In the vertical dimension, our sexuality is a moving image of divine love for mankind, as of a bridegroom for his bride. Each of us stands at the intersection of this web of meanings; we are ‘never merely ourselves,’ as C.S. Lewis put it in The Four Loves, but always already something more.

Since virtues involve a clear-sighted grasp of what is, it follows that chastity is likewise a “thick,” vigorous, polysyllabic simple virtue, whereas lust is thin, anemic and obtuse. The chaste man is a man of sweeping vision, capable of keeping in his mind’s eye all that is his beloved. He views her as woman, friend, wife, mother, and gift, as a sign of his redemption, just as Dante sees Beatrice as “an instance and a symbol of all creation glorified by love” (Sayers). Chastity is a poet. The eyes of lust, in contrast, are always directed downward, stuck on one thing. To see a woman this way, however, is not even to see her as a woman, but as something less. Not even as a woman. Just as the words of a poem receive their meaning as parts of a greater whole, but are by themselves only sounds, so too does the lustful man, in precinding from the beauty of this woman who is never merely herself, make her something less than human, a thin, anemic, mundane thing. Lust is unnatural because it is not supernatural, because it cannot see eternity in the face of the woman who stands before him in glory.

Chastity is also a profoundly social virtue. Like justice and charity, chastity contains an essential reference to the good of another person; it presupposes a relationship with others. It also comes from others. Real virtues, as opposed to the abstractions of philosophers, are learned at home as fathers and mothers pass their character and wisdom on to their children. We learn first by imitation, do we not? Ontogeny aside, chastity has a phylogeny as well. The Catholic tradition–and Plato (Rep. 401b-e)–has long held that the sword and shield of chastity is true friendship, a like-minded community of friends dedicated to a common vision of the good life. A community that surrounds its children with what is truly fine will find that “when reasonable speech comes” to them as they mature, the children will “take delight in it, recognizing on account of its being akin” to what has already been sown in their souls (Rep. 402a).

Lust, in contrast, requires privacy. It happens behind the eyes before it happens behind computer screens or the pages of a book, furtive, ashamed, and lonely. It believes that sex is about personal pleasure–or in any case, that it is sometimes perfectly reasonable to pursue sex merely for pleasure. It treats sexual desire as essentially self-referential, as a desire for sensations rather than persons. So far as sensations go, no harm, no foul. You see how lust shrinks our eternal horizons to the cusp of immediacy: this feeling, now. Lust lays men low.

Anyone who has passed the newsstand in the grocery store has seen the tasteless leads on the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine guaranteeing “great sex” if we use their ‘sex secrets’ and ‘techniques.’ Given Cosmo’s reductive attitude towards sex, this is like praising a thief for his safe-cracking skills, or a Nazi for his efficiency. As should be clear from the above reflections, truly satisfying sex involves right attitudes towards the transcendent aspects of sexuality, and not merely concern for physical pleasure production. Thus a purely technocratic attitude towards sexuality such as we find in Cosmo and public sex-ed classes undermines and corrupts a healthy comportment towards sexual love.

An analogy with education will help to make the point clearer. In What Money Can’t Buy, Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel argues that paying students to read, as some school districts do, is a pragmatically and morally unsound practice (51-55). The well-read mind is valuable, Sandel points out, not merely for the professional opportunities education affords us, but also for its own sake. Liberal education fits the mind for its own excellence in the way that practice made Isaac Perlman free to do with a violin what an untutored string-scratcher cannot: make beautiful music. The liberal mind sounds its own worth; it measures itself according to its vocation to “be itself” rather than according to some extrinsic criteria (like fame, fortune, or power) accidental to its nature as mind. Paying students to study substitutes these extrinsic incentives for the intrinsic ones. This not only induces us to do the right thing for the wrong reason, Sandel argues, but in fact corrupts the very good the discipline of study aims at, since valuing wisdom for its own sake is partly what makes someone wise in the first place. This is similar to paying people to be your friends: attempting to purchase the good destroys it by corrupting the attitudes constitutive of it. When extrinsic attitudes are entrenched over time in a mind, institution, or culture–e.g., in the modern educational system that prostitutes itself to capitalism–it becomes impossible to reason well about pedagogy because we no longer understand what learning is for.

More often than not, these corrupting attitudes are not held explicitly by individuals–nearly everyone one asks is ‘for’ liberal education and healthy marriages–but embodied in practices, techniques, and cultural narratives. MIT professor Sherry Turkle recently argued in Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other that social networking practices are undermining the real relationships we all claim to value. As she said in a New York Times editorial,

FACE-TO-FACE conversation unfolds slowly. It teaches patience. When we communicate on our digital devices, we learn different habits. As we ramp up the volume and velocity of online connections, we start to expect faster answers. To get these, we ask one another simpler questions; we dumb down our communications, even on the most important matters. It is as though we have all put ourselves on cable news. Shakespeare might have said, “We are consum’d with that which we were nourish’d by.” (“The Flight From Conversation,” April 21, 2012)

Neil Postman made similar arguments decades earlier in Technopoloy about computers and political surveys; Marshall McLuhan made the point decades earlier yet in in The Medium is the Message. And Pope Paul VI made the point about contraception in Humana Vitae in 1968, something continuously underscored by his successors to the Chair of Peter.

Against Contraception: The Argument from Chastity

Like lust, contraception is reductive in character: its use habituates us to judge sex according to technocratic criteria extrinsic to human sexuality. By deliberately divorcing sex from fecundity, contraception makes us blind to the genealogical and theological dimensions of human sexuality. It allows us to pursue sexual pleasure or romantic feelings for their own sake, with no thought of sexuality’s family-making ends. This closes us in upon our selves, destroying the sacramental character of sexuality by twisting its natural signification. As G.E.M. Anscombe pointed out in her 1973 essay “Contraception and Chastity,” contraception makes the complimentary, interpersonal, and self-donation essential to good sexuality unintelligible. The widespread practice of contraception has led our culture to believe that sex is for pleasure or for love, but not necessarily for family. Insofar as sex makes someone feel pleasure or loved, then, all sex is equally good: there are no sexual sins, no disordered sexual desires, since the end of sex is simply personal happiness; it has no goal outside of the self. I sometimes ask my students if they can imagine married life “B.C.”–before contraception–happy. Rarely does someone answer affirmatively. It is this attitude towards sexuality that explains why the Obama administration hysterically defends the ‘right’ to free contraception, but not free natal care, flue shots, or cancer treatments. Don’t we have a right to be happy?

Contraception also encourages us to think of reproduction as an event rather than a way of life. But this is false on many counts. Reproduction is a process that is completed not by birth, but by the realization of human excellence in an intellectually and morally mature adult. A society that aborts the reproductive process at any stage–either in the womb, or in childhood by abuse, or in adolescence by its conspicuous inability to provide anything other than a pubescent cultural milieu–has failed to reproduce itself.

Reproduction also begins long before conception takes place. Ask college students what kind of parents they want to be to their children, and they naturally respond that they want to be more than providers of food, shelter, and cell phones to their children. They want relationships marked by love, affection, and respect; they want their children to know that they are loved as God loves us all: for their own sake.

What these future fathers and mothers fail to realize is that their relationship with their children has already begun. The man or woman who contracepts is someone who has already assigned a value to his children–and not the value he claims. The ideology implicit in the practice of contraception is that children are inconveniences or burdens to be avoided until the demands that they make can be met by your finances, attention, or interest, when you have gained all of the hedonic ‘experiences’ or professional accomplishments you want and which children would inhibit acquiring. By the time these young men and woman want parenthood–though in too many cases, unlooked for and unwanted, parenthood finds them–they discover that their years of contraceptive sex have corrupted their youthful hopes for being the kind of parent they wished (and perhaps still secretly wish) to be. Children, with their demands for love and attention, their needs and frailties, are drains on the childless lifestyle idealized by a deliberately sterile culture. Pitied by their younger colleagues, and bitter about their family responsibilities, these perpetual adolescents flee from family life through divorce, abandonment, or neglect–dad works too much, so sorry–and have no sexual wisdom to pass on to their bothersome children other than to have fun while avoiding disease and pregnancy at all costs. And really, what’s the difference?

In short, contraception attacks the virtue of chastity, and without chastity, there can be no fruitful love or family life. Chastity, remember, is not celibacy, which is abstinence from sex. The celibate can be lustful and the newlywed couple chaste. More than the mere avoidance of sin, or near temptations of sin, chastity is perfected sexual desire, desire alive to the weight of glory. Rejecting the modern individualism that reduces us to anonymous, homeless sexual consumers, chastity makes its home among one’s community of forefathers and grandchildren and thinks on its responsibilities accordingly. The non-contracepting couple is in their chastity practicing how to be virtuous spouses and parents. They do not think of children as inconveniences, but as the crowning fruit of marriage. This does not entail seeking the good of children at every opportunity, which would be contrary to prudence. Rather, it means that when they desire to space their children, they do not engage in practices whose implicit technocratic ideology would condition their attitudes contrary to those needed for flourishing family life. Rather, they engage in practices like Natural Family Planning, whose periodic abstinence teaches us to be masters of our desires, and to expand our amorous vocabulary to express our love of each other in non-sexual ways. Chastity, remember, is a poet.

Having a proper concern for persons and their genealogical and theological dimensions requires truthful thinking and feeling. In the sexual realm, this means engaging in practices that encourage us to value children as ends in themselves, as persons God willed for their own sake, rather than as inconveniences. The demands of love are never truly burdensome: they make an easy yoke, and light. Love surely calls for patience, fortitude, and humility–that one make a gift of oneself–but this is love’s joy, not its death, as modernity supposes. Indeed, for Christians, love is a never-ending task, something one does unto the edge of doom. The sacrifice of the Son is love’s revelation. When marital love, as a way of life, embodies this sacrifice, it becomes a natural sign of supernatural grace. Every other way is death, signifying nothing.

Categories: Ethics

Tagged: Chastity, Contraception, Gratissumum Sane, John Paul II, Letter to Families, Lust, religion, Sex, theological anthropology, theology

Faith, Wonder, and the Method

Posted on January 29, 2013

In Summa Theologica 2-2.1.4, Aquinas argues that every action can be understood in two ways: according to its order of intention–the goal one has in mind when one acts, and aims to bring about by acting–as well as its order of execution, or the means by which that goal is accomplished. Every real action requires both an ultimate and and a first means, since lacking these “no one would begin to work at anything,” having either nothing to do or no way to do it. The end is the object of love, since we seek only what we believe to be good, whereas means are the object of prudence, since the man of practical wisdom seeks his ends well. Good human action thus requires the full complement of our faculties: reason (in the form of prudence), understanding (in our framing of the end), will (in our choice of ends), and appetite (in our attraction towards the end). Let’s think about what this implies for education.

Means Without Ends

Many writers have lamented that the modern university teaches means but not ends. For instance, in an address on “The Aim of Liberal Education” given the University of Chicago in 2003, Andrew Chrucky argues that modern education aims at teaching ‘facts and theories’ and ‘techniques of persuasion,’ but deliberately avoids discussions of ‘what purposes that knowledge will be used for.’ He points out that this is like teaching someone how to make a bomb without ever discussing what it is appropriate to blow up. Modern education focuses on ‘amoral cognitive skills’ while neglecting the moral and emotional education we require for human flourishing.

The reasons for this systematic neglect are legion, their roots reaching back to the European Enlightenment. The Enlightenment changed our notion of reason, and hence our understanding of the aim of education. For the ancients and medievals, whom I’ll simply call the ‘ancients,’ the wise man is a man of vision, e.g., the poet who sees beautiful similes among diverse things, or the philosopher who seeks ever higher truths to contemplate. In contrast, the wise man of the Enlightenment is the scientist and technician, the man of method. Here is how René Descartes explained the motivation for the change in the opening chapter of his Discourse on Method:

the diversity of our opinions, consequently, does not arise from some being endowed with a larger share of reason than others, but solely from this, that we conduct our thoughts along different ways, and do not fix our attention on the same objects. For to be possessed of a vigorous mind is not enough; the prime requisite is rightly to apply it. The greatest minds, as they are capable of the highest excellences, are open likewise to the greatest aberrations; and those who travel very slowly may yet make far greater progress, provided they keep always to the straight road, than those who, while they run, forsake it.

Having a “method” makes reason egalitarian, the dunce the equal of the genius; it democratizes reason. One need only follow the steps of his method, Descartes argued, and truth–objective, verifiable, unarguable truth–will be discovered without (or often despite) much intellectual talent. With the Enlightenment’s great propagandist, Francis Bacon, Descartes argued that aims of the scientific method include technological mastery, the relief of suffering, and political peace. For modernity, the cosmos is not a poem to be unfolded and contemplated–an interpretive enterprise whose subjectivity inevitably invites disagreement, war, and distraction from the more important business of relieving man’s mean estate–but raw material we can use for the satisfaction of human desire. To know something is to be able to put it to use. Unlike art, which seeks out the meaningful heart of things, the method only seeks how they work: “hypotheses non fingo,” as Newton put it.

Consequences of the Technocratic View of Reason

The adoption of this technocratic view of reason altered an established, richer view of reason in several ways.

First, it led the modern world to divorce truth and goodness. The ancients understood the world to be teleologically ordered to ends both naturally (through internal principles) and divinely (by Providence). As a result, they did not carve the world into what we moderns call ‘facts’ and ‘values.’ Indeed, the teleologist would regard the concept of an ‘objective’ world, one containing no values, as inadequate and incomplete a description of the world as the concept of a private realm of ‘subjective’ values whose validation needs pay no attention to truth. The arborist, for example, a good teleologist, considers it both natural and good for trees to reach their branches towards the sun because doing so facilitates their flourishing as living things. (How else do plants grow?) Marriage is good for the same reason: because it creates persons and communicates culture in a way that facilitates our flourishing as naturally social beings called to complementary, interpersonal, agapic love. (How else does one love a child?) In a world of inherent ends, goodness is coextensive with being: to exist is to be good. Thus, cleaving the world into facts and values fails to cut at the joints. If the world is also created for the glory of God, its goodness limns giftedness. To know the world is to be grateful for it. Thus the wise man worships.

Modern thinkers have rejected teleology, however; the scientific method requires patterns, powers and predictions, but neither ends nor explanations. Hence it cannot distinguish between what is natural (a normative, metaphysical concept) and what is normal (a statistical concept). If something happens frequently enough, even if what happens is contrary to the nature of the thing in question–say, a statistically significant disposition in human beings to drink Draino–the modern thinker will find himself compelled to call that aberration natural (it happens, after all, in ‘nature’). Since the statistics are ambiguous–some people like Draino, some don’t–the modern thinker will rightly deny that we can read morality off the statistics, and accuses the ancients of doing precisely this, of the so-called ‘naturalistic fallacy.’ The ancients did no such thing, of course, since teleology is a metaphysical concept, not a statistical one. Every schoolboy can explain why, on the one hand, being popular doesn’t make something good–try that for jumping off bridges–and why drinking Draino isn’t good for a biological being even if one finds it enjoyable. Because they grasp the inbuilt order of things, in other words, the ancients can distinguish between something’s appearing good to you and something’s being good for you. Modernity is blind to that difference, and can only understand claims about what’s ‘good’ as the arbitrary and unjust projection of one’s capricious desires onto the canvas of an objectively ‘neutral’ world. The link between truth and goodness has been broken.

The second traditional characteristic of reason lost by modernity is the ability to see the world as symbolically meaningful; it divorces truth from beauty. Consider the older view. As a made thing, God’s creation reveals something of its Maker, as a pot bears the marks of the potter. Thus Aquinas would remark that God can “signify his meaning, not by words only (as man also can do), but also by things themselves” (ST 1.1.10c). Nature is God’s first revelation. Though each thing speaks sotto voce, its own word, the combined polyphony of beings makes a chorus to God. (Tolkien would borrow that idea in his Similrillion.) Whereas the conceptual link between a conventional sign and what it signifies is arbitrary–as when we use the symbol “$” to signify dollars–a created universe also contains natural symbols, things whose natures represent something greater than themselves. For instance, Dante scholar Dorothy Sayers reflects,

The arch, maintaining itself as it does by the mutual thrust and pressure of all its parts, is at once an instance and a natural symbol of that great dynamic principle of stability in tension by which the physical universe is sustained. Beatrice, a real and beloved woman, is, in the eyes of Dante, an instance and a symbol of all creation glorified by love. The Incarnate life of God on earth, because it is a historic fact, is at once the supreme instance and the unique natural symbol of the whole history of man, and the whole nature of God, and the relations between them. … If it is not historic, then it is either not symbolical at all, or else ‘merely’ a conventional symbol. If, on the contrary, it is a historic fact, then it is a natural symbol and by contemplating it we can really learn something about God and Man. … [A natural symbol] is itself an instance of what it symbolizes: and therefore, by simply being what it is, it tells us something about the true nature of that thing for which it stands. (Introductory Papers on Dante, p. 8)

Augustine said the same thing of the mountains, that they cried–“We are not He, look higher!”–and both Plato (Rep. 500c) and Aristotle (Met. 12.7, 1072b4) saw the sublunar world move out of love for a greater Beauty.

In contrast, the Empiricist psychology of modernity considers the mind to be, at its best, a passive recorder of data, one that goes bad when it distorts or biases that data by reorganizing it. Thus the moderns considered imagination a threat to the usefulness of the mind. The method, it was thought, would eliminate such distortions by reducing observation to measurement and inference to calculation. In other words, the method would eliminate subjectivity by reducing the world ‘information,’ the incoherent idea that truth comes in context-less, un-theory-laden, narrative-free chunks. For the traditionalist, in contrast, imagination was the first stage of understanding, the iris of the eye of the soul. Speaking a great truth required poetry, or at least a passable metaphor. The reason for this was not the post-modern one that truths are only meaningful within an (arbitrary) web of belief, but the ancient one that because the world is naturally symbolic, only the bright containers of poetic truths can frame the fulness of being precisely by acknowledging its essential limitlessness. Speaking truly means speaking “up”; the highest expression of language is liturgical. Thus the wise man worships.

Finally, consider the fact that modernity’s egalitarian method conceives of truth, and our grasp of it, in radically new ways–that is, the divorce of truth from Truth. Gone is the idea that some objects require one’s being appropriately disposed, morally and intellectually, to know them properly. Yet how else does one come to appreciate great works of art–or a woman, asks Roetke–without first being moved by them? (If seeing beauty only required having eyes, the dog-faced baboon would have as much aesthetic taste as Socrates!) How else does one come to see the goodness of the moral life, if one is not aware of its fineness? (Aquinas says the virtuous person radiates honestum, suggesting that the immoral life is both superficial and ugly [ST 2-2.168.1c].). How does one come to believe the truths of faith unless one seeks salvation in humility? Only the penitent man hears the voice of God, who is as if silent to the hard-hearted.

Here we fathom the deep antipathy between the method and faith. Scientism, the view that everything real is knowable by the method (cf. Descartes, Discourse on Method 2.11), assumes the mundanity of the cosmos. If the world is polyphonic in the way suggested above by Dante and Aquinas, then scientism must stop its ears and treat faith as a siren’s song. For faith is the virtuous response of the intellect to a reality that exceeds the mind’s capacity to comprehend, just as love is the virtuous response to a reality whose goodness transcends the use of human concupiscence. Scientism and its method are therefore systematically deaf to the voice of divinity, and the technocratic ideology of modern education is atheological when it is not explicitly atheistic. Put otherwise, insofar as our dispositions do no work in modernity’s method–the whole point of the method is to eliminate them–then art, faith, and morality, and the Beauty, Truth, and Goodness they aim at, are reduced to an unreality beyond reason’s ken. Thus does modernity pit the sciences against the liberal arts and the Faith (they contain no knowledge, it is said).

Yet is is precisely as beautiful, true and good that we are attracted to things as ends. The modern predicament is thus, in a sense, the opposite of the ancients: possessed of awesome power, we have little that is genuinely worthwhile to accomplish. If truly fulfilling action requires a worthy final end, as Aristotle and St. Thomas and countless others have argued, then a university that cleanly and totally separates the study of ends and means does a moral, spiritual, and intellectual disservice to its students. It makes monsters of them, turning them into spiritually deformed beings who will use their Promethian abilities to service small and childish desires. Whatever our technical abilities, Aquinas would say, without a wholesome vision of the end, the life of modern man is an aborted one, having never truly begun. Thus worships the modern man.

Implications for Pedagogy

The above observations are neither new nor complex, and the practical conclusions drawn from them below are not original or sophisticated either. Nevertheless, here they are.

The first thing to be learned from the above analysis is that teaching students technique without awakening their love for a subject is less effective pedagogy than engendering love and skimping on technique. A passionate professor who can rouse his students to wonder will develop students who are independently motivated to seek the truth. Like Romeo, having grasped the value of an end, the lover searches for means. Sharing the beauty of one’s subject, therefore, will always be more important than accomplishing measurable ‘learning objectives.’

Yet beauty cannot be grasped by a mundane mind. Such minds must be prepared by a course of study that encourages the imagination to grasp the great analogy of being. One should study poetry, history, languages and literature along with the sciences, not only insofar as they prepare one for advanced coursework, but because they introduce the soul to its proper objects: truth, beauty, and goodness. Obviously, such a course of study should be undertaken prior to one’s training in a profession or academic discipline.

The second thing to be learned is that students who have methods and means but no definite ends will either require extrinsic motivations to practice their discipline (money, power, or pleasure), or else will give it up. I think the first option most likely. A restless man with means but no ends will search for ends he can apply himself to, ends which will often be contrary to the ends of his craft, as Socrates once told Thrasymachus. Business will aim at personal profit rather than the material reproduction of society; art will titillate rather than edify; medicine will enhance rather than cure. Universities would do well to note that there are no natural limits to such desires, that unless they teach students to ask about the food that truly satisfies, the fare provided will fail to nourish the human soul. “Be not thine own worm,” George Herbert reminds us: to satisfy such desires, the soul must eat itself.

Categories: Education

Tagged: Age of Enlightenment, Aquinas, Descartes, Education, Francis Bacon, Liberal Arts, Method, Science, Scientific method, University

Is Everyone Moral?

Posted on January 21, 2013

In chapter 1 of Introducing Moral Theology, William Mattison makes an interesting distinction between descriptive and normative morality.

Consider Austin Power’s nemesis, Dr. Evil. Dr. Evil is an arch villain; he lives for world domination, and revels in causing other people pain. Nevertheless, as his more pragmatic son Scott learns, Dr. Evil has a certain “style” of doing things. He will never simply “shoot” Austin, as Scott suggests; he would prefer to steal Austin’s “mojo,” or feed him to sharks with laser beams attached to their heads, or ruin Austin’s honeymoon by replacing his new wife with a murderous fem-bot. Likewise, although Dr. Evil shows little attachment to his henchmen, he shows tender regard for his bald kitty, Mr. Bigglesworth, and his dwarf-clone, “Mini-Me.”

Dr. Evil’s life is clearly organized around a moral code: he has unique goals, and accepts some ways of seeking those goals while rejecting others. It is in this sense Mattison says that, at the descriptive level, Dr. Evil is “moral.” Dr. Evil (1) engages in practical reasoning–reasoning about action, or what is to be done and how, and (2) follows practical “rules” that give his moral code its style (e.g., shooting Austin is bad form). In this descriptive sense, one could compare and contrast the moralities of anyone by discussing the ends they aim at, the overriding goals of their lives, the various ways they seek to accomplish those ends, including ways they reject seeking those ends. Whereas Dr. Evil seeks to rule the world through terrorism, Jesus seeks to rule the world through agapic love.

To be a moral, then, in the descriptive sense, is to engage in practical reasoning. Everyone who deliberates about what to do or to be is moral in this way, since morality is coextensive with rationality. Animals can’t be moral because they at most aim at technical rather than moral ends–they engage in productive thinking about how to make or do something, such as build a nest, but not in moral thinking about whether to be a doctor or an artist, or whether they should cheat on their philosophy exam. Human beings can’t not be moral, since that would require us to act without reason, and we are beings who do whatever we do only out of deliberation (or out of habits we’ve built up by acting in deliberate ways). We cannot “opt out of” morality.

Put otherwise, we are “rule-making” beings. We invent rules for ourselves and seek them in nature. Why does a lever require less force to lift a boulder than if one simply tries to lift the thing? Because Force x Distance = Work. What is the best way to lose weight? Does cheating on your spouse, as a rule, lead to a better relationship or not? Should you send thank-you cards when you get birthday presents? Because we are practical reasoners, we develop rules for all of these questions; that’s what rational beings do.

Notice, however, that we can naturally phrase our answers to every practical question as an “ought” statement. What is the best way to lose weight? You should diet and exercise. If you receive a birthday present, you should send thank-you cards. Why do we do this?

For two reasons. First, because there is often more than one way to do something. So you want to lose weight? You could diet and exercise, but you could also cut off your arm, or move to the moon. Given a diversity of means, to choose one over the others, is to engage in normative or evaluative reasoning, judging the goodness or badness of each means according to a larger criterion. Why shouldn’t you cut off your arm? Because it will lead to deformity or death, both of which are bad. Why not move to the moon? Because that would change your weight but not your mass, which is the real cause of your bad health.

The second reason is related to the first: because the world contains multiple, contradictory goals we could be seeking at any time. Exercise or eat a bucket of ice cream? It’s not that you can’t do both–you could even do both at the same time! But exercise and ice-cream binging are good for different goals, and are bad for opposite goals: you can’t get skinny by eating ice cream. So whether you exercise or eat a bucket of ice cream depends on whether health is one of your goals, and whether it has priority over other goals. How do you choose between them? By evaluating the goodness and badness of various goals, by prioritizing among possible ends. The result is a normative, practical rule: In general, I should do what’s healthy and avoid what’s not.

To be moral in the descriptive sense–which every rational human being is, by nature–is to make practical judgments about ends and means. With a little effort, we can express these judgments in statements, e.g., “You shouldn’t stab your brother with a pencil,” or “No, Mini-me, we don’t bite our kitty.” Once we have these statements, however, we can reason about them and evaluate them. Is diet and exercise the best way to be healthy? Is health a greater good than pleasure, all things considered, or should it give way to pleasure in some circumstances, like smoking a cigar to celebrate a birth? What criteria do we use to decide such questions, and are those criteria good criteria?

To ask these questions is to engage in normative ethics. Normative ethics is philosophical thinking about whether some moralities in the descriptive sense are better or worse (more rational or irrational) than others. Normative ethics goes beyond simply comparing and contrasting the moralities of Jesus and Dr. Evil, and asks which leads to a better life for a human being.

Many people dislike normative ethics because it makes these judgments. Such people think that we should refrain from making normative judgments about the moralities of other people and simply live and let live. All moralities are equal; none is better than any other. This is the position known as moral relativism. Some people are moral relativists for political reasons, believing that social peace requires us to keep mum about our opinions on the actions of others, since voicing these opinions leads to social strife and worse, which should be avoided at all costs (even the cost of doing philosophy.) Athens once made that judgment about Socrates. Others are moral relativists for philosophical reasons, defending moral relativism with moral skepticism, the view that we cannot know which ends are better or worse than others, or that we lack clear criteria for judging between various means to those ends.

A few quick points about moral relativism, and why it must be false as a philosophical position. First, it refutes itself: moral relativism is itself a judgment of normative ethics, since it judges that all moralities in the descriptive sense are equally good in the normative sense. Moral relativism does exactly what it prohibits; it is practically contradictory. This is most clear in the case of the political defense of moral relativism. Since the business of government is the business of making social policy, and policies encourage some ways of life while punishing others, one cannot be neutral in the realm of politics. The classical liberal’s attempt to do so ends with the tyranny of license over liberty. More on that some other time.

The reason why moral skepticism must be false is more interesting. To hold that ethics is impossible–that we cannot reason about morality in a normative sense–is in fact to make some very specific and controversial claims, e.g., that we cannot compare and evaluate ends, or means, etc. But why can’t we?

The skeptic must hold that we cannot think ethically because ends or means are themselves inscrutable. But if that were true, we could never act, since rational action requires some understanding of ends, means, and ways of choosing between them, on the basis of which we make our decisions. Even the emotivist (e.g., the modern economist), who denies that we require an understanding of ends in order to act, that the criteria of goodness is simply passion itself, and that means are easy to calculate according to preference satisfaction, cannot escape this criticism. For his theory itself is an ethical theory–hedonism, that pleasure is the greatest good–which is itself subject to rational scrutiny.

Now I don’t think this is a knock-down argument against moral skepticism. It blurs the line between a psychological claim–humans require understanding for action, or they don’t–and an epistemological claim–we cannot know moral truths, or we can. But it does have promise. It has the potential to refute moral skepticism if one can establish moral realism, the that there are moral truths, facts, or realties that the mind is built to know, the latter part of which one could argue on either evolutionary or religious grounds. More on that later perhaps; I’m out of blogging time for today!

Categories: Ethics

Tagged: Descriptive Morality, Dr. Evil, Ethics, Moral Relativism, Normative Morality, Practical Reasoning, William Mattison

Aquinas on the Unity of our Final End, Part 2: Against Serial Teleologists

Posted on January 14, 2013

Two Weak Objections to Aquinas’ Argument

This is the second part of a longer post on Aquinas’ argument for the unity of man’s final end in Summa Theologica 2.2.1.5. The first part can be found here.

The first reaction many people have to Aquinas’s argument is to deny his assertion that one cannot simultaneously have more than one final end. Our analogy for this principle above was that one cannot simultaneously be on the way to both Boston and Los Angeles. However, one might object, one can simultaneously be on the way to both Boston and Los Angeles. If one imagines the route as a route to Boston and then to Los Angeles–a linear route rather than a disjunctive route, as it were–then we can imagine being en route to both cities at the same time, although we will reach Boston before we will reach Los Angeles.

Unfortunately, this objection conflates proximate with ultimate ends. As we explained in our analysis of the order of execution above, there are intermediate steps within the order of intention which function as intermediate or proximate ends. To treat Boston as a stop on the way to Los Angeles is to understand it precisely as a proximate end. Yet although Boston and Los Angeles are both one’s destinations, this does not mean that Los Angeles and Boston are one’s destinations in the same way. Los Angeles is the ultimate or final destination, the place where one’s journey will stop or be finished, whereas Boston is merely a waystation to that place. Aquinas’ point is that one cannot simultaneously have more than one ultimate end, and not that one cannot have multiple proximate ends.

However, one might readily object that we can have more than one ultimate end in a single action. Imagine being thirsty, and having several beverages to choose from: water, diet coke, and coffee. Insofar as any one of these beverages will quench one’s thirst, perhaps we can describe our desire as a disjunctive desire: for a diet coke, or a water, ora coffee, any one of which will bring our desire to rest–which is one way Aquinas characterizes an ultimate end: “It is therefore necessary for the last end so to fill man’s appetite, that nothing is left besides it for man to desire” (2-2.1.5).

This won’t do either. For, Aquinas would argue, insofar as we can imagine diet coke, water, and coffee as equally satisfying one desire, there must be some single description applicable to all three beverages in virtue of which they satisfy one desire rather than three different desires. In this case, it is the fact that we’re thirsty and these are beverages (liquids that satisfy thirst) that each beverage can bring that desire to rest. If the ultimate end were more specific, say, for a sweet beverage, then it could not be disjunctively satisfied by diet coke, water and coffee, since only the former could meet that description. Consequently, we can say, such a desire does have only one ultimate end–quenching thirst–rather than three disjunctive ends and, as a corollary, any set of objects that can disjunctively satisfy some desire must be unified by some shared characteristic in virtue of which they satisfy that desire. Desires can be disjunctively satisfied, but cannot be themselves disjunctive. (This is a version of the One-Over-Many Argument, and we’ll investigate it’s Third-Man implications below.)

The Serial Teleology Objection

However, this defense may not be sufficient to defend (2). For even granted the above distinction between proximate and ultimate ends and the rejection of disjunctive desires, can’t one be a serial teleologist in the way some people are serial monogamists? In other words, even if Aquinas is right to reject the possibility of one action’s simultaneously having multiple ultimate ends, isn’t it possible for one life to have multiple serial ultimate ends–that is, for a person to aim at various ultimate ends throughout his life, not as an intelligible series of proximate ends, but as new beginnings, as it were?

Let me give two examples to motivate the objection. I entered college as a art major. My goal was to moonlight as a painter while paying the bills as a graphic designer. Then I read Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and soon changed my major to philosophy and literature. Whereas I formerly ordered all of my actions to the goal of becoming a professional artist, I now adopted the new end of becoming a professional philosopher. Since becoming an artist was in no way a means to the goal of becoming an artist, and both being an artist and being a philosopher functioned, at different times, as ultimate ends for me, what we have here is a case of serial teleology. At one time I had one end, and at a later time I had another in no way related to the first.

Just as college freshmen are famous for changing their majors–for serial teleology, as it were–aren’t human beings likewise famous for changing their ends, for better and for worse? We even have words for the phenomenon: corruption or fall when we turn from the good to the bad, and conversion when we turn from the bad to the good. From an everyday perspective, at least, conversion seems to involve someone’s turning away from one ultimate end and adopting a new one, as it were, changing their minds about what is most important in their life. Isn’t that what happened to St. Paul when he was knocked off of this horse (and countless other saints)? Or what do you make of Dante’s account of the fate of Buonconte da Montefeltro, a sinner who, mortally wounded at the battle of Compaldino in 1289, died with the Virgin Mary’s name on his lips and so ends up in Purgatory rather than Hell (like his father) (cf. Purgatorio, 5.85-129; Inferno, 27.112-23). On this Danteist interpretation of the self, the meaning of one’s life–its practical unity–is determined by the ultimate end one is presently aiming at, and not the one you’ve been aiming at, say, for most of your life. Your character in that case is irrelevant; only your next choice counts as determining your ultimate end.

This is a serious objection to Aquinas’ argument, I think, because if it is sound, it falsifies his narrative conception of the self, tied as it is to the thesis that one’s character determines one’s destiny. It challenges Aquinas’ thesis because his defense of it depends on a strong analogy between the practical unity of an action and the practical unity of a life, namely, that both derive their unity from the possession of a single, ultimate end. Admitting the possibility of serial teleology in lives but not in actions would weaken that analogy to the point of uselessness.

A Response to the Serial Teleologist

The solution to the objection from the serial teleologist is similar to the solution to the objection from disjunctive desires, and reminiscent of Plato’s Third Man problem in the Protagoras.

The first step is to assert that there must be some reason for changing from one end to another, and that if there’s a reason for the change, there must be come way to compare the ends. If there were not, the change would be unmovivated and irrational: unless x appears better than y in respect to z, there is no reason to prefer x to y. Analogously, as Plato used to argue, we cannot say that a tabletop is longer or shorter than a book unless we have a standard unit of length that allows us to compare the two (say, the inch). Insofar as we are dealing with practical reasoning, however, we can only compare two ends as ends–that is, as intentional goals of a practical agent–in terms of a greater end they are a means to. I think that proposition is analytic, though I’d love to consider this further. In any case, if two ends are comparable, it follows that they must both be proximate ends, since their very comparison requires us to posit a further, more ultimate end by which we judge their worth.

However, this isn’t sufficient to show the unity of this more ultimate end. Consider the cases in which (a) one chooses water over coffee in respect to hydration at time 1, and but coffee over water at time 2 in respect to its power to stimulate, or (b) chooses philosophy over art in virtue of its interestingness as a freshman, but architecture over philosophy as a junior in virtue of its greater money-making power. Cases such as these seem to show that even if our initial principle is true–that all comparable ends are proximate ends–it doesn’t necessarily follow that all proximate ends are comparable by virtue of one standard of comparison, does it?

Aquinas thinks that it does, at least insofar as we’re talking about the proximate ends of one unified agent. Why does Joe choose hydration or stimulation, intrinsic or extrinsic worth as his criteria of desirability at any time at all, Aquinas would ask? We’re faced with the following dilemma. If Joe’s proximate ends are not comparable by virtue of one ultimate standard of comparison, then Joe cannot be a unified agent–at least, not one whose life exhibits practical intelligibility. Why is that a problem? Precisely because of Joe’s nature and his perception of himself as a rational, unified, personal agent. That is, I consider those two pieces of evidence, ontological and phenomenological, as evidence against the first horn of the dilemma: to be person just is to exhibit practical unity over time (as I argued earlier in a post on Aquinas’s narrative conception of personhood). On the other hand, if Joe has a reason for preferring one end over another, even if he choses different ends at different times, it cannot be the case that the practical buck-passing goes on forever. For the whole problem began with the supposition that Joe has indeed acted, and the two conditions for that possibility are not only some first means in the order of execution, but also some last end in the order of intention–else Joe would lack the necessary motivation for the action. Positing an infinite (or schizophrenic) regress of intentions fails to explain an action because it lacks sufficient causal grounds for the datum, Joe’s action.

So the real question we need to ask is this: what is this one unit of measurement motivates the serial teleologist in each of these changes? Aquinas’s answer is fiendishly simple: goodness. For the object of the will is the good as such; if something is to appear choiceworthy, it must appear good. (From a practical point of view, ‘good’ just means ‘choiceworthy.’) Thus, he would say, the various ends of the serial teleologist are only desired because they are thought to be good. We can even make the answer a bit more concrete. The good-as-such for a human being is called happiness: whatever we desire, we find it choiceworthy insofar as we believe it will make us happy. Why do we want to be happy? The only answer we can give (philosophically) is a formal one: because, having rejected an infinite series of intentions, there must be some end that is desired for its own sake, and for the sake of which everything else is desired, else action would never begin. That ultimate end–whatever it is–is called happiness.

This answer gives us a very interesting response to the serial teleologist. Happiness is the name of the ultimate end of any unified life ordered by practical reason. Happiness is thus the final end of every person qua person. That’s true even if individuals disagree about what makes them happy, the nature or content of happiness. Solving that problem will wait for a future post.

Categories: Aquinas, Happiness

Tagged: Aquinas, Final End, Narrative Self, Treatise on Happiness, Unity

Aquinas on the Unity of Our Final End, Part 1

Posted on January 8, 2013

Consider this the first part of a long post on Aquinas’ arguments for the unity of man’s ultimate end. The second part will evaluate Aquinas’s arguments and defend them from several objections.

As we pointed out in an earlier post, Aquinas makes three claims about the final end of the human person in question 1 of the Treatise on Happiness:

Every person has a final end that gives intentional or practical unity to their lives (q. 1, a. 3-4).
Every person has exactly one final end (q. 1, a. 5).
Every individual person has the same final end as every other individual person (q. 1, a. 7)

I’ll admit that Aquinas’s argument for (2) has given me some trouble in the past, so we’ll analyze it here today.

Aquinas’s Argument for the Unity of the Ultimate End

In q.1 a. 4, Aquinas argues that whenever we consider some bit of practical reasoning–say, changing a flat car tire in order to get the car moving again, in order to reach the dance recital on time–there are two “orders,” or rational principles, governing the chain of reasoning. On the one hand, if someone asks why we are changing the car tire, he’s asking about the order of intention: what goal are we aiming at by changing the car tire? (Many answers are possible: building a realistic car sculpture; practicing for pit crew for the Indy 500, etc.). On the other hand, if someone knows both that we’re headed to the dance recital and that we have a flat tire, he might ask: how are you going to get to the recital on time? Here he’s asking about the order of execution, that is, the means by which we’re going to achieve our goals.

Both the order of intention and the order of execution can consist of an indefinite number of actions. Just changing a car tire involves a plurality of steps: you have to locate the lugnuts, lugwrench and carjack, jack the car, remove the nuts and the tire, etc.; and once that task is complete, there are the countless little actions one must take while driving (e.g., operating the pedals, judging the fastest route) in order to make it to the dance recital on time. The same is true for the order of intention, which involves many of the same actions, understood now as ends: we locate the lugnuts for the sake of removing the tire, which we remove for the sake of replacing the tire, which we replace for the sake of returning the car to the road, etc.

This much is straightforward. Now comes the key move. Aquinas argues that, in any actual and unified action, there must be something first in both the order of intention and in the order or execution (q. 1, a. 4). In other words, every actual and unified action must have a definite beginning (of execution) and end (of intention); an infinite series is impossible in either direction. Here’s how Aquinas puts it:

there is to be observed a twofold order in ends—the order of intention and the order of execution: and in either of these orders there must be something first. For that which is first in the order of intention, is the principle, as it were, moving the appetite; consequently, if you remove this principle, there will be nothing to move the appetite. On the other hand, the principle in execution is that wherein operation has its beginning; and if this principle be taken away, no one will begin to work. Now the principle in the intention is the last end; while the principle in execution is the first of the things which are ordained to the end. Consequently, on neither side is it possible to go to infinity since if there were no last end, nothing would be desired, nor would any action have its term, nor would the intention of the agent be at rest; while if there is no first thing among those that are ordained to the end, none would begin to work at anything, and counsel would have no term, but would continue indefinitely.

Consider, first, that we’re changing the car tire in order to get to the dance recital. Aquinas’ argument presupposes that we can identify a specific series of changes in the world as falling under this description, and that this description excludes other changes occurring in the world at the same time (the price of rice in China; Mr. T’s new favorite color). This is what we mean by saying that Aquinas’s analysis is limited to a unified series of actions: that the individual actions within the series are related to one another as means to ends, not by chance, but according to some rational principle that gives intelligibility or meaning to the series.

Now if there were nothing first in the order of execution, there would be literally no beginning to “changing the car tire.” Should that happen, Aquinas dryly observes, “no one will begin to work.” We have all observed the truth of this statement. Telling a group of young cub scouts to change a tire is nearly as useless as asking a group of college freshman to engage in philosophical thinking: both will stare blankly at you because they don’t know how to begin. On the other hand, if there were nothing first in the order of intention, that is, no last thing that one is aiming at, “there will be nothing moving the appetite”: one will have no action at all to think about. For the end or goal or intention at which one aims is what gives meaning and value to the series of actions in the first place: that I need to get to the dance recital is what motivates me to change the car tire rather than taking out my iPad to play games, and is also what makes changing the tire but not playing the iPad a means to that goal. So long as we are speaking of one action (changing the care tire to get to the recital), then, that action must have a definite beginning and a definite end; lacking either, we would simply have no action at all. (By supposition, we do have an action–changing the car tire–so by reductio ad absurdam, the action must have a beginning and an end.)

It follows, Aquinas thinks, that insofar as the final end in the order of intention actually orders one’s actions in one way rather than another, one action cannot simultaneously have more than one final end. An action (even when that ‘action’ involves many steps in the order of execution) is one by virtue of having one final end. One action cannot simultaneously have more than one ultimate end, because that would be the impossible equivalent of driving with two simultaneous destinations: you cannot, at one and the same time, be on your way to both Boston and Los Angeles.

Now, as we have argued earlier, Aquinas thinks that what is true of action is true of the life of persons. That’s the point of talking about Aquinas’s narrative conception of the person, namely, that there is a practical unity in one’s life that orders and gives value to one’s life just as there is a practical unity in an action (like changing a car tire) that orders and gives value to that action. Just as there is a single, unified end to changing a car tire–making it to the dance recital, in this case–so too, Aquinas argues, is there a single, unified end to one’s life. This is, as I understand it, the third argument Aquinas gives for (2) in q. 1, a. 5c:

since voluntary actions receive their species from the end, as stated above, they must needs receive their genus from the last end, which is common to them all: just as natural things are placed in a genus according to a common form. Since, then, all things that can be desired by the will, belong, as such, to one genus, the last end must needs be one. And all the more because in every genus there is one first principle; and the last end has the nature of a first principle, as stated above.

Coming Soon: Aquinas on the Unity of Our Final End, Part 2: Against Serial Teleologists!

Categories: Aquinas, Happiness

Tagged: Thomas Aquinas, Treatise on Happiness, Ultimate End

More on Aquinas’s Narrative Conception of Personhood

Posted on December 31, 2012

This is the second of a series of posts on what we’re calling the ‘narrative’ conception of personhood in St. Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on Happiness (in the Summa Theologicae, Ia IIae qq. 1-5). (The first can be found here.) Recall that in the first question of the Treatise, Aquinas makes three claims about the final end (or meaning) of the human person, the first of which we’ll discuss in this post:

Every person has a final end that gives intentional or practical unity to their lives (q. 1, a. 3-4).
Every person has exactly one final end (q. 1, a. 5).
Every individual person has the same final end as every other individual person (q. 1, a. 7)

The argument for (1) is based on the idea that, as Georg Wieland puts it, “the person is a dispositional essence” (“Happiness” (Ia IIae, qq. 1-5)” in The Ethics of Aquinas (Georgetown UP, 2002), p. 59). Persons act deliberately and voluntarily. When we act this way–when we knowingly choose to do something–we are doing something for a reason, and that reason makes our action intelligible as one kind of action rather than another. As Aquinas puts it, “moral acts properly speaking receive their species from the end” (q. 1, a. 3). Now keep in mind that, as Aquinas moves from claim (1) to claim (3), he’s moving from a claim about individuals–from the claim that every individual aims at some ultimate end or other–to a claim that all human beings in fact have the same end, both general (happiness) and particular (deformity). Claim (3) will thus allow us to judge whether someone’s individual character, derived from the particular ultimate end they aim at, is in conformity with the ends of their nature as a human being–their personhood–but more on that later.

Let’s motivate claim (1) with an example. If Max shaves his head, he must have had a reason for doing so that explains and gives meaning to his baldness. Perhaps he shaved his head so that it will better reflect light and make him more noticeable at night as he rides his bicycle. In that case, Max’s head is (as he intended it to be) a safety device. But we don’t have to be Max to know that his shaving has meaning. When we see Max’s newly shorn head, we may well wonder how to interpret his head: has Max become a racist, or joined a gang? Is he about to undergo chemotherapy? So long as his shaved head is the result of his own deliberate action (rather than something that happened to him while he was asleep, say), Max’s head has a definite meaning derived from the goal Max had in mind when he shaved his skull, and that is of practical importance when we’re gauging how we’re supposed to react to Max’s makeover.

Our actions and our lives, Aquinas argues, are somewhat like Max’s head. Our lives have a practical unity, which we call our character, and the meaning of that unity is derived from the final end at which our lives aim, just the meaning of Max’s head is derived from Max’s intention when he shaved it. This is so because our final end orders or arranges all the actions we choose as a means to that goal. This is what makes for a single, unified series of actions–in the way that the scenes of a story are part of a unified narrative–rather than a disparate series of coincident events. Just as the plot of a story allows us to understand how its individual parts relate to one another as an intelligible whole, so likewise do we only understand the unified meaning of Max’s getting out the clippers, shaving his head, and smirking as he appraises himself in the mirror when we know why he was inclined to shave his head.

So too does our character allow us to understand how the events of our lives form a practical whole. Consider the fact that we have multiple possible actions available to us at any given time: reading philosopystone, saving the world from the minions of Dr. Evil. We cannot do them all simultaneously. We must prioritize among our ends, and choose which one seems best. But which one? Subjectively speaking, the action that appears most choiceworthy to us will depend on our character, on our acquired disposition to see and interpret the world in some ways rather than others. A crook will see opportunities in a jewelry store that a love-struck girl of marriageable age will not, and vice versa. The fact that we easily and regularly choose reading philosophystone over saving the world (say) is explained by our character. Gluttons regularly choose food over justice, cleaning out the buffet while those behind them in line go hungry; fools regularly choose amusement over seriousness, eventually rendering themselves incapable of engaging in serious thought, even when such thought is called for (e.g., at election time). Now human beings have a relatively fixed nature, as does our environment. We can reasonably assume that other human beings are going to desire food, love, honor, power, and knowledge, and given the multiplicity of goods available at any given moment, are going to make choices privileging some of these goods over others throughout their lives. (Very few people, for example, never struggle with their diet, or their sexuality, or their work ethic.) These choices display patterns, and as those patterns become second nature (what Aquinas calls a habitus, a virtue or vice), they give unity and intelligiblity to one’s life insofar as they explain it, identifying its causes.

Aquinas goes so far as to argue that our lives will have an intelligible order, a character, even if we are not ourselves aware of what this character is, or at what end we ultimately aim (q. 1, aa. 6-7). That’s a bit like arguing that every college student has a major even if not all college students are aware of what their major is. We’ll discuss this more in a later post when we discuss what I call the Objection from Mystery to Aquinas’s narrative conception of the person. For a quick illustration of the idea, however, recall that when Dante goes to Hell in the Inferno, he learns that although some souls are surprised by the circle they are place in (some are not), it’s still true every soul chose its circle–its character–in the course of its life. Like heaven, hell is the final interpretation of a person, when a soul receives in purity what it most desired, clearly or obscurely, in life. (C.S. Lewis makes much the same point in The Great Divorce.)

Two interesting philosophical asides.

Aside #1: That final causes make motion intelligible is just as true of intentional action as of unintentional action. It is possible to understand why someone is at the grocery store buying eggs only if one knows the end he has in view: baking a cake, say, or committing teenage vandalism. Likewise, it is possible to understand why some metals conduct electricity only by knowing that conductivity is a standard (rather than chance) effect of running electricity through those metals. Particular efficient causes are only intelligible as efficient causes because they are directed towards some ranges of effects and not others. (See one of Ed Feser’s excellent blog posts on the topic here.) Efficient causality presupposes final causality and is incoherent without it. Miss that point of Thomistic metaphysics, and you’ll end up as confused about billiard balls as Hume was in Enquiry 4-5.
Aside #2: Attentive readers may note similarities between Aquinas’s arguments here about needing an ultimus finis as a condition for the possibility of attributing intentional unity to a human life and Immanuel Kant’s defense of causality as a transcendental concept required for distinguishing between an objective and subjective order in experience in the Second Analogy in The Critique of Pure Reason, that is, for distinguishing a series of changes happening to one person from a series of changes happening to one object. Perhaps we can use that as grist for a future post.

Categories: Aquinas, Happiness

Tagged: Aquinas, C.S. Lewis, Dante, Happiness, Hume, Narrative Self