Ancient or Classical Philosophy
Bibliography: Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, “Plato” by Leo Strauss and “Aristotle” by Harry V. Jafla, History of Political Philosophy, 1963,1972; Gilbert Ryle, “Plato,” Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1967; Mortimer J. Adler, Aristotle for Everybody: Difficult Thought Made Easy, 1978; Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 1981; William Plato’s Sophist, 1984; Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, 1986; Therapy of Desire, 1994; Hans-George Gadamer, The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy, 1986; Bernard Williams, Theaetetus, 1992; Seth Benardete, S. Cobb, Plato’s Erotic Dialogues, 1993; Stanley Rosen, Plato’s Statesman: The Web of Politics, 1995.; Mary Louise Gill, Parmenides, 1996. Note: The debates between these scholars as to the amount of departure between modern and post-modern philosophy have with the ancients is not one I am competent to judge. I will say, however, that I find the approach Nussbaum, Williams, and Charles Taylor more accurate to what I see in the texts. Further, my suspicion is that people like MacIntyre and Leo Strauss use the ancients to beat up the moderns, somewhat similar to wielding a club, because of their distaste for what is modern. As will become clear in my presentation, modern thought has far more continuity with ancient spirit, as well as depth in itself, than what even the fans of modernism recognize.
What was the secret of the ancients? I suggest that it
was a tradition, the tradition of critical discussion. The story of the problem
of change is the story of a critical debate, of a rational discussion. The
unique phenomenon of critical debate and rational discussion has a close
connection with the astonishing freedom and creativeness of Greek philosophy.
How can we explain this phenomenon? What we have to explain is the rise of a
tradition. It is a tradition that allows or encourages critical discussions
between various schools and, more surprisingly still, within the same school.
It is a tradition that admits a plurality of doctrines that try to approach the
truth by means of critical discussion. It thus leads to the realization that
our attempts to see and to find the truth are not final, but open to improvement.
Our knowledge, our doctrine, is conjectural. It consists of guesses, of
hypotheses, rather than of final and certain truths; and that criticism and
critical discussion are our only means of getting nearer to the truth. The
tradition created the rational or scientific attitude, and with it our Western
civilization, the only civilization based upon science, though of course not
upon science alone. In this rationalist tradition, we do not forbid bold
changes of doctrine. Such rational discourse encourages innovation, regarding
it as success and improvement, as long as the change arises out of the context
of a critical discussion of its predecessors.
The chief means of moral education is the telling of
stories. Key features of the poems of Homer, for example, involve kinship and
household. In heroic society, people are what they do. Courage is important,
not simply as a quality of individuals, but as the quality necessary to sustain
a household and a community. They vow friendship and fidelity. One central
theme of heroic societies is also that death waits for both alike. Life is
fragile, people are vulnerable, and it is of the essence of the human situation
that they are such. There are powers in the world no one can control. The man
who does what he ought moves steadily towards his fate and his death. Defeat
and not victory lie at the end. To understand this is itself a virtue. In
heroic society, one can exhibit character of the relevant kind in a succession
of incidents and the succession itself must exemplify certain patterns. The
self in heroic society does not detach itself from any particular standpoint or
point of view, to step backwards, view, and judge that standpoint or point of
view from the outside. In heroic society, there is no outside except that of
the stranger. Moral structure claims, that it embodies a conceptual scheme that
has three central inter-related elements. It embodies a conception of what the
social role that each individual inhabits requires. It requires a conception of
excellences or virtues as those qualities that enable an individual to do what
his or her role requires. It requires a conception of the human condition as
fragile and vulnerable to destiny and to death.
The intervention of a god in Greek tragedy often signals
the disclosure of incoherence in moral standards and vocabulary. We have
received a set of virtues, such as friendship, courage, self-restraint, wisdom,
and justice. We are dealing with a response to incoherence, a response in each
case informed by a different purpose. The common Athenian assumption then is
that the virtues have their place within the social context of the city-state.
One is to note that humility, thrift and conscientiousness could appear in no
Greek list of the virtues. Plato’s account and redefinition of the virtues has
its derivation from a complex theory, a theory without which we will be unable
to grasp what a virtue is. I emphasized earlier that Plato’s theory links the
virtues to the political practice of an ideal rather than actual state. To
adopt a stance on the virtues will be to adopt a stance on the narrative
character of human life. If one understands a human life as a progress through
harms and dangers, moral and physical, the virtues will find their place as
those qualities the possession and exercise of which generally tend to success
in this enterprise and the vices likewise as qualities that likewise tend to
failure. Each human life will embody a story whose shape and form will depend
upon what is counted as a harm and danger and upon how success and failure,
progress and its opposite, are understood and evaluated.
In
Plato (430-347BC) developed a philosophy in which the
worth and dignity of humanity finds expression. That is why he attracts even
modern persons. He makes a heroic attempt to save the lives of human beings by
making them immune to luck. As Socrates noted, nothing can harm the good
person. Aristotle returned to many of the insights and values of tragedy, as he
articulates a conception of practical rationality that will make human beings
self-sufficient in an appropriately human way. The dialogue form of Plato makes
it difficult for readers to see clearly what choice Plato wants us to make,
thus making it difficult to speak confidently of what Plato actually taught. As
good as Platonic thought can be, we cannot remain there or go back to it.
Modern people have come to a point that makes higher demands upon us. Among the weaknesses of modernism is that it
does not want to accept its own greatness, and thus some people even today
regard it as enticing to view Plato and Aristotle as the highest points of
philosophical reflection. The claims of the struggle of humanity for with and
dignity help us to appreciate Plato, while at the same time move beyond him.
Modern thinkers do not go back to Plato; they need to experience the needs of
thoughtful persons of our own time. Plato upholds the value of philosophy in a
total way that we as modern people cannot adopt. He has none of the modest of
attitude toward the philosophic enterprise as it stands along with other
spheres of knowledge or even toward God. If a modern philosopher took the same
approach to philosophy, we would think of the philosopher as missing the mark.
In Plato, we can appreciate it because it is distant from us.
In
Plato’s time, there was no distinction between philosophical and literary
discussion of human practical problems. He identifies epic, lyric, tragic, and
comic poetry; the prose scientific or historical treatise, and oratory. One is
that there was no such thing as a tradition of the philosophical prose treatise
available to Plato as a model. It is also important to bear in mind that people
regarded the poets as the most important ethical teachers. At the same time,
one can misunderstand Plato if one takes the myths that Plato develops as the
core of his thought. Rather, Plato uses myth to entice the reader into the core
of his teaching. In Socrates’ view, philosophical books are to philosophizing
as tennis manuals are to tennis. They cannot do it; and they are no substitute
for the live activity, although they might be, in some circumstances, more or
less useful records of some points. They say the same thing to every reader
without any regard for the particular characteristics of each reader’s game or
for the way that game will vary in response to a particular opponent. As
Socrates saw it, philosophy is each person’s committed search for wisdom, where
what matters is not just the acceptance of certain conclusions, but also the
following out of a certain path to them; not just correct content, but content
achieved as the result of real understanding and self-understanding. Books are
not this search and do not impart this self-understanding. The Platonic
dialogues contain more than a single voice. They present dialogues that did not
actually take place. Plato uses the dialogue to explore philosophical questions
in vivid and intellectually flexible ways that the philosophical treatise does
not allow. The form of dialogue allows Plato not to speak in his own person.
Although we can discern times when Plato is writing directly to the reader,
that fact encourages us to re-consider the proposition that he always does so.
Plato developed, questioned, and changed his theories. Dialogues might fairly
claim that they awaken and enliven the soul, arousing it to rational activity
rather than lulling it into drugged passivity. They owe this to their kinship
with theater. Through its depiction of the dialectical process, the dialogue
can show us moral development and change taking place. Plato learned from
Socrates turning aside from didactic flatness. The character of Socrates is the
real protagonist and the model for our activity as readers and interpreters. A
tragic poem cannot be a good teacher of ethical wisdom. Why should a work whose
aim is to teach practical wisdom avoid engaging the emotions and feelings? The
first and most obvious point is that language that appeals to sense and emotion
can distract reason in its pursuit of truth. What we find in middle-period
dialogues, then, is theater; but theater purged and purified of theater’s
characteristic appeal to powerful emotion, a pure crystalline theater of the
intellect. Platonic inquiry uses particular cases as data towards a general
account. In Plato’s anti-tragic theater, we see the origin of a distinctive
philosophical style, a style that opposes itself to the merely literary and
expresses the philosopher’s commitment to intellect as a source of truth. By
writing philosophy as drama, Plato calls on every reader to engage actively in
the search for truth. Plato lays before us various attitudes that also belong
to philosophy, such as curiosity, puzzlement, and intellectual surprise. His
characters may be excited, bored, confused, or impressed. They take up all
sorts of analogies, metaphors, stories, and models, learning something from
them and then throwing them away. They embody processes of inquiry. Thus, they
do not merely present Plato’s systematic beliefs. The reader must keep in close
touch with the tone of the dialogue, sustaining a sense of what is a joke, what
is merely provisional, and what Plato tries out or tries on.
Reading
Plato engages us in the philosophical enterprise, in that in our philosophical
pursuits, we need to bring into dialogue in our minds the philosophers we read.
We need to ask tough questions of those whom we read. In the modern era, the
essay or book gives the impression that the reader is passive in learning what
the writer has to say. Instead, reading Plato reminds that philosophy is
dialogue, conversation, and dialectic. We encounter thoughts with which we find
profound disagreement and profound delight. We listen to those emotional
responses, exploring with the writer the direction these responses lead us.
At
the heart of Plato's philosophy is his theory of Forms, or Ideas. Ultimately,
we must understand his view of knowledge, his ethical theory, his psychology,
his concept of the state, and his perspective on art in terms of this theory.
The central problem with Plato is that things do not share essences, but they
do share heaps of overlapping features.
Plato's
theory of Forms and his theory of knowledge are so interrelated that we must
discuss them together. Influenced by Socrates, Plato was convinced that
knowledge is attainable. He was also convinced of two essential characteristics
of knowledge. First, knowledge must be certain and infallible. Second,
knowledge must have as its object that which is genuinely real as contrasted
with that which is an appearance only. Because that which is fully real must
be, for Plato, fixed, permanent, and unchanging, he identified the real with
the ideal realm of being as opposed to the physical world of becoming. One
consequence of this view was Plato's rejection of empiricism, the claim that we
derive knowledge from sense experience. He thought that propositions derived
from sense experience have, at most, a degree of probability. They are not
certain. Furthermore, the objects of sense experience are changeable phenomena
of the physical world. Hence, objects of sense experience are not proper
objects of knowledge.
The Republic
contains Plato's own theory of knowledge, particularly in his discussion of the
image of the divided line and the myth of the cave. In the former, Plato
distinguishes between two levels of awareness: opinion and knowledge. Claims or
assertions about the physical or visible world, including both commonsense
observations and the propositions of science, are opinions only. Some of these
opinions are well founded; some are not; but none of them counts as genuine
knowledge. The higher level of awareness is knowledge, because there reason,
rather than sense experience, is involved. Reason, properly used, results in
intellectual insights that are certain, and the objects of these rational
insights are the abiding universals, the eternal Forms or substances that
constitute the real world.
Mathematical
entities are a good way to understand the theory of Forms. A circle, for
instance, is a plane figure composed of a series of points, all of which are
equidistant from a given point. No one has ever actually seen such a figure,
however. What people have actually seen
are drawn figures that are more or less close approximations of the ideal
circle. In fact, when mathematicians define a circle, the points referred to
are not spatial points at all; they are logical points. They do not occupy
space. Nevertheless, although we could never see the Form of a circle,
mathematicians and others do in fact know what a circle is. That they can
define a circle is evidence that they know what it is. For Plato, therefore,
the Form "circularity" exists, but not in the physical world of space
and time. It exists as a changeless object in the world of Forms or Ideas,
which we know only by reason. Forms have greater reality than objects in the
physical world because of their perfection and stability and because they are
models, resemblance to which gives ordinary physical objects whatever reality
they have. Circularity, squareness, and triangularity are excellent examples,
then, of what Plato meant by Forms. An object existing in the physical world
may be called a circle or a square or a triangle only to the extent that it
resembles ("participates in" is Plato's phrase) the Form
"circularity" or "squareness" or "triangularity."
Plato
extended his theory beyond the realm of mathematics. Indeed, he was most
interested in its application in the field of social ethics. The theory was his
way of explaining how the same universal term can refer to so many particular
things or events. We can apply the word justice, for example, to hundreds of
particular acts because these acts have something in common, namely, their
resemblance to, or participation in, the Form "justice." An
individual is human to the extent that he or she resembles or participates in
the Form "humanness." If we define "humanness" in terms of
being a rational animal, then an individual is human to the extent that he or
she is rational. A particular act is courageous or cowardly to the extent that
it participates in its Form. An object is beautiful to the extent that it
participates in the Idea, or Form, of beauty. Everything in the world of space
and time is what it is by virtue of its resemblance to, or participation in,
its universal Form. The ability to define the universal term is evidence that
one has grasped the Form to which that universal refers.
Plato
conceived the Forms as arranged hierarchically; the supreme Form is the Form of
the Good, which, like the sun in the myth of the cave, illuminates all the
other Ideas. There is a sense in which the Form of the Good represents Plato's
movement in the direction of an ultimate principle of explanation. Ultimately,
Plato intended the theory of Forms to explain how one comes to know and how
things have come to be as they are. In philosophical language, Plato's theory of
Forms is both an epistemological (theory of knowledge) and an ontological
(theory of being) thesis.
Plato
associates the traditional Greek virtues with the class structure of the ideal
state. Temperance is the unique virtue of the artisan class; courage is the
virtue peculiar to the military class; and wisdom characterizes the rulers.
Justice, the fourth virtue, characterizes society as a whole. The just state is
one in which each class performs its own function well without infringing on
the activities of the other classes.
Plato divides the human soul
into three parts: the rational part, the will, and the appetites. The just
person is the one in whom the rational element, supported by the will, controls
the appetites. An obvious analogy exists here with the threefold class
structure of the state, in which the enlightened philosopher-kings, supported
by the soldiers, govern the rest of society.
Plato's
ethical theory rests on the assumption that virtue is knowledge and one can
learn it, which one has to understand in terms of his theory of Forms. The
ultimate Form for Plato is the Form of the Good, and knowledge of this Form is
the source of guidance in moral decision-making. Plato also argued that to know
the good is to do the good. The corollary of this is that anyone who behaves
immorally does so out of ignorance. This conclusion follows from Plato's
conviction that the moral person is the truly happy person, and because
individuals always desire their own happiness, they always desire to do what is
moral.
The
concept of mimesis (imitation) is important to Plato, Aristotle, and later
development of literary theory. In Book of X of The Republic, Plato he uses the term to signify imitation or
representation in the sense of copying the objects and circumstances of the
world by means of literature and the visual arts. In literature, this implies
the attempt to reproduce life as it is. It becomes an imperfect copy of an
ideal object or actual state. Although art is mere illusion, it is a dangerous
one, because we can mistake its products for reality. The appeal of poetry is
to the lower, less rational, part of our nature. It strengthens the lower
elements in the mind of at the expense of reason. Comedy makes us laugh,
tragedy makes us weep, and poetry in general makes us give in to grief, pity,
laughter, lust, anger, and so forth. However, we should control our emotions
rather than indulge them. Plato takes up
the charge that poetry is a bad moral influence. Dramatic poetry in particular
has a bad moral effect on those who hear it, for they soon learn to admire it,
and therefore to model themselves on the weaknesses and faults that it
represents. Plato too readily discounts the strengthening and invigorating
influence that it might exert by its representation of what is good. In the Protagroas, Plato suggests that the
indiscriminate admiration for the poets is mere superstition, and that their
judgments on conduct and morality are unreliable. This unreliability comes from
the fact that poets compose their works due to some natural endowment and under
the power of non-rational inspiration.
Plato
proposes a stern and beautiful proposal for a self-sufficient human life. He is
courageous in self-criticism of his own beliefs. His students had no doubt that
he was defending views in works such as Republic
and Phaedo. Yet, in the Phaedrus and Symposium, the victory of Socrates is an ambiguous and contested
victory. Plato’s elaboration of radical ethical proposals has its source in an
acute sense of the problems caused by ungoverned luck in human life. Plato
deeply connects the need of human beings for philosophy with their exposure to
luck; the elimination of this exposure is a primary task of the philosophical
art as he conceives it. Plato can solve these problems by a new kind of expert,
one whose knowledge will take practical deliberation beyond the confusion of
ordinary practice, fulfilling an aspiration to scientific precision and control
already contained within ordinary belief.
The
merchant, physician, and other community leaders insist that they share the
task of nurturing human beings. People possess logos, which opens up human
nature to the physical and social world. Human needs together with reason
produce techne, which in turn multiplies the needs and the power of reason.
The
fundamental metaphysical and epistemological insight of Plato is that many
important notions are of things having features in a way independent of one’s
own perspective and of the circumstances surrounding the objects about which we
make the judgment as they appear to introspection. Aristotle first observed,
however, that Plato was wrong to think that one can construe the properties we
ascribe to perceptible physical objects as independent of viewpoint, time, and
circumstance. Many judgments of our introspection relate to time, relate to
observers, and relate to circumstance. Further, the notions we employ and the
properties they express depend for their identity on other notions and
properties. His theory of forms tends toward a strict atomism. Later, he
accepts some sort of essential interrelation among forms that has
epistemological significance in that knowledge of one form depends on others,
especially the Good.
My
approach in the following material is to discuss in chronological arrangement
what I consider the primary dialogues of Plato, remembering that scholars of
Plato simply do not know the order in anything other than a general way.
The
dialogues that contain the most accurate presentation of the historical
Socrates would include Hippias Minor,
Charmides, Laches, Protagoras, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Ion, Lysis,
Euthydemus, Menexenus, Hippias Major, Republic Book One. The dialogues tend
to be short. They tend to end with questions unanswered and without positive
results, consistent with the claim of Socrates that he has no knowledge. The
Socratic dialogues are amusing, bantering, extroverted, optimistic and
mischievous in tone. The Socratic dialogues are almost exclusively ethical in
content, concerned with individual ethics and individual education, care of the
soul both for oneself of and for the young. Socrates shows little interest in
immortality of the soul. The Apology seems
almost agnostic about it. Virtue is an expertise like any other expertise.
Socrates evidently thinks of this expertise as intellectual, and as involving
the ability to give an account, to explain to others, and to teach them, it is
not just a matter of knowing how. It does not involve any training of the
emotions independent of the understanding to be reached by discussion. Socrates
is unlikely to have granted that there could be any education that is not
routed via the intellect. We may reasonably identify this teaching with
bringing people to understand how it can be that case that p. These dialogues treat arithmetic and geometry as just ordinary
expertises like any other, such as cobblery and boxing. Socrates apparently
believed in the unity of virtue. A person will be brave if and only if
temperate, wise, just, and pious, temperate if and ony if brave, wise, just,
and pious, and so forth. We also find an intellectualist theory of desire. All
desires are desires for whatever is best for me in the circumstances in which I
am. Virtuous people differ from the vicious not in their motivations but in
their intellect. In particular circumstances, the good person correctly chooses
virtuous activity as a means to his or her real good, and the bad person
mistakenly chooses pleasurable activity as a means to his or her real good. All
desires to do something are rational desires, in that they always automatically
adjust to the beliefs of the agent about what is the best means to their
ultimate end. Rational desires adjust to the beliefs of the agent. Te only way
to influence my conduct is to change my opinion as to what is best. The basis
of this adjustability of desire to belief is that desire is toward whatever is
best. If anyone errs, it is due to ignorance. Knowledge and understanding
enable one to avoid the kind of wavering to which a person without knowledge is
subject.
In
Plato’s Protagoras, Socrates argues
that human social life will make decisive progress only when we have developed
a new techne, one that assimilates practical deliberation to counting,
weighing, and measuring. The motivation of Socrates’ proposal is the inability
of the Protagorean “art” to solve pressing problems with which both thinkers
are concerned. The dialogue as a whole is a complex reflection about the
relationship of sciences to problems, techne to tuche (luck). The dialogue is
about the way in which science saves us and transforms us, helps us attain out
ends and reshapes the ends themselves. Techne means craft, art and science;
closely associated with wisdom and knowledge; a deliberate application of human
intelligence to some part of the world, yielding some control over tuche.
Techne concerns itself with the management of need and with prediction and
control concerning future contingencies. The person who lives by techne does
not come to each new experience without foresight of resource. He possesses
some sort of systematic grasp, some way of ordering the subject matter, that
will take him to the new situation well prepared, removed from blind dependence
on what happens. Aristotle said techne has features to universality,
teachability, precision, and concern with explanation.) Hippocrates views his
relationship to Protagoras as analogous to that of patient to doctor. He and
Socrates now agree that therapy of the soul is analogous to the doctor’s
therapy of the body. Just as one goes to a doctor for physical healing, so the
proper end of philosophy is the healing of the soul. Socrates warns Hippocrates
of the need for the circumspection before he turns over his soul to an alleged
expert for cure. Since the treatment will change the soul for better or worse,
it is important to ask questions about the doctor’s knowledge and the healing
it promises. We notice the vulnerability of these people to luck through their
attachment to vulnerable objects and activities. The love affair with
Alcibiades may go well or badly; this is not in Socrates’ control. Insofar as
he attaches importance to a pursuit and an object that are not in his grasp or
even readily manipulable, he puts his own life at the mercy of luck. He does
not know or control his future. Further, the values pursued by these people are
plural. They see no way of rendering them commensurable or of avoiding serious
conflicts among them. Finally, we see the power of passion and need to derail
practical planning. Socrates’ pursuit of Alcibades has often eclipsed all his
other pursuits; the friend is more interested in love affairs than in anything
else; the erotic and disorderly personality of Alcibades dominates the scene.
Those are the diseases. The correct techne of practical choice would seem to be
the one that could cure them. The contrast is between living at the mercy of
tuche and living a life made safer or more controlled by techne. Techne seeks
mastery of contingency. Universality and explanation yield control over the
future in virtue of their orderly grasp of the past. Teaching enables past work
to yield future progress; precision yields consistent accuracy, the
minimization of failure. A person who says that practical reasoning should
become a techne is likely, then, to be demanding a systematization and
unification of practice that will yield accounts and some sort of orderly
grasp. He will want principles that one can teach and explanations of how one
produces desired results. He will want to eliminate some of the chanciness from
human social life. Socrates claims to have enabled us to see our deep and
pressing need for an ethical science of measurement. I want to suggest that one
can understand both the adoption of the hedonistic promises and the vagueness
surrounding this strategy in the light of Socrates’ goal of finding the right
sort of practical techne, one that will do what the arts of Protagoras could
not. We will be saved only by something that will assimilate deliberation to
weighing and measuring; this requires a unit of measure, some external end
about which we can all agree, and which can render all alternatives
commensurable. Pleasure enters the argument as an attractive candidate for this
role. Socrates adopts it because of the science it promises, rather than for
its own intrinsic plausibility. He concludes that hedonism is deeply defective.
It is only with the aid of the hedonistic assumption that Socrates is able to
reach conclusions that he clearly claims as his own. Ethical science is
continuous with ordinary belief in that it fulfills an ideal of rationality
embodied in ordinary belief; thus, there is a natural transition from ordinary
belief to scientific practice. An ethical science of measurement will save our
lives. If we accept his diagnosis of our problems and their urgency, and agree
that we want to save our lives, it may occur to us that Plato gives us, in
Socrates’ argument, an advertisement for its premises. What Socrates gets us to
see is the connection between the enabling role played by our belief in an incommensurable
plurality of values in getting the problem going and the way we ordinarily see
things. Socrates offers us a radical proposal for the transformation of our
lives. This science of measurement will enter into and reshape the nature and
attachments of the being who receives it. It is now not surprising that he
tells us little about the intuitive acceptability of his proposed end. It may
not be something that one can properly assess from our ordinary viewpoint. From
our ordinary viewpoint, things do look plural and incommensurable. However,
this viewpoint is sick. We want, and know we need, the viewpoint of science.
Now we understand why love and fear drop out when the premises come in. If we
really accept these premises, love and fear, as we know them, do drop out. Here
is another benefit of the science: it restructures our attachments so that they
are far less fragile, even taken singly. By the end of the dialogue, everyone
rejects Protagoras’s “The human being is the measure of all things”, in favor of
the Socratic, “All things are knowledge.” Protagoras agreed to let Socratic
rationality judge the issue and Socratic rationality insists that the
intuitions of the ordinary person are unreliable. Ordinary intuitions and
attachments cannot carry the day. The dialogue asks us to become suspicious of
our own Protagorean evaluation and to look, in ourselves or in another, for a
way of seeing, intellectually pure and precise.
In
the Meno, Plato puts forward a
debater’s teaser about investigations of any sort. If someone does not know
something, how can the inquiry succeed? The person will not recognize whether
he or she has been looking for. Alternatively, if the person had known what he or
she was looking for, why would he or she look for it? The conclusion of this
sophistical argument, if accepted, would show that it is never any use trying
to find out anything. Neither thinking nor any other kind of investigation
could possibly achieve its aim. Socrates rejects this conclusion and argues for
a positive doctrine about inquiry, thought and knowledge, the doctrine or
reminiscence or recollection. The argument of Socrates proves only that what we
gain knowledge about is already in some sense in us. The composition of the
poet, the invention of a new joke, and so on, already has such compositions
within us. They possessed the intelligence and the equipment to compose new
poems, make new jokes, or invent new inventions. What the poet possessed was
the talent or ability, plus the vocabulary and the prosody, to compose new
poems. That the solution was in the person in any other way Socrates does not
prove by his argument, which amounts to having one’s memory refreshed, without
any answer to the resultant question. How did it ever get into us, even in some
previous life? Yet, it cost Plato and Aristotle much intellectual effort to
separate out the notion of ability, capacity, and skill from the notions of
performance, application and exercise. Toward the end of the Meno, Socrates reminds Meno that in many daily affairs correct
opinion serves us just as well as knowledge. This opposition of knowledge to
opinion is of great importance. Plato gives much of Theaetetus to the
discussion.
The Symposium is about passionate erotic
love. Socratic knowledge of the good, attained through pure intellect operating
apart from the senses, yields universal truths, and, in practical choice,
universal rules. The lover’s understanding, attained through the supple interaction
of sense, emotion, and intellect yields particular truths and particular
judgments. Socratic knowledge itself is not simply propositional knowledge.
Eros is intolerable. People need to get above it and away from it. Eros is not
possessive or acquiring; it is creative and productive. The proper metaphor for
Eros is that of giving birth in a beautiful manner. The life of giving birth in
beauty or the path of Eros is that of a person who is pregnant in soul and
gives birth to what is fitting for the soul, namely, good sense and virtue.
Good sense suggests managing households and cities. The lover immediately
engages in many conversations and seeks education and to educate. The ideal
lover engages with the world, practicing the virtues of ordinary life, ordering
cities and households and engaging in useful conversations. The object of the
love is not out of this world.
Are
we to assume that Plato in the last period of his writing rejected the erotic
rhetoric of his teacher, and with it the doctrine of the Ideas as the objects
of philosophical Eros, in favor of new and more powerful technical elaborations
of discoveries introduced but not perfected by Socrates? Further, the stranger
reduces the clarity and distinctness of mathematics to an absurdity and opens himself
to the obscurities of mythical discourse. The stranger anticipates Nietzsche’s
famous characterization of the human being as the not yet fully constructed
animal, without forgetting that to be partially constructed is already to
possess a nature. Underneath the pious rhetoric of the stranger is a clear
perception of the tragedy of human n existence, which does not cease to be
tragic simply because it becomes a comedy. Erotic playfulness becomes an
irrelevant diversion to the serious business of technical expertise. The
stranger appears to come increasingly close to Socratic doctrine until, at the
close of the work, one can scarcely distinguish between the contents of their
speeches. Could the Statesman be an
elaborate Platonic joke? The joke is on those who lack the wit to appreciate
Plato’s elegance or the playful seriousness that is required to penetrate the
initially tedious details of the Statesman in order to enter the presence of
its enigmatic author. The stranger is a Platonic anticipation of certain
aspects of the Cartesian attempt to master nature by techne, suggesting that
traditional accounts of the difference between ancient and modern thought are
oversimplifications. Plato at least experimented with the conception of
politics as the technical application of techne to the task of defending human
beings the hazards of nature. In so doing, he discovered the problem of
constructivism.
The Phaedrus could be a reflection on how
one should undertake the journey of life and the role of relationships and
conversations with others in that journey. The questions with which Socrates
opens the dialogue can lead us to ask where we are and where we are heading and
where we should go and how we should get on. The dialogue concludes with an
emphasis on the importance of friendship and an exhortation to take the next
step. Socrates suggests that one can use myths as metaphors to illuminate
issues about life in this world. Truth in the myth does not require some sort
of literal description of the content of this or any other world. Socrates can
acknowledge that these stories are human creations and their significance lies
in what they can show us about our world and our lives without seeing this as
undermining their truth. The fact that Plato makes this way of understanding
mythical logos explicit in the Phaedrus
is one of its most interesting features. It opens the question of Plato’s
understanding of the mythopoetic function of logos in a context where elaborate
poetic metaphors play a central role in the text.
The Phaedrus displays a new view of the role
of feeling, emotion, and particular love in the good life. Plato explores this
change of view inside the dialogue itself. Plato embodies important features of
his own earlier view in the first two speeches, and then recants and criticizes
those speeches. The recantation is a serious recantation of something that
Plato has seriously endorsed. The prevailing opinion that finds the two early
speeches degraded and disgusting has failed to appreciate their force. This
work is an apology for Eros and poetic writing. Plato has a deep understanding
of erotic motivation and its power. The Phaedrus
is a work in which he works out a more complex view of these motivations and
accepts some of them as good. He admits that he has been blind to something
and, conceived oppositions too starkly. He seeks, through recantation and
self-critical argument, to get back his sight. Phaedrus is a dialogue about madness or possession. The mad person
is one who is in the sway of inner forces that eclipse or transform the
calculations and valuations of pure intellect. The pre-Phaedrus dialogues attack madness as a simple evil. The denial of
all cognitive value to the non-intellectual elements is not surprising. We must
look to the demonstration that follows to find out what the value of madness is
and what elements of the previous view the dialogue recants. Three points emerge. First, the
non-intellectual elements are necessary sources of motivational energy. Second,
the non-intellectual elements have an important guiding role to play in our
aspiration towards understanding. The fact that the continuing good health of
intellect requires the nourishment of the non-intellectual parts would not show
that these could or should ever steer or guide intellect. However, Plato’s
contrast between madness and sophrosune (sound mind) is a contrast between
passion-ruled and intellect-ruled states. He is clearly claiming that certain
sorts of essential and high insights come to us only through the guidance of
the passions. Socrates’ story of the growth of the soul’s wings shows us what
lies behind this claim. The non-intellectual elements have a keen natural
responsiveness to beauty, especially when Plato presents beauty through the
sense of sight. The role of emotion and appetite as guides is motivational.
They move the whole person towards the good. Yet, emotion is also cognitive,
since they give the whole person information as to where goodness and beauty
are, searching out and selecting the beautiful objects. They have in
themselves, well trained, a sense of value. We advance towards understanding by
pursuing and attending to our complex appetitive and emotional responses to the
beautiful. It would not be accessible to intellect alone. The picture of moral
cognitive development in the middle dialogues is one of a progressive
detachment of intellect from the other parts of the personality. The developing
soul of the Phaedrus is in a very
different state. Complex and impure, throbbing with ferment in every part,
fevered and in constant motion, it depends for its growth on just three impure
aspects of its condition. In order to move towards beauty, this soul must be
open and receptive. This account achieves viewing human sexuality as something
much more complicated and deep, more aspiring, than the middle dialogues had
suggested. Further, it views the intellect as something more sexual than they
had allowed, more bound up with receptive and motion. The erotic appetite is
now not a blind urge for the replenishment of intercourse. It is responsive to
beauty and serves as a guide as to where true beauty will be found.
Intellectual activity emerges here as something different in structure from the
pure and stable contemplation of the Republic.
As the philosopher reaches out here towards recollection and truth, his mental
aspiration has an internal structure closely akin to that of the lover’s sexual
yearnings and fulfillments. The account of the growth of the wings uses
unmistakably sexual metaphors to characterize the receptivity and growth of the
entire soul. Intellect, no longer separated from the other parts, searches for
truth in a way that would not meet the elements of the middle dialogues for
purity and stability. Third, the passions, and the actions inspired by them,
are intrinsically valuable components of the best human life. So far, we might
believe that Plato has revised only his view of motivation and education, not
his view of the best life. However, the Phaedrus
gives the passions, and the state of madness, much more than a merely
instrumental role. Plato shows himself ready to judge questions about the best
life from the point of view of the interests, needs, and limits of the being in
question. One finds the best life for a human being not by abstracting from the
peculiarities of our complex nature, but by exploring that nature and the way
of life that it constitutes. This best human life is unstable; always prey to
conflict. They risk, in the exclusivity of their attachment to a mutable
object, the deep grief of departure, alteration, and death. Let us return to
the four indictments of the passions that Plato offers and see how he has
recanted. First, although some appetites are blind animal forces reaching out
for their objects without discernment, this picture now becomes too simple and
in particular committed slander against Eros. Second, although the appetites
need management, now they also need nourishment. Third, the passions now have a
cognitive function rather than being sources of distortion, and indeed their
information proves necessary for the best insight. Fourth, the intellectual
element is no longer sufficient in discerning truth, for such discernment
requires the whole personality. Therefore, we find a different conception of
the person, where we find emotions of wonder and awe, a careful concern for the
other’s separate needs and aspirations. Each discovers more about his or her
own aims as he or she sees them reflected in another soul. Neither imposes on
the other a vision already fixed. Each elicits from his or her own soul a
deeper beauty.
The Republic
shows us why Socrates was accused and why there was good reason to accuse him.
Socrates engages in philosophical discourse with civil society, thereby
demonstrating that philosophy has a positive benefit to the city. In expressing
the relation of philosophy to the state, he expresses its relation to the
actual, human world. His engaging rational discourse to discover truth is a
challenge for us as modern readers, many of whom have lost confidence in such
discourse. His argument is that justice pays. The goodness of human life
depends heavily on our having a close connection with something eminently
worthwhile that lies outside of us. To live well one must be in the right
psychological condition, and that condition consists in receptivity to the
valuable objects that exist independently of oneself. If one is oblivious to
these objects and devotes oneself about all to the acquisition of power, or the
accumulation of wealth, or the satisfaction of erotic appetites, then one will
not only become a danger to others but one will fail to achieve one’s own good.
The Republic,
Plato's major political work, is concerned with the question of justice and
therefore with the questions "what is a just state" and "who is
a just individual?" He proposed full communism as the only way to have a
just state. This meant abolishing private property and sharing family responsibilities.
Socrates expects ridicule. He even considers incest a live option. He makes an
absurd proposal for the ideal state. The ideal state, according to Plato, is
composed of three classes. The merchant class maintains the economic structure
of the state. The military class meets security needs, and the
philosopher-kings provide political leadership. An educational process that
begins at birth determines a particular person’s class and proceeds until that
person has reached the maximum level of education compatible with interest and
ability. Although the ideal city trains women and men equally, given his view
of the natural superiority of men, women would not make into the ruling class
of philosophers. Those who complete the entire educational process become
philosopher-kings. They are the ones whose minds have been so developed that
they are able to grasp the Forms and, therefore, to make the wisest decisions.
Indeed, Plato structures his ideal educational system to produce
philosopher-kings. The three classes correspond to the responsibility of the
state for nourishing the body, defending the city, and have rulers who have the
common good in mind. They also suggest an elite corps of philosophers who, in
order to get the warrior class to make the sacrifices needed, would need the
noble lie (myth or poetry) to persuade them to act in that way. In contrast,
the Enlightenment believed that wisdom could find broad access as people
interact with each other freely. The Enlightenment agreed with the importance
of encouraging merchants and defending the country. However, the Enlightenment
disagreed that rulers would have the common good in mind. In fact, it assumed
that rulers would have their self-interest in mind. For that reason, they
formed a vision of government that limited the power of the state in such a way
that power resided nowhere. They also hoped that, although one person would not
have wisdom enough for civilization, the collective wisdom of people through
their involvement in representative democracy would lead to the common good.
They valued pluralism and tolerance in the public sphere because they had
confidence that such freedom would lead to the common good. The same principle
held good for economic life – people pursuing that which they believe would
lead to the fullness of their lives would lead to the good of all. The
pluralism and tolerance of modern society is very different from the dominance
of philosophers that Socrates envisioned. Part of the comedy that the Republic
represents is that, while Socrates spent so much time dealing with the city,
its ugliness in contrast to the soul becomes apparent. The soul is of ultimate
concern to the philosopher, and yet the philosopher rules the city, whose
primary concern is with the body.
The
myth of the cave describes individuals chained deep within the recesses of a
cave. Bound so that vision is restricted, they cannot see one another. The only
thing visible is the wall of the cave upon which appear shadows cast by models
or statues of animals and objects that pass before a brightly burning fire.
Breaking free, one of the individuals escapes from the cave into the light of
day. With the aid of the sun, that person sees for the first time the real
world and returns to the cave with the message that the only things they have
seen heretofore are shadows and appearances and that the real world awaits them
if they are willing to struggle free of their bonds. The shadowy environment of
the cave symbolizes for Plato the physical world of appearances. Escape into
the sun-filled setting outside the cave symbolizes the transition to the real
world, the world of full and perfect being, the world of Forms, which is the
proper object of knowledge. This myth suggests that the only way to bring
fullness of human life is to have contact with that which transcends everyday
life. The Enlightenment offered the counter myth that we need to bring light to
the cave and transform human life within the cave. It is rather clear that the
Enlightenment was right in this analysis.
In
the Republic, Plato continues his
assault on the goodness of the ordinary. Ordinary people, when asked what seems
fine to them, will name many activities that the philosopher’s argument will
judge worthless. Most people, if asked what is worthwhile, will praise the content
of their own lives. From what position does this eye see well? Moreover, what
is the nature of the obstacles to its true vision? The Republic argues that
the best life for a human being in the life of the philosopher, a life devoted
to learning and the contemplation of truth. The
Republic also argues that the best life is a life ruled by reason, in which
reason, evaluates, ranks, and orders alternative pursuits. The conception of
rule by reason articulated in the fourth book of the dialogue is a purely formal
conception that does not attempt to specify the content of the life that reason
plans and orders. All that is required
there is that the agent harmonize his or her soul, order his or her life plan,
in accordance with some orderly conception of the good. The central example of
pure or genuine enjoying is the intellectual activity of the philosopher.
Socrates’ praise of this activity gives us insight into the features that are
constitutive or intrinsic value. He stresses purity, stability, and truth. His
theory of value supports the life of the philosopher as against a life devoted
primarily to need relative pursuits. He proposes asceticism for the
philosopher. One had better closely scrutinize any theory of value that has as
its consequences a plan of life that is so remote from what a normal human
being normally pursues and values. How does he throw away so much ordinary
value? From what perspective or standpoint is it that all our eating and
drinking look as valueless as scratching an itch? One thing is very clear: this
standpoint is nothing like that of the ordinary human being. Plato readily
grants that most people do ascribe intrinsic value to the bodily pleasures and
to the states that are their objects. This is a delusion, resulting from the deficiency
of the perspective from which they make their judgments. It is only from the
point of view of the real above in nature, that is, from the viewpoint of the
philosopher, who can stand apart from human needs and limitations, that society
will make an appropriate judgment about the value of activities. He attempts to
elucidate this point of view. The philosopher must first be an ascetic,
dissociating him or her self from the body’s needs. It is from the viewpoint of
one who no longer sees his characteristic human needs as genuine parts of
himself that Plato rejects the associated activities as valueless, selecting
others as intrinsically good. This may seem grossly unfair. Surely, one might
wish to argue, one must assess the pursuits of a species from within the ways
of life and the standing needs of that sort of creature. Once we realize how
severe an obstacle desire is to true judgment we are, as Plato sees it, led
inexorably to the conclusion that adequate judgments can be made only by
getting free and clear of appetitive influence altogether. Each pleasure or
pain to which we attend is like a river that binds the soul to a dangerous
source of delusion and impurity. Plato assumes that no reflective person wishes
to be the dupe and slave of his appetites. The only solution seems to be to get
ourselves to a point at which we have no pressing human needs at all. We can
then survey all the alternative activities coolly, clearly, without pain or
distraction, using pure reason itself by itself, so that eating and love-making
do eventually look, to our soul’s eye, like nothing more interesting than the
grazing and copulating of cattle. No merely human being is ever good measure of
anything. It is not a good basis for an ethical theory. Only the perfect will
be good measure of value for the ideal city, for only from the undistracted
viewpoint of perfection can one see truth. Plato’s standpoint of perfection is
not immediately available to any creature who wishes to assume it. Plato
suggests a long and difficult affair to learn to detach ourselves from our
human needs and interests, or to get to a point at which we can do so at will.
Therefore, if Plato were really committed to a model of rational evaluation
utilizing such a standpoint, we would expect him to provide us with a model of
education to accompany it. Plato excludes the representation of several of the
human emotions most frequently treated by poetic art; grief, passionate love,
fear. Plato rules out these emotions by an argument that assumes that standpoint
of perfection and asks, from this standpoint, about their value. For the true
hero, Socrates argues, or for the good, it is not appropriate to grieve deeply
for the death of a mere mortal. In this appeal to what befits the god, Socrates
both uses a standpoint of perfection to determine an aesthetic and moral value
and constructs from the young citizens, in speech, a representation of that
standpoint as a moral ideal. We should imitate beings that are completely
without merely human needs and interests, in order to cultivate our own
potential for objective rationality. Therefore, our literature should depict
those beings and their deliberations. The best life will be a life maximally
devoted to contemplative, scientific, and aesthetic pursuits, in which all
other activities have a merely instrumental value at best. It is important to
stress at this point that the activities chosen by the philosopher are supposed
to be valuable intrinsically, not because the philosopher chooses them. His
pursuits are good because his choice responds to value, not because he judges
from the appropriate standpoint. The political life of the philosopher can
count as intrinsically valuable because it realizes and contemplates stability
and harmony in the city. In part, the superior harmony of the philosopher’s
life results directly from this reduction in the number of his or her
commitments. The city will not exactly eliminate either ownership or the
family. It will spread these around in common among members of the city. There
is no city and family conflict if the whole city simply is the family, and thus
other kinds of family ties unknown to it. There is no conflict between what is
my own and what belongs to the city, if citizens hold all property in common.
These strategies chosen to minimize conflict enhance the stability of single
pursuits. In pursuing this kind of city, Plato has not yet perceived the
importance of preserving and nurturing individuality within the context of
community. Personal property is a possession that belongs to me as a certain
person, and in which my person as such comes into reality. Plato excludes it
for that reason. He cannot explain how in the development of industries there
can be incentive toward creative activity. People who have creative energy depend
upon their capacity for holding property. Plato thinks that strife, division,
hatred, and avarice will come with elimination of private property. We might
imagine this in a general way. However, I suspect it more reasonable to suggest
that the care we give to that which we own expresses our subjective freedom in
a way that human society needs for its advancement. Plato abolishes the family,
thereby removing yet another domain where individuality can become actual.
Socrates introduces the division of labor as the basis of the city. In order to
limit the unending progress of techne and rational desire, one must effect the
regulation of politics by philosophy. The regulation of techne is obviously
impossible when philosophy is itself defined as a techne rather than as the
love of wisdom. Yet, the connection that each being has with the feelings of
his or her own body cannot be generalized or spread around as can other things
formerly one’s own. The sensations of this piece of flesh have a connection
with me that is altogether different from the connection I have with that other
piece of flesh over there. Plato must still show us, ordinary as we are, that
this ideal of rational valuing and this standpoint of perfection are worthwhile
goals for a human being to pursue. He must give us some reason to want to
attain his ideal, or to think that it is one to whose pursuit we are already in
some way committed. We might object that the external god’s eye perspective is
neither attractive nor important. It may not be available. Any objectivity
about value that is worth talking about, perhaps any about which it is even
possible to talk, must be found within the human point of view and not by
attempting, vainly, to depart from it. Plato has dealt with such objections. He
believed that he could show us that much that is valued in the internal human
viewpoint on the world is a source of intolerable pain for a rational being. We
are motivated to seek true, stable, value because we cannot live with the pain
and instability of our empirical lives. From within our human lives, for the
moment, their pain, we have a deep and positive natural desire to get at
something greater than the merely human. What the imaginary objector does,
Plato would say, is to simplify and flatten human moral psychology by omitting
a longing that is in tension with many of the other things that we are and do.
If he is right about the complexity of our nature, when we simplify and flatten
Plato’s arguments, we are at the same time avoiding part of our own
psychological complexity. Plato would say that to cease to see and feel these
things would be to cease to be human.
One
wonders if The Republic is a comedy
of the absurd to highlight the impossibility of the ideal. We may need to read
it dialectically, relating these utopian demands in each instance to their
opposite, in order to find, somewhere in between, what Plato really meant.
Plato does not mean the institutions of this model city to embody ideas for
reform. Rather, they should make truly bad conditions and the dangers for the
continued existence of a city visible as contrary. Thus, Plato intends the
total elimination of the family to display the ruinous role of family politics,
nepotism, and the idea of dynastic power in the democracy of Athens. It uncovers
something, and not only the obvious fact that no city would let philosophers
govern it. The paradox of the philosopher-king gives us the positive insight
that both aiming at the good and knowing reality pertain to the political
actions of the true diplomat as well as to the true theoretical life. What
makes a political system a good one is not the consent of the governed. A good
political community must be one that promotes the well-being of all the
citizens. If the citizens fail to understand where their good lies, then it is
the proper task of political leaders to educate them.
Laws is a
practical program, possibly for adoption by Dionysius the Younger. It has
little interest except for historians of the period. This work is largely
devoid of the theory of forms. It devotes itself to a discursive and
painstaking account of the formation and administration of a practical utopia,
Magnesia. The Philosopher-Kings vanish without trace. The only vestige of rule
based on metaphysical or theoretical insight of a more than ordinary kind is
the supremacy of the Nocturnal Council, composed of gentleman farmers,
intelligent and educated, but hardly philosophers. The state is administered
under an extensive and detailed corpus of constitutional, civil, and criminal
law, some of it of dizzying complexity. The absence of metaphysical
underpinning from a description of a political structure does not show that the
underpinning does not exist. The political structures are hierarchical and
authoritarian. Plato may intend this work as a practical work intended for
consumption by non-philosophers, without dwelling on the metaphysics, which he
keeps in the background. The evidence from his work Statesman suggests that Plato had a concern to ground political
knowledge in knowledge of the relevant forms. When Plato wrote Laws he was in his seventies. The search
for the nature of virtue was still unfinished business. He set out a blueprint
for a second-best ideal state. He wanted to keep open lines of communication
between the academy and political leaders. At the end of his life, he
maintained his commitment to virtue and human happiness, the core business of
philosophy.
In
the Phaedo, Plato offers an ontology
of concepts. A general idea or concept according to this new doctrine, is
immutable, timeless, one over many, intellectually apprehensible and capable of
precise definition at the end of a piece of pure ratiocination because it is an
independently existing real thing or entity. The human mind or soul can get
into non-sensible contact with the ideal and eternal objects of the
transcendent world. We are ephemerally at home here, but we are also lastingly
at home these. He proves the immortality of the soul by our ability to
apprehend the everlasting concept objects that Plato often calls the Forms. The
motivation for this theory appears to be the defense of mathematics and
dialectics as sciences. The natural sciences had clear objects of study. The
abstractions of math and philosophy did not seem to have any objects of study.
He separated the concept world from the natural world. He renounces causal and
mechanical explanations; for what he thought was important were answers to
teleological questions. Thus, he preferred asking what for and to what purpose.
In this way, Socrates explains why he focused on philosophy rather than natural
science.
In
the Sophist and Parmenides, he argues as forcibly as Aristotle does against that
very separateness of his concept objects, which had seemed needed for the
scientific primacy of conceptual inquiries.
In Parmenides, Part I, Plato deploys the
young Socrates’ arguments for, and the arguments of old Parmenides against the
theory of Forms. The arguments of Parmenides are the arguments of Plato. Plato
no longer needs the theory of forms to vindicate dialectic against contempt and
suppression. He no longer needs the theory of forms to represent genuine
science against the unstable pretensions of the natural scientists. The Academy
of the late Plato is the Academy of the young Aristotle. Both breathe the same
air.
Parmenides reverses
the characteristic role of Socrates and his interlocutor. Socrates advocates a
position, and Parmenides subjects the position to cross-examination. The
dialogue explores an issue for which the historical Parmenides was famous. His
argument implies that reality consists of just one thing. Parmenides famously
argued that the only path to truth is that “it is and cannot be.” We want to
know what subject he is talking about when he says “it” is. We also want to
know what he means when he says it “is.” He could mean that the subject of his
inquiry must exist. He challenges the evidence of our senses, which reports a
plurality of changing things. The Platonist rejects the position of Parmenides.
Each form, though distinguished from others by its own proper character, shares
with all forms the formal or ideal properties of the being Parmenides
identifies. Each is ungenerated and indestructible, unchanging, intelligible,
and uniform. Each form is a stable entity with a unique nature. The controlling
issue of the dialogue is the oneness attributed to forms. In Part I Parmenides
will repeatedly show that despite the conviction of Socrates that each form is
one, it is after all many. One lesson of Part I is that oneness itself is slippery.
What do we mean when we say that something is one? Do we mean that it is a
single thing? Do we mean that it is a whole composed of parts? What is oneness
itself? Do we mean that it is a whole composed of parts? Therefore, Plato
chooses Parmenides as the main speaker because he will use themes of the
historical Parmenides in his investigation of forms. What mattered for Plato
was the apparent contradiction that Zeno exposes: that the same things are both
F and not-F, like and unlike. Socrates introduces his theory of forms to
resolve the contradiction. The challenge Socrates presents to Parmenides is to
show that the difficulty Zeno displayed in the case of visible things one can
also display in the case of forms. Socrates asserts that forms are what they
are by themselves and do not admit their opposites. He ends his speech by
challenging Zeno and Parmenides to show that this is not the case. Parmenides
takes up this challenge in Part II. Before he does so, he questions the
presentation of Socrates. First, what forms are there? Second, what is the
nature of the relation between physical objects and forms known as
participation? Third, on what grounds does Socrates regard each form as one,
and are those grounds viable? Parmenides demonstrates that the forms are not
one, but many. Parmenides concludes by suggesting that no relation exists
between physical objects and forms. Entities in each group relate only to other
entities in their group. However, if we in our realm do not relate to forms and
they in their realm do not relate to humans, what import can they have for us?
If forms exist but do not relate to us, they do not explain anything. They do
not ground our knowledge, since we have no access to them. Why posit forms at
all? By the end of Part I, forms do not relate to us, or we to them. Therefore,
they are not responsible for the characters of things have in our perceptible
realm. The relations that perceptible things have to other things in our realm
determine perceptible things. Humans have access only to things within the
human world. Humans cannot appeal to forms to explain judgments about the human
world or relations among things within it. Instead, humans must be satisfied
with appearances. The analogy of the cave at least had a way out of the cave.
The world at the close of Part I does not. Our only access to the objects is
through the shadows. We have no fixed criteria by which to explain our
judgments, and even if such criteria existed, they would be irrelevant, since
Parmenides has removed any causal link between forms and appearances. This
world is intrinsically unstable.
Part
II of Parmenides is incredibly
difficult. Some of the arguments contain blatant fallacies. A natural response
is to consider it a waste of time. However, at the end of Part II Plato says
that this exercise will give the student a full view of the truth. The second
part of the dialogue has an important message, though we must work hard to see
it. Part II contains some invalid arguments, and many of the valid arguments rely
on false premises. Although Plato probably made some mistakes, most of the
errors seem quite deliberate. Part II highlights conflicts by means of
antinomies and exposes errors based on invalid reasoning or misconceptions. It
challenges us as readers to notice what has gone wrong and challenge the
argument that leads to such an absurd conclusion. Deduction shows that if we
consider the one in isolation from everything else, it is nothing at all.
Deduction 2 shows that if we consider the one in its relations to everything
else, it is everything indiscriminately. Deductions 3 and 4 both consider
consequences for the others, starting from the hypothesis that one is.
Deduction 3 produces some constructive results by assuming that the one is
altogether one and that the others somehow partake of it. Deduction 4 destroys
this conclusion by suggesting that if the one is altogether one and in no way
many, the others cannot partake of it. If the others were to partake of the
one, they would fragment it into many. It has us imagine a situation in which
the one exists but does not relate to other things. Deduction 5 shows how not
to understand the negative hypothesis that “one is not.” If we assume that the
one is not by partaking of being in relation to not being, the one must have
infinite shares of being, even not to be. Deduction 6 shows that if the one
really is not, it is nothing at all. Deductions 7 and 8 considered consequences
for the others, on the hypothesis that one is not. Deduction 7 has us imagine
what other things would be like if there were no oneness. The world is lively
and varied, a world that exhibits a rich assortment of appearances. This world
has no lasting objects, since the masses we catch sight of dissolve before our
eyes. However, the world is, with things appearing to have various properties
through their interactions with each other. Deduction 8 helps us discover that
this world is an illusion. The masses we thought we saw are not there after
all. This world requires the one in order for the world to appear. Even the
appearances have vanished: nothing exists. This absurd conclusion is the result
of denying the existence of the One and forms. Despite the difficulties, forms
must exist. Without forms, we will have nowhere to turn our thought and destroy
the possibility of dialogue, conversation, and dialectic. Parmenides suggests
that the only way toward a full view of truth is to propose a hypothesis,
consider relations such as one and many, being and not being, like and unlike,
motion and rest, generation and destruction. One must then repeat the process
through the perspective of the opposite. The repetition helps one grasp the
underlying principles that ground the solution. The lesson is forms or some
stable objects exist if any world is to be at all. Did the conclusions along
the way rely on false assumptions? The key issue is the assumption of Socrates
in Part I that the one cannot be both one and many. This is the false
assumption that ultimately leads to the conclusion in Deduction 8. The assumption
of Socrates is false, and it must be false because we have a world that needs
explanation. How can the one be one, even though other things partake of it,
and it partakes of others things? Must the one participate of being even to be
itself? We must find another way to explain participation or find a better way
to understand the function of being as a bond. Plato continues this discussion
in Sophist, Timaeus, and Philebus.
The Timaeus is in large part a synoptic
digest of contemporary Italian and Sicilian natural science. It claims nothing
higher than probability for its descriptions. The study of nature is pastime.
It suggests that we have knowledge only of Forms, while opinion is the realm of
the world. Plato briefly stated and championed the theory of forms. The case
for the theory rests on the antithesis between knowledge or reason and true
opinion. Plato makes this distinction to derive from the differences between
the timeless and immutable objects of knowledge and the short-lived objects of
sense-given opinion. The Academy used the Timaeus
as a basic textbook of natural science and Plato wrote it for this end.
Theaetetus, Sophist, and Statesman are a trilogy of dialogues that show Socrates formulating
his conception of philosophy as he prepares the defense for his trial. The
description of Socrates as a midwife in Theaetetus
is one of the most famous that Plato ever made. The midwife description is a
method of education that is at the same time a method of doing philosophy. It
seems like an especially appropriate image for philosophy, as opposed to
geometry or cobbling. The procedure of philosophy should be a discussion in
which Socratic questioning engages with one’s own personal conception of
things.
Theaetetus
has a central question: What is knowledge? The results are negative, even
thought we make advances in our understanding of what knowledge is even as we
dispose of various theories through dialogue. The proposed answers speak to
important pre-conceptions. They help to identify theoretical problems that we
must face in any later discussion of knowledge. We must assume that the
dialogue is trying to get some doctrine across to us, as opposed to making us
think about the issues. Readers must contribute more and more as the dialogue
proceeds. Our task in Part One is to find the meaning in the text and follow
the argument to a satisfactory conclusion. In Part Two we must respond to the
meaning in the text by overcoming the problems and paradoxes that it leaves
unresolved in Part three, the task is nothing less than to create from the text
a meaning that will solve the problem of knowledge. Each part discusses three
different suggestions for what knowledge is. First, that it is perception,
second that it is true judgment, and third, that it is true judgment together
with an account. A critique of Plato at this point is that no definition
captures the various applications of a word. In trying to understand game,
machine, honest, or natural, we shall not get far by looking for the kind of
neat formula that universally applies. Why should we expect one for knowledge?
However, we may question whether Plato is really looking for such a formula in
this dialogue.
Socrates
constructs a theory based on the idea that knowledge is perception. He begins
with the statement of Protagoras that humanity is the measure of all things, by
which he takes that individuals are the measure of the things that for them as
individuals. Thus, if one person finds the wind cold and another finds it warm,
the right thing to say is that is that the wind is cold for one and warm for
the other. Neither person can be wrong. It is wrong to imply that there is any
such thing as the state of the wind. From this, we make an easy step to say
that statements of immediate experience can report everything that really
happens. Everything that is, is so for some individual. Individuals exist only
as participants in these perceptual encounters. Understood in this way, the
teaching turns out to be a version of the theory associated with Heraclites.
Everything is in flux; nothing is anything without qualification. The central
problem of Part One is to decide the sense in which these three things do come
to the same thing. In the course of reaching this conclusion, Socrates
questions the basis on which people conventionally suppose that some of their
experiences had better tell them how things really are than others do. He even
asks how one can tell whether one is awake or dreaming, a skeptical question
that bothered Descartes as well. One of the primary problems with Protagorean
theory is that someone who thinks it false cannot be wrong, in that someone’s
perception of falsity cannot be wrong. Socrates points out that any claim to be
able to do such a thing involves predictions, and a prediction about future
Protagorean certainties cannot itself be a Protagorean certainty. No one
possesses a criterion within oneself of what will be, even of what will be for
oneself. Protagoras destroys his own claims to be wise than others. By removing
any realm for expertise, he removes one of the most important applications of
the notion of knowledge. The fact that we can increase our knowledge suggests
further problems with Protagoras. Further, Socrates points out that we gain
knowledge through the senses rather than by the senses. Knowledge requires
non-sensory concepts. Knowledge requires total participation, and not just
individual senses like hearing, seeing, touch, and so on.
Part
Two considers knowledge as true judgment. The problem is that we may have a true
belief about a certain matter, but it may be sheer luck that one’s belief is
true. He uses the example of a jury that may make a true judgment without exact
knowledge of the events, although we unclear if the reason is that jury does
not have time to consider the cases or whether they were not there and did not
see. Socrates has a discussion of whether we can make false judgments. He uses
a well-known image of wax block as an example of memory making and impression
within us that we might sometimes make mistakes in perception when something
appears like a previous impression. The Aviary is an example of our knowledge
and possibility of making wrong judgments about number. Plato appears concerned
with the puzzle of identity mistakes as he made the discovery that knowledge is
necessary for error to happen. Earlier, Plato assimilated error to ignorance.
He now saw that one could not make an error without possessing knowledge. I can
make a mistake about something only if I know it, know something about it, or
know enough about it for my false belief to be a belief about that thing. This
led him to ask questions about what one needed to know in order to make
mistakes, and this led to questions of identity.
Part
Three considers whether knowledge is true judgment with an account. Socrates
considers the relationship between parts and wholes. Socrates wonders whether
we can have an account by enumerating the parts in that how would one know one
had enumerated all of them. Further, we would need some knowledge of the whole
in order to have knowledge of its parts.
The Sophist concerns itself with being and
nonbeing as well as true and false speech. If everything is just what it is and
nothing else, it is impossible for there to b e any speech, either true or
false, for speech is impossible unless something can be put together with
something else. The condition for speech are the same as the conditions for
nonbeing, and we can have speech if there is always falsehood or being if there
is never truth. Parmenides must and cannot be right. The Eleatic stranger leads
us to believe that inasmuch as logos comes to be through the weaving together
of kinds, the problem of nonbeing has been solved. However, he goes on to
characterize logos, insofar as one can say it is true or false, as the weaving
together of verb and noun without every showing how these two kinds of logos
relate to one another. The stranger says that he has failed to solve the
problem of nonbeing, and the dialogue proves that being is no less baffling.
Even his own logos will be as far as it goes adequate for both. He implies that
no single logos can be adequate for both unless it is indifferent to that
difference.
At
the beginning of the Sophist,
Socrates asserts that the sophist and the statesman are each an apparition of
the real philosopher, while the stranger says that the sophist, the statesman,
and the philosopher are separate. To be means to be something, even though it
does not mean to be countable. We can have no arithmetic of being. The analysis
of nonbeing must be an analysis of the non-arithmetical basis of division. It
must be an analysis of appearance at the same time that it is an analysis of
the stranger’s practice of dichotomy. The name of this double analysis is the
other. The problem confronting this dialogue Theaetus initiates and to which Statesman
responds.
The
stranger calls the illness of soul wickedness or moral vice, and the ugliness
of soul ignorance. Morality is the health, truth the beauty of soul. Noble
sophistry is what doctors do, removing the impediments to the proper
acquisition of knowledge, making the soul healthy and not beautiful. The
ugliness of soul establishes shame. Shame brings about the beauty of
self-knowledge, which in turn embeds itself in ignorance. The principle of nonbeing
is to be the cause of perplexity. It is the ground of thinking. He eventually
considers being as power rather than being as countable, thereby approaching
being as potentiality, even while it denies potentiality. It is such a powerful
definition because it seems to preserve our ordinary understanding. The soul in
its cognitive doing must set the ideas in motion. However, simply because one
loves something does not alter it, however much the lover might believe that
the beloved is duty-bound to change. Therefore, the fact that one knows the
ideas would not involve their alteration. If thinking is the greatest degree of
the power to make, and body the lowest degree of the power to be affected, the
tension between a comprehensive and a precise account of being would seem to be
resolved. Being is on a sliding scale. The higher beings need the lower; the
lowest in its total passivity needs at least one agent power. Nevertheless, the
comprehensive definition of being as power does not allow any being to be
something. Dialectics is the science of conjunction and disjunction. It
examines which classes are consonant with which classes, and which do not
receive each other. It examines whether some classes are connecting elements
through everything, and whether in the case of divisions there are other causes
of division through wholes. No art or science ever considers itself in its
partiality, for this would be to look at itself from outside itself, which it
could only do if it employed its principles outside the domain to which it
applies. However, since it cannot
acknowledge scientifically the limitations of its domain, it necessarily
enlarges its domain whenever it pretends to examine itself. Being is the name
for what we do not know. It is in that which people always seek, but one could
not seek it unless it in some way it confronted us and already disclosed itself
to us. The name of being in its partial disclosure is the stranger. Being is a
question that looks like an answer. To say that being is something is not to
give a complete answer but to pose the further question as to what something
is. The form of the question “What is?” is always the same, but Parmenides, who
first discovered the question, seems to have mistaken this sameness of form for
the answer, about which nothing further could be said. If there was total
communism, Parmenides would be right, but then one could ask no question, let
alone answered. Partial communism is already implicit in our asking questions.
So the question of being in both the Theaetetus and the Sophist was bound up
with and came to light with the question of soul, for to raise the question of
being is to raise the question of questioning: What is that which makes
questioning possible? Reasoning and knowledge become weaving together, fitting
things together, with the assumption that not fitting things together means
falsehood.
The Statesman discusses briefly what
interests us politically, and it discovers at length what holds no interest for
philosophy. Its central theme is the relation between sound judgment
(phronesis) and techne. The issue is not simply what constitutes the
appropriate method for the analysis of political knowledge, but also the extent
to which the application of techne to human experience is an act of production
rather than discovery. The stranger applies techne to the task of defining
politics as the art by which human beings produce artifacts, in particular the
artifact of the city, in order to protect themselves against a hostile nature.
Another central theme is the possibility of philosophical rule phronesis
unencumbered by law. His account of political construction is both pious and
conventional. We need politics because of the friendly and hostile nature of
human beings. It is an applied or practical and productive theory. The stranger
uses diaeresis in such a way as to blur the distinction between the discovery
and the construction of formal elements. Diaeresis evolves into the
construction of construction. In this sense, the Statesman presents with a striking anticipation of the modern
problematic of theory and practice. The Eleatic Stranger exhibits the Platonic
madness by arguing that phronesis could rule only if it were omnipotent. Since
this is impossible, phronesis must submit to legislation and thus to the
productive art of the statesman, who combine the theoretician and the
productive technician. The stranger is a man of techne in a way that Socrates
is not. In Plato, the distinction is between theoretical (Gnostic) arts and
practical and productive arts and between arithmetic and logistics on the one
hand and architecture on the other. If politics is a productive art, then the
city and its citizens are artifacts. The Statesman underlines the artifact
status of the city by the paradigm of weaving. The art of the weaver produces
clothing to defend the body against the rigors of nature. Nature appears
divided against itself and human existence is the locus of this division. The
diverse human natures are the raw materials out of which the city is constructed.
It is not the human being but the citizen who is a work of art. The stranger
suggests the politics needs myth to supplement conceptual analysis. The image
of weaving suggests producing, cleaning, and repairing are three distinct types
of the nurturing of clothing, where as the various aspects of weaving are
subclasses of production. The art of the statesman will be some sort of
internal as well as external rule. Theory and practice weave together. Politics
must understand human nature as well as human technical capacity. The statesman
bridges the separation of theory from practice. Politics must also know how to
command, which involves tools for commanding as well as sound judgment. Weaving
as a model suggests that every synthesis or production of those articulations
within the continuous web of human experience that are pertinent to the
particular intention of the analysis. Since politics and diaeresis are both
productive arts, the fundamental distinction between theory and practical
production exists as an artifact of human judgment. Human beings do not produce
themselves; nor are their experiences pure construction. Nature produces human
beings; one discovers and acquires the structure of intelligibility rather than
produced. What we produce is the particular articulation of the structure. The
political art is directed to the soul through the instrumentality of the body.
The philosopher is concerned with the whole and so with the body, but from the
standpoint of the soul. The diplomat is concerned with the soul, but from the
standpoint of the body. We are right to approach the art of politics via the
body, but in the last analysis, we cannot understand this art except based on
an understanding of the soul. The diplomat must understand the soul from the
standpoint of the city, and this is an inadequate understanding of the soul. In
order to understand the city we must be outside or beyond both. The diplomat
cannot understand politics; only the philosopher can do that.
Even
the digressions of the Eleatic stranger both go on too long and still fall
short, or they end before he has said enough to justify his digressing the
first place. We cannot reasonably doubt that the stranger must have intended
the most obvious errors, repetitions, and confusions. They are themselves part
of the teaching. The Statesman looks as
if it is condemning political philosophy in the presence of its founder.
However, the theme is not political philosophy, but political science. The Statesman shows that one must know
political philosophy almost entirely through misconceptions. Plato does not
stay at the level of dreams in his treatment of politics, but the shadow of the
dream is discernible everywhere in that treatment. Aristotle, by contrast,
writes more in the light of common sense when it comes to political life. The
stranger proposes to find the two kinds of science, of which one is political
science, and the other every other science. He convinces Young Socrates that
political science is as theoretical as arithmetic. A science that is fully
known without its ever being exercised is proved a theoretical science because
in its being exercised it relies on something nonscientific. Political science
is against the grain of both politics and science, even if it comes the closest
philosophy can to the Socratic identity of virtue and knowledge. Political
philosophy is necessarily a latecomer to both the city and philosopher. Plato
means the discovery of political science to be exemplary for the dialectical
science, whose theme is the highest and greatest of the beings. However,
political science cannot be exemplary unless one brings it together with things
alien to it, although we may make a case that those alien things are already
present in political science and make it the only natural paradigm for
dialectics. Part One examines the conditions that would make political life
unnecessary. Part Two argues that the city understands itself of necessity in
light of what would, if realized, make the city dispensable. The law is a sign
of this necessary misunderstanding. The stranger vindicates the city over
against the city; he vindicates both Athens and Socrates.
What
happened to Plato around 365 BC? Behind the character Socrates in those early
dialogues lies an extraordinary personality, whose sheer intellect and
character virtually swamped the personality of the young Plato. Around the age
of 40 the opposite personality of Plato emerged, with some intellectual help
from the Pythagorean mathematical philosophers. He began to assert such matters
in his writings. He discovered that merely human life was more complicated, but
also richer or better, than he had imagined. The truly blessed life involves
the proper cultivation of both activity and passivity, working in harmony and
mutuality.
Aristotle
(384-322 BC) rejected the concept of knowledge rooted only in perception. Rather, all knowledge is taught to us, and
all knowledge requires the reasoning process.
He recognizes that pure perception does not exist without the reasoning process. Scientific knowledge advances by empirical
observation and rational demonstration.
Knowledge is a dialectical process, constantly seeking a middle term
between opposites. Contrary to Plato, he
affirmed the importance of observation of sensory objects, as well as the use
of the senses, as an important part of our gaining of knowledge. Yet, that could not be enough. The reasoning process included these initial
acts of perception, and could logically lead to genuine knowledge. He also
rejected the idea that knowledge must be clear, certain, and not subject to
change. He agreed that knowledge is universal and of the real. He had to find a
way of giving reality permanence to the universal without re-introducing the
Form of Plato. Plato regarded the Forms as the causes of things being or
becoming what they are or become. Aristotle needed a new doctrine of causation
and new source of change and of motion. Theoretical knowledge meant first
philosophy, physics and mathematics. It meant knowledge for its own sake.
Practical knowledge meant ethics, politics, and a number of other activities.
It meant knowledge pursued for the sake of action or production.
The heart of logic was the syllogism. His treatment of
syllogistic argument provided the basis of the teaching of traditional formal
logic until the beginning of the 20th century. He takes the
conclusion to a practical syllogism to be a particular kind of action. Isolated
expressions signify substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time,
position, condition, action, or passivity. These categories were referred to
quite frequently elsewhere, but neither the order nor the number was precisely
fixed. Certain pervasive terms are recognized as able to run through all the
categories, terms such as one, being, same, and other. In what he would not
have considered as mutually exclusive, he classifies grammatical distinctions,
the things words signify (things), and logical entities. The categories were
the way Aristotle departed from the Forms of Plato. The result is a philosophy
less utopian than Plato’s, and more willing to take account of, and to reshape,
the opinions of ordinary people.
The proportional analogy, or analogy of relationship, is
found in Metaphysics Lambda 4. The
point of his argument is that things that exist do not share any common
substance or idea but only an analogous structure in their movement from
privation to form or potentiality to actuality. Each carries out this movement
in a way peculiar to it and different from others. The eye is actualized in
seeing. The ear is actualized in hearing. He opposes the singularity of the
good as taught by Plato with this exposition. The issue in practical philosophy
becomes the proper function or activity in which human beings find their
fulfillment, and any idea of the good in itself, should it exist all, is
irrelevant. Later scholastic theology added attributive analogy. We say that a
thing is white or is larger than something else, and so on. Before we can say
any of these things we must be able to say what it is. When we do that, we are
not merely articulating a structural parallel, but rather a structural
convergence on the ultimate sense of is in being or substance. Aristotle never
carries this argument over to our saying “is good,” and for the most part he
argues that when we say a flautist is good or a soldier is good, we are
speaking of a proportional analogy, an analogy of relationship. The best of and
for all things is the good in which the actualization of the individual goods
culminates. Good does not exist independently, but is always characteristic of
this thing. In Plato, good is an abstract concept similar to that of
mathematical abstractions like point, line, and so on.
Primary substances are particular entities, while
secondary substances are species and genera to which individual entities
belong. The categories were also the way Aristotle rejected Parmenides, who
seemed to make change, diversity and predication impossible. Aristotle sought
reality in a substrate behind the elements, a substrate to which varying
qualities could attach. Substance is its power to be the recipient of contrary
qualifications, while it alone has no opposite. Substance does not come into
existence or pass out of existence either as matter or as form. What comes into
existence is a concrete object combining matter and form. Their previous
existence was only potential. The genesis of a new substance involves the
passage from potential to actual existence for both matter and form in a new
concrete object. The cause of change requires a correct analysis of the process
of change itself and the identification of the source or sources of the change.
Those causes are matter, form, efficient cause, and final cause. Three causes
of motion are nature, force, and free will. However, even a self-moved mover
requires external sources of motion. In order to avoid an infinite regress, he
posits an unmoved mover that is one, eternal, and nonmaterial. The teleological
character of his physical theories has brought much censure upon his head. It
has tended to seem a natural but dangerous doctrine in biological studies and
wholly wrong in the study of inanimate nature. Normally, however, his teleology
is not a doctrine of any over-all pattern of purpose in the universe. Nor does
he intend to show how natural objects may serve purposes outside themselves.
Rather, teleology is a matter of internal finality, a doctrine that the end of
each object is to be itself. He roots it in his equation of final cause with
formal cause. The study of the end or purpose of a thing is the study of its
form, and to the extent that a modern scientist is concerned with the formal
and universal elements in nature, he follows Aristotle’s approach.
The question of substance was always the basic question in
philosophy, in that the question, “What is being” becomes “What is substance?”
Substance is always the individual thing, and as such is the subject of
attributes in all the categories. The search for substance is the search for
what is, as distinct from what “is something.” If a thing does not exist, it
cannot be anything. Substance exists alone, is prior to definition, and is
prior for knowledge. Substance involves a discussion of essence, the universal,
the genus, and the substrate. The essence of a thing will be its final cause;
it is the form. The essence of a thing consists in the form that it has
achieved or actually realized. These are opposed to potentiality.
The
aim of Aristotle was to save the appearances and their truth. He promises to
rehabilitate the discredited measure or standard of tragic and Protagorean
anthropocentrism. He promises to do with his philosophical work in a place from
which Plato and Parmenides had spent their careers contriving an exit. He
insists that he will find his truth inside what we say, see, and believe,
rather than far from the beaten path of human beings, as Plato would have it.
He insists that good philosophy makes one operate within these limits. The
phenomena to which Aristotle would direct us is the data of human experience
and, both sense data and linguistic usage. The philosopher must set down the
relevant appearances. Then, the philosopher must set out the puzzles or
dilemmas with which they confront us. The phenomena present us with a confused
array, often with direct contradiction. They reflect our disagreements and
ambivalences. The first step must be to bring conflicting opinions to surface
and set them out clearly, marshaling the considerations for and against each
side, showing clearly how the adoption of a certain position on one issue would
affect our positions to others. Without this serious attempt to describe the
puzzles, the philosopher is likely to accept too quickly a solution that
disguises or avoids the problem. The philosopher must then bring the argument
back to the phenomena and show that our account does preserve the phenomena as
true. The principles or procedures he uses suggest that what is universally
believed is not to be entirely discarded and that nothing we have to be using
in order to argue or inquire can get thrown out. This leads to the question of
first principles. For Aristotle, we grasp them and use them already, inside our
experience. His enunciation of first principles is an attempt to understand
principles we already use. We become habituated intellectually, by which he
means the sensitive awareness, produced by education and experience, of the
fundamental role this principle plays in all our practices, all our discourse.
The disagreement with Plato is that when he refers to The Good or The White is
not referring to anything, much less communicating anything to us. He has a
kind of realism, hospitable to truth, to necessity, and to a full-blooded
notion of objectivity. It insists that truth is one for all thinking,
language-using beings. This realism articulates carefully the limits within
which any realism must live. Talk of the eternal or immortal are important
because they are important for our world. The attempt of Plato to find a
vantage point outside the appearances is futile because such a vantage point is
unavailable and destructive because the glory of the promised goal makes the
humanly possible work look boring and cheap. Plato encourages us to neglect the
study of ethics, politics, biology and physical science in our world in order
to escape the cave and move into the sunlight. If it is a universal human
desire to grasp the world and make it comprehensible to reason, then it seems
clear that oversimplification and reduction will be deep and ever-present
dangers. In seeking to be at home, we may easily become strangers to our home
as we experience it. In our anxiety to control and grasp the uncontrolled by
techne, we may all too easily become distant from the lives that we originally
wished to control. We become strangers to some aspect of the life we live and
the language we use as we adopt simple pictures of the world: hedonism,
materialism, mechanism, and so on. Someone who does not want to return to
phenomena is one who is not at peace with his or her humanity.
Human
beings are the only living creatures who has experience of the good and bad,
the just and unjust, and the other ethical concepts with which this study
deals. Only the human being has the capacity to express these conceptions in
speech. Humans alone among creatures are both reasonable and lacking in
individual self-sufficiency. The ability to use the name of justice is based on
experiences of need and scarcity that a godlike being would not share. That
data for an inquiry into our conception of F
can come only from peoples whose ways of life are similar to ours with respect
to those conditions that gave rise to our use of the term F.
When
we understand the causes of action, it permits us to see our neediness in
relation to the world that is at the very heart of our ethical value. He does
this by broadening the matter to an account of movement and action in the
animal kingdom as a whole. He wanted to link the study of human beings with a
comprehensive inquiry into the functioning of living beings in general. The
failure to make this link is a failure to preserve deeply shared appearances
concerning our links with other forms of life. The point is that the
combination of vulnerability and activity provides a good basis for our
practices of praising those who deserve praise and blaming those who do wrong.
Serious ethical assessments require the capability for intellectual causality;
the quickest way to speak of a human being as beyond the pale of ethical
assessment is to say that person does things the way an animal does. Certain
very high standards must be met in order to justify the most serious of our
ethical judgments of persons. Yet, Aristotle also insists on the ethical
relevance of the different distinction that involve persons not fully
responsible for their actions. The main job of politics is to educate children
in such a way that they will become capable of leading good lives according to
their own choice, this result would be very unfortunate. He retains his simple
theory as well as his complex theory. He can present a plausible and
interesting answer to these questions. The simple theory tells us that we begin
the educational process not with a creature who is simply there to be causally
affected and manipulated, but with a creature that responds selectively to its
world through cognition and desire. We explain these movements by the person’s
own view of things, the person’s own reaching out for things as the person
views them. Praise and blame are from
the beginning not just pushes, but appropriate modes of communication to an
intelligent creature who acts in accordance with its own view of the good. They
are attempts to persuade that creature to modify, actively, its view of the
good, to reach out for objects that are more appropriate. A study of our beliefs
about desire reveals its intentionality and selectivity. We can also say that
the practices of education and exhortation in which we engage would be
unintelligible if desire were purely mindless.
Aristotle
insisted that there is no deliberating about ultimate valued ends. To
deliberate about the appropriateness of an end is to subordinate it to some
other end, and this is by hypothesis infeasible in the case of an ultimate end,
goal or value. This teaching is not correct. It overlooks the fact that ends
can be related to each other in appropriate and relevant ways that are
different from subordination. We can deliberate about an end not only on the
basis of whether its adoption and pursuit facilitate the realization of some
other superior end, but also on the basis of its coordination, by asking how
well it fits into the overall economy of other, associated ends. We can ask
about the extent to which their conjoint adoption allows for mutual adjustment
and supportiveness.
A
science of the good in general is meaningless for practical philosophy.
Practical philosophy is not knowledge of the right thing to do in a given
situation, in the way that mathematical and scientific knowledge is. Practical
philosophy is not a theoretical science in the modern sense, in which we might
apply a theory to practice in natural science. Practical philosophy is more
like knowledge of cures, and accordingly, Aristotle often draws comparisons
with this kind of knowledge. Any talk of the application of theory to practice
would presuppose a separation between the theory Aristotle imparts in such an
ethical pragmatics and lived practice. Such a separation does not exist here.
The ideal of an objective theory, neutral in regard to all the interest at
stake in any practical application of it, is neither Platonic nor Aristotelian.
The theoretical doctrine that he presents as practical philosophy has to be of
use in practice. Practical philosophy is useful in the way it is useful for an
archer to pick out a definite pint on the target at which to take aim. This way
he will score a better hit. This can only mean that one is better able to keep
one’s aim fixed in the right direction when one can set one’s sights on a
specially targeted point instead of on a larger object. The theoretical instruction
that can be given in practical philosophy puts in one’s hands no rules that one
could follow in order to hit what is right in accordance with an art. After
all, taking aim does not constitute by any means the whole of archery. One has
to have learned how to handle the bow, and whoever wishes to profit from
practical philosophy must be trained for it in the right way. Only then is
practical philosophy of use in decision making. It assists our concrete,
practical ability to size things up insofar as it makes it easier to recognize
in what direction we must look and to what things we must pay attention. One
does not rely on the theoretical generalities of practical philosophy in the
way that one relies on a rule. As a modern question, what is the existential
status of moral rules, and how can we be said to know them when we apply them?
Aristotle is at pains to show that the methodological models of the
mathematical sciences and technology are misplaced here. For the being of the
rule or ethical principle is not like that of the being of something that is
always apart from its instance and toward which the latter may be said to
strive, even while nevertheless always falling short. Rules in ethics have
their reality only in the tradition of their applications, instances, or
interpretations. Each of these is an accretion of reality. This understanding
of the reality of ethical rules requires that we revise our conception of how
we know them. We do not know them as we know the clear and distinct mathematical
realities. We know them only in a limited way from within the tradition of
their applications, in which we always already find ourselves under way.
Consequently, the same measure of exactitude is not to be expected here as in
the mathematical sciences and technology. Indeed, this kind of rigor would be
disastrous. Understanding moral principles is not being a stickler for the
rules. Judicious discretion is faithfulness to the tradition, adjusts to the
particularities of the given case. Practical philosophy cannot guarantee that
one will hit the target in a specific case.
Aristotle
thought that intellectual pleasures are primary. This line of thinking is
deeply problematic. Rationality does not demand that we seek satisfaction in
reason alone and view the pleasure of reason as solely and uniquely genuine.
Reason can and does acknowledge the need for diversity and variation. It
recognizes the importance of activities that call for little exercise of
reason. The importance of a balance of varied goods within a complex economy of
values is something that reason itself emphasizes. To insist that rational
satisfaction rather than mere pleasure is the pivot of genuine happiness does
not mean that commonplace pleasures have no legitimate place in a truly happy
life.
An Aristotelian account of what is involved in
understanding human behavior involves an in eliminable reference to such items.
Hence, it is not surprising that any attempt to understand human behavior in
terms of mechanical explanation must conflict with Aristotelianism. Fact
becomes value-free, is becomes a stranger to ought and explanation, as well as
evaluation, changes its character because of this divorce between is and ought.
Ethical theorizing proceeds by way of a reflective
dialogue between the intuitions and beliefs of the interlocutor and a series of
complex ethical conceptions, presented for exploration. Most people, when asked
to generalize, make claims that are false to the complexity and the content of
their actual beliefs. They need to learn what they really think. When, through
work on the alternatives and through dialogue with one another, they have
arrived at a harmonious adjustment of their beliefs, both singly and in
community with one another, this will be the ethical truth, on the Aristotelian
understanding of truth; a truth that is anthropocentric, but not relativistic.
The greatest obstacles to communal agreement are deficiencies in judgment and
reflection. If we are each led singly through the best procedures of practical
choice, we will turn out to agree on the most important matters, in ethics as
in science.
We dwell in one realm only, the realm of nature, and that
all of our powers, including moral reflection, are worldly and in need of
worldly goods for their flourishing. Connections between being well-fed and
being free, between bodily integrity and moral functioning, are all directly
and clearly drawn in such a theory. By acknowledging these vulnerabilities and
their connections to valuable functioning, we gain incentives the Stoics never
fully give us for promoting the appropriate distribution and redistribution of
material goods, so that all citizens have enough.
Aristotle gives an account of the virtues that decisively
constitutes the classical tradition as a tradition of moral thought. What does
the good for humanity turn out to be? Blessedness, happiness, prosperity. It is
the state of being well and doing well. The virtues are precisely those
qualities the possession of which will enable an individual to achieve blessedness
and the lack of which will frustrate movement toward that telos. Aristotle’s
belief in the unity of the virtues is one of the few parts of his oral
philosophy that he inherits directly from Plato.
We ask and answer our question about the good life within
appearances. Ethical reflection is fully anthropocentric. The goal of ethical
reflection is practical. Therefore, the life of which we write must be within
our capabilities. Further, it must be a life that, as we deliberate, we can
choose. It must be a plan of life that we survive in such a life. A human being
must be able to live this life. Good and valuable things may not be so
relatively to all imaginable ways and conditions of life. The good of some
genuine values may be relative to context and no less good for that fact. The
values that constitute a good human life are plural and incomparable. A
perception of particular cases takes precedence over general rules and
accounts. For any given piece of deliberation, it must be about something,
which is itself not up for question in that particular piece of deliberation.
However, within the piece of deliberation, I can ask both for means to that end
and for a further specification of the end. This conception demands
comparability. Something can be an end in itself and at the same time be a
valued constituent in a larger or more inclusive end. This particularity of
ethical life leads to vulnerability. The rules and universal principles are
guidelines or rules of thumb. They summarize particular decisions, useful for
purposes of economy and aids in identifying the salient features of the
particular case. In deciding to work with such principles, we would be
acknowledging that people whom we revere as people of practical wisdom have
judged choices of this sort appropriate. Principles are descriptive summaries
of good judgments valid only to the extent to which the correctly describe such
judgments. They are normative only insofar as they transmit in economical form
the normative force of the good concrete decisions of the wise person and
because we wish for various reasons to be guided by that person’s choices. The
simplicity of such principles aides in teaching and guiding functions, as well
as make it less correct as a summary of complex choices. This view allows for
the contingent features of the case at hand to be authoritative over principle.
It keeps us in a significant sense at the mercy of luck. A new, unexpected, or
even idiosyncratic feature can cause us to revise the rule. This theory has
room for surprise, room for both the cognitive insecurity and human
vulnerability. In this sense, ethical principles are non-technical and
non-scientific. Practical wisdom uses rules only as summaries and guides. It
must be flexible, ready for surprise, prepared to see, resourceful as
improvisation. The crucial prerequisite for practical wisdom is a long
experience of life that yields an ability to understand and grasp the salient
features, the practical meaning, of the concrete particulars. The person of
practical wisdom is a person of good character; a person who has internalized
through early training certain ethical values and a cert conception of the good
human life. He or she will focus upon friendship, justice, courage, moderation,
and generosity. The character of people and their value commitments are what
that person is; personal continuity requires a high degree of continuity in the
general nature of these commitments. This continuous basis goes a long way
towards explaining what that person can and will see in the new situation: an
occasion for courage, for generous giving, and for justice. This conception is
open to revision even at the highest level. This revision may come from the
perceptions embodied in new experience. The general conception is not inclusive
of everything that is of relevance. The particular case would not be
intelligible without the guiding and sorting power of the principles.
Emotion and passion have an essential motivational role
to play in human excellence. A model of rationality that suppressed or
neglected these elements would starve the soul of nourishment essential for
living well. Emotions are selective and responsive to training, and therefore
play a constructive role in moral motivation, impelling persons toward more
appropriate objects in keeping with their evolving conception of the
appropriate. They are well equipped to do well by us. Beyond motivation, we can
recognize and cultivate emotional states so that they will be good guides for
reason in the situation of choice. Choice is an ability that is on the
borderline between the intellectual and the passionate. Further still, emotion
has full intrinsic value in the best human life. Moderation is appropriate
choice with respect to bodily pleasure and pain. It is not compatible with
practical wisdom to seek to minimize the appetites or unduly to dissociate
oneself from their claim. Appropriate eating, drinking, and sexual activity has
intrinsic value, because of the way in which they satisfy contingent needs. To
be needy is an appropriate thing for a human being to be. We are not
self-sufficient creatures. The perception that is the most valuable
manifestation of our practical rationality is a complex response of the entire
personality, an appropriate acknowledgement of the features of the situation on
which action is to be based, a recognition of the particular. It has
non-intellectual components.
Good activity is vulnerable to circumstances. Calamities
that are temporary or partial diminish the best human life for that person. A
stable good life, based upon steady character and consisting in activity
according to the excellences of character and intellect, is vulnerable.
Excellence based upon goodness of character makes the good life tolerably
stable in the face of the world. However, this stability has limits. A gap
exists between being good and living well. Uncontrolled happenings can step
into this gap, impeding the good state of character from finding its proper
fulfillment in action. In certain cases of circumstantial constraint, the good
person may act in deficient or even shameful ways, doing things that he or she
would never have done but for the conflict situation. They act as well as they
can. Yet, they will do something bad they would not have chosen. Circumstances
of life can impede character itself. Especially at risk are those virtues that
require openness or guilelessness rather than self-defensiveness, trust in
other people and in the world rather than self-protecting suspiciousness.
Virtues like love and friendship require trust in the loved person. Generosity
is incompatible with continual suspicion that the world is about to take one’s
necessary goods away. Greatness of soul requires high hope and expectation.
Even courage requires confidence that some good can come from such action.
Human excellence requires some external resources and conditions. Membership in
a political community has a necessary instrumental role in the development of
good character, for habituation is the most decisive factor in becoming good. If
the political regime is itself evil, habituation of good becomes incredibly
difficult. Civic activity and the presence of good political surroundings prove
instrumentally necessary for the development and maintenance of good character.
Favorable political conditions are required instrumentally for people to act
well according to excellence. Participation in a well-functioning political
community is a necessary condition for the development and exercise of the
individual’s other excellences. The political participation of the citizen is
an intrinsic good or end, without which a human life, though flourishing with
respect to other excellences, will be incomplete. The citizen has a claim to
office, even if he or she yields this claim to another. For a political
community to deprive individuals of the chance for office diminishes the good
life for that citizen.
Aristotle’s account of practical reasoning is in
essentials surely right. Practical reasoning has four essential elements.
First, the wants and goals of the agent presupposed by but not expressed in,
his or her reasoning. Second, the major premise, an assertion to the effect
that doing or having or seeking such-and-such is the type of thing that is good
for or needed by a so-and-so. Third, the minor premise wherein the agent,
relying on a perceptual judgment, asserts that this is an instance or occasion
of the requisite kind. The conclusion is the action. Hence, any adequate
teleological account must provide us with some clear and defensible account of
the telos. Any adequate generally Aristotelian account must supply a
teleological account that can replace Aristotle’s’ metaphysical biology.
Almost all of us feel a regular need to persuade someone
of something, to defend our actions, and to organize our thoughts so that
others will understand our point of view. Aristotle’s Rhetoric is a way to deal with this reality in the reasonably freed
city of Athens. Rhetoric is the energy inherent in emotion and thought,
transmitted through a system of signs, including language, to others to
influence their decisions or actions. Aristotle identifies three occasions of
civic rhetoric. One is deliberation about the future action in the best
interests of a state. Political and ethical topics fall under this type of speech
situation. The goal of ethical action is a full human life. Constituent parts
of such a life are good birth, numerous and good friendships, good children, a
good old age, the virtues of body, reputation, honor, good luck, and virtue.
Since deliberative rhetoric aims at what is beneficial, a speaker needs to
grasp the topics of the good, which is whatever is chosen for its own sake.
Good things include happiness, virtues of the soul, virtues of the body,
wealth, friends, honor, the ability to speak and act, natural talent,
knowledge, and so on. Two is speeches of prosecution or defense in a court of
law seeking to determine the just resolution of actions to have been taken in
the past. Three is speeches that do not call for any immediate action by the
audience, but characteristically praise or blame some person or thing, often on
a ceremonial occasion such as public funeral or holiday. In all three settings,
speakers seek to persuade or influence action or belief and thus to impose
their own ideas or values on others. A speaker presents a trustworthy character
by showing practical wisdom, virtue, and good will. Emotions should be
considered in terms of what the state of mind is of the person who feels a
particular emotion, about whom the emotion is felt, and for what reason. He
supplies propositions for creating or modifying each emotion.
Poetry has its place in life, and is therefore an object
worthy of philosophical study.
Poetics is a
study of the poetic kinds: epic, dramatic and lyrical poetry. Aristotle is not
outdated in this complex, challenging theory, except for the breadth of its
foundations. Those foundations include a careful analysis of human action,
speech, and thought, and many aspects of his wider philosophy. He has much to
offer that is timely about literature and its relation to life. He responds to
Plato by arguing that poetry can be of philosophical value without being
philosophy and of educational value without being education. He rejects Plato’s
view that poets compose under inspiration rather than by the use of reason.
Since poets use reason for their composition, they contain truths from which we
can learn. Aristotle discusses mimesis under the heads of the objects of poetic
imitation. It discusses the types of men and activities that are imitated or
represented, and the manner of imitation that differentiates the three poetic
kinds. It explains the origins and development of poetry. Poetry is mimesis or
representation of reality, but a useful one from which we can learn. The nature
of representation is that it is an intellectual process. We identify what is
represented because it has some features of the actual object. Imitation of
ugly things is capable of possessing beauty. He agrees that poetry excites the
emotions. In doing so, it releases emotions, and hence has the effect of
reducing them. In its concern with universal truths, the poetic treatment of a
subject is more valuable than a historical treatment, since history has a
concern only with facts. He argues that poetry is something more philosophical
and more worthy of serious attention than history. The most important part is
the discussion of tragic drama. The parts of drama include plot, character,
diction, thought, spectacle, and song. Pity and terror are painful emotions in themselves,
but much depends on why we feel them. To experience them in real life is
genuinely painful, while to experience them in tragedy is proper. If the plot
is correctly structured, it will arouse in the audience the correct emotional
response. It the action is badly structured, it will arouse the wrong emotional
response, such as shock or revulsion. In the Ethics, he argues that we should feel correct emotion towards the
right object, at the right time, to the proper degree and so on. There are
things about which it is right to feel anger, pity, or terror. Such correct
emotional reactions as proper compassion, justified anger, and the right degree
of courage can affect decision or moral choice. Too much fear leads to
cowardice, while too little will lead to being foolhardy. One of the main
factors in the building of good character is to develop a settled disposition
to feel emotion correctly, since this will lead to good decisions. We become
good by habitually doing good; by feeling emotions appropriately we become
habituated to having the right emotional responses that are the mean between
extremes. These emotions help us make the correct decisions, so that we come
closer to where virtue lies, and become virtuous in character. Poetry offers a
way in which we can learn these responses without the hazardous process of
undergoing in actuality the experiences represented in poetry. By responding
emotionally to the representation, we can learn to develop the correct
emotional responses. Poetry has an educational and moral function as it helps
to form character. Catharsis, then, combines education and entertainment. He
puts forward views of his own, studies the methods of the great poets and
drawing conclusions from them, and lays down and defines a critical terminology.
He gives an answer to the critique that Plato offered of poetry. Correct
imitation is in itself a source of pleasure. He also discusses the important
concept of organic unity. He notes that the beautiful, whether a living
creature or an object made up of various parts, must have those parts properly
ordered. An epic will be like a single complete organism. The comparison of a
literary work with that of a living organism is important in that Aristotle
does not describe organic unity as a formal, dead, mechanical kind of unity.
The notion of a living organism, when related to literature, implies growth and
vigor in that literature. He also discusses the relationship between plot and
character in drama. Character is subordinated to action because it is the
product of action. Character develops in particular directions by the nature of
our actions from our earliest days. Our tendency of character can be manifested
only in action. Similarly, in drama, character in its full and proper sense can
be manifested only in action, and must play a subordinate part to plot. By
catharsis, he mans that emotions as pity and fear he means their restoration to
the right proportions, to the desirable mean that is the basis of his
discussion of human qualities in the Ethics.
The theory of Aristotle becomes a rather subtle and sophisticated answer to
Plato.
ST. THOMAS AQUINAS (1224/1225-1274) was life
devoted to the pursuit and defense of truth, a life permeated and motivated by
a deep spirituality. He began, not with
a pre-conceived notion of reality, but with the existent world, and made
enquiries of it. He is objective, in
that he reflects upon sense experience.
He tried to weave all of human knowledge and unite them in one body of
knowledge, all under the various departments of knowledge led by the
church. God created the universe so that
it has purpose in all its parts.
Everyone is to seek God, there being two ways to do that. First, one seeks God through revelation or
faith. The second was through
reason. Certain things one can accept only
by faith, such as the trinity, incarnation, creation. Other things one can establish through
reason, such as God's existence. Since
there was only one source of truth, there can be no conflict between revelation
and reason. If there is, it is the result
if faulty reasoning. He believed in
glorifying God by relating all knowledge to God's divine plan. His use of Aristotle was significant in that
it was the most powerful and comprehensive intellectual synthesis known in the
world at the time.
His
views are a re-thinking of Aristotle, with influences from Stoicism, Neo-Platonism,
Augustinianism, and Boethianism. He
sought a middle way. Thus, he did not
just adopt this philosopher, but filtered it through his own Christian
tradition. For Aristotle, being and
essence are identical in each particular instance. In Aquinas, there is an
explicit claim that in all creatures there is a real distinction between a
think and its being. Being and essence (quiddity), were known by different
intellectual acts. The real distinction between essence and existence is the
fundamental truth of Christian philosophy in that it distinguishes between God
and creatures. Likewise, the five ways for demonstrating the existence of God
lacks a framework within Aristotelian thought. Aristotle in his ethical works
insists on the fundamental importance of this cultural habituation for shaping
one’s practical philosophy. Through this habituation, one originally acquires
the starting points or first principles of moral philosophy. The rest of one’s
oral thinking proceeds from those culturally instilled first principles. Even
outside the realm of practical philosophy, Aristotle seems to recognize clearly
the need for correct upbringing from one’s earliest years. The notion of the
essential dependence of philosophy upon historical circumstances appears to be
just as Aristotelian as it is postmodern, and any comparison of the thought of
Aristotle with that of Aquinas should consider that dependence. With Aquinas,
his Christian habituation and attitude inevitably make a profound difference in
one’s philosophical thinking. It has prompted the query, “How could a Christian
philosophize as though he or she had never heard of Christianity?” The
Christian habituation toward them influences the selection of topics and the thrusts
of interest, and in full accord with postmodern hermeneutic norms has to be
taken into account in interpreting their philosophical meaning. Let us turn to
the concept of being to compare them. Everything encountered in our perception
is being. If it happens to be a metal, a plant, an animal, or a person, it is a
substance. If it is a color, a size, or a relation, it is an accident and
requires a substance in which it inheres. If it is right there before our eyes,
it is actual. If it is to come into being in the future, it is still something
potential and requires efficient causality to make to actual. If it undergoes
change, it is temporal and is composed of matter that changes form one form to
another. Aristotle shows no distinction between thing and being. For Aquinas,
the sublime truth of Christianity was that it knew being in God, “I am who I
am.” The primary instance of being was God. God continued to be thoroughly
remote from other things. No creature could have being as its nature. They
differ in that the same intellectual activity does not grasp what a thing is
and that it is. The result is that knowing what a thing is will never give
knowledge of its existence. The effect in epistemology is that we make a
separation in being through judgment. We gain understanding of essence or
nature through conceptualization, while we understand existence through
judgment. They also differ in methodology. The philosophical thought of Aquinas
proceeds strictly from the external sensible things that everyone knows regardless
of religious belief. It uses only naturally evident starting points or premises
for its demonstrative procedures. The whole problem lies in how it can isolate
these starting points in a way that was not available to Aristotle, and yet in
a manner that leaves them grounded solidly in external reality and not in an
linguistic or historical habituation. External things remain epistemologically
prior, and thus both Aristotle and Aquinas differ from modern philosophy that
focuses on the epistemologically prior experiences of sensations, ideas, or
linguistic and historical formation. Aquinas came to approach sensible things
from an existential viewpoint grasped through judgment. He looked upon being as
the proper name and nature of a creative and provident God. This approach to
external sensible things prompted the philosophical search for the way in which
people knew these sensible things through human cognition. From the viewpoint
of their nature, people knew them through simple apprehension or conceptualization.
From the viewpoint of their being, people grasped them through judgment. This
was not something that was divinely revealed, but something available to
unaided human reason. However, prior to Aquinas nobody had approached sensible
things in just that way. He viewed existence to be the actuality of essence,
the actuality of all actualities and the perfection of all perfections. This
purely philosophical development did not look to any revealed source for its
notions of essence, existence, and their relations to each other. It looked
only at sensible things. It saw that people knew their natures and
universalized through conceptualization, while people grasped their existence
in each instance through judgment. From these aspects as known in sensible things,
it reasoned in its own distinctive way to the infinitely perfect being that was
the cause of all other existence. Aristotle saw finite form as the highest
actuality in sensible things; Aquinas saw existence as that actuality. Once one
sets aside the Cartesian origin of philosophy in ideas, it is not difficult to
see how things can be epistemologically prior to both thought and language,
with sensible things themselves as the ground on which the differences between
the philosophy of Aristotle and the philosophy of Aquinas are to be judged.
Aquinas
also had a relationship to Islamic and Jewish thinkers, especially Moses
Maimonides, a Jew, and Ibn Sina Avicenna, a Muslim, and Ibn Rushd Averroes,
another Muslim. In Avicenna, the matter of distinguishing existing from essence
is primary. Aristotle bequeathed this issue to posterity: the relationship of
existing individuals to their intelligible natures or rationes. Aristotle meant substance to be exemplified
paradigmatically by existing individuals, yet equally clear that what makes
something to be what it is, its essence or secondary substance, comprises what
is knowable about it. It is fair to say that the Metaphysics left this as an aporia.
Islamic philosophy made a radical distinction between necessary and contingent
existence: between the existence of God and that of the created world. Aquinas
removed existing from Aristotelian categories, proposing that philosophers
understand it be in terms of the master analogy of actuality and potentiality.
In
Metaphysics, no science can demonstrate the existence of its own subject. The person
studying metaphysics can study God as the cause or principle of what does fall
under being as being. Aquinas distinguishes between the philosophical science,
which studies God indirectly as the cause of that which falls under its
subject, and another kind of theology that has God as its subject and depends
on belief in divine revelation for its principles. Even so, no real conflict
between faith and reason or between faith and philosophy can exist, since both
have God as their source. Metaphysics does not depend on matter in order to
exist or for one to understand it. Being as being enjoyed a kind of freedom
from matter.
This
leads him to the analogy of being. What kind of unity must characterize the
notion of being if it applies to every being and to the differences that obtain
between beings? He predicates Being analogically rather than purely univocally
or equivocally. The problem of analogy arises at two levels. On the one hand,
one may address it at the level of beings insofar as one discovers them through
sense experience and fall under being as being or being in general, the subject
of metaphysics. However, one may also address this issue the vertical or
transcendental level. On this level one is concerned with explaining how being
and like names may be meaningfully applied to different kinds of substance. One
predicates something univocally when it remains the same in name and
intelligible content or definition. This way one predicates the name animal of
a human being and of a donkey. One predicates something equivocally of
different things when the name remains the same but its meaning differs in
different applications. In this way, one may use the name dog of a barking
creature and of a heavenly body. Finally, one may predicate something
analogically of different things that differ in definition but that one relevantly
relates to the same thing.
Aquinas
distinguishes different causal orders that may ground analogical predication.
Frequently Aquinas makes the point that the intelligible content corresponding
to an analogical term is partly the same and partly diverse in its various
analogical usages. Aquinas grounds his theory of analogical predication on
sameness and difference that obtain in reality. He distinguishes between the
analogy of many to one and the analogy of one to another. He accepts the
reality of different levels of being and hence of different kinds of substances
within the created universe, the hierarchy of being. He must also defend
analogical rather than univocal predication of being of different individual
substances that fall within the same species.
He
closely relates his analogy of being with a metaphysics of participation, which
is also the heart of the problem of the one and the many. How can there by many
beings and yet each of which is different from every other? When something
receives particularly that which belongs to another universally, the former participates
in the latter. If a given subject possesses a particular quality or
characteristic only partially rather than totally, the subject participates in
the quality or characteristic. Aquinas distinguishes a number of different ways
in which participation may occur. However, other things participate in
existence, but existence does not itself participate in anything else. If
something is to be the subject of an accident, it must participate in
existence. It must exist. Participation of a being in existence is real and
leads to a real distinction between the participating subject and that in which
it participates. If a subject is to exist, it must first participate in
existence.
Participation
of beings in existence most naturally falls under Aquinas’s third major type,
that whereby an effect participates in a cause. Created or caused entities or
natures participate in existence in three ways: existence in general, God, and
participating in the act of being that the existing creature intrinsically
realizes. He draws a very close connection between the metaphysics of
participation and his view that there is real composition of nature or essence
and act of being. His theory of real composition of essence and existence in
beings other than God is a necessary condition for and a part of his
metaphysics of participation.
In
terms of essence and existence, he concludes that an intelligence is form plus
existence and that it receives its existence from the first being that is
existence alone. The act-potency composition of separate intelligences suggests
that want receives something from another is in potency with respect to what it
receives and that which it receives is present in it as its act. The quiddity
or form that is in an intelligence is in potency to the existence it receives
from God, and that its existence is received as act. Potency and act, essence
and existence, are present in intelligences, even though intelligences lack
matter and form.
The
argument for the existence of God itself uses as its point of departure the
otherness of essence and existence in all beings including intelligences other
than God. Many individual beings exist because each one of them participates in
existence in general. No one of them is identical with it or exhausts it. If
particular entities share in existence in limited fashion, this is because in
each of them there is an essence principle that limits the existence it
receives. Each receiving and limiting essence principle enters into real
composition with the act of being it receives. He had a much-contested view
that prime matter is pure potentiality. He also had a much-contested view that
only one substantial form in each substance, including human beings. In terms
of the existence of God, he is convinced that philosophical argumentation can
prove that God exists. He also denies that the existence of God is self-evident
to us in this life. One can establish it only by reasoning from effect to
cause. Certain things in this world move other things. Whatever moves has
something else that moves it. He concludes that nothing can be mover and moved
at the same time or move itself. Therefore, another moves whatever is moved. One must grant the existence of some first
mover that nothing else moves, which we call God. It is also impossible for
something to be the efficient cause of itself, so the first efficient cause is
God. Since everything is capable of not existing, there must be a necessary
being, which we call God. Since there are gradations of good, true, nobility,
we must grant that something is the cause of existence, goodness, and the
perfection for all other beings, which we call God. Since all things tend
toward their end, some intelligence must order them to their end, and this we
call God. We can know that God is, and what God is not, but not what God is.
Human beings cannot have quidditative knowledge of God, either because of
philosophical investigation or as based on divine revelation.
How
can we know the being that transcends sense experience? This is metaphysics, the attempt to explain
the many experiences we have. His views
are based on Aristotle, Metaphysics. St. Thomas believed in the via negativa, the negative way. This prevented him from having too much
confidence in the power of human reason to penetrate the divine essence. Rather, only God's existence can be known by
reason. Predicates, positive statements
about who God is, are denied because the word falls short in describing God's
perfection. God cannot be physical, no
matter or form (simplicity), infinite and perfect, immutable, eternal,
one. The positive way cannot represent
God perfectly. This is where the use of
language is important. He makes a
distinction between what is, its essence, and that a being is, the act of
being. The latter does not suggest the
necessity of materiality. There are
transcendentals like thing, something, one, true (intelligible meaning), good,
and beautiful. Univocal use means
precisely the same sense. In this sense,
all language falls short. Equivocal use
means an entirely and completely different sense. This would not be true of human language
about God, unless agnosticism would be accepted. Analogical use suggests a half-way point
between God and human beings.
Individuals know through their five sense first, and must apply their
limited language to God, recognizing that anything said about God in this way
falls short of who God really is. This
is based upon the concept of resemblance.
It is this relation, this likeness to God, which allows human beings to
speak about God at all. He believed one
could demonstrate divine intelligence and divine free will. Individuals perceive God's perfection only in
pieces. That knowledge is imperfect and
inadequate, but it is not false. For St.
Thomas, the most adequate name for God is the one given to Moses, "He who
is."
He
discusses the relationship between faith and knowledge. Faith is motivated by the object of faith,
but not sufficiently to accept it as true.
The will is needed to bring one to faith. Knowledge has a clear vision of the object,
not needing a direct influence from the will.
Philosophy moves from prior knowledge, or present experience, to new
knowledge by a way of reduction to basic principles.
Philosophy
makes use of the natural light of reason, while the theologian accepts
principles on authority, on faith, only what is revealed. The philosopher begins with experience and
argues by reason to God. The theologian
begins with what is known by God in revelation.
Philosophy is directed to the knowledge of God, and thus revelation is
morally necessary, given the fact that God is the goal to which humanity is
directed. The supernatural end of the
individual is directed toward the eternal, while the natural end can be
explored by the philosopher. The
supernatural end cannot be discerned by the philosopher. That end is the beatific vision of God. However, through the use of natural powers a
limited natural happiness in this life can be discovered without the benefit of
faith or revelation. Most people will
need to accept on faith what the philosopher can demonstrate rationally. Thus, it is possible for a truth to both
believed on the basis of an authority and at the same time be demonstrated as
true on the basis of reason. It was the
bold adoption of Aristotle as a model which made St. Thomas an innovator of his
day. He wanted to show that Averroes did
not have a corner on the market of interpreting Aristotle. Yet, he often expressed himself on themes
consistent with Augustine while using Aristotelian categories.
Concerning
the principles of created things, he adopts a common-sense standpoint. The human mind comes to know in dependence on
sense experienced. Reflection on these
objects, however, at once leads the mind to form a distinction in the objects
themselves. All such natural objects
change in terms of place, size, color & shape, and generation or
corruption. Human experience
distinguishes between substance and accident, and between the different kinds
of accidents. Then there is the
difference between matter and form, the later making anything the class of
created things which it is. The first
act of any individual thing is that which makes it a specific class and
determines essence. Matter and form must
be considered together, the principle of individuation. This is the Aristotelian doctrine of
hylomorphic composition, which is contrary to the Augustinian doctrine of the
separation of form and matter. In this
view, change proceeds from a certain rhythm.
Finite being has being because it exists. Existence is that in virtue of which
substance is called a being. It exists
necessarily, essence is actualized by existence. He did not distinguish essence and existence
in that the former could exist without the latter. Existence for finite beings determines the essence. As an aside, he accepted the Aristotelian
notion of absolute space and time. He
also accepted the Eudoxian astronomy of his day, placing earth at the center,
while being open to new ways of understanding data.
God's
existence is not known through direct intuition, but through reflection. He rejected the ontological or a priori
proof of God's existence given by St. Anselm.
The distinction between the ideal and real is not seriously enough
considered in this proof. This means
God's existence must be proved a posteriori, through an examination of
God's effects. He argues from certain
facts in the world which lead him to believe God exists. Thus, the world of the five senses do not
contain within themselves sufficient ontological explanation for their
existence. The first proof is that from
motion, used by Aristotle. As an
infinite series is impossible, we come in the end to an unmoved mover, a first
mover, which we naturally understand to be God.
The second proof is from the order or series of efficient causes. Nothing can be the cause of itself, and since
it is impossible to have an infinite series of causes, there must be an
efficient cause, which we call God. The
third proof is that the finite world has some things existing and some things
perishing, making all things contingent.
There must be a necessary being, not contingent on other beings, which
brought all other contingent beings into existence. A note about the infinite series. He is not concerned with time, but with
ontology. Logically, there cannot be
infinite series, whereas in time there could be. The fourth proof is based upon the degrees of
perfection in this world. There is a
hierarchy of being. What is the supreme
goodness, truth, and beauty, must be the cause of such values in this
life. The argument is Platonic in origin
and presupposes the idea of participation in being. This is what we call God. The fifth proof is teleological. Everything that exists has a purpose. This does not happen by chance, but is the
result of intention. Therefore, there
exists an intelligent being, by whom all natural things are directed to an
end. In this way, St. Thomas attempted
to show how God can be known in God's works.
In
terms of creation, all finite things must proceed from God through
creation. Every part of creation has a
real relation to God, is dependent upon God for existence. God did not create out of necessity. But then, why did God create? God created in order to diffuse
goodness. However, he did not believe it
was possible to demonstrate that creation at a moment in time was possible to
prove. This was known only through
revelation. It is possible that God
could have created a different kind of world.
Why this one? Evil is the
privation of goodness or perfection, though it does really exist. It is important in view of what it
lacks. God did not will the evils in
this world. Yet, God willed the world in
which the evils which God "foresaw" would occur. God was willing to
put up with the evil in the world which occurred through human choice in order
achieve a greater good, that of human beings who would freely give to God their
love. Human beings are free. Yet, what is necessary in terms of what God
foresaw, is contingent from the human perspective.
In
his view of human nature, he was influenced by Aristotle, On the Soul,
Augustine, John of Damascus, and the Bible.
In terms of the individual, St. Thomas stresses the unity of the human
being. Body and soul belong together,
not only reasoning and understanding, but also sensing. This union cannot be the result of sin, as
Origen thought. There are different
faculties of the soul. The vegetative faculty
is that of nutrition, growth, and reproduction.
The sensitive faculty is the five senses plus imagination. The rational faculty is the active and
passive intellect and the will, and has as its object sense experience. The mind has the ability to abstract
universal meanings and grasping them in the use of the intellect. People have will, and necessarily desire to
be happy. People will what is good,
though not necessarily the will of God.
Free will implies rationality.
Reason is not instinct. Choice
concerns the means to the final end of human choice, which is happiness. Between intellect and will, he considered the
intellect the more noble faculty of the soul.
It is the intellectual and volitional aspects of humanity which make
humanity different from animals. Is the
closeness of the relation between soul and body incompatible with personal
immortality?
In
terms of the philosophy of mind, he divides physical life into animate and
inanimate life. He relates animate life to the soul, and thus trees and cats
have souls, though they are not spiritual beings. The soul of a plant is merely
nutritive, the soul of a non-human animal is nutritive and sensory, and the
human being has a soul involving nutritive, sensory, and rationality. Through
intellect the human being can have cognition of the natures of all bodies, and
any faculty that can have cognition of certain things cannot have any of those
things in its own nature. He defines a human being as a rational animal. He
defines an animal as a living, sensitive, corporeal being. However, his theory
of subsistence threatens to leave the human being identified with the human
soul, looking like an incorporeal, subsistent entity that is temporality and
rather casually associated with a body. He thinks of sensuality as the
inclination to seek the suitable and flee the harmful and the inclination to
resist and overcome whatever deters one’s access to the suitable or promotes the
harmful. The important issue is the manner and extent of the rational
faculties’ control of sensuality. Rational animals necessarily seek happiness.
He affirms emphatically that human beings are free to make choices. His mature
view appears as a version of compatibilism.
In
terms of the process of knowing, he believed the mind was a tabula rasa,
there are no innate ideas, and that the mind focused upon sense
experience. Knowledge is limited to sense
experience and the intellectual understanding of it. Internal sensations through the five senses
create impressions by which objects are known directly. The higher functions of understanding,
reasoning, and judging have universal meanings arising out of sense
experience. There could be no direct
knowledge of a spiritual being. This
means that metaphysical knowledge is impossible. However, St. Thomas avoided this conclusion
by saying that intellect is moving toward being, not toward particular beings. This presupposes the activity of the human
intellect. The passive intellect
receives sense data, while the active intellect moves toward immaterial being
in sensible being.
In
terms of his theory of knowledge, he builds his epistemology based on metaphysics
and psychology. In cognition, first, he needs a metaphysical account of the two
relate: the human soul and the object of human cognition. Here he draws
primarily on his Aristotelian hylomorphism. On the one hand, the soul is the
substantial form of the body, that by virtue of which human beings are
substances with a characteristic form of life or set of potentialities that
distinguishes them as a species. The objects of cognition, on the other hand,
are primarily the particular corporeal substances to which we have access
through sense perception. A cognizer is assimilated to an object of cognition
when the form that is particularized in that object, such as a stone, comes to
exist in the cognizer’s soul. Second, he sees himself as needed to account for
the soul’s capacity for being assimilated to objects in this way. A sensory
cognitive power gives them cognitive access to the particular corporeal
substances and accidents that inhabit the external world. They must have
intellective cognitive powers by virtue of which they are able to transform the
enmattered, particularized forms existing in sensible objects into intelligible
species. This much of the psychological story of cognition provides a
rudimentary account of how we can be cognitively assimilated to the simple
elements of reality, substances and their accidents. The soul must not only
possess the forms of the simple elements of reality but also manipulate them to
form complexes isomorphic with reality in subject and predicate propositions. Intellect
is the power by virtue of which we can be assimilated in this way to reality,
and by virtue of intellect’s activity of understanding we can both grasp the
natures of things and use tem as constituents of propositions. Human beings are
also able to acquire cognition of new things by reasoning discursively based on
things already cognized. By virtue of its distinct activity of reasoning,
intellect enables us to infer certain propositions from other propositions. His
epistemology breaks naturally into two parts, one dealing with the prior, data
gathering stage of the process, and one dealing with its latter, inferential
stage. He develops his account of the inferential stage as a part of his logic.
The intellective power is self-reflexive with respect to its activities.
Intellect can take its own judgment. Creatures with intellect have the capacity
not only for being cognitively conformed to reality but also for considering
whether or not its cognitions in fact conform to reality. In terms of knowledge,
the intellective power is self-reflexive with respect to its activities. The
intellect can take its own activities including, its acts of cognition, as
objects of thought and judgment. A creature with intellect has the capacity not
only for being cognitively conformed to reality but also for considering
whether or not its cognitions in fact conform to reality. With scientia and
inferential justification, scientia is knowledge paradigmatically because
complete and certain cognition of the truth of a given proposition constitutes
impeccable justification, a kind and degree of justification that guarantees
the propositions truth. He has an Aristotelian analysis of a theory of
demonstration: the proper object of scientia is the conclusion of a
demonstrative syllogism. If the justification characteristic of scientia is
derivative, what is the nature eof the justification from which it derives. In
terms of scientia and foundationalism, propositions that are known by virtue of
themselves are epistemic first principles, the foundations of scientia. The
first proceeds by attacking rival accounts of justification, concluding that
inferential justification is possible only if there is non-inferential
justification. The opposing view suggests that all epistemic justification is
inferential and one can be inferentially justified in holding a proposition
only if one is justified in holding some other propositions. Aquinas calls
circular demonstration. According to this view, the regress of inferential
justification can be infinite without being vicious if it circles back on
itself. Scientia requires foundations. The propositions that constitute scientia’s foundations immediate
propositions. Propositions are immediate by virtue of expressing what might be
called metaphysically immediate relationships or facts, the relationships that
hold between natures and their essential constituents. This metaphysical
picture allows us to see the kind of objectivist requirement he incorporates
into the theory of demonstration. When he claims that the first principles of
demonstration must be immediate and indemonstrable, he is claiming that they
must express metaphysically immediate propositions and not just propositions
that are epistemically basic and unprovable for some particular epistemic
subject. The structure of demonstration is isomorphic with the metaphysical
structure of reality: immediate, indemonstrable propositions express
metaphysically immediate facts, whereas mediate, demonstrable propositions
express metaphysically mediate facts. Moreover, because fully developed
demonstrations are isomorphic with reality, the premises in a demonstration can
be thought of as giving the cause of the conclusion. This metaphysical picture
explains how immediate propositions express metaphysical foundations and how
they fill the role of epistemic foundations. First, by virtue of being
predications in which the predicate belongs to the account of the subject, they
are essential predications and universally and necessarily true. Second, such
that when w are acquainted with them, we cannot fail to see their necessity. We
cannot conceive of the falsity of those propositions. Non-inferential
justification consists in one’s being directly aware of the immediate facts
that ground a propositions necessary truth. He describes them as cognized or
known by virtue of themselves. He might better have said that they are
cognizable or knowable by virtue of themselves since he holds that a
proposition’s being immediate is no guarantee that it will be known by any human
being. They are proper objects of non-derivative knowledge. However, their
actually being known by virtue of themselves requires hat one by acquainted
with the facts expressed by those propositions, which requires that one
conceive the terms of those propositions. It seems that he supposes that we
have phenomenological evidence for the existence of non-inferential
justification of this sort this implicit phenomenological appeal constitutes
grounds for his foundationalism that are independent of his rejection of rival
epistemological theories. These first principles will be mmediate, universal,
and necessary, and with respect to the demonstrative conclusions they entail,
they will be epistemically prior, and express facts that are both
metaphysically prior and explanatory. In qualifying and extending scientia,
Aquinas can admit that paradigmatic scientia can be attained only in a priori
disciplines such as logic or geometry, while allowing that we an correctly be
said to have scientia with respect to many other sorts of propositions. He
makes room for secondary scientia in two ways. First, as corporeal creatures,
human beings have cognitive access to the world through the bodily senses.
Human cognition must start from and rely on sense perception; we acquire
propositions about sensible objects first and find them psychologically easiest
to assent to. Propositions about particular sensible objects are sometimes
better known t us even though by nature or considered in themselves they are
not better known. They can constitute immediate propositions for us and
function as epistemic first principles grounding what is for us scientia.
Second, he holds that because of their particularity and materiality, the
objects of natural science, corporeal substances in the realm of nature, admit
of contingency. He allows that we can have scientia with respect to them to the
extent that we can render them universal. He holds that the paradigm of
justification, attainable in certain purely formal, a priori disciplines, guarantees
the truth of cognition by virtue of grounding it in the universality and
necessity of the objects cognized and the infallibility of our access to them.
However, he allows kinds and degrees of justification that only approximate
that necessity and infallibility. It is a mistake to suppose that his
epistemology is coextensive with his account of scientia, but he does take
strict scientia, as he conceives of it, as the paradigm of epistemic
justification and the model by which other sorts of justification are to be
understood and against which they are to be measured. In that sense, the
account of scientia is not merely a part of this theory of knowledge, but is
cornerstone. As to difficult first principles, he denies that the fact that
many have rejected some proposition shows that the proposition cannot be known
by virtue of itself. He claims to be justifies in holding T by virtue of condition. He recognizes a sort of justification
acquired from dialectical or probable reasoning. Dialectical reasoning is distinguished
by its producing conclusions that are not certain but merely probable. In terms
of cognition of real natures, he discusses our cognitive relations to these
entities, entities he things of as the logically simple elements out of which
complex propositional knowledge is built. His answer to the genetic question of
how we come to have cognition of first principles is that we have certain
cognitive powers that make it possible for us to have cognition of the natures
or quiddities of things, the universals that are the constituents of
categorical propositions. We might think of the puzzle as drawing our attention
to an epistemological gap between human cognizers dependent on sense perception
and cognition of universals. Aquinas presents his theory of intellective
abstraction as the solution. The sources of universal cognition are partly
extrinsic and partly intrinsic to the soul. His empiricism identifies an
external source. Cognition of universals, originates from sense perception, and
so from the external world of material particulars. However, he acknowledges
that something is required on the side of the soul, a cognitive capacity that
manipulates sensory data to produce intelligible universals. We cognize the
universal real natures that constitute the subject and predicate of epistemic
first principles when we possess actually intelligible species or forms
abstracted by this mechanism from the material conditions that render them
merely potentially intelligible. In terms of epistemological optimism, a modern
person recognizes that Aquinas rarely addresses skeptical worries. If asked
what justifies him in thinking our faculties reliable, he would surely reply
not by claiming that his belief in our cognitive reliability is itself caused
by a reliable belief-forming mechanism but by pointing us to his philosophical
theology and its foundationalist arguments for the existence of a good creator
of human cognizers and by appealing to cases in which we have certain and
infallible cognition of truth. Aquinas’s apparent confidence that skepticism is
false may well derive from his certainty that global skepticism is false.
Aquinas may suppose that given this certification of the intellect’s ability to
grasp truth in particular cases, we are justified in supposing that our
cognitive faculties generally give us access to reality, at least in the
absence of compelling reasons for thinking otherwise. The direct guarantee we
do have for some gives us good reason to trust others. Human beings are limited
cognitive beings with restricted access to reality. He acknowledges that what
they can know about the structure of nature and the realm of immaterial beings
is incomplete in both depth and breadth.
In
terms of morality, he believed the moral law did not depend solely upon
revelation. The divine will for humanity
logically presupposes the idea of human nature, and thus what is moral can be
known through reason, without explicit thought about God. Natural law suggests a sufficient knowledge
of what is morally right. "Good
should be done and sought after; evil should be avoided." The natural inclination is toward
self-preservation, reproduction, and the use of reason toward universal goods,
are all natural and good, provided they are reasonably pursued. The focus is on the reasonableness of one's
behavior as fulfilling the ultimate purpose of happiness and the vision of
God. This is the path of
perfection. Conscience is not a special
moral sense, but the best practical judgment concerning a specific moral
problem. In the Nicomachean Ethics
Aristotle argues that people act for an end of happiness. This is an activity directed toward the
attainment of the highest and noblest good, which is contemplation. This is not in the religious sense, but in
the philosophical sense of having contemplation on truth, goodness, and
beauty. His ethics was eudaemonistic,
teleological, and intellectualist.
Though St. Thomas followed Aristotle closely, the only acts that fall
within the moral sphere are free acts.
The teleological emphasis dominates.
Rationally controlled activities must be directed to some good, and
judge good or bad in terms of attainment and means to that end. Happiness is not found in any created thing,
like power or sensible pleasure, but found only in God. It is the natural desire of humanity to
attain the vision of God. At this point,
he departs from Aristotle and speaks much like St. Augustine. He follows in Aristotle in suggesting that
moral intellectual virtues are habits, by which people live rightly. It is reason which gives orders and imposes
obligation. For Aristotle, virtuous
people are independent, while for St. Thomas they are dependent in that they express their utter dependence
upon God.
Moral
theory derives from reflection on actions performed by human agents. This
truism calls attention to the priority of moral action over moral theory. Since
human persons engaged in acting are aware of what they are doing and why, the
distinction between theory and action is not one between knowledge and non-knowledge,
between knowing and willing, but rather a between two kinds of practical
knowledge. Human action is for the sake of an end. Each human act aims at some
good as its end, a property arising from reason and will. The action is the
action it is because of the objective the agent has in mind in performing it.
We can also speak of some further end, until we reach the first or ultimate
end. Aristotle based this observation upon human government, suggesting that
wise government has the common good as its end. Further, happiness is the
ultimate end of human life. With Aquinas, the notion of human good is implicit
in any human action. People make mistakes about is good for them, and thus
happiness consists in the attainment of that which truly realizes the supreme
good. Aristotle suggested that if we want to know whether something good or
not, we ask what its function is. Virtue becomes anything performing its
function well. What characterizes the human agent is rational activity, and the
virtue jof that activity makes the human agent good. Virtue is that which makes
the one having it good and renders the activity good. Virtue ensures a steady
love of the good and involves will essentially, good being the object and love
being the act of the will. The good for a human being consists of a plurality
of moral and intellectual virtues. The moral virtues enable one to order the
goods of the sensory appetite to te comprehensive good of the agent. Human
beings have an inclination to preserve themselves in existence, to make, to
have young, to care for the young, to reason, know, converse, and live together
in society. These are natural inclinations. We can pursue such goods well or
badly, which is the foundation of moral discourse. The moral order consists of
putting our minds to the pursuit of the objects of natural inclinations, such
that we pursue them well, that is, toward our comprehensive good. Natural law
is a theory about moral reasoning. Natural law is the theory that there are
certain truths about what we ought and ought not do known per se. Every human
agent has conscious or unconscious access to natural law. Do good and avoid
evil is a principle any human agent will recognize. We make such natural law
judgments with only slight consideration. In the same way, lying, stealing,
seducing the spouse of another is contrary to reasonable, human order of our
lives. Human happiness is an imperfect realization of the notion of ultimate
end. We can have imperfect and perfect realization of ultimate end. Moral theology
presupposes natural law about the human good.
Aquinas
made a significant contribution to social theory for this period. Aristotle believed the State satisfied the
needs of humanity. St. Thomas did not. He believed God instituted the State and
necessary to the plan of God. It was
therefore good. Human beings are not
isolated individuals who can attend happiness alone. Rather, they need relation to others to
accomplish that end. Thus, human society
is natural to humanity. In the same way,
government is natural to society. It
would tend to disintegrate without it.
This meant the state was not the result of sin, which Augustine tended
to say, nor the result of egoism. The
laws of the State must be in accord with natural law, or they are a perversion
of law. Each state made up classes, each
having special functions: 1) daily labor provided by peasants and artisans, 2)
war provided by nobles, 3) justice was provided by the ruler, and 4) prayer and
sacraments by the clergy. Those who do
not do their functions are rebelling against God. Those who perform their functions fulfill
their duty in the world. Since the end
of humanity is beyond this life, the church plays an important role in being
indirectly exerting power over the state.
Aquinas
broadens Aristotle’s notion to argue that humanity is by nature a political and
social animal who uses reason and speech to cooperate in building political
communities that respond to the needs of the group and of the individuals who
compose it. The political community will be a union of free people under the direction
of a ruler, who aims at the promotion of the common good. Government has a
positive role and moral justification. The autonomy of the temporal rule is not
absolute. Based on the Neo-platonic notion the great chain of being, he
supposed that monarchy was the best form of government and had divine sanction.
At the same time, he endorsed popular participation in government, based upon
acquaintance of republican institutions in the Italian city-states. Such
participation was through corporate groups, and thus not directly by
individuals through voting and majority rule under a constitution. He suggests
women have use for procreation only. Further, women are naturally subject to
men because men have a greater capacity for reason. In terms of natural law, he
suggest that reason has the capacity to perceive what is good for human beings
by following the order of our natural inclinations, such as self-preservation,
family life and bringing up children, and the goals of knowing God and living
in society. Knowledge of the natural law is rational knowledge that is based on
our perception of natural goals or inclinations that are naturally apprehended
by reason as good. Aquinas combines disparate elements in Aristotle to arrive
at this theory of natural law. He ascribes prudence as a virtue by which human
beings choose the right means for the attainment of ends that are identified by
practical reason. Equity is the power of the ruler to depart from the letter of
the law when its literal application would violate its spirit. Deliberate
abortion of the fetus is equivalent to murder, but only after quickening or
ensoulment. Abortion before then was a sin, but it was not murder. He also
systematized the conditions of the just war theory. One needed declaration by
the ruler who had the duty to defend the common wealth, a just cause such as
self-defense, and a right intention. One intends only the defense of one’s own
life, but not the killing that may inevitably result, and that only the
minimally necessary force may be used.
In
terms of the relation between theology and philosophy, theologians have the
right jto own philosophical truths, a right to correct philosophical errors,
and a right to re-direct philosophical motivation. Theology strengthens
philosophical reflection and improves philosophical discoveries. Christian
theology done well ought to speak more an better things about matters of
concern to philosophy than the philosophers themselves can say. If a Christian
theology cannot do ths, Aquinas would not count it theology done well.
It
was in the 20th century that the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas were
introduced into the canon law of the Roman Catholic Church. 589:1 says priests are to follow the
teachings of Aquinas and 1366:2 encourages professors to use his
principles. However, this does not mean
there are no rivals. Scotism and
Ockhamism have been strong rivals.