Just Thomism

Democritus might have based his atomism on an argument like this: let all possible cuts be made in a natural body. This leaves either something or nothing. If nothing, then things must be made from nothing, but this is impossible. Therefore there is something unable to be cut: a-tomos.

Notice, however, that this indivisibility is purely factual, not logical. Domocritus cannot argue that there is a logical impossibility of the atom being unable to be cut, only a factual one. This is the difference between the inability of an atom to be divided and the inability of a subsistent point to be divided.

Proclus’s theistic argument is that every being proceeds from some first cause. 

By “being” Proclus seems to mean more or less what we mean by “the universe”, i.e the totality of distinct things that one sees when he looks around.

He proceeds by elimination: either (a.) there is no cause of being at all (b.) all the causes of things revolve in a circle or (c.) the causes of being go ad infinitum. 

But (a.) cannot be, says Proclus, for then there would be no science of being. There would, however, be a problem of self-reference here since, by this point in the book, he has been speaking about being as such for pages, and so any proof that the science was impossible would amount to a sound argument for the impossibility of logic. Sciences isolate some domain of experience and look, for among other things, for the extrinsic causes that gave rise to the things in that domain. Geology looks for the causes of planetary formation; astronomy for causes of stellar formation; biology for a clear account of abiogenesis.

True, we could respond to this that, while there is certainly a reason to look for causes in sub-universal domains, there need not be on in the whole universe. But this might be to miss the point: it is difficult to argue that the universe logically lacks any need of a cause, i.e. that we see a logical impossibility in it being caused, but the structure of any science is precisely from logical order.

Causality in a circle, however, either means that there is no causality or that something causes first. If a bunch of tow trucks are all hooked to each other, and moving around, then either they all have their motors running, or none do. If none, then they wouldn’t move at all, if all of them, then they aren’t towing each other, they are simply moving at the same time. But if one has its motor running, then this is the first cause of the motion, and it is no more being towed by something than a man is towed by pulling his own bootstraps. The remaining alternative is just a variant of the second option.

An infinite series of causes, however, has the same problem as was discussed in (a.), since a science is no more possible if the cause is placed at an infinite remove than if it is denied altogether.

And so Proclus’s proof – which seems clunky and thrown together, with all of its multiple options to be ruled out – seems structured in such a way as to point to the logical necessity of a being like God from the very possibility that the universe can be studied at all. Given that the universe could only be uncaused – if at all – as a fact and not by logical necessity, the very possibility of a science of the universe turns on there being some extrinsic cause of it.

An interesting corollary to this fact is that it might be possible for the universe to be a brute fact and caused by God. This is obviously not so if brute fact is taken as one for which no explanation is possible; but the usual account of brute facts is that they are such that no explanation is necessary. But if Proclus is right, the universe might be factually brute without being logically so.

Bill Vallicella draws a conclusion:

So any sense or reference linguistic signs have must be derivative and relational as opposed to intrinsic.

This is right, and Vallicella’s proof is sound – what I’m musing over is what happens when we link it up with another premise:

Any entity can be made to signify, either in a language or at least ad hoc

Any entity, whether physical or immaterial, could be made a signal or sign that something is to be done. But if this is true, then mind is set outside not only the physical, but even outside of entity as such. But it would be ridiculous to take this as a sign that mind has no existence at all. The entity is only itself; the mind is both within itself and outside itself: within so far as it has entity; outside so far as even that entity could be taken as signifying.

-Semi-automatic guns are interesting cases of essentially subordinated causality. The loading that the gun does by itself is essentially subordinated to the loading that the person does by pulling back the slide, and yet the gun really does load itself. If we want to catch the difference, we might speak about the difference between “loading” (which is something persons do) and “reloading” (which is something the gun does by itself). This analogizes to nature, which, as we learn from Newton’s Third Law, sees an absolute identity between action and reaction.

-The scientific view of nature in a word sentence: action and reaction are the same. Newton does not say this exactly, but this is what it comes to. A formally mathematical account of nature can’t avoid this.

-Machines can only have directions of process – can only have inputs as opposed to outputs – in relation to either life or value. Machines redirect (that prefix again) vital action into value.

-Determinism is necessary so far as nature is considered as a machine apart from its inputs or outputs. Any supposed input is just a result of a causal process.  The action upon the finger is entirely determined by the firmness of the button that pushed upon it. The finger’s action was entirely determined by the causal process that terminates in its being pressed upon.

-Considered mechanically, loading and reloading are the same. The slide moves back in response to a force. In fact, we might just as well consider the slide as pushing the hand as the hand pushing the slide. It’s all one big machine, if machines are all you’re trying to explain.

-Scientism in three steps: a.) give an account of, say, loading that applies to both loading and reloading – say, a mathematical law. (b.)  call the account a description of “the mechanism” (c.) proceed to be baffled and snicker at any appeal to “vital forces” or “free will”. The mechanism suffices to explain anything! Who needs to put some ghost inside of it!

-Note that the gun really does load itself (one can’t define semi-auto except by reference to the gun loading itself) and yet is loaded by the living. Subordinated activity does not negate self-activity.

Throughout his life, Hegel had to deal with the charge that he was a pantheist, and at one point in Lectures on Religion  he protests that no one has ever been a pantheist, that is, no one has ever thought that the mere totality or heap of all finite, contingent things piled together deserved to be called God. God is not reached by mere enumeration.

Seen from this angle, pantheism is an evaluation of things that is perhaps motivated by a desire to place God within the world of experience; or perhaps the desire to avoid irreducible dualisms while still retaining the reality of God. The positive part of this doctrine is worth keeping, sc. that the divine activity – and therefore essence – is present in the world of experience. The supernatural is not the wholly other from the natural, but the measure of God exceeding the natural.

Say Empiricism is right that objects are only given to us by sensation. This does not of itself tell us anything about the logoi or rationes of the things sensed. Any one object has an indefinite amount of rationes or aspects under which it can be considered:

Δ

So is that triangle, or isosceles, or the sound “d”, or “the change in”, or “figure” or “symbol”? For that matter, is it “creature” or “contingent reality”? These are all distinct logoi of the one thing sensed.

There seems to be at least one impression involved in

Δ

But even what counts as an impression is dependent on the ratio one takes of the thing. Is this keyboard one impression, or many? If many, how many? One impression per key? One group for letters and another for symbols? Inputs and commands? The sense input only comes to us as already informed by a ratio or logos that places the impression as like or different from others; and it would destroy and muddle thought to try to separate out some pure sense data that came to us separate from a peculiar logos.

One of the main differences between Empiricism in St. Thomas or Aristotle is that they divided the sense intuition from the ratio of the intuition; and argued for “creature” or “dependent on other” to be a possible ratio under which one could encounter the sense intuition. Knowledge could in this sense extend beyond intuition, even while the intuitions themselves were limited to sensible things.

Said another way, one can insist that all objects of thought are limited to sense intuitions and still allow for a knowledge of the trans-sensible based on the diverse logoi of the intuitions themselves. We might be limited to Δ and things like it, but this does not mean that we can exclude “creature” as one logos of Δ.

Whatever we clearly and distinctly know to belong to the nature of a thing, we can truly affirm of it.

Existence is clearly and distinctly known to belong to the nature of God.

And so since we see clearly and distinctly that unicorns are quadrupeds, we must affirm that this is truly the case, though we are not committed to confirming everything that might be said of them (e.g. whether they sleep, or whether they exist, whether there are any on Krypton).

Spinoza gives no account of the minor premise, and so presumably thinks it self-evident. Any serviceable philosophical account of God will do: God is a necessary being, the absolute, the non-conditioned, etc.. Again, if existence did not belong to him by nature, it would belong to him in the way it belongs to a derivative, secondary reality or creature, etc.

Like all ontological arguments, there is always some fresh way of putting them that makes them seem obvious and irrefutable.

The mythology of Easter – one can hardly call it an event – has been in desperate need of liberal reform for a very long time. As everyone knows, all the various narrative accounts disagree with each other, and in fact are incoherent; the various elements of the story cannot be made to hang together in any sort of literalist or fundamentalist sense; and the central figure of the story is, quite honestly, not something that anyone in our modern age can believe in.

Seriously folks: candy, eggs, ham… and a bunny? 

Aristotle sees the peculiar feature of substance as its ability to remain through contraries, which makes substance uniquely responsible for motion and change. Motion, which is of itself sensible and a defining characteristic of the physical world, is therefore only possible because of something that is not of itself sensible.

Objection: a surface changes both in quality, position, and place, but a surface is not a substance. Surfaces, moreover, are per se sensible. Therefore we do not need to posit substances to explain the motion of the physical or sensible world.

Response: A physical surface is the limit or totality of a quantity, but things can change from one physical quantity to another, and so one and the same thing has more than one definite quantity. But no actual quantity has more than one definite quantity.

Notice that this account of substance captures it in two ways: on the one hand, we see it in its indetermination or potentiality, and so in its dependence. It is neither this quantity nor another. Considered in this way, the actual quantity can be seen as replacing the substance, and so far as we study merely changes in quantity, we can overlook substance without consequence. On the other hand, substance is not this sheer possibility of things but  an actuality prior to the flux, and is therefore independent of it. To the extent that we forget about the reality of substance in this latter sense, change in quantity becomes either arbitrary or impossible, and so – even within the limits of a quantitative study – such forgetfulness will lead to either the belief that that the science is essentially subjective or that nothing it studies really changes.  Physical science has arguably reached both extremes in the Copenhagen interpretation (which allows for indeterminism only by making the science essentially dependent on the willed act of measurement) and in Einstein’s block universe.

… Aristotle develops Plato’s account of perseity as “communion” into an account of the various relationships of universality between the subject and the predicate. We can first note that some predicates are said of all instances of some subject. Such predication seems to always involve perseity, though it need not be made explicit. In looking for an explanation of malaria, for example, we might notice that all cases of malaria arise from being near swamps, but this does not mean that it getting malaria and being near swamps considered precisely as such have a per se relation to each other. We can observe, for example, that the two are connected always or as a rule without being convinced that there is any intrinsic feature of a swamp that is the direct cause of malaria.

A more fundamental relation between subject and predicate is one that exists between them in virtue of something intrinsic or per se to them. For example, we don’t just believe that fire and its heat are simply together as a rule, we are also convinced that there is something intrinsic to fire that makes this so. Again, we do not just observe cones being a third of the area of the cylinders that contain them, we also can see that it is an intrinsic feature of the cone that makes this the case. We are (perhaps) not entitled to hold that these particular convictions are indefeasible, and perhaps either one is open to being overturned by the discovery of a cold fire or a new and more complete theory of geometry, but to be mistaken about which features are intrinsic to things is not the same thing as to deny that we can come to know any intrinsic features of some subject. At the bare minimum an intrinsic feature is a heuristic that guides our explanations of things from what merely happens to be so towards what must be so.

Aristotle’s account of the per se is based on the more fundamental axiom that our explanations of what things are must start off confused and imprecise and gradually be made more complete. Malaria does not come to us with a label or tag that tells us exactly what place to look for it or how we are to consider any of the objects in that place. It might first be related to being in hot climates; and then not to a hot climate as such but to hot areas with swamps; and then not to the swampiness of the place as such but to an extrinsic feature of swamps (sc. that mosquitoes adapted to use them as ecosystems); and then not to mosquitoes as such but to the fact that mosquitoes both carry and transmit a certain parasite. Notice that, with each progressive development in our understanding, we might be relatively convinced that we have found malaria as such. We might be convinced that malaria is just a peculiar way of being weakened or broken down by heat, just as some people still believe that colds are a peculiar way of being weakened or broken down by the cold. Again, we might be convinced that malaria is just a swamp fever, or that it is caused by something either intrinsic to swamps (e.g. their brackish) or something else. Every stage in this process might be supported by evidence to the point of convincing a rational observer; but for all that, we can recognize from our comfortable perch as outside observers that we have not found malaria itself until we have found the parasite. This terminal point of the explanation is simply when we reach to what the thing is in itself, that is, when we come to get a distinct look at the thing which we first understood only nominally and in a confused way.

Notice that on this account of explanation it consists in moving from some X to an account of what X is intrinsically or in itself. Explanation does not terminate in some brute fact in the face of which we can say nothing more than “it just is that way”, but rather in moving from something that is merely named to what the thing named is in itself. The explanation does not end with a shrug that can do no more than accept that “all explanations have to stop somewhere” but with the conviction that we have actually found the thing which we had initially done no more than name. The simplest account we can give of this sense of explanation is that it consists simply in discovering what we mean. We meant something by malaria, but this initial meaning occurred in a jumble of confused facts that required a difficult process of discovery and many sophisticated theories and tools to discover that malaria itself is the name for a mosquito-borne parasite.

Because this account of explanation is based on the general fact that explanations move from the confused to the distinct, every sort of cause will admit will move from some X that is merely named to the X itself. For example, the if we witnessed the first atomic attack on Hiroshima, we would want to know who was responsible for it and so we would be looking for an explanation in the order of agent causes. Now notice that the first person we could actually see dropping the bomb would be the bombardier on the plane, though it would be pretty easy to establish that he only dropped it at the behest of the flight commander. But neither of these persons is who we are looking for when we ask who is responsible for the event, but  only the one who was responsible for all of them doing what they did, sc. Harry Truman. Likewise, if we caught the Watergate spies, they would be the first persons we knew were responsible for the break in, but they would not be the ones we are looking for when we ask who is responsible for the break in.

Just as there is a long series of diverse subordinate agents there is a corresponding series of distinct goals or final causes: the bombardier was only intending to pull a lever at the proper time while Truman had the much broader motive of terrifying his enemies into unconditional surrender. Here again, explaining a fact consists in discovering who we mean when we consider “the one responsible for this” or what motive we are looking for when we ask “why did this happen?” Truman is not a brute fact explaining why the bomb dropped, he is the one we meant to talk about from the beginning when we spoke of the one responsible for the action. Again, it is ridiculous to say that the explanation of motives “breaks down” after we discover the motive to terrify the Japanese into submission, since this would be like saying that our ability to look for something “breaks down” after we find it.

On this account of explanation, the explanans is simply “the thing itself”: e.g. malaria itself is the parasite as opposed to any other environmental feature, the one who dropped the bomb was Truman himself as opposed to any of his subordinates. Though speaking of a “thing itself” certainly suggests the familiar Platonic theory, Aristotle’s account of explanation is a complete redefinition and repudiation of it. The things themselves are not separated entities, or even forms inhabiting matter, but just the precise realities that we first target in our merely nominal and confused accounts. The trajectory of explanation is not from the facts to a form that is outside of them but from a name which we impose in the midst of a confused awareness of facts to a thing among those facts that actually deserves the name. The thing itself – or the thing per se – is not given separately from what we start with, but within what we start with, though indistinctly.

Aristotle distinguished two senses of perseity. In the first, any intrinsic connection between a subject and predicate will be a per se connection. In this sense, when we say an exothermic reaction is hot we say something per se, since it falls in the very definition of exothermic reaction that they give off heat. There is, however, a stricter sense in which it is not precisely the exothermic reaction that is hot, but only the mean molecular motion, since it is only this latter that is precisely what heat is, and it is in virtue of exothermic reactions giving rise to such motion that they are hot. Aristotle called the looser sense of the per se kath’ auto, which can be unproblematically translated as  “per se”, but he called the stricter sense katholou (or “universal” in the genitive case) which we will here call primo since this was the Medieval usage. It is this strict sense of the per se – the per se and primo – that we target when we seek to explain something, even if, for practical reasons, we are often content with explanations that fall short of this level of rigor.

The Per se and Primo in The Fourth Way

Any causal explanation targets the primo and per se, and all cosmological arguments are a causal explanations of various things manifest to sensation. We can see that the Fourth Way is appealing to this principle because it twice appeals to the Medieval theory of fire as the cause of what was hot, which the Medievals saw as the per se and primo cause of heat, in exactly the same way that we now see mean molecular motion and the per se and primo cause of heat. It is crucial that we describe the Fourth Way as reaching, for example, what is per se and primo good, true, etc. because there are all sorts of things that are per se good – virtue, charity, food, and even everything that exists – which are nevertheless not good such first. This is why it is not enough to appeal to a principle like “things that are participated reduce to things that are essential”. Just as a thing can be essentially hot without being what is hot first, so too a thing can be essentially good without being what is good first of all.[1]

St. Thomas places the principle that the causal explanations reduce to some first in at the logical beginning of his cosmological arguments, though he first applies it to the special case of a first cause of motion, saying that a series of causes cannot be infinite because: “then there would not be a first mover, and it would follow that there would be no other movers, since a second mover does not move except by the motion of the first mover, as a stick does not move unless it is moved by the hand.” [2] St. Thomas’s example is clearly from the order of efficient causes, and we saw above that the a first cause is necessary in this order since such a cause arises simply from giving a distinct account of what one means in speaking about “what is responsible for the motion”. One simply can’t mean to speak about an instrument or something with a derivative responsibility for an action when he asks about what is responsible for an action. Doing so would be like answering a child who asked “why are we driving to Church?” by saying “because I’m pointing the car towards it”. To ask the question about my what intention is responsible for the action means asking about what is responsible first of all. Any other explanation explains only in a qualified sense, and is in some way an indistinct grasp of the facts.[3] While it is true that there are all sorts of reasons why we do not press our questions to completely distinct answers – reasons ranging from practical concerns to the dimness of our intellect to the desire to restrict ourselves to a limited domain of explanation – nevertheless St. Thomas is claiming that the completely distinct answer to “what is responsible for the stick moving” is “God”.

The Fourth Way starts from no specific class of facts, but from any fact about the world which, when understood per se and primo, deserves to be called God. St. Thomas need not be seen as restricting himself only to “transcendental perfections”, as the manual Thomists have read him. The Fourth Way can, in fact, start with things given in all the other four proofs, and can reach all the conclusions they reach by its own proper way of proceeding and without appeal to any extra premises. For example, we see movers that are more and less immobile, and so there must be some mover that is immobile per se and first; we see causes that are more and less causal, so some cause must be per se and first; and we see necessary things that are more and less necessary, and thus there is something whose necessity is per se and first. If such a being is “what all call God” in the preceeding proofs, it is also in this case.

Reading the Fourth Way in this way leads to several good results, which I will here only sketch in outline:

It gives the proof scientific value, even in the contemporary sense of science. The Fourth Way, as we have continually stressed, appeals to a principle that is common in all causal explanations, not just those that are supposedly metaphysical, but also those that are scientific, or medical. We are looking for the per se and primo just as much when we are looking for the cause of malaria or diabetes[4] as we are when we are looking to establish the existence of God. This explains why this proof is uniquely concerned with proving its relation to the empirical and scientific, not only by twice appealing to the Medival account of the per se and primo cause of heat, but also by referencing De Caelo et mundo, an essentially Astronomical book.

It gives a simple and elegant account of the analogy of names from creatures to God. On our account of the per se and primo, it is the end point of an explanation that starts from something that is merely named and moves to something most deserving of the name. But this how St. Thomas divides analogous names from univocal and metaphorical names in the Summa theologiae. If, St. Thomas says, we consider the thing we impose the name on first then we will call the creature “good” or “existent”, but if we consider what the name signifies, then we see goodness and existence as belonging not to the creature but to God. Words like “good” or “existent” can be understood as naming either the things we first grasp in an indistinct and simply nominal manner, and in this sense we “mean” to indicate creatures when we speak of them. But we can never mean to indicate the indistinct and secondary as such in a causal explanation, and so in the proper sense of meaning or signification we do not signify the creature. It is precisely this double sense of meaning, arising with respect to a single word, that gives rise to the diverse proportional or analogous names that are said of God and creatures.

It can contribute to a larger dialogue about the explanatory necessity of form. Though Thomists frequently lament that the modern sciences have apparently cast out all formal and final causes, they have not yet come up with a principle actually useful to modern science that points to the explanatory power of form. But an understanding of perseity seems to be just such a principle, for it reduces causal explanations to something “in itself” or “of itself”, which have been, since Plato, unmistakable references to formal causality; and such causes become final causes as soon as we recognize the role that they play in a causal process that brings them about.

[1] This premise seems to be particularly important to preserve the real integrity and perseity of creatures, and to keep a proof for the existence of God from negating their proper existence. This problem becomes particularly acute when we consider the question of human freedom in the face of the causal power of God; though, as we have just seen, there is no problem with saying that the creature is essentially free and even autonomous, we only deny that this essential freedom is the first such essential freedom.

[2] ST 1.2.3.co. Note that the principle that causal explanations reduce to some first, though it occurs temporally at the end of the argument, is logically the first premise of the argument. No other principle or truth in the argument is more general. This general conclusion about causes is presupposed in the subsequent proofs.

[3] It’s interesting to note that some explanations are explicitly targeting means, and so are targeting things that are in themselves secondary. But even when we ask these “how” questions in the order of means, we are still we are asking for something that is first. A catapult, for example, in an instrument that uses a rock as an instrument to destroy things, but if someone asks “how did we destroy the city wall” the answer is not “with rocks” but “with catapults”. If we said only the first, we would mean that the rock was our primary instrument, i.e. that we held it in hand and hammered the wall, or hurled it at the wall with our bare hands.

[4] The recent finding of the ATP/P2X7R pathway by researchers at Boston’s Children’s Hospital is simply a finding of the per se and primo cause of diabetes