Just Thomism

-Spacetime = The state where things cannot have all their goods. I can either have the comforts of home or the beauty of Paris, the energy of youth or the experience of age. The properly eternal leaves this behind.

-I can make sense of “the cake is done now” but one needs pretty peculiar circumstances to say “2+2=4 right now”. A clock is simply not a useful measuring tool for whatever exists as an equation. Even if we imagine some things as true at all times, what this means is that differences in time make no difference in the thing.

-Evil involves taking one good so as to be unable to take the one we wanted. Evil therefore exists only in time. At the limit case (hell) all the goods we reach for make us unable to get the one we wanted.

A: So you’re saying if I allow for any punishment, I have to allow for every punishment?

B: Exactly, though you left off my insistence that I was speaking in principle.

A: So if I allow any punishment in principle, then I have to allow every punishment in principle.

B: Now that’s exactly right.

A: But that sounds as ridiculous and morally repugnant as what I said before. If I allow you to give parking tickets I have to allow you to flay people alive?

B: In principle?

A: Yes, fine, I have to allow in principle that you can flay them alive?

B: Right.

A: That’s nonsense.

B: Isn’t punishment just giving someone what’s deserved?

A: I guess.

B: And by “deserved” you mean greater punishments for greater crimes and lesser for lesser?

A: Yes.

B: But the only limit you could put on this would require saying that there is a limit to how great a crime could get. Is there any such limit?

A: No, crimes can get worse without limit. But there has got to be some other limit that kicks in.

B: Like what?

A: At some point trying to proportion the punishment to the crime will require us to be cruel and inhuman.

B: Based on what you’ve agreed to, this is the same thing as saying “At some point justice no longer becomes possible”.

A: Right.

B: And it becomes impossible because it is no longer a virtue, but is cruel and inhuman?

A: Right. Giving the worst offenders what they deserve would mean breaking them at the wheel or flaying them alive, and asking someone to do that isn’t just.

B: But what you’re saying is that at some point justice is not a virtue, and this is nonsense. I can understand some amount of drinking that is no longer a virtue, but not some amount of temperance that fails to be.

A: Why can’t there simply be limits on justice? Why assume that human justice is infinite, or that it has an answer to every problem? Why doesn’t this place in principle limits on what we can do?

B: You can’t just assume that limits like that are in place.

A: Fine, I’ll argue for them. Any principle pushed to extremes distorts the very virtue it once gave rise to, and the principle of proportionate punishment is just such a principle. QED.

B: Is that true of a principle like “don’t kill the innocent” too?

A: No, that seems less like a principle and more like a tautology. “Innocent” just means “those who should not be harmed”

B: That’s its etymology, sure, but there’s probably the same thing between just or fair and proportionate.  What you call “tautology” I just call insight.

A: That might all be right, but I can’t get past the idea of proportionality only working within limits, even if I don’t know what the argument looks like for it. Crimes that are too unusually cruel simply can’t be met with the cruelty they deserve. There is some in-principle limit on how far one can push cruelty. The line won’t be drawn everywhere equally, but it has to be somewhere.

B: So the limits of proportionality would be historically variable?

A: Right. So maybe when the murder rate was astronomically higher in the Middle Ages (didn’t Steven Pinker prove this somewhere?) then racking and burning wasn’t beyond the limits. Who knows, maybe the limits were all but unreachable. But now it’s at least arguable that deliberate killing is so rare that even state killing is beyond the in-principle limits of how far punishments can go.

B: You want to argue that certain punishments were once right in principle but now no longer are, based on limits to proportionality that are somehow measured by what is cruel and unusual by variable social standards?

A: Yes. Proportionality has an in-principle limit by what is cruel or unusual, but what falls under this description will be variable.

What gets called Anselm’s Ontological Argument starts as a critique of atheism, i.e. the whole argument is a response to Ps. 13 and 52: the fool said in his heart ‘there is no God’. So why not keep it as a critique of atheism? So taken, Anselm is only obliquely interested in proving “God exists” but is directly interested in showing that atheism is incoherent.

The bones of the argument are

Atheism requires thinking about God and judging he is non existent.

Thinking about God and judging he is non existent is impossible.

Atheism is impossible.

The first premise is a definition, so all the interesting work is happening in the other premise. As I’ve argued many times before, the Anselm is tacitly starting with chapter 7 of Augustine’s De doctrina, where Augustine claims that if you are thinking about X but can think of something better, then X is not God (call it Augustine’s axiom or AA). In other words, the argument starts with a criteria to sort out thoughts and determine whether they are not about God. There are interesting conceptual difficulties with AA (isn’t the thought of God plus chocolate better than just the thought about God?) and they need to be met with a robust sense of transcendence, but either leave them aside for the moment or limit yourself to considering just strata of being and not any putative merological sum.

By contraposition AA states that God is that than which nothing greater can be thought, but keep it in its original form. Anselm’s argument then becomes:

1.) AA

2.) Anyone who (supposedly) thinks about God as non-existent can think about something that would be better if it existed (namely, God as existent)

3.) Therefore, whoever thinks about God as non-existent is not thinking about God.

4.) But atheism requires thinking about God and thinking about him as non-existent.

5.) Therefore, atheism is impossible.

Notice the argument never leaves the head. We are simply asking whether we can conceptualize God as non-existent, and Anselm claims that this involves a fundamental incoherence that goes unnoticed by atheists. Better yet, since Anselm is as free to define his terms as any man, he can claim that what he means by God is something that makes atheism incoherent. If one defined God as “thinking” he could get the same result, but what makes Anselm’s argument so interesting is that he starts from an account of God that is far more plausible than claiming “God is thought”.

Notice that the Guanilo parody arguments seem to miss the point against the argument given here. Guanilo would have to replace “perfect island” for “God” in AA, but this only gives us an obvious falsehood.

So there might be more bite to the OA as a critique of the possibility of a certain kind of thought (namely, atheism) than as a proof for a being existing in the real world. That said, if atheism were impossible, then theism would be true, and if theism is true, God exists. That’s just how contradictories work.

-Even if one were praying solely out of his own self-interest he would still pray to our father or for us sinners. The normal way of acquiring goods is getting them from those who already possess them, whether by gift or learning or seeing things modeled.

-One of Socrates’s central teachings is less often recognized than explicitly made.  While even the sophists could accept that the tyrant doesn’t do good things, Socrates insists on a claim, verging on the bizarre, that the tyrant is the least free of all men and never does what he wants. He makes it explicitly in Gorgias, he builds a whole city in defense of the claim in Republic, etc.

-If there is a self, there is suffering.

Christianity = yes, and there are selves.

Buddhism = yes, but suffering can cease.

Modern World = No, selves will do away with suffering. There are two variants:

(Christian variant) God and the Church exist to humanize us, minimize suffering, and lead  all things lead to heaven

(Secular variant) the main task of reasoning and science is relief of man’s estate. We will humanize him, provide more goods, figure out the laws of nature and put them under our control. Humans do not need to wait for heaven to enjoy the life of a self without suffering.

-Humility is selflessness, so both Christianity and Buddhism involve fundamental selflessness. For the Buddha, the last obstacle to conquer is the comparison of oneself to others. For Christianity, one of the two ultimate goals of human life is to see persons as other selves.

-For Christianity, to deny the reality of the person is to deny God first. Personality exists in excelsis though unfathomably. Freedom and power exist without unactualized possibility, communion exists with absolute sufficiency of each self, the goodness of each person is equal to their community, and (most of all) origination exists without causality.

-The West has not lost the theological conviction that the self exists in excelsis. Our humanist atheism is unthinkable except as the substitution of man for God, i.e. placing humanity in the empty space of the God who does not exist, and who somehow kept humanity ignorant, violent, and without technology. That this substitution was even a possibility is something we learned from Christianity first, which consists in just this sort of man-God substitution.

-If the West lost this sense of personality in excelsis nothing in our present consciousness of the world would make sense.

-New atheism is the last mode of prophesy, perhaps even the last call to repentance. At bottom it is the horror that we would lose the ability to curse God, blame God, substitute humanity for him. We can only live in the hole left by the god who never existed. Sure, Dawkins is blaming christianity and Pinker is proving it is violent, backward, stultifying, irrational, but there is a critique of atheism-as-oblibiousness too since if we lose the sight of humanity as divine substitute then we will lose humanism too. For example, the central humanist value of compassion is based on an account of humanity as a species fundamentally willing and able to do away with suffering. Humanist compassion must see humanity’s motives as pure, its power and technological potency as unlimited, its knowledge of the true causes of things as having no fundamental limitation. Sure, Pinker would deny this if we put it so explicitly, but the denial could never enter into the structure of humanist compassion, since humanist compassion could never be, say, Mother Teresa’s compassion of solidarity in suffering and an acceptance of its redemptive power and our inability to meet it with some final solution. Saintly compassion is exactly the sort of misguided compassion that our technological and social engineering is already solving and will continue to solve.

Cognitive models are limited to capturing formal thought, and so any text of material logic can be turned into a catalogue of modalities of knowledge that cognitive models ignore. Take just the first eight chapters Posterior Analytics. 

1.) All discourse and learning is from previous knowledge. That is, all acts of reasoning develop previous insights.

2.) There are different orders of priority in knowledge and therefore in causality. This follows from knowledge = knowledge of causes. What is closest to sense is most known to us in a qualified sense what is most general is most known to us absolutely. Orders in causality map over this: causes closest to sense are causes in a qualified sense while those furthest from sense are causes absolutely.

3.) Some non-tautological knowledge is indemonstrable due to reasoning being superfluous. If some basic premise were tautological (A=A) then when we try to add anything to it we only end up saying the same thing twice, viz. “A is A, and B is A, therefore…B is A.” No knowledge can be developed from a tautology, but it is possible for arguments to develop knowledge, therefore there is some indemonstrable belief that is non-tautological. Definition must be something other than tautology.

4 and 5.) There is a difference between what is said of all, the per se, and the commensurately universal (or per se and first). This was the subject of AI = AS.

6.) Proof of conclusions is from mediated universality. A proof is from a middle term, named such from its universality being midway between the major and minor. This status as proof is a function of recognizing the more universal as more known. See #2.

7.) Discourse must be homogenous, whether properly or by subordination. The homogeneity of the science or discourse has to range over all possible predicates while still allowing for their discovery. Clearly a model of a genus as a predicate list does not allow for this.

8.) All demonstration is of the eternal, no demonstration of the corruptible as such. Formal structures cannot capture this. Some fruit fly or nano-secondly existing element is just as good a syllogism as God, triangles and the universe.

One can go on mining truths like this ad infinitum. If one wants truths of material logic closer to physical science, he can go diving in Topics, which is a much longer book than Posterior. 

Formal logic can’t distinguish between the per se and the per accidens, especially when the accidental is said of all. So velocity is both d/t and p/m, and whenever one has v, d/t or p/m he can always substitute any for the other, but universal substitutability doesn’t make any two things related per se. v is d/t per se and anything else per accidens.

Plato was the first to figure out that sophistry trades in the per accidens and he demonstrates again and again how it can trick even the wise. The distinction is Trasymachus’s undoing even though he proposes it first: if leadership is a skill then a leader never makes mistakes qua leader but he also never works for his own advantage, and he will always agree with the exercise of the skill that he finds in others as opposed to seeing to outdo them. The platonic project is defined in opposition to sophistry as the search for the “thing itself” (perseity) in its opposition to the accidental, even if (and perhaps especially when) the accidental is said of all and convertible with it.

But AI only goes as far as formal systems do, and so the anticipated “singularity” would be an intelligence that never distinguished the per se from the per accidens. At the summit of human-created intelligence we therefore get an artificial sophist. Not quite, however, since sophists only come from the ranks of those who know the accidental, which is a fog that the AI can neither fall under nor dispel.

Thesis: Every transitional event in the life of Christ begins with an explicit revelation of the Trinity.

The revelation of the trinity is therefore not simply in the Gospel but is structural to it.

Conception and Birth: the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.

[W]hat is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit…. you are to give him the name Jesus,^[f] because he will save his people from their sins… All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: ²³”The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel”– which means, “God with us.”

Public Ministry: 

Which can be distinguished into (a) his baptism (b) his first sermons to his believers (c) his preaching of the kingdom after the death of John and (d) his journey to Jerusalem (this last also is a transition to his passion).

(a)  As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. ¹⁷ And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”

(b) I take John as giving the chronological order of the events of Christ’s life, so the first sermon to believers in to Nicodemus:

“Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit. ⁶ Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. ^7… 16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

(c) Following John’s own confession that “He must increase, I must decrease” we get:

³⁴ For the one whom God has sent speaks the words of God, for God gives the Spirit without limit. ³⁵ The Father loves the Son and has placed everything in his hands.

(d) After a messianic prophesy in Mt. 16: 24- 28 (and all Christians, following Ps. 110 and 2 and Daniel 7 take “messiah” as somehow equal to God or God born of God), we get the Transfiguration, which recapitulates the trinitarian theophany of the Baptism, this time with the Holy Spirit not as dove but as shakina or cloud:

⁵ While he was still speaking, a bright cloud covered them, and a voice from the cloud said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!”

Passion: 

This begins with the Last Supper:

¹⁰ Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me? the words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself: but the Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works. ¹¹ Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father in me: or else believe me for the very works’ sake. ¹² Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father. ¹³ And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son…¹⁶ And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; ¹⁷ Even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you.

Resurrection:

‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” ¹⁸ Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news: “I have seen the Lord”….²¹ Again Jesus said, “Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” ²² And with that he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit”.

Ascension:

[He] commanded them that they should not depart from Jerusalem, but wait for the promise of the Father, which, saith he, ye have heard of me.

⁵ For John truly baptized with water; but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost not many days hence.

⁶ When they therefore were come together, they asked of him, saying, Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?

⁷ And he said unto them, It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power.

⁸ But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.

[And here we get a recapitulation of the Baptism and Transfiguration]

⁹ And when he had spoken these things, while they beheld, he was taken up; and a cloud received him out of their sight.

STA’s arguments for the immortality of the human soul turn on the mode of knowledge and not its objects, and so it seems that any attempt to explain post-mortem experience has to start by vacating all objects of human knowledge. For Santayana this is a deal-breaker:

Perhaps it is not logically impossible that spirit should exist without body: but in that case how should spirit come upon any particular images, interests, or categories? If occupied with nothing, it would not be a conscious being; if occupied with everything that is possible, i.e. with the whole realm of essence at once, it would not be the consciousness of a living soul, having a particular moral destiny, but only hypostasis of intelligence, abstracted from all particular occasions. But can intelligence be abstracted from particular problems and from problems set by contingent facts?

Realms of Being, p. 565.

But to lose all objects of experience is not the same as to become oblivious to them: if Pac-Man left his two dimensional existence for our own then all substances he has ever known would be lost, since in our world two dimensionality is not a substance but a limit of substance. For all that, in his new perspective he would see in a single perspective what he before could only know from a moving, variable, and much more limited perspective that shifts over time.

In God a single thought suffices to capture everything in its distinction, while in us there is a distinct thought for every distinction in thought, and so just as a single three dimensional perspective suffices to capture all that is two-dimensional, the single divine perspective suffices to capture all that is divided in lower ones, and which the lower beings can only explore over time.  This is what STA means when he says that all thought is a participation in the divine light, and all things are seen within it. All knowledge causes unity because it makes a world, but from the perspective of divinity all these worlds are parts seen from a single, all encompassing perspective. To use STA’s idiom, all knowledge is a participation in divine knowledge.

An object is simply an intelligence in act, and so to posit actual intelligences without actual objects is a contradiction. To prove the existence of intelligence after death is to prove an object of thought after death. This object is in one sense just the material world, though it it no longer known from a perspective within that world. To think that this loss of perspective is a loss of object is ultimately to muddle the mode of knowing with the object of thought.