Just Thomism

The difference between our world and a Parmenidean world is matter, the subject of motion. So Parmenidean worlds are immaterial.

But the domain of forms as forms, or mind, is an unchanging Parmenidean world, where all forms are acts of one form, making a single perfection.

All form is a principle of operation. The difference is whether the form operates entirely from its own intrinsic resources in separation from other forms, or whether it also operates from a form apt to be in another. The first sort of form is non-cognitive, the second cognitive.

Plato* makes it clear his system is distinct from natural science, and in some sense opposed to it, since sciences reduce to fundamental integral parts while Plato reduces to form and therefore also, in a different sense, to the teleological causality of mind. Plato’s system has costs, of course: even Plato is clear that his own approach has a sort of simple-mindedness that science has no patience for, since explaining by form often amounts to saying things are bigger by bigness, hot by heat, alive by life (or “soul”) etc.

For all that, forms exist and so overlooking them leaves some things inexplicable. The “hard problem of consciousness”, for example, is what knowledge or consciousness adds to mere physical information or encoding, but what it adds is a different ratio or esse of form, i.e. form as intentional or ordered to knowledge. So long as form is left out of the discussion consciousness will always be illusory or irrelevant. No matter how  precise, useful and predictive our scientific accounts of knowledge get, they’ll involve an explanation where an addition to physical and encoded information is superfluous.

There is a similar “big problem” about the universe – as Hawking put it: “Why does the universe bother to exist?” The problem is insoluble from within science since existence is not just form but the forma formarum. Existence is most of all what we mean by form, relative to which other forms are not so much beings as ordered to being.

In the absence of form it becomes impossible to give any principled division between physics, chemistry, and biology. The living is divided from the non-living by form, and the non-living divides into the absolutely simple and the complex molecular by another formal division, with chemists seeking to reduce the complex to the simple and physicists seeking the simple absolutely. Given only science, no one can figure out why one would ever divide these sciences from any principle intrinsic to them, but as soon as one sees that the fundamental inanimate, complex inanimate, and the animate are three orders differing by form, the reason for their division is obvious and unavoidable.

The inability to give a principled distinction between the animate and inanimate will arise in part from an inability to see the distinction between the natural and artificial orders, since this too reduces to nature having an intrinsic principle whereas the artificial, even at its most complex, (the machine) does not. It’s from this that the sciences have their peculiar disposition to atheism, for it’s the forms in things that are most of all what are divine in them, and whose intrinsic powers of operation are always taken for granted in human art. Said more simply, overlooking form leaves no principle for dividing human art and divine art in kind.

Because form is the principle of operation, the sciences cannot give a primary source of operation or action, but will always chase it back either infinitely or to a beginning that is only such accidentally or by fiat. Sciences always take up the story of an action in medias res, so the causal story they tell is on the one hand deterministic or random (depending on what your theory of laws is) and on the other hand homogeneous with no essential first principle. No cosmological argument is possible in scientific terms, except accidentally, and even this accidental theistic argument gives one no scientific resources to describe its cause as divine.

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*As accepting the reality and causality of form, of course, “Plato” is Aristotle is Neoplatonism is the whole of Scholasticism, notwithstanding their violent diversity. Still, all the points in the first paragraph are Plato’s in his argument against Kebes in Phaedo. 

Material and cognitive subjects are opposed, but allow for a two-stage gradient between the purely material subject and the purely cognitive one.

Matter, which has one form but always has an order to another, gains the other by losing what it has. This is how matter solves the puzzle of Parmenides, or why a material world can move and change.

Knowing subjects are forms with an order to another, but which gain that other for the perfection of their own form. In a knowing subject, forms distinct from it, if received, perfect it. Forms distinct from the cognitive subject perfect its form while remaining distinct. 

Because the whole force of the comparison leads to a negation of matter in the knowing subject, speaking of the knowers “receiving” or “being informed” is not essential every mode of cognition. Even where knowledge requires passivity, it is also essentially and more formally impassive. Again, where knowledge involves receptivity, the knowledge happens not in receiving – which is motion and actus imperfecti, but only in the actus perfecti of cognition.

Among created beings, at one extreme there are purely material subjects, which are thus entirely non-cognitive, and others entirely cognitive: angels. Between these there is a two stage gradient, either requiring material receptivity on the side of the subject (senation) or not on the side of the subject but only on the side of the object (intellects that are forms of bodies.)

Material: Sense object as thing.

But the sensible can be known in one way and not in another, it is intelligible under one ratio and not in another. Truth about it allows for error about it. One is not merely knowing or ignorant. We must introduce a principle into the sensible as thing allowing for this.

So is circularity an idea, or something circles have?

Is diabetes something in the knowledge base of endocrinologists, or what makes someone diabetic?

Existence: subject of metaphysics or a common factor all the non-illusions I’ve ever encountered?

Is this post something I wrote or you know?

The answers are all “yes” since circularity, diabetes, existence, and this post are all one res that, in the above, were considered as different in ratio. Asking whether circularity is in my mind or in circles is like asking whether the door is the way in or the way out. Being “real” and being “thought” are distinct in the same way that being “an entrance” and being “an exit” are: just as the same door is both, it’s the same post that I wrote and you read.

In one sense, to notice circles are circular by circularity is the only thing dumber than speaking of opium causing sleep by its soporific powers, and before this, Ockham complained that this sort of thing leaves us saying nonsense like nothing is nothing by nothingness. I’ll happily concede that Molière and Ockham both noticed something true while insisting that they say something both dangerous and fatal if they try to speak about the principle of union between mind and world: Form.

Sam Harris and Robert Sapolsky both deny free choice by noting that any human act is part of a larger causal environment and therefore arises from causes beyond one’s control. Admittedly, this is not the majority philosophical opinion, but I value the argument since I think it foregrounds an important fork in the road.

So the key premise is what acts by prior causes does not act by itself. But free choice demands acting by oneself, QED. One response is to note that to assert prior causes of an act in some way is not to assert them in every way, and so the Sapolsky-Harris argument would fall to the fallacy of secundum quid and simpliciter. True, what is absolutely free and so absolutely self-caused would certainly have to be at the absolute beginning of a causal series, and so be presumptively divine, but this wouldn’t rule out things that are at the beginning of causal series in some way. Even if we concede (and I in fact think this is true) that my freedom demands I be the source of being, moral choice does not demand I be the source of being as such or absolutely, but only of intentional being insofar as it is a cause of my acts.

Very well, say Sapolsky-Harris, but don’t these intentions arise in you from you-know-not-where? Even if I can explain making this intention, either I made it from some previous intention or not, which gives me a causal series requiring something outside my own intention.  I concede the truth of this. Part of the reason I concede it is that Aristotle insists on it too (see quotation below.) So the question is not whether there is a cause prior to thought, but only what sort of cause it could be.

This is where we come to a fork in the road mentioned above: either we allow for prior causes more perfect than thought, or we see all causes as at the same level of thought. Obviously, if one takes thought as purely material and all prior causes as homogeneous with it, or even if one allows for emergent levels of natural causes in a fundamentally natural world, one is homogenizing causes. So taken, thought seems inescapably generated from a non-rational world, or rather just to be a relatively small part of a non-rational world. The causal theory is certainly plausible, but it demands that any rational justification of my thought be reduced to the non-rational order and so be illusory.

In other words, when reason asserts its rights at all, even when asserting that right within the context of the argument just given, it hangs upon a cause transcending reason, which, by its transcendence, stands even to my own sourcehood of being as something more perfect. The causes of reason and choice – and even of the non-rational order – are not ultimately beneath these things, demanding a causal reduction that pulls down; but above it, demanding a causal reduction that points upward to causes in comparison to which even our reason is lower.

-Any theory of evil has to recognize that the act is committed in the process of persons seeking real goods, that is, things we would want for them and for ourselves.

-The cold I had last week was some virus flourishing and rejoicing – indeed its coming as close to God as possible for it.

-Participation isn’t just a relation between more and less perfect. The gymnast who scores 8.8 doesn’t participate in another earning a perfect 10. Participation demands the higher perfection shares its perfection with a lower, in such a way that the higher is somehow the good of the lower.

-Marital union rests on the physical unity of the persons as a principle of human life, and the mystical union of Christ’s body on the physical unity of God and humanity as principle of a divine life.

-I hear Christ’s lament when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth as referring to the hardening of hearts and cooling of charity at the end of the world. Without detracting from this sense, those to whom he addressed it did not take it as a question about the end, but a question about whether they would succeed in founding the faith in the first place. For us, Christ’s words are about winding down to the end, for the Apostles, they were a challenge to ensure that the faith spread far and wide before the Apostles themselves died. Both interpretations are true, but their’s was truer.

-The highest unions preserve the distinction between their members: the union of principles in sexual reproduction; the union of accidents and organs in sensation; the union of substance and cognition in intellection; the  union of Christ and the baptized in the mystical body or by grace, or of God and the intellect in the beatific vision; of the Logos and the human nature of Christ, or of the union of persons in the divine nature. At each stage there is a greater and greater overcoming of the division of the distinct and the homogenization or confusion of unity.

-What is higher than what we can understand is by definition excluded from being an object of intellect, but not from being an object of will. The man largely ignorant about what makes his country worth dying for can nevertheless die for it.

Physics reduces to conserved quantities as the primum mobile.

To pray each mystery as one invited into it as a friend of the family. That she told you story of the annunciation as one of her close friends, that she wakes you up in the middle of the night to see the newborn Christ, that you were with her in Jerusalem when she found her twelve year old son.

Not that this does away with the amazement of it all. How in the world did I end up privy to the secrets of a queen, or accompanying a king and divinity?