Just Thomism

To be raised Catholic is to be tempted to take a cross as nothing but a crucifix without a corpus, but the two are ontologically different. The crucifix is an icon, i.e. an instrument of liturgical and devotional piety; the cross is an ideological symbol, indicating unity of dogma and doctrine and the power to maintain it. There is an interesting theological history waiting to be written on the valuing of one over the other. Constantine, Medieval realism and the Black Plague, Protestantism, etc.

1.) Much of the discussion about free will occurs in the free will vs. determinism debate, where “free will” is nothing more than something undetermined. But how good of a look do we get at free will from its supposed indeterminacy?

2.) Libet-style experiments certainly consider something we are undetermined about, e.g. whether to move our wrist at time 6 or 8 or whether to push a button on the left or the right, etc. In all such choices, we want to choose between undetermined alternatives where there is nothing at stake.  Does that qualification make a difference?

3.) Consider the times you are undetermined and there is something very much at stake. You’re trying to make a decision, and when it wakes you up at night you can’t get back to sleep for two hours. All your alternatives carry the threat of a very large mistake, and no matter how many times you turn the idea over in your head you remain trapped in your head.

4.) Maybe you resolve this stress and maybe you don’t, but here’s how it tends to resolve for me. At some point you find your way into a conversation with someone else where you have to bear your heart, and the other person responds in kind. This in itself isn’t enough to resolve things, but it often (usually? reliably?) gets you one step closer to a resolution. The resolution comes from another heart-to-heart discussion yielding an insight where the right path opens up, confusions get dispelled, things that were out-of-proportion return to their real proportion, and you experience a joy and relief. The aporia is resolved in a relatively simple conclusion, the objections are reborn as prompts that now point toward the truth of your resolution, and the argument is over.

5.) So indetermination about something that matters is a sort of insight-starvation or insight-hunger. So what then?

6.) Sam Harris claims if free will  appears anywhere, it is in the sort of indetermination about things that don’t matter. Think of a city, any city. I went with “Chicago”. What just happened? My interior monologue went like “I doesn’t matter which, so just go for it… well, don’t think of something too obvious – just because it’s random doesn’t license picking the same lame city as everyone else…well, whatever, just go with Chicago.” The monologue reveals some parts of my own personality or temperament, which are deeply ingrained if not natural habits. In the face of this kind of indetermination, one decides to hand over the process to natural proclivities, temperamental elements, the gut, etc. This makes the result is fitting, though not arising from insight.

7.) Choices about things that don’t matter are less choices than about things that do matter. Free choices belong most of all to rational beings, and whatever is just as easily decided by a coin flip is less rational than what demands deliberation and counsel. But when things matter, indetermination reveals itself as insight hunger or insight-starvation. The indetermination of free will is thus heavily, though not entirely, saturated by ignorance. Indetermination is a desire to follow truth, to be right, etc, which shows itself most clearly to us when we are starved or hungry for it, in the face of alternatives demanding insight to resolve.

8.) This account has to alter if applied to angelic or divine freedom, but some parts do scale.

Form is anything lost or gained by change, matter is what changes to another form.

Examples: Since “being on the left” is lost by moving to the right, “being a cat” is lost when a falcon eats the cat, “being musical” is gained by practice, all these are forms. Considering the same things as able to be on the right, able to be a falcon, or able to be musical is to consider them as material.

The composition of matter and form is therefore not of one thing to another, making the whole more massive or heavy, but the reality that the same thing in one way ceases to be by change (qua form) and in another way comes to be by it (qua matter.)

Question 3 on divine simplicity clarifies how God is a cause of created things. Thomas is not trying to shrink God down to a self-identical mathematical point but to explain how he relates to created action, existence and intelligibility.

1.) Q. 3 a. 1-2 Action: God’s spirituality follows immediately his being the immobile cause of motion. To be in motion belongs first to matter and then to quantitative extension (the first being principium and the second principiatum) and God needs neither to cause motion. Of course created forms are also immobile causes of motion, but they are also parts of larger wholes, and so Thomas also clarifies in the second article that the divine immobility is not simply from a immobile part, but that he is entirely immobile.

Divine spirituality thus shows how God’s action causes all other action, in virtue of the perfection belonging to it from immobility. Actus perfecti causes actus imperfecti.

2.) Q. 3 a. 3-4. Existence. The perfection of the divine action follows from the perfection of his being. Being is the first concept intellects form, so we clarify it not by reducing it to something more basic but by specifying what kinds of things it means first. As existence it is simply existing. As essence, being is what is apt to exist, as opposed to what is impossible, and in its opposition to the impossible it is also what is intelligible or apt to be intelligible; as supposit, it is an existing essence as distinct, but not as distinct from another essence, e.g. it is duck not as distinct from fish, but as distinct from another duck.

Thomas first clarifies that supposit and essence are the same in God, or that  God (used as a proper name) is divinity. While always distinct in our thought, these two senses of being are distinct in reality only when supposit adds particular matter to an essence defined by matter and form, and as God has no matter at all, whether in a definition or otherwise, we can say either that his essence includes the perfection of supposit (like concrete existence and individuation, or any perfection of a proper name), or that his supposit has all the perfection of essence (like being intelligible in itself, or any perfection of an abstract name said of him.)

Just as nothing needs to be added to divinity to make it God, nothing needs to be added to divinity to make it exist in fact. While all these senses of being are distinct logically or semantically, none in God are distinct ontologically. Divinity is “apt to exist” in the understated sense that it is ontologically the same as its existence.

The upshot is that all a divine supposit is, whether as divinity or existing, anything predicable or attributable to it. In the Christian tradition this is most insisted upon in the doctrine of the trinity, which concerns the predicable attributes of Father, Son, and Spirit, but simplicity relates to creation as the grounding for anything true of creatures predicated substantially of God. Predicable attributes of God and creatures are caused to exist in creatures because they formally exist first in God, the way that anything that is predicated of something per accidens or per se secondarily is predicated of it only because of what is predicated per se and first. Just as things fly in virtue of what flies per se and first (i.e. what produces lift in the air by differential pressures over an airfoil) so too things exist, or are good, dignified, causative, immaterial, actual, fathers, cognitive, alive, persons, or anything else said of God and creatures in virtue of a divinity that is all of those things per se and first, indeed, who is identified with all those predicates. God is, for example, the goodness by which things are good, not in the sense that he enters into the composition with creatures (as Thomas will make explicit at the end of Question Three) and yet for the same reason that the essence described by the definition of flight causes things to fly. Natural predicates like flight differ from a metaphysical predicate like “good” because natural predicates are defined with matter, and so their forms existing per se and first also exist in matter, whereas what is per se and first in a metaphysical predicate exists separate from matter.

At the heart of scientific explanation, whether ancient or contemporary, is the search for what corresponds per se and first to some term, which is nothing other than to see clearly and explicitly what comes to us first in a confused and relative manner. In fact, “to know what belongs to a predicate per se and first” is nothing other than a per se and first account of the more confused claim that “science wants to figure out what things are” or “science figures out what is real.” Again, “to find what is per se and first” is what is per se and first in the relatively confused and merely negative distinction between correlation (which is accidental or per se and secondary) and causation. Seen from this angle, divine simplicity is the terminus of the desire for a scientific explanation of metaphysical predicates, and so to ground an account of things true about some physical substances and accidents in their first and proper cause.

3.) Intelligibility. In the fifth article of Question Three, Thomas proves God is not in a genus, and so exceeds any positive knowledge contained, however confusedly, in the proper object of our intellect. Just as in the ontological order God is per se and first, so also he is in the epistemological order, not in the sense that he is first known, but that intelligible predicates are said per se and first of him: actual, truth, immaterial, intelligible, logos, etc.

Say I define physicalism as:

1.) The physical is non-mental

2.) The physical causes the mental.

Left at this, the scholastic division between ens naturale and ens intentionale is physicalist, since the physical causes the mental in the sense that the forms we know are received from things; and yet, per (1), it is not the same thing for a form to exist naturally as intentionally.

I object: I meant “the physical causes the mental” in the same way that, a la Scrooge’s hypothesis, a bit of undigested beef causes Marley’s ghost, i.e. mental being is only apparent being. OK, but intentional being is also apparent as opposed to real being. It is form not as in matter but in cognition. Intentional being doesn’t add to the number of things existing naturally, but is only a different manner in which natural form exists. Intentional being is only another natural being in the way that the word “cat” is another cat. Sometimes intentional forms might be mistaken for the real forms that they arose from – we might mistake the effects of beef for a ghost – but for Scrooge to know he is mistaken is to get an intentional form right, since the ghost is beef as known or intentional.

You’re taking a test on the order in which the states entered the Union, and you read the following question: 

Kentucky…

a.) Was the 13th state admitted to the union. 

b.) Was the 15th state admitted to the union. 

c.) Was the 17th state admitted to the union. 

d.) None of the above. 

Any multiple choice question would work, of course, but the point is to see the identity and distinction of subject, predicate, and union. The very possibility of asking a multiple choice question makes the distinction of the three clear, as subject, predicate, and union are divided into prompt, one-of-many options, and correct answer. This distinction, however, is not of three individuals siloed off from each other, but the distinction in a three-fold mutual indwelling. That (b) is the sole appropriate predicate proceeds from the prompt, and this “being appropriate” is the union of the two. 

So when we say that the Third Person of the trinity descended in tongues of fire, we do not mean that the tongues were a private psychological experience that the two other persons of the trinity experienced from the outside, but that whenever there is a union of The Son and Father, that just is the Holy Spirit. Just as in the context of the order of States (notice the context!) the full sentence “Kentucky AND (b)” has the same content as “Kentucky” OR “b”, so also in divinity “Father AND Son” (that is, the Holy Spirit) is the same divinity as “Father” OR “Son”. 

Subjects of sentences are sorts of foundations, giving rise to predicates as quasi-efficient causes. Predicates of sentences are formal components, being the full logos or intelligibility of the subject (though in calling them the “full logos” we do not mean to render the subject in itself meaningless or unintelligible.) Unions of sentences are copulative order of subjects to predicates.  

(this is my own take on an idea better argued by Urban Hannon)

By Aristotle’s own account, actuality is at the bottom of his metaphysics, and so explains all else while being inexplicable by prior concepts:

Our meaning (of actuality) can be seen in the particular cases by induction, and we must not seek a definition of everything but be content to grasp the analogy, that it is as that which is building is to that which is capable of building, and the waking to the sleeping, and that which is seeing to that which has its eyes shut but has sight, and that which has been shaped out of the matter to the matter, and that which has been wrought up to the unwrought.

Metaphysics IX: 6

Aristotle’s first three examples are operative or second acts, which are more actual than first or merely entitative acts. Later, in book XII, Aristotle proves there is something purely actual and so more actual than anything else, and so the perfect fullness of actuality is this being’s fullest operative act. In the real order, actuality first means the divine happiness.

So in Aristotle’s metaphysics, all that exists is some falling away from or approaching toward God’s own happiness. The Aristotelian critique of Platonic participation, therefore, is of a participation in a disembodied and inactive mere idea, as opposed to participation in the uninterrupted and indiminishable enjoyment that God takes in himself.

In explaining why Christ wrote nothing, Thomas argues: 

[I]f Christ had committed His doctrine to writing, men would have had no deeper thought of His doctrine than that which appears on the surface of the writing.

ST 3.42.4

We have here a demand that teaching develop and deepen; that even divine words – especially divine words? – are vitiated if their sense is taken as a limit on their meaning. 

The desire to return ad fontes or to the “pure original” is thus not an unqualified good, nor is an inability to find things in the plain sense of the original a reason to throw them out. One shouldn’t throw out fruit in a misguided attempt to get back to the vine. 

We relate to the corporate as impersonal, and even anti-personal. Our paradigm for the corporate is, well, the corporation, which is a set of relations where “persons” fall into and fill up slots in an entirely replaceable way. The corporation is a perfect and complete structure into which one simply just adds people, replacing them whenever they can’t do their task.

This corporate structure is how we prefer to arrange everything ordered to a common good: governments, schools, parishes, hospitals, gyms, sports teams, any big-enough club, worship communities, etc. We like the system and believe it works.

For all that, it is utterly impersonal, and its unrivaled presence in our lives trains us to instinctively oppose corporate and personal goods. It is axiomatic to us that common goods are depersonalizing. What matters in collective action or seeking a common good is a function, and any person fulfilling that function is perfectly equivalent to another. If you make the sandwiches, get on base, preach the sermons, or do surgery just as well as the other guy, you can replace whoever works at Subway, plays baseball, is pastor, or does surgeries. In fact, if you do any of the things better, you deserve to replace them.

There remains, however, a glaring exception to this: the family. While the family has a sort of arrangement into which persons “fill slots”, they do not fill them in a functional way. Whatever sisters ought to do, they aren’t replaced by someone who could do it better (if it even makes sense to understand sisters as filling functional roles.) The common good of a family, in glaring opposition to all other common goods we experience, is not in competition with the personal existence of the family members.

What we mean by “personal existence” includes this irreplaceability that we gesture at in talking about “the dignity of persons”. While the minimal sense of this dignity demands, say, not killing people, this is clearly a part of a larger sense that persons are irreplaceable. We acknowledge this irreplaceability in the “commitment” of romantic love – a society of two persons! – but we have a very difficult time preserving personal dignity in any society larger.

For Catholics, this makes for an unintelligible Church. The mystical body becomes depersonalizing, and the bride of Christ becomes a metaphor for  a faceless and impersonal participation in the salvation of JesusCo®. Such an idea is grotesque, and certainly not worth anyone’s shed blood. True, the Church has offices that can be filled by others, but one is not baptized into an office but into God’s family. The Church is corporate and has a common good, but it is a common good that, like the family, preserves the dignity of the person.

What gets called the relativity of motion is that place is extrinsic to the placed. Local motion doesn’t need a backdrop, it needs this place extrinsic to it, that place extrinsic to it, and both places extrinsic to each other.

Because both places are extrinsic to each other, we can place a box around both and move the box in place, and then put an even larger box around those places ad infinitum. And so we generate the infinite spaces of Lucretius’s javelin. It’s easy to take this as making infinite place the divine womb of physical being, but the ontological cash value of the metaphor is that quantity in itself cannot be whole. Quantity exists to facilitate motion, which is not actual simply speaking but the act of a potential as such. Motion demands an extrinsic actuality, and so speaking of the “whole system of mobile things” involves an abstraction in the mind that can’t exist in reality, like “the whole process of the baseball causing the home run.” If this is the story you’re telling, it can start from a home base placed anywhere and end at an outfield wall placed anywhere, and as this need not be any definite distance, the distance is certainly infinite. This infinity, however, arises from an abstraction from agency – which is not infinite but to an end.