The Avengers and classical theism

Watched The Avengers again on Blu-ray the other night.  In a movie full of good lines, a few stand out for (of all things) their theological significance.  Take the exchange between Black Widow and Captain America after the Norse god Thor forcibly removes his brother Loki from S.H.I.E.L.D.’s custody, Iron Man gives chase, and Captain America prepares to follow:

Black Widow: I’d sit this one out, Cap.  

Captain America: I don’t see how I can.

Black Widow: These guys come from legend, they’re basically gods.

Captain America: There’s only one God, ma’am.  And I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that.

Or consider the scene in which Nick Fury, director of S.H.I.E.L.D., exchanges words with the imprisoned Loki:

Loki: It burns you to have come so close.  To have the Tesseract, to have power -- unlimited power -- and for what?  A warm light for all mankind to share?  And then to be reminded what real power is.

Nick Fury (walking away from Loki’s cell contemptuously): Well let me know if real power wants a magazine or something.

Finally, there is Loki’s defeat at the hands of the Hulk:

Loki: Enough!  You are all of you beneath me.  I am a god, you dull creature.  And I will not be bullied by…

[The Hulk grabs him, repeatedly smashes him to the floor like a rag doll, then walks away as Loki lays there moaning]

Hulk: Puny god.

We cannot assume Captain America to have had time between battles to study classical philosophy and theology, but his words could be read as containing implicitly the answer to pop atheism’s “one god further” objection (which I have discussed here, here, and here).  The God of classical theism is not “a god” among others, precisely because He isn’t an instance of any kind in the first place, not even a unique instance.  He is beyond any genus.  He is not “a being” alongside other beings and doesn’t merely “have” or participate in existence alongside all the other things that do.  Rather, He just is ipsum esse subsistens or Subsistent Being Itself.  He is First Cause not in the sense of being the cause that came before the second, third, fourth, fifth, etc. causes, but rather in the sense of having primal or absolutely underived causal power whereas everything else has causal power in only a derivative and thus secondary way.  He is not “a person” but rather the infinite Intellect and Will of which the persons of our experience are mere faint reflections.   Since He has no essence distinct from His existence which could even in principle be shared with anything else, He is not the sort of thing there could intelligibly be more than one of.  And so forth.  Nothing less than this could be the ultimate source of all things and thus nothing less could truly be divine.  (See my earlier posts on classical theism for the rundown.)

Hence the good Captain was correct to insist that there is only one God and that He just isn’t the sort of thing that wears a superhero costume, wields a hammer, can get knocked around by Iron Man, etc.  (Whether you think the God of classical theism actually exists is not to the point -- for the point is that if He exists, He is not the sort of thing of which Thor, Loki, et al. are instances.)  Fury was right to mock Loki’s claim to be “real power” since even if Loki existed, his power, however great, would still be merely participated or derived power rather than the Power Itself that is the God of classical theism.  The Hulk was right to dismiss Loki as “puny” despite his claim to divinity, since any god would, even if he existed, be merely one creature among others and thus (like everything else) be puny compared to the God of classical theism.  

Such beings, if they existed, would differ in no significant respect from the powerful extraterrestrials, other-dimensional beings, etc. of modern science fiction.  And thus it is no surprise that that is exactly how they are treated in contemporary pop culture.  Thor, Loki, and Co. would simply not be worthy of worship even if they existed.  But let’s give ‘em their due: They make for some bitchin’ comic book and movie characters!

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Was Aquinas a dualist?

At the start of chapter 4 of Aquinas(the chapter on “Psychology”), I wrote:

As I have emphasized throughout this book, understanding Aquinas requires “thinking outside the box” of the basic metaphysical assumptions (concerning cause, effect, substance, essence, etc.) that contemporary philosophers tend to take for granted.  This is nowhere more true than where Aquinas’s philosophy of mind is concerned.  Indeed, to speak of Aquinas’s “philosophy of mind” is already misleading.  For Aquinas does not approach the issues dealt with in this modern philosophical sub-discipline in terms of their relevance to solving the so-called “mind-body problem.”  No such problem existed in Aquinas’s day, and for him the important distinction was in any case not between mind and body, but rather between soul and body.  Even that is potentially misleading, however, for Aquinas does not mean by “soul” what contemporary philosophers tend to mean by it, i.e. an immaterial substance of the sort affirmed by Descartes.  Furthermore, while contemporary philosophers of mind tend to obsess over the questions of whether and how science can explain consciousness and the “qualia” that define it, Aquinas instead takes what is now called “intentionality” to be the distinctive feature of the mind, and the one that it is in principle impossible to explain in materialistic terms.  At the same time, he does not think of intentionality in quite the way contemporary philosophers do.  Moreover, while he is not a materialist, he is not a Cartesian dualist either, his view being in some respects a middle position between these options.  But neither is this middle position the standard one discussed by contemporary philosophers under the label “property dualism.”  And so forth.

To the modern philosophical reader, all this might make Aquinas sound very odd indeed, confusing and perhaps confused…  Yet had Aquinas been familiar with the ideas of contemporary philosophers of mind, he would have regarded them as the confused ones, and in particular as having gotten the basic conceptual lay of the land totally wrong.  For the “mind-body problem” is essentially an artifact of the early modern philosophers’ decision to abandon a hylemorphic conception of the world for a mechanistic one, and its notorious intractability is, in the view of Thomists, one of the starkest indications of how deeply mistaken that decision was.

End quote.  In a recent paper, the esteemed Alfred Freddoso takes his own Thomistic look at contemporary philosophy of mind, and explains how much of what is today taken for granted in the field is “bound to strike a Thomist as strange and insufficiently motivated.”  Nor is it only the views of materialists that Freddoso (and I) are critical of.  For reasons he clearly explains, the views of many dualists, and even of many orthodox Catholic thinkers, must from a Thomistic point of view be regarded as seriously deficient.  Give the paper a read.  You’ll find in it, among many other good things, a useful overview of the way the Thomistic approach to issues in the philosophy of mind reflects a broader Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy of nature.

I have one point of disagreement with Fred, though (as it seems he would agree) it is more terminological than substantive.  He says some very kind things about both my book The Last Superstition and David Oderberg’s book Real Essentialism.  But he takes exception to Oderberg’s (and my) tendency to characterize Aquinas’s position as “hylemorphic dualism.”  Fred writes:

Unlike Feser, I am very uneasy describing St. Thomas’s position as a form of dualism — even ‘hylemorphic dualism’ — since it is precisely the unity of the human being that St. Thomas wants to emphasize over against Plato’s position, which (as he interprets it) posits many substantial forms in the human composite.  (The term ‘hylemorphic dualism’ originates, I believe, with David Oderberg in Real Essentialism (New York: Routledge, 2007).) This is largely a verbal disagreement, but I for one resist making Thomistic philosophical anthropology conform to what I believe to be the illegitimate contemporary taxonomy of ‘solutions’ to the alleged ‘mind-body problem’, according to which each solution is either a type of materialism or a type of dualism.

Freddoso is right to say that the term “hylemorphic dualism” probably originates with David Oderberg (certainly it originates with him as far as David or I know), though it is David’s 2005 Social Philosophy and Policy paper “Hylemorphic Dualism” that (at least as far as I know) actually marks its first appearance.  But Aquinas’s position is characterized as “Thomistic dualism” in William Hasker’s 1999 book The Emergent Self and J. P. Moreland and Scott Rae’s 2000 book Body and Soul, and Aquinas is characterized as “a non-Cartesian substance dualist” in Eleonore Stump’s 2003 book Aquinas.  And there is a good reason why these (and other) writers classify Aquinas as a kind of dualist.  The reason is that is that Aquinas just obviously is a dualist given the sense of “dualism” that has long been operative in modern philosophy of mind.  As Stump writes:

It is clear that Aquinas rejects the Cartesian or Platonic sort of dualism.  On the other hand, Aquinas seems clearly in the dualist camp somewhere since he thinks that there is an immaterial and subsistent constituent of the subject of cognitive function.  (p. 212)

In particular, Aquinas holds that the human intellect is immaterial and that because it is, the human soul of which it is a power survives the death of the body.  And that is more than enough to make him a dualist as “dualism” is generally understood today.  To the vast majority of contemporary philosophers, to say “Aquinas thinks the soul is immaterial and survives the death of the body, but he isn’t a dualist” sounds a little like saying “Aquinas believed the existence of God can be demonstrated, but he isn’t a theist.”  

The reason Freddoso (and some other writers on Aquinas) resist the term “dualism” is that they tend to use it in an older sense, to refer more or less exclusively to what is today generally regarded only as one version of dualism among others -- specifically, to what Stump calls “the Cartesian or Platonic sort of dualism.”  On a Cartesian or Platonic view, the real you is something entirely immaterial -- your soul -- and the body is merely something with which you are contingently associated, and not essentialto you at all.  Human beings are violently sundered in two, the seamless unity of their material and immaterial aspects denied.  Naturally, Aquinas, who (following both Aristotle and Christian tradition alike) regards our bodily nature as essential to us, rejects such a view.  For that reason, Freddoso worries that by applying to Aquinas the “dualism” label:

Thomism gets put into the same general category as philosophical anthropologies according to which human beings are not properly speaking (i.e., per se) animals at all, but instead immaterial souls closely associated with animal bodies… One might have hoped for a more fine-grained problematic to begin with, where Thomistic philosophical anthropology would be seen as (a) clearly distinct from dualism in insisting that human beings are both unified substances and animals in the full-blooded sense and (b) clearly distinct from materialism in insisting that there is a radical metaphysical underpinning, viz., an immaterial form, for the human animal’s distinctiveness from other animals.

The trouble is that the term “dualism” just doesn’t have these exclusively Platonic and Cartesian implications in contemporary philosophy.  Many modern dualists are “property dualists,” who hold precisely that human beings are material things and indeed animals of a certain kind, but animals who happen to have immaterial properties in addition to material ones.  To be sure (and as the above quote from my Aquinasbook indicates) I would not classify Aquinas as a “property dualist” either, in part because it isn’t correct to describe him as holding that thoughts and the like are “properties” of a material substance.  But the existence of property dualism as a position within the broad dualist camp nevertheless illustrates the point that “dualism” as it is understood today simply does not imply the idea that a person’s body is not essential to him.  

Now Freddoso does have some things to say about property dualism, but his remarks seem to me somewhat odd, and are in my view in any case mistaken.  For one thing, he says that though property dualism “is often presented as an alternative to materialism” it is in fact “clearly a form of materialism.”  He also writes:

A zombie-world is one which is just like ours in its physical constitution and physical events, but in which there are no sensuous experiences.  Is a zombie world possible?  If it is, then even so moderate a form of materialism as property dualism is false, since the presence of the sensuous experiences cannot be accounted for merely by the presence of the physical, no matter how the latter is constituted, and sensings and feelings do not necessarily supervene on the physical.

The reason this is odd is that the notion of a “zombie” is commonly put forward precisely in arguments against materialism and in favor of property dualism! For example, David Chalmers’ book The Conscious Mind, which is an especially influential recent defense of the possibility of “zombies,” makes use of the notion precisely as a way of defending property dualism.  Since a zombie would be identical to us in all its material properties but devoid of consciousness, it follows (so the argument goes) that consciousness is not material but rather a non-material property of human beings.  (In his paper “Why I Am Not a Property Dualist,” John Searle argues that property dualism in fact threatens to collapse into a Cartesian-style substance dualism.  While I have criticizedother aspects of Searle’s paper, that much seems to me hardly less plausible than Freddoso’s opposite assertion.)

The reason Freddoso says what he does about property dualism seems to be that he associates it with a fairly strong claim about the supervenience of the mental on the physical.  But as Chalmers writes:

There is a weaker sort of property dualism with which [Chalmers’] view should not be confused.  It is sometimes said that property dualism applies to any domain in which the properties are not themselves properties invoked by physics, or directly reducible to such properties.  In this sense, even biological fitness is not a physical property.  But this sort of “dualism” is a very weak variety.  There is nothing fundamentally ontologically new about properties such as fitness, as they are still logically supervenient on microphysical properties.  Property dualism of this variety is entirely compatible with materialism.  By contrast, the property dualism that I advocate involves fundamentally new features of the world.  Because these properties are not even logically supervenient on microphysical properties, they are nonphysical in a much stronger sense.  When I speak of property dualism and nonphysical properties, it is this stronger view and the stronger sense of nonphysicality that I have in mind.  (p. 125)

Hence Freddoso is perhaps conflating what is really only one version of property dualism -- what Chalmers calls a “very weak variety” -- with property dualism as such.  Be that as it may, there is certainly nothing in property dualism per se that entails materialism.  And since property dualism also does not entail treating a person’s body as non-essential to him, there is nothing in dualism per se as the term “dualism” is generally understood today that entails a specifically Platonic or Cartesian conception of persons.  That narrow construal of “dualism” has become archaic.

Hence it seems to me that for a Thomist to insiston using “dualism” in the more narrow, archaic sense is like refusing to use the word “atom” the way modern physicists do on the grounds that the ancient atomists thought of atoms as essentially indivisible.  In both cases, the meaning of the term has as a matter of linguistic fact simply changed fundamentally and nothing of substance rides on it anyway.  Insisting on the older usage gains nothing and has as a downside that it sows confusion.  In the case at hand, refusing to allow that Aquinas could in any sense be called a dualist at best seems baffling to most contemporary readers (given that Aquinas affirmed the immateriality of the intellect and the immortality of the soul) and at worst threatens to foster positive misunderstandings (if, for example, it leads any contemporary readers to conclude that Aquinas’s position might be compatible with naturalism broadly conceived).  

As my longtime readers know, I have no problem whatsoever with insisting on old ideas and even old usages when something substantive is at stake.  Hence I am keen to insist not only on the fundamental importance of the Aristotelian theory of act and potency but even on the language of “act” and “potency,” since I think these terms have connotations which make them more suitable means of conveying the concepts in question than contemporary putative substitutes like “categorical properties” and “dispositional properties.”  

But there are other cases where the benefits of reviving older usage are balanced or even outweighed by the costs.  For example, if in every context I used the word “science” only in the technical Aristotelian sense of the word, I might please certain Aristotelian or Thomistic readers of the sort who occasionally complain (in the combox, say) that my usage is insufficiently traditional.  But I would baffle the vast majority of my readers, who would be led into grave and entirely avoidable misunderstandings, and who are (quite understandably) not keen to read through a primer on the history of philosophical linguistic usage as a prolegomenon to every blog post.  And in my estimation, preserving the archaic use of “dualism” is even less important than insisting in every context on the older sense of “science.”

But I hate to disagree with Fred, whose work I have long admired and from whom I have learned much.  Our minor disagreement notwithstanding, this latest paper is of great interest.  Again, give it a read.

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New Scholastic Meets Analytic Philosophy

Lindenthal-Institut in cooperation with the publisher Ontos Verlag announces an international colloquium on the theme “New Scholastic Meets Analytic Philosophy,” to be held in Cologne, Germany on December 7 - 8, 2013.  The invited speakers are E. J. Lowe, Uwe Meixner, David S. Oderberg, Edmund Runggaldier, Erwin Tegtmeier, and Edward Feser.  Details can be found here.

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Justice or revenge?

I have, in various places (e.g. here, here, here, here, here, and here), defended capital punishment on grounds of retributive justice.  And I’ve noted (following the late Ralph McInerny) that what many people who object to capital punishment really seem to find off-putting is the idea of punishment itself (capital or otherwise), smacking as it does of retribution.  A reader asks what the difference is between retributive justice and revenge.  It seems, he says, that there is no difference.  But if there isn’t, then it is understandable why many people object to capital punishment, and even to punishment itself.

I think the reader is correct to suggest that the perception of a link between retributive justice and revenge is the source of much opposition to capital punishment, and of suspicion of the notion of punishment itself.  The thinking seems to go something like this:

1. Revenge is bad.

2. But retribution is a kind of revenge.

3. So retribution is bad.

4. But punishment involves retribution.

5. So punishment is bad.

The trouble with this argument, some defenders of punishment might think, is with premise (2).  But while I would certainly want to qualify premise (2), the main problem in my view is actually with premise (1).  “Revenge” (and related terms like “vengeance” and “vindictiveness”) have come to have almost entirely negative connotations.  But that is an artifact of modern sensibilities, and does not reflect traditional Christian morality.  For there is a sense in which revenge is not bad, at least not intrinsically.  Indeed, there is a sense in traditional Christian morality in which revenge is a virtue.  What is bad are certain things that are often, but only contingently, associated with revenge.  Hence those who reject punishment on the grounds just summarized are not wrong to see a link between retribution and revenge.  Rather, they are wrong to assume that revenge is inherently bad.

Let me explain.  Or rather, let me allow Thomas Aquinas to explain:

[V]engeance is not essentially evil and unlawful….

Vengeance consists in the infliction of a penal evil on one who has sinned.  Accordingly, in the matter of vengeance, we must consider the mind of the avenger.  For if his intention is directed chiefly to the evil of the person on whom he takes vengeance and rests there, then his vengeance is altogether unlawful: because to take pleasure in another's evil belongs to hatred, which is contrary to the charity whereby we are bound to love all men.  Nor is it an excuse that he intends the evil of one who has unjustly inflicted evil on him, as neither is a man excused for hating one that hates him: for a man may not sin against another just because the latter has already sinned against him, since this is to be overcome by evil, which was forbidden by the Apostle, who says (Romans 12:21): "Be not overcome by evil, but overcome evil by good." 

If, however, the avenger's intention be directed chiefly to some good, to be obtained by means of the punishment of the person who has sinned (for instance that the sinner may amend, or at least that he may be restrained and others be not disturbed, that justice may be upheld, and God honored), then vengeance may be lawful, provided other due circumstances be observed. (Summa Theologiae II-II.108.1)

You might say, then, that vengeance just is retribution, and is lawful so long as it is carried out in the right spirit and in the right manner.  Indeed, as other moralists in the Thomistic tradition make clear, it is more than merely lawful.  For example, Prümmer’s Handbook of Moral Theology, once a standard reference work in the subject, classifies “revenge” as among the “virtues related to justice.”  Similarly, Volume II of McHugh and Callan’s Moral Theology: A Complete Course devote a section to “the virtue of vengeance” (sec. 2381).  

Of course, that does not mean that such authors would approve of the sorts of thing we usually think of these days as paradigm instances “revenge” or “vengeance” --  Michael Corleone shooting Sollozzo and McCluskey in The Godfather, say.  On the contrary, they would condemn these as acts of murder.  For one thing, only lawful authorities, and not private individuals, can legitimately inflict a penalty of death on someone who has merited it.  Of course, there are forms of revenge or vengeance that don’t involve the taking of life, and which might in principle be carried out by private individuals.  But even here, there is, as Prümmer notes, a danger that “excessive love of self or even hatred of the neighbor” may motivate an otherwise lawful act of vengeance, and that what presents itself as the virtue of revenge might in fact be its corresponding vice of excess, “cruelty or savagery.”  As McHugh and Callan add, such vicious excess can manifest itself in either “the quality or the quantity of the punishment.”  

But if there is a vice of excess corresponding to revenge or vengeance, there is also a vice of deficiency, namely what Prümmer calls “excessive laxity in punishment” and which McHugh and Callan say “rewards crime, or allows it to go unpunished, or imposes penalties which are agreeable to offenders, or not a deterrent, or not at all equal to the offense” (sec. 2383).  

Now what we have here is, obviously, in part a matter of semantics.  Words like “vengeance,” “revenge,” and “vindictiveness” have to some extent merely come to be used in a way that connotes what is really just a corruption of vengeance or revenge rightly understood.  Hence in the entry on “Vengeance” in Roberti and Palazzini’s Dictionary of Moral Theology of 1962, we are told on the one hand that:

In a general sense, the infliction of physical punishment upon someone as retribution for injury caused to another is called vengeance.  If done for good and just motives, e.g. love of justice, or preservation of the juridico-social order, or the correction of an evildoer, by a competent authority, according to laws, vindication, of itself, is a good act.

On the other hand, we are told:

However, if punishment for an evil deed is inflicted out of an ill-feeling toward the one who has offended, ill-treated, or caused suffering to another, or simply to satisfy one’s ill feeling toward his enemy, or for the pleasure of payment in kind, vengeance is an evil act, opposed to that precept of charity which prescribes that Christians love their neighbor even if an enemy.  The latter form of vindication is properly called vengeance.

Vengeance is a sin, and opposed to the precept of the Divine Master to love everyone, even enemies, and to pardon sincerely any offense or injury.  One of the main characteristics of vengeance is punishment of an offender beyond proper limits, with disregard of the laws which prohibit acts of vindictive justice by private individuals.

So for the Dictionary, in the “general” sense of the term -- that is to say, when used to refer to the sort of thing Aquinas, Prümmer, and McHugh and Callan have in mind -- an act of vengeance is “of itself, a good act.”  But what is “properly” called “vengeance” is the abuse of what Aquinas, Prümmer, and McHugh and Callan have in mind -- namely, retribution that is carried out in a spirit of hatred, or is excessively harsh, or is carried out by those without authority to punish.  Here the Dictionary seems to give a nod to contemporary usage while agreeing in substance with the earlier authors.

Still, the issue is not merely verbal.  For it seems that what are in fact perfectly innocent and indeed honorable motives on the part of those who defend capital punishment are often wrongly assimilated to the dishonorable motives condemned by the authors I’ve quoted.  Hence those who sincerely believe that some offenders simply deserve to die given the enormity of their crimes, that justicewould not be served unless they were executed, that they would in effect be “getting away with” their crimes were they not executed, etc. are sometimes characterized as “vindictive,” “vengeful,” or the like.  If these words are meant in the sense in which Aquinas et al. would use them, then the claim is true but is not a criticism, or at least not a criticism that doesn’t simply beg the question; for vindictiveness or vengefulness in that sense is just a desire that retributive justice be carried out, and that is, all things being equal, a good thing, or so defenders of capital punishment would claim.  But if what is meant instead is that those who think murderers deserve the death penalty, that justice requires it, etc. are necessarily motivated by a spirit of hatred, then the charge is false; while if those who make the charge are claiming that the punishment is excessive, then they are (once again) simply begging the question.

No doubt those who advocate severe punishment for horrendous crimes very often really do (quite understandably, if wrongly) hate the offender.  Outrage at injustice can easily degenerate into hatred of the unjust, just as amorousness can degenerate into animal lust.  But it would be fallacious to assimilate amorousness to animal lust, and it is no less fallacious to assimilate the desire for just punishment to hatred of the offender.  They are distinct, however commonly conjoined.  

It is also worth emphasizing that the mercy and forgiveness that many would pit against retribution in fact presuppose retribution.  It is only if someone deserves punishment that you can show mercy to him by not inflicting it.  And forgiveness is quite empty if the one you forgive does not merit the ire you would otherwise direct toward him.

Needless to say, a critic might reject the moral and metaphysical presuppositions of the view of justice to which I’ve been giving expression.  Defending those presuppositions is a separate task.  The present point is just that merely to characterize that view as “vengeful” or the like is to offer precisely nothing by way of rational criticism of it.  

But all this revenge stuff can get pretty heavy, so let’s end on a lighter note.  For a look at the fun side of vengeance, I give you the fetching Cobie Smulders chewing the scenery in a now famous clip from the gag reel of The Avengers. 

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