Natural law or supernatural law?

When you blur a real distinction between any two things A and B, you invariably tend, at least implicitly, to deny the existence of either A or B.  For instance, there is, demonstrably, a real distinction between mind and matter.  To blur this distinction, as materialists do, is implicitly to deny the existence of mind.  Reductionist materialism is, as I have argued in several places (such as here), really just eliminative materialism in disguise.  There is also a clear moral distinction between taking the life of an innocent person and taking the life of a guilty person.  To blur this distinction, as many opponents of capital punishment do, is to blur the distinction between innocence and guilt.  That is why opposition to capital punishment tends to go hand in hand with suspicion of the very idea of punishment as such.

The eliminativism can go in either direction.  If there really is no distinction between mind and matter, then you could take this to mean that mind per seis unreal and what really exists is just matter.  But of course, you could equally well take it to entail that matter is an illusion, and opt for idealism rather than materialism.  If there really is no morally important distinction between the guilty and the innocent, then you could reject punishment altogether.  But you could equally well conclude (since in practice we can, after all, hardly avoid punishing evildoers to some extent) that not only the guilty, but the innocent too, might sometimes be punished if the consequences of doing so are good enough. 

A real distinction that is all too often blurred in theology is that between the natural and the supernatural -- between the limited relationship with God that is our natural end and the gratuitous, supernatural gift of the beatific vision; between the knowledge of God’s existence and nature that is available to philosophical reason, and that which is given only in revelation; and between the natural law and supernatural virtue.  One way to blur this distinction is to collapse the supernatural into the natural -- for example, to reduce God to a symbol, and Christian charity to a mere political program for social justice.  This, as Karl Barth famously put it, is not to speak of God at all but merely to speak of man in a loud voice, a kind of virtual atheism.

But another way to blur the distinction is to go in the other direction, absorbing the natural into the supernatural -- a tendency to be found in Catholic Nouvelle Théologie writers like Henri de Lubac and, it seems, in David Bentley Hart.  Where morality is concerned, the tendency is, as we’ve seen recently with Hart, to denude the notion of natural law of significant content, so that it is only through the lens of revelation that one can clearly see what the natural law requires and only via grace that one can to any extent obey it.  (I do not say that this is exactly what Hart himself thinks – though it seems to me he did not make it clearexactly what he thinks – but only that this is the direction in which his recent remarks about natural law tend.)

But a law that cannot be known from the nature of things, but only via special divine revelation, is not the natural law.  And a law that we could never have obeyed anyway is not a law for whose violation we can be held responsible.  To make knowledge of and obedience to the natural law essentially dependent on grace is to make of it something supernatural.  It is also to fail to do justice to the facts.  When an ill and tired pagan mother is moved by the tears of her crying child to come to its assistance at the expense of her own health and comfort, the love that moves her is real love, not some counterfeit.  Socrates’ self-control was truly virtuous.  Aristotle really was wise.  Confucius really was noble.  Plato had a genuine love for the good, and Plotinus for the divine.  Examples can easily be multiplied.  To deny that such virtue really is virtue, despite its having arisen apart from Christian revelation, would simply be to deny the obvious.

This is not Pelagianism, first because it has nothing to do with our attainment of the supernatural end of the beatific vision; and second, because even the highest degree of natural excellence attained by the pagans is flawed, like a beautiful Greek statue that has been chucked violently down the stairs and had various bits and pieces busted off of it.  (And of course, the operation of the natural order no less than the supernatural presupposes the conserving and concurring action of God.)  The virtue of the pagan qua pagan, however real, is never without serious defect and never extends beyond the natural order.  It can never get him an inch closer to the beatific vision, even if it makes him more suited to the natural knowledge of God that the great pagan philosophers had, albeit in an imperfect way. 

When one denies all this and absorbs the natural into the supernatural, implying that the only real virtue is Christian virtue and the only real theological knowledge is revealed knowledge, the sequel is to move in one of two opposed further directions.  The first is to condemn non-Christian thought and culture as without value, and to deny that there is any common moral and theological ground on which the Christian might win over the non-Christian.  The salvation even of the most apparently noble pagan comes to seem like a long shot at best, since even his apparent goodness is regarded as essentially just evil in disguise.  This makes of Christianity something repulsive and inhuman, unattractive to the non-Christian, not because he hates the good that Christianity upholds, but because he hates the refusal of such a Christianity to acknowledge the good to be found in nature and in human civilization. 

The alternative, opposite tendency is to affirm the evident good to be found in non-Christian thought, culture, and everyday life, but then to conclude that it must “really” be a result of grace, and that in some way non-Christians must “really” be Christians without realizing it, or at least would opt to become Christians if only they realized they should.  Their natural virtue, in other words, must “really” be supernatural even if they don’t know it.  The Christian merely has the “fullness” of the very same thing the non-Christian has, and the salvation of all well-meaning non-Christians seems certain.

Absorbing nature into grace thus tends to lead either to the Christianity of the rigorist, the prig, the holy roller, the buckle-shod puritan; or to the Christianity of the laxist, the bleeding heart, the universalist, the sandal-wearing bearded fruit-juice drinker (to borrow a choice phrase from Orwell).  Naturally, the Aristotelian-Scholastic theologian -- who insists on upholding the real distinction between nature and grace, the natural and the supernatural -- adopts the sober middle position between these extremes, and his shoes are both sensible and agreeably stylish. 

Again, I am not saying that Hart -- or de Lubac or like-minded thinkers for that matter -- would want to go to either of the extremes in question.  The trouble is that when one blurs the distinction between the natural and the supernatural, it is difficult to show how one can avoid them.

In recent decades some Christians seem to have taken a view that amounts to a bizarre amalgamation of both extremes -- a notion to the effect that non-Christians are more or less incapable of any natural virtue, and yet somehow are certain to be saved precisely for that reason.  Pope Benedict XVI, when still Cardinal Ratzinger, described this sort of attitude in his 1991 talk “Conscience and Truth.”  He recounts a conversation he had with someone he describes as “a strict Catholic who performed his moral duty with care and conviction” yet who expressed what Ratzinger characterizes as a “disquieting” view.  I’ll quote the entire relevant passage:

In the course of a dispute, a senior colleague, who was keenly aware of the plight to being Christian in our times, expressed the opinion that one should actually be grateful to God that He allows there to be so many unbelievers in good conscience. For if their eyes were opened and they became believers, they would not be capable, in this world of ours, of bearing the burden of faith with all its moral obligations. But as it is, since they can go another way in good conscience, they can reach salvation. What shocked me about this assertion was not in the first place the idea of an erroneous conscience given by God Himself in order to save men by means of such artfulness—the idea, so to speak, of a blindness sent by God for the salvation of those in question. What disturbed me was the notion that it harbored, that faith is a burden which can hardly be borne and which no doubt was intended only for stronger natures—faith almost as a kind of punishment, in any case, an imposition not easily coped with. According to this view, faith would not make salvation easier but harder. Being happy would mean not being burdened with having to believe or having to submit to the moral yoke of the faith of the Catholic church. The erroneous conscience, which makes life easier and marks a more human course, would then be a real grace, the normal way to salvation. Untruth, keeping truth at bay, would be better for man than truth. It would not be the truth that would set him free, but rather he would have to be freed from the truth. Man would be more at home in the dark than in the light. Faith would not be the good gift of the good God but instead an affliction. If this were the state of affairs, how could faith give rise to joy? Who would have the courage to pass faith on to others? Would it not be better to spare them the truth or even keep them from it? In the last few decades, notions of this sort have discernibly crippled the disposition to evangelize. The one who sees the faith as a heavy burden or as a moral imposition is unable to invite others to believe. Rather he lets them be, in the putative freedom of their good consciences.

End quote.  Now the attitude Cardinal Ratzinger was criticizing is deeply perverse and delusional, and I think it is in fact even worse than his remarks indicate.  The cardinal was making the point that the Catholic faith is a benefit rather than a burden, a source of moral knowledge and strength which, naturally, can only aid rather than inhibit one’s salvation.  But notice that the moral teachings his interlocutor was concerned with were no doubt the usual ones that the Church’s critics revile her for upholding -- the condemnation of abortion and the defense of traditional sexual morality.  And these teachings are not strictly speaking matters of faith in the first place, but matters of natural law.  They are good for human beings as such, whether or not they are Catholic and even apart from our supernatural end.  And they can be known and at least imperfectly followed even apart from faith in divine revelation.

Cardinal Ratzinger’s colleague seems to have conflated the natural law with the supernatural virtues.  Since the non-believer lacks the latter, he must (so the reasoning seems to go) also lack any capacity for the former; and since he lacks that capacity (so the reasoning apparently continues) he cannot be held responsible for living up to the natural law.  How much farther could one get from the teaching of St. Paul in Romans 1 and 2, according to which sinful pagans are “without excuse” given the law that is “written on their hearts”?  (And note that it is precisely sexual immorality that Paul puts special emphasis on as a sign of their decadence.)

If a non-Christian finds the Church’s teaching on sex too austere -- teaching a Plato, Aristotle, or Plotinus would have easily seen the logic of, whether or not they would agree with every last detail of it -- then the problem runs far deeper than any difficulty with Christianity per se.  It reflects a kind of alienation of modern people from their own nature.  And if someone not only disagrees with, but viscerally despises the directives of natural law -- despises what would be necessary to fulfill him even if the supernatural gift of the beatific vision had never been offered him -- it is perfectly ludicrous to think he is likely to attain even his natural end, let alone the supernatural end of the beatific vision.  Modern secularists are surely in graver spiritual danger than the ancient pagans, who, for all their faults, at least could see that the existence of God was demonstrable and understood the broad outlines of natural law. 

The modern secularist, or at least the educated modern secularist, needs to be brought up to the level of the ancient pagan before he is likely to take Christian revelation seriously.  He needs a renewed understanding of the nature on which grace builds and apart from which faith, revelation, and the supernatural falsely seem to float in mid-air, without a foundation in reason or reality.  He needs natural theology and natural law -- natural theology and natural law grounded in the truths even the pagans knew, natural theology and natural law as articulated and defended within Scholasticism, within Thomism -- and he needs it now more than ever. 

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Some questions on the soul, Part I

In a recent post I spoke of the soul after death as essentially the human being in a “radically diminished state.”  The Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophical reasons for this characterization were set out in an earlier post.  A reader asks how I would “answer [the] challenge that it appears the Bible suggests our souls in communion with God are better off than those of us here alive in this ‘vale of tears.’”  After all, St. Paul says that “we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord,” and Catholics pray to the saints, who are obviously in a better state than we are.  Isn’t this clearly incompatible with the claim that the soul after death is in a “radically diminished state”?  Furthermore, wouldn’t the conscious experiences that Christian doctrine attributes to the saved and the damned after death be metaphysically impossible on an Aristotelian-Thomistic conception of the soul?  Wouldn’t a Cartesian view of the soul be more in harmony with Christianity?  Do we have here a case “where Aristotelian philosophy is just at odds with revealed Christian truth”?

 
No, we don’t.  First of all, in the posts in question I did not say that the soul post-mortem is in a radically diminished state full stop, in every respect.  I was not giving a complete theology of the afterlife, but just addressing a specific metaphysical question.  What I said is that the soul is in a radically diminished state qua substance.  A human being is a single substance, and after death but prior to bodily resurrection most of its activities (walking, seeing, hearing, digesting, etc.) are no longer naturally possible for it.  Hence it is in that sense -- and obviously -- radically diminished.  However, the capacities that naturally survive are the highest ones -- intellect and will -- and divine assistance also raises the otherwise diminished soul to something it never had even when the body was present, viz. the beatific vision.   In that sense the soul is of course in a much betterstate.  Obviously, something can be worse off in some respects and better off in others, and indeed worse off in some respects but still better off overall.  That’s a familiar fact of life and, as it happens, a fact of the afterlife too.

Second, as to the experiences of the soul after death and prior to its reunion with the body at the resurrection, consider the suffering of the damned from hellfire.  What can the nature of this suffering be given that the senses are bodily and the body is not present?  Aquinas considers this issue in several places, including Article 21 of Disputed Questions on the Soul, from which it is worth quoting at some length:

[S]ometimes a thing is hindered in one way by its contrary as regards its very act of existing which it receives from some inhering form; and in this way something is acted upon by its contrary through alteration and corruption, as wood, for example, is consumed by fire.  Secondly, a thing is hindered by an obstacle or a contrary with respect to its inclination, just as the natural inclination of a stone is to tend downward, but it is hindered in this by some obstacle and opposing power so that it is brought to rest or is moved contrary to its nature…

[I]n a being which possesses knowledge, torment and punishment are the natural effects of both kinds of suffering, although in different ways.  For the suffering [or being-acted-upon] which is the effect of change by a contrary, results in affliction and punishment by sensible pain, as when a sensible object of the greatest intensity corrupts the harmony of a sense.  Therefore when sensibilia are of too great intensity, particularly those of touch, they inflict sensible pain… However, the second kind of suffering does not inflict punishment by sensible pain, but by that sadness which arises in a man or in an animal because something is apprehended by an interior power as being repugnant to the will or to some appetite.  Hence things which are opposed to the will and to the appetite inflict punishment, and sometimes even more than those which are painful to sense…

[T]he soul cannot suffer punishment by corporeal fire according to the first kind of suffering [i.e., being acted-upon], because it is impossible for the soul to be altered and corrupted by suffering of this specific kind.  Hence the soul is not afflicted by fire in this way, namely, that it suffers sensible pain thereby.  However, the soul can suffer by corporeal fire according to the second kind of suffering, inasmuch as it is hindered from its inclination or volition by fire of this kind. This is evident.  For the soul and any incorporeal substance, inasmuch as this belongs to it by nature, is not physically confined in any place, but transcends the whole corporeal order.  Consequently it is contrary to its nature and to its natural appetite for it to be fettered to anything and be confined in a place by some necessity; and I maintain that this is the case except inasmuch as the soul is united to the body whose natural form it is, and in which there follows some perfection.

End quote.  The way in which the disembodied soul suffers from hellfire, then, is in Aquinas’s view not via sensory pain but rather by having its will frustrated.  And the way in which its will is frustrated is by being confined to something corporeal -- the fire in question -- when its natural state qua immaterial is not to be confined to anything corporeal exceptto the body it is the form of.  Thus there is no conflict between the Aristotelian-Thomistic view that the soul retains only its intellectual and volitional functions between death and resurrection, and the Christian teaching that the souls of the damned are tormented by hellfire.  There is torment, but it is a matter of the frustration of the will rather than of sensory pain.

It might be objected that this is not faithful enough to the relevant biblical texts.  But that this is not a good objection is clear from some remarks Aquinas makes in Summa Contra Gentiles Book IV, Chapter 90:

[T]here is no reason why even some of the things we read in Scripture about the punishments of the damned expressed in bodily terms should not be understood in spiritual terms, and, as it were, figuratively.  Such is the saying of Isaiah (66:24): “Their worm shall not die”: by worm can be understood that remorse of conscience by which the impious will also be tortured, for a bodily worm cannot eat away a spiritual substance, nor even the bodies of the damned, which will be incorruptible.  Then, too, the “weeping” and “gnashing of teeth” (Mat. 8:12) cannot be understood of spiritual substances except metaphorically, although there is no reason not to accept them in a bodily sense in the bodies of the damned after the resurrection.  For all that, this is not to understand weeping a loss of tears, for from those bodies there can be no loss, but there can be only the sorrow of the heart and the irritation of the eyes and the head which usually accompany weeping.

End quote.  Obviously a disembodied soul cannot weep or gnash its teeth, since it lacks eyes and teeth.  Nor can it be nibbled at by worms, since it has no flesh for them to eat.  If these biblical passages must be taken figuratively when applied to disembodied souls, though, so too must passages that might seem to imply that a disembodied soul experiences pain of a sensory sort.

It is worth noting that an implication of Aquinas’s view seems to be that hellfire punishes the souls of the damned (at least prior to their reunion with their bodies at the resurrection) precisely by confining them to matter in the manner in which Cartesian souls are tied to matter.  On the Aristotelian-Thomistic view, the disembodied soul is only an incomplete substance, and qua form of the living body is in its natural state only when conjoined to the matter of its body.  It is inherentlysuited to that particular bit of the material world, and only to that one.  On the Cartesian view, by contrast, the soul is a complete substance in its own right, so that its relation to any and all material objects is entirely contingent.  It is no more inherently tied to any particular human body than it is inherently tied to a pig’s body, or a tree, or stone, or a vacuum cleaner.  It is related to the body not as form to matter but rather more like the way a demon would have been related to one of the Gadarene swine it possessed in the famous biblical passage, or the way a poltergeist is related to the vacuum cleaner it moves around the room it is haunting.  (Hence Ryle’s “ghost in the machine” characterization of Cartesianism.) 

Aquinas’s view seems to be that a disembodied soul tormented by hellfire is essentially forced to “haunt” that hellfire (as it were), and is tormented by the fact of being confined, contrary to its will, to that particular bit of matter to which it has no natural connection.  (And perhaps the knowledge that that very fire will one day cause sensory pain to its resurrected body is part of the torment as well.)  You might say loosely that hell (prior to the resurrection) is, in effect, being forced to live like a Cartesian soul.

Be that as it may, the Aristotelian-Thomistic conception of the soul is, I submit, far more in harmony with the Bible than the Cartesian view is, not less in harmony with it.  The Cartesian view makes the biblical idea of bodily resurrection pointless, since the Cartesian soul is a complete substance all on its own, and apart from the body.  It is no accident that the Platonic view of the soul, which was the precursor of the Cartesian one, tended to see the body as a prison, as something positively unnatural and confinement to which is undesirable.  It is boundto be that if the soul is a complete substance in its own right. 

By contrast, the psychosomatic unity that the Aristotelian-Thomistic view insists upon but the Cartesian-Platonic view effectively denies is just what one sees in scripture from Genesis onward.  The resurrection is necessary precisely because without the body, we are, however otherwise better off, to thatextent radically diminished, and our complete beatitude thus calls for the restoration of the body.

Of course, what Aristotle himself thought about the post-mortem soul is a matter of controversy, but it is in any event irrelevant.  What matters is not what Aristotle thought but what Aristotelianism entails and/or is compatible with.   (“Aristotle thought such-and-such; therefore Aristotelianism entails such-and-such” is a common fallacy, but a fallacy for that.)  That the Aristotelian view of human nature is in fact much more consonant with Christian teaching than the Platonic view is is precisely the reason it won out in Catholicism and why treating the soul as the “form of the body” is official Catholic teaching.  Tired anti-Thomist caricatures notwithstanding, the motivation is to do justice to the biblical conception of man, not a commitment to Aristotle über alles.

I’ll address some other recent reader questions about the soul in a follow-up post.

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Midwest Studies in Philosophy

My article “The New Atheists and the Cosmological Argument” appears in Volume 37 of Midwest Studies in Philosophy.  The theme of the volume is “The New Atheism and its Critics” and the other contributors are A. W. Moore, Michael Ruse, David Shatz, Gary Gutting, Kenneth A. Taylor, Andrew Winer, Richard Fumerton, Jonathan L. Kvanvig, Gregg Ten Elshof, Massimo Pigliucci, and Alister E. McGrath. 

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Man is Wolff to man

As a follow-up to my series of posts on the critics of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, let’s take a look at philosopher Robert Paul Wolff’s recent remarks about the book.  Wolff is not nasty, as some of the critics have been -- Nagel is Wolff’s “old friend and one-time student” -- but he is nevertheless as unfair to Nagel as some of them have been. 

Most of his post is not about Nagel at all, but consists of an anecdote about Edward O. Wilson and some remarks about the wealth of knowledge Wolff has found in the biology books he’s read.  The point is to illustrate how very meticulous good scientists can be, and how much they have discovered about the biological realm.  All well and good.  But so what?  What does that have to do with Nagel?

Well, Wolff’s complaint is:

Tom Nagel undertakes in his slender 128 page book to show that "the materialist Neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false," and yet in those pages, there is not a single chapter, a single paragraph, a single sentence, indeed not a single word about all of this extraordinary science.  On the face of it, that just cannot be right.

End quote.  This is, of course, a common complaint about the book.  Indeed, some of Nagel’s critics seem to think that in order to justify dismissing Mind and Cosmos, it suffices merely to note that it doesn’t read like a Scientific American article or pop science book -- without, you know, engaging Nagel’s actual arguments at all.  As Wolff would say, on the face of it, that just cannot be right.

It seems right to these critics because “the materialist Neo-Darwinian conception of nature” concerns biology, biology is a science, and therefore (so these critics conclude) any criticism of that conception had better be hip deep in the scientific details.  But this is fallacious, because while “the materialist Neo-Darwinian conception of nature” concerns biology, it also -- as the word “materialist” should make blindingly obvious -- concerns metaphysics.  And it is thataspect of the conception, rather than the biological aspect, that is Nagel’s main target in the book.  No one who’s actually read the book and is trying to be fair to Nagel could leave that fact out, and it isn’t a small point.  It’s the whole point, as I’ve shown in my series of posts on Nagel’s book and its critics.

The expression “materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature” rather obviously covers several distinct theses, including the following (the list is not intended to be exhaustive):

1. Species arise from earlier species via evolution.

2. Evolutionary change is gradual.

3. All species share common ancestors.

4. The key mechanisms of evolution are natural selection operating on variations resulting from mutation, gene flow, and sexual recombination.

5. The first living things arose from inorganic precursors via purely material processes.

6. Matter and material processes are devoid of any irreduciblyqualitative, intentional, or teleological features. 

7. Evolution interpreted in a materialist way suffices to account for every aspect of the biological realm, including consciousness, intentionality, and value.

As anyone who has read the book knows, Nagel’s main concern is with theses (6) and (7).  He does not deny (1) - (3), nor even necessarily (4) and (5), though he would certainly qualify the latter in light of one of the alternative, non-materialist conceptions of matter he entertains.  But it is definitely the “materialist” rather than the “Neo-Darwinian” part of the expression “materialist Neo-Darwinian conception of nature “ that most exercises Nagel.   It is the nature of the basic material substrate of the evolutionary process, rather than the process itself, that he thinks is the problem with trying to account for consciousness, intentionality, and value in “materialist Neo-Darwinian” terms. 

That is why he devotes attention to ideas like panpsychism, neutral monism, and Aristotelian teleology.  And that is why he does not, and need not, devote attention to biological details of the sort cited by Wolff.  Nagel’s critique goes far deeper than anything evolutionary biologists have much to say about.  For again, it is, for the most part anyway, materialist metaphysics rather than evolutionary biology that he is concerned with.  And I have explained what his arguments actually are, and how certain critics persistently misinterpret them, in the series of posts linked to above.  In particular, many critics ignore the fact that Nagel’s arguments against materialism in Mind and Cosmos are essentially just brief summaries of arguments he has presented in more detail in earlier works like The Last Wordand “What Is It Like To Be a Bat?”  And they falsely suppose that the arguments are concerned with weighing probabilities, when in fact they are mostly concerned with what is possible in principle.

Hence it is no good for Wolff to complain that Nagel has failed to “trac[e], step by step, the neurological development of species that appear to be located somewhere along the continuum between consciousness and non-consciousness.”  Nagel and other very prominent philosophers have developed arguments which purport to show that no amount of neurological evidence could by itself even in principle explain consciousness.  These arguments are extremely well-known in academic philosophy; more to the present point, they are surely well known to Wolff.  Wolff may disagree with the arguments, but insofar as he pretends that they don’t exist, it is he rather than Nagel who is guilty of “philosophical malpractice.”

As I say, all of this should be pretty obvious to any fair-minded person who has read the book.  It should be especially obvious to a philosopher trained to make careful distinctions and familiar with the sorts of metaphysical issues Nagel addresses.  Any philosopher should also see the glaring problems with another example Wolff offers of the purported ineptness of philosophers when addressing scientific matters.  He writes:

Consider a different example, this one from the medical field of neurology.  One of the bits of philosophy put forward back in the day when I was actually reading philosophy was the notion of "contrast terms."  It was said that pairs of terms such as "left/right" or "up/down" were defined in relation to one another in such a manner that it was impossible to understand one without understanding the other.  Nobody offered any evidence for this claim.  Its truth was taken as self-evident.  Well, along comes the wonderful neurologist Oliver Sacks, who reports the case of a woman who, having suffered a massive cerebral stroke, lost all understanding of the concept "left" while retaining a complete understanding of the concept "right."  She ate only the food on the right half of her plate and complained that the portions were too small.  When she made herself up, she only put lipstick on the right half of her lips.

End quote.  Well, did the woman in question really lose the concept of “left”?  Maybe.  Or maybe she still had it but lost the ability to apply it.  Or maybe her problem was merely visual rather than cognitive.  And maybe she could focus on the right side of things after her stroke only because she had had the concept of “left” to contrast “right” with before the stroke.  On the other hand, maybe all this is wrong.  For example, maybe there’s no sense to be made of having the concept unless you can apply it.  (Though what does “can” mean here?  “Can” in practice or only in principle?)  Maybe there’s no way neatly to distinguish the perceptual and cognitive here.  And so forth.

One thing is for sure, though, and that is that neuroscienceby itself is not going to be able to answer these questions, because they are philosophical.  In general, neuroscientific results never tell you anything absolutely straightforward about philosophical issues like free will, perception, consciousness, and the like.  Typically, the lessons purportedly read off from the neuroscience were in fact first read into it, by neuroscientists and others unreflectively making highly challengeable philosophical assumptions.  We’ve seen in earlier posts how true that is when neuroscience is claimed to shed light on free will, introspection, “mindreading,”and the mind-body problem.  M. R. Bennett and P. M. S. Hacker have, in their book Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, shown how permeated with fallacies is the literature purporting to shed neuroscientific light on philosophical problems.  (If Wolff were still “actually reading philosophy” he might know this.)

One of the ironies of the Nagel affair is how some of the same people who can easily see vulgar scientism for what it is when peddled by an arrogant ignoramus like Lawrence Krauss suddenly lapse into an equally vulgar scientism when the topic is evolution.  Some physicists think their discipline can show how something might come from nothing?  Oh dear, let us count the fallacies.  Some biologists claim to be able to explain consciousness and intentionality?   Have mercy on us o high ones!  How low do you want us to bow?  Someone in our ranks disagrees?  How high do you want us to hang him?

This is a phenomenon whose explanation should be looked for not in philosophy but in social psychology -- specifically, the black sheep effect.  All you have to do is put the words “Darwin” and “disagree” in the same sentence and a certain segment of the herd collectively freaks out, tripping over themselves to report the errant sheep to the wolf.  And you know what wolves do to sheep.

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