Was Aquinas a materialist?

Denys Turner’s recent book Thomas Aquinas: A Portrait is beautifully written and consistently thought-provoking.  It is also a little mischievous, in a good-natured way.  A main theme of the book is what Turner characterizes as Aquinas’s “materialism.”  Turner is aware that Aquinas was not a materialist in the modern sense.  And as I have emphasized many times (such as at the beginning of the chapter on Aquinas’s philosophical psychology in Aquinas), you cannot understand Aquinas’s position unless you understand how badly suited the standard jargon in contemporary philosophy of mind is to describe that position.  Turner’s reference to Aquinas’s “materialism” is intended to emphasize the respects in which Aquinas’s position is deeply at odds with what many think of as essential to a “dualist” conception of human nature.  And he is right to emphasize that.  All the same, as I have argued before, if we are going to use modern terminology to characterize Aquinas’s view -- and in particular, if we want to make it clear where Aquinas stood on the issue that contemporary dualists and materialists themselves think is most crucially at stake in the debate between dualism and materialism -- then “dualist” is a more apt label than “materialist.”

When philosophers and theologians whose formation is in classical and medieval thought and who lack much familiarity with contemporary analytic philosophy hear the word “dualism,” they tend automatically to think of Platonism.  That is to say, they tend to associate “dualism” with the view that a human being is essentially an immaterial soul, that the body is not only extrinsic to human nature but even a kind of prison from which the soul needs to be liberated, and that the natural orientation of the soul’s cognitive powers is toward the realm of Platonic abstract ideas rather than concrete material reality.  Now, Aquinas was definitely nota “dualist” in this sense.  As Turner rightly emphasizes, Aquinas regarded animality and thus corporeality as no less a part of our nature than our intellectual powers are, and he took our cognitive faculties to be naturally oriented toward the material world.  The body is not a prison but essential to us, so that without his body a human being is radically incomplete.

However, when philosophers whose formation was in contemporary analytic philosophy hear the word “dualism,” what they tend automatically to think of is the view that the human mind is at least partially irreducible to or inexplicable in terms of anything corporeal.  And when they hear the word “materialism,” they tend automatically to think of the view that the human mind is entirely reducible to or explicable in terms of the corporeal.  So, the assertion that Aquinas was not a “dualist” but was more like a “materialist” is bound to sound, to the typical contemporary academic philosopher, like the claim that Aquinas thought that there is no incorporeal aspect to human nature -- that human beings are, like other animals, entirely corporeal.  And that is certainly not what Aquinas thought.  He puts forward many arguments purporting to show that the human intellect is incorporeal.  So, given current usage, it is misleading to deny that Aquinas was a “dualist,” and extremely misleading to say that he was a “materialist.”  He clearly was a kind of dualist, in the modern sense of “dualism,” and clearly was nota materialist, given the sense typically attached to “materialism.”

One reason this is not sufficiently clear from Turner’s discussion is that Turner gives the impression that the main difference between Aquinas and contemporary materialism is that Aquinas, unlike materialists, regarded all matter as conjoined with form.  As Turner sums up what he takes to be the key issue, it is because material things have form that they can on Aquinas’s view be “alive with meaning,” whereas matter as the contemporary materialist conceives of it is “meaninglessly dumb” or devoid of any inherent meaning (p. 97).  The impression Turner leaves the reader with is that as long as we beef up our conception of a material thing so that it includes the Aristotelian notion of form, then Aquinas’s position can plausibly be called “materialist.” 

But that is simply not all there is to the difference between Aquinas and modern materialism, even if it is an important part of the story.  To be sure, Aquinas does think that purely corporeal things can possess what Turner calls “meaning” by virtue of having the forms they do.  For example, a bird is purely corporeal, and its bodily organs and activities have the “meanings” they do because the matter that makes up the bird has the substantial form of a bird rather than the form of some other thing.  For example, the bird has visual experiences which represent objects in its environment, and its wings serve the function of allowing it to fly.  Because Aquinas’s notion of matter is Aristotelian (rather than the desiccated notion of matter the modern materialist has inherited from Descartes and Co.) -- in particular, because he affirms immanent formal and final causes -- there is for him nothing mysterious about how a purely material substance could possess features like intentionality and teleology.

But in Aquinas’s view, the “meaning” of which rationalanimals are capable goes well beyond the “directedness” toward an end of which sub-rational animals, merely vegetative forms of life, and indeed even inorganic processes are capable.  For rational animals possess mental states with conceptual content.  This is what distinguishes intellect from the sensation and imagination of which non-human animals are capable.  And in Aquinas’s view (as Turner himself notes), strictly intellectual activity does not have a bodily organ but is essentially incorporeal.  That the human soul possesses this incorporeal activity alongside its corporeal activities is the reason why Aquinas thinks that the human soul can (unlike the souls of non-human animals) persist beyond the death of the body, and also why he thinks it cannot have been derived from our parents but must be specially created by God.

So, that he affirms that natural objects are composites of form and matter is by no means the only thing that sets Aquinas apart from modern materialists.  That intellectual activity is essentially incorporeal or non-bodily, that the human soul survives the death of the body, and that it must be specially created by God are, needless to say, all theses that the contemporary materialist would also firmly reject.  Meanwhile, contemporary dualists would affirm some or all of these theses.  So, to say: “Aquinas thought the human soul was incorporeal, survives the death of the body, and must be specially created by God -- but he was a materialist, and not a dualist!”… to say that would, really, be beyondmisleading.  To most modern readers, it cannot fail to sound utterly bizarre, indeed incoherent. 

Part of the problem here is that Turner, like many others, treats Aquinas’s claim that the soul is the form of the body as if it were terribly mysterious.  For how can the soul be the form of the body and yet persist beyond the death of the body?  Some deal with this purported mystery by emphasizing the soul’s persistence beyond death, and interpreting Aquinas as if he were, at bottom, “really” a kind of Platonist or Cartesian.  Turner, in effect, deals with it by emphasizing the soul’s status as the form of the body, and interprets Aquinas as if he were “really” a kind of materialist.

The error in both cases, I would suggest, is that when Aquinas says that:

(1) The soul is the form of the body

both sorts of readers at least implicitly interpret him as meaning that:

(2) The soul is the form of a substance which is entirely bodily or corporeal.

As a result they are puzzled when Aquinas goes on to say that the soul persists beyond the death of the body.  For how, on an Aristotelian account, could the form of a corporeal substance persist when that substance is gone?  Hence, they conclude, either Aquinas at bottom really thinks, or if he were consistent ought to think, that the soul is not the form of the body but rather a substance in its own right; or at bottom he really thinks, or if he were consistent ought to think, that the soul is the form of the body and thus that it does not persist beyond the death of the body; or Aquinas really thinks both things and is therefore just not consistent.

But there is no inconsistency, because (1) simply does not entail (2), and Aquinas would reject (2).  For in Aquinas’s view, the human soul is the form of a substance, that substance is a human being, and a human being has both corporeal and incorporealoperations.  Hence the soul is not the form of a substance which is entirely bodily or corporeal.  Rather, it is the form of a substance which is corporeal in some respects and incorporeal in others.  Now, those corporeal respects are the ones summed up in the phrase “the body.”  Hence the soul is, naturally, the form of the body.  But it simply doesn’t follow that the soul is the form of a substance which is exhausted by its body, viz. by its bodily operations.

This is why there is nothing terribly mysterious about why the soul, as Aquinas understands it, can persist beyond the death of the body.  For the substance of which the soul is the form does not go out of existence with the death of the body.  Rather, the corporeal or bodily operations of that substance cease, while the incorporeal operations continue.  To be sure, the substance in question has been severely reduced or damaged; that is why Aquinas thinks of the disembodied soul as an “incomplete substance.”  But an incomplete substance is not a non-substance.  Thus, to say that the soul persists beyond the death of the body is not to say that the form of a substance persists after the substance has gone out of existence (which certainly would be a very mysterious thing for an Aristotelian like Aquinas to say!)

That a human being is this unique, indeed very weird sort of substance -- corporeal in some respects and incorporeal in others -- is what makes us different from, on the one hand, non-human animals (which are entirely corporeal) and on the other hand, angels (which are entirely incorporeal).  Platonists and Cartesians essentially assimilate human beings to angels, whereas materialists essentially assimilate human beings to non-human animals.  Aquinas rejects both views.  All the same, since to be a “dualist,” as that term is typically used today, it suffices to affirm that human beings have both corporeal and incorporeal features, there is obviously a clear sense in which Aquinas is a dualist.  And since affirming that human beings have incorporeal features -- not to mention affirming that there are purely incorporeal substances, viz. angels -- would suffice to keep one from being a “materialist” on pretty much any construal of “materialism,” it seems no less clear that Aquinas was not a materialist.

So, it seems to me that Turner’s use of the term, though understandable in light of those aspects of Aquinas’s position he rightly wants to emphasize, is ill-advised.  All the same, you cannot fail to learn from Turner’s book even when you disagree with him.

(For more on Aquinas’s philosophical psychology, see, among the many posts on the mind-body problem collected here, those devoted to the subject of Thomistic or hylemorphic dualism.)

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Web of intrigue

Analytical Thomist John Haldane has been appointedto the J. Newton Rayzor Sr. Distinguished Chair in Philosophy at Baylor University.

At The Times Literary Supplement, Galen Strawson arguesthat it is matter, not consciousness, that is truly mysterious.

At Aeon magazine, philosopher Quassim Cassam investigates the intellectual character of those drawn toward conspiracy theories.

At Public Discourse, William Carroll defendsthe reality of the soul against Julien Mussolino, author of The Soul Fallacy.

Fr. C. John McCloskey puts forward a traditional defense of capital punishment at The Catholic Thing.

The “iThink”: Philosopher Charlie Huenemann on how to understand, and teach, the nature of Descartes’ philosophical revolution.

A new paper from James Franklin: “Uninstantiated Properties and Semi-Platonist Aristotelianism,” from the Review of Metaphysics.

Augustine's Confessions: Philosophy in Autobiography, a new anthology edited by William E. Mann, is reviewed at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.  Also reviewedis another anthology, edited by Tad Schmaltz: Efficient Causation: A History.

Tuomas Tahko announces a new volume on the theme Aristotelian Metaphysics: Essence and Ground.

The University Bookman reviews two books arguing for the rehabilitation of the reputation of General Douglas MacArthur.

At Public Discourse, “new natural lawyers”  John Finnis and Robert P. George reply to Gary Gutting’s recent criticisms of the natural law approach to sexual morality.  

Aquinas and the Nicomachean Ethics, edited by Tobias Hoffmann, Jörn Müller, and Matthias Perkams is reviewed in the Claremont Review of Books. 

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Pigliucci on metaphysics

At Scientia Salon, philosopher Massimo Pigliucci admits to “always having had a troubled relationship with metaphysics.”  He summarizes the reasons that have, over the course of his career, made it difficult for him to take the subject seriously.  Surprisingly -- given that Pigliucci is, his eschewal of metaphysics notwithstanding, a professional philosopher -- none of these reasons is any good.  Or rather, this is not surprising at all, since there simply are no good reasons for dismissing metaphysics -- and could not be, given that all purported reasons for doing so themselves invariably embody unexamined metaphysical assumptions.  Thus, as Gilson famously observed, does metaphysics always bury its undertakers.

Pigliucci’s misgivings began, he tells us, when he first encountered the medieval Scholastics while in high school in Italy.  Though he admits that “medieval logicians actually did excellent work,” he says that “as a teenager prone to (intellectual) rebelliousness… I couldn’t but reject the Scholastics.”  He adds that “the Scholastics still have a bad reputation in philosophical circles.”  Now of course, neither adolescent rebelliousness nor appeal to contemporary intellectual fashion constitutes a serious argument.  So, does Pigliucci actually have any substantive grounds for rejecting Scholasticmetaphysics, specifically?  He doesn’t tell us.  Does Pigliucci even understand Scholastic metaphysics?  For example, does he understand how it differs (profoundly!) from the kind of metaphysics one finds in rationalist philosophers like Leibniz and in the work of most contemporary metaphysicians?  From other things he says in his post, it seems not.

We’ll come back to that.  First, consider the other factors which, Pigliucci tells us, deepened his suspicion of metaphysics.  While in college, he says, he was impressed by the logical positivists’ famous verification principle, and their application of it to a critique of metaphysics.  The basic idea, as is well known, is that any meaningful statement must (the verification principle claims) be either analytically true (like “All bachelors are unmarried”) or empirically verifiable. Yet metaphysical statements are (the argument continues) neither.  Therefore they are strictly meaningless, not even rising to the level of falsehood.

There are various problems with the verification principle, the most notorious being that it is self-refuting, insofar as the principle itself is neither analytically true nor empirically verifiable.  It is thus no less “meaningless” and indeed “metaphysical” (as verificationists conceived of metaphysics) as the claims it was deployed against.  Alternative formulations of the principle have been attempted, but the trouble is that there is no way to formulate the principle in such a way that it both avoids self-refutation and still has the anti-metaphysical bite the positivists thought it had.  These are such well-known points that it is unlikely that Pigliucci still regards verificationism as a serious challenge to metaphysics.  So, even if it impressed Pigliucci as a student, what does that have to do with why he is still suspicious of metaphysics now, as a professional philosopher?

The third influence on his suspicions, he says, was “Hume’s Fork” -- David Hume’s famous doctrine that any proposition that concerns neither “relations of ideas” nor “matters of fact” can contain only “sophistry and illusion” and might as well be “commit[ed] to the flames.”  Naturally, the suspect propositions included, in Hume’s view, those of traditional metaphysics, and Pigliucci tells us that on first encountering it he found Hume’s position “a neat and no nonsense kind of view.”  The trouble, though, is that Hume’s Fork is an anticipation of the positivists’ verification principle, and has similar problems.  In particular, it appears to be no less self-refuting, for Hume’s Fork is not itself either true by virtue of the relations of the ideas that enter into its formulation, or true by virtue of empirically discernible matters of fact.  Hence it is no less “metaphysical” than the propositions it was used to criticize.  And as with the verification principle, while one can attempt to reformulate Hume’s Fork in such a way as to keep it from being self-undermining, doing so also strips it of its anti-metaphysical bite.  And again, Pigliucci presumably realizes this, since it is well-known.

So far, then, if Pigliucci intends to give us serious rational grounds for being suspicious of metaphysics, he’s 0 for 3.  But he cites a fourth influence on his skepticism: James Ladyman and Don Ross’s book Every Thing Must Go, which, while it advocates a “scientific” or “naturalized” metaphysics, is hostile to traditional metaphysics.  On what grounds?  In Ladyman and Ross’s view, the trouble with any metaphysics that isn’t essentially just the book-keeping department for empirical science is that it is going to amount to mere “conceptual analysis.”  And “conceptual analysis” is grounded in ordinary language, commonsense intuitions, and “folk” notions -- all of which often conflict with the picture of the world science gives us.  The concepts the metaphysician analyzes and the intuitions to which he appeals thus may well float free of objective reality.  Hence any metaphysics that isn’t essentially just the systematization of what the various sciences have to tell us lacks (so the argument goes) any solid foundation.

This might seem to be a more formidable challenge to metaphysics than either the Humean or the verificationist challenge.  After all, Ladyman and Ross do not eschew metaphysics entirely, since they allow that metaphysics is respectable if suitably “naturalized” or made “scientific.”  And many contemporary metaphysicians do indeed ground their arguments in “conceptual analysis,” “intuitions,” and the like.  Hence, Ladyman and Ross might seem more sober than the likes of Hume, A. J. Ayer, and Co., neither directing their attacks at a straw man nor advocating an unreasonably extreme alternative position.

In fact, though, the Ladyman/Ross position is not only not a better argument than the Humean and verificationist arguments, it is on closer inspection really just the same argument superficially repackaged.  For Hume’s “matters of fact” and the positivists’ “empirically verifiable propositions,” read “naturalized (or scientific) metaphysics.”  And for Hume’s “relations of ideas” and the positivists’ “analytic statements,” read “conceptual analysis.”  Hence the Ladyman/Ross thesis that if a proposition isn’t a claim of natural science/”naturalized” metaphysics, then the only other thing for it to be is “conceptual analysis,” is essentially just a riff on Hume’s Fork.  And it has the same problem.  For the Ladyman/Ross thesis is not itself either a claim of natural science/”naturalized” metaphysics, or knowable via “conceptual analysis.”

Of course, some “naturalized metaphysicians” might suggest that neuroscience or cognitive science supports the Ladyman/Ross thesis, but if so they are deluding themselves.  For the actual empirical results of neuroscience or cognitive science would support the thesis only if interpreted in light of a naturalistic metaphysics, but not if interpreted in light of (say) an Aristotelian metaphysics, or an idealist metaphysics, or a panpsychist metaphysics, or a Cartesian metaphysics, or a Whiteheadian process metaphysics, etc.  Hence any attempt to appeal to the results of neuroscience or cognitive science naturalistically interpreted, in order to support the Ladyman/Ross thesis, would be question-begging.

So, the fourth influence on Pigliucci’s skepticism about metaphysics really gives him no better a reason for his skepticism than the first three do.  Nor is the self-refutation problem the only problem with the critiques of traditional metaphysics in question.  Another problem is that the verificationist, Humean, and Ladyman/Ross objections all presuppose too narrow and parochial a conception of metaphysics.  In particular, they tend unreflectively to frame the issues within a rationalist/empiricist/Kantian dialectic inherited from the early moderns.  But the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition -- against which these early modern positions reacted and defined themselves -- rejects the basic assumptions underlying them.   

Like the rationalists, Aristotelian-Scholastic philosophers hold that there are metaphysically necessary truths which can be known with certainty, but they reject the rationalist view that such truths are innate or that metaphysics is an essentially a prioridiscipline.  Like the empiricists, Aristotelian-Scholastic philosophers hold that our concepts and knowledge derive from experience, but they also reject both the empiricists’ desiccated conception of “experience” and the empiricist tendency to conflate the intellect and the imagination.  They regard the intellect as capable of “pulling out” from experience far more than either the rationalist or the empiricist supposes.  Hence they reject the assumption that if a proposition isn’t empirical in the thin empiricist (as opposed to thick Aristotelian) sense of “empirical,” then it must be a matter of “conceptual analysis,” with the only remaining question being whether “conceptual analysis” is to be understood in rationalist, Humean, Kantian, Wittgensteinian, Strawsonian, or Frank Jackson-style terms. 

Thus, when Ladyman and Ross -- with, it seems, Pigliucci’s approbation -- describe contemporary “conceptual analysis” and “intuition”-based metaphysics as “neo-Scholastic,” they demonstrate thereby only their own utter ignorance of (or, worse, perhaps indifference to) what Scholastics themselves actually believe.  For from an Aristotelian-Scholastic point of view, contemporary “conceptual analysis” and “intuition”-based metaphysics is essentially an anemic successor to early modern rationalist metaphysics -- a metaphysics which Scholastics would reject, and which defined itself in opposition to the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition.

As an example of the sort of thing he regards with suspicion, Pigliucci cites the contemporary metaphysician’s appeal to “conceivability,” as in arguments to the effect that “if it is conceivable, say, that there could be a being that is made exactly like me, atom per atom, and who however doesn’t experience any phenomenal consciousness, then this is sufficient to show a lacuna in physicalism.”  Writes Pigliucci: “I reject the very idea that conceivability is a reliable guide to metaphysics at all.”

The example is ironic in two respects.  First, Aristotelian-Scholastic metaphysicians would agree that conceivability doesn’t have the significance for metaphysical inquiry that many contemporary analytic metaphysicians suppose it to have.  But second, it is quite comical for someone who thinks Hume a paradigm of “no nonsense” anti-metaphysical thinking to cite the appeal to conceivability, of all things, as an Exhibit A piece of metaphysical sleight of hand.  For the principle that “whatever we conceive is possible, at least in a metaphysical sense,” is, as is extremely well known, a key component of Hume’s own method.  (The quote is from the Abstract of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature.)  For example, this conceivability principle is central to Hume’s critique of the principle of causality, a key thesis of traditional metaphysics.  To reject the conceivability principle is thus to reject precisely one of Hume’s key weapons against Scholastics and rationalists alike.

But it’s worse even than that.  Hume conflates intellect and imagination, so that to “conceive” something is, for him, essentially to form a mental image of it.  This “imagist” account of concepts has been widely regarded as a philosophical howler at least since Wittgenstein (though any Scholastic or rationalist could have told you what is wrong with it).  The Humean thesis that we can read off sweeping metaphysical conclusions from the mental images we form is a thesis far more preposterous than any of those held up by Pigliucci for ridicule.

A further irony: Pigliucci (no surprise) makes some dismissive remarks about theology, a subject about which he seems to know as much as he knows about Scholastic metaphysics, viz. not much at all.  In particular, he evidently knows nothing about the crucial role played historically by the theological voluntarism of Ockham and Nicholas of Autrecourt, the occasionalism of Malebranche, and the Cartesian and Newtonian replacement of substantial forms and causal powers with “laws of nature” understood as divine decrees, in setting the stage for the Humean conception of natural objects and events as “loose and separate.”  Understood in light of its historical background, Hume’s philosophy can be seen to owe largely to bad theology.

In fact, when Hume’s various philosophical errors are exposed -- the assumptions inherited from bad theology, the conflation of intellect and imagination, the self-undermining character of Hume’s Fork, and so forth -- little is left in the way of actual argumentation to support the anti-metaphysical and anti-theological conclusions for which he is famous.  His bloated reputation notwithstanding, Hume is exactly what Anscombe said he is: a “mere -- brilliant -- sophist.”

Why that reputation is as bloated as it is, everyone knows:  Skeptics simply like Hume’s conclusions, and don’t care to investigate too carefully how plausible, at the end of the day, are the arguments by which he arrived at them.  F. H. Bradley, though a metaphysician himself, famously characterized metaphysics as “the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct.”  Never was it more obvious than in the case of Hume and his fans how true this can be of opponentsof metaphysics.

As it needn’t be said, a lot more could be said.  Since I say a lot more in Scholastic Metaphysics -- about the difference between Scholastic metaphysics and what passes for metaphysics in much contemporary philosophy, about scientism, about Hume’s foibles and intellectual forebears, about laws of nature and much else -- I direct the interested reader to that.

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Reasons of the Hart

A couple of years ago, theologian David Bentley Hart generated a bit of controversy with some remarks about natural law theory in an article in First Things.  I and some other natural law theorists responded, Hart responded to our responses, others rallied to his defense, the natural law theorists issued rejoinders, and before you knew it the Internet -- or, to be a little more precise, this blog -- was awash in lame puns and bad Photoshop.  (My own contributions to the fun can be found here, here, here, and here.)  In the March 2015 issue of First Things, Hart revisits that debate, or rather uses it as an occasion to make some general remarks about the relationship between faith and reason.

The natural law debate revisited

I cannot help but comment briefly on Hart’s summary of his side of the debate of two years ago.  He writes:

I took my general point to be not that natural-law theory is inherently futile, but rather that its proponents often fail to grasp just how nihilistic the late modern view of reality has become, or how far our culture has gone toward losing any coherent sense of “nature” at all, let alone of any realm of moral meanings to which nature might afford access.  In our time, any argument from immanent goods to transcendent ends must be prepared for by an attempt to “recover the world,” so to speak: a deeper, wider tuition of sensibility, imagination, and natural reverence.

Well, I for one know full well that that is what Hart was saying.  And as I pointed out many times two years ago, the problem with Hart’s criticism -- now, as it was then -- is that it rests on a fatal ambiguity.  Is Hart’s target the “new natural law” theory of people like Germain Grisez, John Finnis, Robert P. George, and Chris Tollefsen?  Or the “old natural law” theory of people like Ralph McInerny, Russell Hittinger, David Oderberg, and me?  Hart’s criticism might seem to have force to someone who doesn’t know the difference between these two views.  But once one disambiguates them, Hart’s criticism collapses entirely.

The problem is this.  Hart’s point is that natural law theory, even if correct, rests on a classical (Platonic, Aristotelian, Scholastic) metaphysical conception of “nature” that is simply rejected, and indeed not even understood, by most of its modern critics.  Hence there is little point in arguing for moral conclusions on the basis of that conception of nature until one has first done the hard work of showing, to a modern audience, that that conception of nature is still plausible.  But this objection is aimed at a straw man.  All natural law theorists are very well aware that the classical conception of nature is a tough sell for most contemporary readers.  They deal with this problem in one of two broad ways. 

The approach of the “new natural law” theory is to eschew any appeal to the traditional classical metaphysical conception of nature, and to ground its approach instead on an account of practical reason which, it is argued, should be intelligible and acceptable even to someone who does not accept the classical conception.  (This is why the “new natural law” theory is new.)  The approach of “old natural law” theorists, by contrast, is to reaffirm that natural law theory must be grounded in a classical metaphysical conception of nature (which is why the “old natural law” theory is old).  But they recognize that, precisely because they are committed to this older conception, they have a lot of work to do in order to show that that conception is as defensible today as it was in Aquinas’s day.  That’s one reason they write books like this one and this one.

What you don’t ever see is any natural law theorist who both (a) grounds his position in a classical metaphysical conception of nature while (b) blithely assuming that that conception is any less controversial today than the natural law conclusions he derives from it are.  Certainly Hart has never been able to identify any specific natural law theorist, “new” or “old” -- not one-- who does this.  Exactly who is actually guilty of the charge Hart raises against what he refers to as “most natural-law theory in today’s world”?  Exactly who actually evinceswhat Hart calls “a boundless confidence in reason’s competency to extract moral truths from nature’s evident forms, no matter what the prevailing cultural regime”?  Hart has persistently refused to tell us, persistently refused to explain whether he has “new” or “old” natural law theorists in mind, persistently refused to answer the objection that his charge rests entirely on the ambiguity in question.  Hart laments that the controversy of two years ago indicates that it is “perilous to express doubts” regarding the persuasiveness of contemporary natural law theory.  But he could have avoided peril had he simply refrained from attacking a straw man.  Just sayin’.

Fides et ratio

Anyway, the focus of Hart’s latest piece is the question of the relationship between faith and reason.  Hart objects to the charge that he is a fideist, arguing that both fideism and rationalism of the seventeenth-century sort are errors that would have been rejected by the mainstream of the ancient and medieval traditions with which he sympathizes.  With that much I agree.  I agree too with his claim that the use of reason rests on the “metaphysical presupposition” that there is a natural fit between the intellect and that which the intellect grasps -- an “orientation of truth to the mind and of the mind to truth.”  I agree with him when he argues that naturalism cannot account for this fit, that the best it can attribute to our rational faculties is survival value but not capacity to grasp truth, and that this makes it impossible for the naturalist rationally to justify his own position.  And I agree with him when he argues that idealism in its various forms also cannot account for this fit -- that if naturalism emphasizes mind-independent truth to such an extent that it cannot account for the mind itself, idealism emphasizes mind to such an extent that it cannot account for mind-independent truth.

All well and good, and indeed a set of points whose importance cannot be overemphasized.  What puzzles me, though, is the way Hart characterizes the position he would put in place of these errors -- a way that at least lends itself to a fideist reading, his rejection of the “fideist” label notwithstanding.  In particular, he says that the metaphysical presupposition that there is a natural fit between the intellect and that which the intellect grasps is a matter of “trust,” that “there is a fiduciary moment within every act of reason,” and -- most significantly -- that “reason arises from an irreducibly fiduciary movement of the will” (emphasis added).

Now, what exactly is an “irreducibly fiduciary movement of the will”?  That certainly sounds a helluva lot like a Jamesian “will to believe” that there is a natural fit between intellect and mind-independent reality, an act of will that is not itself susceptible of rational justification.  For if it is susceptible of rational justification, why talk of “will” rather than intellect, and why call the “movement” of the will “irreduciblyfiduciary”?  And if we must simply will to trust that there is this fit between mind and world without having a rational justification for doing so, why does this not count as a kind of fideism?

Then there is Hart’s characterization of the rationalism he rejects as holding that reason is “capable of discerning first principles and deducing final conclusions without any surd of the irrational left over” (emphasis added).  So, is Hart saying that, in any attempt rationally to justify a position, there always is some “surd of the irrational left over”?  Again, why wouldn’t this count as fideism?

On the other hand, the objections Hart rightly raises against naturalism and idealism themselves constitute rational grounds for maintaining that there is a natural fit between the intellect and mind-independent reality, a mutual orientation of the one to the other.  For Darwinian naturalism, as Hart points out, gives us a view of the mind on which it floats entirely free of truth.  Any belief or argument whatsoever could seem absolutely indubitable even if it were completely wrong, ifthis were conducive to survival.  Idealism, meanwhile, tends toward the opposite extreme of tying truth so closely to the mind that it effectively collapses the former into the latter.  What is true ends up being whatever the mind takes to be true, so that we save the mind’s capacity to know truth only by making truth trivial.  As Hart indicates, it is no accident that in the history of continental thought the sequel to idealism was postmodernism, on which truth is entirely mind-relative. 

Now, both of these extreme positions are incoherent.  They are both defended by their proponents with arguments, yet each view undermines any argument that could be given for it.  We cannot make sense of the practice of formulating and rationally justifying propositions unless we presuppose both that there is a distinction between the intellect and the truths which the intellect grasps, and also that the intellect is naturally “directed” or oriented toward the grasp of these truths.  But so to argue just is to give a rational justification of these presuppositions; reductio ad absurdum is, after all, a standard argumentative strategy.  In that case, though, the presuppositions do not rest on an “irreducibly fiduciary movement of the will” with a “surd of the irrational left over.”  And Hart does indeed condemn postmodernism precisely for making of reason “the purest irrationality, a game of the will.”

So Hart’s position seems ambiguous.  On the one hand, there is the emphasis on an “irreducibly fiduciary movement of the will,” skepticism about the rationalist attempt to eliminate “any surd of the irrational,” and talk of “reason’s faith.”  On the other hand, there is the rejection of the “fideist” label and criticism of views which entail “irrationality, a game of the will.”  So which is it?

One way to read Hart here is that he tends to sympathize more with the “voluntarist” (Scotus, Ockham) rather than “intellectualist” (Aquinas, Neo-Scholastic) strain in Christian thought, but still wants to resist the fideist and irrationalist tendencies of voluntarism.  Another way to read him is that his view is at bottom an “intellectualist” one, but that he has merely expressed himself badly.  I suspect that the former interpretation is the correct one.  And I have, in recent posts (here, here, and here), given some of the reasons why intellectualism and “rationalism” of a sort (albeit not of a Cartesian or Leibnizian sort) are to be preferred to voluntarism.

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