Aristotle watches Blade Runner

You can never watch Blade Runner too many times, and I’m due for another viewing.  In D. E. Wittkower’s anthology Philip K. Dick and Philosophy, there’s an article by Ross Barham which makes some remarks about the movie’s famous “replicants” and their relationship to human beings which are interesting though, in my view, mistaken.  Barham considers how we might understand the two kinds of creature in light of Aristotle’s four causes, and suggests that this is easier to do with replicants than with human beings.  This is, I think, the reverse of the truth.  But Barham’s reasons are not hard to understand given modern assumptions (which Aristotle would reject) about nature in general and human nature in particular.

Barham suggests that, where replicants are concerned, a four-cause analysis would look something like this: their efficient cause is the Tyrell Corporation and its engineers; their material cause is to be found in the biological and mechanical constituents out of which they are constructed; their formal cause is the human-like pattern on which the Tyrell Corporation designed them; and their final cause is to function as human-like slave laborers. 

With human beings, Barham says, things are different.  Here, he thinks, the analysis looks like this: their efficient cause is, proximately, their parents, and remotely, evolution; their material cause is the biochemical matter out of which they are constituted; and their formal cause is the “blueprint” to be found in their DNA.  But with human beings, Barham says, it’s not so clear what their final cause is.

Now, you might think that his reason for saying this has something to do with attributing our remote origin to evolution rather than divine creation.  You might think, in other words, that he is supposing that if God didn’t make us, then we must not have a purpose or final cause.  But that is not Barham’s reason -- and it’s a good thing, since that would not be a good reason for saying it.  For Aristotelians, at least where true substances are concerned -- water, lead, gold, copper, trees, birds, spiders, human beings, etc. -- you don’t need to know anything about their remote origins in order to know their teleological features or final causes, any more than you need to know their remote origins in order to know their formal or material or (immediate) efficient causes. 

For example, you don’t need to know whether God made acorns in order to know that they are “directed at” or “point toward” becoming oaks.  You don’t need to know whether God made trees in order to know that their roots are “for” taking in water and nutrients and giving the tree stability.  You don’t need to know whether God made spiders in order to know that their webs have the function of allowing them to catch prey.  You don’t need to know whether God made copper in order to know that copper has a tendency to conduct electricity.  Etc.  All you need to do is to observe how birds and spiders tend to act when in their mature and healthy state, what acorns and copper tend to do under various circumstances, etc.  The causal powers a thing exhibits are the key to understanding its finality or “directedness.”  (Recall that, contrary to the standard caricature, most finality or teleology in nature involves nothing as fancy as biological function.  It typically involves just a mere “directedness” or “pointing” toward a certain standard outcome or range of outcomes.) 

Barham is aware that for Aristotle, to know a natural object’s teleological features, one needs to observe how it characteristically behaves, and that this is as true of human beings as it is of anything else.  He is also aware that for Aristotle, what is characteristic of human beings is that they exhibit rational powers, so that living in accordance with reason is, for Aristotle, our final cause. 

So far so good.  But now comes Barham’s mistake.  He thinks Aristotle’s answer faces the following difficulties.  First, Barham thinks that there are alterative candidates for our final cause or natural end that are no less plausible than rationality.  His examples are agency, the capacity for morality, and love.  Second, he notes that we often act irrationally and suggests that replicants can be no less rational than human beings are -- in which case rationality is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a human being.  Third, he seems to think that a problem with any proposed characteristic (rationality, moral behavior, love, or whatever) is that there are instances of human beings who don’t exhibit it -- so that (Barham seems to conclude) none of them can be the final cause of human beings as such.  (In fairness to Barham, in some cases it’s not clear whether these are objections Barham himself endorses, or merely objections he thinks are implicit in Blade Runner.)

Longtime readers no doubt know already how I would respond to objections of this sort.  (They will also be familiar with the Aristotelian and Scholastic notions to be deployed below -- notions I’ve spelled out and defended in many places, and most systematically in Scholastic Metaphysics.) 

First, that we often act irrationally does not entail that we are not rational.  Indeed, you cannot act irrationally unless you are rational, in the relevant sense of “rational.”  To be irrational is not the same thing as to be non-rational.  Rather, to be irrational is to reason badly, or to let one’s emotion cloud one’s reason, or to be impaired somehow (by mental illness or brain damage, say) so that one is prevented from exercising one’s reason -- all of which presupposes that one does indeed have reason.  Contrast a spider, say, which is not irrational precisely because it does not even rise to the level of reasoning badly.  A spider is instead non-rational.

Second, agency, morality, and love are not really in competition with rationality as candidates for our characteristic activity, certainly not on the analysis an Aristotelian like Aquinas would put forward.  For these are all themselves just special cases of rationality.  Consider Aquinas’s view that will follows upon intellect. Will is “rational appetite,” the tendency to be drawn toward what the intellect sees to be good.  To be “rational,” then, is for Aquinas to have a will as well as an intellect.  Now, agency, in the sense here in question, is just the capacity to behave in light of reason -- that is to say, to have a will.  Morality is just a matter of an agent’s pursuing what the intellect perceives to be good for him and avoiding what it perceives to be bad.  Loving a thing is just willing what is good for it.  So, the Aristotelian can take Barham’s alleged alternatives not to be true alternatives to rationality at all, but indeed to be instances of rationality. 

Third, that some human being doesn’t actually exhibit one of the features in question -- for example, that there are sociopaths unmoved by moral considerations, or that severely brain damaged people cannot exercise reason -- doesn’t entail that these features are not part of the nature of all human beings after all.  To appeal to one of my stock examples, dogs are of their nature four-legged, even if there are occasional dogs which, due to injury or genetic defect, are missing a leg.  For to say that dogs are of their nature four-legged does not mean, on an Aristotelian understanding of the nature or essence of a thing, that every single dog will in fact have four-legs.  It means that any dog in its mature and undamaged state will have four legs.  Even three-legged dogs by nature have four legs -- that is to say, being four-legged is what they naturally tend toward.  It’s just that in a three-legged dog this tendency has been frustrated.

Similarly, a human being who is so severely brain damaged that he can no longer reason, or so psychologically aberrant that he is utterly unmoved by the demands of morality, is still someone who by nature tends toward rational activity and a sense of guilt at doing evil.   It’s just that, as with the damaged dog, the manifestation of the natural tendencies has been blocked.  (Note that this does not make them any less human, any more than a three-legged dog is any less a dog.  An imperfect or damaged dog is in no way a non-dog, and an imperfect or damaged human being is in no way non-human.  You have actually to be an X in the first place in order to count as an imperfect or damaged X.)

What about the suggestion that Blade Runner’s replicants, like humans, have rationality?  Here things are a little more complicated, but only because replicants are, of course, fictional.  There is no “fact of the matter” about what a replicant is; hence it’s not entirely clear what to say about them.  What we are told about them makes the situation highly ambiguous.  On the one hand, superficially they seem to be like robots or androids.  And in that case I would say that they are metaphysically on all fours with computers, clocks, toaster ovens, etc.  That is to say, they have mere accidental forms rather than substantial forms, and are thus not true substances.  On the other hand, on closer consideration they are far more human-like than the stereotypical android or robot is.  Not only are they at least partially made out of biological material, but they are so close to human beings in their appearance that it seems that a physical inspection (including an X-ray or the like) wouldn’t reveal something to be a replicant.  Hence Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) has to administer a complex psychological test to determine whether Rachael (Sean Young) is a replicant.  But then replicants seem to have an organic unity that indicates that they have substantial forms rather than merely accidental forms, and thus are true substances.  (I have discussed the difference between substantial and accidental form in many places, such as here, here, and here.  For the full story, see chapter 3 of Scholastic Metaphysics.) 

Now, either way we interpret them, replicants will not be true counterexamples to the Aristotelian claim that what is distinctive about human beings is that they are rational animals.  For suppose that replicants have only accidental forms, and thus are not true substances.  They are in this case merely mechanical systems, like computers running software or clocks which have been designed to display the time.  And in that case, for reasons I’ve stated many times (e.g., recently, here) they would from the Aristotelian point of view no more literally have rationality than a statue of a man literally has eyes.  They would merely behave as if they had it.  The rationality would all be observer-relative -- a projection of the human programmers of the replicant’s imitation brain, rather than something really in the replicant itself.

Suppose instead, though, that replicants have substantial forms and thus are true substances.  Then it is much more plausible to say that they have genuine rationality, as well as true sensation, appetite, locomotion, and the other functions we share with non-human animals.  But in that case they would be rational animals -- in which case they would be human beings.  True, they would be human beings with very exotic origins, but that is a question of where they came from, and that is a different question from the question of what they are.  On this scenario, they would be more like clones of human beings (even if not exactly like clones) than they would be like robots or androids, and clones of human beings would certainly be human beings.  But if replicants are just exotic human beings, then, once again, they are not counterexamples to the claim that being rational is what is distinctive of human beings.

Of course, all of this presupposes the Aristotelian metaphysics of substance, but the point is that, contrary to what Barham implies, that metaphysics has ample resources to deal with the purported counterexamples he thinks Blade Runner is offering us.

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D. B. Hart and the “terrorism of obscurantism”

Many years ago, Steven Postrel and I interviewed John Searle for Reason magazine.  Commenting on his famous dispute with Jacques Derrida, Searle remarked:

With Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he's so obscure.  Every time you say, "He says so and so," he always says, "You misunderstood me."  But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that's not so easy.  I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism).  We were speaking French.  And I said, "What the hell do you mean by that?"  And he said, "He writes so obscurely you can't tell what he's saying, that's the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, 'You didn't understand me; you're an idiot.'  That's the terrorism part."

Now, David Bentley Hart is hardly as obscure as Derrida, and I would hardly call him a “terrorist.”  (Foucault’s expression here is characteristically over-the-top.)  Still, I can’t help but think of Searle and Foucault’s description of Derrida’s method of dealing with his critics when reflecting on the way Hart tends to respond to his critics.

First example: Take Hart’s now notorious attack on natural law theory of two years ago.  As I showed in my initial reply to Hart, there are a number of serious problems with that piece.  But as I have also by now pointed out many times, the most serious -- indeed, the fatal problem -- is that Hart relentlessly conflates “new natural law” theory and “old natural law” theory.  His central thesis, which he not only presented in his original article but has reiterated in several follow-up pieces, is that natural law theorists both (a) appeal to formal and final causes inherent in nature but also (b) are blithely unaware of the fact (or at least downplay the fact) that most of the modern readers they are trying to convince firmly reject the very idea of formal and final causes.  And the trouble is that there are no natural law theorists of which this is true.  For (a) is not true of “new” natural law theorists, and (b) is not true of “old” natural law theorists.  Hart is thus attacking a straw man. 

Certainly Hart has, in the original piece, in three different follow-up pieces now, and in two further brief references to the debate, failed to offer a single example -- not one -- of a natural law theorist whose work actually fits his description of natural law theory.  Indeed, he has explicitly refused to name any names, even though doing so would instantly defuse the main objection his critics have raised against him.

(For the record, these follow-up pieces are: Hart’s first reply to his critics in his column in the May 2013 First Things, to which I responded at Public Discourse; Hart’s lengthy further response to his critics in the letters pageof the same issue, to which I responded here at the blog; and what he characterized as his final response in his August 2013 column in First Things, to which I also responded here at the blog.  Hart then briefly revisited the debate in his column in the March 2015 First Things, to which I responded here; and he briefly referred to it yet again in his June/July 2015 First Things column, to which I recently responded at Public Discourse.)

Even more bizarrely, though Hart has addressed other objections head on, he has, in those three lengthy follow-up pieces and two briefer remarks -- five occasions total -- not even acknowledged, much less directly responded to, the central objection just summarized, even though it has been repeatedly raised against him.  He could very easily say: “I have been accused of conflating new and old natural law theory, but here is why that charge is mistaken…,” or: “Let me give you a specific example of a natural law theorist who is guilty of doing what I say natural law theorists in general are guilty of.”  But he doesn’t.  Why not?  It can’t be because he has judged that answering his critics is somehow not worth his time; again, he has revisited the debate five times now.  So, obviously he does want to try to answer his critics.  And yet he never acknowledges or directly responds to their central criticism.  Why is that?

Then there is the obscurity in what Hart doessay in reply to his critics.  If you read my responses, linked to above, to his three lengthier attempts to reply to those critics, you will see that I there show -- documenting my analysis with many quotes from Hart -- how difficult it is to find a clear and consistent position in what he says.  As I demonstrate in those pieces, just when you think you’ve finally nailed down what Hart means, he says something else that conflicts with that reading.  Hart himself confesses in one place to some “obscurity,” and in another that he “may have been guilty of a few cryptic formulations” and “should have been clearer.”

And yet despite admitting himself to being sometimes “obscure” and “cryptic,” and despite failing repeatedly even to acknowledge much less answer the main objection leveled against him -- where, if only he would do so, he might finally clarify things in a single stroke -- Hart claims that it is my criticismsof his remarks on natural law that are “confused,” “simplistic,” and guilty of “fallacies,” and that our dispute over natural law “largely involved Feser furiously thrashing away at what he imagined I was saying” (where the latter remark was embedded in the larger context of ad hominemremarks about my purportedly robotic and dogmatic adherence to “The System” of “Baroque neoscholasticism,” “manualism,” “two-tier Thomism,” etc.).

Now that, I submit, comes pretty close to what Foucault and Searle call “the method of… [the] terrorism of obscurantism.”

Second example: Hart’s March 2015 column in First Things is primarily devoted to the question of the relationship between faith and reason.  As I noted in my March 13 blog post commenting on that column:

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 also noted several other things Hart says in the column with which I agree, and indeed I said that they are “points whose importance cannot be overemphasized.” 

I also noted, however, that certain other things Hart says there seem, whatever his intentions, to imply a kind of fideism.  For example, he says that even reason “arises from an irreducibly fiduciary movement of the will” (emphasis added), and indicates that he rejects the view that reason is “capable of discerning first principles and deducing final conclusions without any surd of the irrational left over” (emphasis added).  That certainly makes it sound as if he thinks that in all our attempts rationally to justify our beliefs, there is always at bottom some “surd of the irrational” and that it is “the will,” in an “irreducibly fiduciary movement,” which decides upon first principles.  And that is a view of the sort that would commonly be regarded as a kind of fideism.  Still, I did not say that Hart is a fideist, full stop.  I said that his position is ambiguous and can be read in different ways. 

Incidentally, you’ll find a similar ambiguity in Hart’s recent book The Experience of God.  On the one hand, he argues (quite rightly in my view), that any materialist account of our rational thought processes can be shown to be self-undermining, and that the very logic of explanation when pushed through consistently leads inevitably to affirming the existence of a divine necessary being as the only possible explanation of why the world of contingent things exists.  That certainly evinces a very optimistic view of what reason can accomplish vis-à-vis the dispute between theists and philosophical naturalists. 

On the other hand, Hart also says in that book that he has “begun to vest less faith in certain forms of argument” (p. 84), and that it is good to “let all complexities of argument fall away as often as one can” in favor of a “moment of wonder, of sheer existential surprise” (p. 150).  He suggests that “our deepest principles often consist in nothing more -- but nothing less -- than a certain way of seeing things” and that “every form of philosophical thought is itself dependent upon a set of irreducible and unprovable assumptions” (p. 294).  He wants to remind us of “the limits of argument, and of the degree to which our most cherished certitudes are inseparable from our own private experiences” (Ibid.).

Does this mean that all attempted rational justifications come down at the end of the day to “private experiences,” “moments of wonder,” or the like?  Is there, after all, no common ground by which the theist might rationally demonstrate to the naturalist that the latter’s position is mistaken?  Are there just irreducibly different possible “movements of the will,” any of which involves a “surd of the irrational”?  If so, why wouldn’t this amount to fideism?  Or is there some other way to read Hart’s remarks here?  The problem is not the way Hart answers these questions.  The problem is that Hart doesn’t even addressthem, much less answer them, at least not in The Experience of God or in the column on faith and reason.  It just isn’t clear what he would say.

Now, a reader recently called my attention to a recent combox discussion at Eclectic Orthodoxy, to which Hart contributed and in the course of which he made the following remark:

[W]e are all so prone to thinking in the rather arid categories of (for want of a better word) analytic correspondence that we regard the entire tacit dimension of knowledge (which is the foundation of all knowledge) as somehow either merely inchoate or merely emotional. If one is not careful, one ends up with the barren dialectic of “rationalism” or “fideism,” and one ends up like a certain popular Thomist I know of, unable to think in any other terms than that.

Well, I’m sure we’re all wondering who the “popular Thomist” in question is.  But one good reason for thinking that it isn’t me -- or rather, for thinking that it shouldn’tbe me -- is that my views simply don’t correspond to those attributed by Hart to this “popular Thomist.”  For one thing, and as I explicitly said in my post on Hart’s faith and reason column, like him I reject what he called, in the column, “the Scylla and Charybdis of ‘rationalism’ and ‘fideism’ [which] seems like such a tarnished relic of the seventeenth century (or thereabouts).”  For another thing, I have written quite a bit, and quite sympathetically, on the “tacit dimension of knowledge.”  (See, for example, my defense of Burke’s and Hayek’s account of the indispensable role that tradition, habit, and inexplicit rules play in moral and social knowledge.)  It’s just that I don’t think that this tacit knowledge has anything to do with “movements of the will,” a “surd of the irrational,” or the like. 

Now, if some man assures us with vehemence that he is not a bachelor, but also denies with equal vehemence that he is or ever has been married, never explains to us how both these things can be true but also dismisses with contempt our suggestion that maybe he really is a bachelor after all (accusing us of applying “arid categories” and a “barren dialectic,” no less)… if someone does all that, then weare hardly the ones being unreasonable.  Nor would it be reasonable for his defenders breathlessly to protest “But he said he’s not a bachelor!  You’re not interpreting him charitably!” 

Similarly, though Hart insists that he is not a fideist, but nevertheless also says things that would normally be taken to be fideistic positions, and does not explain how he can reconcile these claims while at the same time dismissing his critics as being simplistic and misunderstanding him… well, once again, that seems pretty close to what Foucault and Searle call “the method of… [the] terrorism of obscurantism.”

Diagnosis: So, just what is Hart’s deal, anyway?  Why this resort to obscurantisme terroriste?  Let’s consider the following:

Item one: As a stylist and a thinker, Hart’s strengths and predilections lie in rhetoric rather than rigor, and he has a clear animus against writers of the opposite tendency.  Hence his confessionthat he “delight[s] in casual abuse of Thomists,” and his regular glib dismissals of anything he takes to smack of “neoscholasticism.”  Hence his equally condescending remarks about analytic philosophers in The Experience of God.  Hence his explicit refusal, in the same book, actually to set out and defend in any detail the arguments against materialism and for the existence of God that he endorses.  Explicit, step-by-step arguments, the dispassionate weighing of lists of possible objections and possible replies to those objections, the making of fine distinctions and careful definitions of key terms, and so forth -- the sort of thing typical of a Scholastic or an analytic philosopher -- are not the sort of thing for which Hart seems to have much patience.

What Hart really likes are grandiloquent pronouncements and the big picture.  A sense of his style and interests is given by the titles and subtitles you’ll typically find in a Hart book or article: “Being, Consciousness, Bliss,” “The Veil of the Sublime,” “The Mirror of the Infinite,” “A Glorious Sadness,” “The Practice of the Form,” “The Terrors of Easter,” “The Doors of the Sea,” “The Violence of Metaphysics and the Metaphysics of Violence”… that kind of stuff.  The sort of thing sure to prompt an “Oooh!” or an “Aaaaah!” as you dip into Hart while sipping brandy.  Grand Rhetoric and Grand Themes, and hold the argumentational minutiae please.  That’s Hart’s shtick, and he’s shtickin’ with it.  You can see how an analytical Thomist who posts comic book panels on his blog might get under his skin.

Item two: Whether or not you want to call it “fideism,” the view that what we take to be rational argument always comes down at the end of the day to “movements of the will,” “personal experiences,” “ways of seeing things,” “moments of wonder,” and the like tends inevitably to put the accent on the character of a person giving an argument rather than on the argument itself.  If your conclusions are mistaken, perhaps that’s because you haven’t had a “moment of wonder,” or have had the wrong “personal experiences,” so that your overall “way of seeing things” is off kilter.  Or perhaps the “movements of your will” are simply corrupt. 

Of course, sometimes the problem really is with the character of the person giving an argument.  Sometimes people really are arguing in bad faith.  Furthermore, Hart’s view doesn’t entail that all errors are a consequence of some deficiency of character.  It is consistent with some errors just being a result of mistaken inferences or getting the facts wrong. 

Still, if you are someone who is inclined to emphasize “the limits of argument,” and the role that “movements of the will” and the having of the right “personal experiences” play in ensuring a sound overall “way of seeing things,” then there is bound to be a strong temptation to jump too quickly to the ad hominem, to look straightaway for a deficiency in your critics and not just in their criticisms. 

And Hart does indeed sometimes suggest that deficiencies of background experience or personal motivation underlie his critics’ resistance to his views.  Hence, in his most recent response to me in First Things, Hart laments that “Feser [was not] fortunate enough to be catechized into Orthodoxy rather than The System.”  And rather than focusing on the actual arguments I gave against there being animals in Heaven (which was the subject of our dispute), he put the emphasis on what he alleged were my true motives for taking the view I did (viz. to uphold “The System”). 

Kidding on the square, Hart also suggests in The Experience of God that a preference for analytic philosophy reflects “some peculiarity of temperament or the tragic privations of a misspent youth” (p. 344). 

Furthermore, in one of his replies to critics of his article on natural law, Hart says:

I am in the end quite happy for believers in natural law theory to continue plying their oars, rowing against the current (so long as they do so in keeping with classical metaphysics), but I do not think they are going to get where they are heading; so I shall just watch from the bank for a while and then wander off to the hills (to look for saints and angels).

And in reply to one critic in particular, he says:

As to what “other approach” he should take to “modern moral life,” I encourage Mr. Kainz to pursue classical natural law theory (which was not the topic I addressed), if he likes. The Great Commission also comes to mind. (Do what you think best.)

The insinuation is obvious.  If what motivates you is Christ’s Great Commission and if you value the teachings of saints and angels over those of worldly men, then you’ll agree with Hart.  And if you don’t agree with Hart, well…

(I say more about these two passages in my analysis from two years ago of the piece from which they are quoted.)

So, with this in mind, consider the scenario in which Hart not infrequently finds himself.  A Grand Man makes a Grand Point about a Grand Theme, in Grand Style.  And then some yutz analytic philosopher or neoscholastic comes along logic-chopping and ruining the moment.  The temptation is strong to conclude that there’s got to be something wrong with the critic and not just with whatever his silly criticism is.  He just hasn’t got the character or education to see all the Grandness. 

Conclusion: On the one hand, then, we have a strong predilection for rhetoric and an impatience with rigorous argumentation.  That’s a recipe for the first half of obscurantisme terroriste.  And on the other hand, we have a strong tendency to look for volitional, experiential, moral, and spiritual deficiencies -- personal deficiencies -- in those who have the wrong opinions.  That’s a recipe for the second half of obscurantisme terroriste.  Thus, a temptation to deal with critics via what Searle and Foucault call “the method of… [the] terrorism of obscurantism” is, I would suggest, bound to be an occupational hazard of the Hart style of theology.

And this is an analysis even Hart should love.  “The Terrorism of Obscurantism” sounds just like a Hart chapter title, no?

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Stupid rhetorical tricks

In honor of David Letterman’s final show tonight, let’s look at a variation on his famous “Stupid pet tricks” routine.  It involves people rather animals, but lots of Pavlovian frenzied salivating.  I speak of David Bentley Hart’s latest contribution, in the June/July issue of First Things, to our dispute about whether there will be animals in Heaven.  The article consists of Hart (a) flinging epithets like “manualist Thomism” and “Baroque neoscholasticism” so as to rile up whatever readers there are who might be riled up by such epithets, while (b) ignoring the substance of my arguments.  Pretty sad.  I reply at Public Discourse.

 
Previous installments of my various exchanges with Hart can be found here.

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