Judging a book by what it doesn’t cover

In his encyclical Aeterni Patris, Pope Leo XIII called for a “restoration of Christian philosophy.” He was quite specific about what he had in mind:

[D]aily experience, and the judgment of the greatest men, and, to crown all, the voice of the Church, have favored the Scholastic philosophy.

Indeed, he was even more specific than that:

Among the Scholastic Doctors, the chief and master of all towers Thomas Aquinas…

We exhort you, venerable brethren, in all earnestness to restore the golden wisdom of St. Thomas, and to spread it far and wide for the defense and beauty of the Catholic faith, for the good of society, and for the advantage of all the sciences… Let carefully selected teachers endeavor to implant the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas in the minds of students, and set forth clearly his solidity and excellence over others.  Let the universities already founded or to be founded by you illustrate and defend this doctrine, and use it for the refutation of prevailing errors.

Other popes have echoed the theme.  For example, Pius X, in Pascendi Dominici Gregis, wrote: “[L]et Professors remember that they cannot set St. Thomas aside, especially in metaphysical questions, without grave detriment.”

Before certain readers start hyperventilating, I should pause to note that my point is not to argue from papal authority for the superiority of Aquinas.  If you think Leo, Pius, et al. were wrong -- for example, if you think Scotus is a better guide to metaphysical questions, or if you think Scholasticism in general is wrongheaded, or if you couldn’t care less in the first place about what the popes have to say -- well, for present purposes none of that is either here or there.  My point is rather to explain how the term “Scholastic” came to have a certain connotation.  In the decades after Leo’s encyclical appeared, the Neo-Scholastic movement sought to implement his program.  One key feature of this movement was that its representatives tended to treat Thomism as normative for Scholastic thinking more generally.  Scotist and Suarezian positions were taken seriously and sometimes adopted, but the default position tended to be Thomistic.  Another key feature was that the Neo-Scholastics were keen to emphasize that Scholasticism is not a museum piece but a living tradition that offers a serious response to modern assumptions in philosophy.  Accordingly, the emphasis in Neo-Scholastic works was not on historical scholarship but rather on articulation of the structure of the Scholastic system and application to contemporary problems.

These tendencies by no means reflected a blind submission to papal authority.  The Neo-Scholastics had arguments for the view that Scholastic, and in particular Thomistic, positions were superior to those of the modern systems of thought (rationalist, empiricist, idealist, etc.) that had supplanted Scholasticism.  And they had arguments for the view that the departures from Thomism represented by writers like Scotus, Ockham, and Suarez were often harmful to the integrity of the Scholastic system, and inadvertently contributed to the dissolution of the Scholastic synthesis and rise of the modern systems.  A reasonable person can disagree with these views, but they represent a coherent and well thought out philosophical position.

It is one I happen to agree with, and my book Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction is very much written in the spirit of this approach.  It is not an exercise in antiquarianism.  It is not written for historians of philosophy, or for Latinists, or for those who are interested in the minutiae of intra-Scholastic debate over the centuries.  It is written for people interested in understanding the framework of Scholastic thinking about fundamental metaphysical questions, and how it relates to controversies in contemporary analytic philosophy.  So, if you are the sort of anal retentive academic historian of philosophy who thinks that (say) a definitive history of the early 14^th century dispute over universals must be written before we can begin tentatively to think about gesturing towards a recovery of the point of view from which the question of contemporary application might someday be asked… well, my book is not for you. 

The book is also written from a decidedly Thomistic point of view.  I discuss the views of Scotus, Ockham, and Suarez where they disagree with Aquinas, because the reader should know where and why Scholastic metaphysicians differ with one another.  But the book is not about these intra-Scholastic disputes, and it does not attempt to settle them to the satisfaction of Scotists, Ockhamists, and Suarezians.  Rather, the book is about the dispute between, on the one hand, what I take to be the strongest version of Scholasticism, and on the other hand the various metaphysical views which prevail within modern philosophy, and within analytic philosophy in particular.

I am quite explicit about these aims of the book, and it is in light of those aims that the book should be judged.  Now, Michael Sullivan of the Scotist blog The Smithy (and, I think, a friend of this blog), has just posted the first in a series of posts reviewing my book.  He more or less acknowledges its specific aims, and assures us that “a book review ought to evaluate a book on the basis of its own goals, not our expectations for what a different sort of book might have been had the author cared to attempt it.”  Unfortunately, the then goes on to evaluate the book precisely on the basis of his expectations for what a different sort of book might have been had I cared to attempt it.

In particular, Sullivan is irritated that I do not have more to say about Scotus, Ockham, and Suarez, that I rely on English translations rather than Latin originals, and that I’m too beholden to relatively recent Neo-Scholastic works.  He develops his complaint at some length, though he has (so far, anyway) nothing to say about what is actually in the book, only about what is not in it.  Had I been writing a neutral historical account of all the various thinkers and arguments that have fallen under the label “Scholastic,” Sullivan’s complaints would have been reasonable.  But as Sullivan himself is well aware, that is not what I was trying to do.  And given the actual aims of the book, Sullivan’s complaints seem to me to be rather silly. 

Sullivan says that my book is not “scholarly.”  By that he means that it does not emphasize primary sources, does not cite works in the original languages, is not historically comprehensive, etc.  And that is indeed the kind of thing that characterizes a “scholarly” work of history, say.  But there is another sense in which a work might be “scholarly,” which is operative in works of philosophy that are not primarily concerned with history.  It has to do with knowing the current state of discussion, mastering the relevant literature, adhering to academic standards of argumentational rigor rather than aiming for a “pop” audience, etc.  I submit that my book, judged by its actual aims, is very much a scholarly one in that sense. 

That is a kind of scholarship I commend to Sullivan and other non-Thomist Scholastics.  Every so often at The Smithy one finds expressions of annoyance at the tendency to treat Aquinas as the Scholastic gold standard.  That’s understandable.  Scotus, Ockham, and Suarez were thinkers of genius and certainly deserve more attention than they get.

But here’s the thing.  Thomists have, for over a century and with renewed vigor in recent decades, been putting forward Scholastic arguments in the context of contemporary mainstream debates in metaphysics, natural theology, philosophy of mind, ethics, and other areas.  They have made it clear that these are arguments with contemporary relevance, not mere museum pieces.  Naturally, given that they are Thomists, their brand of Scholasticism has been Thomistic.  And naturally, they have been less concerned with history-of-philosophy spectacle-cleaning than with presenting an argument in its strongest possible form, regardless of whether this or that Scholastic presented it exactly that way.   If many people think of Aquinas and Thomism when they think of Scholasticism, that’s a big part of the reason. 

If Scotists and Suarezians really want non-Scholastics to take their own heroes as seriously as they take Aquinas, they need to do more of this sort of thing themselves.  They need to get out of the library stacks and into the debate.  They need to avoid getting so absorbed with doing “scholarship” that they forget about doing philosophy.  They need to worry less about the history of Scholasticism and more about the future of Scholasticism.  That would seem to be a more productive use of their time than complaining that Thomists haven’t been adequate publicists for Scotus and other non-Thomists. 

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Review of Gray etc.

Readers of the Claremont Review of Books may want to look for my review of John Gray’s book The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Mythsin the Spring 2014 issue.  At the moment the review is behind a pay wall, but subscribing will fix that problem.

On another matter, readers keep asking me how to get hold of Scholastic Metaphysics, which was released on April 1, somewhat ahead of schedule.  Apparently the book sold out very quickly because supply could not meet all the pre-orders and Amazon has been out of stock for some time.  I have been told that a new shipment arrived at the U.S. distributor’s warehouse a week or so ago and that the book should once again be available from Amazon this week.  So, sit tight, and many, many thanks for your patience and interest.

While you’re waiting, you could always pick up a copy of my book Locke, which, as I recently learned, Prof. Joseph Pappin III very kindly reviews in Vol. 22 of the journal Studies in Burke and His Time.  Readers wanting to understand how modern philosophy moved away from what once was the Aristotelian-Scholastic mainstream will find the book of interest.  From Pappin’s review:

Edward Feser’s Locke is not only an outstanding introduction to the full range of John Locke’s philosophy, it is also a penetrating interpretive work, presented with clarity and conciseness.  One of its strengths is stated by Feser in Chapter One: “Locke straddles the medieval and post-modern worlds, the age of faith and the age of skepticism and secularism.”  Feser’s book is in large part framed by this tension he finds in Locke’s corpus.

Locke is divided into six distinct chapters, with individual chapters of considerable length devoted to the Essay Concerning Human Understanding and another on the Second Treatise of Government.  Preceding these chapters is a sustained examination of the Aristotelian-Scholastic background to Locke’s thought while setting before the reader “The Lockean Project” … Feser justifies this approach “because,” as he declares, “nothing less would serve as an appropriate introduction to the intellectual background against which Locke was reacting”…

This reviewer highly recommends Feser’s tome as an ideal introduction… [and] successful interpretation of the strengths and inherent weaknesses of the “Lockean project.”

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Sexual cant from the asexual Kant

Kant never married and apparently died a virgin.  He is sometimes described as having had a low opinion of sex, on the basis of passages like this one from his Lectures on Ethics:

[S]exuality is not an inclination which one human being has for another as such, but is an inclination for the sex of another… The desire which a man has for a woman is not directed towards her because she is a human being, but because she is a woman; that she is a human being is of no concern to the man; only her sex is the object of his desires. Human nature is thus subordinated. Hence it comes that all men and women do their best to make not their human nature but their sex more alluring and direct their activities and lusts entirely towards sex. Human nature is thereby sacrificed to sex. (Louis Infield translation, p.164)

“Sexuality, therefore,” Kant concludes, “exposes mankind to the danger of equality with the beasts.”  He qualifies the claim, but just barely:

Sexual love can, of course, be combined with human love and so carry with it the characteristics of the latter, but taken by itself and for itself, it is nothing more than appetite. Taken by itself it is a degradation of human nature; for as soon as a person becomes an Object of appetite for another, all motives of moral relationship cease to function, because as an Object of appetite for another a person becomes a thing… (p. 163)

I think the account of sexual desire implicit here is seriously wrong both metaphysically and phenomenologically -- that is to say, both in terms of what the natural end or telos of sexual desire actually is, and in terms of how this desire is typically felt and its end typically perceived.  Kant is correct that sexual desire is not aimed at another human being merely quahuman.  But it is wrong to say that the end is or is perceived to be merely the sexof the other as such.  Kant makes it sound as if a man’s sexual desire is “aimed” at femaleness per se, and a woman’s sexual desire “aimed” at maleness per se -- as if it could in principle equally well be satisfied by a female or male of any species.  That is definitely not the case where the natural end of human sexual desire is concerned.  (Naturally, in affirming the existence of a “natural end” I’m looking at the subject from a Thomistic natural law point of view, which I’ve developed and defended elsewhere.)  Nor is it true phenomenologically either, except in those rare individuals tempted to bestiality. 

As I argued in an earlier post and a NCBQ article, a man’s sexual desire is aimed by nature toward a womanand a woman’s sexual desire is aimed by nature toward a man.  And that is also how it is typically experienced, though of course as everywhere else in the natural order there are imperfections and aberrant cases.  What a man wants, even when his intentions are not honorable, is not “a human being” but neither is it merely “a female.”  He wants a woman, and a woman is of course simultaneously human and female.  And what a woman wants is a man -- who is of course both human and male -- and neither “a human being” nor “a male.”  Kant abstracts out “being human,” “being female,” and “being male,” and seems to think that if the object of sexual desire isn’t the first, then it can only be one of the latter.  (For Kant, it seems, we’re all like George Michael.)  But the true object of sexual desire is what you had before you abstracted these things out.

As I indicated in the earlier post, it is important to keep in mind how true this is even in most immoral sexual encounters.  Conservative moralists often speak  as if sexual immorality were essentially a matter of dehumanizing or animalizing the sexual act, but that is not quite right.  Casanova and Don Draper are womanizers, not “femalizers.”  Nor is it merely that they want females of the species Homo sapiens.  They want their sexual partners to have the reason and volition that distinguish human beings from other animals.  The womanizer wants a woman to admire and surrender to him, and only what can think and choose (as non-human animals cannot) can do that sort of thing.  You can’t seducea non-human animal.  That is not to say that there aren’t perverts who really do desire something non-human or formerly human (as in bestiality or necrophilia) but that is rare and so very far from the paradigm case that even many people otherwise unsympathetic to the natural law understanding of sex can see that there is something warped about it.

It is also just mistaken to say that “all men and women do their best to make not their human nature but their sex more alluring” and that the “Object of [sexual] appetite… becomes a thing.”  It is true that men and women trying to attract members of the opposite sex do not try to enhance what they have in common as human beings, but neither do they try to reduce themselves merely to maleness or femaleness understood as that which they have in common with non-human animals.  A man tries to enhance his masculinity and a woman her femininity.  Non-human animals are male or female, but they are not masculine or feminine.  To be masculine is to be (to that extent) an excellent specimen of a male human being, and to be feminine is to be (to that extent) an excellent specimen of a female human being.  Humanness as such is not emphasized, but neither is it abstracted out.  The man trying to attract a woman is not saying “Look at what a human being I am” but neither is he saying “Look at what a male animal I am”; he is saying “Look at what a man I am,” where a man is both human and male at once.  Similarly, a woman trying to attract a man is saying “Look at what a woman I am,” where to be a woman is to be neither merely human nor merely female but both at once.

So, while it is understandable why Kant would be suspicious of sexual desire if it really had the teleology he seems to think it does, I think he just gets the teleology wrong.  To be sure, Kant does not say that the gratification of sexual desire is inherently immoral.  He allows that it is morally permissible in marriage.  But the reasons he gives are instructive:

The sole condition on which we are free to make use of our sexual desire depends upon the right to dispose over the person as a whole... If I have the right over the whole person, I have also the right over the part and so I have the right to use that person’s organa sexualia for the satisfaction of sexual desire. But how am I to obtain these rights over the whole person? Only by giving that person the same rights over the whole of myself. This happens only in marriage… Matrimony is the only condition in which use can be made of one’s sexuality. If one devotes one’s person to another, one devotes not only sex but the whole person; the two cannot be separated. (pp. 166-67)

With sex as with everything else, morality for Kant boils down to respect for “the person.”  It is because in marriage two “persons” are united -- not a man and a woman, mind you, but “one’s person” and “another [person]” -- that the gratification of sexual desire becomes morally permissible.  (Whyis not clear.  If sexual desire as such involves treating another person as a mere animal or as a thing, how can it ever be permissible on Kantian terms to gratify it?  Why wouldn’t the ideal Kantian marriage be sexless?)

We seem to have implicit here a kind of Cartesianism.  There’s the body, which is either male or female but as such a merely animal and inhuman sort of thing; and then there’s “the person,” which is a bloodless, sexless, rational and willing agent hidden behind the body.  Menand women disappear.  It’s as if for Kant, the ideal human beings would all be like the androgynous Pat and Chris from the old Saturday Night Live “It’s Pat” sketches. 

Not (to be fair) that Kant explicitly says this or would want to say it.  And Kant himself inadvertently gives the reason why this would be a mistaken view of human nature when he writes:

The body is part of the self; in its togetherness with the self it constitutes the person; a man cannot make of his person a thing… (p. 166)

Exactly right.  But that means that since Harry’s body is part of himself and it is a man’s body, then being a man, specifically, is part of what it is to be Harry, and thus Harry’s being seen and sexually desired as a man is precisely notto be seen and desired as a thing.  Similarly, since Sally’s body is part of herself and it is a woman’s body, then being a woman, specifically, is part of what it is to be Sally, and thus Sally’s being seen and sexually desired as a woman is precisely not to be seen and desired as a thing.  Where real human beings (as opposed to angels and as opposed to SNL’s Pat) are concerned, to be a person just is to be either a man and thus male, or a woman and thus female.  It just is to be of one sex or the other.  And to desire someone sexually just is a way of desiring a kind of person, namely the human kind.  Your sex is not contingent and extrinsic to you but rather intrinsic and essential to you.  (That is why, for Aquinas, though sexual intercourse will not exist in the hereafter, sex -- being a man or being a woman -- will exist forever.)

But then, Kant’s discussion of sexual morality in the Lecturesis not clear or carefully worked out in the first place.  For example, his account of marriage makes crucial use of the notion of having mutual property rights in one another, yet just a couple of pages earlier (at p. 165) he had argued that a human being cannot properly be thought of as a kind of property, not even his own property.  Presumably he would regard the “property” talk in the passage about marriage as metaphorical, but how exactly do we cash out the metaphor in a way that will preserve the force of the argument?

Given that he very strongly condemns homosexual behavior in the Lectures, Kant would no doubt have been horrified by the notion of “same-sex marriage.”  Yet what he says about marriage could certainly be developed in a way that would allow for it.  If marriage is essentially a union of human persons, and maleness and femaleness are extraneous to being human persons (as what he says about sexual desire seems to imply, whether or not he would want to draw the conclusion), then why couldn’t a marriage exist between any two human persons? 

As I have noted before, while Kantian personalist talk has in recent decades become popular among some conservative Christian moralists, it is something of which they ought to be wary.   It is conceptually sloppy and tends toward conclusions that are (at least from the point of view of the traditional natural law theorist) either too rigorist or too lax.  Yes, human beings are persons, but so are angels.  What is distinctive about human morality is what sets us apart from the angels.  That is one reason why the traditional Aristotelian-Thomistic conception of human beings as rational animals is superior to the Kantian approach.  Our animality -- and thus our being either men or women, either male or female -- is as essential to us as our rationality, not something extraneous or tacked-on.  For the Thomist, “It’s Patrick” or “It’s Patricia.”  It ain’t “Pat.”

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Linked in

Two new papers from David Oderberg: “Is Form Structure?” and “The Metaphysics of Privation.”

Donald Devine and I have been debating the merits of John Locke for years.  Don offers his latest thoughts at The Federalist in “The Real John Locke -- And Why He Matters.”

Stratford Caldecott -- Catholic writer, G. K. Chesterton Research Fellow at St. Benet’s Hall, Oxford, and Marvel Comics fan -- has cancer.  Marvel has stepped up to grant him a dying wish, and the stars of the Marvel movies have given him a touching tribute.  Fr. Z has the story, as do The Independent and the Catholic Herald.

Terry Teachout’s new biography of Duke Ellington is reviewed at The Weekly Standard.

Is resistance to “same-sex marriage” futile?  Over at National Review Online, Ryan T. Anderson argues that it is not.

Also at NRO, Thomas Hibbs watches Mad Men while reading Dante.

Straussian political philosopher Steven B. Smith is interviewed at 3:AM Magazine.  So is metaphysician John Heil.

Guitarist Jon Herington is interviewed about touring with Steely Dan and other stuff.

At The American Spectator, John Derbyshire reports on the “Toward a Science of Consciousness” conference in Arizona.  (Behind a pay wall, I’m afraid.)

If you haven’t yet seen the new Guardians of the Galaxytrailer, here it is.  Director Edgar Wright has quit the Ant-Man flick.

So whaddaya think of Wikipedia?  Spiked expresses what will perhaps forever be the main complaints.  (Whoever did my entry has made some… kind of odd choices.  Plus for some reason they still have me teaching at LMU and visiting at Bowling Green.  Weird.)

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