The Four: A Survey of the Gospels

Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom

From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John

Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Jane Austen
(A Biography)

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

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Philosophy: Nature again

My colleague Jonathan McIntosh takes issue with my post about nature in Aristotle:

“I like the idea of questioning or challenging Aristotle’s notion of nature, but is it possible that your remarks confuse ‘not being impeded by an external influence for the fulfillment of one’s nature’ with therefore somehow ‘not needing any external influences for the fulfillment of one’s nature’? My understanding is that Aristotle is not trying to exclude the role of external influence (indeed, the very idea of nature, or a potency in need of actualization from the outside) presupposes it, but is rather talking about those violent, catastrophic external influences (violent or catastrophic, at least, relative to the nature in question) that might knock a thing’s nature ‘off course.’ To use your example, we do gash our knees, but our knees also heal. Why? That’s part of the knee’s nature, a potency the knee already has that is capable of actualization. Cut the leg off at the knee, however, and it won’t grow back. Why? Because the body’s otherwise natural ability to adapt, respond, heal, etc., has been ‘impeded’ (the capacity for healing has not only been not actualized, but obliterated all together). And as you know, in many areas, especially the ethical and political, Aristotle seems to have a fairly robust account of our need of ‘external influences’ for our potential to be human to be fulfilled. You can’t cultivate the virtue of friendship, for example, unless you have friends to practice, and by whom to be practiced, upon.”

Philosophy Theology - Trinity: Nature and Origin

The concept of nature is front-loaded.  Nature is what things are in their origin.  Hence physis sometimes means “birth.”

Hence too Arius: If the Father is ungenerated and the Son begotten, then they must have distinct natures.

Athanasius and the Cappadocians deny the premise.  True, the Father is ungenerated in every sense; He is not even begotten.  The Son is ungenerated in the sense that He is eternal; but He is begotten.  He originates from the Father, while the Father originates from none.  Yet, they are the same nature, and same substance, homoousios.  Origin does not determine nature.

Breaking the link between nature and origin, Trinitarian theology opened the possibility of a back-loaded, eschatological ontology.

Philosophy: Actualizing potential

Aristotle argued that certain kinds of things have “a principle of motion and of stationariness,” an “innate impulse to change.”  Artificial things do not have such an impulse or principle, insofar as they are products of art, though “in so far as they happen to be composed of stone or of earth or of a mixture of the two, they do have such an impulse.”  Such things that have such a principle or impulse toward motion are things that “have a nature.”  A nature is an impulse to actualize what is potential in the thing.  One definition of nature is that it is “the immediate material substratum of things which have in themselves a principle of motion or change.”

Now this is an account of change, and thus seems to be an account of time.  But in fact Aristotle seems to be shielding nature from real time and history.   His model is botanical: Plants grow according to a “nature”; nature is the way plants would grow if not impeded by external influence.  That’s not even a very satisfying description of plant growth, and it certainly doesn’t describe how human beings are realized more fully as humans.  We don’t smoothly grow from seed, but become more fully human as we speak and are spoken to, as we gash our knees and blister our hands, as we are beaten by disappointments and grow big with success.

On this account of nature, we become what we are potentially.  Reality is more as Rosenstock-Huessy described it: We respond, though we shall be changed.

Philosophy: Classification

Jorge Luis Borges cited the classification of animals from a fictional Chinese dictionary, and Foucault used that list to demonstrate the relativity of classification systems.

Augustine beat them both to it.  Faustus wants to distinguish neatly between sects and schisms, and concludes that there are only two sects, the Manichean and the children of darkness.  Manicheans do not, as catholics claim, resemble pagans in the least.  Catholics are the ones who resemble pagans.  Well, Augustine says, it all depends on how you group things together:

“things are often divided now in one way, now in another, in accord with many differences, so that what was in one group is found to be in another group in which it was not found before on the basis of other differences.  For example, if one divides all beings of flesh into what can and what cannot fly, quadrupeds are, on the basis of this difference, more like humans than birds because they are equally incapable of flying.  On the other hand, if someone divides them on the basis of another difference, by saying that some are rational and others are non-rational, the quadrupeds are now more like birds than humans.  For they are equally without reason.”  Religions can be classified in different ways too: “if someone divides them by saying that, of those who belong to a religion, some people want one God to be worshiped and others many gods, by this difference pagans are far removed from us, and Manicheans should be included with pagans, while we should be included with the Jews.”

Philosophy: Knowledge Network

By his own admission, Rick Ostrander’s Why College Matters to God: A Student’s Introduction to The Christian College Experience contains little that is new, but it is a very deft introduction to the Christian view of things (organized around the time-honored creation-fall-redemption scheme) with many helpful illustrations.  Designed for college freshman, the book is remarkably accessible without being silly or trite.

One of his most illuminating sections compares the development of a worldview to the completion of a crossword puzzle.  In a crossword, words depend on other words; you follow the clues to solve an interlocking network of words.  No word stands on its own.  Likewise, a worldview develops as a network of knowledge, each bit of knowledge depending as much (or more) on its “fit” with other bits as on the bits’ connections with some foundational presuppositions.

Continue reading…

Philosophy: Artificial Paternity

In the aforementioned book, Burrus several times cites Nancy Jay’s (Throughout Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice, Religion, and Paternity) arresting observation that “birth by itself can never provide sure evidence” of paternity, yet evidence of paternity provides the “crucial inter-generational link.”  That is: Watching a birth, you can tell who the mother is; the mother is the one from whom the child emerges.  Until very recently, there is no similarly reliable empirical way to test paternity.  Yet, paternity is a cornerstone of law and social custom in many societies.

Which means: Paternity has a natural, biological root (somebody impregnated the mother, or at least somebody’s sperm did).  But unless someone observed the act of impregnation (which is, to say the least, unusual), paternity has historically been constructive, fictive, assigned.

Which also means: Paternity has historically rested on trust.  That red hair might be a recessive gene, or it might be evidence of a rival.

Which also makes one wonder: How does the use of DNA paternity testing affect masculinity and paternity in law and society?  What happens when paternity no longer relies on trust?

Philosophy: Foucault, Colonialist

Godzich again, explaining that Foucault remained immured in the very hegemonic discourse that he assaulted: “Foucault conceived of himself as the surveyor of these very hegemonic modes of cognition, as someone who would describe their systematicity and their hold.  Though he labeled the enterprise an archaeology, he paid scant attention to the ways in which these hegemonic modes of cognition did establish themselves and to the means by which they managed to maintain their grasp.  In fact, his own concern with the hegemonic forced him to discard with a ruthlessness equal to that of what he was describing any practices, discursive or otherwise, that sought to maintain any autonomy with respect to these hegemonic behemoths.”  Hence his “inability to articulate the movement, or the shift, from one hegemonic mode of cognition to another.”

Philosophy: Levinas

In his introduction to Michel de Certeau’s Heterologies: Discourse on the Other (Theory and History of Literature), Wlad Godzich gives as concise a summary of Levinas as you are likely to find: “Against a notion of the truth as the instrument of a mastery being exercised by the knower over areas of the unknown as he or she brings them within the field of the same, Levinas argues that there is a form of truth that is totally alien to me, that I do not discover within myself, but that calls on me from beyond me, and it requires me to leave the realms of the known and of the same in order to settle in a land that is under its rule.  Here the knower sets out on an adventure of uncertain outcome, and the instruments that he or she brings may well be inappropriate to the tasks that will arise.  Reason will play a role, but it will be a secondary one; it can only come into play once the primary fact of the irruption of the other has been experienced.  And this other is not a threat to be reduced nor an object that I give myself to know in my capacity as a knowing subject, but that which constitutes me as an ethical being: in my originary encounter I discover my responsibility for the existence of this other, a responsibility that will lie at the root of all my subsequent ethical decisions.  Knowledge and its operations are subordinated to this initial ethical moment, for the responsibility that I then experience is the very ground of my response-ability, that is, my capacity to communicate with others and with myself in noncoercive ways.  Reason can now deploy itself in the field that has been opened up by the relation I have to the other.  It is a reason chastised, not likely to seek hegemonic control, for were it to do so it would have to do violence to my self as the self that is in this relation of response-ability to the other.”

Philosophy: What Hath Plantinga Wrought

Atheist philosophy Quentin Smith notes in a 2001 article that the theistic arguments of Plantinga, Wolterstorff, Alston, and others opened the door for God to return to philosophy.  Plantinga’s work in particular made it “apparent to the philosophical profession that realist theists were not out-matched by naturalists in terms of the most valued standards of analytic philosophy: conceptual precision, rigor of argumentation, technical erudition, and an in-depth defense of an original worldview. . . . In philosophy it became, almost overnight, ‘academically respectable’ to argue for theism, making philosophy a favored field of entry for the most intelligent and talented theists entering academy today. . . . God is not ‘dead’ in academia; he returned to life in the late 1960s and is now alive and well in his last academic stronghold, philosophy departments.”

Two comments: First, this suggests that “new atheism” is something of a backlash; like most aggressive and shrill movements (militant Islam), it is driven by panic and defensiveness not confidence.  Second, the revival of theism in philosophy is a prime illustration of the kind of cultural change that James Davison Hunter advocates in his most recent book.

Philosophy: Aristotle and Touch

My colleague Jonathan McIntosh points to the Aristotelian source for Thomas’s views on touch:

“we have a more precise sense of taste because it is a certain type of touch, and that is the most precise sense a human being has. For in the other sense, the human being is left behind by many of the animals, but with respect to touch he is precise in a way that greatly surpasses the rest, and this is why he is the most intelligent of the animals. A sign of this is that within the human race, being naturally well or badly endowed with intelligence depends on the organ of this sense and not on the others, for those with tough skin are badly equipped by nature for thinking, but those with tender skin are well equipped” (Aristotle, De anima 2.9421a19-27).

What intrigues me is the way that Aristotle’s views on touch are overlaid with class distinctions.  Rough-skinned slaves and metics are not fit for thought, and Aristotle has the temerity to say that they are rough-skinned “by nature.”  Smooth-skinned aristocrats are fitted by nature for leisure and philosophy.

Philosophy: Gastronomic Epistemology, 2

Knowing is like tasting and eating.  Where does that get us?

If knowing is like eating, then we know things other by taking them into ourselves.  Knowing is a kind of participation, union, indwelling.  If knowing is seeing, we keep everything at a distance.

If knowing is like eating, what we know becomes part of our bloodstream.

If knowing is like eating, we can’t know and leave the world unchanged.  It will show our teeth marks.

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Philosophy: Touch

Thomas says that “excellence of mind is proportionate to fineness of touch” rather than sight.  Why?  ”In the first place touch is the basis of sensitivity as a whole; for obviously the organ of touch pervades the whole body, so that the organ of each of the other senses is also an organ of touch, and the sense of touch by itself constitutes a being as sensitive.  Therefore, the finer one’s sense of touch, the better, strictly speaking, is one’s sensitive nature as a whole, and consequently the higher one’s intellectual capacity.  For a fine sensitivity is a disposition to a fine intelligence.”

Add Merleau-Ponty’s observation that touch is inevitably a mutual sense: To touch is to be touched.

Between these two we go a good ways toward a satisfying epistemology.

Philosophy: Objectivity and Distance

Carolyn Korsmeyer (Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy) questions the traditional hierarchy of the senses that places vision and hearing at the top of the heap.  Why do they come out on top?  Korsmeyer says that the issue is distance; distance keeps the thing perceived (seen, heard) an object, keeps it at arm’s length, and distance is the precondition of objectivity.  Taste, touch, smell require proximity, even intimacy, and so these senses are considered subjective.

Now, on the face of this, the hierarchy Korsmeyer challenges is nutty.  The further I am away, the more space lies between me and the thing I want to know, the better I know it?? Who but a philosopher would think so?  Who but a courtly lover would think that admiring from afar is better than tasting, smelling, touching?

Another reason for the hierarchy is that distance keeps things external, while proximity brings things closer.  Taste requires that I take a bit of the things tasted into my self, into my subjectivity, and thus is not cannot yield knowledge as scientific and sound as vision and sound.  Korsmeyer begs to differ: Taste and smell, she says, are “chemical senses” that depend on factors that are “as it were hard-wired in the individual and not subject of alteration.”

For Korsmeyer, taste and smell are not mechanistic, merely chemical senses.  Cultural factors and individual experience form taste; edible and inedible are categories that depend on cultural norms and personal experience.  And we can refine our sense of taste.  Taste and touch don’t yield mere “sense experience” as empiricists might claim.  They also receive and construct meanings through their interactions with the world.

Philosophy: Singing the world

What does language do?  Refer?  Communicate concepts?  Affect action?  Yes, but, according to Merleau-Ponty, with all of these doings of language it never loses its basic link to gesture and sound.  Language never loses its affective dimension, never loses its musicality.  James M. Edie sums up the point:

“Merleau-Ponty’s first point is that words, even when the finally achieve the ability to carry referential and, eventually, conceptual levels of meaning, never completely lose that primitive, strictly phonemic, level of ‘affective’ meaning which is not translatable into their conceptual definitions.  There is, he argues, an affective tonality, a mode of conveying meaning beneath the level of thought, beneath the level of the words themselves. . . which is contained in the words just insofar as they are patterned sounds, as just the sounds which this particular historical language uniquely uses, and which are must more like a melody – a ‘singing of the world’ – than fully translatable, conceptual thought.”

Philosophy: Imagination

Imagination, David Abram argues (following Merleau-Ponty), is not “a separate mental faculty” but “the way the senses themselves have of throwing themselves beyond what is immediately given, in order to make tentative contact with the other sides of things that we do not sense directly, with the hidden or invisible aspects of the sensible.”  These anticipations are products of imagination, but are not arbitrary: “they regularly respond to suggestions offered by the sensible itself.”

A professional sleight-of-hand magician, Abram illustrates by talking about coin tricks: “I may suddenly hide the coin behind the hand, clipping it between two fingers, so that it is no longer visible to their gaze.  If, an instant later, I reach into the air on the other side of my body with my left hand, and bring into view another silver coin that had been clipped behind that hand, the audience common perceives something quite wondrous.  They will not perceive that one coin has been momentarily hidden while a wholly different coin, in another place, has been brought out of hiding, although this would surely be the most obvious and rational interpretation.  Rather, they will perceive that a single coin, having vanished from my right hand, has traveled invisibly through the air and reappeared in my left hand!”  Abram says that “the perceiving body does not calculate logical probabilities; it gregariously participates in the activity of the world, lending its imagination to things in order to see them more fully.”

Philosophy: Character and meaning

Arians use the words of Scripture, Athanasius acknowledges, but they use them only as a cloak and disguise to deceive and seduce.  They are like the devil their father, who used Scriptural language to tempt Eve and attempted to tempt Jesus by quoting Scripture.

What’s the difference between faithful use of Scriptural words and deceitful use of Scriptural words?  For Athanasius, the difference lies in the character of the speaker.  Arians don’t mean what they say because they don’t speak “from an upright mind.”  Had they expounded the Christian faith with appeals to the orthodox fathers, their use of Scripture would be taken seriously, since the “character of the men is sincere and incapable of fraud.”

Behind this characterization of Arians is an implicit theory of language, one that locates meaning not in words (only) but in the character of the person speaking.  ”Is it true?” is a question not only for the proposition but for the proposer.

Philosophy: Natural Law

J. Budziszewski’s The Line Through the Heart: Natural Law as Fact, Theory, and Sign of Contradiction is about the best and most accessible defenses of natural law one could hope for.  At the micro level, J. Bud’s arguments, rejoinders, and observations are sharp, often witty.  (I mean no disrespect with the abbreviation, faintly reminiscent of J. Lo, but if I try Budziszewski throughout this post, I’ll miss it half the time at least, which is more disrespectful.)  His dissection of the coercive confessional politics of contemporary liberalism is superb.

Like the best of traditional Christian natural lawyers (Aquinas), J. Bud’s treatment of natural law refuses to dodge theological issues.  Faith and reason, nature and supernatural, creation and revelation, are intertwined, mutually illuminating but inseparable.  He is very good on the ways that the norms of natural law, which he says everyone knows in some respects, get distorted by our culpable subterfuges.  He rejects the “Second Table” project that attempts to detach the “second table” of the law from the first.

He is also aware that these theological points are problematic for some versions of natural law theory.

Continue reading…

Philosophy: RG Collingwood

Simon Blackburn has a somewhat surprisingly admiring review of a biography of RG Collingwood in a recent issue of TNR.  Collingwood comes off as very contemporary, very stimulating.  In what Blackburn calls a “succinct and perspicuous . . . statement of the public nature of the self,” Collingwood wrote, “The discovery of myself as a person is the discover that I can speak, and am thus a persona or speaker; in speaking I am both speaker and hearer; and since the discovery of myself as a person is also the discovery of other persons around me, it is the discovery of speakers and hearers other than myself.”  Very Rosenstockian, that.  Very Robert-Jensonian too.  And Wittgensteinian.

Not surprisingly, Collingwood rejects philosophical investigations that treat their subject matter in an ahistorical fashion.  The notion that we can get to a timeless a priori.  Blackburn summarizes Collingwood’s critique:

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Philosophy: Subject and object

Zbigniew Herbert’s “I Would Like To Describe” is about as good a refutation of subject-object dualisms as you’re going to find.

I would like to describe the simplest emotion

joy or sadness

but not as others do

reaching for shafts of rain or sun

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Philosophy: Greek and Christian Philosophy

Jenson notes that the university arose as a place of discourse, an institution centered on the word, and adds that “Mediterranean antiquity’s specific ideal of knowledge would never by itself have made the university.  The organ of truth, in the classic tradition, is the ‘mind’s eye’; knowledge is theoria, seeing.”  In practice, philosophy took a different track: Socrates and Plato conversed, and this not only “rescued Greek theoria from the inhumanity that was always its temptation,” but also made it possible for the gospel to engage philosophy as “a rival and an ally.”

Jenson adds, “The difference between Christian and pagan antiquity’s theology is that the latter, for all that it consists in talk, leads to silence, is the handmaiden of cognition as pure seeing, while Christianity’s talk leads precisely to more talk, to the purification and enlivening of a message.”

Christianity took up the philosophical dialogue into its own conversation: “The university was founded by believers, to have a place in which to exegete their Book and argue interpretations of their message.  Just so, no book and no argument could be foreign to it.”  That is crucial to understanding what happened to the university when the Enlightenment detached learning from theology: “When the Enlightenment revolted against theology in the name of reason, it thus revolted also against philosophy as anciently practiced, since it was theology by which that practice was now carried on.  Thus in the Enlightenment’s understanding and practice of ‘reason,’ the countervailing factor is gone.  Reason becomes what even Aristotle did not make it: sheerly the individual’s ability to see truth.  And for that, the university is, when push comes to shove, not really needed at all.”

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