Traditional premodern religion provided an ontological security, by grounding us in an encompassing metaphysical vision that explains the cosmos and our role within it.

Modernity and postmodernity question such transcendental narratives and therefore leave us with ontological anxiety about the apparent meaninglessness of the universe and the ungroundedness of our lives within it. The result is that we are afflicted with “a deepening condition of metaphysical homelessness,” which is psychologically difficult to bear (Berger, P. (1973). The Homeless Mind.)

Great quote, and I think my point would be that this "questioning" tends to result in its own sort of dogmatism. The standards by which such questioning procedes, particularly what counts as valid philosophical evidence, is held to the rigid epistemic standards of Anglo-empiricism. This tends to exclude a lot of philosophy from the outset, and tends to dismiss a good deal else as "pseudoproblems" that aren't worthy of engagement. But more than that, these epistemic standards are often seen as absolutely inviolable. They are beyond questioning because they aren't even seen as the sort of thing that should be subject to questioning, even though they are fairly recent innovations, and even though they have a produced a tradition whose answer for "what can we know?" seems to be "not much of anything."

But this perhaps is what feeds into the "bourgeois metaphysics," the notion that "one has the right to choose the truth," or "live your own truth," because nothing much can be said about capital T "Truth" (or Goodness) anyhow.

...If one’s self-image involves internalizing the perceptions that others have of us, the anonymity of mass society is part of modernity’s lack-of-identity problem. How to distinguish oneself, if, as DeLillo has also said, “only the lethal believer, the person who kills and dies for faith,” is taken seriously in modern society (Juergensmeyer 125)? Better to be known as someone who was willing to die for his beliefs, than not to be known at all – than to be no one at all.

This helps us to understand why terrorist attacks such as those on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which seem strategically absurd and self-defeating, can nevertheless be desirable. They are not instrumental means to realize political goals but symbolic. ...

And it's worth noting here that the standard profile of "First Wave" Islamist terrorists in the West were younger men who were raised in, or at least spent their adolescence in, the West. A great deal were engineers or engineering students as well, and a great deal had serious difficulties with any romantic relationships, which is a recurring theme in terrorism in the Western context. That profile is far different for suicide attackers within the context of MENA and Central Asia's civil wars (who are often developmentally disabled, fed drugs, etc., and have much less agency in the whole situation). By contrast, the "First Wave" terrorists and many of the ISIS inspired "lone wolves" in the US and Europe seem to have a lot in common with racially motivated right-wing terrorists in the West and apolitical spree killers.

The main problem with our usual understanding of secularity is that it is taken-for-granted, so we are not aware that it is a worldview. It is an ideology that pretends to be the everyday world we live in. Most of us assume that it is simply the way the world really is, once superstitious beliefs about it have been removed. ...

I agree. This is very reminiscent of Charles Taylor's assault on "subtraction narratives" of secularism, that it is just "what you get when superstition and authoritarian control pass away." It leads to a sort of transparency of ideology where it cannot be recognized as such.

By privatizing an unmediated relationship between more individualized Christians...

Through and because of which (through a positive feedback loop), we get Taylor's "buffered self," and Weber's "disenchanted cosmos." This feeds into the unfreedom many see in liberalism. If one thinks that one must be free from the vices to be truly free, and that freedom from the vices is not easily accomplished, then there must be a positive education in and training of virtue to attain freedom (e.g. the ascetic disciplines and spiritual exercises that characterized Pagan, Christian, and Eastern philosophy and education until the modern era).

The buffered self needs no such training. First, because it is pure ratio and can slip back into a disengaged, buffered reasoning as needed, and second because, having denied man any "rational appetites" (i.e. the appetites of Plato's "rational part of the soul"), reason is itself just a tool for meeting the demands of desire; it is and ought only be the slave of the passions (it's worth noting that Hume's recommended dictum, so common today, is a concise summary of the conditioned of the damned in Dante's Hell, and would be seen by him as literally the definition of slavery.

The OP offers a broad indictment of liberalism. But there is no clear argument. You've written a mood piece. The dissatisfaction is real, but the reasoning is thin. Liberalism is accused of being hollow, flattening, spiritually dead. But the case is assumed rather than made.

But it isn't a broad critique of liberalism? I mentioned a broad array of very different "external" critiques of liberalism that see it as incompatible with human flourishing and freedom (i.e., precisely because liberalism offers up a myopic and desiccated vision of human freedom, and Rawls certainly would be a target of some of these critiques; Simpson's title is an explicit response to Rawls). I mentioned several because I figured people might be familiar with at least some of them.

My point, however, was that liberal apologists aren't able to digest these critiques because they cannot get past the presupposition that the liberal conception of freedom is the only possible valid conception of freedom. Hence, they always frame dissent as advocating a "return to authoritarianism," or a desire to "trade freedom for some other good," which often entirely misses the point. And this is because liberalism is often not seen as an explicit ideology by its proponents, but rather "the freedom to choose any ideology."

To wit, your response is a great example:

At its core, the critique chafes at pluralism itself. It wants one truth, publicly affirmed and normatively binding. Liberalism refuses this. It does not deny truth—it refuses to coerce consensus. That refusal is treated here as decadence. But it is, in fact, a guardrail against authoritarianism. The demand that a culture publicly reflect a metaphysical or theological unity is a recipe for repression—of minorities, of dissenters, of difference. Liberalism protects that space. It allows communities to pursue deep, even ultimate, goods—so long as they don’t do so by coercion. That is not a bug. It is the point.

The deeper issue is metaphysical. Liberalism is faulted for not being a theology. It doesn’t offer a doctrine of eros, virtue, or transcendent meaning. But that’s by design. Liberalism is a political framework. It permits those deeper views—it doesn’t impose one. If that’s the flaw, then name the alternative. A confessional state? A return to teleology? A politics grounded in love? Perhaps. But that needs to be argued, not implied through nostalgia and allusion.

Is liberalism really just a framework that "permits those deeper views," without "imposing one" of its own? Are the only options aside from it a return to the oppressive institutions of the past? Does it really only "protect spaces" of discourse and not impose discourse or indoctrinate its citizens in its own dogmas and doctrines?

To quote the OP:

Indeed, despite the fact that it seems obvious that all cultures indoctrinate their children into the dominant ideology, liberalism often seems to think it is excluded from this historical norm, such that any alternative form of education seems like pernicious indoctrination. That's one of the perils of "bourgeois metaphysics," is that it becomes transparent and cannot be recognized as an ideology. It can default into the claim that it "isn't an ideology," but rather "the freedom to have any ideology one wishes." That's the myopia of liberalism in a nutshell, ideology gone transparent, a historically distinct (and historically quite narrow) vision of freedom become totalized and absolutized.

This reminds me on the thread on classical education, where the immediate fear was that an education in a framework of virtue ethics (the norm in East and West for most of history) would be "indoctrination," as if modern liberal education was "value-neutral" and free from any such indoctrination. It isn't.

Liberalism is equated with consumer capitalism, secularism, and moral relativism.

Can you name a single society where they haven't gone together? These issues are certainly written about across the Anglophone world, Europe, Korea, and Japan. Eastern European writers came to similar conclusions and reflect on the "shock" it brought, which has led to the phenomena of "Soviet nostalgia" in the former Warsaw Pact nations.

Consider this alternative view of freedom from a quote from St. Augustine:

Therefore the good man, although he is a slave, is free; but the bad man, even if he reigns, is a slave, and that not of one man, but, what is far more grievous, of as many masters as he has vices.

We might fault Augustine for a certain privilege in saying this, but it's worth noting that Epictetus, who was a slave, said the same thing, just not as pithily.

Now, does liberalism do a good job at educating and training individuals in the virtues so as to avoid the unfreedom that comes with being vice-addled? Does it even see this as desirable or an important function of a "liberating society?"

I would say it doesn't. Kids are plied with caffeinated corn syrup slush from grade school, and are now exposed to hardcore pornography through the internet on a regular basis from about the same age. Everywhere, one sees powerful examples of the ideal of freedom as freedom to consume, to "live one's truth," and to "fulfill one's appetites and desires." And as noted in the OP, "capitalist realism" attempts to backwards project these norms onto all prior epochs.

The role of education for the upper classes is rather to gain markers of success so that one might attend a good college, so as to attain more markers of success, so as to attain a good job, so as to earn a lot of income, so as to fulfill one's desires. Perhaps those desires involve a "prosocial" element. Perhaps they don't. That's the individual's choice after all. The education system is there to empower them to make those choices (and to sort them by "merit"), not to help them discover what is "truly good and choice-worthy," or "truly just."

But obviously this view conflicts with other powerful visions of freedom. It certainly conflicts with those views that see ignorance of what is truly best as a limit on freedom. "Freedom" to do as one pleases, on these views, isn't freedom if one is bound by ignorance about what is truly better. It's merely "being a slave to appetite, instinct, circumstance, culture, and the passions." The presupposition that an "education in virtue" is somehow a pernicious form of indoctrination is, of course, itself a doctrine that people are taught from their youth. As noted above, Hume's vision of freedom is pretty much identical to Dante's picture of spiritual slavery; to claim one is right is to claim the other is wrong. They cannot equally be respected by a "value-neutral" system. The purportedly "value-neutral" system we have sides heavily with Hume.

Nor need we only look to the pre-modern tradition. Han is a great contemporary example. Nietzsche has one of the fierier condemnations of the way in which liberalism leads to unfreedom.

We could consider Huxley's "A Brave New World," here. What makes it dystopian? The heavy use of shallow media, endemic drug use, reduction of sex and romance to pleasure, etc? The desiccation of the human experience and removal of beauty? From the liberal point of view, I would imagine it must instead be the centralized control, caste system, and conditioning. Yet the conditioning is just a more extreme form of the incentive-based "nudging" that has come to dominate liberal technocrats' approach to problem solving. E.g., on the problem of rampant obesity and spiking rates of diabetes, the solution is "nudging" via vice taxes and reminder warning labels.

At any rate, if the caste system were removed, the centralized planning done away with, and the more extreme forms of conditioning and social pressure reduced, and the adults of the society consented to it (recall, those who dissent get to leave the society and go to their own private "Galt's Gulch" for romantics and intellectuals), it's hard to see what the liberal critique could be. "A Brave New World," is an "almost-utopia."

You can see this in liberal criticisms of anti-liberal movements as well. For instance, the "nu-Right" as simply "a bunch of sore loser men who are upset about too much equality and liberty." That is, liberalism has provoked an angry (perhaps now even existential) response by being too good and too just.

Whereas for the nu-Right, their liberal detractors (at least the non-elite/non-"winner/dominator" ones) are castrati, betas, cuckolds, bovine consumers who have accepted a pale simulacra of freedom and allowed all the depth to be sucked out of life. And this criticism arises from a certain sort of self-hatred within the nu-Right, for this is how the nu-Right often sees itself as well (which is why "conversion stories" are so common in nu-Right spaces, the story of one's "awakening to the reality of life" and "greater depths"). The movement is, I would argue, in many ways chiefly a revolt of Nietzsche's Last Men (Nietzsche himself being a great precursors critic to modern liberalism). After all, who else would have more reason to fetishize the Overman than the Last Man?

Bathing in one's subjective sense of the numinous might also be somewhat indulgent and narcissistic.

Perhaps, but you could consider Schiller's view where the moral and appetitive are aligned in the aesthetic and our actions are over-determined in desire and duty. On the view, the aesthetic and "spiritual" is precisely what helps us overcome egoism.

A lot of new "spiritual but not religious" stuff strikes me as somewhat akin to Romantic philosophy in a lot of ways, with the stress of the numinous, the deeper nature beyond mechanism and disenchantment, etc. But like any good modern ethos, it also has to sell itself in disenchanted terms, hence the peer reviewed studies on the benefits of mindfulness and meditation, the economic indicators referenced in appeals to "cultural Christianity," and of course sticking within the limits of bourgeoisie metaphysics such that "everyone can be right" about their own experience and synchretism.

I get the appeal. What I find bizarre is some of the Christian alignment with this sort of thing (or Muslim, or Buddhist, although the last is less surprising because Western Buddhism is itself often already stripped down for contemporary audiences). From the standpoint of Christian doctrine, a Jungian analysis in of the Pentateuch that does not invoke the name of Christ and the revelation of Christ in Scripture, is perhaps interesting, but hardly helpful for the "Lost." Nor is "cultural Christianity" much of a step in the right direction. Far from it, it's to lean on the clay leg of human pride; if anything it is better that people be brought low that they might rise higher.

Liberalism has always had the potential to become a victim of its own impulse to dismantle institutions and expand the definition of citizenship - especially in the context of capitalism.

I think this is actually the sort of critique liberalism is easily aware of. It moves "too fast," and "change needs to be managed." You know, "the people aren't ready," or "the system isn't ready for advances in technology." And so there is self-reflection in liberal terms about the threat of expanding wealth inequality under AI, or cultural tensions derailing the benefits of replacement migration, etc.

What I think it tends to have myopia about is the way it does positively indoctrinate, it does punish people for slipping outside its value norms, it does push ideologies that actually challenge it out of the public sphere by force, and it does manage to enforce many of the same systems of oppression it claims to have dismantled, and in some cases manages to make them worse (e.g. the "exporting of misery" referenced earlier).

I think this tends to get missed precisely because liberalism is seen as "the natural place where you end up if you dismantle what was bad in the old world." It's worth noting though that monarchy and noble privileged was also once seen as "natural." It was the natural place you ended up if you advanced beyond mere anarchy. If liberalism is "natural" in this way, then the problems of liberalism are "natural" and endemic, not attributable to liberalism itself.

So, for example, people focus on the option of "escape valves" and "exiting the system." But it's worth pointing out that the Russian Tsars tolerated anarchist communes and fringe religious communities. There mere existence of toleration of some low levels of dissent, pushed to the borders, isn't good counter evidence to the totalitarian tendencies in modernity anymore than it was in imperial Russia.

It seems to me that there is a plausible trade-off between duration and intensity in terms of punishment. One might justly meet out a short, but intense punishment for a sin that occured over a long duration or vice versa.

The problem I see for St. Thomas here is that the claim that breeches in the order of man's conformity to the will of God continue forever itself has to presuppose that universalism is false. If universalism is true, then God is eventually "all in all," and all such breeches are repaired "at the end of the ages" (perhaps after "the age to come").

If universalism is true, there are no human, or even demonic crimes that have infinite effects. By the same logic, if annihilationism or infernalism are true, there are indeed such crimes.

The difficulty for both sides is that appealing to this seems to require begging the question and assuming that one of the positions is the case in order to make a claim about the duration and effects of any creatures' transgressions.

And I don't know if it works to say: "well the breech would be infinite if God didn't act," because I think this has to rely on a sort of nature/supernatural distinction that I find extremely unhelpful and hard to justify. Absolutely nothing happens without God, and so of course God is required for any repair. God is also required for baptism, for reference, for the sun to rise, etc.

So again, logically, if eternal punishment does in fact occur, is God to then be understood as not being the ultimate telos/end of all that exists?

That man's telos lies in God does not mean that man reaches his end. On a deflationary evolutionary naturalist view, man's telos is to reproduce. That doesn't mean all men will eventually have children.

There is a more nuanced question of whether or not God would allow sin to exist forever, or if perhaps God's hands are tied in that God cannot both create free creatures and ensure that all shall reach their end in God. However, to my mind, sustaining this problematic becomes more fraught when it has to rely on the accident of the time of one's death marking an absolute limit on repentance, if only because there is no strictly logical reason why this must be so. Indeed, there is no logical barrier to reincarnation, etc. Hence, we rely on revelation. But in turning to revelation we see what appear to be claims of the total conquest of sin (as opposed to its sequestration and eternal persistence), e.g. that God shall be "all in all."

But nothing would seem to preclude things not attaining to their end. Hart makes a similar sort of argument, but it is crucially different. He says a rational nature stays in motion until it reaches its natural ends, and so barring extrinsic limits, it will move forever, at the limit turning towards its true end.

For my part, when I say infernalism has difficulties, this is not to say the other views don't themselves have difficulties. I think these are mostly theological though. When David Bentley Hart says that we couldn't be happy with our own ignorance about damned family members or their eternal torment without having been radically changed so as to be "replaced," he might be right. But this seems equally true vis-á-vis the truly wicked. What of the BTK Killer or Ted Bundy, or even a Jeffery Epstein would really remain once selfishness and attraction to finite ends is removed? Not very much it would seem, suggesting a sort of annihilationism within universalism (unless God is simply replacing the wicked).

Or, to the infernalists' point, it seems that some might refuse to turn towards God. Universalists make a good point that it makes no sense for a rational nature to flee from the Good forever, if only because movement will continue until it finds rest in the Good. Yet, just as St. Gregory of Nyssa sees an eternal ascent into the Good, an asymptotic approach to the infinite, one can envisage a similarly unending movement away from the purifying light that burns. Moreover, if one has disfigured the Imago Dei enough, are we still talking about a rational nature?

Or perhaps the Augustinian curvatus in se, the curving inward of the self in sin, becomes so extreme that, like a black hole, there is no escape velocity capable of pulling away from its gravitational pull.

I don't really find these questions to be resolvable in terms of philosophy. The case in Scripture seems more concrete though.

For, it is obvious that aion is sometimes used in the Scriptures to mean less than "infinite temporal duration" but also seemingly as an adjective for the uncreated, that which is without beginning or end (at least plausible). This can render a different reading of Matthew 25, and at any rate, annihilation is as much an infinite punishment as continuous extrinsic torment. So too, a lesser reward (because one has made oneself incapable of a higher beatitude) might itself be a sort of punishment. But this requires a perhaps less than straightforward reading of Matthew 25.

On the other hand, the New Testament is full of quite explicit references to "all," "the entire cosmos," "all in all," "every knee," etc. And the difficulties in rereading the inclusivity out of these seem fairly monumental, requiring us to attribute to the Apostles a seeming inability to write clearly such that straightforward readings of their words will result in us taking away the exact opposite of "what they really mean." "All" must really mean "some," "especially" means "exclusively," "not just us [Christians] but the entire cosmos," means "just the elect," and "all were made vessels of wrath that mercy might be shown on all," means "all were made vessels of wrath that mercy might be shown on some."

I think it would be fair to say that the decline in support for infernalism has pernicious causes in a culture whose ethics has become hung up on only the worst sort of offenses, and a general comfort with sin and lack of concern with the spiritual life, etc. But it also has certainly been helped by the widespread expansion of access to critical texts and education in Greek, that make at least some of the efforts to radically re-read what New Testament texts appear to say in a straightforward manner appear to be little more than doctrinal massaging. A good infernalist response to these issues, IMHO, cannot rest on trying to bulldoze through these passages by explaining that "all in all," really means "all in some."

And this is where I take umbrage with some historical narratives that try to dismiss the history here are little more than "some Church Fathers let too much Greek philosophy into their though and followed Origen, and this trend lasted a good deal longer out East because they were isolated." Because that isn't how the position was primarily argued, from abstract philosophical grounds, but rather by pointing to the straightforwardly universalist sounding lines of Scripture that appear in virtually every New Testament book, but particularly in St. Paul's epistles.

I will just chime in that here the objection 2 seems weakest to me.

Reply to Objection 2. Even the punishment that is inflicted according to human laws, is not always intended as a medicine for the one who is punished, but sometimes only for others: thus when a thief is hanged, this is not for his own amendment, but for the sake of others, that at least they may be deterred from crime through fear of the punishment, according to Proverbs 19:25: "The wicked man being scourged, the fool shall be wiser." Accordingly the eternal punishments inflicted by God on the reprobate, are medicinal punishments for those who refrain from sin through the thought of those punishments, according to Psalm 59:6: "Thou hast given a warning to them that fear Thee, that they may flee from before the bow, that Thy beloved may be delivered."

Punishment delivered as a means of deterring other would-be transgressors is punishment oriented towards an end that is distinct from retribution. But clearly it will not deter anyone from sinning to continue to punish sinners after the Judgement, assuming that those who have been beatified are incapable of sin. One only needs a continuous deterence policy when the people one is hoping to deter are capable of transgressing.

But the larger issue is that, if one takes infants to be born under the rupture in the order St. Thomas refers to, this could be read as saying:

"All men are subject to damnation from conception, since they cannot repair the order that is ruptured in Adam. And they can do nothing to repair this order themselves."

I.e. the Calvinist vision.

But the reply to objection four could be used just as well by Calvin in arguing for the impossibility of most men receiving any mercy from God, since the means of repair can only come from God, and it will remain unrepaired for so long as it is not repaired. But then there is no point even thinking in terms of human justice, since all are under condemnation and it is only lifted if it is lifted ("at God's good pleasure.") This remains just as true for infants and children who die without the sacraments, yet pace (later) Saint Augustine (who I feel might only be taking up the position to skewer the Donatists re ineffective baptisms) mainstream Catholic theology says God repairs this rupture for those who have died (either by way of beatitude or by way of sparing them from active punishment in Limbo).


Yet I would say rather that a means of repair does exist, that this is the key point of the Gospel, where Christ tells us to "repent," and mourns that Jerusalem has not repented, so that he might gather it up in his wings. This is, of course, a repair accomplished "by God," but it is also one attainable by man. So, to objection four, which seems the main point, the idea then has to be that repentance is not an option for the damned. For, were the damned alive and guilty of the same sins, they could repent and be saved. But can the dead not repent? Or if they repent are they punished anyhow?

Dante pointedly dodges this question by not having a single sinner in the Inferno take any responsibility for their sins or show any repentance.


Anyhow to the OP, I am now realizing in my rambling first post it probably would have been more helpful for me to note that all sin was generally taken as being primarily a sin against God. And I would agree with this, the idea of God as some sort of disengaged "third party" to sin does not make a lot of theological sense.

The question of whether eternal punishment is justified seems to me to be different from the question as to whether eternal punishment is theologically sound. The two need not go hand in hand, and indeed they usually don't go together, with the claim that God would be justified in punishing repetent sinners, but shows mercy instead, being a common one.

Theologically, the focus on "extrinsic punishment" and "extrinsic reward," seems less helpful, and it becomes a philosophical problem when it leads into voluntarism, such that "good" is just proper calibration of action, thought, and belief towards extrinsic goals. This is something Pope Benedict XVIII avoids here:


47. Some recent theologians are of the opinion that the fire which both burns and saves is Christ himself, the Judge and Savior. The encounter with him is the decisive act of judgement. Before his gaze all falsehood melts away. This encounter with him, as it burns us, transforms and frees us, allowing us to become truly ourselves. All that we build during our lives can prove to be mere straw, pure bluster, and it collapses. Yet in the pain of this encounter, when the impurity and sickness of our lives become evident to us, there lies salvation. His gaze, the touch of his heart heals us through an undeniably painful transformation “as through fire”. But it is a blessed pain, in which the holy power of his love sears through us like a flame, enabling us to become totally ourselves and thus totally of God.

Yet aside from being an "opinion of recent theologians," this is also a conception right at home with many of the earlier Church Fathers.

An incisive précis on literature in Pax Americana ...
https://lithub.com/viet-thanh-nguyen-most-american-literature-is-the-literature-of-empire/

There is an impressive lack of self-awareness in that article given the way in which Americans are extremely prone to simply painting their own domestic politics onto other parts of the world, or that he cites as exemplary "anti-imperialist work" narratives that do exactly this.

So the problems of modernity would stem from the collapse of older institutions a century ago and a surfeit of income and lesiure, not from any positive constructions within modernity itself?

I just have a hard time buying it. Not least because, for all prior epochs for which we have better hindsight, such "subtraction narratives" don't pass the smell test. It's not just that old structures pass away; positive constructions arise to take their place. I don't know why this should be any different for the 20th and 21st centuries.

However, IMHO the common tendency for apologists of "modern secular liberalism" to see it as "just what happens when superstition and calcified oppression are washed away and the progress of science and technology hum along," (e.g. Pinker or Harris are fine examples) is itself definitive of a certain sort of myopia affecting liberalism. It's an outlook that justifies itself with a certain sort of inevitably (e.g. Fukuyama's particular understanding of the "End of History"). Fukuyama is a good example because he presciently identified a major fault line that looks libel to tear liberalism apart in the US and Europe, the revolt of the "Last Men." Yet somehow he missed that this could possibly pose an existential threat, let alone countenancing that it is symptom of something seriously deficient in the underlying liberal ethos. Afterall, how could anything be systematically wrong with "life with oppressive structures removed and scientific progress set lose?" All efforts to diagnoses modern pathologies need to "come from outside" if that's the case.

Plus, "suicide rates are surging because oppression is being lifted and people have too much freedom and income," doesn't feel quite right. Even if I agree that they might be tied together in some compelling way, there is something definitely missing from that equation. The antecedent only implies the consequent given other, equally important qualifications, e.g. "too much choice," is only paralyzing when one is not equipped to deal with it. Ceteris paribus, an end to oppressive institutions should foster greater solidarity, as it certainly appears to have in past epochs. It certainly doesn't seem to have done so in later 20th century contexts however (e.g. the Korean 4B Movement is decidedly not what I think Hegelian feminists were thinking of in terms of mutual recognition).

But no doubt some will argue that the word of disenchanted rationalism and modernity has allowed us to retreat into crude things like money in place of spiritual riches.

The two aren't unrelated though, right? Hume has been extremely influential, particularly in Anglo-American thought and the broader culture. The "is-ought gap" is something of a popular dogma, and I would guess that moral anti-realism has a pretty large market share of all college educated younger adults. Of course, Hume relies on modern assumptions, most notably a "deflation of reason" whereby he can claim that reason, the intellect, or the "rational part of the soul" possess none of its own desires, but is instead merely a calculating tool that helps to correlate pain and pleasure with different sensations and then helps us predict the best ways to act to achieve certain ends judged as good on these grounds.

Actually, there is an argument here that I think is quite good that such a view makes truly rational and free agency impossible. Every end can only be judged good relative to some other finite end, and there is ultimately no way to choose between different potential "ultimate" or even "benchmark" ends in a rational manner (no one, "truly best" standard).

Likewise, there is no love of goodness and truth for their own sakes (i.e., the desires of the "rational soul" that allow us to transcend current desire and belief in the old model). Hence, every end must be ordered to some other end, in a sort of infinite regress. Yet, "justification must stop somewhere" and when it does it will bottom out in a standard that is chosen not because it is known as "truly best," but instead through inchoate impulse and instinct. David Bentley Hart writes about this a lot from the phenomenological side, but I don't think he makes the most cogent presentation of it. This is also an issue for epistemic as well as ethical pragmatism.

Of course, the advocate of the Humean or "pragmatic" views might just shrug and say it is what it is. If reason is just a calculator, we shouldn't expect for an sort of ultimate ordering of teloi. Whether this affects happiness and people under the sway of such view's capacity to "live a good life," or "be good people," is another question. However, at the very least, the phenomenon of a "crisis of meaning" seems to cause many people very real mental anguish (and to motivate self-centered hedonism in at least some cases). I think Charles Taylor is correct in saying that this particular sort of crisis is distinctly modern; I have never seen it in older works of fiction, whereas it is almost the definitive issue in much literature from the 19th century onwards.

That is, it is possible to be rule oriented and someone who looks to tradition for answers and who interprets the rules passed down through the generations and still be atheistic.

E.g., some forms of Confucian thought that

All I can say is, if I were offered a Rawlsian "original position" lottery, and asked to pick a time and place to be incarnated over the past 3,000 years, while not knowing my sex, ethnicity, amount of economic power, physical health, education, et al., the choice would be obvious to me: right here, right now ("here" being understood as any European country with universal health care and good public libraries :smile: ).

But part of the calculus here is that the peasants laboring under the medieval nobility, or the tenant farmers who lived contemporaneously with Jane Austen's landed gentry are considered "part of that elite's society," whereas, through a sort of neat accounting trick, we have decided that the slaves mining metals for Westerner's phones, the child laborer who sewed their clothes in a sweltering Dhaka factory, or the migrant workers who picked their food out in the fields, are each not "part of the Westerner's society." Hence, we might think that are least some of the claims about "radical improvements for even the poorest" play too much off the accidents of national borders, and the way in which globalization has simply allowed the West to export most of its lower classes safely to the other side of national borders. Afterall, more people live as slaves today than in any prior epoch, and a great deal more in conditions that might be fairly deemed "wage slavery." Likewise, anyone who prioritizes animal well-being to any significant degree can hardly look at modern agriculture as much more than "hell on Earth."

That is, I think there is a certain distinct weakness to "veil of ignorance" when employed in the context of globalization and late-stage capitalism. There might also be a significant problem of time preference. Currently, it is not clear what the final toll of the ecological disasters wrought by modern liberalism will be. There is good reason to think that they might be extreme though, since the nations that are most geographically and politically vulnerable to climate change are also those set to continue to experience exponential population growth this century. Given whose consumption drives climate change, this looming catastrophe might be considered another case of "exporting misery."

Anyhow, more to the point on "backwards looking" ideologies that focus on things like "virtue," etc., I will just point out that these might be justified in liberalisms own consumption-focused empirical terms. The Amish are a fine example, in that they live in a developed country and yet eschew three centuries of technological innovation. They also have a great deal of serious problems, for instance, only educating their children to 8th grade, a fairly repressive culture, etc. It's not anything you'd want to replicate. Yet they manage to become wealthier than their neighbors, building larger net worth in spite of having vastly larger families. Likewise, they have a longer healthspan despite avoiding modern medicine. At one point they had an adult lifespan almost twice that of the surrounding population. They also perform better on a number of other metrics considered important by the welfare economist.

It's not that hard to see at least some of the reasons for this, which tie into their culture. But it's at least a challenge to liberalism that avoiding its consumption driven lifestyle and ethos, or its balkanization, might enough to overcome the economic disadvantages of giving up automobiles, electricity, the internet, secondary education, modern medicine, etc.

I quite like the official Roman Catholic response, although sometimes Catholic theologians don't seem to always respect it:

155 In faith, the human intellect and will co-operate with divine grace: "Believing is an act of the intellect assenting to the divine truth by command of the will moved by God through grace."27

Faith and understanding

156 What moves us to believe is not the fact that revealed truths appear as true and intelligible in the light of our natural reason: we believe "because of the authority of God himself who reveals them, who can neither deceive nor be deceived".28 So "that the submission of our faith might nevertheless be in accordance with reason, God willed that external proofs of his Revelation should be joined to the internal helps of the Holy Spirit."29 Thus the miracles of Christ and the saints, prophecies, the Church's growth and holiness, and her fruitfulness and stability "are the most certain signs of divine Revelation, adapted to the intelligence of all"; they are "motives of credibility" (motiva credibilitatis), which show that the assent of faith is "by no means a blind impulse of the mind".30

157 Faith is certain. It is more certain than all human knowledge because it is founded on the very word of God who cannot lie. To be sure, revealed truths can seem obscure to human reason and experience, but "the certainty that the divine light gives is greater than that which the light of natural reason gives."31 "Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt."32

158 "Faith seeks understanding":33 it is intrinsic to faith that a believer desires to know better the One in whom he has put his faith, and to understand better what He has revealed; a more penetrating knowledge will in turn call forth a greater faith, increasingly set afire by love. the grace of faith opens "the eyes of your hearts"34 to a lively understanding of the contents of Revelation: that is, of the totality of God's plan and the mysteries of faith, of their connection with each other and with Christ, the centre of the revealed mystery. "The same Holy Spirit constantly perfects faith by his gifts, so that Revelation may be more and more profoundly understood."35 In the words of St. Augustine, "I believe, in order to understand; and I understand, the better to believe."36

159 Faith and science: "Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason. Since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind, God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth."37 "Consequently, methodical research in all branches of knowledge, provided it is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of the world and the things of faith derive from the same God. the humble and persevering investigator of the secrets of nature is being led, as it were, by the hand of God in spite of himself, for it is God, the conserver of all things, who made them what they are."38

Or the contrasting Eastern position, which tends to stress asceticism and "knowing by becoming" a bit more heavily:

The Nature of Faith

It is the Orthodox Christian faith – the faith which was once delivered unto the saints[xxi] – that will be addressed here, a faith uniquely distinct from what is articulated in other religions and other Christian faiths. Furthermore, “Faith is not a psychological attitude,” as Alex Nesteruk states, “it is a state of communion with God that provides ‘an ontological relationship between man and God.’[xxii]”[xxiii] Faith, in other words, is a way of being, a way of existing in communion with God that restores the nature of man in the deepest sense.

Let us now consider how faith relates to knowledge. Just as there is assumed knowledge particular to philosophy and science (assuming that knowledge can be sufficiently grounded and justified), there also exists knowledge that is particular to faith. Unlike the West’s project of Natural Theology, however, the Orthodox Church makes no separation between natural and supernatural revelation. For as Dimitrue Staniloae explains:

Natural revelation is known and understood fully in the light of supernatural revelation, or we might say that natural revelation is given and maintained by God continuously through his own divine act which is above nature. That is why Saint Maximos the Confessor does not posit an essential distinction between natural the revelation or biblical one. According to him, this latter is only the embodying of the former in historical persons and actions.[xxiv]

Therefore, there are those things which human reason can discover from nature only if grounded in the light of supernatural revelation, and then there are those hidden mysteries of God that require special divine revelation, without which they could not be known.[xxv] By the assistance of grace from God, faith is seen to be of a different order than the knowledge obtained from natural revelation through discursive reason, which relies on sense perception and experience, and is often assumed by those outside the faith to operate on the powers of the intellect alone.[xxvi]

In Orthodox theology, knowing (scientes) about God is done primarily through humility and ascetism...

Recall Moses’ encounter with God on Mount Sinai when he is told that no one can see God’s face and live. On the surface this is a puzzling passage, since it causes one to wonder how God, who is Life itself, could cause death upon seeing Him. However, St. Gregory of Nyssa explains this passage and the relationship between life and intelligibility in his Life of Moses:

Scripture does not indicate that this [to see God’s face] causes death of those who look, for how could the face of Life ever be the cause of death to those who approach it? On the contrary, the divine is by its nature life-giving. Yet the characteristic of the divine nature is to transcend all characteristics. Therefore, he who thinks God is something to be known does not have life, because he has turned from true Being (tou ontōs ontos) to what he considers by sense perception to have being. True Being is true Life. This Being is inaccessible to knowledge …. Thus, what Moses yearned for is satisfied by the very things which leave his desire unsatisfied.[xxviii]

According to St. Gregory, “to think that God is an object of knowledge is to turn away from true Being to a phantom of one’s own making.”[xxix] This is why, at least in part, the West’s scholastic project of natural theology as an attempt to seek God as an object of knowledge and prove His existence using philosophy leads the West to worship their idea (the phantom of their own making) of God rather than God Himself.

https://www.patristicfaith.com/senior-contributors/an-orthodox-theory-of-knowledge-apophaticism-asceticism-and-humility/

https://www.academia.edu/45384040/An_Orthodox_Theory_of_Knowledge_The_Epistemological_and_Apologetic_Methods_of_the_Church_Fathers

There is an interesting history there. There is the absolute unity in Dionysus' "Darkness Above the Light," and later conceptions would tend to play up unity even more, as in the German Dominican mysticism of the later High Middle Ages (e.g. Eckhart). And this unity would sometimes even seem to become "prior" to the Trinity in later German thinkers, e.g. Boehme. This is the "Unground," although it is sometimes associated with the Father and can risk a sort of Arianism (but not necessarily, since even orthodoxy speaks of the eternal "begetting of the Son" and "procession of the Spirit").

Other's elevate the Trinity or take a via media.

For Jan van Ruusbroec (1293-1381), a Flemish priest, the Trinity became the very essence of spiritual life. He fully shared the insight of the negative [apophatic] theologians that God resides beyond light and beyond words. But darkness and silence are no more the ultimate goal of the spiritual quest than they are definitive of God’s own life. It is precisely the mystery of the Trinity that transforms negative theology into a mysticism of light and charitable communication. Instead of considering the divine darkness as a final point of rest beyond the Trinity, as Eckhart had done, Ruusbroec identified it with the fertile hypostasis of the Father. The Father is darkness ready to break out in Light, silence about to speak the Word. Having reunited itself with the Word, the soul returns with that Word in the Spirit to the divine darkness. But it does not remain there. For in that point of origin the dynamic cycle recommences: “For in this darkness an incomprehensible light is born and shines forth—this is the Son of God in whom a person becomes able to see and to contemplate eternal life” (Spiritual Espousals III/1). Ruusbroec’s vision not only leads out of the impasse of a consistently negative theology; it also initiates a spiritual theology of action. The human person is called to partake in the outgoing movement of the Trinity itself and, while sharing the common life of the triune God, to move outward into creation.

From the compilation of mystical works "Light From Light"

Or there is the view in Ferdinand Ulrich of being itself being fundamentally "gift."

I am personally partial to a view that comes out of Saint Augustine's triadic dialectical analysis in De Trinitate where he identifies triads in the mind and in the nature of being itself. For there to be any meaning, any life at all, there must be a triadic, semiotic element of:

Ground/Object/Father
Sign Vehicle/Logos/Son
Interpretant/Spirit

Or Lover/Beloved/Love (Peirce's association of Thirdness with hypostatic abstraction works well with the Augustine analogy here).

The sign/meaning relation is not a composition. It is not composed of these parts, but is rather a union with moments. It is a nuptial union between interpretant and object, accomplished in the logos, but irreducible. Thus, the movement from pregnant silence to "anything at all" involve the triadic moments.

There are parallels between Augustine and Hegel here as well (I've always been an admirer of Big Heg).

Whether or not the Trinity violates simplicity is another question, but theologians have tended to affirm both the Trinity and absolute simplicity. The reason the God-man Jesus Christ can have a finite ipseity as Incarnation is because he is "fully man and fully God," "two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the distinction of natures being in no way annulled by the union, but rather the characteristics of each nature being preserved and coming together to form one person and subsistence, not as parted or separated into two persons, but one and the same Son and Only-begotten God the Word, Lord Jesus Christ; even as the prophets from earliest times spoke of him, and our Lord Jesus Christ himself taught us, and the creed of the fathers has handed down to us" (as the Chalcedonian Formula puts it).

One response that I am aware of is the Thomistic response, which essentially claims that the sin is in part evaluated relative to the dignity of the being offended; and since sinning is against God and God is infinitely good, it follows that any sin carries with it infinite demerit. Therefore, although the sin itself was inflicted upon something finite by something finite the sin was, at least in part, against God and so something with infinite merit must be given to suffice justice (and that's why Jesus dying saves us from our sins since Jesus is God: the one thing that has infinite merit)

FYI, I am pretty sure this line, at least in its widely accepted Western form, comes in good deal earlier, through St. Anselm of Canterbury (although I've found many ideas in theology, like philosophy, are never truly new). And in Saint Anselm a "penal substitution" theory of salvation is dominant. Whereas in the East a doctrine of "Original Sin" never took root (at least not Augustinian Original Sin, the Orthodox often call it "Ancestral Sin" to differentiate), and, while the language of sacrifice remains, the language of "healing" (Christ the Physician of Souls) and transfiguration often plays a larger role. You can see this in the relative stress put on key events. The Crucifixion plays a larger role in the West, particularly in some Protestant denominations. Whereas the Incarnation and Resurrection are given greater focus elsewhere, and in the East the Transfiguration is often raised to a level with these other events (if still being the least of them).

You can even see this in church decoration, with the most obvious single item in most Western churches being a crucifix right at the center of the church where all can see, whereas the images that dominate Eastern churches will be Christ Pantocrator (Christ Almighty, Ruler of All) on the central dome of the church (surrounded by icons of the prophets and saints), and at the center of the iconostasis the image of Mary the Theotokos (the Incarnation) and Christ as man (or the "Royal Doors" will also have the Annunciation, Gaberiel announcing the Incarnation to the Blessed Virgin). By contrast, May will be off to the side in a Western Rite Roman Church and generally wholly removed (along with any imagery except for the crucifixion) from most Protestant churches.

The art is a nice way to see theological emphasis, and attempted explanations of salvation tend to work within this framework of emphasis.

There are three broad paradigms I think one can identify here: infernalism (Hell as temporally unending punishment), annihilationism (the eventual destruction of unrepentant souls, also an "eternal punishment" in that it never ends), and universalism (the eventual reconciliation of all and total destruction of all sin) All seem to be very old and each have been advocated for by some of the universal Fathers and Doctors of the Church (the more influential saints). Notably, most ancient universalists, unlike modern ones, still think people go to Hell, just not forever. Indeed, they tend to think virtually everyone goes to Hell for purgation for some time, Mary and Christ might be the only sure exceptions (and Christ still goes for the Harrowing). And they tend to think salvation and deification come exclusively through Christ (so they would be exclusivists in modern terms).

I would agree that infernalism has a number of extremely difficult logical challenges. Probably the biggest is that no one ever knowingly chooses the worse over the better but for weakness of will, which implies that all evil involves less than perfect freedom and so less than perfect culpability. I think it easily has the least support from Scripture of the three views, although all three could find support.

I've talked to @boundless about this at length, but I am pretty sure we share an opinion on this. David Bentley Hart's "That All Shall Be Saved," and Talbot's "The Inescapable Love of God," are pretty good on this topic. I thought the latter made the case a bit better, although Hart's take has more philosophical depth and some good explanations of the classical tradition. Talbot's work can be found on Google for free easily, but it is the first edition and he says he added a lot for the second. They also come from distinct traditions, Hart Orthodox, Talbot American Evangelicalism.

I think the standard Patristic response here would be to object to the literal reading of Scripture. "The spirit[ual] reading gives life, the flesh[ly] profits nothing" (John 6:63). This would be to make the mistake of the disciples who turned away because they were disturbed when Jesus told them they must eat of his flesh and drink of his blood.

As St. Gregory of Nyssa puts it in the life of Moses re God "walking" or possessing a body:

If these things are looked at literally, not only will the understanding of those who seek God be dim,
but their concept of him will also be inappropriate. 302 Front and back pertain only to those things which
are observed to have shape. Every shape provides the limits of a body. So then he who conceives of God
in some shape will not realize that he is free of a bodily nature. It is a fact that every body is composite,
and that what is composite exists by the joining of its different elements. No one would say that what is
composite cannot be decomposed. And what decomposes cannot be incorruptible, for corruption is the decomposition of what is composite.

If therefore one should think of the back of God in a literal fashion, he will necessarily be carried to
such an absurd conclusion. For front and back pertain to a shape, and shape pertains to a body. A body by
its very nature can be decomposed, for everything composite is capable of dissolution. But what is being
decomposed cannot be incorruptible; therefore, he who is bound to the letter would consequently conceive
the Divine to be corruptible. But in fact God is incorruptible and incorporeal.

Or as he says more generally:

Scripture does not indicate that this [to see God’s face] causes death of those who look, for how could the face of Life ever be the cause of death to those who approach it? On the contrary, the divine is by its nature life-giving. Yet the characteristic of the divine nature is to transcend all characteristics. Therefore, he who thinks God is something to be known does not have life, because he has turned from true Being (tou ontōs ontos) to what he considers by sense perception to have being. True Being is true Life. This Being is inaccessible to knowledge …. Thus, what Moses yearned for is satisfied by the very things which leave his desire unsatisfied

Saint Gregory is fairly representative on this sort of issue. St. Paul, for his part, refers to the story of Hagar and Sarah as "allegory" in the Epistle to the Galatians, and there is no prima facie reason for us to dismiss taking him at his word here, since his interpretive style is rarely literal. Still, if we look to the Patristics as an example of ancient exegesis, they don't tend to so much dismiss the literal/historical meanings (except where they lead to absurdity) as find them unimportant, since the historical events unfolding in the cosmos are all ultimately signs whose true relevance lies in the intelligible and anagogic.

There are certainly differences with the Neo-Platonic view though. For instance there was a move by some Arian thinkers to conceptualize the Logos as akin to the Nous, and arguments against the Logos being the same as the Divine, since it contains multiplicity. But the counter is that what appears as multiplicity to us is simple unity in the Divine, which could be consistent with something like:


The One is not, as it were, unconscious, rather all things belong to it and are in it and with it, it is completely self-discerning, life is in it and all things are in it, and its intellection of itself is itself and exists by a kind of self-consciousness in eternal rest and in an intellection different from the intellection of the Intellect.

Otherwise there would be the question of how what is absent from the First Principle is present elsewhere, or how truths might obtain that are outside the scope of the First Principle.

I hadn't really been thinking about the Trinity itself though. That's a much more fraught issue. Obviously there were lots of objections to that, and from Islamic and Jewish thinkers as well, since "one essence, three hypostases," is hardly obvious in its implications.

As a suggestion, you might want to then address the previously made arguments of these numbskulls or else shmucks head on, rather than talk behind their backs without giving any mention. (Here presuming this numbskull shmuck was I.)

By no means, the supposition that being "the ground of being" makes God irrelevant or impotent or both (or somehow absolutely nothing like "God") was made by many posters in this thread. I wasn't even thinking of anything you mentioned.

While it is true that such non-deity unmoved-mover could make a deity of superlative power (else agency) utterly superfluous to metaphysical considerations regarding reality at large – indeed, not necessitating the occurrence of any so called “celestial beings” whatsoever – it does not by any means then deny the possibility of the existence of such (and if they do in fact occur, prayers to such celestial beings will then have their effects). Instead, such an understanding of the a non-deity unmoved-mover of all that exists as “the Good” will entail that, were celestial beings to occur, all these will be inescapably subject to this same non-deity unmoved-mover which goes by the term “the Good” – such that, in considering those celestial beings that are far closer to the Good than any of us are, they gain their power from their very proximity to this same “unmoved-mover of all that exists” which is of itself not a deity.

Yup. And that's the understanding we see of the celesial hierarchies in general, e.g. in Dionysius the Areopagite, each angel bestowing power upon the one beneath it, while facing up to those above it (with the Seraphim and Cherubim being the closest to the Divine "in" the primum mobile, beyond the fixed stars in the cosmology of the time). And it has the helpful benefit of tracking with the intermediary role of angels in divine action in the Scriptures, although Orthodox theology tends to hold that the major theophanies involve the pre-incarnate "fleshless Logos."

By its very definitions, the Good / the One, while not being a deity, would be the non-temporal juncture wherein a) no duality whatsoever between the subject of understanding and the object of its understanding will remain and b) it will be (as it has always been) qualitatively infinite (limitless) and, hence, devoid of any quantity in so being divinely simple. This thereby entailing an infinite understanding which is of itself infinite and nondualistic awareness, one which is the source of all rationalizations but which supersedes any and all duality involved in reasoning.

Right, thus even merely angelic knowledge is all intellectus, not discursive ratio. A big project of the Enneads is explaining divine simplicity and divine freedom given the dualism in human knowing and action. E.g.:

Further, this objected obedience to the characteristic nature would imply a duality, master and mastered; but an undivided Principle, a simplex Activity, where there can be no difference of potentiality and act, must be free; there can be no thought of "action according to the nature," in the sense of any distinction between the being and its efficiency, there where being and act are identical. Where act is performed neither because of another nor at another's will, there surely is freedom. Freedom may of course be an inappropriate term: there is something greater here: it is self-disposal in the sense, only, that there is no disposal by the extern, no outside master over the act.

And, as to its reason for being, the Good / the One as actuality here becomes the sole brute fact there is, in so being being the only a-rational reality there is. (With arational being beyond that which can be either rational or irrational, thereby in no way being of itself irrational.)

But God isn't a brute fact in Plotinus or the Christian and Islamic "Neo-Platonists." We might say that in God essence and existence are unified (to borrow the later terminology). God isn't irrational, as you note, but as Dionysius says, super-rational and super-essential. I wouldn't call this arational though, and at any rate God is not a "brute fact" in the sense the term is often employed today, although the term is fitting if it only implies "not referred to anything else."

But to me, "brute fact" suggests "for no reason," or "random." This would also seem to me imply that the Good's willing of itself is in some sense arbitrary. Plotinus responds precisely this concern:

To say that The Good exists by chance must be false; chance belongs to the later, to the multiple; since the First has never come to be, we cannot speak of it either as coming by chance into being or as not master of its being. Absurd also the objection that it acts in accordance with its being if this is to suggest that freedom demands act or other expression against the nature. Neither does its nature as the unique annul its freedom when this is the result of no compulsion but means only that The Good is no other than itself, is self-complete and has no higher.

The objection would imply that where there is most good there is least freedom. If this is absurd, still more absurd to deny freedom to The Good on the ground that it is good and self-concentred, not needing to lean upon anything else but actually being the Term to which all tends, itself moving to none.

I'm not really sure what "I-ness" is supposed to mean here, or why a "deity" is defined by it. To refer to my earlier point, these notions have long been theological orthodoxy in the traditional churches, but have not been seen as precluding that God is God. God is impassible, eternal, immutable, not a being, simple, unlimited, etc. and this is precisely why God is God.

A lot of Pagan responses to this have been preserved, since they helped develop doctrine and provoked important responses. But the critique was generally not that the Incarnation was impossible (although I'm sure this objection must exist somewhere), but rather that it was unfitting, demeaning, etc.

I'm a bit skeptical of narratives that try to pin all these problems on just the (mis)rule of leaders on one side of the political spectrum. The problems being discussed (difficulty getting good jobs, huge numbers of applicants for each job, over qualified workers, unaffordable housing, low quality services, welfare expenses becoming unaffordable, etc.) are endemic to the West. You see the same sorts of complaints re Canada, France, Germany, Sweden, Spain, the US, etc. Yet different sides of the political spectrum have had very varying degrees of long term control across these different states.

Nor is it clear that things are better anywhere else. Housing is increasingly unaffordable in the US, yet it is one of the most affordable rental and ownership markets in the world. It's "hell" in Canada and the UK, yet income to rental/mortgage rates are actually a good deal worse in most of the developing world.

Certainly, Japan and Korea, might shed some light on things. These are wealthy states that haven't experimented with the neo-liberal ideal of the free movement of labor across borders (migration on a fairly unparalleled scale, e.g. to the extent that German children born today will be minorities in Germany before they are middle age) to nearly the same degree. This, and differing cultures, has given them a different blend of problems (e.g. too much work instead of not enough; homes losing value as investments, or even being given away for free, which is a total loss for someone). Yet some of the other problems are very much the same, or even more acute (e.g. the gender-politics gap/war is probably the worst in ROK, scarcity vis-á-vis healthcare services, etc.).

At the highest level, we can say that the welfare state is going to have sustainability issues if the population isn't growing and/or income and wealth aren't growing rapidly. One solution has been replacement migration, but the demographics who tend to meaningfully boost net population tend to also be low income and low networth, and in many contexts most will never be able to afford the mortgage payments on new construction, putting upwards pressure on housing prices while not resolving the welfare state's fiscal problems in the way native growth would. And the political buy-in required for major redistribution projects (like constructing trillions in new housing) seems to be undermined by the major demographic shifts of replacement migration.

Whereas on the other hand, the dramatic increases in welfare outlays and surge in demand for healthcare that come from a much older population (something migration offsets to some degree) have not been matched by the big increases in income, productivity, and automation that would be required to allow for a healthy welfare state under a shrinking/aging population.

Which is all to say that these problems seem to be an unavoidable consequence of falling birthrates and higher average ages (itself a consequence of falling birthrates), although they might be managed more or less well.

I am not sure if it's a wash though. Unfortunately, I remain pretty pessimistic about the long term ramifications of all this in terms of political stability in the West, and I think history to date bears this out.

And unfortunately, welfare economics has no way of looking at this malaise except as "if people could consume more they would be happier." But it's in no way clear if this is really true. Being able to consume dramatically more mostly seems to make us want to be able to consume even more, and to jealousy guard our new consumption. It doesn't ever seem to lead to blissful satiety. So, the widespread malaise, the ballooning "deaths of despair" and "diseases of appetite" driving down life expectancy, the fact that people find all sorts of labor "unsatisfying " or even "humiliating," and related pathologies seem to me to require deeper psychological, philosophical, and spiritual therapies. Economic policy will do very little on its own, especially when divorced from cultural and educational change.

Modern thought has its genesis in the Reformation, a period in which theology dominated philosophy and science more than in any other epoch, so we shouldn't be surprised to find the origin of many shifts in theology. For instance, the move to exclude "natures" as previously conceived, and thus to shift towards a scientific picture of "laws" and discrete, subsistent substance (as substratum) acting according to laws, has its origins in a rejection of natures on account of the fact that they imply a role for human virtue in human perfection, which was seen as being in conflict with salvation by "faith alone," or "total depravity."

C.S. Lewis has a pretty good quote on part of this shift:

If we could ask the medieval scientist 'Why, then, do you talk as if [inanimate objects like rocks had desires]?' he might (for he was always a dialectician) retort with the counter-question, 'But do you intend your language about laws and obedience any more literally than I intend mine about kindly enclyning? Do you really believe that a falling stone is aware of a directive issued to it by some legislator and feels either a moral or a prudential obligation to conform?' We should then have to admit that both ways of expressing are metaphorical. The odd thing is that ours is the more anthropomorphic of the two. To talk as if inanimate bodies had a homing instinct is to bring them no nearer to us than the pigeons; to talk as if they could ' obey laws' is to treat them like men and even like citizens.

But though neither statement can be taken literally, it does not follow that it makes no difference which is used. On the imaginative and emotional level it makes a great difference whether, with the medievals, we project upon the universe our strivings and desires, or with the moderns, our police-system and our traffic regulations. The old language continually suggests a sort of continuity between merely physical events and our most spiritual aspirations.

The Discarded Image

But this is hardly an ancillary concern. Hume's entire argument against causality rests on presupposing the understanding of cause dominant in his era, one grounded in this "law" framework. Yet this argument played a major role in Kant's motivations for the critical philosophy. Likewise, the noumenal/phenomenal distinction rests on certain assumptions about the relationship between things and their appearances, between their being and their acts, assumptions that were radically reformulated due to the same theological concern with natures (and renewed anxiety over the Euthyphro Dilemma and Divine Sovereignty). That's just one example. It's hard to even imagine a Hume or a Kant without the deflation of reason and the emergence of Charles Taylor's "buffered self" as well for instance.

I'm also curious: if God is Being itself, what are the implications for divine action? A God who acts throughout history would seem unlikely in that case. I'm assuming that God can’t or doesn’t act like a being in this world, but instead provides the conditions that make action possible. But what exactly does that look like, beyond the obvious?

Why would it imply that God cannot act (a sort of impotency?) or would not act? I am not sure the idea of God as Being suggests any particular historical "act" on God's part, but nor would it seem to preclude one. Some of the comments in this thread seem to suggest that if "God is being itself," then God is impotent vis-á-vis creatures, insensate, irrational, etc., instead of possessing the fullness of knowledge, the fullness of rationality—as Dionysius the Areopagite says, being super-rational, super-essential, etc. Boethius famous account of the "God of the Philosophers" has a role for Providence, it just specifies no particular Providential revelation. Indeed, it need not, because, for Boethius (at least in this text) everything is Providential. And as St. Augustine says, the daily rising of the sun is no less miraculous than the temporary parting of the Red Sea. The former is perhaps more miraculous, a more splendid theophany, we have just become inured to it.

The Timaeus has been influential in the long history of seeing God as necessarily benevolent. Consider the goal of "being like God." To be wrathful, aside from being an "imperfection," would also be to have one's behavior determined by another. To be even merely indifferent to another would still be to be defined and delimited by what one is not, and so to be less than fully transcendent, and so to be less than fully "like God." Only in the positive identification of the self in the other is this transcendence achieved. And so it is, analogously, for God. God is not the finite creature, but "within everything but contained in nothing" (Augustine). Indifference implies an absence however.

The indifferent God has other problems too. If God is indifferent, then why is the creature here at all? If it is truly "for no reason at all," then God is irrational as a cause. We speak analogically of course, but this seems like a God that produces the universe as we might sneeze, less "thought thinking itself" and "will willing itself," more thoughtless, inchoate action.

Thus, Pagan conceptions of God tended to include beneficence, but in a way that washed out any concern for particularity, and so for history, or for the world of sensible particulars. These might be accounted for as illusion, less than fully real. Whereas the Abrahamic conception tended towards a God who loved creatures even in their particularity and "even when we were still sinners" (Romans 5:8-9). This in turn tended to lead to a much larger role for the passions and appetites (once properly oriented toward the Good, True, and Beautiful themselves, towards God), and so also even for the individuality of embodiment. However, the goal of "becoming like onto God," is the same as in the Pagan philosophers, but the notion of what this means has been expanded.

In the Christian tradition, theosis and deification need not imply a sort of "absorption," nor a total loss of particularity. Dante showcases individuals and world history right up to the climax of the Paradiso for instance. Instead, what is required is a transcending of finitude in love (eros leading up, agape cascading downwards onto other creatures), a "moving beyond finitutde from fininitude," as much as the creature is capable of.

Hence, the process of exitus et reditus ends not in a sort of "reabsorption" and silence, but in the deification of all creation (creation as incarnation, e.g. St. Maximus), with man becoming adopted sons and daughters in a family whose firstborn is the Incarnation, the fullness of the Divine dwelling within the finitude of flesh, born to a human woman, true Theotokos (Mother of God). And this historical "breaking in" then becomes the model for history until the "end of the ages," with man assuming the role of the Blessed Virgin, giving birth to Christ in the immanent world in thought and deed, and "birthing" Christ's mystical body, which is the Church (and which is also the bride of Christ). Creation, in which history occurs, is then not a "subsistent, separate entity" that God sets in motion and then "tweaks with miracles here and there," but is instead fundamentally sacramental (mysterious), an outward sign of inner/upward meaning, a finite ladder by which one ascends, e.g.:

12. The creatures of this sensible world signify the invisible things of God [Rom. 1:20], partly because God is of all creation the origin, exemplar, and end, and because every effect is the sign of its cause, the exemplification of the exemplar, and the way to the end to which it leads; partly from its proper representation; partly from prophetic prefiguration; partly from angelic operation; partly from further ordination. For every creature is by nature a sort of picture and likeness of that eternal wisdom, but especially that which in the book of Scripture is elevated by the spirit of prophecy to the prefiguration of spiritual things.

St. Bonaventure - Itinerarium Mentis in Deum. Chapter 2.12


This narrative is a dramatic expansion, yet it is not generally seen as a rejection of what is similar in parallel forms of thought that developed alongside it in the Pagan tradition (or in other regions of the world).

Actually, the narrative expansion and Logos theology helps clear up some difficulty left in Aristotle re the way finite things can be wholly intelligible in-themselves (it doesn't seem they can be).



There is obviously continuity between the modern and pre-modern in many aspects. But there is definitely an extremely large gap as well. I don't think Hume or Kant, let alone Wittgenstein and Quine, the key concerns and presuppositions that drive their thinking, would be (at least initially) at all coherent to earlier thinkers. Just for example, it takes and extremely different "metaphysics of appearances" and of "intelligibility" to make Kant's noumenal/phenomenal dualism a coherent concern. St. Thomas takes up the very question of "do we know things or just the phantasms they produce in us," but the problem is easily resolved by him, not because he is a "dogmatist," as the later charge would go, but because he has very different starting assumptions.

The very fact that Kant's critique could be wielded (fairly to Kant or not) as a blanket dismissal of the classical metaphysical tradition as "mere dogmatism" to this day shows the chasm. Likewise, that empiricist epistemic presuppositions that undercut older understandings of understanding (noesis/intellectus) are taken as so sacrosanct that they can lead to survey texts and historical reviews largely just glossing over earlier understandings as embarrassing fantasies, shows the shift has been, in at least some areas "tectonic." The denial of any "first philosophy" and the defacto replacement of metaphysics in this role with, first epistemology, and then philosophy of language, also is emblematic of the degree of the transition.

Schiller is definitely interesting, going beyond Kant in so.e important ways. Hegel was a great appreciator, and even more of Goethe, who he called his "father," but Hegel gets so cerebral at times that you'd hardly know it unless you knew where to look!

IMHO, the Romantics at least partially recover something quite important, although I think the radical deflation of the way "reason," "intellect," and the "will" came to be conceived prior to this era stopped the full recovery of a much richer, earlier aesthetics. Sadly, Beauty and Nature still end up being something somewhat "irrational" (sometimes just to the extent they are truly desirable), instead of being the very thing "sought for its own sake" that can orient any "rationality" at all.

In the Romantic period, this ideal comes to be identified with beauty. Schiller takes on board the notion he finds in Shaftesbury and Kant, that our response to
beauty is distinct from desire; it is, to use the common term of the time, “disinterested”; just as it is also distinct, as Kant said as well, from the moral imperative in us. But then Schiller argues that the highest mode of being comes where the moral and the appetitive are perfectly aligned in us, where our action for the good is over-determined; and the response which expresses this alignment is just the proper response to beauty, what Schiller calls “play” (Spiel). We might even say that it is
beauty which aligns us.11

This doctrine had a tremendous impact on the thinkers of the time; on Goethe (who was in a sense, one of its co-producers, in intensive exchange with Schiller), and on those we consider “Romantics” in the generally accepted sense. Beauty as the fullest form of unity, which was also the highest form of being, offers the definition of the true end of life; it is this which calls us to go beyond moralism, on one side, or a mere pursuit of enlightened interest, on the other. The Plato of the Symposium returns, but without the dualism and the sublimation. Hölderlin will call his ideal female companion, at first in theory, and then in the reality of Suzette Gontard, “Diotima”. But this name returns not as that of an older, wiser teacher, but in the form of a (hoped for) mate. (Of course, it ended tragically, but that’s because reality cannot live up to such an ideal)

From the standpoint of this anthropology of fusion and beauty, we can understand one of the central criticisms that the Romantic age levelled at the disengaged,
disciplined, buffered self, and the world it had built. Beauty required the harmonious fusion of moral aspiration and desire, hence of reason and appetite. The accusation against the dominant conceptions of disciplined self and rational order was that they had divided these, that they had demanded that reason repress, deny feeling; or alternatively, that they had divided us, confined us in a desiccating reason which had alienated us from our deeper emotions.


-Charles Taylor "A Secular Age"

Still, I think Taylor is pointing to a pernicious dualism that remains unresolved here. It reminds me a bit of what made the Desert Fathers stand out from Pagan ascetics, the embrace of the emotions, embodiment, the passions, and the appetites to the extent that they are "rightly oriented" towards true beauty, hence "The Love of Beauty," (as opposed to love of wisdom) being a popular title for anthologies from the Fathers.

Which I would have preferred when I was a student at school. I went to a very expensive elite school. It was Christian, and we had a daily chapel service. This school was modeled on Eton and followed old British pedagogical traditions. This was 45 years ago. We were given ethical instruction and read pointless New Testament stories, which had no impact on most students and were at best a source of mirth. The poor and minorities were generally held to be human trash. Everyone was acutely aware that the real goal of the school was to get one into a law or medical degree, to then make money and gain power. Many of my fellow students joined their millionaire—and sometimes billionaire—fathers in family businesses.

For the most part, despite an energetic display of Christianity and a lot of rhetoric about the centrality of morality, this school was merely churning out neoliberal toadies who, on leaving school, often treated people poorly. Which I also observed in the subsequent decades.

This seems to me to still be a problem of lack of ethical education though. Daily chapel service is not necessarily ethical education. Or, as you describe it, it was an ethical education in the dictum "seek power and status, for these are worthwhile goods."

But that's the type of moral education most elites get, whether it be "conservative" and tinged with Ayn Rand and the Prosperity Gospel, or "liberal" and framed in terms of "effective altruism" and post-modern anti-realism ("live your truth!").

One should hardly be shocked that such future leaders go on to be poor leaders. Yet I wouldn't take that as a knock on ethics necessarily. It would be like rejecting diets because one grew up around crash dieters who followed off short morning fasts by binging candy bars; that something is done poorly does not mean it is impossible to do well.

I of course acknowledge the hybridization of the One and the omni-creator deity in the course of history - such that the omni-creator deity takes on the characteristics of the One. Omni-benevolence being one such characteristic when it is addressed in relatively very abstract manners - which can be simplified into the dictum of "God is Love".

Well, I guess there are two questions here: compatibility and historical influence. "God is love" (1 John 4:8) predates Plotinus by a good deal and likely influenced his thought. It is not something that grows out of Neoplatonism, although it is perhaps an understanding sharing common roots in the Alexandrian intellectual milieu (e.g. Philo).

The self-subsistent ontological ground of being, being itself, in some ways is more reflective of the "I AM" than the Platonic demiurge who must create from pre-existing materials as well.

Are you however disagreeing with the thesis that the characteristics by which the One is defined - e.g. that of perfectly infinite pure being (hence, devoid of any and all finitudes) - are logically incommensurate with the characteristics of any deity - which, as deity, necessitates some finitude(s) in at least so far as being a psyche/mind distinct from other co-occurring psyches/minds?

I'm not sure. I'd disagree if the idea is somehow that what the transcendent transcends is somehow absent from the transcendent itself, e.g. if God is incapable of what man is capable of. Or as Plotnius says, if we suggest that what is best in the Nous is somehow absent from the One, or something that the One is incapable of, this would be "absurd." There can be no actuality coming from anywhere else.

I don't think they're logically incommensurate though, or at least they haven't been seen as such. In Dante's Paradiso for instance, the blessed can all read Dante's thoughts before he speaks because they can "read" them in the fullness of the Divine Mind. The angels and celestial intelligences need no independent memory because all knowledge is contained in Light they are turned to. There is no separation here, the Celestial Rose at the climax of the Commedia is "in" the Empyrean, in the fullness of the Divine Mind (but in no way exhaustive of it). See the quote above by Moevs.

There is also the idea of the creature as mirroring the divine in precisely the way it extends beyond its nature (becoming self-determining). "A thing made by a consummate artist radiates a certain gratuitousness, not in the sense of being arbitrary, but in the sense of being unconstrained, and this freedom coincides with an evident necessity." That is, God's power empowers, creatures are the authors of themselves to the extent they also transcend their finitude. Hence, "at the first beginning of [the] world, we must therefore postulate not so much a power that exercises its force, as an infinite goodness that communicates itself to the world: Love is the deepest spring of all causality.” (From Schindler, Retrieving Freedom).

I don't think the above contradicts the earlier view, but is rather a thinking out of what it means for what is not-God.

Do you rate Hart as a theological thinker?

I think Hart is pretty great, although I think he sometimes writes at a level that is probably going to be overly abstruse for general audiences, which is fine for some contexts, but he does so in books he publishes for general audiences. And I think this sometimes leads to him getting carried away in the flow of what might be "consensus" in his subfield, but which can hardly been taken for granted for more general audiences, which ends up having the effect that his arguments fail to anticipate likely objections. I haven't read his book addressing New Athiesm, so I'm not sure how much this tendency applies when he is presumably addressing a wider audience.

He also seems to mostly write in the context of some sort of conflict (e.g. against infernalism and for universalism, against the nature/supernature distinction, against New Atheism, etc.), which is too bad because he sometimes has very cogent descriptions of the classical tradition nestled in these arguments, but they're always as asides, and this means his projects lack the strong positive formulations of someone like von Balthasar, or Ferdinand Ulrich.

How should one understand this? It certainly has a whiff of Neoplatonism. But also aligns with Hinduism. In Advaita Vedanta, Brahman is described as Nirguna (without attributes) and beyond all categories, including being and non-being. Brahman is also seen as the inexhaustible source or ground of all contingent existence.

There are similarities for sure. I sometimes think "Platonism" and "Neoplatonism" are unhelpful labels, even though I still find myself using them. Often, they get used for things that are only in Plato in embryonic form, or obliquely, and which are then not unique to, or even originating in the proper "Neoplatonists."

You can see some of the similarities and the implications in a passage like (about high scholasticism):

...these principles are that: (

1) the world of space and time does not itself exist in space and time: it exists in Intellect (the Empyrean, pure conscious being);

(2) matter, in medieval hylomorphism, is not something “material”: it is a principle of unintelligibility, of alienation from conscious being;

(3) all finite form, that is, all creation, is a self-qualification of Intellect or Being, and only exists insofar as it participates in it;

(4) Creator and creation are not two, since the latter has no existence independent of the former; but of course creator and creation are not the same; and

(5) God, as the ultimate subject of all experience, cannot be an object of experience: to know God is to know oneself as God, or (if the expression seems troubling) as one “with” God or “in” God.

Let me spell out these principles at greater length. In medieval hylomorphism (the matter-form analysis of reality), pure Intellect (consciousness or awareness) is pure actuality, or form, or Being, or God: it is the self-subsistent principle that spawns or “contains” all finite being and experience. Intellect Being is what is, unqualified, self-subsistent, attributeless, dimensionless. It has no extension in space or time; rather, it projects space-time “within” itself, as, analogously, a dreaming intelligence projects a dream-world, or a mind gives being to a thought. The analogy holds in at least three respects: (1) like dreams or thoughts, created things are radically contingent, and dependent at every instant of their existence on what gives them being; (2)as there is nothing thoughts are “made of,” so there is nothing the world is “made of”: being is not a “something” to make things out of; and (3) dreams and thoughts have no existence apart from the intelligence in which they arise, but one cannot point to that intelligence because it is not a thing. In the same way, one cannot point to the Empyrean, the tenth heaven that the Comedy presents as the infinite intelligence/reality “within” which all things exist; remove it and the universe would instantly vanish. Note that the analogy in no way implies that the world is “unreal” or a “dream” (except in contrast to its ontological ground); rather, it expresses the radical non-self-subsistence of finite reality. This understanding of the radical contingency of “created” things is the wellspring of medieval Christian thought, without which the rest of medieval thought makes little sense.

Conscious being spawns experience by giving itself to it, by qualifying itself as this-or-that, and thus in one sense becoming other than itself. This is how the world comes into being: it is one valence of the Incarnation and the Trinity. ...As Beatrice puts it in Paradiso 29: conceived in itself, the ultimate ontological principle is a splendore, the reflexive self-awareness of pure consciousness; creation is its re-reflection as an apparently self-subsistent entity, a limitation of its unqualified self-experience as something, as a determinate thing. This voluntary self-experience of self as “other” is love; thus Dante can say that creation is an unfolding of divine love

Christian Moevs - The Metaphysics of Dante's Comedy - Introduction: Non-Duality and Self-Knowledge - pg. 5-6

Indeed, that's partly Plotinus's response. Also that the empiricist conception of knowledge actually makes knowing anything impossible, and is perhaps not even coherent. The knowledge that is most properly called so is always a sort of self-knowledge. Lloyd Gerson's article on "Neoplatonic epistemology : knowledge, truth and intellection" is pretty good here.

The One is then at direct odds with any notion of an omni-creator deity - that said, with most nowadays understanding the latter to be what is addressed by the term "God" and having little to no comprehension of the former.

I think it would be fair to say that this has not been the common reception of Neoplatonism across history. Augustine, the Cappadocians, etc., found a lot to use there, so too for the Muslim philosophers. Neoplatonism has been taught as part of "natural theology" throughout most of the history of Christianity, and the scholastics flocked to it when it returned again in other forms through the Theology of Aristotle, Book of Causes, etc. And this interchange existed even when the two schools were coexisting in the same cities and engaged in active dialogue.

David Bentley Hart, mentioned at the outset of this thread, is an Eastern Orthodox Christian and often refers to himself as an "unreformed Neoplatonist" when poking fun at post-Kantian metaphysics for instance. Hence the common terms "Christian/Jewish/Muslim Neoplatonism."

Is Neoplatonism central to this notion of God as Being itself? The world emanates from The One.

It's influential, but the direction of influence goes in both ways. Often, it's assumed that the influence largely goes in the direction of Neoplatonism -> Christianity (-> Islam). Sometimes this is assumed because Platonism/paganism is older than Christianity, more often because this is the order of influence in the biography of the most influential "Christian Platonist," Saint Augustine.

Plotinus scholarship has really come around on this though. Plotinus grew up on a hot bed of Jewish, orthodox Christian, and gnostic Christian Platonism, and these intersected with pagan learning in Alexandria, with converts going both ways. He was a younger contemporary of Origen and Clement (although he would have been a teen when Clement died), and there is a recorded exchange of ideas between the groups. Plotinus has his own arguments against the Christians and against gnosticism in particular, but he borrows a lot from them. For instance, the whole solution of emanation and the structure of the hypostases seems to show up earlier in more recently discovered gnostic texts.

Nor was the "gnostic" always particularly divorced from the "orthodox" in Christianity at this point, some elements of it simply became orthodox theology, some outgrowths became the bizarre (at least to us ) alternative Genesis narratives of the Sethians (something embraced by a minority of "gnostics" it would appear). This "middle Platonism" set the stage for Plotinus and his students.

Yet the influence is obviously strong in the other direction, particularly through Augustine and we might suppose through Dionysius the Areopagite (although we don't know his exact sources and who he was). Plotinus was particularly helpful for Christianity (and Islam and Judaism) in resolving some crucial issues in Aristotle vis-á-vis the Divine Will and "potency" in God, not as "capacity to be moved/changed," but instead instead as "power" (the common translation here).

So take this influential passage from Aristotle's Metaphysics (XII):

The First Principle [is that ] upon which depends the sensible universe and the world of nature.And its life is like the best which we temporarily enjoy. It must be in that state always (which for us is impossible), since its actuality is also pleasure. (And for this reason waking, sensation and thinking are most pleasant, and hopes and memories are pleasant because of them.) Now thinking in itself is concerned with that which is in itself best, and thinking in the highest sense with that which is in the highest sense best...

Yet how is such a "being" thinking and simple? Doesn't "knowing" and "knower" imply duality? And how can God be free if It only does what is good (the Timaeus has already gotten at "why is God good?" but had left "God" as less than fully God and the Good.)

These issues are what Plotinus will help Christians with and his additions will be developed through lots of thinkers until Aquinas hits on the idea of power as perfect self-communication (which is already shaping up in St. Maximus).

And because Porphyry's introduction to Aristotle's Categories also had tremendous influence and staying power, Neoplatonism also had a lot of influence on more foundational approaches in philosophy.

Indeed, you are correct. St. Thomas' theology is no more wholly summed up by "God is being itself," than is the case for Aristotle ("pure act"), Plotinus, St. Maximos, or Al Farabi. Even those with the strictest commitment to apophatic theology and the Via Negativa go further than this, since this would be not to say much of anything (I think we can agree here). "God is the ground of being" is not meant to be an exhaustive theology, and certainly not a definition.

Those of an apophatic bent might put it differently though. To paraphrase Dionysius the Areopagite: to say "God is" is false. And to say "God is not" is false. But it is more incorrect to say "God is not."

A key difference in this sort of "classical" theology is whether or not thinkers thought an analogy of proper proportion existed between God and creatures, such that analogous predication vis-á-vis the Divine was possible. Likewise the question of if God is only known through God's energies, never His essence.

But aside from the fruits of discursive reason and "natural theology" there is the issue of revelation and illumination, but also the ascetical and spiritual life as a means of "knowing by becoming." Growth in virtue is growth towards "becoming like God." Virtue is ultimately love, and so it is conformity to God who "is love" (I John). Knowledge is attained through contemplation, through union, and this is a reflexive knowledge that cannot be shared directly though discursive means since the knowing is the being.

Plato says something not entirely dissimilar about the limits of discourse in Letter VII.

Atheists acknowledge basic assumptions but generally would treat these as provisional and open to revision, not sacred truths. Foundational beliefs like causality are not equivalent to teleological or theistic explanations, because they don’t posit an agent or a purpose we must subscribe to without evidence.

In my experience there is great variability in atheists' willingness to countenance radical skepticism, e.g. a denial of the intuitions underwriting logic, a denial of causality, taking the "Problem of Induction" (or other arguments from underdetermination) seriously, or skepticism re the authority of reason and argument in general. For instance, the "New Atheists" tend to dismiss this sort of skepticism out of hand, and I would guess that those who tend to embrace it more fully would tend towards agnosticism (since they allow that they cannot know much of anything, or that "knowing" is something more affective).

The question of teleology is sort of a fraught one. I don't think it is that simple. There are at least plausible arguments that causation degenerates into, at most, Hume's constant conjunction (which opens up the Problem of Induction question) without final causes (or that it must simply be eliminated, e.g. Russell). And these arguments don't even tend to come from the advocates of telos, at least not exclusively. Many of the most famous ones come from those who assiduously want to foreclose on final causality and have then realized that there is "nothing left" to causes and "reasons" except coorelation vis-á-vis "sense data."

Maybe not—maybe mechanistic causation can survive alone without being eliminated. Either way, the suppositions that the world we happen to find before us "just is" and that this assertion of brute fact, the dismissal of the Fine Tuning Problem, glossing over the epistemic and metaphysical issues that arise from materialism's representationalism and its positing of a "being outside intelligibility," or the sorts of plausibility issues brought up by Nagel in his "Mind and Cosmos" (just for example), has never struck me as just "following the empirical facts," or in any sense "obvious." In some sense, it's a demand to close empirical inquiry re explanation—the positive claim that it must end at the wall of "it just is, for no reason at all." And in deterministic versions of materialism, it leads to the sorts of conclusions Will Durant highlights—e.g. that every last letter of Hamlet came into being because it "just did," the result of a causeless Rube-Goldberg machine that exists "for no reason at all," and so too for all our emotions, loves, and dreams.

There is a sort of collapse of the intelligibility of causes, or "reasons," that comes with the removal of final causality, whereas the removal of formal causality seems to reduce causation to mere correlation. Yet even with some notion of formal (not uncommon in contemporary philosophy of physics these days, e.g. ontic structural realism), we are still left with no explanation of this form. It still "just is." Everything, the history of the cosmos and our lives, as well as the cosmos's quiddity, "what it is," or the nature of "efficient causal mechanisms" (e.g. "natural laws") ultimately has to bottom out in "for no reason at all." Aside from this difficulty, there is the seemingly obvious fact that final causality is at work in living organisms, or at least in us. Denials of this in the form eliminativism and epiphenomenalism have their own plausibility issues, and at the very least they don't seem "obvious."

This is of course not to say final cause does not have its own problems. Final causes have to end somewhere, and they will either bottom out in the inscrutable, just like the denial of final causes, or they will ascend to the infinite and ineffable. The dilemma then, seems to leave us straddling a chasm. On one end we face the inchoate and inscrutable, "it just is," which arises out of the denial of telos (or which is a feature of extreme voluntarist Protestant theology, from which modern athiesm largely historically evolved). On the other end we have the ineffable, the infinite, whose essence seems inherently unknowable, and which can only be probed by discursive reason through the apophatic via negativa.

But I would tend to follow Charles Taylor in "A Secular Age" here. If the answer to this long running quagmire seems "obvious" and without difficulty, this will tend to be because one has been "spun" in a closed position to the other frame. This tends to involve having avoided the issues that dominate the middle ground. It is, at the very least, not something that seems obvious to a great deal of thoughtful people who have dedicated their lives to the question. And, with Charles Taylor, I would agree that the pivot to either of the "closed" positions in either the "immanent frame" or the "transcendent frame" often tends to result more from moral and aesthetic judgement re the cosmos and conceptions of nature, than from arguments about the actual facts in question. Karen Armstrong's "Sacred Nature" is a pretty good work on these different framings across different cultures.

Maybe it is even so that things "just are " Yet, I've never been able the fathom how this assertion, when taken as obvious, doesn't need to rely on the same sort of dogmatism at work in the assertions of people of a "simple faith." This is particularly true when it is supported with "science says this is so," or "one cannot possibly have understood modern cosmology and think there are any issues here" (cosmologists debate this sort of thing all the time). At least the fundamentalist is actually correct about what their authority has said in this case (even if we would tend to give the authority far less credence).

You mentioned David Bentley Hart in your other post. His first two essays in "You Are Gods," do a decent job laying out the metaphysical and phenomenological arguments for the claim that any rational (and thus any truly free) agent must be oriented towards the infinite. Nicolas of Cusa is one of his big sources here. And ties into notions of final causality in that a chain of final causes that stops short of the infinite seems to require bottoming out in inchoate impulse.

For one, one cannot rank actions according to what is "truly best" without a "highest good" by which to order them. Barring this, all actions are only ordered to some end that must be justified and judged good according to some other finite end, and so on, in an infinite regress. But since finite creatures cannot consider an infinite number of standards in a finite time, judgement must end in the irrational.

What does this mean for the problem of suffering?

For one, that evil is a privation, an absence. It is the slide towards multiplicity and materiality (i.e., mere potency, God being pure actuality). For instance, this metaphysics undergirds Dante's image of Satan as completely impotent, frozen in ice, forever flailing his legs at the "center of the cosmos" in vain. At the climax of the Commedia, Dante the Pilgrim's understanding will undergo a radical inversion as he realizes that the Mind of God that is "out beyond" the last Heaven (the "furthest out") is actually a dimensionless point with no location that "contains" the material cosmos, and that the material cosmos is nothing more than created being reflecting the light of this point. The image is like a candle diffusing light into mist, with darkness at the edges. The darkest area with any light at all, the area furthest from the point, is Hell.

In this image, the sin is the Augustinian "curvatus in se," a curving inward on the self and towards finite goods, which is a failure to fully reflect the divine light, which all things reflect to varying degrees to the degree they are at all. To be ruled over by the passions and appetites' drive towards finite things is to be oriented away from God, towards finite things, and ultimately towards nothing, since they are nothing of themselves.

This is an old idea though, you can see it in Socrates's admonition that the Athenians should chastise his sons if they act poorly, so they they will not "think themselves something when they are truly nothing" (St. Paul makes a similar point in Ephesians).

I don't know if that will clear much up. My description is probably only going to be so helpful because the area you are asking about is incredibly broad, since in the "classical metaphysical" tradition all of ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, physics, and even the philosophy of history hang together quite tightly, while the Doctrine of Transcendentals and the Analogia Entis run throughout them. It'd be like trying to explain the whole of "Continental Philosophy" in a post, although the classical tradition does have a good deal more unity (but also spans 2,000+ years).

One book I like here is Robert M. Wallace's Philosophical Mysticism in Plato, Hegel, and the Present. It's pretty accessible and I feel like starting with Plato is easier because he is more focused simply on how the Good is what makes man psychologically one and "like God." The book does get into the weeds with Hegel and a recap of contemporary thinkers, but those sections are skippable. But then it's Aristotle's Physics and Metaphysics where the relationship between the Good and Unity (the way in which anything is 'one' and this 'is' at all) gets extended out to the entire cosmos of beings (plural). And the Metaphysics also has the initial consideration of Truth as a transcendental.

I have not found a good accessible book on this next move in the development unfortunately, but I do think Wallace captures something of the idea. David Bentley Hart's "Ye Are Gods" recounts some of the phenomenological arguments for the Good as the only possible target of all rational thought. The problem is that he is litigating theological ideas and assumes you already know the Transcendentals well, and I don't think it is very accessible. D.C. Schindler's Love and the Postmodern Predicament is one of the more accessible works, but he's a bit polemical in it vis-á-vis the issues he finds in contemporary thought and I think this will be an insurmountable distraction for many audiences unfortunately.



Neither Hart nor Tillich are working with new ideas. What they are expressing has been Christian orthodoxy for pretty much all of (well-recorded) Church history. It's the official theology of the Catholic and Orthodox churches, encompassing a pretty large majority of all current and historical Christians (and many Protestants hold to this tradition to).

It is, for instance, what you will find if you open the works of pretty much any theologically minded Church Father or Scholastic: St. Augustine, St. Bonaventure, St. Maximos, St. Thomas Aquinas, either of the Gregorys, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Gregory Palamas, etc.

It even shows up in materials for the catechumenate, although often to a far lesser degree because it's difficult to understand and also unnecessary to fully understand. Indeed, on the Orthodox view, one can only understand it properly through the life of praktikos and asceticism.

I hardly see how it can be some sort of "trick of equivocation" for traditional Christians to insist on 2,000 years of theological precedent laying out what they believe in response to atheist criticisms of "Christianity." And this seems particularly true because a good deal of these concepts also apply to considerations of the "golden age" of Islamic thought, and any fair consideration of Stoicism and Neoplatonism, which have not been immune from atheist critiques. Assertions that the real "God of Abraham" has to leave behind orthodox theology in the largest, oldest churches, as well as the Patristics, the Scholastics, the mystics, etc. just seems to me like demands that "Christians take ownership of the strawman we have constructed for them."

It also seems wholly unnecessary. Surely one can make positive apologetic arguments for athiesm without having to claim to engage with (and vanquish) the vast edifice of pre-modern theistic thought, just as surely one can offer social/political criticism of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism without having to argue if the Analogia Entis makes sense.

But there is also a weird standard here of "Christianity must be judged by the defense given of it by any random church-goer." I suppose this perhaps comes out of a certain sort of Protestant theology as well (one athiesm has inherited), and the idea of the "buffered self" who simply applies reason to commonly accessible "sense data" (as opposed to notions of "wisdom"). Yet I would hardly think this standard should be applied generally, and so would question if it is fair as applied to the faithful.

Does Nietzsche's philosophy stand or fall based on the description the average Nietzsche fan on the internet would produce for it? Given my experiences, this would be grossly unfair to Nietzsche. Nor would I expect the average person who embraces any given interpretation of quantum mechanics to necessarily understand it very well. It's a bit like making the assumption that every US citizen has become a Constitutional law expert by osmosis and is prepared to give an interpretation and defense of the Constitution and relevant jurisprudence. Or it is like demanding that your random hooligan in a black bloc be able to explain communism or anarchism—Marx and Proudhon—or any supporter of the Democratic party be able to articulate a cogent policy defense of Obamacare?

It's not incoherent. Ceteris paribus, slapping tariffs of imports will tend to reduce a country's trade deficit. Whether this is a worthy goal is another thing. However, it will tend to increase domestic production, particularly in a country with a huge trade deficit. This might very well be a benefit if the country is one in which the top 10% account for over half of all consumer spending, since the people taking jobs in new production and benefiting from increased domestic investment will tend to be part of the 90% who are not consuming most of the goods.

At any rate, it's not the worst timing. Apparently, there is a decent likelihood that the next decade will see a tumultuous shedding of white collar jobs due to AI (the looming crisis in academia as enrollment peaks and declines only adds to this) and this will lead to a rapid acceleration in the tendency of wealthy nations to have most of their income come from capital, not labor. Production is certainly liable to become more automated, but not in the sea change way that white color work might soon be getting reduced. So, there is a sort of impetus there for an increased focus on production as well.

Of course, something like a carbon tax (or something even broader on pollution) might have accomplished something similar in a more rational way.

The tariffs and the return of "industrial policy" that differed radically from the neo-liberal orthodoxy that had dominated the GOP for decades were discussed throughout the campaign. You can find all sorts of articles on this from before Trump was elected, and he had rhetoric focused on the trade deficit in his speeches on a regular basis.

It's certainly true that when voters pick a candidate they are rarely selecting on a single issue, but it's hardly a move that has come out of left field. Both polling and my person experience living in an area that went hard for Trump suggest that the most common attitude for supporters is that they are willing to "try it out" and suffer some "short term pain for long term gain."

Second, it's perhaps dysfunctional that major policy choices are made wholly by presidents in this way. That's an outgrowth of decades of dysfunction in Congress, which can no longer govern. But if this move makes Trump "dictatorial," then what of Biden's decision to unilaterally increase net migration rates four-fold without any action from Congress largely through choosing not to enforce standing US laws?

This is not something Biden campaigned on, probably because actually increasing (as opposed to maintaining) net migration is extremely unpopular, polling on average on par with Kamala Harris's performance in rural Southern counties. Yet, despite COVID restrictions keeping migration low during the first half of his term, he managed to oversee a net migration figure significantly higher than the high levels under George W. Bush's two terms(or Obama's two terms) in a little over half of a single term.

When liberal outlets said that surging migration rates were simply an inevitable consequence of the economy and pent up demand, were they "gaslighting" the public? I don't think so, although their description certainly had a lot of ideological bias. There was indeed pent up demand from the pandemic. Early in the pandemic, and the initial recovery, real wages for low-income Americans grew at the most rapid pace in almost half a century (after marked declines in the 80s and 90s). Wage growth for the bottom 40% was outpacing inflation, while those in the top 10% saw their real wages decline for the first time in ages. I think it's no coincidence that it was at this point that major outlets began screaming in alarm about inflation... and then switched to a steady narrative of "it's not that bad," once things returned to "normal," (i.e., with the top end of the income distribution seeing steady real growth above inflation again.) At any rate, obviously growth in the lower end of the wage distribution is going to attract more migration, that isn't wrong.

However, the commonly expressed notion that there was nothing that could be done short of some inhumane Korean border solution has been proven demonstrably false. The US was able to rapidly bring down illegal entry to the country in 2020 and 2025 through policy, as I think any honest account should have been able to acknowledge.

One side's "gaslighting" is just another's "political slant" or "political blinders." In 2020, there were 66 million people in the lowest income quintile. Most immigrants entering without legal status end up in this quintile and are competing with its members for wages. The net migration under Biden was equivalent to 15.6% of this entire population; it would be 7.8% growth if we look at the bottom two quintiles taken together.

If you look at bedrock economic assumptions and dominant orthodoxy, one assumption you are going to find that holds even stronger than "tariffs aren't that great" is "if you increase the labor supply 15.6%, it is going to put downwards pressure on wages."

For the past half century, we've had very poor wage growth for the lower 40%, phenomenal growth for the top 10%.



This radically reversed in 2020



The top lines are the poorest Americans in the second graph. Why did this occur? A number of reasons, but by far the most obvious is the "labor shortage." The supposed labor shortage occurred because of a massive cut off in migration (particularly the illegal immigrant that tends to funnel workers entirely into these lower quartiles), a mass retirement of Baby Boomers, and other pandemic related issues. This jump occurred despite all the supply chain shocks that one would expect to hit low wage workers hardest.

Yet if you ask liberal economists, who generally will acknowledge that illegal immigration tends to negatively impact poorer Americans (both their earnings, access to government services, and ability to unionize), they are often going to try to find other explanations here. I don't think this is gaslighting though, I think it's a combination of ideological blindness and self-censorship (self-censorship to the extent that one pays a penalty in the current climate for expressing heterodox beliefs, and this is particularly true on migration, where opposition is equated with racism).

I guess my summary point would be this:
A. Unilaterally raising tariffs, a power the President has, is no more "dictatorial" than unilaterally massively increasing net-migration by choosing not to enforce standing laws or precedent (indeed it seems less so).

B. Tariffs are still more popular than increasing net migration dramatically.

On at least this issue, the difference seems to be largely one of spin. If anything, there was more "gaslighting" in the former case as the Biden Administration didn't triumphantly announce radical changes in migration policy, but often went out of its way to deny that it was actually allowing substantial changes.

The great irony here is that, of the heterodox economists who have defended tariffs up to now, they are overwhelmingly liberals.

Grand strategy wise, I suppose there could also be the hope that, given all the rumblings in the Chinese economy, that this will throw them into a much greater recession than what the US faces. The "new multi-polar order" has already really taken a hammering with Russian performance in Ukraine and the absolute disaster Iran's axis faced in their conflict with Israel.

But then Trump is inexplicably coddling Russia right as they are facing what I think could only be fairly called a defeat, so it's not like that seems part of their thinking. He seems to be actively courting an invasion of Taiwan by turning on an ally, while at the same time removing China's main incentive (exports) not to take Taiwan and alienating all the allies we'd rely upon to sanction/boycott China in the event of a war. So, his bizarre Russophilia (Putinphilia) basically undermines that line of argument.

Natural disasters and cyclical recessions are one thing, but businesses don’t expect Black Swan events to be caused by the policy whims of a dictator, which is why there is little urge to invest in authoritarian regimes where policy changes on a dime.

China is certainly an authoritarian regime, and it had a pretty long history of radical policy shifts when it began sucking in trillions of foreign investment in the 1980s and 1990s. Corporations will go wherever they can get short-term profits, which is why they will also flock back to Russia without state intervention to stop them. Jack Ma, the Chinese equivalent of Jeff Bezos, chided the Chinese Communist Party on market liberalization (fairly mildly) and then got disappeared for half a year. Bao Fan likewise disappeared. China averaged executing one of its billionaires on charges related to corruption or overstepping the lines on the power of private individuals vis-a-vis the Communist Party about once a year through the 2000s.

Western corporations have largely shrugged at this, just like they (and the Arab states) shrugged at the re-education of Muslims in East Turkestan.

Meanwhile, Trump won the most votes in a free and fair election, and his party won both chambers of Congress. People are getting what they voted for. It's not a failure of "too little democracy" (i.e. "too much authority") when a proven incompetent populist demagogue wins power, quite the opposite.

There may be a temporary increase in demand, but in the longer term American companies will not be able to compete with foreign companies who re-assemble cheaper supply chains excluding the U.S.

It's probably more likely to be the opposite, provided the tarrifs remain in place. The silver lining is that a good deal of near-shoring already occurred due to the COVID-19 pandemic and that near-shoring potentially has a lot of environmental benefits. Off-shoring production has been a way to off-shore polluting as well, i.e., to get around the labor and environmental regulations in developed states. But this comes with the very real environmental costs of shipping stuff all across the world for different stages of production.

Politically, I get "playing to the crowd" on consumption having to go down temporarily, but I think liberals should acknowledge that actual meaningful action on climate change would also require this sort of "short-term pain" for long term gain. The problem I see with the Trump plan is more that it, like everything his administrations do, doesn't seem well thought out, is implemented chaotically, and will likely be subject to all sorts of favoritism.

Lots of wealthy states have vibrant economies despite significantly higher levels of protectionism than the US though. The conventional orthodoxy surrounding the analysis of protectionism puts a premium on GDP growth and raw consumption that is vastly too high, while tending to ignore or downplay the effects on social mobility, inequality, sectoral shift, and median consumption or particularly the consumption of the lower two quintiles.

We have now had a ton of research on how the shift of millions of jobs and trillions in investment to China has played out for US citizens. While it seems that, had this not occurred, US GDP might be lower, it also seems that many areas of the country would be doing vastly better, and that overall inequality and mobility would be improved to a meaningful degree. Whether or not it is possible to "undo" the damage at this point is another question.

However, the inability of the West to scale up military production for the Ukrainian war does at least show that there are pretty massive national security reasons for wanting to bring industry back, since the ability to scale up has been, frankly, pathetic. Unfortunately, where the need is highest is in commercial ship building (essentially extinct in the US, with China outproducing it almost 200:1 in tonnage commissioned), and that would require direct, major government intervention to resuscitate.



I mean, Vance strikes me as incredibly opportunistic and unlikable, but he would surely be an improvement over the chaos of Trump. He would be preferable if only because he is less charismatic and so less able to get by on sheer bluster.

Alternatively, the higher ratio could be indicative of engaging in political bait posts and trolling :naughty:

Maybe I'll set up a sticky post demanding that, in line with current executive orders, all American posters MUST sign each post with:

"HAIL TRVMP, AVGVSTVS! HAIL VANCE, CEASAR!"

And banning the sharing of traitorous Vance memes:



(I have legit forgot what the guy actually looks like at this point)

That ought to be good for some replies.

I'm familiar with the broad critiques of 20th century philosophy. I am not really a fan though. For one, they very often start from the premises of the Anglo-empiricist tradition (even if this is normally to somehow debunk it), or draw on those who did (e.g. Wittgenstein), but I think those premises are quite deficient. That and you get a sort of broad rejection of the pre-modern tradition, largely on the back of Kant's charge of dogmatism and Heidegger's charge of "ontotheology."

I think these critiques are far weaker than is generally acknowledged, and start from an inaccurate understanding of "classical metaphysics." For example, as Gadamer and others have pointed out, Heidegger starts from the late-medieval nominalism he is familiar (e.g. Suárez) with and then backwards projects this onto classical metaphysics writ large. Yet neo-scholastics and Catholic philosophy more generally tends to look at the late-medieval/Reformation period as one giant "wrong turn" in philosophy to begin with.

The reduction of "reason" (and the activity of the intellect more generally) to discursive ratio alone is a primary culprit here, and the post-structuralist epistemic challenges don't seem immune from this tendency. More broadly, the entire notion of reason as primarily occurring within the context of "language games" tends to be simply presuppose this view of reason, and normally many of the Anglo-empiricist epistemic presuppositions (again, even if they oppose that camp's conclusions). Likewise, the emergence of Sausser's semiotics, and the resultant decoupling of the sign and signified requires that one not begin from the tripartite semiotics embraced by C.S. Peirce, John Deely, etc., which comes out of the Latin tradition (originally from Saint Augustine in the Doctrina Signorum).

This perhaps explains an historically interesting phenomenon. Catholics love their phenomenology. Husserl's prize student Edith Stein is a Catholic saint. The phenomenologist philosopher Karol Józef Wojtyła became the pope and saint John Paul II. Ferdinand Ulrich is another example, or Hans Urs von Balthasar or Erich Pryzwarra.

Yet the epistemic and metaphysical conclusions reached in this alternate tradition tend be quite different (and in some sense, vastly more optimistic). I cannot help but think that this divergence comes from avoiding some of the bad epistemic premises that come down through Hume and Kant and dominate both analytic and continental thought (although prehaps overcome in Hegel to some degree), and the deflation of reason (a sort of concomitant of Charles Taylor's "buffered self," which trends in continental thought, enactivism, etc. have tried to overcome, but often without wholly leaving behind some of its presuppositions). My take is that there is a certain forgetfulness here, an inability to see other options because history has been swept aside by the "devastating" charges of the "critical philosophy."

But anyway, you seem to be talking about empathy, and whether it is possible.Do you really think being in a marginalized group makes one so radically different from those who are not, but sympathize, that knowing what their plight, their issues, their pov, should be called into question? The knowledge claim of one who stands outside a group depends not so much on the qualitative distinctness of the group, but rather on the universal descriptive features of this group and seeing here that there is warrant for their cause. But interpretatively. one does stand at a distance as one stands naively outside any field. This, though, doesn't make empathy impossible, just limited.

No, I don't. I think we are in agreement here? I was just pointing that out as a common position that seems relevant to the consideration of "what it is like to be..." I think human imagination, while fallible, is capable of accurately covering such ground to varying degrees, and I also think that claims to special epistemic status due to being a member of a group tend to be bunk. This is not to say they might not be appropriate in some cases, but they are often called upon to adjudicate questions in economics, political science, etc., where I think the special pleading is not appropriate.

The bat? That is a theoretical distance that is almost absolute, again, especially given that language itself is an alien imposition on all things.

Well, this gets back to the first part of my quote. Do I think it is possible to imagine what it is like to be a bat? Sure, obviously. How accurate will such a conception be? That's a tough question; I'm agnostic. However, do I think that "being a bat" would grant access to intellectual knowledge that humans cannot possess? Probably not much. As noted above, we have radars that are more sensitive and powerful, and we can gather the information, the form/act, of things through various medium (e.g. sound waves) and abstract from them via instruments. Yet there still seems to be a sensory knowledge element that cannot be attained, and quite possibly an element of aesthetic knowledge too.

I don't see language as a "barrier," here. I think language, sign systems, models, etc. (and the senses) are best thought of a means of knowing, that through which we know, not what we know. The sign vehicle in the semiotic triad is not some sort of impenetrable barrier that forever keeps the object and the interpretant separated, but is rather the very means of their nuptial union, which is why the sign relation is irreducibly triadic and defies reductionist analysis. The difficulty in "knowing what it is like to be a bat," rather flows from the difference in sense knowledge (which is itself ultimately a primarily a means).

I think Kant, and philosophy following him, errs by taking the old scholastic adage "quidquid recipitur ad modum recipientis recipitur," "everything is received in the mode of the receiver," and problematically absolutizes it. There is an element of ecstasis in knowing, a "going out" and a "joining" that gets washed out and lost. Likewise, the way in which the "mind is potentially all things," gets lost in the emphasis on how the receiver receives, but not upon how the receiver is changed by (and becomes identical with) what is received.

There is something very interesting in the way modern thought swan dives into skepticism across an epoch where advances in technology and scientific theory rapidly accelerate, leading to advances the would have seemed like magic a mere generation ago. One would think that techne would serve as the proof of episteme. Even a radically skeptical reading of Plato, one that would reduce him down to doing not much else over 2,000+ pages but offering up Socratic irony, would have to allow that Socrates gives way to the knowledge embodied in techne. And yet here we are. Perhaps this is because folks like Alasdair MacIntyre are right and this surge in theoretical knowledge has come at the same time as a collapse in practical and aesthetic knowledge, leaving a sort of vacuum in the modern psyche. That might make sense, and it would explain things like the Amish outperforming their neighbors on all the measures of welfare economics (e.g. income, wealth, life expectancy, health span, self-reported happiness, marriage stability, etc.) all while supporting massive families and eschewing centuries of technological progress and theory.

The idea of the physical is contained within the mental, but it seems obvious that what the idea of the physical is the idea of is not contained within the mental.

Mental" can be understood to be just a word (and a misleading one at that) for a concept that signals that we cannot understand how experience, judgement abstraction and conceptualization, although always of physical things, are themselves physical processes. The only alternative is dualism, or the idea of a mental realm or substance which does not depend on the physical or idealism, which renders the physical as a mere idea.

Well, that's how the physicalist likes to present it at least. It makes "all other options" seem to be, at the very least, at least as unappealing or problematic.

I would rather say though that physicalism is itself a sort of dualism. There are quite different varieties of physicalism, but each of the main forms introduce a sort a sort of metaphysical and epistemic dualism.

Physicalism with "strong emergence" is really not that different from substance dualism except with the added claim that the mental emerges from the physical (whether this solves the interaction problem is another question). With strong emergence, whatever is strongly emergent is in some sense fundamental. Consciousness is in nature fundamentally and potentially from the begining, even if it isn't actual.

Then you have something like property dualism, which normally needs to also posit epiphenomenalism because all the behavior of conscious things must still be explainable in wholly physical terms, without remainder. But property dualism is still a sort of dualism. It says that things can be explained in two different ways that cannot fully explain each other. It also still introduces all the problems of epistemic dualism, the Kantian question of how we can ever truly know this "physical" noumena which is said to cause phenomena. In any case, as noted above, I find epiphenomenalism has plausibility issues, but it also seems to still require panpsychism or some sort strong emergence (each with their own difficulties).

Finally, there is the denial of consciousness tout court, a sort of hyper empiricist behaviorism. This perhaps resolves the dualism problem, but at the cost of denying we exist. Very few among even those who accept the label of "eliminitive materialist" go this far. They tend to instead stay more towards the aforementioned "property dualism + epiphenomenalism" view, with some added caveats about the mental world being "much more impoverished" than we think it is.

Hence, I think it's fair to say that physicalism tends to be a dualism. In its common forms, it goes along with representationalism (and all the Humean and Kantian epistemic problems that brings). Representationalism is a sort of epistemic dualism as well. The mental is essentially a "representation" of the physical. And normally it is said to be an accidental representation of the physical; the representation (and intelligibility/quiddity) is not essential to physical being.

Hence, I would rather draw a distinction instead between monism and dualism. Idealism normally gets presented as the idea that things are somehow "composed of mental substance " or "in the mind." This is fair for some idealisms, not really for others. For instance, Hegel and Plato, often called idealists (or Aristotle, who is occasionally called one as well) in no way deny the reality of "external objects," of "rocks and stars," etc. What they deny instead is the accidental relationship between things and their quiddity, or the epistemic dualism of representationalism. Plato might rightly be called a "dualist" in another sense, but this is in terms of "degrees of reality," i.e., in terms of self-sufficiency (something shared by Aristotle and Hegel). One need not read Plato as a dualist in this sense, but many do, and it doesn't seem wholly unfair (the "two worlds Platonism.") In general though, I think what defines "idealism" tends to be its monism. It is a sort of unfortunate (and perhaps unintended) smear of physicalist to instead associate this "monism" with an "idealism" that is defined by its least palatable varieties (e.g. Berkeley).

So for instance, for Hegel the "truth is the whole," and this cannot leave out the process of Spirit, of being knowing itself as being and as its self, which is not accidental representation, but part of the core of what being must be to be anything at all. But he certainly wasn't anti-scientific or an anti-realist, quite the opposite.

St. Augustine, St. Bonaventure, Duns Scotus Eriugena, St. Maximus the Confessor, or St. Thomas Aquinas all believed in the creation of a corporeal, physical world ex nihilo, and also a sort of idealism in this way as well.

Subject/object dualism is another sort of dualism that tends to dominate physicalism. Whereas in many philosophies the highest form of knowledge is always a sort of reflexive self-knowledge (Gereson's article on Neoplatonist epistemology is a good one here).

Sure, but it works the other way too. Our ability to communicate in this way also requires an understanding of EM fields, which are universal and not "composed of electrons" (rather electrons are the activity of the field, at least on many understandings). And everything on the internet is born of an understanding of the principles of information theory, which are substrate independent, while information is itself relational and not "composed of bits," at least not as a sort of "building block." That is, information theory is not the study of some ontic component, "the bit." A bit requires some minimal variance, some ability for a measurement to standout from its background, a background that is necessary to understanding the message encoded.

Likewise, understanding the function of eyes, that they are for seeing, or of a heart, requires an understanding of the goal-directed whole. Whereas biologists who are committed to extreme reductionism often feel forced to deny function as a sort of illusion.

Absolutely. So, discursive justification (proofs, etc.) start from the higher level (understanding at least something) and try to progress back to that level vis-á-vis some other object of knowledge. We try to move from understanding to understanding.

Aquinas actually has it that judgement is most proper to understanding (knowing truth as truth simply), and only secondarily ascribed to discursive judgement.

Sense knowledge is prior to discursive judgement. I suppose understanding is in some sense beyond it (but is itself most properly called judgement).

Second, big things are made of little things. And the big things have the characteristics they have because of the properties of the little things. Although liquidity is not a characteristic of particles, the properties of particles are responsible for liquidity, once enough particles of certain types join together in certain ways. The fact that particles join together in certain ways at all, so we have physical objects with any characteristics, is due to the properties of the particles.

Sounds like "smallism" to me. The problem is, there is no prima facie reason for smallism to be true. A sort of "bigism" where parts are only intelligible and definable in terms of the whole seems to have at least as much to recommend itself.

But there is perhaps a more immediate problem in the real of physics. Are the fields in which particles emerge nothing but the sum total of particles involved? This is not how quantum field theory describes things. Indeed, it's the opposite, the fundamental "building block" can be seen as merely a measurable activity of the whole and is only definable in terms of the whole. Or, on accounts in physics that make information ontologically basic (matter and energy emerge from information), we face the problem that information in fundamentally relational and dependent on context.

So, "'what a thing is' is what it is made of," might be replaced with (at least with some justification) "'what a thing is' is what it does" which always brings in context and suggests a process metaphysics instead of a substance metaphysics.

Or we might want a middle path here, one with relatively self-determining/self-organizing/discrete wholes at different scales.

Also, "if something is chosen it is choice-worthy" would imply that people are infallible as to what is best for them and can never make "bad choices." This gets back to the example of smokers who give "rational reasons" for why they do not want to quit smoking. I am not saying that we can say that the recalcitrant smoker is necessarily wrong about the relative benefits of smoking of course, just that their "reasoned choice" in no way implies that they are always correct either. In general, I think we have good reason to believe they are normally wrong.

But there are more obvious examples. I made a reasoned choice about buying a van off Carvana. I wasn't able to look under it when I picked it up. When we put it up on the lift it was leaking transmission fluid everywhere; the transmission had been fixed up just enough to get it to be able to drive off the lot. Clearly, my reasoned choice about my best interests was wrong.

:up:

Yes, I agree. The connection only breaks down as we move out of the human ethical sphere. Hence the example of plants. Something might be "good or bad" for a plant, but living things that possess only a vegetative soul do not really participate in choices (and arguably even those with a sensitive soul don't rise to the level of "choosing" in the way that those with an intellect do).

But I think this highlights something helpful, which is that, without something that is chosen for itself, goodness (and choice-worthyness) dissolves into an endless multiplicity. In this case, anything is only ever good as respects some end, and that end is only ever good as respects some other end, etc., in an infinite regress. IMHO, this is why appeals to "pragmatism" to paper over epistemic and moral relativism/nihilism are ultimately flawed.

Likewise, if Hume is right and all desire ultimately rests on what is irrational, then man cannot determine or prioritize his own desires based on which are "truly best." All we will have is Nietzsche's clash of desires. Yet the desire for truth and "what is truly best" supposes a sort of intellectual desire. Such intellectual desire goes beyond all sensuous appetite and the passion. It has to. It must be able to ask of any and all appetites or passions "but is it good that I should feel this way?"

To me, this capacity for intellectual desire seems obviously essential to meaningful freedom and self-determination. We need something like Harry Frankfurt's second-order volitions, the ability to desire to have (or not have) other desires. Else we would simply be impelled forwards by inchoate and unfathomable desires (unfathomable because they cannot be known and chosen as "truly good.") As R. Scott Bakker puts it, we would be slaves to a "darkness that comes before" the light of intellect.

Moreover, if many disparate goods are sought for their own sake we still face a multiplicity problem. Yet if we are ordered to an infinite (or highest) good (actual or merely ens rationis), there is no such difficulty. This desire for an infinite good is exactly what we find in man at any rate. Even atheists such as Leopardi come to this conclusion. There is no finite end to desire, but instead the desire to "be gods." Yet its also unclear why, if materialism is true, such a desire for the infinite should exist. All desire should find full satisfaction in accessible goods.

David Bentley Hart has a pretty good essay on the phenomenology of this, looking at the idea as presented by Nicholas of Cusa (and to a lesser extent St. Gregory of Nyssa) in "You Are Gods." It ends:

In Christ’s human—which is to say, rational—nature, we see the rational human spirit in its most intimate and most natural unity with divine Spirit, which is absolute reason, and the most intimate and natural unity of human intellect with divine intellect.31 And so on. One should not let the sheer grandiloquence of these apostrophes to the God-man distract one from their deepest import, or from the rrigorous logic informing them. Because what Nicholas is also saying here, simply enough, is that in Christ the fullness of human nature is revealed precisely to the degree that it perfectly reveals the divine nature of which it is the image, and that human spirit achieves the highest expression of its nature only to the degree that it is perfectly united with divine Spirit. That is, in Christ we see that the only possible end for any rational nature
is divine because such also is its ground; apart from God drawing us from the first into ever more perfect union with himself, we do not exist at all. We are nothing but created gods coming to be, becoming God in God, able to become divine only because, in some sense, we are divine from the very first

Which is not to say that this phenomenology and analysis of rationality leads to the specific revelations of Christianity. It might lead as well to Neoplatonism, some forms of Romanticism, New Age syncretism, etc. Rather, it shows that the atheistic assumptions best represented by Hume, that the human desire for an infinite good can simply be dismissed as a sort of confused mathematical induction on finite goods (e.g. just adding +1 to the goodness of some beneficent father figure without end) fails to really take the issue seriously, both the presence of the infinite good as an intentional object (if not an actuality), and its role in making goodness a coherent unity. The latter is what allows for any rational agency that doesn't ultimately bottom out in inchoate, unknown desire, i.e. the capacity to choose things because they are truly best and are known as such.

Yes, there is perhaps a useful clarification here. I have been conflating two things:

A. The need for any sense knowledge to achieve abstraction and an understanding of meaning (an intellectual understanding of things); and

B. The need to have had particular experiences to gain particular sense knowledge.

Because I would tend to agree with you. I don't think having the sensory system of a bat is going to help me attain new intellectual knowledge. Maybe it could, by helping me notice certain things, but only in an ancillary way. We humans can create all sorts of instruments to probe the being of things, and so we are quite able to access intellectual knowledge through our senses, even if such knowledge is not available to our senses unaided. We have chemical sensors far more sensitive than the nose of a bloodhound, and radars far more powerful and sensitive than a bat.

So, perhaps the knowledge of "what it is like to be a bat" is largely or wholly just sense knowledge. Still, when we consider things like "being a black man in America," or "being a single mother," it's important to recall that our imagination is only so powerful, and that each particular experience is also unique, such that our extrapolations based on our sensory/intellectual knowledge to experiences we have not had might include crucial errors.

Whereas point A speaks to the "man in the Chinese room." Some sensory knowledge is required for us to gain intellectual knowledge. A man who has never left a blank room, but who has learned to read, and has read about the world outside the room, will have severe deficits. Even the room gives him some sense knowledge, so he will understand something of what he reads. But the attainment of intellectual knowledge cannot be reduced to language or the rules of language. This would be in line with the idea that the intellect must abstract the intelligible species from the senses. We experience language and other sign systems through the senses, but this might not be enough in extreme cases where common sense experiences have never occurred.

Now another question might be: "would being a bat grant us new aesthetic knowledge?" or "new experiences of beauty?" On the one hand, it seems obvious that possession of different sensory systems means that different things will "please when experienced." Flies love feces for instance. On the other, if we think of beauty as "what pleases when known" and move away from immediate sense knowledge, then perhaps the difference only matters so much. Yet I think experiencing things directly in new ways might lead to an experience of beauty as known in new ways too. That's my intuition. Because beauty relates to wholes, and different types of sensation relate to wholes in different ways, new senses would add new access to beauty.

This seems apparent when we consider someone born blind who is given their sight. It seems the new sense knowledge would also lead to new aesthetic knowledge (even if we think brute animals are incapable of aesthetic knowledge on account of lacking an intellect).