Hence, as historical facts go, paganism at root was (and yet remains) very tolerant. — javra

Might I suggest that this is an overly rosey picture? For instance, across the Roman Empire vast numbers of people were tortured to death, publicly executed, or enslaved because they wouldn't offer sacrifices to the state gods and worship the emperors. Likewise, the Seleucids engaged in similar practices. And of course, aside from the well known attempts to genocide Christians out of existence there is the suppression of the Bacchic cult, Egyptian cults being made illegal on pain of capital punishment for essentially being demonic, etc. This is hardly an analog for modern religious pluralism and secularism.

More pointedly, the Near East had numerous genocidal wars that were framed in religious terms, where foreign peoples were exterminated and their idols and temples destroyed in honor of the dominant groups gods, often with victims explicitly sacrificed to the gods (Assyrian monuments being a fine example). The practice of the "ban" under which all men, women, children and even livestock were massacred as a sort of holy war is a prime example. There is for instance a Moabite monument celebrating the capture of an Israelite city and the sacrifice of all adults and children to Chemosh as offerings (this is not wholly out of line with even later Pagan culture, where Aeneas sacrifices many victims to the shade of Pallas, although here we are at least almost certainly supposed to see this as a lurch towards the beastial; yet it is still something a premier Roman hero could engage in and remain a hero).

Also, re Athens, consider why Socrates was executed. Anaxagoras narrowly escaped similar punishment for calling the sun a flaming stone and Protagoras supposedly had to flee the city for similar reasons (there being other mentions of people executed or exiled for "athiesm" as well).

From what I've seen, Tacitus and Juvenal are not outliers in referring to foreign cults as degenerate and immoral, or effeminate and tied to sexual deviance. A common propaganda point against Mark Antony was that his relationship with Cleopatra had led him to degenerate and essentially demonic foreign gods whose rituals involved sexual deviancy. The idea of foreign gods being malevolent is not new to Christianity; there are plenty of references to evil gods even in the Pagan philosophers. So too, the invective and propaganda leveled against Christians in antiquity wasn't something new, but more of a redirection of old bigoted tropes previously aimed at foreigners.

Pagan religion could be inclusivist, particularly in terms of rebranding existing foreign gods under the dominant pantheon. It could also be brutally repressive. And in between it could be merely bigoted. The Norse had no qualms with justifying the mass murder, rape, and enslavement of the Christians for instance. But in part, this is merely because many religions called for no justification for wars waged explicitly for conquest, slave taking, rape, and pillage so long as they belonged to an appropriate out-group (often defined by religion in the East, less so in the West). Whereas, if such acts are considered inherently wrong, because all humans have dignity, some other sort of justification is required (and religion can be mustered for these ends).

The norms in question are often quite alien though. For instance, a villa decoration at Pompeii features Cassandra having her clothes torn off to be raped by Ajax; IIRC this is a feature picture for a dining hall. Hence, even outside the realm of religious tolerance, and especially in the realm of sexual norms and sexual violence, it's difficult to hold many "Pagan" cultures up as forerunners of modernity.

And yet, this view I uphold of itself can well be labeled heretical, if not far worse, by many if not the majority of Christians who "keep the faith", so to speak. I say this form experience. And it's not quite what Jesus Christ had in mind, such as via his parable of the Good Samaritan. — javra

I don't know what you mean here. You don't think that Jesus had in mind that the God of Israel is God and that, say, Jupiter is not? At any rate, "heresy" normally describes false teaching within Christianity (or is applied similarly outside this context). An Arian who denied the divinity of Christ was a heretic, a Hindu cannot be a heretic because they are not advocating for false teachings related to Christianity.

Anyhow, how can it be that people who hold to a creed (Islam, Christianity, etc.) are in error for judging others to be in error in rejecting that creed, but you are not in error for judging them to be in error for subscribing to that creed? This is a difficulty with various sorts of perennialism too. To say that "everyone is right," but only if they agree that everyone is right, is actually to say that almost everyone is wrong (or to not take their claims seriously).

I am not sure I understand. What exactly is it about appeals to eternity that make them different in kind so that false/wicked/corrupt exemplars should be fatal to a tradition's claims?

Second, religions make many claims that aren't related to eternity, would these be invalidated to? Or perhaps more to the point, your critique seemed to target all co-natural, contemplative knowledge, and yet many philosophical traditions that appeal to this sort of knowledge do not make the sorts of eschatological and soteriological claims common to Islam or Christianity. So, are they to be dismissed due to false exemplars as well? For instance, would this be fatal to any sort of strong virtue epistemology? Or would it apply to all traditions that put a heavy emphasis on praxis and contemplative knowledge (and so Platonism, the Peripatetics, Stoicism, etc.)?

I guess I just don't see the connection. And if one takes this seriously doesn't it essentially raise up "anti-metaphysical" Enlightenment thought by default since it becomes immune to false exemplars (which abound in every tradition), but does not make "eternal claims?" (Plato for instance makes many claims about eternity and the nature of the soul's relationship to it).

You may not seek to impose a white nationalist Christian theocracy on the world, but many who benefit from undermining liberalism and secular culture certainly do. — Tom Storm

Right, but I think there is a quite robust argument to be made that it is secularism and liberalism that has spawned fundamentalism, elevated fideism, etc. The two are not unrelated. It's not unlike how the excesses of laissez-faire capitalism and the Gilded Age spawned socialism. Even if one sees socialism as largely or wholly negative (and many do not), it would still be the case that it is precisely deficiencies in the existing system that strengthened it. Addressing these deficiencies (e.g., the erection of the welfare state, etc.) ultimately went a long way to addressing the excesses of the socialist movement, where reforms were made. Invoking the specter of Christian nationalism here might thus be likened to invoking the threat of Stalinism to oppose the New Deal in that, arguably, the New Deal actually made a sort of American Stalinism less, not more likely precisely because it addressed the issues that motivated Stalinism.

Then tell me: On the grounds of what should one still have faith and still trust them, against facts? — baker

Well, consider you examples. Similar examples could be drawn up to undermine faith in the scientific establishment, modern medicine, the liberal state, Marxism, or Enlightenment rationalism itself. For instance, there is no shortage of examples of doctors treating patients for illnesses they know they do not have and killing them in the process, or knowingly prescribing them addictive drugs in order to make more money.

Yet none of these traditions claim they are immune to corruption, so these examples don't result in a contradiction of sorts. Hence, it seems to me that the more powerful claim would not be that some cases of corruption exist, but that no cases of spiritual progress exist or that such "progress" is actually itself undesirable (the latter being the more common modern argument, in part probably because the former seems difficult to prove). That is, not "there are people who pretend to be saints," but rather "there are no saints."

Or else it needs to be explained why corruption is a specifically unique problem only for specific sorts of religious/philosophical/spiritual traditions, but presumably not all (since all such traditions have examples of corruption). For instance, is Russellian style atheism and the appeal to "man against the darkness," i.e., being good in a meaningless universe obviated by Russell's sorted personal life (or those of other advocates)? This is precisely the sort of argument religious folks raise—"the degeneracy of key athiests displays the inherent folly of their claims to a morality without God," and yet I think this alone is a facile argument because it can be applied against any ideology or ethos, from Marxism to Buddhism to modern medicine.

One might say for instance that, because the Providential nature of the Church it should be immune to corruption. However, Christianity itself has not tended to claim this, in part because Christ and the Apostles repeatedly warn of false teachers and simony across the New Testament and similar sentiments can be found in the Hebrew scriptures.

Likewise, with a faculty of intellectus or noesis (or similar notions in the East), the mere presence of error cannot be decisive, or else it should be equally decisive in proving that we should have no faith in discursive ratio and argumentation. For instance, Plato's warning against misology in the Phaedo is focused on the repudiation of more discursive and formal argumentation, which can prove misleading at times, and yet ought not be disparaged simply because such bad exemplars exist. So too, if such claims are caricatured as a sort of magical, exceptional knowledge, we are essentially already accepting the Enlightenment framing since this is often not how philosophies that embrace them tend to explain them (e.g., as Robert Wallace points out, the sort of "mystical knowledge" Plato often invokes is generally accessible to all or almost all to some degree).

I had a thread on this a while back, although the essay it focused on had some serious issues with trying to cram the issue into a Marxist framing (which works for some aspects, but not for others)

You raise an interesting question because not every "drug lord" story, much less every story that fetishizes evil, ends up with a "just" ending. Some end with the anti-hero being successful (e.g., Hannibal, Peaky Blinders). Hence, I don't really think "atonement" is the general emphasis here. I think it has more to do with the celebration of the "unconquerable will" and the freedom embodied in criminal transgression.

Hence, I still agree with you 100% here:

reason is the power that allows you to spit on everyone (the law, morality, society, the state, stupid gangsters with automatics); only chance can still oppose him. — Astorre

Exactly. And it is an instrumentalized reason that allows one to do this. The question of what reason says one ought to do is often deferred, sometimes indefinitely, although as you note, sometimes there is a redemptive "crisis point," as when Walter has to save Jesse.

Anyhow, I think such endings often play more of a role of showing how the character has ultimately decided to brave "real stakes and dangers," as well as providing a sort of convenient plot element for closing a series/film with pathos, rather than any sort of moral lesson (i.e., "crime doesn't pay"). Redemption is sometimes in the mix (Pulp Fiction... sort of), but not always (e.g., not in Scarface or Goodfellas really). Either way, the anti-hero who dies or is finally imprisoned is often presented like Icarus. They flew too close to the sun, but we can also say "at least they flew! At least they tried!"

Also, it's sort of a trope in some modernist literature and literary analysis that it is precisely the inevitability of defeat, and the impossibility of "total victory" that lends "struggle" its meaning, and this often seems to be part of the idea as well. (You even see this reading of Homer too, although I take it that the key insight Homer gives us is actually that even immortality cannot make the meaningless meaningful, not that finitude grants meaning to the otherwise meaningless).

For example, in another well-known series, "Game of Thrones," each character does something morally reprehensible (at least according to our understanding of medieval and even modern morality). And for modern cinema, this is something of a quality mark. On the surface, this adds realism. The creators tell us, "You can't be a saint, we're all sinners," "the world is a complicated place," "not everything is so clear-cut." It looks cool. — Astorre

Right, sometimes you'll see the claim that "morally grey" characters are a helpful addition to modern art. I don't think this is quite right. Aeneas is morally grey and ultimately fails to live up to the principles he is supposed to embody. David is morally grey; he commits adultery and then covers it up with murder and is condemned by the prophet Nathan. I think the real difference is a sort of perspectivism that justifies such characters. The David Story (Samuel - early I Kings) is incredibly rich, but it doesn't ask us to see the Bathsheba incident in a way that "justifies David in his own eyes."

Well, there is good and bad here. No doubt, the modern novel has led to psychological portraits with more depth. I think a problem though is that perspectivism as a narrative tool can often bleed into perspectivism as a sort of philosophy (and this is bad when it is not intentional, but something an author or audience feels they cannot avoid). The way this tends to play out IMHO is that authors need to keep conjuring up ever more wicked and sadistic villains in order to project some semblance of moral order onto their plots (certainly something you see in A Game of Thrones).The irony here is that the need to introduce super sadistic, over the top evil villains ends up sort of bowdlerizing the plot in the same way a more sanitized story would.




And yet people ultimately do end up idolizing him, although perhaps not quite as much as Tony Montana (Scarface), Thomas Shelby (The Peaky Blinders), etc. The drug lord anti-hero is a sort of trope at this point.

You make a very important point; Walter is a relatable, but also somewhat pathetic figure. Weeds had a somewhat similar thread with a "single mom turned crime lord." Walter, through ambition and a shedding of social niceties, transcends this pathetic, "beta male" mentality and moves into a space of limitless ambition, or as he puts it, the pursuit of "empire." I think this goes along with our society's fetishization of acquisitiveness (pleonexia is now pretty much a virtue instead of a vice, we are to never be satisfied, always striving for more, maintaining our grindset mindset, etc.). Yet at a deeper level I think this has to do with the fear in our culture, particularly among men, of degenerating into a bovine consumer, a castrated subhuman who no longer receives or deserves recognition (thymos). This thread in modern life was aptly diagnosed by Fukuyama in The End of History and the Last Man for instance . Yet, whatever else the drug lord is, they aren't one of Nietzsche's "Last Men." Walter's story is partially the tale of a man transcending Last Manhood through crime. The point isn't so much the crime, as this transcending motion.

But this also intersects with the particularly capitalist elevation of fortitude when wed to ambition and acquisitiveness. Mark Fisher gets at part of this when he analyzes the notion of "keeping it real" in gangster rap culture. To "keep it real" is to cease being a dupe and beta, to no longer pretend that the old morality of piety, temperance, humility, etc. has any real purchase. It is to be "real" in precisely the way liberalism says man *really* is, i.e., as an atomized self-interested utility maximizer driven on by irrational bodily and thymotic appetites. This is all anyone *really* ever was; the "old morality" was variously a duplicitous trick played on the masses by the elites, and the clergy's own twisted will to power coming out in the will to dominate themselves and others through religion. Walter White and other similar characters shed their connection to custom and desire for safety, and so overcome mediocrity and the omnipresent ill of bourgeois boredom and self-hatred.

You can see this in the cut throat competition of "reality TV" as well. They often seem to try to cast people who will gladly play up the "win at all cost" psychopath role.

I don't know Breaking Bad, but another example commonly given is the way that the Batman nemesis Joker has now become his own offering, with standalone Joker characters and films that have no relation to Batman. Tolkien writes well about the phenomenon. I may try to dig up some quotes. — Leontiskos

Yes, but I think the Joker, Tyler Durden of Fight Club, and other similar characters play to a slightly different ethos. The Joker burns all the money he receives in the Dark Knight. He isn't pursuing meglothymia through a sort of "capitalism by other means," but is turning against society itself (often to point out its own fraudulence). He is beyond the need for recognition. There is a bit of "divine madness" there ("holy fools" also shunned custom to engage in social commentary, although obviously in a very different way). I think these sorts of characters are extremely relevant to the appeal of "trolling" mentioned in the other thread on that topic.

For instance, when the Joker gives two boats, one full of regular citizens, one full of prisoners, the power to blow each other up in the Dark Knight, and then threatens to kill everyone if one side won't murder the other, the whole point is that he is exposing the "real" human being that lies beneath the niceties of the "old morality" (or something like that).

Hannibal Lecter is also a good example here because his total shedding of custom and ability to endure suffering turn him into a superhuman of sorts.

Unfortunately, R. Scott Bakker's work isn't that popular (which I sort of get, he isn't for everyone) and I think only @180Proof has read him here, but he is (perhaps unintentionally) a great example here. He is an eliminativist who has a fairly negative view of humanity, and he engages in a trope across his books where there will be a sort of anti-hero/villain character who becomes superhuman through recognizing and accepting the truth of eliminativism and mechanism, and then using this insight to manipulate others (and to manipulate himself through technology and technique). The idea is that, if one realizes that custom is ultimately groundless, it can become just another tool for mastery. Likewise, the body and soul become tools. Everything can be instrumentalized and bent towards the achievement of one's goals; and wed to a potent enough intellect, this combination is unbeatable.

But Bakker is very interesting because, despite this seeming voluntarism (a voluntarism that emerges from his prizing of intellect, but an intellect reduced to a tool), he has in some ways a more ancient, and thick, notion of freedom as involving self-mastery, self-government, and self-knowledge. I suppose Hannibal partially embodies these traits too, although in a way that isn't as fully thought out.

The problem though is that, as these notions are taken to their limit, and you get characters that are ever more superhuman in intellect, cunning, self-control, etc., and ever more beyond/above all custom and morality, they actually start to become incoherent, because there is no reason why someone, so liberated, should want to do one thing instead of any other. Realistically, they might as well decide to sit down until they expire from exposure. This can happen with the Joker in some forms too, which is why he needs his insanity to keep him moving.

Nussbaum talks about something somewhat similar re the ways in which athletic competition would cease to be meaningful, rewarding, or interesting if man transcended his physical limitations to a large enough degree. It's a keen diagnosis, although I am not sure if the solution quite hits its mark. It does not seem necessarily problematic for man to transcend some elements of his being, such that his past desires seem trivial; this is only problematic if there is not a parallel deeping of higher desires (which is exactly what the Platonists and Christians say there is, and attest to this experience, so the criticism fails to be decisive even in its own terms).

I would counter that your post confuses cause with symptom by positing the motive for bullshit and trolling as the valuing of arbitrary power for its own sake. You don’t seem to allow that lying, bullshit and trolling may not be primarily intended to cause breakdown in understanding, but may arise as adaptive coping responses to such breakdown. The problem then would not be lying but the deterioration of trust that makes one believe lying is the only recourse. I find the accusation of ‘trolling’ to be most often used as a dismissive weapon to delegitimize the reasoning and justifications of those who we disagree with. — Joshs

That's an excellent point. It seems to me like a mix of both. Some trolls really do seem to buy into nihilism in explicit terms, and yet they often do so in ways that seem reveal a deep anger that others do not hold to "higher" ideals of justice, virtue, etc. This can manifest as anger at society, for indoctrinating the troll in such values as a sort of sham, or anger at the reality of the world.

So for instance, in the rants of spree killers often involve ironic "shit posting," and many times skew towards a sort of marketized "might makes right" ideology, and yet in a certain sense they also generally display disgust at this reality (e.g., Eliot Rodgers).

The move from the serial killer of the Baby Boomers as society's central boogieman (unrestrained hedonism and sadistic licence) to the spree killer (sheer nihilistic self-assertion) is itself interesting, and not unrelated, since the spree killer is oftentimes a troll (e.g., the Christchurch shooter's use of memes and even spouting trollish lines as he engaged in mass murder).

The troll in many cases sees themselves (not without justification perhaps) as a victim, either of society or of metaphysical realities (of truth, the truth of valuelessness oftentimes) themselves.

But there is also the celebration of transgression for transgression's sake, transgression a liberatory, that one sees in the celebration of crime more generally, as in @Astorre's new thread https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/16266/the-aestheticization-of-evil

It may be that we cannot finally determine the motivation for a speech act without the aid of psychology. For all we know Trump's X tweet may be a cry for help. — Colo Millz

They often are cries for help, or simply cries of woe. I think we can differentiate them partially in terms of motive. The troll often acknowledges that they are trolling, and this acts as a sort of security field of irony, since to ever be serious is also to be vulnerable. There is a sort of spiritual and emotional constipation at work here.

One is to read them proleptically as laying the groundwork for dealing with the new demands of the modern age through decluttering the views of their predecessors from dogmatic, superstitious and irrational elements. This may indeed be what they saw themselves as doing, not knowing where modernity would lead. Another way to read them is to view them as trying to create space in an enchanted world that remained more vivid to them than it does to us for newer social and scientific realities. — Pierre-Normand

So would the efforts of Schiller, Goethe, Schelling, etc. (and later echos in the 20th century) then be a sort of inversion of the bolded, an attempt to clear space in an increasingly mechanistic and instrumentalized world for a sense of "enchantment" that was ever less vivid?

But if that has to be one's goal, doesn't that already say a lot? Perhaps it's a worthy goal, but if you compare Romantic literature to its inspirations, say to Beowulf or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, it seems obvious that the older goal, of simply holding back the darkness (or basking in the glory of the cosmos and ordering oneself to it, as in Scipio's Dream or the Consolation of Philosophy) is always going to be more romantic. And yet, while I wouldn't want to say Cicero or Boethius are naive, I do think there is something gained (as well as lost) in the distance the Romantics have from the sentiment they want to capture.

To borrow a metaphor from the Enlightenment, a common theme was that man had just reached "adulthood" with the Enlightenment. This often took the form of what Taylor calls a "substraction narrative," where "childish superstition and dogmas are overturned an man comes into his own, into the flourishing adulthood on the new reason." Enlightenment adulthood is what is left when childish error is put aside. But I might ask of the lifecycle metaphor if we might not perhaps still be in our adolescence (we certainly seem to be grappling with uncontrollable passions, courting ecological disaster for instance). And with adolescence can come greater levels of clarity, but also greater levels of self-delusion (normally a mix of both!).

So I think this is the central difference, and its significance lies in what it reveals about the motivations and aims of the respective arguments. H&A are motivated by the promise of freedom and an end to domination, aiming at a radicalization of the Enlightenment. Reactionaries would banish it and reinstate domination of a different type. And that's a big difference. — Jamal

But that's not how they would see it, right? Their argument is rather that the Enlightenment systems leave men enslaved, and what is worse, not merely as outwardly the slaves of tyrants or kings (which it might also do, e.g., communism)—leaders who might be more or less wise and just—but what is worse, inwardly slaves to unrestrained passions and ignorance. The result is that "leaders" are generally as fully enthralled as those they rule over.

And this complaint need not rely on any appeal to a "Golden" or even a particularly "better" age, only the notion that freedom requires self-governance, which requires a level of cultivation that Enlightenment thought generally fails to provide because it operates on a "thin" (often wholly formal) vision of freedom.

That is, liberalism and consumerism, communism, capitalism, technocracy, etc. "leave most men, even its societies 'elites,' firmly entrenched in something like 'Plato's cave,' and what is worse, convinces us that watching shadows on the cave wall is the fullest attainment of freedom and power, the most a man can hope for," (the famous cave analogy of course being put to many different sorts of uses, some more or less plausible, in this sort of critique).

Now, it might be easy to dismiss the maximalist versions of this sort of critique, but I think most people will invariably agree with some form them. For instance, for most, Huxley's A Brave New World is not a utopia simply because virtually all of its citizens consent to their state and find its rule pleasurable. Rather, it is a dystopia precisely because all of the citizens "freely" consent to it. (And, unlike many fictional dystopias, ABNW is very honest about how it functions, and the Alphas and Betas at least know exactly how and why it is organized as it is). Likewise, I think most people can sympathize with J.S. Mill's desire to refine utilitarianism by speaking to some degree of differentiation between "higher" versus "lower" pleasures (e.g., pornography and fast food versus learning to appreciate fine art) to at least some degree. We might have the suspicion that Rawls' man who wants to spend his life counting blades of grass does not have a good conception of what it means to "live a good life" and "be an excellent person," or that a system that tends towards something like Idiocracy at the limit is not, in the end, making men free, regardless of if the "choosing agents" involved "choose" such a system "without coercion."

That is, while "reactionary" (but also many Nietzschean) attacks on Enlightenment values, particularly exclusive humanism might be dismissed as "aristocratic," caricatured, etc., they also exist on a spectrum and to dismiss them all is to be pushed very far to one side of that spectrum. I am not sure if attempts to stake out some middle area of the spectrum, such as Nussbaum affixing "internal" and "external" as prefixes to "transcendence" (the "external" being the bad sort) really resolve the issue here either.

Of course, not everyone feels this way, some are happy to deny any real distinction between the lower and higher, or any "proper ordering" of desire and the authority of logos over thymos (honor and regard) and epithumia (pleasure and safety). For those who do want to hold on to something of such a distinction though, the question is whether they can justify such an ordering of goods on the "thin" anthropology common to liberalism and the Enlightenment more broadly, and I think that is where traditional critiques tend to make their hay vis-á-vis Enlightenment thought's inability to promote true liberty. (And not all such critiques are wholly negative either, sometimes Enlightenment thought plays the role of Stoicism for Boethius, a sort of initial medicine for promoting negative freedom, that is none the less at best prepatory for deeper therapies).

Also, there is the more general notion that categories are oppressive, or at least suspect. Whereas, there is contrary the argument that, since knowledge and understanding are liberatory, and categories are essential to human understanding, an undue skepticism of categories and the universal is in fact corrosive and oppressive.



Well, in the post you're responding to I pointed out that Medieval thought is (and is widely acknowledged to be) largely refining earlier paths, or synthesizing and harmonizing them. This has both good and bad elements. The bad comes in the form of slavish appeals to authority (although the best authors tend to transcend this to some degree), and a lack of flexibility in some areas, or the fact that some novel paths that predict ideas in modern thought are never developed.

Early modern thought tends to be much more original and creative. I also think it is noticeably far more amateurish, and so in some ways it ends up being more creative in the way self-trained artists might be when compared to artists well-trained in some particular school (although this analogy has its risks). This isn't really surprising considering the massive shifts in who is doing philosophy, the type of education they receive, the incentives they face, the factors determining which works become popular, etc. The explosion in creativity is itself not an unalloyed good (just as an explosion in creative medical treatments is not necessarily a good if the treatments are not themselves effective).

But here is a key difference. The medievals and late-antique thinkers' negative tendency to give undue weight to authority is also paired with a strong understanding of their own historical dependence. The general modern tendency to equate multiplicity and potency with freedom tends to obscure this sort of dependency, which in some ways only makes it more potent and inescapable. It's a bit ironic given the huge focus in modern thought on historicism, but I think it's precisely this sort of historicism (e.g., claims that the true thoughts of the sages of yore are wholly inaccessible to us, whereas a medieval might easily think of a thinker, even a Pagan or Muslim, centuries dead as a close teacher and mentor) that actually allows the influence of the past to become transparent, precisely because it becomes inaccessible and so in a sense inert. But the "problem" here isn't the influence of the past, but its transparency, and not even so much its transparency as the fact that what is being passed on (e.g., the conflation of voluntarism with freedom) is corrosive.

One issue here is that many of the foundational categories and dialectics of modernity were themselves self-conscious inversions of past thought, of the via antiqua, etc. They were, as @Pierre-Normand puts it, "exercises in clearing space," (sometimes with good motivations, sometimes political power moves), and so in some sense instrumental and time/goal limited. But the space has long been cleared and yet we are still left holding the same old tools because we think they are essentially an extension of our arms. So, re the "inaccessible past," I think the past, particularly re realist ontologies, the Analogia Entis, the Doctrine of Transcendentals, etc. is not so much necessarily inaccessible, as rendered alien and inaccessible by the very transparency of what were originally self-conscious inversions of these ideas, and that is what I mean by a "failure to transcend modernity."


Just as a quick example, there are innumerable ways to attack teleology and realism, or to argue positively for varieties of nominalism. Yet the fact that arguments on this front so often (and across diverse modern schools) fall into the same dialectic of pitting realism and teleology (often as "authority") against freedom (or creativity) strikes me as one particularly robust manifestation of the old Reformation struggles haunting modern thought.

Am I right to surmise that for you the history of Western philosophy since at least Descartes amounts to little more than a reshuffling of older theological concepts, and that you would not feel particularly intellectually or spiritually deprived if you had not been exposed to modern philosophy? — Joshs

A life without Big Heg and Dusty Dosto? Perish the thought! Plus, modern thought does many things well. Harry Frankfurt's notion of "second-order volitions" may not be very original, but it is advanced with exceptional clarity, which is something analytic philosophy has sometimes done much to improve. And of course, one needs a philosophy for one's own era. Plato could hardly speak to the nature of the modern state, consumerism, capitalism, and the educational system they foster the way Byung-Chul Han, C.S. Lewis, Mark Fisher, or Autumn Kern can.

It's important to note though that your first clause doesn't imply the second. Medieval philosophy certainly is dominated by the "reshuffling" (or refinement, or exploration, etc.) of older theological notions, as is late-antique thought, yet this can hardly be considered a deficit. Or at least it ought not be considered one. I know it is, because we live in an era where even the Oresteia, Aeneid, Commedia, or Troilus and Criseyde get written off as "fan fiction" due to insufficient novelty.

The problem, as I see it, (or at least one problem) is that modern thought has often tended to think that this pattern only affects antique and medieval philosophy. Its own dogmas become transparent (one being the prizing of multiplicity as a sort of proxy for freedom). Hence, the very long catalog of modern thinkers who dismiss the collected works of all past saints and sages, of East and West, as "twaddle" or some such, and then clear the ground to lay out their radical new rebuilding plan (or anti-plan). Well, when this has gone on for several centuries straight, one might suppose that the issue is not so much about what past thinkers have actually said, as about the tradition that keeps feeling to need to engage in such projects.

I probably agree with Taylor on transcendence and have made similar points myself. We mostly settle on beliefs because they are emotionally satisfying. — Tom Storm

Well, the bolded is really not Taylor's point. His main thrust is that the answer is not obvious in the way many people think it is, but not that philosophy necessarily devolves into a sort of emotivism. Also, the common notion that emotional motivations stand in opposition to, or beside rationality would be one of those assumptions vulnerable to deconstruction and genealogical investigation. For instance, in any tradition that has a place for the rational appetites, an answer might be "emotionally satisfying" precisely because it brings understanding (i.e., because it is true), and "all men by nature desire to know."

Sure, but a crippled bird still knows precisely where freedom lies

I think that's debatable. If you let poultry with clipped wings loose in the slaughterhouse so that they can walk to their own destruction they'll gladly acquiesce.

Been on a 3 hour Vervaeke kick. — Tom Storm

That's about three more hours than I've seen. I'm mostly familiar with the notion of a "meaning crisis" through the usual suspects, Nietzsche and his successors, Dostoevsky and later Russian writers like Pelevin, Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre (the slide into emotivism in ethics and aesthetics being a sort of special case of the meaning crisis thesis), William Stace, Bertrand Russell, the New Athiests, etc.

Pierre Hadot's approach to "spiritual exercises" and his focus on Epicureanism and Stoicism as more accessible to moderns, as well as the neo-stoic renaissance in the world of "tech culture" are also good concrete examples of the phenomena.

I would tend to agree with Charles Taylor though that the epistemic and metaphysical presuppositions that leave people "spun" open or closed to "transcendence" are themselves largely aesthetic (which is not to say unimportant; the idea that Beauty is of secondary importance is of course merely the presupposition of a particular sort of Enlightenment "world-view.") I think you can see this clearest in people from a solidly materialist atheist frame who nonetheless recoil from the difficulties of the "sheer mechanism" doctrines of the eliminativists and epiphenomenalists, and find themselves open to the notions of God in Spinoza, deflated versions of Hegel, or—most interesting to me—a sort of bizzaro-world reading of Neoplatonism where the One is a sort of "abstract principle" in the same sense that the law of gravity might be (suffice to say, I don't think this reading survives contact with the sources in question, which is why it is interesting that it arises at all, or why the material must be transformed as it is).

I can see the appeal but I don't personally feel a need for it. — Tom Storm

Right, but I would ask if to approach this primarily as a matter of "appeal," enjoyment, or usefulness, etc. is to simply refuse to step into the opposing frame, since it normally includes epistemic and metaphysical claims, and not merely claims about enjoyment or aesthetics. As a contrast, if one was told that one's brake pads had worn out, or that one's air conditioner was destroying the ozone layer, one should hardly reply: "I see the appeal of those claims, but I feel drawn to think otherwise." Or likewise, "I see the appeal of treating people of all races equally, but I find holding to stereotypes to be more illuminating for myself."

There is a similar difficulty in the whole, loose "transcendence industry" that spans areas of "mindfulness" to some elements of "outdoor education." There is a recognition of the importance of some elements of tradition, but given other commitments this tends to merely cash out as there being some sorts of more intellectual "pleasant experiences," sometimes of the sort that they help people develop "good character," "compassion" etc. (although what exactly these mean in modern contexts is another question). This seems to me to be a crucial issue with the contemporary reception of Aristotle vis-á-vis contemplation and the rational appetites. Are these just "pleasant experiences" (perhaps because they are "felt" to be deeply meaningful and even illuminative) or are they experiences of unique and potent epistemic import? This issue comes up with the Western reception of Hinduism and Indian praxis as well. A key question here is whether a faculty of co-natural or contemplative knowledge even exists, or if this is merely an illusion cast by sentiment. I do not think the answer is obvious.

It seems to me that the difficulty often lies in trying to access a foreign frame or "social imaginary" without actually leaving the dominant paradigm (which itself reduces core claims in the parallel visions to mere matters of "taste").

You’re seriously going to try and pin MAGA on ‘post-modernism’? — Joshs

I am not trying to "pin" anything on anyone, I am simply referring to a particularly influential clique in Trump's broader movement using the labels that are normally applied to them.

I think it's obviously false that 99.99% of Trump's influential supporters are "traditionalists" however, since many in the camp I am referring to are outspoken transhumanists or post-humanists, who see custom and tradition simply as tools, and who want to move beyond humanity itself. Likewise, "tradition" in the American context normally refers to Protestantism, or at least Christianity, and yet these folks tend to refer to Christians as "Christcucks" or Christ as a "Jew on a stick" (if they are even that polite).

There were a few comments that I wanted to make but, until I can find the time to do so, I just wanted to say that this whole post of yours, and not just the part where you respond to me, is one of the most enlightening ones I've read on TPF in the last 20 years. — Pierre-Normand

I'm glad you found it helpful; I find this area fascinating. The big eye opener for me was seeing how much these broadly "aesthetic" or even "theological" (even for athiests, or maybe "world view" is a better term) inclinations end up driving notions of reason and truth, such that they actually end up playing a major role in epistemology and metaphysics that is often unacknowledged in post-Enlightenment thought precisely because it either still aspires to "dispassioned reason," or else adopts the standpoint of post-modern critique that nonetheless fails to transcend many of the presuppositions of the Enlightenment (this being a pet peeve of mine because then "critique" tends to butcher pre-modern Western and Eastern thought by reading the Enlightenment into it).

It’s my view that for the most part the “meaning crisis” is a case of too much freedom. For some, that freedom is crippling — Tom Storm

If you've crippled a bird's wings are they still free to fly away simply because you've opened the cage door?

Welcome back!



Those are certainly major turning points in the genesis of modernity. I wonder though if today's secularity tends to obscure how much of the modern ethos is theological in origin. So for instance:

The rise of liberal individualism followed naturally: each person became the arbiter of value within an indifferent universe. — Wayfarer

Historically, such a view of man seems to flow from voluntarist idealizations of freedom and power that first crop up in theology, not secular philosophy. That was originally the whole impetus for attempting to uproot the old metaphysics, and for the resurrection of empiricism itself; absolute divine will can brook no "natures" as a challenge to its freedom in willing.

Modern thought has not so much moved beyond this idea as simply cut God out of the picture and raised man into his place. Sometimes this happens with man as an individual (e.g., some existentialists), but the liberal solution is often instead to democratize this new role for man (e.g., the "language community" makes things what they are by "stipulation," or "we" do, collectively and pragmatically), whereas the *post-modern" response to the grandiosity of making man into God has been to dissolve man into a sort of panpsychic, universal will sea, variously composed on language, social systems, etc., but this "sea" is still ultimately the ground of all being and intelligibility. (I don't even think this is "post" modern because it still seems very much caught up if Reformation dialectics).

Anyhow, those theological concerns, and the aesthetics of freedom as power come to drive the modern view of "science," although a preference for the "abstract" and "non-personal" then developed out of that same "new science," which sort of cuts against the theological and philosophical volantarism. I think this is why modern thought is almost bipolar, and this is most obvious in its anthropology where it can be seen oscillating between the pure freedom of a Kant or Sartre and man as pure mechanism, as in the eliminativists.

The second factor I've sort of puzzled about is how notions of reason become wholly discursive, such that by Hume and Kant's day they can basically just write-off most of past thought (Eastern as well as Western) by asserting this fact about reason definitionally (i.e., dogmatically) and no one calls them out on it. The role for co-natural and contemplative knowledge, and of the cultivation of this knowledge through praxis and doxastic virtue essentially vanishes—and this shift too seems to have originally had a theological motivation (e.g., the emptying of the monasteries and convents, often paired with the massacre of their inhabitants, as dangerous alternative sources of authority beside the new princes-made-popes-in-their-own-land).

In the classical and pre-modern worldview, reason was understood as objective—it reflected an intelligible order inherent in reality itself. To act rationally was to conform to this cosmic or moral order, in which reason provided not only the means for action but also the standards by which ends were judged. — Wayfarer

Yes, and even to participate in divine Logos. There is an erotic and ecstatic element here.



Taylor provides an excellent framework for these issues and a solid deconstruction of the epistemic and metaphysical assumptions of the "closed-world system" (that reason is wholly discursive and instrumental often being one of its axiomatic assumptions).

It's funny you mention Aristotle here because I've been doing a project that compares modern character education (which is almost always justified using an "Aristotlian" paradigm), particularly in the realm of outdoor adventure education (OAE), with late-antique Christian and Platonist philosophical pedagogy. In doing this, I actually came across an article by Kristján Kristjánsson, who writes a lot on Aristotle and character education, who claims that Aristotle is himself advancing a "disenchanted" view that is "too sterile" to motivate robust character education efforts.

More broadly, I've noticed that the "Aristotle" of the antique Greeks and that of modern "virtue ethics" might we well be two different philosophers. The modern version allows some sort of "telos" for man, in that certain things are "good for him" because of "the sort of thing he is," but seems to have a much greater difficulty making any sort of argument for some desires being "higher" versus "lower," or securing the notion that the rational soul must lead, train, and unify the sensible soul and vegetative soul (logos ruling over and shaping thymos and epithumia). But as far as I can tell this radically destabilizes virtue ethics, since now man is merely loosely ordered (on average) to an irreducible plurality of goods which "diminish when shared."

This seems to me to stem from epistemic and metaphysical assumptions brought to Aristotle in the later context. In particular, the idea of a telos as a sort of "emergent physical property" is often quite unclear and squishy (because "strong emergence" normally is in general).

I don't mean to suggest these issues crop up for all modern versions of Aristotle, or even those committed to "physicalism," but it's just an issue I noticed with the sort of Aristotle that is popular in character education (which of course is tailoring itself to suit the precepts of contemporary liberal education as well, which seems to cause significant tensions with having any positive content for moral education outside a few key areas like racism, sexism, etc.).

I’m not convinced that the idea that the world is meaningless is really the problem we face. One can hardly accuse MAGA of this, or China. Surely it is the wrong kind of meaning that ends up causing harm. — Tom Storm

A big part of what has defined MAGA as against the W. Bush coalition is the outsized role played by the post-religious, post-modern "nu-right" or "alt-right." They tend to recognize something like a "meaning crisis" but are often themselves nihilists, hence the naked embrace of "might makes right" ideologies. Everything is just a sort of natural selection, etc. Hence, accelerationism coming into vogue among them.

There is a pretty close linkage here to the Manosphere. The hyperfixation of seeking validation through sexual conquests, wealth, status, and above all the implicit capacity for violence, and so the obsession with warrior archtypes and societies, seems to me to be a direct result of a lack of any other meaningful thymotic outlets for young men. Which is pretty much what others have been saying.

Anyhow, I don't think this group represents a huge bloc of voters (although it also isn't marginal among younger Republican voters). However, it has played an outsized role in radical organizations, and increasingly in the second term, in policy.

Likewise, the Chinese elite's obsession with making a mark on history through dominance can be seen through a similar lens. Bereft of any ordering logos, and faced with becoming Nietzsche's "Last Men," people see becoming "great men of history," or conquerors as a bid for meaning.

The point of the "meaning crisis," as I've normally seen it presented, isn't that everyone becomes a depressed nihilist (although some do), but that people flounder about looking for meaning and recognition anywhere they can find it, which can lead towards pathological outlets.

The hardwired notion that God gave us dominion over the Earth and its animals seems to have something to do with our environmental issues.

As opposed to places where Islam and Christianity are more marginal, like China, India, or the Soviet Union?

Genesis has also been used to call for stewardship over ownership. It seems to me more that the logic of industrialization simply has been successful in bending local cultural/religious norms to it ends, dressing it up in whatever garb is needed to make it more palatable. At the very least, explicitly athiest regimes have had no problem generating ecological disasters of truly titanic scale, such as the Aral Sea.

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Anyhow, I wouldn't say the "crisis of meaning" comes down to "too many choices," or "too much freedom," in the minds of critics at least, but rather something like: "all the myriad choices are bad, and I'd rather have fewer and good choices than an ever increasing menu of the inadequate," and "this is an ersatz freedom that simply amounts to freedom to become a bovine Last Man—when AI learns to mindlessly consume I'll have no purpose left," or something like that. To reduce it to anxiety over modernity is to ignore the strong positive thrust that often comes alongside it.

Right, I am just wondering about the general linkage there. I can think of American subcultures (hardcore punk, rap) that are extremely homophobic (lyrics peppered with slurs, etc.) and yet have shed almost all outward embrace of Christian culture. Whereas historically in the West negative attitudes towards homosexuality predominated prior to Christianity.

So for example, the linkage can go in the other way. People who have strong feelings about homosexuality and gender, etc. gravitate towards existing Christian frameworks, which you see in the embrace of "cultural Christianity," or the language can simply be rolled forward without its religious foundations. And this is why I actually think a psychological argument makes more sense, even if those arguments have their obvious flaws.

The culture war makes for very weird combinations here, such that "cultural Christians" sit alongside conservative Christians in condemning liberal Christians' embrace of various philosophies of sex, and yet until relatively recently any sort of "Christianity" that denied the divinity of Christ, the virgin birth, etc. would have been considered obviously the gravest sort of hersey, far above any opinion about sex.

We could talk about such things, but given the example you provided, I would simply concede that one should prefer a fertile marriage to a sterile marriage (ceteris paribus). Or using your own language, if it is better to marry a fertile wife than a sterile wife, then it is more choiceworthy to marry a fertile wife.

As to the more general question, we would need to specify the proposition in question. For example, we might want to talk about the proposition, "A sterile marriage or a sterile sexual act is necessarily illicit." I would say this relies on modal reasoning in the same way that "moral obligation" challenges rely on modal reasoning, and I think there are good Aristotelian answers to be had, but I will postpone the question for now given the complexity of this thread. That's the sort of question that could perhaps benefit from a different thread altogether. — Leontiskos

It seems relevant to many of the points made here though. It isn't considered immoral for sterile couples to marry. And if such marriages were considered wholly defective per se that would represent an extremely narrow view of marriage.

Anyhow, while I object to the idea of a sui generis moral good that is discontinuous from other goods, I do not think this means that all value judgements must become "moral judgements." Surely it is better to be born with a functional hand, but it is hardly a moral failing to be born with a mangled one. Likewise, is it immoral or even a sort of deficit for someone born sterile to marry?

This is what I mean by arguments from procreation being too weak. They have not traditionally been thought to preclude sterile heterosexual couples from marrying.

Under this scheme, eristic is what happens when I fail to escape from the direct engagement, i.e., in Adorno's terms, fail to move from the particular (Bob's argument) to the metacritical universal (Christian ideology). — Jamal

That set's a rather large task for oneself though, no? "Christian ideology," is incredibly broad. Even to only focus on the natural law tradition is quite a project. And it would require focusing on the natural law tradition, and not just "the real reasons" some conservatives are drawn to it (which strikes me as necessarily an argument from psychoanalysis of sorts). But there are lots of wrinkles there, not least that the status of homosexuality is not uniform across modern versions of the tradition, nor Christianity, nor conservatism. Yet surely those differences are important in considering the genealogy of why some strains differ.

Can there be a genealogical account of "Christian ideology," that makes absolutely no reference to Christian theology? Or one of the natural law that doesn't account for its philosophical basis? It strikes me as something like trying to explain the appeal of Marxism in the West entirely in terms of the "real motivations" of Western Marxists, as wanting to appear counter-cultural, hip, or transgressive, which, even if it is partially true, will also remain shallow. It doesn't explain the particulars. Costin Alamariu is a reactionary conservative and yet that whole set of masculinist identitarians tends to be quite accepting of homosexuality and its "classical roots." There is not a necessary linkage between the terms "reactionary," "Christian," "conservative," and any particular stance towards homosexuality.

Genealogical accounts are normally big door stoppers for a reason. One thought is that homosexuality was widely considered to be a mental illness, or defect of sorts by progressive liberals until relatively recently. So, if you want a complete genealogy, you have to look at why that changed, as a sort of broad, widely held default, and why particular groups did not find the drive towards this change compelling. But I think here, at the sociological level, you would have to look at particular theological traditions and bedrock assumptions there. This is probably besides the point for Bob though, who says he isn't a Christian, and so is probably not a good target for a critique of Christian ideology.

I think both these philosophers have been accused of committing ad hominem or the more general genetic fallacy. — Jamal

Well, in Nietzsche's case it's also just bad history, with no rigorous methodology, bordering on mere creative fiction. Also, his work is littered with emotional invective, so this criticism is always going to bite in at least some areas. :smile:

(Sorry, I can't help myself here. Nietzsche's many merits notwithstanding, I do not take him to be a very good historian to say the least.)

Ah, I get you now. I thought you had a typo because I was considering the case where one knowingly chooses the worse over the better, not vice versa; hence my confused response. I agree, Kant makes a crucial point here. Although, I would say that if one chooses the better strictly on the grounds that it is better (against one's other inclinations), this would still be a case of "choosing the better because it is better."

The way Plato would put it is that this is a case where the desires of the rational part of the soul (the nous, logos) weigh against those of the lower parts (or in New Testament terms, we might say the spirit, as opposed to the flesh and psyche; or the "heart," as in "the eye of the nous," not the passions, trumping the passions). And Plato's point is similar to Kant's, although I think more nuanced, in that he sees this desire for the "truly best" as known as good as what allows us to transcend current belief and desire, and thus our own finitude.

One of my problems with Kant is that his notion of freedom seems to largely be a sort of consequence of his epistemology and metaphysical assumptions (which I find flawed), and so he has to assume this sort of bare, inviolable, individual freedom. Whereas I think the ancients had the right of it that freedom is arduous to attain, and has a strong social and corporate (and even historical) element as well (something Hegel, Solovyov, and Dante get at quite well too).

We can particularize this to an act of charity. I may correctly see that helping an effective AIDS charity is an act of goodness, or the right thing to do, or in accordance with spiritual principles, or however one cares to phrase it. But if I do so because (though I absolutely agree that it's good to help AIDS patients) I enjoy the attention and the gloss to my self-esteem, Kant would call the action ethically worthless. I wouldn't go that far, myself, but Kant is raising an important point. Isn't there a huge difference between the person who does the right thing for the wrong, or equivocal, reasons, and the person who does it because they want to do the right thing? (An interesting subsidiary question, by the way, is whether "wanting to do the right thing" can be stated in non-Kantian -- that is, non-procedural -- terms, or whether the Kantian conception requires some version of the categorical imperative as the basis for discussing ethics.)

Like everything in ethics, this is nuanced and endlessly complex. I don't think deontological ethics offers a knockdown argument to virtue ethics. In fact, I think they work best in tandem. But one can certainly point out that the question of motivation in virtue ethics needs a lot of elaboration. Is "wanting to be a 'good' human" (in the pre-modern sense of "good human", where it's the same sort of usage as a "good hammer" or "good poem") a sufficient motivation for ethical action? Doesn't it matter why one wants this? Or must we disregard motivation entirely, and merely speak of good or right actions, or the human good as a kind of correspondence with what is essential or natural to humans? — J

Well, why someone acts is a huge part of ethics, both for Plato and Aristotle, but even moreso for the later tradition. Understanding is crucial. Mere habituation is a sort of half measure that is not fully self-determining. So, Kant is getting at something important here, I just don't see how it is missing from the earlier tradition, whereas he also misses that the good person ideally desires the good because of its goodness.

Of course, this is maybe a bit more clear in Plato than Aristotle, and certainly it is more clear in the later tradition, but I think it's fairly clear in Aristotle (or at least many readings of him, including all ancient ones by his fellow Greeks). Where it isn't always clear is in the "Aristotle" of modern "virtue ethics," which tends to ignore that ordering of the appetites (epithumia and thymos to be ruled and shaped by logos) and want to make Aristotle a "naturalist" in a very modern sense that only reintroduces a very weak notion of teleology, normally as some sort of "emergent property" of organisms. Deprived of its metaphysical grounding, this Aristotelian ethics does face issues with including Kant's insights, because understanding and phronema are no longer "higher."

I am working on a project that compares modern character education literature to late-antique philosophy and it's almost like two wholly different Aristotles! A concern in the modern literature is that Aristotle's ethics is "selfish" because it focuses on the perfection of one's virtue. This claim is even more common against Plotinus. I imagine the late-antique thinkers would be thoroughly perplexed by this because their metaphysics of goodness (heavily influenced by Aristotle) has it as diffusive, and always related to the whole. Plotinus took in and brought up orphans at his own expense precisely because he became more like God; "being like God" could hardly result in "selfishness" ("becoming like God" being the express goal of late-antique ethics). They would ask, "how could goodness be a curse and not a blessing?"

Well, suffice to say I think that metaphysics lies at the heart of this disagreement. If man's telos simply means that certain physical inputs (including social or "intellectual" ones, which in the modern context are still considered to be emergent physical inputs) are good for him, and others bad, based on what he is, and thus sex and food sit alongside "knowing and experiencing 'the Good'" as a menu of goods that make us happy, then we face an irreducible and unordered plurality of goods. "Knowing the good and being conformed to it," gets reduced to "having certain sorts of positive experiences." Whereas, when the Platonists read Aristotle, they thought it was obvious that the lower is ordered to the higher, and that the higher required ever-increasing conformity to the Good, which of course involves the willing of the Good for its own sake. This is perhaps more obvious in the Christian tradition, particularly in the idea of Blessed Virgin as the apex all creation, showing forth creation's (and man's) proper role in "giving birth to God," to the "body of Christ" (physically for her, as the Church for mankind) in thought and deed.

Hans-Georg Gadamer would say that these two viewpoints are two distinct "horizons", by which I understand him to mean that they are contexts of meaning or "traditions", that frame and delimit what we can perceive or interpret. We can never "get outside of" these horizons, we are always already situated within them, unable to get at some Kantian "thing-in-itself". — Colo Millz

Do you think this interpretation should be considered as being universal or absolute, or is it itself subject to continuous fusions, potentially becoming unrecognizable in the process?

In Hegelian terms, we might ask if it is absolute, or merely one of the moments of the absolute's coming into being? Or in classical terms would it be merely one form of participation in the infinite Logos, or a universal aspect of intelligibility itself?

As to the Biblical narrative, a difficulty here is that the Bible itself is read in fairly divergent ways by some traditions. However, I don't think the text even requires such a fusion for the notion that man is continuous with nature or an animal, and certainly not that he is a "creature." Such comparisons are quite common throughout the Scriptures. The breath/spirit, ruach, breathed into man in Genesis 2 is the same as that breathed into the brutes, and just consider that not long after this God tells man:

In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return unto the ground, for out of it wast thou taken; for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. (Genesis 3:19).

Likewise in Wisdom 6:7

For he which is Lord over all shall fear no man's person, neither shall he stand in awe of any man's greatness: for he hath made the small and great, and careth for all alike.

Psalm 104 (103 in the Septuagint/hours) is another pretty good example of the continuity of man with creation. But man is also a divine image bearer, hence the notion of a "middle being" within an ontology of a "suspended middle" between nothingness and the divine fullness. This carries with it a justification for a certain sort of "anthropocentrism" and yet it's hard to see how this wouldn't carry over into any fusion unless it is simply negated. Man will be an animal, but he will remain a unique one.

Also, the entire notion of man being "creaturely" seems to me to have theological undertones. Doesn't a creature and creation imply a creator? Certainly, Christian thinkers such as Pryzwarra make this essential to their philosophy. Whereas, on a certain view of "naturalism" man and animals are only arbitrary unities, just a "special case" as respects any other possible ensembles of particles that might be considered. Here, biology is only discrete from physics on wholly subjective and "pragmatic" grounds. But man isn't a "creature" here, he is a brute fact, and not even that, for he is an essentially arbitrary subdivision of a universal brute fact (or in some more recent ontologies, he simply a stream of computation in a universal mathematical object, but this "stream" is only arbitrarily distinct from the universal computation, a wholly subjective demarcation).

You don't think parents who see gender dysphoria as an illness are capable of truly or fully loving their children? Would this apply to something like autism or Down's syndrome too (which are surely even more relevant to personal identity)?

Anyhow, if seeing gender dysphoria as a pathology amounts to "denying someone's identity," wouldn't this mean that sex actually is deeply essential to identity in precisely the way essentialist claim? I suppose this would go along with the sentiment that even if a treatment for gender dysphoria existed it would not be desirable, or that it should be removed from the DSM.

Hence, the notion that the primary purpose of marriage is, or has historically been, to reproduce is a bit of joke in light of the surplus of evidence that presents itself. — javra

I'm not really sure what you mean here. That is precisely how marriage tended to be viewed by philosophers and theologians. Of course, these pre-modern thinkers would probably be the first to agree that "most people" behave contrary to this ideal, but that doesn't amount to evidence that it wasn't the ideal. Also, most people were peasant serfs (and earlier, many were slaves) and so not particularly focused on alliances and amassing generational wealth and prestige.

Homosexuals, just like Shakers, can well adopt those children that were unwanted by their own parents—this if they so desire to have children of their own. God knows there are far too many unwanted children in this world. And as has been evidenced time and time again, being raised by two gay men or two gay women does not in any way convert the naturally inborn sexual inclinations of the child come their adulthood. But maybe more importantly, if gay folk want to be monogamous for the remainder of their lives, then let them so be via marriage. They ought not be condemned to forced promiscuity or else celibacy or else in any other way punished for their monogamy-aiming aspirations (such via lack of corresponding legal rights)—however implicit this proclamation might be. — javra

I'd imagine that many people who view homosexuality as a sort of imperfection could agree with this though, no? My extremely Catholic grandmothers were fine with civil unions, back when that was a thing. It's not like those who see gluttony as defect want to ban fancy food (and here "gluttony" traditionally referred not only to over consumption, but any undue focus on food).

The issue of "condemnation" is interesting though. Leaving aside homosexuality for a moment, there is the whole idea that any notion of gluttony is "fat shaming" or perhaps "consumption shaming." To speak of licentiousness is "slut shaming," etc. There are all "personal choices," and all personal choices are relative to the individual, so long as they do not transgress the limits of liberal autonomy and infringe on others, or so the reasoning seems to go.

I do wonder if the shift in moral language is part of the difficulty here. To say something is "bad" becomes to describe it as possessing a sort of specific "moral evil." But this is hardly what was traditionally meant by gluttony being "evil." It was a misordering of desire, although towards something that is truly desirable, and didn't denote anything "horrific."

So, to 's point, this is perhaps more an issue with liberalism. Liberalism has a strong sense of the "morally bad" as distinct, because everything else is personal choice, and so to say anything is bad, that it "ought not be done" or that it is "not ideal" become a sort of "condemnation."

Of course, this says nothing about whether homosexuality is ideal or not, I only mean to underscore where certain tensions come from.

Now, this libertarian principle is complicated for a Christian - it would, for example, legalize prostitution, I suppose. — Colo Millz

Well, it depends if you accept the liberal anthropology of man as a more or less atomized actor. That is, are such "personal choices" really only effecting the people who make them? Or more to the point, should the law be instructive, so as to lead people (both individually, but also collectively) towards virtue in a positive sense, as an aid to virtue. That's how Saint Thomas thinks of human laws, as aids. However, he also didn't think it made sense to make many vices illegal.

To be honest, it has always seemed bizarre to me that prostitution is illegal, but then all manner of pornography is incredibly easy to access for children. The latter seems to have a far more corrosive and dehumanizing effect, and I think feminist critiques of the porn industry have a lot of bite. Of course, prostitution involves objectification, but pornography seems to take this to another level.

, there are many possible reasons for choosing the better over the worse, — J

Such as? If one had "good reasons" for choosing "the worse" over the "better" it seems to me that, by definition, we must think that "the worse" is in fact, in an important respect, better than "the better." Else why choose it?

No doubt, I might choose the "worse character" in playing a video game against a child, because I want the competition to be more fair, etc. But in those cases, I am choosing the "worse" because it is truly better as respects the ends that I believe to be themselves better. So, in this example, winning the game is not better than having a more equal competition.

Not sure I get this. Can you expand? — J

Well, that's the classical definition of goodness, and it might take some unpacking. Goodness isn't something over and above a thing, just as there isn't a thing and its truth as something distinct, over and above it. Being "transcedentals," goodness and truth are conceptual, not real distinctions (but of course, "objective"). They are being as considered from a particular aspect, as intelligible/knowable (truth), or as desirable (goodness).

An easy way to see how this takes shape in ethics is to consider that pre-modern ethics (in the East too from what I can tell) is primarily concerned with reality versus appearances, and the higher versus the lower. We want what is truly most desirable, not what merely appears most desirable. We know we can be wrong about what is most desirable, and this leads to regret and bad consequences. Ethics is about discovering the best way to live/act, i.e., what is truly desirable. In this context, to knowingly choose the worse over the better is essentially to act contrary to reason and desire.

Of course, a difficulty here is that subjectivism has sort of crept into our definitions. "Desirable" becomes just "whatever is currently desired." However, Etymonline tells me that the word entered the English language in the 14th century, then meaning: "worthy to be desired, fit to excite a wish to possess." That's the better way of taking it here.

So we agree there is (or perhaps may be) a logical basis for the is/ought distinction? — Banno

No, I agree with the many critics who say that the division is wholly metaphysical. Maybe it can be justified, but it would have to be justified on metaphysical terms. However, what Russell is talking about is a real limitation of deduction. I am not totally sure why she is calling it "Hume's Law" though since it's a slightly different issue. My suspicion is that maybe people use the name for the issue she is talking about too, a sort of semantic drift in the literature maybe, sort of like how "Aristotelian essences" in many articles in analytic philosophy have very little to do with Aristotle's metaphysics. IDK though.

Hume's issue isn't just that we cannot go from "particular" to "universal" facts about values, but that there simply are no such facts, because value statements can never be purely descriptive since they relate to purely subjective sentiment. It's a very early-modern sort of division.

The other point of contention is your "Hume's psychology... precludes knowing virtually any facts at all", which is far too strong. Experience grounds our knowledge. — Banno

I agree that it's too strong. That's the problem with Hume! I mean, he basically says as much too. He says you'd go insane if you took his conclusions to heart. Bertrand Russell said something similar, basically "Hume demolishes the line between sanity and insanity" or something to that effect.

Is the opposed view "purely philosophical"? This is one of the double standards at play in such issues, and like the slavery question in my thread, "Beyond the Pale," the double standard is most obvious when it comes to deciding the burden of proof. The anti-metaphysicalists tend to say, "Well if you can't demonstrate your position via purely philosophical arguments, then I guess my position wins by default" (i.e. such a person accepts no onus to provide arguments for their own position, and one manifestation of this within this thread is the emotivism).

The modern egalitarianism that secularity has become so reliant upon is deeply religious, as the historian Tom Holland and others have shown in detail. The struggle between modern egalitarianism and traditional Judeo-Christian morality is basically an internecine conflict about how to weigh different "theological" premises (such as the equal treatment owed in virtue of the imago dei).

The irony in this case is that the modern view is much more religious than the traditional view, and this can be glimpsed by noting that non-Christian cultures are not internally tempted by the positions that the West is now staking out. Egalitarianism is not a conclusion of natural reason. A culture guided by natural reason does not come to the conclusion, for example, that men and women are of equal athletic ability and should compete in the same sports leagues. — Leontiskos

That's a fair point. I don't think there is an obvious "default." As I pointed out, a number of traditions move towards seeing all sexual relations as, at best, unnecessary, and so one could argue that all that is required is that marriage is itself justified.

Isn't this a bit like what you argue against in posts like <this one>? You seem to be saying something like, "Well it would be better, but it's not morally obligatory." — Leontiskos

Sure, but I here just thinking through the traditional response "out loud." Traditionally, it has not been considered a "misordered love" to marry someone of the opposite sex who is sterile, or for elderly people to marry, no?

This is why I think any sort of justification has to rest on a thicker philosophy of sex and anthropology (which personalists do get into in more modern terms).

and we get another instance of interminable moral debate that doesn't touch what I think is interesting and important, namely the genesis and the social meaning of the ideas. — Jamal

This is interesting because this is exactly the sort of critique Rosaria Butterfield, who had been a lesbian professor of queer studies and is now married to a male pastor, levels against modern LGBT categories. That is, they are a sort of coercive identity thinking, particularly when taught at state schools and framed as (relatively) immutable and immune to agency. It makes sense given her background in post-modern and critical theory and new orientation I suppose. You know, something like: "I found my true identity in Christ, despite what the controlling cultural dialectic tried to tell me." To me, this sort of thing always suggest the interminability of post-modern arguments and arguments from psycho-analysis more generally.

3. It leads to a more humane society: no loving couples are told by authorities that what they're doing is a privation of goodness or that they are sick in the head. — Jamal

It's worth noting here that Thomas himself did not think that it was prudent to criminalize all manner of behaviors he considered harmful. For instance, prostitution and gambling. Unless you mean "authorities" in the broadest sense, in which case any society that allows religious freedom will fail at 3, no? So, we will be forced to either tell imams, priests, and rabbis that they cannot speak with their authority on certain issues, or else default on 3.

Russell's paper is interesting but she is actually only speaking obliquely to Hume's position (actually, the choice of title is a little puzzling in that respect; maybe the term "Hume's law" is used differently in some areas of philosophy for what she is talking about, but it isn't Hume's original position). It's true that, from the epistemic direction, the Guillotine is justified as a sort of a special case of the more general attack on induction, but Hume's objection would also prohibit moves from the "universal" to the "particular" wherever "values" are concerned. I did find that a little strange actually, Russell is speaking more to Hume's justification for the "law" than the "law" itself.

Hume's claim is more expansive though. Because morality is just sentiment, it can never justified by reason alone, full stop. Reason is also wholly inert in terms of action, so even if normative claims did work in this way, they could never drive behavior. Those claims are what set up the Guillotine. What Hume is objecting to has nothing to do with form, it has to do semantics, what kinds of facts there are, and how language refers to them.

Russell gets at the epistemic side: we cannot know universal value claims. But actually, Hume goes further. There can simply be no such thing as a descriptive fact about value, so of course one cannot derive "ought" from "is" even leaving aside the gap from particular to universal. His position can be described as ontologically eliminativist in this respect. It isn't a sort of skepticism on this issue; because of his psychology, such facts are impossible. He is pretty explicit about this in the Treatise BTW, he compares "vice and virtue" (values) to secondary qualities (which in his context are wholly subjective and do not exist in the world objectively at all).

A great many philosophers since have rejected the fact/values distinction and this has nothing to do with logic per se. If you want a close analogy, consider logical interpretations by emotivists.

Well, if the good is being qua desirable (what is truly most fulfilling of desire) in what way is it ever "better" to choose the worse over the good?

Why is it morally obligatory to choose the better over the worse?

Why choose the better over the worse? Why choose good over evil? These seem extremely obvious to me, so I am not sure how to answer. Those who deny morality tend to say that nothing is good or evil, not that it makes sense to choose evil as evil. Even Milton's Satan has to say "evil be thou my good," because "evil be evil to me that I might choose you anyway" makes no sense. So, what is the definition of "morally obligatory" here?

Of course they don't. That's why they aren't moral injunctions. Whereas "You ought to help the poor" is. Is there a reason why "ought" can't have both moral and non-moral uses? Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that "we still don't use the word 'ought' exclusively in this way"? For why should we? -- surely the deontological ethicists weren't recommending that. — J

So, helping the poor isn't truly desirable or a path to happiness? Then why do it?

Kant's response relies on sheer formalism to answer this question. I suppose what is "desirable" is "the good will willing itself," but because of his epistemic presuppositions Kant is only able to establish this by sheer definition. Indeed, other people and their freedom as moral agents cannot be known according to Kant, but are mere "postulates of practical reason" needed to justify practical reason's definitional drive towards universalization.

I will just repeat what I've said before here:

The problem here is that Kant makes "moral goodness" a wholly sui generis (and wholly formal) good that is isolated from all other goods (e.g., the good "good food," or a "good baseball player," or even the good of being in love, etc.). I do not think it is too strong to say this is a sort of castration of the Good as classically conceived. We go from a source of endless fecundity and plentitude, which is present in all being, both reality and appearances, to a sheer formalism. The good that we have access to is no longer generative. It is essentially cut off from how the world is. No matter how the world is, all "rational entities" will share the same sterile goal, none able the affect the other's aims.

More to the point, this makes being "moral" unrelated to "having a good life" except accidently. But if being "moral" doesn't make us or others happy, what good is it? Why should we care about contradicting our "rational nature" when rationality itself seems only accidentally related to desire? Although Kant comes to many laudable conclusions, I think there is something perverse in the idea that "what is most choice-worthy" is a "good will" that is its own object and law giver. It makes desire collapse into a solipsistic black hole. The creature must never look outside itself for the "moral." There is no Eros drawing us on. The Other is irrelevant. Only the Same matters; the entire goal of ethical life ends up being an effort to universalize an isolated, autonomous will so that it becomes self-similar ("law-like") in its willing. Is this not a picture of the incurvatus in se with a halo of moral conclusions disguising it?

It's also arguably the height of hubris to think that "how to become a good person" is something that requires no contact with being or others, but only isolated reason. The entire edifice hangs on the idea that practical reason can never be corrupted (an assumption that seems phenomenologically suspect). This is a move that pretends to flow from epistemic humility, but which absolutizes the self above all others. Yet, given the epistemological constraints, this only makes sense. Kant might be said to be doing the best possible with the conditions he has set for himself.

I mean, what is the point of Kantian ethics if you don't agree with his epistemology? Kant himself seems to allow that it must be developed only because of the extreme epistemic limits he has set on himself.

Well, I don't want to go off topic, but it seems somewhat relevant insomuch as an attraction to children (or animals, and other such orientations) are considered to be "bad for people" such that they ought never act on their desires and should move to purge themselves of them.

Now, consider this in comparison to those ascetics who feel this way about all sexual desire. If we are of the opinion that the ascetics are wrong, but also that some sexual desires ought never be pursued, then we are somewhere in the middle and we have some range in mind for what constitutes "proper" or "good" sexual desire and conduct.

As regards biology, as far as I know, there is no evidence to indicate that pedophilia is inborn at birth. — javra

Well, that is very much how people describe it, they "just knew," from an early age. And they have the same sorts of aggregate differences in brain behavior that one finds with homosexuality, etc., although this is hardly surprising. No strong genetic correlates have been identified that I am aware of, but it's also an area that has garnered less attention in research.

Perhaps this is just an "angle" for advocacy, but AFAIK, research suggests that some people do experience such a strong orientation.

, on the other hand, there is evidence to indicate that homosexuality is inborn at birth. — javra

Right, but it's very much the same sort of evidence. This is exactly what "MAP" advocacy groups point to.

This such that those homosexuals which are in no way bisexually disposed cannot be altered into holding heterosexual drives no matter the culture or any imaginable attempt (such as that of “conversion therapy”, aka "sexual orientation change efforts" – which, btw, is commonly acknowledged today to be very harmful). — javra

Right, but this is equally true for pedophilia. There is not a reliable "cure" for it. Although, people do relate being "cured" of it, this is true for homosexuals as well (and I see no reason to believe that all people who express having undergone such a reorientation are necessarily somehow lying or self-deceiving).

And, there is no harm that results from consensually homosexual activities — javra

I would disagree with this. Grave harm often follows, and from "consensual" heterosexual relationships as well. These are often some of the experiences people regret most in life. Wouldn't the point instead be that homosexual relationships are not "necessarily harmful?"

And this I think is a large difficulty for any sort of natural law explanation that tries to argue that homosexuality is a vice per se. However, it seems easy to point out at least one way in which such relationships may be less than ideal, in that they cannot produce children. Yet this doesn't seem to me to offer the sort of clear moral linkage we might expect.

To see why, consider the case of someone who is paralyzed from the waist down. No doubt, it is "ideal" that they be cured and be able to walk. However, it hardly follows from this that using a wheelchair is "wrong" because being able to walk might in some way be a fuller realization of human life and capabilities. Thus, a natural law theory really needs to show that it is, all else equal, better for homosexuals to be celibate (this is of course, excluding any criticisms of fornication, lust, etc. in general). This is where I find traditional explanations to often be lacking because they don't really countenance the idea of a monogamous homosexual relationship.

For instance, from a Patristic or Thomistic perspective, being "intrinsically disordered" doesn't mean "horrific" or "evil in every respect." The idea is more that the powers of the soul are directed contrary to their purpose/fullest fulfillment. In this context, the real issue is the special sacramental meaning of procreation (it's interesting to note here that this philosophy was largely developed by people who had chosen to eschew their desires and live as celibates, even though many had previously engaged in sexual relations).

I would imagine then that they would say that the wheelchair analogy breaks down because the wheelchair is a sort of remedy that compensates for absence, whereas the procreative focus of marriage is a sort of signification of divine mysteries (sacramental) but not an essential part of "the good life" (for many saints were celibates, and the Blessed Virgin was of course, "ever-virgin"). Hence, as respects many types of relationships, the point would be that, even if an act brings pleasure, affection, and mutual support, it can still involve a love that is ultimately misdirected. This is essentially the same rationale used against masturbation, fornication, and adultery (of course, there is a sort of stigma issue in these texts too. Saint John of the Ladder finds masturbation too depraved to even mention, an idea that had long currency until fairly recently, resulting in some rather funny letters written by Wagner to Nietzsche's doctor over the fear that he was engaged in "self-abuse.")

But of course, such an explanation is deeply tied to the idea that the sexes are revelatory of God, e.g., Genesis 27:

So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.

I do not know if the conclusion can be justified outside this understanding. And what is interesting here is that in similar Western Pagan and Eastern traditions, the move is generally not towards saying "all sorts of sexual relations are beneficial," but more often towards seeing them as unnecessary, or even as pernicious distractions. Hence, the justification of marriage here is more about its positive sacramental significance.

However, and here is the tricky part from a Christian perspective that wants to argue that homosexuality is a vice per se, Saint Paul seems to allow for concessions to human frailty as at least part of the justification for sex (e.g., I Corinthians 7):

Now concerning the matters about which you wrote: “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.” But because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.

Now as a concession, not a command, I say this. I wish that all were as I myself am. But each has his own gift from God, one of one kind and one of another.

And the traditional response here goes back to the particular function of marriage and procreation as a sacrament and a sort of transfiguring divine pedagogy (which is also the argument against contraception). However, there is a question about pastoral responses here (and birth control is a great example here too) where it seems that the standard is unlikely to be met by many (and yet the ideal is that all can attain to "sainthood").

But at this point, aren't we relying on more theological points? It's hard for me to see how this can be a purely philosophical argument. The procreative function of romantic relationships is too weak to justify a claim that homosexuality is a vice per se. To be sure, it might be better if, if one wanted, one could have children with one's spouse, but it hardly follows from this that it is somehow wrong to marry some who is sterile when one could marry someone who is fertile, etc.

Good point, that's another common usage of "ought." And given Hume's epistemic commitments, I do wonder if there can ever be anything other than these sorts of "ought" claims outside claims about "relations of ideas," which are themselves grounded in sense perceptions from which we can only ever derive predictive oughts (which arguably can never be justified according to his epistemology and psychology).

Hume's division isn't logical, it's metaphysical and epistemic. If one rejects Hume's psychology, which Hume himself seems to acknowledge cannot be justified given his epistemology, one has no reason to accept the division.

Just consider the assumption that there are facts about values.

So:

X is better than Y (X is more worthy of choice than Y) is true (a fact).

It does not follow that this fact can never imply "choose X over Y." To be truly "more worthy of choice" or "better," or "more desirable," is simply to be what ought to be chosen. The only reason this is obfuscated is because much modern ethics has this bizarre fixation on "ought" as only applying to a sui generis sort of "moral obligation." Yet even after centuries of this, we still don't use the word "ought" in this way. "You ought to try the chicken," or "she likes you, you ought to ask here out," do not imply "you are morally obligated to eat this chicken," or "you are morally obligated to ask our friend out on a date."

I suppose, if we face objections here we can allow that it is an axiom of practical reason that: "it is true that one ought to choose the better over the worse, the more choiceworthy over the less, etc."

So:

1. It is true that we ought to choose the better over the worse.
2. X is better than Y.
C. Thus, we ought to choose Y.

Is fine, and so it follows that if there are facts (is statements) about values we should have no problem following these into conclusions about what we "ought" to do. If people insist that 1 must be included in all arguments involving "values" I would counter that this seems unnecessary given what "better" or "good" mean, but it hardly seems too problematic to include it since it is obviously true.

The point of the division is more that Hume's psychology precludes ever knowing such facts, although it also precludes knowing virtually any facts at all, which we might suppose just indicates that it is a grievously deficient theory of knowledge.

Good points, and it's worth pointing out that the status of homosexuality in "thick" teleological accounts varies a bit across traditions. This is why I have tended to point towards lust and fornication in general, since these are more widely accepted as vices and the reasons why seem fairly straightforward (of course, some traditions are skeptical of sex in general), and so they are better entry points for understanding if and why such a tradition might consider homosexuality a sort of "vice."

The particular justification of homosexuality as a vice in the Christian and Islamic traditions is sort of obscured by the fact that, since there was no such thing as a "gay marriage" an easy justification was that any such relationships necessarily fell outside the covenetal relationship in which sex was appropriate. And likewise, since most people married regardless of "desire" such relations also generally involved adultery.

Sexual sins are in some respects unique in these traditions because of their particular anthropology which sees man as the image bearer of God, which then gives human procreation and generation a unique role in the cosmos and history (Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body in Simple Language is quite good here). So, even when homosexuality was not remotely on people's radar, there was still the idea that heterosexual intercourse ought to be solely oriented towards procreation (whether this is an error is another question), hence "missionary position," etc. Indeed, Saint Paul's comments on heterosexual marriage can (although they need not be) read somewhat ambivalently (personally, given his context, where there was such a huge focus on childbearing, I think he is more offering a justification of the desirability if the celibate life for those who are oriented towards it).

Hence, a coherent Christian, Jewish, or Muslim justification of why homosexuality is a vice per se (as opposed to the general way in which all lust, fornication, adultery, etc. is a vice) needs to be built on a more complete understanding of the role of sexuality and marriage. It will suffice to say that this is already and extremely fraught topic though, even as respects heterosexual relations and marriage. It is, I would say, probably one of the worst topics to look at if one is trying to understand the basics of natural law for this reason.

Maybe I overly conflated your views with those of Count Timothy von Icarus, who from what I've so far read at least alluded to homosexuality being either unnatural or an illness — javra

What exactly left that impression? The only two things I have tried to clarify here are that:

A. The "natural" of the natural law is very different from the "natural" of contemporary "naturalism" and so one must take time unpacking its distinct metaphysics and anthropology; and,

B. What defines a "mental illness" versus "bigotry," etc. cannot be reducible to mere current opinion, which is constantly changing, and does not always seem to track particularly well with "the good life" and "being a good person" (for we often fetishize certain vices).

The fact that people seem to be reading this as "you mentioned both homosexuality (an abnormal, as in, relatively rare, tendency in sexual desire) and pedophilia (another abnormal tendency in sexual desire)," therefore you are slandering homosexuals (presumably because pedophiles really do deserve to be shamed and attacked for their particular desires or called "ill") is ironic, since it's exactly what they themselves point out as a sort of bigotry (it being important to note here that most people who sexually abuse children are not pedophiles per se, and that many pedophiles do not sexually abuse any children in their lifetimes, although the word is unhelpfully extended to both groups, but I speak here of the "illness" by which adults have a strong and/or exclusive sexual attraction to children regardless of their acts).

But, presumably many people do think in the case of those with something like an exclusive and "inborn, innate" attraction to children or adolescents that they should in fact go their whole lives without ever giving into such desires, regardless of if they were "born that way" or that such desires and interactions are "natural" in the sense that they are ubiquitous in human societies and can be found in brutes. And presumably, people who think that those with these desires ought never fulfill them would also agree that if they could be "cured" of them, they should be (hence our society's acceptance of "chemical castration" in these cases, etc.). And while people might try to justify this wholly in terms of the ethics of liberalism, focusing solely on "consent" (an issue muddied by the idea that children and adolescents can consent to attempts to change their sex or prevent puberty), I think that, on some consideration, it will be clear that it is not good for the adults involved either. An attraction to a "particular age" is necessarily an attraction to a person qua body, not a person qua soul. You can even consider this with someone like Jeffery Epstein, who was not a "pedophile" in the medical sense (his victims would have been eligible for marriage in almost all societies in human history), and yet surely it would have been better for him to be ordered towards a fulfilling marriage or the celibate life rather than towards coercing adolescents into sex.

But my only point here is that many of the arguments in this thread are defective. Something being "natural" in the modern sense of the term doesn't mean it is good or just, nor does a desire being "inborn" mean it is good and just (for as pointed out, envy, greed, lust, wrath, etc. are all "natural" and "inborn" in this sense). Nor is appealing to the rapidly shifting consensus of society or experts a particularly strong argument. These all seem to be appeals that are beside the point. Likewise, even if homosexuality were "unnatural" in the modern sense (and it isn't), that would be a terrible argument in favor of it being a vice. Nor do I think attempts to ground such an assertion in some sort of Darwinian account of the advantages of heterosexual vagina intercourse makes much sense. Presumably, any sort of natural law account of why homosexuality is not ideal has to ground such an account in a robust anthropology.

Do you disagree? — RogueAI

Absolutely. For one, this would imply that homosexuality really was a form of mental illness right up until it wasn't, and that it could easily become so again. And presumably, on any realist account of science, what is "science-based" is not, "whatever experts currently believe," but rather something like "what is really the case," or "what ideal inquiry would reveal."

As to the DSM, no, I wouldn't think so.

But, to speak more broadly, I also don't think the DSM is at all helpful for describing "mental" or "spiritual" health in a general sense. Consider that fornication is considered "normal" unless one is a "sex addict," or that greed would essentially be left out as an "illness." So the entire paradigm of medicalized "medical illness" also seems like a bit of a red herring to me. That's yet another reason why I would not say that spiritual and mental health are reducible to "what experts currently say."

So is a thing unnatural because it is not "oriented to God", as you seemed to first say, or because it is contrary to a things internal order... Or are these, for you, the same? — Banno

They are the same, although this is true for man as a rational being in a fuller sense.

Sure, although I am more familiar with Catholics criticizing that distinction to be honest. I only brought it up because "natural" in the common, secular philosophical usage tends to exclude any sort of "transcendent" end (I do not like the term here, but it is how it is usually labeled). And this tends to simply exclude the rational appetites such that there are only "intellectual pleasures" to the extent that one finds "activities of the mind" (be they literature, philosophy, or video games) "pleasing."

But if we take "natural" in this sense and speak to the natural law we end up with a weird sort of mismatch because there aren't really higher and lower appetites anymore (or I would argue, rational freedom) but just a sort of plurality of "natural goods" that are natural just in that they are "things men enjoy."

Or to put it another way, I'd say natural law presupposes a certain anthropology that tends to be not so much denied today as utterly unknown. I only meant to get at a mismatch in terminology because if you begin speaking about goodness and truth as formal objects, people nowadays immediately jump to "transcendence" often understood as "supernatural," which then seems to make the law primarily revelatory rather than immanent in being, if that makes sense.

That went out of style 50 years ago — RogueAI

So a mental illness is whatever "the professionals" or "society" says it is? IIRC, there was a somewhat successful push to normalize and legalize pedophilia in Western Europe within that time frame as well, but, had it been more successful, I am not sure if that success ought to the determining factor as to whether being a "minor attracted person" is a sort of "disorder" or not. Likewise, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany had their own particular way of defining "mental illness" that I don't think most people would like to affirm. But if the definitions of secular Western liberal democracies are better than those of other parts of the world, or of Western liberal democracies not so many years ago, then presumably it is in virtue of something other than that such definitions are "current."

At any rate, I didn't lump anyone in with anyone else. Plus, taking umbrage at being "lumped in" with pyromaniacs and pedophiles (who surely didn't choose to be such) might itself be called a sort of bigotry, no? They would certainly say so.

Yet, my point was that the entire idea of a "mental illness" presupposes some sort of standard of health, and the notion of "pathologies." However, I don't see how this makes the notion of mental health intrinsically "bigoted." Appeals to contemporary or prior norms are sort of beside the point; rather that standard ("health") should be the criteria for "illness." Otherwise we would be forced to say that homosexuality was an illness, ceased to be so (in some select places), but might very well become one in the future, which seems a little odd, no?

More broadly, I would say every society, to varying degrees, has issues with making vices into "virtues." Today, you see this more with acquisitiveness, and perhaps also with male aggression and license. And while it's a tricky subject, since a "proper order" might vary by cultural, historical, and social context, it seems somewhat obvious to me that the "ideal human ordering" is not simply "what most people say it is," nor a function of "what the many think and feel," and so there is a standard/goal to which one may come closer or fall further away from. And the various ways of "falling short" would be how I would classify "mental" or "spiritual" illnesses.

A good example here is reason. Reason is ordered to truth. But reason can be instrumentalized and ordered to lower desires. And this would be "contrary to nature." Likewise, cancer is contrary to nature in that it is a misordering of body.

But "nature" here is used in its original sense, as principle. I fear there is a sort of lexical drift here that makes a sort of "translation" necessary.



More broadly, evil, as a privation, in unnatural. That, I think, is more straightforward. What a thing is cannot be a privation (what it is not).

As noted above, the problem here is that the term "nature" was radically redefined during the Reformation and we are the inheritors of the latter tradition. I almost wonder if a different word should be used, such as logoi/logos or phusis, but I am also sometimes annoyed by other traditions refusal to translate key terms so I am ambivalent about that.

The problem of what is natural and unnatural seems more difficult than the problem of good and evil, since the handy answer of free will is unavailable. Again, if everything has a divine origin, then how could anything be unnatural? — Banno

Well, in the latter traditions you will sometimes see the rough language of natural law ("unnatural") used, but against a backdrop where "morality" relates to a sui generis "moral good" that is wholly "supernatural" (a new category) in origin.

This is, BTW, exactly Alasdair MacIntyre's key thesis. The old moral language, e.g., "unnatural," "virtue," etc. is utterly incoherent in the modern context and carries on in a sort of bizarre zombie form through sheer inertia, getting rolled out in the way Warhammer 40k "techno priests" use technology they have almost no understanding of by holding to strict religious rituals that happen to coincide with their use.

If I've understood all that, you are saying that what is natural is what god wills?

Well, at least the divine origin of the normative is explicit here. — Banno

If the idea you have is a sort of voluntarism or "divine command theory," then no, quite the opposite. I'd argue that divine command theory is itself a sort of moral anti-realism.

The natural law is ontological. It has a "divine origin" insomuch as everything (being itself) has a divine origin. There is not, however, a distinctly normative command that sits outside or is projected onto the being of things (a sort of sui generis "moral goodness.")




I'm not sure if I understand this. How could one be "utterly ethical" and at odds with Goodness itself?

The basic idea here is not unique to Christian thought. One can find it all over the Pagan philosophers, in Jewish, Islamic, etc. thought (this is indeed the broader tradition I was referring to). The Good itself (i.e., being qua desirable) is the formal object of the will, just as truth (being qua intelligible) is the formal object of the intellect. That's in more Western scholastic terms, because I thought they were appropriate given the topic of this thread, and because I think the language is clearer, but you can find the same essential idea back in Plato for instance. To be "rational," to participate in the Logos, is to be ordered to the True and Good (and so Being itself, in its fullness). So, whatever is rational by nature (crucially man in this case) is ordered to the Good and True.

"Natural" here is conceived of in its original context, as relating to the phusis by which mobile/changing being changes (i.e., acts one way and not any other, the principle of cause and intelligibility in change). Man changes, but is rational.

IDK, Boethius does a pretty good job explaining this without any appeal to special revelation. It is not that revelation is unimportant, but it is also not an insight that, in its basic assumptions, is unique to any particular tradition of revelation (or even the West).

The term "natural" needs to be defined here. If "natural" has something like its more modern meaning where it is defined over and against the "artificial" or "man-made" than neither homosexuality nor oral, anal, etc. sex, masturbation, etc. is "unnatural" in that they can be observed, albeit rarely, in wild animals. Likewise, if "natural" means "ubiquitous (or even relatively common) to primitive human societies" then murder, rape, slavery, human sacrifice, cannibalism, pedophilia, etc., and of course lust, gluttony, sloth, despair, wrath, greed, envy, and pride would be equally "natural."

Whereas "natural" in the tradition Saint Thomas comes from (if not as much the modern tradition built on his name) sees man, and indeed all rational beings (and so the angels) as essentially and naturally oriented to God in a unique way, through the nous (will and intellect, with Goodness and Truth as their formal object). There is no possibility of an orientation of natura pura vis-á-vis man qua rational here, since to be rational is to be oriented towards the Good, Beautiful, and True by nature.

I think the nature/supernature distinction is one of the grave missteps of modern thought that has unfortunately attached itself to a sort of "Neo-Thomism" (although this strain has largely gone into remission in the 20th century following de Lubac and others). If we think of an end for man that is "purely natural," where "nature" is defined in opposition to the "supernatural," thus sealing off the "natural" from God, and implying a sort of self-sufficiency of ends, then it is hard to see how fornication (heterosexual or homosexual) is a "natural" evil. Afterall, having already sealed off the ultimate target of the rational appetites, the role of the intellect and will now seems to be wholly instrumental and deliberative, and the ultimate ends for which we strive are the "purely natural" ends of man as a non-rational (in the old sense) animal. Hence, sexual pleasure is simply one of the plurality of goods to be sought, and sexual sins become perhaps a sort of "exclusively supernatural" sin.

Anyhow, fornication is, in the earlier context, "unnatural" and a violation of the "natural law," in precisely the way lust, greed, pride, etc. is more generally. It is a misordering of loves and a misordering of what truly fulfills human nature.

However, from the perspective of what Charles Taylor calls "exclusive humanism" which denies all "transcendent ends" (or in the classical tradition, "rational ends"), the "pleasures of the flesh" are just one good among social and intellectual pleasures to pursue.

At any rate, I think the question of "naturalness" in the first sense is a total non sequitur that several posters in this thread seem to be getting led off track by. Murder and rape are natural in this sense but surely they are not just and good. Nor does the fact that some people are "born with a strong inclination" towards something necessarily mean that such an orientation is good and just. Just consider that people are born with strong inclinations towards alcoholism, wrath, pedophilia, etc. Are these thus healthy? Surely they are "natural" in terms of being ubiquitous and present in brutes as well, and in all human societies, but that seems irrelevant to their goodness.

Whereas, under the "natural law," what accords with nature (the "law") is precisely that path that being reveals to us as good and just, leading man upwards towards what can fulfill his infinite desires, and here "what the brutes do" or "what most men do" is wholly irrelevant.

On the cultural issues you raised, I do fear there is a bit of mixed messaging here considering the degree to which heterosexual fornication, pornography, etc. has been not only normalized but even glorified in the broader culture, such that it is plastered in advertisements all over the surfaces of our cities and the media is saturated it (acquisitiveness, pleonexia, even more so, such that it is now a virtue of sorts). This is where the cultural presentation of the "natural law" starts to look outwardly incoherent and arbitrary, because the metaphysical grounding becomes submerged and we instead seem to have a sort of arbitrary, voluntarist pronouncement instead. The equivocation on "natural" doesn't help I suppose, nor do the voluntarist undertones of "law" in our current context. I would rebrand it "moral ecology," or "Logos ethics," or something personally.

Give me a fucking break with your faux innocence. Calling an entire class of people mentally ill couldn't be more bigoted. Try applying that to any other group. — hypericin

Isn't that definitionally true of any designation for any mental illness? Alcoholics are a class of people. Pyromaniacs as well. Pedophiles are a class of people who are classed according to sexual desire, as are zoophiles, etc.

I think the better question is what properly constitutes a mental or spiritual illness. If classifying a group of people according to some desires, behaviors, etc. is bigotry than the concept of a mental illness itself cannot but be bigoted. Yet surely there are such things as mental and spiritual illnesses; from the more diffuse, e.g., acquisitiveness, to the more specific, e.g. schizophrenia.

Come around for the thread of Proclus' Elements in a few weeks; he's got some great ideas on this. :grin:

Are those who can’t pay, who live on the streets, are they absolutely inevitable in capitalism? Or are they still inevitable in any larger society and any economy? Again, why is this a feature of capitalism, and not a feature of human ignorance and greed and other badness in human hearts? — Fire Ologist

Well, we might consider here that just because a problem is perennial does not mean that it cannot be better or worse in different eras and systems. "The poor you shall always have with you," (Matthew 26:11) but surely there is a difference between the worst excesses of the Gilded Age and the New Deal Era, where economic mobility (as well as equality) was vastly greater.

We might consider here the pronounced nostalgia people have for the Soviet system in Eastern Europe despite its many infamies.

Part of the problem here is that liberalism is self-undermining in a sort of positive feedback loop. Income and particularly wealth follow a power law distribution, whole all evidence suggests that human ability is largely on a normal distribution. The cumulative exponential gains on capital make this somewhat inevitable without some sort of policy mechanism to redistribute wealth of a quite vast scale. And yet, in a system where wealth is convertible into cultural and political power, this means that there is always the risk of state capture, rent seeking, and moves by the elite to undermine liberalism so as to install themselves as a new sort of aristocracy.

It's worth nothing here that many economists and historians see the rise of strong, absolutist monarchs in the early modern period as precisely a dynamic whereby the poor and emerging middle class decided to align themselves with a push towards dictatorial power so as to have someone who could protect them from recalcitrant elites. I think you can see something very similar in the West right now, especially as legislatures have largely become too dysfunctional to govern, and power is transfered to the executive.

But the point here is that this sort of problem, positive feedback loops that destroy the system's equilibrium, are part of liberalism itself.

The massive bureaucratic state arises because many people, like all children, don’t want to be responsible for their own livelihoods and decisions. We shoot each other when in a debate, and then do not come together to rebuke the shooter, for instance. We behave like spoiled brats. — Fire Ologist

Well, the anthropology undergirding liberalism says that all people are free just so long as they avoid grave misfortune or disability. It's just a power all adult humans attain. This is probably the real crucial difference. Epicetus, the great philosopher-slave, said that most masters were slaves. Plato, Saint Thomas, Saint Maximus, etc. thought that freedom was hard to win. It required cultivation, ascetic labors, and training. Self-governance, at the individual and social level requires virtue and virtue must be won. As Plotinus has it, we must carve ourselves as a sculptor chisels marble.

But education in modern liberal states often wholly avoids philosophy and ethics. It's main role is to train future "workers and consumers." Freedom is assumed as a default, and so freedom to consume (wealth) becomes the main focus.

On the view that self-governance requires virtue, which requires positive formation and cultivation, this can be nothing but disastrous. Likewise, it is hardly fair to inculcate people in vice, indeed to give them a positive education in vice (which I would say our system does) and then to say that only problem with the system is that the citizens (the elites as much as the masses) are childish and vice-addled.

The traditionalist critique of conservative liberalism is precisely that it makes people unfree. Consumerist culture and secularism are not liberatory. What is required for freedom is not merely "small government," or as progressive liberals would have it "redistribution such that all have wealth." The path out of the cave is rather arduous and requires a virtuous society.

I forgot another core part: the marketization anonyminitization of these moves also requires phenomenal state intervention since personal relationships, shame, the threat of losing access to the community (fatal in prior times), norms, etc. can no longer regulate such "transactions." Hence, a massive state must grow up to reduce the friction points between now atomized individuals, to issue licenses for all sorts of marginal professions because trust and reputation have been dramatically reduced, etc.

Hence, the champions of "small government" find themselves wed to the very process by which government must continually grow, such that it is now massively (on orders of magnitude) more invasive to the average person's life than at any prior point in history (when the norm was to hardly ever interact with anyone outside one's local officials).

For instance, transfer payments to older "workers" now dominate the budgets of modern states and have driven their wild deficits because relatives no longer take care of the aged and the default that people have been made to expect (and which our architecture promotes) is that seniors and young parents live in atomized consumer households (increasingly as single worker/consumer parents who shuttle the children between households as a normal).

An interesting facet here is that, because the procedural is generally elevated in the name of "fairness" (the liberal substitute for justice), pension benefits are normally entirely based on how much money you earned previously and no other factor. Whereas in prior epochs people might worry about their future of they alienated their family and community, money now becomes the overwhelming concern.

Cool, I am traveling the next two weeks so I'll probably start won't start it for a bit at any rate. IIRC its 212 propositions total, and normally just a paragraph for each of them. We'll see how far we get. Some are more bridge propositions, and probably don't admit of as much discussion. I'll try to figure out what would be a good translation to use that is up online, there are several.

This thread coming up again reminded me of a great quote from the Ladder of Divine Ascent (15.89)

What is this mystery in me? What is the meaning of this blending of body and soul? How am I constituted a friend and foe to myself? Tell me, tell me, my yoke-fellow, my nature, for I shall not ask anyone else in order to learn about you. How am I to remain unwounded by you? How can I avoid the danger of my nature? For I have already made a vow to Christ to wage war against you. How am I to overcome your tyranny? For I am resolved to be your master.

But, in context, the problem is not so much that "soul and body" are opposed in principle, but that they have become opposed in fallenness. It is precisely grace and deification (for which ascetic labors, prayer, and the mysteries are aids), perfected in the resurrection, that binds us back into a whole.

As Saint Paul puts it:

For we know that the Law is spiritual, but I am fleshly, sold into bondage to sin. For I do not understand what I am doing; for I am not practicing what I want to do, but I do the very thing I hate. However, if I do the very thing I do not want to do, I agree with the Law, that the Law is good. But now, no longer am I the one doing it, but sin that dwells in me. For I know that good does not dwell in me, that is, in my flesh; for the willing is present in me, but the doing of the good is not. For the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want. But if I do the very thing I do not want, I am no longer the one doing it, but sin that dwells in me.

I find then the principle that evil is present in me, the one who wants to do good. For I joyfully agree with the law of God in the inner person, but I see a different law in the parts of my body waging war against the law of my mind, and making me a prisoner of the law of sin, the law which is in my body’s parts. Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, on the one hand I myself with my mind am serving the law of God, but on the other, with my flesh the law of sin.

It's easy to get a dualist reading out of this, but I am not sure if it is that different from Plato's description of the "civil war in the soul" (Republic), although there is now a higher, theological understanding of the phenomenon. Yes, the mind (nous) is pitted against the flesh, but these are phenomenologically distinct as appetites, and so the point can be taken without any need to project a metaphysical distinction of two "separate substances." This seems unnecessary in the context of the Epistles. The "flesh" often seems to denote the particular state of fallen humanity, not the material body per se.

Indeed, sin is in a sense extrinsic here ("not I, but sin that dwells in me"); just as in Gensis 4:7 when God speaks to Cain: "And if you do not do well, sin is lurking at the door; and its desire is for you, but you must master it.”"

Deneen is pretty good on this, and I won't be able to sum it up as good as he does. He uses the Amish as a contrast point. The Amish don't use insurance. Prima facie, insurance does not necessarily require any special technological innovation that the Amish might eschew. However, they reject it because it takes the burden of caring for the unfortunate away from the community and displaces it to the anonymous market. It allows misfortune to shift from a communal problem to that of the atomized individual consumer, who must make wise consumption choices in balancing future risks against current consumption. It is bad for the community, and that is the standard they use to judge the adoption of new practices. Whereas, under capitalist competition, there is a sense that one is forced to adopt new technologies regardless of if one thinks they are beneficial, since to not do so would be to lose competitive advantage.

You can see the displacement of community and institutions by the market in all areas of everyday life. Where once people relied on friends and family to pick each other up at the airport, or drive each other to the bus station, now there is Uber. This relationship is now marketized and anonymized. So too, where once people made meals for the sick, bereaved, or those who had just had children, now there is a host of services that will deliver meals to them, or they can simply use Door Dash, etc. Likewise, childcare is increasingly anonymized and marketized. People use app-based systems to find babysitters, they hire "sleep consultants" to help them with cranky babies because relatives no longer live close enough to offer guidance. Romance is no different, where once there were community "matchmakers" (often centered in the church) now there are dating apps, etc.

One upshot of this is that it increases inequality. Those who can pay get all the benefits of community with none of the costs. Those who can't pay lose community, and get the insecurity of the gig work of providing its benefits to the wealthy to boot.

Obviously, something very similar happens with the balkanization of entertainment and prohibitions on public festivals, etc. so as not to impede the "flow of commerce." Something like the Liturgy of the Hours, once a staple of urban Christian life (even if many did not attend) or the Muslim daily prayers is pushed out by the demands of capitalist competition.

This is a goal of capitalism though. Everywhere becomes everywhere else, aided by the destruction of cultural barriers and the free flow of labor and goods across all borders. This standardization only helps growth, and it helps attain the liberal ideal of freedom by dislodging the individual from the "constriction" of tradition and culture. Indeed, we do a great deal in terms of education and urban planning to try to positively engineer people into becoming ever more the "atomized utility maximizer" that liberalism says they are. When foreign peoples fail to live up to this standard and start falsifying supposedly universal economic theories, the move is generally to declare their behaviors as "impediments to growth" that must be overcome.

For a last example, consider minimum lot size requirements and minimum parking requirements, which have helped turn America's suburbs and strip malls into wholly unwalkable isolated islands of private dwellings and private businesses. This is exactly the physical architecture you create if your goal is the atomized individual chooser that liberalism says man is (and that traditionalism generally says he isn't). It's also exactly the sort of physical architecture you'd expect for a country with a "loneliness epidemic." Whereas, if you go to the surviving old town centers of Europe, or a place like the Azore's, you find a sort of compact, if chaotic net with places of commerce tightly wrapped around a core common area and old church; a very different landscape.

Finally, just consider how much people must move to keep up with the capitalist economy. That alone destroys community. All the people I know who are committed careerists in the upper echelon of society have bounced around America's major urban centers in order to continue advancing (this also makes raising children a major liability). Then, on the opposite end, rural areas and rust belt towns, denuded of work by globalization, see all their young people fleeing to find work (which also destroys communities). Maybe it is worth the benefits, but conducive to "conserving tradition" it is not.

There is the old idea of "Chesterton's Fence:"

There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

I get the feeling that a lot of the modern reaction in favor of "tradition" is really just a reaction against the open-ended push towards an amorphously defined "progress." Often, "tradition" is not understood as any sort of particular intellectual tradition or philosophy or aesthetic, but it rather a sort of garb for identity politics. It is thus defined in terms of what it is against. You can see this in how heavily modern traditionalist movements tend to rely on aesthetics over substantial thought. And on the opposition to "progress" Chesterton has another point:

Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, “Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good—” At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their un-mediaeval practicality. But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.

This is not to say there aren't deep, coherent strains in appeals to "tradition." It's just that they are usually marginal, in part because most "traditions" are not (easily) compatible with mass politics and the sort of consumer culture in which ideas must now compete.

So you are proposing that this capacity is the only "ordering principle" which is valid - or the fullest expression of one anyway. — Colo Millz

Well, the ordering principle would be the rational appetites, i.e., the desire for what is really true and truly good (as opposed to merely appearing so, or a sort of "pragmatism" ordered to sensual or emotional desires). But it's important to note that these would have been considered essential to reason itself, such that this is really just "reason" leading as a principle. For instance, in Aquinas, orientation towards the Good and True—virtue—just is action in accordance with "right reason," even if it might also be considered a sort of participation in divine love (as it is more explicitly in Saint Maximus the Confessor).

That is, logos must lead, generally through thymos (spiritedness, the desire for honor, recognition, social goods, etc.), over epithumia (sensual desires re pain and pleasure). This sort of "logos narrative" can be seen in negative form in Homer (in the insufficiency of thymos in the Iliad) and the role of logos in ordering Odysseus towards the good of his oikos (household), such that he abandons the pleasures of epithumia (unending life and material comforts with a beautiful lover) even though all the demands of thymos have already been met. And it's stronger in the Aeneid, with Aeneas ordered to thymos and the historical telos of Rome (justice), but mature form comes out in Boethius, Dante, etc.

Whereas, modern literature reveals what undermines this "logos narrative." First, reason loses these ordering desires, becoming merely instrumental, but moreover "sealed off" from being (it is no longer participatory). This leads to a sort of straightjacket intellectualism where discursive human reason is never able to attain to direct contact with its object. You see this in characters like Hamlet ("nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so"), Ivan Karamazov, etc. And then, because of this first pathology, you get a voluntarist strain, best represented by Milton's Satan ("the mind is its own place, and in it self/can make a Heav'n of Hell or a Hell of Heav'n). Because being outside the self is unknowable, the will becomes its own object, and sheer self-assertion the purest freedom. A Brave New World is a good societal view of the first issue, because it is a hyper-rational society that can see no good outside the immediacy of sensual pleasure, while 1984 is a great example of the sheer worship of power.

I mean I know the philosophical definition, it is a non-discursive insight into truth, a kind of intellectual "seeing".

It's just so unfamiliar to me, living in an Enlightenment environment that I need to picture what it even could be as a human capacity. — Colo Millz

Yes, and it's very hard to escape the caricatures of it as "you just know," a sort of sheer groundless assertion. Yet that is definitely not what Plato is getting at, nor are the Patristics or Scholastics generally fideists or sentimentalists. That's why I think the easiest way to track down this "lost notion" is through the role of the rational appetites in someone like Plato.

I like how I Robert M. Wallace frames this in more accessible modern terms. The relevant "higher experience" here isn't some sort of rare "peak experience," but rather something open to all. This is supported by phenomenological and psychological exploration that secures the metaphysical grounding. Yet, in the older tradition, one could also be more or less unified in the way described, and more or less attuned to and faithful to "what is higher in oneself," and so the measure of wisdom and virtue is that saint or sage, not the "dispassioned, properly skeptical (not "enthusiastic") salon-going everyman of the enlightenment" (or the ironical cynic of the postmodern moment).

The limits of "discursive" reasoning after Kant are so absolute for someone like me, I have a hard time imagining there can be some other capacity which is non-discursive, or that that kind of insight can have any validity at all. — Colo Millz

Yes, but it is worth considering how Kant and Hume secure the claim that human reason is wholly discursive. Afterall, their claims run counter to the great sages of both East and West. What sort of discursive argument or empirical observation can justify such a move? It's hard for me to imagine what the answer could be.

The common critique is that none does in their work. Hume just asserts that it is so in the first two books of the Treaties and then follows out the implications of this from there. Indeed, according to his own epistemology, Hume cannot possibly know "how the mind works" in the ways he claims to. Likewise, Kant simply assumes that human reason is discursive by definition.

To be sure, Enlightenment thinkers can appeal to introspection. The problem is that this is exactly what all the past thinkers do as well (and they both make transcendental arguments, e.g. Parmenides "the same is for thinking as for being," Plotinus, etc.). For instance, Plato is careful to "guide us through" a sort of form of thinking, rather than asserting his position, and in this he is arguably less dogmatic.

To my mind, it's obvious that no reasoning process can be wholly discursive. One must start with something. The Enlightenment move is to try to make such intuitions "obvious to all" but I am not sure if this is successful, in part because what is "obvious to all" seems to be historically conditioned by traditions themselves (e.g., Hume gets away with his assumptions because they are already popular). Whereas, the total abandonment of any intuition, what you see in more post-modern assertions of "pragmatism all the way down" (i.e., even math and logic are ultimately just games chosen based upon usefulness) doesn't actually remove claims to intuition, so much as it absolutize them by making "usefulness" a sort of unanalyzable metaphysical primitive.

Anyhow, while the argument was originally that noesis must be forsaken because different traditions (say, Hindu and Catholic) couldn't agree, then sheer discursive reason has proven no better in this respect. Liberalism, fascism, Marxism, etc. have been no less violent in asserting themselves, and no better at agreeing. Marxism is a great example because it now seems obviously historically contingent, and yet for so many, until relatively recently, its truths were simply what dispassioned pure reason and the data of history inevitably led one to believe (and yet now we tend to see it as the semi-religion it was for many practitioners).




You're too kind. I don't really know Russian culture that well, I just have some Russian authors and thinkers I quite like. To be honest, while Dostoevsky frames things in unique terms appropriate to the "crises of modernity," I think a lot of the "solution" he slowly and painfully works out can be found in a heritage that is common to Eastern and Western Europe, as well as the Near East and North Africa. Unfortunately, I think this set of ideas ("tradition" would be a fair label) has largely been overshadowed. So, it isn't a uniquely Russian problem to have lost touch with it. It's true in Catholicism too for example, despite a decades long movement to renew interest in the Patristics and the East and West's shared heritage which has been championed by successive popes (I think it was Pope Benedict who called the East and West the "two lungs" of the Faith).

I suppose there are lots of reasons for this. Charles Taylor's stuff about closed world systems probably gets at the intellectual side, but I also think it is also very hard for a heritage that is so contemplative (the Pagan parts and those from Judaism and Islam too) to reach people in our fast-paced and stimulus saturated world. There is a sort of positive feedback loop here too. These ideas tend to be missing from popular media (novels, movies, video games, music, etc.), whereas ideas that were originally self-conscious inversions of the old forms do have a strong presence in popular culture. There are counter-examples like the Chronicles of Narnia and the Lord of the Rings, they are just vastly outnumbered.

I am in some doubt if any such "ordering principle" has yet been discovered by Enlightenment thought. — Colo Millz

For sure. I don't see how it ever could be. Enlightenment thought is in part defined by its blanket denial of noesis/intellectus, or the role of any sort of "contemplative knowledge" in valid epistemology. Empiricism is particularly robust in its axiomatic denial here (e.g., Hume just asserts it as a given in the opening books of the Treaties, even though his own epistemology forbids his knowing that this is "how the mind works," and Kant makes human reason discursive through sheer definition).

I got into this comparative difference for our essay competition recently: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/15990/tpf-essay-dante-and-the-deflation-of-reason/p1 (it might be easier to read the short or long version with the links).

As you are proposing, perhaps Christ really is the only valid such "ordering principle", as it was for Dostoyevsky. — Colo Millz

Valid, no. For even on the view that Christ is the fullness of revelation, this does not mean that there is no revelation elsewhere. As Saint Paul says in the Epistle to the Romans (1:20), the signs of the divine are everywhere—"written on the Book of Nature" as it would later be put.

Since Christ is the Logos, all reason is a participation in Christ, and yet not all reason recognizes this. Indeed, this must be revealed historically, and illuminated through faith for most Christian thinkers. The perennialists often go too far in flattening different traditions to make them into a single unified philosophy, and so produce strange fictions like the "Buddhist" or "Gnostic" Meister Eckhart or Eriugena, but they do get at something quite deep and apparent in the confluences across the world's great wisdom traditions. Here, it is Western modernity that stands out as an outlier, in that varieties of virtue ethics dominated across the East and West, and an ultimate metaphysical grounding of the Good in a sort of knowledge that becomes self-knowledge is a common factor. Yet even the Epicureans, who come closest to the dominant modern metaphysics, do not face the issue of the modern irreducible plurality of goods that forces ethics to transform from primarily a dialectic of higher versus lower desires (or appearances versus reality) into one of "the self-interested subject versus the society" (a dialectic of "goods which diminish when shared" and so one of irreducible competition). This is because they don't face the same sorts of epistemic limitations that make any questions of value or metaphysics maximally distal uncertain (or even a matter of mere taste).

Charles Taylor is pretty good on the epistemic inversion that drives the problem here.

I think the Good as a unifying principle for ethics and politics can be found in many places, although in more or less full development. Boethius, for instance, relies solely on philosophy in the Consolation, and I think he gets us quite far. Virgil, a symbol of human reason and Pagan learning, also gets Dante to a sort of finite utopia in the Comedy.

In the past, I've tried to look at how a recognition of this in Aristotle could help to inform modern empiricist attempts to "ground ethics," such as Sam Harris project. However, I think Plato's psychological outline is probably the most accessible. There is, to my mind, a fairly obvious sense in which, in order to consistently seek virtue (at the individual or political level), we must establish "the rule of the rational part of the soul," such that our desire for Truth and Goodness comes to rule over and reshape our "lower" desires. Otherwise, our pursuit of virtue will always be accidental, only occuring when truth and goodness just so happen to line up with our "lower desires." There is a sense in which virtue is a prerequisite for freedom and one must be "free to choose the good" in order to choose it. The Enlightenment move to define freedom in terms of power/potency instead of actuality essentially inverts this however.