I thought of saying something about the "terminal malfunction of another moist robot," but I was concerned it would be mean spirited as well. But this is how Dan himself talked about his own mortality, and he seemed to think there was a benefit in accepting this view. So there is a bit incongruity here that I think says something about that approach to thinking of ourselves.



It might be useful to clarify. Physics might be seen as generally tending towards a sort of ontological reductionism. Grand unification's goal is to reduce the number of ontological entities down, ideally to just one. However, if this is ever successful, it will essentially mean abandoning the substance metaphysics in which methodological reductionism (all things must be explained in terms of their smallest parts) makes sense. If you just have one entity, then process does all the explanatory lifting.

Grand unification, as it is often posed, would be an attempt to explain everything in terms of properties of the whole of the universe, and so it runs counter to methodological reductionism. As Max Tegmark puts it, "everything can fit on a T-shirt." This is the opposite of smallism, the idea that all facts about larger things are fully explainable in terms of facts about smaller constituent parts, where the smallest things are said to be most "fundemental." It doesn't go along with the idea that "what things are" is equivalent to "all the building blocks that make them up." The "building blocks," instead are only definable in terms of the whole.

You might also consider how Tegmark and other ontic structural realists virtually always posit the entire universe as a single mathematical object, rather than a collection of mathematical objects.

Now, within physics, there also seems to be a slightly less popular, but still quite visible trend of pushing back on theory reductionism (new theories can explain higher-level phenomena in ever more "basic" terms).

Paul Davies presents a "proof" based on some principles in information theory, that tries to show that, if the universe is computable (and there are decent reasons to think it is), the complexity of life requires some sort of "strong emergence." But "strong emergence," might even be a bit of a misnomer here. You only need "strong emergence," in an ontology where things' properties inhere in their "building blocks." In most of its forms, pancomputationalism is essentially a process metaphysics where "more is different," an pancomputationalism seems extremely popular as an idea in physics. Wheeler's "it from bit," in most formats, particularly those with the "participatory universe," also don't go along with a broad theory reductionism, at least not one that would tend to define itself in terms of methodological reductionism (smallism).

What I'd suggest though is that smallism often tends to get packaged/smuggled into theory reductionism. But without smallism, theory reductionism just amounts to looking for "fundementality," with no obvious reason to preference parts or wholes. Defining "fundementality," is itself challenging, but leaving that aside, a lot of the problems that seem to be inherit in theory reductionism often turn out to be related to smallism.

Teleology is sort of at the heart of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis debate. It is far from being the only issue, but opponents of EES also often roll out "charges" of teleology (or the door being opened to teleology) as reason enough for dismissing the paradigm. Philosophical issues are not the only thing at stake but they show up front and center in many response articles. If minds, instead of mindless genes, might play some role in selection, then, so the reasoning goes, the "firewall" between the world of nature and the world of mind will be destroyed. This is often taken to be ipso facto bad.

I am not sure if this is even a warranted judgement. Barring epiphenomenalism, which comes with a host of explanatory and epistemic problems, it seems fairly obvious that organisms' minds and intentionality would play a role in their survival and reproduction. We rely so heavily on genes because it's easy to get information on them. But this is like looking for the keys under the street light because that's where you can see. Prima facie, if we actually had as good a way to fully catalog the phenotypes in some population, phenotype would be a better predictor of selection since it contains the meaningful variance in genotype + all sorts of additional relevant information. And if we could somehow catalog behavior too, this would be even more predictive. But behavior clearly has something to do with intentionality in animals.

It's clearly possible for mind to control selection, as simply looking at domestic livestock will tell you. Barring man being somehow unnatural or supernatural, human selective breeding of plants and animals represent an instance in nature of intentionality clearly interacting with selection. IMO, it certainly seems plausible that such interactions would occur on a sliding scale, rather than being a binary where man is the origin point of some fully sui generis difference in how selection works.

Inheritance Systems and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (2020) is a good introduction on EES. More broadly, teleology as "function" remains a fairly hot area in biology/the philosophy of biology. You can find all sorts of discussions on this issue. The Oxford Very Short Introduction to Philosophy of Biology has a decent overview (the Routledge handbook is very technical by contrast IIRC.)

I find it useful to zoom out on this issue to the physical sciences. Certain types of teleological explanation in physics and chemistry are ubiquitous in pedagogy and they tend to go along with "top-down" explanations, or those invoking a sort of "bigism" (i.e. constituent parts are definable/explainable only in terms of larger wholes / global principles). There has been a lot written on this. I found https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11191-022-00358-8 to be a helpful article.

I am of the opinion that the heavy preferencing of reductionism in biology and particularly in neuroscience comes from the dearth of good "top down" explanations of phenomena. There is no good theory of conciousness, so of course the field looks to what is better understood to explain things. Whereas, it seems like reductionism is far less popular in the physical sciences, and this makes sense given they have very many good "top-down," explanations and because unifications—the explanation of disparate phenomena in terms of more general principles— seem to have been far more common over the last century than reductions. You can even see this in the goals of the fields. In physics, the goal is "grand unification," whereas in neuroscience the goal itself is generally seen as involving some sort of reduction. The idea of emergence is particularly hard to grapple with if you only understand parts relatively well, whereas if you understand the behavior of the whole better than the parts (certainly true in chemistry), the idea of emergence is not so unsettling.

Anyhow, I think this ties back into to existentialism in a few ways. For man to be the sui generis origin point of all meaning we need that "firewall," in place. Reductionism, while not required, offers a bit of a bonus in making the world absurd, which allows for overcoming absurdity. What I find interesting though is how vigorously such a firewall is defended given it seems to clash with naturalism. IMO, the fact that we experience meaning and value entails that nature does produce meaning and value, provided man isn't supernatural in some way.

I think nihilism is endemic in today's culture...

It's also held as a dogmatic position itself, which you point out. In existentialism, it's generally held out as freeing people from a "tyranny of ideas," but it is itself something that be dogmatically enforced. E.g. the largest controversy ongoing in biology seems to largely center around concerns that "teleology" or something like it, cannot be allowed to gain a foothold — and telology is considered a non-starter for largely philosophical reasons.

I would say a blend of existentialism and scientism is the dominant religion of the academy today, and it certainly tries to defend itself in the same way the Church tried to defend Aristotlean metaphysics during the early modern period. They might not be putting people on trial, but people were certainly threatened with having their careers ruined for dabbling in quantum foundations through the 1990s, largely because such work challenged the dominant "anti-metaphysical" paradigm, which was considered to be "anti-scientific."

Positivist definitions of objectivity and in-itselfness are held out as the gold standard of existence, of thing's being not "mere illusion." But then evidence that this definition of objectivity is broken is rolled out as somehow being definitive on questions of meaning, rather than simply showing that the definition is flawed.

But the view that "freedom from ideas" itself enhances freedom assumes a lot. In general, we don't think of people blundering around through ignorance as a model of freedom. Yet, if knowledge of "what the world is," actually enhances our freedom, rather than limiting it, (and the huge number of things we are "free to do" thanks to the development of arts and sciences suggests this is the case) then Derrida and Foucault's idea that avoiding ontology is a way to become "freer" is simply misguided. Likewise, if in an important sense it is true that we "discover" ontology and metaphysical truths more than we "create" them, then Deleuze's point about creativity doesn't end up making a whole lot of sense. The person who achieves freedom from reality is only free until reality comes crashing back into their life, and the person who thinks they are creating when they are only creating their own delusions is in a sad state. Positions seemingly born of skepticism often tend to have to assume that quite a lot is true.

Freedom from what?

For Hegel, it's more of a "freedom to..." In a great deal of modern philosophy, freedom is thought of in terms of potentiality. This is freedom as the ability to "choose between." The potential to "do anything."

But Hegel is far more in line with the ancient/medieval tradition, which sees freedom primarily in terms of actuality—the ability to actualize what one sees as good (and, crucially, to know what is truly good). The ability to choose, potency, is certainly a factor in this conception of freedom, but the perfection of freedom lies in actualization.

So, if I think it would be good to shovel my elderly neighbors walkway, but I instead give in to my desire to be warm and watch TV, there is a sense in which I am not totally free. I am like St. Paul in Romans 7, at war with myself, unable to actualize what I truly think is best. Likewise, when I act in ignorance, I am in a way constrained.

I for one, would rather have a sense of duty than freedom.

Hegel doesn't think these two are in contradiction. Duty is essential to freedom because freedom has a social element. Man is the "political animal." By nature, we want to live in communities. Living in communities also increased our freedom, e.g. we don't have to spend all our time finding food because people specialize in agriculture; we can "learn how to do," all sorts of things because people can teach us, etc. Knowledge and arts, which are developed as a social project, enhance our causal powers, and so our freedom.

But people can also act as a constriction on each other's freedom. How is this overcome? Through identification with the other and with one's duties. For instance, I don't want to get up in the middle of the night to change diapers. However, I want to "be a good father and a good husband," and this entails certain duties. Thus, I identify with my obligations, and am happy to do them, even if they aren't pleasant. Likewise, the ER doctor doesn't always like staying up long hours, but they identify with their role and so desire it at a higher level. But one isn't free to "become a good doctor," or "become a good fire fighter," without being free to take on certain obligations. Duty then, is a perfection of freedom in actualization.

But then liberty doesn't have to be "curbed by morals." Liberty is living according to morals. Hence why the classical philosopher is normally saint-like, even before the rise of the Christian tradition (e.g. Appolonius, Prophyry's Pythagoras, Socrates, etc.) Whereas in the modern context, the saint is more likely to be seen as in some way "tyrannized by values," rather than the highest actualization of freedom.

You haven't met my wife. She buys cars based on the colour. Good is something she can't even conceptualise when it comes to cars.

Ha, well people certainly can lack a well developed sense of practical reasoning concerning different arts, etc. However, it's certainly not the case that practical reason is not present at all. Without any sense of what constitutes a good choice, there is absolutely no reason to choose one thing over any other.

So, I would imagine that your wife would still not pick a car that doesn't start, one that is wrecked, or one where the mechanic says, "only problem with this one is that it doesn't have brakes, so it can go, but it can't stop." Likewise, she isn't going to buy a toy car if she needs a car, because it's clear that the tiny toy car cannot fulfill the telos of a car. It is not good as a means of transportation.

I think Aristotle may not be right about this.

Right, but that's not really the question. The question is if Aristotle, who would want to remain ignorant of it?

I am skeptical of the notion that people are completely indifferent to the status of their own intellect, such that they can honestly I say things like: "I hope my core beliefs are fundamentally flawed and that I blunder through my life in ignorance. I also sincerely hope that I will never know what will lead me to happiness, but rather I wish to remain ignorant of this. I hope my intellect is profoundly stunted such that I really never understand what is going on around me."

Well only subject to some criteria of value.

If the Good is just "I prefer," then we determine the value, no? But if we've made ourselves miserable, then we clearly haven't chosen well. What constitutes a good decision seems particularly apparent in the case where the Good is just "whatever has made me feel good." Yet it's also clear that certain virtues would still play a role in the ability to "make good choices," for oneself vis-á-vis this fully relativized good.

“The study of why our moral sense and cultural moral norms exist".

Interestingly, for Hegel, this historical question is central the ethics proper. Both what we "have done," and what we "ought to do," are ultimately driven by reason's propelling humanity towards the accomplishment of human freedom.

Begging the question is when you assume your conclusion. E.g., something like: "our perception of objects is indirect because we don't perceive things directly."

I am saying the virtues are relatively objective in many contexts because virtually any adult member of the culture can point to them, allowing that there will be more difficult borderline cases. This is less true today in the West due to multiculturalism and the adoption of post-modernism, but it's still fairly true. No one watches a Disney movie and is confused about who the villain is for instance.

The concept 'harm' seems to only pick out that which is subjectively held to be the case in the real world.

On the one hand, you could say this about every fact, since all facts are known through the frame of consciousness. On the other, that taking fish out of water or running over turtles in a car harms them is about as obvious of a fact as you can get in the life sciences.

So, i say it's implausible to suggest that harm has an objective meaning, other than from a subjective pov (i.e experiences, for me, will either meet, or not meet my internal benchmark for having received harm).

I'm really not sure how you're using the term "objective," here. It seems like we can say, in quite objective terms, that the victim of an aggravated assault has been harmed, even if they can't wake up from their coma to give us their subjective take here. When juries are selected for homicide cases, none of the jury members feel the need to ask the judge, "but are we sure any harm has occured? We'd really need to ask the victim to have any idea."

The problem is that I had to replace "quality" with "virtue". Using quality originally, there will be qualities that are completely up to the aesthetic preferences of someone:

That makes more sense. Although, consider the examples above. It still seems like harm is fairly obvious in many cases, and these will also tend to be the more important cases (e.g., offending someone with a joke versus setting their home on fire).

The fact that the definition of something no longer depends only on outside objects that may be referenced should be enough to say something is not objective.

I'm not sure how this definition is supposed to work. For instance, in chess, the thing being referenced is the game itself, but the rules of chess are objective. How a word is spelled correctly is also an objective fact, but it's the language that is referred to for this.

A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test

It's worth noting that this problem doesn't seem limited to practical judgement (good/bad), but applies as readily to aesthetic judgement (beautiful/ugly) and theoretical judgement (true/false). For instance, we might allow Descartes' his claim in the Meditations, that his experience warrants a belief in the existence of his own experiences. But what about the "evil genius" who controls all of Descartes' perceptions and intuitions—who essentially pilots his consciousness like a remote control car? Can we ever completely rule out the evil genius?

Perhaps the universe was just created an instant ago with all our memories? Perhaps all the world's leaders are reptiles from another planet disguised as human beings? Etc.

Likewise , it seems we can always ask of things, "but is it really beautiful?" Or "why is it beautiful?"

The open endedness of reason then, seems endemic. Even when faced with syllogisms we can simply question our inference rules.

What is demonstrated in the quote above is the way in which any moral law is based on values and interconnected with power structures. It leads to the idea of the way in which moral views are connected to power structures and interests, even to the point of being ideologies.

Again, I think the same thing can be said of theoretical judgements and aesthetic judgements. Scientific paradigms don't sit outside power structures or historical currents either.

This is an important point. However, it seems it is often taken too far, such that all judgements becomes reduced to nothing but power structures and historical currents.

Certainly what is considered a virtue is filtered through different contexts, but there are also threads that seem to run through almost all contexts.

But something doesn't need to apply in every context to be "objective." There are many variants of chess, but what constitutes a legal move in a given chess tournament is still objective. Likewise, in Homer and Hesiod's world, what constitutes virtue is quite objective.

Of course, you're correct that what constitutes harm is, to at least some degree, bound up in the virtues, and the virtues are bound up in a given context, but I'm not sure how this leads to their not being at all objective.

If I raise my child to be a craven, licentious, covetous, and vicious glutton there is a sense in which people in my community can point to what I've done and talk about a "harmful upbringing," without having much difficulty agreeing with one another.

This kind of frame seems circular.

How so? Even if the human good is just defined by personal preference, it is clear that people can make choices that they themselves regret. Hence, people say things like "I have ruined my life," or complain that "my life has become meaningless to me."

It's also clear that "what is good," is generally not obvious. People often make choices that, upon later analysis, they decide were bad. "If I only knew then what I know now," etc. And people often disagree about what the Good consists in.

In this case, certain meta-virtues seem essential, in that people will need both the epistemic virtues required to investigate what the Good is and the self-control to be able to make themselves act on that knowledge.

The nihilist might say, "but there is no Good, so any search is doomed." However, it's hard to see how they can know this from the outset. The Good—like truth, freedom, conciousness, and beauty—has been hard to decisively pin down—to give "a philosophically adequate explanation of," (at least based on some standards.) But that hardly means it can be eliminated. No on buys a car without any consideration of if it is a "good car." The same is true with all sorts of considerations. It is quite impossible to live one's life without reference to practical reason. The nihilist can't leave practical judgement behind, they still live their life according to it. So, it seems strange that they'd not want to investigate it at all.

Think about it this way: people don't knowingly want to believe falsehoods. People are often upset with what the truth reveals itself to be. They might even prefer to not know the details of certain specific truths. However, we don't want to be fundamentally deluded about the basics of being itself, merely blundering through life. If Aristotle is correct, and there is an identifiable purpose to human life that can effectively guide us to happiness and flourishing, who would want to remain ignorant of this fact? It seems like everyone would want to know it. But then certain virtues are required for exploring this question effectively.

Likewise, if the Good reduces to personal preference, it is still true that we can make better or worse choices relative to this deflated Good. And our ability to make better choices still seems predicated on knowledge about the world and ourselves and the exercise of self-control, so certain meta-virtues still show up as beneficial.

Perhaps, but I'm not certain if this is true or how common it is for anyone to transcend their beliefs and desires, regardless of passions.

It seems ubiquitous. People are attached to their opinions because they are their opinions. We have a desire to be right and to be seen as being right (i.e., as responsible agents of truth). So if you ever work on fixing a car, plumbing, electrical, etc. with someone else, you will invariably run into disagreements about what is broken, and people tend to defend their own diagnoses, and this is a source of many arguments. But when one party definitively shows, "hey, look, this is disconnected, that's why it won't start," it's not at all uncommon for the other party to say, even if grudgingly, "oh, you're right, I was wrong."

The same sort of thing shows up and a fact is looked up, e.g., "who won the World Series in 2004." It's a trivial example, but a common one. Faced with a truth that cuts against current belief and desire the person is forced to change in conformity with the truth, to go beyond current belief and desire.

Is it not the case that humans find results emotionally satisfying? One reason people embrace scientism might be the notion that only science, with continual demonstration of its effectiveness, can provide us with reliable knowledge about reality. You can see how emotionally satisfying this might be.

Sure. "All men by nature desire to know." But the contention wasn't "emotion is never involved in science, mathematics, etc.," it was against the claim that reason reveals itself to be "nothing but," emotion, i.e., that rational decisionmaking occurs "rarely if ever."

But I am not sure how you plausibly explain the development of the natural philosophy into the modern scientific method or mathematical proofs being emotion "all the way down." It doesn't seem like any methodology for solving problems should be any better than any other in this case — all claims about methodology would reduce to emotional preferences.

I am fine with people engaging in discourse and making agreements about what they think society should do and what is best pragmatically in certain situations. But one mustn't mistake this for absolute truth. It's just an ongoing and evolving conversation and the source of morality therein lies within human society and its evolving beliefs and practices rather than in any external, objective or 'perfect' reality.

Isn't the "mustn't" there an ought statement? But wouldn't this just be an expression of emotion? Or something to the effect of "I am fine with people discussing things so long as it is frivolous. But no one can make meaningful decisions about how society works unless their position agrees with my view."

But this seems like an odd view to hold if you think all assertions of truth are just assertions of current preferences. If this were itself true, it seems quite impossible that people could ever be wrong about what is good, so what here is the "mustn't" about?

Anyhow, this is sort of the essence of bourgeois metaphysics. Everyone is entitled to their own beliefs so long as they are beliefs about things that make no real difference. But of course, "[questions of morality are] just an ongoing and evolving conversation and the source of morality therein lies within human society and its evolving beliefs and practices rather than in any external, objective or 'perfect' reality," is itself a truth claim, and it one that seems to be justifying an all encompassing view of what constitutes proper governance and the shape of human life.

I'll respond to the rest later, but it's worth pointing out that that MacIntyre's interest in Thomism, and his conversion to Catholicism, come after the publication of After Virtue. That is, the causal chain seems to be sort of the reverse; he becomes Catholic in part because he believes the ethical arguments, he doesn't make the arguments because he is Catholic.

MacIntyre was not a Christian for much of his long career. He was an agnostic Marxist and wrote in support of/to develop Marxism early on, largely from the perspective of analytical philosophy. You can see an interest in Christianity that predates his conversion, but it's filtered through Marxism. He's publishing largely on Hume, Marx, Hegel, and Marcuse, not Aristotle, Augustine, or Aquinas, who he turns to later. Indeed, a flaw in After Virtue, at least from my perspective, is that it fails to adequately account for how metaphysics and epistemology are essential to ethics in the classical/Christian tradition, and this seems to be because he embraces the ethics without having yet come around on the metaphysics.

After Virtue comes out in 1981 and is the fruit of his growing dissatisfaction with Marxism, which he has been publishing in favor of for about three decades at this point. To hear him tell it (and his story is backed up by the order of publication), the first thing that happens is he loses his faith in Marxism and begins to think that Nietzsche, Hume, and the other "masters of suspicion," really don't understand or have good arguments vis-á-vis pre-Enlightenment ethics. The interest in Aquinas seems to flow from interest in Aristotle, which makes sense in terms of Aquinas being the most famous Aristotlean. His religious conversion then seems to follow from the shift in philosophical beliefs, or at least being concurrent with it, rather than him writing After Virtue as a sort of apology for beliefs he has always held.

It's also pretty clear from some of the witty barbs that he has become even more disillusioned with analytic philosophy than with Marxism.

How would one demonstrate that virtue, in the context of such venerable system building, is an exception?

MacIntyre's theses are difficult to adequately sum up. It might be worth quoting his warning from the second edition:

It is important to note that I am not claiming that Aristotelian moral theory is able to exhibit its rational superiority in terms that would be acceptable to the protagonists of the dominant post-Enlightenment moral
philosophies, so that in theoretical contests in the arenas of modernity, Aristotelians might be able to defeat Kantians, utilitarians, and contractarians. Not only is this evidently not so, but in those same arenas Aristotelianism is bound to appear and does appear as just one more type
of moral theory, one whose protagonists have as much and as little hope of defeating their rivals as do utilitarians, Kantians, or contractarians.

The Enlightenment demand that ethics be explained in "objective terms," where "objective" has been redefined to be something like "without reference to social practice," (or even, "without reference to minds") is itself what is broken for MacIntyre. It's akin to asking "what are the differences between men and women sans enviornment." It doesn't make sense because humans cannot exist outside an enviornment. "Objectivity: A Very Short Introduction," is a really great, short work on these issues. Unfortunately , a great deal of analytic philosophy seems to focus on trying to fix this terminally defective vision of objectivity and its relation to truth, whereas some Continental philosophy sometimes seems to lapse into using it as a strawman to dismiss "all prior philosophy."

Aristotle was aware of the role of social context in shaping the human good. Indeed, one of the critiques MacIntyre has of Aristotle is that his ethics seems truncated in that it cannot apply outside the bounds of the polis, cutting slaves and barbarians off from a "common good." This is an issue resolved by later thinkers in the tradition.

However, while we can't say things about individuals' telos outside of any context, we might be able to say things about man's telos that hold for all contexts (or at least, all realistic/historical contexts.) MacIntyre suggests meta goods that one can observe vis-á-vis the "good life": "the good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man, and the virtues necessary for the seeking are those which will enable us to understand what more and what else the good life for man is.” The virtues are those qualities/habits that “achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving any such goods.”

And I'd argue that there appear to be good arguments for such meta virtues. For example, Plato's"being ruled over by the rational part of the soul," seems to contain a constellation of traits that are necessary for being self-determining and self-governing, for being a good learner, and for "living a good life." A person who is ruled over by appetites and passions cannot transcend their current beliefs and desires; their actions are determined by a mere part of themselves.

Even for the nihilist, the rule of reason seems important. It seems that "this is good," cannot simply be another way to say "I currently prefer this," since it's clear that we can often make choices that we agree were "bad for us." The Good seems to at least have to also involve "what we will prefer to have done in the future." But then there are "facts of the matter," related to what we will prefer to have done in the future, and determining and acting according to these facts requires the traits associated with Plato's "rule of reason." The philosopher who denies this is essentially saying that we can never be wrong about what is good for us. But if this is the case, Plato's critique of Protagoras in the Theatetus applies. If no one can ever be wrong, there is no point in having philosophers or teachers, engaging in discourse, or even thinking before we act.

But looking for "what is necessary for the 'good life' in all contexts," is already moving away from MacIntyre's more poignant criticism of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment era ethics. The more important question would seem to be: "in what context is the good life for man best achieved." This is sort of (in a vague way) like the difference between trying to find the optimal point on a social welfare function and trying to find the input conditions that produce the best possible social welfare function (i.e. finding the utility maximizing point on some single line versus figuring out which inputs create the lines with the highest peaks.)

I've generally suspected that most, if not all philosophy or theory, is rationalisation after emotion.

It's a consistent explanation for sure. By contrast, most moral nihilists are not epistemic nihilists. They want to deny that the judgements of practical reason (judging good versus bad) have any truth value (or that such judgements are always false). But then they also want to have it that the judgements of theoretical reason do have truth values. Indeed, they often use evidence to support their claims of nihilism, which presupposes some ability to distinguish truth from falsity. But you really can't have one coherently without the other.

But I think you will have a problem explaining how it is the natural philosophy eventually gave us penicillin, air planes, and cars. If all theory is just following emotions, why should the tools of reason appear to work so much better than simply doing what one prefers?

Is MacIntyre's advocacy of a coherent moral framework (essentially by way of Aristotle), not just an example of that which pleases him emotionally or aesthetically? It also seems to be an appeal to tradition.

In the classical tradition, part of what makes the Good good is precisely that it is emotionally and aesthetically pleasing, so it seems impossible that it could be an either/or. The virtuous man, by definition, enjoys virtuous action. For Plato, the philosopher has eros (erotic appetitive desire) and love (the attraction of the passions) for the Good. The higher part of the soul has reached down and oriented the "whole person," to the Good. If a theory of the good isn't beautiful and pleasing we should question it's legitimacy.

Anyhow, I find such "arguments from psychoanalysis" border on being their own category of fallacy. Someone having emotional reasons to want their position to be true in no way precludes their being correct. If the Celtics are up 126-89 with 30 seconds left in the game, my being a Celtics fan in no way undermines my judgement that they are going to win the game. You can generally think up reasons for why someone "wants x to be the case," for essentially every argument. E.g., "extreme relativism is appealing because it means there is no responsibility and we never have to feel guilty," etc. It seems to be a fact of human nature that people want to both know the truth and to be seen to be responsible "agents of truth," which in turn means there is virtually always an emotional reason to desire that what one is arguing for us true.

I have generally assumed that one can be a virtuous serial killer if one values excellence in a slightly different way to usual intersubjective custom. But is this difference an indication of flawed reasoning, or simply a different way of constructing values? What makes a value immutable?

Consider other things we construct; say an automobile. You can construct an automobile many different ways according to all sorts of different tastes. You might be able to construct an infinite number of different automobiles. Yet it remains true that there are very many ways to construct an automobile such that it fails to do the things that automobiles are supposed to do, fails to do them well, or simply fails to be an automobile at all.

It doesn't seem that value should have to be immutable to be objective, grounded in something outside emotion, or subject to rational understanding. From the classical view, it seems like what we generally term value has to relate to relative good. What would be immutable is the Good which mutable things participate in.

So I would want to ask, first, why "positive utilitarianism" is not partially correct (i.e. why consideration of the harm-complement is non-moral). Second, I would want to inquire into the relevant definition of harm.

I can think of one reason to preference the reduction of the negative over the maximization of some positive principle (e.g., pleasure for J.S. Mill).

Like I said earlier, the human good is bound up in normative good, which changes over varying historical contexts, even if it is not "arbitrary" or "unconnected to the world outside social practices." If we accept this, it seems somewhat obvious that most normative measure does not result in a measure where we can simply maximize some value as a means of "maximizing goodness." To take the Athenian Stranger's self-referential example from the Statesman, we don't maximize the good of a speech by maximizing (or minimizing) its length, but by making it "just right," for its purpose. A speech can certainly be "too long," or "too short," but identifying this on any sort of clear spectrum seems like it is going to miss something.

Minimizing harm seems to be less likely to fall into the "min/max" trap. We are inclined to think of disease, dysfunction, etc. as a variation from some stability point or harmony. We don't always think like this, but it seems sort of natural. Most basic human ailments are the result of a variance from some "golden mean." E.g., mania or depression are both bad for a person, a heart rate that is too high or too low are both bad, etc. If we wanted to look into the origins of this, I would say it partially lies in biology. Animals need to maintain homeostasis. We don't want to be "too hot" or "too cold," to eat "too much" or "too little," to have too many of some sort of blood cells or too few, etc.

However, when it comes to the acquisition of positive things, we often tend to look to maximize the good. For example, Mill wants to maximize pleasure (and we might consider here Plato's distinction of which pleasures are better than others in the Philibus or Aristotle's in Book X of the Ethics as counter examples). This makes a certain sense to me, because when it comes to the acquisition of external goods, food stores, money, etc., it is always nice to have more as a sort of "backup." More won't hurt, we can always just not use a resource we have "extra," of, or share it in exchange for some other good.

Research in economics tends to line up with this to some degree. People preference the threat of losing $1,000 over the potential of gaining $1,000. The idea here is that agents' utility functions are curved, such that losses bring you down the steeper part of the curve while gains are upwards, along a flatter part of the curve. Other experiments have brought out the difference between the fear of loss, variance from the current stability point, versus the desire to maximize gain

Of course, my point would be that neither minimization/maximization or looking for some variance from an ideal spot works for many types of normative measure. However, the variance model is likely to be "more right," more often. If we insist on trying to conceptualize the human good mathematically, I would insist on it being an n-dimensional object, with very many dimensions whose shape is determined in part by normative measure.

We might think of a cube here instead of a line, where each dimension is some factor, and maybe we are aiming for some middle point in the cube. Since the human good varies by historical context, we could suppose that the "shape of the human good," has a very high number of dimensions, and in fact, a shifting number of dimensions depending on which normative measures are relevant. These shapes won't be tidey and equilateral, meaning that "finding the center," is not only hard, but that, depending on the shape, the center could be very far from the "golden mean point," on some dimensions. That is, we can't get to the "right spot," on all the meaningful dimensions at once, depending on what the human good looks like in our context.

But, this doesn't doom us to unhappiness. It also seems that a person, and even moreso a culture, can change the shape of the human good relevant to them by changing their values and normative measure. So, part of "trying to get to an ideal society," would involve getting to a shape were being in "the right place," on some measures doesn't entail that you are "in a bad place," on others.

Have I contradicted myself with this geometric analogy? Absolutely. I don't think we can actually measure the human good in this way, even as a point in some n-dimensional space. But the analogy is useful in illustration how shifting personal and cultural norms change the landscape of solutions. The "shape" of the human good varies in this way, according to practices and historical events, but it isn't solely determined by these things. Human nature itself, and the grand gyre of history, plays an essential role in which shapes will allow for better solutions (i.e. being in "the right place" on one dimension doesn't entail being in the wrong place on others).

For example, current American cultures focus on status and wealth makes it such that it is difficult to balance the good of having regard from others and avoiding Aristotle's vice of grasping/acquisitiveness. We have made a vice into a virtue, and so the shape of the human good is such that finding a balance across different dimensions becomes difficult.

Glad you liked it!

Silghtly off-topic I suppose, but I've found these sorts of Aristotelian "human good" accounts of morality, which I take you to be espousing, to be persuasive recently so I would like to ask whether you have made some posts previously elaborating and maybe formalizing these views to any larger extent? If not, are there any resources you would recommend for seeking out these views - both their proponents and critics?

I'm not sure how familiar you are with the tradition. I've written some very general summaries I'll share below.

In terms of going deeper, Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue is one of the more influential works comparing the classical/medieval tradition and modern ethics. His thesis is that most modern moral discourse is not truly reasoned, but emotive and rationalized after the fact. That means that systems that appear to have rational principles are in fact voluntaristic frameworks disguised as rational. Misology is a big problem here. Reason is said not to apply to many different areas, and so reason loses its coherence and relation to the whole.

It can be a little dry and "gets into the weeds," at times, but overall, it is quite accessible. A big point of his is that Nietzche's critique of ethics, so popular in our times, seems spot on for Kant, Hume, etc. (Enlightenment ethics) but doesn't really touch the older tradition. I found myself mostly agreeing with this. Nietzsche tends to deal with strawman versions of Plato and other older thinkers (or more charitably, how those thinkers are seen popularly in his time) and I don't think he adequately addresses some of the big challenges they have for his philosophy, particularly the need for reflexive "inner" freedom, and the ways in which our polis is prior to our personal identity.

Another really good one is Robert M. Wallace's Philosophical Mysticism in Plato, Hegel, and the Present, which is a fairly short and accessible book that lays out the classical idea of freedom (grounding ethics) quite well. For the ancients and medievals, freedom is perfected in actuality. Whereas today, we tend to look at freedom more in terms of potentiality, the freedom to "choose between."

The ancients certainly saw choice as part of freedom. However, consider that no one would seem to want to knowingly choose what is bad for them. If someone knows something to be evil or worse, there is a sense in which they will always choose the better if they are able. Thus, freedom is perfected in the actuality to choose the Good, not in the mere potentiality to choose anything. A person who choses the worse/evil is in some way constrained, be it by being disordered (Plato's civil war within the soul), having defective reason, or being in some way ignorant of what is truly best.

The relation between knowledge and freedom is crucial for the ancients. Plotinus' use of the story of Oedipus in the Enneads is instructive here. Sophocles’ Oedipus is in many ways a model of freedom. He is powerful, a king, competent, and wise. Yet he ends up doing the very thing he has been seeking to avoid his entire life, killing his father, due to a truth that lies outside his understanding. Here, we might also consider Homer's Achilles. Achilles is considered praiseworthy because he chooses a glorious death rather than a long but inglorious life. Such a choice requires that Achillesknow his options. Were Achilles to simply blunder into his death, he would be much less a hero, more a pathetic victim of a fate that lied outside his understanding

Then, for a look at the metaphysical shift the undercut Aristotle, Joshua Hochschild's look at the rise of nominalism in late-medieval scholastic philosophy is good: https://www.academia.edu/36162636/What_s_Wrong_with_Ockham_Reassessing_the_Role_of_Nominalism_in_the_Dissolution_of_the_West

Finally, there are D.C. Schindler's two books comparing the classical and medieval tradition with modernity: Freedom from Reality and Retrieving Freedom. The first looks at modern notions of freedom and ethics, primarily using Locke as an exemplar, and then compares it to Plato and Aristotle. You could probably skip to the Plato and Aristotle chapters and still get a lot of value. The second traces the evolution of the tradition through Plotinus, St. Augustine, Boethius, St. Bernard, St. Bonaventure, and St. Aquinas, before looking at how it was supplanted. Schindler has really strong analysis, but at times gets a little "preachy," or seems to undervalue many of the good things about modernity that help enhance freedom. I think this might turn off some readers. Wallace's work as the benefit of being shorter and lacking this element, although it doesn't go as deep into the Aristotelian tradition.

Schindler is someone who has worked in Catholic philosophy his entire life, and so whether he means to or not he tends to often write for his particular audience. This doesn't detract from the good analysis, but it can be grating at times.

In terms of primary sources, Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy is fantastic and a good synthesis of Plato, Aristotle, Neoplatonism, and the Christian philosophical tradition. Aristotle's ethics is also quite accessible too if a bit dry. For Plato, I might put the Republic and Phaedrus up to. Maybe Symposium too. The Sophist/Statesman too, but those get much more "into the weeds."

I'll try to get to the other questions later. Here are my attempts at very briefly summarizing key distinctions in Aristotle, although they necessarily miss out on quite a lot. Ancient and medieval ethics tend to be unified to epistemology and metaphysics. Hence, it's hard to give an adequate exposition of the part without the whole. They would almost certainly best be classified as "objective" though, although ethics contains subjective and socially constructed elements for Plato and Aristotle for sure.

Aristotle defines the human good in terms of the Greek term "eudaimonia." This term has been famously difficult to translate, corresponding to some blend of the English terms "happiness," "flourishing," and "well-being." Given the difficulties in defining this term, it may be helpful to first investigate what eudaimonia is not.

In Book I of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that pleasure, honor, and virtue are not equivalent to eudaimonia. Rather, these three are subordinate means of achieving eudaimonia, in the same way that “bridle making… [is] subordinate to horsemanship.”1 They are “lower ends… pursued for the sake of the higher,” i.e., eudaimonia.2

Aristotle calls the life spent pursuing pleasure “completely slavish… a life for grazing animals.”3 Pleasure is a “good of the body,” while eudaimonia is a “good of the soul,” unique to man because it requires reason.4 Pleasure is temporary, while eudaimonia must be measured across a lifetime.”*5 While “a truly good… person… will bear the strokes of fortune suitably,” a hedonist will fall into misery if their fortunes change.6 Neither is eudaimonia equivalent to honor. Those who seek honor wish to be honored for being virtuous. Thus, “in their view… virtue is superior [to honor].”7 Virtue cannot be equivalent with eudaimonia either, for one may be virtuous, yet still “suffer the worst evils and misfortunes.”8

Having said what eudaimonia is not, let us now turn to what it is. Eudaimonia is a self-sufficient cause for action, admitting no ancillary considerations. “Honor, pleasure… and every virtue we certainly choose because of themselves… but we also choose them… [so that] we shall [achieve eudaimonia ] .”9 However, “we always choose [ eudaimonia] because of itself, never for the sake of something else.”10 Other candidates for "the human good," (e.g. virtue, pleasure, etc.) cannot be equivalent to eudaimonia if what is true of eudaimonia is not true of them.

For Aristotle, eudaimonia is “activity of the soul in accord with virtue.”11 It is the development of what is unique to man: reason. Excellence in reason allows man to make good choices and turn his desires towards good aims. Virtue is a “necessary condition for eudaimonia ,” while honor and pleasure may be “cooperative instruments” that aid eudaimonia, but they are not eudaimonia itself. 12 We praise honor and justice, which bring eudaimonia about, but instead celebrate eudaimonia , as it is the greatest good we hope to achieve.13

What sort of life then best fulfills man's unique telos? This would be the life of theôria or "contemplation."14 For it is the contemplation of truth that is "best," and "the pleasantest of the virtuous activities."15 Further, it is theôria that is most unique to man as the "rational animal," and thus most indicative of man's telos. Such a life is also preferable because it is reason that is the most "divine" characteristic of man. Pursuit of reason is what allows us "to make ourselves divine" "as far as we can," and "live in accordance with the best thing in us."16 That said, Aristotle allows that other forms of life can nevertheless result in eudaimonia, it will just not be the highest form of it. **

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*For Aristotle, happiness might even be judged beyond a lifetime, involving what happens to one’s descendants, i.e. Solon's pronouncement that we must "count no man happy until the end is known."

** In Book X, it seems we can see more of Plato's influence on Aristotle; this corresponds more with the Phaedo.

1 Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Book I, Chapter I § 4.
2 Ibid. Book I, Chapter I § 4
3 Ibid. Book I, Chapter V, § 3
4 Ibid. Book I, Chapter VII, § 2-3
5 Ibid. Book I, Chapter VII, § 5
6 Ibid. Book I, Chapter VII, § 5
7 Ibid. Book I, Chapter V, § 6
8 Ibid. Book I, Chapter VII, § 5
9 Ibid. Book I, Chapter VII, § 5
10 Ibid. Book I, Chapter IX, § 7
^11^Ibid. Book I, Chapter IX, § 7
^12^Ibid. Book I, Chapter IX, § 7
^13^Ibid. Book I, Chapter XII § 4
14 Ibid. Book X, Chapter 7 § 1
15 Ibid. Book X, Chapter 7 § 2
16 Ibid. Book X, Chapter 7 § 3
17 Ibid. Book X, Chapter 8 § 1


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Aristotle's arguement that the virtues are more similar to crafts than natural faculties (e.g. sight) hinges on how we come to possess the virtues. For Aristotle, the virtues are a type of habit. For instance, if we are generous, this means that we are in the habit of acting generously. Such habits can be ingrained in an individual through repeated action. Natural properties of objects can not be "trained" in this way. For example, Aristotle notes that it is not possible to train a rock into having the propensity to fall upwards simply by throwing it upwards repeatedly. Since nothing in nature can be trained to act against its nature, Aristotle concludes that the virtues are neither contrary to human nature, nor a product of it.

For Aristotle, one can become more brave by acting bravely in perilous situations and habituating oneself to overcoming fear. That is, we develop the virtue by practicing it. This is not the case for natural faculties. For example, we do not come to see or hear by often engaging in the acts of seeing or hearing. Rather, we see and hear by nature, and doing more seeing or hearing neither improves nor degrades either faculty.

By contrast, we do seem to learn the virtues in the same way we learn crafts. For example, a man learns to build houses by participating in the act of building houses in the same way that a man can learn to be prudent by regularly taking time to carefully assess situations before forming a judgement about them. Likewise, crafts can be taught, and it also seems possible to teach the virtues.

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Aristotle uses the concepts of the continent and incontinent person to develop a distinction in the ways people end up pursuing vices. Some people do not believe that their vices are immoral. Perhaps they were raised in a bad environment and have come to see cheating as a proper means to an end, or to see licentiousness and gluttony as natural routes to the "good life" of pleasure. These people do not perform their vices because they lack constraint, rather they do so because they have bad habits and believe engaging in vice to be proper behavior.

By contrast, the incontinent person knows their vices as vices. They will acknowledge that their sloth or gluttony is bad, and yet they are unable to exercise the self-control required to stop themselves from engaging in these vices. The incontinent person might even attempt to develop virtue, overcoming small temptations, and yet continually fail to overcome large ones - the triumph of appetite and passion over reason and virtue.

A continent person then, is one who is tempted by vice, but who acts in accordance with virtue and reason instead. They are not perfectly virtuous, for the person who is perfect in virtue enjoys being virtuous, but neither do they give in to vice. In the virtuous person, desire, reason, and action are in harmony, while in the continent person there is disharmony between desire on the one hand and reason and virtue on the other.

Aristotle notes that of these types, the incontinent person is the hardest to help. For the person raised in vice might reform if shown what is good, but the incontinent person already knows what is good and fails to do it.

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It's interesting to contrast Aristotle's view with that of modern thinkers who would have it that virtue lies precisely in following moral laws even when we don't desire to follow them. Afterall, where is the sacrifice or effort on our behalf if we are simply doing what we like?

I suppose the disagreement here probably lies in how virtue is defined. If virtue is those dispositions and skills needed to live a good life, then it would seem obvious that it is beneficial to enjoy doing what is good. However, if virtue is the ability to follow moral laws, then it seems like being able to override desire is more important than having right desires.

I tend to come down more with Aristotle. The good, meaningful life seems to entail freedom. One is freer if they do what they want than if they have to constantly wage war against themselves (e.g. St. Paul in Romans 7). I happened to come across a great line on this reading the Penguin Selected Works of Meister Eckhart last night: "[the just] person is free, and the closer they are to justice, the more they become freedom itself... For nothing created is free. As long as there is something above me which is not God, I am oppressed by it..." (German Sermon 3 on John 15:16)

But how would that amount to an ontological difference rather than just a different mode of consciousness?

I think people get to this in different ways, but I can think of a few examples. There is Sokolowski's "The Phenomenology of the Human Person," (excellent work blending Husserl, Aristotle, Aquinas, and modern science informed philosophy of perception). For Sokolowski, there is a very good reason (grounded in phenomenology, and perception) for positing that things have an "intelligibility." Intelligibilities are a potency in things. We do not actualize them simply by perceiving things (they are in Aristotlean second potentiality in perception). Words and other symbolic systems like mathematics are what actualize intelligibilities. An intelligibility might be thought of as "the sum total of true things that can be said of a thing."

We never fully grasp an intelligibility seen there are seemingly infinite contexts from which to approach any entity, but we can come to grasp them more or less. Grasping an intelligibility is in many ways a social project, something that occurs across the entire historical "human conversation," including the arts, sciences, etc.

We have good reason to believe in intelligibilities because it does not seem like they should spring up uncaused or be the sui generis results of a magical human power. We should believe in them particularly from a naturalist frame.

But then the grasp of thing's intelligibility involves understanding its species and genus (scholastic sense of the terms), its telos (at least for living things; the healthy adult versions of living beings are phenomenologicaly "present" to us even when observing the immature or diseases for ), and the universals involved with it. Animals may potential grasp intelligibilities in their own weak way (although Sokolowski denies this because for him language is essential for actualization), but they don't grasp essences and universals. But if these things have ontic reality, and there are good arguments that they do, than human beings, through being the "rational animal," very much live in a different world from animals. We have access to a higher ontic plane (in the sense of vertical reality one finds in Hegel and Plato, where what is more self-determining is in a way more real because it is not merely a bundle of effects of causes external to it).

In such a view, the relationship between knower and known is a very special relationship. It is the place where many of a things properties can be present at once, whereas in nature things only manifest a small number of their properties vis-á-vis their current context at any time. So things most "are what they are," in the mind of the knower, whose mind becomes like the things known.

The human attunement to universals makes it distinct then. Sokolowski doesn't look at the Transcendentals, but we could throw them in here too. For example, only the human mind seems to grasp the unity of being, the way in which the Many must also be One. This isn't just a graduation in experience of the world, but access to the depths of its ontic structure. Reason is ecstatic, transcedent, pushing people beyond current belief and desire — beyond themselves. Love, attuned to Beauty and Goodness, is like this too (will vs intellect). But reason seems to require words and syntax, and so, in the form that gives access to the Transcendentals, human reason is unique.

But the Transcendentals and universals are natural. They are just transcend finite nature in a way, a "yes, and..." E.g., Plotinus' notion of the Good as the first principle of nature, but also as transcending it.

I'm not sure what your definition of "objective," is here, but it seems like the objective should be a subset of number two. The objective is the view of things with biases removed, accounted for, or flattened out.

Objectivity cannot exist without subjectivity. For a world without any experiencing beings, talk about the "objective existence of things," becomes meaningless. Without the possibility of subjectivity, "objectivity" is a contentless term, seemingly applying equally to everything and nothing. "Objective," just becomes equivalent with "is," the term doesn't delineate any possible distinction.

There is, of course, a tendency to make "objective" a synonym for "without reference to mind," "noumenal," or even "in-itself, relating to nothing else." I don't think this is a helpful redefinition. If anything, it seems like a conflation, and it becomes particularly pernicious if combined with the idea that "objectivity approaches truth at the limit," or "the true view of things is the view from nowhere/anywhere."

Of course, it's true that a knowledge relationship cannot exist "without reference to a knower." But then it hardly seems like "without reference to a knower," should be the gold standard of knowledge. This is the incoherence at the center of positivism, whose ghost lingers on as a sort of voodoo strawman held aloft by post-modern thought as the foil that can be defeated to show all notions of objectivity and truth are relative or empty. But that the idea that "the truth of things is how they are conceived of without a mind," is simply broken doesn't really say much about truth and objectivity as a whole.

To give this some application: murder is wrong, means: after running around with the other sheep watching this one kill that one, and this one die and that one live on, and after living myself so I can judge this myself, I propose a rule that murder is wrong, that each of us equally enjoys life more than death, and each of us has no individual right to take another one’s life.

To reframe this to see if I am getting it right this would be something like: "I find all these murders unpleasant, you all do too. So let's not murder."

But then this seems to circle back to individuals' desires, or am I missing something?

What do we say to the sheep who says, "I personally enjoy the murders. Why should I follow this rule?" That is, what is the answer to the nihilists' question: "why is bumping bad?"

Is the answer "because that's what makes the most sheep happy?" But then why is this good? We could be like Nietzsche and denigrate the herd. Is the answer in human nature?

I guess an example for contrast might be helpful. Consider Plotinus. The Good is the first principle above intellect, the first principle responsible for (although transcending) being. A sunset's goodness and beauty are according to its participation in being, rather than anything related to individuals.

Or we could consider Aristotle. There is a human telos, but rather than it simply being the ground for our preferences, it is also defines the perfection/actuality of a human life. Actuality is better than potentiality, so the life of theoria is higher (more divine), a greater actualization of freedom and purpose. However, this would remain true even if we had a horrible society, maybe something like A Brave New World, where no one agrees with this claim, because it isn't grounded in the individual(s). That is, what the sheep are currently saying doesn't determine the good. It's possible we could have a bunch of very vice addled sheep after all.

By contrast, even the Kantian deontology seems to me to be grounded in the individual. The unconditional good is the good will of the individual, acting in accordance with rationality. There is an overlap with the earlier, dominant tradition in that there, good behavior is also in accord with reason, but there is a strange flip where it is no longer necessarily the case that being good is good for you. Indeed, you sort of end up in a place where you're most praiseworthy when you are doing things you hate out of a sense of duty, which IMO is an indication that we sheep have begun stumbling down the wrong path.

Violation! The fact that the stair has a bottom shows we are dealing with Hegel's "bad infinity."

Anyhow, Aristotle claims that we cannot have an actual infinity, only a potential one. However, Hegel famously rebuts this claim with the Essence chapter of the Greater Logic, a text that is infinitely dense and impenetrable.

I think it's a good analogy in some respects.

Two things worth pointing out:

1. That people differ in their opinions is as true for what are generally taken to be "is facts" as it is for "ought facts." For instance, you can find plenty of people who continue to argue that the Earth is not roughly spherical, but rather flat, or that its surface rests on the inside of a sphere with the Sun and Moon at its center. Similarly, if you spend any time on mathematics forums you will invariably come across people arguing that division by zero should be equal to infinity. We could also consider the endless Facebook debates about simple arithmetic with ambiguous notation and confusion over whether PEMDAS is supposed to work in the order of the acronym (multiplication before division), or if multiplication and division have equal precedence going left to right.

People often point to disagreement as evidence of the subjective nature of morality. However, if disagreement represents good evidence that morality is subjective then it seems we have good evidence that everything is subjective. My position would be that people can simply be wrong about things, and often are. This in no way entails that knowledge is impossible, just that disagreement may be common.

A similar issue comes up when the historical variability of morals is used as evidence of their subjectivity. If anything, scientific claims vary more through time than moral ones.

2. Consider why it is that everyone dislikes rancid food. It isn't just that rancid food is offensive to our tastes. Eating rotten food is a very good way to get yourself sick. From an evolutionary perspective, we can identify how our reaction to rancid food is a sort of defense mechanism to stop us from eating things that will harm us.

So there is a link here to human nature in two ways. First, in terms of the almost universal disgust people feel vis-á-vis rancid food, second because in a fairly obvious way rancid food can be "bad for us," making us ill.

The analogy works on two levels then. That certain acts seem almost universally morally offensive would seem to point to tastes grounded in human nature. These tastes aren't uncaused; there is a reason for them. That reason would seem to be tied to the human good.

Of course, a person might have a condition where rancid food simply isn't disgusting to them (psychopaths in the moral analogy). However, this doesn't negate the link to human nature. Such a person is going to be more likely to get food poisoning, resulting in harm to them. Likewise, psychopaths are far more likely to end up is prison or killed, neither of which is good for a person. The variance in their tastes seems to run counter to the human good; it is in some way defective, diseased.

People also sometimes eat disgusting tasting things because they see a higher good in it. I don't think anyone ever ate mescaline cactus and thought, "this is delicious." People might develop a taste for high proof whiskey, but I doubt anyone takes a sip of pure grain alcohol and says "yum, just the flavor I was hoping for." Rather, people consume these things because they are hoping to get some sort of higher good, and it is possible over time to acclimatize one's tastes to such things.

You can see a similar sort of thing happening with moral norms. Where the analysis goes wrong, IMO, is when this is taken to mean there can be no linkage to the human good. All too often in modern philosophy there is a tendency to think that if a relationship is dynamic and difficult to formalize it simply cannot exist or cannot be analyzed.

Ethics takes place in a social sphere defined by practices. You can't talk about "human nature in itself, cut off entirely from context." It's like asking "what are the differences between men and women simpliciter." People don't exist simpliciter. The differences exist in a dynamic range of contexts, but that doesn't mean there are no differences. Likewise, language exists in the context of social practices. That doesn't mean it doesn't "relate to how the world is," outside of social practices. We wouldn't have a word like "carcinisation" if multiple different lineages didn't develop the traits associated with crabs through convergent evolution. Carcinisation predates human language, and human language has a word for it because it exists.

But practically speaking, we live in herds and interact with other decision makers, and there are limited burgers, and we all agree that society, with its trading and divisions of labor, is beneficial

This is certainly how modern ethics has tended to frame things. I would argue though that this framing is essential to why it tends to collapse into emotivism. It's based on a sort of bourgeois metaphysics where self-interest and the individual lie at the center of the universe. Such a system is allergic to assertions of "Truth" with a capital T because it infringes on the individual's prerogative to determine what is true. But of course, such a position already has to assume certain things about truth and knowledge for it even to make sense that safeguarding the individual's right to "their truth," is something worthwhile or even possible.

We have to assume an objective, mind independent group of herding animals called “other persons with other minds” exists in order to construct some form of ethical line, like “stealing money is OK but stealing a child’s life through murder is NOT OK,” and we have to interact with the other herd members to bump into these lines and seek enforcement of these lines by saying “no, stop it” or “yes, do it.”

This is certainly the case. However, IMO we need to be careful about seeming to put such an ontological assumption prior to human nature (and thus practical reason). A person only has the words and understanding that are a prerequisite to expressing such an "assumption" because one is a member of the human species, the "rational/political animal."

Animals do not seem to question the ontic status of their enviornment. The drive to even consider such assumptions seems bound up in the fact that "all men by nature desire to know..." No one wants to have false beliefs. They do enter into a skeptical frame thinking "I sure hope I am wrong about what I come to believe." Skepticism itself assumes that it is worth doubting whatever pops into one's mind, that there is a value in knowing truth. But then this is essence (and the practical reason it includes) acting prior to the skeptical moment.

Despite the delusions of all people, morality is the only thing going on. Morality is objective and true. All acts are only of course moral acts in that they SHOULD be judged morally. There is no act, no substantive state, that is not merely a succession of choices amid free will. This universe is alive. It emerges life as a natural law. The seeds of life exist as choice down to the sub-atomic level. Choice is effectively the only act thing in the universe. States are all the consequential arrangements of matter and energy and we will say consciousness as well. Really though we could JUST say consciousness because matter and energy are both just forms of consciousness.

These and other seemingly absolute statements seem sort of at odds with your prior claims that no one can know anything and that any pretension to knowledge is a sort of delusion/vainglory, no?

That is incorrect.

All morals are forced to be hypothetical ought-judgments. We cannot know. So all beliefs are effectively hypotheses.

But I take it you don't actually know if what you've just. claimed is true or not. Is it only a hypothesis? Weren't you saying something about how people shouldn't speak/write in such a way that they seem certain about things, but instead should always piously acknowledge their ignorance. But then...

Consequentialism is a dangerous lie. Deontological morality is the only thing that makes any sense...

The good is objective.

Etc.

look like knowledge claims.

All thinking is incoherent.

You should have led with this.

Aside from the piety of declaring ignorance, you might want to consider not being so rude lol.

This is a good thread. I will just point out a few things.

First, an additional argument that might help out with these claims can be found in the part of the Summa Contra Gentiles in the section On The Human Good. There, St. Thomas points out that we must have some ends in order to explain action. If we have no ends, then we will not have any reason to act one way rather than another, nor any reason not to simply be passive. When people say acts have no moral valence, what they often imply if that they are done for no particular ends.

Not all ends are concious. We do not generally breathe because we have the end of staying conscious and comfortable in mind, but we can clearly infer this is the end of the activity.

His argument to a final end is perhaps a bit more shakey, but it is worth pointing out. If there is no final end, then it seems motion requires an infinite regress of ends. (It is too long here to really lay out in detail, IIRC this discussion is from chapter 25-30 to somewhere in the early 40s).

This of course conflicts with how teleology is generally seen today, e.g., in terms of constraints in physics and function in biology. But I think drawing a parallel is probably still possible.

Second:

A popular view would hold that acts exist on a moral spectrum, such as the following:

| Heroically virtuous | Mildly good | Neutral | Mildly bad | Heinous |

According to this objection the “neutral” acts are not moral acts.

There are a number of places where Plato talks about normative measure, most notably in the Statesman. In Plato's Statesman: A Philosophical Discussion, Michelle Barney has a really good article on this. The rub is that people, including Socrates in the earlier dialogues (particularly the Protagoras) often want to put normative measure on a scale of reference where there are clear rankings of "greater than" and "less then," akin to the number line or the ranking above.

The point Plato pulls out is that normative measure often doesn't work this way. In particular, he does this with a clever bit of self-reference by having the Eleatic Stranger ask if his speech on weaving has been "too long."

Well, how do we know when a speech, movie, play, etc. has been "too long?" It really depends on what the end of the speech, etc. is. Certainly, a speech can be too long, but it's not the sort of thing we can determine on a scale like a number line. Some speeches can be very long and still be "too short," depending on their topic.

But in the modern view, we seem to want to reduce everything to quantitative measure that can be placed on a scale like the number line, where we can point to "more is better," or "variance from this point is worse." It's clear that this isn't always the case in normative measure. Plato makes a similar point in the Phaedrus when he has Socrates discuss what would happen if he claimed to be a doctor because he had all sorts of medicines, but then has no clue "how much" he should give to a person.

Normative measure is filtered through practices, which are socially established, even if they relate to non-social phenomena. MacIntyre has a good section on how practices are established and how they define "internal goods," in After Virtue. For an example, being "a good chess player," is established by a social practice, although it is fairly objective. Someone who cheats to win chess pursues a good external to the practice, since you cannot "play a good game of chess," while cheating.

The point here is that I think part of what trips people up in ethics is the way in which the good is often filtered through practices that help us define our ends. These practices are socially constructed, but they are not arbitrary. They relate to "how the world is," prior to any practice existing and evolve according to things other than social practice. However, it seems impossible to reduce them to things outside social practices, and the human good is certainly quite bound up in practices and normative measure.

Practices relate to internal and external goods, and are situated within the pursuit of the higher human good. Without a "human good," it is impossible to explain how practices evolve. Practices make determining goodness difficult if we don't take account of them because they will seem arbitrary if we look at them in isolation, without their relevance to the human good. And they give us trouble because they are not easy to quantize into a model like the number line.

Hume famously denies this sort of good exists. However, I think he essentially just begs the question here. It isn't trivial question begging because he shows what follows from an attempt to reduce everything to the mathematical physics of his day, but it still assumes that oughts aren't observable in the way facts are. Obviously, for Aristotle, the human good is observable, and there are fact statements about (which entail ought statements.) This interacts with normative measure in an indirect way, in that Hume's view seems to end up denying normative measure if it isn't careful, even though it obviously exists. No one goes out to buy a car or house without any idea of what would make them
good in mind.

In the thread I had on bugs in computer games, instances where "canonical rules are 'wrong,'" the issue seems partly to lie in violations of multiple interelated levels of normative measure (e.g. what makes for coherent rules, what makes for a good game, etc.), as well as a violation of the human good (reducing pleasure and introducing frustration). When people have a hard time seeing how this relates to "goodness" overall, I'd argue that part of the problem is following the thread through multiple interlocking levels of practice, each with their own standards of normative good which are based on, but not reducible to, the human good.

There seems to be space in realist accounts for both what Husserl calls the "truth of correctness" (true/false) and a "truth of completeness" (awareness/ignorance). I think the intuition that there can be gradations of knowledge generally flows from an understanding of knowledge in terms of completeness and perfection.

Vis-á-vis completeness, a set of statements is more true if it truthfully describes more of what a thing is, and more false just in case it attributes false things to the subject of knowledge or precludes true things. It's possible to have descriptions that are more complete than others, but which also have more elements of falsity mixed in to them. These can still seem to represent "more knowledge" of a thing, a "better grasp on its intelligibility," than a description that is entirely accurate, but extremely sparse on detail (accuracy versus completeness). There is a sense in which, as completeness increases, accuracy becomes more difficult.

It's easy to draw comparisons to the idea of entropy here. As a description becomes more complete, there are fewer ways the world could be and still be wholly consistent with the description. The formalization of completeness might be something like a thing's Kolmogorov Complexity, the description that allows it to be uniquely specified (and we might add "constructed" to avoid problems in the philosophy of information akin to the Meno Paradox). This is finite, whereas there is an infinite number of true propositions that can be made in reference to any thing because we can list all the things that are not true or it, which appears to have no limit.

I also don't think you need bivalence for realism. It's more of a metaphysical question as to whether all statements about the future have truth values, or if potentially/actuality and potency/act are required for an accounting of the world.

The attempt to reduce truth and knowledge totally to propositions isn't intuitive. At the very least, it misses something psychologically intuitive.

I've tried using this example as a more intuitive way to summarize the "more is different of computation."

When you have a grain of table salt and you add more grains of table salt what do you get? More salt. Our terms don't change. And the intuition in a substance metaphysics where particles are ontologically basic is that the world sort of works like this. Yes, we can make many different kinds of things depending on how we combine our pieces, but all the properties of things can ultimately be traced to their physical constituents. In a universe where grains of salt are basic you might be able to make very many different salt structures, salt castles, salt railways, etc., but salt is always salt.

Computation does not seem to work this way. If I start with the input 1 and then add to my input, the prime() function is not going to output more of the same. 1,2, or 3 result in the same output, 1 (true for prime). If we add to our input again we get our first 0. Add more and you get 1,0,1,0,0,0 (5,6,7,8,9,10).


I am not sure if it is a good vehicle for the explanation though. Whenever I have seen explanations of how process deals with superveniance (superengraphment in process) and emergence the examples have been extremely complicated and technical, and I feel like this one might miss something in that you can ask the question "but doesn't it all reduce to dominoes, squares of Turing Machine Tape, etc." I guess the tricky move is in not seeing the substrate as ontologically basic, which is how we tend to think of it.

4. Cognitive Science
Cognitive scientists might argue that the self, while being a constructed narrative, is not necessarily an illusion but a functional entity. The "self-model" used by our brains helps in predicting actions and planning future activities, which is crucial for survival and social interaction.

This of course requires the epiphenomenalism is not true, and in turn that reductionism and causal closure are not true, in essence ruling out most popular formulations of physicalism. The self, being something that exists within phenomenal awareness can have absolutely no effect on behavior under causal closure. Likewise, we cannot eat sweets or have sex because these are pleasurable. Our actions must be wholly explained in terms of our physical constituents, whose actions are in turn wholly determined by physics. If things that are useful for survival and reproduction "feel good," this is merely accidental, having nothing to do with behavior or function.

And, as Jaegwon Kim seems to be able to demonstrate, if substance metaphysics accurately reflects reality, i.e., if thing's properties of things inhere in their material constitution, reductionism pretty much has to be true.

It seems that either way, at least one of our fundamental intuitions/assumptions is wrong. Either consciousness has absolutely nothing to do with function and behavior (which brings up a host of epistemic issues since natural selection will not ever directly interact how consciousness seems) or "what things are and what they do," is not wholly determined by "what they are made of." You'd need something new: information theoretic contextuality, process metaphysics, Deacon's metaphysics of absence and constraint, pancomputationalism (also process) - something that radically departs from the dominant view of what physicalism is re supervenaiance and causal closure.

That, or explaining how elimnitivism and epiphenomenalism make sense and how they don't result in intractable epistemic issues that make them self-refuting. If I knew a good answer, I'd write a book, but I assume the former is a more likely solution than the latter, that the science of consciousness is in a position similar to physics before Einstein, in need of a paradigm shifting rethink of its most basic assumptions.

If conscience is thought of as a sort of "set of moral first principles," à la Aquinas, it seems possible to explain how people can often get things so wrong when it comes to judgements about politics.

Conscience has the easiest time connecting to proper judgment/discernment when we do not have to reason very far from "first principles." E.g., in simple cases of child abuse, armed robbery, etc., it is relatively easy to make judgements about which acts are morally unacceptable. The realm of international politics is significantly more murky, both due to its complexity, the trade-offs faced by policymakers, its unpredictability, and due to the problem of most people not being particularly well informed about issues they take a stand on.

People often base their claims in these cases on things that are shown to be patently false. Here, to the degree the individual can be held responsible, the defect isn't so much in conscience as in theoretical reason and epistemic virtue (both of which are ultimately necessary for proper moral judgement).

Goodness can be deployed in a twofold manner: in itself or for something else. The former is intrinsic (goodness), and the latter is extrinsic (goodness); and, as such, the former is intrinsic valuableness, and the latter is extrinsic valuableness. Intrinsic goodness is legitimately called moral goodness and is the subject matter (along with other related dilemmas and topics) of ethics proper: ethics, as a science, must be objective—for it cannot be a viable study if each member is studying something else than another (and this is exactly what happens if the study itself were subjective).

Since you seem to be building off Aristotle you might look closely at this part. The idea that "objectivity approaches truth at the limit," or that "x in-itself is what it is without relation to some knower," is a fairly modern invention. I don't think it is going to tend to play nicely with ancient and medieval ethics. For Aristotle and later Aristotlean's like St. Thomas, things are defined by their relations to one another, such that "in-itselfness" cannot be the gold standard for knowledge.

The ancients and medievals were concerned with absolute good, rather than what we would tend to think of as "objective good," today. The absolute, to be truly absolute, must include both appearances and reality, the relative and the in-itself. One reading of Plato is that only the Good is good "in-itself." When we move to applying the good to the world of appearances, wherein lies all human ethical decisions, we have moved to the realm of relative good (forms might also be said to be good in-themselves in a different, more complicated way).

So consider what Aristotle says about human telos in Book X of the Ethics. He seems to have a lot in common with Plato here. The highest human good is contemplation because it is human reason that is the most divine part of the person. This is a reaching out to the Absolute, rather than an attempt to locate the "in-itself goodness," of things, which is going to be impossible.

Only an undivided noetic grasp of the Good gets at the Good in-itself. Words, human discursive reasoning, etc. is essentially processual, meaning its subject is not present to us "all at once," and so grasping the Good in this way relativizes. Likewise, words point to relations, to appearances. Thus, we can only speak of relative good. This is why Plato points to the historical figure of Socrates, the good man, rather than attempting to answer Galucon's question about "why would we ever prefer to be the man who is truly just but who is punished and denigrated rather than the man who merely appears just and is rewarded and celebrated?" And I think this grounds Eckhart's view of the truly just man as "becoming justice itself."

However, this does not entail any sort of all encompassing moral relativism. Ethics certainly is relative, based on the role one is in, one's culture, etc. Yet the Good still grounds it. It's sort of like how one cannot point to the "objective," "in themselves differences" between men and women. Men and women always exist within a culture that shapes how any differences between the sexes manifests. The range of possible contexts for these differences to manifest in is essentially limitless. However, this doesn't mean there are no true differences either. The absolute view includes all such possible contexts, rather than trying to reduce them out of the equation.

For St. Thomas and later Aristotlean's only God (Being itself) has substantive Good. You can get this from readings of Plato as well. It's less clear in Aristotle but Book X seems to point in the same direction (Aquinas' commentary on book X is interesting).

Eudamonia is an interesting state, because it has communal, inter-dependencies which are required for one to achieve it in a maximal sense—e.g., a person cannot, no matter if they are a psychopath or ordinary citizen, achieve a maximal state of eudamonia if everyone else around them is tremendously degenerating. Thusly, the most (positively) intrinisically valuable state is universalized states of eudamonia (i.e., universal flourishing and deep happiness); and this is ‘The Good’.

The opening parts of Axel Honneth's Freedom's Right has a really good summary of this sort of social freedom and how it interacts with other sorts of freedom, and the connection between freedom and flourishing. This area is the core focus on Hegel's Philosophy of Right, which is actually fairly straightforward as far as Hegel's writing goes.

And if the good for man involved a social element, the individual cannot be the sole measure for even relative good.

Personally I am not religious, yet the concept of sin makes intuitive sense to me.

It is to go against one's conscience, which I would interpret as going against one's higher self (God).

This is the intuitive idea behind Aquinas' ethics. It is always bad to deny one's conscience, even if one's moral reasoning is ultimately in error (however we can be negligent, and thus to blame, if we could have corrected our error). Natural Law then is largely the application of this to the aggregate, based on the primary principle of "do good and avoid doing evil."

I think the tradition has stood up so well even in the absence of its grounding in theology and human telos precisely because it is intuitive.

Of course, there is no shortage of people who CLAIM to know God’s will. There are priests and pastors who CLAIM to know what God wishes and what God does not wish. If I become a Catholic, I’ll be told God wishes me to go to Mass every Sunday. If I become a Jehovah’s Witness, I’ll be told God does not allow blood transfusions. If I become Hindu, I’ll be told God doesn’t want me to eat beef. If I become a Muslim, I’ll be told God doesn’t want me to eat pork. Etc. Etc. Etc.

There has never been a shortage of people making contradictory claims about all manner of things. Is the world flat? Does dark matter exist? Why does the sun rise an set? What is the cause of various illnesses? Etc.

But surely nature tells us many of these things in a way such that we can come to know the truth of them. The same is said of sins and the Natural Law.

But being told by some human being what God wishes and God does not wish is a very, very different thing than being told by God. It’s difficult to imagine two things more different: one is a work of man, the other a work of God.

Consider probably the single most influential passage for natural theology in Romans 1:

18 For God’s wrath is revealed from heaven against all godlessness and unrighteousness of people who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth, 19 since what can be known about God is evident among them, because God has shown it to them. 20 For his invisible attributes, that is, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen since the creation of the world, being understood through what he has made. As a result, people are without excuse. 21 For though they knew God, they did not glorify him as God or show gratitude. Instead, their thinking became worthless, and their senseless hearts were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man, birds, four-footed animals, and reptiles.

24 Therefore God delivered them over in the desires of their hearts to sexual impurity, so that their bodies were degraded among themselves. 25 They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served what has been created instead of the Creator, who is praised forever. Amen.

Saint Paul continues in Romans 2 on righteous gentiles who have not heard (and so are not subject to) divinely revealed law, but who righteously obey the natural law.

Romans 2:12 For all who sin without the law will also perish without the law, and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law. 13 For the hearers of the law are not righteous before God, but the doers of the law will be justified.14 So, when Gentiles, who do not by nature have the law, do what the law demands, they are a law to themselves even though they do not have the law. 15 They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts. Their consciences confirm this. Their competing thoughts either accuse or even excuse them 16 on the day when God judges what people have kept secret, according to my gospel through Christ Jesus.

What would it even mean for God to reveal his will to someone?

This made me chuckle given your handle. He speaks from a burning push of course!

Exodus 3:2 And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.

3 And Moses said, I will now turn aside, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt.

4 And when the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses. And he said, Here am I.

5 And he said, Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.

6 Moreover he said, I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. And Moses hid his face; for he was afraid to look upon God.

Here is the better St. Augustine passage I was thinking of from De Trinitate:

For people have doubted whether the powers to live, to remember, to understand, to will, to think, to know, and to judge are due to air or to fire or to the brain or
to the blood or to atoms or to a fifth body (I do not know what it is, but it differs from the four customary elements); or whether the combination or the orderly arrangement of the flesh is capable of producing these effects. Some try to maintain this opinion; others, that opinion. On the other hand, who could doubt that one lives and remembers and understands and wills and thinks and judges? For even if one doubts, one lives; if one doubts, one remembers why one doubts, for one wishes to be certain; if one doubts, one thinks; if one doubts, one knows that one does not know; if one doubts, one judges that one ought not to comment rashly. Whoever then doubts about anything else ought never to doubt about all of these; for if they were not, one would be unable to doubt about anything at all.40

Hume famously denied finding any real self during introspection, finding instead a "bundle of sensations," in the Enquiry.

But I encountered a pretty good argument against this in "The Rigor of Angels: Kant, Heisenberg, Borges, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality."

Eddington writes:

Kant realized that Hume’s world of pure, unique impressions couldn’t exist. This is because the minimal requirement for experiencing anything is not to be so absorbed in the present that one is lost in it. What Hume had claimed— that when exploring his feeling of selfhood, he always landed “on some particular perception or other” but could never catch himself “at any time without a percepton, and never can observe anything but the perception”— was simply not true.33 Because for Hume to even report this feeling he had to perceive something in addition to the immediate perceptions, namely, the very flow of time that allowed them to be distinct in the first place. And to recognize time passing is necessarily to recognize that you are embedded in the perception.

Hence what Kant wrote in his answer to Hamann, ten years in the making. To recollect perfectly eradicates the recollection, just as to perceive perfectly eradicates the perception. For the one who recalls or perceives must recognize him or herself along with the memory or perception for the memory or impression to exist at all. If everything we learn about the world flows directly into us from utterly distinct bits of code, as the rationalists thought, or if everything we learn remains nothing but subjective, unconnected impressions, as Hume believed— it comes down to exactly the same thing. With no self to distinguish itself, no self to bridge two disparate moments in space-time, there is simply no one there to feel irritated at the inadequacy of “dog.” No experience whatsoever is possible.

Here is how Kant put it in his Critique of Pure Reason. Whatever we think or perceive can register as a thought or perception only if it causes a change in us, a “modification of the mind.” But these changes would not register at all if we did not connect them across time, “for as contained in one moment no representation can ever be anything other than absolute unity.”34 As contained in one moment. Think of experiencing a flow of events as a bit like watching a film. For something to be happening at all, the viewer makes a connection between each frame of the film, spanning the small differences so as to create the experience of movement. But if there is a completely new viewer for every frame, with no relation at all to the prior or subsequent frame, then all that remains is an absolute unity. But such a unity, which is exactly what Funes and Shereshevsky and Hume claimed they could experience, utterly negates perceiving anything at all, since all perception requires bridging impressions over time. In other words, it requires exactly what a truly perfect memory, a truly perfect perception, or a truly perfect observation absolutely denies: overlooking minor differences enough to be a self, a unity spanning distinct moments in time.

I'm always fascinated by this issue, the difference between conciousness as naively grasped versus what it reveals itself to be when carefully studied. However, I am quite skeptical of the eliminitivist position. Top often is seems like a bait and switch, at least when it is rolled out as an answer to, "from whence conciousness." Because, of course, showing conciousness is not what we naively take it to be is not equivalent with explaining it or "explaining it away," as Dennett puts it — something he seems to think he accomplishes, on which I disagree.

The reference to "Funes" here is to Borges' short story "Funes the Memorius," about a man whose head injury curses him with a completely perfect memory. It's a really thought provoking story on this topic and not long.

St. Augustine's consideration of the self building on self-evident triads is an interesting approach too. The one in Confessions is probably the most well-known, but in the second part of "De Trinitate," he builds a remarkable edifice of these, one of the more interesting treatises on philosophy of mind sandwiched into a theology text.

I am talking about these three things: being, knowing, and willing. For I am and I know and I will. In that I know and will, I am. And I know myself to be and to will. And I will to be and to know. Let him who can, see in these three things how inseparable a life is: one life, one mind, and one essence, how there is, finally, an inseparable distinction, and yet a distinction. Surely this is obvious to each one himself. Let him look within himself and see and report to me. (Confessions)

The photo is hung up on my wall. The flower is 1,000 miles away. There is a very literal spatial separation between the photo and the flower. The flower and its properties do not exist in two locations at once.

There is spatial separation when any property is instantiated. Properties are only instantiated in interactions. A thing having a photograph taken of it is just one type of physical relation in which a thing's properties manifest. The viewing of that photograph is another.

Our intuition is that direct interactions should be something like one billiard ball moving another, but modern physics shows that this sort of directness is extremely hard to pin down and is quite murkey.

I'm inclined to say than that a thing's effects are signs of it. Directness then should probably be looked at from a phenomenological perspective. A painter doesn't seem to be present in their paintings. The person painted is directly present in a way. This leaves room for some ambiguity, it probably can't be strictly formalized, but then again you can't really do that with the physics of physical interactions either.

The point as applied to logic is this: we only find logic in between the concepts and premises we posit, in the relation that is joining premise to conclusion.

Aristotle makes just this point in the Posterior Analytics.

[71a] All teaching and all intellectual learning result from previous cognition... This is also true of both deductive and inductive arguments, since they both succeed in teaching because they rely on previous cognition: deductive arguments begin with premisses we are assumed to understand, and inductive arguments prove the universal by relying on the fact that the particular is already clear.

Aristotle, in Metaphysics, IX 10, distinguishes between two kinds of truth: truth as the correctness of speech and thought (true vs false propositional knowledge), and truth as the grasping of indivisibles (ignorance versus awareness) (asyntheta, adiaireta).

A lot of discussion of adiareta looks at how it can come prior to propositional knowledge as a sort of basic sense awareness. However, I think it would be appropriate to say that propositional knowledge must reinforce and "make more full" our awareness of terms as undivided unities. For, if we had to "unpack" all our propositional knowledge about complex things every time we used them in thought we'd never get any thinking done.

However, me might also think of adiareta being in some ways unconscious/subconscious processing, something I've written about before in the context of R. Scott Bakker's "Blind Brain Theory" (https://medium.com/@tkbrown413/blind-brain-theory-and-the-role-of-the-unconscious-b61850a3d27f)

One of the things that often gets missed in discussions of metaphysics that draw from physics is the way in which computation — which we increasingly use to describe how the world moves from state to state (causation) — is how computation is inherently step-wise and processual. 2+3 = 5 is taken as simple identity, instead of something that becomes.

And this leads to all sorts of problems, like the "scandal of deduction," where it seems that no new information is ever developed by deterministic computation. The problem here is to miss precisely what you highlighted, that thought is essentially processual. Eternal relations, taken as what is most real by positivists, are an abstraction from such processes.

Wittgenstein takes the opposite view in the Tractatus, calling belief in a causal nexus a "superstition," and pointing to eternal entailment relations as what is more real. I think this is a mistake. What we deal with is becoming, even when we work with syllogisms. Such reasoning is, as Aquinas says, dividing and concatenating, it is discursive and processual.

There is a long history in philosophy in giving epistemic preference to the immutable and eternal, since truths about these things should always be true. Plato really cements this trend, and you can see all through the history of philosophy: Hume's relations of ideas vs matters of fact; Kant's analytic/synthetic, etc.

What later versions of the divide do though is they miss Plato's focus on the unity of knowledge, the way in which the grasp of things goes beyond the discursive. So we end up in a weird place where trying to know what must be most unified through these discursive means. We try to get to reality rather than appearance, the in-itself rather than the relative, while still firmly stuck in the mode of knowing that is discursive and relativising.

The epistemological point is this: we will never be finished coming to know, even one thing.

If a thing is what it does, its relations to all other things (properties), then it seems impossible that we should ever grasp them in their entirety. Even if we were to grasp much of what a thing is, it would not be present to us "all at once," since thinking is processual.

However, a thing's relation to mind is the relation in which the most of its properties can be brought out. A thing only does so much during any given interval, not all of its properties are actualized. Only in the knowing mind can these be digested in discursive knowledge and the made present in a unified term.

Complete knowledge cannot be a view from nowhere, since appearances are part of what a thing is. The absolute contains reality and appearance, so the absolute view contains all appearances, a "view from everywhere," that must also be "all at once," the God's eye view.

Surely this is the rub? Most direct and indirect realists alike would assume that a photo is epistemically better grounded than an artist's impression? Even if the artist is an eye-witness at the scene?

Sort of. An artist's rendering or a skillful photographer can utilize their skill (a sort of pictorial syntax) to bring out more of a thing's properties, "what it is." For example, skillfully wartime correspondence don't just shoot photos randomly, they seek to bring out the essence of events. Likewise, an artist might be able to bring out certain properties of a thing better than some carelessly shot photograph. Anatomical diagrams are a good example here, particularly the way in which they abstract away variations in individuals and attempt to show the essential nature of some organ, system, etc. The artist can do things like abstract the circulatory system away from the rest of the body.

Under any ordinary reading, the flower is not "directly presented in" or "a constituent of" the photo. The photo is just a photosensitive surface that has chemically reacted to light.
— Michael

Things are phenomenologicaly present in pictures. This is how we speak of things. A person can be "in" a picture. A picture is a representation of a person but a person is not a "representation of pictures of them," even though both share a likeness. To simply discuss the properties of the photo is to abstract away the very mind in which likeness and representation exist. I think it's simply an unhelpful move to try to understand representation without reference to the subject to whom the representation appears. But for the subject, phrases like "hey, that's my brother in that photograph," are not mistakes or untruths. People are made more or less phenomenologicaly present in representations.

Anyhow, perception seems like it would be better described by analogy to a lens rather than a picture. A lens is something that can affect how things appear. But it is also something you look through actively. The agent is involved in what the lens is pointed at. It is something through which we see, rather than what we see. When we look at something through a lens, we do not tend to say we are "seeing the lens," even though all the light we see passes through the lens and is affected by it.

Pictures are more static. The agent viewing a picture isn't actively involved in what is presented, which is not how perception works.

Awareness of some things is only possible via language use.

Exactly. A lot of phenomenological treatments go a step further, claiming that one cannot be aware of the intelligibilities of things without language. Language is what allows us to both explore the intelligibility of things (dividing and composing á la Aquinas/Aristotle) and in turn to develop a noetic grasp of their natures (essential vs accidental, genus, species, etc.). There is, of course, awareness prior to language, and animals are aware of things, but this would be the sort of awareness associated with Aristotle's "sensible soul," not the "rational soul." This sort of awareness does not allow us to be agents of truth in that it cannot allow us to "say things about things."

I'll admit that I was initially skeptical from this view point, but I find Husserl's explanation of how predication emerges from the phenomenology of human experience quite convincing. It's not that this view necessarily replaces the Kantian view of certain properties of mind shaping how we come to the world, or the neuroscientistic view of how our faculties are grounded in biology. Rather it's a "yes, and..." addition to how the nature of experience creates the ground for predication, which in turn allows for language, syntax, and the grasp of intelligible edios.

Perhaps there are species somewhere in the universe with an intelligence on par with humans whose grasp of intelligibilities is not like this. If we were a solitary species, something more akin to a tiger, language and conversation might not be so essential to how we grasp the world. But it seems true in the human case at least.

One cannot become aware of something that does not exist(purely imaginary things) without language use.

Or incorporeal entities/properties, e.g. economic recessions, complexity, information, chaos, order, communism, liberalism, Catholicism, etc.

Secondhand info exists. The recent public usage of "CRT" is evidence of how one can become aware that there is a theory named "Critical Theory" based upon false belief about the theory. If based upon false belief, and it counts as an awareness that there is such a thing as "Critical Theory", it could be said that they know Critical Theory exists. Such awareness/knowledge seems to require propositional belief though, so it's not a good example of the criterion/outline you've offered, although it seems to be a case of "false awareness".

That's one way of looking at it. I think the Aristotlean view would tend towards saying that this is an awareness of something, namely a propaganda narrative. The person is simply mistaken about what they are aware of. That is, they have both false propositional beliefs about CRT and they are also simply ignorant of many facets of it. They are aware of a real thing, CRT, but their awareness is quite incomplete, for they are ignorant of much of it.

In the case of UFOs, we are aware of other people's experiences of what they take to be extra terrestrial craft. Those people are aware of some sensory experience they have explained in terms of UFOs. Something caused that experience, and so the awareness of it isn't false. It is an awareness of something. Rather their propositional beliefs about the causes of that experience may be false. Similarly, chemists used to think they were aware of phlogiston when they saw flames. We now realize they were aware of the process of combustion. The awareness was of something (not false), it just has false beliefs attached to it.

I would think it's impossible to become aware of something that one does not believe exists. I do not see how one can become and/or be aware of something else that they do not believe is there.

Consider the case where the Loch Ness monster is real. Someone sees a huge ripple in the loch, like something big moving under the surface. They ascribe this to some normal animal or a drone. In reality, it was Nessy, the last elamasaurus!

Well, in this case they have been made aware of Nessy, or at least effects produced by Nessy (which are signs of their cause). They just have false propositional beliefs about what they experienced vis-á-vis it's causes.

This is, of course, just one way to look at it. But I think the Aristotlean frame is useful here in that otherwise we very quickly slip into having the opposite of awareness become falsity rather than ignorance. However, I do think there is a difference between ignorance and false belief, and that it's helpful to keep them apart.

Sokolowski talks about the problem of "vagueness." Vagueness often creeps in when people talk about a topic they understand poorly, e.g. quantum mechanics. Vagueness is the product of a mix of ignorance and false propositional belief, a sort of haze over something, a poor grasp of its intelligibility such that we not only predicate the wrong things of a thing, but are also simply ignorant of what might properly be predicated of it.

The Phaedrus is also helpful here in the "love" is normally excluded from the analytical frame in a way moral goodness is not (at least not from the Enlightenment on, where it increasingly becomes something that must be "demonstrable to all rational agents."). We generally don't demand that people explain "being in love" in stark, analytical terms, or even allow that such can be given an adequate description.

The Phaedrus starts out with the terrible speech, laying out a sort of cold, analytical love based on rational self-interest because this is a relative sort of love defined in terms of relative goods. The love of the last speech is instead ecstatic, the lover of absolute beauty is in a way "out of their mind," but at the same time has a firmer noetic grasp on beauty than the analytical lover who sees beauty in relative terms. "Genuine love, by contrast, cannot be “explained” exhaustively, which means that it cannot be “situated” in any manifest way relative to self-interest, precisely because it has an absolute character, or, rather, because it represents the relation to an absolute object." (Schindler's Plato's Critique of Impure Reason)

This reminds me of how Plato describes the philosopher as wanting to couple/mate with the Good in the Republic. There is a going beyond the self and participation-in.

Being is love with Absolute Beauty starts to look a lot like being in love with Absolute Good though. Normally, the Doctrine of Transcendentals (the communicability of Good, True, Beauty, and Unity) is identified in its earliest form in Aristotle, but it seems to also be in Plato to some degree too.

I've often read in discussions of Plato on this forum that he never claims that Socrates or anyone has ever seen 'the form of the good'. Yet in this passage, and even though Socrates has said 'God knows whether it happens to be true', he nevertheless says 'anyone who is to act intelligently....must have had sight of this.' That seems an unequivocal confirmation that the form of the Good is something that 'must be seen'.

It can be seen, but not demonstrated. That's Schindler's thesis anyhow. In each of the three images Socrates creates in the middle of the Republic something has to come from outside the image to introduce the absolute. E.g., in the divided line, the absolute (Good) cannot lie on the line because the absolute contains both appearances and reality — what is good relative to other things and what is good in itself. In the cave analogy, it is Socrates himself who interjects and "comes in from outside."

This points to the historic Socrates, the man who lived a good life trying to help others, who was willing eschew wealth and comforts for the Good, and who ultimately died to demonstrate it. At the center of the Republic then is not a mere demonstration or argument, but an act, the act of the good man who must decend back into the cave because the absolute includes everything, including those trapped in the cave, even if it means suffering and death.

The nod to the historic Socrates is the answer to Galucon's earlier demand that the Socrates of the dialogue demonstrate how it can be the we would prefer to be the just man who is ridiculed and punished instead of the unjust man who is praised and rewarded. He can direct us to the summum bonum but he can't dissect it and demonstrate its goodness without losing something, rather the "whole body," of the reader must be turned to it.

...now, Plato affirms that the [lower] four levels [of knowledge] all present the qualities of a thing (τὸ ποῖόν τι), and only the fifth level corresponds to that which the soul in fact seeks, namely, the being itself.19 it is in relation to this concern that we ought to understand Plato’s ordering of the levels. If he groups knowledge and right opinion (along with νοῦς) together on a single level, it is because there is some feature they share in common, which distinguishes them from everything else.The feature Plato identifies is that they lie in the soul.

Notice, Plato is here talking specifically about the form of the relationship implied between the soul and reality. he is not, in other words, talking about truth or falsity, stability or instability, which is typically at issue when he dis- distinguishes between knowledge and opinion.21 instead, the significant issue in this context is place, i.e., the locus or terminus of the soul’s movement toward reality.

This is why he does not need to distinguish knowledge from right opinion in this particular context, because they both reside “in the soul.” What is important to Plato in Letter VII, and the one thing he insists on here, is that they are distinct, both from words (names or definitions) and shapes (images) on the one hand, and from the reality itself on the other. right opinion and knowledge may be “true” or correct in themselves—in fact they necessarily are by definition—but they nevertheless remain penultimate in relation to the soul’s aspiration to the real. it is also precisely this that gives them the same “rank,” as it were. unless reason is essentially ecstatic, it would make no sense to line up knowledge and opinion next to each other.22

The problem with debates between skeptics and dogmatists, or, in modern language, between “coher- entists” and “foundationalists” or perhaps between “relativists” and “absolutists,” is that both sides typically assume that knowledge has no other form than that of a possession that is able to be formulated propositionally. one side claims that some of these formulations have absolute and universal validity, the other claims that none do. But neither sees the mode of knowledge that Plato indicates here is genuinely absolute: it is not the soul’s possession of a thing, and so it is not a conceptual content that can be verbally formulated, but is rather the soul’s dwelling with the being of the thing itself, a relation that, precisely because it transcends verbal formulation, provides in fact the only genuine basis for one’s words.

There is an incredible tension here: the heart of a matter is what is most vulnerable; precisely what is most important cannot be said. and if it cannot be said, one can never give a fully adequate description of it or argument for it—at least not in words alone.

But by justifying it in this way, we are implying that its own goodness or necessity is relative to these reasons. a verbal defense will be adequate to the extent that a thing’s goodness is in fact reducible to these (relative) reasons that can be given for it. if such a defense succeeds, then it implies that the interlocutors accept the relativity of the thing’s goodness. it follows that to assume that all things can be given justification by argument is to assume that there is nothing good in an intrinsic way, nothing good in a more than merely relative sense. something that was good in an intrinsic sense would ultimately not be able to be justified in terms of anything but itself—and this includes any of its qualities, be they essential or accidental, which can be articulated in a proposition, for even an essential attribute is not the being of a thing, but the verbal sign of an aspect of it. socrates can defend justice only by being just to the end.36 one can thus give powerful arguments on behalf of, say, justice, and defend them in a manner that keeps one from seeming “ridiculous,” as Plato says, but all the while one remains at the penultimate level in relation to the being of justice. We can understand, then, why socrates refuses to give an “adequate” verbal account of the good and insists that he can speak of it only in the mode of belief. in other words, he cannot speak as if what he is saying represents knowledge of it (506c), and so whatever he says remains an image rather than the reality itself (cf. 533a).37 he thus shows himself in the Republic to be taking seriously what the author of Letter VII asserts; a modest silence about the heart of things is no false modesty, but a modesty that acknowledges what it means for something to be true in a more than relative sense. in this respect, Letter VII provides a decisive confirmation of our interpretation of goodness as the cause of truth: a thing is true because it exists in itself in a manner irreducible to its relations, and this is just what it means to participate in absolute goodness.

In Plato, there is a transcedent reaching out to things known, unlike Aristotle's conception of the mind coming to "be like" that which it knows. But I don't think they're really that different. Plato's framing has the benefit of showing how the quest for knowledge and the good allows us to reach past what we currently are, whereas Aristotle's has the benefit of showing how it transforms is internally.

I think overall, Plato is more optimistic about making this move. Aristotle has a similar goal in Book X of the Ethics, but it's less clear if man, hoping to "become like what is most divine," can ever reach that goal, which is why Aquinas has to add infused contemplation/grace into the equation in his commentary on the Ethics to allow the human being to actually achieve happiness in the beatific vision.

Augustine's expressionist semiotics is helpful here too. Signs can only direct our attention to the immutable. The grasp of it lies outside all signs, just as a proper grasp of a geometric proof lies outside any of the drawings used to direct one to understanding it.

My gospels used to be (some maybe still) Heraclitus, Plato/Aristotle, Nietzsche and the others, and then Kant of course

An interesting mix. Plato and Aristotle have a pretty similar vision of the human good, but Nietzsche and Kant's seem very different from each other and from Plato and Aristotle.

I think existentialism, to me is the philosophy of modernity, and we are still in its era

I think this is absolutely true. I would imagine the Nietzsche is the philosopher most read by the general public today, and Sartre and Camus are probably up there. I always check bookstore's philosophy sections just to see what is considered marketable, and the section is generally small (shrinking) with the same few titles. Nietzsche almost always has the most shelf space.

It really seems like the movement came to dominate popular culture and the arts after WWII. And I'd agree that we still seem to be in that era. Although we seem to have hit a sort of second stage where something like Nagel's ironic stance on the Absurd has become more dominant than the deadly seriousness of the earlier era.

The positivism/reductionism that inspired modern existentialism does seem to be cracking up. If scientism is one half of the modern secular "religion/world view," then you'd expect the philosophical side to change when science moves away from reductionism. After all, while you don't need reductionism/smallism to justify the absurdity of the world, the case for its absurdity is often made through appeals to "everything being meaningless particles in the void."

But that view seems to be declining in the sciences, along with the "anti-metaphysical" view, whereas in philosophy proper at least "objectivity" has increasingly been redefined in order to make it coherent, so that it is no longer the "view from nowhere," or a synonym for noumenal and "in-itself."

The other reason for change I see is how the message of existentialism, the drive to "create yourself," has been co-opted into the self-help literature of late stage capitalism, increasingly applied to career success, having a "grindset," side-hustles, etc. This cheapens it and ties it to relatively noxious parts of modern culture and individualism run rampant. Plus, it seems at odds with societies undergoing rapid declined in social mobility.

The other thing is that the increasingly histrionic political/social enviornment seems at odds with the ironic turn of existentialism. The political climate in turn has turned up the volume on identity, and of course much of identity politics seems to tie existence up in essence.

I don't know what comes next though. There is DFW's "post-irony," a sort of new sincerity that looks back prior to the modern era. The science writers turned social critics of our era (Pinker, Rovelli, etc.) tend to put forth a sort of pragmatic liberal neo-enlightenment humanism, but I just don't see it taking off. You might lump Harris in there too.

It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world i

And by 1788 we get Legrange's Analytical Mechanics boasting that it has no diagrams, only algebraic equations, because these involve less of the human sensory system in the understanding of mechanics and so are more objective. Ontic structural realism, things just being the math that describes them, seems like the terminus point for this trend.

I recall hearing a story about John Wheeler posing a question about "what do you get when you write down all the laws of physics, all the most beautiful equations we've discovered?"

"A bunch of chalk on a blackboard, not a universe."

Which I guess was his lead in for pitching "if from bit," and the participatory universe idea. The idea of the first concept being that you need some real ontological difference, not just math, to explain the world.

It's worth considering how the description of the polis is framed originally as a means of describing how justice improves the self-governing soul.

Hegel's Philosophy of Right is an interesting continuation of many of the themes in The Republic, but it gets at the social level, the need for an organic self-determining consensus, in a better way.

Of course Hegel gets accused of being a totalitarian too, but I don't think this is really a proper reading. He is more just a fatalist who hadn't quite grasped the role advocacy organizations play in society, probably because they really didn't exist yet in his day.

Nietzsche, Camus, and Sartre were the first philosophers I read and I initially took it as a sort of gospel. But having now read a lot more philosophy, I think there is a way in which they are very much speaking to a specific historical epoch, whereas when I first read them, it seemed like they should be responses to "all thought up to this groundbreaking point where the Absurd was recognized."

But moral nihilism, extreme relativism, and radical skepticism are as old as philosophy. I don't think there ever was much of a movement that thought what was good was obvious, ethics trivial, or one that believed in any "objective/inherit meaning/value," that stood apart from an agent who knew these things. A certain sort of relativism is sort of the norm in ancient thought, with its disdain for "barbarian ways," whereas something like awareness of the Absurd shows up in ancient literature (e.g. Ecclesiastes is around 450-200BC IIRC).

And that's why I now think of them more as responding to their specific era and the rise of positivism and scientism, which also spurred an anti-modernist fideist backlash in religion as well. From the first you get "in-itselfness," "meaning-of-itself," and objectivity as the gold standard that all knowledge, including moral knowledge, needs to meet. From the second you get the idea that the good is obvious and has been through all history, and cannot be shaped by context.

You also see self-government and self-control morph from being the key thing that you need to be free, to often being seen as a sort of tyranny enforced from the outside. It sort of strikes me that industrialization and the attendant alienation from one's labor, and compulsory education might have something to do with this.

Which is more just commentary on my own initial ignorance. I would have to go back and read them again to see if there is a historical awareness of this in the texts themselves. I've read Nietzsche more recently and I didn't really see it. It seems helpful for a framing of the views though.

And when you find the absurd you don’t forget the truth and meaning of it.

Ha, just so.

I would read the text first, but I have two recommendations for secondary sources.

The first is Wallace's "Philosophical Mysticism in Plato, Hegel, and the Present." The book isn't really about mysticism, at least not in the sense of being about mystical experiences and contemplation. It's instead a very good treatment of Plato's entire philosophy. You might even want to skip the review sections on modern philosophy or on Hegel, it's really the Plato chapters (most of them) that are the best. It has one of the most clear explanations of the case for the reality of the forms out there.

The second is Schindler's "Plato's Critique of Impure Reason." This is perhaps a better source just on the Republic because it has a pretty extensive review of theories on each section of the book. I'll just warn that the introduction is a little off topic, but you can skip it and come back to it without missing much. I found it interesting though.

I read this one more recently so I don't know if it will stick with me the same way, and I will say it isn't quite as clear and concise, but I did think it was quite a good treatment and it offers a lot of other viewpoints up as well.

The Teaching Company also offers some good lectures on Plato. They are ludicrously overpriced on their website but Amazon, Audible, and Wonderium have more affordable ways to listen to them. Michael Sugrue's course on the dialogues as a whole is very good, although obviously spread pretty thin.

David Roochnik also has a course just on the Republic. I thought it was good, having more time to go into detail, but it just didn't seem to pull everything together the same way.

I'll leave an except from Wallace I really like:

By calling what we experience with our senses less real than the Forms, Plato is not saying that what we experience with our senses is simply illusion. The “reality” that the Forms have more of is not simply their not being illusions. If that’s not what their extra reality is, what is it? The easiest place to see how one could suppose that something that isn’t an illusion, is nevertheless less real than something else, is in our experience of ourselves.

In Republic book iv, Plato’s examination of the different "parts of the soul” leads him to the conclusion that only the rational part can integrate the soul into one, and thus make it truly “just.” Here is his description of the effect of a person’s being governed by his rational part, and therefore “just”:

Justice . . . is concerned with what is truly himself and his own. . . . [The person who is just] binds together [his] parts . . . and from having been many things he becomes entirely one, moderate, and harmonious. Only then does he act. (Republic 443d-e)

Our interest here (I’ll discuss the “justice” issue later) is that by “binding together his parts” and “becoming entirely one,” this person is “truly himself.” That is, as I put it in earlier chapters, a person who is governed by his rational part is real not merely as a collection of various ingredients or “parts,” but as himself. A person who acts purely out of appetite, without any examination of whether that appetite is for something that will actually be “good,” is enacting his appetite, rather than anything that can appropriately be called “himself.” Likewise for a person who acts purely out of anger, without examining whether the anger is justified by what’s genuinely good. Whereas a person who thinks about these issues before acting “becomes entirely one” and acts, therefore, in a way that expresses something that can appropriately be called “himself.”

In this way, rational self-governance brings into being an additional kind of reality, which we might describe as more fully real than what was there before, because it integrates those parts in a way that the parts themselves are not integrated. A person who acts “as one,” is more real as himself than a person who merely enacts some part or parts of himself. He is present and functioning as himself, rather than just as a collection of ingredients or inputs.

We all from time to time experience periods of distraction, absence of mind, or depression, in which we aren’t fully present as ourselves. Considering these periods from a vantage point at which we are fully present and functioning as ourselves, we can see what Plato means by saying that some non-illusory things are more real than other non-illusory things. There are times when we ourselves are more real as ourselves than we are at other times.

Indeed, we can see nature as a whole as illustrating this issue of how fully integrated and “real as itself ” a being can be. Plants are more integrated than rocks, in that they’re able to process nutrients and reproduce themselves, and thus they’re less at the mercy of their environment. So we could say that plants are more effectively focused on being themselves than rocks are, and in that sense they’re more real as themselves. Rocks may be less vulnerable than plants are, but what’s the use of invulnerability if what’s invulnerable isn’t you?

Animals, in turn, are more integrated than plants are, in that animals’ senses allow them to learn about their environment and navigate through it in ways that plants can’t. So animals are still more effectively focused on being themselves than plants are, and thus more real as themselves.

Humans, in turn, can be more effectively focused on being themselves than many animals are, insofar as humans can determine for themselves what’s good, rather than having this be determined for them by their genetic heritage and their environment. Nutrition and reproduction, motility and sensation, and a thinking pursuit of the Good each bring into being a more intensive reality as oneself than is present without them.12

Now, what all of this has to do with the Forms and their supposedly greater reality than our sense experience is that it’s by virtue of its pursuit of knowledge of what’s really good, that the rational part of the soul distinguishes itself from the soul’s appetites and anger and so forth. The Form of the Good is the embodiment of what’s really good. So pursuing knowledge of the Form of the Good is what enables the rational part of the soul to govern us, and thus makes us fully present, fully real, as ourselves. In this way, the Form of the Good is a precondition of our being fully real, as ourselves.

But presumably something that’s a precondition of our being fully real must be at least as real as we are when we are fully real. It’s at least as real as we are, because we can’t deny its reality without denying our own functioning as creatures who are guided by it or are trying to be guided by it.13 And since it’s at least as real as we are, it’s more (fully) real than the material things that aren’t guided by it and thus aren’t real as themselves.


Philosophical Mysticism in Plato, Hegel, and the Present - Robert M. Wallace

This idea of freedom as self-determination and of the intellect being able to unify the person and make them most fully themselves ends up playing a big role in Aristotle (Book X of the Ethics), Boethius (the Consolation), St. Augustine, and St. Aquinas' view of the human food in the Summa Contra Gentiles, although they all develop it in novel ways. Aquinas and Hegel also expand it into discussions of essence and the intelligibilities of things in a very interesting way.

Or, if the idea of the Platonic ascent really strikes you fancy when you get to the cave, check out St. Augustine's "beatific vision" with St. Monica in Book IX of Confessions.