It reminds me of a satirical settlement I once heard of the conflict between the Christian doctrine of creation and the Aristotelian doctrine of an eternal universe: "Creation very seldom happens; it only occurred once, and that was very long ago."
So I think one of the reasons postmodernism gained increasing plausibility was (not to be too materialistic) that it hit right at probably the greatest enrichment in human history.
The architecture of moral guardrails that is embedded in traditional religious and social structures seemed less relevant because we created, in effect, a mass aristocracy.
Aristocrats (or rich people in general) have usually been shielded from the effects of their failings by a combination of wealth and the ability to monkey with the rules governing them. Once we broadened the wealth of society dramatically and allowed democratic norm-setting, the median citizen gradually gained the ability to act more and more like a louche courtier in the eighteenth century, a minor Astor in the nineteenth, or a Kennedy in the twentieth.
And in doing so, they became more accepting of their neighbors’ transgressions of social codes until we’ve kind of settled into a slightly hedged version of Aleister Crowley’s “do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,” and postmodernism nicely provides a rational (-ish) framework for this.
I know a lot of “post-liberals” lay this at the feet of Locke, Liberalism, etc., but at some level, I think it’s less intellectual than that. Some form of liberalism is necessary in a pluralist world (in which the West has lived since at least the Reformation), which is why it was ultimately invented. That we ended up in a society so rich we felt (and to your point, crucially, *are* to some degree) free to cast off our traditional moorings, is to my mind more of a historical fact than a philosophical error. (But I’m a historian not a philosopher.)
That said, for philosophers, an important, but often ignored, issue is that while we have been able to functionally ignore a lot of these received rules, we haven’t actually refuted them in general. It’s possible the Gods of the Copybook Headings are lurking out there like the Great Old Ones, waiting for the stars to be right…
There’s a lot of truth in this, yes. I definitely think a major problem in our time is that a large share of the population, perhaps most of us, are like aristocrats who haven’t yet grasped that privilege comes with responsibility.
I think anyone with a modern scientific education will tend to find the Aristotelian conception of *telos* weird and superfluous. That's not quite me. I've taken it on board, a bit hesitantly, in my own way.
See if this helps you understand where I'm coming from. Take an acorn. One could tell lots of causal stories about it. Aristotle would distill them into four: efficient, what made it; formal, its shape; material, what it's made of; and final... which is its purpose, or flourishing, or something. Modern science recognizes the first three, and it's easy to identify the sensory evidence. The fourth one seems odd. And yet, from Aristotle's perspective, it does important work. The acorn has a kind of purpose or destiny of becoming an oak. That's a key to what it is. And if you leave the final cause out, you would never foresee that it becomes an oak.
Now, Aristotle knew nothing about DNA and all the other incredibly complex macromolecules that comprise living things. But now we do. And with that knowledge, we can explain why the acorn becomes an oak without bringing final causes into it. We know, more or less how all that molecular machinery works. Maybe that doesn't exactly prevent you from projecting telos onto the acorn, but it certainly isn't explaining anything, it's totally unclear how it fits into the picture of the cosmos, and it seems objective.
There's more to be said about the cause of the acorn, because those elaborate macromolecules would be extremely improbable unless something caused them to be the way they are. The concept of evolutionary equilibrium can do a lot of important work in explaining them. If the oak didn't have a way to perpetuate itself through its seed, oaks wouldn't exist. So all sorts of hypotheses can be made by reasoning from evolutionary equilibrium, and they tend to be quite successful. And when a modern person reasons from evolutionary equilibrium, what they're doing has a certain kinship to Aristotle, perceiving final causes. But we understand them in a different way, that removes the need to postulate this weird entity, *telos,* in order to understand the ordinary purposiveness of biological life. If we say that a frog jumps to be able to escape predators, we are explaining the frog's features by an argument from purpose, but purpose is simply a placeholder for evolutionary equilibrium.
Now, I am probably pretty unique in that I separate this kind of reasoning from the grand meta-narrative of evolution as an explanation of all life. My evolutionary reasoning is not particularly distinctive; what is distinctive is that I combine it with skepticism towards the grand theory of evolution, and justify evolutionary reasoning with an argument from equilibrium.
But it has a similar effect in dethroning Aristotle. Modern science has a picture of the world that doesn't put *telos* in anywhere in everyday causal chains. It doesn't fit in. Soul, mind, consciousness: those are entirely unexplained by science, there are various attempts, but they're ludicrous, and dualism just never gets embarrassed by empirical data at all, nor are there any remotely convincing attempts to explain away the phenomena that dualism takes as its starting point. But naturalistic teleology of the kind associated with Aristotle is deprived of its everyday motivators by modern science.
So I don't think it's really a choice to unsee evolutionary equilibrium and naively see purpose in ordinary biology the way you would if you hadn't understood that. It would be like trying to unsee the Copernican Revolution on Newtonian physics or the periodic table. Once you've grasped the concept and seen the way the evidence aligns-- but in this case, the concept is the real breakthrough-- your worldview updates, and your way of interpreting reality. And if you entertain the obsolete view, the arguments against it will pop back into your mind unbidden.
But the stakes are not what you say. There's no question here of "reductive, materialist explanations of the world." The mind exists, and it's not reducible to matter, so materialism is false. And human minds are full of purpose and meaning. Teleology might have purchase on living nature, too, but you can't just illustrate that by pointing out that the purpose of an acorn is to become an oak, because that is explained without residue by evolutionary fitness. Purpose in nature is a bit more elusive and not quite so obvious, but there's a fine case to be made for it, I think. That's a long story, but it's more or less the intelligent design school.
Meanwhile, back to the carnivory of the lion. If you try to judge the telos of the lion in a a merely intuitive way, if you take it as an example of the normal purposiveness of nature, then I think you would conclude that carnivory is part of the telos of the lion. Everything about the lion seems adapted for that. But once you understand evolutionary fitness, the reason you previously had to impute the carnivory of the lion to the original purpose of a deity vanishes. We can't really understand how a lion that eats straw like an ox could be flourishing or happy God's purpose in the things of nature. May, after all, be very different from what we perceive. And that opens new possibilities for redemption.
I don’t think I really fully grasp the content of your Eureka moment with evolutionary biology. I had a period years ago where I was very interested in the New Atheists, so I read some stuff in this vein… EO Wilson and George Gilder and later maybe Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, which is sort of adjacent maybe… but this wrought no revolution in my thought. I definitely did not feel that “oh this explains everything!” Some of it’s interesting, some seems like a massive eyeroll, all taken together it seems to me of a piece with a lot of modern social science… but more so, perhaps. That is, the materialism is everywhere evident and creates not just meaning gaps but also real deficiencies on the level of the plausibility of explanation. But, sometimes it does fit and seem somewhat interesting, which shows that *methodological* materialism can be useful sometimes within its proper bounds. However I do remember thinking that sociobiology was a kind materialist fundamentalism, fundamentalism, dedicated to materialist explanation of all things to a greater extent than most social sciences. Which still seems basically true to me.
That all fits fine with my Aristotelianism. I see no need to update my worldview. Thus no need to treat mind as some alien category that we’ll have to insert somehow into a system that by nature seems causally closed. It doesn’t to my eyes seem anywhere within smelling distance of that.
The metaphysics is a lot nicer I think if you aren’t dazzled by evolutionary biology but I suppose if you really think it’s so vastly sweeping in its explanatory scope that even blending it with other causal factors gives you an overdetermination problem, that would make Cartesian dualism more appealing!
"Here’s the first thing that would perhaps surprise the jaded conservative: physicalism really wasn’t an “unshakable dogma” in this setting. Academic philosophers were aware of other positions, and some even adopted them. That was not unacceptable, merely eccentric. To be a dualist or an Aristotelian was to have an accent. Physicalism was simply the standard lingo."
This confirms by impression that if dualism is a minority position, that's simply because the great (over)simplification of reality that is physicalism is so seductive. If you accept either non-material minds or telos-infused natures, you have to deal with a richer ontology and fit it together somehow. Dismissing dualism and dismissing teleology come from the same reductionist impulse.
Your combination of dismissiveness towards dualism and complacency about teleology seems odd. I have a sense, perhaps mistaken, that it comes from excessive deference to a Thomist synthesis that was always somewhat awkward and infertile, being hacked together from inherently alien elements, of the Christian transcendental and the Aristotelian immanent. A wholesome achievement but not the last word, with plenty left to learn not only from modern science but modern philosophy.
Once you reject physicalism for a richer ontology, fitting the parts of reality together becomes more difficult and maybe unattainable by mere philosophy.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to post that yet. I was just saying, I did find that comment interesting and I’ve been thinking about it, though I had too much to do yesterday to get sidetracked into responding. And anyway it does bear some thinking about. There might be a sense in which a very broad definition of dualism could be extended to include hylomorphism but it does seem to me that you’re sort of blase about the interaction problems that basically explain why dualism seems to be “perennially minority”: eg it doesn’t quite go away but most don’t want to adopt it. (More).
If your main priority is “richer ontology” then yes! Thomism’s got your back! When you suggest that that synthesis was “awkward and infertile” I hardly know what to say. How much time have you spent with the Scholastics? I fell in love with them before I became confessionally Catholic. Like a majestic, graceful cathedral. It’s that point in undergraduate life when you start to see how the pieces interlock and you think, holy cow. This is amazing. It really is I think a bit like Newtonian physics; the grace and consistency of it in themselves are pretty convincing that “well, this surely must be true on some level.”
Now of course, Newtonian physics *can* push you down some blind alleys if you treat it as the description of everything; that’s sort of the point I was making earlier in the week in my discussion of materialism. And the Thomistic synthesis likewise should not be taken as the end-all of everything, but simply to reject either one is to my mind a bad mistake. And for Cartesian dualism? Please. Again, there might be more expansive definitions of dualism by which something like the Scholastic synthesis would count, even though it’s not typically classified that way. (But then again, you seem in other conversations to want some sort of *evolutionary* teleology to replace Aristotelian teleology, which doesn’t satisfy me even remotely. Now you’re replacing a major, operative piece of the Christian philosophical tradition with something taken straight from a camp I generally regard as a kind of “materialist fundamentalism,” and I have absolutely no interest in doing that.) But the reason to prefer a hylomorphic or Thomistic view is because it’s a graceful, integrated view that can *do* so much more for you.
It’s not “oddly complacent” to think that a rich, centuries-long philosophical tradition has a lot to offer. That’s a *reasonable* assumption, especially because I have an explanation for why that synthesis was largely rejected, and it’s not because it wasn’t any good.
By the way, I'd be interested in a fuller exposition of your view you're on how evolutionary teleology relates to Aristotelianism at some point, but your quick "doesn't satisfy me even remotely" dismissal sounds a bit like an ostrich with its head in the sand.
Aristotle saw the biological world as full of functional, purposive natures. Life is indeed full of purpose! But we now know, thanks to Darwin, a very general and powerful reason why that is the case. Purpose is evolutionary fitness. It would have to be, once you see it! And once you grasp the work that purpose as evolutionary fitness can do, biology largely ceases to provide rich, immediate intuitive evidence that telos needs to be included in ontology.
That's not to deny that telos exists. But it needs to be motivated some other way, maybe via some sort of "hylomorphism as the antidote to skepticism" path.
What's rarely understood but very important is that this argumentative move, the concept of and purpose as evolutionary fitness, is completely separable from evolution as an origin story for life. Evolution claims to explain how life forms emerge and change. Purpose as evolutionary fitness explains why they don't, why they stay consistent and stable amidst the world of constant change. *However* life emerged, it would have to have evolutionary fitness in order to persist in the world that we know.
And this is actually, as I see it, indispensable for apologetics. Nature is full of suffering and cruelty, which seems to be incompatible with the goodness of God. How is one to fit the carnivory of the lion into a worldview centered around a benevolent Creator? Evolutionary fitness explains the carnivory of the lion in one way, but couldn't an omnipotent God have prevented that?
Now, if you say "we can just recognize carnivory as part of the nature of the lion, and that nature has its own peculiar kind of goodness," as it seems to me an Aristotelian is wont to do, then you've taken the fatal step.
But the prophet says something different: the lion will eat straw like the ox.
However thoroughly nature seems to be infused with cruelty and suffering, it has another origin and another destiny, and all the cruelty and suffering is abnormal and off track. Evolutionary fitness can explain much about why it happens, and why it turns into a stable pattern. But it's *not* written in the ultimate natures of things, however much common sense might perceive it that way.
Evolutionary fitness can explain the natures of things in ways that don't depend on the design of God, and that therefore allow the actual designs of God to be something different and better from nature as we observe it. But obviously this is complicated and hard to articulate.
It almost seems like you’re saying that the purpose of evolutionary theory is to absolve God of responsibility for suffering. Like you’re moving in sort sort of gnostic direction.
Maybe it’s not that; maybe it’s just some version of a best-possible-world theodicy wherein evolutionary fitness shows a kind of internal *cohesion* to the world that helps us see why this world is intrinsically good, and thus worth preserving in its integrity even when the results in a particular case seem to be bad. (The lion eating a child, say.) Fine, but in that case you have to explain what’s good about evolutionary purpose and how it relates to the meaning of the world and of human life more broadly. Material explanations, explanations based in efficient causality, lack a robust sense of purpose. So you have to make up for that. The fear of course is that they will become reductive by basically *substituting for* explanations of the sort that show why the world has purpose.
So "the purpose of evolutionary theory" isn't to justify God but just to describe the truth. Descent with modification is a fact. "Survival of the fittest," or differential survival based on heritable traits, is a fact. Evolutionary tendencies follow. Whatever traits nature and organisms have, must be compatible with evolutionary equilibrium.
Much apparent purpose in nature is explained by evolutionary equilibrium. That limits the extent to which apparent purpose in nature can be treated as evidence for divine design, but it does not foreclose that line of argument altogether, and I agree with the "intelligent design" school that mere unguided evolution probably can't come close to explaining the amount of order in nature we observe.
Maybe the mental model this points me towards is that God created a good world, but gave freedom to angels and men, and some of them abused it, and that led to pride and competition, and in that framework, evolution changed the natures of things. So that when we, now, perceive the natures of things, we partly perceive the original good designs of God, and partly the fruits of a fallen world of pride and competition, in which evolutionary fitness, with its strong component of cruelty and exploitation, comes into its own. There would be a whole lot of work to do mapping those concepts onto nature as we observe it, and I would be very out of my depth attempting it. But it's a kind of outline of the truth as best I can apprehend it.
So... "Awkward and infertile" doesn't mean "not true " I've intermittently tried to dive into Thomas Aquinas, and I tend to find him hard to follow and unconvincing, But mostly not wrong. I much prefer secondhand sources, like, say, Peter Kreeft. From those sources, I get the idea that I might agree with Aquinas more than any modern philosopher. But his style of exposition, leaning on authority and then making arguments of which many are silly... Well, that's never going to move the needle with me. But that's based on exposure to only a tiny fraction of his work, so I can't really say.
You say it's odd to dismiss a position while admitting I don't understand what it is, but I'm not really dismissing any positions other than dismissiveness towards dualism. Descartes starts with "I think, therefore I am": that's dualism in a nutshell, or at least the starting point for it, and it's largely irrefutable. "You are your body?" No, I am my thoughts, first and foremost, and the reducibility of thought to a material basis is very, very unproven and it seems almost prima facie inconceivable. Sure, the "pituitary gland" is silly; but that's one false step in a promising and necessary project that can be adjusted.
If you're going to say that it's hard to fit a supernatural soul and a material body together, as an argument against dualism, then it's equally difficult to figure out how telos-infused natures fit into a material world that is clearly described at some level by the periodic table. Not hopeless, necessarily; but difficult enough that for an Aristotelian to dismiss dualism on grounds of the difficulty of integrating disparate elements seems to exhibit a striking lack of self-awareness. However, "richer ontology" seems like a common ground, and we may disagree less than it seems.
But for me, rejecting the reducibility of mind to matter, a move for which dualism is a kind of indispensable initial placeholder, whatever may follow, is much more urgent than taking teleology on board, although ultimately I want to do that as well.
You think. You are. Who disagrees? But why does that mean that *you are your thoughts?* Why does the cogito prove you to be “pure mind” whatever that means.
“I think therefore I am.” “I throw the ball, therefore I am.” Now, of course, you might say that this is a less persuasive proof of me because of the greater epistemic uncertainty of the real existence of the physical world. Obviously Descartes would say that. But… do you, a self-described dualist, *not* think it’s me throwing the ball? Would it be more strictly accurate to say “my mind directed my body to throw the ball?” That’s extremely weird.
A Thomist thinks that a human being is by nature a corporeal being, a soul enfleshed. He rejects the categorical split that you seem to take for granted. The soul does survive death but in a diminished and incomplete form (yes, that part is tricky, I agree) and it can’t be complete again until reunited with the body. Which will eventually happen. Do you believe in the resurrection of the Body? I mean it’s in the Nicene Creed and all.
Ok good. So yes to the resurrection of the body, and this is an important Christian contribution that I think Platonist philosophers were inclined to scorn. The Christians don't accept the spiritualization of human identity to the extent of thinking that being corporeal is irrelevant, let alone regrettable. Thomists are right that human *telos,* human flourishing, optimally includes having a body.
But your tripping over the problem of how the soul can survive death if human nature *is* a soul enfleshed is key. It's why Aristotle was not a Christian or proto-Christian, why Aquinas accepted Aristotle's tutelage a bit too much for his own good, why Descartes' restarting philosophy from "I think therefore I am" was an important *and characteristically Christian* move that was corrective to scholasticism's overindulgence of Aristotle, and why CS Lewis, though not unfriendly to Aristotle, made a quite different and rather Cartesian line of argument central to his *Miracles.* As you suggest, "I throw a ball therefore I am" is far less epistemically robust than "I think therefore I am." A person is *really* mind, soul, thought, will; body is an add-on, though a good one, like a book to a scholar or a crown to a king. We can't be our best without a body, but we can *be*; we can't be without a soul.
These aren't huge disagreements philosophically, but they change the read on intellectual history.
I'm curious: what do you think postmodernism has to do with "wokeness?" I was writing something about that a while back, which I never published... But it feels kind of parallel with this.
It reminds me of a satirical settlement I once heard of the conflict between the Christian doctrine of creation and the Aristotelian doctrine of an eternal universe: "Creation very seldom happens; it only occurred once, and that was very long ago."
So I think one of the reasons postmodernism gained increasing plausibility was (not to be too materialistic) that it hit right at probably the greatest enrichment in human history.
The architecture of moral guardrails that is embedded in traditional religious and social structures seemed less relevant because we created, in effect, a mass aristocracy.
Aristocrats (or rich people in general) have usually been shielded from the effects of their failings by a combination of wealth and the ability to monkey with the rules governing them. Once we broadened the wealth of society dramatically and allowed democratic norm-setting, the median citizen gradually gained the ability to act more and more like a louche courtier in the eighteenth century, a minor Astor in the nineteenth, or a Kennedy in the twentieth.
And in doing so, they became more accepting of their neighbors’ transgressions of social codes until we’ve kind of settled into a slightly hedged version of Aleister Crowley’s “do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,” and postmodernism nicely provides a rational (-ish) framework for this.
I know a lot of “post-liberals” lay this at the feet of Locke, Liberalism, etc., but at some level, I think it’s less intellectual than that. Some form of liberalism is necessary in a pluralist world (in which the West has lived since at least the Reformation), which is why it was ultimately invented. That we ended up in a society so rich we felt (and to your point, crucially, *are* to some degree) free to cast off our traditional moorings, is to my mind more of a historical fact than a philosophical error. (But I’m a historian not a philosopher.)
That said, for philosophers, an important, but often ignored, issue is that while we have been able to functionally ignore a lot of these received rules, we haven’t actually refuted them in general. It’s possible the Gods of the Copybook Headings are lurking out there like the Great Old Ones, waiting for the stars to be right…
There’s a lot of truth in this, yes. I definitely think a major problem in our time is that a large share of the population, perhaps most of us, are like aristocrats who haven’t yet grasped that privilege comes with responsibility.
Actually, I guess I did write up part of it, here: https://lancelotfinn.substack.com/p/moral-follies-of-the-information
I think anyone with a modern scientific education will tend to find the Aristotelian conception of *telos* weird and superfluous. That's not quite me. I've taken it on board, a bit hesitantly, in my own way.
See if this helps you understand where I'm coming from. Take an acorn. One could tell lots of causal stories about it. Aristotle would distill them into four: efficient, what made it; formal, its shape; material, what it's made of; and final... which is its purpose, or flourishing, or something. Modern science recognizes the first three, and it's easy to identify the sensory evidence. The fourth one seems odd. And yet, from Aristotle's perspective, it does important work. The acorn has a kind of purpose or destiny of becoming an oak. That's a key to what it is. And if you leave the final cause out, you would never foresee that it becomes an oak.
Now, Aristotle knew nothing about DNA and all the other incredibly complex macromolecules that comprise living things. But now we do. And with that knowledge, we can explain why the acorn becomes an oak without bringing final causes into it. We know, more or less how all that molecular machinery works. Maybe that doesn't exactly prevent you from projecting telos onto the acorn, but it certainly isn't explaining anything, it's totally unclear how it fits into the picture of the cosmos, and it seems objective.
There's more to be said about the cause of the acorn, because those elaborate macromolecules would be extremely improbable unless something caused them to be the way they are. The concept of evolutionary equilibrium can do a lot of important work in explaining them. If the oak didn't have a way to perpetuate itself through its seed, oaks wouldn't exist. So all sorts of hypotheses can be made by reasoning from evolutionary equilibrium, and they tend to be quite successful. And when a modern person reasons from evolutionary equilibrium, what they're doing has a certain kinship to Aristotle, perceiving final causes. But we understand them in a different way, that removes the need to postulate this weird entity, *telos,* in order to understand the ordinary purposiveness of biological life. If we say that a frog jumps to be able to escape predators, we are explaining the frog's features by an argument from purpose, but purpose is simply a placeholder for evolutionary equilibrium.
Now, I am probably pretty unique in that I separate this kind of reasoning from the grand meta-narrative of evolution as an explanation of all life. My evolutionary reasoning is not particularly distinctive; what is distinctive is that I combine it with skepticism towards the grand theory of evolution, and justify evolutionary reasoning with an argument from equilibrium.
But it has a similar effect in dethroning Aristotle. Modern science has a picture of the world that doesn't put *telos* in anywhere in everyday causal chains. It doesn't fit in. Soul, mind, consciousness: those are entirely unexplained by science, there are various attempts, but they're ludicrous, and dualism just never gets embarrassed by empirical data at all, nor are there any remotely convincing attempts to explain away the phenomena that dualism takes as its starting point. But naturalistic teleology of the kind associated with Aristotle is deprived of its everyday motivators by modern science.
So I don't think it's really a choice to unsee evolutionary equilibrium and naively see purpose in ordinary biology the way you would if you hadn't understood that. It would be like trying to unsee the Copernican Revolution on Newtonian physics or the periodic table. Once you've grasped the concept and seen the way the evidence aligns-- but in this case, the concept is the real breakthrough-- your worldview updates, and your way of interpreting reality. And if you entertain the obsolete view, the arguments against it will pop back into your mind unbidden.
But the stakes are not what you say. There's no question here of "reductive, materialist explanations of the world." The mind exists, and it's not reducible to matter, so materialism is false. And human minds are full of purpose and meaning. Teleology might have purchase on living nature, too, but you can't just illustrate that by pointing out that the purpose of an acorn is to become an oak, because that is explained without residue by evolutionary fitness. Purpose in nature is a bit more elusive and not quite so obvious, but there's a fine case to be made for it, I think. That's a long story, but it's more or less the intelligent design school.
Meanwhile, back to the carnivory of the lion. If you try to judge the telos of the lion in a a merely intuitive way, if you take it as an example of the normal purposiveness of nature, then I think you would conclude that carnivory is part of the telos of the lion. Everything about the lion seems adapted for that. But once you understand evolutionary fitness, the reason you previously had to impute the carnivory of the lion to the original purpose of a deity vanishes. We can't really understand how a lion that eats straw like an ox could be flourishing or happy God's purpose in the things of nature. May, after all, be very different from what we perceive. And that opens new possibilities for redemption.
I don’t think I really fully grasp the content of your Eureka moment with evolutionary biology. I had a period years ago where I was very interested in the New Atheists, so I read some stuff in this vein… EO Wilson and George Gilder and later maybe Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, which is sort of adjacent maybe… but this wrought no revolution in my thought. I definitely did not feel that “oh this explains everything!” Some of it’s interesting, some seems like a massive eyeroll, all taken together it seems to me of a piece with a lot of modern social science… but more so, perhaps. That is, the materialism is everywhere evident and creates not just meaning gaps but also real deficiencies on the level of the plausibility of explanation. But, sometimes it does fit and seem somewhat interesting, which shows that *methodological* materialism can be useful sometimes within its proper bounds. However I do remember thinking that sociobiology was a kind materialist fundamentalism, fundamentalism, dedicated to materialist explanation of all things to a greater extent than most social sciences. Which still seems basically true to me.
That all fits fine with my Aristotelianism. I see no need to update my worldview. Thus no need to treat mind as some alien category that we’ll have to insert somehow into a system that by nature seems causally closed. It doesn’t to my eyes seem anywhere within smelling distance of that.
The metaphysics is a lot nicer I think if you aren’t dazzled by evolutionary biology but I suppose if you really think it’s so vastly sweeping in its explanatory scope that even blending it with other causal factors gives you an overdetermination problem, that would make Cartesian dualism more appealing!
Here's the link I should have shared earlier: https://lancelotfinn.substack.com/p/the-grand-coherence-chapter-8-biology
"Here’s the first thing that would perhaps surprise the jaded conservative: physicalism really wasn’t an “unshakable dogma” in this setting. Academic philosophers were aware of other positions, and some even adopted them. That was not unacceptable, merely eccentric. To be a dualist or an Aristotelian was to have an accent. Physicalism was simply the standard lingo."
This confirms by impression that if dualism is a minority position, that's simply because the great (over)simplification of reality that is physicalism is so seductive. If you accept either non-material minds or telos-infused natures, you have to deal with a richer ontology and fit it together somehow. Dismissing dualism and dismissing teleology come from the same reductionist impulse.
Your combination of dismissiveness towards dualism and complacency about teleology seems odd. I have a sense, perhaps mistaken, that it comes from excessive deference to a Thomist synthesis that was always somewhat awkward and infertile, being hacked together from inherently alien elements, of the Christian transcendental and the Aristotelian immanent. A wholesome achievement but not the last word, with plenty left to learn not only from modern science but modern philosophy.
Once you reject physicalism for a richer ontology, fitting the parts of reality together becomes more difficult and maybe unattainable by mere philosophy.
It’s odd to be so determined to reject a position even as you acknowledge you don’t understand what it is.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to post that yet. I was just saying, I did find that comment interesting and I’ve been thinking about it, though I had too much to do yesterday to get sidetracked into responding. And anyway it does bear some thinking about. There might be a sense in which a very broad definition of dualism could be extended to include hylomorphism but it does seem to me that you’re sort of blase about the interaction problems that basically explain why dualism seems to be “perennially minority”: eg it doesn’t quite go away but most don’t want to adopt it. (More).
If your main priority is “richer ontology” then yes! Thomism’s got your back! When you suggest that that synthesis was “awkward and infertile” I hardly know what to say. How much time have you spent with the Scholastics? I fell in love with them before I became confessionally Catholic. Like a majestic, graceful cathedral. It’s that point in undergraduate life when you start to see how the pieces interlock and you think, holy cow. This is amazing. It really is I think a bit like Newtonian physics; the grace and consistency of it in themselves are pretty convincing that “well, this surely must be true on some level.”
Now of course, Newtonian physics *can* push you down some blind alleys if you treat it as the description of everything; that’s sort of the point I was making earlier in the week in my discussion of materialism. And the Thomistic synthesis likewise should not be taken as the end-all of everything, but simply to reject either one is to my mind a bad mistake. And for Cartesian dualism? Please. Again, there might be more expansive definitions of dualism by which something like the Scholastic synthesis would count, even though it’s not typically classified that way. (But then again, you seem in other conversations to want some sort of *evolutionary* teleology to replace Aristotelian teleology, which doesn’t satisfy me even remotely. Now you’re replacing a major, operative piece of the Christian philosophical tradition with something taken straight from a camp I generally regard as a kind of “materialist fundamentalism,” and I have absolutely no interest in doing that.) But the reason to prefer a hylomorphic or Thomistic view is because it’s a graceful, integrated view that can *do* so much more for you.
It’s not “oddly complacent” to think that a rich, centuries-long philosophical tradition has a lot to offer. That’s a *reasonable* assumption, especially because I have an explanation for why that synthesis was largely rejected, and it’s not because it wasn’t any good.
By the way, I'd be interested in a fuller exposition of your view you're on how evolutionary teleology relates to Aristotelianism at some point, but your quick "doesn't satisfy me even remotely" dismissal sounds a bit like an ostrich with its head in the sand.
Aristotle saw the biological world as full of functional, purposive natures. Life is indeed full of purpose! But we now know, thanks to Darwin, a very general and powerful reason why that is the case. Purpose is evolutionary fitness. It would have to be, once you see it! And once you grasp the work that purpose as evolutionary fitness can do, biology largely ceases to provide rich, immediate intuitive evidence that telos needs to be included in ontology.
That's not to deny that telos exists. But it needs to be motivated some other way, maybe via some sort of "hylomorphism as the antidote to skepticism" path.
What's rarely understood but very important is that this argumentative move, the concept of and purpose as evolutionary fitness, is completely separable from evolution as an origin story for life. Evolution claims to explain how life forms emerge and change. Purpose as evolutionary fitness explains why they don't, why they stay consistent and stable amidst the world of constant change. *However* life emerged, it would have to have evolutionary fitness in order to persist in the world that we know.
And this is actually, as I see it, indispensable for apologetics. Nature is full of suffering and cruelty, which seems to be incompatible with the goodness of God. How is one to fit the carnivory of the lion into a worldview centered around a benevolent Creator? Evolutionary fitness explains the carnivory of the lion in one way, but couldn't an omnipotent God have prevented that?
Now, if you say "we can just recognize carnivory as part of the nature of the lion, and that nature has its own peculiar kind of goodness," as it seems to me an Aristotelian is wont to do, then you've taken the fatal step.
But the prophet says something different: the lion will eat straw like the ox.
However thoroughly nature seems to be infused with cruelty and suffering, it has another origin and another destiny, and all the cruelty and suffering is abnormal and off track. Evolutionary fitness can explain much about why it happens, and why it turns into a stable pattern. But it's *not* written in the ultimate natures of things, however much common sense might perceive it that way.
Evolutionary fitness can explain the natures of things in ways that don't depend on the design of God, and that therefore allow the actual designs of God to be something different and better from nature as we observe it. But obviously this is complicated and hard to articulate.
More here: https://lancelotfinn.substack.com/p/the-grand-coherence-chapter-12-sociobiology
It almost seems like you’re saying that the purpose of evolutionary theory is to absolve God of responsibility for suffering. Like you’re moving in sort sort of gnostic direction.
Maybe it’s not that; maybe it’s just some version of a best-possible-world theodicy wherein evolutionary fitness shows a kind of internal *cohesion* to the world that helps us see why this world is intrinsically good, and thus worth preserving in its integrity even when the results in a particular case seem to be bad. (The lion eating a child, say.) Fine, but in that case you have to explain what’s good about evolutionary purpose and how it relates to the meaning of the world and of human life more broadly. Material explanations, explanations based in efficient causality, lack a robust sense of purpose. So you have to make up for that. The fear of course is that they will become reductive by basically *substituting for* explanations of the sort that show why the world has purpose.
So "the purpose of evolutionary theory" isn't to justify God but just to describe the truth. Descent with modification is a fact. "Survival of the fittest," or differential survival based on heritable traits, is a fact. Evolutionary tendencies follow. Whatever traits nature and organisms have, must be compatible with evolutionary equilibrium.
Much apparent purpose in nature is explained by evolutionary equilibrium. That limits the extent to which apparent purpose in nature can be treated as evidence for divine design, but it does not foreclose that line of argument altogether, and I agree with the "intelligent design" school that mere unguided evolution probably can't come close to explaining the amount of order in nature we observe.
Maybe the mental model this points me towards is that God created a good world, but gave freedom to angels and men, and some of them abused it, and that led to pride and competition, and in that framework, evolution changed the natures of things. So that when we, now, perceive the natures of things, we partly perceive the original good designs of God, and partly the fruits of a fallen world of pride and competition, in which evolutionary fitness, with its strong component of cruelty and exploitation, comes into its own. There would be a whole lot of work to do mapping those concepts onto nature as we observe it, and I would be very out of my depth attempting it. But it's a kind of outline of the truth as best I can apprehend it.
So... "Awkward and infertile" doesn't mean "not true " I've intermittently tried to dive into Thomas Aquinas, and I tend to find him hard to follow and unconvincing, But mostly not wrong. I much prefer secondhand sources, like, say, Peter Kreeft. From those sources, I get the idea that I might agree with Aquinas more than any modern philosopher. But his style of exposition, leaning on authority and then making arguments of which many are silly... Well, that's never going to move the needle with me. But that's based on exposure to only a tiny fraction of his work, so I can't really say.
You say it's odd to dismiss a position while admitting I don't understand what it is, but I'm not really dismissing any positions other than dismissiveness towards dualism. Descartes starts with "I think, therefore I am": that's dualism in a nutshell, or at least the starting point for it, and it's largely irrefutable. "You are your body?" No, I am my thoughts, first and foremost, and the reducibility of thought to a material basis is very, very unproven and it seems almost prima facie inconceivable. Sure, the "pituitary gland" is silly; but that's one false step in a promising and necessary project that can be adjusted.
If you're going to say that it's hard to fit a supernatural soul and a material body together, as an argument against dualism, then it's equally difficult to figure out how telos-infused natures fit into a material world that is clearly described at some level by the periodic table. Not hopeless, necessarily; but difficult enough that for an Aristotelian to dismiss dualism on grounds of the difficulty of integrating disparate elements seems to exhibit a striking lack of self-awareness. However, "richer ontology" seems like a common ground, and we may disagree less than it seems.
But for me, rejecting the reducibility of mind to matter, a move for which dualism is a kind of indispensable initial placeholder, whatever may follow, is much more urgent than taking teleology on board, although ultimately I want to do that as well.
You think. You are. Who disagrees? But why does that mean that *you are your thoughts?* Why does the cogito prove you to be “pure mind” whatever that means.
“I think therefore I am.” “I throw the ball, therefore I am.” Now, of course, you might say that this is a less persuasive proof of me because of the greater epistemic uncertainty of the real existence of the physical world. Obviously Descartes would say that. But… do you, a self-described dualist, *not* think it’s me throwing the ball? Would it be more strictly accurate to say “my mind directed my body to throw the ball?” That’s extremely weird.
A Thomist thinks that a human being is by nature a corporeal being, a soul enfleshed. He rejects the categorical split that you seem to take for granted. The soul does survive death but in a diminished and incomplete form (yes, that part is tricky, I agree) and it can’t be complete again until reunited with the body. Which will eventually happen. Do you believe in the resurrection of the Body? I mean it’s in the Nicene Creed and all.
Ok good. So yes to the resurrection of the body, and this is an important Christian contribution that I think Platonist philosophers were inclined to scorn. The Christians don't accept the spiritualization of human identity to the extent of thinking that being corporeal is irrelevant, let alone regrettable. Thomists are right that human *telos,* human flourishing, optimally includes having a body.
But your tripping over the problem of how the soul can survive death if human nature *is* a soul enfleshed is key. It's why Aristotle was not a Christian or proto-Christian, why Aquinas accepted Aristotle's tutelage a bit too much for his own good, why Descartes' restarting philosophy from "I think therefore I am" was an important *and characteristically Christian* move that was corrective to scholasticism's overindulgence of Aristotle, and why CS Lewis, though not unfriendly to Aristotle, made a quite different and rather Cartesian line of argument central to his *Miracles.* As you suggest, "I throw a ball therefore I am" is far less epistemically robust than "I think therefore I am." A person is *really* mind, soul, thought, will; body is an add-on, though a good one, like a book to a scholar or a crown to a king. We can't be our best without a body, but we can *be*; we can't be without a soul.
These aren't huge disagreements philosophically, but they change the read on intellectual history.
Wow! How fun!
I'm curious: what do you think postmodernism has to do with "wokeness?" I was writing something about that a while back, which I never published... But it feels kind of parallel with this.
Oh, wokism is absolutely drenched in postmodern
concepts and ideals! Postmodernism seems to reseed effortlessly in our age, like a weed…