Smashed Toys, Superheroes and Education

Two on Spiderman at Inside Catholic linked to this essay called Toyland by Steve Ditko, who is one of the creators of Spiderman. It was really interesting to read a kind of Aristotlean philosophy in this context -- I guess because he is a follower of Ayn Rand who considered herself a follower of Aristotle-- the whole essay is good reading but this part particularly related to education:

“Asked point blank by a fan if things in the Marvel Universe will ever go back to normal after being ‘screwed up’ by House of M and Civil War, Joe Quesada said, ‘These toys are meant to be broken. If we just told stories that kept the status quo, nobody would be in this room, and I’d be out of a job. They’re meant to be thrown against a wall, smashed together, and built back up again.’” (“Baltimore 06: Cup o Joe”, Newsarama.com, 10 September 2006.)

First, let’s examine and understand a necessary and fundamental distinction: The natural (disease, germs, etc.) and the man/mind made (science, medicine, cars, computers, etc.).

Everything man/mind made serves some purpose of being useful, good, practical or mistaken, useless, bad.

And almost everything man/mind made can be used to serve some purpose that it was not originally, purposefully made for: Airplanes are made, used, for air transportation, a human good, a value for living. But they were used as a deliberate terrorist weapon for the destruction of a life-serving, economic creation and for the deaths of innocent lives.

Every mind can identify the authority and the license involved in that destructive action.

And words can be and are used for all kinds of negative purposes, for excuses, lying, rationalizing, propaganda, ideologies, pseudo-sciences, prestige, etc.

With that, let’s examine that Joe Quesada sentence and some key words in the full context of comic book characters, stories, editing and publishing.

“These toys are meant to be broken”, “smashed together” and “status quo”.

“Broken” and “smashed” are not creative concepts but aggressive and destructive.

Next, there are two definitions of a toy: (1) “…a thing of little importance; trifle” and (2) “a plaything especially for children.”

So the purpose of a toy can be useless, negative or useful, positive depending on the particular context and on the toy’s purpose, function, of why it was made and what the end or goal it serves.

So a super hero comic book, a super hero, can be seen, held, as a “toy”, a “trifle”, of little use, value, to human life, so only fit to be “smashed”, “broken”.

Or the comic book, the “hero”, can be seen, held, as important, useful, a real value for man/mind and life.

It all depends on the evaluating, judging mind, the degree of rationality, reasoning, and what is believed, accepted, as a valid standard of value–the intrinsic, subjective or objective– that is used, operating.

A toy as a plaything for a child can be for a purpose of activating, stimulating, broadening his mind toward new experiences, discoveries, opportunities, benefits, possibilities, etc.

A toy doll can give a young girl all kinds of new experiences, of playing at being a friend, a sister or even a parent, etc.

A toy game for a young boy can be used to play with learning various skills, being adventurous, competitive, competent, even suggesting a future career.

A further elaboration on toys is with the Montessori School for young children (3-6 yrs.). The Montessori teaching method is teaching with toys. A young mind implicitly learns identity–A is A, causality, if/then, etc.– in having to fit round, square or odd-shaped objects into their appropriate holes on a board.

Toy building blocks teach a mind that there must first be a solid base, a foundation, to build, erect, a firm block structure (pyramid, etc.). There is an implied hierarchy, ranking, for the whole to stand, exist.

What is learned implicitly is that contradictions of identity, A is A, cannot lead to success in the real world.

It is the still emotionally-driven mind that gets frustrated and wants to “smash” the “toy”, the learning device, when it can’t get the material, the identities, to act any way it emotionally wants: A square piece in a round hole, etc.

The child’s mind has to identify, understand, learn to train the beginning of an ordered mind in the actual, successful doing. A pleasurable, rewarding experience.

A child’s mind learns that if he wants a certain effect–standing blocks, etc.–his mind has to obey the non-contradictory, the facts, identities of reality.

He then goes on to condemn progressive education, because it does not base itself on reality but emphasizes a subjective sense of individuality and molding of reality to suit some social or personal agenda.

The Progressives‘, all anti-objective education’s, goal is to teach, train, the child’s mind the need to “smash” particularly the status quo like property rights, i.e. the right to life, that the abstract community “mind”, meaning some authority with a license, decides what is to be “smashed”, to be “broken”, turned into a non-, an anti-identity for some common good.

Though I'm an unschooler, I'm not particularly a progressive; certainly the unschoolers I have most in common with believe that unschooling's an appropriate way to approach and respect reality, not bend and twist it to suit one's own personal preferences. More about progressive education here in Messing About and Opening Windows. More about superheroes in Superheroes, Emergent Teens, Norms and Nobility. A bit of Ayn Rand in All Literature is Dangerous. Thank you, dear blog archives, you always tell me where I am in thinking about various things. ;-)

Anyway, I liked the analysis of the role of toys and play towards a closer approach to reality, versus the destructive and mutilating use of toys and words. I'm sure you thought of the destructive kid Sid in Toy Story when you read the bit about smashing toys and building them back in new ways, too.

Joy, Hope, Sorrow, Fear

The Circe Institute announced that Marcus and Laura Berquist have been named the winners of the 2009 Russell Kirk Paideia Prize for Lifetime Contribution to Classical Education. (HT: Quiddity)

I was just reading an article on "Joy in Homeschooling" by Laura Berquist in The Latin Mass magazine. I like the distinctions she made in this passage.... very helpful to me:

"...Joy is a passion we experience with respect to a good we actually possess. Hope, on the other hand, is the passion we experience with respect to a difficult good we wish to possess, but do not yet have. Hope is what we feel when the children are young and we are working toward the goals we want to achieve for and with them. Sorrow is the passion felt regarding an evil actually existing, while fear is the passion we experience regarding an evil not yet experienced."

If you pull out these emotions you have a pretty fair range of what I can experience as a homeschooling mom within, say, five minutes. Or maybe less.

Aristotle on Virtue

A virtuous action is not merely any action which, somehow or other, will lead to happiness. We do not display virtue when we do something that happens to be good, but we must act with a deliberate desire to perform our cuntion as human beings properly, that is, to perform it voluntarily and in full awareness of the fact that there are possible alternatives, which, however, we reject in deciding to act the way we will.

The Greek word Aristototle uses for this process is proairesis, which literally means "forechoice", "A choosing (one thing) before, ie, rather than (another)," and without it no action can have moral value. Aristotle's final definition of the concept at the end of his discussion in III. 2-3 is "a deliberate desire for things that are within our power: we arrive at a decision on the basis of deliberation, and then let the deliberation guide our desire." It is, in other words, a thoughtful organization of our desires -- not of all desires, but only of those which we are capable of fulfilling through our own efforts -- without which no action can be termed "virtuous."

But in order to have virtue it is not sufficient to exercise this proairesis or "choice" of acting well only on a number of isolated occasions. Virtue is, for Aristotle, a hexis (literally, "a having," "a holding," "a being in a certain condition"), something so deeply ingrained in a person by constant habit that he will almost automatically make the morally right choices on every occasion, rejecting at the same time and equally automatically all the alternatives as wrong. Virtue will thus be a firmly established characteristic of the person, and the aggregate of all his characteristics will constitute his character. -- from the Introduction to Nichomachean Ethics by Martin Ostwald

Enthusiasm

"Enthusiasm is an emotion of the ethical part of the soul."

I read this yesterday in Poetic Knowledge, which I was bringing to Liam at college upon his request. The quote is from Aristotle. It seems that according to James Taylor (author of the book, and not the singer in case you wanted to know): to the ancients, a large part of the goal for education was to foster the student's delight in what is good.

Here is the whole quote:

But music is pursued, not only as an alleviation of past toil, but also as providing recreation. And who can say whether, having this use, it may not also have a nobler one? In addition to this common pleasure, felt and shared in by all (for the pleasure given by music is natural, and therefore adapted to all ages and characters), may it not have also some influence over the character and the soul?

.... beyond question they inspire enthusiasm, and enthusiasm is an emotion of the ethical part of the soul. Besides, when men hear imitations, even apart from the rhythms and tunes themselves, their feelings move in sympathy. Since then music is a pleasure, and virtue consists in rejoicing and loving and hating aright, there is clearly nothing which we are so much concerned to acquire and to cultivate as the power of forming right judgments, and of taking delight in good dispositions and noble actions.

I'm not so much concerned with music itself here so much as how music is one example of the more general point he is making.... that more than anything else we are concerned to acquire the power of forming right judgments and taking delight in good things.

Also from Poetic Knowledge, a quote from Plato:

But to love rightly is to love what is orderly and beautiful in and educated and disciplined way. ... for the object of education is to teach us to love what is beautiful.

At the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Plato's position is summarized this way:

What kind of concept of happiness is contained in this ‘inspired’ view of human life and strife? As was pointed out earlier, the happy life is not here conceived of as a life subordinate to the well-being of the community. But it is not a lonely life spent in the pursuit of truth and one's own good either.

The message of the two dialogues is two-pronged.

(1) On the one hand, there is no permanent attainment of happiness as a stable state of completeness in this life. In the ups and downs of life (and the afterlife) humans are in constant need of beauty — in the sense of completion and self-completion. Man is neither a god nor wise, he is at best a god-lover and a philosopher...... To know is not to have; and to have once is not to have always... it (is) quite clear that humans stand in an eternal need to replenish what they constantly lose because they are mortal and changeable creatures.

(2) On the other hand, the eternal pursuit of the good and the beautiful is not a lonely enterprise. As especially the Phaedrus makes clear, love for a beautiful human being is an incentive to search for a higher form of life, as a sacred joint journey of two friends in communion (255a-256e).

Where am I going with this? It seems that possibly it goes back to what I said a few posts ago.... that when I refuse to love what is good, I miss out on the chance of joy. If as the ancients said, education is a matter of not just knowing about, but somehow participating in the Good, True and Beautiful through understanding and imitation, then I probably have the task of continuing to educate myself even as I educate my children. "Purify the source", as Mauriac said, and this seems to relate in this case to "The mother's heart is the child's schoolroom." If I want to grow in virtue, I need to continue to grow in virtue. A truism, but something that is possible to neglect. As Plato said, "To know is not to have; and to have once is not to have always." Heraclitus says that we never step in the same river twice.

Another quote, long, from CS Lewis's Abolition of Man. Note that he is talking about the very same thing as James Taylor is talking about, a tradition that goes back to ancient times:

Let us suppose for a moment that the harder virtues could really be theoretically justified with no appeal to objective value. It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous. Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite sceptical about ethics, but bred to believe that 'a gentleman does not cheat', than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers.

In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment. The crudest sentimentalism (such as Gaius and Titius would wince at) about a flag or a country or a regiment will be of more use. We were told it all long ago by Plato. As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the 'spirited element'.²⁰ The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity,²¹ of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment—these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.

This also seems to relate a bit to St Therese's mention that she flew by way of Love, while by Fear she crawled reluctantly.

I think I've been well-meaningly but futilely trying to reason through virtuous principles into action rather than simply contemplating the good and following it, with reason as a bolster and scaffold. Hard to explain the difference. The will is a rational appetite; it's informed by reason but not necessarily, in itself, moved by it. My Christian faith teaches me that there is nothing in faith and the moral life that is contrary to reason ... ever, ever. At the same time it teaches me that discursive reason is not sufficient (and this is something that can be demonstrated quite simply without any reference at all to Christian special revelation; discursive reason itself can reason out the limitations of discursive reason).

Perhaps this helps me with something that has bothered me for a long time.... Charlotte Mason's ideas on the Way of the Reason. Or perhaps it doesn't help! I'll have to think about that some more.

Katie at CM, Children and Lots of Grace has been blogging about Poetic Knowledge. It's not an easy book, but it's a good one.

more thoughts on delight and its role in virtue

In Aquinas on the Function of Moral Virtue, the writer says:

Suppose, for instance, I find some worthy cause and decide it would be best to give money, and every month I send them some funding. However, every time I do it, it pains me. I do the right thing, but I'm not taking pleasure in it. My act is certainly continent, and I can be said to persevere—and those are perfections of a sort. But they are perfections that fall short of virtue. In my example, my reason is perfected: (1) I discover the right thing to do, and (2) my reason persists in holding the right view even though it pains me to give money. The discovery, the perseverance, and the giving are all good. However, there is something short of complete perfection here: My emotions do not completely follow where my reason leads. A virtuous person would respond differently. The person who has acquired moral virtue has trained his or her appetites to respond to the judgment of reason about what is worth pursuing. The appetites become good instruments of reason and follow its judgment. I will call this the "instrumental function" of virtue. Through this function, we perform right actions readily. That is because one component of our emotions is a bodily state, a state that makes us ready to perform acts of the sort the emotion inclines us to perform. Through this function we also take delight in acting. When my desires are satisfied, I am pleased. When the appetites are good instruments of reason, then when one acts as reason demands, one is pleased, even on a sensory level.

Virtue quite literally makes acting well feel good.

So does that mean that if I have to force myself to do something I know is good, that I might as well give up in discouragement? No, because doing something that is good is good, no matter how distasteful I find it, and Aquinas says that perseverance and continence are meritorious.

Does it mean that if I find some natural pleasure in doing good, for example I like eating temperately because I like fitting into my size 8 jeans, that I am virtuous? No, that is not the same thing as delight in virtue, the way I understand it. That's sort of a "mercenary" reward.

There is a bit more about this here, in Law and Virtue in Aquinas. This article is very interesting and relates to some other things I wanted to talk about sometime, but for right now I just wanted to bring out the point of the article, that there are three ways of doing something right, and they go in an ascending scale from least perfect to most perfect:

• Because you are afraid of the consequences of doing wrong (ie punishment from the authorities, or perhaps natural consequences like getting fat if you eat too many desserts)
• Because reason tells you to do right (you know it is healthier for your body to eat better food, perhaps; or perhaps you focus on how you function better when you are eating right? I am guessing a bit here. I think it relates to how St Paul says he knows the good but doesn't always DO it as a result, because his flesh wants to do otherwise).
• Because you delight in the right act. (from the Psalms -- "My delight is in the law of the Lord". )
  

This last part is still somewhat puzzling to me and is the main reason I'm writing this out, but here are a couple of quotes from Aquinas:

It is not always through the perfect goodness of virtue that one obeys the law, but sometimes it is through fear of punishment, and sometimes from the mere dictate of reason, which is a kind of beginning of virtue...

... virtue is natural to man according to a kind of beginning. This is so in respect of the specific nature (of man), in so far as in man's reason are to be found instilled by nature certain naturally known principles of both knowledge and action, which are the nurseries of intellectual and moral virtues, and in so far as there is in the will a natural appetite for good in accordance with reason.

This is basically a formulation of St Paul's teachings in Romans 1 about the "law written upon our hearts". I get that part of it. The part that still puzzles me a bit is the part that goes beyond reason to delight in the good thing for itself. I think if I could figure out that part of it, it would be easier to do things well.... well, perhaps not easier, but I would be less conflicted.

Definition of terminology according to Thomas Aquinas, (I'm going to put it in a quote box even though I paraphrased the definitions a bit in a "catechism" format)

What is delight? (aka pleasure) It is the proper accident of happiness but not its essence.
What is happiness? It is the ultimate end for rational beings, including humans. It requires possession of the virtues.
What is virtue? It is a habit or perfection of the soul, "Virtue, which is an operative habit, is a good habit productive of good works." (here)
Why is virtue a requirement for happiness? This was originally carefully worked out by Aristotle in natural terms, and a summary is here. Basically, because the highest power of man is a disposition to do good, and it's the only one that can't be taken away by misfortune, so it is the most properly human of all dispositions.
What's a habit? a quality by which a being or a power is well or badly disposed. There are habits of the body, e.g., strength and weakness, and habits of the soul. Grace is a habit in the soul as a whole ; the intellectual, moral, and theological virtues are habits in the parts of the soul.
What does essence mean? (aka "very being") of a thing. The essence of a thing is stated in its (real) definition, which explains the proper accidents of a thing.
What's an accident? An accident is a predicate that is attributed to a subject in fact but not by necessity. Aristotle and Aquinas distinguish the proper accident of a thing from the essence of that thing.
So what's a proper accident? (aka accident per se). The proper accident of something accompanies it but does not explain it. But the essence of thing may explain or help to explain the presence of the proper accident.
That brings us back to the beginning of all this, What is delight?

Did that make sense?

Man is made for happiness. Delight accompanies happiness but does not explain it. Virtue is a requirement for happiness because it does not depend upon exterior things for its perfection. Satisfaction in exterior things tends to reach a point where the delight falls off. In other words, if you have too many brownies you feel miserable, even though you may still want to eat more. Having 20 houses is not really any more productive of delight than having 1, though people may think so for a time. Plus, since your housing can be taken away by mischance it is not yours in the same way that personal qualities are yours.

I get stuck there.... maybe I am over-intellectualizing (nah, couldn't be that!). I do think I tend to muddle distinctions when I'm doing this amateur philosophizing, and that causes problems. I don't totally apologize because anything worth doing is worth doing badly, as Chesterton says. But I probably have to be ready to put it on the back burner. St Therese of Lisieux said she was much more able to do things out of Love than Fear and I can certainly go along with that. When I'm trying to do something in a better way it works MUCH better to think of it as an act of love than some sort of avoidance of peril (peril paralyzes me).

I should like to resolve this some time, but perhaps I won't during my life.

The Light of the Intellect

(I'm picking up my blogging on Charlotte Mason's Way of the Will which I started during the summer. Originally I planned to continue it through the fall and merge into a discussion of habits, but instead I got absorbed in homeschooling details -- fancy that! it seems to happen every fall! So this is an older draft that I'm brushing up and trying to finish -- it might still be a bit rough because I am still thinking some of this through)

The light of the body is the eye: if therefore your eye be single, your whole body shall be full of light. But it your eye be evil, your whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you be darkness, how great is that darkness! (Luke 11:34)

I have been trying to think about how to approach this part of Charlotte Mason's The Way of the Will, which is about the role of education in forming character. It's a tremendously large topic, and one where misunderstandings crop up often. Here are some difficulties:

• If education is important in forming will, does that mean that an uneducated person can't be virtuous or is somehow basically inferior to an educated person?
• If we are all broken by sin, can education really be of any help in mending our condition? Isn't this a sort of "works-righteouness?"
• Related to the others: Can you have a strong will and yet be bad? A strong intellect, and yet be bad?

Briefly, the answers would be No, Yes, No, Sort Of. In other words, you don't have to be educated or even intelligent to live a life of virtue; education is not sufficient for virtue, yet it is important; you can have a strong will and a strong intellect and yet be bad, but only in a provisional way, defining "strength" in a value-free way. The Romans closely correlated "strength" with "virtue" (the etymology is the same "vir" which also evokes "manliness" or a specifically human type of behavior).

Aquinas writes on the question of whether there can be intellectual without moral virtue:

Other intellectual virtues can, but prudence cannot, be without moral virtue. The reason for this is that prudence is the right reason about things to be done (and this, not merely in general, but also in particular); about which things actions are. Now right reason demands principles from which reason proceeds to argue. And when reason argues about particular cases, it needs not only universal but also particular principles.

As to universal principles of action, man is rightly disposed by the natural understanding of principles, whereby he understands that he should do no evil; or again by some practical science. But this is not enough in order that man may reason aright about particular cases. For it happens sometimes that the aforesaid universal principle, known by means of understanding or science, is destroyed in a particular case by a passion: thus to one who is swayed by concupiscence, when he is overcome thereby, the object of his desire seems good, although it is opposed to the universal judgment of his reason.

Consequently, as by the habit of natural understanding or of science, man is made to be rightly disposed in regard to the universal principles of action; so, in order that he be rightly disposed with regard to the particular principles of action, viz. the ends, he needs to be perfected by certain habits, whereby it becomes connatural, as it were, to man to judge aright to the end. This is done by moral virtue: for the virtuous man judges aright of the end of virtue, because "such a man is, such does the end seem to him" (Ethic. iii, 5). Consequently the right reason about things to be done, viz. prudence, requires man to have moral virtue.

So in other words, moral virtue isn't technically necessary for intellectual strength.... you can be Harvard-bound without being Heaven-bound, so to speak, as Newman said. Yet to act rationally (ie with prudence) you need "right reason" which is informed by moral principles. And Aquinas says that if you are living badly, your intellect can be clouded because you don't have proper control over or perspective on your appetites that are contrary to reason.

Our job as parents, anyhow, whether we delegate some of the academic parts to schools or not, is to integrate religious, moral and intellectual formation, as Newman also recommended. Often, intelligent students who are formed without much attention to religious or moral principles are intelligent enough to figure out that something is missing from a purely secular academic training, and thus intelligence seems a futile gift to them, or like a tool to be exploited, or like a completely separate compartment from other things (so that you see some highly trained lawyers and doctors whose religious intelligence is that of a bright 8 year old, frozen in time exactly where their elders left it).... which invariably cheapens it and flattens it out, any way it goes.

Consolations of Philosophy

“The sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher. Philosophy indeed has no other origin." Plato -- Theatetus

I thought I would try to blog a bit about philosophy, since it comes up a lot on this blog.

If I had only heard of philosophy through the one class I took in university, I would think that it was a sterile and esoteric subject. I think I vaguely remember the professor discussing whether a car window was open or closed, lecturing to blase students who hadn't even discerned why they were even at the university in the first place.

Thankfully, it is difficult to read much in the Catholic treasury of faith, history and literature without coming upon the word Philosophy in a very different guise.

I think I probably longed for philosophy before I even knew what it was. I remember studying the scriptures long before I converted to Catholicism. I was talking to some Jehovah Witnesses not because I was interested in their form of religion, but because I wanted to "give reasons for the faith that was in me." (at that time, I was an Evangelical Protestant Christian). One Witness tenet is that the Holy Spirit is not a Person but simply a sort of force emanating from the Father. I did an intensive study of the Holy Spirit through scripture and fell in love with Him -- the Holy Ghost, that is -- a strange way of saying it, but I can't really say it differently. It was like vowing allegiance. To something I couldn't see, Who seemed more real and substantial than most of the things that you can bump into or step on.

Later, after I started homeschooling, I was pondering Proverbs. A lot of the homeschooling books I read were very big on Proverbs, mostly the child-training maxims. But when I read the book, I was pulled in by Wisdom -- Sophia:

Wisdom crieth without; she uttereth her voice in the streets....

Get wisdom, get understanding: forget it not; neither decline from the words of my mouth.

Forsake her not, and she shall preserve thee: love her, and she shall keep thee.

Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding.

I didn't care as much about "the rod bringing reproof" as I did about wisdom calling, with no one to hear her beautiful message and come to her shelter. I hear her voice now! It's like the curtain stirring and drawing aside for a moment that CS Lewis described in Surprised by Joy. But there's more to it than just hearing, I realized. I'd have to follow her, shelter under her wing, be willing to die rather than forsake her (because what IS life without wisdom, as Socrates pointed out in Phaedo when his followers asked him to desert philosophy in order to save his life). It's not JUST a matter of setting off; there is a road map, and sometimes you toil and don't seem to get anywhere, and sometimes you fall into a morass. But it is worth it.

Later still, as I first came upon the term "philosophy" in a Christian sense, in Catholic readings, I realized that the term was a declaration of allegiance, of love and alliance, to Wisdom. "Sophia" derives from the word for wisdom, and "Philo" evokes "love" or friendship. I pondered the story of Solomon choosing wisdom above all else. His story is a good one, which shows that choosing wisdom is a constant re-conversion, because you can easily fall away, as he did when he let his wives bring false gods into the land and let his sons associate with peers instead of mentors.

St Paul, in 1 Corinthians 9:

Every athlete exercises discipline in every way. They do it to win a perishable crown, but we an imperishable one.

Thus I do not run aimlessly; I do not fight as if I were shadowboxing.
No, I drive my body and train it, for fear that, after having preached to others, I myself should be disqualified.

The merchant, having found the pearl of great price, sells everything he has in order to buy the field it is in.

Wisdom has chosen a weak servant in me. I have to be aware of that constantly and shore up that weakness. I can be inclined to set up my camp chair in the field and forget the pearl. Things like running and digging make me tired. But again, it is worth it.

Sorry about all the autobiographical details. The point here is that Philosophy, etymologically, is not a subject in the strict sense; it is a sort of relationship. The Church calls philosophy the "ancilla fidei" -- the handmaiden of religion. It is a search, not an arrival; a quest, not a product; again, an ongoing devotion which is never "done" or achieved. Socrates said he was only wise in knowing he was not wise; that's probably the best approach, loving wisdom because it's NOT yourself. If one was wise already, why would one have to search? One would only have to look inside. CS Lewis reminds us that this is a trap.... the moment we forget the object of joy and start trying to focus on the joy itself, it goes away.

I am not saying, "It is better to travel than to arrive". Not in the least! Once again, it is "love" and love doesn't get done with. It is ongoing. Love is essentially in relation to something else, as is knowledge.

Socrates said that Wisdom begins in Wonder. Mysteries deepen and expand the more you ponder them, not expand in numerical proliferation like a mutating cell or dust bunnies under the bed, but start with simple things and grow into something one couldn't have imagined to start with, like a seed grows into a mighty tree.

Philosophy can stretch the boundaries of your mind, like theology. It is immeasurably capacious. Yet it is simple. Everyone can access the treasury. It is not strictly dependent upon intellectual acuity, and in fact one's rational intellect can prove a stumbling block, because that is limited and tends to set limits even where they don't exist. Wisdom can be won "connaturally" through virtuous living and love for the good, according to Aquinas. This is why you meet simple, ordinary folk who are very wise, and some very smart people who have little to no wisdom, who have limited their understanding to what they can grasp by strictly rational means.

Philosophy is everybody's business, as Mortimer Adler writes. He quotes Aristotle:

"The investigation of the truth is in one way hard, in another easy. An indication of this is found in the fact that no one is able to attain the truth adequately, while, on the other hand, we do not collectively fail, but every one says something true about the nature of things, and while individually we contribute little or nothing to the truth, by the union of all a considerable amount is amassed."

Jonathan Dolhenty terms the philosophical endeavour as:

"an analysis of the human condition as seen through the eyes of an authentic philosophical realism fundamentally grounded on the judgments of common sense, critically examined and expanded."

The part I want to focus on particularly is the "common sense" part of it. I think common sense (insofar as it is TRUE common sense) is similar to what Aquinas calls "right judgment". Philosophy goes beyond common sense, just as faith goes beyond natural reason. But like Faith and Reason, Philosophy and common sense are compatible, or ought to be.

The sky is the limit; but the atmosphere, the air of philosophy, is right around you, in the questions your toddler asks; in the mystery of a tiny seed growing into a tremendous sequoia; in the musings of your silent moments, when you ponder what it all means, why it is one way and not another, the hidden and not-obvious things that are passed over when life is too hurried and harried. Philosophy is in the reasons, articulated or not, that you choose one type of life over another. Philosophy is a relationship, as I think every child probably knows; at least, I did, when I was small and could feel a sort of Breath around almost everything I did.

The reason I'm writing this out is because I often write about philosophy, yet am not necessarily someone who always "judges rightly" or understands all the upper expansions of the philosophical discipline. The word "amateur" is not dissimilar in etymology to the "philo" in philosophy since they both imply interesting oneself with something out of love. I think a lover of wisdom can talk about the thing he (or she) loves without claiming to be anything more than a devoted amateur. People who love make mistakes sometimes, but the mistakes don't invalidate the whole enterprise, so long as they don't distract and lead us right off the path. And because they love, they have a corrective in their mistakes.

One more thing -- I doubt if I have very many readers to whom the word "philosophy" has negative connotations. But of course, one hears about the "vain philosophy, traditions of men" condemned by St Paul in Colossians, and I have read some homeschool writings that take the Apostle to mean that philosophy is vain by definition. Quite obviously, there are vain philosophies. Generally I think one of the biggest temptations in philosophy as a science is a kind of gnosticism or elite-ism, an "inner circle" of those in the know (CS Lewis speaks of the psychology of this temptation). Another is the "use" of philosophy to gain power. Philosophy nowadays isn't thought of as a road to power, but remember that what we call simple Science now was traditionally called Natural Philosophy -- it was the philosophy that had to do with understanding of the natural world. If you look at it this way, you can probably see that Philosophy of the Material Kind is sometimes used by its "high priests" as an occasion for pride and accumulation of power. This is a misuse, of course.

Closer to my everyday life, there can be a "vain-ness" in philosophy from the excess of curiosity, a vice that Thomas Aquinas mentioned which means seeking out knowledge out of season and proper occasion. This would be something like sloth (at least in my life) -- a replacement of actual One Needful Thing with a bunch of mental philosophy-related trivia. Maybe this is another application of Non Multa Sed Multum ;-). St John Chrysostom says:

"the evil rises from idleness and a vain philosophy, that one should be occupied about words only. For it is a great injury to be uttering a superfluity of words, when one ought to be teaching, or praying, or giving thanks."

Perhaps that's a good place to close. ... or start ;-).

Trust, and the Knowledge of the Heart

"Trust your children."" Trust your instincts." I have heard this said often in the unschooling community. I have written about trust myself quite a bit. For example, here:

Another insight that unschooling offers to me is that learning is largely about relationship. Trust is the bottom-line of an effective relationship. Not blind, naive trust but committed, optimistic trust. Most "systems" of education think of relationship as a peripheral benefit. But to me it seems central, fundamental. No one can teach anything or learn anything if there is not trust to start with.

Still, I have always had a bit of reservation about what, exactly, "trust" meant; especially in the formulation "trust your instincts." It has always seemed reasonable to me to look at my instincts with a bit of wariness. Here is the dictionary definition for instinct:

An inborn pattern of behavior that is characteristic of a species and is often a response to specific environmental stimuli

A powerful motivation or impulse.

An innate capability or aptitude

The third one sounds the most promising, but all of them sound like they could lead me wrong. So if they could lead me wrong, why should I trust my childrens' instincts? I do trust the kids themselves, but in the same measured, cautious way I trust myself. In Catholic terminology it is called the charitable assumption. St Ignatius puts it this way:

...Let it be presupposed that every good Christian is to be more ready to save his neighbor’s proposition than to condemn it. If he cannot save it, let him inquire how he means it; and if he means it badly, let him correct him with charity. If that is not enough, let him seek all the suitable means to bring him to mean it well, and save himself.

This works as a parenting principle for me, as well as a general one.

This is where the question has been in my mind up till recently. Then recently, I read in John Newman's Grammar of Assent, something that crystallized my vague misgivings.

It seems to me unphilosophical to speak of trusting ourselves. We are what we are, and we use, not trust our faculties. ...Our consciousness of self is prior to all questions of trust or assent. We act according to our nature, by means of ourselves, when we remember or reason. We are as little able to accept or reject our mental constitution, as our being. We have not the option; we can but misuse or mar its functions.

Now, you are wondering if I am going to say that I have had a sea-change about unschooling, or decided that "trust" is contradictory to Catholic realism. But almost the reverse is true. Rather, Newman's precise formulation actually clarified the issue for me, and I realized that the talk of "trust" might be imprecise, but was not necessarily out of bounds.

I hope you can bear with this! I know it's a lot of quoting, but I have some more, and then perhaps it will be clear where I am going!

There is a very good article online called Heart Speaks to Mind about John Newman's thought. In the course of this article, the author defines what philosophers call "connatural knowledge."

Connatural knowledge appears occasionally in the works of St. Thomas Aquinas, usually in describing how something may be known without having a very precise concept of it. A chaste person who is uneducated may not know much about chastity as an idea, but that person knows it very well through experience or participation in the virtue. Likewise, a mystic may not know God theologically, but may know Him experientially very well. This kind of knowledge through experience or participation knows by way of a similarity of nature -- thus connatural. Sometimes the similarity is innate; thus we know, through a similarity of natures, how the cat feels when it is hungry. At other times it learns through experience how a thing is, or feels, or is desirable, fearful, et cetera.

Here is another definition of connatural knowledge, from the Radical Academy:

"connatural knowledge," ...is a knowledge which:

• follows on the "lived experience" of the truth;
• is the living contact of the intellect with reality itself;
• is not always given expression in concepts;
• may be obscure to the knower;
• is overlaid with elements from the affective or feeling side of man's nature.

Connatural knowledge is also called Poetic Knowledge by some philosophers, and there is a book by James Taylor (not the singer) that bears that title and is very interesting reading.

Newman says that truth has integrity -- it is one::

"I lay it down that all knowledge forms one whole, because its subject-matter is one; for the universe in its length and breadth is so intimately knit together, that we cannot separate off portion from portion, and operation from operation, except by mental abstraction..."

So it seems to follow that truths arrived at by this type of "natural" knowledge are truths, no less so from being arrived at in an inarticulate, heart-felt, living way. In fact, systems of logic are based on this basic poetic knowledge, and rely on connatural understanding as reality checks. If you have ever observed that highly trained intellectuals can sometimes (not always) be the most silly, misguided people in their lives and thinking, while some simple folk can be profoundly wise and sensible, then you are seeing mere logic and human reasoning pitted against sound connatural knowledge.

Chesterton writes:

Logic and truth, as a matter of fact, have very little to do with each other. Logic is concerned merely with the fidelity and accuracy with which a certain process is performed, a process which can be performed with any materials, with any assumption.....Logic, then, is not necessarily an instrument for finding truth; on the contrary, truth is necessarily an instrument for using logic—for using it, that is, for the discovery of further truth and for the profit of humanity. Briefly, you can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.

I hope you can see that I have come full circle here. My thought is that unschoolers are often using "trust your instincts" as a simple synonym for the more specialized concept of connatural knowledge. Their very sense of what's real -- what's good and true and beautiful -- teaches them to look through their inner eye, and rely on that when something is in question.

It's not that it's bad to reason analytically- -it's a unique human quality-- but if your reasoning ,or more likely, someone else's reasoning, is going against your deepest instincts -- there, I used the word! -- you might want to doublecheck. Maybe the reasoning is wrong; maybe the premises are false. It happens. In some ways, you could say that connatural knowledge informed by grace actually is a beacon for logical reasoning, a destination light, as well as a foundation and starting point.

Now, this inner knowledge is not infallible, of course, because of fallen human nature. Think of Woody Allen saying "the heart wants what the heart wants" wants as a justification for involvement in an irresponsible relationship. What his heart wanted was natural, but wrong and damaging. I agree with Newman. We can use or misuse our faculties, so it is important to keep a balance. "Know thyself" might apply here. How to improve the integrity of our "heart knowledge"? I have to wrap this one up because it is getting long, but I would say, for a start: through reliance on grace, through improving habits of virtue, and through "thinking upon these things" --- that is, whatever is true, pure, wholesome, beautiful and of good report. In other words, through something like Charlotte Mason's Atmosphere, Discipline, and Life.

Now that I've gone through all that, here is my friend Cindy's thoughtful post on Trusting Myself (and God and the dc) . Also, here are some links that I collected that talked about connatural knowledge, just in case anyone wants to read even MORE (as if!)

• Theses of Philosophy
• Virtue

Armchair Logic

Fun armchair logic test. (HT: Philosopher Mom)
I got 100% too. Not bad for an English Lit major!

Epiphany

Today is officially the feast day of the Epiphany, though it's not really the traditional Epiphany day, and it is a turning point -- bringing our holidays to a close and starting us back to our ordinary lives.

Next Week:

• Sean will return to school
• Liam has one more week at home, but he will probably be busy -- programming to do, thesis to write, book to read.
• We will return to homeschooling, probably transitioning back in slowly.
• I'll be cleaning the house, which needs it.
  

Today and tomorrow I am going to make some sort of start simply by picking up things that are out of place and restoring them to their places. This usually works to get me re-engaged with how the house works. Putting away the baskets of folded laundry might help, too. And I will start putting away the Christmas decorations, which is always a bit sorrowful.

Today I hope to:

• Play Robo-Rally with the boys.
• Make pizza.
• Keep the fire going.
• Finish Kant and the Nineteenth Century (I have typed this enough times so that it sounds like a rock band name).
• Keep an eye on Aidan (he seemed to have a partial seizure this morning -- he has these very infrequently, about twice a year. I am never QUITE sure it is indeed a seizure, but he used to have scary full-blown ones, usually entailing an ambulance trip and sometimes a respirator. These ones look like the very beginnings of the old complete seizures -- he gags, gets disoriented and starts repeating the same sentence over and over -- but he pulls back out of them himself whereas he used to go into grand mal. We'll take the improvement! But anyway, he seems totally back to normal and is laughing up a storm and "buzzing" -- his word for bugging-- his dad and siblings).

I am up to Charles Peirce and William James in the philosophy book. Pierce is said to be a "realist" in that he did believe in objective reality, not just subjective perceptions. He rejected Descartes' approach and went back to the notion of metaphysics as "scientia generalis".

'The business of metaphysics is to study the most general features of reality and real objects."

Peirce and James were Pragmatists, of which school the Catholic Encyclopedia says:

Knowledge begins with sense-impressions. At this point the Pragmatist falls into his initial error, an error, however, of which the idealistic Intellectualist is also guilty. What we are aware of, say both the Pragmatist and the Idealist, is not a thing, or a quality of an object, but the state of self, the subjective condition, the "sensation of whiteness", the "sensation of sweetness" etc. This error, fatal as it is, need not detain us here, because, as has been said, it is common to Idealists and Pragmatists. It is, in fact, the luck-less Cartesian legacy to all modern systems.

St. Thomas says:

Cognition is brought about by the presence of the known object in the knowing mind. But the object is in the knower after the fashion of the knower. Hence, for any knower, knowledge is after the fashion of his own nature (Summa theol., I, Q. xii, a. 4).

So acknowledging that perception is filtered through the subjective, does not necessarily mean that reality proceeds from the subject.

But starting with the subject and his reasoning or experiential process ends up casting radical doubt on even that much. This is the legacy. Nietzsche wrote about a man biting off a snake's head and springing up victorious. But in fact, I think the snake bites the man's head off, and the man seems to feel better without his head troubling him any longer.

(sigh)

To try to wrap this up a bit, if you look at the etymology of epiphany as Greek meaning "to manifest" or "to show" and consider that "ancient Liturgies speak of Illuminatio, Manifestatio, Declaratio" -- all these terms speak of a relationship between something that can be known, and the potential knower (and in these terms, of course, a communicator is also implied -- in one case the communication is by means of lighting the darkness, in one it is a primarily visual appearance, in one it is an auditory telling).

In other words there is no proceeding from the mind of the knower. Rather, the reality is proceeding *from* the outside and by some conveyance process making it possible for the subject, the individual, to know. Empirical reality is conveyed through the senses, but we have knowledge that is not understood directly through the senses. Even empiricists trust in processes that do not derive strictly from phenomena and our perceptions of them. Peirce, who was trying to reclaim this traditional understanding -- he thought of himself as philosophically in the tradition of the Scholastics, though his philosophy differed from theirs as I am understanding it -- saw it as necessary to reclaim metaphysics as well.

I think that is where my thought process as a teenager probably diverged from Descartes' and his followers in Western philosophy. ... though I still get muddled with the details of the western philosophy. But anyway, what I was trying to think through was not a fundamental skepticism but a way of increasing certitude by disallowing alternatives or doubts.

The Catholic Encyclopedia article on knowledge expresses it this way:

Truth and certitude are conditions of knowledge. A man may mistake error for truth and give his unreserved assent to a false statement. He may then be under the irresistible illusion that he knows, and subjectively the process is the same as that of knowledge; but an essential condition is lacking, namely, conformity of thought with reality, so that there we have only the appearance of knowledge. On the other hand, as long as any serious doubt remains in his mind, a man cannot say that he knows. "I think so" is far from meaning "I know it is so"; knowledge is not mere opinion or probable assent.

It goes on to say more about the standings of belief and faith as related to knowledge, which is interesting, but doesn't quite relate to the thread of thought here.

But back to epiphany -- as a Truth to be known, revealed or manifested to the knower. There is still a personal aspect there, but the Thing that is to be Known in no way depends on whether the individual actually DOES know it. I think that was always a given in my mind as much as the First Cause, so the way my mental process worked, if I could show myself that my consciousness was not a hallucination and that it did not come from itself, then I could eliminate the problem of subjectivism from my thinking and avoid that loop of self-referentialism.

Hmm, that makes a bit of sense to me, though I don't know if it is expressed well enough to make sense to anyone besides myself.

Anyway, a blessed feast day to all!

Newman -- Intellect and Religion

One more resource on Newman's idea of the relation between intellect and devotion. Intellect as the Instrument of Religious Training. He uses the opportunity of the Feast of St Monica to discuss this.

THIS day we celebrate one of the most remarkable feasts in the calendar. We commemorate a Saint who gained the heavenly crown by prayers indeed and tears, by sleepless nights and weary wanderings,..... as a mother, seeking and gaining by her penances the conversion of her son.

From there he goes on to make the point that religion and intellect are meant to be united, integrated though not muddled into each other, and that the ideal university is one where they are indeed.

Here, then, I conceive, is the object of the Holy See and the Catholic Church in setting up Universities; it is to reunite things which were in the beginning joined together by God, and have been put asunder by man. Some persons will say that I am thinking of confining, distorting, and stunting the growth of the intellect by ecclesiastical supervision. I have no such thought. Nor have I any thought of a compromise, as if religion must give up something, and science something. I wish the intellect to range with the utmost freedom, and religion to enjoy an equal freedom; but what I am stipulating for is, that they should be found in one and the same place, and exemplified in the same persons. I want to destroy that diversity of centres, which puts everything into confusion by creating a contrariety of influences. I wish the same spots and the same individuals to be at once oracles of philosophy and shrines of devotion.

It will not satisfy me, what satisfies so many, to have two independent systems, intellectual and religious, going at once side by side, by a sort of division of labour, and only accidentally brought together. It will not satisfy me, if religion is here, and science there, and young men converse with science all day, and lodge with religion in the evening. It is not touching the evil, to which these remarks have been directed, if young men eat and drink and sleep in one place, and think in another: I want the same roof to contain both the intellectual and moral discipline. Devotion is not a sort of finish given to the sciences; nor is science a sort of feather in the cap, if I may so express myself, an ornament and set-off to devotion. I want the intellectual layman to be religious, and the devout ecclesiastic to be intellectual.

.... Let both influences act freely, and then, as a general rule, no system of mere religious guardianship which neglects the Reason, will in matter of fact succeed against the School. Youths need a masculine religion, if it is to carry captive their restless imaginations, and their wild intellects, as well as to touch their susceptible hearts.

This reminds me a bit of Benedict XVI's planned speech at La Sapienza, which was called off because of protests by students and faculty who apparently weren't able to make these distinctions.

Today the danger of the Western world -- to speak only of this context -- is that man, precisely in the consideration of the grandeur of his knowledge and power, might give up before the question of truth. And that means at the same time that reason, in the end, bows to the pressure of interests and the charm of utility, constrained to recognize it as the ultimate criterion. To put this in terms of the point of view of the structure of the university: The danger exists that philosophy, no longer feeling itself capable of its true task, might degenerate into positivism; that theology, with its message addressed to reason, might become confined to the private sphere of a group more or less sizable. If, however, reason -- solicitous of its presumed purity -- becomes deaf to the great message that comes from the Christian faith and its wisdom, it will wither like a tree whose roots no longer reach the waters that give it life. It will lose courage for the truth and thus it will not become greater but less. Applied to our European culture this means: If it wants only to construct itself on the basis of the circle of its own arguments and that which convinces it at the moment -- worried about its secularity -- it will cut itself off from the roots by which it lives; then it will not become more reasonable and more pure, but it will break apart and disintegrate.

Newman as an Aristotlean

"While we are men, we cannot help, to a great extent, being Aristotelians, for the great Master does but analyze the thoughts, feelings, views, and opinions of human kind. He has told us the meaning of our own words and ideas, before we were born. In many subject-matters, to think correctly, is to think like Aristotle; and we are his disciples whether we will or no, though we may not know it. " Cardinal Newman, Idea of a University

Another From the Files article. I'm going to tackle The re-imagined Aristotleanism of John Henry Newman, though inadequately. I'm trying to continue thinking through some of the books I've been reading recently -- Newman's Uses of Knowledge, and Kant and the Nineteenth Century. So hopefully, this will give me a chance to process as I type.

This article seems to disagree with the article I blogged about before, which made the case that Newman departed from classical notions of paideia.

Here:

Aristotelianism saturates The Idea of a University: in Newman's defense of liberal as opposed to servile arts; in the treatment of intellectual disciplines as "sciences," which are not only interrelated but ordered in a hierarchy; in the notion of "the philosophical habit of mind," that intellectual virtue which Newman says is the fruit of genuine education--in each of these subject matters, to understand Newman accurately is to think like Aristotle.

and here

The phrase "a philosophical habit of mind" describes what Newman had originally struggled to name, a "perfection or virtue of the intellect," which he first called simply "philosophy." So philosophy is not just a science, but a virtue, and this in the specifically Aristotelian sense of an acquired capacity or "habit." Like Aristotle, Newman emphasizes both the intellectual dimension of the virtue--the power by which one "apprehends the great outlines of knowledge"--and the moral and affective dimension--its fostering of "freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation."

In describing this "philosophical habit of mind," Newman is articulating what Aristotle simply called "wisdom" or sophia, the highest of the virtues of speculative intellect. Aristotle says that sophia is "the most finished of the forms of knowledge," explaining that it includes both the apprehension of first principles (by intuition or nous) and the grasp of what follows from first principles (by "scientific" knowledge or episteme). It is "knowledge of the highest objects" with "its proper completion."

The ability of the Idea of a University to communicate a notion of philosophy or "wisdom" as both a science and a virtue makes clear not only the fact, but also the subtlety, of Newman's Aristotelianism. This subtlety, in turn, accounts for its being so often overlooked.

Basically, within the framework of defending Newman's Aristotlean roots of though, the article makes a case that Newman's way of thinking offers a better approach for a true conservatism than, say Burke's:

In Aristotelian terms, Burke's defense of tradition begins and ends at an argument quia (establishing the fact that). This is an important project, but it is natural to inquire further for the argument propter quid (explaining the reason why).....

It has been the abiding philosophical challenge of conservatism to ground its appeal to tradition on something more solid than pragmatic calculation or personal faith, to articulate "traditionalism" as a principled view that does not reduce to one of its historic enemies: utilitarianism on the one hand, or subjectivized irrationalism on the other.

One interesting part of this article to me is its relationship to the Descartes/Kant trail I've been on. I mentioned that to a Catholic in the Aristotlean/Thomist tradition of thought, Descartes diverged onto an errant road by his focus on subjective consciousness as a starting place. I am going to be bumbling through this, since it's not really in my mental comfort zone, but certainly in reading Kant and the Nineteenth Century I am sharply aware of a philosophical death spiral that came out of the focus on subjectivism. First there was Kant saying that our minds aren't equipped to know what's outside of empirical reality (or at least, that is an approximation of what he said). Right now I am at Kierkegaard and Nietschze -- who both critiqued and opposed reason itself. It seems that Kierkegaard posited some kind of intuition that one believes in spite of reason (he fell down on the side of religion, but a subjective religion indeed) and Nietzche basically seemed to critique all thinking as either a waste of time or some sort of deluded power play (and as most know, fell down on the vehemently anti-religion side of the fence).

Newman says:

To Rationalize is to ask for reasons out of place; to ask improperly how we are to account for certain things, to be unwilling to believe them unless they can be accounted for, i.e. referred to something else as a cause, to some existing system as harmonizing with them or taking them up into itself.

I understand "asking improperly" to be something like saying, "Why is the whole greater than the sum of the parts?" or "Why can something not be true and false at the same time in the same way?" To try to pull out analogy, it would be something like saying, "What caused God?" (But I don't think that's really a good comparison, because it's an analytic mistake -- it's like saying "Where are the triangles that have four sides?" You can tell I'm still trying to work this out). The article compares this statement to the position of Aristotle, who in identifying the first principles of reason:

argued that not everything can be demonstrated, because there are no prior principles from which first principles can be demonstrated. Those who deny the principle of non-contradiction, for instance,

"demand a reason for everything. They want a starting point, and want to grasp it by demonstration; while it is obvious from their actions that they have no conviction. But their case is just what we have stated before; for they require a reason for things which have no reason."

This, in my limited understanding, is because "ratio" (discourse) or reasoning, for Aristotle, is a matter of proceeding from first principles to logical conclusions. But critiquing first principles from a subjective empiricism subverts this at the bottom floor. In a way, it overextends the use of a method that works very well in the strictly empirical enterprises such as the study of natural science itself. If I am understanding correctly, starting from that point is a methodological mistake which leads to conclusions that at first might diverge only very slightly from the course but in the long run will pile error upon error, which indeed you see happening during the progress of philosophy in the next couple of centuries, or so it seems.

Now in case this is giving the wrong impression, this is not to set up a faith vs reason dichotomy or say that you have to trust your heart rather than your reasoning process, or things along this line. This is the kind of muddle that ended up afflicting the 19th century philosophers and depending upon their temperaments they took all different erroneous positions as a result. This dichotomy just wasn't a problem for earlier philosophy because they hadn't made the basic methodological error in the first place. Or this is how I understand it. We are still living with these errors, and it's easy to fall into them in one form or another, but I've found Catholicism to be a remedy.

Thinking out loud, here... I knew this one would be a mental stretch, so it's good to get it out of the way. I think my next From the Files are Montessori articles, which will be easier, I hope.

a couple of notes on earlier posts

Martin Cothran made a comment on yesterday's post, pointing out very kindly that in Traditional Logic II, he didn't call Descartes' "cogito ergo sum" a fallacy, but an enthymeme. I made a edit to correct on the post itself, but I thought I should echo that in this post just in case anyone read my last one and walked away with the impression that Traditional Logic contained the statement that Cogito ergo Sum was a fallacy. It does not say that. It was my mistake.

Though I feel regretful that I wrote something inadvertently misleading, and resolve to be more careful in future (cast loose that blanket and brave the curriculum closet to check my facts), I am kind of glad it was a mistake because I had been afraid there was something I was missing about how syllogisms work.

(By the way I really like the Memoria Press Logic series -- they were remarkably successful with my second son in particular -- logic is still one of his favorite subjects).

Here is the relevant section in Traditional Logic 2, Chapter 6, p 54 of my edition on Cogito Ergo Sum:

"One of the most discussed issues in the history of thought is that concerning the foundation of knowledge. How do we know anything? To this question, Rene Descartes, a 17th century philosopher, answered, I know at least this: that I think. And if I think, then I must exist.

Descartes is considered to mark the transition from the Middle Ages to the "modern" world. Yet Descartes' ideas were founded on ideas much older than himself. In fact, the argument we study here, sometimes known simply as "the cogito"..... was thought of long before .... Aristotle, who wrote about 2,000 years before the birth of Descartes, is quoted by St Thomas Aquinas (a 13th century philospher) saying, "We sense that we sense, and we understand that we understand; and because we sense this, we understand that we exist."."

While I'm commenting on my earlier posts and the comments they received, I wanted to mention Sloth's gnawing little teeth. Stephanie commented:

What if we understand that to mean that enjoyment of things is the opposite of duty? That's wrong-headed, it seems to me. ..Instead, what if we enjoy things that are ours to do? What if we do them, not "because" we enjoy them, but because they are what we are good at?.....
Prioritizing by way of enjoyment only is not right, obviously. But prioritizing away from enjoyment? That seems just as wrong. Does that make sense?

This is very true. The Catechism says:

The virtuous person tends toward the good with all his sensory and spiritual powers; he pursues the good and chooses it in concrete actions. Human virtues are firm attitudes, stable dispositions, habitual perfections of intellect and will that govern our actions, order our passions, and guide our conduct according to reason and faith. They make possible ease, self-mastery, and joy in leading a morally good life. The virtuous man is he who freely practices the good.

The way I understand it, given that virtue is a good in itself, it ideally ought to be delightful. Because it sometimes isn't, given our fallen nature, because we are sometimes reluctant to do what is best, there are prescriptions like Msgr Knox's for discerning and remedying that reluctance. But it doesn't follow that choosing the most horrible option is a virtue in itself. It is a sort of discipline that may be necessary or advisable in certain circumstances, but it's a means to an end, not an end in itself.

Kant, from what I am straining to understand, thought that virtue is merely "duty",and correspondingly thought joy, Aristotle's eudaimonia which Aquinas took onto a Christian plane, was a sort of chimaera. This is different than the Catholic point of view, which says that joy and virtue are closely related in themselves, though in our fallen state, doing good things sometimes involves effort which is distasteful to our weakened human natures.

Clare just showed up dressed in a black coat and hat, brown skirt, paddock boots and with a basket of flowers in her hands, singing quietly

All I want is a room somewhere/ Far away from the cold night air..

From that perhaps you can guess that while Liam is here, we are going to do another play reading, continuing Pygmalion which we started last time.

gratuitous New Year's family photo -- the big boys are watching the sparkly ball come down in New York, while Paddy is watching Kevin open a bottle of champagne (it fizzled -- the cork disintegrated, so no POP).

Cosmological Credo

A bit more about that semi-Cartesian Credo I mentioned. Right after I wrote it out I found a relevant section in the book I have been reading called History of Western Philosophy: Kant and the Nineteenth Century. This book was another dime sale find that seemed to be dropped on the moveable library bookshelf just for me. At Amazon it costs $65 new!

The book is definitely hard going, and Kant is not easy to understand, so I probably will have trouble summarizing it clearly, and will have to rely on vague language as a sort of smokescreen.

One of Aquinas's arguments or proofs for the existence of God is that of the "First Cause".

Motion, i.e. the passing from power to act, as it takes place in the universe implies a first unmoved Mover (primum movens immobile), who is God; else we should postulate an infinite series of movers, which is inconceivable.

For the same reason efficient causes, as we see them operating in this world, imply the existence of a First Cause that is uncaused, i.e. that possesses in itself the sufficient reason for its existence; and this is God.

Hume opposed both the idea of "cause" in itself .... that one thing was actually "caused" by another, or at least, that our minds could know them to be.

From what I understand, Kant thought that all our thinking was either "a posteriori" (conclusions drawn from empirical experience) or "a priori" (intuitions that made thinking about empirical experience possible in the first place). So he thought that notions of time and space were "a priori". They weren't gained by experience per se, but were the mental pre-conditions that made it possible to make mental order of experience to start with.

So he did not think there was any way our minds could come to the notion of a First Cause, because a first cause by definition is outside of "a posteriori" experience and so it is over-applying particulars and in particular, extending a "category" out to where it couldn't apply.

The way I understand it, if you assume that every result has a cause, you have two choices:

• An infinite retrograde of causes.
• Some First Cause that put everything else in motion.

But thinkers like Hume wouldn't propose that every effect has a cause, even, or at least, that our minds are able to propose that with any kind of certainty. I don't understand that one very well yet. Certainly it is a difficult mental stretch to think that way.

Kant thought of "cause" as a way of thinking rather than a reflection of reality per se and in that way, he thought that our minds simply could not come to a knowledge of these things outside the sphere of a posteriori knowledge (knowledge derived from experience). This didn't rule out the existence of God for him, by the way -- he had proofs of his own, which are sort of weak.

Anyway, from childhood without knowing anything about Aquinas I'd always just assumed that given that reality DID exist, that there couldn't be an infinite retrograde of causes or motions. Something had to have started it all. I guess that wasn't a given though to the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment fallacies. It was easy for me to jump from the reality of my consciousness to some kind of originator of my existence. Kant thought that this skipped several steps. But all the same, it isn't a ridiculous assumption, given that the alternative leads to lots of problems. The possibility of infinite retrograde seems to confuse physics with metaphysics in a way that a First Cause does not.

Jacques Maritain, a post-Kantian Thomist scholar, thought that Kant's thinking was a form of nominalism. He held that "the critique of knowledge is part of metaphysics" which puts into words something that has bugged me about Kant's reasoning. But now I am really getting over my head.

Also, in Traditional Logic Martin Cothran says that Descartes "Cogito ergo sum" is a formal fallacy. I don't remember exactly why that would be, and it is too cold in the house to get out of my blanket and rummage around in my curriculum closet. Certainly it is an enthymeme lacking a minor premise. I would frame the syllogism this way, and certainly this was my own mental process as a teenager:

• I have consciousness.
• To have consciousness is to exist.
• Therefore, I exist.

It looks OK formally. Or am I wrong about that? Anyone?

(ETA that Martin Cothran didn't actually call "cogito ergo sum" a fallacy, and he points it out very kindly in a comment on this post; he actually did call it an enthymeme; and it's in Chapter 6 of TL 2 under enthymemes. Next time I will definitely drag myself to my bookshelf to check before I make a statement like that).

That clicking sound is my statcounter reader count dropping down next to zero, I am sure. Mental wrestling is a boring spectator sport. That reminds me of an idea my husband used to propose to amuse himself..... Game Programming Olympics. Two or more game designers would go head to head, duct-taped glasses perched on nose and plastic pocket protectors in place, fueled with vending machine Snickers and Big Gulps, and ... they would program. There could be a commentator, and a thrilling soundtrack.... like the Rocky theme song, Come and Fly Now or Thus Spake Zarusthusa. Everyone would turn on their TVs to watch. Yep!

There's a bit more about the Cosmological Argument, here. I used it a bit to help my rephrasing but any mistakes in accuracy are mine, not Stanford's, I'm sure.

cogito ergo credo

(a roundabout attempt at starting to talk about my conversion -- weren't you just waiting ? : ))

This happened when I was just turned 18. The year before that, we had been living near Geneva, Switzerland, and I had graduated from an international school there. When we moved back to Anchorage, Alaska, rather than go right off to college out of state, I stayed home for a year and attended the local university part time.

I think my father must have driven me to university in the morning on his way to work, but on the way home I usually walked. Anchorage is a rather plain, frontier-looking city surrounded by austere and awesome natural beauty. It is rimmed by mountains -- the "smaller" deep blue Chugach range, which still contains mountains up to 13, 000 feet and the distant, almost unreal Alaska range, in shades of white, of which Mt Denali is the tallest among the tall, at over 20,000 feet. The trees are mostly thin silver birch, limned in black, and meagre spruce. But the landscape is dominated by those mountains, like icons of duration, set off by the ever-shifting clouds which sometimes hide the distant mountains and sometimes set them off in a cold glow. Walking home, I was washed in pale, delicate colors of sky and mountain and vegetation.

The distance was two or three miles. As I walked, I would imagine tales of journeys and adventure and danger. But I would also think and think. I'm not sure exactly how it came about, but what I often thought about was ontology and epistemology, though I did not call it those to myself.

I had never stopped believing in God in the experiential sense, but I had brought the intellectual question "Whether God exists" into the forefront of my mind during the difficult high school years, when classmates were living lives obviously separate from God, and the youth group at my church seemed silly and patronizing, and I had made some choices in life that had disappointed me in my own ability to live well. I was also reading Boswell and Alexander Pope and other Enlightenment authors at the time, taking advantage of the treasure-stocked university library (when in Europe, it had been a challenge to find a supply of books that were written in English). Though most of these readings did not talk philosophy -- mostly I liked the way they slammed each other in print, even in heroic couplets -- I suppose I breathed in some of the air of rationalism and skepticism that those people of the late 18th century breathed.

So... did God exist?

And consequently, as I walked, I began to speculate whether anything existed at all. Sure, I experienced it. But how, really, could I be sure I was experiencing a reality that was outside of myself. How could I be sure that what I perceived through my senses was accurate?

From what I have found out since, I was repeating Descartes' thought experiment, though I did not know it.

But I have convinced myself that there is absolutely nothing in the world, no sky, no earth, no minds, no bodies. Does it now follow that I too do not exist? No. If I convinced myself of something [or thought anything at all] then I certainly existed.

I had not convinced myself that there was nothing else besides myself, as he says he did. But I perceived that there was no way to know for sure by starting from inside oneself, and yet, to frame a skeptical question, there seemed no other way to start.

This idea took hold of my imagination. When I got home from the walk, I would touch the piano. It was glossy and solid. It felt real. But did that matter? What was there of necessity that said that what felt or "seemed" a certain way actually WAS that way? What did "real" mean anyway? Was it just a provisionary word we use to accept and deal with our conceptual understandings, which might or might not actually approximate to true?

The only thing I could be sure of, as Descartes says, is that my consciousness existed. I knew that without question because it was barraging me every minute with mental and sensory input. Even in sleep, it was there in some form. Sleep was not a break in consciousness so much as a different state. So I felt that in order to ask the question, "What is the nature of everything?" I had at least to have the mental apparatus to ask questions. That was a starting point.

I also knew that I, my consciousness, had a beginning somewhere in time. There was a time when my consciousness did not exist as I knew it now. In fact, I could remember almost precisely when it started, sometime after babyhood.

(I don't remember ever speculating explicitly whether the passage of time, too, could be illusion. But certainly the speculation was there implicitly, as it almost had to be),

Still, whether or not my notion of time proceeding in consciousness was illusory, I was quite sure I had not self-originated. My consciousness did not include an act of self-creation. Nor did these sensory perceptions seem to come wholesale from myself.

There had to be something from whence I had originated. .... at least one other Being in the universe besides me, who was responsible for my existence.

(I did not really consider a "Force" as a possible cause of my existence, at least not as an ultimate cause, because I figured that "forces" are not existent in themselves, and they are not agents except in a secondary way, at least the way the apparent world was set up. It had to be in some sense a Person, as I saw it).

Person was necessarily a vague concept at this point in my thinking. So to posit a God did not necessarily mean it had to be the Christian God. (I did not consider the Greek gods a possibility, or any pantheistic system, because that only pushes the agency question back a notch. Nor did I seriously consider the good/evil dual deities, for the same reason. So I did figure it was One God).

If there was a God, and this seemed surer to me than anything except my own consciousness.... was He what you would call a "good" God?

As I walked daily through the pale light I felt the sky almost looming over me like an immense bright bulk of ether. Sometimes I felt like it was just me, my consciousness, and this Presence. Was He good? Why ought He to be?

In some ways, I realized rather painfully, it was a bit of a moot point. Good or not, He WAS and if He Was, He was primary, He had to be, because I wasn't the primary myself. I couldn't really call a referendum on Him. By definition, this is a frivolous effort UNLESS He is good. If He is a tyrant, I was in His universe..... it was His rules. How would I have the wherewithal to critique Him? Surely as Generator He would have ruled out that possibility from the start, except as a sort of cruel mockery. Mockery or not, it would be worth nothing, this moral sense, if it were installed by a deceptive God. I could not use it as a compass or a condemnation. It would not be "real" any more than anything else.

I am not talking about cowardly submission here. I am talking about intellectual coherence. .... the creature, strictly speaking, is incapable of critiquing the creator. The power we have to critique anything comes from holding a larger standard than what is held by the object of our criticism. One has to step outside of the situation to critique, and by definition this would be impossible IF He were a tyrant and at the same time the Primary Agent.

Realizing this helped me past a certain childishness that many, not least myself, are subject to. I read a lot of atheists and agnostics who say something to the effect that "If God is there, He is not good, so I will have nothing to do with Him." This makes a certain emotional sense, but it does not make rational sense. It is like Jonah. It is basically putting God into a subsection of one's rational framework, which is impossible if He is really God. On the other hand, it is consistent for a Christian to "critique" God in a certain sense, because they believe in a God who has given them the wherewithal to do so.

Descartes writes:

The fact that an atheist can be “clearly aware [clare cognoscere] that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles” is something I do not dispute. But I maintain that this awareness [cognitionem] of his is not true knowledge [scientiam], since no act of awareness [cognitio] that can be rendered doubtful seems fit to be called knowledge [scientia]. Now since we are supposing that this individual is an atheist, he cannot be certain that he is not being deceived on matters which seem to him to be very evident (as I fully explained).

.....

Thus I see plainly that the certainty and truth of all knowledge [scientiae] depends uniquely on my awareness of the true God, to such an extent that I was incapable of perfect knowledge [perfecte scire] about anything else until I became aware of him.

This was basically my thought process. It is true that I had by definition no outside referendum as to whether my senses could be trusted, or in that sense whether God could be trusted. Neither did I really have much doubt. I was speculating this way because I had imbibed skepticism as a possible response to the world -- from the atmosphere of my high school and from reading --- and I wanted to follow out the skeptical logic to its ultimate conclusions. I wanted to give it a fair shake and see if it could be a viable way of seeing the world.

Looking around at the evidence of my consciousness, at the delicate silver birches that were rough on the edges and silky in the bark, at those mountains that seemed to make white into a spectrum of color, at the warm home waiting for me at the end of the walk, I could not propose to myself that this was completely a deception by an Evil Genius. Why would He bother, for one thing? Sure, there were bad things too..... if I went up to those mountains I would probably perish in short order from hypothermia, and that would be the end of my consciousness. That did not take away though from the goodness of the thing in itself. It seemed to me that whereas good can have a shadow of "not good" in some of its contingent effects, that it was difficult to conceive that "good" could generate out of bad, of its own, any more than that "something" could come out of nothing of its own.

Part of my "case" that God was good was that He had to be; "had to be" in the sense that I had to presume He was so in order to trust the evidence of my senses and even to trust my own moral sense that made judgments about good and bad in the first place.

As Aristotle writes:

But if life itself is good and pleasant (...) and if one who sees is conscious that he sees, one who hears that he hears, one who walks that he walks and similarly for all the other human activities there is a faculty that is conscious of their exercise, so that whenever we perceive, we are conscious that we perceive, and whenever we think, we are conscious that we think, and to be conscious that we are perceiving or thinking is to be conscious that we exist... (Nicomachean Ethics, 1170a25 ff.)

So I remember sitting down near the piano with the lamp on it and realizing I had a choice.

I didn't really have a choice whether to believe in God or not. The way my intellect had presented it, there was no choice. "I have consciousness, and a stream of apparent sensory impressions, and I did not generate those myself." Therefore, there was Someone Else.

My choices were:

• A deceiver God -- who gave me sensory impressions that were illusory, perhaps even wrenched around my thought processes so they were deceptive and warped (whatever that would mean, in an illusory world created by a tyrant).
• A trustworthy God, who did as it seemed He had done -- made an objective world, put me in it as the child of a family, with a unique consciousness of my own, along with other people who as they seemed to me had unique consciousnesses of their own, and bestowed me a reasoning process that could help me make sense of the created universe, etc.

"Bad God" and "Good God" could not be the choices, yet, because remember, my moral sense without divine trustworthiness was a meaningless artifact. The choices were between delusive subjectivity and an objective reality, though perceived subjectively. Later, when I decided on "trustworthiness", I could decide on "good" by using the evidence of my senses and my reasoning process.

In some ways, I saw as Descartes said, that the atheist or deceiver thesis is a life-and thought-stopper. People walk around still, either denying the existence of God or saying He must be a bad God, but that is, it seems to me, because they have been preserved in a cheerful state of relative innocence and trust.

There is also the agnostic thesis. .... an "as if" acceptance of the material cosmos at face value. "I have no way of really knowing anything beyond the appearances of my senses, so I will assume that those appearances are reflective of some sort of reality and I will trust in them, and only in them". This did not seem satisfying to me because it hardly answered any of my questions, only set them aside.


Descartes writes:

All these considerations are enough to establish that it is not reliable judgement but merely some blind impulse that has made me believe up till now that there exist things distinct from myself which transmit to me ideas or images of themselves through the sense organs or in some other way. (Med. 3, AT 7:39-40)

In the end, I decided that of the two choices, though in one sense I had no way of having complete certainty, that the "trustworthy God who created a trustworthy universe that could be understood to some extent by a human intellect" thesis was much more workable than the alternatives. It came down to choosing the road to intellectual and material life. It "felt" like somewhat of a leap of faith. At the same time, it seemed that it was the only rational choice.

I do not say that every person has to go through this mental process in his or her life, nor do I think I got into it as deeply as another person could have. But I do think it's difficult to raise the skeptical question and NOT go through this mental process or something similar, IF one isn't simply skimming over the surface of life. A lot of the modern philosophers have dealt in one way or another with this question of whether anything can be known. It seems to a scientist, perhaps, who happens to be a strict materialist, that it is silly to go off on these side paths when after all the universe is all around to be experienced. In one way, it IS a side path. Many solid Theists would share with the materialists this robust sense that the question is not really a matter necessary to pursue. On the other hand, skepticism by its very nature makes these questions relevant, even pressing, for a rational mind... it unavoidably, even if implicitly, raises these questions, in a way theism does not.

A couple of notes:

In this post, I am trying to lay out my own thought processes that I went through quite a long time ago. So for instance, I'm aware that Cartesian philosophy is much more complex and to Catholics, more arguable, than it appears in this -- I am describing my teenage thought processes, so there is much that is sketched or incomplete because they were not issues in my mind at the time.

Also, I am vaguely aware that Kant addressed the "First Cause" and that basically real skepticism such as Hume's disallows the possibility of coming to universal principles from empirical experience. I am leaving all that aside completely, as well, because these weren't concerns of mine (and really still aren't, except in a theoretical way).