The Development of Modern Thought

The Development of Modern Thought

Louis Dupre

9/7/95: Lecture

Six crucial ideas that have been salient to modern thought will be considered. Ideas that arose in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (the enlightenment).  From ideas of the preceding period (the Renessence), these ideas are salient in modern thought. A change in world-view; reality itself changes too.  Ideas or spirit is a reality. 

There are two theories of modernity:

1. Assp: certain presuppositions beginning with Socrates have caused a degredation of modern thought.  Post-modernity has resulted from this degredation. 

2. Post-modernity is only hostle to only that which came with the Renessance(1400's).

Dupre: is there a post-modernity?  It is a continuation of the principles of modernity.  So, we still live in modernity, degredated.  But no new world-view which has replaced it. The fact that the human mind is the center of reality is a theory which is at the very center of modernity.  At issue here is the central position of the person.  We moderns take this for granted.  Before this was the dominant world-view (the idea has been around for a long time--e.g. Socrates and the Bible--creation of man), the person was seen as a part of nature.  Why does it change so much to put the person in the center? 

Why did the dominant world-view change?  1300's-1400's: Nominalism--the idea of an omnipotent God. If so, anything can happen which can please God and we can't know God.  So, the world can't be predicted. No universal ideas; no rational order to the universe. This view fostered empirical science.  Apriori speculation was being replaced.  One could no  longer rely on the fact that God had created a rational universe.  The human mind became the center of meaning and value because God's design itself could not be relied upon to predict nature. The person becomes a creator in his own right. This was a big idea in the renassance.  So, don't expect any meaning or value from apriori ideas or from nature itself--this created doubt-- and the human person is a creator--of meaning and value.  Descartes: the human mind alone is capable of creating certainty.

The beginnings of this change to the person as the center as the dominant world-view: Petrarca in the Renassance.  He read about Augustine's writings on the self. His Confessions, written as a personal narrative in constant dialogue with God.  Petrarca saw himself as apart from nature. He saw himself as different from nature. Unlike Augustine, he saw himself isolated from God. Isolation.  This mentality is salient in modernity.  Another Renessance figure: Pico della Mirandola: He wrote The Oration of the Dignity of Man.  On the creativity of the person.  Another Renessance figure: Montaigne. He wrote a diary as essays.  He was a religious person fed up with the religious wars in France (in the 1500's). He thought about himself, by introspection.  He said that he was only speaking for himself.  He sought self-knowledge about himself, rather than about the universal human nature.  He looked for his own being; a self-explanation--to know yourself.  Self-discovery.  Unlike Descartes, he did not try to formulate a science of himself, but just sought to understand himself as a person.

9/12/95

The nominalist theology, beginning with Ockham in the 1300's,caused a breakdown which occasioned in a negative sense the emergence of modern ideas.  Ockham: God is totally unpredictable, so nothing in nature can be predicted in themselves.  Result: meaning is no longer derived from nature or from a creator.  Nature was no longer divine.  Nominalism led to the development of empirical science in the 1400's. By the 1500's, this breakdown had created doubt and skepticism.  Skepticism was the prevailing philosophy.  Montangue, in France, was at that time a skeptic, and turned for meaning to himself.  Calvinists and Catholics had been fighting in France.  He urged folks to stay with the established church.   Descartes, in the 1600's, began, too, as a skeptic.  The beginning of Cartesian philosophy: question everything. If it is not absolutely resistant to doubt, then consider it as false.  Assp: too much that was uncertain was taken for fact.  Descartes' doubt was existential; nothing was taken as certain. Even the question of whether he existed. The evil deceiver. My doubt is my only certainty. So, there is a doubter. So, I exist.  Dupre: to say that there is doubt does not necessarily mean that I exist.  Also, to say that I exist is not a sufficient starting point for science.

Descartes uses mathematics to come up with clear ideas.  But, the evil deman could be behind even math. So, he says: I have an idea of God in my mind. It is an idea of such a nature that without it there could be no other clear ideas. One can only see the finite against a background of infinity.  Dupre: Yes.  What is the quality of the infinite?  The idea of perfect existence has certainty.  Dupre: but he treats existence as a quality of an idea.  Descartes keeps doubting with the evil demon and tries to remove that doubt by proving that God exists. He is only certain that he exists and God as a perfect idea of existence exists.  Important: no meaning inherent in things themselves; the mind creates meaning. Nature no longer has a meaning in itself.  Descartes can only rely on things of the mind, rather than on the things themselves.  This was a change--reality being defined exclusively from the mind. In the modern way of determining reality, there is a turning to the subject. What does 'subject' mean?  In modern thought, the mind.  It is the underlier of all the rest and the source of the meaning of things in the world.  'Subject' used to mean the thing itself. It now means the sole source of meaning and value. There is no more meaning in nature or given by God than that which is given by the subject (the mind).  The human subject is creative.

So, with Descartes, a paradox: doubt and yet certainty of the centrality of the person (the doubting being).  Certainty of things outside the doubting being depend upon the centrality and existence of the doubting self.  The existence of the idea of God (assured because that idea is existence) is necessary to assure one that the evil deceiver is not still at work.  Moreover, clear ideas must be real ideas (existing).  All reality must be defined from the mind; no meaning except in the mind. Did Descartes replace truth with certainty?

9/14/95

Descartes (cont):

Real existential doubt developed into a scientific doubt.  He wanted to overcome the uncertainty inherent in medieval thinking.  'I know that I think because I doubt. Therefore, I exist'.  It is with one's thinking that one doubts.  Dupre: how can he get out of his methodical doubt (doubt as to the method itself).  In my doubt I find only my own consciousness.  That I have a clear and distinct(what is intuitive) idea is that which dissuades such universalized doubt.  Not that there is something out there, but I can't question that the idea is there.  There must be a thinker to have an idea. Therefore, that I am a thinker cannot be doubted.  That I must exist for there to be a thinker means that I must exist as a thinking thing.  Descartes saw mathematics as being clear and distinct just as ideas are.  So he goes on to be certain about mathematics.  Dupre: but this does not get to certainty of the real world.  Descartes: only if there is an evil deceiver could there still be doubt on the things to which the ideas refer--the existence of the things in the real world.  So, he needs to prove the existence of a non-deceiving God.  Needed: assurance that his created nature is not deceiving him.  'If I come to the idea of a creator who created me and is good, then my clear and distinct ideas could not be deluded (so the referants of the ideas conform to the ideas).  Difficult to prove the existence of God when he has so much doubt.  Descartes had totally separated the mind from the world.  Of the latter he is sure of nothing.  Complete isolation. An isolated self as central. This ends up with a purely mental view of the world.  The beginning of modern physics: defining the outside world as extentions--reduces the world to the mind.  Anything to be said of the world would be said in mental terms. Implicit in this reduction is the priority of the subject over the world.  Denial of one's place in a larger order in which  one knows one's proper place.  Dupre: but nature does not exist solely for humans.  An animal's existance is not dependent upon humans.  The world has lost its intrinsic meaning and has meaning instead solely in term of the human subject.  The world is taken then as an object.  Moreover, reality is seen as an object, for use by humans.  Things are reduced to being objects (for humans) but where is the world itself apart from the human mind?  For Descartes, there is only one subject: the mind.  Before Descartes, the subjects were many.  With Descartes, there is only one subject: the mind.  How does he prove the existance of God with this handicap?  He has three proofs in the Meditations. We will look at two.  1. Humans have ideas in our minds. We don't know where they come from: innate, or from without, or fabricated (e.g. fiction).  All ideas in my mind are all alike in that all ideas are in my mind(ideas include intuitions and feelings).  In regard to the things to which ideas refer, there are big and small ideas.  As a big idea, I have the idea of a perfect being.  That idea of an infinite being cannot be accounted for because what causes an idea must have at least as much reality as the idea itself. Dupre: No: one can have ideas of fictitous entities.  The idea of the infinite could be simply the negation of the idea of the finite. But to Descartes, the idea of infinity must come before an idea of finitude.  My idea of infinity is necessary as a background for my smaller ideas.  Only an infinite being existing can be the cause of the idea of an infinite being.  Dupre: where does this notion/assumption of causality come from, given Descartes' doubt of all but his own existance as a thinking thing.

Descartes' second proof of the existance of God:  My mind is imperfect because it doubts.  If I were my own creator, I would have done a better job on myself.  My imperfection shows that I can't be the author of my own being.  So, I must be the result of a being that I am not.  Dupre: but what kind. How good is good enough to be a creator? Descartes: it must be a perfect being.  So, not an evil deceiver.  So, I can't be deceived.  So, my clear and distinct ideas are reliable.  Dupre: this does not take us far.  Only on matters of extension (to the res extentia--the outside world).  Dupre: but this does not mean that the world is res extentia.  It does not get us very far in terms of the ideas that are then certain.

Dupre: what we end up with is disembodied subjectivity wherein meaning and value depend only on the mind.  Meaning and value do not reside in the world.   Isolated, disembodied isolation makes it difficult to see the other as a subject. Distrust of the world, due to his nominalist crisis, is difficult to come back from.  Such universal existential doubt is not necessary because we are in the world.  Isolation is thus artificial.  The first thing is not doubt but an act of trust.  Heidegger returned to Descartes because the latter is the beginning of solitary consciousness, of subject/object (the mind as the only subject, supporting all reality).  The self as the foundation of God.  From the 1600's on, many proofs for the existance of God.  Why?  The transcending element of nature disappears.  Doubt because then reality as object was supposed to depend on the doubting/finite mind. 

9/19/95

Descartes: an attempt to re-establish ideas in the context of the breakdown of meaning by nominalism.  Locke, in contrast, goes along with nominalism, taking the way of experience(observation).  The former is rationalist while the latter is empiricist.

On the self: it is seen as creative of meaning in modern thought, but what is inside the self?  In the extreme rationalists and empericists, there is not much inside the self.  The real turn toward modernity is the focus on the subject (the self bestows meaning). 

Though Locke opposes Descarte's innate ideas and sees ideas coming through the sences, they agree on the self.

Locke, The Essay Concerning Human Understanding.  Locke was interested in the relation between revealed and natural religion. He saw a convergence.  He was also interested in political theory.  Issue in that book: what are the limits of human understanding.  Four parts.  First, there are no innate ideas (against Descartes).  For Descartes, an idea is anything that enters my mind (feeling is included).  Dupre: this is vague--includes feelings and reasoning.  Locke separates them: ideas are of the same origin--experience.  Descartes: moral ideas are innate.  Locke: moral ideas come from observation--pleasure is good and pain is bad.  We experience something it becomes an idea.  Of these, we have sensations ideas and ideas of reflection.  Of the latter, if I reflect on my inner experience, I will find feelings and perception.  Both: I see blue and I reflect on it.  Dupre: all consciousness is of something and self-consciousness.  Locke: there are simple(an idea given by one or more sense--e.g. see blue).  A simple idea can also be a feeling--a simple feeling. A simple idea can also be a reflection.  Complex ideas are ideas that the mind fabricates from several ideas.  The implication being that they are fabrications of the mind. We perceive simple ideas and the mind puts together complex ideas. Elementalism: complex ideas come from simple ideas.  A kind of atomism.  Dupre: Experience is never simple; things have a complexity already in their origin. Locke: two kinds of ideas attributed to the world, some of which are real. We have primary qualities (e.g. a piece of wax) which never change (and thus are real--Descartes) and subjective qualities(they are not really there).  Subjective qualities are not in the things themselves but are in the mind.

Complex ideas: modes, substances and relations.  A mode is an idea of which we don't have the impression that it can stand by itself. Something that exists as a quality of something; a supposition.  It is not ever completely by itself. A substance is an idea that rests on itself (unlike a mode).  It has its own independence.  Dupre: what accounts for the difference that accounts for the ability to stand on itself? Locke didn't give an answer. I am a substance.  Dupre: this is shaky.  Relations are between modes and substances. 

The idea of self: relations can be of many kinds, including identity and difference.  What establishes self-identity?  Locke: a continuity of memory. Key: extension of temporal consciousness.  Dupre: what if one loses one's memory? Is he a new person?   So, in relations of identity and difference comes the realization that one thing is the same or different than another.  Space can be  an idea of sensation (seeing something in space)--a simple idea, or a complex idea--space as in geometry. 

Substance is always a center of power.  Dupre: a substance doesn't have to be distinguished into primary and secordary qualities.

9/21/95

Locke:

We have reflection (from the mind, based on sense impressions) and ideas from sense impressions. Simple ideas can come from a single or multiple senses.  For instance, space perception is constituted by sight and feeling.  Colors are simple ideas. It can be a combination of a reflection and a sense impression (e.g. pleasure).  Dupre: but this is not how one perceives.  See Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception. 

Locke: complex ideas of modes(something that can't be by itself).  For instance, 'virtue' is a mode of being.  It is in someone.  Finally, there are substances: complex ideas that subsist by themselves.  For instance, the idea of person.  Personal identity: consider what a person stands for.  A person is that kind of substance that is accompanied by a continued consciousness.  Dupre: this is the first we have heard of the person.  

Cassier: A Yale Philosophy professor.  The philosophers of the sixteenth century were interested in how science is possible.  It was in doing that that they backed into Psychology.  Locke follows this pattern.  Specifically, a psychology of perception as it limits science.  Cassier: exact insight into the nature of human understanding requires tracing its development.  To know the mind's capacity for knowledge, one must start with this.  Perception, from its development,  is relevant to knowing our capacity for knowledge.  Dupre: these are frustrated attempts which fall short of knowing the self or science.  Hume wanted to write a science of the self.

Locke: what is the extent of knowledge?  Knowledge--a function of seeing two ideas.  The principles of agreement(e.g. whether an idea agrees with real existence) and disagreement of ideas are salient.  Relations are seen intuitively, by reasoning(connecting intuitive ideas), and by sensation.  Dupre: he is elusivein that he says little on the self.  As for existence, I have an intuitive knowledge of my own existence and I have a discursive (reasoning with certainty) knowledge of God. God is the link between my knowledge and the rest of reality.  Lastly, I know of the sensible world by my senses (which can't be relied upon).  So, decreacing certainty. 

Cassier: the truth is in the process.  It is not useless to know how we get our ideas.  The problem of modern consciousness: how do I get from ideas from reality?   The nominalist crisis of the 1500's. Should we invent reality?  Descartes and Locke: the self is definately true.  Locke: God provides the infrastructure of our knowledge such that it can not decieve us.  God makes that bridge. Locke, too. Anything we know depends on the creater.  The reality of our thinking---whether it is true depends on God.  Dupre: how do I get from ideas to reality?  By the creator.   God is the source of ideas and reality.  In the middle ages, the meaning was in the meanin of the objects themselves.  Cassier: Malebranche drew conclusions from this: since all reality comes from our certainty in God, all insight we see in God. To see something as true depends on the divine presence.  Truth is insight into that divine essence.

Berkeley, an Irish Bishop, followed Locke and said that let us suppose that reality is nothing but our ideas, then not necessary to have God as a bridge.  For him, 'being' is being perceived.  This is subjective idealism.  This is the conclusion of Locke's theory (Locke avoids this by being contradictory).  Locke: knowledge is nothing but relations of ideas.  He relates them to existence via God.  We don't know much about God, so there is little certainly in this.  Dupre: the certainty of the world and of its relation to ideas is vague. 

So, Descartes' absolute skepticism has led us to the self: to be in the world is to be perceived; I am the perceiver.  But what of meaning of things in themselves.  This is left unanswered. 

9/26/95

Locke:

There is no true knowledge without complex ideas of relation.  He sets reality as one such idea, but how then can one get out of the realm of ideas then to reality?  He states that reality has three categories: the self (from Descartes), the existance of God (certain by discurcive reason--intuitions linked), and nothing is absolutely certain.  Berkeley: to know is to go to the reality because there no matter (reality is only in ideas).  Dupre: this sounds artificial.  To be is to be perceived.  Locke and Berkeley are symptomatic of the problem of being set in a corner (limited reality to ideas).  Hume: all we know of is the self.  Left open: knowledge of the bridge between ideas and reality.  The doubt in Descartes led to this skeptical conclusion.  The view that reality is limited to ideas is to say that meaning comes from the mind rather than from God or from the world.  The centrality of the self.  But this led these empiricists to skepticism: a lack of certainty and meaning. 

The self.  Descartes: the 'I' is a substance that doubts and thus thinks.  Dupre: why is it necessarily a substance just because it is acknowledged that thinking exists.  So, the centrality of the self is not securely founded.  Locke: wanted to correct Descartes. What justifies me in saying that I am a self is my remembrances. Dupre: but what of those who have forgotten their pasts.  Are they no longer the same people?  Have they lost their identity because they lost their memory? No.  Berkeley: wanted to correct Locke.  For Berkeley, the self is the agent of perception.  I am nothing but the receiving reality of that which is perceived.  Dupre: this is superficial.  Hume, finally, admits that he does not know if he exists as an independent unit. The self is that where perceptions come to a unity.  But he knows how he got to the idea of himself as existing as an independent entity: a self.  Dupre: but this is just about the idea of the self.  This is like 'the illusion of the self' in Mahayana Buddhism.  Hume: it is not an illusion but is an idea.  Buddhist: it is not an idea but an illusion. Get rid of self-love and replace it with compassion.  Hume's perception of himself is always of a particular perception (e.g. I is that which feels hot).  There is at no place a clear certainty or unity that could justify the existence of the self.  The idea of the self comes from a succession of related ideas (on a cinema screen).  Memory recognizes things--the idea of the self is that memory (recognizing things).  Since there is remembrance, I am a self.  Similar to Locke.  Dupre: there is no real unity here that could constitute the self.  So this is a failure in Philosophy.  None of that is common sense.  So, the self had become central yet was an unresolved question, so there was skepticism (lack of meaning).  We are stuck in the question (on the self). 

A related problem: Science and the Self. Locke: ideas of sensation and of reflection(inner awareness).  Dupre: self-consciousness needs to be distinguished from more general inner awareness.  For Locke (Berkeley and Hume too), ideas begin on the sensation level.  Dupre: why then distinguish ideas of reflection?  They reduce ideas to the senses, with the self giving them meaning.  This radical empiricalism is reductionism.  On the basis of this came the science of empiricism as applied to the person.  The scientific revolution was in full swing then.  As by obervation, one could gain knowledge of the world, so too could another object in the world, the person, could be known via observation.  The science of mechanics would then apply to the human person.  Hume: the science of the person was the most important of the sciences.  The French philosophers tried to destroy Descartes view of the self, using that of the empiricists: that the self is the unity of sense impressions.  Condillac, for instance.  This led to materialism. The science of the person is that of observation based on sensations.  This is stronger than Locke because here reflection is reduced to perception.  Why was the British empiricism so strong in France?  Descartes stressed the body in the self, as being determined by causes.  The British empiricists, in basing the self in ideas, allowed for freedom of the self(to direct itself).  Power is that which is the active element that receives the sensations.  Such power is freedom.  The empiricists such as Condillac and the British: needs, passions, and drives come first, followed by sensations (by which ideas come).  The former are the power of the self.  John Dewey: thinking is practical problem solving. 

This changes the perspective of man.  Feelings.  Rousseau, for instance, the science of the human person is the most important.   It is a study of feelings (emotions and instincts) rather than of the intellect.  Feelings precede thinking.  Dupre: Yes.  Suzanne Langer: Mind, An Essay of Feeling.  The beginning of mental life is not thinking or sensing but is feeling.  Because in feeling there is not an opposition between myself and an idea.  The oppposition between myself and the picture dissappears.  Art can only be felt.  In feeling, there is a unity (of the self not only in itself, but with the environment).  Rousseau wrote The Confessions. The Confessions of Augustine is a dialogue between his soul and God.  The Confessions of Rousseau is his self assertion--the total center of value--that justifies himself.  The person has become primary. 

9/28/95

The self in constituting its own meaning and value loses itself.  There is not much to say about the self when it is central.  Descartes and Locke actually say very little about it.  What constitutes meaning and value after I have discovered the self is universal, so nothing in these tells us much about my particular self.  

Rousseau:  feelings are central. They are not universal, so they tell me something about my particular self.  Meaning (which is universal) can come from them and yet the particular self can be known from them.  Unlike the Rationalists, Rousseau says that feelings(which are particular) rather than reason(which is universal).are what are central to ideas.  Feelings are more of the private self than is reason.   Kierkegard: the self is private and individual. 

The second matter in this course: Nature.  For Descartes and the British empiricists, the self was merely a way to know nature.  Condiac saw the self as an add-on of nature.  Dupre: Psychology used to be part of cosmology.  The concept of nature finds its interpretation from the self in the modern age (due to the centrality of the self as subject as established as explained above). 

The theory as nature in antiquity:  'Nature' to the Greeks was not the wilderness.  Rather, it meant physis(Physics) and kosmos(Cosmology).  'Nature' was viewed as the essence of things.  Physis: to confort--the coming forth of (reality).  Nature is the elementary matter.  Kosmos: an ordered totality, or 'order'.  For the Greeks, order was the main thing to say about reality.   Similarly, Indians were looking for the principle of unity.  For the Buddhists, everything is reduceable to one reality.  A striving to utter and absolute simplicity.  For the Greeks, the search was for balance or harmony.  The order, unity, and simplicity was in these terms, giving Greek Philosophy its aesthetic quality.  Important to Greek thought: Form.  For instance, the pure forms from Plato.  The form of reality from Aristotle.  For the Greeks what really matters in understanding reality is not the notion of existence (this notion didn't exist for the Greeks--for the Greeks, ousia was the closest word which meant essence rather than existence).  The meaning is the form rather than the existence of a thing.  The form is the essence which is in balance, unity and order.  To go against or outside the Form was thought to be wrong.  Acting in congruence with the Form puts us in harmony or order.  Judaeo-Christian view: there must be a higher principle of creation.  Greek view: the creator and created are part of (rather than above) the cosmos.  So, the Greeks would not speculate beyond Form.  The world is eternal.  It is not infinate in space because that would not have form.  Limit belongs to the essence of form.  In Plato's writing, the Demiurge is what creates the world (from within it).  Plato did not believe that the world was created from without; rather, he used this myth to tell us what goes into a perfect world: Form, matter, principles of inherence...  He is talking about principles of reality rather than a story of origins.  Derrida: the basic problem of the Greek world-view is the principle of logos-centralism: the Form is also the ultimate principle of intelligibility; everything in the world has an intelligence.  Logos meant not only intelligence but also balance.  During the third century, BCE, stocism was big.  It brought out that element of logos.  The harmony of the world is that of intelligibility.  So, everything in the world is there for something (good).  From the idea that intelligibility is the heart of reality:  everything has an end.  Nomos: law.  Nature as Form is not only in balance and intelligence, but it is of a law(the normative quality of the logos).  Dupre: our history is of these ideas.

Judaeo-Christianity, the second source of Western culture, gave rise to the idea of creation.  The world is not the ultimate reality; there was a creator who is divine who created a world that is not divine.  That the world was created ex nilio is a misunderstanding of the demiurge of Plato.  The prime matter in Plato is a way of saying that the world is form in the context of chaos.   Creation of the world from outside is to imply that meaning does not come from the world but from outside.  For the Greek, meaning is inherent in the world itself.  For the Judaeo-Christian, meaning comes from outside in God's will, and this is how meaning comes into the world (meaning does not stay outside of it).  So, meaning is not solely outside the world; rather the world is not a self-sufficient source of meaning. 

Platonists like the Christians believe that there is a supreme principle in the world.  The Greek principle of form (i.e. logos) related to Jesus.  Both: by which God is present in the world.   Two crises in Christianity:  In the Western Christianity, redemption did mean the presence of the divine within as was thought in Eastern Christianity but sinfulness.  In the West, redemption meant to be saved from sin.  This went away from the Greek view of the divinity in the world.  In Eastern Christianity, grace is the presence of God in the world, whereas in the West it is a prescription for sin.  So, in Western Christianity, the world was seen not as containing divinity but as being inherently sinful (the redeeming principle coming from outside--alien to the world). 

To the Greeks, Form is universal so meaning is inherent in the world. For the Western Christian, Jesus is an individual, so meaning is at a particular point in the world(relatively constrained in the world).  Eastern Christianity: divinity in the world was relatively spread out because grace was seen as divine presence.

10/3/95

The Greeks had an aesthetic view of harmony and reason in the cosmos.  This is the source of human law and order.  The cosmos was not created by a being beyond the cosmos because the cosmos would lose its self-sufficiency.  The gods are within the cosmos.  Moreover, the cosmos was not created.  It has always been.  In the early Christian vision, God is in the world.  For instance, deification.  God was seen as immanent and inherent in the world as well as being beyond the world.  The former was consistant with the Greek thought. 

The primeval form for Christians is Christ; for Greeks, the primeval form is universal.  The Greek worldview since Aristotle, as it went into Christianity: the earth is immoble in the center.  Around the earth are the planets and fixed stars.  The philosophical meaning of this pattern: from a source beyond the stars is the unmoved mover (Aristotle).  This principle of movement is a godlike principle which is within the cosmos. The unmoved mover transmitted its power to bodies of movement which in turn are in a heirarchy.  This view was used as a basis for monarchy.  Christians took this view.  Then, a breakdown by the nominalists who questioned our ability to know such order: God is so far beyond the cosmos that the order can't be predicted.  Nominalism gave an imputus to Physics and Astronomy.  When God withdraws from the world, the whole creation becomes empty of godliness.  Nothing divine in the world.  This is a breakdown of ancient physics as well as theology. 

There were two answers to this.  Physics took that of observation.  What happened to theology in a world without God?  As with Descartes, in a world of total skepticism, the self becomes the center.  God had set things in motion at the beginning and now meaning is to be seen in the subject (the self).  Another theological answe: Nicholas of Cusa, a Cardinal, disagreed with the view of God beyond the cosmos. He claimed that God penetrates the world and is also beyond the world.  The world is an expression of God.  This was not pantheism (everything in the world is God).  Rather, it was panentheism: that there is divinity in the world--God as immediately present in the cosmos.  If the cosmos is infinite in time and space, then how could God be exclusively beyond it?   Bruno, a Dominican, agreed that God is not beyond the world.  He was burnt in Rome.  His vision of panentheism he took from Cusa.  He attempted to describe the world as divine.  For Cuza and Bruno, there was no 'above' an infinite space.  Also, they questioned the idea that the earth is in the center because if the cosmos is infinite, how can there be a center?  Futther, they claimed that the source of motion is within rather than from above.  This view laid the ground for Capurnicus who claimed that the earth was not central and thus still.  It was from ancient philosophy and his intuition that he thought that the earth moves.  He had read in Cicero that the world moves. Also, Capurnicus claimed that the Sun was the center.  He had read Aristarchus from whom Capurnicus concluded that the Sun is at the center..  So, Capurnicus used math and observation merely to prove these theses.  The imputus came from philosophy.  In Joshua, it was written that the Sun was stopped.  Capurnicus went against scripture?  He gave his book to Paul III of Rome who agreed with him. 

Implications of these changes: how do things move if there is not an unmoved mover from outside the cosmos?  The Hebrew, Christian, and Islamic view rested on the view that movement came from 'outside'. 

Dupre: the argument was aesthetic; Plato's form idea predominated.  Both sides sought to show that their view as aesthetic.  For instance, the idea that the stars are fixed goes well with the idea of a form.  It was not until Galelao that it was claimed that the stars move. They look fixed because they are so far away. This suggested an infinite cosmos. Also, the circular orbits of the planets are not circular, but they were assumed so even by Capurnicus because of the aesthetics based on the idea of a form. 

After Capurnicus came Bruno who knew little mathematics.  But Bruno saw the implications of Capurnicus' theory.  For instance, if the earth is not the center, there is no justification in thinking that we are alone.  The cosmos is not centered.  To call the Sun central is arbitrary because there is no life on it.   Also, Bruno had read Cuza.  Also, if God is infinite, then He can only express Himself infinitely: the cosmos must be infinite in time and space.  The cosmos itself is God in HIs self-expression.  This must be infinite because God Himself is infinite.  Creation went out of the window, assuming that the cosmos is infinite.  There is no time to God.  So, the nominalist view of God as the outside creator had died.  Bruno replaced with divinity that void left by the nominalist.  Once Gallelao showed that the stars move, then it was seen that the cosmos was much larger than it had been assumed to be.  It was Bruno who first envisioned an infinite eternal cosmos without center or end.  Thus, no outside creator.  This infinite, eternal cosmos was for him infused with the divine spirit, as the self-expression of God.  Such an expression must be infinite and eternal because God is so.  There must be innumerable worlds for such self-expression of God to be possible.   It followed for Bruno that the image of God can't be one individual such as Christ.

 

10/5/95

Galeleo: established the modern cosmology.  Capurnicus had not touched on the issue of the fixed stars. Capurnicus merely indicated that the earth moves around the sun.  This was said to be against the book of Joshua which stated that Joshua had stopped the sun in its orbit around the earth.  But, Paul III was a humanist. He felt that the sun should be in the center.  This had nothing to do with scientific evidence. 

Galeleo was open to Platonic considerations.  So, the issue was not the sun and the earth.  Rather, it was the question of the oliptic orbit.  Platonists saw a circle as being more of a form of nature's order.  But Galeleo was platonic in that he believed that the essence of reality belonged to the ideal. Thus, it is mathematical.  However, Plato had strongly defended the mathematical structure of the cosmos and that in this material world, mathematics is only present in a less than perfect sense.  Pure mathematic order is in the celestrial bodies because it was believed that they were of more subtle material.  Contrary to Plato, Galeleo claimed that perfect math also applied to celestrial bodies.  Galelao accepted that this world is run by mathematical laws.  He brought back the ideal order into the real order.  Aristotle: that which is true of the ideal order is true for the material order.  Galeleo agreed.  So, a 'super-idealism'.  He agreed with Plato that matter impeeds mathematical preciison but disagreed in stating that this distortion was not sufficient to inhibit the application of perfect math to the real world.  There is no difference between the physical laws of this world and of the celestrial bodies.  So, the stars are subject to physical laws.  So, there can be a universal system of mechanics that applies everywhere.  No longer necessary to have a prime mover come down into a hierarchy.  Motion and causality don't come from outside the cosmos, but according to mathematical laws inside the cosmos.  The homogenization of the cosmos is the most revelutionary discovery of Galelao.  There is no priviledge of the celestrial bodies over the earth. 

The issue between Galelao and Rome was not that the earth orbits the sun; rather, it was the matter of where God enters into the system.  How do we explain how things are moved if an outside first mover is not accepted?  Rome was concerned because there was no alternative system of explanation offered.  In 1610, he published a book called A Messenger from the Stars.  Two theories: the surface of the moon is not clean and the shape of it is not perfectly round.  This contradicted Platonic forms.  Second, he discovered four more planets.  But he was counting three of Jupiter's moons.  This discovery removed one of the main objections against Capurnicus; namely, that the moon turns around the earth as well as the sun.  Galelao's discovery of Jupitor indicated that moons don't orbit around the sun.  So, the objection against Capurnicus' view of our moon was no longer valid.  Then, he (actually Scheiner) discovered sun-spots on the Sun.  The problem: even the sun is not perfect.  The whole platonic background of what things should be like fell hard and there was not a worked-out alternative.  Galaleo: don't take everything in the bible literally.  He argued that if the Sun were to stop rotating, then so too would the planets.  In reference to Joshua, it was actually the earth that stopped.  But this whole literal interpretation of the bible should be dropped.  Cardinal Barberini protected Galaleo.  Rome had no problem with the earth orbiting a still sun. But if the sun rotates in place, then how could the sun stand still with the earth having stopped?  Wouldn't this go against scripture.  In 1616, Rome requested that Galaleo put his theory as a hypothesis.   In 1623, Barberini became the Bishop of Rome (Urban VIII).  At stake: who has the last word about reality: theology.  Galelao had not studies theology.  Galelao moved to Rome where he wrote The Dialogue of Two World Systems in which he defends Capurnicus in a manner which compromised the Bishop of Rome by calling his arguments stupid, under a pseudonym.  The Bishop of Rome was furious.  Galaleo ws put on trial.  He retracted all but that it was a hypothesis.  In short, what worried Rome was that no alternative was given.  Needed: an alternative interpretation.  Also, this was the end of theology's dominance in cosmology.  There was also the issue of whether the bible could be interpreted figuratively.  Finally, both Galaleo and Barberini were proud, stubborn men. 

10/10/95

Three points on Galaleo:

Galelao saw the world as geometric.   This implies that the world is objective and that God is the supreme geometrian.  It is a Platonic idea in the sense that the whole world is viewed as an ideal model.  Galelao agreed, but stated that matter has a distorting effect. So, he recognized that there would be a discrepancy between a geometrical result and real-world occurances.  Thus, Galaleo used a mathematical method so to be sure that the world itself is mathematical. 

Second, Galalao saw the world as infinite.  The enormous distance which must be in the cosmos that was suggested by his discovery of the moons of Jupitor, suggested this. 

Third, Galalao saw the the laws of the celestrial bodies are the the same as those operative on the earth and the moon.

From these points, it was seen that the old theory of causality (from above the cosmos) was wrong. 

Descartes:

Bruno died in 1600.  Galaleo's discoveries came afterward.  Descartes was in Holland during the time of the discoveries.  Descartes wrote a treatise on the world in which he assumed Galaleo's discoveries.  Descartes had certainty of the self and of God.  As a result, God can't be an evil deceiver.  We are thus sure of the world to exist and of those things in the world that come in clear ideas.  The world reveals itself in one idea: extension.  So, there is the thinking thing and extensions.  That's it. 

Meditation 6:  two kinds of operations in the mind.  Pure intellection (reason--a mental operation) and imagining (including sense perception and fantasy).  So, the mind turns not only inward but outward.  Geometry depends on both of these.  In the third meditation, different idea types: in the mind and from without.  The problem: how we can think.  Berkeley: bodies need not exist in order for one to think.  Descartes: a body is necessary for one to think.  There is no freedom in my mental life from ideas that seem to come from without.  If no extensions, there is no world that imposes itself, so no ideas from without.  So, thinking on ideas from without depends on the existence of the world (e.g. the body).  Descartes then worries about being deceived on what is imposed on him from the world.  People at a distance look small, for instance.  What is the active element (who is acting) behind passive ideas from the world?  A faculty of the mind in taking in ideas from the world.  But, there is another: the souse of the passive ideas.  God or the ideas themselves?  If from God, that would be deception(they seem to come from the world).  So, they come from the objects themselves.  How do I as an active agent perceive these passive ideas that have their source in the objects perceived in the world?  Specifically, how can I become aware of my body?  The connection between my body and mind is so intimate that I can't deny it or have been deceived on it.  For instance, when I have a head-ache, I have a head-ache.  The close cooperation between body and mind is not really justified by Descartes.  For him, the body and mind are separate.  Dupre: a hopeless case to connect them, given this assumption.  As for deception, where does it come from?  There are primary qualities of the world, which can't be justified.  They are transferred directly from the world to the mind without being deformed.  For instance, mathematical sizes and shapes.  Secondary qualities of the world can't be justified. They are affected by my subjectivity and are thus not reliable. For instance, color.  Dupre: this distinction is arbritrary and biased towards mathematics.

Descartes distinguishes different views of the world: First, the distinction between primary and secondary qualities.  The latter are advantageous.  They come from without and are formed only by my perceptions.  The former are innate in the mind.  Second, that there is a 'spiritual; Pineal gland that perceives the world. 

Dupre: the question is this: do we get ideas from the world or from in the mind.  How?  Descartes states that to perceive  a secondary quality is a process in the mind.  Primary qualities are from the world.  The link between sensation and the mind is God.  Dupre: this means that Descartes did not have an answer for the link.  On space: it is nothing but extension. Descartes rejects the notion that there is a vaccum.  On motion: it is an essential quality of the material world, given by God.  The motion instilled at the beginning of the cosmos remains constant.  On this, Descartes builds the three laws of nature that gave rise to mechanization.  Each body remains in rest or in motion unless touched by something else, for instance (Newton).  Everything that moves does so naturally in a straight line because God is straight(God is always the same).  These laws are based on the idea that motion is constant on the whole. 

So, mechanization is based on the idea that the world is extention and that motion in the cosmos as a whole is constant.

10/12/95

Newton:

At his time, not much of modern Physics and Astronomy was known.  Galaleo, for instance, believed in a center of the cosmos.  There was also not much known about motion.  Galaleo believed that lines are naturally straight because God is straight.  Newton had an insight of the law of motion.  Descartes and Galaleo assumed that the cosmos has been calculated by God and so could be described mathematically (geometrically).  Calculation, rather than experimentation and observation, was all that was thought to be required.  Newton did not view God as a geometric God.  To him, we just don't know.  So, we can't be certain that geometrical calculation is sufficient to know how the world actually works.  We must observe how things function to understand them, rather than relying solely on our reason.  On matter, it is not a matter of essence but of function.  We will never know what things are in their essence. 

The methods of natural philosophy (science of the natural world): Galileo: break down the factors of natural things by analysis into quantifiable elements. Key: analysis.  This was called metodo resolutivo.  Then, compositivo: put the factors back together: synthesis. Descartes speaks of these two movements in mathematical terms.  Newton too spoke of analysis and synthesis, but for him analysis began with observation.  From it, mathematical elements could be induced, from which claims could be deduced.  Newton would say that mathematics is to be used only in relation to motion of things.  Descartes, seeing the world as res extensa, would want to apply mathematics to anything in the world.  Everything in the cosmos is a machine, according to Descartes.  For Newton, he does not ascribe causation to what he observes whereas Galileo and Desartes assumed causality on what they calculated about. 

Newton's four rules:

1. Admit no more causes of natural things than what is relevant to their appearances.  In other words, we should not assume more interpretations than we really need.  If you can interpret something in one way, then stop there.  Dupre: but why can't there be more than one interpretation of something?  Newton was religious and believed that if God is perfect, he would not have created a disorderly world with more than one cause for a thing.  God wouldn't need to add a second cause to something.  Assumed: nature does nothing in vain (i.e. without cause).  Dupre: but there is random events in nature.  So, if one has found an interpretation for the cause of something, then one has found it.

2. If one has found the same effects in natural objects, then one must ascribe the same cause to them.  The descent of stones in Europe and America have the same cause, for instance.  Dupre: He assumes an orderly world (created by God).  But the nominalists had stated that we know little about God. 

3. The qualities of bodies are to be esteemed to universal bodies. In other words, if you find the same characteristics in more than body, then you can assume that all such bodies have the characteristics.  Further, there is a characteristic of all bodies.  Descartes would say that extention and motion are the characteristics of all bodies.  God added motion to extentions.  Newton accepts this: bodiliness is extension and motion.  But, bodies are also impenetrable.  We know this not from reason but from observation.  Dupre: this results in atomism, which was too far for Newton. He assumed that atoms are solid.  Key: Newton adds a characteristic that Galileo and Descartes had not been able to add: hardness of physical objects. If a natural body naturally appears to gravitate towards the earth (in proportion to its mass), then all bodies are endowed with a principle of mutual gravitation.  Galileo wrote on gravity, but to him gravity 'went down' to the same place, predestined by God.  Newton contradicts that.  Rather, there is an attraction among bodies which can be calculated.  The heavier body will attract the lighter one.  There is also a countervailing force of repulsion.  The operation of the cosmos is thought of to be on a different basis: the same calculations can be made to different celestrial bodies.   Newton stated that gravity is a property of objects rather than what they are. Again, Newton wants to focus on the functions of natural bodies rather than what they are. 

4. Alternative unproved hypotheses are not enough to stop one in one's interpretation of something.  Otherwise, nothing can be made distinct.  He does not want to discuss what he can't prove.  For instance, he did not want to discuss what is behind the force of gravity.  Modern science has not followed him on this law.  He stayed with the functions of objects and stayed away from hypotheses of the cause of the functions themselves because he could not prove them.

Space:

For Newton, space was a pure hypothesis so there was nothing to say about it.  Rather, space has to do with Theology.  Newton did some exegesis of the Bible.  For Descartes, space is extension.  It is the same thing as bodiliness.  So, there can be no such thing as void space.  Newton believed that the cosmos which is finite in space and time exists within infinite space and infinite time.  Mechanical causes did not give cause to so many regular movements in the cosmos.  There must be a creator at the origin--an intelligent being.  Infinite space is essential for creation.  Sensorium(an emptiness within which there was creation) is necessary for this.  Lutiah, a Jewish mystic of the 1400's said that God is infinite, so He emptied Himself into which he created the world (otherwise, there would be no more room within which the creation could be, apart from God).  Blondel thought that all things are in God, so an infinite God could create.

10/17/95

Themes on the Idea of Nature in the Seventeenth Century:

1. Extension of the universe.  Through history, the universe has been seen as increasingly large and humans have become more and more lost in it.  Capernicus, for instance, held that the earth is not the center of the solar system, that the sun is not the center of the universe, and that there is no center to the universe.  This led to a sense of fear; that nature would not necessarily take care of humans. This led to a detachment from the universe.  The universe (nature) is a reality in which we are no longer the center, a nature which no longer takes care of us.  In fact, the universe, or nature, is no longer a cosmos--an ordered reality that turns around mankind.  But it is the object of the mind. But if you say 'object', it  means that which is in front of me. The mind makes nature into something different than us. Pascal remarked a paradox here in that as we became more detached from seeing the universe as  a cosmos, we have kept the notion of having spiritual control over it.

2. The self-sufficiency and independence of nature. The conflict between Galileo and the Church was about who had the last word; it was to what extent we can consider nature (rather than 'creation') as a reality that can be studied in its own right without looking ato anything beyond nature.  God set up the laws of nature, after which man must use reason to uncover the laws of nature.  There was no longer believed to be a higher order beyond the universe.  So, Physics via mathematics, rather than Theology, was coming to have the final word.  This was the point of contension during the 1600's. 

Nature adopts a certain independence.  The use of the word 'nature' had meant 'that which we can do by our faculties--such as use reason, have faith.  The theological sense of this use of 'nature' is 'creation'.  Then, as nature came into its own light as an object of study, it meant the stuff of the universe.  The laws of this 'stuff' were mathematical to Galileo, so he held that theology should not have the last word; that his finding was not a hypothesis vis a vis theology.  Galileo considered nature to be mathematical, with God as the great geometer at the beginning but has been out of the picture vis a vis natural laws since then.  So, 'nature' came to be 'the law of nature' or 'laws'. For Newton as well, a mechanistic universe could not be possible without a push into motion by God. So, the belief that nature has an independent existence and intelligibility does not in itself mean atheism.  Cassier: 'the truth is revealed not in God's word... but in God's work.'  'The truth of physics is in physics.'  'Revelation of the sacred word can never give such brightness.'  In other words, scripture was no longer a legitimate authority for natural philosophy. 

3. The uniformity of nature.  Mathematical calculation as applicable to differentiated phenomena was possible only if one assumed a uniformity to nature.  Such uniformity was seen by some as a harmony to nature.  The universe was believed to be the best possible world (Leibniz), so there would be no exceptions in a perfect world.  For Newton, the uniformity of the whole universe was a conclusion.  But why is it uniform?  What are the ontological foundations for this kind of uniformity that exists throughout the universe?   At the end of the seventeenth century, there were two replies.  First, a practical one: 'no hypothesis'.  Even for Newton, he came up with a certain law and says that we can't go any further than we know about the law from the law and its manifestations.   BUt how can we predict something unless we assume it to be the case beyond what be observe? Second, Leibnitz states that there is a total harmony of nature.   It is this principle that allows us to speak of uniformity.  But this merely puts off the question, whereas the first option was merely to be practical.  Leibnitz gave a proof for the existence of God in which it follows that everything must be in the best possible way.  God can only make the best possible world. If he made something less than best, he would stop being God.  So an infinite, perfect, omniscient God would make the best possible world as one having no exceptions, thus having uniformity in its laws.So Leibnitz rejects the notion of empty space (a perfect God would not fail to use that which He created), so he rejects Newton's 'infinite space' notion of the universe.

The Enlightenment of the 1700's:

Whereas in the seventeenth century, God had a place in nature as the designer of the clock, in the eighteenth century that of God was entirely(as set in the Bible) was entirely separated from the laws of nature.  The final word for the latter came from Physics rather than theology.  In the seventeenth century,  this was the conflict. 

Second, mechanism developed and was applied to the natural laws (i.e. mechanistic laws).  Rules of the uniformity of nature came to be seen as mechanistic. This resulted in materialism: everything is matter that simply acts and reacts.  Buffon refuted the mechanistic approach.  d'Alembert combined it with empiricism, arguing that observation is needed to compliment what we can know of mechanistic laws by mathematical calculation.  Why?  The universe was no longer believed to be perfect, so mathematical calculations under the assumption that the universe would reflect them perfectly were no longer relied upon; instead, observation of imperfect dynamics was included in the methodology of natural philosophy. 

Third, there was a dynamism of nature which countered the mechanism above.  Leibniz, for instance, believed that a substance is not a piece of matter but is a dynamic spirit (i.e. not res extentia).  In other words, substance is a power-center; matter is energy.  God is the supreme monad.  Our souls are monads over which are the collection of monads that make up our bodies.  God established this energy.  Diderot was also against mechanism.  He argued that secret forces in matter exist which after much time can create living beings (evolution).  There is thus a spontaneous evolution of matter.  Against Leibniz, however, there is not a pre-established order by the supreme monad, but a spontaneous evolution of nature.  Still, both philosophers did not reduce substance to matter and so held that there is spirit in the universe. 

So, three trends in the eighteenth century: a separation of the laws of nature from scripture, mechanism (combined with empiricism and resulting in materialism), and dynamism. 

10/19/95

Three movements in the relation of nature to God: the Separation of the Divine and Nature. This led to study of nature apart from a divine context(Naturalism) and eventually to atheism.  Pascal: 'the hidden God'.  Atheism is a logical consequence of modern thought.  Descartes led to this separation.  Specifically, French materialism. Second, a re-divination of nature.  Is there nothing divine in nature?  Bruno asked this question.  Spinoza identified God with nature: 'God that is nature'.  Dupre: this is pantheism.  Third, the reintegration of the Judaeo-Christian tradition into the world's concerns via the Reformation.  A new form of traditional religion.

What is religion?  Religion deals with some source of reality that is the basis of everything.  Religion is about transcendence. That what we perceived is not the real.  Not necessarily on 'God'.  Buddhism, for instance. 

In the West, Hebrew and Greek civilizations were formative. Philosophy was unimportant in Judiasm until the Hellonistic period.  So, we start with Greek Philosophy.  What is the idea of transcendence in Greek philosophy?  Moreover, how do we come to the notion of transcendence in philosophy?  People feel that the appearance of things does not justify their reality; therefore, there must be a reality behind that which is perceived.  Transcendence: the justification of appearances.

For Plato, the theory of the forms, or ideas, can be seen as an answer.  In Plato, there is the realms of appearances and of the forms.  The purpose of the forms is to justify the other reality--that of appearances.  The forms are on a transcendant level--not on that of appearances.  For Plato, metaphysics consisting of this transcendant reality is the religious as well as philosophical answer.  Religion for Plato was not with the gods, but with the forms as a transcendent realm of the real.  To justify that which appears, forms must enter into the realm of appearances. 

For Aristotle, the earth was in the center of concentric circles, above which is the unmoved mover who is indifferent to the world and is only the first cause of movement in the world.  But Aristotle saw the divine immanent in the cosmos.  Plotinus was a neo-Platonist.  His was the first mystical philosophy.  The highest principle is that which is also the lowest principle, penetrating all.  It is our innermost being.  Augustine was converted to Christianity from neo-Platonism.  God is more interior to me that I am to myself. 

Ancient Judeao-Christian thought:  Nature is created by God rather than an everlasting reality within which the transcendent lives.  The Hebrews: Philo.  He brought the Hebrew biblical element together with Greek philosophy in the first centure, C.E.  The salient question was of whether God is one.  God is not just outside the cosmos, but is immanent.  This was so too in Greek philosophy, as noted above.  From the fourth century on, the Greek Christian Church was neo-Platonist.  So, it is a mystical religion.  Becoming present in the divine is salient here.  This came out of the Greek idea of theosis:  the becoming god.  The purpose of religion is to become divine in the world.  The creation becomes in effect a mystical symbol.  But, Christianity could not accept the following in Plato: for Plato, what is good (participates in the ideas) is the mind; matter/body is bad.  This soul/body distinction went against the Hebrew idea that the person is one.  Jn., in Chistian scripture, argued against Gnosticism.  Gnosticism, 'those who know', held that the body was bad such that creation was viewed differently.  Christian Gnosticism: there were two creation.  The first was of matter, by the Hebrew God.  The second creation was by Christ, in which the spirit was created.  The Hebrew and Christian institutions rejected this.  In the Latin West, there was basically Roman Law.  When Rome fell, the center of the West had fallen.  Waves of barbarians in the sixth to ninth centuries.  In the West, grace was seen as a medication--the gift of the divine that will redeem sin.  Grace here is something external; something imposed.  Nature is corrupt and there is a divine infusion from outside. This eventually led to the separation of nature and the divine.   For the Greek Christians, grace is our union with the divine.  No such separation has occurred.

Aquinas: rediscovered Greek philosophy (Aristotle). For Aquinas, nature pointed beyond itself.  The independence of nature is relative.  Not nature but the Aristotelian virtues are the end of mankind.

Nominalism: God is distant and outside the cosmos such that we can say nothing about God.  Radical separation between nature and God.  Aristotle, too, saw nature as totally separated from its source: God is the unmoved mover outside the cosmos.  Descartes: two sciences--one of nature and one of God.  In the former was the germ of atheism.  What is there left of the relation between the divine and nature?  A break of transcendence from the order of reality. 

Natural Theology: that nature must have a creator implies that God is separate from the cosmos.  This is to separate nature and God.  Proofs from God don't work unless there is first God's presence (in nature); otherwise, the proof is of nature.

10/24/95

This course is about a transformation rather than an ending of religion.  This is a cultural and ideological phenomenon.  There was a separation of natural philosophy and theology.  Before hand, there was the medieval cosmology which integrated the two.  For instance, God is the first cause (Aquinas) and mechanistic laws run from it(Descartes).  Nominalism: the idea that God's power is so far above that of his creatures that God can do what He pleases and that humans can't know about God.  Potentia absoluta: absolute power.  In the beginning, God is almighty.  Potentia determinata: that which is actually done; one concrete thing is chosen.  Aquinas: the natural powers of nature are in the scheme of potentia determinata.  God fills in the gaps.  A cooperation.  Nominalist theology: the potestia absoluta of God is given up for the power to entrust everything to the natural causes.  This leads to a separation between divine and natural causes.  Physics has nothing to do with God anymore.  Here we have the world of nature, willed by and independent of, God.  Also, there is the supernatural world which is that of God of which we can't know.  So, in the fifteenth century in Britian, it was thought that the only way to know of the natural world was observation; prediction was not enough because one could not presume that it follows God's intervention or that we could even know of God's design or of God himself.  Dupre: the separation of nature from the supernatural is fatal if one wants to be religious. 

Luther saw that the separation would lead to a paganism that would take nature as an independent entity.  Grace is a gift of God that comes into this world.  To Luther, grace is a total and direct relation between God and the world, rather than God sending something into this world.  Erasmus, like Luther, reacted against the separation. Erasmus took it from below, claiming that nature should the basis of the divine.  The divine is in the system of nature.  A Christian humanism.  Trusting in nature.  Freedom was emphasized by Erasmus.  The high point of nature is human freedom, which in turn has an upward movement to God.  See Erasmus, De Libero Arbitrio.  Luther wrote De Servo Arbitrio to refute that book.  To Luther, humans have an absence of freedom.  Luther: Erasmus does not consider the Fall; that we are a lapsed nature.  So, to think that nature is the way to God is unChristian, according to Luther.  Is Luther emphasizing corruption too much?  Dupre: from a Christian view, one can't assume that nature can be relied upon to get one to God.  To Luther, grace decends from God and it is this grace that is our freedom.  It is a different kind of freedom than that which Erasmus had.  Luther's freedom: humans are justified from God alone and not from works.  So, a divine freedom.  Erasmus' freedom: a human freedom, from nature, and so from works.  The distinction: is the divine earned as well as given --cooperation(Erasmus) or only given(Luther)?  Dupre: Luther has a nominalist element in his theology.  Luther was reacting against the notion of nature as 'earning'.  But unlike Erasmus, Luther did not remove the separation.  Rather, Luther wanted to get rid of nature (because the Catholic church was of it), so he was a supernaturalist. 

Forward in time and backward in thinking: Descartes.  He used the scheme which Erasmus and Luther reacted against (potential absoluta as separated from potentia determinata).  For instance, Descartes took God to be all powerful. He stated that as a finite being he could not have an idea of an infinite being.  There is the nominalist separation here.  He simply claimed that there is more reality in the infinite than in the finite.  Descartes was the one who worked out the separation: the realm of faith is separated from the paths to scientific knowledge.  Philosophy became separated from Theology.  Nature can be considered in itself without reference to God, and then God can be proved from that.  Dupre: but nature is separated here from the supernatural, so how could one say anything about God by nature?  The true justification: is there in my own life an opening to religious experience.  Then ask, can I place names, piety, and my own religion on it?  This does not presuppose a separation.

10/26/95

Disintegration of the Western cosmic system.  Specifically, a separation of the realm of God from that of nature. A separation of nature and grace.  For instance, Descartes stated that knowledge and faith must be separated.  Luther tried to bring them back together via prevenient grace in the natural world. He rejected the Rennasence attempt to reintegrate them from nature to God.  Rather, for Luther, grace comes down on a totally corrupt nature. Luther destroys the value in nature.  There is no salvation from it.  He despairs completely of helping himself.  Dupre: this is destructive of nature.  An exptreme pessimism about the world and human nature.  Rousseau argued against this in a book about education. A total rejection of the notion of original sin.  Culture and civilization causes the problem, not human nature.  Erasmus disagreed with Luther too, arguing that nature can be beneficial in the salvific process.  Rennescence: reintegration from below; Luther: reintegration from above(a reaction against nature itself).  Dupre: neither of these is a satisfactory solution. 

As a result of the separation of God from nature came Deism and Atheism.

The Enlightenment: 

As a result of the scisms, tolerance of differences in religious belief.  It was based on an agreement that God is manifested in nature (natural religion); differences on the rest were considered to be unimportant.  Descartes, for instance, based his study of God on that of nature.  So, natural theology was a result of the separation.  There was some agreement in natural theology: that there is a creator and an afterlife, and that good will be rewarded.  This is Deist belief.  Deists don't accept religion based on denominations, or scripture, but accept only that which is based on the idea of God.  For instance, Locke intended to write a theology that did not rely on scripture but on a natural faith.  Dupre: Christianity can't be reduced to that which is shown in nature.  Mendelson claimed that Judeaism is based in nature (logic).  Toland and Tindal claimed that Christianity had brought nothing new that was not already in nature.  Voltaire went further, warring against the Church of France. And Voltaire was against atheism and was religious.  He was a Deist: he believed that God exists and that there is an after-life.  He was sensitive to the problem of evil. He disliked the way the Church came up with these things.  Voltaire felt that the Quakers had the least dogma and therefore were the best.  Diderot became a Deist because he saw superstition in Church teachings.  He was also a scientist and so saw nature as mechanistic: as a power that has its own force and thus needs no outside impact.  God is thus not needed in nature.  Matter may have power to move itself.  He defended an evolution.  Most deists, however, believed that God was necessary as the first cause.  But Diderot believed that nature does not need God.  This led him to atheism.  Mechanism is an example of something misconceived which led to atheism. d'Holbach was an atheist who wrote a book with footnotes written by Diderot.   Mechanism assumes that God is the first cause.  This a misunderstanding of transcendence. Dupre: such misunderstandings lead to atheism.  Creation does not entail the medieval belief that God is the first cause but that the world is dependent.  Mechanism is based on a misunderstanding of creation (as God being the first cause). 

So, one can reintegrate nature and God by claiming that the world is dependent rather than that it had a beginning (i.e. a first mover from the outside). 

In short, Luther attempted to restore the integration of the cosmos in medieval thought.  Rousseau and Erasmus reacted against Luther.  The Deists tried for a unity by giving a minimalist account of God and claiming that nature can be explained without God.

10/31/95

Pascal reacted against the ontological proofs of God (e.g. Descartes). Pascal was born in 1683 in France.  He invented probability calculus.  This penetrated his thinking.  Descartes did not think in probabalistic terms.  Also, Descartes taught that res extentia implies that there is no empty space.  Pascal taught that there could be.  Pascal was a physicist and mathematian. 

The Jansenist attempt of reunion.  Recall that nature had become separated from grace (supernaturalism).  The Enlightenment was the first attempt to bring them back together; the Reformation was the second (nature is totally corrupt).  Baius: from the beginning, nature was in the order of grace (from Augustine).  Grace was lost in the Fall.  Baius stated that therefore the split is artificial.  An all-good creator must have made a divinized nature (creation).  Nature is entitled by its essence to be divinized.  So, when the Fall came, both nature and grace go.  Everything is totally corrupt.  The good things in nature are splendid vices.  God redeems us in Christ: those who are redeemed are completely restored.  Then came Jansenius.  The theory of Baius had been condemned.  But Jansenius sees value in it. so he salvages it: in the first stage before the Fall, grace is in the order of nature.  Unlike Baius, Jansenius claimed that this was by God's good will rather than required.  Second stage: the Fall and total corruption. God will redeem some of the people.  Baius' universal salvation was changed to elect or chosen salvation.  There is a pessimism here: only a few are elected.  The Fall ruined everything and only a few will be restored.  Protestantism on the other hand claims that no one recovers.  For Jansenius, those who are redeemed are intrinsically sanctified (they recover).  In other words, unlike Protestant thought, some of nature is still of grace.  So, there is some connection between nature and grace.  Pascal was a Jansenist. 

For Pascal, redemption is not from the resurrection but is in the suffering of Christ.  In this sense, Pascal contradicted mainline Catholic thinking.  So, Jansenism was not Protestantism or mainline Catholocism.  The suffering of the persecuted Jansenists was a sign of their election.  Jansenists also believed that God is utterly unknown; totally transcendent. 

Pascal's sister was a nun at Port Royal, a Jansenist convent.  By that time, Pascal had become Jansenist.  He intended to write an apology of Christianity.  Various versons, because disparate papers had to be put together after his death.  Pascal criticizes Descartes' method.  Pascal: 'The heart has its own reasons(intuition) that the reason(discursive reasoning) does not understand'.  Meaning:  our reasoning is based on things that we can't prove.  Geometry has principles which can't themselves be proven.  So, Pascal claimed that intuitive knowledge precedes rational knowledge.  The knowledge of the heart that is intuitive is the only knowledge that has any certitude.  To figure something out that you can't reason out is intuitive.  Nothing of rational reasoning applies to metaphysics.  Pascal liked Montaingne (we don't know anything about metaphysics).  So, God is hidden.  Unlike the nominalists who claimed that we can't know God because God is distant.  To Pascal, God is near but hidden (i.e. transcendent).  This excludes any natural theology.  So, on ontological or cosmological proofs.  Descartes is useless to Jansenists in general and Pascal in particular.  Pascal was an existentialist: God is not known by philosophical reasoning.  The true God is that which has been revealed in Christ.  The purpose of Pascal's apologetic was to show that God was in Christ.  He does not rely on rational reasoning.  Rather, he trusts in a blind faith.  A non-geometrical spirit.  Pascal had the sense that mankind lives in the midst of emptiness: a void of space.  'The internal silence of the infinite space frightens me.'  I have no significance vis a vis the universe.  An absolute lostness of the person in the universe.  Dupre: this is the way we feel in the modern world.  There is the misery and yet the greatness of mankind.  To realize my insignificance and misery is precisely my greatness. 

The wager of Pascal: bet that God exists--what do I lose?  A short life.  Even if a slight chance that God exists, what do we have to lose in betting on this, because what you can lose if God does not exist is little.  You would still exist in this life. 

Pascal: this decision is an existential decision.  The support for it is not in rational reason but in his notion of mankind in the universe.

11/2/95

Descartes reacted against the separation between nature and grace.  Descartes builds up a natural theology from nature.  Pascal reacted against this move.  Pascal was based in Jansenism: an attempt to reunite nature and grace by optimistically claiming that grace is implicit in nature.  That is, the Jansenists claimed that grace is implicit in nature.  People are thus entitled to union with God because people are divinized from the beginning.  The Fall of Adam and Eve represents a break of this unity between nature and grace.  Nature is then totally corrupt.  But unlike Protestant views, the elect will be restored from their nature (as it was originally infused with grace). 

To Pascal, reason is corrupt, so no proofs of God's existence.  There is not enough of God revealed for one to do more than read by faith.  The predestined elect can do this.  The elect emphasize the suffering of Jesus rather than the triumph of the resurrection; it is in the agony that the elect participate.  The Jansenists became marginized by their own theory; they felt that nature is not very helpful. 

Moreover, when nature was separated from grace at the end of the middle ages, theology separated from mysticism.  The problem was in the separation of system and experience.   The result was an impoverishment of theology and the estrangement of mysticism.

Dupre: the Burock was a spiritual movement.  It was during the thirty-year war which ended in 1648.  Ignatius of Loyola, who lived before the Burock and was founder of the Jesuits, was a modern person, meaning that he was soldier; namely, he spoke of the human person as one who knows what he wills.  The idea of method in life.  Ironically, Descartes was a disciple of the Jesuits and emphasized 'method'.  Ignatius formulated a method emphasizing will-power.  For Ignatius, there are two centers of power: the person ( a gift, but not merely grace; rather, a given power) and the divine giver. Pascal rejected the tension here.  The foundation for Ignatius is in God, to be contemplated in looking at nature (which bears the marking of God).  In the Baroch style, there is a point from above and a center below, so like Ignatius.  There is the horizontal line of human effort in tension with a divine point from above.  In contrast, the Rennessance emphasized the horizontal effort of mankind, rather than a tension between the horizontal and vertical.  The two centers in the Baroch style are in tension.  Spiritually, the transcendent (the vertical) is no longer straight, but swirls down.  The divine is mediated or represented.  Each level of reality is unique(represents reality in a unique way).  The hidden God is made present in his representations.  What is real doesn't matter; rather, representation merges with reality. Thus the human performance was a mask which represents the divine.   

11/7/95

Pascal attempted to give religious meaning back into the world.  The Baroch movement did too, placing the human person at the center.  But in this movement, there is also a divine center through which the creative aspect of the human subject is set as derived; a realization that our power dwells elsewhere.  The tension between those two centers account for the dynamic and power of the Baroch. As opposed to the perfect forms of Platonism, there is a tension; a constant pulling.  This is symbolized in the oval shape.  It is not a perfect shape, having within it a tension.  The paradigm in which one's power is from another leads to one's identity being in representing something else.  Thus, the theatre has played a salient role in the Baroch movement. Dupre: a danger here of 'fakeness' and thus a lack of identity.  There was also an idealism of expansionism, going to the new world.  But, the movement degenerated after about fifty years.  Why?  That which was spiritual became externalized into pure expressiveness.  In the beginning, it was an expression of the divine power; by the end it was mere expressionism for its own sake.  The spiritual tension was lost by the end of the sixteenth century.  The Baroch was the last spiritual unity of Europe. 

The greatest threat to religion in the eighteenth century was not materialism or objectivism, but relativism.  By the end of the 1600's, people began to speak of 'religions'.  In the fifteenth century, Christianity was the religion of Europe.  By the eighteenth century, Chistianity in Europe had been fragmented and Judiasm and Islam were taken seriously.  Contacts with other continents brought with it encounter and knowledge of the 'primative' religions. 

Montesquieu wrote The Spirit of the Laws.  Laws may be good for one kind of people but not another; context is a variable in the laws applicable to a people.  Relativism: different kinds of laws are appropriate for different peoples. 

Biblical criticism: Historicism entered.  The writers of the books in the Bible spanned different times and cultures.  Those histories had an effect on what they wrote.  Simon wrote against the Protestants: history influenced the writing of the Bible, so we need the Church to interpreted.  Criticism had started. 

Spinoza was a Dutch Jew.  He wrote an ethics with postulates and conclusions.  He did not believe in human freedom.  The Synagogue excommunicated him.  He wrote a book on the Bible.  His rule: only things which never change are true.  Like geometry.  Anything that changes, like history, is not true.  He claimed that the Bible was needed in order to lead a good and coherent life in the midst of change (history). But the Bible has history in it, and was influenced by it.  So, for instance, there are contradictions in the Bible's stories.  This was the beginning of historical criticism.  All knowledge to history belongs to the imagination. So, because the Bible is about and effected by change (history), it is of the imagination.  His thesis: only what never changes is true.  Dupre: this is not true; this only leaves us with geometry.  Nevertheless, there was a breakthrough of relativism here.  The Bible was no longer held by all Jews and Christians as having absolute authority.

Lessing's thesis was borrowed from a writing of Spinoza his theory that only the truths of reason can be absolutely certain.  Leibniz and Spinoza: only the truth of reason never changes and is thus absolutely certain.  Descartes: I will not accept anything that I can question.  Truth must be certain.  Dupre: NO. Spinoza: nothing in my ethics is uncertain, so it is true.  Historical facts are always questionable, so are not certain and thus not true.  Lessing's thesis: Christianity is said to be built on the fact of Christ's resurrection.  But reports of miracles are only as reliable as historical facts.  So, the reports should not be more certain than that of historical facts, which are not certain and thus not truth.  If no historical truth can be demonstrated, then don't use a miracle to found a religion.  The truths of history are accidental rather than truth.  Historical fact should not force one to truth.  Anything that is historically true is not really true.  So, don't base your religion on it.  Don't base metaphysical statements on a testimony in history.  There is not a good connection between taking as a historical fact one of Jesus' miracles and the belief that the risen Christ was the Son of God.  Lessing points out the gap in this leap.  Historical and metaphysical truth are of two different degrees of certainty, so one can't base one on the other.  Historical facts are surrounded by vagueness.  So, one can't go from them to metaphysical truth.  Only the latter doesn't change and is certain.  This is the rationalist argument, from Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz.  Dupre: But to say that truths of reason and fact are separate is a manifestation of the Englightenment view.  The two are not mutually exclusive.  Is there sufficient historical evidence to warrant my commitment to a metaphysical truth?  Don't say instead: there is no historical evidence which has the capacity to warrant a metaphysical truth claim. 

Lessing also claimed unlike Spinoza that the Bible was of the imagination from the history; rather, in the Bible, we see that religion is historical.  Historical stories are merely used to educate humanity on religion. 

11/9/95

Religion (Con't):

Lessing seems to have attacked Judaism and Christianity; but this does not necessarily mean that he was not religious.  Spinoza, whom Lessing studied, was religious even as he attacked a certain approach to interpreting religion.  Lessing: religion is that which educates individuals to pure thought.  Dupre: this view jeapardizes religion, even as Lessing himself was religious.

The Ethics of the Modern Age:

Spinoza was in the early modern age.  Although not the pioneer that Descartes was, he was daring in his ideas.  He studied Descartes.  Also, he studied Bruno (pantheistic writer).  Spinoza has been called a pantheist.  

Spinoza's general theory: he was a rationalist.  Pure reason was for him the highest authority.  For instance, to know something is to know it in its cause; its source.  True knowledge is of the cause.  To know a thing, you must know its cause.  It follows that the way of ideas is the same as the way of reality: in reality, the cause comes first.  So it is with ideas too.  The order and sequence of ideas must be the same as the order and sequence in reality.  Truth and reality are parallel, converging lines.  If you think something straight, then this is how it is in reality.  Pure ideas and reality coincide.  Perfection of knowledge: Truth and reality totally coincide.  Descartes: I think therefore I am.  Spinoza: we should start thinking of God because God is the first cause in reality.  Spinoza didn't like the radical skepticism that came with Descartes' start with his own thinking.  Spinoza thought of God that He is a substance.  Key: his definition of substance.  For Descartes, a substance is an idea that can stand alone (can be conceived of or exist by itself), or God.  Spinoza: but this is not a good definition because there is an exception in it.  So, Spinoza drops the God part.  Further, Spinoza argues that a substance has certain qualities, called attributes or properties.  Two substances can never have the same attribute in common.  Why?  An attribute is an exhaustive property, so there can be only one substance for a given attribute. 

Spinoza: suppose there is a substance with an infinite number of properties; that would be God. We know God exists because there is nothing that could prevent such a powerful substance from existing.  My attributes are in God, so I do not exist; God is everything.  Therefore, there is no cause and effect, or freedom.  Each attribute is exhaustive, meaning that the whole of God is revealed by it.  Idea and extention, for instance, are attributes.  Attributes can have infinite and then finite manifestations, or modes.  My mind is a finite manifestation, or mode,  of 'idea' which is an attribute of God.  My body is a finite mode of the attribute extension.  So, the human mind and body are two different aspects of the same (divine) reality.  The mind is the thought of the body, so the human being is not just a mind (against Descartes). 

The Ethics of Spinoza:  Recall: God is in all, so there is no causality nor freedom.  There is only conatus essendi, the drive to be.  The persistence in existing toward more being is our overwhelming drive.  This tendency is in our minds and bodies.  Spinoza Ethic: There is a tendency to desire more being, or life.  Once satisfied, this is joy, mental and physical.  So, joy, or pleasure, is that which makes me increase my being.  So, if my being weakens (such as in sickness), there is pain rather than pleasure.  Whatever increases the potential of the mind is pleasure. The mind also reflects the pleasure and pain of the body.  What is good?  That which enhances my vitality. It gives pleasure.  That which gives pain decreases my living vitality and is thus bad.  Emotions are important in this ethic.  A passive change in my disposition is an emotion.  Enhancing the mind or body effects emotions which can come either from above or below, resulting in joy.  Active emotions are from the mind whereas passive emotions are from the body.  Key: change the passive emotions (unknown to the mind) to active emotions(known to the mind).  Convert passions passively received into understanding. By understanding a passive emotion, we can stop the ones that give us less life (passions).  The key is to understand passive emotions in their cause.  Why?  To know something is to know its cause, and ideas and reality converge, so if you know the cause of a bad idea, you can stop the cause of a bad reality (one that inhibits one's life). 

11/14/95

The Ethics of the Modern Age:

Spinoza:  The way of the sequence of ideas is the same as the way of the sequence of events in reality.  Thinking rightly follows the way of reality.  To know something is to know it in its cause (it's beginning).  This is also the source of reality.  So, begin with the idea and reality of God.  This is the source of both ideas and reality.  The idea of God is the most important idea.  If thinking did not at some point (its origin) hit the real, what use would there be for thinking?  Somehow, thinking and reality must meet.  In God, the ultimate idea meets the ultimate reality. 

For Spinoza, what is it to be finite?  It is that which can be limited by another thing of the same nature.  The universe is not therefore finite. Substance is that which is in itself and is conceived through it self, needing no conception of another thing.  An attribute is that which the intellect perceives of the substance as if constituting the essence.  A mode is the affection of a substance; that which does not exist in itself but must be understood through something else--a substance.  If the universe is a mode, it can't be explained without God.  God is a substance absolutely infinite.  Key: 'absolutely'.  God has infinite attributes.  So, the attributes of my substance are of God.  The key to this system: in nature, there can't be two or more substances with the same attribute (they would be the same thing).  Two substances must have nothing in common.  Any substance must have its attributes be in God because God has an infinite number of attributes.  Therefore, there is just one substance: God.  Spinoza's ethic: anything that exists can't exist as a substance independent of God.

 Modes of attributes are characterized by a drive to exist; to persist in existence.  An emotion is a transition to a higher or lower state of being.  Happiness or pleasure is a higher state of being; Sadness or pain is a lower state of being.  Whatever gives pleasure or happiness is good because it enhances the vitality of the body and mind.  Whatever causes sadness or pain is bad because it diminishes the vitality of the body and mind.  The beauty of the soul is reflected in the body.  The body does not always radiate the beauty of the soul.  Good emotions can be passively induced by someone or something else.  Love, as it depends upon another, is a form of human bondage.  So, even positive emotions, if passive, can have a bad side.  So, convert passive emotions into action.  Come to a point in which the mind is the only active part, so that my mind is in charge.  Move up our emotions to our mental life of thinking, because thinking is the source.  To understand an emotion is to relativize, and thus gain control over it and turn it to happiness, which enhances the vitality of the mind and body.  Through understanding my emotions, I can convert them into action that takes me to pleasure and happiness--ultimately, this is to live in God.  The aim of the ethical life is the intellectual love of God: where my idea of God is the reality of God. 

God doesn't have a will or an intellect.  To speak otherwise is to anthropomorphize.  So, God is not the Creator of the World; He did not will the creation of the world.  Rather, one substance radiates in as many ways as it can.  Humans, as finite modes of some of God's attributes, are as necessary as God.  Spinoza makes a distinction, however, between God and finite modes, so he is not a pantheist.  There is a passive status in the reality of a finite mode. 

There is immortality for humans as finite modes.  The human mind can't be absolutely destroyed with the body.  This is not personal immortality, but a return to the divine mind.  But he claims that the mind is a reflection of the body. Dupre: Spinoza can't have it both ways.  Another problem: Spinoza believes in human freedom only in the intellectual ascent to God.  But we have no control over it.  Are we really free?  Dupre: a complex, static system.  Why? Because there is no telos.  Freedom is reduced to reaching the highest level.  God is not free because for him there is no better.  How then can we have freedom, as we are of the same substance as God.

This is a system of pure rationality. 

Locke's ethical system:   a system of experience.  On this basis, anything that gives me pleasure is good and everything that gives me pain is bad.  Hedonism (lust).  Unlike Spinoza, who argued that that which is peasurable is good if it is right reason.  Locke: pleasure is a reward of God's law.  Whoever does the right thing will have pleasure; whoever does the wrong thing has pain.   How does he explain accidents?   Dupre: what is the difference here between an is and an ought.  Locke goes from an 'is' (experience) to an 'ought'(pleasure).  But, he does not give a rationale for the link. 

Shaftesbury's (Locke's student) ethics: the ideal in life is God (beauty). To get there, to do well is to fit yourself into the harmony with the nature of the universe.  Ethics is not a matter of obligation but of eloquance.  Find the stylist way of doing things. 

11/16/95

The Ethics of the Modern Age:

A problem with Spinoza's ethic: is it too rational?  What impact can it actually have in practical life.  It does not consider the will.  Spinoza's ethic is not of practical reason, but of the intellectual contemplation of God.  Kant is critical of this.  Locke and Hume are based on experience, so pleasure and pain are at the root of their ethics.  But how can a real ethic come from this?  Pleasure and pain themselves don't work, so Locke attached: following the will of God, to them.  But this is to make an exception to an ethical system.  Not a strong position.  Shaftesbury opposed Locke in claiming that pleasure and pain are not relevant or even sufficient in ethics.  Shaftesbury includes beauty in the good; we have a direct intuition through our feelings of what is good (without reasoning about it).  Moral feelings are benevolent.   This was the beginning of the school of moral feelings.  This school didn't last very long.  The British were too practical for statements such as an intuitive feeling with the harmony of nature.  Hutcheson: if moral feeling is benevolent, then the good is to do the greatest good (benevolence) to the greatest number.  Utilitarianism.  Dupre: how is this to be calculated?  Hutcheson: that what is useful.  But he does not define that which is useful.  There is the absense of what is good in itself.  Like Smith: do what is useful.

Kant saw that pure reason required a practical aspect to be an ethic.  Also, Kant saw that experience is not sufficient upon which to found an ethic because experience is so broad that it can be defined in terms of something that is not necessarily good--usefulness, for instance.  Needed: why is that which is useful good?  Why is it the good? Utilitarianism does not answer these questions and is thus not an ethic.  The useful is not necessarily the good.  Kant: nothing is unconditionally good except for the good will; intention is that which matters.  But what is it for the will to be good? What is it about the will that makes it the good unconditionally?  Kant: to act with the intension to do your duty.  It is not enough to do your duty; you have to intend doing my duty.  The good will is well intensioned simply out of a sense of duty rather than something else.  But, what is my duty?  Who has ever acted exclusively out of a sense of duty?  Kant does not deny that it is difficult.  Kant: to do your duty is to act in a way that could be done anywhere.  The maxim of the categorical imperative.  Any interference from experience is not good.  No mixed motives, regardless how noble.  So, Kant's morality is not in inclinations or experience.  So, all moral precepts must be apriori.  They must come from pure reason, but unlike Spinoza they must be practical.  Kant wants rationality itself as the basis--not even human reason, but reason itself.  Everything in nature works in accordance with laws (e.g. Galaleo).  The human will too must be working with laws. Unlike Spinoza: only a rational being has the capacity to act in conformity with the idea of law.  Only humans know that laws are laws.  Since reason is required to derive action from law, the will is nothing but practical reason.  Spinoza would not have seen the will as being practical reason.  The problem with human reason is that it is incarnated.  So, there are inclinations going against reason.   So, reason in a human has a lot to overcome.  Kant thus refers to law as duty as being an imperative.  The law of reason on a practical level must impose itself as 'thou shalt' because it must overcome contrary forces such as inclinations.  We owe it to reason to act this way.  This is how an incarnated rationality ought to work.  The holy will is the will that would not suffer from the counter-effect of drives counter to reason.  For such spiritual beings with such a will, there is no law; no imperative. 

Kant: two kinds of imperatives.  The hypothetical and categorical.  The hypothetical: 'If, then you must'.  The categorical: 'thou shalt'.  No conditions.  Being rational beings, we have no choice but to act rationally with a rational intension. 

Reason dictates as an imperative because I am a spirit in the flesh.  How is a rational law formulated apriori that is practical?  He has three formulas.  The first two are similar: Act only on that maxim (principle of action) through which I can will that it be a universal law.  That my principle of action could be adopted by any rational being.  Absolute rational and feasable.  In this sense, it is from reason apriori made practical.  Spinoza, having a thought of God as the ultimate of morality, does not have feasability included and is thus not of practical reason. Kant's imperative is both pure reason and practical reason. 

Example of Kant's formula: on suicide, can this maxim be applied to everyone?  No, because there would be nobody left.  The question here: can the principle of self-love here become a universal law of nature?  No, because if everyone were to follow it, there would be no one left.  Dupre: but, not everyone would consider suicide; not everyone would be too miserable to want to stop it.  Another example: a person has inherited money.  Why should he develop his talents, so he neglects his natural gifts and has fun.  Can this rule of not developing one's talent be universalizable?  He says no.

Kant's morality is on the basis of unconditional reason.  There are categorical imperatives that should always be followed.  Dupre disagrees with his examples.

11/28/95

The Ethics of the Modern Age:

Kant: the only thing that is absolutely will is the good will (a will motivated by a good intention--that is, by a sense of duty).  What is duty?  The duty is to live in accord with pure reason.  Pure reason is the law of duty.  This leads to the imperative: acting according to reason rather than the instinct.  'Thou shalt'.  The categorical imperative.  The moral imperative accepts no exceptions so it is categorical rather than hypothetical.  Rationality imposes itself upon the human agent as an element of force.  How is this imperative made concrete?  Dupre: it is not very practical.  Kant gives three examples of things not to do according to duty including suicide and lying.  The moral test of suicide: is is contradictory to do it?  For Kant, that which is rational is universal and that which is rational is moral.  So, one should not due that which everyone could not do.  Not everyone could kill themselves, or no one would be left.  This goes against the rule of life which is universal.  For Kant, one should act in such a way that everyone could act so.  Dupre: but not everyone would commit suicide because not everyone is under such pain and suffering. So, it would not be against the univresal law of life because not everyone would kill themselves. The rule of universalization is inadequate for defining the categorical imperative. 

For Kant, nothing that is purely empirical can be a rule for ethics.  So, anything that deals with my inclinations.  Reason works apriori.  I must know what my principles are before I use them vis a vis my inclinations from sense experience.  Religion, for Kant, is to look at the commands of reason as divine commands.  When acting in accord with reason, one is acting in accord with God's will.  Religion is on the source of reason: God's will. 

For Kant, one's intension must be pure.  One must be intending to do one's duty.  So, the test of morality is one of intension.  For Kant, 'absolute' means no categorical imperative. Is there anything for Kant that has absolute value?  An end in itself.  Not conditional.  That is: every rational being exists as an end in itself.  So, in whatever I do in my relations with rational beings, don't use them as means to further ends.  Don't consider a rational being as just a means.  To take advantage of an other is to treat them as a means.  Reason is always an end.  So, Kant reformulates the categorical imperative: act so to treat humanity never simply as a means but also as an end.  Note that Kant is not telling us that humans can't be used as a means; rather, that humans should not be treated as merely a means.  This reformulation is more concrete/practical.  Consider suicide.  Is he treating his rational being as a mere means if he kills himself?  I can't use my very existence as a means for getting out of my unhappiness.  Consider false promise.  To do so would use the other as merely a means.  Consider contingent duty to oneself.  It is not sufficient not to treat a rational being as a mere means; we must harmonize our behavior to the end.  Dupre: Kant is here refining his rule, admitting that universality is insufficient.  Herder, a student of Kant, viewed an ideal of humanity as the highest ideal.  Kant disagreed.  But Kant absorbed this idea of the development of humanity. To harmonize our behaviour is to develop humanity.  Don't treat humanity as a mere means, but also seek to harmonize it.  The latter goes beyond the criterion of universality in the categorical imperative.  This addition (harmonizing) includes feeling.

Social Theory:

All modern social theories are based on a few (questionable) concepts.  Nature, natural law, and natural (human) rights.  The meaning of each has changed such that they are unrecognizable.  These concepts come from Locke and Rousseau.   In the modern sense, these terms refer to our inclinations and inherent rights. Nature in the modern sense means human nature--rational.  But, in antiquity, the salient qualities of human nature was our social aspect.  See Plato and Aristotle.  Recall that the nominalists did away with universals, in the late middle ages.   Speaking of human nature apart from individuals became more difficult.  In the seventeenth century, the state of nature was viewed as the pre-social state; the state before the social contract.  But Aristotle would say that sociality is part of human nature, so how could there be a pre-social human nature?  So, there is a sociability, but no stable social structure.  Locke: the problem with this is in punishing folks who harm others.  Modern individualism is based on this assumption that the society came only after such a contract.  Locke: the social contract was an extension of the state of nature.  We had natural rights to life, liberty and property before the contract.  The social contract is a means of recognizing and protecting these rights.  Dupre: but before society, there were no rights because there was no one to recognize those rights.  Before society, there were merely needs.  Rights presuppose the recognition (by others) of one's needs.  The social contract enabled the basic needs to be acknowledged as rights. 

On natural law, for the Stoics it was a moral law; it was the order of the cosmos.  The Roman jurists never used 'natural law' in the legal sense because it was thought to have a law there was required to be a law-giver.  Later, God was said to be the law-giver, and natural law had a legal sense.  So, natural law (which was said to exist in the natural state before the social contract) was not legalistic.  So, there was nothing legal in the state of nature. The natural law then was viewed as reason.  Only after the social contract, we got organized and established legal laws to make natural law (reason) concrete.  So, there were no human (natural) rights before the establishment of a particular political order; a right, as a legal law, must be given in a political structure. 

But, Locke claims that the social state was the extention of that which already existed: a natural law (legal), natural rights, and property.  The contract was undergone solely to protect property.  So, for Locke natural (human) rights precede political society.  He assumes that rights are innate. Dupre: they are not; rather, they are given by a law-giver.  Locke also claimed that property precedes, and thus does not depend upon, political society.  The rights to life, liberty, and property are thus innate to human nature for Locke, and do not depend upon a partucular structure of society.  Dupre: the political contract presupposes a social contract that is there from day one, because human nature is social.  Rights and juridical law depend on the political contract, and are thus arbitrary.

11/30/95

Social Theory:

Natural law and rights are in the state of nature.  Then, a social contract which engages a civil state.  Dupre: there was not 'law' as juridical and 'rights' in the state of nature as both require a law-giver (i.e. a civil state). 

Hobbes: He was a mechanistic and materialistic philosopher.  Yet, he succeeded in making the social state of humans necessary; that is, it is not of free choice but we are driven into it.  This is almost to say that humans are social by nature.  For Hobbes, the state of nature involves humans being all alike.  No common power, so no law.  No law-giver, so everything is allowed.  But, he qualifies this: there is natural law--human nature imposes 'obligations' or laws (not juridical) that are really the inherent nature of human nature that imposes upon us.  This nature/law is one: to preserve your life at all costs.  This is an instinct or natural force, called by Hobbes a natural law, which we are compulsed to observe by our nature.  This drives us to power, because the more power one has, the more likely one's life can be preserved.  This, plus the drive vain glory, makes the natural state so dangerous.  The instinct for vain glory is from instinct, but is not rational so is not part of natural law. Natural law does not drive us to vain glory, but drives us to power, which includes accumulating resources.  Given the danger in the state of nature, it is in our instinct (to preserve our lives) to endeavor peace or increase one's strength for war.  So, from the first law of nature, Hobbes deduces the second: endeavor for peace.  Peace, moreso than war, is more conducive to preserving one's life, unless peace is undergone  unilaterally (in which case, get as strong as possible and fight).  The pursuit of peace in the state of nature means abandoning as much of your rights as is necessary.  So, if everyone settles for peace, some rights will have to be given up.  Hobbes: one's freedom must be given up.  Rousseau: No.   Finally, Hobbes claims that once in peace, folks must be willing to keep their promises.  The natural law, in accord with our conscience, includes the desire for peace and keeping my promises. But, in behavior, one has to see what others are doing and be prepared for war if necessary.  To Hobbes, there are both natural law and natural rights.  For Hobbes, law (lex) and right (jus) differ.  Dupre: Hobbes appeals to Roman law to define 'law' and 'rights'. But in Roman law, 'law' and 'right' meant the same thing; neither were juridical.  They both meant what binds as well as what gives freedom.  They both meant the order.  But Hobbes claims that natural laws are few and natural rights are many. 

So, Hobbes has three natural laws that force us into the civil state: becoming political beings.  This involves giving up all rights to the political sovereign.  This may be a king or a Republic.  Rousseau: it should not involve giving up one's right to freedom.  Hobbes in the beginning in the 1600's, when Charles I was executed and then James II was exiled.  Hobbes didn't like these revolutions.  No right to a revolution, because it risks going back to the state of nature which is dangerous.  Moreover, the soveign represents each person, so don't overthrow it.  But the social contract becomes invalid for one when one's life is threatened, even by the sovereign.  This is the only limitation to the rights and power of the sovereign.  You can do anything to preserve your life.  One's rights are what the sovereign defines. 

Thomas Paine, on the rights of man, claimed that there was a state of nature.  He claims that for the two years of the American Revolution there was no polity, and yet there was no disorder.  So, the state of nature is not dangerous; government is not necessary to preserve life.  John Locke was behind these thoughts.

Locke wrote a defense of revolution and against the divine right of kings.  Locke wrote his second treatise against Hobbes.  For Locke, the state of nature is not a state of danger or warfare.  Locke wrote it in 1690, when there was a different idea of primative times: that of the noble savage--happy authentic human beings the way God made us.  So, there is peace in the state of nature.  There is natural law there.  For Hobbes, the natural law is of reason which obliges to peace to preserve one's life.  For Locke, the natural law is of reason; it is a system which demands not only self-preservation but a complete morality.  Also, there are natural rights: life, liberty and property.  To Hobbes, natural rights are anything you can get away with, and so are limitless.  To Locke, natural rights are limited.  The right to life includes self-preservation which is both a natural law and right for Hobbes.  Hobbes: if a threat, then get rid of it.  Locke: if a threat, get rid of it and punish it.  But what is the limit?  Can the victim decide the adequate amount of punishment?  Can the victim be the judge and executioner?  Locke: No.  So, a social contract.  We move into a civil state as a better way of protecting our rights, rather than being forced into it to preserve our lives.  Protecting our rights meant protecting property.  The purpose of the state is to protect life and property.  American Constitution: protection of property was changed into the right to pursue happiness.  But this is not what Locke implied in his term.  For Locke, juridical laws out of natural laws make it possible to punish enfringements against the natural rights.  The problem, and thus the need for a state, lies for Locke in the ability to punish.  So, civil law does not exist to preserve us against a dangerous state of nature.  But, for Locke, without a social contract, there is no reliable civil society.  Locke is initiating a theory of revolution: a social contract is not innate or necessary.  Thomas Paine: a social contract is void without assent.  Locke: civil society is the continuation of the state of nature, structured by the social contract.  For Locke, the inequalities in the state of nature, such as property, continued in the civil society.  Rousseau: the civil society based on property (an extension of the natural state) legitimates the inequality of the state of nature.  A State is necessary to reverse this.  Such a State is not included in Locke.  Rousseau justifies such a State (and its social contract--the political contract) on this point.

12/5/95

Social Theory:

Hobbes: Law of nature and natural rights before the social contract.  That law is self-preservation.  Anything towards it is allowed.  But certain things, owing to one's conscience, should not be done.  This limitation is vague.   There is no restriction on the rights; anything that can make your life safer is allowed.  This state is one of warfare, so folks are driven by the threat of loss of life therein into the civil state.  Human nature is an individual state, but there is this inevitable social drive.  So, each individual is social in the state of nature.

12/7/95

Social Theory:

State of Nature; Civil Society:

For Hobbes, this transition is necessary because folks can't survive in a state of war. Humans are not social by nature; in fact, we are anti-social.  Locke, in contrast, views humans in general as social from the beginning.  But the few who trespass create a need for punishment.  The civil state is formed for this function: to punish.  Behind Locke's state is the protection of property. 

Rousseau has both Hobbes (transition to civil society is a matter of necessity--that it is matter of nature) and Locke(humans are socialable from the beginning, with a potential to become social).  For Locke, agriculture and metalogy institutionalized property with suplus production.  For Rousseau, this created inequality.  This began the state of war for Rousseau.  Hobbes: this was the state from the beginning!  Rousseau was against civil society because it formalized the inequality.  He does not want to go back to innocence, but forward to the state.  The social contract is a political State that is autocratic, with all power within itself.  No power delegated to intermediate bodies such as Churches and schools.  The State exists to rectify the inequality.  Political equality thus remains, so no transfer of sovereignty to the State.  Even the legislative and executive bodies are functionaries.  Laws are voted on by the people.  Deputies could be used.  Dupre: this is utopian.  Rousseau had Geneva in mind.  It was a small city (10,000 people).  Even if everyone could vote, if one person voted against some bill that became law, would not his sovereignty be lost?  So, Rousseau's State is not majority-rule.  How can one have a democratic State that does not take the sovereignty of any citizen.  There is a total re-education, for Rousseau, into the general will.  The State educates the people such that the votes are unanimous.  Is this not tyranny?  Rousseau: the citizen is converted into a different being.  In the state of nature, people are not yet social.   The State fulfills the social nature of mankind.  It is thus necessary that no authority be given away from the State to other bodies.  If not, the particular will comes up again, and there is division and thus someone's sovereignty is lost.  So, education is public and religion is not just private; even that which is private can't contradict the State.  Christianity is not good for a State.  That religion prepares folks to be slaves.  Universal love is also a weakness vis a vis the State because the State requires an iron fist.  He calls for a civil religion, defined by the sovereign (the people). It would have no dogmas but would have virtues that would be conducive to the State.  Rousseau wants to abolish the civil society: a political extenstion of the state of nature.  Needed to end it: a new person.  A social being.  With the State rectifying the inequality of property, this social being would be equal socially, economically, and politically. 

Hegel: there is the civil society, above which is the State which recognizes the corporate bodies in society and is the unity.

Rousseau, like Machevelli: the state is everything.  Rousseau is the father of the fascist as well as communist State in practice.  Marx, like Rousseau: the task of the State is to dissappear.  For Rousseau, the State exists to extinguish the (inequality) civil state.  When this is done, there is no more need for the State.  Natural law in the state of nature did no good, because folks were not social beings then.  They were socialiable.  Citizenship makes the full human being, fully reflective.  Such reflection is necessary for the natural law to work.  A transformation of human nature is needed.

A critique of Rousseau:  Edmund Burke.  He wrote a book against the French Revolution in 1790 (before the king was killed).  Burke objects that from scratch is made a new beginning from the revolution, because it went against reason.  The rationality of State institutions comes out of history.  To start from scratch is thus not rational.  If a State is started solely from abstract reason not formed out of history, it would not be formed rationally; the State would not be humane.  Thus, Burke was critical of Rousseau's theory of the radical break between the civil society and the State.  

Dupre: the essence of modernity is an absolute priority of the human subject and subjectivity (including abstract reason).  Nature becomes an impoverished objectified thing separate from the human being.  The State formed out of abstract reason becomes inhumane.  Morality, whether of feelings or duty, becomes apriori to the action. But morality is in the act itself, rather than just the intension.  So, nature has to be broadened.  Morality, too, is not just what reason dictates, but is part of nature.  To make morality into abstract reason is to artifically delimit morality and set it up apriori.  Also, from Locke came utilitarianism wherein the protection of economic possession such that what is right is what is useful.  In this, nature was separated from us.  Also, there is no absolute value to this ethic.  Finally, the salience of the ego marginalized religion.  Moreover, there is something to life that is not just the self or reason.  There is a transcendent.