THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY: A SHORT SURVEY

James Fieser

www.utm.edu/staff/jfieser/110

Copyright 2008, updated: 1/7/2012

CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter 1: Presocratic Philosophy

Chapter 2: Classical Greek Philosophy

Chapter 3: Hellenistic Philosophy

Chapter 4: Classical Eastern Philosophy

Chapter 5: Medieval Philosophy

Chapter 6: Renaissance and Early Modern Philosophy

Chapter 7: Continental Rationalism

Chapter 8: British Empiricism

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PREFACE

Philosophy is a subject that civilizations around the world have explored since ancient times. The word “philosophy” itself literally means “the love of wisdom,” and this reflects the devotion that philosophers everywhere have to the subject. Philosophical theories are ever-changing, and their development throughout history is a fascinating tale. One dominant philosophical tradition emerges, only to be knocked down and replaced with another, and yet another, and so on through time. It is not usually through brute force that succeeding traditions topple over the earlier ones, but through argumentation and criticism. It is a battle of ideas that, fortunately for us, is preserved in the writings of the great philosophers, waiting to come alive again as we read their words. But while specific theories come and go, what remains is a consistent set of philosophical problems that drives each new generation on to battle: What is real? What does genuine knowledge consist of? How are mind and body related? Do we have free wills? Does God exist? Where do moral and aesthetic values come from? Because many nagging philosophical questions remain the same, a look back through the history of philosophy is not just a matter of curiosity, but rather a trek through an almost sacred repository of ideas that demand reconsideration.

Different philosophical traditions emerge in different world cultures, often with their own story line that stands independently of others. The two dominant ones are those that emerged in Eastern and Western civilization respectively. Both began at roughly the same time—about 500 BCE—and until recently both have developed with very little interaction between each other. The fact that the history of philosophy began in both Eastern and Western civilization about 500 BCE invites us to ask what was so special about that particular time period. After all, human beings just like us roamed the planet for perhaps half a million years, possessing the same natural intelligence and curiosity that enables us to ask probing questions about reality. During that time frame, there may well have been many lone philosophers who had something profound to say, but that’s something that we will never know.

What we need for a history of philosophy, though, goes beyond what the earliest human communities were capable of providing. First, there needed to be the right social structure in which teachers could devote their lives to philosophical exploration and pass on their knowledge to their full-time students. This wasn’t possible until cities emerged with the agricultural revolution around 12,000 years ago. Second, there needed to be a written language, since a mere oral tradition would not be reliable enough to preserve the detail and nuances of philosophical discussion. And not just any written language would do since it would need to be complex enough to record human thoughts, rather than just human actions or events. Such sophisticated written languages did not emerge until about 1,000 BCE. From there it was just a question of time until a sufficiently affluent and creative society placed enough value on philosophical questions to nurture schools of thought where teachers and students could debate and write about such subjects.

The present text, The History of Philosophy: A Short Survey, follows philosophy’s story, beginning with ancient Greece on through contemporary times. A fully-detailed history of philosophy would require dozens of volumes, and would be beyond the capacity of any single author to produce. The task I’ve laid before myself here is more modest. I focus on a comparatively small group of around 75 of the most famous philosophers, and restrict discussion of them to their most influential philosophical contributions. The bulk of the book is on Western philosophy, with only one chapter devoted to the Eastern tradition; this is not a statement about the comparative value of Eastern philosophy, but, instead, reflects the limitations of my knowledge base. Throughout the work I occasionally try to show how philosophers were shaped by the views of their predecessors, but I do not overburden the text with retrospective analysis or foreshadowing. To that extent, each chapter and most of the main chapter divisions can be intelligibly read independently of each other. Except for the short conclusions at the end of each chapter, I avoid injecting my personal opinions about the truth or merits of the theories under examination. Even the most seemingly outlandish of these theories will continue to be studied with great interest ages from now, and it is narrow-sighted to dismiss any as wrongheaded. These philosophers are great, and will remain great, not simply because of their specific conceptions of reality, but because of the ways that they presented and defended their positions. It is joy to explore their ideas, and hopefully some of that will come through in this survey.

Copyright Information

The History of Philosophy: A Short Survey by James Fieser is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. You are free to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work under the following conditions: (1) Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). (2) Noncommercial — You may not use this work for commercial purposes. (3) No Derivative Works — You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.

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CHAPTER 1: PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY

A. Beyond Mythology

Issues of the Presocratics

B. Milesians

Thales: Water

Anaximander:  The Boundless

Anaximenes: Air

C. Ionians

Heraclitus: Change and the Logos

Pythagoras: Mathematical Relations

D. Eleatics

Xenophanes: Anthropomorphism and Pantheism

Parmenides: The One

Zeno of Elea: Paradoxes

E. Pluralists

Empedocles: Four elements and Two Forces

Anaxagoras: Mind and the Divisibility of Material Ingredients

F. Atomists

Atoms in the Void

The Mind as Material

G. Sophists

Protagoras: Relativism

Gorgias: Skepticism

H. Conclusion

Questions for Reflection

1. If you had no scientific knowledge at all, what might you think is the primary stuff of nature from which everything is made?

2. Everything in nature seems to change. Does anything remain the same throughout that change?

3. Assume that you had no knowledge of God or religion. Someone then tells you that God is like a giant person in the sky, and someone else tells you that “God” is just another name for the total universe. Which view would make more sense to you?

4. Assume that you have no knowledge of science. Can material stuff be divided in half, on to infinity, or must we arrive at some indivisible particle?

5. Assume that you have no knowledge of religion or modern science. Are any truths absolute and unchanging, or is it all a matter of social custom?

The story of philosophy in Western civilization begins in ancient Greece, which produced three of the world’s greatest thinkers, namely, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. While it would be nice to start our study with Socrates, the first prominent figure in the history of philosophy, the fact is that Socrates did not create his views from thin air. Rather, he was the outgrowth of a remarkably fertile philosophical environment within Greece that had been germinating for a couple centuries. We call this early period Presocratic philosophy, that is, philosophy before Socrates, and well over 100 philosophers actively contributed to its accomplishments. We will look at the views of fourteen especially prominent Presocratic thinkers.

A. BEYOND MYTHOLOGY

Even before the Presocratic philosophers came on the scene, religious mythology was already setting the conceptual stage for philosophical speculation. Religion, then as now, was a powerful social force in shaping views of human nature and the cosmos. According to the Greeks, the gods bring about natural disasters, make demands on human conduct, and determine our place in the afterlife. Two Greek mythologists in particular developed an especially sophisticated religious world-life view. The first is Homer (fl. c. 750 BCE), the famed author of the epic tales the Iliad and the Odyssey, which chronicle the adventures of a hero named Odysseus. Throughout his journeys to the underworld and other parts of the mythological universe, Odysseus regularly encounters gods and other mythological creatures, sometimes appeasing them, other times battling them. Second is Hesiod (fl. c. 700 BCE), author of the Theogony, a work that describes the origins of hundreds of deities from a common pair of ancestors at the beginning of the world.

The first philosophers of ancient Greece moved beyond Homer’s and Hesiod’s traditional mythological explanations of the world and stressed the rational unity of things. There is one unique aspect of Homer’s and Hesiod’s mythology that may have jump-started early Greek philosophy: their cosmologies do not attribute the creation of the world to the work of the gods. While Zeus is the supreme god, he is not described as the creator. Homer takes the universe as a given, and Hesiod describes its origins as follows:

First Chaos was created, then wide-bosomed Earth, the eternal unshaken foundation of the immortal gods who inhabit the snowy peaks of Olympus or the gloomy Tartarus within the depths of the wide-pathed Earth. Love then arose, most beautiful among the immortal gods, which who loosens the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and mortal men. [Hesiod, Theogony]

For Hesiod, first there is emptiness, then earth, and only then do the gods appear. And, when the gods do appear on the scene, they behave in a rather disorderly way, and often bend the operations of nature according to their whims. This all leaves much room for speculation about how the physical cosmos emerged, what it was composed of, and what gives it order. The explanations offered by the first philosophers were not only philosophical, but, by the standards of their time, they were also scientific. Thus the first philosophers were also the first scientists, and, in fact, many had practical interests in mathematics, astronomy and biology.

Issues of the Presocratics

Over a period of 200 years, the Presocratic philosophers focused on three key issues. First is the problem of the one and the many, that is, explaining how one basic thing can be the source of many varied things. The world contains an enormous variety of objects, some living, others inanimate; some solid, others liquid. It seems reasonable to suppose that all things come from a common source or type of stuff. Identifying that common source, though, is the challenge. Second is the problem of change and constancy, that is, explaining how things remain constant as they change over time. Not only are there many kinds of things in the world, but each one is subject to change. Living things like trees grow old and die; inanimate objects like rocks weather away and change their form. As things go through changes, there’s still something about them that enables them to retain their identity. Third is the problem of relativism, namely, determining whether principles are absolute or created by people. Suppose that I arrive at some reasonable explanation of how the world operates. Is that explanation true just for me, or have I discovered something more universal that must be true for everyone? While some truths might appear to be independent of me, identifying those truths is a challenge.

The theories of the Presocratic philosophers were daring, sometimes to the point of being bizarre. Being the first ones to venture into the uncharted territories of both philosophy and science, they explored virtually any explanation of things that seemed reasonable, and because of this there is a richness and diversity to their views that we have not since seen. This makes it all the more unfortunate that none of the books authored by the Presocratic philosophers have survived intact. All that we have are some summaries and scattered sentences from their works that are quoted by later writers such as Plato and Aristotle. From these quotation fragments, we are left to reconstruct their original views. Sometimes a clear image emerges; other times, as we will see, it’s a matter of guesswork.

B. MILESIANS

The first known philosophers of ancient Greece were from a city-state called Miletus. Located on the west coast of what is now the peninsula of Turkey (then called Anatolia), Miletus was a thriving seaport, and part of a region of cities called Ionia. As a hub of sea trade, residents of Miletus were in contact with surrounding cultures and as such were influenced by many of their views, particularly theories of astronomy that came from civilizations to the east of Greece. The three first philosophers from Miletus were Thales, Anaximander and Anaximines, all of whom attempted to answer the question “What is the common stuff from which everything is composed?”

Thales: Water

The very first among the Milesian philosophers was Thales (c. 625-545 BCE) who held that water is the basic stuff of all things. Thales himself didn’t write anything, and what we know of him comes from later sources. He was famed for his expertise in astronomy and geometry, and, according to one story, he successfully predicted an eclipse of the sun in the year 585 BCE. There are colorful stories about his life, such as the following which describes how he fell into a well:

A witty maid-servant saw Thales tumbling into a well and said that he was so eager to know what was going on in heaven that he could not see what was before his feet. This is applicable to all philosophers. The philosopher is unacquainted with the world; he hardly knows whether his neighbor is a man or an animal. For he is always searching into the essence of man, and enquiring what such a nature ought to do or suffer different from any other. [Plato, Theaetetus]

The event very likely never took place, and, in fact, this story represents a common stereotype about philosophers both then and now: they are so absorbed in their speculations that they don’t pay attention to where they’re walking. Another common stereotype of philosophers is that their skills have very little real world application, and such a criticism was allegedly raised against Thales as well. As the story goes, though, Thales proves them wrong by making a bundle of money investing in olive oil:

People detested Thales for his poverty, as if the study of philosophy was useless. However, it is reported that, through his skill in astronomy, he perceived that there would be a large harvest of olives that year. Then, while it was still winter, and having obtained a little money, he put deposits on all the olive oil businesses that were in Miletus and Chios. He obtained them at a low price, since there was no one to bid against him. When the season came for making oil, many people wanted the rights, and he sold them all at once for whatever terms he pleased. Raising a large sum of money by that means, he convinced everyone that it was easy for philosophers to be rich if they chose it, but that that was not what they aimed at. In this manner is Thales said to have shown his wisdom. [Aristotle, Politics, 1.11]

The details of Thales’ philosophy are as sketchy as those of his life. The best account is from Aristotle, who notes that all of the first philosophers attempted to discover the underlying stuff of all things, but they disagreed about what that particular stuff was. The Greeks already held to the view that there were four basic elements, namely, earth, air, fire and water. From these, Thales selected water as the primary stuff of nature, and Aristotle speculates about why Thales chose water specifically:

Thales, the founder of this type of philosophy, said the principle is water (for which reason he declared that the earth rests on water). Perhaps he got this notion from seeing that the nutrition of all things is moist, and that heat itself is generated from the moist and kept alive by it (and that from which they come to be is a principle of all things). Perhaps he also got his notion from the fact that the seeds of all things have a moist nature, and that water is the origin of the nature of moist things. [Ibid.]

As Aristotle explains, moisture seems to be an essential element in all living things. Water also seems like a reasonable choice since it’s at a middle state between earth and air insofar as some moist substances can evaporate and turn into air, and others solidify and turn to slime or earth.

Even if we understand Thales’ reasoning for why he selected water as the primary substance, there is still some haziness about what it means for water to be the source of all things. On the one hand, it could mean that the world originated from water, a view that had been around in mythology for a long time. On the other, it could mean that the world is still made of water, and things as they are now are composed of water as their primary stuff. This second interpretation of Thales is the more common one, and the one that constitutes Thales legitimate claim to fame. It seems like an easy thing to identify a single element like water as the primary stuff of all things. But it is a very sophisticated move to abandoned mythological foundations of the natural world in favor of physical explanations, and this is precisely what Thales did.

Anaximander:  The Boundless

Following Thales was his student and fellow-Milesian named Anaximander (c. 610–545 BCE), who held that the underlying cause of everything was an indefinable stuff that he called the boundless. One reported story of his life is that “when he sang, the children laughed; when hearing of this he said, ‘We must then sing better for the sake of the children.’” He was famed as an astronomer, made clocks, and was supposedly the first person who drew a map of the earth. Most significantly, though, he was the first of the Greek philosophers to produce a written account of his views on the subject of nature. Unfortunately, only a couple sentences of it survive, just hinting at his view that the boundless is the primary stuff: “The boundless is the original material of existing things; further, the source from which existing things derive their existence is also that to which they return at their destruction, according to necessity.” We get a slightly better picture of his views from a comment made by a later philosopher:

Anaximander of Miletus, son of Praxiades, a fellow-citizen and associate of Thales, said that the material cause and first element of things was the boundless, he being the first to introduce this name of the material cause. He says it is neither water nor any other of the so-called elements, but a substance different from them which is infinite, from which arise all the heavens and the worlds within them. [DK]

The picture that emerges from these discussions is that Anaximander agreed with Thales that there was a single source of all things, yet he criticized Thales for selecting water as the fundamental element. More precisely, he argued that none of the traditional four elements could be the primary stuff, as Aristotle explains:

[According to Anaximander,] there is a body distinct from the elements, the boundless, which is not air or water, in order that the other things may not be destroyed by their infinity. The elements are in opposition to each other: air is cold, water moist, and fire hot. Therefore, if any one of them were infinite, the rest would have ceased to be by this time. Thus, he said that what is infinite is something other than the elements, and from it the elements arise. [Aristotle, Physics, 3.3]

According to the above, there is a fundamental conflict between the qualities that we see in the four primary elements: something which is wet cannot cause something which is dry. If anyone of the four elements was the primary substance, spread infinitely throughout the cosmos, then it would counter act the others and prevent them from existing. Thus, the ultimate cause of things must be some invisible and limitless physical substance, which is capable of morphing into all the physical things that we see. The importance of Anaximander’s theory is that he was the first to ground ultimate reality in something which is non-perceptible. Unlike earth, air, fire and water, which we know through the senses, the boundless is a substance that we cannot detect in that way. Many philosophers after Anaximander similarly proposed a non-sensory explanation of things.

Anaximenes: Air

The third of the founding philosophers from Miletus was Anaximenes (c. 585-525 BCE), who held that condensed and expanded air is the source of everything. He was a student of Anaximander and, like his teacher, he wrote a book with only a sentence or two surviving. The most notable fragment is this, which stresses the central role of air in conception of reality: “Just as our soul, being air, holds us together, so do breath and air surround the whole world.” We find a more complete account of his view of air in the following summary from an early philosopher:

Anaximenes of Miletus, who had been an associate of Anaximander, said, like him, that the underlying substance was one and infinite. He did not, however, say it was indeterminate, like Anaximander, but determinate; for he said it was Air. It differs in different substances in virtue of its rarefaction and condensation. In its thinnest state it comes to be. Being condensed it becomes wind, then cloud, and when still further condensed it becomes water, then earth, then stones, and the rest of things comes to be out of these. [DK]

On Anaximenes view, then, physical objects differ only in how condensed the air is in a given space. The more compressed, the more it becomes solid; the less compressed, the more it becomes watery or airy. The importance of this is that Anaximenes was the first to suggest that reality could be measured. We could at least in theory say that a certain amount of pressure exerted on an area of air will result in it attaining a specific level of solidity. This provides a more scientific account of reality, particularly in comparison to Anaximandar’s theory which removed ultimate reality from the realm of what we can perceive.

C. IONIANS

Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes started a philosophical trend in their geographical region of Ionia, and, from neighboring cities, they were joined by two other philosophers, namely, Heraclitus and Pythagoras. Together, these five philosophers are sometimes seen as forming a distinct Ionian school of philosophy.

Heraclitus: Change and the Logos

Heraclitus (c. 540–c. 480 BCE) argued that an ever-changing world around us is held together through a unifying principle that he called the logos. Heraclitus was born into an aristocratic family from the Ionian city of Ephesus, not far from the city of Miletus where Greek philosophy first began. As he grew in fame, he also became disliked by his fellow citizens for his superior tone and gained the nickname "the obscure" for his use of riddles. Self-taught, he claimed that he investigated everything there was to know and learned everything by himself. His book On Nature was supposedly composed in an intentionally obscure style so that only those who were wise would understand it, thereby protecting himself from ridicule by the common people. Legend has it that the great Persian king Darius requested that Heraclitus travel to his palace to clarify the obscurities within the book. Heraclitus refused, saying that he had no interest in receiving such a royal honor and was content to live modestly. Progressively withdrawing from society, he spent his last hears living in the mountains, eating grasses and plants. Becoming sick with edema, he returned to the city to find a cure. But when he approached physicians with his problem, he presented it in the form of a riddle, which they couldn’t understand. Attempting to cure himself, he covered his body with cow dung which brought on his death.

The traditional understanding of Heraclitus’s obscure philosophy is that it has two main themes, one of which is a problem that he poses, and the other is his solution to the problem. The problem is that everything in the world is continually changing. Things grow then decay, are created then disintegrate. The most permanent things we see like mountains or stone monuments wear down with time. As things change, they exhibit opposing tendencies: “Cold things become warm, and what is warm cools; what is wet dries, and the dry is moistened.” He famously makes this point with the analogy of stepping into a river: “You cannot step twice into the same rivers; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you. It scatters and it gathers; it advances and retires.”

Constant change, then, is the problem. What, though, is the solution? According to Heraclitus, there is a unifying plan that underlies the coherence of all natural changes and harmonizes their opposing tendencies. He dubbed this the logos, the Greek word meaning “plan” or “formula”. In this passage he describes the difficulty people have in recognizing and understanding the logos:

It is wise to listen, not to me, but to the Logos, and to agree that all things are one. . . . Though this Logos is true always, yet people are as unable to understand it both when they hear it for the first time and when they have heard it at all again. For, though all things come into being in accordance with the Logos, people seem as if they had no experience of it. [DK]

For Heraclitus, then, as things in the world go through change, exhibiting their opposing characteristics, the logos gives things their unity. Even though the flowing river is constantly changing by scattering and gathering, the logos gives it structure so that we can recognize it as a river, rather than merely a series of haphazard and opposing events.

Heraclitus identified the ordering structure of the logos with one of the four elements, namely fire. He describes the cosmic role of fire here:

The ordered universe, which is the same for all, was not made by one of the gods or by humans. Rather, it always was, is now, and forever will be an ever-living fire, ignited in measure, and extinguished in measure. [DK]

Fire not only gives structure to the world, but it is also the primary stuff from which everything is made. In this way he follows in the footsteps of Thales and his fellow philosophers from Ionia who grounded the unity of things in a specific element. Similar to Anaximenes’ theory, Heraclitus held that things take on a different form based on how expanded or compressed fire is. When more compressed, it becomes water, and, when even more compressed, earth.

Pythagoras: Mathematical Relations

Famed mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras (c.570–c.497 BCE) held that mathematical relations underlie reality. Born on the Greek island of Samos—part of the Ionian region along the Turkish peninsula—as a young man Pythagoras spent much time studying religious practices throughout the Mediterranean area, and in time formed a colony of followers for both religious and scientific purposes. While he wrote nothing, his views were recorded by his followers, most of which, though, have not survived.

The Pythagorean school itself was a remarkable institution, and the level of reverence that Pythagoras’s followers had for him rose to a cult-like status, as we see here:

Pythagoras is said to have been a man of the most dignified appearance, and his disciples adopted an opinion about him that he was Apollo who had come from [the mythical realm of] Hyperborea.  It is said, that once when he was stripped naked, he was seen to have a golden thigh. There were many people who affirmed that, when he was crossing the river Nessus, the river called him by his name. [Diogenes, Lives, “Pythagoras”]

His students also believed that his teachings were prophesies of the gods. There were two groups of followers within the Pythagorean school. First there was the privileged inner circle of followers, called the “mathematicians,” who could study with him in person. Second, there was an outer circle, called the “listeners”, who couldn’t see Pythagoras directly but only received summaries of his views and listened to him from behind a curtain. The Pythagoreans also had a list of strange rules to follow, which included these:

Do not stir the fire with a knife. Rub out the mark of a pot in the ashes. Do not wear a ring. Do not have swallows in the house. Spit on your nail parings and hair trimmings. Abstain from eating beans. Abstain from eating living things. Roll up your bedclothes on rising and smooth out the imprint of the body. Do not urinate facing the sun. [Ibid]

As Pythagoras’ fame spread, legend has it that no fewer than 600 scholars would try to visit him each day, “and if any of them had ever been permitted to see him, they wrote about it to their friends as if they had gained some great advantage.” Pythagoras died, as the story goes, while visiting a friend’s home for dinner; the house was set fire by his enemies who feared that he would grow in power, take control of the city, and become a tyrant.

Today Pythagoras’s name is associated with the Pythagorean theorem, and, as legend has it, when he discovered it he sacrificed 100 cattle to the gods. He also influenced the axiomatic approach to geometry that was later formalized by Euclid. For Pythagoras, though, mathematics was at the center of his philosophy insofar as he believed that mathematical relations govern all things. In fact, he considered numbers themselves to be sacred. Everything is related to mathematics and, through mathematics, everything can be predicted and measured in rhythmic patterns. Two types of mathematical ratios were important for Pythagoras: the Tetractys and musical harmony.

The Tetractys is a mystical symbol involving ten points arranged in four rows: one, two, three, and four points in each row respectively:

*

**

***

****

The four rows represent earth, air, fire and water, and various combinations of the points generate important numbers and ratios. The Tetractys is similar to the aesthetic principle of the more well-known “Golden Ratio” that was developed later by Euclid and Renaissance artists. With both the Tetractys and the Golden Ratio, objects that contain special proportions have a natural beauty or balance to them such as, for example, a window opening that is three feet wide and four feet tall—where three and four are the bottom two rows of the Tetractys. The reverence that Pythatoras had for the Tetractys is seen in the following Pythagorean prayer:

Bless us, divine number, you who generated gods and men. O holy, holy Tetractys, you that contains the root and source of the eternally flowing creation. For the divine number begins with the profound, pure unity until it comes to the holy four; then it produces the mother of all, the all-comprising, all-bounding, the first-born, the never-swerving, the never-tiring holy ten, the keyholder of all. [DK]

For Pythagoras, the cosmos itself is arranged in ratios connected to the Tetractys, and, as described below, music is a perfect example of how ratio and harmonious structure are interrelated:

The tetractys is a certain number, which being composed of the four first numbers produces the most perfect number, ten. For one and two and three and four come to ten. This number is the first tetractys, and is called the source of ever flowing nature. This is because, according to them, the entire cosmos is organized according to harmony, and harmony is a system of three intervals: the fourth, the fifth, and the octave. The proportions of these three intervals are found in the aforementioned four numbers. [Sextus Empiricus, Against the Mathematicians, 7.94-95]

Musicians, particularly players of stringed instruments, will instantly recognize the mathematical basis of the three harmonic intervals mentioned above. More precisely they are these:

Musical 4th: interval of 4:3 (e.g., divide a string at the 1/4 mark)

Musical 5th: interval of 3:2 (e.g. divide a string at the 1/3 mark)

Musical octave: interval of 2:1 (e.g., divide a string at the 1/2 mark)

Like other Presocratic philosophers, Pythagoras also had theories about most everything, including how the cosmos was originally formed and then developed. The following passage describes Pythagoras’ view of the cyclical nature of the cosmos:

Pythagoras declared that the soul is immortal, then that it changes into other kinds of animals. In addition, the things that happen recur at certain intervals, and nothing is absolutely new. Also, all things that come to be alive must be thought akin. Pythagoras seems to have been the first to introduce these opinions into Greece. [Porphyry, Life of Pythagoras, 19]

There are two cyclical aspects of the cosmos alluded to in the above. The first is what we now call reincarnation: upon the death of my body, my soul lives on by migrating to the body of a newborn baby, and when that body dies I move on to another. The second is that the events in the cosmos itself repeat after certain periods of time. Both of these are ideas found in Hindu thought, which Pythagoras might have come in contact with during his travels.

Among his most notable pieces of wisdom is his comparison of life to what takes place at Olympic games. There are, he argues, three types of lives that we see among people at the games. The lowest is the merchant who seeks to make money by selling to the swarm of visitors. Next is the athlete who participates in the games to win a prize. The highest, though, is the spectator who observes the events.  The last of these is the philosopher who surveys the world and reflects on it.

D. ELEATICS

The most radical philosophical theory among the early Greeks was proposed by a group of philosophers from the city of Elea, a Greek colony on the south-west coast of Italy. They are thus referred to as Eleatic philosophers in honor of their home town. The leader among the Eleatic philosophers was a man named Parmenides, who argued that our every day perceptions of the world are completely wrong, and all reality is the One, that is, a single, undifferentiated and unchanging thing. We will look at three Eleatic philosophers who are associated with this view: Xenophanes who first suggested it, Parmenides who developed it, and Zeno who defended it.

Xenophanes: Anthropomorphism and Pantheism

Xenophanes (c. 570–c.478 BCE) was a self-taught poet and philosopher who attacked traditional notions of the gods and offered a conception of God as identical to the cosmos as a whole. Born in the Ionian city of Colophon—near Miletus—Xenophanes left home when around 25 to be a traveling poet throughout the Greek cities, and for some time settled in the city of Elea. A story relates how a fellow philosopher once said to Xenophanes that he was unable to find a wise person. Xenophanes replied, “That’s very likely, since it takes a wise person to discover a wise person.” Xenophanes authored several works in poetic form, and recited them publicly during his travels. Of the surviving material from them, three topics that he discusses are especially important in philosophy.

First, he holds that our concepts of things are often relative to the perceiver; he writes, “If god had not made brown honey, people would think that figs are far sweeter than they do think of about them.” This may be the first written account of a philosophical position of relativism, namely, the view that the truth of some important claims depends on the views of some individual or social group. Xenophanes’ example of the sweetness of figs focuses specifically on the information that we receive through our senses. Figs indeed taste sweet to us, but the level of sweetness that we assign to figs depends on whether we’ve ever had honey, which is much sweeter. Perceptual relativism like this is rather innocent, but other areas of relativism are more controversial, such as the view that whether the rock in front of me actually exists or whether the reality of the rock depends on the views held by me or some social group. From his fragmentary writings, it’s not clear how far Xenophanes pushed the issue of relativism, although some Greek philosophers after him indeed pushed it to its extreme.

A second area of focus for Xenophanes is his satirical attack on anthropomorphic conceptions of the gods, particularly as held by Homer, Hesiod and Pythagoras. Anthropomorphism is the tendency to ascribe human qualities to non-human things, and this occurs in religion when we describe divine beings as having human qualities. He writes,

Mortals suppose that the gods are born and have clothes and voices and shapes like their own.

The Ethiopians make their gods black and snub-nosed; the Thracians say theirs have blue eyes and red hair.

If oxen and horses or lions had hands, and could paint with their hands, and produce works of art as people do, horses would paint the forms of the gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, and make their bodies in the image of their various kinds. [DK]

His point is that something in human nature prompts us to view divine beings as having human characteristics just like our own. Xenophanes notes extreme cases in which believers hold that God has a physical form similar to that of humans. Less extreme cases of religious anthropomorphism, though, would involve ascribing human-like mental processes to God, such as holding that God experiences emotions like love, anger, compassion. According to Xenophanes, traditional Greek religion depicts the gods as having the worst possible human characteristics. He writes, “Homer and Hesiod have ascribed to the gods all things that are shameful and disgraceful among mortals, such as theft, adultery and the deception of one another.” For Xenophanes, no level of religious anthropomorphism is acceptable, and we need to envision the gods in a radically different way.

How, then, should we view the nature of divine beings? This leads us to Xenophanes’ third philosophical contribution, which is his view that God is identical with nature as a whole—a position that we now called pantheism, literally meaning “all God”. The standard view of God in Western civilization (in ancient times as well as now) is that God created the world, but exists independently of it: God has his own unique identity, and the created universe has its own. Pantheism, though, denies that God and the universe have their own independent identities; rather, they are one and the same thing. The following is a summary of Xenophanes view of God, as related by an early philosopher:

The essence of God is of a spherical form, in no respect resembling humans. The universe can see and hear, but cannot breathe; it is in all its parts intellect, and wisdom, and eternity. [Diogenes, Lives, “Xenophanes”]

The spherical form of God mentioned above is the form of the universe itself, which was a common conception of the cosmos in early Greek astronomy. Thus, for Xenophanes, God is the totality of the universe in its spherical form. Even though God and the universe are one and the same, God still has some type of mental qualities, as Xenophanes describes here:

God is one, the greatest among gods and humans, who is like mortals neither in form nor in thought.

He sees all over, thinks all over, and hears all over. But without toil he sways all things by the thought of his mind.

He always remains in the same place, without moving at all; nor does it suit him to go about here or there. [DK]

It’s as though God has one giant body that covers the entire physical universe, yet at the same time God has a mind that monitors everything that takes place within him and can move everything with the mere thought of his mind. Having said all that, though, Xenophanes cautiously notes the limits of our ability to know God:

There never was nor will be a person who has certain knowledge about the gods and about all the things I speak of. Even if he should chance to say the complete truth, yet he himself does not know that it is so. But all may have their opinions. [DK]

Ultimately, according to Xenophanes, we are left with our own opinions on the subject of God, which again raises the issue of relativism with respect to our religious knowledge. It is Xenophanes pantheistic view of God and the cosmos that influenced the next two philosophers from Elea, namely Parmenides and Zeno, thus creating a localized pantheistic school of thought.

Parmenides: The One

Parmenides (b. 510 BCE) was born into a wealthy family in the city of Elea, and his only known writing is a book titled On Nature that he composed in poetic verse as allegedly conveyed to him by the goddess Persephone. In a nutshell, Parmenides argues that only one unchanging thing exists, and it is an indivisible spherical-shaped thing, like a toy marble, which he calls “the One”. It might appear that the world consists of countless different things—me, you, the chair I’m sitting on, the dog barking down the street. According to Parmenides, though, this is all just an illusion, and I can’t trust my common sense; the truth is that only the One exists.

Why would he offer an account of the world that is so contrary to common sense? The answer is not entirely clear. While Parmenides and his followers were the only major thinkers in Western civilization at that time to offer this view, it has close similarities with some Eastern philosophical views, particularly within Hinduism. And within Eastern philosophical traditions the proof of “the One” is based on mystical experience. When you enter a mystical state of enlightenment through meditation, you will experience the oneness of everything and see that the world of multiplicity and change around us is an illusion. Maybe Parmenides was inspired by this kind of a mystical experience, but we know so little about his life and background that there is no way of telling.

Regardless of what inspired him, he offers a proof of his theory of “the One,” which requires serious attention. He begins arguing that there are just two paths of inquiry: the path of assertion in which you maintain that something is, and the path of denial in which you maintain that something is not. If we think about these two paths, we’ll see that the path of denial is nonsense: you cannot know what is not, and you can’t even express it. He makes this point here:

There are only two ways of inquiry that can be thought of. The first, namely, that it is (and that it is impossible for it not to be), is the way of belief, for truth is its companion. The other way of inquiry, namely, that it is not (and cannot be), is a path that none can learn at all. For you cannot know what is not, nor can you express it. [DK]

That leaves us with the remaining path of assertion: the only meaningful way of inquiry is to assert that something is, as he maintains as follows:

It is the same thing that can be thought and that can be. What can be spoken and thought must be; for it is possible for it to be, but impossible for nothing to be. . . . One path only is left for us to speak of, namely, that it is. In this path are very many signs that “what is” is uncreated and indestructible; it is complete, immovable, and without end. [DK]

His point is that we can say anything that we want about reality, so long as we don’t use the word “not”, since that would involve the path of denial. Establishing the path of assertion is only preliminary. The next step is to draw out the implications of asserting only that something is. The result is that we arrive at the qualities of the One, namely, that it is eternal, indivisible, unmoving, and round.

The first implication of the path of assertion, then, is that whatever exists must be eternal, that is, uncreated and indestructible. If we say that a thing came into existence or will go out of existence, then this would require saying “it is not” before it existed and “it is not” after it existed. But that would take us down the path of denial since we’d be using the terms “not”, and thus uttering nonsense.

[The One is eternal], for how can “what is” be going to be in the future? Or how could it come into being? If it came into being, then it is not. Nor is it, if it is going to be in the future. Thus is becoming extinguished and passing away not to be heard of. [DK]

The second implication of the path of assertion is that whatever exists is indivisible. If we say that it has parts, then we maintain some of it is here, but not there. This, again, takes us down the impossible path of denial. Parmenides writes,

[The One] is not divisible, since it is all alike, and there is no more of it in one place than in another, to hinder it from holding together, nor less of it, but everything is full of what is. For this reason it is wholly continuous; for what is, is in contact with what is. [DK]

Third, the One is unmoving, since movement requires us to say that it is now in this position, but not in that position, yet again taking us down the path of denial. He writes,

It is immovable in the bonds of mighty chains, without beginning and without end; since coming into being and passing away have been driven afar, and true belief has cast them away. It is the same, and it rests in the self-same place, abiding in itself. And thus it remains constant in its place; for hard necessity keeps it in the bonds of the limit that holds it fast on every side. For this reason it is not permitted to “what is” to be infinite; for it is in need of nothing; while, if it were infinite, it would stand in need of everything. [DK]

Finally, the One is round. If it was irregularly shaped, one part would be greater and another smaller; this would require us to say that this part is not like that part, yet again taking us down the path of denial. He writes, “Since it has a furthest limit, it is complete on every side, like the mass of a rounded sphere, equally poised from the center in every direction; for it cannot be greater or smaller in one place than in another.”

According to Parmenides, then, what we can say about reality is that it is an eternal, single, unmoving, and round thing.

Zeno of Elea: Paradoxes

We might think that Parmenides’ theory of the One was so bizarre that no one would take him seriously, much less adopt it. Surprisingly, though, he had followers who staunchly defended his position, one of which was Zeno (c. 490–430 BCE), Parmenides’ student from the same city of Elea. Zeno’s claim to fame is a book he wrote titled Attacks which contains paradoxes that ultimately defend Parmenides’ view of the One. Zeno’s purpose for writing the book is portrayed by Plato in the following:

The motive of my book was to protect Parmenides against ridicule by showing that the hypothesis of the existence of the many involved greater absurdities than the hypothesis of the one. The book was a youthful composition of mine, which was stolen from me, and therefore I had no choice about the publication. [Plato, Parmenides]

The target of Zeno’s work is the common sense world of appearances that virtually everyone believes in. We all ordinarily believe that the world contains a multiplicity of things: you, me, the chair that I’m sitting on. We also believe that things in the world go through change: they come into existence, change configuration in innumerable ways, then go out of existence. Zeno then presents a series of paradoxes that show the impossibility of motion or any other change, and thereby show the absurdity of this so-called “common sense” view of the world. Thus, those who disagree with Parmenides theory of the One by defending common sense appearances will find greater difficulties than those they were trying to avoid. In short, our common sense views of the world turn out to be even more absurd than Parmenides’ view of the One.

While Zeno is reported to have produced more than 40 paradoxes in defense of Parmenides, little of his actual wording survives, and we are able to reconstruct only a handful of them. One group of paradoxes targets the common sense conception of motion, that is, the basic view that things in the world around us move—such as leaves blowing around in the yard, a dog running down the street, a ball rolling across the floor. In the following, Aristotle summarizes three of Zeno’s paradoxes of motion:

The first asserts the non-existence of motion on the ground that that which is in motion must arrive at the half-way stage before it arrives at the goal. This we have discussed above. [i.e., “It is always necessary to traverse half the distance, but these are infinite, and it is impossible to get through things that are infinite.”]

The second is the so-called ‘Achilles’, and it amounts to this, that in a race the quickest runner can never overtake the slowest, since the pursuer must first reach the point whence the pursued started, so that the slower must always hold a lead. ...

The third is that already given above, to the effect that the flying arrow is at rest [i.e., “If everything when it occupies an equal space is at rest, and if that which is in locomotion is always occupying such a space at any moment, the flying arrow is therefore motionless.”] [Aristotle, Physics, 6]

Let’s look at these in more detail. The first is called the paradox of the stadium runner. Imagine that a runner sets off on a race track. Before he can reach the finish line, he must pass the halfway point. Before he can do that, though, he must pass the 1/4-way point, and before that the 1/8-way point, and so on to infinity. The runner would have to cross an infinite number of way points in a finite time, and thus can never reach his goal.

The second argument is called the paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise, and is similar in structure to the first. Achilles is the Greek mythological hero who could run like the wind. Suppose that Achilles was in a race with a much slower tortoise, and gave the tortoise a few second head start. Could Achilles overtake the tortoise? No, says Zeno. Suppose that the tortoise gets to point A on the road; Achilles will need to reach point A before overtaking the tortoise. But, once Achilles reaches point A, the tortoise will have moved on to point B, and Achilles will need to reach point B before overtaking it. Again, though, once Achilles reaches point B, the tortoise will have moved on to point C, and so on. Since the tortoise is always on the move, regardless of how slowly, it will be moving on to an infinite number of points that Achilles will need to cross. Thus, Achilles can never overtake the Tortoise.

The third paradox, regarding the motion of the arrow, takes a slightly different strategy than the above two and can be formulated as follows:

(1) Anything occupying a place just its own size is at rest.

(2) In the present, a moving arrow occupies a place just its own size.

(3) Hence, in the present, a moving arrow is at rest.

(4) However, in the present a moving arrow always moves.

(5) Hence, a moving arrow is always at rest throughout its movement.

The paradox here is that there’s good reason to say both that, first, the moving arrow is always at rest, and (b) the moving arrow is always in motion.

We might have some quick negative reactions to Zeno’s three paradoxes. First, we might ask why the stadium runner and Achilles just don’t run really fast and quickly cover all the points they need to. But Zeno would say that it doesn’t matter how fast they move: they still need to cover an ever-increasing number of points. This fact doesn’t change, regardless of their speed. Second, we might point out that in real life runners do reach the finish line and overtake slower competitors. Doesn’t this refute Zeno? No it doesn’t, Zeno would say. The question under consideration is whether common sense reality is only an illusion. Of course it appears as though the runner reaches the finish line. However, the paradoxes of motion aim to show that our underlying assumptions about reality are seriously flawed, specifically our assumption that things actually move at all.

While something indeed seems odd about Zeno’s paradoxes, there is no obvious or easy way out of them. The paradoxes are generated by the underlying assumption that it is impossible to touch infinitely many points in a finite amount of time. One possible solution is to deny that space is really infinitely divisible. According to traditional geometry, for any two points that you designate, there are an infinite number of points between them. For centuries people assumed that this was true of the actual physical world too, and not just true in geometry. But is real space infinitely divisible? Many physicists today say no, and hold that the tiniest portions of space may involve indivisible segments. So, when we move across space we jump from one of these segments to the next, rather than sweeping over an infinite number of points.

E. PLURALISTS

All of the Presocratic philosophers we’ve looked at so far struggled with the problem of the one and the many. On the one hand, our ordinary view of the world is that it is composed of many things. Yet, on the other hand, there seems to be a unifying force behind all of this diversity. How then do we reconcile these two views of reality? The standard solution for Presocratic philosophers was to seek out a single source or explanation of all that exists, whether it’s water, fire, mathematical relations, or the One. There is, though, an alternative strategy called pluralism (literally meaning “many-ism”), which in philosophy refers to the view that many kinds of things exist. Rather than reduce all things to a single force or substance, why not instead reduce everything to a few basic forces of substances? This is the approach taken by two Presocratic philosophers, namely, Empedocles and Anaxagoras.

Empedocles: Four elements and Two Forces

Empedocles (c. 495–c. 435 BCE) held the view that there are four basic elements–namely earth, air, fire and water–which are organized by the two forces of love and strife. Born in Acragas, a Greek colony in Sicily, Empedocles had varied careers as a physician, politician, and even a magician. He joined the Pythagoreans, but was banned from the school after he published many of Pythagoras’s secret views in a poem; this prompted the Pythagoreans to thereafter exclude all poets from membership. Empedocles also claimed to be a god who was exiled to earth for breaking his Pythagorean vow of vegetarianism. Like Pythagoras, Empedocles too believed in reincarnation, and in fact argued that, as punishment for his sin, his soul transmigrated into the bodies of animals and even plants. He writes, “For once I was a boy, and once a girl, a bush, a bird, and a fish who swims the sea.” Having sufficiently purified himself, though, he claims to have worked his way back up to the position of a god. To highlight his divine status, he wore bronze sandals, the purple robes of royalty, a garland around his head, and, as the story goes, even performed miracles. He once prevented strong winds from destroying local crops by stretching out animal skins atop a hill to catch the wind. There is also an account of him raising someone from the dead. Empedocles modeled his poetic writing style upon that of Xenophanes and Parmenides, and his principal book, On Nature, was the longest philosophical work that appeared up until his time. There are various accounts of his death, one of which is that he died from a chariot injury while attending a festival. Another story describes how he planted his bronze sandal at the mouth of a volcano, making people think that he jumped in.

There are two central themes to Empedocles’ philosophy. First is his view that all things come from the four elements—or roots, as he calls them—of earth air, fire and water. While the four elements had been part of Greek thinking for some time, Empedocles expanded their role to be the four fundamental substances from which all things emerge, and this became the foundation of physics within Europe for the next 2,000 years. Second is his view that two forces are responsible for the mixing and unmixing of the four elements, namely Love and Strife, which function as physical forces of attraction and repulsion. He describes how the four elements and two forces first emerged from the cosmos:

I will tell you of a twofold process. At one time it [i.e., the cosmos] grew together to be one only out of many, at another it parted to pieces so as to be many instead of one. Fire and Water and Earth and the mighty height of Air. And also, apart from these, dreaded Strife of equal weight to each, and Love in their midst, equal in length and breadth. . . . All these elements are equal and of the same age in their creation. But each presides over its own area, and each has its own character, and they dominate in turn in the course of time. [DK]

All change that occurs in the cosmos results from the combination, separation and regrouping of these indestructible elements, depending on the amount of Love and Strife that is present.

Empedocles continues explaining how the universe as we know it evolved from the original appearance of the four elements and two forces. Imagine that the cosmos is like a large kitchen blender that contains equal portions of earth, air, fire and water, all swirling around. Suppose, then, that the two forces of Love and Strife are thrown into the blender, where Love has the power to draw the elements together, and Strife has the power to have the elements separate from each other. As the mixture swirls around in the blender, it will exhibit four separate states, depending on how much Love and Strife are sucked into the mix.

Consider first when Strife is pulled into the mix by itself, while Love sinks to the bottom of the blender. As Strife circulates through the four elements, it makes the four elements repel each other, sort of like mixing water and oil. Thus, all the earth collects together in one side of the blender, air on another side, fire on another and water on another.  According to Empedocles, this was what the first stage of the cosmos was like. Consider second when Love is pulled into the mix by itself, while Strife submerges to the blender’s bottom. As Love churns into the mix, its attractive powers cause the four elements to blend together into one formless glob of stuff. Empedocles describes this phase of cosmic development here:

When Strife had fallen to the lowest depth of the vortex, and Love had reached to the center of the whirl, all things came together in it so as to be one only. This did not happen all at once, but they came together at their will each from different quarters. [DK]

Third, consider what happens when a lot of Love, with just a little bit of Strife, mixes through the four elements. While much of the mixture will remain in a single glob because of Love’s powers of attraction, a little bit of Strife will cause some parts of it to separate and create individual things. The problem, though, is that in this state the four elements are not separated quite enough, and the result is that some things become stuck together in grotesque ways, such as the faces of people being stuck to the bodies of animals. Empedocles describes this here:

Many creatures with faces and breasts looking in different directions were born. Some offspring of oxen had faces of people, while others, again, arose as offspring of people with the heads of oxen. There were creatures in whom the nature of women and men was mingled, furnished with sterile parts. [DK]

Fourth, consider what happens when a lot of Strife, with just a little bit of Love, churns through the four elements. Again, individual objects will emerge, but now there is enough Strife to keep them from being glued together in strange ways. This is the balance of Strife and Love that exists now in the cosmos. However, we should not get too comfortable with this current mixture of elements and forces: the blender is always turned on, and the life cycle of the universe moves back and forth between extremes of unity and diversity. As time progresses, sometimes Love will again sink to the bottom of the blender, then Strife, and so on for eternity.

Anaxagoras: Mind and the Divisibility of Material Ingredients

Anaxagoras (500–428 BCE) held that the world is comprised of infinitely divisible portions of elements that are set in motion by a cosmic Mind. Anaxagoras was born into a wealthy family from the Ionian city Clazomenae (near Miletus), and eventually abandoned his inheritance to devote himself to philosophy. He was a student of Anaximenes (the third of the founding philosophers from Miletus). For around 20 years he lived and taught in the city if Athens. While there, he stated that the sun was just a mass of burning iron, and not a divine being as mythologists claimed. For this act of irreligion he was sentenced to death, although he was ultimately punished with exile. When he first heard of his sentence by the Athenian court, he said “Nature has long since condemned both them and me.” After relocating to a new city, the citizens there held him in high regard and upon his death put the following inscription on his tomb: “Here lies Anaxagoras, who reached for truth, the farthest bounds in heavenly speculations.”

Being a pluralist like Empedocles, Anaxagoras also held that the cosmos is composed of several material ingredients, and not just a single one. Also like Empedocles, he held that all of the ingredients swirl around in a cosmic blender, and create individual things like rocks and trees as they move around. Here, though, is where his similarities with Empedocles end. There are three major themes to Anaxagoras’s philosophy, the first of which is that the material ingredients of the cosmos are infinitely divisible and exist in a completely vacuumless environment (that is, a plenum—a term that means the opposite of vacuum). While today we assume that material things float in empty space, Anaxagoras denied this, maintaining that all the material stuff swirling around in the cosmic blender is packed solid, with no empty areas. Also, Anaxagoras held that if you take a material thing and divide it in half, then that part in half, you can keep doing this on to infinity. He makes his point about the indivisibility of material stuff here:

All things were together, infinite both in amount and in smallness, for the small, too, was infinite. And because all things were together, nothing was distinguishable on account of its smallness; for air and aether covered all things, both being infinite, for these are the most important [ingredients] in the total mixture both in number and in size. [DK]

The second feature of this theory is encapsulated in his statement that “A portion of everything is in everything”. For the sake of clarity, let’s suppose that there are four main material ingredients in the cosmic mix, namely earth, air, fire and water (Anaxagoras’ surviving writings do not contain a clear list of elements). Let’s say that the rock in my front yard is composed of 97% earth, 1% air, 1% fire, and 1% water. No matter how small of a piece of the rock I examine, it will contain the same portions of these four material ingredients. In each piece I examine, earth will predominate, and thus give it its characteristic of rock-like solidity. Similarly, a glass of wine might contain 97% water, 1% earth, 1% air, and 1% fire, and so too with every microscopic drop of wine that I examine. Anaxagoras describes his view of portions here:

Since the portions of the great and of the small are equal in amount, for this reason, too, all things will be in everything. Nor is it possible for them to be apart, but all things have a portion of everything. Since it is impossible for there to be a least thing, they cannot be separated, nor come to be by themselves. They must be now, just as they were in the beginning, all together. In all things many things are contained, and an equal number both in the greater and in the smaller of the things that are separated off. [DK]

Thus, within the giant cosmic blender, portions of all the material ingredients are spread throughout the mix, and the variety of things that we see in the world around us is already contained within the primordial mix. This, according to Anaxagoras, helps explain how things change. When a piece of wood disintegrates into earth, the elements of earth were already embedded within it. When the wood ignites into fire, the fire was already embedded within it.

The third main feature of his theory is that Mind is the external force that accounts for all the motion, growth and change that occurs within the material ingredients. Mind is the motor that causes the giant blender to churn the mixture of stuff. He writes, “All things were mixed up together; then Mind came and arranged them all in distinct order." Mind for Anaxagoras performs much the same function that Love and Strife performs for Empedocles. He describes its function in the following:

Mind has power over all things, both greater and smaller, that have life. Mind had power over the whole revolution, so that it began to revolve in the beginning. It began to revolve first from a small beginning; but the revolution now extends over a larger space, and will extend over a larger still. All the things that are mingled together and separated off and distinguished are all known by Mind. [DK]

In the above Anaxagoras maintains that Mind begins by making swirls within small areas of the mix, and this slowly passes to larger areas.

In short, the primary function of Mind is to initiate motion within the cosmic mix of material ingredients. To that extent, it functions as a force of physics. But is it anything more than this? Anaxagoras also seems to suggest that Mind has a partly divine function; but to the extent that it is divine, it is not an anthropomorphized god like Zeus or some other divine being of religious devotion. While we may like to know more about the kind of thing this Mind is, Anaxagoras does not provide the details. In fact, Aristotle criticizes Anaxagoras for inventing the notion of Mind as an artificial crutch to prop up his theory. Aristotle writes, “When Anaxagoras cannot explain why something is necessarily as it is, he drags in Mind, but otherwise he will use anything rather than Mind to explain a particular phenomenon” (Aristotle, Metaphysics, 985a18).

In any case, with his two-pronged theory of material stuff on the one hand, and Mind on the other, Anaxagoras holds the honor of being the first matter/spirit dualist in Western philosophy. That is, according to Anaxagoras’s dualism, there are two radically distinct types of things in the cosmos—matter and Mind—each of which performs its unique role in creating the universe and all that it contains.

F. ATOMISTS

The next important advance in Presocratic philosophy was a theory called Atomism. While most of the previous theories about the universe that we’ve examined so far have been rather strange, Atomism is different in that its essential features are the ones that we hold to today. Its central thesis is that the world is composed of indivisible particles called atoms that exist within empty space. Everything contained in the universe, then, results from the clumping together of these atomic particles. It is tempting to think that the originators of this theory had a special insight into the nature of the physical world, but the reality is that it was just a lucky guess. There was no scientific equipment at the time that could prove or disprove any proposed theory of the cosmos. The Presocratic philosophers were all insatiably curious about the nature of things and stretched their imaginations to the farthest limits, proposing every conceivable explanation. With such a diversity of ideas being explored, one was bound to get it right, and it turned out to be Atomism. However, it took over 2,000 years for civilization to realize this, and when physicists of the 20th century finally discovered what they believed was the tiniest particle of matter, they named it the atom, in honor of this Presocratic theory.

Two Presocratic philosophers are associated with the theory of Atomism: Leucippus, who proposed the theory, and his student Democritus who systematized it. Very little is known about Leucippus’ life, but he is reported to have been a student of Zeno, and may have come from the city of Elea, home of both Parmenides and Zeno. He wrote a work called The Great World System, none of which survives in itself, although its contents may have been incorporated into the writings of Democritus, who we do know much more about. Democritus (460-350 BCE) was from the Greek coastal city of Abdera (now in modern-day Greece). Born into a wealthy family, he was tutored by Persian astronomers, and, after his father’s death, traveled extensively learning what he could. At some point he became a student of Leucippus as well as the Pythagoreans and perhaps also of Anaxagoras. He secluded himself from the public, but nonetheless became famous for his knowledge of natural phenomena and the ability to predict the weather. One story reports that he met with Socrates in Athens, without revealing to Socrates who he was. A prolific writer, he composed dozens of works in the areas of ethics, physics, astronomy, mathematics, and music, none of which, unfortunately, survive. His lasting fame in philosophy, though, is his development of Leucippus’ atomism.

Atoms in the Void

The central notion of atomism is that the universe is composed of an infinite number of atoms that are dispersed throughout an infinite vacuum of empty space (or “void”), with no beginning in time. This is the exact opposite of Anaxagoras’s position in two important ways. First, Anaxagoras argued that matter was infinitely divisible. That is, if you take a rock, break it in half, then that in half, and so on, you will never arrive at a smallest piece. You could in theory keep splitting that thing in half for ever. Atomism denies this: if you keep breaking apart the rock, eventually you’ll arrive at a tiny component—an atom—that cannot be broken down any further into smaller pieces. Second, Anaxagoras argued that the cosmos is a vacuumless plenum: it contains no empty space and even the tiniest area is jam-packed with material stuff. Atomism also denies this: atoms exist in a vacuum of empty space. Their reasoning is that if there was no empty space, then things would be so squeezed together they couldn’t move.

According to Leucippus and Democritus, the atoms themselves have several features. Each atom is of the same substance, colorless, ungenerated, indestructible, unalterable, homogeneous, solid, and indivisible. Their shapes and sizes have infinite variations, and they are spread throughout the universe. They are also continually moving, or at least vibrating, within the vacuum of empty space. While in motion, they collide with each other, and, when they do, sometimes they rebound, other times they join together and form compound bodies that we are able to perceive through our senses. An early philosopher describes this view of the atomists here:

Substances are unlimited in multitude and atomic … and scattered in the void. When they approach one another or collide or become entangled, the compounds appear as water or fire or as a plant or a human. But all things are atoms, which he calls forms; there is nothing else. [Plutarch, Against Colotes]

Differences in objects result from changes in the shape, arrangement, density, and position of the atoms.

The Mind as Material

It’s one thing to account for the composition of rocks and other inanimate objects in terms of material atoms clumped together. However, Leucippus and Democritus argue that everything in the universe is composed of the material stuff of atoms, including conscious human beings; there are no non-physical spirits or souls, or gods. In philosophy this is a position called materialism—only material things exist—and the challenge of materialism is to explain how and conscious thought in humans can be a purely material thing. Throughout much of history, philosophers argued that this was impossible, and that human thought could only take place in a non-physical soul or spirit. After all, conscious thoughts do not seem to be the kinds of things that take up physical space. They are not like three-dimensional rocks and trees. However, the atomists argued that conscious thoughts are indeed material, very much like rocks and trees.

While minds are material, they are rather unique material things, and the Atomists explained them with two special kinds of atoms: fire-atoms and image-particles. First, human minds are composed of fire-atoms that are distributed throughout the human body; think of them as a type of perceptual tissue, sort of like the role that today we give neurons. Second, all visible objects emit tiny image-particles which fly off in all directions. (The concept of the image-particle is often translated “idols” from the Greek word eidola which Democritus used). With the thickness of only one atom, the image-flakes preserve the shape of the original object. A rock, for example, continually sheds image-flakes, which have the shape of the rock itself. I mentally perceive the rock, then, when the image-flakes strike my eye and excites my fire-atoms. One early philosopher describes this aspect of the atomist theory here:

[Leucippus and Democritus] attributed sight to certain image-flakes, of the same shape as the object, which were continually streaming off from the objects of sight and impacting the eye. [DK]

The mental act of thinking is a more focused form of perception. Some places in my body that contain fire-atoms are so densely compressed that image-flakes excite motion in them as they pass through them; hence, thought arises.

In addition to explaining human thought, another challenge of materialism is explaining divine beings such as God that are traditionally thought to be non-material spirits. The atomists had a physical explanation of these too. Some image-flakes are very large, and appear in the shape of humans, which we perceive in our dreams. An early philosopher provides this summary of Democritus’s view of the gods:

Democritus says that certain image-flakes of atoms approach humans, and of them some cause good and others evil… These are large and immense, and difficult to destroy though not indestructible. They indicate the future in advance to people when they are seen to emit voices. As a result people of ancient times, upon perceiving the appearances of these things, supposed that they are a god, though there is no other god aside from these having an indestructible nature. [Sextus Empiricus, Mathematicians. 9:19]

The gods, then, are not spiritual beings that reside on mount Olympus: they are only strange image-flakes that excite our imaginations. This essentially amounts to a denial of the existence of God, which is a rather controversial side effect of atomism’s materialism.

Another controversial side effect of materialism is a view called determinism: all events are determined according to the strict laws that govern the operations of material things. Since, according to materialism, human beings are composed only of material stuff, then all human actions are also determined—hence there is no free will. We see this in the following statements about Democritus by two early philosophers,

[Democritus held that] everything that happens, happens of necessity. Motion is the cause of the production of everything, and he calls this necessity. [Diogenes Laertius, Lives, “Democritus”]

Democritus, the author of the Atomic Philosophy, preferred admitting the necessity of fate to depriving indivisible bodies of their natural motions. [Cicero, On Fate, 10]

According to atomism, then, all human actions are determined by the laws that govern the movement of atoms. We noted already how atomism foreshadowed the general makeup of the universe held by modern physicists. Similarly, their commitment to materialism and determinism foreshadows views that dominate contemporary philosophy of mind. Nevertheless, in its time it was just one of many Presocratic theories battling with its rivals for attention.

G. SOPHISTS

A final group of Presocratic philosophers are the Sophists (Greek for “wise ones”), a collection of traveling freelance teachers with a reputation for skepticism. They journeyed around the Greek region, but were frequently in Athens, Greece’s greatest city, and sometimes functioned as political representatives from their home towns. At the time they filled an important educational function. In the absence of any public schools, parents’ options were limited when it came to educating their children. The two common choices were for fathers to train their own sons in the family business, or to find tradesman nearby who would take on their son as an apprentice. Sophists offered a third alternative, which was particularly attractive for wealthy families. Sophists claimed to be able to teach anything and charging a fee for their services. They were particularly good at rhetoric and politics, which appealed to parents who wanted their sons to be civic leaders.

If the Sophists were merely teachers-for-hire, this would be nothing remarkable. The reality, though, is that much of their teaching was controversial and touched on important philosophical themes. First, like other Presocratic philosophers, they advocated a naturalistic world view in place of the traditional and older mythological world view. This served to undermined traditional moral and religious values of the children they were instructing. Second, many Sophists taught their students an arguing technique called anti-logic, which involved arguing both sides of a case as strongly as possible. For example, a book titled Twofold Arguments, written by an anonymous Sophist, compiles arguments pro and contra on ethical issues, such as moral goodness, honor, justice, and whether virtue can be taught. The result of teachings like these was that Sophists were accused of undermining the very notion of truth by making the weaker argument appear the stronger. Third, there was an ongoing debate among the Presocratic philosophers whether so-called facts about the world are simply matters of human convention or matters of nature—custom versus nature. The Sophists usually defended the “custom” position, especially in matters of ethics and political systems.

Because of these controversial components of their teaching, eventually the word “sophist” became a term of contempt for someone who reasons subtly but deceitfully. Among the many Sophists teaching throughout the Greek world at the time, the most renowned were Protagoras and Gorgias.

Protagoras: Relativism

Protagoras (c. 490–c. 420 BCE), the most famous of the Sophists, is remembered for his relativist statement that “man is the measure of all things.” Like Democritus, Protagoras was from the coastal city of Abdera (now in modern-day Greece), and may have even studied with the former. In Protagoras’ travels as a teacher, he spent several years in Athens, and legend has it that because of his irreligious teachings he was exiled from that city and his books were burned. An early philosopher describes Protagoras’s accomplishments, which succinctly embodies the questionable reputation of all the Sophists:

He was the first person who demanded payment of his pupils…. and who instituted contests of argument, and who armed the disputants with the weapon of sophism. It was also he who first left facts out of consideration, and fixed his arguments on words, and who was the originator of the present superficial and futile kinds of discussion. On this matter Timon says of him, “Protagoras, that slippery arguer, in disputatious contests fully skilled.” [Diogenes, Lives, “Protagoras”]

He authored books on many topics, from rhetoric to wrestling. Protagoras died, as one story relates, on a voyage to Sicily when the ship wrecked.

There are two philosophically important elements of Protagoras: his relativism and his religious agnosticism. His famous statement of relativism in its more complete form is “Man is the measure of all things: of existing things that they exist; of non-existing things that they do not exist.” His general point is that the truth of all judgments is relative to our human thinking; that is, human preference is the standard by which we judge everything. But this may be understood two different ways. On the one hand, it could mean that all judgments are relative to the individual: each person is the measure of all things. For example, my judgment that honey is sweet makes it true that honey is sweet. On the other hand, it could mean that all judgments are relative to our culture: human society is the measure of all things. For example, society’s assessment that honey is sweet makes it true that honey is sweet. While it’s not clear whether Protagoras had in mind individual or cultural relativism, he is nevertheless at the forefront of a long tradition of relativism that champions both of these types.

But perhaps the most significant part of his famous statement involves the second half, which maintains that humans are the ultimate standards “of existing things, that they exist; of non-existing things, that they do not exist.” This implies that his relativism is not just about how honey tastes to us, or even ethical matters such as the kinds of actions that we find good or bad. It also extends to truths about the physical world itself: whether or not the rock in front of me actually exists is also dependent upon human beings – either an individual perceiver or a social convention. We’ve already noted Xenophanes’ commitment to some form of relativism, but Protagoras’ position is more sweeping because it extends to the most fundamental judgments about what does or does not exist.

Concerning Protagoras’s religious agnosticism, this is expressed in a lone quotation that reportedly appeared as the opening statement in one of his books:

Concerning the gods, I am unable to know either that they exist or that they do not exist or what form they have. For there are many obstacles to knowledge: the obscurity of the matter and the brevity of human life. [DK]

Technically, he is not denying the existence of the gods, the position of atheism. Rather, he is denying the capacity to know anything about the gods whatsoever, as expressed in the very term “agnosticism” which literally means “no knowledge.

Gorgias: Skepticism

Gorgias (c. 483-375 BCE), the second most famous Sophist, is remembered in philosophy for his skeptical positions on ethics and knowledge. Born in the city of Leontini on the island of Sicily, Gorgias was a student of Empedocles and attracted attention when at around age 60 he went to Athens as a political ambassador where he delivered public lectures to much acclaim. He was the first to give unrehearsed lectures on any subject that someone in the crowd might suggest, in which he demonstrated his encyclopedic range of knowledge. With his reputation on the rise, he remained in Athens and accumulated students among the rich and powerful. In time he himself became quite wealthy and, prior to his death at over 100 years of age, he had a gold statue of his image placed in a temple.

Gorgias was foremost a teacher of rhetoric and argumentation, and did not aim to teach moral or political virtue. However, some of his writings, which were largely exercises in argumentation, flirted with skepticism by taking a seemingly absurd position and defending it with persuasive force. For example, one book, titled In Praise of Helen of Troy defends Helen’s acts of adultery, thereby conveying a kind of ethical skepticism. Today this might not strike us as being particularly controversial, but it might be like arguing for the view that Hitler was a really nice guy. Even if it was just a rhetorical exercise in argumentation, it crosses an important line of ethical protocol.

Even more dramatically, a book of his titled On Not Being argues for three absurd positions: that (1) nothing exists; (2) if anything exists, it cannot be known; and (3) if anything can be known, it cannot be communicated. While his book no longer survives, summaries of his main line of argumentation do survive, and they exhibit a similar kind of philosophical reasoning that we’ve seen in Parmenides. Regarding his first claim, that nothing exists, Gorgias argues as follows:

If what-is is eternal, it is unlimited, but if it is unlimited it is nowhere, and if it is nowhere it is not. So if what-is is eternal, it is not at all. Further, what-is cannot be generated either. For if it has come to be it did so either from a thing that is or from a thing that is not. But it has come to be neither from what-is (for if it is a thing that is, it has not come to be, but already is), nor from what-is-not (for what-is-not cannot generate anything, since what generates anything must of necessity share in existence). … It follows that nothing is. For if neither what-is is nor what-is-not nor both, and nothing aside from these is conceived of, nothing is. [Sextus Empiricus, Against the Mathematicians, 7.65 ff.]

According to the above reasoning, existence can only be of two types: it is either eternal or it is created. But eternal existence is impossible since it would be unlimited and, thus, exist nowhere. Further, created existence is impossible since nothing is there to create it. Therefore, nothing exists.

His next point is that if anything does exist, we can’t know it, as summarized here:

Things seen are the objects of sight, and things heard are the objects of hearing. We accept things as real when we see them without hearing them and vice versa. So we would have to accept things as real when we think about them without seeing or hearing them. But this would mean believing in things like a chariot racing on the sea. Therefore reality is not the object of thought, and cannot be comprehended by it. [Ibid]

According to the above, we have several ways of perceiving things, and each is its own authority, independent of others. For example, I hear a dog barking and I accept its reality without seeing it. However, with my mental faculty of conception I can perceive something impossible, like a chariot racing on the sea. Since this faculty of perception is its own authority, it undermines the reliability of all types of perception which conflict with it. It thus makes our knowledge of existence impossible.

Finally, he argues that if anything can be known, it cannot be communicated, which is summarized here:

Speech can never exactly represent perceptible things, since it is different from them, and perceptibles are apprehended each by the one kind of organ, speech by another. Therefore if anything exists and is comprehended, it is incommunicable. [Ibid]

Gorgias’s point in the above is that there is a big gap between the sensory mechanisms by which we perceive external things, and the mental mechanisms by which we communicate through speech. They are each in their own realms, and because of this our speech has no real connection with the things that we perceive. Thus, if anything can be known, it cannot be communicated.

H. CONCLUSION

It is appropriate that this chapter end with the skeptical views of the Sophists. The Presocratic philosophers before them showed a remarkable amount of creativity as they tried to offer rational explanations of the physical world around them. Thales and his countrymen attempted to arrive at the fundamental stuff from which all physical things are made, suggesting that it might be water, the unbounded, or air. Others tried to find the unifying forces behind all change, suggesting that it might be fire, mathematical relations, forces of love and strife, and Mind. While this kind of intellectual creativity is all well and good, there comes a point that a reality check is needed, and the Sophists provided just that. Just because a theory is interesting, that by itself doesn’t mean it’s correct. Just because an argument is well structured and looks compelling, that doesn’t mean that its conclusion is correct. There’s no better illustration of that than Gorgias’s arguments in On Not Being, which are every bit as compelling as Parmenides’ arguments for the One. Gorgias recognized, though, that his argument was just an act of mental gymnastics. For the Sophists, argumentation is aimed at persuading people, not necessarily at discovering truth. The skeptical message of the Sophists is that we need to view philosophical and religious theories with suspicion. We also need to recognize the power that well-crafted arguments can have on us, for both good and ill.

But the skepticism of the Sophists is not an end in itself. People have a built-in need to ask big questions like “where did everything come from,” and then offer far reaching answers to those questions. The next round of great philosophers – Socrates, Plato and Aristotle – offered some of the boldest and most influential views imaginable. All the while, though, the skepticism of the Sophists lurked in the shadows as a force that they had to reckon with.

Questions for Review

Please answer all of the following questions for review.

1. What was Thales’ reason for saying that water is the primary stuff of nature?

2. What was Anaximander’s reason for suggesting that the unbounded is the primary stuff?

3. What was Anaximenes’ reason for saying that air is the primary stuff?

4. What was Heraclitus’s point when he said that you can’t step into the same river twice?

5. According to Pythagoras, what role do numbers and ratios play in the larger scheme of reality?

6. What were Xenophanes’ views about anthropomorphism and pantheism?

7. Why, according to Parmenides, must the One have no parts?

8. Explain one of Zeno’s paradoxes.

9. According to Empedocles, how do the forces of Love and Strife affect the structure of the four elements?

10. Explain Anaxagoras’ view about the infinite divisibility of matter.

11. According to Atomism, what role do image-flakes play in perception?

12. What did Protagoras mean by “Man is the measure of all things”?

Questions for Analysis

Please select only one question for analysis from those below and answer it.

1. Different Milesian philosophers said that the primary stuff of nature was water, the unbounded, or air. Pick one of these and defend it against the other two.

2. Defend Pythagoras’s view that numbers underlie all reality.

3. Try to refute one of Zeno’s paradoxes.

4. Write a dialogue between Anaxagoras and Democritus about the infinite divisibility of matter.

5. Defend the Atomists’ assumption that materialism leads to determinism.

Works Cited

Quotations in this chapter designated by “DK” are adapted from various English translations of the Presocratic fragments, which in turn are based on original Greek source material compiled by Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz in Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Zurich: Weidmann, 1985). In some cases I have included the citations of the original Greek sources, particularly when they are from Plato, Aristotle, or some other prominent classical philosopher. Much of the biographical information on the Presocratics comes from Diogenes Laertius (3rd cn. BCE), The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, available various translations.

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CHAPTER 2: CLASSICAL GREEK PHILOSOPHY

A. Socrates

Socrates and the Sophists

The Socratic Dialectic Method

Wisdom and Self-Examination

Obedience to the State

B. Plato

Knowledge and the Forms

The Cave and the Divided Line

Soul: Dualism, Immortality, Three Parts, Virtues

Politics: Tradespeople, Guardians, Rulers

Art: Imitation, Education, Censorship

C. Aristotle

Logic: Syllogisms, Fallacies, Categories

Physics: Purpose, Natural Objects, Four Causes, Unmoved Mover

Metaphysics: Matter-Form, Substance-Accident, Potentiality-Actuality

Soul: Form of the Body and Three Types

Ethics: Desire-Regulating Virtues

Politics: Natural Rulers

Art: Imitation and Catharsis

D. Conclusion

Questions for Reflection

1. Suppose that you wanted to teach others an important truth. Are there any truths that would require you to first contradict and offend your listeners before you could make your point?

2. Are there any eternal truths, and, if so, where do they reside?

3. In what ways, if any, to our physical bodies enslave our minds?

4. Are there built-in purposes to all natural things?

5. Assume that you have no knowledge of religion. Does it make sense to say that our minds can survive the death of our bodies?

With an ever-growing number of philosophers coming on the scene, the Greek-speaking territories were lively intellectual environments, particularly the city of Athens which was becoming the cultural center of the area. Within this philosophically energetic community, Greece’s three great philosophers emerged: Socrates, his student Plato, and his student Aristotle. At first each of these was just one among many active philosophers, but soon the substance and sophistication of their views made them towering figures, and they established schools of students who perpetuated their views.

A. SOCRATES

Socrates (469–399 BCE) is famous for his dialectical method of questioning people. Born and raised in Athens, he was from a poor family, his father a stone mason and his mother a midwife. Socrates married and fathered three sons with his wife, a much younger and most difficult woman. It is not known by what method he supported himself and his family, although tradition has it that he followed in his father’s footsteps as a stone mason. In any event, he did not have much money, and spent his time dialoging with the young and old on moral issues—often in a very confrontational way. In market places, on the streets, at people’s homes: wherever people would listen, he’d engage them in discussion. His personal appearance was not particularly inviting; he dressed like a bum, had a snubbed-nose, cloudy-eyes, and a large mouth. Socrates lived in Athens during a critical time in its history. While the city was at the height of its cultural glory, it was besieged in a war lasting almost 30 years with the neighboring Greek city-state of Sparta. At its lowest point, 150,000 Athenean citizens encamped behind the city walls, fending off attacks.  At different times Socrates himself served in the Athenian army. Ultimately, Athens suffered a humiliating defeat, and in an effort to stabilize society, there was no room for a social troublemaker like Socrates who challenged Athenian traditions. He was charged with the crime of atheism and corrupting the youth, and when alienating himself further during his trial, he was found guilty and executed.

In spite of Socrates’ historic fame, this is pretty much all that we know for certain about him—and even some of this might be folklore. Part of the problem is that he wrote nothing himself, and what we do know of his life and teaching comes largely from the writings of Plato, and to a lesser extent those of another student of his named Xenophon. In both cases these authors composed their works in a literary style that mixed historical facts about Socrates with fiction. This is most evident with Plato who composed his philosophical works in dialogue form, modeled after Greek plays of the time; in these he honors Socrates by making him the lead character. In these dialogues Socrates moves among a strange cast of politicians, aristocrats, and Sophists—most also based on historical figures. On the one hand, Plato deserves the highest praise for being the first to write in the form of a philosophical dialogue, thereby heightening the drama of a potentially tedious subject. On the other hand, this makes it almost impossible to know where the Socrates of history stops, and the Socrates of Plato’s imagination begins. Many scholars believe that Plato’s earlier dialogues reveal a bit more of the true Socrates than his later ones. Thus, in our study of Socrates here we draw out features of Socrates’ teaching from a couple of these early sources, most notably Plato’s Apology, which purports to be an account of the defense that Socrates gave at his trial.

Socrates and the Sophists

Socrates trial was held in Athens’ central market place, where spectators were shaded from the hot sun by cloth canopies. A jury of 501 citizens was chosen at random, and Socrates’ defense speech was timed by a water clock. As noted, Socrates was accused of atheism and corrupting the youth, both of which are linked to his assumed reputation as a Sophist. For decades Socrates had irritated influential Athenians with his endless haranguing, and, from their perspective, he was an annoying Sophist who held unconventional views about religion and morality and used linguistic tricks to trap opponents. Thus, according to the charges against him, Socrates allegedly “inquired into things below the earth and in the sky and made the weaker argument appear the stronger.” Socrates was such a prominent debater and teacher within Athens that he was depicted in a play by Aristophanes called The Clouds. In one scene Socrates is sitting in a basket above the ground suspended by a rope. A visitor calls to him, and Socrates gruffly responds:

Socrates: Mortal, what do you want with me?

Visitor: First, what are you doing up there? Tell me, I beg you.

Socrates: I am navigating the air and contemplating the sun.

Visitor: So it’s not on the solid ground, but from the height of your basket, that you look down on the gods, if indeed....

Socrates: I have to suspend my brain and mingle the subtle essence of my mind with the air, which is of similar nature, in order to clearly penetrate the things of heaven. I would have discovered nothing had I remained on the ground to consider from below the things that are above. For the earth by its force attracts the sap of the mind to itself. . . . So why have you come?

Visitor: I want to learn how to argue. I have borrowed money, and my merciless creditors do not leave me a moment’s peace. . . . I swear to the gods that I am ready to pay any fee you may name.

Socrates: By which gods will you swear? To begin with, the gods are not coins that have any value with us here. [Aristophanes, The Clouds]

In this one short exchange we find the essence of both accusations against Socrates. At his trial he denied that he was a Sophist since Sophists charged fees for their teaching, and Socrates taught for free. He also denied ever philosophizing about unconventional religious matters as depicted in Aristophanes’ play.

Granted, then, Socrates was not a money-charging Sophist like Protagoras or Gorgias. But what exactly was he doing? At his trial he explained that he was on a moral quest to discover wisdom. It all started, he explained, when a young man was interested in finding out who the wisest person alive might be, and went to a temple at the nearby town of Delphi and asked the Prophetess there if she knew. She replied that was Socrates. When Socrates got word of what the Prophetess said, he attempted to prove her wrong by finding someone wiser. So, he approached famous politicians, poets and tradespeople, but he discovered that none could live up to their reputations. The politicians weren’t as wise as they claimed; the poets didn’t know the meaning of their own poems, and were simply mouthpieces for the gods; the tradespeople thought they knew everything, just because they were good at their specific crafts. Socrates explains what he learned from this exercise:

I asked myself on behalf of the oracle, whether I would like to be as I was, neither having their knowledge nor their ignorance, or like them in both. I answered to myself and to the oracle that I was better off as I was. . . . God only is wise; and by his answer he intends to show that the wisdom of men is worth little or nothing; he is not speaking of Socrates, he is only using my name by way of illustration, as if he said, He, O men, is the wisest, who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing. [Plato, Apology]

Thus, on the plus side, through this exercise he discovered that wisdom consists of recognizing that one knows nothing. On the minus side, through his critical inquiries he antagonized virtually everyone in town.

The Socratic Dialectic Method

Socrates’ method of teaching involved his dialoguing with people in a rather unique way; the technical term for this is dialectics, or more specifically, the Socratic dialectic method. There are three features of this method. First, he would typically begin by asking his student or debating opponent a question like “What is justice?” or “What is religious piety?” When the student would answer, Socrates would invariably find the response to be trivial, unclear, or just plain wrong. Second, he would refute the student’s answer by exposing absurdities with it. The refutation would usually begin slowly and subtly by getting the student to agree to a seemingly innocent point. Then Socrates would make the student draw out the implications of the innocent statement, which would end up contradicting the student’s original answer. Third, throughout the exchange, Socrates would typically heap insincere praise upon the student, such as by saying “That’s an excellent answer!” or “Good lord I think you’ve solved the problem!” This aspect of the method is called Socratic Irony. All in all, the dialectic process would be a humbling one for Socrates’ students, and even a humiliating one for his opponents who were rich and powerful community leaders.

There’s no better illustration of Socratic dialectics in action than at his trial when, quite strangely, Socrates begins interrogating his accuser. The opponent in question, a religious fanatic named Meletus, is the one who officially charged Socrates with atheism and corrupting the youth. Socrates then uses the dialectic method against Meletus to refute both of these charges. In the following, Socrates challenges the accusation that he corrupts the youth. He begins by asking Meletus the basic question “who improves the youth?”

Socrates: Tell the judges who is the improver of the youth; for you must know, since you have taken the pains to discover their corrupter . . .

Meletus: The laws.

Socrates: But that, my good sir, is not my meaning. I want to know who the person is, who, in the first place, knows the laws.

Meletus: The judges, Socrates, who are present in court.

Socrates: Do you mean to say, Meletus, that they are able to instruct and improve youth?

Meletus: Certainly they are.

Socrates: All of them, or some only and not others?

Meletus: All of them.

Socrates: By the goddess Hera, that is good news! There are plenty of improvers, then. And what do you say of the audience: do they improve them?

Meletus: Yes, they do.

Socrates: And the senators?

Meletus: Yes, the senators improve them.

Socrates: But perhaps the members of the assembly corrupt them, or do they too improve them?

Meletus: They improve them.

Socrates: Then every Athenian improves and elevates them, all with the exception of myself, and I alone am their corrupter. Is that what you affirm?

Meletus: That is what I stoutly affirm. [Ibid]

The aim of the entire exchange above was to corner Meletus into asserting the rather extreme view that everyone in Athens improves the youth while Socrates alone corrupts them.  Note the ironic statement above where Socrates says to Meletus “By the goddess Hera, that is good news!” Socrates then goes into refutation mode by having Meletus agree to a very simple question: “Does only one person harm horses while everyone else does them good?” Socrates’ point is that in no area of life is there only one person who harms while everyone else does good: not with horses, or dogs, or whatever. This contradicts, and thus refutes, Meletus’ earlier claim that everyone in Athens improves the youth while Socrates alone corrupts them.

Wisdom and Self-Examination

While Socrates may have won this particular logical battle with Meletus, he did so with argument tactics that quite likely reinforced jurors’ suspicions that he was a troublesome Sophist. Indeed, the majority of the jury found him guilty. At that point in the proceedings, Socrates could suggest alternative punishments to the overly-zealous death sentence that Meletus was requesting for him. There was a standard list of lesser punishments that they were expecting Socrates to select from, such as paying a substantial fine, or promising to stop making trouble, or imprisonment, or permanently relocating to another city. The alternative punishment that Socrates recommended to the jury is about as bizarre as one can imagine: he suggested that he should receive a reward in view of the positive impact that his actions had on society. Chief among his accomplishments, he argued, was persuading people to seek virtue and wisdom before pursuing private interests. The specific reward that Socrates recommended was commonly reserved for visiting political dignitaries and Olympic champions, and, by our standards today, it would be like throwing someone a parade or awarding someone a medal of honor.

In addition to recommending a reward, Socrates explained why he did not request one of the standard alternative punishments, or simply staying quiet from thereon. He couldn’t hold his tongue, he explained, because it would be disobeying a command by God: “the greatest human good is daily discussion about virtue (and of those other things about which you hear me examining myself and others), and that the unexamined life is not worth living.” In this quotation we find Socrates’ most famous statement, that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” In a nutshell, true wisdom consists of continually examining one’s moral values through discussion with others. While at the close of his defense Socrates did offer to pay a fine, it was too late. He sufficiently antagonized the jury and they gave him the death sentence.

Such is the picture that Plato gives us of Socrates at his trial: a man of wisdom devoted to his moral mission, come what may. But Xenophon, another of Socrates’ students adds perhaps a more human side to the story. Socrates was 70 years old by this time, and prior to the trial, according to Xenophon, Socrates told others that a death sentence at his age might not be such a bad thing:

If my age is still to be prolonged, I know that I cannot escape paying the penalty of old age, in increasing dimness of sight and dullness of hearing. . . . It may be, you know, that God out of his great kindness is intervening in my behalf to suffer me to close my life in the ripeness of age, and by the gentlest of deaths.  [Xenophon, Apology]

Obedience to the State

The drama of Socrates’ fate did not end with his trial. During a month’s delay before his scheduled execution, he continued to greet and converse with friends while in prison. In another early dialogue of Plato’s called Crito, we find Socrates in prison with a wealthy student of his named Crito. Crito had bribed the prison guard to allow Socrates the chance to escape, and Socrates explains that he is morally obligated to follow the decision of the jury. The central issue that he debates with Crito concerns the level of obedience that we have to the state. Although Socrates was undoubtedly a social rebel during his life, on the issue of political obedience he takes a very conservative position. The dialogue opens with Crito giving Socrates several of arguments for why he should escape. Crito himself does not want to lose Socrates as a friend, and he fears that people will think poorly of him for not having helped Socrates. Further, Crito argues that by remaining in prison Socrates is conceding defeat to his enemies within Athens, and is also deserting his Children. Socrates rejects all of Crito’s reasons, since they merely express the opinions and values of the masses. In the end, he argues, the only opinion that should matter is that of the expert, the one who is skilled in the particular subject of political obedience. That expert, according to Socrates, is none other than the Laws of Athens themselves.

Continuing in this dialogue, Socrates imagines that the Laws of Athens took on human form so Socrates and the Laws could debate the issue. The Laws then offer two specific arguments for political obedience. The first is a debt of gratitude argument that focuses on the obligation that we have to our parents for rearing and educating us. Since society also performs the same function of nurturing and educating us, we owe society the same obedience that we do our parents. In the words of the Laws, “in disobeying us he is disobeying his parents” (Crito). The second is a social contract argument that focuses on an agreement that we make with a city when we live in it. At any time we could pick up and leave our city of residence, but by choosing to remain there we are implicitly agreeing to abide by the laws of the city. By staying, each person “has entered into an implied contract that he will do as we command him” (ibid). For both of these reasons, then, Socrates is duty-bound to obey the laws, and thus must accept the verdict of the jury which was acting under the authority of the Law of Athens.

Thus, Socrates remained in prison within the company of Crito and other devoted students while he was executed by drinking a poison from the hemlock plant, which results in a death through paralysis of the central nervous system. In the following, Plato provides a moving description of Socrates’ death:

Raising the cup to his lips, quite readily and cheerfully he drank off the poison. . . . The man who gave him the poison now and then looked at his feet and legs; after a while he pressed his foot hard, and asked him if he could feel; Socrates said “No.” . . . [The man] said, “When the poison reaches the heart, that will be the end.” He was beginning to grow cold about the waist, when he uncovered his face, for he had covered himself up, and said--they were his last words--he said: “Crito, I owe a chicken to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?” Crito said, “The debt shall be paid; is there anything else?” There was no answer to this question; but in a minute or two a movement was heard, and the attendants uncovered him. His eyes were set, and Crito closed his eyes and mouth. Such was the end of our friend, concerning whom I may truly say, that of all the men of his time whom I have known, he was the wisest and justest and best. [Plato, Phaedo]

The whole episode was traumatic for all of Socrates’ followers, and many, such as Plato, committed themselves to carrying on the vision of philosophy that Socrates established.

B. PLATO

The focus of Plato’s philosophy is his view that reality is located in a spirit-realm containing perfect models of objects and concepts that he calls Forms. Born into one of the oldest, wealthiest and most influential families in Athens, the man we know historically as “Plato” (428–348 BCE) was at birth named Aristocles, after his grandfather. His nickname, Plato, meaning “broad,” could possibly have come from his wrestling-trained physique or style. At first Plato seemed destined to become a politician since he had several family members who were prominent public figures. In particular, a cousin and uncle, along with others known as the “Thirty Tyrants,” became self-appointed dictators after overthrowing the government at Athens and they invited Plato to join them. Once seeing their unethical and violent practices, however, Plato refused. The next year they were deposed. After the execution of his beloved teacher Socrates, Plato left Athens, traveling for a number of years through Egypt and Italy, studying philosophy. Determined to pass on the teachings of Socrates that had so inspired his own life, in 387 BCE Plato returned to Athens, acquired a house and gardens, and opened a school of philosophy and science, with classes held in a gymnasium. The school later became known as the Academy and is thought to have been the first university—which continued in operation for 900 years when finally shut down by a Roman emperor in 529 CE. While Plato was certainly the centerpiece of the Academy, he fostered an open range of critical inquiry, and there was no official list of Platonic doctrine that students were required to adopt. It was at the Academy that Plato spent the rest of his life teaching and writing, with the exception of two trips to Sicily where he hoped to establish a perfect society. Both visits ended disastrously, and on the second he was held captive and escaped only with the help of some friends.

We already noted that Plato wrote his philosophy in the form of dialogues with Socrates as the main spokesperson. In view of the fact that only scattered sentences of the Presocratic philosophers have come down to us, the number of surviving writings that we have of Plato is remarkable—around 25 dialogues topping 1,500 total pages in modern printed editions. Scholars believe that Plato’s own philosophical views are best represented in his later dialogues, where, again, they are presented by the Socrates character. One of the longest and most famous dialogues expressing Plato’s views is The Republic; while it focuses particularly on the notions of political justice and the perfect society, it touches on virtually every component of Plato’s thought.

Knowledge and the Forms

The starting point for Plato’s philosophy is a distinction that he frequently makes between knowledge and opinion. To the extent that we are all interested in learning new things, we certainly would prefer to know the truth of something, rather than just have an opinion about it. Plato was especially turned off by the relativism of the Sophists, as expressed in Protagoras’s view that “Man is the measure of all things,” and this set him on a quest for a firm foundation of knowledge. Many of the ideas we have are fluctuating, but, he argues, these are “a matter of opinion, and not as a matter of knowledge” (Republic, Bk. 5). Occasionally, however, we see absolute and eternal truths like justice and beauty for what they really are, and this is genuine knowledge. The main points of difference between knowledge and opinion are that opinion is changeable, it may be true or it may be false, it is not backed by good reasoning, and it is the result of mere persuasion. By contrast, knowledge is enduring, it is always true, it is backed by good reasoning, and is the result of instruction.

Thus, Plato had an especially optimistic conception of knowledge, and he hoped to reject the opinionated relativism of the Sophists. But there’s something even more dramatic in Plato’s view of knowledge that’s reflected in his statement that “those who see the absolute and eternal and immutable may be said to know” (ibid). That is, there is an eternal reality that underlies genuine knowledge; that reality is the realm of the Forms. Think of the Forms like this. Down here on earth, everything is imperfect and subject to decay and destruction. There are, for example, lots of tables, but each one is flawed in some way. However, in a higher spirit-like realm there are perfect versions of all of these things—or Forms as Plato calls them. There are perfect Forms of tableness, perfect Forms of mathematics, perfect Forms of moral concepts. Everything down here on Earth is just a cheap copy of the perfect Forms, and it takes a special act of the intellect to rise above this frail world of appearances into the true realm of knowledge in the Forms. A story relates that once Plato was lecturing about the Forms and using nouns like “tableness” and “cupness” to refer to them. A critic interrupted him and said, "I see a table and a cup, but I see no tableness or cupness." Plato responded, "That is understandable since you have eyes by which you can contemplate a cup and a table, but you don’t have intellect by which you can see tableness and cupness."

There are four key features of his theory of the Forms. First, the Forms are immaterial: they are non physical spirit-like entities that, for Plato, exist somewhere in the center of the universe. The universe, then, has two tiers containing a lower physical level of ordinary things, and a higher spirit level of the Forms that contains a vast number of perfect abstract objects. Second, particular objects in the physical realm participate in the Forms and are what they are by virtue of this participation. Socrates was a just person because he participated in the form justice. A billiard ball is well-made if it participates in the perfect from of sphericalness. Conversely, when things in the world are defective, it’s because they fail to participate in the perfect Forms, such as an unjust person or a lop-sided billiard ball. Third, there is a highest form which is that of perfect goodness, which Plato simply calls the Good. All good things here on earth participate in the Good, whether it’s a good person or a good billiard ball. Similarly, all of the other Forms such as justice or sphericalness participate in the Good: all Forms are perfect, and they get their perfection by participating in the Good itself.

Fourth, knowledge of the Forms is acquired through intuitive recollection. We obviously can’t travel up to the realm of the Forms and experience them directly. Plato explains that we remember them from a previous life when we had a more direct experience of them. We don’t necessarily recall each form one at a time, but a single recollection may unleash a flood of knowledge about the Forms:

The soul, as being immortal, and having been born again many times, and having seen all things that exist, whether in this world or in the world below, has knowledge of them all. It is no wonder that it should be able to call to remembrance all that it ever knew about virtue, and about everything. For, all nature is similar, and the soul has learned all things. Thus, there is no difficulty in the soul drawing out and learning all things from a single recollection, so long as a person is strenuous and does not faint. All inquiry and all learning is simply recollection. [Meno, 81 c-d]

Strictly speaking, then, knowledge of the Forms can neither be taught nor learned. No philosopher, not even Socrates, can “teach” someone knowledge of the Forms. The best that a teacher can do is help that person recollect the knowledge he had of the Forms in a previous life. Plato boldly illustrates this in one of his dialogues where the Socrates character helps an uneducated slave boy solve a complex mathematical puzzle. The puzzle is how one might double the area of a square. Through a series of probing questions posed by the Socrates character, the boy arrives at a solution (i.e., draw a second square around the first such that the midpoints on the sides of the second touch the corners of the first). This shows that everyone has access to knowledge of the Forms, and it just takes the right teacher to draw this knowledge out of us.

Plato’s notion of the Forms was probably inspired by mathematics. When we look at numbers and mathematical relations, such as 1+1=2, they seem to be timeless concepts that never change, and apply everywhere in the universe. Humans do not invent numbers, and humans cannot alter them. The eternal and unchanging character of mathematical relations, then, is explained by the fact that they are perfect and unchanging Forms. For Plato, the manner in which we gain mathematical knowledge is a model for all knowledge.

Sometimes Plato simply assumes the existence of the Forms, and other times he offers arguments for their existence, two of which are especially important. The first is an argument for the Forms based on knowledge. As we’ve seen, Plato draws a basic distinction between knowledge and opinion: knowledge is infallible and unchanging, opinion is fallible and changing. Genuine knowledge must be grounded in some source that is enduring and unchanging, and those are the Forms. Laid out more formally, the argument is this:

1. Knowledge is enduring and true.

2. This knowledge cannot be about the ever-changing world revealed through the senses.

3. Therefore, it must be about another world, one that endures, which is the world of the Forms.

The second argument for the Forms is based on general names that we use when referring to a collection of things. For example, there are many tables, but we use a single term to refer to them all, and that single term stands for the Form of the table. Plato makes this point here:

We are in the habit of positing a single Form for each set of many things to which we give the same name. . . . Let us take any common example: there are beds and tables in the world—plenty of them. . . . But there are only two Forms of them, one the idea of a bed, the other of a table. . . . And the maker of either of them makes a bed or he makes a table for our use, in accordance with the Form. That is our way of speaking in this and similar situations. But no artificer makes the ideas themselves:  how could  he? [Republic 10, 596]

The central point of the argument is that if there is a set of things all of which go by the same general name (e.g., table), then there is a Form for that set.

The Cave and the Divided Line

In the Republic, Plato uses two analogies to illustrate the various levels of reality. First is his famous allegory of the cave. Picture a group of people imprisoned in a subterranean cavern, which opens to the daylight by a long, wide passage. They are chained with their backs to a fire looking at shadows thrown by fire onto the wall in front of them—shadows of people and other figures that pass behind them. These people represent the condition of those who see nothing but the shadows of realities in the lower physical realm. If one of these prisoners should be freed from his chains, turns around and walk towards the light, at first he would be dazzled by the glare and unable to see clearly, but eventually he would realize that what he previously took for realities were nonentities. If he were brought up out of the cave into the light of day, he would soon be aware of the real objects and know that what he had previously beheld in the cave were only shadows, illusions.  Plato writes,

He will need to grow accustomed to the sight of the upper world. And first he will see the shadows best, next the reflections of men and other objects in the water, and then the objects themselves. Then he will gaze upon the light of the moon and the stars and the glittery heaven; he will see the sky and the stars by night better than the sun or the light of the sun by day. Last of all, he will be able to see the sun, and not mere reflections of it in the water, but he will see it in his own proper place. [Republic, 7]

Each discovery represents a new stage in the pursuit of wisdom; each stage is also painful since it requires staring at brightly illumined objects. Remembering his previous state in the cave, he would pity those who were still within it. But when returning to explain the truth of things to them, they wouldn’t take too kindly to him. Indeed, the unenlightened may even want to kill him as they did Socrates. All this represents the education of the philosopher: ascending out of the cave with great difficulty, gradually adjusting one’s eyes to the light, and ultimately seeing objects as they are in themselves. It is no surprise, Plato says, that “those who attain to this heavenly vision are unwilling to descend again to human affairs.” The allegory of the cave is rich in metaphor, and, in addition to explaining the realm of the forms, it says a lot about the general quest for human knowledge. Ignorance entraps us, and much of what we believe in is unreal. Further, when we finally attempt to escape from our ignorance and achieve true knowledge, the task is a very difficult one.

Plato’s second analogy, that of the divided line, is a bit more detailed. Imagine that we took a 20 inch line and broke it into two pieces, one representing the physical realm and the other representing the realm of the Forms. Suppose, then, we broke each of these in half. Here are the four segments and what they represent:

Visible physical world of things (four inches total)

Segment 1 (one inch): lower physical reality (shadows)

Segment 2 (three inches): higher physical reality (physical objects)

Intelligible spiritual world of the Forms (16 inches total)

Segment 3 (four inches): lower Forms (e.g., Justice)

Segment 4 (twelve inches): higher Forms (e.g., the Good)

The varying lengths of the line segments represent the varying degrees of truth in the respective levels of the universe. Plato believes that the visible world is less real than the intelligible world of the Forms; so, the line segments pertaining to the visible world are shorter than those of the intelligible world. He describes here the two components of the visible world:

Compare the subdivisions in respect of their clearness and want of clearness, and you will find that the first segment in the visible realm consists of images. And by images I mean, in the first place, shadows, and in the second place, reflections in water and in solid, smooth and polished bodies and the like. . . . Imagine, now, the second segment, of which this is only the resemblance, to include the animals which we see, and everything that grows or is made. . . . Would you not admit that both the segments of this division have different degrees of truth, and that the copy is to the original as the sphere of opinion is to the sphere of knowledge? [Republic, 6]

Segment 1 – the lowest level of reality – consists merely of shadows and reflections of things. For example, when we look at the shadow of a table, the shadow is only a distorted image of the real table. The real table itself is a physical thing that is part of segment 2. Just as shadows are cheap copies of physical objects, so too is the entire visible world a cheap copy of the intelligible world.

Moving on to segments 3 and 4, like the visible world, the intelligible world also has a lower and higher level of reality. The lower level – line segment 3 – consists of scientific knowledge such as geometry and mathematics. Suppose, for example, that an engineer sketched out the specifications for a basic table. The blueprint would include geometrical shapes, calculations about stress points, and other mathematical components. As Plato sees it, the engineer has his vision set on the realm of the Forms, and not on visible physical objects. Most moral Forms, such as Justice, are also in segment 3 and, like the engineer, the moral person must also set his vision on that realm. Segment 4 of the divided line represents the highest level of reality: the Good. We all seek the Good and, like the sun, the Good illuminates everything that we know.

At the close of his discussion, Plato explains that there are four mental faculties that enable us to grasp the four levels of reality as represented by the divided line:

Corresponding to the four divisions, let there be four faculties in the soul—reason answering to the highest, understanding to the second, belief to the third, and imagination of shadows to the last—and let there be a scale of them, and let us suppose that the several faculties have clearness in the same degree that their objects have truth. [Republic, 6]

The weakest mental faculty – imagination – is responsible for detecting the images of shadows and reflections. The next faculty – belief– allows us to detect physical objects. For Plato, the exercise of these two faculties amount to nothing better than opinion, such as my opinion that I can sit on the chair in front of me without it collapsing. By contrast, knowledge is restricted to the domain of the Forms. Knowledge of the lower Forms is understanding, and knowledge of the Good is reason.

Soul: Dualism, Immortality, Three Parts, Virtues

The scientific study of psychology emerged rather recently, at the close of the nineteenth-century. However, philosophers from Presocratic times onward have speculated about the nature of the human mind—or soul as it was called in Greek times. Plato’s account of the soul is undoubtedly one of the most influential in the history of philosophy, and its impact is felt even today. There are three components to his theory: (1) body-soul dualism, (2) the immortality of the soul, (3) the three-part division of the soul, and (4) the cardinal virtues.

Let’s begin with his body-soul dualism. We’ve already seen that Plato’s theory of the Forms depicts the universe as having two different levels of reality: the physical realm and the realm of the Forms. This is a type of matter-spirit dualism, where the material component of the universe is the changing physical realm of appearances, and the spirit realm is the unchanging realm of the Forms. When turning to his analysis of human nature, we see a parallel kind of dualism: we are made of both a physical body and an immaterial spirit. The soul, though, is the vastly superior component within us. Our bodies and all the desires that they produce are obstacles to knowledge and immortality. In a sense, the body entombs the soul, and death releases the soul from bodily limitations. In the following, Plato graphically describes the ways in which our bodies cause us troubles:

While we are in the body, and while the soul is infected with the evils of the body, our desire will not be satisfied. And our desire is of the truth. For the body is a source of endless trouble to us because of the mere requirement of food. It is liable also to diseases which overtake and hinder us in the search after true being. It fills us full of loves, lusts, fears, fancies of all kinds, endless foolishness, and in fact, as people say, it takes away from us the power of thinking at all. What is the source of come wars, and fighting, and factions? The body and the lusts of the body. Wars are occasioned by the love of money, and money has to be acquired for the sake and in the service of the body. [Phaedo]

Lusts of the body, he explains are the source of so many of life’s woes, such as wars which are driven by a desire for wealth. Our bodies also distract us from inquiring after truth, and, ultimately, we will attain true wisdom only after death when we shed our bodies:

Experience shows that if we would have pure knowledge of anything, we must leave the body. The soul by herself must observe things in themselves. Then we shall attain the wisdom which we desire, and of which we say that we are lovers, not while we live, but after death. If while in company with the body, the soul cannot have pure knowledge, one of two things follows: either knowledge cannot be attained at all, or, if at all, only after death. For then, and not till then, the soul will be parted from the body and exist in herself alone. [Ibid]

The best we can do now, he argues, is resist the cravings of the body, keep ourselves pure, and look forward to the time when death releases us and we can commune with pure truth. We will then be able to see “the clear light everywhere, which is no other than the light of truth” (ibid).

The second aspect of Plato’s theory of the soul is that it is immortal. Unlike our bodies which will die and decay, the soul, Plato believes, is immortal, and he offers various arguments in proof of this. One argument for the soul’s immortality is from the unchanging Forms: the soul resembles the unchanging Forms and, thus, like the Forms themselves the soul is immortal. He makes this argument here:

When the soul and the body are united, then nature orders the soul to rule and govern, and the body to obey and serve. Now consider which of these two functions is more like the divine, and which is more like the mortal. Doesn’t the divine appear to you to be that which naturally orders and rules, and the mortal that which is subject and servant? . . . The soul is in the very likeness of the divine, and immortal, and intelligible, and uniform, and indissoluble, and unchangeable. By contrast, the body is in the very likeness of the human, and mortal, and unintelligible, and multiform, and dissoluble, and changeable. . . . If this is true, then isn’t the body susceptible to speedy dissolution, and is not the soul almost or altogether indissoluble? [Ibid]

Laid out more formally, the argument is this:

1. Material things come into existence and go out of existence.

2. Forms such as beauty and goodness are eternal and unchanging.

3. The soul is more like the Forms than it is like material things

4. Therefore, the soul is eternal and unchanging.

A second argument that Plato offers for the immortality of the soul is from self-motion. While the argument is a little tricky, it begins with a common assumption of his day that the human body does not move itself, but instead is prodded into motion by the soul. Sometimes our bodies might move from outside forces, such as when I ride in a car. However, the most important bodily movements that I make are produced inside of me by my soul, without any interference from outside forces. When my soul moves my body, then, my soul itself is a self-moving thing: it triggers bodily motion all by itself. Plato continues arguing that there is something special about self-motion: since it is uncreated by any outside force, it must be immortal. It is immortal in the sense that it has no beginning and cannot be destroyed. He states this here:

Only the self-moving, never leaving self, never ceases to move, and is the fountain and beginning of motion to all that moves besides. Now, the beginning is uncreated, for that which is created has a beginning; but the beginning is created of nothing, for if it were created by something, then the created would not come from a beginning. But if it is uncreated, it must also be indestructible; for if beginning were destroyed, there could be no beginning out of anything, nor anything out of a beginning; and all things must have a beginning. [Phaedrus, 245d-e]

Since self-moving things are eternal, and the soul is self-moving, the soul then must be eternal. He draws this conclusion here:

But if the self-moving is proved to be immortal, he who affirms that self-motion is the very idea and essence of the soul will not be put to confusion. For the body which is moved from without lacks a soul. However, that which is moved from within has a soul, for such is the nature of the soul. If this is true, must not the soul be the self-moving, and therefore of necessity uncreated and immortal? [Ibid]

Presented more formally, the argument for the immortality of the soul from self-motion is this:

1. If something is self-moving it is immortal, since self-motion is uncreated and that which is uncreated is immortal.

2. The soul is self-moving, since it moves the body from within (rather than the body moving from an outside force).

3. Therefore, the soul is immortal.

The third element of Plato’s theory of the soul is that the soul has three parts to it. We regularly see cartoon images of a man trying to make a decision, such as eating a high calorie slice of cake. On one shoulder a tiny devil says “Go on, eat it, it will make you happy!” On the other shoulder a tiny angel says “Don’t eat it, it will make you gain weight!” The man then has to judge between the two. This parallels Plato’s account of the three parts of the soul: a bad part, a good part, and a third part that controls the impact of the first two. Using an analogy, he explains that the three parts are related to each other like a charioteer driving two horses, one of a good and the other of a bad nature. First, he describes the good horse:

The right-hand horse is upright and cleanly made. He has a lofty neck and a curved nose; his color is white, and his eyes dark; he is a lover of honor and modesty and temperance, and the follower of true glory; he needs no sting of the whip, but is guided by word and gentle warning only. [Ibid]

The good horse is a high-energy creature that is motivated by honor and other noble goals, and anxious for victory. The problem, though, is that if it had its way it would become arrogant and hot-tempered. Next, the bad horse:

The other is a crooked and lumbering animal, put together every which way. He has a short thick neck; he is flat-faced and of a dark color, with grey and blood-shot eyes. He is the companion of insolence and pride, shag-eared and deaf, barely yielding to whip and spur. [Ibid]

The bad horse is motivated by pleasures of every sort. If the bad horse always got its way, the results would be disastrous and lead to over-indulgence in every area of desire. The job of the charioteer is to be in charge of both horses, and make reasoned judgments about which horse to hold back at which time. He describes the role of the charioteer in a situation in which the charioteer sees a woman that he is in love with. The bad horse tries to jump on the woman, while the good horse tries to ignore her. The charioteer decides to behave himself, so he pulls back the reins forcing both horses into submission. At a later time, though, the charioteer decides to romance the woman, and he controls the horses differently.

The fourth and final aspect of Plato’s theory of the soul involves what are now called the four cardinal virtues. This draws directly on his theory of the three-part division of the soul. The charioteer analogy describes how the each part of the soul each play a role when making difficult choices. However, for Plato, there’s an important step we need to take to assure that the whole chariot will always run smoothly. We need to develop good habits that keep each aspect of the soul in line. These good habits are virtuous character traits that we are taught when young and continue to develop as we mature in life. Specifically, the four cardinal virtues are temperance, courage, wisdom, and justice. Temperance restrains the bad horse. It has us control our basic desires and natural impulses towards food, lust, and any other pleasurable drive that we might have. Courage restrains the noble horse, and it helps control the heroic parts of our personalities. We don’t want to thoughtlessly rush into danger when trying to rescue someone, or act arrogant about how courageous we are. Wisdom guides the charioteer, and helps the rational part of our soul make delicate judgment about right way to live. Finally justice helps you integrate all three parts of our souls personality—the bad horse, the noble horse, and the charioteer—so that each part performs precisely as it should in the right situation. The type of justice he describes here is for the proper functioning of the individual person. In his political philosophy, though, he describes the broader notion of justice that involves society as a whole. For Plato, the three parts of our soul are so intertwined that the four cardinal virtues are a package deal: if you have one virtue you also have the others, and if you lack one you also lack the others.

Politics: Tradespeople, Guardians, Rulers

Plato’s Republic is one of history’s great works of political philosophy, describing a perfect society that is ruled by a philosopher who has knowledge of the Forms. The work opens with an attack on a common skeptical view of social justice, namely that justice is merely a convention created by those in power and, essentially, that might makes right. This is precisely the kind of relativist view of justice held by Sophists; for them there is no absolute or independent standard of justice and, to the extent that “man is the measure of all things,” the person in power is the one who creates the standard of justice of the day. Plato opposes this, and instead argues that there is an ideal conception of justice—a form of justice—that is eternal and unchanging, and is the standard for societies to follow.

If justice isn’t simply a matter of might making right, what then is it? For Plato justice is the harmonious relation between the parts of the community where each person fulfills his or her own role. He encapsulates this with the simple definition that justice is "each doing his own." All parts of society must work together like all the parts of a giant human being. There is a political body in which each part performs its own critical task. Plato argues that there are three main parts of society that parallel the three parts of the individual human soul. First, there are trades-people—farmers, carpenters, clothiers, merchants—who provide for society’s basic needs. This part of society is the lowest and corresponds with the bad horse that is driven by desires. Next there are the guardians who protect society from outside attackers. This corresponds with the good horse that is driven by an energetic drive for honor. The living conditions of the guardians are very unusual because of the unique role they play. The guardians, both men and women, live together in one large family with no marriages or private property. They sleep in communal barracks, have romantic relations with anyone they prefer, and children are raised separately from adults.

Finally there are the rulers who are selected from among the best guardians, and whose job is to decide the best course for society. They are thus like the charioteer using reason to control the desires of the trades-people and the energetic drive for honor among the guardians. But the greatest ruler is the philosopher-king who has knowledge of the Forms. Plato describes the role of the philosopher-king here:

Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have rest from their evils – no, nor the human race, as I believe. Only then will our State have a possibility of life and behold the light of day. . . . We will discover some people whose natures are such that they ought to study philosophy and to be leaders in the State. There are others who are not born to be philosophers, and are meant to be followers rather than leaders. . . . And may we not say of the philosopher that he is a lover, not of a part of wisdom only, but of the whole? [Republic, Bk. 5]

Plato stresses the importance of everyone—trades-people, guardians and rulers—sticking within their own class and performing their assigned function. This is precisely what a just society consists of and what occurs when "each does his own.” In the following Plato describes the chaos that can occur when people go outside their respective classes:

We will recognize that justice is the having and doing what is a person’s own, and belongs to him. . . . Suppose that the cobbler, or any other man whom nature designed to be a tradesperson, has his heart lifted up by wealth or strength or the number of his followers, or any like advantage, and attempts to force his way into the class of guardians. Suppose a guardian moves into that of rulers and guardians, for which he is unfitted, and either to take the implements or the duties of the other. Suppose that one man is a tradesperson, ruler, and guardian all in one. I think you will agree with me in saying that this interchange and this meddling of one with another is the ruin of the State. [Ibid, Bk. 4]

Clearly, according to Plato, there is a great social need for everyone to stay within their designated ranks. Suppose, though, that Bob the tradesman wants to be a guardian. What’s to stop him from following his dreams? Plato’s answer is that we need to trick people into thinking that they are naturally assigned their places in the social hierarchy, and thus should be content in their current status. One way of accomplishing this is to brainwash them with a religious myth about how the gods forged each of the three classes of people out of a different kind of metal: trades-people were made with iron and brass, guardians with silver, rulers with gold (ibid, Bk. 3). It’s of course a lie, but it’s a noble lie that brings about the needed consequence of social order. Is there any possibility people will believe this tale? Not with the first generation of people that hear the story, Plato suggests, but future generations will very likely fall in line.

Art: Imitation, Education, Censorship

Plato had mixed feelings about artistic expression in all of its Forms—including painting, sculpture, literature, music. The basis for his view is the presumption that art is an imitation of reality, and the better the imitation, the better the art. What’s crucial, according to Plato, is for art to focus on the right reality, namely, the true essences of things that are in the Forms. But artists don’t always do that and, instead, they imitate the world of appearances which, we’ve seen, is itself a poor copy of the true reality of the Forms. Thus, in the worst case scenario, art risks being a bad copy of a bad copy—that is, art badly copying the world of the senses, while the world of the senses badly copies the true realities in the Forms. For example, if an artist paints a picture of a bed, he makes a copy of a particular bed in the physical world. The craftsman who makes the physical bed, though, is producing in imperfect copy of the form of bedness, as Plato describes here:

If the craftsman does not make that which really is, then he cannot make true existence, but only something that resembles real existence. If anyone were to say that the work of the maker of the bed, or of any other craftsman, has real existence, he could hardly be supposed to be speaking the truth. . . . No wonder, then, that his work too is an indistinct expression of truth. [Ibid, Bk. 10; 597a]

Because of art’s capacity to imitate things, all art has moral effects on people, where some of it is morally uplifting when directed towards the Forms, while some of it is morally corrupting when directed towards appearances. In literature, he argues, good models of story telling are those “narrated by Homer and Hesiod, and the rest of the poets, who have ever been the great storytellers of humankind.” On the other hand, other story tellers are to be blamed for “the fault of telling a lie, and, what is more, a bad lie.” The specific flaw occurs “whenever an erroneous representation is made of the nature of gods and heroes -- as when a painter paints a portrait not having the shadow of a likeness to the original.” As Plato sketched out the details of his perfect society, he concluded that if artist expression was to be permitted at all, it had to be seriously censored and only then could it be a useful tool for moral education. He describes this here:

The first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers of fiction, and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good, and reject the bad; and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell their children the authorized ones only. Let them fashion the mind with such tales, even more fondly than they mould the body with their hands; but most of those which are now in use must be discarded. [Ibid, Bk. 2]

Even in music, censorship is needed since some scales and rhythms are better than others. Those that evoke sorrow and relaxation should be banned, while those that bring out courage will benefit soldiers in time of war. Similarly, some instruments are better than others, and he says, “the flute is worse than all the stringed instruments put together.”

C. ARISTOTLE

The philosophy of Aristotle (384–322 BCE) focuses on the notion that things have a natural purpose that defines what they are. Aristotle was born in a small town in Northern Greece, his father being the personal physician of the king of Macedonia. When both his parents died while Aristotle was yet a boy, he was further raised by a guardian and educated as a member of the aristocracy, studying a broad range of academic subjects. At 18, he was sent to Plato’s Academy in Athens, where Plato had found him an outstanding student, calling him the “intelligence of the school.” He remained until Plato’s death twenty years later, but left the Academy because of disapproval over Plato's successor.  Along with a small group of Plato’s disciples, Aristotle relocated to a different Greek city, which was ruled by a former student of Plato’s; during his stay there Aristotle married the ruler’s daughter, who bore him a daughter of his own.  Although Aristotle chose not to follow his father’s medical career, he gained considerable knowledge of science and traveled the area studying botany and zoology. When the reigning king of Macedonia died, the succeeding king hired Aristotle to supervise the education of his son, Alexander the Great. Alexander studied under Aristotle until his father was assassinated, at which time the son became the ruler. Two years later, Aristotle returned to Athens and founded a school known as the Lyceum, conducting courses for the next twelve years. During this time Aristotle’s wife died, and he remarried and had a son. After the death of Alexander the Great, anti-Macedonian conflict broke out, and Aristotle was charged with religious impiety. Remembering a similar issue with Socrates, Aristotle left Athens for his mother’s estate, determined that Athens would not “sin twice against philosophy.” He died one year later, but his school continued for centuries afterward.

Like Plato, Aristotle composed philosophical dialogues intended for general readers. While none of these survive intact, a considerable number of his technical treatises have been preserved, totaling about 2,000 pages in modern printed editions. These were probably based on his lectures at the Lyceum in Athens, some parts being polished, other parts being bare outlines. The range of subjects that he covers in his treatises is vast, including logic, physics, astronomy, psychology, animal science, metaphysics, ethics, politics, and rhetoric. And, for centuries afterwards, many of these works were considered to be the ultimate authority in their subject areas.

Logic: Syllogisms, Fallacies, Categories

Followers of Aristotle grouped together several of his logical works under the title Organon, Latin for “instrument”, suggesting that logic is a foundational tool for all other reasoning. We will look at three components of his logic: the syllogism, logical fallacies, and categories.

The most outstanding component of his logical works is his system of syllogistic logic, the first systematic formulation of deductive logic which was unsurpassed until the nineteenth-century. A “syllogism” is a special kind of argument that involves logically valid relationships between different categories of things. Here is the standard example:

(1) All humans are mortal.

(2) Socrates is human.

(3) Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

In the above there are three categories of things: men, mortal beings, and Socrates. If we abbreviate these three categories with the letters H, M and S, the logical structure of the argument emerges:

(1) All H are M

(2) All S are H

(3) Therefore, all S are M

By simply reading over each line, we can see that there is a logical thread that connects each of the statements together. The first two lines are called “premises” and supply the evidence for the argument. The third line is called a “conclusion” and is what we infer from the evidence in the premises. The evidence in the above argument shows how the three categories of things relate: (1) everything in the category of H (humans) is contained in the category of M (mortal beings), and (2) everything in the category of S (Socrates) is contained in the category of H (humans). This evidence then leads to the conclusion that (3) everything in the category of S (Socrates) is contained in the category of M (mortal beings). The above argument structure has a logical force to it called validity, which most simply means that when all the premises are true the conclusion must also be true. This is just one of 14 syllogistic argument Forms within Aristotle’s system of logic that are valid.

Another aspect of Aristotle’s logic was his analysis of bad argument forms, particularly the intentionally deceptive argument strategies that the Sophists used when teaching public speaking skills. For many Sophists, what mattered most in public speaking was persuading the audience, and it mattered little if the arguments that one used were logical tricks. Aristotle felt otherwise, and in a book titled Fallacies of the Sophists he exposes thirteen logical tricks that were part of the Sophists’ collection. He dubs these faulty arguments “logical fallacies.” Consider this example that Aristotle himself gives:

(1) What belongs to X is the property of X (e.g., what belongs to Athenians is the property of Athenians).

(2) Humans belong to the animal kingdom.

(3) Therefore, Humans are the property of the animal kingdom.

The two premises are true enough, and the conclusion—as bizarre as it is—seems to logically follow from it. What is the logical trick behind it? The fallacy in this case is that there are actually two meanings of the phrase “belongs to”. One meaning is “property” which is stated clearly enough in premise 1. But the other meaning is “member of” which is hidden. The argument, then, secretly mixes together two distinct meanings of the phrase “belongs to”. This is the fallacy of equivocation.

The third aspect of Aristotle’s logic is his list of categories – that is, the different ways that we can categorize reality. For example, when I say “The time now is 12:00” I’m talking about the category of time. When I say “Put that rock over there” I’m talking about the category of space. According to Aristotle, there are 10 such categories, which are listed as follows and include examples that Aristotle himself gave:

* Substance: man, horse

* Quantity: four foot, five foot

* Quality: white, grammatical

* Relation: double, half, large

* Place: in the lyceum, in the market place

* Time: yesterday, last year

* Position: is lying, is sitting

* State: has shoes on, has armor on

* Action: cutting, burning

* Affection: being cut, being burned

Most statements that we make will use only a couple categories at a time, such as “The time now is 12:00.” Here, though, is an example of a sentence that incorporates all ten categories:

Joe, who is six foot tall, wears white and is double the height of his son, was in the market place yesterday, sitting with his armor on, burning a candle, which then tipped over and burned him.

The categories serve a double function. First, they reflect the structure of reality, and the different ways that the actual world is arranged. Second, they reflect the structure of the language that we use to describe the world. They are predicates that describe a subject. In the sentence “Joe is six foot tall,” the word “Joe” is the subject and “is six foot tall” is the predicate that expresses quantity. When we take together these two functions, the predicate categories that we use in language are indicators of the categories in reality. For Aristotle, since the categories express the very nature of reality, study of them is an essential job of philosophy.

Physics: Purpose, Natural Objects, Four Causes, Unmoved Mover

Aristotle did various hands-on studies of the natural world—analyzing plants, animals, celestial objects and even the weather—and much of his work was foundational in the history of science. However, he also speculated more generally about the different forces and underlying structures of nature. We will look at four such aspects of his philosophy of nature, particularly as appear in his book Physics, all of which greatly impacted on the history of philosophy and shaped much of the philosophical vocabulary that we use even today.

Perhaps the single most important aspect of Aristotle’s philosophy of nature is the notion of purpose, also called teleology from the Greek word telos, meaning purpose. For Aristotle, every natural object and event has a built in purpose—a goal, an aim, a function—and any examination that we make of natural things needs to take that into account. For example, the purpose of a tree is to grow up tall, sprout leaves, soak up water. The purpose of a human being is to be rational. Aristotle suggests that the purpose of a thing can be set down in a genus and species definition. For example, “human being” is defined as an animal that is rational, where “animal” is the genus (the larger category), and “rational” is the species (the sub-category). Aspects of our purpose as human beings are reflected in both the “animal” and “rational” components of this definition. We are indeed animals, and thus have functions and aims that other animals have. We desire food and have feelings of fear and rage just like many animals do. However, it is our rationality that distinguishes us from other animals, and, so, this is our higher purpose.

A second feature of his philosophy of nature is the distinction between natural and artificial objects. Natural objects are things that exist by nature, such as a tree, and have an innate tendency to change in some ways, and stay the same in other ways:

Of things that exist, some exist by nature, and some from other causes [that are artificial]. ‘By nature’ the animals and their parts exist, and also the plants and the simple bodies (earth, fire, air, water). For, we say that these and similar things exist “by nature”. All the things mentioned present a feature in which they differ from things which are not constituted by nature. Each of them has within itself a principle of motion and of stability (in respect of place, or of growth and decrease, or by way of alteration). [Physics, 1.4]

Artificial objects, by contrast, are human made things, such as beds and coats. Unlike natural objects, artificial ones have no innate tendency to change or stay the same; that’s something that we humans impose on the objects. Aristotle continues,

On the other hand, [artificial objects, such as] a bed and a coat and anything else of that sort, as receiving these designations (that is, in so far as they are products of art) have no innate impulse to change. But in so far as they happen to be composed of stone or of earth or of a mixture of the two, they do have such an impulse. And they have that impulse to that extent which seems to indicate that nature is a source or cause of being moved and of being at rest in that to which it belongs primarily, in virtue of itself and not in virtue of a connected attribute. [Ibid.]

If I create a simple chair from the wood of the tree, the chair may indeed naturally change as the wood deteriorates. But the chair will not on its own grow into reclining chair, or a bar stool, or a lifeguard chair. As the chair’s creator, once I establish its shape as a basic wooden chair, there is no longer any capacity within the chair to transform into a different type of chair.

Third is Aristotle’s conception of the four causes. Daily we think of the physical world in terms of the causes that bring about change and motion. The wind caused the door to shut, the medicine caused the illness to go away, the rain caused the plants to grow. Aristotle explains that the term “cause” has different meanings, each of which rests on a different aspect of nature. So important is the notion of causality that, according to Aristotle, “people do not think they know a thing till they have grasped the ‘why’ of it.” There are, he argues, four distinct types of causes: efficient, material, formal, and final. The efficient cause is the force behind a cause. Take, for example, a sculptor who, with chisel and hammer in hand, chips away at a stone block to create a statue. The physical act of chiseling is the efficient cause. He writes of this,

[A cause can be] the primary source of the change or coming to rest. For example, the man who gave advice is a cause, the father is cause of the child, and generally what makes of what is made and what causes change of what is changed. [Physics 2.3]

Then there is the material cause, which is the physical stuff out of which a thing is made, such as the stone that makes up the statue. He explains, “That out of which a thing comes to be and which persists, is called ‘cause’” whether it’s the stone of a statue or the silver in a bowl.” The character of the material itself causes an object to have a particular quality—such as how a silver bowl would differ from a wooden or a stone bowl. Third there is the formal cause, which is the form or shape that is causally imposed on a thing, such as the shape of the statue. It is “the form or the pattern and the definition of the essence” of a thing. Using a musical example, Aristotle explains that the form of a musical octave is a numerical ratio of 2:1, and this constitutes the cause of the sound.  Finally, there is the final cause, which constitutes the purpose for which something is done; the purpose of the statue, for example, might be to honor a famous person by putting a stone image of him on public display. He explains how final causes are particularly evident when it comes to medicine, insofar as a particular drug or activity is the purposeful cause of physical health:

[Something is a cause] in the sense of end or “that for the sake of which” a thing is done. For example, health is the cause of walking about. If asked “Why is he walking about?” we say, “To be healthy”. When we say that, we think we have assigned the cause. The same is true also of all the intermediate steps which are brought about through the action of something else as means towards the end. For example, reduction of flesh, purging, drugs, or surgical instruments are means towards health. All these things are “for the sake of” the end, though they differ from one another in that some are activities, others instruments. [Ibid]

A fourth important aspect of Aristotle’s philosophy of nature is that of the unmoved mover: a divine being that is responsible for the motion of the sun, moon, planets, stars, and, ultimately, all motion on earth. While his conception of the cosmos is radically different from what we know to be true today, his views were influential on astronomers for the succeeding thousand or so years. Imagine the cosmos as containing 55 glass-like spheres of differing sizes, with the smaller ones nested inside of the larger ones. Connected to each of the spheres is a celestial object: the sun is attached to one sphere, each planet and comet to its own sphere, and to largest and very outer sphere all the stars are attached. The earth is at the very center of these nested spheres, and as we look up into the sky we see the heavenly bodies move. More precisely, each sphere is moving, and we see the motion of the celestial objects that are attached to it. Now comes the big question: What makes each sphere move? They can’t just spin on their own, so something must be causing the motion.

Aristotle’s answer has three parts to it. First, each sphere has a god right next to it, and each of these 55 gods has the job of moving the sphere that is assigned to it. Second, the gods move the spheres without the gods actually moving themselves. It’s not like the gods reach out with their hands and yank the spheres into motion. Rather, they seduce their assigned sphere into moving. Take, for example, the god assigned to the outer sphere that contains all the stars. That god is a very glorious and majestic being, so much so that its assigned sphere falls in love with that god and, in a sense, the sphere does a dance of joy in expression of that love. The type of causal motion that this god imposes on the sphere is not an efficient cause, but rather a final cause:

The object of desire and the object of thought move in this way; they move without being moved. … The final cause, then, produces motion as being loved, but all other things move by being moved. … On such a principle, then, depend the heavens and the world of nature. [Metaphysics, 12.7]

The sphere moves out of sheer attraction towards the god. Thus, the god moves the sphere, without moving itself: it is an unmoved mover. The particular god on the outermost sphere is the grandest of the 55, and, as Aristotle describes here, it is eternal, without size or parts, and unchanging.

It is clear then from what has been said that there is a substance which is eternal and unmovable and separate from sensible things. It has been shown also that this substance cannot have any magnitude, but is without parts and indivisible … But it has also been shown that it is impassive and unalterable; for all the other changes are posterior to change of place. [Metaphysics, 12.7]

The third part of the theory is how the other 54 gods get their grandeur to seduce motion in each of their assigned spheres. As the outer god is the magnificent one of the bunch, the other 54 gods get their majesty by being allied with this greatest one. A king, for example, has the highest level of majesty. A prince derives his majesty because of his relation to the king, and so too with other nobility, like dukes, earls, knights, counts, and barons. So, the grandeur of the final god transfers down through all the gods. The sphere containing the moon is the closest to the earth. Its motion causes movement in the clouds and the wind, and this, in turn, is the cause of all other motion on earth.

Metaphysics: Matter-Form, Substance-Accident, Potentiality-Actuality

The philosophical term “metaphysics” was introduced with Aristotle’s writings, particularly his book that goes by the title Metaphysics. The prefix “meta” means “above” or “beyond”, and thus it is a study that is beyond the physical. Scholars speculate that editors of Aristotle’s writings created the term to simply refer to a book of Aristotle’s that came “after” his book on physics. Regardless of its origin, the term quickly took on a special philosophical meaning as the study of reality in its most general sense. While physical science also deals with reality, it does so through experiment and sensory observation. Metaphysics concerns those aspects of reality that cannot be discovered through experimentation. We will look at three aspects of Aristotle’s metaphysics here: the relations of matter-form, substance-accident, and potentiality-actuality.

First is Aristotle’s distinction between matter and form. We’ve already seen Plato’s view of these two concepts: perfect abstract Forms exist in a higher spirit-realm of the universe, and material things down here on earth take their shape and structure by participating in abstract Forms. Aristotle rejects Plato’s theory of matter and form, and gives two particularly compelling arguments against it. First, he argues that introducing the idea of the Forms does not clarify the nature of an object, but simply confuses things by introducing more concepts. He writes,

Above all, one might discuss the question what on earth the Forms contribute to sensible things, either to those that are eternal or to those that come into being and cease to be. For they cause neither movement nor any change in them. But again they help in no way either towards the knowledge of other things . . . or towards their being. [Metaphysics 1:9]

Second, Aristotle argues that “participation” is the key notion of the Forms, but nowhere does Plato explain what participation is. He writes,

All other things cannot come from the Forms in any of the usual senses of “from”. And to say that they are patterns and the other things participate in them is to use empty words and poetical metaphors. [Ibid.]

Thus rejecting Plato’s theory, Aristotle’s view is that all things are combinations of form and matter: there can be no matter without form, or form without matter. Using more modern philosophical terminology, Aristotle holds that there is no “prime matter” (i.e., formless matter) and no “substantial form” (i.e., nonmaterial form). Instead, for Aristotle, both matter and form are combined together making up everything that we see around us. The oak tree outside my window has the unique form of an oak tree, but at the same time it is a form that gives shape and function to the material stuff that it is made of. Artificial as well as natural objects are like this: the table in front of me is composed of material stuff that has the shape and function of a table. Even the most substance-less form that we can think of, such as the honeycomb in a beehive, still contains some matter, namely the bee’s wax. Similarly, even the most formless blob of material stuff that we can think of still has a blob-like shape and at least some function. Aristotle did in fact speculate about the existence of formless matter, but it is a speculation that he appears to have rejected. The difference of opinion between Plato and Aristotle regarding matter and form is dramatically illustrated in a famous painting called “The School of Athens” by the sixteenth-century Italian artist Raphael. In the painting Plato and Aristotle are both descending a staircase. The elder Plato is pointing up into the air, signaling that truth and reality exist in the higher realm of the Forms. The younger Aristotle is pointing to the ground, indicating that truth and reality exist down here in the physical realm where matter and form are combined. Aristotle’s view that existing things are all a combination of matter and form is called hylomorphism (Greek for “material form”).

The second aspect of Aristotle’s metaphysics involves the distinction between substance and accident. Let’s start with a simple illustration: “John is six feet tall.” In this statement, “John” is the substance, that is, the reality that underlies all of his qualities. By contrast, “six feet tall” is the accident, that is, a quality or property that belongs to the substance. Aristotle defines substance here:

We call “substance” the simple bodies, that is, earth and fire and water and everything of the sort, and in general bodies and the things composed of them, both animals and divine beings, and the parts of these. All these are called substance because they are not predicated of a subject but everything else is predicated of them. [Metaphysics, 5.8]

A substance, then, is simply a thing to which a property attaches. He defines “accident” here:

“Accident” means that which attaches to something and can be truly asserted, but neither of necessity nor usually. For example. . . A musician might be pale; but since this does not happen of necessity nor usually, we call it an accident. There are, then, attributes and they attach to subjects, and some of them attach to these only in a particular place and at a particular time. Thus, something will be an accident whenever it attaches to a subject, but not because it was this subject, or the time this time, or the place this place. [Metaphysics, 5.30]

That is, accidents themselves may change within a particular thing, but that change does not alter the kind of thing that each substance is. John was not always six feet tall, but he was still John. So too with other accidental properties about John, such as hair color and weight. The substance-accident distinction connects directly with Aristotle’s ten categories that we examined earlier. On that list, the first category is substance, while the remaining nine categories are accidents that attach to substances.

The substance-accident distinction is often useful in ordinary situations like appraising antiques. Suppose that I’m looking at purchasing a specific antique table as an investment. I see that it has been refinished, which diminishes its value. That is, one of its accidental properties has changed (its finish), but it’s still in substance the same antique table. Then on closer inspection I see that one of its legs has been replaced; this is an important change, but still an accidental change that doesn’t affect its substance as an antique table. But then I see that the entire top has been replaced; this is a quite serious alteration that makes the table an entirely different object. It is no longer the same substance as the table originally was, but instead is more like a replica. In a nutshell, antique appraising comes down to the question of whether a change in an object is merely accidental, or whether it affects the substance of the thing itself.

The third aspect of his metaphysics is his distinction between potentiality and actuality. The distinction here is commonsensical: a full-grown oak tree is in actuality a full-grown oak tree, while an acorn is potentially a full-grown oak tree. Aristotle offers these examples:

We say that potentially, for instance, a statue of Hermes is in the block of wood and the half-line is in the whole, because it might be separated out, and we call even the man who is not studying a man of science, if he is capable of studying; the thing that stands in contrast to each of these exists actually. [Metaphysics 9.6]

In short, potentiality is a capacity, and actuality is the fulfillment of that capacity. The potentiality-actuality distinction is another that is useful in ordinary situations. Teachers often scold students by saying “you have so much potential, if you’d only just use it!” Aristotle considers this very situation. Take, for example, the skill of playing the violin. Before any training, we are in a state of potentiality regarding the violin: we don’t know how to play it, but we have the capacity to do so. That capacity then becomes actualized in one of two ways. First, I learn how to play—although I may decide to never pick it up and play it. Second, I not only learn how to play, but I actually pick it up and play it. In recent years, Aristotle’s distinction between actuality and potentiality has played a key role in the ethical debate on abortion, specifically concerning the status of a fetus as a potential human being. We grant that actual persons have the right to life; we also grant that fetuses are potential persons. The remaining ethical question is whether the right to life attaches to potential persons as well as actual persons. That is, is there something inherently valuable about the fetus in its state of potentiality that justifies conferring on it the right to life even before it is actualized? Critics of abortion may say yes, while its defenders may say no.

Soul: Form of the Body and Three Types

Like Plato, Aristotle also offers a detailed account of the human mind, or soul as the Greeks called it. There are two key features of Aristotle’s notion of the soul: the soul’s relation to the body, and the three types of souls.

First, according to Aristotle, the soul and body of a human or animal are so interconnected that they are inseparable. The soul itself is the principle of life in the physical body, and is the source of self-directed nutrition, growth, movement, and feelings within it. The soul gives the body its physical shape through nutrition and growth, and it gives the body its capacity to do things. The soul is the form of the body. We’ve seen earlier that, for Aristotle, form and matter cannot be separated from each other. From that perspective, the soul and body of an organism cannot exist independently of each other: a human body without a soul is dead, and it remains a “human” body in name only. Aristotle makes this point here using an analogy of an eyeball and sight:

Suppose that the eye were an animal: sight would have been its soul (for sight is the substance or essence of the eye which corresponds to the formula, the eye being merely the matter of seeing). When seeing is removed, the eye is no longer an eye, except in name. It is no more a real eye than the eye of a statue or of a painted figure. . . . As the pupil plus the power of sight constitutes the eye, so the soul plus the body constitutes the animal. From this it indubitably follows that the soul is inseparable from its body… [On the Soul, 2.1]

In this analogy, the eyeball is like the body, and sight is like the soul. When seeing is removed from the eyeball, the eyeball itself is no longer an eyeball except in name only. Granted, then, the human body is no longer a “human” body without the soul. Can the human soul continue to exist separately from the body? Again, the answer is no for the same reason: just as form cannot exist separately from matter, the human soul cannot exist separately from the human body. He writes,

The soul does not exist without a body and yet is not itself a kind of body. For it is not a body, but something which belongs to a body, and for this reason exists in a body, and in a body of such-and-such a kind. [On the Soul, 2.2]

Unlike Plato, then, Aristotle is denying the immortality of the soul and in essence maintaining the impossibility of life after death in a disembodied soul. This aspect of Aristotle’s philosophy, more than any other, put him at odds with later philosophers who believed in the immortality of the soul.

The second aspect of Aristotle’s view of the soul is that there are three kinds of souls, depending on how complex the living organism is. They are the nutritive, appetitive, and reasoning souls. At the lowest level is the nutritive element of the soul that is responsible for self-nourishment, growth, and decay. This is a capacity of life that plants have, and thus the nutritive aspect of the soul is sometimes also called the “vegetative” function. He explains the nutritive soul here:

What has soul in it differs from what lacks it, in that the former displays life. Now the word “living” has more than one sense; if any one alone of these is found in a thing we say that thing is living. “Living” may mean thinking or perception or local movement and rest, or movement in the sense of nutrition, decay and growth. Hence we think of plants also as living, for they are observed to possess in themselves an originative power through which they increase or decrease in all spatial directions; they grow up and down, and everything that grows increases its bulk alike in both directions or indeed in all, and continues to live so long as it can absorb nutriment. [On the Soul, 2.3]

Moving up one step is the appetitive component of the soul, which is responsible for sensation and movement. Animals have this in addition to the nutritive element, and it is the appetitive component that allows them to perceive the world, have desires, and move their bodies from place to place—tasks which plants clearly cannot do. Finally, there is the rational component of the soul, which, for Aristotle, is unique to humans, although humans possess the nutritive and appetitive components too. The range of rational abilities that humans have by virtue of this soul is rather extensive, and involves reasoning about science, craftsmanship, and morality.

Ethics: Desire-Regulating Virtues

While all of Aristotle’s views have been highly influential, his ethical theory is particularly noteworthy because of the dominant place it even now holds in contemporary ethics. His main work on the subject is Nicomachean Ethics, named after his son Nicomachus who might have edited the book from Aristotle’s lecture notes. Three important themes emerge from his theory.

First, happiness is connected with our function as rational humans. The goal of all human action is happiness, he argues, and while this may be obvious enough, it is less obvious what exactly happiness is. If we can indeed figure out what happiness is, then “we shall be like good archers who have a mark at which to aim, we shall have a better chance of attaining what we want” (Ethics, 1.2). Philosophers commonly identify happiness with pleasure, honor or wealth, but each of these by themselves will not bring about happiness. Rather, happiness is connected with the purpose and function of human beings, as reflected in the structure of the human soul. We’ve seen that the human soul has three components, namely, the nutritional, the appetitive, and the rational; it is the latter two that are most directly connected with human happiness. The appetitive and animalistic part of us gives us desires, but it is the rational part of us that enables us to control our desires, thus preventing us from living like mere animals. Take the appetitive desire for pleasure, for example, which animals and humans both have. Animals follow their drive for pleasure, with no restrictions on their levels of indulgence. They eat whatever and whenever they can, they engage in sex based purely on their natural urges. While humans too have the same inclinations, we control our desires through our reason, and this is an important way that our behavior differs from that of the animals.

The second part of Aristotle’s theory is that moral virtues are desire-regulating character traits. Let’s grant that our human reason keeps us from being animals by controlling our desires. The specific way that reason accomplishes this, though, is through the development of good habits. Suppose that whenever I pass by a restaurant I have a powerful urge to go inside and order the fanciest thing on the menu. My reason, though, talks me out of it by having me considering the impact that overeating would have both on my health and my budget. When this happens enough times, I’ll develop a good habit that enables me to resist that desire. That desire-regulating habit is a moral virtue, and the development of such habits is precisely what morality is all about. Since we have a wide range of desires that emerge from the appetitive part of our soul, there are an equally wide range of moral virtues that we need to develop to curb those desires.

The third part of his theory is the doctrine of the mean. Whenever we develop desire-regulating habits that are good, they are midway between two bad ones. Take again the example of restraining myself from going to restaurants. When I properly regulate my desire for pleasurable food, that good habit is called the virtue of temperance. Suppose that I fail miserably at the task and instead develop a bad habit of indulging every time I have a craving: this bad habit is the vice of over-indulgence. On the other hand, suppose that I restrain myself too much and get into the habit of never eating anything pleasurable. That too is a bad habit and is the vice of insensibility. Thus, as I seek the perfect habit to regulate my desires, I want the middle ground between the two vices of excess and deficiency. The chart below shows the virtues and vices that pertain to five particular natural urges:

Natural Urge || Vice of Deficiency | Virtuous Mean | Vice of Excess

Pleasure          || Insensibility              Temperance                 Overindulgence

Fear of danger || Cowardice                Courage                       Rashness

Anger              || Spiritlessness            Good Temper              Ill-temper

Give money     || Stinginess                  Generosity                   Extravagance

Importance      || Timidity                    Self-Confidence          Conceit

Aristotle warns that the virtuous mean is not a strict mathematical calculation between two extremes. For example, if eating 100 apples is too many, and eating zero apples is too little, this does not imply that we should eat 50 apples, which is the mathematical mean. Instead, the mean is rationally determined, based on the relative merits of the situation. That is, it is “as a person of good judgment would determine it.” With apples, a person of good judgment might conclude that one or two apples a day is the way to go. Aristotle concludes that it is difficult to live the virtuous life primarily because it is often difficult to find the proper mean between the extremes:

It is always hard work to find the mean in anything, for example, it is not everybody, but only a person of science, who can find the mean or center of a circle. So too anybody can get angry—that is an easy matter—and anybody can give or spend money, but to give it to the right persons, to give the right amount of it and to give it at the right time and for the right cause and in the right way, this is not what anybody can do, nor is it easy. [Ethics, 2.9]

Politics: Natural Rulers

In his book Politics, Aristotle wrote extensively on the subject of governments. While Plato’s account of politics involves an elaborate plan for the perfect society, Aristotle mainly dissected the different functions of government, in much the way that a biologist would describe and analyze the parts of an animal. One aspect of his political theory, though, connects directly with his larger view of human nature: the formation of governments is something that humans do naturally. He writes:

It is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that people are by nature political animals . . . .  Now, it is evident that man is more of a political animal than bees or any other social animals. Nature, as we often say, does nothing in vain, and man is the only animal whom she has endowed with the gift of speech. [Politics, 1.2]

One reason for this is that people are not self-sufficient, and rely on society for their survival. Thus, society is prior to both the individual and even the family. Nature has implanted within us a social instinct, and when we follow this to perfection, we are “the best of animals, but when separated from law and justice, we are the worst of all.”

Just as human society itself emerges as directed by nature, so too does nature assign us different roles to play in society. Some of us, he argues, are natural rulers and others are natural slaves; this is something that is both necessary and useful for society. Virtually everything in nature is split between one element that rules, and another that follows:

A distinction between the ruling and the subject element comes to light in all things which form a composite whole and which are made up of parts, whether continuous or discrete. Such a duality exists in living creatures, but not in them only. It originates in the constitution of the universe. Even in things that have no life, there is a ruling principle, as in a musical scale. [Politics, 1.5]

For Aristotle, this ruler-subject split is even seen in individual creatures insofar as an organism’s soul rules over its body. Thus, to the extent that human governments are an outgrowth of nature, we should expect to find a natural distinction among people.  Within human households, which are the smallest governing units of society, there are three main ruler-subject divisions: husband-wife, master-slave, father-child. There is, Aristotle argues, a character difference between the ruler and subjects in these categories which underlie the natural hierarchy. This does not imply that women and children are natural slaves; rather, these are separate hierarchical categories fashioned by nature for separate purposes.

Still, this is not the most flattering component of Aristotle’s philosophy, and, in centuries to come, his idea of natural rulers and natural slaves had been regularly drawn upon to defend oppressive social policies. But return again to Raphael’s “School of Athens” in which he depicts Aristotle pointing downward towards truth. Slavery was an ever-present reality in the social realm that Aristotle was investigating, and he could ignore that fact no more than the facts of animal physiology that he studied. He thus found a spot within his system of nature for the master-slave relation. To break free of the brutal facts of the physical world that we see around us, one needs to point upward towards a higher realm of truth, as Plato does in Raphael’s painting. Not surprisingly, in his political philosophy Plato creates a blueprint for a perfect social system that radically departs from the actual social structures of his day. For example, in his account of the guarding class, we find men and women having equal status. If there is a moral to this story it is that philosophy benefits with a diversity of theories, some of which point downwards, others upwards.

Art: Imitation and Catharsis

A final area of Aristotle’s philosophy is his theory of art, which we find in his book Poetics. While the work focuses on the art of poetry—and poetic tragedies specifically—it has implications on all forms of art, including painting, sculpting and music. Like Plato, Aristotle believed that art was a type of imitation. This is clearly seen in paintings and sculpture, which capture the visual image of a person. But even with poetry and music imitation takes place. Imitation differs in the various arts in three respects: “the medium, the objects, the manner of imitation, being in each case distinct” (Poetics, 1). We can imitate people or events through the medium of colors, voice, rhythm, language, harmony, or some combination of these. Music, for example, employs both rhythm and harmony. Even dancing counts as an art that imitates things, specifically through the medium of rhythm. What exactly does dance imitate? Through rhythmical movement, Aristotle explains, it imitates character, emotion, and action.

Also like Plato, Aristotle believed that art carries a moral message. Since art imitates people, and people are either good or bad, then art too reflects the moral qualities of people. There is flexibility within art as to how good or bad we represent people, and sometimes we can portray people much better or worse than they actually are:

The objects of imitation are men in action, and these men must be either of a higher or a lower type (for moral character mainly answers to these divisions, goodness and badness being the distinguishing marks of moral differences). It follows that we must represent men either as better than in real life, or as worse, or as they are. It is the same in painting. . . . The same distinction marks off tragedy from comedy; the one aims at representing men as worse, the other as better than in actual life. [Poetics, 2]

There’s a unique quality that some forms of art have, namely that they help purge or flush out our negative emotions. The term for this is catharsis, and, while Aristotle only gives two brief references to this function of art, it has nonetheless been influential. In one place he simply states that music has this ability to purge emotions (Politics, 8.7). In another he states that tragic poetry does this “through pity and fear effecting the proper catharsis (or purging) of these emotions” (Poetics, 6). A good example of what he’s talking about is the kind of emotional release that I might experience when seeing a horror movie or reading a dramatic novel. Throughout the day we build up negative feelings that stay within us, just festering. The best thing for us would be to release those emotions, and nothing does this better than screaming in the movie theater or having our hearts pound as we read a dramatic story. When Greek audiences attended tragic plays, they were very vocal with their reactions, groaning and crying as they viewed the downfall of the tragic hero on stage.

D. CONCLUSION

It’s difficult to imagine what the history of philosophy would have been like if Socrates, Plato and Aristotle had not existed – or perhaps worse yet, if their writings had all been lost to the ravages of time as happened with those of the Presocratic philosophers. Socrates set in place the ideal model for the philosopher. We should pursue truth, even at the risk of going against popular social and religious beliefs. We should critically investigate theories, scrutinize their arguments, and reject what is unsound.  And ultimately, we should admit when we don’t have the final answer to a problem. While Socrates set out the goal and style of philosophizing, Plato added to its substance. His conceptions of absolute truth, human knowledge, and the human mind became the raw materials for philosophy down through the ages. The twentieth-century philosopher A.N. Whitehead said it best: “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” Today we don’t believe Plato’s view of the Forms, but until as recently as 200 years ago it was the leading way of articulating the notion of absolute truth. Even now it is an indispensible way of characterizing the most optimistic conception of truth, even if we don’t accept it. Aristotle added further to our basic philosophical toolkit with his views of logic, natural purpose, causality, substance, and virtue. These are all part of our current philosophical vocabulary, and, when we seek clarification on any of these notions, we start by looking at what Aristotle said on the subject. Aristotle also gave us an alternative way of conceptualizing reality: rather than looking for it in the other-worldly realm of the Forms as Plato did, Aristotle says that we find it right here in the physical things that we see around us.

As philosophy continued to develop after Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, it always looked back to these three founding fathers as something like authority figures. While they were certainly not correct in everything that they said, they laid before us the main philosophical issues, and they gave us the instruments for continuing the dialogue.

Questions for Review

Please answer all of the following questions for review.

1. Why did Socrates think he was the wisest person?

2. Explain the Socratic dialectical method.

3. For Socrates, whose view counts on the issue of civil obedience, and what is that view?

4. For Plato, in what ways does knowledge differ from opinion?

5. What is the realm of the forms, and what are the main features of the forms?

6. State briefly Plato’s two arguments for the immortality of the soul.

7. What, for Plato, are the three parts of the soul, and what do they do?

8. What, for Plato, are the three parts of society, and what is the function of each?

9. For Plato, what is so bad about art, and why should it be censored?

10. For Aristotle, what is the difference between natural and artificial objects?

11. For Aristotle, what is the relation between form and matter?

12. Explain Aristotle’s distinction between substance and accident.

13. Explain Aristotle’s view about the relation between the soul and body.

14. For Aristotle, what are the three kinds of souls?

15. What are moral virtues, and what is their relation to vices?

16. Why, according to Aristotle, are their natural rulers and natural subjects?

Questions for Analysis

Please select only one question for analysis from those below and answer it.

1. Criticize Socrates’ social contract argument for civil obedience.

2. Try to defend Plato’s theory of the forms.

3. Write a dialogue between Plato and Aristotle on their different views of form and matter.

4. Write a dialogue between Plato and Aristotle on their different views of the immortality of the soul.

5. Criticize Aristotle’s view that there are built-in purposes to things.

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CHAPTER 3: HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHY

A. Cynicism

Diogenes the Dog

B. Epicureanism

Atoms, the Slight Swerve, and Free Will

Image-Flakes and Perception

Ethics: Pleasure and Pain

C. Stoicism

Zeno

Logic: Conviction, Connectives, Argument Forms

Physics: God and Fate

Epictetus: Accepting what we Cannot Control

D. Skepticism

Skepticism and Tranquility

The Ten Methods

Skepticism and Self-Refutation

E. Neoplatonism

Plotinus and Plato’s Influence

Divine Triad: The One, Intellect, Soul

Returning to the Beauty of the One

F. Conclusion

Questions for Reflection

1. In what ways might traditional social values lead us away from truths about human nature and happiness?

2. What sorts of pleasures lead to true and lasting happiness, and which sorts don’t?

3. To what extent are events in the world determined by God and/or the laws of nature, and is there any room for free choice?

4. There’s a common expression that there are two sides to every issue, which implies that we should be cautious about making quick judgments. Are there really two sides to every issue, including science, morality and religion?

5. Is there anything wrong with the view that the physical world and all humans are just a piece of God, sort of like God’s pinky toenail?

The final phase of ancient Greek philosophy begins after Aristotle, during a period of history that we call Hellenistic civilization, which lasted from around 300 BCE to 200 CE. The term “Hellenistic” means “Greek-like” (derived from “Hellen,” the word that the ancient Greeks used to describe their civilization), and refers to the uniquely Greek culture that spread around the ancient world beginning with the military campaigns of Alexander the Great. When Alexander first conquered the Mediterranean world, small city-states were enveloped by larger political dynasties. Culturally, the conquered territories were infused with Greek culture—language, art, religion, and philosophy. When Alexander died, his empire was divided among his generals into dynasties. These Greek dynasties were soon conquered by the Romans, who themselves adopted Greek culture and philosophy, spreading it further throughout their Empire. All the while, Athens continued to dominate as a philosophical learning center, with Plato’s Academy, Aristotle’s Lyceum, and several new Hellenistic schools. While the new schools continued discussing the same issues of nature, reality and knowledge as did their predecessors, they added a therapeutic element, offering unique accounts for attaining happiness. The principal schools of this period that we will look at here are Cynicism, Epicureanism, Stoicism, Skepticism, and Neoplatonism. Some philosophers of the time, not content with following any particular one of these schools, blended the views of many to suit their needs, thus creating yet another philosophical approach called Eclecticism.

A. CYNICISM

One of the first Hellenistic schools to emerge is that of Cynicism, which emphasized denying established conventions and following one’s natural inclinations. Cynic philosophers taught through deliberately shocking speech and action, thereby conveying their condemnation of traditional social values such as wealth, reputation, pleasure, property, family duties, and religion.

The earliest Cynic philosopher, an Athenean named Antisthenes (c. 444-365 BCE), studied under Socrates and was present at his execution. But unlike Plato who was inspired by the content of Socrates’ teachings and his dialectic method, Antisthenes was attracted to Socrates’ “in your face” attitude and learned from him “the art of enduring, and of being indifferent to external circumstances.” While none of Antisthenes’ writings survive, he is credited with a number of startling sayings that reflect his defiant attitude towards social convention, such as “I would rather go mad than feel pleasure.” He was once criticized for associating with disreputable men, and he responded “Physicians also live with those who are sick, but they do not catch fevers.” Plato once spoke poorly of him and Antisthenes replied “It is a royal privilege to do well, and to be evil spoken of.” Once he was asked why he had so few disciples, and he replied “Because I drove them away with a silver rod.” When asked why he criticized his pupils with harsh language, he said “Physicians too use severe remedies for their patients.”

Diogenes the Dog

Antisthenes’ most famous pupil, and the one who gave the most distinct character to the school of Cynicism, was Diogenes (412-323 BCE), who came to Athens from the city of Sinope on the north coast of what is now Turkey. He was exiled from his home town when he and his father defaced the coinage of that city—an act of disrespect which in our times would be the equivalent of burning the flag. Someone once criticized him for being exiled, and he responded, “You wretched man, that is what made me a philosopher!” In Athens he continually pestered Antisthenes to take him on as a student, eventually inciting the master to raise his stick to hit him. Diogenes put his head under the stick and said, “Strike, for you will not find any stick hard enough to drive me away as long as you continue to speak.” Antisthenes then took him on.

As with his teacher, none of Diogenes writings survive, but an array of stories about his peculiar views and behavior give us a picture about what he believed. He lived as a beggar in the streets of Athens, sometimes residing in a barrel. He spent his days criticizing his fellow Athenians for their shallow lifestyles and blind adherence to social conventions that removed them from living freely according to the principles of nature. He said of himself that he adopted the same type of life as Hercules, preferring nothing in the world to liberty. He ignored subjects like music, geometry and astronomy, holding them to be useless and unnecessary. Someone once criticized him for philosophizing without possessing any knowledge; he responded, “If I only pretend to wisdom, that is philosophizing.” Perhaps the most famous story about him is that he walked around during the daytime with a lit candle saying “I am looking for a genuine man.” His point was that few people lived as they should, try as we might to find them. This message is reflected in another story where, when returning from the Olympic games, someone asked him whether there was a great crowd there; he replied, “Yes, a great crowd, but very few men.”

A running theme in Diogenes’ philosophy was contempt for luxury. He said, “things of great value were often sold for nothing, and things worth nothing sold for a great price.” When a famous general asked Diogenes to dine with him, Diogenes said “I would rather lick up salt in Athens than enjoy a luxurious table with him.” Once he saw a child drinking out of his hands, and so Diogenes threw away his cup and said “That child has beaten me in simplicity.” He also threw away his spoon when he saw a boy scoop up his food with a crust of bread after breaking his eating utensil. While rejecting luxuries, Diogenes warned about dismissing all pleasures since, paradoxically, people get a sense of pleasure from ascetic lifestyles. For, just as people who live in luxury grow accustom to it and resist losing it, so too do people feel a kind of pleasure in their contempt for pleasure. Legend has it that Alexander the Great once met him, saying “I am Alexander, the great king;” Diogenes replied “And I, am Diogenes the dog.” Another version of the story relates that Diogenes was sunbathing and Alexander, who was nearby, said, “Ask any favor that you want from me”; Diogenes then requested that Alexander step to the side since he was blocking the sun.

Athenean citizens seem to have had a love-hate relation with him. On the one hand, he would boldly confront anyone he saw, mocking them for ordinary things. For example, when someone had dropped a loaf of bread and was too ashamed to pick it up again, Diogenes tied a cord round the neck of a bottle and dragged it through the streets while following the man, just to heckle him for his pride. Similarly, when he saw an untalented man tuning a musical instrument, he said to him “Aren’t you ashamed to be arranging proper sounds on a wooden instrument, and not arranging your soul to a proper life?” There are also numerous stories about people hitting him.  Once a man struck him with a broom, and said, “Watch it!”  so Diogenes struck him back with his staff and said “Watch it!” On the other hand, at least some citizens found him endearing and when a youth had broken Diogenes barrel, they beat the young man and gave Diogenes another one.

Diogenes acquired the nickname “the Dog”, and in fact the name “cynicism” itself derives from the Greek word for “dog”. While it’s not clear how the designation “dog” originated, it may have been as simple as the fact that Diogenes was a vagabond, just like a stray dog. Someone once asked him what he did that made people refer to him as a dog, and he replied with a witty but unhelpful answer “Because I nuzzle up to those who give me anything, and bark at those who give me nothing, and bite the scoundrel.” He was regularly ridiculed by people for his nickname, as when he was once eating in the marketplace and bystanders kept yelling “Dog” at him. He replied “It is you who are the dogs, who stand around me while I am at dinner.” Once, too, some boys circled around him and said “We are watching out so that you don’t bite us;” he responded, “Don’t worry, a dog does not eat the meat of cows.” One time at a banquet some of the guests threw him bones, as if he was a dog; he responded by lifting his leg and urinating on them just as a dog would.

Diogenes was in Athens while Plato was still alive, and the two did not get along well together. Plato once called him a dog, and Diogenes responded “I certainly am, for I have wandered back to those who sold me.” Plato defined a human being as a “featherless biped”; Diogenes subsequently produced a plucked chicken and said “Here is Plato’s human being.” This prompted Plato to add to his definition the clause “with broad flat nails.” Once Diogenes stood under a fountain, where bystanders were pitying him; Plato was also there and said “If you really want to show pity for him, just walk away” since he was only acting like that to gain a disgraceful reputation.

While traveling to another city, Diogenes’ ship was captured by pirates and he was sold into slavery. When the slave auctioneer asked him what he was skilled at, Diogenes said “At governing people,” and, pointing to a well-dressed buyer, he said “Sell me to that man, for he wants a master.” The man indeed purchased Diogenes, put him in charge of his estate in the city of Corinth and had him tutor his son. He died at age 90 by holding his breath because, as his friends reported, he wished to escape the remaining portion of his life. A statue of a dog was placed on his grave.

B. EPICUREANISM

The founder and namesake of the Epicurean school was Epicurus (341–270 BCE), who adapted the Atomistic views of Democritus and held that happiness is achieved through pleasure. Epicurus was born on the island of Samos—just off of the Turkish peninsula—which at the time was a colony of Athens, thus giving him Athenian citizenship. He began his study of philosophy at the young age of 14 under the teaching of Democritus, and his Athenian citizenship required him, at age 18, to complete two years of military training. Being in Athens during this time allowed him the opportunity of hearing Greek philosophers who were there then, particularly Aristotle. He traveled for some time, perhaps learning from other philosophers, and, returning to Athens, he bought a house and establish his school, known as The Garden, which was located just outside of the city, and close to Plato’s Academy. He remained at The Garden with his followers for the rest of his life. A most significant difference in his school was that they accepted women. Unlike with the Pythagorean school, Epicurus did not allow his followers to communally own their property, since he believed this showed a distrust of one another. There are reports of him harshly criticizing virtually every other philosopher of the time, calling Aristotle a glutton and drug dealer, the Cynics the enemies of Greece. At the same time, he was reputed to be kind towards everyone, with so many friends that “they could not be contained in whole cities.” Epicurus’ teaching so influenced society that we use the term “Epicurean,” which has now strayed to mean luxurious living, rather than his philosophy that sought tranquility first of all through simple living. At 72 years of age, Epicurus died of kidney stones, making as a final request that his students remember his teachings.

He authored over 300 works, written in a plain and easy to follow style, containing no quotations from other philosophers. 37 of these were specifically on natural philosophy. Of his writings, only three short letters of his survive, which summarize his views. In addition to these, there is an important book-length exposition of his philosophy by the Roman poet Lucretius (c. 99-55 BCE), titled On Nature.

Atoms, the Slight Swerve, and Free Will

Epicurus philosophy of nature is an adaptation of the Presocratic Atomistic theories of Leucippus and Democritus. According to the classic Atomistic theory, the only things that exist are atoms in a vacuum of empty space; they are continually moving, or at least vibrating, and have different sizes and shapes. Epicurus describes the basic features of the atoms here:

The atoms are in a continual state of motion. Among the atoms, some are separated by great distances, others come very near to one another in the formation of combined bodies, or at times are enveloped by others which are combining. But in this latter case they, nevertheless, preserve their own peculiar motion, thanks to the nature of the vacuum, which separates the one from the other, and yet offers them no resistance. The solidity which they possess causes them, while knocking against one another, to react the one upon the other. Eventually the repeated shocks bring on the dissolution of the combined body; and for all this there is no external cause, the atoms and the vacuum being the only causes. [Epicurus, Herodotus]

An important adaptation that Epicurus made to Atomism is that atoms have weight and thus fall downward. However, he recognized that if they all fell perfectly parallel to each other at the same speed, they would never collide to make larger composite bodies. Thus, atoms need to deviate at least a little when they fall, which allows them to make contact with other atoms. Expounding on Epicurus’ theory, Lucretius calls this deviation the slight swerve, and describes its operation here:

When bodies are carried downwards vertically through the void by their own weights, at quite uncertain times and uncertain spots they push themselves a little from their course: you just and only just can call it a change of inclination. If they did not swerve, they would all fall down, like drops of rain, through the deep void, and no colliding would have been resulted nor blow produced among the first-beginnings: thus nature never would have produced anything. [Lucretius, On Nature, 2]

It’s not clear exactly how the swerve takes place, but Epicurus seems to have held that it occurs without any cause. This claim drew attack from other early philosophers, such as the following by the Roman eclectic philosopher Cicero, who felt that there is no place in science for an uncaused event:

The swerving is itself an arbitrary fiction; for Epicurus says the atoms swerve without cause. But this is the capital offense in a natural philosopher, to speak of something taking place uncaused. Then also he gratuitously deprives the atoms of what he himself declared to be the natural motion of all heavy bodies, namely, movement in a straight line downwards . . . This riotous hurly-burly of atoms could not possibly result in the ordered beauty of the world we know. [Cicero, About the Ends of Goods and Evils, 1.6]

Philosophers as well as scientists would have every reason to be suspicious about Epicurus’s claim regarding an uncaused natural event. However, the general idea gains more sympathy today in view of the contemporary theory of indeterminacy in quantum physics (electrons do not have determinate positions and movements). And, just as Greek Atomists are considered intellectual forerunners to modern atomic theory, Epicurus’ view of the slight swerve eerily anticipates contemporary indeterminacy.

While Epicurus initially introduces the theory of the slight swerve to explain how falling atoms collide and form clusters, he uses the theory to another important end, namely, to explain free will. In the chapter on the Presocratics, we noted that classical Atomism implies determinism: all events are determined according to the physical laws which govern atoms. Since humans are composed entirely of physical atoms, then all of our actions are determined according to such laws. Many ancient philosophers, like the early Atomists, were content with the notion of determinism. Epicurus, though, believed that free will is a fact of human experience: the actions that we perform throughout the day display free choice. The problem, then, is how to rectify physical determinism with free will. His solution is that free will is the result of the slight swerve:

What causes this free will for living things all over the earth? From what source, I ask, is it extracted from fate—this will by which we move forward, where pleasure leads each one of us, and swerve likewise in our motions neither at determined times nor in a determined direction of place, but just where our mind has carried us? For without doubt it is one’s own will that gives to each one a start for this movement, and from the will the motions pass flooding through the limbs. . . . But the very mind feels no such necessity within its doing all things, and is not constrained like a conquered thing to bear and suffer. This is brought about by the tiny swerve of the first-beginnings in no determined direction of place and at no determined time. [Lucretius, On Nature, 2]

According to Epicurus, then, atoms have the power of occasional uncaused movement, and thus the atoms that compose our human minds have this power as well. A single uncaused movement within an atom in my mind will trigger a sequence of events that breaks from the otherwise determined mental machinery.

Image-Flakes and Perception

Like the earlier Atomists, Epicurus held that the human mind is a purely physical thing, constructed of atoms, and also that perception results from image-flakes pealing off of objects and hitting our sense organs. Epicurus describes the way in which image-flakes fly off objects into the surrounding air:

There are image-flakes whose shapes resemble the solid bodies which we see, but are much thinner than them. For it is possible that there may be in space some emissions of this kind, which have a capacity to form extremely thin films without depth, and that from solid objects there may emanate some particles that preserve the same position and motion that they had in solid objects body. We give the name of “image-flakes” (or “idols”) to these particles. [Epicurus, Herodotus]

The image-flakes are extremely thin, like flakes, and have virtually no thickness. As they shed from objects, they are immediately replaced with others and thus do not trim down the objects themselves:

One must not forget that the production of the image-flakes is as rapid as thought. For from the surface of the bodies particles of this kind are continually flowing off with no reduction of the bodies, because they are immediately replaced with others. They preserve for a long time the same position, and the same arrangement that their atoms had in the solid body, although, notwithstanding, their form may be sometimes altered. [Ibid]

For Epicurus, image-flakes provide the best explanation of how we perceive physical objects. The objects themselves exist in space at some distance from us, and something needs to be transmitted between the objects and our eyeballs in order for us to perceive them. One might suggest that the sense data gets transferred to us through air, or through a ray. However, Epicurus believes that the image-flake is a much better explanation of perception:

It is difficult to conceive that external objects can affect us through the medium of the air which is between us and them, or by means of rays, whatever emissions proceed from us to them, so as to give us an impression of their form and color. This phenomenon, on the contrary, is perfectly explained, if we admit that certain particles of the same color, of the same shape, and of a proportionate magnitude pass from these objects to us, and so arrive at being seen and comprehended.  [Ibid]

The image-flakes themselves retain all the physical characteristics of the object and carry that information directly to our senses. Even qualities like color and taste exist the physical objects themselves, and those qualities are transmitted to us by image-flakes. This is a departure from the Atomistic view of Democritus who held that qualities like color and taste do not originally reside in physical objects, but subjectively fashioned within the perceiver’s mind.

Ethics: Pleasure and Pain

Perhaps the most influential aspect of Epicurus’ philosophy is his view that morality is intimately linked with pleasure, and that our life’s goal should be to minimize pain and maximize pleasure. He writes that “pleasure is the beginning and end of the good life. We recognize pleasure as the first good, being natural to us, and it is from pleasure that we begin every choice and avoidance. It is also to pleasure that we return, using it as the standard by which we judge every good” (Letter to Menoeceus). While it is easy enough to state as a general rule that we should all seek pleasure, the difficulty is in detailing which types of pleasures best bring about human happiness, and this is the task that Epicurus lays out for himself.

Step one in the quest for a happy and pleasurable life is to eliminate pains as much as we can. While physical pains can be an obstacle to happiness, they don’t need to be. The most extreme pains usually pass quickly; he writes, “Pain does not last continuously in the physical body, and even in its most extreme it is present only a very short time. Physical pain that exceeds pleasure does not last many days” (Principal Doctrines). Chronic pains of lingering illnesses can also be managed so that on balance our lives contain more pleasure. For Epicurus, though, the real problem of pain is not with the physical ones, but psychological ones, particularly anxiety-producing fears. One major source of fear is religious myth, when we experience unease about how the gods view us, and whether they’re poised to punish us or reward us. However, Epicurus argues that we are freed from the fear of the gods since they have nothing to do with human affairs. Natural events such as lightning and earthquakes are entirely the result of the configuration of atoms, and are not caused by the will of the gods. Epicurus does not deny the existence of the gods, but he says that they are entirely different than how people commonly imagine them:

We know there are Gods, since we have distinct knowledge of them. But they are not of the nature that people in general attribute to them, and they do not respect them in a way that agrees with the ideas that they entertain of them. A person is not irreverent for rejecting the Gods believed in by the masses, but, rather, is irreverent for applying to the Gods the opinions entertained of them by the masses. [Epicurus, Menoeceus]

The gods exist in a special realm between worlds, and in that state they are happy and completely  unaware of our existence. Thus the Gods are irrelevant to what happens in our lives and we should just set this worry aside.

Another fear that gives us psychological pain is the terror we experience when thinking about our deaths. Epicurus’s solution to this is simple: we are freed from the fear of death when realizing that everything is material, hence the soul cannot survive death; thus, no pain can be experienced after death. He writes,

Accustom yourself to think that death is a matter that should not concern us. For all good and all evil depend on sensation, and death is only the removal of sensation. Accordingly, the correct view of the fact that death is no concern of ours makes the mortality of life pleasant to us, not because it gives us limitless time, but because it relieves us of the longing for immortality. There is nothing terrible in living to a person who rightly understands that there is nothing terrible in ceasing to live. Only a foolish person says that he fears death, not because it will cause him pain when it occurs, but because it pains him while he anticipates it. It is quite absurd if something that is not distressful when present should distress a person when it is only expected.  [Ibid.]

Clearly, death cannot cause us pain once we die, since we no longer exist. The only issue is the anxiety that we experience when anticipating death, and this, Epicurus argues, is foolish since there is no pain to experience once we die.

In short, most of the pains that we experience in life can either be eliminated, or at least counterbalanced by pleasure. Setting aside the issue of pain, step two in the quest for happiness is understanding which pleasures are best for us. For, “while pleasure is the first good and natural with us, we do not choose every pleasure, but at times we pass over many pleasures when any difficulty is likely to result from them.” We desire a wide range of things, and some contribute to happiness while others can be counterproductive. There are, he explains, three different kinds of desires. First, there are natural and necessary desires, which include food and shelter. These are easy to satisfy and should be pursued. Second, there are natural but unnecessary desires, such as luxury food. These, he argues, should not be pursued since we can’t count on them being available and, when they aren’t, we will be frustrated. Third, there are vain and empty desires, such as power, wealth, and fame. These are difficult to satisfy since they have no limit: even if we acquire power we always want more and thus will never be satisfied. So too with wealth and fame, and so, according to Epicurus, we should not pursue any of these. The key is to seek pleasure through moderation. Simple pleasures, he argues, give us the least amount of disturbance, whereas violent pleasures bring about violent pains – such as how the intense pleasure of drunkenness is followed by a hangover and any number of social problems. He writes,

When we say that pleasure is the chief good, we are not speaking of the pleasures of the degenerate person, or those which involve sensual enjoyment—as some think who are ignorant or oppose our opinions, or else distort them. Rather, we mean the freedom of pain from the body and turmoil from the mind. Life is not made pleasant through continued drinking and partying, or sexual encounters, or feasts of fish and other such things as a costly banquet offers. It is sober contemplation which examines into the reasons for all choice and avoidance, and which chases away vain opinions from which the greater part of the confusion arises which troubles the mind. [Ibid.]

The third step in the quest for happiness is to develop the right virtues, that is, good habits, that will enable us to routinely experience the right kinds of pleasure, with the least amount of pain. Common virtues that Greek philosophers recommended are courage, honor, justice and moderation; Epicurus agrees that all of these good habits will lead one towards happiness. However, there is one main virtue that is the foundation of all of these, and that is good sense (sometimes called “prudence”), namely, the ability to make careful decisions about one’s interests and thereby choose the best pleasures. Which pleasures does good sense recommend? He writes, “Of all the things that good sense provides for the happiness of the whole life, by far the most important is the acquisition of friendship.” Also high on the list are good conversation and frugal living. On the other hand, good sense tells us to avoid the pleasures of ambition, public activity, marriage and children, since these produce more pain than pleasure in the long run.

C. STOICISM

Of all the philosophical schools active during Hellenistic times, Stoicism had the largest number of followers, and was often contrasted with Epicueanism, its closest rival. Stoicism held that the cosmos is governed by an over-arching fatalistic law, and we best achieve happiness when we resign ourselves to fate.

Zeno

The founder of Stoicism was a philosopher named Zeno (334–262 BCE) from the island of Cyprus (not to be confused with Zeno from Elea, who was the Presocratic follower of Parmenides). He was born in the city of Citium—now called Larnaca, one of Cyprus’s largest cities. At the time it was a small city with ties to both Greece and the Semitic land of Phoenicia (now Lebanon).  He moved to Athens at 22, perhaps as the result of a shipwreck. Legend has it that he was at a bookseller’s stall in the market place reading Xenophon’s account of Socrates. Fascinated by the philosopher, he asked the bookseller where he could find such a person. The bookseller replied “follow that man,” pointing to a famous Cynic philosopher who happened to be walking by. Zeno became his student, then moved onto other teachers, and after about twenty years began lecturing himself. His first followers were called Zenonians, but later referred to as “Stoics” after the place where he gave his lectures, namely, on the Painted Porch (Stoa Poikile) in the marketplace of Athens.

He is described as having a slightly twisted neck and harsh personality traits. A student of his once noticed that Zeno corrected everyone around him, except that particular student himself. He asked Zeno why, and Zeno replied “Because I have no confidence in you.” Zeno had very simple living habits, eating food that didn’t require cooking, drinking mostly water, wearing thin clothes, and he was apparently insensible to rain, heat, and pain. These aspects of his personality were ridiculed in a Greek play that contained the following line: “This man adopts a new philosophy: he teaches to be hungry, and nevertheless he gets disciples. Bread is his only food, his best desert is dried figs, and water is his drink.” While this description of Zeno is entertaining in itself, it also illustrates an important philosophical point for Stoicism: happiness is best attained by denying pleasures, and not by pursuing them as Epicurus recommended.

A famous story of Zeno relates that he once whipped a slave for stealing; the slave said it was his destiny to steal, and Zeno said it was also his destiny to be whipped. Again we find a philosophical message here: according to Stoicism, there is a consistency between the destiny that is fated for us and justice for how we behave. According to one account of Zeno’s death, he strangled himself after breaking his toe, which he took to be an indication that his time was up. One of his books, called The Republic, was a work of utopian politics depicting a city that is run by rational citizens. Although the work does not survive, descriptions of its contents conform to his preference for simplicity and austerity. He recommends abolishing money, temples, law courts, marriage. Men and women should dress alike, completely covering their bodies, yet at the same time should practice free love.

Zeno divided the field of philosophy into three areas: logic, physics and ethics. Stoic philosophers offered various analogies to explain how these three parts are related, such as these:

They compare philosophy to an animal, likening logic to the bones and sinews, physics to the fleshy parts, and ethical philosophy to the soul. They also compare it to an egg, calling logic the shell, and ethics the white, and physics the yolk. [Diogenes Laertius, Lives, “Zeno,” 33]

However, the most famous analogy, which was offered by Zeno himself, is that philosophy is like a garden where logic functions as the protective fence, physics is a tree within the garden, and ethics is the fruit that grows on the trees. We will consider each of these in order.

Logic: Conviction, Connectives, Argument Forms

There are many elements to Stoic logic, but we will examine three particularly interesting ones. First is their conception of truth conviction. Zeno argued that are four degrees of conviction: perception, assent, comprehension, knowledge. For example, I might perceive an apple falling from a tree, and think nothing else of it. Then I might push the matter further and assent to—or hold a belief about—the falling apple. Then I might comprehend some implications of the falling apple, such as it would hurt if it fell on my head. Finally, I might have full knowledge about the falling apple, involving the laws of nature which made it act as it did. Zeno picturesquely explained the different degrees of conviction by slowly clenching his fist, as described here:

Zeno illustrated this by the action of his hand. For showing his hand open to view with the fingers stretched out, perception, said he, is like this. Then, closing his fingers slightly, assent is like this. Next, entirely closed together his fingers and doubling his fist, he declared this position to resemble the mental act of comprehension; from that simile he also gave a new name to that mental act, calling it “grasping”. Again when he had brought up his left hand and had tightly and powerfully closed it over the other fist, he said that knowledge was like that, and that no one was able to attain to knowledge but the wise person. [Cicero, Academics, 2.4]

Zeno also states that knowledge, which is the strongest level of conviction “takes hold of us by the hair and drags us to assent.” The message behind these metaphors is that some beliefs are dramatically more compelling than others, and we have a high level of certainty of their truth.

A second component of Stoic logic involves understanding the underlying logical structure of the statements that we make, which they called “assertibles.” Take, for example, these two simple assertible statements: “it is day” and “it is night.” Using a logical connective, they can be spliced together into a longer one such as “it is day or it is night”. In this case, the logical connective is the word “or”. Of the many logical connectives discussed by the Stoics, in recent times the following four have become an essential part of logic in philosophy:

*Conditional (if-then): “If it is day, then it is light.”

*Conjunction (and): “It is day and it is light.”

*Disjunction (or): “It is day or it is night”

*Negation (not): “It is not day”

These four connectives are also foundational to computer programming where they are better known as “Boolean operators,” named after the 19th century British mathematician George Boole.

A third aspect of Stoic logic is the underlying logical structure of arguments. Suppose, for example, that I make the following statement: “Plato is breathing, so he must be alive”. This short sentence contains an argument and, according to the Stoics, the underlying structure of it is this:

If Plato is alive then Plato must be breathing.

Plato is alive

Therefore, Plato must be breathing

Or, more abstractly,

If A then B

A

Therefore, B

Today this particular logical form goes by the name modus ponens. Note that the logic of it hinges on a conditional “if-then” statement in the first line. Another logical argument form of the Stoics, which today goes by the name disjunctive syllogism, is this:

It is night or it is day

It is not night

Therefore, it is day

Or, more abstractly,

A or B

not A

Therefore, B

Here the underlying logic involves a disjunctive “or” statement in the first line, and a negation in the second line. These two argument forms—along with several others introduced by the Stoics—are foundational to contemporary notions of logical argumentation which have dominated philosophy since the early 1900s. Prior to that, it was Aristotle’s conception of logic that reigned supreme. And, we will recall, the basis of logical argumentation for Aristotle was the categorical syllogism, the standard example of which is this:

(1) All men are mortal

(2) Socrates is a man

(3) Therefore Socrates is mortal

What is central to Aristotle’s approach is that logic focuses on categories of things: the category of all men, the category of mortal things, and the category of Socrates the person. By contrast the Stoic’s approach focuses on logical connectives such as if-then, and, or, and not.

Physics: God and Fate

Stoic theories of physics and cosmology are as detailed as any accounts offered by Epicurus, Aristotle, or the Presocratics. A short summary of their position is this:

The Stoics teach that God is unity, and that he is called Mind, and Fate, and Jupiter, and by many other names besides. As he was in the beginning by himself, he turned into water the whole substance which pervaded the air. Just as the seed is contained in the fruit, so too, he being the seminal principle of the world, remained behind in moisture, making matter fit to be employed by himself in the production of those things which were to come after. Then he made the four elements, fire, water, air, and earth. . . . [The Stoics] say that all things are produced by fate. Fate is the connecting cause of existing things, or the reason according to which the world is regulated. [Diogenes Laertius, Lives, Zeno, 68, 74]

The most prominent feature of their physics, as reflected in the above passage, is their notion of fate: everything in the world is determined according to the principle of divine law. Also, as the above indicates, they variously describe their notion of fate as God, fire, destiny, and, perhaps most significantly, logos—the Greek term for “order” first used by the Presocratic philosopher Heraclitus.

The Stoic concept of fate is best illustrated in a puzzle that Aristotle had introduced. Suppose that you are on a battleship, and you face the possibility of going into battle tomorrow: either the battle will happen or the battle won’t happen. Even though we don’t know the future, are either of these two possibilities true right now before they happen? Aristotle said no: both possibilities are indeterminate. He writes, “One may indeed be more likely to be true than the other, but it cannot be either actually true or actually false” (On Interpretation, 9). Stoics, on the other hand, take the opposite view: one of these possibilities is indeed true right now, before it ever happens, even though we don’t yet know which one. The truth regarding the occurrence of a battle tomorrow is not established when the event takes place, but instead is already fixed. Today we refer to this position as the law of bivalence (literally meaning two things interacting). One Stoic philosopher explicitly used the law of bivalence as a proof that all things are fated:

Now, every proposition is either true or false. If it be so, then all effects owe their existence to anterior causes. This once admitted, we must grant that all things are governed by fate. It follows therefore that everything which happens, happens by fate. [Cicero, On Fate, 10]

On this view, if we grant that any proposition about the future is either true or false right now, then we must accept that the state of affairs indicated in that proposition is fated long before it occurs.

Another aspect of the Stoic conception of fate is their rather gloomy theory that we now call the eternal recurrence: the history of the universe is cyclical, going through endless sequences of creation and destruction in which each new one is exactly the same as the previous ones. Heraclitus, we’ve seen, already suggested that the universe continually goes through cycles of creation and destruction. What’s new to the Stoic conception, though, is that each cycle is identical to the others. The life that I’m leading right now is one that I’ve already lived an infinite number of times in the past and will live again an infinite number of times in the future. The rationale behind this view is that the principle of cosmic order—the same logos—recreates the universe each time and thus does so the same way. There are three specific stages to each new cycle. It begins with creative fire, then moves on to the creation and organization of the four elements into the world that we see around us. It finally ends in fire again. Fate not only controls the order of our present world, but it locks in that same sequence of events through all successive versions of our world.

Ethics

The central theme of Stoic ethics is to live according to nature and resign oneself to what is fated in the world around us. There are three themes to Stoicism’s ethical recommendation, the first of which involves living according to nature and its laws. As creatures of nature, the same cosmic ordering principle that gives structure to the world around us is also embedded within ourselves. To live ethically, then, is to live according to both human nature and nature as a whole, as described here:

In his treatise On Human Nature, Zeno was the first writer who said that the chief good was to live according to nature. This means living according to virtue, for nature leads us to this point. . . . Again, to live according to virtue is the same thing as living according to one’s experience of those things which happen by nature. Our individual natures are all parts of universal nature. Because of this, the chief good is to live in a manner that corresponds to nature, that is, that corresponds both to one’s own nature and to universal nature. [Diogenes, 53]

As stated above, one part of living according to nature involves abiding by moral virtues that are part of human nature. Another part of this, though, involves following the laws of human society, for the ordering principle of the cosmos is so thorough that it even shapes human laws:

This also means doing none of those things which the common law of humankind typically forbid. The common law is identical with that right reason which pervades everything, being the same with Jupiter, who is the regulator and chief manager of all existing things. [Ibid.]

Thus, the laws of society reflect the rational ordering principle of the cosmos. Ultimately, it is through the use of our human reason that we discover the rational law in nature, ourselves, and society:

We are to do everything in such a way that the capacity of each individual is in harmony with respect to the will of the universal governor and administrator of all things. This constitutes the virtue of the happy person and the good life. Diogenes [of Babylon], accordingly, says expressly that the chief good is to act according to sound reason in our selection of things according to our nature. [Ibid.]

The second theme in Stoic ethics involves reconciling free will with fate. We’ve seen from Stoic physics that Fate is always looming over us, and because of that it might seem as though we have no choice as to how we live. If there is no free will, how can I decide to morally improve myself? If my very actions are not within my control, then it seems that I’m not morally responsible for anything that I do, such as stealing a car or failing to pay my credit card bill. However, Stoics do not go this far, and even though they hold that Fate controls everything, they still believe that humans have free wills. Thus, free will is compatible with fate. How so? Fate controls everything outside of human beings—such as the weather, movement of the stars, and other natural events—but not completely what takes place in our thoughts. It’s not that our minds defy the natural order of things. Rather, fate sets only the general conditions for how nature operates, but does not micromanage how our thoughts unfold within our minds. One Stoic philosopher explained this with the following analogy:

It is like a man who pushing a cylinder gives it a principle of motion, but not immediately that of revolution. Similarly an object strikes our sense and conveys its image to our mind, yet leaves us free to form our specific sentiment concerning it. [Cicero, On Fate, 19]

According to this analogy, suppose I push a barrel and it rolls down a hill. I am in control of the general force that triggers its motion, but I do not follow the barrel down the hill spinning it with my hands. Its rolling motion owes to the configuration of the barrel itself. Similarly, fate starts natural events in the outside world (like me pushing the barrel), these events strike our senses and create perceptions in our minds. From there on, though, it’s the construction of our particular minds that processes those perceptions (like the cylindrical construction of the barrel itself influencing its motion).

Thus, the notion of free will is at least to some extent reconciled with fate. Questions still remain, though, about how strong this notion of free will is. On the one hand, it could be that our minds are just mini-machines that process perceptions according to inflexible rules, and our sense of free will is nothing more than an illusion. On the other hand, it could be that our thoughts operate freely in a little world of their own, isolated from the purely mechanical rules that govern our physical bodies and the world around us. Unfortunately, based on the scanty number of Stoic writings that survive, we don’t know which of these two routes they took. All that we can say for sure is that, according to the Stoics, we have some kind of control over our own thoughts, but no control over the events outside of us that are ruled by fate.

Epictetus: Accepting what we Cannot Control

This understanding of free will leads to the third component of Stoic ethics, namely, that we should adjust our attitudes to accept the things outside of us over which we have no control. A Stoic philosopher named Epictetus (c. 55–c.135) wrote in detail on this subject. A freed slave, he lived in a modest hut with only a mat, a pallet to sleep on, and a clay lamp. His central point is that we should be concerned only with things within our control, which are restricted to our own thoughts, impulses, and desires. At the same time, he argued, we should not be concerned with things outside of our control, such as our bodies, property, reputation, careers; rather, we should learn to accept these things as they come to us. He makes this important distinction here:

Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, career, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions. The things in our control are by nature free, unrestrained, unhindered; but those not in our control are weak, slavish, restrained, belonging to others. Remember, then, that if you suppose that things which are slavish by nature are also free, and that what belongs to others is your own, then you will be hindered. [Epictetus, Manual, 1]

Epictetus’s writing style is unusually informal, and he uses picturesque analogies to explain how we should deal with life’s most discouraging events. Suppose, for example, that your spouse or family member dies—a traumatic event over which you have no control. How are you supposed to deal with this? He answers this with an analogy of a broken cup:

With regard to whatever objects give you delight, are useful, or are deeply loved, remember to tell yourself of what nature they are, beginning from the most insignificant things. If, for example, you are fond of a specific cup, remind yourself that it is merely a cup  which you are fond of. Then, if it breaks, you will not be disturbed. If you kiss your child or your wife, say that you only kiss things that are mortal, and thus you will not be disturbed if either of them dies. [Ibid, 3]

His recommendation is that with everything you like, condition yourself to see that it is fragile and can easily be destroyed. Thus, when you drink from your favorite cup, realize that it can easily break. When you kiss a family member, remind yourself that you are kissing a mortal human that could die at any moment. If he or she does die, you will have adjusted to that fact in advance, and thus will not be overly disturbed.

He makes a similar point with another vivid analogy. Imagine that you are a sailor and are on shore leave enjoying things on the beach; at any moment the captain may call you back on board, and thus you must be prepared to let go of the things you enjoy.

Consider when, on a voyage, your ship is anchored. If you go on shore to get water you may along the way amuse yourself with picking up a shellfish, or a truffle. However, your thoughts and continual attention ought to be bent towards the ship, waiting for the captain to call you back on board. You must then immediately leave all these things, otherwise you will be thrown into the ship, bound neck and feet like a sheep. So it is with life. If, instead of an onion or a shellfish, you are given a wife or child, that is fine. But if the captain calls, you must run to the ship, leaving them, and do not concern yourself with them. But if you are old, never go far from the ship, for fear that when you are called you should be unable to come in time. [Ibid, 7]

In this analogy, the captain represents fate, and fate is ultimately in control of things in life that are available for you to enjoy, such as family members. If fate changes plans and separates you from your family, you need to be prepared to let them go.

In addition to being removed from loved ones, another common source of unhappiness is desiring something that we cannot have, such as a family, a good job, or wealth. We should deal with this, Epictetus explains, in the same way that we should when we’re at a banquet that has limited amounts of food. Wait until it is your turn to be served, and try to ignore what other people are getting:

Remember that you must behave in life as at a dinner party. Is anything brought around to you? Put out your hand and take your share with moderation. Does it pass by you? Don’t stop it. Is it not yet come? Don’t stretch your desire towards it, but wait till it reaches you. Do this with regard to children, to a wife, to careers, to riches, and you will eventually be a worthy partner of the feasts of the gods. And if you don’t even take the things which are set before you, but are able even to reject them, then you will not only be a partner at the feasts of the gods, but also of their empire. [Ibid, 15]

The best approach to life, Epictetus suggests, is to be so content with a simple lifestyle that you are willing to even turn down enjoyable things when they come your way.

One last analogy: life is like a dramatic play that you are acting in. Fate assigns you a particular role to play, and it’s your moral duty to accept it and act it out, regardless of what it is:

Remember that you are an actor in a drama which depends upon the judgment of the author. If he wants it short, then it is short; if long, then it is long. If it is his pleasure that you should act a poor man, a cripple, a governor, or a private person, see that you act it naturally. For it is your job to act well the role that is assigned you; it is another’s job to choose your role. [Ibid, 17]

This analogy encapsulates the overarching message of Stoic ethics: as a mere actor in a play, you are at the mercy of the author who directs you as he sees fit, so get used to it.

D. SKEPTICISM

A fourth major philosophical school of the Hellenistic period was skepticism, which, as its name implies, emphasized doubting everything, specifically as a means of becoming tranquil and happy. At the time there were two distinct schools of Greek skepticism. One, called Academic skepticism, originated within the philosophical school of the Academy, founded by Plato. While Plato himself was as anti-skeptical as any philosopher could be, within a few generations after his death his followers transformed the Academy into a stronghold of skepticism.

The second school, and the one that we will focus on here, was called Pyrrhonism after its founder Pyrrho (c.365-c.275 BCE). Pyrrho was not connected with the Academy. He was a painter from the Greek coastal city of Elis and is reported to have traveled with Alexander the Great to India, where he studied with scholars and mystics. The core of his philosophical views was that we should suspend judgment on every matter, and Pyrrho tried to practice what he preached. Even distrusting his senses, people would have to steer him clear of wagons, ledges, dogs. He was once traveling in a ship during a tumultuous storm, and passengers were gripped with terror. Pyrrho, though, remained calm and, pointing to a pig on board who was oblivious to the dangers, he said that this was the undisturbed state that we should all hope to achieve. If someone left Pyrrho in the middle of a conversation, he would continue speaking even when no one was there to hear him. A student of his once fell into a pond, and Pyrrho just walked by without helping him. The student later praised Pyrrho for this since it showed an indifference and absence of all emotion. Once when undergoing surgery, he didn’t flinch when the physician cut into him. However, on one occasion a dog attacked him by surprised, and he recoiled. Someone then criticized him for losing his composure, and Pyrrho replied “It is difficult to entirely suppress human nature, but we should nonetheless strive hard to neutralize situations with our actions if possible, and certainly with one’s reason.” He lived with his sister and did the housecleaning without complaining—a remarkable thing for a man to do at that time—and once patiently washed a pig. In spite of his odd and distant behavior, people thought fondly of him.

Though we have some reports of the contents of Pyrrho’s teaching, he authored nothing and the writings of his early students no longer exist. However, the Pyrrhonian school thrived for many centuries and we fortunately have works by a later Pyrrhonian philosopher and medical doctor named Sextus Empiricus (fl. 200 CE). His main book, a lengthy treatise titled Outlines of Pyrrhonism, gives a detailed description and defense of Pyrrhonian skepticism.

Skepticism and Tranquility

Sextus argues that there are essentially three kinds of philosophies. One, which he calls dogmatic, consists of philosophers such as Aristotle and the Stoics who claimed to have found truth. A second kind of philosophy is that of Plato’s Academy, which claims to be skeptical, but does not go far enough. The third kind is Pyrrhonism, which makes no claims about truth at all. He defines true skepticism as follows:

Skepticism is an ability to place appearances in opposition to judgments in any way whatever. By balancing reasons that are opposed to each other, we first reach the state of suspension of judgment, and afterwards that of tranquility. [Sextus, Outlines, 1.4]

This basic definition provides all the ingredients of how skeptics approach knowledge, truth, and even life itself. The starting point is recognizing that there are always two or more conflicting ways of perceiving anything. I say something looks red, you say it looks blue. I say something is good, you say it is bad. Every assessment that I make can conflict with a rival assessment. How, then, should we decide such issues? The answer is that we shouldn’t make a decision either way and instead just suspend our judgment. Sextus writes,

Suspension of judgment occurs by placing things in opposition to each other. We either place appearances in opposition to appearances, or thoughts in opposition to thoughts, or some combination of these. For example, we place appearances in opposition to appearances when we say that this tower appears round from a distance but square when near by. [Ibid, 1.13]

We regularly face decisions in life where we just have to say “I don’t know”. According to skeptics, we should say this about everything.

An especially interesting aspect of Pyrrhonian skepticism, which we see at the close of the above definition, is that by suspending judgment and doubting everything we can attain tranquility and happiness. What’s the connection between doubt and tranquility? If I claim to know that something is true, I immediately open the door for an opposing view, or a debate with someone on the issue, or simply create turmoil within my own mind as I reflect on the alternatives. We commonly find this when debating with others on politics and morality. I can instantly put an end to all the wrangling if I just suspend my judgment. I’ll be more tranquil, and thus happier. Several of the above stories about Pyrrho’s life illustrate his efforts to achieve tranquility through doubt, such as his continuing to speak even after everyone has walked away, apparently remaining neutral on whether anyone was there for him to converse with. In this way, Pyrrhonian skepticism offered a vision of happiness and the good life that rivaled the Epicurean emphasis on pleasure and the Stoic emphasis on resigning oneself to fate.

The Ten Methods

Early on in the development of Pyrrhonian skepticism, philosophers of this school formulated different arguments to show that everything imaginable can and should be doubted. The arguments settled into ten specific methods or patterns of skeptical reasoning. The underlying concept of each is that, for any so-called truth that you pick, there are different and conflicting ways of viewing it, neither of which we can prefer above the other. Thus, we must suspend belief about that so-called truth. Sextus lists the ten Methods here:

Certain Methods were commonly handed down by the older Skeptics, by means of which suspension of judgment seems to take place. They are ten in number, and are synonymously called “arguments” and “points.” They are these: (1) the method based upon the differences in animals; (2) that upon the differences in people; (3) that upon the difference in the constitution of the organs of sense; (4) that upon differing circumstances; (5) that upon differing position, distance, and place; (6) that upon differing mixtures; (7) that upon differing quantity and constitution of objects; (8) that upon differing relations; (9) that upon differing frequency or rarity of occurrences; (10) that upon differing systems, customs, laws, mythical beliefs, and dogmatic opinions. I have made this order myself. [Ibid, 1.14]

All of the Methods follow the same argument structure, which we can illustrate with the first one on the above list: differences in animals. For example, a dog perceives a ball as yellow, but a cow perceives the same ball as red; since the dog’s perception doesn’t have any more authority than the cow’s, and vice verse, we must suspend belief about whether the ball is yellow or red. More generally, the argument structure here is this:

(1) An object appears to have quality X to a dog.

(2) The same object appears to have quality Y to a cow.

(3) We cannot prefer the dog to the cow.

(4) Therefore, we suspend judgment as to whether the object has quality X or Y.

Sextus supports his claim about the perceptual differences in animals with a variety of biological examples, many of which still hold true by today’s scientific standards. He argues that the different sensory perceptions of animals owe to “the different origin of the animals, and also from the difference in the constitutions of their bodies.” He writes,

For how can it be said that shellfish, birds of prey, animals covered with spines, those with feathers and those with scales would be affected in the same way by the sense of touch? And how can the sense of hearing perceive alike in animals which have the narrowest auditory passages, and in those that are furnished with the widest, or in those with hairy ears and those with smooth ones? For even humans bear differently when we partially stop up the ears, from what we do when we use them naturally. [Ibid, 1.14]

We might feel that our own perceptions as human beings have more authority than the perceptions of various animals. But this too is a mistake: “We have no evidence according to which we can give preference to our own ideas over those of so-called irrational animals.” Human sensory perceptions are just one among many differing sorts in the animal kingdom. Thus, Sextus concludes, “since ideas differ according to the difference in animals, and it is impossible to judge them, it is necessary to suspend the judgment in regard to external objects.”

The remaining nine Methods follow the same general structure as this first one regarding animals. For example, Method two regarding the differences between people is this:

(1) An object appears to have quality X to me.

(2) The same object appears to have quality Y to you.

(3) We cannot prefer my perception to yours.

(4) Therefore, we suspend judgment as to whether the object has quality X or Y.

Method three compares how two different sense organs, such as sight and touch, give us different perceptions of the same object; we can’t prefer one sense organ over another, thus we suspend judgment about the qualities that the object actually has. And so on. Using these ten Methods, skeptics cast doubt on every possible assertion that someone might make, and undermine any possible standard of truth. Not only do they cast doubt on the qualities of the things that we perceive, they also question more fundamental assumptions about the world, such as whether one thing causes another, whether something is moving, and whether something can be created.

Perhaps the most controversial of the ten Modes is the last one regarding “differing systems, customs, laws, mythical beliefs, and dogmatic opinions.” This focuses specifically on the different religious and ethical views that people have. Societies differ in their views about the existence and nature of God, and we can’t prefer one society’s views to another. Thus, we must suspend belief about God’s existence and nature. Similarly, societies differ about what actions are right and wrong; thus we must suspend belief about whether such actions are actually right or wrong. This reiterates the issue of relativism first raised by Presocratic philosophers, such as Protagoras who famously stated that “Man is the measure of all things.” According to Pyrrhonian skeptics, all value judgments of religion and morality are creations of human culture. Here are just a few of Sextus’ many examples of culturally relative values that differing societies hold:

Some of the Ethiopians tattoo new-born children, but we do not. The Persians think it is appropriate to have a garment of many colors reaching to the feet, but we think it is inappropriate. People from India have sex with their women in public, but most of the other nations find that shameful. . . . Thus, seeing so great a diversity of practices, the skeptic suspends judgment as to the natural existence of anything good or bad, or generally to be done. [Ibid, 1.14]

From this cultural diversity of values, Sextus concludes that “the skeptic suspends judgment as to the natural existence of anything good or bad, or generally to be done.” That is, the skeptic withholds judgment about the existence of any objective foundation of values. Of the few surviving summaries of Pyrrho’s teachings, we find that he too denies the objective truth behind values, seeing them instead as a matter of cultural customs:

Nothing is honorable or disgraceful, just unjust. And similarly, in every case there is no such thing as downright truth. Rather, people do everything in consequence of custom and law, for nothing is any more this than that. [Diogenes, “Pyrrho,” 3]

Skepticism and Inconsistency

Skeptics were often criticized by rival philosophical schools for being inconsistent with itself. We’ll consider two versions of this attack, which even today are common attacks on skepticism. The first is that skepticism is that its assertions are self-contradictory. That is, skepticism’s central position is “doubt everything,” but this is an assertion that skeptics themselves do not doubt. Similarly, by refuting other positions, skeptics themselves dogmatically make claims about the truth. Skeptics also make dogmatic claims about the truth when holding that every view can be opposed by another view. Indeed, if the skeptic takes seriously his own recommendation “doubt everything”, then the skeptic must doubt his own position. Skeptics were well aware of these criticisms and gave the following response to them:

To this the Skeptics reply, that they only use reason as an instrument, because it is impossible to overturn the authority of reason without using reason. Similarly if we assert that “there is no such thing as space,” we must use the word “space,” but using it not dogmatically, but demonstratively. Again, if we assert that “nothing exists according to necessity,” it is unavoidable that we use the word “necessity.” [Diogenes, “Pyrrho,” 8]

The point is that by skeptically attacking the dogmatic assertions of others, skeptics have no choice but to use the vocabulary and methods of reasoning against the dogmatists. If you assert that the ball in front of you is red, in order to refute you I need to enter into your dialogue and use your own notions of logic and reason to show that you’re wrong. The entire “theory” of skepticism is a tool to refute dogmatic assertions of truth on its own grounds.

A second version of the criticism is that skeptics refute themselves in their very lives as they move around the world and talk about the things they see. They recognize that they are alive, that it is daytime, and they go about their daily routines. Their very behavior is an assertion of truths that we all accept. In response, skeptics concede that they have normal perceptions and understandings about the world they live in. Still, they suspend judgment about the nature of what they perceive:

We certainly do know that it is day, and that we are alive, and we admit that we know many other of the phenomena of life. . . . We confess that we see, and we are aware that we comprehend that such a thing is the fact, but we do not know how we see, or how we comprehend. . . . We assert what is actually the fact, but we do not describe its character. Again, we feel that fire burns, but we suspend our judgment as to whether it has a burning nature. [Diogenes, “Pyrrho,” 11]

The same goes for the language that skeptic’s use when describing ordinary things in the world. While they speak normally when saying something like “the snow on the hill looks white,” they say that they state this merely in a manner of speaking, without asserting positively that it really is so.

E. NEOPLATONISM

The final Hellenistic school that we will examine is Neoplatonism, which held that there is a single source of all reality from which every existing thing radiates, like rays radiating out from the sun. At the time, philosophers of this school saw themselves simply as Platonists, that is followers of Plato’s philosophy. The word “Neoplatonism” is a recently devised term, which indicates that these philosophers adapted Plato’s theory, rather than just followed it. While several Hellenistic philosophers can be classified as Neoplatonists, there is one undisputed leader: Plotinus (204-270 CE).

Plotinus and Plato’s Influence

Born in a Hellenized region of Egypt, in his twenties Plotinus studied philosophy in the city of Alexandria, one of the ancient world’s great centers of learning with its renowned library. He later joined the Roman army and set out with it on an expedition to Persia where he hoped to meet philosophers. The expedition was called off, though, and with difficulty he returned west and settled in Rome where he remained most of his life. At around 40 he established his own philosophical school, first lecturing on what he learned in Alexandria and later moving beyond that. He taught in a conversational style, and spent much time answering questions from his students and reading works of various philosophers. He attracted many followers, including a couple Roman senators. He was so well-regarded that when several older students died they left their children and property under Plotinus’s care, which he managed with great ability. In spite of his gentle disposition, Plotinus had a jealous rival in Rome who tried to harm him through acts of sorcery. However, every spell that the rival cast against Plotinus seemingly bounced back to harm the rival himself, so he gave up. By the time of his death from diphtheria at age 66, Plotinus had written 54 separate treatises, hastily composed with poor penmanship and no rewriting. He entrusted these documents to a close student of his named Porphyry, who subsequently edited them all into a single lengthy work that he titled the Enneads. The term is Greek for “nine”, and represents Porphyry’s division of the 54 treatises into six groups of nine.

Plotinus was heavily influenced by Plato, and the Enneads is packed with references to him. In fact, Plato figures so prominently in Plotinus’s writings that, when copies of Plato’s grew scarce and virtually disappeared, for hundreds of years scholars viewed Plotinus’s Enneads as simply a summary of Plato’s ideas. We now know that Plotinus’s views are different than Plato’s, but because of this mistake of identity, Plotinus’s philosophy skyrocketed in popularity during the middle ages. There are three distinct aspects of Plato’s thought that shaped Plotinus’s views. First is Plato’s matter-spirit dualism: the universe is comprised of both a material-realm and a spirit-realm. The spirit realm houses the perfect Forms that are the source of all truth and reality. The material-realm, by contrast, is an inferior world that poorly copies the Forms. Second is Plato’s body-soul dualism: the body entombs the soul, and upon death our souls rise to the higher spirit realm of truth and perfection. Third is Plato’s view of the Good: it is the form of perfection that illuminates everything else in the universe, just as the sun illuminates the world. Plotinus, we will see, develops each of these three themes in a unique way.

The central point of Plotinus’s philosophy is that all levels of reality emanate from the One, and to understand this it helps to keep in mind the above mentioned metaphor of the sun’s rays, which Plotinus adapted from Plato and used with great regularity. Think of the sun blazing out rays of light in all directions. The center of the sun is the brightest and purest part of it, and as you move further away the sun’s rays grow dimmer and dimmer. Finally, when you are so far removed from the sun that there is no light at all, there is only darkness. Similarly, the One is pure being and from it radiates all the levels of reality, with those closest to the One being most perfect, and those furthest away the least perfect. Beyond that is simply non-being, sort of like absolute darkness. Everything that exists, then, lies somewhere on a spectrum between the pure being of the One at one extreme, and nonbeing at the other extreme.

An initial question that we might raise about the One is why it radiates anything at all? Recall a contrasting view of the One held by Parmenides, the Presocratic philosopher: the One is the only thing that exists, it has no parts or movement, and doesn’t produce anything. Plotinus does not go this route and instead maintains that the One radiates other levels of reality. The reason is that the nature of any existing thing is for it to radiate something, whether it’s fire radiating heat, or flowers radiating fragrances. Thus, the One radiates something too. He writes,

All existences, as long as they retain their character, produce about themselves, from their essence, in virtue of the power which must be in them some necessary, outward-facing hypostasis [i.e., underlying reality] continuously attached to them and representing in image the producing archetypes. Thus fire gives out its heat; snow is cold not merely to itself; fragrant substances are a notable instance; for, as long as they last, something is diffused from them and perceived wherever they are present. [Enneads, 5.1.6]

The above quote uses the term “hypostasis”, a Greek term meaning underlying reality. Plotinus’s point is that all things radiate some underlying reality; so too, then, does the One radiate—or emanate—underlying layers of reality.

Divine Triad: The One, Intellect, Soul

According to Plotinus, God consists of the first three levels of reality, from the center of the One outward, similar to the center of the sun plus two levels of the sun’s corona. God, then, is a divine triad. The reason for this is that the first levels of emanation from the One are so close to it, that it retains the divine element of the One. The three elements of the divine triad are the One itself, Intellect, and Soul. Let’s look at each of these.

The One is pure undifferentiated unity and the cause of everything. Following Plato, Plotinus sometimes refers to it as the Good. Because of its pure and indivisible nature, however, it is impossible to directly describe it with words. Imagine that you stood before an intensely bright light that filled your complete visual range. While you might be able to describe how it makes you feel, you wouldn’t be able to give details about the light itself. In the following, Plotinus graphically describes the unspeakable nature of the One:

The One, as above knowledge, is above knowing. Above all need, it is above the need of the knowing which pertains solely to [things that have a] secondary nature. . . .  Thus the One is in truth beyond all statement: any affirmation is of a thing; but the all-transcending, resting above even the most august divine Intellect, possesses alone of all true being, and is not a thing among things; we can give it no name because that would imply predication: we can but try to indicate, in our own feeble way, something concerning it: when in our perplexity we object, “Then it is without self-perception, without self-consciousness, ignorant of itself”; we must remember that we have been considering it only in its opposites. If we make it knowable, an object of affirmation, we make it a multiplicity; and if we allow knowledge in it we make it at that point indigent: supposing that in fact intellection accompanies it, intellection by it must be superfluous. [Ibid, 5:3:12, 13]

While we can give no concrete description of the One, we still have some very limited understanding of it that we can put into words. He writes,

How, then, do we ourselves speak about it? No doubt we deal with it, but we do not state it; we have neither knowledge nor thought of it. But in what sense do we even deal with it when we have no hold upon it? We do not, it is true, grasp it by knowledge, but that does not mean that we are utterly void of it. We hold it not so as to state it, but so as to be able to speak about it. And we can and do state what it is not, while we are silent as to what it is. We are, In fact, speaking of it in the light of what comes after it. Unable to state it, we may still possess it. [Ibid, 14]

According to the above, we can indirectly describe the One in either of two ways. First we can state what the One is not, while remaining silent about what it is. Later philosophers refer to such a description of the divine as the way of negation. For example, when viewing a basketball, I can say that it is not square, or triangular, or green, or blue. Eventually, by saying enough  If we try to say anything positive about what the One is, we will inevitably misdescribe and distort it, such as if we say that it is powerful or conscious. For Plotinus, we can’t even assert the positive fact that the One exists. The safer alternative is to list the things that the One is not. For instance, we can say that the One has no physical form and that it has no parts. Second, we can know something about the One through examining the next level of reality that it produces, namely, the divine Intellect.

Turning next to the divine Intellect, this is a part of the divine triad that we can describe since it has separate parts to it, unlike the One which has no parts. Among the parts of the Intellect are the Platonic Forms—that is, the unchanging abstract objects (such as justice, roundness, tableness), which serve as perfect models for the imperfect particular things in the physical world. The collection of Forms constitutes every eternal truth that could possibly exist. In a sense, the divine Intellect thinks about all of these Forms, thereby giving a logical organization to all reality which relies on these abstract truths. While the divine Intellect is one step removed from the One, it nevertheless contains much of the character of the One itself. He writes, “The greatest, after the One, must be Intellect. It must be the second of all existence, for it is that which sees the One on which alone it leans, while the One itself has no need whatever of it.”

Moving on to the third part of the divine triad, the divine Soul is produced by the divine Intellect, and is thus two steps removed from the One. Because of this distance from the One, there is some degeneration of quality to it—like making a photocopy of a photocopy. He writes,

In Soul the expression [of the Intellect from which it originates] is obscured, for Soul is a ghostly image of the Intellect. Intellect, on the other hand, looks to the One without reflection, thus becoming what it is. It has that vision of the One, not as from a distance but by being immediately next to it, with nothing in between it. Intellect is as close to the One as Soul to Intellect. [Ibid]

While the divine Intellect thinks about the Forms that it possesses, the divine Soul in its more obscured state desires the perfect Forms that it does not possess. It’s as though the Soul is thinking, if I can’t possess the perfect Form of roundness, then by golly I’ll just make my own round thing out of this material stuff. Thus, in the Soul’s state of desire for the Forms, it produces particular things that copy the Forms, such as a round rock that copies the form “roundness”, or a just person that copies the form “justice”. Plotinus says “Soul, as an activity proceeding from Intellect, is in labor to create after the Forms which it sees in Intellect and from this desire the whole world arises and takes shape” (4.7.13). In this way, the divine Soul creates the natural world, and all the physical and living things it contains, temporarily ignoring its divine and immaterial nature.  Material stuff itself is pliable and can take on the shape of any of the Forms.

At this point, the material world is three steps removed from the One, and is so degenerated that almost nothing of the One is preserved in material things. The material world is like the very last glimpses of the sun’s rays before entering total darkness; it is the very last level of reality just before nonbeing. All the evil that we see in the world around us owes to the fact that material things are so far removed from the divine nature, crumbling away as it touches the boundaries of nonexistence. Because of the material world’s distance from the One, the evil that we see results from the absence of divine goodness. That is, it is not as though evil is the creation of a special malevolent being or force. Evil simply is the absence of good, just as darkness is the absence of light.

Returning to the Beauty of the One

Where do human beings fit into this grand divine scheme of the cosmos? According to Plotinus, there are two parts to the human soul, a higher and a lower. The higher part of my soul resides within the divine Intellect and has direct awareness of the perfect Forms; the lower part is trapped within my body in the material world, and strives to be released from it. Just as Plato deplored the human body, so too did Plotinus. In fact, we have this description of Plotinus’s gloomy view of his own body:

Plotinus, the philosopher and our contemporary, seemed ashamed of being in the body. So deeply rooted was this feeling that he could never be induced to tell of his ancestry, his parentage, or his birthplace. He showed, too, an unconquerable reluctance to sit to a painter of a sculptor, and when Amelius persisted in urging him to allow of a portrait being made he asked him, “Is it not enough to carry about this image in which nature has enclosed us? Do you really think I must also consent to leave, as a desired spectacle to posterity, an image of the image?” [Porphyry, Life of Plotinus]

Thus, while I am alive and the lower part of my soul is trapped within my body, I have an inward striving to ascend to my proper place within the divine Intellect. Ultimately, this will occur when I die. Plotinus himself, when on his deathbed, said “I will now try to make that which is divine in me rise up to that which is divine in the universe” (ibid). But while I’m still here on earth, through a mystical experience I can recognize and ascend to our true divine state:

We must ascend again towards the [divine] Good, the object of desire of every Soul. Anyone that has seen the Good, knows what I mean when I say that it is beautiful. Even the desire of it is to be desired as a good. Attaining it is a task for those that will take the upward path, who will set all their forces towards it, who will rid themselves of all that we have put on in our descent. [Enneads, 1:6:7.]

To take the upward path towards the divine Good, we must strip away everything about us that pertains to our material existence, including those pleasures in life that made us happy and the things that we might find physically beautiful. These, according to Plotinus, are only images of reality. Instead, we must return to our true place of birth. We can’t obviously get there by foot and we can’t even get there through the use of human reason. Instead, we must have an inner vision of the beauty of divine Goodness. To do this, we must first look within ourselves and find the inner beauty of the One that is there in its very limited state:

Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work. So do you also: cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labor to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiseling your statue, until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendor of virtue, until you shall see the perfect goodness surely established in the stainless shrine. [Ibid, 9]

Once we’re capable of seeing divine goodness within ourselves, we will have the right kind of spiritual eyes and can them cast our gaze upward to see the beauty within the divine Intellect. He writes,

When you know that you have become this perfect work, when you are self-gathered in the purity of your being, nothing now remains that can shatter that inner unity. . . When you see that you have become this, then you have become sight. You can trust yourself and have already ascended and need no one to show you. Concentrate your gaze and see. This is the only eye that sees the mighty Beauty. . . . So, rising, the Soul will come first to the divine Intellect and survey all the beautiful Forms in the Supreme and will affirm that this is Beauty, that the Ideas are Beauty. For by their efficacy comes all Beauty else, but the offspring and essence of the Intellect. What is beyond the Intellect we affirm to be the nature of Good radiating Beauty before it. [Ibid]

By seeing the vision of divine goodness, we will experience a union with the divine. We will have no experience of our individual selves and be in a state of tranquility and ecstasy.

Plotinus’s philosophy is perhaps best classified as pantheism, the view that the entire cosmos is identical to God. But it is different from the earlier Presocratic pantheistic notions of Xenophanes and Parmenides. For Plotinus, all existence—even the material world—is part of the One and its radiance, although some parts are more purely divine than others. Pantheistic-minded philosophers in the centuries to come looked to Plotinus for inspiration. However, even those who rejected pantheism were drawn to three particular aspects of Plotinus’s thought. First is the idea that things radiate or emanate from God, particularly divine knowledge or wisdom. Second is the notion that we can only give negative descriptions of God. Third is that evil results from the absence of good.

E. CONCLUSION

The Hellenistic philosophies that we’ve looked at in this chapter emerged before the views of Plato and Aristotle achieved dominance, and thus the newcomers were very much the rivals of the old masters. Epicureanism and Stoicism were especially popular in Roman times. The complete range of Greek philosophies—from the Presocratics on through Plotinus—presented an almost unimaginable variety of theories, which only the most gifted philosophers since then have been able to improve upon. When we speak of the philosophical tradition of Western civilization, it is largely in reference to the outgrowth of this collection of Greek theories.

As distinct schools of thought, though, the five Hellenistic philosophies disappeared with the emergence of Christianity and its status as the official religion within the Roman Empire. While components of the Hellenistic philosophies could be incorporated into early Christian doctrine, the overall thrust of many of these was contrary to Church teaching. There was no place for Cynical defiance of social norms, Epicurean emphasis on pleasure, Stoic fatalism, and Skeptical doubt. Plotinus’s philosophy was the only one that was widely embraced by Christian philosophers.

The decline of these schools also meant the disappearance of the vast majority of their writings, and it wasn’t until the Renaissance one thousand years later that philosophers attempted to revive their teachings, with varying degrees of success. In more recent centuries, Cynicism’s lack of structure has prevented it from becoming a viable social philosophy. While Stoic logic has ultimately triumphed over Aristotle’s syllogistic logic, its view of an impersonal fatalistic deity continues to be at odds with the popular notion of a personal God. By the 19th century, Plotinus’s brand of mystical pantheism became eclipsed by more accessible Eastern philosophies. Ultimately, it was Epicureanism and Skepticism that have best endured, and continue to have an important impact on contemporary philosophy. Epicureanism survives in the form of its direct descendent, utilitarianism, which is one of the leading ethical theories today. Skepticism is a dominant component in contemporary theories of knowledge, and the skeptical arguments of the Ten Methods are timeless.

Questions for Review

Please answer all of the following questions for review.

1. Give an example of Diogenes’ odd behavior that shows his contempt for luxury.

2. Explain Epicurus’ view of the slight swerve and how it applies to free will.

3. According to Epicurus, how do we get rid of our fear of the gods?

4. For Epicurus, what are the three kinds of natural desires, and which kind best brings about happiness?

5. According to Zeno the Stoic, what are the four degrees of conviction?

6. Explain the Stoic view of the eternal recurrence.

7. Explain the Stoic metaphor of rolling a barrel down a hill and how this applies to the issue of free will.

8. According to Epictetus the Stoic, which types of things are within our control?

9. According to Sextus Empiricus the Skeptic, how does skepticism lead to tranquility?

10. Explain the first mode of skepticism.

11. What is the skeptic’s response to those who say that the skeptical position “doubt everything” is self-refuting?

12. For Plotinus, what are the three parts of the divine triad, and what does each of them create?

13. For Plotinus, what can we say about the nature of the One?

14. According to Plotinus, how do we gain the proper eyesight to see the beauty of the One?

Questions for Analysis

Please select only one question for analysis from those below and answer it.

1. Defend the Cynic view that happiness is achieved through defying social convention.

2. Criticize Epicurus’ notion of free will as based on his conception of the slight swerve.

3. Explain the Stoic law of bivalence and how it relates to fate.

4. Critics charged that skeptics refute themselves in their very lives as they engage in the world. Explain the skeptic’s answer to this and discuss whether it is an effective response.

5. Discuss in what ways, on Plotinus’ view, God is or is not the cause of evil in the world.

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CHAPTER 4: CLASSICAL EASTERN PHILOSOPHY

A. Hindu philosophy

The Self-God

Release from Rebirth

Yoga

Vedanta

B. Buddhist Philosophy

Four Noble Truths

Improper Questions and the No-Self Doctrine

Dependent Origination

Emptiness and Zen Buddhism

C. Confucian Philosophy

Ritual conduct

Humanity and the Superior Person

Filial Obedience and Good Government

Mencius: Inherent Human Goodness

D. Daoist Philosophy

The Dao

Return

Non-Action and Non-Mind

Minimal Governing

Lieh-Tzu: Following Natural Desires

E. Conclusion

Questions for Reflection

1. People speak of God dwelling within us. Suppose that was literally true, and God was at the core of all of our individual identities. Would that change they way you viewed the world and religious practices?

2. Suppose that the process of reincarnation actually happened. Would that be a good thing or bad thing?

3. Would it be possible to completely eliminate your desires and notion of self identity, and, if so, what would that be like?

4. For you to be morally good, do you need to have the right inner attitude, or is proper behavior good enough?

5. Suppose that there are two types of people: high energy active types, and low energy passive types. Which would be better for social stability, the natural environment, and your personal happiness?

At the time that ancient Greek philosophy was blossoming, on the other side of the world a different set of philosophical traditions emerged within the Eastern Asian regions of India and China. Like Greece, both of these areas had complex social structures, sophisticated cultures, and, most importantly, systems of writing that enabled people to record their thoughts. But unlike Greek philosophy which was largely secular, Eastern philosophies were intimately tied to their local religious traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism and Daoism. Distinguishing Eastern philosophy from religion is an issue of emphasis: its philosophy deals less with worship rituals and depictions of the gods, and more with larger questions of our relation to the cosmos.

While the specific elements of the various Eastern philosophies differ dramatically, many share a specific conception of God and the cosmos. Philosophers and theologians of all traditions try to understand how God – or an ultimate divine reality – relates to the world. There are two general approaches. First, I can look at a mountain or a forest and see these as external objects that God creates, which are not literally part of God himself. God himself transcends or rises above the things in the world, and is beyond even the cosmos itself. To communicate with God, I must look beyond this finite created world and seek God in his secluded realm. The Western religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam typically depict God in this way. The second approach is that I can look at the same mountain and forest and see these as literally parts of God. God is not external to the cosmos, but dwells within it or is immanent to it. This view is often called pantheism, a term literally meaning all-God. On this view, God dwells within me too since I am part of the cosmos. To communicate with God I look within myself, and not outwards to a secluded divine realm beyond the cosmos. Communication with God, then, involves a mystical experience by which I become aware of my union with God. Eastern religious traditions in general gravitate towards this pantheistic notion of God.

A: HINDU PHILOSOPHY

The best place to begin examining Eastern Philosophy by looking at Hinduism. Hindu texts are among the oldest in the East, and their concepts directly or indirectly influenced the philosophy of other Eastern philosophical traditions. While many of the world’s religious traditions were founded by renown people—Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad—Hinduism has no founding figure, and it covers a diversity of views of the people of India dating as far back as 3,500 BCE. The term “Hindu” comes from the Persian word “Hind,” which was the name given to the Indus River region of northern India. Most generally, “Hinduism” means the religion of the Indus River region. Early Hindu religion was polytheistic, similar to the religion in ancient Greece and Rome. Their sacred text is a large work called the Vedas, which literally means “bodies of knowledge,” written between 1,500-800 BCE in the ancient language Sanskrit. It describes features of various gods, rituals to appease them, and hymns to chant to them. Hindu philosophical discussions emerged shortly after, from around 800 BCE to 200 CE., emphasizing the pantheistic notion of the divine reality that permeates the cosmos. The Hindu name for this reality is the Atman-Brahman, literally meaning the Self-God, and much of Hindu philosophy focuses on this concept.

The Self-God

The dramatic implication of the notion of the Self-God is that I am the God of the cosmos. This requires some explanation, and classical Hindu philosophers were prepared to provide it. The Atman is our true Self that lies at the inner core of our human identities, and it is only this inner core that is identical with God. Hindus sometimes use an analogy of an onion to describe the various layers of our identities. Like an onion with many layers of skin, our human identities also have different layers. The outer layers of our identities involve common sense views of ourselves that we experience empirically, such as our individual physical bodies, sensations, thoughts and feelings. The Self-God is like the inner core of the onion, hidden beneath many distracting layers, and consequently we fail to immediately comprehend the very existence of that inner core and our divine status. Instead, we see ourselves as distinct beings – each of us with our own bodies and minds – and we see the world itself as consisting of a multiplicity of isolated parts. By pealing away the outer layers of our identities, though, we will find the Self-God within each of us and see the underlying unity of the world.

The doctrine of the Self-God was put forward in two specific Hindu works: The Upanishads and The Bhagavad Gita. The Upanishads is actually a series of more than 200 anonymously-written texts, although Hindu tradition gives special emphasis to only about 18 early ones composed between 600 and 400 BCE. In one of the most famous of these, a father picturesquely describes to his son how things that seem diverse in fact have an underlying reality. Plants, animals, humans, and everything else are united in the Self-God that exists beneath the physical structure of things. Take, for example, how bees collect juices from a variety of trees and unify those juices in their honey:

Bees make honey by collecting the juices of distant trees and reducing the juices into one form. These juices have no discrimination and do not say “I am the juice of this tree or that tree.” In the same manner, when all these creatures merge with Being [either in deep sleep or in death], they do not know that they merged with Being. Whatever these creatures are here — whether a lion, a wolf, a boar, a worm, a fly, a gnat, or a mosquito — they become that again and again. Everything that exists has as its soul that which is the finest essence. It is Reality. It is the Atman, and you are that, my son. [Chandogya Upanishad]

This passage makes a distinction between our physical identities and our underlying true identities. Our physical identities go through continual cycles of reincarnation; this is so of animal life as well as human life. Our true underlying identities, though, merge with God, which is undifferentiated reality. The father says to his son, “You are that,” meaning that his son is the Self-God that he’s describing (Tat Tvam Asi in the Sanskrit language). According to later Hindu tradition, this phrase “You are that,” as spoken by the father, encapsulates the message of all the Upanishads.

The Bhagavad Gita, or Song of God, is a 100-page section of an epic poem called the Mahabharata. At about 5,000 pages and composed over an 800 year period, the Mahabharata is the world’s longest epic poem. It chronicles a legendary feud between two branches of a royal family. The long-standing quarrel culminates in a bloody battle. The story line behind the Bhagavad Gita focuses on prince Arjuna, the leader on one side of the feud, who is despairing about going into battle against his kinfolk. He expresses his grief to his charioteer, Krishna, who, it turns out, is the manifestation of the Hindu god Vishnu in human form. Krishna comforts Arjuna with a philosophy lesson about discovering the Self-God:

Those who distinguish between the slayer and the slain are ignorant of them both. No one slays, and no one is slain. No one is born, and no one dies. No one who once existed, ceases to exist. They are unborn, perpetual, eternal and ancient, and are not slain when their bodies are slaughtered. If we understand a person to be indestructible, perpetual, unborn, undiminishing, how can that person slay, or be slain? [Bhagavad Gita, Sect. 2]

Krishna’s point is that we are all eternal by virtue of the Self-God within us, and what happens to our bodies is insignificant. By implication, Arjuna should not worry about the conflict with his relatives since even if their bodies die in battle, their inner selves are untouched.

Release from Rebirth

Hindus have a long tradition of belief in reincarnation, which, most simply, is the view that one’s present life is followed by a series of new lives in new physical bodies. There are two components to rebirth. First, there is the basic process of rebirth itself: when I die, my true Self will be reborn into another body, and when that body dies, I will be reborn into another, and so on. The Bhagavad Gita picturesquely states “As a person throws off worn-out garments and takes new ones, so too the dweller in the body throws off worn-out bodies and enters into others that are new” (Bhagavad Gita, 2). Some Hindu writings are explicit about the mechanics of the rebirth process. When I die, and my body is cremated, my soul rises with the smoke and travels through the heavens for several months. My soul then falls back to earth, mixes with natural elements, and is consumed by humans. From there my soul works its way into a man’s semen, and, through intercourse, enters a woman’s womb.

The second component of rebirth is that the moral consequences of my behavior in this life are carried over to my next lives. Known as the doctrine of karma, or action, the quality of my existence in my new life is largely a function of my good or bad actions in my present and previous lives. To illustrate, imagine that my true Self carries around a karma pouch from one life to another. Each time I perform a good deed, a good-karma token is tossed into the pouch, and when I perform a bad deed, a bad-karma token is thrown in. When I die, I carry the karma pouch and all of its tokens on to the next life. If I have an abundance of good-karma tokens, then in my next life I may be healthier, wealthier, and more spiritually mature than I am now. On the other hand, if I die with an abundance of bad-karma tokens, then I may be reborn sickly, poor, and ignorant. To make my next lives better, I should do what I can to accumulate as many good-karma tokens as I can.

While we might think of reincarnation as a good thing, it is instead something that we should dread. We need to do what we can to become released (moksha) from the rebirth cycle. Hindu writings stress several approaches to release, two of which are especially dominant. One approach is that release is a matter of accumulating a great abundance of good karma over our various lives. When I get as good as I can possibly be, then the rebirth process is over and my true Self remains with God. The appeal of this approach is that it underscores the fact that life is a moral journey, with perfection as our ultimate goal. The other approach to release involves discovering the Self-God within me through disciplined reflection and meditation. The appeal of this approach is that I can go more directly towards my final goal and experience the pure Self-God right here and now. Both of these approaches, though, are interconnected. Before I’m capable of reflectively experiencing the Self-God within me, I must first be morally mature. If I rob a bank this morning, I stand little chance of discovering the Self-God within me this afternoon, no matter how hard I meditate. Developing that moral maturity might require that I go through several more reincarnations until my karma pouch is filled with good tokens, at which time I’ll be able to more successfully meditate.

Yoga

It is one thing for us to theoretically understand the concept of the Self-God, and entirely another for us to discover the Self-God within each of us. To assist believers in this task, Hindu tradition developed a series of yoga techniques. The term “Yoga” literally means “to yoke” or “to harness,” and, more generally, it means  “discipline”. The Bhagavad Gita is something like a handbook of the various Yoga methods, and we’ll look it its account of two of them.

The first of these is the Yoga of action (karma), which involves routinely behaving with indifference to the fruits of our actions. By engaging in pure action, unconcerned with the action’s results, we distance ourselves from the outer layers of our identities and our perceptions of the world. We thus become more sensitive to the reality of the Self-God. Suppose, for example, that it is lunchtime and I make a sandwich. Ordinarily, I do this to ward off hunger pangs, to satisfy my food craving, to keep me healthy, or to keep me alive. All of these reasons, though, emphasize the outer layers of my identity: my bodily cravings, my desires, and the continuation of my finite life. This all takes me far from my true inner Self. I should still eat the sandwich, but I should disassociate myself from the act of eating, and view it as though someone else is eating the sandwich. Since all of our actions focus on our outer selves, the Yoga of action prescribes disassociation from everything that we do: “By renouncing the fruit of one’s actions, the person who is endowed with intellect, is freed from the bond of birth and goes to the place that is devoid of illness” (Bhagavad Gita, 2). Ultimately, reincarnation is the result of people clinging to the fruits of their actions. We are locked into our physical bodies as long as we enjoy the results of our activities. We need an evenness of mind to give up the fruits of our actions.

According to the Bhagavad Gita, we will not reach this degree of indifference in our actions by following traditional customs in the scriptures: “Scriptures prescribe many ceremonies to attain pleasure and power, but rebirth is the fruit of those actions” (ibid). Like eating a sandwich, we perform religious rituals for a purpose; in this case, the purpose is to appease God or to get to heaven. However, religious actions are no less distracting than any other action. There are clear psychological indicators when we disassociate ourselves from our actions, namely, we are freed from all emotions and attachments:

When a person abandons all the desires of his heart and is satisfied in the Self and by the Self, then he is called “stable in mind.” A sage of stable mind is free from anxiety when surrounded by pains, is indifferent when surrounded by pleasures, and is freed from passion, fear and anger. He is without attachments on every side, whether desirable or undesirable, and neither likes nor dislikes. The person of understanding is well poised. Just as a tortoise pulls in all its limbs, the sage withdraws his senses from the objects, and his understanding is well poised. [Ibid]

The analogy of the tortoise in the final sentence explains the benefit of freeing ourselves from emotions and attachments. Through detachment, we withdraw from the world of the senses, which in turn enables us to be more in tune with the Self-God.

A second type of Yoga discussed in the Bhagavad Gita is that of meditation, which involves immediately experiencing our union with God through contemplation. The practice of meditation requires a disciplined effort, and to that end the Bhagavad Gita provides step-by-step instructions. When attempting meditation, we should first find a private spot, assume a seated posture, gaze ahead, subdue our thoughts and senses, and lose self-consciousness. Through this method, we directly experience the unified Self-God within us.

The Yogi should constantly engage himself in Yoga, staying in a secret place by himself, subduing his thoughts and Self, and freeing himself from hope and greed. He should set up a fixed seat for himself in a pure place, which is neither too high, nor too low, made of a cloth, a black deerskin, and grass, one over the other. Once there he should practice Yoga for the purification of the Self; he should make his mind one-pointed, subduing his thoughts and the functions of his senses. He should hold his body, head and neck erect, immovably steady, looking at the point of his nose with an unseeing gaze. His heart should be serene, fearless and firm in the vow of renunciation. His mind should be controlled as he sits in harmony. In this manner he will think on me and aspire after me. [Ibid, 6]

The point of all these steps in the meditative process is to block out distractions. Imagine that you are in a room with 50 radios playing, all tuned to different channels, and in the back of the room a cat is meowing. The only way to hear the cat is to first shut off all the radios, one by one. Similarly, the meditative techniques guide us in successively shutting down the commotion of ordinary consciousness so that we can experience our inner Selves.

In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna and Arjuna discuss some of the pitfalls of the Yoga of meditation. Krishna says that this meditation method is not for everyone, but only for those who can avoid extremes in their conduct and desires:

Yoga is not for the person who eats too much or too little, or who sleeps too much or too little. Yoga kills all pain for the person who is moderate in eating, amusement, performing actions, sleeping, and waking. When his subdued thought is fixed on the Self and free from desiring things, then we can say that he is harmonized. Just as a lamp in a windless place does not flicker, so too will the subdued thought of the Yogi be absorbed in the Yoga of the self. . . . The Yogi who harmonizes the self and puts away evil, will enjoy the infinite bliss of unity with the eternal God. The self, harmonized by Yoga, sees the Self abiding in all beings, and all beings in the Self. Everywhere he sees the same thing. [Ibid]

Thus, if we succeed in being moderate, then we will see the unity of the Self in everything. In response to Krishna, Arjuna objects that, for some people, their minds are so restless that it is impossible to bring it under control as Krishna advises. Krishna replies that through practice and the subduing of our passions we may successfully restrain our thoughts; this underscores the challenge in bringing our Self under control, and why we may appropriately refer to Yoga as a “discipline.” Pressing the issue, Arjuna asks what will happen to the person who attempts the Yoga of Meditation, but fails. Krishna responds that, even if someone fails at the Yoga of Meditation in his current incarnation, through good deeds we may be reincarnated as a Yogi who finally succeeds at meditation. “In this reborn state, he retains the characteristics belonging to his previous body, and with these he again works for perfection” (ibid).

Vedanta: Monism

In philosophy, monism is the view that the universe is composed of only one type of thing, and Hinduism as a whole tends to be monistic, with its pantheistic conception of God enveloping everything. Beginning in the eighth-century CE, the issue of monism was heavily debated by a group of philosophers within Hinduism’s Vedanta tradition, which drew its inspiration directly from the Upanishads. The debate started with the views of a scholar named Sankara (788-820 CE). Philosophically, there are two ways that we can understand the notion of monism. The first, which we will call weak monism, is the view that the universe consists of one basic thing, but that thing is divided into sub-units. An orange, for example, is a unified whole insofar as it is a self-contained biological unit. On the other hand, an orange clearly has parts to it, such as its outer peal, inner sections, and seeds. The second kind of monism, which we will call strong monism, is the view that the universe consists of one undifferentiated thing that has no sub-units. A cannon ball, for example, is composed of a single metallic stuff through and through, and has no obvious internal parts that differentiate it. When reflecting on the monistic themes in the Upanishads, Sankara had to decide between interpreting them as weak monism or strong monism. He took the Upanishad’s notion of unity literally and went with strong monism.

There are dramatic implications to strong monism. If reality as a whole is the single, unchanging God, then there is something unreal about our commonsense perception that the world has parts. That is, as I look around me, I visually perceive a world that is composed of distinct elements, such as cars, houses, mountains, and rocks. Further, I also ordinarily see myself as a distinct thing from the people and objects that surround me. For Sankara, all of these commonsense perceptions are unreal, and the truth of the matter is that beneath these commonsense perceptions is the underlying unity of God beneath the unreal appearance of things. In the following, Sankara argues that individual selves and the world of appearances are unreal. The only reality is the unchanging, undifferentiated God:

When accepted as the doctrine of the Vedas, this doctrine of the individual soul having its Self in God does away with the independent existence of the individual soul. This is just as the idea of the rope does away with the idea of the snake [for which the rope had been mistaken]. And if the doctrine of the independent existence of the individual soul has to be set aside, then the view of the entire phenomenal world having an independent existence must likewise be set aside insofar as it is based on the individual soul. [Commentary on the Vedanta Sutra 2.1.14]

As Sankara suggests above, suppose that when walking down the road I see a snake. On closer inspection, though, it is not a snake at all, but only a rope. In the same way, the world deceptively appears differentiated, but on closer inspection it is undifferentiated. There is an unreality to how we ordinarily perceive the world as having parts.

According to Sankara, the strong monistic view of the world is embedded in the famous phrase from the Upanishads “You are that”:

everything has its Self in God, [and so] the whole world of appearances is non-existent, including actions, agents, and consequences of actions. Nor can it be said that this non-existence of the phenomenal world is declared by Scripture to be limited to certain states. For the passage “You are that” shows that the general fact of God being the Self of all is not limited by any particular state. [Ibid]

For Sankara this means that all (not just some) elements of the world of appearances are unreal. Thus, the tree I see in front of me may seem to be there, but it is actually unreal. Similarly, although I seem to be a real physical person that performs actions, this component of me is unreal too. Why, though, do I perceive the world of appearances in this illusory and deceptive way? According to Sankara, this deception is caused by a force called Maya, sort of like a magician who has the ability to create illusions. It shields us from knowledge of the true nature of God, and makes me think that the illusory world of appearances is real. My goal, then, is to overcome this ignorance and see the undifferentiated nature of God as it truly is.

A rival Vedanta scholar named Ramanuja (1017–1137 CE) rejected strong monism in favor of the theory of weak monism, and here’s why. Suppose that Sankara’s strong monism is correct. That is, suppose that the only thing that exists in the universe is a single, unchanging and undifferentiated God. Anything else that I think exists is a matter of deception. A consequence of this is that it makes no sense at all for me to worship God. First, if God is completely without parts, then God has no personality and is much like a huge glob of clay. There’s no point in worshipping that kind of thing. Second, if my true inner Self is this God, then by worshipping God I am worshiping myself, which also seems silly. Third, any acts of worship that I perform, such as prayer, sacrifice, or charity, would be part of the world of appearances. But the world of appearances is not real, so any acts of worship I perform would also be unreal. Strong monism, then, undermines the whole notion of religious worship; thus, Ramanuja concludes, we must reject it in favor of weak monism.

According to Ramanuja’s weak monism, although the world is unified in a single God, God has differentiated parts. Like the different internal parts of a single orange, individual souls and the physical world make up the body of God. So, we are in one sense united with God, but in another we are distinct from God. This approach rescues the world of appearances, which Sankara rejected as unreal. For Ramanuja, when I perceive various cars, houses, mountains and rocks around me, they are all real parts of God. When I distinguish between my own personal identity and other beings around me, I am again perceiving a genuine distinction within God. This approach also rescues the meaningfulness of religious worship. Since I am only a small component of God, it is reasonable for me to show devotion to the totality of God.

To make his point, Ramanuja offers his own interpretation of the phrase “You are that” from the Upanishads:

The words “That” and “You” denote a God distinguished by difference. The word “that” refers to God as omniscient, etc., which had been introduced as the general topic of consideration in previous passages of the same section, such as “It thought, may I be many.” The word “you,” which stands in relation to “that,” conveys the idea of God insofar as its body consists of the individual souls connected with non-intelligent matter. [Commentary on the Vedanta Sutra, 1.1.1]

For Ramanuja, the terms “That” and “You” clearly have different meanings, and so there is some difference within God which allows me and the world of appearances to have distinct existences, even though they are all unified within God.

B. BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY

Buddhism was founded in India by a former Hindu monk named Gautama Siddhartha (563-483 BCE), better known as Buddha, a term which means the “enlightened one.” Buddha came from a wealthy family in what is now the country of Nepal, where his father was a feudal lord. The night before he was born his mother dreamed that a white elephant entered her womb through her side. Hindu priests interpreted the dream as a dual destiny: he would either be a universal monarch, or universal teacher. Hoping that his son would take the path of a monarch, his father confined him to the family estate, sheltering him from the ugly experiences of illness and death. At age 29, he had three occasions to glimpse the outside world, and each time he was shocked to learn about the suffering that humans experience. First he saw an old man, then a sick man, and then a dead body. On a fourth occasion he saw a Hindu monk, which inspired him to leave his family estate to pursue a life of religious devotion. Buddha wandered for six years, learning what he could from holy people about the solution to the human predicament. He joined a band of five ascetic monks who taught him the practice of self-renunciation. So austere were Buddha’s efforts, though, that he almost died of starvation. He started eating again to regain health, and his ascetic colleagues left him in disgust. Disheartened by his failures, Buddha sat under a fig tree, vowing to not rise until he achieved supreme awakening. He stayed up all night, and at the first glimpse of the morning star he became enlightened. He eventually drew a large crowd of followers and set up monasteries in every major city. Buddha eventually died by accidentally eating poisoned mushrooms at the home of a close disciple.

Through his early experiences as a monk, Buddha became dissatisfied with many traditional Hindu teachings, such as the role of the priests and the authority of their scriptures. Nevertheless, Buddha’s underlying philosophy draws heavily from Hinduism, and one contemporary scholar has gone so far as to say that Buddhism is Hinduism stripped for export. Buddha himself wrote nothing, and the oldest accounts of his teachings are in a voluminous collection called the Pali Canon, compiled during the first five centuries after Buddha’s death. The texts are written in a language related to Sanskrit, called “Pali”, hence the designation “Pali Canon.”

Four Noble Truths

The most famous part of the Pali Canon is a section known as “The First Discourse,” which, according to tradition, Buddha delivered to his ascetic friends immediately after his enlightenment. The content of the discourse is the foundation of all Buddhist teaching. The discourse presents “four noble truths” concerning the quest for enlightenment. The first truth is that life is suffering:

Now this is the noble truth concerning suffering. Birth is attended with pain, decay is painful, disease is painful, and death is painful. Union with the unpleasant is painful, and separation from the pleasant is painful. Any craving that is unsatisfied is also painful. In brief, the five components which spring from attachment are painful. This then is the noble truth concerning suffering. [Samyutta-nikaya, 56.2]

The Pali word for suffering is sometimes translated as anxiety or frustration, but a good description is dislocation. For example the pain that I experience from a dislocated shoulder is the result of my arm being yanked out of its normal position. Similarly, the root of all suffering involves some twisting or distortion of our true nature. A poignant illustration of suffering is the birth process. From the moment we come into the world as infants, we find suffering. With each contraction the mother is gripped with perhaps the greatest physical pain that she will experience in life, while anxious friends and relatives stand by helplessly. Physically contorted as it emerges, the baby is forced to cry so that it may begin breathing. Once giving birth, the mother remains in pain for some time, and the frail baby requires continual monitoring at the risk of dying. Buddhist writings offer an endless list of suffering that we experience throughout our lives, such as that from sickness, old age, fear of death, failure to fulfill ambitions, separation from loved ones, and association with people we dislike. Even on a good day – if we can escape some actual human tragedy – our lives are nevertheless dominated by preemptively avoiding suffering. We monitor our diets, struggle to keep up with an exercise routine, cautiously drive around town, lock our doors, and stay clear of hostile people.

The second noble truth is that the cause of suffering is desire:

Now this is the noble truth concerning the origin of suffering. It is that thirst or craving which causes the renewal of existence, accompanied by sensual delight, and the seeking of satisfaction first here, then there. That is to say, it is the craving for the gratification of the passions, or the craving for a future life, or the craving for success in this present life. This then is the noble truth concerning the origin of suffering. [Ibid]

The above quote describes desire as an insatiable craving for private fulfillment. We cling or grasp to virtually anything that might satisfy our yearnings, much like a child that jealously clutches a favorite toy. Ultimately, our cravings can never be truly satisfied, and so we suffer – as a child does when we attempt to wrench a toy from his hands. The central point of this noble truth is that for every type of suffering we experience, there is some misguided craving that is at its source. Suppose, for example, that my leg gets broken in a car accident on my way to the store. Chronologically, I had several desires that led up to the accident. One desire impelled me to buy a car to begin with, rather than simply to walk everywhere. Another desire inclined me to purchase something that I don’t currently own. Yet another desire had me go shopping at that particular time, rather than stay home. And, once I’m at home in my leg cast, lying in bed, my present desires perpetuate my suffering. I want to go back to work, but I can’t. I’d like to go to a restaurant, but I can’t. I’d prefer to walk around outside but I can’t. The more things that I desire and cling to, the more I increase my suffering. Why are we driven to cling so ferociously to so many things? Buddha has an answer. Desire arises from five distinct components of our human nature. These components are matter, sensation, perception, predisposition, and consciousness. Each of these five components has me rely on something outside of me. Even if I want to do something as simple as walk from the living room into the kitchen, I rely on the material construction of the house itself, my raw sense perception of it, and how these perceptions automatically register in my mind. Since the human condition is shaped by desire – many if not most of which go unfulfilled – then our condition is one of suffering.

The third noble truth is that the end of suffering is achieved by extinguishing our desire; this is the state of nirvana, a term that literally means “to extinguish.” Of the virtually endless number of desires that bubble up from my five components, my goal should be the destruction of these, as Buddha describes here:

Now this is the noble truth concerning the elimination of suffering [i.e., the attainment of nirvana]. It is the destruction of this very thirst, in which no passion remains. It is the laying aside of, the getting rid of, the being free from, and the harboring no longer of this thirst. This, then, is the noble truth concerning the destruction of suffering. [Ibid]

In this passage Buddha depicts nirvana as a state in which “no passion remains.” Most people can understand the task of eliminating some desires – such as the desire for unhealthy foods. But the idea here is that we should extinguish all desires, and this will bring on a mental state of enlightenment.

Addressing the goal of the third noble truth, the fourth is that nirvana is achieved by adopting a series of moral attitudes, beliefs, and actions, which Buddha collectively calls the eightfold path: “This is the noble truth concerning the path that leads to the elimination of suffering. It is the noble eightfold path.” Briefly, these are the eight recommendations. (1) We should adopt right views that are free from superstition or delusion. (2) We should have right aims that are high and worthy of the intelligent and earnest person. (3) We should practice right speech, which is kindly, open, and truthful. (4) We should perform right conduct that is peaceful, honest, and pure. (5) We should adopt a right livelihood that brings no harm or danger to living things. (6) We should put forth the right effort in self-training and self-control. (7) We should have right mindfulness insofar as we have an active and watchful mind. (8) We should engage in right contemplation, which involves earnest thought on the mysteries of life.

On the surface, the eightfold path endorses many of the values that, since our childhoods, we’ve been taught to adopt. In fact, these eight recommendations appear integral to simply conducting our normal desire-filled lives in a civilized manner. How, then, do these eight recommendations lead to nirvana, the extinguishing of all desires? Buddha’s explanation is that they all involve adopting a Middle Way, which is the calm detachment achieved by avoiding the extremes of asceticism and self-indulgence:

There are two extremes, fellow monks, which a holy person should avoid: the habitual practice of ... self-indulgence, which is vulgar and profitless ... and the habitual practice of self-mortification, which is painful and equally profitless. There is a middle path discovered by the Buddha – a path which opens the eyes and bestows understanding which leads to peace of mind, to the higher wisdom, to full enlightenment, and to Nirvana. Truly, it is the noble eightfold path. [Ibid]

For each of the recommendations in the eightfold path, we can see how we must follow a middle course. For example, with the first path of right aims, I should strive to be free from superstition and delusion. If we look at common superstitions and delusions today, such as belief in alien abduction or racial superiority, these are clearly extremist views that we should steer clear of. This middle course “opens the eyes and bestows understanding,” which eventually leads to nirvana. The Middle Path is a stepping-stone towards nirvana insofar as it creates a mental disposition, which in turn enables us to be receptive to the nirvana experience.

Improper Questions and the No-Self Doctrine

Philosophers and theologians worldwide devote a great amount of attention to speculative issues that cannot be easily demonstrated. What is God’s nature? How did the world come about? Is there life after death? What kind of existence can I expect to have in the afterlife? In fact, many religions feel that their main mission is to give decisive answers to these questions and convey their answers to as many people as they can. We readily recognize that some religious speculations are superfluous to the central aim of religion – for example, speculations about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Where, though, do we draw the line between the superfluous and essential? The starting point is to determine what in fact is the main goal of religion. Buddha’s single complaint about the formal religion of his time was that its rituals and speculations detracted from religion’s main goal, namely, enlightenment.

Buddha makes this point in a dialogue with a student. The student, who has heard Buddha teach for some time, is puzzled that Buddha apparently ignores a number of issues that philosophers commonly address. Foremost among these are whether the world is eternal and whether there is life after death. In response, Buddha says that he refuses to discuss these topics since they do not help attain enlightenment. In the passage below, he uses an analogy to explain his resistance to these questions. If someone is shot with a poisoned arrow, his main concern should be to have his wound treated, and not to inquire after details about his assailant’s social caste:

Suppose that a man had been wounded by an arrow thickly smeared with poison. When friends and relatives went to procure for him a physician, suppose the sick man said, “I will not have this arrow taken out until I have learned whether the man who wounded me belonged to the warrior caste, priestly caste, worker caste, or servant caste.” Or again, suppose he said, “I will not have this arrow taken out until I have learned the name of the man who wounded me, and to what clan he belongs.” . . . That man would die without ever having learned these things. Suppose similarly someone said “I will not lead the religious life under the Buddha until he explained to me that the world is eternal or not eternal ... or that the saint exists or does not exist after death.” That person too would die before the Buddha ever explained this to him. [Majjhima-Nikaya, 63]

Buddha continues arguing that speculations on such things do not address the basic problem of the human condition. We are in a state of seemingly endless suffering, and the only way to overcome this is to extinguish our desires. Ultimately, these are the truths that matter:

I have not explained that the world is eternal, ... that the world is not eternal, ... and that the saint neither exists nor does not exist after death. And why have I not explained this? Because this does not profit us, it has nothing to do with the fundamentals of religion, and does not tend to aversion, absence of passion, cessation, calm, the supernatural faculties, supreme wisdom, and nirvana. ... And what have I explained? Misery, the origin of misery, the cessation of misery, and the path leading to the cessation of misery. And why have I explained this? Because this does profit and concerns the fundamentals of religion. [Ibid]

Accordingly, Buddha distinguishes between essential and nonessential religious speculations on the basis of whether they bring about the end of suffering through nirvana.

Buddha’s resistance to nonessential speculations is seen clearly in how he addresses the issue of personal identity, and questions like “Do I exist?” and “What does my self consist of?” My commonsense notion of my conscious self is that it is a fixed and permanent feature of my identity. Just as my arms and legs are features of my body, my consciousness is a feature of my non-physical self. As I travel through life, a conscious part of me receives new experiences through my senses, reflects on them, recalls other experiences from my memory, and has me act out in a variety of ways. There is always some permanent me that is watching, thinking, and acting. However, Buddha denies the meaningfulness of such notions of the self, a position known as the no-self doctrine. He explains that our ordinary notion of the self consists of five components or aggregates, namely, matter, sensation, perception, predisposition, and consciousness. However, if we examine each of these one by one, we will see that they cannot be the foundation of a permanent self. For example, sensations come and go in rapid succession and are far too fleeting to have any permanence. One moment I’m having a pleasant sensation, the next moment a painful one. The other four components of the self are equally temporary and changing. In the end, there is not a shred of permanence to be found in the self, and all that these five components will give is us suffering:

When a follower hears and sees this, he will find suffering in matter, suffering in sensation, suffering in perception, suffering in predisposition, suffering in consciousness. [Samyutta Nikaya 22:59]

By rejecting this common notion of the self and its five components, we thereby free ourselves of suffering associated with it. Embracing the no-self doctrine is thus integral to the very act of nirvana, which has us extinguish our identities and frees us from suffering.

Doctrine of Dependent Origination

The Hindu law of karma maintains that our actions have moral consequences that will affect us either in this life or in a reincarnated life. The mental image we might have of this Hindu position is that an invisible supreme judge watches us and tallies up our good and bad deeds. He then appropriately rewards or punishes us as time permits, and, if time runs out in this life, then he carries the rewards and punishments over to the next life. Buddha rejected this particular picture of the doctrine of karma. There are no mysterious tally sheets with our names on them. However, Buddha does not completely reject the notion of karma, but instead gives it an earthly-grounded spin. According to Buddha, all events that take place are the result of precise causal chains of events. When I trace back the series of causes of any given unfortunate event, I find that it causally rests upon my desire, and, ultimately, on an unjustified concept I have of my conscious self. This notion of causal connectedness is called the doctrine of dependent origination.

In a discussion from the Pali Canon, one of Buddha’s followers claims to have a perfectly clear conception of the doctrine of dependent origination. Buddha, though, is not impressed and explains how complicated the notion really is:

Dependent origination appears complicated and is indeed complex. It is through not understanding and penetrating this doctrine that humankind is accordingly like an entangled twist, an ensnared web, or like jumbled grass. It fails to disengage itself from punishment, suffering, destruction, and rebirth. [Digha-nikaya 256, Mahanidana sutta]

In the final sentence Buddha suggests that misconceptions about punishment owe to our failure to grasp true causal connections. Suppose, for example, that my friend gets injured in an automobile accident shortly after he and I visited with each other. I might then feel partly responsible for the accident because our visit lasted too long, which put him in the wrong place at the wrong time. I might then expect to receive some karmic punishment for my role. However, I may have a more realistic view of my responsibility if I better understand all of the causal forces at work in the accident – particularly the mental states of those involved as well as the long string of sorrowful consequences that follow from the accident.

We know from the first two Noble Truths that desire is the ultimate cause of suffering. According to Buddha, the doctrine of dependent origination allows us to explain the connecting links between desire and suffering in very precise terms. Focusing on the suffering associated with old age and death, Buddha traces these back to their initial sources:

If one asks whether old age and death depend on anything, the reply should be that old age and death depend on birth. . . . birth depends on existence . . . existence depends on attachment . . . attachment depends on desire . . . desire depends on sensation . . . sensation depends on contact . . . contact depends on mental and physical phenomena . . . physical phenomena depend on consciousness. [Ibid]

Human consciousness, then, kicks off the entire series of causal events that results in the suffering from old age and death. The successive links are these: consciousness > mental and physical phenomena > contact > sensation > desire > attachment > existence > birth > old age and death. To attack the problem at its source, we should subdue our consciousness, and this is the message of the third noble truth, namely, nirvana.

Emptiness and Zen Buddhism

Around 100 CE, Buddhism split into two main denominations, Theravada and Mahayana. While Theravadists held fast to the teachings of the Pali Canon, Mahayanists argued that Buddha’s more advanced teachings were transmitted orally and ultimately recorded in newer Mahayana texts. A running theme within these new Mahayana works is the notion of emptiness, the view that all reality is devoid of any discernable content or description. The view here is not a nihilistic denial that reality exists; instead, it is a denial that reality has any describable distinctions. The metaphor of emptiness presumes that there is something like a container that has nothing in it. The container, in this case, has a label on it that reads “reality”. But is the container literally empty in the sense that nothing at all exists within it? No. It is one thing to say that reality is not as it initially appears, and it is another to say simply that nothing exists. The point of the metaphor is this: when we look inside the container we find that it has no distinguishable parts or qualities that define its true nature. It is for all practical purposes empty, but there is still some characterless thing in the container.

One anonymously written Mahayana text, the Heart Sutra, pushes the notion of emptiness to its extreme. It starts by maintaining that everything about our identities and the ordinary world we live in are empty and have no true content. However, the author continues with the more radical claim that even the four noble truths and nirvana are empty:

There is no knowledge, no ignorance, or no destruction of knowledge. There is no decay and death, or no destruction of decay and death. There are no [four noble truths, namely,]  pain, the origin of pain, the elimination of pain, and the path to it. There is no knowledge, no obtaining, no not obtaining of nirvana. [Heart Sutra]

It’s not enough to merely concede that the ordinary realm of life and death are empty of descriptive content. What’s more is that nirvana, the very solution to our misery, also has no descriptive content. Why is this so dramatic? We’ve seen that Buddhist teachings in the Pali Canon make a fundamental distinction between (a) the ordinary realm of life, death and suffering, and, (b) the realm of nirvana in which suffering is extinguished. But the point of the Heart Sutra is that even this distinction is not justified. Stated most forcefully, the ordinary realm and the nirvana realm are the same thing; that is, the world itself does not change when viewing it in nirvana. The entirety of reality is one huge empty thing that is incapable of distinction or descriptive content.

Grasping the notion of emptiness is a genuine challenge, and one branch of Mahayana Buddhism devised an innovative method for conveying the idea. Founded in China around the fifth-century CE, Zen Buddhism is renown for its paradoxical meditative puzzles, such as “what is the sound of one hand clapping?” Zen resists any verbal formula, and has no creeds. The focus of Zen is experience, and rational discourse and doctrine play no role in gaining enlightenment. In Zen, the experience of enlightenment is transmitted from the mind of a seasoned teacher to the student in training. It is sometimes compared to a flame that is passed from candle to candle.

The Zen approach is based on one of Buddha’s discourses known as the Flower Sermon, in which he simply held up a golden lotus. No one in the crowd understood Buddha’s cryptic meaning except his leading disciple. The historical origin of Zen is attributed to a possibly fictitious figure named Bodhidharma (470-543 CE) who reportedly moved from Northern India into China. For nine years he sat in meditation and was eventually approached by a young man named Hui-K’o who wanted to be Bodhidharma’s disciple. Bodhidharma resisted, until, in an act of desperation, Hui-K’o cut off his left arm and said to Bodhidharma, “My mind is not at peace; please bring it peace.” In reply Bohdhidharma said, “If you bring me your mind I will give it peace.” Hui-K’o replied, “When I look for it, I cannot find it.” Bodhidharma answered, “There! I have pacified it for you.” Hui-K’o then became enlightened.

Some centuries later Zen made its way into Japan, and one of its main schools developed what is known as the koan system. Koans are absurd riddles, such as the famous “what is the sound of one hand clapping?” which defies any logical response. The koan system involved a Zen master having his student answer a series of up to 50 absurd riddles over the course of many years. Around the eleventh-century famous koans were assembled in written collections. Some classic beginners’ koans found in these collections are “What was your face like before you were born?” and “Does a dog have the Buddha-nature?” By struggling with these conceptually paradoxical questions, the student’s mind would be loosened from traditional reasoning, he’d see that ultimate reality is not discoverable, and experience the emptiness of all things. Some classical “correct” responses include lifting one finger, kicking a ball, and slapping the face of an inquirer. There are also intermediary level koans which request impossible tasks, such as “Stop that ship on the distant ocean,” or “Take the four divisions of Tokyo out of your sleeve.” A solution in this latter one might be to take out a paper handkerchief folded in four sections, which symbolically become the four divisions of Tokyo. In a series of formal consultations, the student would meet with his master twice daily to discuss progress on the solution. Usually the master would criticize the student’s solution, and, ultimately, the student will recognize by himself when he gets it right. The end result is enlightenment.

C: CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY

Around 500 BCE, China was in social upheaval and went through what is called its Warring States period. National emperors lost control over China’s various territories while local rulers increased their strength, waging wars against each other to the point that only the strongest states could survive. Although exaggerated, stories reported that as many as 400,000 people were slaughtered in battles. In response to the problem of social chaos that impacted nearly everyone’s life, a Period of 100 Philosophers emerged in which sages proposed various solutions. Some recommended a totalitarian system, concentrating power in the ruler. Others recommended loving everyone as a means of attaining peace. It was in this context that China’s great teacher Confucius emerged, offering his own solution to the problem of social chaos.

Confucius (551–479 BCE) was born in what is now China’s Shandong province, along the country’s mid costal region. His family name was Kung, and the name “Confucius,” by which we know him in the West, is a Latinized version of “Kung Fu-tzu”, which means master Kung. His father, a distinguished soldier, and his mother both died when he was a child. He married at 19, had a son and daughter, and worked as a clerk in a temple in which he learned rituals from elders. Confucius set his eye on governmental work and eventually, in his 50s, held posts including police commissioner and imperial ambassador for a peace conference. Disillusioned by these jobs, he traveled for 13 years to the various states in China, giving advice on government. He made the grandiose claim to show concrete social improvements within one year, and achieve complete change within three years. No ruler took him up on his offer and, disillusioned again, he returned to his home state. He continued teaching his followers and died at age 73. Although he considered himself a failure, his followers preserved and developed his teachings, which ultimately resulted in the flourishing of the Confucian school that heavily impacted Chinese intellectual life for 2,000 years.

Confucius’s solution to the problem of anarchy was to return to the old Chinese customs before social turmoil broke out. To aid in that effort he researched China’s old cultural traditions and edited several books of ancient Chinese history and literature. Confucius wrote nothing of his own views, though, and the principal record of his teachings is work called the Analects, or “digested conversations,” which is unsystematic collection of discussions, recorded by his students after his death. While the Analects is somewhat sketchy and does not record any of Confucius’s organized discourses, it does offer a picture of his central teachings. As a philosopher, Confucius was foremost and ethicist who emphasized the importance of virtuous conduct. Much of his ethical thought focuses on four specific themes: ritual conduct, humanity, the superior person, filial obedience, and good government.

Ritual Conduct

Foremost among Confucius’s teachings is the notion of ritual conduct (li), which is the effortless adherence to social norms and the performance of customs. By Confucius’s time, ritual conduct became associated with ceremonial formality, particularly in religious practices. But Confucius uses the notion more broadly to include customs as diverse as major holiday celebrations and simple greetings.

For Confucius, rituals and traditions are the visible glue that binds society together. For virtually every activity, there is a proper way of behaving. If we don’t follow these customs, then, in spite of our best intentions, we behave like bumbling fools. He makes this point here:

Respectfulness without the rules of ritual conduct becomes laborious bustle. Carefulness without the rules of ritual conduct becomes timidity. Boldness without the rules of ritual conduct becomes insubordination. Straightforwardness without the rules of ritual conduct becomes rudeness. When those who are in high stations properly perform all their duties to their relations, the people are inspired towards virtue. When old friends are not neglected by them, the people are preserved from meanness. [Analects, 8.2]

Here’s an example of how ritual conduct might apply to political life. Imagine that, during a city council meeting, I want to propose the development of a new park. As I make my case I need to be duly respectful and careful, yet bold and straightforward. If I don’t know the rules of ritual conduct, my efforts will be strained, and in the course of the discussion I can too easily either understate my view or inadvertently insult the council members. On the other hand, if I am properly skilled in the ritual conduct of business discussions, then I’ll be able to make my case easily and effectively.

There is both an inward and outward component of ritual conduct. The outward component concerns the visible ritual itself. The inward component involves having the proper attitude in ritual conduct, rather than simply going through the motions with no thought of their significance. Confucius argues that the true development of ritual conduct requires that we subdue ourselves. Also, when performing our various duties, it is important that our actions flow from within ourselves, and are not motivated by outward pressures:

Yen Yuan asked about perfect virtue. The Master said, “To subdue one’s self and return to ritual conduct is perfect virtue. If a person can for one day subdue himself and return to ritual conduct, all under heaven will attribute perfect virtue to him. Is the practice of perfect virtue from a person himself, or is it from others?” Yen Yuan said, “I beg to ask the steps of that process.” The Master replied, “Do not look at what is contrary to ritual conduct; do not listen to what is contrary to ritual conduct; do not speak what is contrary to ritual conduct; do not make movements which are contrary to ritual conduct.” Yen Yuan then said, “Though I am deficient in intelligence and vigor, I will make it my business to practice this lesson.” [ibid, 12.1]

For Confucius, learning ritual conduct involves active social participation, similar to how we learn any skill or art form through direct involvement. Insofar as it is a skill, Confucius groups ritual conduct together with the skills of learning poetry and music. What all of these skills have in common is that they involve cultivating a special aesthetic sense of appreciation. They also refine us, elevate the quality of our lives, and serve as a tool for moral instruction.

Humanity and the Superior Person

The Confucian notion of humanity (jen), is the attitude of goodness, benevolence, and altruism towards others. Again, there is a distinction between one’s mere outer expressions of humanity and one’s inner sense of it: “Fine words and an insinuating appearance are seldom associated with true humanity” (ibid, 1.3). When we think of humane behavior, we think of the various ways that we relate to other people, has Confucius relates here:

The Master said, “It is humane manners that constitute the excellence of a neighborhood. If a person in selecting a residence does not fix on one where such prevail, how can he be wise?” The Master said, “Those who are without humanity cannot abide long either in a condition of poverty and hardship, or in a condition of enjoyment. The virtuous rest in humanity; the wise desire humanity.” The Master said, “It is only the truly humane person who can love, or who can hate, others.” The Master said, “If one’s will is set on humanity, there will be no practice of wickedness.” [Ibid, 4.1-4]

To acquire humanity, I should develop the virtues of dignity and patience, which will help me be at peace regardless of the difficulties that I face in life.

Central to the concept of humanity is the Confucian principle of reciprocity (shu), which is “Do not do to others what you would not have them do to you.” This principle is similar to the famous Golden Rule in the New Testament, namely, “Do to others what you would want done to yourself.” The principle difference, though, is that the Golden Rule puts forward a positive duty, that is, I should treat you benevolently or charitably since that is how I prefer to be treated. The principle of reciprocity, on the other hand, involves negative duties to avoid harm. For example, I should not steal from or lie to you since I would not want that kind of treatment myself. Because of this difference in emphasis, the principle of reciprocity is sometimes called the “Silver Rule.” We find Confucius state the principle of reciprocity in a several of passages throughout the Analects. In one case he chastises a student for not following the principle: “Tzu-kung said, ‘What I do not wish people to do to me, I also wish not to do to people.’ The Master said, ‘you have not attained to that’” (ibid, 5.11). In another passage Confucius states that the principle of reciprocity should be the guiding principle of ones life: “Tzu-kung asked, saying, ‘Is there one word that may serve as a rule of practice for all one’s life?’ The Master said, ‘Is not reciprocity such a word? What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others’” (ibid, 15.23). In another passage, the principle appears among a longer list of moral recommendations:

Chung-kung asked about perfect virtue. The Master said, “It is, when you go abroad, to behave to everyone as if you were receiving a great guest; to employ the people as if you were assisting at a great sacrifice; not to do to others as you would not wish done to yourself; to have no murmuring against you in the country, and none in the family.” Chung-kung said, “Though I am deficient in intelligence and vigor, I will make it my business to practice this lesson.” [Ibid, 12.1-2]

Because of its emphasis on mere avoidance, the principle of reciprocity is sometimes criticized for being too passive: it is one thing to say that I should simply avoid harming you, but it is another and much better thing to say that I should actively seek your improvement. However, the wording of the principle of reciprocity is flexible enough to include positive as well as negative duties. For example, since I would not want anyone to withhold charity from me, then I should not withhold charity from others.

For Confucius, the superior person (chun-tzu) is the ideal human who personifies the virtue of humanity. The term originally referred to children of aristocrats who inherited their family estates, but, like the term “gentleman” in English, the notion of a superior person acquired a broader ethical meaning. In the Analects, Confucius sees the superior person as the ideal to which his followers should strive. The superior person consistently exhibits a range of virtuous qualities, including humility, respectfulness, kindness, justice, impartiality, honesty, consistency, caution, and studiousness. Although this is a somewhat abstract list of qualities, a set of passages in the Analects points out some very particular attitudes of the superior person:

The Master said, “The superior person is distressed by his want of ability. He is not distressed by people not knowing him.” The Master said, “The superior person dislikes the thought of his name not being mentioned after his death.” The Master said, “What the superior person seeks is in himself. What the inferior person seeks is in others.” The Master said, “The superior person is dignified, but does not wrangle. He is sociable, but not a partisan.” The Master said, “The superior person does not promote someone simply on account of his words, nor does he put aside good words because of the person.” [Ibid, 15.18-22]

In the above we see that, paradoxically, the superior person is not driven by a need for fame, yet at the same time he “dislikes the thought of his name not being mentioned after his death.” What Confucius had in mind is something like this. The drive for fame while we are alive is too frequently tied with how wealthy, powerful, or successful we are. The underlying passions here are pride and arrogance, which the superior person should clearly reject. On the other hand, when we consider our life-long legacy and how people remember us after our deaths, we think more about how good we’ve been as human beings, and less about the degree of wealth and power that we’ve obtained. It is, then, admirable to hope to be remembered for our legacy as a good person.

In spite of the lengthy list of values that the superior person holds, Confucius stresses that the superior person is not a by-the-book rule follower, whose beliefs are rigidly fixed. On the contrary, “The superior person in the world does not set his mind either for anything, or against anything. What is right he will follow” (ibid, 4.10). That is, the superior person’s attitudes and conduct will be guided by an overall sense of justice, and not by a nitpicky set of regulations. In keeping with his emphasis on the internal aspects of moral attributes, Confucius describes the psychological state of tranquility to which the superior person must rise. Distress, anxiety, and fear are all obstructions: “The superior person is satisfied and composed; the inferior person is always full of distress” (ibid, 7.36). Regardless of how much tragedy we might experience, our internal sense of virtue should give us peace: “When internal examination discovers nothing wrong, what is there to be anxious about? What is there to fear?” That is, if I know that my internal character contains the marks of virtue, then I can take faith in this, even if I’m plagued with misfortunes such as family tragedy or financial disaster.

Becoming a superior person involves an ongoing process that cannot be quickly attained, and an anecdote about a 17th century Confucian monk illustrates this point. Upon turning 90, the monk commented that he now saw how foolish he was at 80, and he looked forward to when he’d have better knowledge at a later age. Similarly, Confucius did not believe that he himself was a perfectly superior person: “In matters of learning I am perhaps equal to other people, but I have not yet attained to the character of the superior person, who carries out in his conduct what he professes” (Ibid, 7.33). That is, Confucius did not yet fully embody the values he knew that he should possess.

Filial Obedience and Good Government

Confucius held that there are five relationships (wulun) that underlie the order of society, namely, (1) father and son, (2) elder brother and younger brother, (3) husband and wife, (4) elder friend and junior friend, and (5) ruler and subject. Confucian writings sometimes refer to a shorter list of relationships called the “Three Bonds”, which include those of the father-son, husband-wife, and ruler-subject. Each of these involves a superior and a subordinate, and special duties are required of both parties:

What are “the things which people consider right?” Kindness on the part of the father, and filial duty on that of the son. Gentleness on the part of the elder brother, and obedience on that of the younger. Righteousness on the part of the husband, and submission on that of the wife. Kindness on the part of elders, and reverence on that of the juniors. Benevolence on the part of the ruler, and loyalty on that of the minister. These ten are the things which people consider to be right. [Book of Rites]

With each of these five relationships, the subordinate person is duty bound to show obedience, and the superior person to show kindness. Of the five relationships, the two that Confucius discusses the most are the father-son and the ruler-subject, which we’ll consider here in more detail

The relationship between father and son – commonly known as filial obedience (hsiao) --  sets a standard for the others. Respect for all superiors is ultimately an extension of respect for one’s parents, and we should treat all elders with respect almost as if they were surrogate parents” (Analects, 1.6). By respecting parents we will respect elders in general, and by doing this we will be less likely to stir up confusion and thereby undermine social order, either in or outside of the home. Virtually all cultures stress the obligations that children have to respect and obey their parents and, to that extent, this value is not a Confucian invention. Like other virtues, though, Confucius gives a unique twist to this one by emphasizing the importance of having the proper attitude in fulfilling this duty, rather than simply abiding by the letter of the law. Without this proper inner attitude, we are no better than animals that might help provide for older members of its species: “Filial obedience nowadays means to support one’s parents. But dogs and horses also are able to do something in the way of support. Without reverence, what is there to distinguish the one support given from the other?” (Analects, 2.7). By having the proper attitude of respect for our parents, we will perpetuate the value system that we learned at home, long after we are grown and leave the house: “If the son for three years does not alter from the way of his father, he may be called filial” (ibid, 4.10). The respect that we have for our parents while they are alive continues in the form of ancestral veneration when they die, and requires that we perform various sacrificial duties.

Suppose that my father asks me to do something that was obviously wrong, such as steal the neighbor’s wheelbarrow or rob a store. Would filial obedience obligate me to follow my father’s instructions? Confucius’s reply to this question was “When a command is wrong, a son should resist his father, and a civil servant should resist his noble ruler.” Respect for parents, then, is not blind obedience. One benefit of resisting is that we will remind our father of his moral duty and prevent him from committing some wrong: “If a man has a good friend to resist him in doing bad actions, he will have his reputation preserved. So, if a father has a son to resist his wrong command, he will be saved from committing serious faults” (Classic of Filial Obedience). The prospect of resisting one’s parents and attempting to morally instruct them places the child in an awkward situation. This highlights the obligation that parents are under to cultivate a proper sense of morality within themselves and thus avoid forcing this dilemma on their children.

Turning next to the ruler-subject relationship, Confucius saw himself as a political reformer, and he held that good governing consists of the ruler setting the moral example for the whole country. His goodness will trickle down through the various layers of social hierarchy, and the whole country will prosper when he is benevolent. According to Confucius, “He who exercises government by means of his virtue may be compared to the north polar star, which keeps its place and all the stars turn towards it” (Analects, 2.1).

What, though, must the ruler himself do to acquire virtue? Confucius lists five kinds of actions that will lead to good government:

“When the person in authority is beneficent without great expense; when he lays tasks on the people without their grieving; when he pursues what he desires without being selfish; when he maintains a dignified ease without being proud; when he is majestic without being cruel.” (ibid, 20.2)

First on this list is beneficence, and, to display this, the ruler does not necessarily have to actively shower his subjects with luxuries. Instead, the ruler can emphasize things from which people naturally benefit, such as efficient governmental programs and honest governmental administrators. Second, concerning laying tasks on people without making them grieve, Confucius believes that the ruler should discover people’s natural capacities and encourage them to work in those areas. A musician, for example, should not be forced to work as an accountant. Third, a ruler can unselfishly pursue what he desires when he restricts his desires to cultivating a good government. Fourth, without being arrogant, he should carry himself with dignity with everything and everyone he comes in contact with. Fifth, without being fierce, a ruler should appear majestic in everything that he does – right down to how he places a cap on his head.

Good government is the theme of a later Confucian classic titled The Great Learning, which tradition attributes to Confucius’s grandson. According to this work, good government is a matter of rulers exhibiting their clear character to the world, that is, displaying their virtue as a model for others to follow.  How does the ruler acquire clear character?  The Great Learning, tells us that there are eight causal links that culminate in clear character and effective governing. The underlying theme of these eight steps is intense moral and philosophical reflection:

The ancients who wished to exhibit their clear character to the world first brought order to their states. Wishing to order their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their personal lives. Wishing to cultivate their personal lives, they first corrected their minds. Wishing to correct their minds, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge rests in investigating things. [The Great Learning]

According to the above, the first step in acquiring clear character is extending our knowledge by “investigating things.” For Confucius this involved not only knowledge of arts and sciences, but a knowledge of oneself and one’s limitations: “When you know a thing, to hold that you know it; and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it; this is knowledge” (Analects, 2.17).

Mencius: Inherent Human Goodness

The second most influential philosopher in the Confucian tradition is Mencius (390–305 BCE), or Meng-tzu. A few generations removed from Confucius, Mencius studied under a disciple of Confucius’s grandson and, like Confucius, Mencius traveled around China to promote political reform. He confronted rival philosophical schools, typically those that emphasized human selfishness. Mencius believed that governments should be run through exemplary conduct, with goodness as the goal. The most well known aspect of Mencius’s thought is his view of the inherent goodness of people. According to Mencius, our minds and hearts house our inherent tendency towards moral goodness. Evil, he believes, results from bad social influences that reduce our natural moral strength.

Mencius presents this idea in a conversation between himself and a skeptical philosopher named Kao. Kao argues that human nature is neither good nor bad, but can be molded either way, just as we can mold a piece of wood into different things. “Human nature,” says Kao, “is like a tree, and righteousness is like a wooden cup or a bowl. The fashioning of benevolence and righteousness out of a person’s nature is like the making of cups and bowls from the tree” (Mencius, 6a.1). But Mencius rejects Kao’s analogy and argues that any such “molding” – even for the sake of moral goodness – would do violence to our nature. We would thus be forced to see moral virtues such as benevolence and righteousness as distortions of who we are. Mencius asks,

Without touching the nature of the tree, can you make it into cups and bowls? You must do violence and injury to the tree before you can make cups and bowls with it. If you must do violence and injury to the tree in order to make cups and bowls with it, on your principles you must in the same way do violence and injury to humanity in order to fashion from it benevolence and righteousness. Thus, your words would certainly lead all people on to consider benevolence and righteousness to be calamities. [Ibid]

As the conversation continues, Kao insists that human nature is neither inherently good nor inherently evil. But, just as we might redirect the flow of water east or west, society is capable of directing our nature towards good or towards evil. Thus, according to Kao, “Human nature is indifferent to good and evil, just as water is indifferent to the east and west” (ibid, 6a.2). But Mencius rejects this analogy too, and argues that human nature possesses potential goodness, just as the nature of water is to flow down hill:

Water indeed will flow indifferently to the east or west, but will it flow indifferently up or down? The tendency of human nature to do good is like the tendency of water to flow downwards. All people have this tendency to good, just as all water flows downwards. Now, by striking water and causing it to leap up, you may make it go over your forehead, and, by damming and leading it, you may force it up a hill. But are such movements according to the nature of water? It is the force applied which causes them. When people are made to do what is not good, their nature is dealt with in this way. [Ibid]

Mencius tells us exactly what our inherently good nature consists of. First, he argues that we naturally have four specific moral virtues, namely, commiseration, shame, respect, and approval. Second, these four virtues naturally give rise to others, namely humanity, righteousness, ritual conduct, knowledge. Mencius insists that nature has instilled these in all of us, which we can all find if we just look for them: “We are certainly furnished with them. Any different view simply owes to an absence of reflection” (ibid).

D. DAOIST PHILOSOPHY

Like Confucianism, Daoism emerged during China’s Warring States period, and its specific recommendation for ending social chaos was that we should imitate nature and go back to the primitive tradition of China before the appearance of kings and feudal systems. Tradition credits the founding of Daoism to a figure named Lao-tzu, literally meaning “master Lao.” But virtually nothing concrete is known about him, and some modern scholars argue he was created by early Daoists as a kind of rival to Confucius. Tradition also credits him with composing Daoism’s most important text, the Dao De Jing, which literally means The Book of the Way and its Power. According to one story, as Lao-tzu was leaving his home town, the city gatekeeper was sorry to see the great master go and asked that he write a book of his views by which people could remember him. Lao-tzu sat down on the spot and composed the Dao De Jing. Although tradition dates the Dao De Jing at around 450 BCE, scholars today place it at around 300 BCE based on its literary style. The work is an anthology of sayings compiled to instruct kings on government; specifically it recommends that kings should rule through an extreme “hands off” policy, allowing social events to conform to nature.

The second most important book in Daoism is the work attributed to and named after Daoist philosopher Chuang-tzu (369-286 BCE)—or, “master Chuang”. Unlike the Dao de Jing, the Chuang-Tzu is not a political treatise. Intended for a more general readership, it is composed in a popular style with vivid stories and parables. We know few facts about Chuang-tzu’s life, and tradition maintains that he held a minor political position. According to one story, he was once invited to become a prime minister but replied, “I would rather leave myself to my own enjoyment in the mire than be a slave to the ruler of a state. I will never take office. Thus, I shall remain free to follow my own inclinations” (Chuang-Tzu, 37). We also find an anecdote about his burial plans, which highlight the theme of naturalness in Daoism:

When Chuang-tzu was about to die, his disciples indicated their wish to give him a grand burial. He replied, “I will have heaven and earth for my coffin and its shell; the sun and moon for my two round symbols of jade; the stars and constellations for my pearls and jewels; and all things assisting as the mourners. Will not the provisions for my burial be complete? What could you add to them?” [Ibid, 32]

We will look at some of the more prominent themes that appear in both the Dao De Jing and the Chuang-tzu.

The Dao

The notion of the Dao is the central concept in Daoism. Literally the term means “way” or “path”, but it more specifically refers to the fundamental ordering principle behind nature, society, and individual people. An initial obstacle to understanding the concept of the Dao is that it has an unspeakable mystical quality and cannot be defined. We see this in the opening and most famous passage of the book:

The Dao that can be named is not the eternal and unchanging Dao. The name that can be spoken is not the eternal and unchanging name. The nameless is the source of heaven and earth. The named is the mother of all things. Always be without desires and you will see mystery. Always be with desire, and you will see only its effects. These two are really the same, although, as development takes place, they receive the different names. They are both a mystery, and where mystery is the deepest we find the gate of all that is subtle and wonderful. [Dao De Jing, 1]

According to the above, if you try to name, speak, or describe the Dao, then you have missed the point and distorted the Dao’s meaning. It is an indescribable source of all existence, and we grasp the Dao only by mystically experiencing its subtlety. This experience begins with subduing one’s desires. From the start, the Dao De Jing advocates a non-intellectual and even anti-intellectual approach. We should abandon hopes of finding an adequate verbal description of the Dao, and instead psychologically realign ourselves so that we are not driven by our desires. With no mental conceptions or desires to muddy the waters, we then allow the Dao to exhibit itself through our own lives, and we can recognize its presence in the natural world around us.

Another passage early on in the Dao De Jing states that the indescribable nature of the Dao is like an empty vessel, which we should never try to fill with concrete descriptions that will invariably misrepresent it:

The Dao is like the emptiness of a vessel; and in our employment of it we must be on our guard against all fullness. How deep and unfathomable it is, as if it were the honored ancestor of all things. We should blunt our sharp points, and unravel the complications of things; we should dim our brightness, and bring ourselves into agreement with the obscurity of others. How pure and still the Dao is, as if it would continue forever. I do not know whose son it is. It might appear to have been before God. [Ibid, 4]

The Dao’s nature, according to the above, is infinitely deep and as mysterious as any investigation into the origin of things in the far distant past. To understand it, we must take an approach that is opposite to what we might expect. For example, we typically learn about things through our senses of sight, hearing, or touch. But the Dao lacks any sensory qualities that might enable us to perceive it in those ways. In fact, if we try to investigate the Dao as though it were just another physical object of perception, we will find that its nature actually consists of lacking any tangible qualities: “We look at it, and we do not see it, and we name it ‘the colorless.’ We listen to it, and we do not hear it, and we name it ‘the soundless.’ We try to grasp it, and do not get hold of it, and we name it ‘the bodiless’” (ibid, 14). What is the Dao’s form? It is formless. What is its appearance? It is invisible. Try as we might to list its qualities, we are left with empty descriptions.

In spite of the Dao’s unspeakable quality, the Dao De Jing tells us at least something about the Dao’s nature. One recurring point is that the Dao both creates and sustains everything that exists: “The Dao produces all things and nourishes them; it produces them and does not claim them as its own; it does all, and yet does not boast of it; it presides over all, and yet does not control them” (ibid, 10). Although the Dao is the originator of all things, it should not be misconstrued as a kind of pre-existing God who created a universe distinct from itself. Rather, before things originated, the Dao was in a formless state of potential. As it took on the state of existence, the Dao produced things that remain part of its nature:

There was something undefined and complete, coming into existence before Heaven and Earth. How still and formless it was, standing alone, and undergoing no change, reaching everywhere and in no danger of being exhausted. It may be regarded as the Mother of all things. I do not know its name, and I give it the designation of the Dao, the Way or Course. [Ibid, 25]

The Dao De Jing repeatedly refers to the Dao as the mother of everything, and the metaphor of a mother has important implications. A cosmic father evokes images of a craftsman or builder who aggressively manufactures the world from some external raw material. But a cosmic mother gives birth to things, generating them from within herself, and continually nurturing them. It is like a great tree that sprouts branches, leaves, and fruit, continually feeding them all from within. It is like a great river that spawns and sustains a myriad of life forms.

Return

A central theme of Daoism is that of return: all things eventually decay and return to their ultimate source within the Dao. There are clear natural cycles in the cosmos: everything around us has been recycled and will again be recycled. We tend to praise human accomplishments that have the most lasting value, such as timeless works of art, scientific discoveries, and moral traditions. However, when we look at nature, we see that nothing is permanent and everything comes and goes in cycles. Growth and decay are not just one-time events, but occur again and again in an endless natural cycle. This is the pulse of the universe that we find in most everything that we observe. Trees, animals, and even societies grow and die, and their elements will ultimately be recycled. The passage below illustrates this point with plants, which first display luxuriant growth, and then return to their origin:

All things alike go through their processes of activity, and then we see them return to their original state. When things in the vegetable world have displayed their luxuriant growth, we see each of them return to its root. This returning to their root is what we call the state of stillness; and that stillness may be called a reporting that they have fulfilled their appointed end. [Ibid, 16]

Plants and animals die and decay, leaving their elements to become the raw materials of other things. We too will wither, die and decay, whether we like it or not. Chuang-tzu gives a story of a dying man whose body has become deformed. Rather than be angry and resistant to his physical changes, he gladly accepts them:

If the creator transformed my left arm into a rooster, I would watch the time of the night. If he transformed my right arm into a cross-bow, I would then be looking for a duck to shoot for roasting. If he transformed my rump-bone into a wheel and my spirit into a horse, I would then be able to ride in my own chariot. I’d never have to change horses. I obtained life because it was my time. I am now parting with it in accordance with the same law. [Chuang-Tzu, 6]

According to Chuang-tzu, then, we should submit to the natural process of transformation, and to do otherwise amounts to disobedience: “If a parent tells a son to go east, west, south, or north, the son simply follows the command. The yin and yang [forces of nature] are more to a man than his parents are. If they are hastening my death and I do not quietly submit to them, I would be obstinate and rebellious.” Ultimately, we have no say in the matter.

Non-Action and Non-Mind

The most practical advice of Daoism is that of non-action (wu wei), also called effortless action: everything we do should flow with simple spontaneity and without contrivance. Artificial actions run counter to the natural course of things, and usually involve aggression and competition. Picture a log floating down a river with a large rock in its path. Rather than knocking the rock over, the log gently bumps into it, casually floats around it, and continues on its course. Passivity, rather than aggression, is the attitude towards life that we should adopt. In the natural world, weakness is linked with life, and strength with death:

Man at his birth is supple and weak; at his death, firm and strong. So it is with all things. In their early growth, trees and plants are soft and brittle; at their death they are dry and withered. In this manner, firmness and strength are the accompaniments of death, whereas softness and weakness are the accompaniments of life. [Dao De Jing, 76]

Chuan-Tzu gives a story that vividly describes non-action. A prince was watching his cook slice meat with a rhythmical and harmonious cutting technique. The cook then explained his secret:

I am devoted to the method of the Dao, which is superior to any skill. . . . Observing the natural lines in the meat, my knife slips through the great crevices and slides through the great cavities, taking advantage of the accommodations thus presented. My skill avoids the ligaments, and even more so the large bones. A good cook changes his knife every year because he cleanly cuts. An ordinary cook changes his every month because he hacks. Now I have used my knife for nineteen years. [Chuang-Tzu, 3]

By working in harmony with the meat and slicing between the joints, rather than hacking through bone, the cook incorporated the practice of non-action. He lost awareness of the techniques of butchering and cut the meat almost as if he was in a trance. Impressed by the cook’s explanation, the Prince concluded, “I have heard the words of my cook, and learned how to care for life.”

We might think that passivity and weakness would make us easy targets of attack, and more vulnerable to manipulation than we otherwise might be. Paradoxically, though, the Dao De Jing explains that non-action is actually the most successful means of self-defense and military engagement: “The softest thing in the world dashes against and overcomes the hardest; that which has no substantial existence enters where there is no crevice” (Dao De Jing, 43). We overcome obstacles by homing in on an adversary’s vulnerabilities and then effortlessly shattering their strength. A good illustration of this is the Marshal Arts, which distinguish between hard and soft techniques. Hard defense forms such as Tae Kwon Do attempt to batter an adversary into submission through forceful kicks and punches. By contrast, soft defense forms such as Aikido attempt to redirect an adversary’s force against himself through techniques of twisting and throwing. Daoists prefer a soft approach when engaging in combat: “The person who relies on the strength of his forces does not conquer, just as a tree that has grown strong is doomed by the lumberjack” (ibid, 76). The effectiveness of this soft approach is evident in the devastating effects that water sometimes has: “There is nothing in the world more soft and weak than water, and yet for attacking things that are firm and strong there is nothing that can outrank it” (ibid, 14).

Paralleling the notion of non-action is that of non-mind (wu-hsin): we need to eliminate knowledge and act spontaneously through natural intuition. Accumulated knowledge hinders creativity and can make one inflexible or subject to a false sense of security. Since the Dao runs through each of us, everything that we need to know about life is already within ourselves. Nature will automatically direct us when needs arise. The Dao De Jing rejects traditional methods of education, such as learning from a master or traveling around and gaining knowledge through experience.  The true sage never has to even leave home:

Without going outside his door, one understands all that takes place under the sky; without looking out from his window, one sees the Dao of Heaven. The further that one goes out from himself, the less he knows. Therefore the sages got their knowledge without traveling, gave their right names to things without seeing them, and accomplished their ends without any purpose of doing so. [Ibid, 47]

Not only should we avoid acquiring knowledge by conventional means, but we should also rid ourselves of the cumbersome knowledge that we’ve acquired throughout the years. Most importantly, our understanding of the Dao itself comes through the practice of non-mind: “Those who are skilled in the Dao do not dispute about it, and those who dispute are not skilled in it” (ibid, 81). Philosophical discourse and debate will be of no help, and the most perceptive Daoists avoid debating about the Dao.

Minimal Governing

As a political treatise, the Dao De Jing insists that if rulers follow the Dao then their states will be well ordered and in natural harmony: “If a prince or the king could hold onto the Dao, all would spontaneously submit themselves to him” (Ibid, 32). To rule in accord with the Dao, leaders must abandon common notions of governance, which typically involve authoritatively imposing their wills on the people. Instead, a more Dao-centered way of ruling involves not ruling at all, but allowing society to function naturally.

Successful rulers should adopt the attitude of non-action when governing: the more aggressive input and regulation a government imposes on its citizens, the more that disorder results. But when a leader sits back and does nothing, society develops on its own. Nature needs no help from rulers, and when the general public follows the Dao, each person will naturally find peaceful and simple ways to flourish. Even a well-intentioned leader may disrupt the natural flow of social order by imposing rules. The mere existence of rules will generate rule-breakers. Daoism thus recommends political anarchy in the true sense of the word, namely, a peaceful state of no rule in which we naturally find our place:

A sage has said, “I will do nothing with purpose, and the people will transform themselves; I will keep still, and the people will correct themselves. I will not trouble with them, and the people will become rich by themselves; I will show no ambition, and the people will arrive at primitive simplicity by themselves.” [Ibid, 57]

The best style of governing, then, is for the ruler to take a hands-off approach through the practice of non-action. However, to the extent that rulers do intervene in society, they should try to rid artificial values from their subjects’ minds through the practice of non-mind:

In exercising his government, the sage empties the people’s minds, fills their bellies, weakens their wills, and strengthens their bones. He constantly tries to keep them without knowledge and without desire, and where there are those who have knowledge, to keep them from acting on it. When there is this abstinence from action, good order is universal. [Ibid, 3]

While things in the natural world automatically follow the law of the Dao, people do so by choice, and this may require rulers to help empty people’s minds of ideas that distract from the Dao. The specific kind of knowledge that is most damaging to social harmony involves conventional standards of value and worth. Nature does not teach us to value one style of clothes over another, for example. The value that we place on specific luxury items, leisure activities, concepts of beauty, or human accomplishments, are principally matters of cultural brainwashing. Criminals break the law because they cannot easily acquire the endless array of things society dangles before them. If rulers can get their citizens to practice non-mind and shed their preconceived standards of value, then they won’t be seduced into criminal behavior.

The perfect society envisioned by Daoism does not consist of large and complex cities of the sort that exist throughout the world today. Instead, primitive simplicity is the ideal, which in practical terms means small farming families and communities. Chuang-tzu describes this original and more natural human living environment:

People originally wove and made themselves clothes; they tilled the ground and for food. These are common to humanity. They all agreed on this, and did not form themselves into separate classes. In this way they were constituted and left to their natural tendencies. Therefore in the age of perfect virtue people walked along quietly, steadily looking forward. At that time, on the hills there were no footpaths or excavated passages. On the lakes there were no boats or dams. [Chuang-Tzu, 9]

This, according to Chuang-tzu, is how society originally was; but then rulers came along and disrupted its natural simplicity by imposing rules and artificial standards:

When sages appeared, tripping people up with charity and constraining people with the duty to one’s neighbor, then people universally began to be perplexed. The sages went to excess in performing music and fussed over the practice of ceremonies. Then people began to be separated from each other. . . . The injury done to the Dao in order to practice charity and duty to one’s neighbor was the error of the sages. [Ibid]

Leaders first disrupted the natural order of things by introducing an alien standard of morality: “they dangled charity and duty to one’s neighbor in order to comfort their minds” (ibid). Leaders added to this an endless list of complex ceremonies, which only confused people and created differences between them.  These differences prompted people to outdo each other by striving for knowledge and pursuing personal gain. Finally, leaders created governments to assure that people conformed to these new standards. The best rulers, then, are those that facilitate a primitive society, and the worst rulers are those that try to force order on people through the creation of rules.

Lieh-Tzu: Following Natural Desires

After the Dao De Jing and the Chuang-Tzu, the third most important book in Daoism is the Lieh-Tzu, meaning “master Lieh”. Tradition attributes it to a scholar named Lieh Yukou from period of 100 philosophers, but scholars today date its composition at around 300 CE. Sometimes called the Classic of Complete Emptiness, the Lieh-Tzu recommends pursuing the path of emptiness as a means of becoming united with the Dao. As a whole, the work has a skeptical and dismal undertone, emphasizing the certainty of our annihilation, resigning oneself to fate, and abandoning efforts in life.  In view of the shortness of life, the work recommends that we follow our own natural inclinations in pursuit of happiness.

In the most famous part of the book (Section 7, titled Yang-Tzu), Lieh-tzu criticizes the emphasis we often place on pleasing others and acquiring notoriety that will last beyond the grave. This emphasis is especially strong in Confucianism, which holds that “The superior person dislikes the thought of his name not being mentioned after his death” (Analects, 15.20). Lieh-tzu begins his argument by noting how short life is. If we’re lucky we will live for at most 100 years, but most of our lives will be consumed by infancy, the incapacities of old age, sleeping, suffering and illness. After all of this “there is less than an hour during which time we are comfortable, satisfied and carefree.” Where, then, are we to find happiness during our brief lives? Lieh-tzu’s answer is pleasure: “It is only found in beautiful things and good food, music and sex” (Lieh-tzu, 7). Unfortunately, he continues, our efforts here are often thwarted. Often these pleasures are out of our reach. Worse yet, we often voluntarily forego available pleasures in the hopes of attaining fame or empty praise after our deaths. And even when alone we deny ourselves pleasures simply to conform to what others expect. “We thus deny ourselves happiness in our best years, and we cannot live freely for a moment” (ibid).

Lieh-tzu’s solution is that we should enjoy life’s pleasures when the opportunities arise, and avoid conforming for the sake of praise from others. It is irrelevant whether you leave an honorable or dishonorable legacy after your death since, once dead, you won’t be conscious of your legacy at all:

People of long ago understood that in life we are here temporarily and in death we are gone temporarily. ... The wicked and foolish both die. While alive they were the virtuous emperors Yao and Shun. When dead they are rotten bones. While alive they were the evil emperors Chieh and Chou. When dead they are rotten bones. In either case, they are rotten bones. Can anyone tell them apart? Enjoy your life right now while you still have it. Why bother with what happens to you after you die? [Ibid]

On face value, Lieh-tzu’s emphasis on pursuing pleasure seems to run counter to the Daoist rejection of desire, which we find in the opening verse of the Dao De Jing: “Always be without desires and you will see mystery; always be with desire, and you will see only its effects.” But there may be some wiggle room here. On the one hand, if we are preoccupied with desire then we will not be able to see the Dao work through all things, including our own lives. On the other hand, though, part of our nature is to have desires: our natural inclinations should guide our conduct. The issue then rests on whether the desires for pleasure are natural or artificially imposed. Leih-tzu’s list – which includes desires for beautiful things, good food, music and sex – appears to be firmly grounded in our natural human inclinations.

CONCLUSION

This chapter opened stating that Eastern philosophies tend to be pantheistic—the view that God is the totality of the cosmos. While the general notion of pantheism may be easy enough to grasp, the devil is in the details, and the various Eastern philosophies wrestled with this concept in different ways. Classical Hindu writings, like the Upanishads and Bhagavad Gita, focused on the pantheistic idea of God at the core of our true identities, and how we might discover the Self-God through Yoga practices like meditation. Vedanta philosophers pushed the idea of monism—the cosmos being composed of one divine stuff—but disagreed about whether God was undifferentiated or had parts. Within Buddhism, the theme of pantheism emerges first with the notion of nirvana, the idea that we should extinguish all desire and components of our ordinary consciousness. Within the nirvana state, we subdue our individual selves and experience the oneness of everything. Mahayana notions of emptiness stress that even the nirvana experience is undifferentiated and empty of descriptive content. While classical Confucian philosophy focused more on moral virtue than on the nature of God, its moral message has a strong theme of social interconnectedness. Some later Confucian philosophers developed this idea of interconnectedness in pantheistic ways. Daoism’s pantheism appears clearly in its view that the Dao is the natural force of the universe, which underlies everything. While Hinduism and Buddhism have us gain enlightenment by disassociating ourselves from the world of appearances, Daoism takes the opposite approach and has us discover the interconnectedness of ultimate reality within the cycles in the natural world.

Eastern religions invariably maintain that understanding ultimate reality and reaching enlightenment are difficult tasks: it is hard for us to find the Self-God within us, or reach Nirvana, or become a Superior Person, or live in accord with the Dao. If Easterners themselves must struggle to internalize these concepts, what chance do people in Western cultures have who lack the benefit of life-long exposure to pantheistic ideas? Even if we can intellectually grasp the central points of these Eastern philosophies, we may not be able to take them seriously or adapt them into our already formed views of things. But while there is a gap between pantheistic and nonpantheistic views of divine reality, some middle ground may still be found. It will invariably, though, require at least some compromise of the Western view that God is a distinct being from his creation.

Those who doubt the existence of a divine being face yet a different obstacle when approaching Eastern philosophy: is all this Eastern talk about undifferentiated ultimate reality and mystical enlightenment just nonsense? But even here there may be some room for compromise, since the pantheistic message of Eastern philosophy is capable of a naturalistic spin. The natural world is interconnected, both with its general laws and forces of nature that govern physical bodies throughout the universe, and with the ecological interdependence of living things on earth. Daoism in particular has been adapted to a non-religious view of the natural world: the Dao is just the flow of all the interconnected components of nature. On this view, we humans can become enlightened about our part in this unified fabric through what is called nature mysticism: we might experience a unity of all things when reflecting on some dramatic component of the natural world. For some mystics, reflecting on something like a sunset, a forest or an ocean can trigger a sense of connection with the natural world.

Questions for Review

Please answer all of the following questions for review.

1. In Hindu philosophy, what is the Self-God?

2. In Hindu philosophy, what is the doctrine of karma?

3. Describe the Hindu methods of action yoga and meditation yoga.

4. Describe Sankara’s strong monism and Ramanuja’s weak monism

5. Describe the Buddhist Four Noble Truths.

6. What is the Buddhist no-self doctrine, and how does that connect with Buddha’s notion of essential and non-essential questions?

7. Describe the Buddhist doctrine of dependent origination.

8. What is the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness, and how do Zen koans lead to an awareness of emptiness?

9. What is the Confucian principle of reciprocity, and how does it relate to the notion of humanity?

10. What are the Confucian five relationships, and what are the obligations of the superior and the subordinate in these?

11. What are some of the characteristics of the Confucian superior person?

12. How do Mencius and Kao differ on the issue of human goodness?

13. What is the Daost notion of the Dao?

14. What is the Daost notion of return?

15. What are the Daost notions of non-action and non-mind?

16. What is the Daoist method of governing?

Questions for Analysis

Please select only one question for analysis from those below and answer it.

1. Discuss the conceptual similarities between the notions of Hindu release, Buddhist nirvana, and living in accord with the Dao.

2. Write a dialogue between Sankara and Ramanuja on the issue of strong vs. weak monism.

3. According to Buddha, the religious issues worth discussing are those directly related to attaining enlightenment, specifically understanding the causes of suffering and the elimination of suffering through nirvana. Give your own examples of religious issues that people speculate about today, and explain why these might be unnecessary for understanding the causes or elimination of suffering.

4. Discuss the debate between Mencius and Kao on the issue of inherent human goodness, and defend one side over the other.

5. Discuss the Daoist view of minimal governing, and explain whether it could ever be an effective method of ruling.

6. Pick either the notion of the Hindu Atman-Brahman, Buddhist emptiness, or the Dao, and show how that concept might connect with a non-pantheistic view of reality in Western philosophy or religion.

***********

CHAPTER 5: MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY

A. From Classical to Medieval

Four Issues for Medieval Philosophers

B. Augustine

Faith, Certainty, Divine Illumination

Time

Evil, Free Will, Foreknowledge

Morality, Proper Desire, Two Cities

C. Pseudo-Dionysius and Boethius

Pseudo-Dionysius: Positive and Negative Religious Language

Boethius: Universals and Divine Foreknowledge

D. Anselm

Ontological Argument

Guanilo’s Criticism

E. Muslim and Jewish Philosophy

Averroes: Resolving Conflicts between Philosophy and Scripture

Maimonides: Interpreting Scripture Non-Literally

F. Aquinas

Twofold Truth and Proofs for God

Divine Simplicity and Religious Language

Morality and Natural Law

G. Scotus and Ockham

Scotus: Divine Illumination, Form-Matter, Divine Command Ethics

Ockham: The Razor and Nominalism

H. Conclusion

Questions for Reflection

1. Can any proof be given of God’s existence, and, if so, what might that be?

2. Consider a statement like “God loves us” or “God is angry with us.” Are we supposed to understand “love” and “anger” literally, or are these just human emotions that require a non-literal interpretation when applied to God?

3. What is the connection between God and morality? That is, does God create moral standards, or are moral standards independently existing things that God just happens to adopt?

4. There’s a lot of suffering in the world, much of which appears to be completely undeserved, such as the suffering that young children experience. Does this fact of suffering negatively impact the kind of being that God is?

5. Can something be true in science but false in religion, and vice versa, or is there only one truth that applies to both areas?

For around 1,000 years, the story of philosophy in Europe had been that of the Greek thinkers, beginning with the Presocratics on through those in Hellenistic times. However, as Christianity swept through the Roman Empire, by around 400 CE, the face of philosophy was dramatically changed along with every other cultural institution of the time. This new phase of philosophy also lasted for about 1,000 years, and is called medieval philosophy, named after the medieval period of European history.

A. FROM CLASSICAL TO MEDIEVAL

The transition from Greek to medieval philosophy was a rather rough one, and it exhibits a love-hate relationship that Christian culture had with Greek civilization. On the one hand, the new breed of philosophers was greatly influenced by Greek thought, particularly the views of Aristotle and Plotinus. While Plato remained a towering figure, it was largely in name only since for many centuries copies of his writings virtually vanished. In the absence of actual books by Plato, medieval philosophers looked to Plotinus for a summary of Plato’s views, unaware of how original Plotinus’s views were. Thus, many of the most important views that they attributed to Plato were those of Plotinus. On the other hand, however, Christianity brought with it a cultural and intellectual tradition from the land of Israel that was very much at odds with Greek ways of thinking. At the heart of the difference was the Bible and its central themes of a monotheistic God, life after death, and, perhaps most importantly, the idea of furthering the kingdom of God. As Christian emperors took the throne, they took decisive measures to curb the influence of cultural institutions that conflicted with the Christian message. Orders were given to destroy all pagan temples and shut down schools of philosophy that had been in operation since the days of Plato and Aristotle. What we find within medieval philosophy, then, is an interesting blend of Greek and Christian views to the degree that thinkers of this period were able to make them compatible.

Historians mark off medieval civilization as starting with the downfall of the Roman Empire and ending with the founding of the Renaissance—roughly from the years 400-1500. This range of time itself falls into three distinct periods, each of which impacted developments within medieval philosophy. The first period is the early middle ages, from around 400-1000. Often called the “Dark Ages”, it is characterized by tough times in the aftermath of the Roman Empire’s fall, including localized rule, decreased trade, mass migration, and feudalism. While this timeframe witnessed the Christianization of Europe, Islam was also rapidly enveloping the surrounding regions, and, as with Christianity, Muslims developed their own philosophical tradition that mixed Greek philosophy with their own faith tradition. The next period is the high middle ages, from 1,000 to 1300, which experienced much better times. Population increased, countries and regions regained political cohesion, intellectual thought was revitalized. Most important for philosophy, though, was the emergence of medieval universities which became centers of learning and gave birth to a distinct philosophical method called scholasticism, which systematically blended philosophy and theology. The final period is the late middle ages, lasting from 1300–1500. Times were again tough with economic stagnation, wars, and the Black Plague that killed around half of Europe’s population. The unity of the Catholic church also came under fire, which helped bring the middle ages as a whole to a close.

Four Issues for Medieval Philosophers

Throughout the middle ages, four specific issues attracted the attention of its greatest philosophers from the Christian, Muslim and Jewish faith traditions. First is the relation between faith and reason, which involves whether important philosophical and religious beliefs are grounded in the authority of faith, or in reason, or in some combination of the two. One of the most extreme proponents of the faith-only position is the early Church theologian Tertullian (155–230 CE), whose views are encapsulated in two vivid statements that he makes. First, he asks the rhetorical question “What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?” Athens here symbolizes reason and the tradition of Greek thinking; Jerusalem represents faith, and the doctrines of Christianity that are held by faith. So, what, then does reason have to do with faith? His implied answer is “nothing at all!” His second famous statement is “I believe because it is absurd,” which he wrote when discussing a Christian doctrine about the nature of Christ that went contrary to logic. His point is that reason obstructs our discovery of truth so much that we should expect truths of faith to run contrary to it. Thus, reason is not just a dead end in the pursuit of truth, but it is dangerously misleading. While Tertullian may have been content with the faith-only position, other philosophers held that reason could be an important asset in demonstrating some religious truths that we also know through faith.

A second issue of interest for medieval philosophers was proving the existence of God. Many medieval philosophers argued that, while we can certainly believe in God on the grounds of faith alone, there are rational proofs that we can also give to show God’s existence. Chief among these is a causal argument:  motion and change on earth trace back to a first cause, which is God. Several versions of this argument were put forward, some with a particularly high level of sophistication. Other proofs for God’s existence where also forthcoming, which used entirely different strategies.

Third was the problem of religious language. Even if we know that God exists, can we say anything meaningful about him with human language? We commonly describe God using words like “powerful” and “good”, but all of these seem tainted by our limited human experience. Should we give up describing God altogether? Should we reinterpret our descriptions of God in special ways? The solutions that philosophers offered to this problem were both varied and original.

The fourth issue is the problem of universals, namely whether concepts such as “greenness” and “largeness” exist independently of human thought. The particular tree in front of me is green and large. But there are lots of other particular things that are also green or large, and thus in some sense share the more universal attribute of greenness or largeness. The question, then, is whether universals such as greenness and largeness exist independently of human thought in some external reality, or whether they are just products of the human mind. Medieval philosophers held every possible view on the subject, and in many ways the problem of universals represents medieval philosophy at its best.

B. AUGUSTINE

The first major medieval philosopher was Augustine (354–430), who emphasized attaining knowledge through divine illumination and achieving moral goodness by loving God. The details of his life are openly laid out in his autobiography, titled Confessions, which even today is considered a classic of world literature. He was born in the North African region of Tagaste to a devout Christian mother and pagan father. For much of his youth, his middle-class parents' greatest concern was affording a university education for him. Once having attained this difficult goal, learning rhetoric at Carthage, Augustine's zeal for studying theology became his driving force. But first came a period of trying out life's alternatives. To his mother’s great displeasure, he became entrenched in a new Persian religion called Manichaeism and then joined a group of Neoplatonists. In both cases he sought to understand how evil could exist in a world that was created by a good God. The Manichaean explanation was that the material world is inherently evil, but through special knowledge from God we can rise above it. Neoplatonists argued that evil results from the physical world being so far removed from God, and thus absent from his goodness.

For fifteen years he lived with an woman and fathered a son; but when his mother eventually convinced him to marry properly, he left his mistress. While awaiting his bride-to-be's coming of age, he took up with yet another woman and prayed his famous prayer, "Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet." But his marriage to either woman never transpired. While teaching rhetoric in the city of Milan, he attended sermons of the Bishop of that region, which gradually led to his Christian conversion. Returning to North Africa, he was drafted into the priesthood by the locals for his popular preaching, and later became their bishop, devoting the rest of his life to writing and preaching in that region. Augustine died at 75, even as invading barbarian armies were tearing down the city walls of Hippo. Augustine’s literary output was enormous, and he may be the most prolific writer of the ancient world. His most famous writings are his Confessions and The City of God. While only a couple of his shorter works are devoted exclusively to philosophy, most notably On Free Choice, many of his compositions are interspersed with philosophical content, and from these a complex system emerges.

Faith, Certainty, Divine Illumination

The starting point for Augustine’s philosophy is his stance on the relation between faith and reason. We’ve seen that there are two ways of approaching the relation between faith and reason: first, Tertullian’s faith-only position, and, second, the view that reason by itself can go a long way in establishing religious truths independently of faith. Augustine struck a middle ground between the two, advocating a position that he called “faith seeking understanding.” His inspiration for this was a passage from the Old Testament book of Isaiah “Unless you believe, you will not understand.” On this view, reason by itself is not good enough to give us proper religious knowledge; instead, we have to begin with faith to set us in the right direction and, once we believe in God through faith, we can seek to understand the foundations of our belief through reason.

A running theme throughout Augustine’s writings is that knowledge is indeed attainable, and we should reject the efforts of philosophical skeptics. By the time Augustine came on the scene, different Greek schools of skepticism were well established, and for centuries had been producing arguments to show that we can no nothing at all for certain. Every belief I have can be brought into question; even my belief that the tree in front of me exists is uncertain since I might just be having a hallucination. In opposition to the skeptics, Augustine argues that there are four main areas in which we have genuine knowledge that even the skeptics cannot question. Right off, each of us has indisputable knowledge of our own existence. He writes,

On none of these points do I fear the arguments of the skeptics of the Academy who say: what if you are deceived? For if I am deceived, I am. For he who does not exist cannot be deceived. And if I am deceived, by this same token I am. [City of God, 11:26]

His point here is simple: no matter how deceived I am—such as through hallucinations or flawed sensory perception—I still have to exist in order to be deceived. This knowledge is so obvious and self-evident that it enables me to go one step further and say that I know that I know. Knowledge is thus an indisputable fact.

In addition to knowledge of one’s own existence, we also have certainty in three key areas: math, logic and immediate sense experience. Mathematical truths, such as “three times three is nine,” are so compelling that it is impossible to doubt them. So too with logical truths:

I have learned through dialectic [logic] that many other things are true. Count, if you can, how many there are: If there are four elements in the world, there are not five; if there is one sun, there are not two; one and the same soul cannot die and still be immortal; man cannot at the same time be happy and unhappy; if the sun is shining here, it cannot be night; we are now either awake or asleep; either there is a body which I seem to see or there is not a body. [Against the Academics, 3:13]

While Augustine recognizes that sense perceptions themselves are not always trustworthy, he nonetheless maintains that reports of immediate experiences are indisputable, such as “the snow appears white to me.” Even if in reality the snow happens to be a different color, what remains true is that I perceive it as white. He writes:

I do not know how the [skeptical] Academician can refute him who says “I know that this appears white to me, I know that my hearing is delighted with this, I know that this has an agreeable odor, I know that this tastes sweet to me, I know that this feels cold to me.” [Ibid 3:11]

These areas of knowledge, then, seem to be completely indisputable because of the self-evident nature of their specific truths. There are other areas of knowledge, though, that lack this self-evidence and may indeed be fallible, such as the truths themselves of what our senses report, and also the knowledge that we gain through the testimony of other people. Nevertheless, he argues, in view of how much important information they provide us, we can have reasonable confidence in them as reliable sources of knowledge. Regarding our senses, he argues, “Far be it from us to doubt the truth of what we have learned by the bodily senses, since by them we have learned to know the heaven and the earth, and those things in them which are known to us.” So too with the knowledge that we gain through the testimony of other people. While the reports of some people cannot be trusted, testimony is nonetheless an indispensable source of knowledge. He writes, “Far be it from us too to deny that we know what we have learned by the testimony of others: otherwise we would not know that there is an ocean, or that the lands and cities exist which numerous report mention to us” (On the Trinity, 15).

Granted, then, according to Augustine we can know many things indisputably and other things with at least a high degree of certainty. While certainty in these areas seems to be a natural part of human thinking, knowledge of other types of truth require special help from God before we can grasp them. God illuminates our minds to enable us to see these truths, and Augustine succinctly describes this theory of divine illumination here: “The mind needs to be enlightened by light from outside itself, so that it can participate in truth, because it is not itself the nature of truth. You will light my lamp, Lord” (Confessions, 4:15:25). Human nature is limited, Augustine believes, and thus we’re not in a position by ourselves to comprehend the most important ones. Truths regarding virtuous living and religious faithfulness are cases in point: “Among the objects of the intellect, there are some that are seen in the soul itself, for example, virtues which will endure, such as piety, or virtues that are useful for this life and not destined to remain in the next, as faith” (Commentary on Genesis, 31:59). For us to grasp these truths, God illuminates our soul, which triggers a special intellectual vision by which we can see them. While Augustine is quite clear that humans stand in need of divine illumination, he is less clear about how this process takes place. Does divine intuition unleash a flood of specific innate ideas in our minds? Is it more like a capacity that allows us to detect and zoom in on the truth? One recent interpretation is that we first develop beliefs on our own, and then God illuminates our minds so that we can see if they are true or false; God provides the justification for our beliefs.

Time

Augustine is one of the first philosophers to have speculated about the nature of time. Time, he says, is something that everyone experiences and is intimately familiar with. We feel the passage of time throughout the day, we note the lengths of time that it takes for things to happen, we can distinguish between short and long amounts of time. However, once we try to explain exactly what time is, we are at a loss. “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know. If I wish to explain it to someone that asks, I do not know” (Confessions 11:14). There are two main ways that we can view the nature of time. First, we might think that it is objective, and part of the external nature of the world itself. Past, present and future are realities. Second, we might think of time as merely subjective, existing only as a product of our minds. While it is tempting to go with the first interpretation, Augustine goes with the second: time has no meaning apart from our minds. The reason is that the past no longer exists, and the future is not yet here. He writes,

These two times then, past and future, how can they exist since the past is gone and the future is not yet here? But if the present stayed present, and never passed into time past, then, truly, it would not be time, but eternity. Suppose that time present (if it is to be time) only comes into existence because it passes into time-past. How, then, can we say that it exists, since its existence is caused by the fact that it will not exist? We can’t truly say that time is, then, except because it tends towards non-being. [Ibid]

It is as though everything that occurs will instantly evaporate with the passing of the present moment.

The extent to which the past and future are real at all, they must be embedded in the present moment—since the present is all that really exists:

It is now plain and evident that neither future nor past things exist. Nor can we properly say, “there are three times: past, present, and future”. Instead, it we might properly say “there are three times: a present-of-things-past, a present-of-things-present, and a present-of-things-future.” [Ibid 11:20]

When we speak about the past, present and future, we need to connect them all to the present moment. The past involves only memories that we have in the present, and, thus, we should call this the present-of-things-past. The future involves only mental anticipations of what might come, and we should call this the present-of-things-future.

Evil, Free Will, Foreknowledge

Medieval philosophers developed very precise notions of God and the attributes that he has, many of which are even now well-known among believers. For example, God is all-powerful (i.e., omnipotent), all-knowing (i.e., omniscient), and all-good (i.e., omni-benevolent). Other commonly discussed attributes of God are that he is eternal, that he is present everywhere (i.e., omnipresent) and that he has foreknowledge of future events. While these traditional attributes of God offer a clear picture of the kind of being that he is, many of them present special conceptual problems, particularly when we try to make them compatible them with potentially conflicting facts about the world.

One of these is the famous problem of evil: how are we to understand God’s goodness in the face of all the suffering that we experience?  It’s clear that suffering is abundant throughout the world, and such suffering is a type of evil. It’s also clear for religious philosophers that God is in control of things, which seems to imply that God is the source of that suffering and evil. But if God is good, then it seems that he can’t be the source of evil. Thus, there is a conflict between God’s power and goodness on the one hand, and the presence of suffering on the other. How can we resolve this conflict? The first step, for Augustine, is to recognize that God has only an indirect role in the cause of some suffering, as he explains here:

[You ask whether God is the cause of evil. In response,] if you know or believe that God is good (and it is not right to believe otherwise) then he does no evil. Further, if we recognize that God is just (and it is impious to deny it) then he rewards the good and punishes the wicked. Such punishments are indeed evils for those who suffer them. Therefore, if no one is punished unjustly (this we must believe since we believe that this universe is governed by divine providence) it follows that God is a cause of the suffering of some evil, but in no way causes the doing of evil. [On Free Choice: 1:1]

For Augustine, God’s goodness means that he does no evil. Yet, God’s justness means that he rewards good and punishes evil. Thus, God indeed causes some suffering through punishment, but he is not the cause of evil actions themselves.

The cause of evil itself, according to Augustine, is the human will, and thus all blame for it rests on our shoulders, not on Gods. We willfully turn our souls away from God when we perform evil deeds:  “look for the source of this movement and be sure that it does not come from God” (On Free Choice, 2:20). Even the punishment that God imposes on us for our evil is something that we brought on ourselves, since “punishment is used in such a way that it places natures in their right order” (On Free Choice, 3:9). Thus, a first solution that Augustine offers to the problem of evil is that human will is the cause of evil and reason for divine punishment. A second and related solution is that the evil we willfully create within our souls is only a deprivation of goodness. Think of God’s goodness like a bright white light; the evil that we humans create is like an act of dimming that light, or shielding ourselves from it to create an area of darkness. It is not like we’ve created a competing light source of our own, such as a bright red light that we shine around to combat God’s bright white light. Accordingly, the evil that we create through our wills is the absence of good, and not a substantive evil in itself. Augustine writes, “That movement of the soul’s turning away, which we admitted was sinful, is a defective movement, and every defect arises from non-being” (On Free Choice, 2:20). Drawing from Plotinus, “non-being” is Augustine’s term for the complete absence of God.

Yet a third solution to the problem of evil is Augustine’s suggestion that the apparent imperfection of any part of creation disappears in light of the perfection of the whole. To explain, Augustine considers a common objection that God seems to be the source of suffering when our young children die with no clear purpose. His response is this:

In view of the encompassing network of the universe and the whole creation (a network that is perfectly ordered in time and place, where not even one leaf of a tree is superfluous) it is not possible to create a superfluous person. . . . Moreover, who knows what faith is practiced or what pity is tested when these children’s sufferings break down the hardness of parents? We do not know what reward God reserves in the secret places of his judgment for these children . . . . [On Free Choice, 3.27]

Augustine is saying here that troubling events such as the suffering of children are part of a larger system of things in the world, and even these events have a place in contributing to the good of the whole. If we were capable of grasping the entirety of the creation, we would then see the role that each thing plays in the greater scheme of things, contributing to its total perfection.

The tension between God and evil is just one of the problems surrounding God’s attributes. Another that Augustine considers is the possible conflict between God’s foreknowledge and human free will. If God knows ahead of time what I will do at midnight tonight, then when the time comes I must do that, and thus have no free choice. The problem can be laid out more precisely as follows:

1. If God foreknows all events, then all events happen according to a fixed, causal order.

2. If all events happen according to a fixed, causal order, then nothing depends on us and there is no such thing as free will.

3. God foreknows all events, hence there is no such thing as free will.

Augustine’s solution is to distinguish between two distinct things about my future decisions that God might focus on. On the one hand, God might focus on and foresee my actions, in which case it looks as though my actions are already causally fixed on the timeline. On the other hand, however, God might focus on and foresee what my choice will be, what mental decision I make. By foreseeing my choice, God is focusing on a free will decision that will be left to me in the future. Thus, God's foreknowledge of my actions is dependent upon what my choice will be, and not on my action itself. He explains this here:

Since God foreknows our will, the very will that he foreknows will be what comes about. Therefore, it will be a will, since it is a will that he foreknows. And it could not be a will unless it were in our power. Therefore, he also foreknows this power. It follows, then, that his foreknowledge does not take away my power; in fact, it is all the more certain that I will have that power, since he whose foreknowledge never errs foreknows that I will have it. [On Free Choice, 3:3]

For Augustine, the issue comes down to this. Suppose that I somehow foreknew what choice you would make tomorrow at noontime. Would that necessitate you doing it? Clearly not. Thus, God’s foreknowledge of your choice does not interfere with your freedom any more than my foreknowledge of your choice would.

Morality, Proper Desire, Two Cities

Augustine’s moral philosophy rests on a single theme: desiring all things in their appropriate manner, and reserving our most supreme desire for God. Humans have the capacity to desire things with a wide range of intensity, from very low to very high. According to Augustine, our human psyches are designed in such a way that the highest intensity of desire should be our ultimate love for God. The intensity of our desires for other things—wealth, fame, material goods—should be far less. Our principal moral task is to make sure that all of our desires are properly ordered, that we desire things in the right way. When we fail to do this, our desires become disordered; that is, we desire a lowly thing such as a coat with the intensity that we should otherwise devote to something much higher, even God himself. It is this disordered desire that motivates us to do evil: He writes,

When the miser prefers his gold to justice, it is through no fault of the gold, but of the man; and so with every created thing. For though it is good, it may be loved with an evil as well as with a good love: it is loved rightly when it is loved with proper order; evilly, when disordered. [City of God, 15:22]

Not only is properly ordered desire central to morality and virtuous conduct, but it is also the cornerstone to a good and just society. Augustine’s political views are mapped out in his book The City of God, which he initially wrote against Roman pagans who blamed the 410 fall of Rome on the domination of Christianity within society and their abolition of polytheistic worship. According to Augustine, we need to see society as consisting of two “cities” or cultures: an earthly one and a heavenly one. The defining difference between the two is that citizens of the earthly city are motivated by disordered desire, while those of the heavenly city have properly ordered desires. He writes,

Two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self. The former, in a word, glories in itself, the latter in the Lord. For the one seeks glory from men; but the greatest glory of the other is God, the witness of conscience. The one lifts up its head in its own glory; the other says to its God, “You are my glory, and you lift up my head.” In the one, the princes and the nations it subdues are ruled by the love of ruling; in the other, the princes and the subjects serve one another in love, the latter obeying, while the former take thought for all. The one delights in its own strength, represented in the persons of its rulers; the other says to its God, “I will love you, Lord, my strength.” [City of God, 14:28]

The Roman Empire itself, he argues, is a perfect example of an earthly city that overindulged in disordered desires. This led to immorality, vice, crime, and its ultimate downfall. Citizens of the heavenly city, who have properly ordered desires, realize that the only eternal good is found in God. They live by faith and “look for those eternal blessings which are promised” (City of God, 19:17)

People of the heavenly city are obviously forced to live here on earth among rival members of the earthly city. However, they consider themselves as resident aliens and follow the laws and customs of the society they in which they dwell, but do not settle down to enjoy them. He writes, “So long as the heavenly city lives like a captive and a stranger in the earthly city . . . it does not hesitate to obey the laws of the earthly city, whereby the things necessary for the maintenance of this mortal life are governed” (ibid).  The earthly city at its best seeks peace in this life, a necessary condition for happiness. Accordingly, “the earthly city, which does not live by faith, seeks an earthly peace, and the end it proposes. . . is the combination of men’s wills to attain the things which are helpful to this life” (ibid). The heavenly city makes use of this peace only because it must.

C. PSEUDO-DIONYSIUS AND BOETHIUS

While Augustine was the dominant philosopher of the early middle ages, two others were influential on some specific philosophical issues, namely, Pseudo-Dionysius and Boethius.

Pseudo-Dionysius: Positive and Negative Religious Language

We do not know the real name of the philosopher that today we call “Pseudo-Dionysius.” He was a Christian mystical philosopher living in the fifth century who was influenced by Plotinus view that we should describe God through negative attributes. In his writings he goes by the name “Dionysius the Areopagite,” the Christian convert mentioned in the New Testament book of Acts, who was a member of the Athenian high court. Medieval writers assumed that this was his true identity, scholars now know that this was just a pseudonym, and thus we refer to him as Pseudo-Dionysius. The cornerstone of his religious mysticism is his view that a direct experience of God is so blinding and overpowering that it leaves us in what he calls both an “unapproachable light” and a “dazzling darkness.” The experience is “darkness” insofar as we are incapable of describing anything concrete about it; it is ineffable, meaning that it is unspeakable. Similar to Plotinus, Dionysius maintains that we must describe God by way of negation.

In his short work titled Mystical Theology, he discusses the limits of religious language and presents a two-step process that we must take when describing God. First, we begin with positive descriptions by which we attempt to say what God is, such as by saying that God is powerful. Second, realizing the inadequacy of our positive descriptions, we then proceed negatively by denying the positive ascriptions that we made; for example, we deny that God is powerful as humans understand the term “power.” Thus, the more we deny our positive descriptions of God, the closer we get to an understanding of God.

Regarding our positive descriptions of God, Pseudo-Dionysius says that there are three types of descriptions that we can make. First, there are what we can call theological attributes of God, where, as scriptures indicate, we can refer to God as father, son, and holy spirit. These descriptions are quite profound and seem to point at the very essence of God. However, they are also obscure notions that offer us little detail about God’s nature. Next, there are what we can call philosophical attributes, such as that God is powerful, wise, good. These are slightly less profound descriptions of God, but at least they give us a bit more detail about God’s nature. Finally, there are blatant human metaphors that we use to describe God, such as with scriptural passages that refer to God as sleeping, angry, grieved, or enraged. These are the least profound descriptions; they’re trivial and often superfluous. On the other hand, they offer us the greatest amount of detail that we can grasp with our normal human mental capacity.

So much for our positive descriptions of God. The next step is to recognize that all three groups of these descriptions are flawed and offer distorted views of God. As Plotinus suggested, God himself is incapable of direct description because of his pure and simple perfection, and the best we can do is describe God negatively—by saying what he is not. Pseudo-Dionysius agrees, and suggests that we begin by denying the blatant human metaphors that we use to describe God: he has no emotions as humans understand them. Thus, we must recognize that he is not “a body, nor has he form or shape, or quality or quantity or mass; he is not localized or visible or tangible; he is neither sensitive nor sensible; he is subject to no disorder or disturbance arising from material passion” (Mystical Theology, 4). By denying these particular features of God, a more accurate image of him emerges. It is much like how a sculptor begins by chipping away at a block of stone, removing the parts that aren’t quite right, and eventually produces a clear image of a statue. Next we deny the philosophical attributes: he is not power, knowledge, or goodness as humans understand the terms. Finally, we deny theological attributes: he is not father, son, or holy spirit as humans understand the terms.

Through these successive steps of first affirming then denying God’s attributes, Pseudo-Dionysius  argues that we climb higher and higher towards an understanding of God that rests on a mystical experience of the divine as we approach him. God himself, though, can never be adequately described: “for the perfect and sole cause of all is above all affirmation, and that which transcends all is above all subtraction, absolutely separate, and beyond all that is (Mystical Theology, 5).

Boethius: Universals and Divine Foreknowledge

Boethius (480-524) is best remembered for his theory of universals which set the conceptual framework for discussion on that topic throughout the middle ages. He was born in Rome to a wealthy Christian family, but soon after orphaned, he was raised by his adopting family with a great appreciation for Greek and Roman culture, at a time when Rome was ruled by barbarian kings. He was well acquainted with classical philosophy, particularly Plato, Aristotle and Neoplatonism, and his extensive knowledge made him a valuable asset to the royal government. Quickly moving up the ranks in administrative posts, his career came to an abrupt end when he was accused of treason and executed. While in prison he wrote his most influential work, The Consolation of Philosophy.

Boetheus has the honor of being the first medieval philosopher to systematically explore the problem of universals, that is, the question of whether abstract notions such as “greenness” exist somewhere in reality or only in our minds. He got his inspiration from a brief comment about universals made by the Neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry:

I shall avoid investigating (a) whether genera and species [i.e., universals] are real or are situated in bare thoughts alone, (b) whether as real they are bodies or incorporeals, and (c) whether they are separated or in sensibles and have their reality in connection with them. Such business is profound, and requires another, greater investigation.  [Introduction to Aristotle’s Categories]

In the above passage Porphyry lists possible ways of understanding how universals might exist, and Boethius refined these into three positions. The first position is that universals such as “greenness” exist outside of our minds and even separately from bodies physical bodies such as a green tree. This is the classic position taken by Plato who held that abstract notions such as “greenness” exist in the non-physical realm of the Forms. The term for this option is “universals ante rem”, Latin for “before the thing.” Position two is that universals are intrinsic—or built into—physical things. For example, the universal “greenness” is found in all green individual objects, such as trees and grass. This is the view taken by Aristotle, and the term for this position is “universals in re", Latin for “in the thing.” The third position is that universals exist only as concepts in the human mind, and not in any real way in the external world. We abstract them from particular things, such as when after viewing several green trees I form the mental abstraction of “greenness”. The official term for this is “universals post rem”, Latin for “following the thing.” These three positions on universals, as laid out by Boethius, became the definitive options of further discussion on the subject by later medieval philosophers as they defended one of these positions against the others. So, which of these three views did Boethius think is right? It’s not clear. He criticizes them all on various grounds, but in one of his writings he seems to go along with Aristotle, and in another with Plato.

Boethius was particularly influential on one other philosophical issue, that of the conflict between divine foreknowledge and free will. Again, the problem here is that if God knows what I will do before hand, then that event must happen, and I have no free will to do otherwise. Boethius has an ingenious solution to this problem: God stands outside of time and thus knows what I will do by viewing the whole timeline at once; this does not constrain our free choices. This solution rests on a unique conception of God’s attribute of eternality. Consider these two conceptions of what it means to be eternal: (1) endless existence on the timeline, and (2) existence completely outside of time. To say that God is eternal in the first sense means simply that at any point that you pick in the time line, God existed or will exist at that point. God moves through time along with me and everything else in the world. The second notion of eternality places God completely outside of the timeline and suggests that the phenomenon of time does not even apply to God. Boethius goes with this second notion of God’s eternality: “eternity is the possession of endless life, whole and perfect at a single moment” (Consolation of Philosophy, 5:6).

Once we adopt this second view of God’s eternality, according to Boethius, the conflict between foreknowledge and free will disappears. God does not foresee my future actions by peeking down the timeline with a special telescope. Rather, he inspects the entire timeline at once, which includes the free will choices that I make at the moments that I make them.

Since God stands forever in an eternal present, his knowledge, also transcending all movement of time, dwells in the simplicity of its own changeless present. It embraces the whole infinite sweep of the past and of the future, contemplates all that falls within its simple cognition as if it were now taking place. And therefore, if you will carefully consider that immediate presentment whereby it discriminates all things, you will more rightly conclude that it is not foreknowledge as of something future, but knowledge of a moment that never passes. . . . Thus, the divine anticipation does not change the natures and properties of things, and it beholds things present before it, just as they will hereafter come to pass in time. [Ibid]

For Boethius, then, it is misleading to even call this divine “foreknowledge” since this wrongly implies that God is looking into the future. Instead, it is an “outlook” that “embraces all things as from some lofty height” (ibid).

D. ANSELM

Anselm (1033–1109) made his mark in the history of philosophy for developing what is now called the ontological argument for God’s existence. He was born to a noble family, owners of considerable property in the city of Aosta in the Italian Alps. His virtuous mother faithfully provided young Anselm with religious training and inspired in him a love of learning. In contrast, his father was a harsh man with a violent temper. At 14 years of age Anselm sought admission to a monastery, but the abbot, fearing trouble from his father, refused him without paternal permission. The boy was so desperate, he prayed for an illness, hoping the monks would pity him and change their minds. He got half his wish. He became ill, but was still not accepted. This, and the death of his mother, resulted in Anselm leaving his studies for a more carefree life. By age 23, he could take his father’s abuse no longer and left, wandering for three years through the region. He then entered the Benedictine abbey at Bec, Normandy, as a novice, and in a few short years became its Prior. He was later enthroned as archbishop of Canterbury. However, when the King refused to free the church from royal control, Anselm went into exile in protest. When the King died, the subsequent ruler called Anselm back, but the terms were no different, and so Anselm remained in exile. Throughout this time he wrote many short works. At the time these did not receive their deserved appreciation, but are now considered great achievements. Anselm’s writings are in the form of dialogues and meditations, the most important of which are his Monologium and Proslogium.

Anselm followed Augustine’s view of the relation between faith and reason: faith seeking understanding. Thus, Anselm writes “I hold it to be a failure in duty if after we have become steadfast in our faith we do not strive to understand what we believe." In his effort to understand his faith, he was consumed with the idea of proving God’s existence, and, in his first effort to do so, he offers a proof from absolute goodness. He presents the basic intuition behind this argument here:

Since there are goods so innumerable, whose great diversity we experience by the bodily senses, and discern by our mental faculties, must we not believe that there is some one thing, through which all goods whatever are good? [Monologium 1]

More formally, his argument is this:

1. Goodness exists in a variety of ways and degrees.

2. This would be impossible without an absolute standard of good, in which all goods participate.

3. Therefore, an absolute standard of good exists, which is God.

The argument takes its inspiration from Plato’s view of the Form of the Good. According to Plato, all good things that we see around us—a good person, a good photograph, a good meal—obtain their goodness by participating in perfect form of Goodness that exists in a non-physical realm. Anselm agrees, and he draws attention to the fact that the same kind of things often differ in their degree of goodness. Some people are very good, others not so much. Some meals are good, others not so much. The standard of goodness, then, must come from some outside source which is always perfectly good, and that perfectly good source is God.

Ontological Argument

Although Anselm believed that this argument successfully proved God’s existence, he also felt that it was a little too cluttered. It first requires us to experience various good things in the world, then assess their differing levels of goodness, then finally draw the conclusion. Perhaps, Anslem thought, he could do better and construct a more self-contained argument: “I began to ask myself whether there might be found a single argument which would require no other for its proof than itself alone” (Proslogium, Preface). This indeed is what he accomplished in his Ontological Argument for God’s existence, which even today stands as one of the greatest arguments in the history of philosophy. It doesn’t require us to experience anything through our senses. Rather, it simply begins with a definition of God, and draws its conclusion directly from that definition. Although the argument is quite self-contained, it is a bit challenging to grasp its central point as he presents it here:

Even the fool [who says in his heart there is no God] is convinced that something exists in the understanding, at least, than which nothing greater can be conceived. For, when he hears of this, he understands it. And whatever is understood, exists in the understanding. And assuredly that, than which nothing greater can be conceived, cannot exist in the understanding alone. For, suppose it exists in the understanding alone: then it can be conceived to exist in reality; which is greater.

Therefore, if that, than which nothing greater can be conceived, exists in the understanding alone, the very being, than which nothing greater can be conceived, is one, than which a greater can be conceived. But obviously this is impossible. Hence, there is no doubt that there exists a being, than which nothing greater can be conceived, and it exists both in the understanding and in reality. [Proslogium, 2]

Worded more simply, his argument is this:

1. God is defined as “The Greatest Possible Being.”

2. The Greatest Possible Being must have every quality that would make it greater (or more superior) than it would be otherwise.

3. Having the quality of real existence is greater than having the quality of imaginary existence

4. Therefore, the Greatest Possible Being must have the quality of real existence.

Premise one gives a definition of God. Anselm’s actual wording is that God is “that than which nothing greater can be conceived,” which more concisely means simply that God is the greatest possible being. Premise two rests on the notion of a quality that makes something great: to possess it makes you greater than to lack it. Having the quality of strength makes a bridge greater than it would be if it lacked it. Having the quality of healthiness makes be greater than I would be if I lacked it. By definition, the “Greatest Possible Being” must have every quality that would make it great. Premise three states that “existence” is a quality that makes something great. Having a real gold coin in my pocket is greater than just imagining to have one. By existing in reality, I am greater than I would otherwise be if I only existed in someone’s imagination. The conclusion that follows is that the Greatest Possible Being must have the quality of real existence: if it lacked it, it could have been greater. That is, it would be the “Greatest Possible Being that could have been greater,” which is a contradiction.

Anselm recognizes that “existence” is just one quality that makes something greater than it would be otherwise. Another such quality is ultimate power, and, thus, we can reword premise 3 with this quality:

3.1. Having the quality of ultimate power is greater than having limited power.

Thus, the Greatest Possible Being must also have the quality of ultimate power. So too with ultimate wisdom, and ultimate goodness. Anselm writes that the Greatest Possible Being is “just, truthful, blessed, and whatever it is better to be than not to be. For it is better to be just than not just; better to be blessed than not blessed” (ibid, 3). Anselm uses this strategy to show that, not only does the Greatest Possible Being exist, but it exists necessarily; that is, it would be impossible for him to not exist—or, as he words it, “it cannot be conceived not to exist” (ibid). Thus, again, we can reword premise 3 with this quality:

3.2. Having the quality of necessary existence is greater than having contingent existence.

The term “contingent existence,” as used above, refers to things that just happen to exist, but don’t need to exist, such as me, the chair I’m sitting on, and every other physical thing in the world. That is, we can conceive of a universe where none of these things existed. By contrast, necessary existence has to do with things whose non-existence is impossible. Mathematical concepts such as 2+2=4 might be examples of these, since it is impossible for these notions to be false. Anselm’s point above is that necessary existence is superior to mere contingent existence, and thus the Greatest Possible Being must have the quality of necessary existence.

Guanilo’s Criticism

As Anselm’s writings circulated, a monk named Guanilo had trouble accepting Anselm’s argument. While Guanilo certainly believed that God existed, he felt that Anselm’s argument was flawed, and thus tried to expose the problem. Guanilo suggests that we should imagine a mythological “lost island” that we might define as “The Greatest Possible Island”. By plugging this definition into Anselm’s ontological argument, we could then prove the existence of that island. Guanilo writes,

You can no longer doubt that this island which is more excellent than all lands exists somewhere, since you have no doubt that it is in your understanding. And since it is more excellent not to be in the understanding alone, but to exist both in the understanding and in reality, for this reason it must exist. For if it does not exist, any land which really exists will be more excellent than it; and so the island already understood by you to be more excellent will not be more excellent. [Ibid, Guanilo]

Following the argument structure above, the parallel argument that Guanilo offers is this:

1. The Lost Island is defined as “The Greatest Possible Island.”

2. The Greatest Possible Island must have every quality that would make it greater (or more superior) than it would be otherwise.

3. Having the quality of real existence is greater than having the quality of imaginary existence.

4. Therefore, the Greatest Possible Island must have the quality of real existence.

The larger point of Guanilo’s criticism is that Anselm’s type of argument is so flawed that it would show the existence of the greatest possible anything—the Greatest Possible Shoe, the Greatest Possible Unicorn, the Greatest Possible Eyebrow.

Anselm gave an extensive reply to Guanilo, attempting to show that the argument format only works with “The Greatest Possible Being” and not with things like islands.

That being alone, on the other hand, cannot be conceived not to exist, in which any conception discovers neither beginning nor end nor composition of parts, and which any conception finds always and everywhere as a whole. . . . So, then, of God alone it can be said that it is impossible to conceive of his nonexistence; and yet many objects, so long as they exist, in one sense cannot be conceived not to exist. But in what sense God is to be conceived not to exist, I think has been shown clearly enough in my book. [Ibid, Reply]

Anselm’s reply seems to be this. The argument structure only works with “the Greatest Possible Being,” since only “being” is capable of having ultimately great qualities, such as necessary existence. An island, by contrast, is a finite and limited thing that is composed of parts, and is thus incapable of having ultimately great qualities. The very notion of “The Greatest Possible Island” is self-contradictory since it attempts to impose the greatest possible qualities on a finite thing. Again, only the notion of “being” is capable of having ultimately great qualities piled onto it. Thus, only one version of the argument works—the one that focuses on the greatest possible being—and this is an argument that proves specifically proves the existence of God.

E. MUSLIM AND JEWISH PHILOSOPHY

As Christianity spread throughout Europe, pagan religions diminished and all but disappeared. However, two other religious traditions persisted in the region, namely Judaism and Islam, in spite of continual efforts of Christian rulers to suppress them through war, relocation, or forced conversion. While the political relations between the three religious traditions were hostile, there was much more compatibility between them philosophically. One reason is that all three of those religions share a common monotheistic view of an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good God who created the world and watches after us. Because of this doctrinal commonality, philosophers within the three traditions focused on many of the same issues: the relation between faith and reason, proofs for God’s existence, and the meaningfulness of religious language. While Judaism and Islam each have a complex and philosophically rich history, we will only look at the views of two figures: the Muslim philosopher Averroes, and the Jewish philosopher Maimonides.

Averroes: Resolving Conflicts between Philosophy and Scripture

Averroes is the Latin name of the Spanish-Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd (1126-1198), who best remembered for his view that philosophers are best suited to interpret scripture. He was born into a prominent family of judges in Cordova Spain, which was then under Arab control. Schooled in philosophy, Islamic Law and medicine, he made a name for himself in all three of these areas throughout his life. In philosophy he was commissioned to write commentaries on Aristotle’s works. Following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather, he was Cordova’s chief judge for several years. Later on he became the personal physician to the ruler of Spain and Morocco. In spite of his distinguished career, near the end of his life he was forced into exile on grounds of heresy, and his books were burned. He was permitted to return two years later, but died the following year.

One of his most influential works is A Decisive Treatise, which addresses the question: what should we do when scripture conflicts with demonstrative truths of philosophy and science? For example, scripture might hold that God created the world at a particular moment in time; philosophy, on the other hand, might hold that the world has existed from eternity past and was not created at any moment in time. Which view should we follow? His answer is that we should accept the demonstrative truth established by philosophy and seek for a metaphorical interpretation of scripture that will make the apparent conflict disappear. He writes,

If the [scriptural] Law speaks of it, either it will agree with that which has been proved by inference, or else it will disagree with it. If it is in agreement it needs no comment, and if it is opposed to the Law, an interpretation is to be sought. Interpretation means to carry the meaning of a word from its original sense to a metaphorical one. But this should be done in such a manner as will not conflict with the custom of the Arabian tongue. It is to avoid the naming of an object, by simply mentioning its like, its cause, its attribute, or associate, etc. which are commonly quoted in the definition of the different kinds of metaphorical utterances. [Decisive Treatise]

According to Averroes, the problem arises since not all people have the same intellectual capacity to understand scripture: some people can understand logic, while the vast majority cannot. To address the wide range of readers, God crafted scriptures with two levels of meaning. First, there is the common or “exoteric” meaning of scripture that relies on catchphrases, buzzwords, stories and parables. Ordinary readers tend to understand these literally. Second, there is the true meaning of scripture which is hidden or “esoteric”, and requires interpretation. Between these two main levels of meaning there is a blurry middle ground:

There is a third part of the Law which occupies an intermediate position, on account of some doubt about it. Some say that it should be taken exoterically, and that no interpretation should be allowed in it; while there are others who say that they have some of esoteric meaning, and should not be taken exoterically by the learned. This is on account of the obscurity of their meaning. A learned man may be excused if he makes a mistake about them. [Ibid]

Thus, with some scriptural passages it’s not clear whether they are only exoteric and must be understood literally, or whether they are esoteric and need further interpretation.

According to Averroes, there are three groups of people who seek to understand scripture. First there are the masses of people, who are guided only by catchphrases and buzzwords, and thus take scripture literally. Second, there are dogmatic theologians who attempt some interpretation, but don’t have the skill to arrive at the true meaning. Finally, there are the philosophers who, through their studies of logic, have the ability to draw the proper inferences. In fact, their skill is so specialized that they should not even discuss their interpretations with the masses or the dogmatic theologians:

This kind of interpretation should not be discussed with the dogmatic theologians, not to speak of the common people. If any of these interpretations are disclosed to those not fit to receive them--especially philosophical interpretations--these being far higher than common knowledge, they may be led to infidelity. [Ibid]

Ultimately, it is the philosopher who has the logical ability to properly interpret scripture.

In short, Averroes’s maintains that apparent conflicts between philosophy and scripture can be resolved by adopting metaphorical interpretations of scripture that skilled philosophers are capable of drawing. While his position might be a little elitist—and might give too much credit to philosophers’ logical abilities—it offers a consistent way of resolving potential conflicts between philosophy and scripture. While Muslim followers of Averroes’ philosophy embraced his solution to this problem, it also had a great influence on Christian philosophers of the time called “Latin Averroists”, who modified it into a position called the doctrine of double truth. According to this position, there are two levels of truth, one in philosophy and one in religion, and what is true in philosophy could be false in religion, and vice versa. Again, suppose that scripture states that God created the world at a particular moment in time, while philosophy holds that it is eternal. The double truth doctrine maintains that each of these positions is true in its own realm, even though they contradict each other. Averroes himself never went this far, and suggests instead that there is really only one truth, which can be accessed differently by the masses, dogmatic theologians and philosophers. The rather controversial doctrine of double truth devised by the Latin Averroists was ultimately condemned by the Catholic Church in the 13th century.

Maimonides: Interpreting Scripture Non-Literally

Moses Maimonides (1135-1204) was a Spanish-Jewish philosopher who rejected literal interpretations of scripture in favor of allegorical ones. Maimonides was born in Cordova Spain, which under Muslim rule was at the height of that country’s cultural achievement. He was schooled in Greek and Arabic philosophy, Jewish law, and later in medicine. An anti-Jewish political shift in Cordova forced Maimonides into exile, which prompted him to live for a time in Morocco, Palestine, and then permanently in Egypt. After the death of his father and wealthy brother, financial problems pushed him into the field of medicine and he became physician to the court of an influential military general. Maimonides’ most famous philosophical work is the Guide for the Perplexed, which is written as a three-volume letter to a student. The work addresses sensitive subjects, such as religious language and God’s creation of the word, which led some Jewish officials of the time to ban or condemn it. Originally written in Arabic, the Guide was shortly after translated into Hebrew and Latin where it had a great influence on Christian philosophers.

The main goal of Maimonides Guide for the Perplexed is to liberate religious believers from interpreting the Bible literally. Throughout the Bible, some words are indeed meant to be taken literally, and others should be understood figuratively. The difficulty is determining which words should be viewed in which way. He writes:

My primary object in this work is to explain certain words occurring in the prophetic books. Of these some are homonyms, and of their several meanings the ignorant choose the wrong ones; other terms which are employed in a figurative sense are erroneously taken by such persons in their primary [literal] signification. There are also hybrid terms, denoting things which are of the same class from one point of view and of a different class from another. [Guide for the Perplexed, Introduction]

According to Maimonides, religious tradition often wrongly imposes literal interpretations on scriptures, such as with passages that depict God as having human-like emotions. While such literal interpretations seem odd to intelligent believers, they nevertheless feel trapped into accepting the literal interpretation out of religious duty. This places believers in a state of anxiety:

It is not here intended to explain all these expressions to the uneducated. . . .  The object of this treatise is to enlighten a religious man who has been trained to believe in the truth of our holy Law, who conscientiously fulfils his moral and religious duties, and at the same time has been successful in his philosophical studies. Human reason has attracted him to abide within its sphere; and he finds it difficult to accept as correct the teaching based on the literal interpretation of the Law, and especially that which he himself or others derived from those homonymous, metaphorical, or hybrid expressions. Hence he is lost in perplexity and anxiety. [Ibid]

His book is thus titled A Guide for the Perplexed, and aims to help put an end to over-literalizing scriptural interpretations, thus freeing the believer from anxiety.

To accomplish his task, Maimonides painstakingly analyzes scores of Hebrew words in the Bible which, when taken in the wrong way, could mislead readers into interpreting the Bible too literally. His very first example concerns the passage in the book of Genesis where, when creating Adam, God says “Let us make man in our image”. The Hebrew word for “image” in this verse is zelem, and an overly-literal understanding of the word has led many believers into holding that God has a physical body, shaped like a human one with a face, hands and legs:

Some have held the opinion that by the Hebrew word zelem [i.e., image] means the shape and figure of a thing, and this explanation has led some to believe in the corporeality of God [i.e., that God has a physical body]. For they thought that the words “Let us make man in our zelem [i.e., image]” implied that God had the form of a human being, that is, that He had figure and shape, and that, consequently, He was corporeal. They adhered faithfully to this view, and thought that if they were to reject it they would by doing so reject the truth of the Bible. And further, if they did not conceive God as having a body possessed of face and limbs, similar to their own in appearance, they would have to deny even the existence of God. [Ibid 1.1]

The solution, for Maimonides, is to realize that the term there “image” (zelem) in this passage doesn’t mean physical form, but only the essence of a thing. There is in fact another Hebrew word that does mean “physical image” – the word toar – but the passage from Genesis doesn’t use it, preferring instead zelem:

I hold that the Hebrew equivalent of [physical] “form” in the ordinary use of the word, that is, the figure and shape of a thing, is toar. Thus we find “[And Joseph was] beautiful in toar [i.e., physical form], and beautiful in appearance” (Gen. 39:6). . . This term is not at all applicable to God. The term zelem, on the other hand, signifies the specific form, that is, that which constitutes the essence of a thing, whereby the thing is what it is; the reality of a thing in so far as it is that particular being. [Guide for the Perplexed, 1.1]

With other scriptural passages Maimonides takes a different approach when stripping them of their overly-literal meanings. There are, for example, verses that describe God as “merciful” or “angry”, both of which are human-like emotions. His solution here is to interpret these statements as expressing qualities that we see in God’s creation of the natural world, but not as psychological qualities of God himself. For example, the statement that “God is merciful” really means that the natural world as created by God displays merciful characteristics. It gives us nourishment and works in ways that make our lives pleasant. Similarly, the statement “God is angry” really means that the natural world as created by God is severe towards people when they act improperly.

F. AQUINAS

Perhaps the leading philosopher of the middle ages was Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), who maintained that reason, unaided by faith, can give us knowledge of God’s existence and an understanding of morality as it is grounded in natural law. At his family’s castle in Naples, Italy, Thomas Aquinas was born to nobility on both sides, being a son of Count and a relative of a dynasty of Holy Roman emperors. His education began at age five at a monastery where his uncle was abbot, and expectations were high that Aquinas would one day fill that position. He was later transferred to the University of Naples, where he became acquainted with the Dominicans and, to his family’s horror, resolved to join them. At 18, he set off for Rome, but was seized by his brothers, returned to the family castle, and held captive while the family prayed, threatened, and even tempted him with a prostitute, hoping to change his mind. They could not. A year later the family yielded under pressure from the Pope, and Aquinas was sent to Cologne to study under some of the great philosophers of the time.

While Aquinas was described as refined, affable and lovable, he was physically big, solemn and slow to speak, earning him the nickname of the Dumb Ox. A story relates that Aquinas's colleagues teased him saying that there was a flying cow outside, and when he looked out the window they laughed. Aquinas responded that he would rather believe that a cow could fly than that his brothers would deceive him. During his subsequent education, apprenticeship, and public business in the church, he became famous for religious devotion and excellent memory, having memorized much of the Bible. The church offered to make him an archbishop and an abbot, but he refused both, preferring his studies. He composed book after book until he had a mystical experience that compelled him to cease writing altogether. Traveling to attend a Church Council, he became ill and died. Fifty years later he was canonized as a saint despite the lack of traditional saintly manifestations—stigmata, miracles, mortifications—which were waived in lieu of his outstanding contribution to the Church. His philosophical writings commentaries on Aristotle and his most important work, the multi-volume Summa Theologica (Latin for “theological synopsis”).

Aquinas wrote in a formal and technical style that was common during this period of medieval philosophy. From the time of Augustine, medieval philosophy had a mystical and intuitional component to it. We’ve seen this specifically with Augustine’s motto “faith seeking understanding” and Pseudo-Dionysius’ view that through denying our notions of God we ascend higher in our experience towards him. The larger message of this earlier period was one of warning: reason is all well and good in its proper context, but it should not replace the more religiously intimate element of faith. Around 1100, though, this gave way to a more rationalistic approach that emerged within medieval universities called scholasticism, meaning the method of the “schools”. The goal of scholasticism was to systematically bring philosophy into dialogue with theology through a very specific methodology. Philosophical texts would no longer be written as prayers to God or meditations, but rather in a much more scientific-like manner. Precise questions would be posed, followed by a critical analysis of previous philosophers’ views of the subject. Subtle distinctions would be made to help clarify problems. Through this critical analysis, rationally-informed answers to the questions would emerge. Some medieval philosophers, such as Anselm, were transitional figures with their feet in both genres. Aquinas’s writings, though, fully embody the scholastic approach.

Twofold Truth and Proofs for God

Like other medieval philosophers, Aquinas’ philosophy starts with a view of the relation between faith and reason. For a religious believer, faith in God and scripture is of course fundamental. However, he argues, many basic religious truths such as God’s existence can be proven without faith and through reason alone. Accordingly, he proposes a view of faith and reason which he calls the twofold truth: while reason can give us some truth, other truths can only be attained through faith. He writes,

The truths that we confess concerning God fall into two categories. Some things that are true of God are beyond all the competence of human reason, such as that God is three and one. There are other things to which even human reason can attain, such as the existence and unity of God, which philosophers have proved to a demonstration under the guidance of the light of natural reason. [Summa Contra Gentiles, 1.3]

The first class of truths that are accessible through reason alone he calls presuppositions of faith, which include the truths that God exists and God is one. The second class of truths, called mysteries of faith, are accessible only through faith and involve doctrines like the Trinity, which we learn about in scripture and are central to the Christian faith in particular. Human reason alone cannot access these truths, he argues, since, in our present life “knowledge and understanding begins with the senses” (ibid). While this prevents us from knowing God’s inner nature, our senses can still give us information about creation which allows us to infer that there is a powerful and designing creator to all that we see.

Again, one of the things that we can know through reason alone is that God exists, and to that end Aquinas offers five ways of proving God. Briefly, they are these:

1. There must be a first mover of things that are in the process of change and motion.

2. There must be a first efficient cause of the events that we see around us.

3. There must be a necessary being to explain the contingent beings in the world around us.

4. There must be an ultimately good thing to explain the good that we see in lesser things.

5. There must be an intelligent being who guides natural objects to their ends or purposes.

The first three of his proofs share a similar strategy, which was inspired by Aristotle’s notion of the unmoved mover: there is a first cause of all the motion that takes place throughout the cosmos. In more recent times this argument strategy has been dubbed the cosmological argument. We’ll look specifically at Aquinas’s second argument from efficient cause as he presents it here:

The second way is from the nature of the efficient cause. In the world of sense we find there is an order of efficient causes. There is no case known (neither is it, indeed, possible) in which a thing is found to be the efficient cause of itself; for so it would be prior to itself, which is impossible. Now in efficient causes it is not possible to go on to infinity, because in all efficient causes following in order, the first is the cause of the intermediate cause, and the intermediate is the cause of the ultimate cause, whether the intermediate cause be several, or only one. Now to take away the cause is to take away the effect. Therefore, if there be no first cause among efficient causes, there will be no ultimate, nor any intermediate cause. But if in efficient causes it is possible to go on to infinity, there will be no first efficient cause, neither will there be an ultimate effect, nor any intermediate efficient causes; all of which is plainly false. Therefore it is necessary to admit a first efficient cause, to which everyone gives the name of God. [ST 1, Q. 2, Art. 3]

According to Aquinas, we experience various kinds of effects in the world around us, and in every case we assign an efficient cause to each effect. The efficient cause of the statue is the work of the sculptor. If we took away the activity of the sculptor, we would not have the effect, namely, the statue. But there is an order of efficient causes: the hammer strikes the chisel which in turn strikes the marble. But it is impossible to have an infinitely long sequence of efficient causes, and so we arrive at a first efficient cause.

Aquinas’s argument from efficient cause is deceptively brief, and he appears to be offering the same argument that early Muslim philosophers did in the so-called Kalam argument for God’s existence. That is, it seems as though he is saying that it is impossible to trace such causal connections back through time and, ultimately, we must arrive at a first cause, namely, God. However, other writings by Aquinas make it clear that he is doing something different. Why, at least in theory, couldn’t this causal sequence trace back through time, to infinity past, and never have a starting point? Although this may be a strange contention, there is nothing logically contradictory about it. He writes that “It is by faith alone that we hold, and by no demonstration can it be proved, that the world did not always exist” (ST 1, Q. 46, Art. 2). Aquinas suggests that we view the causal sequence somewhat differently. Some causal sequences do indeed take place over time, such as when Abraham produces his son Isaac, who later produces his own son Jacob. But in addition to these time-based sequences, there are also simultaneous causal sequences, which do not trace back through time. Imagine, for example, if I hold a stick in my hand and use it to move a stone. According to Aquinas, my hand, the stick, and the stone all move at the same time. He makes this point here using the terminology of “essential” causes that are simultaneous and “accidental” causes that are time-based:

In efficient causes it is impossible to proceed to infinity essentially [i.e., simultaneously]. Thus, there cannot be an infinite number of [simultaneous] causes that are essentially required for a certain effect—for instance, that a stone be moved by a stick, the stick by the hand, and so on to infinity. But it is not impossible to proceed to infinity accidentally [i.e., over time] as regards efficient causes. [Ibid]

Aquinas’s causal proof, then, proceeds like this:

1. Some things exist and their existence is caused.

2. Whatever is caused to exist is caused to exist by something else.

3. An infinite series of simultaneous causes resulting in the existence of a particular thing is impossible.

4. Therefore, there is a first cause of whatever exists.

Aquinas did not give us an example of the sort of simultaneous causes in the natural world that traces immediately back to God, but here is a likely instance of what he is talking about. Consider the motion of the winds. At the very moment that the winds are moving, there are larger physical forces at work that create this motion. In medieval science, the motion of the moon is responsible for the motion of the winds. But the moon itself moves because it too is being simultaneously moved by other celestial motions, such as the planets, the sun, and the stars. According to Aquinas, simultaneous causal sequences of motion cannot go on forever, and we must eventually find a first cause of this motion, which “everyone understands to be God.”

So much for Aquinas’s second way to prove God’s existence. As noted, the first and third ways follow similar strategies, insofar as they claim that causal sequences of change and contingency cannot go on forever. The fourth way is like Anselm’s argument from absolute goodness: there must be an absolute standard of goodness which is the cause of the good that we see in lesser things. His fifth way, though, is unique and is a version of what in later times is called the design argument. He writes,

The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly, do they achieve their end. Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God. [ST 1, Q. 2, Art. 3]

More formally, his argument is this:

1. Objects without intelligence act towards some end (for example, a tree grows and reproduces its own kind).

2. Moving towards an end exhibits a natural design that requires intelligence.

3. If a thing is unintelligent, yet acts for some end, then it must be guided to this end by something which is intelligent.

4. Therefore, an intelligent being exists that moves natural things toward their ends, which is God.

The central notion behind this argument is that natural objects such as plants and animals have built-in purposes. Here Aquinas draws directly on Aristotle’s concept of a “natural object” which has an innate impulse towards change in specific ways. According to Aquinas, when natural objects move towards their end, this reveals a natural design that could not have come about through chance, but requires intelligence. Since plants and animals lack intelligence to do this, some other intelligence is responsible for this, namely God.

Divine Simplicity and Religious Language

Not only can we prove the existence of God through reason unaided by faith, but there are some features of God’s existence that reason by itself can also reveal to us. Religious philosophers often describe God as having a cluster of attributes, such as being all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good; Aquinas certainly agrees that God is these things. However, he maintains that God in fact has a single attribute: divine simplicity. Several philosophers prior to Aquinas, including Parmenides and Plotinus, held that God is best described as “the One”, namely, a simple, indivisible entity. Aquinas agrees as we see here:

There is neither composition of quantitative parts in God, since He is not a body; nor composition of matter and form; nor does His nature differ from His person; nor His essence from His existence; neither is there in Him composition of genus and difference, nor of subject and accident. Therefore, it is clear that God is nowise composite, but is altogether simple. [ST 1, Q 3, Art. 7]

According to Aquinas, God has no parts whatsoever, no physical parts, and, more importantly, no conceptual parts, such as specific properties or predicates. His basic proof for God’s simplicity is this:

1. If something is composed of parts then it must be potentially divisible (e.g., an actual book is potentially a pile of torn out sheets of paper).

2. God is not potentially divisible.

3. Therefore God is not composed of parts (i.e., God is simple).

While God in is true nature is simple, Aquinas concedes that to finite human minds he appears to have distinct parts. The reason for this seems to be that our minds are designed to understand things in the world around us, virtually all of which have parts--parts of trees, parts of chairs, parts of languages. When we then attempt to understand God in his simplicity, we then very naturally view him as a thing that is composed of parts, and attempt to understand him one element at a time. He writes,

We can speak of simple things only as though they were like the composite things from which we derive our knowledge. Therefore in speaking of God, we use concrete nouns to signify His subsistence, because with us only those things subsist which are composite; and we use abstract nouns to signify His simplicity. In saying therefore that Godhead, or life, or the like are in God, we indicate the composite way in which our intellect understands, but not that there is any composition in God. [ST 1, Q 3, Art. 3]

To satisfy our tendency to view God as a composite thing, we can deduce some sub-attributes of God from his main attribute of simplicity. For example, we can say that God is eternal since if a thing is simple, then it has no “before” or “after” and thus is eternal. Similarly, we can say that God is perfect since if a thing is simple then it is completely actualized, with no remaining potentiality, and complete actualization is perfection.

The whole issue of God’s attributes raises an even more fundamental question of the adequacy of religious language: can any of our descriptions of God satisfactorily represent him? For example, if we say that “God loves us,” what sort of “love” are we talking about, and is the notion of divine love something that can even be put into words? We’ve already seen a variety of answers to this question of religious language: Pseudo-Dionysius said we can only describe God negatively; Maimonides said that we can only describe God allegorically. Aquinas approaches the issue by noting three ways that our words might, at least in theory, apply to God. The first is univocal: the religious and non-religious uses of a word like “love” are completely the same, whether we’re talking about human love or divine love. Aquinas rejects this approach:

Univocal predication is impossible between God and creatures… [The] term “wise” is not applied in the same way to God and to man. The same rule applies to other terms. Hence no name is predicated univocally of God and of creatures. [ST 1, Q. 13, Art. 5]

The problem with the univocal approach is that the gulf between God’s nature and human nature is so vast that the term “love” cannot possibly mean the exact same thing when we’re talking about divine love vs. human love. The next way is equivocal: the religious and non-religious uses of a word like “love” are completely different. Aquinas rejects this approach as well:

Neither, on the other hand, are names applied to God and creatures in a purely equivocal sense, as some have said. Because if that were so, it follows that from creatures nothing could be known or demonstrated about God at all. [Ibid]

The problem here is that if religious language and human language have nothing in common, then we can say nothing at all about God. Rejecting both the univocal and equivocal approach, Aquinas recommends a middle ground between the two: an analogical approach whereby the religious use of a word bears some analogy to the non-religious use. For example, we can say that divine love is to God just as parental love is to a parent. He writes,

In analogies the idea is not, as it is in univocals, one and the same, yet it is not totally diverse as in equivocals. Rather a term which is thus used in a multiple sense signifies various proportions to some one thing. Thus “healthy” applied to urine signifies the sign of animal health, and applied to medicine signifies the cause of the same health. [Ibid]

The point is that there is something in common to both religious language and human language, but it can only be understood as a comparison of two relations. For example, to grasp the notion of divine love, we must first examine the relation between human parents and parental love: we have a special attachment to our offspring that overrides every other human interest. In some parallel way, this is what God’s love towards humans involves.

Morality and Natural Law

In the arena of moral philosophy, Aquinas developed a view called natural law theory, which for centuries was perhaps the dominant view regarding the source of moral principles. In a nutshell, natural law theory holds that God endorses specific moral standards and fixes them in human nature, which we discover through rational intuition. According to Aquinas, there are four kinds of law: eternal law, natural law, human law and divine law. Eternal law, the broadest type of law, is the unchanging divine governance over the universe. This includes both the general moral rules of conduct, such as “stealing is wrong,” and particular rules such as “people should not intentionally write bad checks.” Natural law is a subset of eternal law, which God implants in human nature and we discover through reflection. However, it includes only general rules of conduct, such as “stealing is wrong,” not specific cases. Next, human law is a derivation of natural law that extends to particular cases, such as “people should not write bad checks.” Finally, divine law, as contained in the Bible, is a specially revealed subset of the eternal law that is meant to safeguard against possible errors in our attempts to both obtain natural law through reflection, and derive more particular human laws. In this way we see that the Bible condemns stealing in general, as well as various forms of theft through fraud. All moral laws— whether general ones discovered through reflection, or specific ones derived by legislators, or ones found in the scriptures— are ultimately grounded in an objective, universal, and unchanging eternal law.

What, specifically, are the principles of natural law that God has embedded into human nature? First, there is one highest principle: “Good is to be done and evil is to be avoided.” Aquinas writes,

This is the first precept of law, that “good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided.” All other precepts of the natural law are based upon this: so that whatever the practical reason naturally apprehends as man’s good (or evil) belongs to the precepts of the natural law as something to be done or avoided. [ST la-2ae, Q. 94, Art. 2]

From this, we determine what is “good” for us by looking at our human inclinations; he notes six in particular that are connected with our human good: self-preservation, heterosexual activity, educating our offspring, rationality, gaining knowledge of God, and living in society. He writes,

Because in man there is first of all an inclination to good in accordance with the nature which he has in common with all substances: inasmuch as every substance seeks the preservation of its own being, according to its nature: and by reason of this inclination, whatever is a means of preserving human life, and of warding off its obstacles, belongs to the natural law. Secondly, there is in man an inclination to things that pertain to him more specially, according to that nature which he has in common with other animals: and in virtue of this inclination, those things are said to belong to the natural law, “which nature has taught to all animals,” such as sexual intercourse, education of offspring and so forth. Thirdly, there is in man an inclination to good, according to the nature of his reason, which nature is proper to him: thus man has a natural inclination to know the truth about God, and to live in society: and in this respect, whatever pertains to this inclination belongs to the natural law; for instance, to shun ignorance, to avoid harming or offending those among whom one has to live, and other such things regarding the above inclination. [Ibid]

For Aquinas, these six inclinations comprise what is most proper for humans, and provide the basis for the primary precepts of morality. This gives us six primary principles of natural law: (1) preserve human life, (2) have heterosexual intercourse, (3) educate your children, (4) shun ignorance, (5) worship God, and (6) avoid harming others.

Each of these primary principles encompasses more specific or secondary principles. For example, the primary principle “avoid harming others” implies the secondary principles “don’t steal” and “don’t assault.” These, in turn, imply even more specific or tertiary principles, such as “don’t write bad checks.” As the principles become more specific, they leave the domain of natural law and enter that of human law. When considering whether natural law is the same in all people, he argues that the primary principles are common to everyone, such as “do not harm others.” However, more particular tertiary derivations of human law are not necessarily common to all societies. Still, he argues, human law will carry the force of natural law if the tertiary principles are derived correctly. But, “if in any point it deflects from the law of nature, it is no longer a law but a perversion of law” (ibid, 95).

G. SCOTUS AND OCKHAM

Since around 1100, scholasticism dominated medieval philosophy with its technical style and efforts to defend theology with philosophy. As Aquinas put it, philosophy is the handmaid of theology. Some philosophers made outright assaults against scholasticism on the grounds that it produced useless quarrels and elevated rationalistic philosophy above true faith. But such outright attacks did little to slow down the momentum that scholasticism had built up over the centuries. Other philosophers, though, writing within the scholastic tradition itself, helped drive a wedge between philosophy and theology, thus helping to bring an end to scholasticism’s dominance. Two of these are John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham.

Scotus: Divine Illumination, Form-Matter, Divine Command Ethics

John Duns Scotus (1266-1308) criticized the longstanding theory of divine illumination, and held that God has the power to change moral principles. Born in Scotland, he joined the Franciscan monastic order at an early age and moved on to study theology at Oxford University. When subsequently teaching at the University of Paris, he was caught in a feud between the Pope and France’s king and temporarily exiled from the country. He died in Cologne, Germany, when, according to rumor, he was buried alive after falling into a coma. In modern editions, Scotus’s writings occupy 25 volumes, most of which he composed during a ten-year period of his life. His reputation for scholarship earned him the nickname “the subtle doctor.” Nevertheless, some years after his death when his views fell into disfavor, his very name “Duns” became synonymous with foolishness, and is thus the origin of our word “dunce.”

While Scotus wrote on a wide range of philosophical subjects, we will look at his contributions in three areas. First is Scotus’s rejection of divine illumination. We’ve seen that Augustine proposed the idea that God illuminates our minds to enable us to see special truths: “The mind needs to be enlightened by light from outside itself, so that it can participate in truth, because it is not itself the nature of truth. You will light my lamp, Lord” (Augustine, Confessions, 4:15:25). Divine illumination was a popular view of knowledge throughout the middle ages, and by the time of Scotus several philosophers developed it into an elaborate theory. Scotus, on the contrary, argued that human reason can attain certainty on its own, with no assistance from God through divine illumination. The problem with divine illumination is this: if our natural capacity for knowledge is limited, as Augustine and others maintained, then divine illumination cannot help, since it too will be subject to uncertainty.

When one of those [elements of knowledge] that come together is incompatible with certainty, then certainty cannot be achieved. For just as from one premise that is necessary and one that is contingent nothing follows but a contingent conclusion, so from something certain and something uncertain, coming together in some cognition, no cognition that is certain follows. [Ordinatio 1.3.1.4 n.221]

According to the above analogy, an argument is only as strong as its weakest premise: if you have five premises that are certain, yet only one that is uncertain, the entire argument becomes uncertain. For Scotus, the types of certainty that we can attain in our current human condition, without the help of divine illumination, are certainty about logical inference, causal inference, acts we perform, present sense experience.

A second area of importance in Scotus’s philosophy is his view regarding matter and form. Recall the debate between Plato and Aristotle on the relation between matter and form. Plato held that form can exist independently of material things, such as the forms of justice, 1+1=2, and chairness, all of which exist in the non-physical realm of the forms. Aristotle, on the other hand, held that form cannot exist separately from matter, but, instead, forms must be imbedded into material things, such as the form and shape that an existing wooden chair has. Most medieval philosophers followed Aristotle’s view, which is called hylomorphism (Greek for “material form”). Scotus for the most part accepts Aristotle’s view: the things that we see around us are a mixture of matter and form. However, Scotus makes two important concessions to Platonism. First, he argues that some matter exists without form—a formless substance called “prime matter”. Second, he argues that pure forms can exist that contain no matter—an immaterial form called “substantial form”. Spirits, he argued, are just such substantial forms.

The third of Scotus’s major contributions to philosophy is his view that God creates morality—a position now called divine command theory. The larger question here is what is the ultimate source of morality? Plato and his followers argued that moral standards like justice, charity, and goodness are eternal and unchanging principles that exist in a non-physical realm. They were not created by God, and, on the contrary, they are so permanently fixed in the cosmic nature of things that God himself cannot even alter them. In this way, moral standards are much like mathematical principles, which are also eternal and unchanging. Scotus denies that moral standards are like this. He writes, “The divine will is the cause of good, and so a thing is good precisely in virtue of the fact that he wills it” (Additiones Magnae 1.48). Similarly he states “Everything other than God is good because it is willed by God, and not vice versa” (Ordinatio, 3.19).

While this might at first seem to be a good position for a religious believer to hold, it has an unpleasant side effect, which Scotus himself recognized: God can create any moral values he wants, and he can change them any time he wants. In fact, he maintains, the Bible itself contains a record of God revoking previously established moral principles for special purposes. Specifically, he commanded Abraham to kill his son as a sacrifice; he commanded the Israelites to steal household goods from their Egyptian neighbors; he commanded the prophet Hosea to have children with a prostitute. As unsettling as this might be, according to Scotus we must simply recognize that God has this kind of authority over the creation and suspension of moral principles. Scotus adds, though, that some moral standards even God cannot change, specifically the first few of the Ten Commandments which tell us to avoid making idols and using God’s name in vain. The reason that these are unchangeable, according to Scotus, is that part of God’s nature is that he should be loved: “It follows necessarily that if he is God, he should be loved as God, and that nothing else is to be honored as God, nor is irreverence to be committed toward God” (Oxford Commentary, 3:37).

Ockham: The Razor and Nominalism

William of Ockham (1285-1347) formulated the principle of simplicity known as “Ockham’s Razor” and is also remembered for his view that universals are only concepts in people’s minds. Born near London, Ockham joined the Franciscan monastic order at an early age. As he produced one philosophical work after another, some of his more controversial views attracted the attention of the Pope, and he was investigated for heresy. He further irritated the Pope by holding that Jesus and his apostles owned no property—a view that was especially inflammatory at a time when Popes lived like wealthy kings. He was excommunicated from the Church and, fleeing for his life, he went into exile where he continued writing until he died.

Like Scotus, Ockham challenged many assumptions held by previous philosophers in the scholastic tradition. For starters, in the important issue of faith and reason, he held that belief in God is a matter of faith rather than knowledge. Theology is not a science since we have no direct knowledge of God. He writes,

In order to demonstrate the statement of faith that we formulate about God, what we would need for the central concept is a simple cognition of the divine nature in itself—what someone who sees God has. Nevertheless, we cannot have this kind of cognition in our present state. [Quodlibetal Questions, pp. 103-4]

Further, he argued, proofs for God’s existence fail, and the notion of the Christian trinity is logically contradictory.

Ockham is most famous for his principle of simplicity, popularly called “Ockham’s Razor,” which states that entities should not be multiplied needlessly and that the simplest of two competing theories is to be preferred. Suppose, for example, that I see leaves moving around outside. One explanation for this is that invisible demons are grabbing hold of them and stirring them around. An alternative explanation is that the wind is blowing them. According to Ockham’s Razor, I should reject the first theory since it unnecessarily postulates the existence of a supernatural entity (invisible demons) when I can explain the phenomenon perfectly well with ordinary natural events (the wind). Philosophers prior to Ockham routinely used this notion in the course of proving one thing or another. Ockham, though, relied on it regularly, thus making it something like a trademark for him.

One important application of his Razor is with the medieval problem of universals. Recall what the three options are for universals as developed by Boethius. First, there’s Plato’s view that universals exist in the realm of the forms, separate from physical bodies. Second, there is Aristotle’s view that universals are built into physical things. Third, there is the view that universals are merely mental abstractions that do not exist in the external world. Applying Ockham’s Razor to this issue, we need only ask which of these three views is the simplest and multiplies the fewest number of entities? Plato’s view clearly has lots of excess baggage; indeed, Plato postulates an entire nonphysical realm of the Forms to house universals. Aristotle’s theory also has excess baggage. In addition to saying “the ball is red” we must also say that the universal “redness” is embedded in the ball. The simplest theory, then, is the third which holds that universals exist only as concepts in our minds. Ockham writes,

Nothing should be posited as naturally necessarily required for some effect unless certain experience or a certain argument from what is self-evident leads to that; but neither of these leads to the positing of a universal species. [Commentary on the Sentences, Bk. 2, Q. 15]

This third view of universals, which Ockham endorses, is sometimes called conceptualism, emphasizing the role of mental concepts, but more often it is called nominalism (or “name-ism”) emphasizing the human tendency to name abstract mental concepts such as “redness”.

Ockham offered several arguments in defense of nominalism, with simplicity being just one. Briefly, here are two others. First is the argument from individual existence. According to Ockham, everything that exist should be logically independent from everything else. Plato’s and Aristotle’s views of universals undermine this since it connects objects together through universals. Second is the argument from God’s sovereignty: universals limits God’s power. God should be able to create or destroy things as he chooses. Suppose that universals existed outside the mind as Plato or Aristotle suggested, and that the universal of redness, for example, was connected with all particular red things. If God then chose to destroy a red ball, he would thus also destroy the universal “redness” and every other red thing that’s connected with it. Ockham writes,

God would not be able to annihilate one individual substance without destroying the other individuals of the same kind … [since] he would destroy the universal that is in it and in others of the same essence. [Summa Totius Logica, 1:15:5]

A final influential component of Ockham’s philosophy is his extreme view of the divine command theory. Earlier we discussed Scotus’s view of God’s ability to create moral standards, particularly ones involving murder, theft and sexual morality. God can mandate or suspend these as he sees fit. But Scotus adds that other moral standards, such as duties to love God, are fixed within the nature of God himself and cannot be changed. Ockham, however, takes the more radical position that God can create and alter both types of moral principles if that’s what he chose. Specifically, God could command us to hate him and, thus, that would be the morally right thing to do. He writes,

Every will can conform to the commands of God. God can, however, command a created will to hate Him. Therefore, the created will can do this. Moreover, any act that can be just on earth could also be just in heaven. On earth the hatred of God can be just, if it is commanded by God himself. Therefore, the hatred of God could also be just in heaven. [Fourth Book of the Sentences, 13]

H. CONCLUSION

Considering that Medieval philosophy covers a period of 1,000 years—two-fifths of the entire span of the history of philosophy—it may seem a little odd to devote only one chapter to it as we’ve done here. It is now common practice, though, to deemphasize the Medieval thinkers in deference to those of other historical periods. It is not because of a lack of philosophical writings during this period, since far more Medieval philosophy books survive than do those by ancient Greek writers. The reason is that the entire program of Medieval philosophy rests on a key assumption: readers must be compelled by the specific notion of God that’s advocated by the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religious traditions. Most of the issues that Medieval philosophers wrestled with focus directly on God—his existence, nature, creative activity, and how he fashioned human nature. While at least some of these issues may be interesting in their own right, Medieval philosophy still mainly addresses an audience of monotheists. Medieval Europe consisted almost exclusively of such believers. But as the world opened during the Renaissance and the centuries following, the audience of philosophically-minded readers greatly expanded. Polytheists, pantheists, and atheists from all corners of the globe have a harder time engaging in that dialogue.

Nevertheless, even today there remains a large group of philosophically-minded monotheists who connect with the religious assumptions of the Medievals, and continue to look to their writings for inspiration. In that context, the contributions of Medieval philosophers are no less profound and innovative than those of the ancient Greeks. As religious philosophers today continue to explore such issues, they invariably begin with the basic arguments of the Medievals and follow their philosophical methodology. Scholasticism in particular continues to this day through the efforts of Christian philosophers who follow in the tradition set by Aquinas. Within that environment, the program of Medieval philosophy is alive and well.

Questions for Review

Please answer all of the following questions for review.

1. What are the four main issues for medieval philosophers?

2. How does Augustine respond to skepticism?

3. What are Augustine’s solutions to the problem of evil?

4. According to Augustine, what are the earthly and heavenly cities?

5. According to Pseudo-Dionysius, what are the positive and negative ways of using religious language?

6. According to Boethius, what are the three ways of understanding universals?

7. What is Anselm’s ontological argument for God’s existence?

8. According to Averroes, what are the three types of people who attempt to understand scripture?

9. How does Maimonides resolve the issue of whether God has a body?

10. What is Aquinas’s view of the relation between faith and reason?

11. For Aquinas, what is the difference between an accidental cause and an essential cause, and how does this distinction apply to his second way of proving God’s existence?

12. For Aquinas, what are the three ways of using religious language, and which does Aquinas accept?

13. What is Aquinas’s view of natural law?

14. What is Scotus’s divine command theory?

15. How does Ockham’s razor apply to the problem of universals?

Questions for Analysis

Please select only one question for analysis from those below and answer it.

1. Give one of Augustine’s solutions to the problem of evil, and formulate a criticism of it.

2. Pseudo-Dionysius, Averroes, Maimonides, and Aquinas each talk about the problem of religious knowledge. Do they differ from each other, or are they all saying essentially the same thing? Explain.

3. As explained by Boethius, the three main theories of universals are those of Plato, Aristotle, and conceptualism/nominalism. Which if any of these seem right to you? Explain.

4. Defend or refute one of the arguments for God presented by Anselm or Aquinas.

5. Give Scotus’s criticism of divine illumination, and say how Augustine might respond to it.

6. Explain divine command theory, and give a criticism of it.

***********

CHAPTER 6: RENAISSANCE AND EARLY MODERN PHILOSOPHY

A. Humanism

Pico: Platonism and Human Uniqueness

B. Reformation

Luther: Rejection of Aristotle

Calvin: Sense of God and Double Predestination

C. Skepticism and Faith

Montaigne: What do I Know?

Pascal: Wagering on God

D. Scientific Revolution

Bacon: Scientific Method and Induction

Galileo: Separating Science from Religion

Newton: God’s Role in the Physical Universe

E. Secularized Natural Law

Grotius: Just War Theory

Hobbes: The Social Contract

F. Conclusion

Questions for Reflection

1. Should church authority have control over philosophical speculation?

2. Does God pre-select some people to be damned to hell irrespective of their personal choice?

3. Can someone be an extreme skeptic and yet believe in God at the same time?

4. Should church authority have control over scientific investigation?

5. Can moral laws be independent of God, and if so what is their foundation?

For 1,000 years, philosophy in Europe had been dominated by medieval Christian theologians, and since about the twelfth century by the Scholastic tradition in particular. Beginning around 1400 in Italy, though, Europe experienced a dramatic intellectual movement called the Renaissance, which emphasized the resurgence of science and culture through classical influences. The term “renaissance” literally means “rebirth” and was first used in the 19th century to refer to this extraordinary period of time. It set a new direction for art, architecture, music, literature, scientific discovery, and world exploration. Philosophy was also a beneficiary to this period of renewal. Historians mark the close of the Renaissance at around 1600 when it blossomed into a succession of other movements. In philosophy, the stage that follows on the heels of the Renaissance is called the modern period. In this chapter we will explore some of the major themes and thinkers in Renaissance and early modern philosophy.

A. HUMANISM

One of the most distinctive intellectual movements within the Renaissance was humanism—which was originally called “humanities”, that is, the study of humanity. The main emphasis of humanism was secular education using Greek and Latin classics, rather than medieval sources. There were five traditional subjects in humanities education, namely, grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy. The most significant impact humanism had on philosophy was the revived study of ancient Greek philosophical schools, thanks to the publication of new editions and translations of classical texts. The invention of the printing press during this time made these books much more available to readers, and the influence of classical philosophy spread like wildfire. Humanistic philosophers latched onto the earlier schools of Greek philosophy, almost as though they were pretending that the middle ages never existed. They variously associated themselves with Platonism, Aristotelianism, Epicureanism, Stoicism, or Skepticism, interpreting the classical texts and expanding on them.

Pico: Platonism and Human Uniqueness

One of the most representative humanistic philosophers of the Renaissance was Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494), a Platonist who emphasized the uniqueness of human nature. Born into an aristocratic family in northern Italy, his mother put him on an educational fast track for a career in the Church. Upon her death, though, he abandoned that goal and turned to philosophy, traveling widely and studying a diverse range of thinkers, including those of ancient Greece, Judaism, Islam, and Zoroastrianism. Plato, though, was his primary focus, and through the financial support of the wealthy Italian ruler Lorenzo de' Medici, he published translations of Plato’s writings. One of Pico’s ongoing desires was to set up a forum to publicly debate a book of his titled 900 Theses (1486), in which he proposes 900 basic principles for discovering knowledge in religion, philosophy and science. Drawing on his extensive background, he derived these principles from a variety of philosophical and religious traditions. The Pope, though, put a halt to his plan by declaring thirteen of the principles to be heretical, including these two: “No science gives more certitude of the divinity of Christ than magic and Kabala,” and “A mortal sin of finite duration is not deserving of eternal but only of temporal punishment.” He was imprisoned by the Pope, and only released through the help of his influential patron Lorenzo. He died of poisoning while still in his early thirties.

A central feature of Pico’s philosophy is a concept that we now call “the great chain of being,” which was inspired both by Plato and the Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus. On this view, there is a spectrum of existing things, from the lowest level of raw matter up to the highest level of God himself. Between the two extremes of raw matter and God, there are a variety of intermediary steps. In the following, he describes three basic levels of existence beneath God: the realm of the angels, then rational creatures with physical bodies, then physical bodies with no rational element. He explains this hierarchical chain here:

Platonists distinguish created things into three degrees. The first includes physical and visible things, such as the sky, the elements, and everything made from them. The third is the invisible and nonphysical, which are completely free from bodies and which are properly called “intellectual natures” and are divine and angelical. Between these is a middle nature, which though nonphysical, invisible, and immortal, they nevertheless move bodies, as is necessary for their function. These are called “rational souls” and are inferior to angels yet superior to bodies. They are ruled by the angels, yet are rulers of bodies.  Above all of these is God himself, the author and principle of every creature, and in him divinity has a causal existence. It is from him that divinity proceeds to the angels in their formal existence, and from there divinity is derived into rational souls through participation in their luster. Below that nature nothing can assume the title of the divine. [A Platonic Discourse on Love, 1.2]

In the above Pico also notes how divinity trickles down from God, into angels, and then into rational creatures with physical bodies

Drawing on this conception of the great chain of being, we might ask where human beings fit into the hierarchy? Pico answers this in his most famous work An Oration on Human Dignity (1486), which he composed to accompany his public defense of the 900 Theses. According to Pico, God did not assign human beings any particular spot in the great chain of being. When creating the world, he filled every level of the hierarchy with every sort of being: “The areas above the heavens he gave minds. He gave animated souls to the celestial spheres. He filled the dregs of the lower world with a variety of animals” (Oration on Human Dignity). When finished, though, all the spots were filled, and no place was left for human beings: “Everything had been assigned in the highest, middle, and lowest orders” (ibid). God’s solution, then, was to place people in the middle realm, and from there allow us to choose our own spots in the hierarchy, from a low animal level to a higher divine nature. In the following he describes how God might have instructed Adam, the first human being, about his freedom to choose his own destiny:

I have given you, Adam, neither a fixed place nor a fixed form of your own. You may possess any place or any form as you desire. The laws ordained by me establish a limited nature for all other creatures. In accord with your free will, your destiny is in your own hands and you are confined to no bounds. You will fix the limits of your nature yourself. I have put you in the world’s center so that you may look around and examine the world’s content. I have made you neither heavenly nor earthly, neither mortal nor immortal. You may freely and honorably mold, make, and sculpt yourself into any shape you prefer. You can degenerate into the forms of the lower animals, or climb upward by your soul’s reason, to a higher nature which is divine. [Ibid]

Thus, against the backdrop of the Platonistic great chain of being, Pico explains that our uniqueness as human beings stems from our freedom to carve out our own values, projects and natures. In this way, he typifies a classically-influenced optimism about the human capacity and what humans can hope to achieve if we exercise our highest desire.

B. THE REFORMATION

An important influence on the direction of philosophy during the Renaissance is the Protestant Reformation, which began in Germany as a localized rebellion against the Catholic Church of Rome that at the time controlled Christianity within Europe. Over the centuries the Church became increasingly corrupt as Popes fathered children with mistresses and lived more like worldly kings than spiritual leaders. One of the more controversial fund raising techniques of the Church was to sell certificates called “indulgences” to church goers which would allegedly reduce the time that they or a loved one would have to spend repenting in purgatory before gaining entrance into heaven. The instigator of the Reformation was a German monk named Martin Luther, who, fed up with corruption in the Roman Church, posted a document containing 95 Theses attacking abuses in the Church. Luther later said “I would never have thought that such a storm would rise from Rome over one simple little scrap of paper.” That little scrap of paper provoked a revolt in Germany, which quickly spread throughout Europe and then the world. Culturally, the importance of the Protestant Reformation was that it loosened the grip that the Medieval Church had on European intellectual thought. The Church kept tight control over which sorts of books could be published, and which scientific and religious ideas were heretical and potentially punishable by death. The Reformation created an intellectual environment outside the influence of medieval scholasticism and a centralized church authority. Philosophers from Protestant countries set aside the writings of Aquinas and other official Catholic philosophers, and explored a vast array of theories that would otherwise have been considered taboo.

Luther: Rejection of Aristotle

Martin Luther (1483-1546) was born in Eisleben, Germany. His father operated successful copper mines, and was determined to see his eldest son improve his life by becoming a lawyer. In an effort to comply, Martin Luther received his Master’s degree and entered law school. During a thunderstorm, however, a lightening bolt terrified him into shouting out to the patron saint of miners, “Help, St. Anne! I’ll become a monk!” He then dropped out of law school and entered the monastery, to his parents’ disappointment. He spent long hours in prayer, fasting, and even whipping himself seeking to affirm his salvation, but all this did was to reinforce his sense of sinfulness. Nevertheless, he was soon ordained a priest and began teaching biblical theology at the newly founded University of Wittenberg. The more Luther studied, however, the more he questioned the Church’s official view of salvation and use of indulgences, and he ultimately concluded that salvation is a gift of God’s grace through faith, not through the Church. After disseminating his 95 Theses throughout Europe, the Church ordered him to recant his position, but he refused and was excommunicated from the Church. Under the protection of a sympathetic German Prince, he went into hiding, during which time he translated the Greek New Testament into German. As the Reformation gained momentum in Germany and beyond, he returned to Wittenberg where he continued lecturing. Luther later married an ex-nun that he helped escape from her convent, and together they raised six children. He died at age 62 of a crippling heart attack.

Luther was well versed in medieval philosophy and its heavy emphasis on Aristotle. For Luther, as with many Renaissance thinkers, Aristotle came to represent the narrow-minded and authoritarian position of the Catholic Church, which forced conformity in thinking. In his efforts to break Christianity free from the rule of the Catholic Church, he concluded that the entire university curriculum also required serious overhauling, especially by rejecting its heavy reliance on books by Aristotle. The universities, he argues, “are full of dissolute living, where very little is taught of the Holy Scriptures and of the Christian faith, and the blind heathen teacher, Aristotle, rules even more than Christ” (Appeal to the German Nobility). Aristotle’s writings, says Luther, are incomprehensible, useless, and countless Christians “have been fooled and led astray by the false words of this cursed, proud, and dishonest heathen. God sent him as a plague for our sins” (ibid).

A case in point, according to Luther, is Aristotle’s book On the Soul, which takes the position that the human soul is the form of the human body and cannot be separated from it. Medieval philosophers attempted to adapt Aristotle’s position to make it compatible with the Christian notion of life after death. Luther, though, doesn’t buy it. “Doesn’t the wretched man in his best book, On the Soul, teach that the soul dies with the body, though many have tried to save him with vain words?” (ibid). Further, Aristotle’s Ethics discusses virtues that every morally good person should have, such as courage, temperance, right ambition, right anger, wittiness, and friendliness. Luther argues that this account of morality completely misses the mark: “Then there is [Aristotle’s book] the Ethics, which is accounted one of the best, though no book is more directly contrary to God’s will and the Christian virtues. Oh that such books could be kept out of the reach of all Christians!” (ibid). Luther concedes, though, that Aristotle’s books on Logic, Rhetoric, and Poetics might be usefully studied in a condensed form by students who wish to improve their speaking and preaching abilities.

Calvin: Sense of God and Double Predestination

Luther himself never devised a full-fledged “Protestant Christian philosophy” that aimed to replace the medieval Catholic one. However, French Protestant reformer, John Calvin (1509–1564) attempted just that. Born in Noyon, France, Calvin was educated in both scholastic and humanist thought, and at an early age published a commentary on the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca. By his mid-twenties he maintained that France should break free from the Catholic Church, a view that forced him into exile for the remainder of his life. In Switzerland, still in his twenties, he completed the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536), which ultimately became the theological cornerstone of Presbyterianism and related Protestant denominations. For most of his adult life he resided in Geneva, where he played a dominant role in city affairs, transforming it into something like a theocratic government. In that political capacity, he was involved in the arrest and execution of a rival Protestant reformer on the heretical charges of denying the doctrines of the trinity and infant baptism. Calvin died in Geneva at age 54.

The aim of Calvin’s Institutes, as he states in its Preface, is to provide a Christian philosophy that will guide believers in the study of the Bible. At the heart of his position is a series of doctrines that later became known as the “Five Points of Calvinism.” They are, (1) total depravity: humanity's complete nature is innately corrupted, (2) unconditional election: God predestines some people to salvation, (3) limited atonement: salvation is restricted to those whom God elects, (4) irresistible grace: the elect must accept God's favor, and (5) perseverance of the saints:  God sustains the salvation of the elect in spite of their weakness.

Two areas of Calvin’s thought are of special interest among philosophers today. The first is his notion of the sense of divinity, which is that everyone has an instinctive knowledge of God. He writes,

We hold to be beyond dispute that there exists in the human minds and indeed by natural instinct, some sense of divinity. This is so since, to prevent any person from pretending ignorance, God himself has given all people some idea of his Godhead. He constantly renews and occasionally enlarges our memory of this. [Institutes, 1.3.1]

A consequence of our instinctive knowledge of God is that our own conscience condemns us when we fail to worship God or live devoutly. His main proof that such an instinct exists is that throughout the world, even in the most primitive tribes, people still hold a conviction of God’s existence and a conception of religion. To assure that we properly understand God’s greatness, he argues, God has also engraved his glory upon creation itself, so that by merely looking at nature around us we will grasp the scope of God’s grandeur. Thus, no one, “however dull and illiterate, can plead ignorance as their excuse” regarding God’s existence and power (ibid 1.5.1).

A second area of interest with Calvin’s philosophy is his position of double predestination: God not only pre-selects some people for salvation, but he also pre-selects others for damnation. He writes, “No pious person could simply deny the predestination by which God adopts some to the hope of life, and pronounces others to eternal death” (ibid, 3.21.5). Thus, whether we are saved or not, according to Calvin, is entirely up to God, and we have no free choice over the matter. Double predestination is a conscious decision by God, and he warns that we should not try to dilute God’s authority in this matter by appealing to the doctrine of foreknowledge. For example, we might be tempted to say that God really doesn’t pick out some people for salvation and others for damnation, but, instead, God just looks into the future and sees what choice I will make, specifically, whether I decide to accept God or not. Calvin agrees that God indeed has foreknowledge, however he insists that it has nothing to do with predestination. God sets the agenda for who is saved and who is damned, not us. He writes,

By predestination we mean the eternal decree of God, by which he determined with himself whatever he wished to happen with regard to every person. All are not created on equal terms, but some are preordained to eternal life, others to eternal damnation. Accordingly, as each has been created for one or other of these ends, we say that each person has been predestined to life or to death. [Ibid, 3.21.5]

For Calvin, God not only singles out individual people for salvation or damnation, but he can select entire communities for either fate as well.

C. SKEPTICISM AND FAITH

As Renaissance humanists resurrected the ancient Greek schools of philosophy—such as Platonism, Stoicism and Epicureanism—many also latched onto the ancient school of Skepticism. The writings of the Greek skeptic Sextus Empiricus were particularly popular as they went through dozens of new editions in the decades following the creation of the printing press. Unlike the other ancient schools of philosophy, though, Skepticism had a built-in liability: it recommended that we doubt the existence of God. That, and its other anti-religious recommendations, may have worked fine in ancient times when political and religious officials did not closely micromanage the religious affairs of the average person. Since the middle ages, though, things were different in Europe. Even though the Renaissance and Reformation opened up new religious possibilities for believers, religious and political authorities nevertheless firmly controlled what they deemed to be heretical, and the skeptical denial of God’s existence certainly crossed the line. The few bold souls who publicly proclaimed atheism were quickly executed. Even as late as the year 1697, a young Scottish college student was hanged for blasphemy. Thus, the new breed of Skepticism that emerged during the Renaissance needed to operate within the confines of traditional Christian belief, whether Catholic or Protestant. The solution was to marry skepticism with the “faith-alone” religious position. Recall the issue of faith vs. reason that set the direction for much of philosophy during the middle ages. At the one end of the spectrum, theologians like Tertullian and Pseudo-Dionysius held that religious truth must be discovered through faith alone, with no guidance from reason; this is the faith-alone position. Near the other end of the spectrum, Aquinas held that reason can independently discover many of the truths that we learn through faith. Thus, by embracing the faith-alone position and its rejection of reason, believers of the time could safely adopt skepticism, without fear of punishment by the authorities. The main message of this new breed of skeptics, then, was that skepticism prepares people for faith by showing the bankruptcy of reason.

Montaigne: What do I Know?

One of the most famous Renaissance skeptics was philosopher Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533–1592). Born into a wealthy family near the French city of Bordeaux, as a young boy he was instructed by his father who, having peculiar views about education, emphasized the Latin language so much that the young Montaigne didn’t learn French until age six. At that point Montaigne received more traditional schooling and, after his University studies, worked in government and law. He retired from public office in his mid thirties, devoting his time to writing. The works he composed were rather unique. Rejecting the writing style of technical and scholarly treatises, he instead composed short, speculative and personal pieces, which he called “essays”, in French literally meaning “attempts.” In all, he composed 107 essays on a wide range of topics, which he worked on throughout the rest of his life, interrupted occasionally with political tasks. He died at age 59 from an inflammation of the throat, hearing the Latin mass on his deathbed.

Montaigne was rather pessimistic about the direction of his culture at the time, rampant as it was with corruption and violence. Much of the blame, he argued, rested with human nature itself; he writes that “man is a marvelously vain, inconsistent, and unstable thing, and on whom it is very hard to form any certain and uniform judgment” (Essays, 1.1). This level of suspicion about human nature feeds directly into his appreciation of skepticism. While advocating skepticism, though, at the same time Montaigne holds on to faith as the sole source of our knowledge of religion. He writes that “it is faith alone that grasps the deep mysteries of our religion” and he supports this position with passages from the Bible that debunk the value of human reason (Essays, 2.12). This is precisely where the skeptical tradition from ancient Greece can be of value, since it too doubts the capacity of reason to give us knowledge: “The profession of the Pyrrhonian skeptics is to waver, to doubt, to inquire, and never be assured of anything nor explain himself.” Through this rigid practice of doubt, the skeptic is freed from the disturbances that claims about knowledge typically give people as they are tugged by the sway of reason in every conceivable direction. Through doubt, then, they achieve tranquility. Even their very claim to “I doubt X” is something that they also subject to doubt, as Montaigne explains here with the metaphor of a laxative:

When they say, “I don’t know,” or “I doubt,” they say, that this proposition expels itself along with other propositions, just as rhubarb [i.e. a laxative] purges one of bad humors and is itself purged. This attitude is more clearly seen in the question “What do I know?” I bear these words as inscribed on a pair of balances. [Ibid]

In the above passage Montaigne uses the expression “What do I know” which became a trademark for his skeptical views.

By forcing reason into the arena of faith, Montaigne argues, we get confusing and incomprehensible doctrines about God’s nature. From the skeptics we learn the limitations of reason, and the damage that this does to our faith:

When we say that “the infinity of ages, as well past as to come, are but one instant with God”; that “His goodness, wisdom, and power are the same with His essence,” our mouths speak it, but our understandings do not grasp it. And yet such is our outrageous opinion of ourselves, that we must make the divinity pass through our filter. From this proceed all the dreams and errors with which the world abounds, when we reduce and weigh in our balance a thing so far above our position. [Ibid]

Ultimately, he argues, “It is faith alone that embraces vividly and with certainty the high mysteries of religion” (ibid).

Montaigne’s commitment to skepticism went beyond matters of faith and reason, and, like his ancient Greek predecessors, he took a skeptical stand on morality. Morality, he argues, is driven by custom. As we look around the world, we see the strangest behavior. Even when our conduct starts out innocently, over time it becomes more and more bizarre, all the while becoming firmly fix within society through custom. Eventually, we lose all courage in opposing what custom mandates, and we just fall in line. How extreme does it get? He offers some examples here:

[There are societies] where they boil the bodies of their dead, and afterwards pound them to a pulp, which they mix with their wine, and drink it; where the most coveted burial is to be eaten by dogs; . . . where women urinate standing and men squatting; where they send their blood in a token of friendship . . . where the children nurse for four years, and often twelve; ... where they circumcise the women;  . . . in another it is reputed a holy duty for a man to kill his father at a certain age; . . . where children of seven years old endured being whipped to death, without changing expression. [Ibid, 1.22]

It’s not just our behavior that is dictated by custom, but our conscience itself—the very standard that we use to judge right and wrong—is molded by the customs of our society:

The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature, proceed from custom. Since everyone has an inward reverence for the opinions and manners approved of and received among his own people, no one can, without very great reluctance, depart from them, or apply himself to them without approval. [Essays, “Of Custom”]

Thus, the pressure on our conscience from social custom is so strong that it is virtually impossible to break free from it.

Pascal: Wagering on God

Another French philosopher who integrated faith with a skeptical stance towards knowledge was Blaise Pascal (1623–1662). Born in Clermon, France, after the early death of his mother Pascal was educated in Greek and Latin by his father. As a youth he showed a special capacity for mathematics, and at age 16 he published a work on that subject. At around age 19 he invented the first calculating machine, hoping it would help his father compute taxes at his government job. His early interests also extended to science and he became active in the raging debate of the time about whether a vacuum could exist. When Pascal’s father had become ill, the two physicians who attended him were members of the Catholic Jansenist movement, which led Pascal to a religious awakening. In his early thirties he had a second and more intense religious conversion after almost dying in a carriage accident. He thereafter affiliated himself with Jansenists, writing in their defense on various religious controversies. Pascal suffered various debilitating illnesses through most of his adult life, which ultimately led to his early death at age 39. It was during his final years that he wrote his major contribution to philosophy, an unfinished work in outline form that only appeared in print after his death under the title Thoughts.

Pascal never identified himself as a philosophical skeptic, and, in fact, the principal aim of his Thoughts was to defend Christianity by showing the inconsistencies in views of skeptics such as Montaigne. For example, Pascal offers the following critique of Montaigne’s skeptical view of custom and morality:

Montaigne is wrong. Custom should be followed only because it is custom, and not because it is reasonable or just. But people follow it for this sole reason, that they think it just. Otherwise they would follow it no longer, although it were the custom; for they will only submit to reason or justice. Custom without this would pass for tyranny; but the sovereignty of reason and justice is no more tyrannical than that of desire. They are principles natural to man. [Thoughts, 325]

Contrary to Montaigne, Pascal contends that custom is not the source of morality, and people only follow custom because they think it is moral.

At the same time, though, Pascal was quite skeptical about the value of human reason in general: “There is nothing so conformable to reason as this disavowal of reason” (ibid 173).  Reason, he argues, is grounded in feelings and, as such, it is changeable and can offer us no consistent rule of guidance. Further, he argues, reason presents a major stumbling block to many of the non-rational views that we hold through religious faith: “If we submit everything to reason, our religion will have no mysterious and supernatural element. If we offend the principles of reason, our religion will be absurd and ridiculous” (ibid 174). Accordingly, Pascal believes that reason can tell us nothing about the existence of God, and the rational proofs for God’s existence ultimately fail.

If reason cannot settle the issue of God’s existence, then what possible motivation do we have for believing in God? Pascal answers this with his famous wager:

Since a choice must be made, let’s see which interests you the least. You have two things to lose: the true and the good. And you have two things to stake: your reason and your will; that is, your knowledge and your complete happiness. And your nature has two things to shun: error and misery. Your reason is not more wounded, since a choice must necessarily be made in choosing one rather than the other. Here a point is eliminated. But what about your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in taking heads that God exists. Let us weigh these two cases. If you gain, you gain all. If you lose, you lose nothing. Wager without hesitation, then, that he is. [Ibid, 233]

In a nutshell, his position is this: when reason is neutral on the issue of God’s existence, the balance of positive and negative consequences of believing vs. disbelieving in God should compel us to move towards a faith-based belief in God. The options that Pascal lays out in the wager are these:

|           Believe                        Don't believe

God exists                   |           infinite happiness        nothing

God doesn't exist         |           nothing             nothing

Thus, if we gamble by believing in God, we might gain infinite happiness, whereas if we gamble by not believing in God we gain nothing.

The wager itself, though, is not meant to be a rational proof for God’s existence or even an attempt to rationally settle the issue of whether you should believe in God. Instead, it is an appeal to your feelings, your desire to be happy. The wager is only the first step towards belief in God insofar as it simply establishes your desire. The second step is to put yourself in a position where you can be touched by God through a religious experience. To that end, he says, you should do what other believers have done: participate in religious rituals. Go to church and use holy water as though you believed in them, and the mere practice of these things will open you to an experience that will enable you to truly believe.

D. THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION

European science dramatically advanced during the 16th and 17th centuries, a period that historians now refer to as the scientific revolution. While scientists during the late middle ages were making discoveries, a tipping point occurred in the area of astronomy when Copernicus published his sun-centered theory of the cosmos, which overturned the prevailing earth-centered model that dated back to the time of Aristotle. This sparked innovations in all areas of science, including the development of more sophisticated scientific instruments. In addition to the particular discoveries that were made, scientists also developed methods of scientific investigation, which they felt would help them push the boundaries of knowledge more efficiently and systematically.

Bacon: Induction and the Scientific Method

The champion of the scientific method and acclaimed father of modern science was Francis Bacon (1561-1626). He was born in London into a noble household, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, began his career in the field of law, and progressively climbed the ranks within British government, eventually holding the position of Lord Chancellor. At around age 60 his career and reputation plummeted. He was continually in debt throughout his adult life and often sought desperate means for paying off is creditors, which ultimately led to him being charged with political corruption. For this he was briefly imprisoned in the Tower of London, fined a substantial sum of money, and barred from his place in the British Parliament. He died at the age of 65 after becoming ill when stuffing a chicken with snow to test whether that would slow down its decay. Bacon published works on a range of subjects in science, history, and moral philosophy. He envisioned composing a lengthy plan to reorganize all of the sciences; of the few portions that he did complete, the most famous is the New Organon (1620). The title is an allusion to Aristotle’s Organon (literally meaning “instrument”) which contains the logical portions of his works. By incorporating this term into his title, Bacon was boldly advertising that he was offering a new approach to logic that aimed to replace the outdated one of Aristotle.

The main point of difference between their two conceptions of logic is that Aristotle’s system was deductive, while Bacon’s was inductive. Deduction involves a structure of demonstration similar to mathematics, and Aristotle’s specific form of deductive argumentation is the syllogism as expressed here:

1. All men are mortal.

2. Socrates is a man.

3. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

The important feature of deductive arguments, such as the above, is that the meaning of the conclusion is completely contained within the premises. Further, as long as the premises are true, the conclusion follows with absolute necessity, with no exception whatsoever. Induction is an entirely different strategy that involves generalizations based on observations, such as this:

(a) Rock 1 falls to the ground when I open my hand.

(b) Rock 2 falls to the ground when I open my hand.

(c) Therefore, all rocks similar to 1 and 2 will probably fall to the ground when I open my hand

What is central to inductive arguments such as the above is that specific instances are used as evidence for a universal conclusion. That is, the premises only tell us about two rocks, and the conclusion generalizes about all similar rocks; as such the conclusion goes well beyond the information contained in the premises. This means that the conclusion does not follow with absolute necessity, but only with a specific degree of probability.

Bacon argues that induction is much more suitable for science than deduction is. In science, we begin with observations, and from these try to extract more general truths about nature. Specific observation is critical to this process, as he expresses at the very opening of the New Organon: “Man, who is the servant and interpreter of nature, can act and understand no further than he has observed in either the operation or the contemplation of the method and order of nature” (New Organon, 1.1). Deduction, by contrast, is not capable of drawing universal conclusions from specific observations, and thus confines us to the small amount of facts that we know: “The [deductive] logic now in use serves rather to fix and give stability to the errors which have their foundation in commonly received notions, rather than to help the search after truth. So it does more harm than good” (ibid, 1.12). Because of their reliance on deductive logic, scientists of the past have barely penetrated into the inner recesses of nature. To break these barriers, “our only hope is true induction” (ibid, 1.14).

The precise inductive method that Bacon proposes is in three parts, or three “tables” as he calls them. The first of these is the “table of presence”: we should examine instances in which the same phenomenon is present, and note what other circumstances are in common. Suppose, for example, that several students on campus get sick to the stomach. To determine the cause, we should first examine what they all have in common, such as them having eaten the tuna casserole in the school cafeteria. Second is the “table of absence”: we should examine instances in which a phenomenon is absent, and note what circumstances are in common. Again, with the stomach illness on campus, we should examine what all non-sick students have in common, such as them not having eaten the tuna casserole. Third, there is the table of degrees: examine instances in which a phenomenon is present in varying degrees and note what circumstances also vary. For example, once we’ve reasonably identified the tuna casserole as the cause of the illnesses, we can give differing portions of the contaminated item to different people to see how sick they get.

Galileo: Separating Science from Religion

As science moved forward, it inevitably raised questions about the compatibility of religion and science—a new twist to the longstanding issue of the relation between faith and reason. One scientist was caught directly in the middle of this sensitive transition from the old system to the new one: Galileo Galilei (1564–1642). Born in the Italian city of Pisa, at a young age Galileo was multi-talented, playing the lute and organ (taught by his father, a professional musician), building toys, and doing skilled painting. But none of these were to be his calling in life. After abandoning thoughts of becoming a priest, he bent to his father’s urging and entered the University of Pisa to study medicine. Leaving this for lack of funds, he then switched fields to mathematics. After his father’s death, Galileo moved to the University of Padua, teaching mathematics, geometry, mechanics and astronomy, later becoming chair of the mathematics department. Though a devout Catholic, Galileo fathered three children out of wedlock. Feeling that his two daughters were thus unmarriageable, he sent them to a convent at an early age, where they remained the rest of their lives. His son, however, was later legitimized and allowed to marry.

After developing the telescope, he used it to gaze at night sky and made several discoveries that supported  Copernicus’s view that the earth revolves around the sun, not the reverse. He observed sun spots, mountainous surfaces on the moon, Jupiter’s moons revolving around that planet, and the phases of the planet Venus. When he published a work defending the sun-centered system, opposition arose against him within the Catholic Church on the grounds that his views ran contrary to scripture and Church authority. An edict was issued requiring him to renounce his theory, which he did. He was sentenced to imprisonment, then commuted to house arrest, where he lived another eight years, producing more writings before becoming blind. It took another one hundred years for Galileo to be fully exonerated by the Church, when it authorized the publication of his complete scientific works.

When aggressively putting forward his views on astronomy, Galileo was well aware that he was entering territory controlled by the Church. He responded by arguing that science and religion are different arenas of knowledge and should be kept separate. The immediate problem was that the Church was taking an overly-literal interpretation of biblical passages in support of the old earth-centered system, such as passages about the movement of the sun. For Galileo, though, it’s risky business when imposing any interpretation on the bible that might afterwards be contradicted by scientific evidence from our senses. He asks, “Who can assure us that everything that can be known in the world is known already?” (Letter to Castelli). The role of scripture and religion is to teach us truths about salvation, which would not be available to us by any other means than divine revelation. However, that’s not the case with science: God has given us senses, reason, and understanding, and it makes no sense for God to forbid us from using these intellectual tools in scientific matters and rely instead on revelation. This is precisely the case with astronomy, he argues, since the scriptures say virtually nothing about the subject. Thus, scientific investigation should not begin with scripture, but with experimentation:

In discussing natural phenomena we ought not to begin with texts from Scripture, but with experiment and demonstration. For, from the Divine Word, both Scripture and Nature do alike proceed. And I can see that that which experience sets before our eyes concerning natural effects, or which demonstration proves to us, ought not on any account to be called in question, much less condemned, upon the testimony of Scriptural texts, which may (under their mere words) have meanings of a contrary nature. [ibid]

Accordingly, Galileo argues, Church officials should not presume to tell scientists what they are to believe.

While many advances during the scientific revolution reshaped people’s conceptions of the place of humans in the cosmos, this was especially so with the shift away from the old medieval earth-centered system towards the sun-centered one, which Galileo helped push forward. First, under the older sun-centered system, the universe was of finite size: at the outer edges all the stars were attached to a single orbital sphere that rotated around the earth at its inner core. The very placement of the earth at the center of things was a sign that humans were at the focal point of God’s creative activity. Under the new system, though, the universe is infinitely large, with stars strewn everywhere across the sky, and the earth is no longer the physical center of things. Second, under the old system, heavenly bodies such as the sun, moon and planets were thought to be made from perfect eternal substances that were vastly different in composition from the finite and imperfect material stuff that made up the earth. Under the new system, though, heavenly bodies are stripped of their eternal nature and instead composed of the same finite stuff as the earth. Third, under the old system, God was seen as an active force in the daily functioning of the universe, and the ultimate source of all motion. Under the new system, though, the physical universe is potentially self-sustaining. Even if God did create everything at the start, the new model offered a mechanistic explanation of the cosmos’s operation that did not rely on God as a continuing active force.

Newton: God’s Role in the Physical Universe

By 1700, no one had a better grasp of the science behind the cosmos than Isaac Newton (1642-1727) and, thus, he was the default expert on God’s role in the physical universe. Born in Grantham, England, Newton was educated at Cambridge University and spent many years teaching there, gaining an international reputation through his mathematical and scientific publications. His Principia Mathematica (1687), one of the greatest contributions to science, presented groundbreaking theories on motion, gravity, and the movement of the planets. To assist him in making the mathematical calculations in the Principia, Newton developed the calculus, but kept this a secret for several decades until German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz developed then published his own version of the system. This resulted in a protracted controversy between them over who was the true inventor; the consensus today is that they both invented it independently. In his later years Newton briefly served in the British Parliament, and for the remainder of life was Master of the Mint and president of the Royal Society of London, Britain’s most esteemed scientific institution. He died at age 85.

In a later edition of the Principia Newton made the famous statement “I invent no hypotheses,” making clear that he was focusing only on how the principle of gravity worked, and not what the underlying causes of gravity are. Like the principle of Ockham’s Razor, this illustrates his desire to keep science focused on observable phenomena, rather than making elaborate speculations about the secret nature of things. Yet, at the same time, Newton was privately interested in the hidden forces behind the operations of nature, particularly regarding God’s role in the creation and operation of the cosmos. To this end, Newton offers a design argument for God’s existence based on the mechanical precision of celestial bodies, which cannot be accounted for by chance. For, even a few tiny differences in the size and gravity of the planets would throw them into irregular orbits. He writes,

had the quantity of matter in the sun or in Saturn, Jupiter, and the earth (and by consequence their gravitating power) been greater or less than it is; [then, in any of these cases,] the primary planets could not have revolved about the sun nor the secondary ones [i.e., moons] about Saturn, Jupiter, and the earth, in concentric circles as they do, but would have moved in hyperbolas or parabolas or in ellipses very eccentric. To make this system, therefore, with all its motions, required a cause which understood and compared together the quantities of matter in the several bodies of the sun and planets and the gravitating powers resulting from thence.... And to compare and adjust all these things together in so great a variety of bodies, [such a design] argues that cause to be, not blind and fortuitous, but very well skilled in mechanics and geometry. [Letters to Richard Bentley, 1]

The essence of the above argument is this:

1. The universe exhibits a high degree of precision in mechanics and geometry.

2. It is improbable that this precision resulted from chance.

3. Therefore there is a creator of the universe who is skilled in mechanics and geometry.

Not only does the regular motion of the planets require God’s engineering skills, but, Newton argues, God’s existence is also needed to explain why some celestial bodies are luminous, such as the sun and stars, and others are not luminous, such as the planets.

Thus, for Newton God’s role as cosmic engineer and creator is evident. However, the next theological question is whether the continued operation of the universe still depends in some way upon God’s intervention. God clearly tried hard to make the universe self-sustaining. But did he succeed in making it completely self-sustaining? Newton is less clear about this, and he suggests that it depends on differing views of the universe itself that we might reasonably adopt. For example, if the universe is of finite size, then God is needed to prevent all the celestial bodies from converging on each other through gravity and making a single lump of stuff. On the other hand, if the universe is infinitely large, then God might have evenly spaced out all celestial bodies so that, by evenly tugging each other in all directions, they stay in place. In that case, God would not need to continually intervene to keep the universe from collapsing in on itself.

E. SECULARIZED NATURAL LAW

As the Renaissance shook up traditional conceptions of religious authority, it had a strong secularizing effect on society, as we’ve already seen with Galileo’s efforts to separate science from religion. The secularizing force of the Renaissance also impacted the dominant conception of morality during the middle ages, namely, natural law theory. As typified by Aquinas’s view, natural law is a set of moral standards embedded in human nature by God; it is part of God’s divine wisdom and his eternal law. We will look at the views of two early modern philosophers who developed non-religious views of natural law: Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes.

Grotius: Natural Law and Just War Theory

Hugo Grotius (1583—1645) was born in the Dutch city of Delft, where he was a child prodigy thanks to the educational influence of his father, a city official and curator of Leiden University. He attended the University at age 11, and, while on a diplomatic mission to France at age 15, the King there praised him as the miracle of Holland. Beginning in his late teens, he assumed various positions in the Dutch government that involved issues of international laws and treaties and began writing on the subject. Imprisoned for three years for his role in a religious controversy, he dramatically escaped with the help of his wife by hiding in a book case. He took refuge in France for ten years, and then resumed his career in the Dutch government once the political climate there became safe. He died from exhaustion at the age of 62 after being shipwrecked while on a diplomatic mission. Grotius’s most famous work is The Law of War and Peace (1625), which he composed during exile in France. Its central theme is that natural law establishes the just conditions for declaring and engaging in war.

What exactly is “natural law?” For Grotius, it is a rational principle of morality and social justice which “is so unalterable, that it cannot be changed even by God himself” (Laws of War and Peace, 1.1). In fact, he goes so far as to say that natural law would still have some validity even if “we conceded that there is no God” (ibid, Prolegomena). In this way, natural law is a secular phenomenon, not a divinely-created one. Natural law, he argues, is on the same level as truths of mathematics insofar as the denial of the laws of nature would be contradictory. In the same way that the statement 1=1=3 is inherently contradictory, so too would be a claim that “stealing is morally acceptable.” Reason itself, he argues, contains a clear standard of moral rightness, and certain actions are unquestionably evil when “compared with the nature of a reasonable being” (ibid). Now, God is a rational being, and so too are we human beings. As such, God and humans are both bound by that high moral standard of rationality, and our actions are judged right or wrong accordingly. Even God’s actions, he argues, must be judged right or wrong based on the moral standard of rationality.

According to Grotius, there is a highest moral principle of natural law which is embedded in our rational nature, namely, that we should be sociable—we should live in peace with one another and uphold the social order. He writes,

Among the traits characteristic of man is an impelling desire for society, that is, for the social life not of any and every sort, but peaceful, and organized according to the measure of his intelligence, with those who are of his own kind; this social trend the Stoics called “sociability.” [ibid, “Prolegomena”]

From this general moral obligation of sociability, we can infer five more specific rules of natural law, each of which is central to preserving social stability: (1) do not take things that belong to others; (2) restore to other people anything that we might have of theirs; (3) fulfill promises; (4) compensate for any loss that results through our own fault; (5) punish people as deserved.

According to Grotius, the above five principles of natural law are not only at the core of all morality, but they form the main ingredients of social and political obligation—within our individual countries and also between countries internationally. The basis of all international law, he argues, is that we must fulfill the agreements that we make with others (as expressed in the famous Latin phrase pacta sunt servanda – pacts must be respected); this is a direct application of the third principle of natural law above. And, when situations arise that force us into war with a neighboring country, these principles also underlie the justness of our behavior towards our enemy. Grotius is thus advocating a position of just war theory, that is, the attempt to distinguish between justifiable and unjustifiable wars. For Grotius, natural law theory gives us the exact litmus test we need for making that distinction.

There are two components to Grotius’s just war theory. The first involves the just causes of war, that is, why we might be justified in waging war with any country to begin with. He says that there are three main just causes: to defend ourselves against attack, to seek reparation for some harm that an enemy country has done to us, and to punish a country for inflicting us with some harm. Some wars result merely from the desire to inflict cruelty, completely disconnected with any good reason, and such acts of aggression are clearly unjustified. While every country that engages in war attempts to justify its actions, many justifications are only pretexts which do not stand up to moral scrutiny.

The second component of his just war theory concerns the types of combat techniques that we might rightfully use against our enemy. Can we kill enemy prisoners? Can we kill civilians? Can we lay waste to an entire countryside? For Grotius, there is a moral mandate of moderation that requires us to temper our actions during war. First, we need to preserve the lives of the innocent whenever possible:

Though there may be circumstances, in which absolute justice will not condemn the sacrifice of lives in war, yet humanity will require that the greatest precaution should be used against involving the innocent in danger, except in cases of extreme urgency and utility. [Ibid, 3.11]

Grotius is here drawing a fundamental distinction between combatants and noncombatants, which in contemporary just war theory is referred to as the principle of discrimination. For Grotius, innocent noncombatants include women, children, and religious ministers. Killing these would serve no military purpose, and would be nothing short of cruel. Protection also needs to be extended to farmers, merchants and artisans whose activities help sustain the society itself. Killing off this segment of the population would permanently cripple a country and would not be justified on military grounds. In addition to the principle of discrimination, Grotius also articulates a principle that we now call proportionality: destruction should not extend any further than is necessary to make the aggressor pay for his offence. He writes,

Now, driving off some of our cattle, or burning a few of our houses, can never be pleaded as a sufficient and justifiable motive for laying waste the whole of an enemy's kingdom. Polybius saw this in its proper light, observing, that vengeance in war should not be carried to its extreme, nor extend any further than was necessary to make an aggressor atone justly for his offence. And it is upon these motives, and within these limits alone, that punishment can be inflicted. But except where prompted to it by motives of great utility, it is folly, and worse than folly, to needlessly hurt another. [Ibid, 3.13]

Ultimately, he argues, there are only three justifications for destruction of the enemy’s property: first, when destruction is needed to stop the enemy, second, when the destruction satisfies some debt that the enemy needs to repay, and, third, when the destruction is the only adequate punishment for the enemy’s aggression. Any destruction that goes beyond these three situations is unjustifiable.

In short, Grotius’s view is that natural law is a rational component of the universe, independent of and uncreated by God. We access the basic principles of natural law through human reason, and this guides both our individual moral conduct and the rules we devise for international law. Natural law tells us under what conditions we might justifiably wage war against a foreign country, and it also tells us what kind of warfare tactics are morally justifiable when we engage the enemy.

Hobbes: The Social Contract

A second great contributor to a new conception of morality and natural law was Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), who took a more skeptical approach to the subject than did Grotius. Born in Wiltshire, England, Hobbes was raised by an uncle when his father, a disgraced clergyman, deserted his family. After completing his university education at Oxford, for several decades he worked as a private tutor for distinguished families, one of his pupils being a future King of England. During that time he continued his studies in Greek and Latin classics, traveled through Europe, and became acquainted with some of the greatest minds of the time. It wasn’t until around age 50 that he took a serious interest in philosophy and began composing works on the subject. His efforts culminated in his greatest work, Leviathan (1651), which immediately drew harsh criticism for its skeptical and anti-religious implications. Fearing imprisonment for heresy, he fled England for a few years; upon his return, he was prohibited for a time from further publication. He continued writing until his final years when he died from a stroke at the age of 90.

The backdrop of Hobbes’s political philosophy is his materialist view of the physical world and human nature. The standard view of the subject since the middle ages was the dualist position that the universe contains both material things like rocks, and non-physical spirits such as God and human souls. Hobbes denied this view, holding that the universe is comprised entirely of material stuff. The very notion of an immaterial spirit is groundless, and the first conception of it arose from an abuse of language:

[T]he opinion that such spirits were incorporeal, or immaterial, could never enter into the mind of any man by nature; because, though men may put together words of contradictory signification, as spirit and incorporeal, yet they can never have the imagination of anything answering to them. [Leviathan, 12.7]

While Hobbes does not deny God’s existence, he argues that God’s nature is completely inexplicable, and we can say virtually nothing about him: “the nature of God is incomprehensible; that is to say, we understand nothing of what he is, but only that he is” (ibid, 34.4). In the mind of Hobbes’s critics, this view of God was enough to brand him as an atheist. Hobbes’s materialist position is most reflected in his view that human beings are comprised exclusively of physical stuff, without anything like an immaterial spirit. All of the contents of my mind—thoughts, perceptions, desires, emotions, pleasures, pains—consist only of physical stuff in motion. To understand human conduct, then, means understanding the operations of the human physical machine.

Hobbes sets out his political philosophy by considering how humans behaved in a time before the creation of civil governments. In this state of nature, or “natural condition” as he calls it, people had complete freedom to do whatever they wanted. However, this unregulated liberty led to a condition of war of everyone against everyone in the battle for survival. He describes this condition of brutality in one of the most famous passages in philosophy:

In such condition, there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. [ibid, 13.9]

The conflict between people is so entrenched that it grinds all social progress to a halt, and all I can do is wait for my neighbor to attack and kill me—or try to get to him first. In this condition there is no natural basis for justice or morality:

To this war of every man against every man, this also is consequent, that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no injustice. Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues. Justice and injustice are none of the [instinctive] faculties, neither of the body nor mind. [ibid, 13.13]

On Hobbes’s view, there are three main reasons for conflict. First, there are limited resources that we all desire for our survival. Second, human beings are naturally selfish, and do not have the psychological capacity to help other people merely out of the goodness of their hearts. All of my actions aim to benefit me, and are selfishly motivated. He writes, “of the voluntary acts of every man the object is some good to himself” (ibid, 14:8). Today philosophers call this position psychological egoism. If we were naturally unselfish, then we’d happily let other people have what they wanted; but sadly, for Hobbes, that’s not how we’re designed. Second, human beings have largely the same mental and physical abilities, and, consequently, there is a more or less equal playing field when we compete for the same things.

Thus, the state of nature is a miserable amoral condition that we should escape from if we hope to have a long and happy life. But how can we do that? The solution, for Hobbes, is to devise an agreement with others; that is, we form a social contract by which we agree to set aside our hostilities to create a peaceful society in which we can have long and fruitful lives. Hobbes sets out the framework of the social contract by stipulating several “laws of nature” that move us from a state of war to a state of peace. Law one, for Hobbes, is to seek peace as a means of self-preservation. This follows directly from our natural right to self preservation, whereby each person may “use his own power as he will himself for the preservation of his own nature” (ibid, 14.1). Peace, according to Hobbes, is the best way of surviving. Law two is that, in our efforts to secure peace, we should agree to mutually divest ourselves of hostile rights. That is, I should give up my survival right to attack and kill you under the condition that you give up your corresponding survival right to attack and kill me. Peace can only come about if we both set down our weapons at the same time.

Law three is that we should keep the agreements that we make. Making an agreement to forego hostilities is one thing, but sticking to that agreement is entirely different. Hobbes recognized that there is a strong temptation to break our agreements. Once you’ve set down your weapon, I might be selfishly motivated to quickly pick mine back up, kill you, then take your possessions. To assure that people keep their agreements, we need to create a government that has absolute authority to punish offenders:

For the laws of nature, as justice, equity, modesty, mercy, and, in sum, doing to others as we would be done to, of themselves, without the terror of some power to cause them to be observed, are contrary to our natural passions, that carry us to partiality, pride, revenge, and the like. And covenants, without the sword, are but words and of no strength to secure a man at all. [ibid, 17.2]

Hobbes’s social contract theory is an even bolder secularization of natural law theory than what Grotius offered. For Grotius, natural laws were rational principles like mathematics, and thus independent of God. For Hobbes, though, the laws of nature are rational from a practical standpoint: they are the sorts of laws that any rational person should adopt to save his or her hide:

A law of nature (lex naturalis) is a precept or general rule, found out by reason, by which a man is forbidden to do that which is destructive of his life or takes away the means of preserving the same, and to omit that by which he thinks it may be best preserved. [Leviathan, 14.3]

Thus, the laws of nature are nothing like rational principles of mathematics; they are grounded only in the human desire to survive, and thus are rational only in a pragmatic sense.

F. CONCLUSION

During the Renaissance, philosophy started to have a more modern feel, and, compared to what went on in ancient Greek and Medieval times, it is one that we can more easily identify with today. Philosophers of the time recognized that they were on a new path that departed radically from medieval scholasticism, and they soon began to refer to their own style of philosophizing as “modern” – hence the designation “modern” philosophy. Their first efforts were to breathe life back into the old Greek philosophical schools, which, they believed, contained a vitality that was lost in the middle ages. The freedom to newly explore those classical schools, though, required philosophy to move out from under the control of the Catholic Church. Since ancient times, philosophers were regularly in trouble with legal and religious authorities, and even during the Middle Ages the most innovative philosophers found themselves accused of heresy. While by our standards today the Renaissance was still a religiously confining environment, the Reformation sparked an era of religious experimentation which gave more freedom for philosophical speculation.

What perhaps launched Renaissance philosophy forward the most, though, were the dramatic advances in science. Scientific achievements in astronomy, chemistry, biology and engineering set a high standard for all intellectual disciplines, and philosophers followed that model of scientific rigor. Bacon in particular believed that philosophy and science were virtually inseparable, particularly regarding scientific method. In the centuries following the Renaissance, as we will see in later chapters, philosophers drew heavily on the science of the time. They were knowledgeable about the latest scientific advances, some being notable scientists themselves, and often shaped their writing style in the form of scientific treatises.

Questions for Review

Please answer all of the following questions for review.

1. What Pico’s view of the great chain of being, and where do human beings fit into it?

2. What was Luther’s view of Aristotle?

3. What is Calvin’s view of double predestination?

4. How did some Renaissance skeptics connect faith with skepticism?

5. According to Montaigne, what is the point behind the skeptic’s laxative metaphor?

6. What is Montaigne’s view of morality and custom?

7. What is Pascal’s wager?

8. What are Bacon’s three tables of investigation?

9. What is Galileo’s view about the role of scripture in scientific investigation?

10. What is Newton’s view about God’s role as creator and sustainer of the cosmos?

11. According to Grotius, what are the requirements of just wars?

12. What is Hobbes’s view of the state of nature, and what is needed to reach a state of peace?

Questions for Analysis

Please select only one question for analysis from those below and answer it.

1. Calvin argues that God predestines some people to heaven and others to hell. Is there any rational way of accepting predestination to heaven while rejecting predestination to hell? Explain.

2. Montaigne and other skeptical philosophers of the Renaissance held that skepticism can be of assistance to faith. Explain their rationale and whether you agree.

3. One critic of Pascal’s wager argued that a leader of any religion or cult could offer a similar wager: believe in me and you’ll have eternal happiness. Thus, according to the critic, the wager fails as a motivation to believe specifically in God. Explain whether you agree or disagree with this criticism.

4. Galileo argued that the domain of scripture and religious authority does not cross over into areas of scientific study. Explain his point and whether you agree.

5. Examine Hobbes’s reasoning for why the state of nature is so bad and explain whether you agree.

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CHAPTER 7: CONTINENTAL RATIONALISM

A. Descartes

Methods of Investigation

Systematic Doubt

The One Foundation of All Knowledge

Spirit-Body Dualism

B. Malebranche

Sensory Information: Viewing through God

Bodily Movement: God causing all Physical Motion

God and Evil

C. Spinoza

God as Nature: Substance Monism

Determinism and Human Bondage

Free Speech

D. Leibniz

Monads in an Infinitely Divisible Plenum

Perception, Appetite, and Mirroring in Monads

Dominant Monad Souls and Parallalism

Evil and the Best of All Possible Worlds

Questions for Reflection

1. Is there anything that might make you doubt your own existence?

2. Suppose for a moment that you are composed of both a physical body and a non-physical spirit-mind. How might bio-chemical sensory information in your three-dimensional brain make its way into your non-three-dimensional spirit mind?

3. Some people think that God is nothing more than the sum total of the natural world, and all of the laws of nature that the world contains. Is there anything wrong with this view of God?

4. Suppose that you knew nothing at all about modern science. Which view of the world would best exemplify God’s creative power: (a) a world that contains some matter and some empty space, or (b) a world that is jam packed full of matter with no empty space?

5. Is this the best possible world that God could have created, or might he have done better if he chose to do so?

Rationalism is the philosophical view that knowledge is acquired through reason, without the aid of the senses. Mathematical knowledge is the best example of this since through rational thought alone we can plumb the depths of numerical relations, construct proofs, and deduce ever more complex mathematical concepts. We can even envision that someone locked in a room with no sensory experience whatsoever might still arrive at a sophisticated level of mathematical knowledge. Several ancient and medieval writers held to rationalism, most notably Plato and philosophers who followed in the Platonist tradition. In the mid 17th century, though, rationalism was given a unique twist by philosophers who held that our most important mental concepts are innate—or inborn—and from these we deduce other truths with absolute certainty. Advocates of this position were largely from the continental European countries of France, the Netherlands, and Germany, hence this new breed of rationalism is often called “Continental Rationalism.” The main philosophers associated with this movement, which we will explore in this chapter, are René Descartes, Nicholas Malebranche, Baruch Spinoza, and Gottfried Willhelm Leibniz.

A. DESCARTES

René Descartes (1596–1650) was born in the French city of La Haye en Touraine, subsequently renamed “Descartes” in his honor. At 11 years of age he entered a Jesuit college, and by age 20 earned a law degree according to his father’s wishes. While this education pleased his father, a high-court judge himself, Descartes never actually did practice law. Shortly after graduation, he abandoned all study, and disregarded his own conviction that military life was idle and cruel and became a military engineer for the purpose of traveling, seeing the world and discovering truth found in himself or else in “the great book of the world,” as he said. He sold all of his possessions and invested the funds, along with money from an inheritance and from patrons, which allowed him the privilege and freedom to travel and study most of his life. Specific direction for this came during his time in Europe when on three occasions Descartes dreamed of becoming a scientist and philosopher. At that point, he followed his dreams—literally. His most fruitful time as an author was during his 20 year residence in the Dutch Republic where routinely stayed in bed writing until around noon. While he valued his privacy, and regularly changed residences to protect it, he nevertheless gained international fame through his writings. He became as renown in science and mathematics as he was in philosophy, and his publications reflect this diversity. Descartes never married, although he fathered children and rationalized that, after all, he had never taken a vow of chastity. Invited to become teacher to the 22-year-old Queen Christina of Sweden, Descartes’ daily routine was dramatically altered and he rose at 5:00 a.m. to instruct the demanding queen in philosophy. In addition, she ordered him to write a ballet in verse. When he died of pneumonia one year later at age 53, it was speculated that this pressure and inconvenient schedule was the underlying cause. Alternatively, some suspected that he contracted the disease while nursing a French ambassador with pneumonia back to health.

Methods of Investigation

Like other thinkers of the time, Descartes was attracted to the notion of a scientific method of investigation, which when followed would enable him to make new discoveries and push the boundaries of knowledge. Thus he devised his own method, the starting point of which is to eliminate all former opinions and establish knowledge afresh only on solid foundations. According to Descartes, the knowledge that we typically attain through education and life experience is an unsystematic mixture of truths and falsehoods, and it is often impossible for us to easily distinguish between the two. It is similar to the disorganization and poor layout that we see in old cities as they slowly expand from small villages to large urban areas, randomly adding one neighborhood after another. While we might try to improve the matter by inspecting our knowledge-base one fact at a time, this, he argues, will not do, and the only trustworthy way to proceed is to brush it all aside and start again. Similarly, the most organized cities are planned by a single architect from ground up, and this is the model that we should follow when expanding our knowledge.

Thus, Descartes says, we should being by clearing away our old and disordered schemes of knowledge. After that, we should follow four specific rules of inquiry that will enable us to methodically build a coherent system. Rule 1 is to accept only indubitable, clear and distinct ideas. He describes here his own experience when applying this rule:

The first of these was to accept nothing as true which I did not clearly recognize to be so; that is to say, carefully to avoid precipitation and prejudice in judgments, and to accept in them nothing more than what was presented to my mind so clearly and distinctly that I could have no occasion to doubt it. [Discourse on the Method]

His point is that the foundation of his knowledge should be only facts that he knows with certainty and which he can recognize as such because of the clarity and distinctness that they display. Rule 2 is that, when trying to solve problems, he would “divide up each of the difficulties which I examined into as many parts as possible, and as seemed requisite in order that it might be resolved in the best manner possible” (ibid). Once the problem is broken down into smaller units, he proceeds with rule three that he should begin with the simplest objects, and work to the harder and more complex ones. Finally, Rule 4 is to review: “to make enumerations so complete and reviews so general that I should be certain of having omitted nothing” (ibid).

Descartes recognized that if he actually began by rejecting all of his previous views, he would be temporarily entering a no man’s land in which he could believe or trust nothing until his final system of knowledge was well underway. During that time, though, how should he behave? Should he become an atheist, a drug peddler, or bank robber? To address this concern he established a provisional code of morals that he would follow, which would hopefully keep in on the right track until he completed his system of knowledge. First, he would obey the laws of his country and adhere to his faith in God. Second, he would be consistent in following positions, even if they seemed doubtful. Third, he would focus on changing his desires rather than attempting to change the world because of his desires. Finally, he would choose the best occupation he could, which he determined to be that of a philosopher.

Systematic Doubt

Once establishing his method of investigation, Descartes proceeds to build a system of knowledge that he can trust with absolute certainty. The first step is for him to clear away the unreliable clutter of his previous belief system. To that end he uses a systematic doubting process that would plow away any previous belief he held that was the slightest bit questionable. He writes,

It is now some years since I detected how many were the false beliefs that I had from my earliest youth admitted as true, and how doubtful was everything I had since constructed on this basis. And from that time I was convinced that I must once for all seriously undertake to rid myself of all the opinions which I had formerly accepted, and commence to build anew from the foundation, if I wanted to establish any firm and permanent structure in the sciences. [Meditation 1]

The type of doubt that Descartes describes here is not a common sense doubt, but, instead, an exaggerated systematic doubt. For example, common sense tells me that I should doubt reports that creatures have visited earth from other planets, or that a house is haunted, or that some people can see into the future. Descartes, though, wants to move well beyond this kind of doubt and question things that are even commonsensical. My common sense tells me that the ball in front of me is red, but what if I’m colorblind? It’s unlikely, but as long as there is some reason to doubt it, I should. Thus, his rule of thumb at this stage is that if it can be doubted, it should be doubted. The point of this exaggerated doubt is that, once we clear away everything that’s the slightest bit questionable, we’ll only be left with truths that are certain.

As he casts his doubtful eye on questionable beliefs from his past, he realizes that it would be impossible to inspect each of them one at a time; there are just too many. Rather, it is more efficient to submit to inspection the underlying foundation of the bulk of his beliefs. He writes,

Now for this object it is not necessary that I should show that all of these are false -- I will perhaps never arrive at this end. But inasmuch as reason already persuades me that I ought no less carefully to withhold my assent from matters which are not entirely certain and indubitable than from those which appear to me evidently to be false, if I am able to find in each one some reason to doubt, this will suffice to justify my rejecting the whole. And for that end it will not be requisite that I should examine each in particular, which would be an endless undertaking; for owing to the fact that the destruction of the foundations of necessity brings with it the downfall of the rest of the edifice, I will only in the first place attack those principles upon which all my former opinions rested. [Ibid]

And what is the underlying foundation of most of his beliefs? It is the senses: “all that up to the present time I have accepted as most true and certain I have learned either from the senses or through the senses” (ibid). As skeptics since ancient Greece have noted, there are many reasons to question the reliability of the senses. For example, we regularly experience sensory illusions, such as when things at a distance appear much smaller than they really are. While this is a problem, Descartes argues that it is not a very big obstacle, since we can get used to sensory illusions and trust our senses for more important things. Skeptics of the past have also suggested that the reliability of my senses is undermined when I consider the possibility of whether or not I’m dreaming. I look at the ball in front of me and my senses tell me that it exists. But, if I’m dreaming, then this experience is completely unreliable. It doesn’t make any difference if it really feels to me like I’m awake, since many times I’ve had dreams in which I was convinced I was actually awake. Descartes agrees that this too goes a long way in undermining the reliability of our senses, but not completely. For example, it allows me to doubt whether the ball in front of me actually exists, but it does not entitle me to doubt whether the three-dimensional world itself actually exists. To have even a dream-like perception of a round ball, according to Descartes, there must at least be a three-dimensional world which is the source of my dreams about three-dimensional shapes.

Descartes then pushes the doubting process one step further, and this is his claim to originality: what if God, or some evil genius, is deceiving me about everything, including the existence of the three-dimensional world? Perhaps everything that goes on in my mind is the result of a divinely-implanted hallucination. That would cast doubt on virtually every belief I have, including whether I even have a body:

I have long had fixed in my mind the belief that an all-powerful God existed by whom I have been created such as I am. But how do I know that he has not brought it to pass that there is no earth, no heaven, no extended body, no magnitude, no place, and that nevertheless they seem to me to exist just exactly as I now see them? And, besides, as I sometimes imagine that others deceive themselves in the things which they think they know best, how do I know that I am not deceived every time that I add two and three, or count the sides of a square, or judge of things yet simpler, if anything simpler can be imagined? . . . I will then suppose, not that God who is supremely good and the fountain of truth, but some evil genius not less powerful than deceitful, has employed his whole energies in deceiving me. I will consider that the heavens, the earth, colors, figures, sound, and all other external things are nothing but the illusions and dreams of which this genius has availed himself in order to lay traps for my gullibility. I will consider myself as having no hands, no eyes, no flesh, no blood, nor any senses, yet falsely believing myself to possess all these things. [Meditation 1]

Not only does the evil genius hypothesis cast doubt on the very existence of the three-dimensional world, but it also calls into question the confidence I have in my ability to do mathematics. Thus, when I consider that 1+1=2, perhaps the evil genius is just making me think that it’s true when it in fact isn’t.

The One Foundation of All Knowledge

It’s important to emphasize that Descartes himself was not a skeptic, but just used this powerful skeptical doubting device as a means of clearing away his older and more insecure beliefs. With those out of the way, he goes on to discover some firm belief which even the evil genius can’t make him doubt. All it takes is one truth, he argues, and that then can serve as the foundation for building an elaborate system of knowledge. As the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes once said, “Give me a fulcrum and a lever and a firm place to stand, and I alone can move the world.” Indeed, Descartes finds one such belief that even an evil genius cannot make him doubt: the truth that he exists. He writes,

[Suppose that] there is some deceiver or other, very powerful and very cunning, who ever employs his ingenuity in deceiving me. Then without doubt I exist also if he deceives me, and let him deceive me as much as he will, he can never cause me to be nothing so long as I think that I am something. So that after having reflected well and carefully examined all things, we must come to the definite conclusion that this proposition: I am, I exist, is necessarily true each time that I pronounce it, or that I mentally conceive it. [Meditation 2]

Descartes’ reasoning here is that in order for him to be deceived by the evil genius, he must exist to begin with; this is the same argument that Augustine offered centuries earlier when attempting to show that there is at least one truth that we can be absolutely certain of. In one of his publications Descartes expresses this idea with the phrase “I think, therefore I am” (in Latin, cogito ergo sum). Later on, though, he rejected this expression since it sounded like he was drawing a logical conclusion—and this is a problem since an evil genius might be deceiving him about the reliability of logic. Rather than being a logical inference, the truth of his existence is something that he can immediately grasp “by a simple act of mental vision” (ibid, “Replies to Objections”).

This is exactly the foundation Descartes thinks he needs upon which to build his system of knowledge. How he proceeds in his building project is somewhat complex, but his basic strategy is to shoot down the evil genius hypothesis, then show that he can have complete confidence in a special truth-detecting mental ability that God has given him. Briefly, here are the steps that he goes through.

The first step is to deduce some details about exactly what kind of thing he is. He still can’t say that he has a body, since at this stage the possibility still remains that the evil genius is deceiving him about the three-dimensional world. However, in the very act of grasping his existence, he is exercising several mental abilities, which he describes here:

But what then am I? A thing which thinks. What is a thing which thinks? It is a thing which doubts, understands, conceives, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, which also imagines and feels. Certainly it is no small matter if all these things pertain to my nature. But why should they not so pertain? Am I not that being who now doubts nearly everything, who nevertheless understands certain things, who affirms that one only is true, who denies all the others, who desires to know more, is averse from being deceived, who imagines many things, sometimes indeed despite his will, and who perceives many likewise, as by the intervention of the bodily organs? [Meditations 2]

Thus, he concludes that he is primarily a thing that thinks, and this includes the mental acts of doubting, understanding, conceiving, affirming, denying, willing, refusing, imagining, and feeling.

The second step is to prove God’s existence. Medieval philosophers offered a wealth of arguments for God, but most of these assumed that the three-dimensional world exists and, again, Descartes is not yet in a position to assume this. All that he knows for sure so far is his own existence and the kind of mental abilities that he has. However, he devises a different strategy for proving God that doesn’t require believing in the three-dimensional world. As he surveys the contents of his mind, he finds the usual collection of ideas, such as those of trees, animals, buildings. All of these are finite in nature, and are not particularly reliable.  But then he sees within his mind a concept of “infinite perfection”—an idea infinite complexity and goodness. It’s like a gleaming diamond sitting among a pile of dirty rocks. How did that idea get there? He couldn’t have created it himself, he argues, since his limited mental abilities would be incapable of inventing an idea that is so infinitely elaborate. The only possible explanation is that the idea of infinite perfection was implanted in his mind by God himself, who is infinitely perfect. God, then, must exists. Once he knows that God exists, he proceeds to the third step, which is to debunk the evil genius hypothesis. His argument here is straightforward: God could not be a deceiver since deception is an imperfection, and God is infinite perfection.

The fourth step is to prove that he can have confidence in a special truth-detecting mental ability that God has given him. According to Descartes, whenever we encounter obvious truths such as 2+2=4, something like a light bulb goes off in our heads to alert us that we’re on the right track. This “light of nature,” as he calls, it involves clarity and distinctness: we see clearly and distinctly that 2+2=4. The key question is whether Descartes can trust this truth-detecting light bulb as an accurate indicator of truth. If there’s an evil genius, then it’s not reliable, since the evil genius might be hot wiring it to go off at the wrong time. However, having proven that God is not a deceiver, Descartes can have full confidence that God created him with a reliable clarity and distinctness mechanism. The end result is that every time Descartes examines a new truth and the light goes on, he can add this to his ever-growing edifice of secure knowledge. Armed with the truth-detecting mechanism of clarity and distinctness, Descartes goes on to prove the existence of the three-dimensional world. That is, he perceives clearly and distinctly that his normal perceptions of rocks and trees are caused by actual three-dimensional external objects, rather than the result of his imagination or a hallucination.

Spirit-Body Dualism

Once Descartes knows that a three-dimensional physical world exists, he continues by arguing that human beings are constructed of both a physical body and a spirit-mind—a position called spirit-body dualism. Philosophers since ancient times, such as Plato and Plotinus, advocated spirit-body dualism, and, so, as a general theory, Descartes is suggesting nothing new. What is unique to Descartes’ position, though, is how he defends this theory, as we see here:

I concluded that I was a substance whose whole essence or nature consists only in thinking, and which, that it may exist, has need of no place, nor is dependent on any material thing. Thus the “I” (that is to say, the mind by which I am what I am) is wholly distinct from the body. It is even more easily known than the [body], and is such that even if the [body] did not exist, [my mind] would still continue to be all that it is. [Discourse on the Method]

His point is that he can conceive of himself existing as a thinking thing, even if he had no body and there was no three-dimensional world—sort of like if he was just a spirit-mind bobbing around in the spirit realm. Thinking, he concludes, is an exclusive attribute of a non-physical spirit entity. Non-three-dimensional spirit things think, and three-dimensional physical things do not think. While we do have physical bodies, our thinking does not occur in our bodies, but only in the spirit part of us.

Thus, according to Descartes, I am composed of a spirit-mind that thinks, and a physical body that is essentially an unconscious machine. However, the two interact with each other. When my physical body picks up sensory information, such as a bee landing on my arm, this data mechanically flows through my nerves, into my brain, and ultimately is detected by my conscious spirit. Also, when I think of performing some bodily movement, such as swatting the bee off my arm, the thought within my spirit-mind triggers a physical reaction in my brain that mechanically causes my hand to move.

Where precisely in my brain does data transfer back and forth between my physical body and spirit-mind? According to Descartes, it occurs in the pineal gland. All the wiring in my brain, he argues, feeds to that single point right in the center of my brain:

It is merely the most inward of all its parts, namely, a certain very small gland which is situated in the middle of its substance and so suspended above the duct whereby the animal spirits in its anterior cavities have communication with those in the posterior. It is such that the slightest movements which take place in it may alter very greatly the course of these spirits. And, reciprocally, the smallest changes which occur in the course of the spirits may do much to change the movements of this gland. [The Passions of the Soul, 1:31]

The pineal gland, then, is the master switchboard that conveys information back and forth between my physical body and spirit-mind. From Descartes’ perspective, it seemed reasonable to hypothesize that the pineal gland performed this task since it is so conveniently situated in the middle of the brain. However, we now know that the pineal gland does not serve this function, and, in fact, no part of the brain mediates the flow of all conscious mental activity. Explaining precisely how spirit-minds and physical bodies interact with each other is a serious challenge for spirit-body dualists, and several rationalist philosophers after Descartes offered their own solutions, as we will see.

B. MALEBRANCHE

Descartes was so influential that after his death many philosophers and scientists adopted and refined his basic views. Among these “Cartesians”, as they were called, was French philosopher Nicholas Malebranche (1638–1715), who was especially interested in solving the problem of how physical bodies and spirit-minds interact. Son of a royal secretary, Malebranche was born in Paris with a malformed spine, which caused him pain throughout his life. He was kept home until age 16, later studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, and was ordained into the Catholic church at around age 25. Around the same time he first became acquainted with a work by Descartes, which upon reading gave him heart palpitations and forced him to set it aside for a bit. In his mid-30s he composed his most famous work, The Search After Truth (1674-75), which aimed to combine key elements of Augustine’s and Descartes’ philosophy. Gaining prominence through a succession of publications, he became embroiled in a bitter dispute with a famous critic over some of the more controversial aspects of his views. This ultimately led to his Search being placed on the index of prohibited books. Nevertheless, he continued writing and revising his Search up to his death at age 77.

Much of Malebranche’s philosophy is driven by the problem with spirit-body dualism noted above. The central issue is that our minds are non-three-dimensional spirit, and our bodies are three-dimensional matter; it is an exceedingly difficult task to move information from one realm to the other. Descartes believed that his pineal gland theory solved the problem. Malebranche, though, offers a radically different solution: God performs the task by shuttling information back and forth between our spirit-minds and physical bodies. His theory comes in two parts: God giving our minds sensory information, and God initiating bodily movement.

Sensory Information: Viewing through God

Consider first the problem of how sensory information gets from my physical body into my spirit-mind. Again, imagine that a bee lands on my arm; somehow that sensory information moves from my arm, to my brain, and then jumps into my spirit-mind in the non-physical realm. In fact, according to Malebranche, it requires a virtual miracle to jump realms. All the sensory information in my body and brain is three-dimensional; for me to perceive it in my non-physical spirit-mind, it must get converted into a non-three-dimensional form. He explains the difficulty of this conversion process here, speculating about what it would take to turn a physical stone into a non-physical angel:

It is even more difficult to produce an angel [that is made of spirit] out of a [physical] stone, than to produce the angel out of nothing. This is because to make an angel out of a stone (so far as it can be done) the stone must be annihilated, and afterwards the angel created. But simply to create an angel, nothing is to be annihilated. If therefore the mind produces its ideas from the material impressions which the brain receives from objects, it must always do the same thing, or a thing as difficult, or even more difficult than if it created them. Since ideas are spiritual, they cannot be produced of material images, which have no proportion with them. [Search After Truth, 3.2.3]

Thus, the gulf between physical sensory information in our bodies and conscious experience of that information in our spirit-minds is so enormous, that only God can convert the one to the other.

How exactly does God convert information in our physical bodies to our spirit-minds? There are two steps to this divine process. First, God has within his own mind a master database of all possible perceptions that anyone in the world will ever experience, and all of this data is in non-three-dimensional form. For example, within this database there is the complete range of perceptual experiences that someone might have of Paris in the year 1700, or in the year 2000, or for that matter in the year 3000. It contains the complete range of perceptual experiences of city parks, underground caves, music concerts, prison cells, basements, closets, you name it: God has stored the perceptual information of all of those experiences. Second, at the appropriate time, God feeds the appropriate spirit-mental images into our spirit-minds. For example, if a bee is landing on my physical arm right now, God will inject into my spirit-mind the appropriate visual and tactile sensation of the bee. Malebranche describes this process here:

It is absolutely necessary that God should have in himself the ideas of all the beings he has created, since otherwise he could not have produced them. And, thus, he sees all those beings by considering the perfections which he includes in himself, and to which all beings are related. Moreover, it is necessary to know that God is very strictly united to our souls by his presence, so that we may say that he is the location of spirits, just as space is the location of bodies. These two things being supposed, it is certain that the mind may see what there is in God, which represents created beings, since that is very spiritual, very intelligible, and most present to the mind. Thus the mind may see in God the works of God, supposing God be willing to disclose to our minds what there is in God which represents those works. [Search after Truth, 3.2.6]

According to the above, for God to have created everything in the world, he needed to first have a complete understanding of those things—when a specific tree will grow on a given plot of land, when someone will chop it down, and when someone will carve it into a wooden chair. All of this information is stored in God’s database of possible perceptions. Not only does God use this as a blueprint for creating the world, he also feeds information from this database into our spirit-minds when the time is just right.

Bodily Movement: God causing all Physical Motion

The second part of Malebranche’s theory involves how God gets data from our minds in the spirit realm and converts that into motion in our physical bodies. Again, suppose that I want to get the bee off my arm by swatting it with my hand. My spirit-mind issues a command, for example, “raise my right hand”; God then detects this command in my mind, and activates a sequence of movements in my physical body, such as chemical activity in my brain and nerves, which lead to muscle contractions in my right hand. He writes,

It appears most certain to me that the will of spirits is not capable of moving the smallest body in the world. For it is evident there is no necessary connection between the will we have of moving our arms, and the motion of them. It is true, they are moved when we please, and by that means we are the natural cause of their motion. But natural causes are not true causes; they are only occasional ones, which act merely through the power and efficacy of God, as I have already explained. [Search after Truth, 6.2.3]

God, then, is the true cause of the motion in our bodies, while the physical activity itself is just the occasional or incidental cause. Accordingly, this aspect of Malebranche’s theory is called “occasionalism.”

Thus, God plays a decisive role in reading my thoughts and triggering the appropriate physical activity in my brain. However, according to Malebranche, God’s role in causal activity goes far beyond this. Every causal movement in the physical world is activated by God; we can call this stronger view “extreme occasionalism.” The simple reason for this more extreme view is that, according to Malebranche, all physical things are inert and completely incapable of moving themselves: “It is evident that all bodies, both great and small, have no power of moving themselves: a mountain, a house, a stone, a grain of sand” (ibid, 6.2.3). An infinite spirit, on the other hand, is capable of moving itself. Thus, if a physical thing is in motion, the cause of its motion must be some spirit which has that power—and God is the only spirit that does have it. He writes,

We have only two sorts of ideas, that of bodies, and that of spirits. Since we ought to speak only of those things which we conceive, we should reason according to these two ideas. Since therefore the idea we have of all bodies shows us that they cannot move themselves, it must be concluded that they are moved by spirits only. But when we examine the idea we have of all finite minds, we do not see the necessary connection between their wills and the motion of any body whatever it may be. On the contrary, we see that there is none, nor can there be any. From this we ought to conclude (if we will argue according to our knowledge) that as no body is able to move itself, so there is no created spirit that can be the true or principal cause of the motion of any body whatever. [Ibid]

More formally, the argument that Malebranche offers is this:

1. Only physical bodies and spirits exist.

2. Physical bodies cannot causally move things themselves.

3. Therefore, only spirits can causally move things.

4. Finite spirit-minds cannot causally move things.

5. God, who is infinitely perfect, can causally move things.

6. Therefore, only God can causally move things.

Thus, for whatever motion takes place in the world, God is the only being with the power to produce it and, accordingly, he is the true active cause of all motion, in spite of how things might initially appear.

God and Evil

A final influential component of Malebranche’s philosophy is his explanation of the problem of evil, that is, why an all good God would create a world with such imperfection and suffering. The world as it currently stands is far from perfect, and its imperfections have resulted in untold human misery. The suffering that we experience has two main sources: human-made causes and natural causes. According to Malebranche human-made suffering, such as crime and war, is solely the result of human free choice, and we have no one to blame for that but ourselves. He writes,

[God has not made] the disorder which has crept into it through the bad use we make of our freedom, for God has made no infidels. He only permits men to search after him. I understand this, though I do not know the reason for it. [Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion, 9.9]

The more serious problem concerns the naturally caused suffering that we experience, such as natural disasters, diseases, and physical deformities. This is solely the work of God and seems inconsistent with his goodness. How can we explain why God “who today covers the whole country with flowers and fruit, will ravage it tomorrow with frost and hail?” (ibid).

Malebranche’s answer is that naturally caused suffering is a byproduct of God’s efforts to create the most perfect world, using the fewest number of general laws required. There are two parts to his point. First, God’s attribute of wisdom inclines him to act in the most efficient way possible: “he cannot act uselessly” (ibid, 10). Given the kind of being God is, God has no choice but to act efficiently; thus, his guiding rule when creating things is to act with the greatest amount of simplicity and fruitfulness. To that end, God has fashioned a specific number of general laws of nature, which guide all natural events. Except for the occasional miracle that overrides the general laws, God sticks to this plan. The second part of Malebranche’s point is that the natural world, as it currently is, strikes the right balance between the simplicity of its general laws and the perfection in its operations. Sure, God could have made the natural world with fewer defects, but that would have required adding more and more natural laws, thus diminishing its simplicity:

If the defects of the universe, wherein we dwell, diminish this relation, the simplicity, fruitfulness and wisdom of its ways and laws which God follows increase it all the more. A world more perfect, but produced in ways less fruitful and less simple, would not bear to the same extent as ours the character of the divine attributes. This is why the world is full of infidels, monstrosities, disorder of all kinds. [Ibid, 9.11]

Thus, according to Malebranche, we must recognize that no one but God is responsible for the imperfections in the natural world that result in human suffering. At the same time, though, we must recognize that, even with its imperfections, the current world best reflects God’s grandeur insofar as it reflects God’s need to design things in the most efficient way.

C. SPINOZA

Another philosopher strongly influenced by Descartes is Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677). Born in Amsterdam of Portuguese Jewish parents, Spinoza was raised in the orthodox faith which included intense study of the Jewish Talmud. By the young age of 24, his critical nature came into conflict with Jewish beliefs. Unable to stop his expounding on these, and fearful that it would compound the fact that the Jews were not considered Amsterdam citizens at that time, the Synagogue authorities took the ultimate step and issued a condemnation of him such that his teaching should not be listened to, and no one was to be in contact with him. Ironically, at this point, he adapted the Latin form of his first name, Benedictus, meaning blessed. His parents having both died, Spinoza passed on his share of the family fortune to his brother and stepsister, refused prestigious teaching positions and  developed a career as a lens-grinder, making quality optical and magnifying lenses. For additional income, he sold stolen jewelry smuggled into Holland from France. After becoming entrenched in philosophy, Spinoza’s goal was to establish a clandestine philosophical sect and change the world. On publishing the Theologico-Politcal Treatise anonymously and finding it badly received, he was unable to publish any more of his works, but continued to write nonetheless. In time, inhaling glass dust from lens grinding led to a lung illness and ultimately his death. After this, by Spinoza’s own instructions, his friends collected his writings, edited them secretly, and quietly submitted them for publication, all the while cautious lest they be confiscated and destroyed. The plan succeeded, and the most important of these works is his Ethics, which he completed two years before his death.

The full title of Spinoza’s Ethics is “Ethics Demonstrated in a Geometrical Manner,” which signals from the start that the work’s methodology and writing style are unconventional. Spinoza believed that geometry offered the best approach to systematically proving things, insofar as it begins with basic definitions and axioms, then deduces more complex propositions from these. This is precisely the system that he uses in his Ethics, which on the whole makes the work feel more like a mathematics text than a philosophical treatise. Beneath the mathematical exterior, though, is an innovative theory about God, the cosmos, and human nature.

God as Nature: Substance Monism

In a nutshell, Spinoza holds the pantheistic view that God is identical to nature as a whole, and human beings are just little pieces of God. While pantheism is a hallmark of Eastern philosophy, it is a view of God that has largely been rejected by Western philosophers, two notable exceptions being the ancient Greek philosophers Parmenides and Plotinus. The traditional monotheistic conception of God is that he is an all powerful being that created the universe, but stands apart from everything he creates: the universe is not a piece of God himself. This traditional monotheistic position—sometimes called the transcendent view of God—is completely at odds with the pantheistic position that the entire universe is God. This is what Spinoza holds, and it is this aspect of his philosophy that got him into so much trouble with his Jewish community. To understand God, according to Spinoza, we must look to nature itself and attempt to understand it. The first philosophical task that he sets out for himself in the Ethics is to prove the pantheistic position that God is the totality of the natural world, or, using his terminology, “Besides God, no substance can be granted or conceived” (Ethics, 1.14). The specific argument that he offers for his position is this:

1. There cannot exist in the universe two or more substances having the same nature or attribute. (Proposition 5)

2. God (defined as a substance consisting of infinite attributes, of which each expresses eternal and infinite essentiality) necessarily exists. (Proposition 11)

3. Therefore, besides God, no substance can be granted or conceived. (Proposition 14)

Even for experienced philosophers the above argument is a challenge to grasp, but its key point is in the first premise: two substances cannot share the same attribute. That is, whatever attributes might exist, each one can only belong to one thing at a time. As an analogy, consider that the quality of being “The President of the United States” can only belong to one person at a time, and cannot be shared by two people. So too with the major attributes that we find in nature: they can only belong to one thing at a time. Premise 2 tells us that, by definition, God’s nature consists of every major attribute, and thus there are no such attributes left for other possible things. Since a thing can't exist if it doesn't have any attributes, then God is the only thing that exists. The upshot of the above argument, then, is that nothing in the universe exists apart from God, and everything that we see in the natural world is indeed part of God. Thus Spinoza writes “God is one, that is, only one substance can be granted in the universe, and that substance is absolutely infinite” (ibid, 1.14). The specific pantheistic position he is advocating here is sometimes called “substance monism”—that is, there is only one substance that exists.

Once proving that God is identical to nature as a whole, the next step is to explain precisely what God’s features consist of. Traditional monotheists would say that God’s principal attributes are supreme power, supreme knowledge and supreme goodness. Spinoza, though, does not go this route. First, according to Spinoza, God has an infinite number of major attributes, but humans can only conceive of two: consciousness and three-dimensionality. That is, God has a huge spirit-soul and a huge physical body, which are superimposed on each other. Second, God’s attributes take on different mini-features—or “modes” as he calls them—such as the forms of rocks, trees, and people. These things are all just special arrangements of three-dimensional stuff within God, or, in the case of humans, three-dimensional stuff plus consciousness. To help illustrate the distinction within God between major attributes and mini-features (“modes”), let’s consider the main attributes and mini-features of a green candy gummy bear. It has two major attributes: it is made of gooey stuff that gives it shape, and it is green, which gives it color. Aside from these two major attributes, it has several mini-features. Most noticeably, some of the gooey stuff is in the shape of a nose, or an ear, or an arm, or a leg. Think, then, of God and the universe as though it was a giant green gummy bear. It has two major attributes: greenness (consciousness) and gooey stuff (three-dimensionality). Further, it has several mini-features, such as an ear or a nose (rocks, trees, people), which are different arrangements of the two major attributes of greenness and gooey stuff (consciousness and three-dimensionality). Thus, everything that we see in the natural world is some type of mini-feature of God—me, you, the Empire State Building, Mount Everest. For Spinoza, “Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived” (ibid, 1.15).

Spinoza’s view of God’s two major attributes provides a convenient solution to the spirit-body problem initially raised by Descartes. Recall again the central problem: our minds are non-three-dimensional spirit, and our bodies are three-dimensional matter; it requires a virtual miracle to move information from one realm to the other. Spinoza’s solution is a theory that today we call parallelism: consciousness and three-dimensionality are part of the same divine substance, so spirit-minds and physical bodies automatically operate in parallel with each other. He writes,

Whatsoever can be perceived by the infinite intellect as constituting the essence of substance, belongs altogether only to one substance: consequently, substance thinking and substance extended are one and the same substance, comprehended now through one attribute, now through the other. So also, a mode of extension and the idea of that mode are one and the same thing, though expressed in two ways. [Ibid, 2.7]

Human beings are mini-features of God, and exemplify God’s two attributes of consciousness and three-dimensionality. As little pieces of God, our minds and bodies perform in perfect synchronization with each other, just as God’s major attributes of consciousness and three-dimensionality are perfectly coordinated with each other. So, when a bee lands on my arm and initiates a flow of sensory data in my three-dimensional body, my conscious mind automatically perceives the bee. My mind and my body are thus automatically synchronized, since God’s major attributes of consciousness and three-dimensionality are already synchronized:

Mind and body are one and the same thing, conceived first under the attribute of thought, secondly, under the attribute of extension. Thus it follows that the order or series of things is identical, whether nature be conceived under the one attribute or the other; consequently the order of states of activity and passivity in our body is simultaneous in nature with the order of states of activity and passivity in the mind. [Ibid, 3.2]

The information doesn’t need to jump from the physical realm to the spirit realm, as Descartes supposed. Rather, my body and mind are operating on parallel paths that are unified in God’s single substance.

Determinism and Human Bondage

At first glance we might think that Spinoza’s view of “God” is just a pantheistic version of the Judeo-Christian-Muslim God who answers our prayers and watches over us. Not so. His view of “God” is quite non-personal, and does not include anything more than what he takes to be the totality of the natural world. God is best approached through science and philosophy, not through religious worship and prayer. In fact, he uses the terms “God” and “nature” interchangeably. His naturalistic view of God-as-nature is most clearly seen in his position that God is completely determined—with no free will—and does not act with any purpose. This is precisely what we’d expect a scientist to say about the natural world. The universe has no free will, and everything within the universe happens mechanically; God-as-nature has no plan for our lives or the world in which we live. God does not watch over us, communicate with us, intervene on our behalf, or bend natural events based on our prayers. The mechanistic order of the universe is all that there is:

There is no need to show at length that nature has no particular goal in view, and that final causes are mere human figments. This, I think, is already evident enough . . . [from the fact] that everything in nature proceeds from a sort of necessity, and with the utmost perfection. [ibid, Appendix]

The reason why we erroneously think that God acts with a purpose is that we improperly impose willful purposes on natural events outside of us. The wind blows a tree over on my crazy neighbor’s house, and I think that God is punishing him. My farm fields have a good growing season, and I think that God has answered my prayers and is rewarding me. Since I cannot guide nature myself, I wrongly conclude that God willfully guides natural events for my benefit.

What about human beings: do we have free wills even if God doesn’t? No, Spinoza argues. Since humans are just little pieces of God-as-nature, our actions are also completely determined: “Nothing in nature is contingent, but all things are determined to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature” (ibid, 1:29). Again, we erroneously believe that we have free wills, even when the truth is that we don’t. The source of this erroneous belief, according to Spinoza, is that we are conscious only of the fact that we perform actions, but are completely unaware of our actions’ true underlying causes buried deep within our mental construction. I am conscious of the fact that I reach out and pick up an apple, but I have no consciousness at all of the mental machinery that went into me performing that action. I then mistake the consciousness of my action with free will, and thus wrongly assume that I picked up the apple from my own free will. He writes, “experience teaches us no less clearly than reason, that men believe themselves to be free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined” (ibid, 3.2). Spinoza gives several examples of humans who, in special circumstances, clearly lack free will, yet still believe they act freely:

Thus an infant believes that of its own free will it desires milk, an angry child believes that it freely desires vengeance, a timid child believes that it freely desires to run away. Further, a drunken man believes that he utters from the free decision of his mind words which, when he is sober, he would willingly have withheld. Thus, too, a delirious man, a talkative woman, a child, and others of like complexion, believe that they speak from the free decision of their mind, when they are in reality unable to restrain their impulse to talk. [Ethics, 3.2]

In each of the above cases, a person believes he is freely performing an action, yet from an impartial perspective we can see that the action is determined by purely mechanical psychological factors. Spinoza argues that if a falling stone had consciousness, it might similarly say that it’s falling from its own free will (“Letter to G.H. Schuller”). All of our actions, then, are completely determined, in spite of how it seems to us individually from our own perspectives.

For Spinoza, there is a sinister implication to the fact that human actions are determined by underlying psychological causes: our emotions can easily take control of our lives and force us to do things that go against good judgment. We have a fundamental human frailty that makes it difficult for us to restrain our emotions; he calls this frailty “bondage” since “when a man is a prey to his emotions, he is not his own master, but lies at the mercy of fortune: so much so, that he is often compelled, while seeing that which is better for him, to follow that which is worse” (ibid, 4, Preface). For this reason, people are more easily swayed by emotional appeals than by true reason, and even genuine knowledge itself has the negative effect of stirring up conflicts within our minds that lead to every kind of emotion. Thus if we have any hope of acting reasonably, “it is necessary to know the power and the infirmity of our nature, before we can determine what reason can do in restraining the emotions, and what is beyond her power” (ibid, 4.17). Spinoza is not saying that we can freely choose to restrain our emotions if we try hard enough. Rather, he says, if we understand how emotions take control of us, that knowledge itself might help mechanically alter our psychological framework and thus change how we perform our actions. Our actions will always be determined, and we will always be inclined to act emotionally. But the more knowledge that we have about our emotions, the more that this knowledge will automatically induce us to act more rationally.

Free Speech

Spinoza was a major advocate of free speech, and he had personal reasons for being so. Well aware of the controversial nature of his pantheistic view of God-as-nature, he knew that his views could be published during his life only if there was a political climate of tolerance towards free speech. He thus composed his Theologico-Politcal Treatise, containing perhaps the staunchest defense of free speech in its day, hoping it would help foster an environment of toleration. His general position is that governments should permit people to freely express their opinions, so long as those opinions do not lead to subversive and harmful actions. In fact, he argues, a society is more likely to rebel when its government restricts people to holding only a narrow and irrational set of beliefs.

He makes six specific claims in defense of free speech. First, he argues, it “it is impossible to deprive men of the liberty of saying what they think” (Theologico-Politcal Treatise, 20.71). We have both the power and natural right to be master of our own thoughts, and, try as we might, it is nearly impossible for us to stay silent on issues that concern us. Thus, the contents of our minds—our reasons and judgments—cannot be placed under the control of someone else. This freedom extends to speaking our minds, and not merely silently reflecting on controversial ideas within the privacy of our own heads. Even issues as touchy as proper and improper worship of God fall within the bounds of our liberty of expression. Second, free speech can be granted for everyone without injuring governmental authority, so long as people don’t act contrary to the existing laws. Spinoza recognizes that governmental authority is critical to maintaining a peaceful society, and we should not act in ways that undermine that authority. However, he argues, free expression does not undermine the government’s ability to keep law and order.

Third, free speech can be exercised without disrupting public peace, and any minor inconvenience that it creates can easily be remedied. Similar to the previous point, Spinoza concedes that, in the interests of social peace, we must give up our right to act as we choose. However, there is no benefit to social peace by giving up free expression. Fourth, people can exercise free speech without compromising their loyalty to the government. There is a fear that if people are allowed to speak their minds, then they would quickly become vocal critics of the government, and worse yet, express outright disloyalty. Spinoza contends that this worry is unrealistic. Fifth, laws are entirely useless when they aim to restrict the expression of purely speculative ideas. Those who love truth, virtue, and knowledge would simply break those laws while giving preference to their higher ideals. Finally, free speech is in fact necessary for the preservation of public peace, since death in the name of freedom is considered a glory:

when people try to take it away, and bring to trial, not only the acts which alone are capable of offending, but also the opinions of mankind, they only succeed in surrounding their victims with an appearance of martyrdom, and raise feelings of pity and revenge rather than of terror. [ibid, 20.77]

The job of rulers, then, should be confined to controlling how people behave, and not extend to what people think or say.

D. LEIBNIZ

The final major thinker in the continental rationalist tradition was German philosopher Gottfried Willhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). Born in Leipzig, Leibniz was entrenched in study at quite a young age, possibly intensified at age 6 by the death of his father--a professor of philosophy at the University of Leibzig--who inspired a love of learning and left a massive library, which became accessible to the young boy the next year. In the next few years, Leibniz taught himself Latin and Greek. By the time he entered the University of Leibzig at age 14, he had also mastered philosophy, theology and law. At the age of 20, he graduated with degrees in law and philosophy. Ironically, the University considered his shortfall to be mathematics, although he later developed calculus. When the University would not assure him a position teaching law after graduation, Leibniz took his thesis and submitted it to the University of Altdorf instead. In five months time, he had his doctorate in law. His first job was as an alchemist, a subject he knew nothing about. He spent most of the rest of his life working for two notable German families, mainly as a political diplomat. A charming and well-mannered man, Leibniz had friends and admirers throughout Europe, maintaining correspondence with more than 600 people. But Leibniz’s reputation was in decline in his last couple of years with disputes about his claim to inventing calculus independent of Newton. When he died at age 70, none of his fellow political diplomats attended his funeral. By the time of his death, he had just one book-length publication, The Theodicy, but shortly thereafter a steady stream of his unpublished letters and documents had made their way into print, finally giving him the reputation that he deserved.

Monads in an Infinitely Divisible Plenum

We’ve seen that one of the characteristics of rationalistic philosophy is the use of deductive arguments that are modeled after mathematical proofs. While Leibniz did not push this approach to the extreme that Spinoza did, he still shared Descartes’ drive for certainty. Leibniz writes, “Although I am one of those who have done much work on mathematics, I have constantly meditated on philosophy from my youth up, for it has always seemed to me that in philosophy there was a way of establishing something solid by means of clear proofs” (New System). Another distinguishing feature of rationalist philosophers during the 17th century is that they constructed elaborate metaphysical systems in their efforts to solve longstanding philosophical puzzles. Leibniz has the most elaborate of these. However, underlying its intricacy, his philosophical system is driven by one key assumption: God maximizes his creative abilities. Everything God performs as creator is done in the most perfect, desirable, unified, and orderly way possible. This is evident in creation’s ultra-high level of structural complexity and also in its perfect goodness. He writes,

God who possesses supreme and infinite wisdom acts in the most perfect manner not only metaphysically, but also from the moral standpoint. And with respect to ourselves it can be said that the more we are enlightened and informed in regard to the works of God the more will we be disposed to find them excellent and conforming entirely to that which we might desire. [Discourse, 1]

Sometimes when God maximizes his creative abilities, he opts for the most complex arrangement of things, which allows him to actualize his creative powers most fully. And, since God is infinitely powerful, he opts to create the most infinitely complex world that he can. In some sense, then, God does not follow Ockham’s razor and its principle of simplicity, which would constrain his activities.

In developing his system, Leibniz returns to a pair of issues that preoccupied ancient Greek philosophers 2000 years earlier: whether there is any vacuum of empty space, and whether matter is infinitely divisible. Atomists argued that there is indeed empty space, and matter is not infinitely divisible. The tiniest particles of matter – atoms – cannot be divided into anything smaller, and they exist within a vacuum of empty space. By contrast, Anaxagoras took the opposite position on both issues. First, Anaxagoras held that there is no vacuum of empty space, and thus all area within the cosmos is packed full of material stuff. That is, there is a plenum—the contrary of a vacuum. Second, all material stuff within the plenum is infinitely divisible: it can be divided in half again and again, on to infinity. Leibniz sides with Anaxagoras on both issues: the universe is an infinitely divisible plenum. Leibniz’s main argument in defense of the plenum is based on the view that God maximizes his creative abilities: the more matter there is in the universe, the better this reflects God’s creativity:

I lay it down as a principle, that every perfection which God could impart to things without derogating from their other perfections, has actually been imparted to them. Now let us fancy a space wholly empty. God could have placed some matter in it, without derogating in any respect from all other things. Therefore he has actually placed some matter in that space. Therefore, there is no space wholly empty. Therefore all is full. [Fourth Letter to Clarke]

The same rationale applies to particles of matter: the more the better; and in fact, the very best scenario would be a universe filled with an infinite number of infinitely small substances that are incapable of being divided at all. He writes, “each portion of matter is not only infinitely divisible, as the ancients recognized, but is also actually subdivided without limit, each part into further parts” (Monadology, 65). These infinitely tiny, indivisible substances he calls monads.

Leibniz’ view of monads faces an immediate obstacle: if monads themselves are infinitely tiny and each one takes up no space, how can they jointly unite to make a three-dimensional chunk of matter? Leibniz’s answer is that monads are sort of like mathematical points. Suppose that I hold an apple in my hand; within that spherical area there are an infinite number of mathematical points. While each point itself is infinitely small and does not itself take up any space, all combined they account for the complete spherical area of the apple. While monads are not exactly the same thing as mathematical points, they are what he calls metaphysical points, and can be understood in a similar way. Each monad is a non-three-dimensional spirit-like substance, which, like mathematical points, have infinitely tiny exactness within a three-dimensional area. Unlike mathematical points, however, monads are real things and have actual substance:

Physical points are indivisible in appearance only: mathematical points are exact, but they are nothing but modalities. It is only metaphysical points, or points of substance (constituted by forms or souls), which are both exact and real; and without them there would be nothing real, since without true unities there would be no plurality. [The New System]

Leibniz draws on another conception from ancient Greek philosophy to help explain how monads—as metaphysical points—have a reality. They are, he says, “substantial forms.” That is, they are realities like Plato’s forms that have a spirit-like existence, yet are not composed of three-dimensional material stuff. However, three-dimensional material things, like an apple, emerge from the collective unity of the monads within a given area of space.

Perception, Appetite, and Mirroring in Monads

Granted, then, that the three-dimensional world of material stuff is composed of infinitely tiny monads. How do monads form things? Leibniz’s answer is that monads have four special internal abilities that enable them to congeal together and take on the shape of rocks, trees, people, and everything else that we see. Those three abilities are perception, appetite, and mirroring. Consider first the ability of perception: monads have the ability to perceive what other monads are doing around them. It’s not a conscious perception, such was when I or my cat are aware of a tree limb falling in the yard. Instead, it’s more like how an electronic motion detector might sense things around it without having the ability to mentally reflect on it. He calls this minimal sensory capacity “minute perception,” and notes that animals have this as well: “We might perhaps add that brutes have perception, and that it is not necessary that they should have thought, that is to say, should have reflection or anything that can be the object of reflection” (New Essays, 2.9).

The second ability of monads is appetite. When perceiving what other monads are like around them, they form a desire to change and shape themselves to fit into the crowd. For example, if one monad perceives that those around it are taking on the form of a rock, it will then assume that appearance as well. The monad’s ability to transform itself in many ways resembles what biologists now tell us about how stem cells work in humans and animals. When stem cells are placed next to, say, a kidney, they sense their new location and transform into a kidney cell, thus becoming part of the kidney.

The third ability of monads is to mirror the entire universe. Each monad has embedded within it the master plan of everything that takes place in the universe. The source of this master plan is the intimate connection that each monad has to those surrounding them; as every monad is surrounded on all sides by other monads, there is a direct connection between monads from one end of the universe to the other. He writes,

Because the world is a plenum, everything is connected and each body acts upon every other body, more or less according to the distance, and by reaction is itself affected thereby; it follows that each monad is a mirror, living or endowed with internal activity, representative according to its point of view of the universe, and as regulated as the universe itself. [“Principles of Nature and Grace,” 3]

To borrow another analogy from contemporary biology, it is as though each monad contains the DNA instructions for the layout of the entire universe.

Thus, through perception, appetite, and mirroring, each monad knows where it is, what its neighbors are doing, and what it should do in order to realize the master plan of the universe. And, as the events in the universe change, the monads themselves will undergo the appropriate change in appearance to bring this about.

Dominant Monad Souls and Parallalism

According to Leibniz, the monads that form living things like plants and animals operate slightly differently than those that form non-living things like rocks. At the heart of all living things, he argues, is a dominant monad soul that rules over surrounding monads and unifies them a localized organic structure. He writes,

It is evident, then, that every living body has a dominating entelechy, which in animals is the soul. The parts, however, of this living body are full of other living beings, plants and animals, which, in turn, have each one its entelechy or dominating soul. [“Monadology,” 70]

For example, at the very center of an apple is a dominant monad that signals to surrounding ones that they must take the shape of an apple. Thus, by unifying together surrounding monads, it transforms them into one machine and directs their operations. As time progresses and the apple slowly rots, each monad making up the apple will be going through a change in appetite, thereby progressively displaying a rotten appearance. When we move on to animals, there is a dominant monad which can do more than simply perceive: it has sentience, which means that it can feel, be aware of things, and have memory. This monad is the animal’s soul.

Moving on further to human beings, as with animals, the dominant monad within me arranges the rest of the monads within me to form my body, and it gives me sentience. Added to this, though, the dominant monad in me contains the added ability to reason; this gives me my mind, or “rational soul.” Like Descartes and the other rationalists, Leibniz is a spirit-body dualist: human beings are composed of both a physical body and a non-physical soul. For Leibniz, my nonphysical soul is the dominant monad within me that gives me sentience and rationality; my physical body, by contrast, is composed of non-dominant monads, which band together under the direction of my dominant monad soul. As a spirit-body dualist, Leibniz faces the same problem as did the other rationalists. That is, since our minds are non-three-dimensional spirit, and our bodies are three-dimensional matter, how does sensory information move back and forth between the spirit and physical realms? Leibniz solves the problem with his own unique version of parallelism.

As we’ve seen with Spinoza, parallelism is the theory that a person’s physical body and spirit-mind exist in completely separate realms, but events in each realm magically unfold in perfect synchronization with each other; thus, there is no need for my physical body and spirit-mind to directly communicate and interact with each other. In Spinoza’s case, the two realms are synchronized since they are both part of God’s pantheistic identity. Leibniz is no pantheist, though, and his rationale is different: the mind-spirit and body operate in perfect synchronization like two clocks that are in perfect agreement; they are both part of God’s perfect master plan and thus stay in synchronization. He writes,

Imagine two clocks or watches which agree perfectly . . . . [as when we] construct these two clocks with so much art and accuracy as to assure their future agreement. Put now the soul and the body in place of these two clocks; their agreement . . . . [will be best explained by] the way of pre-established harmony. From the beginning God has made each of these two substances of such a nature that merely by following its own peculiar laws, received with its being, it nevertheless accords with the other. It is just as if there were a mutual influence or as if God always put his hand thereto in addition to his general cooperation. [“The New System,” Postscript, 1696]

While it appears that my body and soul are interacting with each other—shuttling sensory information back and forth, they are not. Instead, they are operating in perfect synchronization where “the soul follows its own laws, and the body likewise follows its own laws” (“Monadology,” 78). Suppose that a bee lands on my arm and I swat it away. According to Leibniz, the laws of nature that govern the physical realm bring it about that a physical bee lands on my physical arm, and my physical hand swats it off. At the same time, though, laws governing the spirit-realm bring it about that I mentally perceive the sensation of a bee, and then make a willful decision to swat it off my arm. The laws the two realms and everything that unfolds in each are in perfect synchronization because God has designed the world that way as part of his great master plan – or “pre-established harmony” as Leibniz calls it.

Evil and the Best of All Possible Worlds

The most famous part of Leibniz’s philosophy is that which deals with the problem of evil, that is, the potential conflict between human suffering on the one hand and God’s goodness on the other. Consider, for example, the immeasurable suffering caused by Hitler in his efforts to exterminate the Jews and dominate the world. If God is good, why would he have allowed this to happen? In a nutshell, Leibniz’s solution is that God has created the best possible world, and even the evils that we see are so integrated into God’s larger master plan, that, on balance, they actually contribute to making the world a better place than it would otherwise be.

The first step in this solution is to show that God creates only the best possible world. Imagine that at the outset of creation God had before him the blueprints of countless possible worlds that he might create. He examines them one at a time to see which is the best and deserving of creating. One possible world, for example, consists of only one brick that floats around in outer space. Another possible world has stars and planets, just like ours, but contains no living things. Yet another is like the previous one but includes plants and animals; however, it contains no human beings. And then there are all the possible worlds that contain humans. In some of these worlds Hitler exists, and in others he doesn’t. God then makes his choice: his wisdom tells him which is the best of these possible worlds, his goodness has him choose it, and his power has him create it. He writes,

Now as there are an infinity of possible universes in the ideas of God, and but only one of them can exist, there must be a sufficient reason for the choice of God which determines him to select one rather than another.

And this reason is to be found only in the fitness or in the degree of perfection which these worlds possess, each possible thing having the right to claim existence in proportion to the perfection which it involves.

This is the cause for the existence of the greatest good; namely, that the wisdom of God permits him to know it, his goodness causes him to choose it, and his power enables him to produce it. [“Monadology,” 53-55]

According to the above, each possible world contains a specific degree of perfection, and God simply singles out the one that has the most.

The second step in Leibniz’s solution is to understand how the evil that exists in this most perfect world is naturally balanced through punishment. Just as there is a pre-existing harmony between realms of the body and soul, there is a similar harmony between the natural world and moral world. Thus, if I commit some evil, I can count on being punished through some natural phenomenon, such as a disease or natural disaster. Similarly, if I perform a good act, I can count on nature rewarding me, such as through good health or good weather. He writes,

We can say also that God, the Architect, satisfies in all respects God the Law Giver, that therefore sins will bring their own penalty with them through the order of nature, and because of the very structure of things, mechanical though it is. And in the same way the good actions will attain their rewards in mechanical way through their relation to bodies, although this cannot and ought not always to take place without delay. [Ibid, 89]

Thus, whenever I experience suffering, my first recourse is to consider whether I’ve committed some evil for which I am being punished.

The third step in Leibniz solution is to understand how enormous evils, such as those perpetrated by Hitler, are part of God’s master plan in this best of all possible worlds. If God is all powerful, it seems that it was within his ability to create a world without such enormous evils. Leibniz responds with a classic answer given by Augustine and others, that is, sometimes evil is necessary to bring about a greater good:

The best course is not always that one which tends towards avoiding evil, since it is possible that the evil may be accompanied by a greater good. For example, the general of an army will prefer a great victory with a slight wound to a state of affairs without wound and without victory. [Theodicy, Summary]

For example, while the fall of Adam brought about enormous evil, it also had the positive benefit of leading to the incarnation of God through Jesus, which “gave to the universe something nobler than anything there would otherwise have been” (ibid). Further, he argues, a world with free creatures who commit evil is better than a world without free creatures. Human free choice is clearly the ultimate source of all evil and suffering, and it would certainly be within God’s power to intervene to stop the evil. For example, God could have dropped a bolder on Hitler’s head when Hitler decided to give up being an artist and go into politics instead. However, Leibniz argues, there is no moral requirement for God to intervene in such dramatic ways, when he can counterbalance such evil through more natural means:

It was consistent with order and the general good for God to grant to certain of his creatures the opportunity to exercise their freedom, even when he foresaw that they would turn to evil: for God could easily correct the evil, and it was not fitting that in order to prevent sin he should always act in an extraordinary way. [Ibid]

Thus, a world with evil may be better than a world without evil. Ultimately, Leibniz argues, we may never have an entirely satisfying answer since we are unable to comprehend the totality of God’s plan, and, thus, we need to simply trust that this is the best of all possible worlds, in spite of how it might appear to us at the moment.

Questions for Review

Please answer all of the following questions for review.

1. What are Descartes four rules of scientific method?

2. What is Descartes’ evil genius hypotheses, and what kind of beliefs does that hypothesis call into question?

3. What is Descartes’ point when he says “I think, therefore I am”?

4. According to Descartes, what is the function of clarity and distinctness mechanism?

5. According to Descartes, how does sensory information in my physical body interact with my conscious non-physical spirit-mind?

6. According to Malebranche’s theory of viewing all things in God, how do our spirit-minds receive sensory data about physical world?

7. According to Malebranche’s theory of occasionalism, how do conscious decisions in our spirit-minds cause physical actions in our bodies?

8. What is Malebranche’s view of extreme occasionalism?

9. What is Malebranche’s solution to the problem of evil, particularly regarding suffering caused through nature?

10. According to Spinoza, what are the two main attributes of God?

11. According to Spinoza’s theory of parallelism, how is sensory information in our physical bodies coordinated with conscious through in our spirit-minds?

12. Why according to Spinoza, do we wrongly assume that humans have free will?

13. What is Spinoza’s general view on the subject of free speech?

14. According to Leibniz, what are the three main abilities of monads?

15. According to Leibniz’s theory of parallelism, how is sensory information in our physical bodies coordinated with conscious through in our spirit-minds?

16. What is Leibniz solution to the problem of evil?

Questions for Analysis

Please select only one question for analysis from those below and answer it.

1. Descartes’ system of knowledge is built upon the foundational assertion of one’s existence. From that he deduces things like God’s existence, the reliability of the clarity and distinctness mechanism, and the existence of the external world. What is the weakest link in the chain of truths that he deducts, and why?

2. Malebranche and Leibniz both offered solutions to the problem of evil; which of these has the better solution and why?

3. Compare Spinoza’s notion of God as nature with the traditional notion of the theistic God (i.e., an all powerful, all knowing, all good God who is conscious and exists independently of the created world).

4. Explain Spinoza argument that humans have no free will and say whether or not you agree.

5. Leibniz argues that monads to not take up space, yet they cumulatively create three dimensional space. Explain whether or not this is possible.

6. All four philosophers in this chapter give God a prominent role in their systems. Which of these conceptions of God best fits with the traditional notion of the theistic God, and why?

7. All four philosophers in this chapter offered solutions to the mind-body problem, that is, how sensory information moves back and forth between our physical bodies and our spirit-minds. Do any of these seem more plausible than others? If none are plausible, can you think of a better solution?

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CHAPTER 8: BRITISH EMPIRICISM

A. Locke

No Innate Ideas

Simple and Complex Ideas

Primary and Secondary Qualities

Natural Rights and Revolution

B. Berkeley

Idealism: No Materials Objects

Arguments against Material Objects

God and Evil

C. Hume

Origin and Association of Ideas

Personal Identity and Causality

Belief in Miracles

Morality: Reason vs. Emotion

Radical Skepticism and Natural Belief

Questions for Reflection

1. Our five senses clearly give us a lot of information. Is there any knowledge that we obtain without our five senses?

2. Consider the qualities of an apple, and explain which of these belong to the apple itself, and which exist only in our minds.

3. When you look at an object, such as a chair, you typically assume that there really exists a “chair-shaped thing” that is the source of your perceptions of it. What is your evidence that a physical “chair-shaped thing” actually exists?

4. You typically assume that your personal identity remains unified and intact as time passes from one moment to the next. Do you really have a unified conscious experience of yourself from one moment to the next? If so, try to describe it.

5. Some philosophers think that morality involves a rational judgment about objective moral truths, and others think that moral judgments are emotional reactions that we have when we observe people act in certain ways. Does one of these views seem more correct than the other?

During the 17th and 18th centuries, Britain certainly had its fair share of rationalist philosophers, particularly of the Platonist variety. However, Britain’s philosophy was soon dominated by an alternative and more scientific view that knowledge is gained primarily or mainly through the five senses. We see this presumption in Francis Bacon’s statement that in our efforts to understand nature we can “can act and understand no further than [we have] . . .  observed in either the operation or the contemplation of the method and order of nature” (New Organon, 1.1). Direct experience is foundational for obtaining knowledge, and this position is known as empiricism. During the first half of the 18th century, three great philosophers—Locke, Berkeley and Hume—argued for this approach, thus forming a philosophical movement known as British empiricism. Contrary to the 17th century rationalist philosophers in Continental Europe, these British empiricists largely denied the role of innate ideas and deduction in the quest for knowledge. Instead, they argued, knowledge comes from sensory experience and inductive reasoning.

A. LOCKE

The originator of British empiricism was John Locke (1632–1704), who was born into a Puritan family near Bristol, England, his father being an attorney and government official. He studied at Oxford University and later worked there in various positions, where he took particular interest in the writings of Descartes and other modern thinkers. The direction of Locke’s life shifted dramatically when he accepted employment as the household physician of a prominent British politician who founded the radical Whig party, which opposed the absolute rule of the British monarchy. As public opposition to the King was on the increase during this period, Locke’s association with the Whigs forced him to flee to the Netherlands for his safety. He returned home after the King was overthrown in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and subsequently published a steady stream of books that he had been working on for some time. The books were instant sensations, and his reputation skyrocketed, rivaling that of Newton. He died at age 72, never having married or produced children. Locke wrote on a range of subjects, including politics, religion, economics and education. His fame as a philosopher, though, rests on his work in two distinct areas. First, as a metaphysical philosopher he expounded the empiricist position that there are no innate ideas and all knowledge comes from experience. He sets this out in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689). Second, as a political philosopher he developed the notion of natural rights in his Two Treatises of Government (1690). We will look at each of these.

No Innate Ideas

Throughout the history of philosophy it was common to hold that human beings are born with a special set of ideas—innate ideas—that guide us in our quest for truth and certainty. In ancient times Plato held that we have an inborn knowledge of the perfect Forms of justice, piety, goodness, and countless others. In the Renaissance John Calvin held that we are all born with a sense of God. Descartes, the leading Continental rationalist, held that we have an innate idea of ourselves and of infinite perfection. When looking at this long history of belief in innate ideas, Locke said that enough was enough, and he launched a powerful attack on the very concept. For Locke, we simply have no innate ideas, and all notions that we have come to us through experience. It’s important to recognize that Locke was not critical of other types of innate human characteristics, such as coughing or blinking, which are inborn muscle reflexes. His attack focuses exclusively on the ideas that we are born with. The movie “Close Encounters of a Third Kind” illustrates the features of an innate idea. The lead character has an idea of a mountain embedded in his mind by some aliens from outer space. The idea obsesses him to the point that one evening at the supper table he scoops a pile of mashed potatoes onto his plate and then shapes it into the image he has of the mountain.

While Locke’s attack on innate ideas certainly applies to the views of Descartes and other Continental rationalists, they were not his immediate target. Instead, according to Locke, there are two types of innate ideas that philosophers commonly allege: speculative ones and practical ones. Good examples of speculative innate ideas, he argues, are the foundational logical concepts that are sometimes dubbed “laws of thought” and associated with Aristotle. Chief among these is the law of identity which simply states that an object is the same as itself, or, in more formal terms, A=A. The chair in front of me is identical to the chair in front of me. The tree in the yard is identical to the tree in the yard. While this seems to be a painfully obvious truth, it does play an important role in logical systems. Next, there is the law of non-contradiction, which Aristotle himself states as follows: “It is impossible for the same thing to belong and not to belong at the same time to the same thing and in the same respect” (Metaphysics, 4.3). The point can be stated more formally as “not (P and not P)”, that is, it is not the case that P and its opposite not-P obtain at the same time. It is impossible for the chair in front of me to exist and not exist at the same time. It is impossible for the apple on the table to be completely red and not completely red at the same time.

The second type of alleged innate idea involves practical ones, that is, ideas that regulate moral behavioral practices. Examples of these, according to Locke, are the famous “five common notions” of religion and morality proposed by British philosopher Edward Herbert (1583-1648). They are (1) There exists a supreme God, (2) We should worship God, (3) The best form of worship is proper moral behavior, (4) We should repent for our immoral conduct, (5) We will be rewarded or punished in the afterlife for our conduct on earth. Herbert argued that all humans have an inborn knowledge of these truths and we find these truths exhibited in virtually all religions around the world.

Locke has two main arguments against the innateness of ideas, both speculative and practical. First, he argues, people in fact do not universally hold to these ideas, contrary to what defenders of innate ideas typically claim. This is particularly obvious with the laws of thought, which children and mentally challenged people have no conception of whatsoever:

If therefore children and idiots have souls, have minds, with those impressions upon them, they must unavoidably perceive them, and necessarily know and assent to these truths. Which since they do not, it is evident that there are no such impressions. For if they are not notions naturally imprinted, how can they be innate? and if they are notions imprinted, how can they be unknown? To say a notion is imprinted on the mind, and yet at the same time to say, that the mind is ignorant of it, and never yet took notice of it, is to make this impression nothing. [Essay, 1.2.12]

Locke’s second argument is that it makes no sense to hold that such ideas lie dormant within us, and then blossom when we reach the right age, contrary to what defenders of innate ideas commonly claim. Again, particularly with the laws of thought, children reason perfectly well regarding identity and non-contradiction, yet at the same time are completely incapable of articulating those specific ideas. If these ideas really were innate, then children should be able to verbally express them. As Locke states it, “How many instances of the use of reason may we observe in children, a long time before they have any knowledge of this maxim, ‘That it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be?’” (ibid). Also, it is obvious that may adults have reached the so-called age of reason, such as the illiterate and those from primitive societies, and yet lack these ideas. These people “pass many years, even of their rational age, without ever thinking on this and the like general propositions.”

Simple and Complex Ideas

According to Locke, then, we should completely reject the theory of innate ideas and instead look for the true source of our ideas within human experience. His basic position, which encapsulates the entire empiricist approach, is that the mind is from birth a blank slate (or sheet of “white paper” in his words), which gets filled with information through experience. However, the process by which we form our ideas through experience has two main steps. We first acquire simple ideas through experience, and then recombine those simple ideas in different ways to create more complex ideas.

Simple ideas are the building blocks from which all other ideas are formed, and, for Locke, there are two main sources of simple ideas. The first and most obvious source is that they come from sensation, specifically our five senses which give us perceptions of colors, tastes, smells, tactile solidity. The color of blue, the taste of sweetness, the tactile sensation of smoothness, the sound of a high-pitched squeak are all basic sensory experiences that are building bocks for our ideas about the external world. Second, there are simple ideas that come to us through reflecting on our mental processes; these are ideas of reflection, or “introspection” as we now call them. I can shut my eyes and think about how my mind operates: how I perceive things through my senses, how I think about problems, how I doubt questionable ideas, how I believe reasonable ideas, how I will to perform actions. According to Locke, “This source of ideas every man has wholly in himself; and though it be not sense, as having nothing to do with external objects, yet it is very like it, and might properly enough be called internal sense” (ibid, 2.1.3).

According to Locke, some of our simple ideas come solely through sensation without any introspective reflection, such as our perceptions of colors, sounds and smells. Others come solely through introspective reflection, such as our notions of perceptions of the mental acts of thinking and willing. Nothing that we perceive through our five senses will give us ideas of these. Then there is an especially interesting group of simple ideas that we can get either through sensation or introspective reflection. Pleasure and pain is a good example. I can feel physical pain through my senses as when a candle flame burns me; but I can also experience emotional pain in my mind when a loved one dies. Another example is the notion of causal force, or “power” as 18th century philosophers called it. Through my senses, I see a volcano spew out lava with great causal force. But through introspective reflection I can also experience causal force when I reflect on my own willful decisions, such as when I will to conjure up in my mind the idea of a rock, a tree or a unicorn. My will itself is a causal power. Other ideas that we get through both sensation and reflection are existence, unity, and succession.

For Locke, there are countless simple perceptions that flood into our minds through sensation and reflection, in fact so many that we don’t even have names for most of them. But as we store these raw simple notions in our memories, our minds mechanically shuffle them around and create new ones which he calls complex ideas. There are three specific mental processes that form complex ideas. First, some are the result of simply combining together more simple ideas. For example, I can get a complex idea of an apple by assembling the simple ideas of roundness, redness, sweetness, and moistness. Second, some complex ideas involve relations that we get from comparing two things, such as the notions of “larger” and “smaller” that I get when comparing two apples of different sizes. Third, there are complex ideas that result from the mental process of abstraction, such as when I arrive at the abstract notion of “roundness” by looking at an apple and stripping away all of its attributes except for its being round. As the mind then churns out complex ideas from simple ones, the complex ideas will be of two types: ideas of substances and ideas of modes. Ideas of substances are those of individual objects such as such as rocks, trees, houses, animals, people and God. Ideas of modes are attributes of those objects that cannot exist independently of them, such as an apple’s attributes of being round, crunchy and moist.

Primary and Secondary Qualities

One of Locke’s philosophical claims to fame is his development of the distinction between primary and secondary qualities of objects. The issue involves a distinction between qualities of objects that actually belong to the object itself, and qualities of objects that we impose on them. Suppose, for example, that I made a list of the qualities that I perceive in an apple. It has a round shape, red surface, smooth texture, and a sweet taste. It also has a particular size and weight. Some of these qualities are part of the object itself, and others are qualities that I am imposing on the apple. For Locke, a primary quality is an attribute of that is inseparable for a physical body, and includes solidity, shape, motion, number. These are components that an object retains, regardless of how we might modify the object, such as by cutting it into pieces. He illustrates this by considering changes that we might impose on a grain of wheat:

Take a grain of wheat, divide it into two parts; each part has still solidity, extension, figure, and mobility: divide it again, and it retains still the same qualities; and so divide it on, till the parts become insensible; they must retain still each of them all those qualities. For division (which is all that a mill, or pestle, or any other body, does upon another, in reducing it to insensible parts) can never take away either solidity, extension, figure, or mobility from any body, but only makes two or more distinct separate masses of matter, of that which was but one before; all which distinct masses, reckoned as so many distinct bodies, after division, make a certain number. [Ibid, 2.8.9]

No matter how much we grind down the grain of wheat, the parts still retain the qualities of solidity and shape which were inherent in the original grain.

In contrast with primary qualities, there are also secondary qualities that are spectator-dependent: we impose the attributes onto objects, and these include colors, sounds, and tastes. For example, there is something in the apple that makes it appear red to me, but the redness itself does not reside within the apple but instead is a function of my sense organs and biology. The phenomenon of colorblindness is ample proof of this: while the structure of the apple itself might trigger the perception of redness in my mind, I need to have the appropriately designed eyes to have that perception. So too with other qualities of the apple like taste and smell: the specific sensations of taste and smell directly depend upon the construction of my tongue and nose.

Locke adds there is a third type of quality of objects—tertiary qualities—which involves the power that an object has to produce new ideas or sensations in us. For example, the mere sight of an apple may produce a feeling of hunger within me. Being near a fire may produce a feeling of warmth within me. Perhaps the main difference between secondary and tertiary qualities is that with secondary ones we often improperly mistake them for primary attributes of the objects themselves. For example, I might just assume that an apple’s redness is actually part of the apple when, upon reflection, I would see that it clearly isn’t. With tertiary qualities, though, we are less apt to make this mistake; for example, I would never presume that my feeling of hunger resides in the apple itself. Aesthetic feelings, such as the sense of beauty I get when viewing a landscape, might also be included among tertiary qualities.

Natural Rights and Revolution

Locke’s empiricist views immediately impacted the direction of philosophy for generations to come, particularly in Great Britain. As influential as Locke was in this regard, however, his impact was even greater with his political philosophy. Even today, people around the world are familiar with the idea that the function of governments is to protect our freedoms, and citizens are morally entitled to overthrow governments when they fail to perform that task. This was Locke’s great political contribution to the civilized world. Prior to Locke, the standard view of political authority was a position called the “divine right of kings.” That is, political rulers are put in power by God, and, as God’s representatives on earth, we can never challenge their authority over us. Locke was strongly opposed to this notion, in part because of his personal experience in England where the people recently overthrew their despotic king. Locke supported the overthrow and composed his Two Treatises of Government (1690) to justify rebellion against bad rulers.

The starting point for Locke’s theory is the state of nature, that is, the condition that humans were in prior to the creation of societies and governments. Thomas Hobbes, we’ve seen, believed that the state of nature is a place of moral chaos, where might makes right, and everyone is perpetually at war with everyone else to gain the upper hand. Locke, though, is a little more optimistic than Hobbes. Yes, the state of nature sometimes can be brutal, but there still are moral rules that everyone must follow. For Locke, everyone is born with fundamental God-given rights and, even without governments, we have a moral obligation to respect each other’s rights. The four main natural rights are those of life, health, liberty and possessions:

The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. [Two Treatises, 2.6]

What if someone does violate my rights by mugging me and taking my wallet, for example? Locke’s answer is that I am entitled to punish the mugger: “every one has a right to punish the transgressors of that law to such a degree, as may hinder its violation” (ibid, 2.7). By violating my rights, the mugger has thereby forfeited all of his own rights, including his right to life, and at that point I am fully entitled to hunt him down, punish him, and even kill him as I see fit. The reason for such a harsh reprisal is that, when the mugger attacks me he puts me in a position where I’m fully under his control, and, even if he doesn’t kill me, I have every reason to assume that he might. The mugger has thus declared war on me and, at that point, I have the right to punish him by any means whatsoever.

While in the state of nature, vigilante justice is the only recourse we have to retaliate against attackers. Once we create a civil society with a government, however, all that changes. Following Hobbes, Locke argues that we create societies by forming a social contract with each other: we agree to mutually set aside our hostilities in the name of preserving peace. And, to assure that we all follow the rules, we set up a government that has the authority to punish anyone who breaks the rules and thereby violates our basic rights. The whole point of establishing societies and governments to begin with is to preserve our natural rights, particularly, Locke argues, our right to possessions:

The reason why men enter into society, is the preservation of their property. And the end why they choose and authorize a legislative, is, that there may be laws made, and rules set, as guards and fences to the properties of all the members of the society, to limit the power, and moderate the dominion, of every part and member of the society. [ibid, 222]

What happens, though, when governments fail at their assigned task, and, rather than protecting our rights they undermine them? Locke specifically has in mind a situation in which the government unjustly takes people’s property and reduces them to “slavery under arbitrary power” (ibid, 222). His answer is that we are thrown back into a state of war, this time a war with our government. By violating our rights, the government has forfeited its authority over us, and we are fully entitled to remove the offending government and set up a better one:

by this breach of trust they forfeit the power the people had put into their hands for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the people, who have a right to resume their original liberty, and, by the establishment of a new legislative, (such as they shall think fit) provide for their own safety and security, which is the end for which they are in society. [Ibid, 222]

As necessary as governments are for assuring that individual citizens respect each others’ rights, the government itself has a responsibility to uphold its part of the social contract; if it fails in that regard, society is entitled to do what’s necessary to remove it—even start a full-fledged revolution. If it comes to that, according to Locke, the blame lies with the government, not with the revolutionaries.

Locke’s justification for revolution was quite radical in his time, especially when other philosophers were arguing that governments have absolute authority over citizens through a divine right of kings, and can never be overthrown. Within a matter of decades, Locke’s rationale was adopted by revolutionary movements in both America and France, as we see specifically in this famous opening to the U.S. Declaration of Independence, penned by Thomas Jefferson:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.—That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

Locke, we’ve seen, stressed that revolution is justified particularly when governments violate our property rights. Jefferson, though, deemphasizes our property rights and implies that the governmental violation of any of our fundamental natural rights may justify revolution.

B. BERKELEY

The second major figure in British Empiricism was George Berkeley (1685-1753). Born into a moderately wealthy family near Kilkenny, Ireland, his father was a customs officer who migrated there from England. Berkeley received his B.A. and M.A. degrees from Trinity College, Dublin, and taught there for some years. Still in his twenties he, he wrote his two main philosophical works, upon which his fame today rests: A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713). In his thirties he was ordained into the Anglican Church of Ireland and received is Doctor of Divinity degree. Shortly after, he devised a plan to establish a college in the Bermuda Islands to train ministers and missionaries for the colonies. He traveled to Rhode Island to prepare for the project, but after three years abandoned it when governmental funding for it never came through. He then donated land and books to the newly founded Yale College and returned to Ireland. Back home he was appointed Bishop of Cloyne in south Ireland, a position that he retained for most of the remainder of his life. Berkeley’s fame grew with his many publications, one of the most unusual of which was a work called Siris (1744), which details the medical benefits of tar-water, which he learned from Native Americans years earlier. He died of a stroke at age 67.

Idealism: No Material Objects

The heart of Berkeley’s philosophy is his theory of idealism: material things do not exist, and all reality exists as perceptions within the minds of spirits. The term “idealism” comes from the word “idea” insofar as the only things that exist are ideas in one’s mind. In that sense, a term like “idea-ism” might have better conveyed its meaning. A good way of understanding Berkeley’s position is to see it as taking Descartes’ evil genius hypothesis seriously. Consider again what Descartes suggested. For all I know, there is no material world whatsoever, and all of my experiences are hallucinations that are imposed into my mind by an evil genius. It might appear that I have a body and am sitting on a chair, but it could be that there is no three-dimensional world at all, and an evil genius is just making those things appear in my mind, while my mind itself floats around without any body. Descartes, we noted, did not actually believe this hypothesis, but only proposed it as a strategy for arriving at certainty about the world around us. Berkeley, however, does take this scenario seriously, although he rejects that there is anything sinister or deceptive about it. This is simply the way that God constructed the world: it is a virtual reality that consists of God continually feeding our spirit-minds sensory information in a very consistent way.

Key here for Berkeley is the regularity and consistency with which God feeds our minds sensory data. God stores all sensible perceptions in his mind – in something like a master database – and he feeds them to us at the appropriate time. Imagine that I perceive myself to be in a room conversing with five friends. For Berkeley, the reality is that I and five other spirit-minds are being consistently fed similar sense data by God. Drawing from his master database of perceptions, God feeds us all sense data of walls, tables and chairs within the room. I decide to speak to my friends and say “Did you hear the President’s speech list night?” Drawing again from his master database of perceptions, God then interjects sensory data into all of our minds that portray the image of my mouth moving with audible words coming out. One of my friends decides to respond and say “The President’s speech was an insult to the intelligence of everyone in this country!” Another friend decides to say “I disagree, and think the President properly addressed the concerns of the nation.” In each case, God reads the thoughts of my friends and interjects sensory data into all of our minds, thus portraying them speaking. When we’re done conversing, we decide to get up and leave the room. We might then ask what happens to the empty room since God is no longer feeding us sense perceptions of it. Does the room go out of existence? According to Berkeley, no it does not: God himself is still perceiving the sensory information about the room and it continues to exist in his mind. Indeed, God continually monitors his master database of perceptions, and thus keeps the perceptions active. Berkeley expresses this point with the idealist motto that to be is to be perceived. That is, external things exist only in our minds or in God’s mind.

On face value, the idealist position of denying material objects seems ridiculous. The vast majority of us believe that we live in a world of material objects that includes physical things like rocks, houses, chairs, and our own bodies. Berkeley, though, takes the opposite view: it is belief in the existence of material objects that is ridiculous. He writes,

It is indeed an opinion strangely prevailing amongst men, that houses, mountains, rivers, and in a word all sensible objects, have an existence, natural or real, distinct from their being perceived by the understanding. But, with how great an assurance and acquiescence soever this principle may be entertained in the world, yet whoever shall find in his heart to call it in question may, if I mistake not, perceive it to involve a manifest contradiction. For, what are the fore-mentioned objects but the things we perceive by sense? and what do we perceive besides our own ideas or sensations? and is it not plainly repugnant that any one of these, or any combination of them, should exist unperceived? [Principles, 4]

His point is that when I perceive something like a table, I’m not really experiencing any physical thing, but instead I’m only receiving sensations. This sensory data is all that I really know, and it is a colossal fabrication to assume that some physical thing is the source of my perceptions of the table. Berkeley recognizes that there is indeed some external source of my perception of the table, but that source is God, not some mysterious physical stuff. So natural is this position, he argues, that it is backed by common sense:

I am content . . . to appeal to the common sense of the world for the truth of my notion. Ask the gardener why he thinks yonder cherry-tree exists in the garden, and he shall tell you, because he sees and feels it; in a word, because he perceives it by his senses. Ask him why he thinks an orange-tree not to be there, and he shall tell you, because he does not perceive it. What he perceives by sense, that he terms a real, being, and says it is or exists; but, that which is not perceivable, the same, he says, has no being. . . . The question between the materialists and me is not, whether things have a real existence out of the mind of this or that person, but whether they have an absolute existence, distinct from being perceived by God, and exterior to all minds. [Dialogues, 3]

Berkeley is classified as an “empiricist” philosopher along with Locke. How, though, can Berkeley be an empiricist if he doesn’t believe in material objects? The answer is that the central point of empiricism involves gaining knowledge through the senses, rather than through innate ideas. And Berkeley wholeheartedly believes that we do acquire all of our knowledge through sense perception. The only issue involves what the source is of those sense perceptions. Whereas Locke believed that material objects feed us sensory information, Berkeley believed that God performs that role, not material things.

Arguments against Material Objects

As always with philosophy, it’s one thing to simply propose a theory, but quite another to prove it. Berkeley rises to the occasion, though, offering an abundance of arguments for his position. We’ll look at the two most compelling of these. The first is his argument from primary and secondary qualities. According to Locke, the fundamental difference between the two types of qualities is whether they are spectator dependent. Primary ones, such as shape, motion and solidity, are part of the external things themselves and not spectator dependent, where as secondary ones such as colors, sounds and tastes are not part of external things and are spectator dependent. On Locke’s view, primary qualities involve the fundamental nature of external things: they are three-dimensional, have solidity, and move around in a three dimensional area. To believe in external material objects, then, requires a commitment to the reality of primary qualities that exist in things, independently of what a spectator might perceive. Berkeley denies that there are any primary qualities of objects in this sense, and he argues instead that all so-called primary qualities are just as spectator dependent as secondary ones. In other words, all qualities of objects are really secondary and thus spectator dependent. His main argument is here:

They who assert that figure, motion, and the rest of the primary or original qualities do exist without the mind in unthinking substances, do at the same time acknowledge that colors, sounds, heat cold, and suchlike secondary qualities, do not- which they tell us are sensations existing in the mind alone, that depend on and are occasioned by the different size, texture, and motion of the minute particles of matter. This they take for an undoubted truth, which they can demonstrate beyond all exception. Now, if it be certain that those original [primary] qualities are inseparably united with the other sensible [secondary] qualities, and not, even in thought, capable of being abstracted from them, it plainly follows that they exist only in the mind. But I desire any one to reflect and try whether he can, by any abstraction of thought, conceive the extension and motion of a body without all other sensible qualities. For my own part, I see evidently that it is not in my power to frame an idea of a body extended and moving, but I must withal give it some color or other sensible quality which is acknowledged to exist only in the mind. [Principles, 10]

His main point is that so-called primary qualities are nothing beyond the secondary qualities that we perceive in things. Visual perceptions of shape, for example, are just patches of color, which are secondary.

To make his case, Berkeley examines several so-called primary qualities and explains with each one how it is spectator dependent. Take, for example, the quality of extension, that is, three-dimensional shape. Our conceptions of an object’s shape hinge directly on the perspective of the spectator. The leg of a bug, for example, appears exceedingly small to us; to the bug itself it would appear to be a medium sized thing, yet to an even tinier microscopic organism it would appear to be huge. The texture of an object similarly hinges on the perspective from which we examine it. From a distance bug’s leg might appear to be smooth; through a microscope it might appear to be quite coarse. The point is that everything that we know about shape depends upon where we stand in relation to the things that we are perceiving; thus, all notions of shape are spectator dependent. The so-called primary quality of motion is also relative to the perceiver. Imagine, for example, that a leaf is falling from a tree directly in front of a humming bird, a human, and a sloth. How would each of these creatures perceive the leaf’s motion? To the humming bird the leaf’s motion might appear to be so slow as to be almost frozen in time. To the human it would appear to be moving at a normal pace. To the sloth it might appear exceedingly rapid. According to Berkeley, speed and time are measured by the succession of ideas in our minds, which varies in different perceivers.

Berkeley’s second argument against material objects is based on the principle of simplicity: there is no real need for the material objects, hence would be a useless creation. Everything we need to perceive sensible qualities is accounted for more efficiently through idealism: God directly feeds us sensory information without creating the material world as a useless middleman. He writes,

If therefore it were possible for bodies to exist without the mind, yet to hold they do so, must needs be a very precarious opinion; since it is to suppose, without any reason at all, that God has created innumerable beings that are entirely useless, and serve to no manner of purpose. [Principles, 19]

In theory, we might think that God could have created the material world as a middleman if he wanted to, sort of as an instrument to accomplish the task. But even that, according to Berkeley, is inconsistent with God’s nature. Instruments are used only when there is a need. A hammer is a useful instrument since I can’t effectively pound in a nail with my bare hands. My glasses are a useful instrument since I can’t see very well without them. However, God, who has infinite powers, has no needs and thus has no use of any instrument that might help him accomplish some task. Berkeley writes:

We indeed, who are beings of finite powers, are forced to make use of instruments. And the use of an instrument shows the agent to be limited by rules of another’s prescription, and that he cannot obtain his end but in such a way, and by such conditions. Whence it seems a clear consequence, that the supreme unlimited agent uses no tool or instrument at all. [Dialogues, 2]

Thus, God is perfectly capable of feeding us sensory information directly without the need for him to create the material world as a crutch.

God and evil

Reconciling God’s existence with the presence of evil in the world has been a central concern among philosophers since at least the time of Augustine. Why would an all good God permit the enormous amount of suffering that we see in the world around us? The problem is especially acute for Berkeley’s theory since God not only permits suffering, but he also seems to be the originator of suffering as he injects all external sensory information into our minds. Imagine again that I perceive myself to be in a room conversing with five friends about the President’s speech. All of my perceptions of the room itself are implanted directly into my mind by God; the dialogue that I’m having with my friends also depends upon God feeding each of us sensations of our voices and bodily images. Suppose that our political conversation becomes heated, a fight erupts and in a fit of anger my friend throws me out the window; my spine is broken and I’m paralyzed for life from my neck down. Let’s now see what God’s role was in this tragedy. First, he enabled the controversy by mediating the sensory information of the dialogue. When things became heated, he could have just cut off the flow of perceptions. Second, since, according to Berkeley’s theory, I have no physical body, God alone is the source of whatever physical pain I experience from my so-called “physical injury”. Third, God is directly responsible for whatever continued incapacity I have as a quadriplegic. God decides to shut off all perceptions I might have of bodily movement and sensation in my arms and legs, and I’m stuck with that for life. While I and my friends are certainly morally responsible for our respective roles, God is nevertheless an active participant and conspirator in how I am affected.

Berkeley has two responses to this criticism. First, he argues that the problem with God and evil is no more severe with his idealist theory than it is for those who believe in the existence of matter. In both cases, God is actively involved in sustaining a world that includes immorality and suffering. If a material world does exist, then it would just be an instrument in God’s hands, and a person is just as morally responsible whether or not he used an instrument. He writes,

the imputation of guilt is the same, whether a person commits an action with or without an instrument. In case therefore you suppose God to act by the mediation of an instrument or occasion, called matter, you as truly make Him the author of sin as I, who think Him the immediate agent in all those operations vulgarly ascribed to Nature. [Dialogues, 3]

Technically, this response does not attempt to solve the problem of God and evil, but only maintains that there is no extra problem added to the situation by endorsing Berkeley’s idealism.

Berkeley’s second response, though, does attempt to solve the problem in a more positive way. According to Berkeley, evil does not consist of outward actions, but inward attitudes:

I farther observe that sin or moral turpitude does not consist in the outward physical action or motion, but in the internal deviation of the will from the laws of reason and religion. This is plain, in that the killing an enemy in a battle, or putting a criminal legally to death, is not thought sinful; though the outward act be the very same with that in the case of murder. Since, therefore, sin does not consist in the physical action, the making God an immediate cause of all such actions is not making Him the Author of sin. [Dialogues, ibid]

Thus, when God feeds us sensory information that involves immorality or is painful, his motives are pure. It is as though he is performing the role of a messenger or delivery service; sometimes the information is good, sometimes not so good. But we shouldn’t blame the messenger when we don’t like what he delivers. Ultimately the fault rests with the person who initially sent the message, not delivered it. With the present example, the fault rests solely with me and my friends.

C. HUME

The last of the great British empiricists was David Hume (1711-1776), who pushed empiricism to its skeptical conclusions. Hume was born near Edinburgh, Scotland into a moderately wealthy family, but the bulk of the family fortune went to Hume’s older brother after their father died, thus forcing Hume to be frugal for some decades. Educated in law at his family’s direction, he quickly abandoned that career and devoted himself to the study of philosophy. In his teens wrestled with the question of God’s existence, balancing the arguments on both sides, and soon rejected the notion of an all powerful divine being. In his early twenties he wrote the manuscript of his most important work, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-1740). To Hume’s disappointment, it received little attention, and the discussion that it did generate was highly critical. Blaming its failure on the work’s technical style, he rewrote and published portions of it in a more reader-friendly format. Hume hoped to work as a philosophy teacher at one of Edinburgh’s universities, but the skeptical and anti-religious nature of his writings poisoned his efforts, and instead he took on temporary jobs in government and as a librarian. With a steady flow of publications, branching out into history as well as philosophy, by his mid forties he became one of the most famous—and controversial—authors in Europe. His wealth grew with his fame. In spite of the skeptical tone of his writings, Hume was a cheerful person and enjoyed socializing with people at all levels of society. Though he never married, he was well received by “modest women” as he words it in his autobiography. One of his friends was the controversial French author Jean Jacque Rousseau, who took political refuge in Hume’s home for a short time. Rousseau had mental problems, though, and, turning on his generous host, he publicly accused Hume of trying to sabotage his reputation. The event turned into an international scandal, and the two never reconciled. Hume died at age 65 from a digestive disorder that lingered for a year and left him emaciated. On his deathbed, crowds of people gathered around his Edinburgh home, curious to know whether he would repent of his irreligion. He held firm in his disbelief, and, in fact, one of his final acts was to plan for the posthumous publication of his most anti-religious writing, which he felt was too controversial to appear in print while he was alive.

Origin of and Association of Ideas

In his own day, as now, Hume had a notorious reputation as a skeptical philosopher, and in many ways he carried on the skeptical tradition forged in ancient Greece. Much of Hume’s skepticism, though, results from pushing the empiricist agenda to its logical conclusion. There are two main building blocks upon which his empiricist philosophy is founded. The first of these concerns the origin of ideas. Thoughts and ideas flow through our minds endlessly – ideas of people, houses, music concerts, scientific discoveries, God, on and on. Where do they all come from? Hume’s answer is that all of our ideas come from two types of experiences, or impressions as he calls them: (1) outward impressions through our five senses and (2) inward impressions through reflection on our mental operations. For example, the idea I have of the color red ultimately came from some outward sensory experience that I had of the color red that was stored in my memory. The idea I have of fear similarly came from an inward feeling of fear that I experienced in the past. He writes,

though our thought seems to possess this unbounded liberty, we shall find, upon a nearer examination, that it is really confined within very narrow limits. . . . When we think of a golden mountain, we only join two consistent ideas, gold, and mountain, with which we were formerly acquainted. . . . In short, all the materials of thinking are derived either from our outward or inward sentiment: The mixture and composition of these belongs alone to the mind and will. Or, to express myself in philosophical language, all our ideas or more feeble perceptions are copies of our impressions or more lively ones. [Enquiry, 2]

Hume offers two proofs for his position that all ideas are copied from impressions. First, he says that if you take any idea you have and examine its components, you’ll find that it traces back to outward or inward one or more sensory experience or inward feeling. Second, he says that, if you go your entire life without having a particular type of sensation, then you would lack the corresponding idea of that sensation. For example, “a blind man can form no notion of colors.”

On face value, Hume’s view is innocent enough, and he seems to just be reiterating Locke’s position that experience is the source of all our mental contents. What Hume does with this, though, is quite radical insofar as he transforms it into a theory of meaning. For my ideas to have any meaning, they must be grounded in some impression that I’ve had. An idea is meaningless, then, if I cannot trace it back to any impression. He writes,

When we entertain, therefore, any suspicion that a philosophical term is employed without any meaning or idea (as is but too frequent), we need but enquire, from what impression is that supposed idea derived? And if it be impossible to assign any, this will serve to confirm our suspicion. By bringing ideas into so clear a light we may reasonably hope to remove all dispute, which may arise, concerning their nature and reality. [Ibid]

For example, if I have an idea of an all-powerful divine being, but I’ve never had any impression of something that is all powerful or divine, then my idea is without meaning. Whatever I idea I do have of God – regardless of whether God even exists – it must be grounded in impressions that I’ve had. It is this theory of meaning that leads Hume down the path of skepticism as he explores one philosophical theory after another. In fact, he believes that much of traditional philosophy and religion can be dismissed as meaningless since it fails this test.

The second building block of Hume’s empiricism is his theory of the association of ideas. Suppose that I sit down on a couch and let my mind wander where it will. I think about the President, then Japan, then my car, then a telephone pole, then a railroad track, then an old apartment I lived in. It is tempting to think that I am conjuring up these ideas spontaneously without any organization behind them. Not so, Hume argues. Our flow of ideas is connected together by three principles of association. First is resemblance, where one thought leads to another because of resembling features that they have. For example, if I look at a photograph of a friend, I’ll start thinking about that friend. Second is contiguity, that is, one thing being in close proximity to another. For example, if someone says something about a store in a shopping mall, I might then think about the store located next to it. Third is cause and effect. For example, if I look at a scar on my arm, I immediately start thinking about the accident I had that caused me to get the scar. These three principles alone, according to Hume, are responsible for all mental association that our minds make in the normal flow of ideas. With the above example, my thought about the President leads me to think about Japan since he recently visited there (contiguity); Japan is where my car was built (causality); my car is parked next to a telephone pole (contiguity); the telephone pole is covered with the same kind of black tar that’s on railroad ties (resemblance); my old apartment was along side a railroad track (contiguity). Hume says that “The more instances we examine, and the more care we employ, the more assurance shall we acquire, that the enumeration, which we form from the whole, is complete and entire” (Enquiry, 3).

Personal Identity and Causality

Hume’s skepticism emerges quite clearly with his treatment of two philosophical notions, namely personal identity and causality. In both of these cases his skeptical conclusions arise from applying the theory of meaning described above. If the traditional ideas of causality and personal identity are to be meaningful, then we must be able to trace those ideas back to some impression. In each case, though, there are problems locating an impression that is suitable for forming these ideas.

Let’s start with the idea of personal identity. The traditional notion of personal identity held by Descartes and other philosophers is that it is a single, unified substance that continues through time. On this view, I am a single conscious entity, and, even though my specific thoughts change, my identity remains intact throughout time, and perhaps even into the afterlife. The critical question for Hume, then, is “what impression is the basis of this traditional idea of personal identity?” His skeptical answer is that we have no actual experience—or internal impression—of a unified, continuous self; thus the traditional notion of personal identity is meaningless. If I introspectively examine the actual experience I have of my identity, I’ll discover that it consists only of various perceptions that come and go, such as feelings of heat or cold. He writes,

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. . . . The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different. . . . [Treatise, 1.4.6]

Thus, the inward impression that I have of my identity is that of an ever-shifting bundle of perceptions, and this is the impression that must form the basis of my true notion of personal identity.

Hume analyzes the traditional notion of causality in the same way, first attempting to discover some impression that forms the idea, then abandoning the traditional notion when the appropriate impression can’t be found. Let’s begin with a simple example of a cause-effect connection, which Hume himself uses: billiard ball A strikes billiard ball B and causes it to move. The traditional notion of causality is that there is an external power or force that causes ball A to strike and move ball B, independently of what you or I might perceive when we watch the balls move. Think of it like an invisible explosion that occurs when A strikes B and forces it to move. That is, there is an objective necessary connection between the cause and effect. Applying Hume’s theory of meaning, for this idea of necessary connection to be meaningful, we need to discover the impression which forms the basis of it.

One possibility is that we perceive an outward impression through our five senses that forms the idea of an objective necessary connection. But do we? Suppose that when ball A struck ball B, it produced a flash of light and a loud boom, and, in fact, that every causal connection we saw was similarly accompanied by a light flash and a boom. If that was the case, then, yes, we would have a very strong outward impression that would give us the idea of an objective necessary connection. But that’s not what happens. When A strikes and moves B, all that appears to our eyes is the motion of two balls, and that’s it. He writes,

When we look about us towards external objects, and consider the operation of causes, we are never able, in a single instance, to discover any power or necessary connection; any quality, which binds the effect to the cause, and renders the one an infallible consequence of the other. We only find, that the one does actually, in fact, follow the other. The impulse of one billiard- ball is attended with motion in the second. This is the whole that appears to the outward senses.  [Enquiry, 7]

He next considers whether there is any inward impression that forms the idea of necessary connection. Locke had suggested one possibility: we experience a feeling of causal power when we willfully move parts of our bodies, such as when I raise my arm. Here we have a causal sequence where the cause is my mental decision and the effect is the raising of my arm. Since the causal sequence is taking place within my own mind, I am thus capable of directly experiencing a feeling of causal power or necessary connection when I willfully raise my arm. But Hume rejects this as well, since we don’t have a clear experience of how or where such willful bodily motion takes place. Indeed, I do mentally experience my willful decision (the cause) and I do see and feel my arm move (the effect), but I don’t experience anything that links them. I don’t feel a special electrical shock or anything unique to the necessary connection by itself.

In the absence of an appropriate outward or inward impression, we must then reject the traditional notion of necessary connection as an objective force or invisible explosion. He suggests an alternative, though. There is a more moderate notion of necessary connection that comes from an inward feeling of expectation that occurs when we repeatedly see A followed by B. Consider again the example of billiard balls: it is only after repeatedly seeing ball A move B that our minds feel a transition from the cause to the effect. He writes,

The first time a man saw the communication of motion by impulse, as by the shock of two billiard balls, he could not pronounce that the one event was connected: But only that it was conjoined with the other. After he has observed several instances of this nature, he then pronounces them to be connected. What alteration has happened to give rise to this new idea of connection? Nothing but that he now feels these events to be connected in his imagination, and can readily foretell the existence of one from the appearance of the other. [Ibid]

In the end, Hume does not completely reject the idea of necessary connection and causality. But he does reject the traditional idea of it being something like a primary quality within objects themselves. Instead, he suggests that necessary connection is like a secondary quality that we spectators impose onto A-B sequences when we repeatedly see A and B conjoined. It’s just a habit of our minds, not a reality in the objects themselves.

Belief in Miracles

One of Hume’s lifelong goals was to help rid the world of religious superstition and fanaticism, and nowhere is this better seen than with his attack on the belief in miracles. To properly understand exactly what Hume is criticizing, three things need to be clarified. First, Hume as in mind a very precise notion of the term “miracle”, which is that it is a violation of a law of nature. It is not simply an unusual event that occurs at just the right moment, such as if I’m saved from drowning by grabbing onto a vine that just happens to be hanging from a tree within my reach. Rather, it must break some law of nature, such as if my arm gets chopped off and a new one instantly appears. Second, Hume focuses specifically on reports of miracles—stories about miracles that we hear about from other people or read about in books such as the Bible. He does not consider miracles that we might directly witness ourselves. Third, Hume focuses on whether it is reasonable for us to believe reports of miracles, not whether the miraculous event actually took place. It is impossible for us to go back in time and prove with absolute certainty whether any reported miracle was genuine. The best we can do is consider whether the evidence in support of a miracle report is compelling enough for us to believe the report. Hume’s precise position, then, is that it is never reasonable to believe reports of violations of laws of nature.

Hume offers a series of arguments against belief in miracles, but his main one is this: it is never reasonable to believe in reports of miracles since those reports will always be outweighed by stronger evidence for consistent laws of nature. Suppose, for example, that the Mayor and all the city officials say that they witnessed a genuine miracle. As they report, a car rammed into city hall, causing the wall to collapse, but seconds later all the smashed pieces of the wall floated into the air, and reassembled themselves just as they were before. Should we believe their report?

According to Hume, our first step is to weigh the evidence for and against this miracle, sort of like we were placing the evidence in the pans of a balance scale. On the one side, the evidence that we have in favor of the miracle is the credibility of the witnesses. They are reporting what they’ve seen with their eyes, and we know from past experience that they are people of their word. On the other side, the evidence against the miracle consists of the accumulated experience that we have in favor of uniform laws of nature. The natural world behaves in an orderly way based to natural laws. We count on this every moment of the day as when, for example, I open a door and expect it to swing on a hinge, rather than do something like transform into a bird and fly away. According to Hume, the evidence that we have in favor of consistent laws of nature is overwhelming, and will always outweigh even the best evidence in favor of a reported miraculous violation of a law of nature. He writes,

A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined. . . . There must, therefore, be a uniform experience against every miraculous event, otherwise the event would not merit that appellation [i.e., that title]. And as a uniform experience amounts to a proof, there is here a direct and full proof from the nature of the fact against the existence of any miracle. . . . [Enquiry, 10]

For Hume, since miracles are defined as violations of laws of nature, any alleged miracle report is instantly outweighed by overwhelming evidence that we have of consistent laws of nature. The wise thing to do, Hume says, is to proportion our belief to the evidence. With the above City Hall example, we should thus disbelieve the report that the wall miraculously reassembled itself since the evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of consistent laws of nature.

In addition to this main argument against belief in miracles, Hume offers four additional criticisms. First, he says, the witnesses who report miracles typically lack credibility. Sometimes they lack sufficient education and good sense, which makes them gullible. Other times they are consciously deceptive. Even in the above example of the City Hall miracle, our first reaction would be to suspect that the Mayor and the city officials concocted the story to hide something politically sensitive. Second, Hume argues that human beings are predisposed to enjoy hearing sensational stories, and this creates an instant audience for accounts of miraculous events. In recent times, we see this in the success of tabloid publications such as the National Enquirer that specialize in stories about alien abductions, monsters such as Bigfoot, and every possible type of miracle. This vulnerability within human nature itself casts doubt on the truth of such sensational claims. Third, Hume states that reports of miracles typically come from pre-scientific and primitive countries whose cultures are obsessed with the supernatural. The most ordinary natural events are ascribed to supernatural causes, and reliance on omens and oracles is the norm. The very location of such miracle reports counts against their credibility. Fourth, Hume argues that reports of miracles support rival religious systems, and thus nullify each other. There are reports of miracles within virtually every religious tradition around the world. Christian miracles support the Christian plan of salvation. Muslim miracles support the Muslim plan of salvation, and so on. The problem is that these religions are rivals to each other and typically discredit the others’ legitimacy. Taken as a whole, then, rival miracle reports are mutually undermining.

Hume recognizes that the Christian religious tradition not only contains reports of miracles, but is in fact founded on miraculous circumstances in the lives of the Biblical characters. Nevertheless, Hume argues, the reasonable thing to do even here is to disbelieve these reports. In fact, belief in such miracle stories is so irrational that it would take an act of God to make an otherwise reasonable person suspend “all the principles of his understanding” and make him believe a miracle story that “is most contrary to custom and experience” (ibid).

Morality: Reason vs. Sentiment

Throughout the history of philosophy, the traditional conception of morality was that it consists of objective universal truths that can be discovered through human reason. Plato’s view of the forms is the clearest example of this. For Plato, moral standards such as justice and goodness exist independently of human society in the higher spirit-realm of the forms. And, for Plato, it takes a mental act of reason to grasp moral truths, in much the way it takes an act of reason to grasp mathematical truths which also reside in the realm of the forms. This is largely the view of morality that moral philosophers in Hume’s day held: we discover objective universal moral principles through reason. Hume rejects this view: morality is not grounded in an objective feature of the external world, but rather on internal mental feelings of pleasure and pain.

Hume’s main argument for his position is that, as hard as we may try, we can never discover any special fact about an action that makes it either moral or immoral – either within the physical act itself or in any alleged higher realm of moral truths. All that we will find is a feeling of pleasure or pain in reaction to the action. He writes,

Take any action allowed to be vicious; willful murder, for instance. Examine it in all lights, and see if you can find that matter of fact, or real existence, which you call vice. In whichever way you take it, you find only certain passions, motives, volitions, and thoughts. There is no other matter of fact in the case. The vice entirely escapes you, as long as you consider the object. You never can find it, till you turn your reflection into your own breast, and find a sentiment of disapprobation, which arises in you, towards this action. Here is a matter of fact; but it is the object of feeling, not of reason. It lies in yourself, not in the object. So that when you pronounce any action or character to be vicious, you mean nothing, but that from the constitution of your nature you have a feeling or sentiment of blame from the contemplation of it. [Treatise, 3.1.1]

Thus, morality does not involve making a rational judgment about some objective moral facts. Instead, moral assessments are just emotional reactions. If I see someone robbing a bank and determine that action to be morally wrong, I am not making a rational judgment about some objective moral truth or fact; rather, I am experiencing a feeling of emotional pain, and that feeling constitutes my negative assessment of the robber.  Using the terminology of primary and secondary qualities, Hume’s point is that morality is not a primary quality that’s part of external things, but is instead like a secondary quality that spectators impose onto actions. He writes, “Vice and virtue, therefore, may be compared to sounds, colors, heat, and cold, which, according to modern philosophy, are not [primary] qualities in objects, but perceptions in the mind” (ibid).

As obvious as this all seems to Hume, he notes that most moral theories insist on linking moral assessments with some factual judgment of reason. They begin by listing some kind of fact, such as a fact about moral Forms, moral truths, divine commands; from these facts, then, they immediately jump to some moral statement, such as “Stealing is wrong”. He makes this point here:

In every system of morality which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not.

The problem, for Hume, is that you just can’t rationally deduce a statement of moral obligation from a statement of fact—stated more succinctly, you cannot derive ought from is. Rather, the obligation comes from feeling, not from deduction of facts. When I see a bank robber and state that “The robber’s act of stealing is wrong”, I am expressing the painful feelings that I am experiencing. Thus, statements of moral obligation are introduced through an emotional reaction, not through a rational deduction.

Radical Skepticism and Natural Belief

Hume was a chronically skeptical philosopher, and we’ve already seen several expressions of this. He began with a theory of meaning that ruthlessly dismembers any concept that is not grounded in an outward or inward impression, and the first victims were traditional notions of personal identity and causality. He questioned the legitimacy of belief in miracles and, in essence, called into doubt anything supernatural. Finally, he attacked the traditional notion of rationally perceived moral truths, and reduced moral assessments to emotional reactions. But there is an even more radical skepticism within Hume’s philosophy that goes beyond these particular issues. According to Hume, the underlying structure of human reason itself is inherently flawed, and thus completely untrustworthy. Specifically, the human reasoning process, even at its very best, is on a collision course with itself and regularly contradicts itself. If we follow one rational train of thought we reach conclusion A; if we follow a different rational train of thought we reach a conflicting conclusion “not A”. It’s like a computer that is running two incompatible programs that eventually cause the computer to crash. Hume describes this collision course here:

The intense view of these manifold contradictions and imperfections in human reason has so wrought upon me, and heated my brain, that I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning, and can look upon no opinion even as more probable or likely than another. Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? Whose favor shall I court, and whose anger must I dread? What beings surround me? and on whom have I any influence, or who have any influence on me? I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, environed with the deepest darkness, and utterly deprived of the use of every member and faculty. [Treatise, 1.4.7]

For Hume, then, the most central questions about human existence are incapable of being adequately answered because of the inherent flaws in the human reasoning process. Whatever reason tells us about these matters can never be fully trusted, and thus we slide down the slope of philosophical despair.

Amidst all this skepticism and despair, though, Hume has a strangely optimistic solution. Human nature has embedded within us some very concrete natural beliefs which enable us to get through the day. Nature forces us to believe in external objects, causal relationships, personal identity, moral responsibility and a host of other notions that are crucial for our normal routines. These are not innate ideas per se, but are normal beliefs about the world that emerge through natural inclinations. For example, when I look at a chair and I’m naturally inclined to think that it exists in the external world exactly as I perceive it. The fact that we have these natural beliefs doesn’t mean that they are entirely true, and Hume warns that many are not. However, they are functionally important for our lives. Also, they serve as a natural antidote to philosophical despair. When radical skepticism causes us to mentally crash, all that we need to do is back off from our philosophical inquiries and let our natural beliefs take over: “Nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium” (ibid). Hume warns that natural beliefs are no replacement for philosophical inquiry, which, even with all its skepticism, is still important to keep us from giving in to gullibility and superstition. As flawed as human reason is, it is still preferable to “superstition of every kind or denomination” (ibid).

Questions for Review

Please answer all of the following questions for review.

1. What are Locke’s main arguments against innate ideas?

2. Explain Locke’s distinction between ideas of sensation and ideas of reflection.

3. What are the three mental processes involved in forming complex ideas?

4. What is Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities?

5. Explain Locke’s view of natural rights and the justification of revolution.

6. Explain Berkeley’s idealism and God’s role as the source of perceptions.

7. What are Berkeley’s arguments for idealism from primary/secondary qualities and simplicity.

8. What are Berkeley’s two solutions to the problem of God and evil?

9. What is Hume’s view of the origin of ideas and the association of ideas?

10. Explain Hume’s view of personal identity.

11. Explain Hume’s view of necessary connection.

12. What is Hume’s main argument against miracles?

13. Explain Hume’s view about emotion and moral judgment.

14. Explain Hume’s view of radical skepticism and natural belief.

Questions for Analysis

Please select only one question for analysis from those below and answer it.

1. Locke argued that if ideas such as Aristotle’s laws of thought were truly innate, then children and retarded people would have some knowledge of them. Explain his argument and try to refute it.

2. Berkeley argued that, just as secondary qualities don't exist outside of the mind, primary qualities don't either. Explain his argument and try to refute it.

3. Hume argued that all ideas are copies of some kind of impression. Explain his argument and try to refute it.

4. Hume argued that we have no idea of a continuous and unified self. Explain his argument and try to refute it.

5. Hume argued that the idea of necessary connection derives from a feeling of expectation which habitually results from observing two constantly conjoined events. Explain his argument and try to refute it.

6. Write a dialogue between Plato and Hume, where Plato defends the view that moral assessments are rational judgments about moral Forms, and Hume holds the view that moral assessments are just emotional reactions.