Josephus: What’s Stronger—Wine, Women, or Truth?

I’ve been reading Josephus’ Jewish Wars and Antiquities of the Jews in recent months, and I came across this delightful story set around 500 BC in Persia – giving an interesting twist to the decree to rebuild Jerusalem as told in the Bible.

Now, in the first year of the king’s reign, Darius feasted those that were about him, and those born in his house, with the rulers of the Medes, and princes of the Persians, and the toparchs of India and Ethiopia, and the generals of the armies of his hundred and twenty-seven provinces. But when they had eaten and drunk to satiety, and abundantly, they every one departed to go to bed at their own houses, and Darius the king went to bed; but after he had rested a little part of the night, he awaked, and not being able to sleep any more, he fell into conversation with the three guards of his body, and promised, that to him who should make an oration about points that he should inquire of, such as should be most agreeable to truth, and to the dictates of wisdom, he would grant it as a reward of his victory, to put on a purple garment, and to drink in cups of gold, and to sleep upon gold, and to have a chariot with bridles of gold, and a head tire of fine linen, and a chain of gold about his neck, and to sit next to himself, on account of his wisdom; “and,” says he, “he shall be called my cousin.” Now when he had promised to give them these gifts, he asked the first of them, “Whether wine was not the strongest?”—the second, “Whether kings were not such?”—and the third, “Whether women were not such? or whether truth was not the strongest of all?” When he had proposed that they should make their inquiries about these problems, he went to rest; but in the morning he sent for his great men, his princes, and toparchs of Persia and Media, and set himself down in the place where he used to give audience, and bid each of the guards of his body to declare what they thought proper concerning the proposed questions, in the hearing of them all.

Accordingly, the first of them began to speak of the strength of wine, and demonstrated it thus: “When,” said he, “I am to give my opinion of wine, O you men, I find that it exceeds every thing, by the following indications: It deceives the mind of those that drink it, and reduces that of the king to the same state with that of the orphan, and he who stands in need of a tutor; and erects that of the slave to the boldness of him that is free; and that of the needy becomes like that of the rich man, for it changes and renews the souls of men when it gets into them; and it quenches the sorrow of those that are under calamities, and makes men forget the debts they owe to others, and makes them think themselves to be of all men the richest; it makes them talk of no small things, but of talents, and such other names as become wealthy men only; nay more, it makes them insensible of their commanders, and of their kings, and takes away the remembrance of their friends and companions, for it arms men even against those that are dearest to them, and makes them appear the greatest strangers to them; and when they are become sober, and they have slept out their wine in the night, they arise without knowing any thing they have done in their cups. I take these for signs of power, and by them discover that wine is the strongest and most insuperable of all things.”

As soon as the first had given the forementioned demonstrations of the strength of wine, he left off; and the next to him began to speak about the strength of a king, and demonstrated that it was the strongest of all, and more powerful than any thing else that appears to have any force or wisdom. He began his demonstration after the following manner; and said, “They are men who govern all things; they force the earth and the sea to become profitable to them in what they desire, and over these men do kings rule, and over them they have authority. Now those who rule over that animal which is of all the strongest and most powerful, must needs deserve to be esteemed insuperable in power and force. For example, when these kings command their subjects to make wars, and undergo dangers, they are hearkened to; and when they send them against their enemies, their power is so great that they are obeyed. They command men to level mountains, and to pull down walls and towers; nay, when they are commanded to be killed and to kill, they submit to it, that they may not appear to transgress the king’s commands; and when they have conquered, they bring what they have gained in the war to the king. Those also who are not soldiers, but cultivate the ground, and plough it, and when, after they have endured the labor and all the inconveniences of such works of husbandry, they have reaped and gathered in their fruits, they bring tributes to the king; and whatsoever it is which the king says or commands, it is done of necessity, and that without any delay, while he in the mean time is satiated with all sorts of food and pleasures, and sleeps in quiet. He is guarded by such as watch, and such as are, as it were, fixed down to the place through fear; for no one dares leave him, even when he is asleep, nor does any one go away and take care of his own affairs; but he esteems this one thing the only work of necessity, to guard the king, and accordingly to this he wholly addicts himself. How then can it be otherwise, but that it must appear that the king exceeds all in strength, while so great a multitude obeys his injunctions?”

Now when this man had held his peace, the third of them, who was Zorobabel, began to instruct them about women, and about truth, who said thus: “Wine is strong, as is the king also, whom all men obey, but women are superior to them in power; for it was a woman that brought the king into the world; and for those that plant the vines and make the wine, they are women who bear them, and bring them up: nor indeed is there any thing which we do not receive from them; for these women weave garments for us, and our household affairs are by their means taken care of, and preserved in safety; nor can we live separate from women. And when we have gotten a great deal of gold and silver, and any other thing that is of great value, and deserving regard, and see a beautiful woman, we leave all these things, and with open mouth fix our eyes upon her countenance, and are willing to forsake what we have, that we may enjoy her beauty, and procure it to ourselves. We also leave father, and mother, and the earth that nourishes us, and frequently forget our dearest friends, for the sake of women; nay, we are so hardy as to lay down our lives for them. But what will chiefly make you take notice of the strength of women is this that follows: Do not we take pains, and endure a great deal of trouble, and that both by land and sea, and when we have procured somewhat as the fruit of our labors, do not we bring them to the women, as to our mistresses, and bestow them upon them? Nay, I once saw the king, who is lord of so many people, smitten on the face by Apame, the daughter of Rabsases Themasius, his concubine, and his diadem taken away from him, and put upon her own head, while he bore it patiently; and when she smiled he smiled, and when she was angry he was sad; and according to the change of her passions, he flattered his wife, and drew her to reconciliation by the great humiliation of himself to her, if at my time he saw her displeased at him.”

And when the princes and rulers looked one upon another, he began to speak about truth; and he said, “I have already demonstrated how powerful women are; but both these women themselves, and the king himself, are weaker than truth; for although the earth be large, and the heaven high, and the course of the sun swift, yet are all these moved according to the will of God, who is true and righteous, for which cause we also ought to esteem truth to be the strongest of all things, and that what is unrighteous is of no force against it. Moreover, all things else that have any strength are mortal and short-lived, but truth is a thing that is immortal and eternal. It affords us not indeed such a beauty as will wither away by time, nor such riches as may be taken away by fortune, but righteous rules and laws. It distinguishes them from injustice, and puts what is unrighteous to rebuke.”

So when Zorobabel had left off his discourse about truth, and the multitude had cried out aloud that he had spoken the most wisely, and that it was truth alone that had immutable strength, and such as never would wax old, the king commanded that he should ask for somewhat over and above what he had promised, for that he would give it him because of his wisdom, and that prudence wherein he exceeded the rest; “and thou shalt sit with me,” said the king, “and shalt be called my cousin.” When he had said this, Zorobabel put him in mind of the vow he had made in case he should ever have the kingdom. Now this vow was, “to rebuild Jerusalem, and to build therein the temple of God; as also to restore the vessels which Nebuchadnezzar had pillaged, and carried to Babylon. And this,” said he, “is that request which thou now permittest me to make, on account that I have been judged to be wise and understanding.’”

The Second Naïveté: Returning to God?

A couple of days ago, I talked about Paul Ricoeur’s concept of the second naïveté—a “post-critical” stage—and ended by taking a very broad-brush approach to see the pre-critical, the critical, and the post-critical as historical stages of the Christian West, the pre-critical being the general Christian consensus prior to Modernity, the critical being the reductionism that marked Modernity, and the post-critical being the Zeitgeist of post-modernism.

Sticking to the broad brush, Kelton Cobb seems to argue in his Guide to Theology and Popular Culture that there has been a general cultural shift away from the critical period of Modernity toward a kind of second naïveté. He takes as an example the humorous (sometimes crudely so) but thought-provoking movie Dogma, which came out in 1999 and features two angels, Loki (Matt Damon) and Bartleby (Ben Affleck), who “have been whiling away the last 4,000 years in Wisconsin, where they were banished by God following a small act of rebellion in the wake of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. … Loki had misgivings about the destruction of Sodom, and quietly raised the question with Bartleby about how it is that a loving God could be so full of wrath. Commiserating with each other, the two got drunk and gave God the finger. As punishment they were banished to Wisconsin, where they were to remain until the end of time itself, when they will be destroyed.”

Finally, however, they find “a window of opportunity—to flee Wisconsin, escape their pending destruction, and ‘go home’ to the God who rejected them.”

Cobb finds the fact that the two suffering angels desire to “go home” at all very worthy of note, because they long to “return to bask in the divine presence of the One whose justice they doubt and whose judgment of them had been their undoing. After 4,000 years of stewing on God’s wrath and their own rejection, they want back in. … The story seems to concur with the idea that even a God whose exercise of justice is faulty is worthy of the longing of creatures who scramble to return to the divine presence. This is different from an earlier generation that, as William James observed, so objected to the image of a wrathful God that they either exorcised this attribute from God’s countenance or abandoned their belief in God altogether. Like Tolstoy and Bunyan, Loki and Bartleby have undergone the depths of despair, suffered the dark flank of God, and come out the other side through a second birth.”

In other words, Ricoeur would say that they had reached a second naïveté.

Cobb goes on to talk about Ricoeur having described the present as a “period of mourning for the gods who have died,” an in-between stage “in which the ancient gods of morality have died of obsolescence and exhaustion. An essential theological task demanded in this period of mourning, he goes on to suggest, is a long recuperative wandering, a detour through the texts of our culture.”

Personally, though, I think Cobb takes the movie a bit too seriously, even if the thoughts he pegs on it might be valid.

Les Misérables: Jean Valjean Meets His Grace

With the success of the movie version of the musical Les Misérables, it might be a good time to re-read that iconic scene from the book in which the ex-convict Jean Valjean, after having enjoyed the hospitality of the Bishop (without knowing that it was the Bishop), stole his silverware and fled. And if you have never read the scene at all, I think it’s high time to do so:

The next morning at sunrise Monseigneur Bienvenu was strolling in his garden. Madame Magloire ran up to him in utter consternation.

"Monseigneur, Monseigneur!" she exclaimed, "does your Grace know where the basket of silver is?"

"Yes," replied the Bishop.

"Jesus the Lord be blessed!" she resumed; "I did not know what had become of it."

The Bishop had just picked up the basket in a flower-bed. He presented it to Madame Magloire.

"Here it is."

"Well!" said she. "Nothing in it! And the silver?"

"Ah," returned the Bishop, "so it is the silver which troubles you? I don’t know where it is."

"Great, good God! It is stolen! That man who was here last night has stolen it."

In a twinkling, with all the vivacity of an alert old woman, Madame Magloire had rushed to the oratory, entered the alcove, and returned to the Bishop. The Bishop had just bent down, and was sighing as he examined a plant of cochlearia des Guillons, which the basket had broken as it fell across the bed. He rose up at Madame Magloire’s cry.

"Monseigneur, the man is gone! The silver has been stolen!"

As she uttered this exclamation, her eyes fell upon a corner of the garden, where traces of the wall having been scaled were visible. The coping of the wall had been torn away.

"Stay! yonder is the way he went. He jumped over into Cochefilet Lane. Ah, the abomination! He has stolen our silver!"

The Bishop remained silent for a moment; then he raised his grave eyes, and said gently to Madame Magloire:—

"And, in the first place, was that silver ours?"

Madame Magloire was speechless. Another silence ensued; then the Bishop went on:—

"Madame Magloire, I have for a long time detained that silver wrongfully. It belonged to the poor. Who was that man? A poor man, evidently."

"Alas! Jesus!" returned Madame Magloire. "It is not for my sake, nor for Mademoiselle’s. It makes no difference to us. But it is for the sake of Monseigneur. What is Monseigneur to eat with now?"

The Bishop gazed at her with an air of amazement.

"Ah, come! Are there no such things as pewter forks and spoons?"

Madame Magloire shrugged her shoulders.

"Pewter has an odor."

"Iron forks and spoons, then."

Madame Magloire made an expressive grimace.

"Iron has a taste."

"Very well," said the Bishop; "wooden ones then."

A few moments later he was breakfasting at the very table at which Jean Valjean had sat on the previous evening. As he ate his breakfast, Monseigneur Welcome remarked gayly to his sister, who said nothing, and to Madame Magloire, who was grumbling under her breath, that one really does not need either fork or spoon, even of wood, in order to dip a bit of bread in a cup of milk.

"A pretty idea, truly," said Madame Magloire to herself, as she went and came, "to take in a man like that! and to lodge him close to one’s self! And how fortunate that he did nothing but steal! Ah, mon Dieu! it makes one shudder to think of it!"

As the brother and sister were about to rise from the table, there came a knock at the door.

"Come in," said the Bishop.

The door opened. A singular and violent group made its appearance on the threshold. Three men were holding a fourth man by the collar. The three men were gendarmes; the other was Jean Valjean.

A brigadier of gendarmes, who seemed to be in command of the group, was standing near the door. He entered and advanced to the Bishop, making a military salute.

"Monseigneur—" said he.

At this word, Jean Valjean, who was dejected and seemed overwhelmed, raised his head with an air of stupefaction.

"Monseigneur!" he murmured. "So he is not the cure?"

"Silence!" said the gendarme. "He is Monseigneur the Bishop."

In the meantime, Monseigneur Bienvenu had advanced as quickly as his great age permitted.

"Ah! here you are!" he exclaimed, looking at Jean Valjean. "I am glad to see you. Well, but how is this? I gave you the candlesticks too, which are of silver like the rest, and for which you can certainly get two hundred francs. Why did you not carry them away with your forks and spoons?"

Jean Valjean opened his eyes wide, and stared at the venerable Bishop with an expression which no human tongue can render any account of.

"Monseigneur," said the brigadier of gendarmes, "so what this man said is true, then? We came across him. He was walking like a man who is running away. We stopped him to look into the matter. He had this silver—"

"And he told you," interposed the Bishop with a smile, "that it had been given to him by a kind old fellow of a priest with whom he had passed the night? I see how the matter stands. And you have brought him back here? It is a mistake."

"In that case," replied the brigadier, "we can let him go?"

"Certainly," replied the Bishop.

The gendarmes released Jean Valjean, who recoiled.

"Is it true that I am to be released?" he said, in an almost inarticulate voice, and as though he were talking in his sleep.

"Yes, thou art released; dost thou not understand?" said one of the gendarmes.

"My friend," resumed the Bishop, "before you go, here are your candlesticks. Take them."

He stepped to the chimney-piece, took the two silver candlesticks, and brought them to Jean Valjean. The two women looked on without uttering a word, without a gesture, without a look which could disconcert the Bishop.

Jean Valjean was trembling in every limb. He took the two candlesticks mechanically, and with a bewildered air.

"Now," said the Bishop, "go in peace. By the way, when you return, my friend, it is not necessary to pass through the garden. You can always enter and depart through the street door. It is never fastened with anything but a latch, either by day or by night."

Then, turning to the gendarmes:—

"You may retire, gentlemen."

The gendarmes retired.

Jean Valjean was like a man on the point of fainting.

The Bishop drew near to him, and said in a low voice:—

"Do not forget, never forget, that you have promised to use this money in becoming an honest man."

Jean Valjean, who had no recollection of ever having promised anything, remained speechless. The Bishop had emphasized the words when he uttered them. He resumed with solemnity:—

"Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I buy from you; I withdraw it from black thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God."

How Different Are Plato’s “FORMS” from Aristotle’s “forms”? (With a brief excursion into Genesis)

In a discussion about the Greek philosophers Plato (c. 424-348 BC) and his student Aristotle (384-322 BC), someone remarked to me recently how surprised he was to find that, in the Metaphysics, Aristotle suggested that species were eternal forms. The reason this surprised my discussion partner was that Aristotle repeatedly asserted how different his theory on substance was from Plato’s, but now it turned out that they both, at least in some sense, taught the existence of eternal forms.

The Greek word translated in Plato as “Forms” and in Aristotle as “species” is eidos. I have only studied Koine Greek, and it is extremely rusty by now, so I am really no authority on Greek. But I have heard that the word eidos has, in fact, a very wide meaning. Just like the Greek word idea, eidos is derived from the verb to see. The most literal translation of eidos would therefore be the "look" of a thing. Homer, for instance, describes King Menelaus as  handsome in his eidos.

Since it is such a general word, context is everything for determining the specific meaning. We would say: "What kind of species is this animal?" The Greeks would say: "What kind of a look does this animal have?" We would say (at least when talking philosophy): "Are we discussing the matter of the chair or the form of the chair?" The Greeks would say again: "Are we discussing the matter of the chair or the look of the chair?"

Therefore, even within Aristotle’s writings, eidos can have different meanings. Aristotle probably has a different concept in mind when he contrasts eidos with matter (in that case the word can be translated as “form/appearance”), as opposed to when he contrasts eidos with genus (in that case the word can be translated as “species”), just like he would have a different concept in mind when reading Homer describing the handsome eidos of King Menelaus. It is all the "look" of something, but sometimes it is the look in the sense of an animal species, at other times the look as opposed to the underlying matter, and again at other times simply the looks of an individual.

So much for the semantics of the matter. Now to the substance.

I would suggest that the tendency to see Aristotle’s eternal-species-as-substance as so similar to Plato’s eternal-Forms-as-substance is mostly due to our current cosmological views. We currently consider the universe to have started 13.75 years ago, the Milky Way to have started circa 10 billion years ago, the sun to have ignited a hydrogen fusion 4.63 billion years ago, the earth to have formed 4.5+ billion years ago, life to have started on the earth about 4 billion years ago, multicellular life about 1.2 billion years ago, diversification of life about 540 Million years ago, the first Homo about 2 Million years ago.

We are so used to think in terms of finite numbers that the concept of eternal existence strikes us as unusual. If we come across two people who both assert that something exists eternally, naturally their positions will seem similar.

But all these specific numbers about the finite age of the things around us are very new. A mere eighty years ago, virtually every cosmologist believed in the eternal existence of the material universe. As recent as the post- WWII years, it was still debated whether some form of the steady state model of the universe was true and the Big Bang theory false.

Since our own view of the universe is shaped by these recent developments in science, it is all too easy to impose this brand-new view in the history of scientific thought onto Plato and Aristotle, using it as a criterion for judging their similarity of thought.

As far as I know, the eternal nature of the basic stuff out of which the universe is made was the common-sense view of the ancient world. That includes all the mythologies. You always begin with some kind of primordial substance out of which the world arose or was made, or on which the world eternally rests.

Even the Hebrews were no exception in this regard. This, at least, seems to be the position of many Hebrew scholars today. My own Hebrew is almost non-existent, in spite of having lived in Israel for more than a year, but I am told (and I can sort of see it with the help of my interlinear Hebrew Bible) that a more accurate rendering of Genesis 1:1-2 would read as follows: "When God created the heavens and the earth in the beginning, the earth being formless and void, darkness covering the surface of the deep, the Breath/Spirit of God hovering over the waters, God said: Let there be light."

In other words, what scholars suggest is that the ancient Hebrews also believed in the existence of primordial stuff, into which God then brought order. On that view, the God of Genesis can be pictured like this. Sometimes when I was away from my family for a week or two, my wife and children used my home office for various purposes, and they did not always manage to clean everything up before I came home. If I came back at night, I would open the door to my office, turn on the light, and start bringing order into the tohuwabohu that met me. The God of Genesis does something similar. He turns on the light and brings order into the disorderly substance of existence. Now this picture does not contradict the possibility of creation ex nihilo, that is, creation out of nothing. The biblical God might very well have created the basic stuff as well, but, like I said, many modern scholars maintain that this is not in fact what the text asserts.

The basic stuff of the universe has always been here and will always be here. This seems to be the given view of Antiquity. (Please correct me if anyone can think of a counter example.) Therefore, both for Plato and Aristotle, the eternity of existence is not really open to debate.  Aristotle might give further reasons for substantiating this view, but not because he ever had any real doubt about it. The only question is: "Of what does this eternal existence consist? What is the foundation of existence?" And this question, I would still maintain, Plato and Aristotle answer in two radically different ways—even if we take the Aristotle of the Metaphysics rather than the Aristotle of the Categories.

Plato’s answer is: Transcendence.

Aristotle’s answer is: Immanence.

For Plato, this world is the shadow of the real world. For Aristotle, this world is the real world, albeit one that contains not just particulars but also universals and even a Prime Mover. I see the eternity of Aristotle’s universals as a non-issue, given the views of the time. What really matters is that they are meant to be understood as immanent, as this-worldly.

Aristotle and the Layer Cake of Reality, Or: What’s Fundamentally Real?

I apologize in advance that this is going to be a somewhat rambling post, mostly inspired by Aristotle’s discussions of substance but not being a careful analysis of it. I’ll reserve the careful analysis for future posts.

If I understand Aristotle’s Metaphysics correctly, its main thesis is that the reality of the world does not rest on something transcendent, something separate from reality, something ideal (in the philosophical sense of the word), whether that be Platonic Forms or Pythagorean numbers. Instead, the reality of the world rests on a natural, this-worldly, concrete substance.

The world, then, can be understood by comparing it to a forest. The bottom of the forest is the ground out of which the whole forest grows and derives its existence. Trees grow out of the ground, live, and die again, falling back into the stuff out of which they had come, but the ground always remains. Likewise, we humans also grew out of the earth, albeit less directly than a tree. There are more layers between us and the earth, but I think Aristotle would agree with the statement: "Dust we are, and to dust we shall return." In other words, the fundamental substance of the world has taken on a certain form in us, but it is not a permanent, unchangeable form. We are trees; we are not the ground of the forest.

Now at what point does a tree start being a tree and stop being a tree? Is a seed already a tree, because the potential of being a tree already resides in it? Is a seedling that is not quite out of the ground yet already a tree? Is a tree that was blown over by a storm still a tree? Is a half-decomposed tree still a tree? Is the tree still a tree as long as one piece of bark from the tree remains, and only when the last infinitesimal splinter of the tree is devoured by a worm does it stop being a tree?

I get the impression that for Aristotle, these kinds of questions about the tree are very much the same questions we can ask about the essence of a human being. Since we are several layers up in the—if I may mix metaphors for a moment—layer cake of reality, since we are composite beings whose components merge and then fall apart again, disintegrating back into the lower layers, it does not make much sense to talk about the ultimate essence of an individual human being. What makes sense is to talk about the ultimate essence of the species human being, since the species is that which remains constant even while individual members of the human race fade in and out of existence. They are gradually assembled into the form of a human being, exist for a while, and then they—sometimes suddenly, often gradually—disassemble again into more fundamental stuff. Humans are not constant; humanness is.

So, this reading of Aristotle would contradict Heraclitus, who said that you can never step into the same river twice, meaning that there is no ultimate essence to anything; everything is constantly changing. Not so in this interpretation of Aristotle. You can step into the same river twice. That is, by meeting Peter Jackson you meet the species homo sapiens, and by meeting Martin Freeman you meet the exact same species. But it seems to me that if you push Aristotle’s logic to its extreme, Peter and Martin as individuals are very inconstant. They are rivers, and you can never step into them as individuals twice. That is because we humans are entities made up of many different components, and these components constantly change. From my conception in my mother’s womb to the moment of my death, I undergo numerous changes, but through it all the species of homo sapiens has been, so to speak , incarnate in me. This species existed even before my potential as a human being had reached its full actuality, and it continues to exist even as I as an individual disintegrate again.

Could it be that part of the problem many of us might have with such a notion is that we approach it from a paradigm in which the individual human being is paramount? If we came from a culture in which the collective mattered more than the individual, we probably would not find this issue so thorny.

But, by and large, our Western culture does still value the individual more than the collective. The historical developments that created this value are complex, but one contributor has certainly been Christianity. From a biblical point of view, the question about the essence of humans  is quite easily answered. We are the image of God. Christianity took this Jewish idea and applied it not just to humans in general, but to every single individual. I, as an individual, carry the image of God in me. That is my essence, and since God is eternal and unchanging, this essence is eternal and unchanging.

Aristotle’s Prime Mover, of course, is no such personal God who has made humans in His image and has even given His life for individual human beings to redeem them from their imperfections and transform them into eternal beings partaking in His own essence. Aristotle, therefore, cannot rely on such an essence to give meaning to the individual. What remains in some sections of the Metaphysics—as opposed to the Categories and, it seems, to other sections of the Metaphysics—is the essence of the human species, not the individual.

Now, in our age of Evolution, Aristotle would have to greatly modify his view on the consistency of species; species fade in and out of existence just like individuals do, only over a period of two million years on average rather than, say, two or twenty or a hundred years. This poses an interesting question: If we transported Aristotle’s ideas about the essence of humanness into the twenty-first century, what would remain? If I may venture a guess, I think Aristotle would bring up even species a few layers in his layer cake of reality. He might stress that species are more fundamental than individuals, but I think he would recognize that species, too, are composite entities that assemble and then disassemble again. They are not fundamental, eternal substances of existence.

The Big Bang theory would be another aspect that would greatly change Aristotle’s view of the world, I think. If the material world actually has a beginning, which we can even measure as a very definite, finite time interval, how can we still posit a natural, this-worldly, concrete substance as the foundation of the world? Transcendence wins the day after all—at least transcendence in the sense of our being forced to think outside of our universe, whether that is by positing multiple universes or by positing a transcendent Being, not a Prime Mover immanent in the eternal reality of the world.

All right, enough philosophical rambling for now. Back to the reality of my daily world, which right now consists of helping my wife and children decorate the Christmas tree.

The Fool Says in His Heart, “There is No God”–What Did the Psalmist Mean?

In Psalm 14:1, we find the statement, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’” Thomas Aquinas and many others have used this verse to talk about atheism versus theism. But what did the Psalmist really have in mind? I doubt it was an intellectual, highly theoretical and abstract disputation about the existence or non-existence of a transcendent Absolute Entity we call “God.”

First of all, the Hebrew word translated as "fool" is not primarily someone who lacks intelligence but who is morally deficient. Second, and in line with that, the whole Psalm is about "evildoers" who "devour" God’s people and oppress the poor. Therefore, the statement about the fool saying in his heart that there is no God is meant to convey: People who suppress their conscience and mistreat other people say to themselves, "There is no one who will take me to account. There is no ultimate justice. I will get away with my crimes."

But neither does the Psalm assert that atheists are necessarily morally deficient. In my understanding, the Psalmist does not say, "All those who deny God’s existence are morally deficient." Rather, he means to say, "All those who blatantly mistreat other people cannot, in their heart of hearts, really believe that there is a God who will hold them accountable."

He does not say, "He who does not believe in God is a fool," but, "The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’" Note the phrase, "The fool says in his heart …" The "fool" may outwardly proclaim quite loudly allegiance to God. But if he acts in such a way that it shows utter disregard to others, his outward confession of faith belies what is in his heart.

Of course, by interpreting Psalm 14 in this way I do not deny that there is a long Western tradition about atheists not being morally upright—a tradition that several morally upright atheists of the past few centuries have tried to dispel.

The Critique of Pure Reason– A Summary

In a famous passage toward the end of the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant says that two things fill the mind with ever increasing wonder: the starry heavens above and the moral law within. Through Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and others, incredible progress had been made about understanding the "starry heavens above." But skeptical philosophers like David Hume maintained that the scientific success could not be extended to other areas such as theology or morality.

Hume said that what we see in the natural world might have all kinds of causes. Inferring a Creator, let alone a particular kind of Creator, goes beyond the evidence. In fact, the very concept of causality is merely a habit of the mind that we form by constantly seeing two things happening together. If we did not repeatedly observe that a billiard ball moved when hit by another billiard ball, we would not bring the two events in relation to each other. And we certainly would not be able to infer from the movement of the one ball that another ball had struck it, unless we have constantly observed the two together.

Likewise, we cannot infer anything about supposed metaphysical causes by looking at the physical world, because causal relations only form in our minds through repeated experience. But no one in his right mind claims, for instance, that he constantly observes God creating the world. God as a cause is inferred from the effect, but that is precisely what, according to Hume, we cannot do.

These and other thoughts by Hume awoke Kant, as he himself said, out of his "dogmatic slumber." Essentially, Hume raised in him the following questions:

1. Given what Hume said about causality, how can I affirm the validity of Newton’s physics, which is built on the concept of causality? What makes it possible for natural science and mathematics to give us apparently reliable knowledge of the world?
2. Why is it so difficult to make similar progress in metaphysical questions about God, the soul, free will, and morality? Is knowledge about these things possible at all? And if so, in what way and to what degree? Clearly, Reason itself compels us to ask these questions, but then Reason seems to be unable to answer them. Why is that?

In Kant’s long and laborious answer, laid out in his Critique of Pure Reason, he essentially harmonizes Hume with Newton. Science and mathematics are so successful, he says, because they only describe reality as it appears to us, not as it is in itself. Science only studies the world that we can touch, feel, see, hear, and smell—the experiences of our senses. Even with the aid of technology such as a telescope or, nowadays, a particle accelerator, we take in all scientific data through our senses. But the way that we experience our senses—the way our mind puts together what we touch, feel, see, hear, and smell—depends on certain forms in which our mind is structured. We cannot help thinking in terms of space and time, cause and effect, quantity and quality, modality and relation. These ways of thinking are what Kant calls a priori, that is, they come before experience. In fact, all coherent experience is dependent on them.

The problem of dogmatic metaphysics is that it pretends we can free ourselves from these necessary preconditions of our experience and get direct, unfiltered knowledge of ultimate reality. Not so, says Kant. Even space and time are not a reality that we perceive without a human filter. On the contrary, it is impossible for us to think of anything without picturing it in time and space. Space and time are, so to speak, mental cookie cutters. They are forms of the human mind that the dough of our experience has to conform to in order to experience anything at all. In Kant’s terminology, they are "forms of intuition" or "forms of sensibility."

Does that mean, then, that space and time are completely subjective and do not exist at all except in our minds? Do we live in some kind of illusory world, like in the Matrix? No, that would be to misunderstand Kant. Space and time are real for Kant. Objects do not merely seem to exist in time and space; they are in time and space. But since space and time are necessary concepts for any experience whatsoever, the concepts only apply to things as they appear to us. In what way and to what degree space and time apply to reality apart from our experience of reality, is unknowable to us. All we can say is they are necessary concepts for experiencing reality. Therefore, while all objects of our experience are in time, not all of reality must necessarily be in time as we understand it. While all objects of our experiences are in space, not all of reality must necessarily be in space as we understand it. On an ultimate level, reality might be quite different from the space-time framework from which we cannot free ourselves.

That is why, Kant thinks, mathematics and geometry have truths that can be definitely proven. They are about the necessary forms of all our experience, which is why they are internally coherent. Geometry takes place in space, and mathematics is done in time. Thus, they must conform to our a priori intuitions of space and time.

This makes arithmetic and geometry "synthetic a priori truths." "Synthetic" means that they are truths not merely about the meaning of words, which would be "analytic" truths, but about the real world. At the same time, however, these truths are a priori in that they are not based on our experience of the real world.

Kant’s conception of time and space as they relate to arithmetic and geometry is a good example of why he called his philosophy a new "Copernican Revolution." Just like Copernicus had reverted our understanding of the universe by proposing that it is us who move, even though it looks as if the sun moved, so Kant tried to show that it is really the structure of our minds that "moves" in a certain way and lets reality appear to us according to these "movements." Empiricists such as John Locke had thought that objective reality impressed itself on the blank slate of our minds. Kant proposed that it was the other way round: Our minds impressed themselves on objective reality. All our experiences of the outer world must necessarily conform to the a priori forms of our intuition and fundamental categories of our understanding. If Locke and Hume had been right, all our ideas about the world would arise as a result of our experience. They would come "after" experience, a posteriori. In contrast, Kant thought that a priori knowledge—knowledge prior to experience—was possible, namely the knowledge of the categories of our understanding to which our experiences conform.

Kant divided these categories as follows:

1. Quantity: unity, plurality, and totality.
2. Quality: reality, negation, and limitation.
3. Modality: possibility, existence, and necessity.
4. Relation: inherence, causality, community, and correlation.

While there was nothing particularly new about this list as such, as Aristotle and the Scholastics had already made similar categorizations, the revolutionary move on Kant’s part was to say that they are a priori: that they precede experience and are necessary conditions for it. In the longest and probably most difficult part of the Critique of Pure Reason, called the "Transcendental Deduction of the Categories," Kant tries to prove that these categories are in fact a priori.

Having, in Kant’s mind, provided this proof, he is now ready to answer his initial questions more explicitly. (1) What makes it possible for natural science and mathematics to give us apparently reliable knowledge of the world? (2) And why is it so difficult to make similar progress in metaphysical questions about God, the soul, free will, and morality? The answer is that science, arithmetic, and geometry stay within the framework of what is possible for us to experience—a framework that is set by the forms of intuition and the categories of the understanding. This is why science is so effective, but it also means that science is limited. It shows us only the “phenomenal” world, not the “noumenal” world. That is, it only shows as the world as it appears to us, not as it is in itself. The world as it is in itself is the realm of metaphysics, and this is why we cannot give scientific answers to metaphysical questions.

The last third of the Critique of Pure Reason attempts to show, as Robert Kane has put it, “how we get into trouble when we try to press the human mind beyond possible experience into the realms of metaphysics.” Take the existence of God, for instance. Trying to prove his existence has failed, Kant says, because such proofs take the categories of the understanding that only apply to the physical world of appearances and impose them on matters that exceed the bounds of our possible experience. We cannot infer what caused the universe to come into existence based on our way of thinking, because our way of thinking is only fitted for inferences about the physical world of appearances.

Or take the soul. We cannot, Kant stresses, know the soul as such, only the self as it appears to us—our “phenomenal” self, not our “noumenal” self. We do not and cannot know what the soul is in itself, apart from the way our sense of self appears to us. Neither can we say anything of scientific certainty about the mortality or immortality of the soul. We may have faith and hope in eternal life based on what Kant calls “practical” Reason, but not scientific certainty.

Nor can we scientifically resolve the conflict between determinism and free will. Science is based on the view that everything works by determined laws, but our understanding of morality is based on the view that we have free will. Without the concept of free will, none of our moral practices would make any sense: no commands or punishments, no blame or excuses, no forgiveness or justice. But how can we reconcile the determined world of science with the free world of morality? Science itself cannot resolve this contradiction, says Kant. It cannot be resolved by “theoretical” Reason, only by “practical” Reason.

And it is this practical Reason that Kant tackles in his second Critique, the Critique of Practical Reason.

William James: Does It Matter Whether or Not Our Beliefs are True?

As mentioned in my last post, I recently read William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience. It is certainly a worthwhile read, even if only for the many testimonies that James gathered for his work. I should add, however, that a large proportion of these testimonies comes from a Christian background, so the Varieties do not have quite as much variety as one might hope of such a work. Still, it should be praised for taking religious experiences seriously and not dismissing them out of hand only because they are religious.

Now on to the problems. James’ pragmatic approach to religious experience, which essentially says that one ought to judge the value of religious experiences solely by their fruit, raises many questions. As Richard Rorty has pointed out, it is not quite clear in James whether or not the actual existence of God/gods is relevant. At times, James talks as if it were of no consequence whatsoever whether or not there really is a spiritual realm beyond our perception. At other times, he seems to say that it matters a great deal.

For example, he says, “Abstractly, it would seem illogical to try to measure the worth of a religion’s fruits in merely human terms of value. How can you measure their worth without considering whether the God really exists who is supposed to inspire them? If he really exists, then all the conduct instituted by men to meet his wants must necessarily be a reasonable fruit of his religion—it would be unreasonable only in case he did not exist. If, for instance, you were to condemn a religion of human or animal sacrifices by virtue of your subjective sentiments, and if all the while a deity were really there demanding such sacrifices, you would be making a theoretical mistake by tacitly assuming that the deity must be non-existent; you would be setting up a theology of your own as much as if you were a scholastic philosopher.”

This is an important point. For instance, the Aztecs (in what is now Mexico) believed that the shedding of human blood and the sacrificing of human life were necessary to keep the cosmos running. Without continuous human sacrifice, the present age would come to an end. Now, as James rightly pointed out, it matters a great deal whether or not this belief is actually true. If it is true, then human sacrifices are necessary. Perhaps we might still consider it an evil, but a necessary evil. As the many wars even in our own time show, we are quite willing to sacrifice human life if we think it necessary for the protection or continuation of our society. And, since we tend to sanction and even sanctify whatever we deem necessary, we might even consider human sacrifice a noble institution. (For anyone who has a hard time imaging how people could ever consider human sacrifice a noble institution, I recommend the novel Aztec by Gary Jennings.)

Now in our modern democracies we tend to say, “You can have any religious belief whatsoever, but you still have to keep the law. If your religion induces you to act against the law, you will be punished like everyone else.” But such a separation between belief and practice is not completely honest. If the Aztec belief is true that human sacrifices are necessary to keep the cosmos running, then, to any morally-minded person, this cosmic reality ought to take precedence over any petty national laws. If the belief is true, it becomes a moral imperative to disobey the law and keep sacrificing humans.

Or, to use a more relevant example for us, take the belief in the existence of an immortal soul. If, as some firmly believe, an immortal soul is created at the moment of conception—or, alternatively, if a pre-existing soul unites itself with the human cells at the moment of conception—then we cannot simply consider the fertilized human egg a fertilized human egg. If this belief is true, then taking the morning-after pill would amount to separating a soul from its body. Our common word for that is murder. And if you truly believe that every woman who takes a morning-after pill is a murderess—and probably a mass-murderess at that—you might feel morally driven to take extreme measures to prevent such murder from taking place. Most people would not consider it morally reprehensible to kill a mass-murderer who is about to kill further victims, if his death is the only way to prevent more crimes. Granted, killing pregnant women would be of little point, since you would kill the baby with her, but targeting abortion clinics or the manufacturers or sellers of morning-after pills would be morally justifiable or even obligatory.

So, by making laws prohibiting such actions, governments are taking a clear stance on the truth or falsehood of certain religious beliefs. By telling the believers in Aztec theology and those who believe in the existence of an immortal soul, “You are not allowed to act out the logical conclusions of your beliefs,” governments are making the clear statement that those beliefs are not true. If they granted that these beliefs might be true, they would make appropriate allowances in the law—just in case Aztec believers really are saving the cosmos through human sacrifices and believers in an immortal soul really are preventing mass-murder.

Like James says, “To this extent, to the extent of disbelieving peremptorily in certain types of deity, I frankly confess that we must be theologians. If disbeliefs can be said to constitute a theology, then the prejudices, instincts, and common sense which I chose as our guides make theological partisans of us whenever they make certain beliefs abhorrent.”

But then, how do we decide which beliefs we reject outright and which beliefs we tolerate as possibly true? Only those who fit our own moral framework? But where does our moral framework come from? Our moral framework is to a large extent determined by the kind of presuppositions we have about the world. How can we judge religious claims by their fruit if tastes vary so significantly between different people? In that case, we are using a kind of reasoning that my two-year old daughter is fond of using at the moment, “I like bananas because … I like bananas.” My daughter has picked up from us older ones that she ought to, if possible, give a rational justification for her opinions, but in many cases the only rationale she is able to give is her own preference.

Does, then, the Jamesean maxim “Judge a religion by its fruit” simply boil down to “Judge a religion by whatever suits your taste?”

Well, in some passages James comes very close to saying so: “But such common-sense prejudices and instincts are themselves the fruit of an empirical evolution. Nothing is more striking than the secular alteration that goes on in the moral and religious tone of men, as their insight into nature and their social arrangements progressively develop. After an interval of a few generations the mental climate proves unfavorable to notions of the deity which at an earlier date were perfectly satisfactory: the older gods have fallen below the common secular level, and can no longer be believed in. Today a deity who should require bleeding sacrifices to placate him would be too sanguinary to be taken seriously. Even if powerful historical credentials were put forward in his favor, we would not look at them. Once, on the contrary, his cruel appetites were of themselves credentials. They positively recommended him to men’s imaginations in ages when such coarse signs of power were respected and no others could be understood. Such deities then were worshiped because such fruits were relished.”

To summarize: Sometimes it matters a great deal whether a religious belief is objectively true or not, because the belief determines whether certain actions are considered right or wrong. Judging religious beliefs merely by their fruit is insufficient, since people’s tastes change significantly throughout the ages. One might say, “Well, then, let’s not judge religious beliefs at all.” But that is not an option either, because we need to make laws to govern civilization, and some of those laws prohibit what would be the logical consequences of certain beliefs.

Would anyone like to contradict my conclusion? Did I misunderstand James?

Has G.E. Moore Refuted Idealism?

As I wrote in my post on the history of Idealism, Idealism asserts that what is most real and/or accessible to us humans are our ideas or thoughts about the world, and it is an open question to what degree those thoughts actually correspond to an outside reality.

Now G.E. Moore set out to refute Idealism in his essay of 1903, and his basic criticism is surprisingly simple—that is, if I understand him correctly. Essentially, he is saying that Idealism would lead to an infinite regress, and if Realism cannot be supported, then neither can Idealism.

If you haven’t read the essay, this explanation is probably not yet very clear. Let me try to spell it out more.

Perhaps his refutation can best be illustrated by saying that G.E. Moore is using the same basic argument against Idealism that Bertrand Russell and others have used against Theism, which is the old question, “Well, if God made the world, then who made God?” God as an explanation for why the world exists, said Russell, doesn’t explain anything, because you are still left with the question of why God exists. You have only pushed the question back one level. Better not to push at all, otherwise you would land in an infinite regress. The Leibnizian question, “Why does something exist rather than nothing?” is unanswerable for us humans, and the belief in God does not solve it. We are still left to ask, “Why does God exist rather than nothing?”

Now, it might be said that God is a more fitting end point for the ultimate mystery of existence than a material universe, and personally I am actually inclined to think so, but here I’m only using it as an example for how G.E. Moore tries to tackle Idealism. He basically says to Idealists, “You wish to push back our perception of reality one level by pointing out that all we have of reality is our awareness of it, and therefore we can only affirm our awareness rather than the reality itself. Well, but then how do you know about your awareness? Of your awareness you are also merely aware, so why not doubt the validity even of your awareness? And then you could doubt the validity of the awareness of your awareness, ad infinitum. Better stop at the outside reality than go down that infinite road of an explanation that ultimately explains nothing.”

To use G.E. Moore’s actual words: “[T]he existence of a table in space is related to my experience of it in precisely the same way as the existence of my own experience is related to my experience of that. Of both we are merely aware: if we are aware that the one exists, we are aware in precisely the same sense that the other exists; and if it is true that my experience can exist, even when I do not happen to be aware of its existence, we have exactly the same reason for supposing that the table can do so also. When, therefore, Berkeley, supposed that the only thing of which I am directly aware is my own sensations and ideas, he supposed what was false; and when Kant supposed that the objectivity of things in space consisted in the fact that they were ‘Vorstellungen’ having to one another different relations from those which the same ‘Vorstellungen’ have to one another in subjective experience, he supposed what was equally false.”

At first this seems like a good point, but I am not sure that G.E. Moore is right. Does he really refute Idealism as such or only Berkeley’s Idealism, and perhaps even a straw-man Berkeley at that? The popular conception of Berkeley is that he said: “Being means being perceived. Therefore, when I am not looking at the tree over there, it isn’t there.” This caricature of Berkeley’s Idealism ignores the most important ingredient of his philosophy, namely God. For Berkeley, God is always present everywhere and perceives everything, and therefore everything is real because it derives its reality directly from God.

So yes, G.E. Moore does refute Berkeleyism, but only the popular conception of it that leaves out God. Moore is correct to say: If you think that things in the outside world do not exist when you are not perceiving them—if perception is the only reality that exists—then you also need to say that your awareness does not exist when you are not thinking about the fact that you are aware of things.

But does this refute Idealism as such? Does this change the fact that I can be much more directly aware of my awareness than I can be of the outside reality? I don’t think so. I can only perceive the laptop in front of me through my five senses: I see its bright screen, I feel the keys on my fingertips, I hear its sound of the fan, I can bend over it and smell the warm metal and plastic; I can even stick out my tongue and taste it. All of this information is transmitted by neurons to my brain and interpreted there in a certain way because my brain is wired to perceive reality in a certain way. What exactly is this laptop apart from my perceiving it?—Well, that is quite a different question from the question of my immediate perception. I am aware of the laptop, but what is the laptop apart from my awareness? A difficult issue, and one that the best philosophers and scientists in the world keep grappling with.

In contrast, in order to be aware of my awareness, all I need to do is to think: “I see, I touch, I hear, I smell, I taste something that I call a laptop.” No one can tell me that I am not having these sensations and that I construe these sensation into the concept “laptop” because sensations and mental constructions are subjective and non-debatable. Perhaps I am hallucinating, perhaps the objective reality of this thing called laptop is radically different from my perceptions, but my perceptions and the concepts in my mind are still real. As far as I am concerned, they are the most real and most accessible things in existence.

Therefore, contrary to what G.E. Moore said, my awareness of the laptop does not stand in exactly the same relation to the laptop as my awareness stands in relation to my awareness. The first is the relation between something subjective to something objective; the other is simply the acknowledgment of the fact that I am having a certain subjective experience.

For me, G.E. Moore has not refuted Idealism. But perhaps I misconstrued his argument and, while criticising him for attacking a straw-man Berkeley, have erected a straw man myself? I have a hard time believing that such a philosophically highly educated man as Moore fell prey to misrepresenting Berkeley and am rather inclined to think that I am misrepresenting Moore. If so, I would welcome more objective input.

Voltaire: Is God at Work in This World of Suffering?

When I was on a Voltaire kick last month, I also read his story Zadig, or The Book of Fate, published in 1747, and it, too, is related to some of the themes we’ve been discussing lately in this blog.

The basic plot of the tale takes place in ancient Babylon, where a virtuous citizen by the name of Zadig rises in the esteem of the king but is betrayed by envious neighbors. Consequently, he falls out of favor with the king and becomes a wanderer in the Middle East, enduring injustice, ingratitude and all manner of suffering. After a while, a civil war breaks out in Babylon, which gives Zadig the opportunity to return and conquer his enemies. In the end, Zadig is king and rules with justice.

That’s the basic plot. But there are several philosophical questions raised by the experiences of Zadig, some of them implicit in the storyline and others explicitly asked by various characters.

When I wrote about Voltaire’s Micromegas, I quoted Professor Kors. Let me quote him again now to list the questions he sees in the text:

1. What are the ethics (not the form) of good government? What matters under any form of government are the morals, civic virtues, and compassion of whoever rules and the ruler’s capacity to remain above flattery.
2. Why does so much human injustice exist in the world?
3. What might be remedies of human injustice?
4. What is the role of chance in human justice?
5. Why does chance seem so opposed to divine providence?
6. Can one look at the human condition and find divine justice?

As is typical of Voltaire, he raises these questions without giving a definite answer to any of them. Rather, he shows the dilemmas of our human condition and thus creates empathy in the reader. Voltaire is foremost a humanist, not a system builder or even at all a systematic thinker.

Although justice triumphs in the end, much of Zadig is dominated by injustice, and it raises the old question of Plato’s Republic: What is justice? What would justice look like? How can we achieve a just society? Is it possible to achieve justice on earth or is injustice so deeply engrained in us that all we can do is to create a few safeguards against the inevitable abuse of power? Should we have an optimistic or a pessimistic view on human nature? Should we go with Hobbes or with Rousseau? And finally, how are we to reconcile God’s justice and providence with the obvious injustice within human civilization?