To untutored common sense, the natural world is filled with irreducibly different kinds of objects and qualities: people; dogs and cats; trees and flowers; rocks, dirt, and water; colors, odors, sounds; heat and cold; meanings and purposes. A man is a radically different sort of thing from a rose, which is in turn no less different from a stone. The warmth of the stone and the redness and fragrance of the rose are features no less real than their shapes or movements; the function of an ear or an eye and the meaning of a human thought or utterance are no less a part of objective reality than a man’s height or weight.
Aristotle and the Scholastic tradition that built on his thought took the view that common sense was essentially correct. It needed to be systematized and refined, and when its implications were drawn out they would lead to metaphysical conclusions far beyond anything the man on the street is likely to have dreamed of, or even to understand. But a sound philosophy and science would nevertheless build on common sense rather than radically undermine it.
The founders of modern philosophy and science overthrew Aristotelianism, and common sense along with it. On the new view of nature inaugurated by Galileo and Descartes, the material world is comprised of nothing more than colorless, odorless, soundless, meaningless, purposeless particles in motion, describable in purely mathematical terms. The differences between dirt, water, rocks, trees, dogs, cats, and human bodies are on this view superficial.
Indeed, at bottom these are all just the same kinds of thing—arrangements within the one vast ocean of physical particles, the differences between the arrangements ultimately no deeper than the differences between waves on the same sea. Color, sound, odor, heat, and cold—understood in the qualitative way common sense understands them—are relegated to the mind, existing only in our conscious representation of the natural world, not in the world itself. Color, sound, and the rest as objective features would be redefined in quantitative terms—reflectance properties of physical surfaces, compression waves, and the like.
Meaning and purpose are similarly relegated to the mind in this system. We may project the meaning and purpose we find in our own thoughts and actions onto the external world, but it isn’t really there at all. What is there is only what can be captured in the language of physical science.
Descartes and some of the other moderns supplemented this austere picture of nature with a conception of the human mind as an immaterial substance that somehow interacts with those parts of the natural world we call human bodies. This Cartesian dualist position is notoriously problematic, and modern materialists have opted to throw out Descartes’ immaterial substance while holding on to his view of the material world. But their own position is, if anything, even more problematic.
The conception of matter they share with the Cartesian dualist says matter is inherently devoid of the qualitative features we know from conscious experience—color, sound, heat, cold, etc.—as well as of meaning or purpose of any kind. To deny that there is anything immaterial that has these features is therefore to imply that there is nothing at all that has them—and thus, in turn, to deny that our conscious experiences or the meanings of our very thoughts and words are real. This “eliminative materialist” position is ultimately incoherent, and few philosophical naturalists are willing to embrace it—though Alex Rosenberg’s recent The Atheist’s Guide to Reality promotes a version of eliminativism—but the conclusion that a consistent materialism leads to it is difficult to avoid.
Thomas Nagel is another prominent naturalist willing to face up to the bizarre implications of materialism, but unlike Rosenberg he takes them to constitute a compelling reason to reject materialism and look for an alternative way to formulate naturalism. Hence the subtitle of his new book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.
Nagel does not reject evolution per se, but only the standard reductionist interpretation of evolutionary processes. But neither does he embrace theistic evolution. (His atheism seems as firm as it was in his earlier book The Last Word, wherein he candidly wrote: “I want atheism to be true. . . . I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.”) His aim is rather to explore the possibility of a teleology or directedness that is inherent to the natural order rather than imposed from without—and indeed to move away from the strictly mathematical and materialist conception of the natural order the early moderns bequeathed to us.
Though Aristotle’s name comes up only a couple of times in the book, it is remarkable how Aristotelian (and even Scholastic) in spirit Nagel’s proposals are, not only in his general willingness to reconsider the immanent or “built in” teleology that was at the core of the Aristotelian-Scholastic conception of nature, but also in some of his more specific theses.
For example, Nagel argues that it is impossible to explain our rational capacities in terms of the consciousness we share with lower animals; that consciousness in turn cannot easily be explained in reductive terms of any sort, and certainly not via a specifically materialist form of reductionism; that even the origin of life from inorganic chemical processes has not been given a plausible naturalistic explanation; and that in each case we need to reconsider the possibility of a teleological account. In so arguing he has essentially recapitulated the traditional Aristotelian hierarchy of irreducibly rational, sensory, and vegetative forms of life (where “vegetative” has here a technical meaning, connoting those organic functions that operate below the distinctively animal kind).
Value, which Nagel insists is a real feature of the world rather than a projection of our subjective desires or sentiments, is, he says, a byproduct of teleology “even if teleology is separated from intention, and the result is not the goal of an agent who aims at it”—again, a standard Aristotelian thesis. (He rightly suggests that theists ought to be open to the idea of immanent teleology of the Aristotelian sort. He may not be aware that medieval theologians like Aquinas were committed to precisely that.)
Throughout the book Nagel emphasizes that for phenomena like life, consciousness, rationality, and value to arise in the later stages of the history of the universe, we have to suppose they were somehow “latent in the nature of things” from the beginning—thereby hinting at the Aristotelian notion of change as the actualization of built-in potentialities, and the Scholastic principle that whatever is in an effect must in some way be contained in its total cause.
More generally, Nagel’s emphasis on the implausibility of reducing certain higher-level features of a thing to features of its parts is reminiscent of the holistic Aristotelian conception of what a natural substance is; and his theme of the possibility of reviving the teleological notion of an “order that governs the natural world from within” echoes the Aristotelian-Scholastic notion of formal and final causes.
It would certainly overstate things to call Nagel an Aristotelian, full stop. His views are too inchoate and tentative for that. All the same, given the target of his critique—the essentially anti-Aristotelian philosophy of nature we’ve inherited from Galileo and Descartes—and the content of his positive proposals, the contemporary Neo-Aristotelian or Neo-Scholastic reader will find it hard to resist a “Told you so!”
Intentionally or not, Mind and Cosmos marks an important contribution to the small but significant Aristotelian revival currently underway in academic philosophy of science and metaphysics. Nagel suggests that the current materialist orthodoxy “will come to seem laughable in a generation or two.” That would be a fitting end for a tradition that has for so long buried Aristotelian philosophy under a mountain of caricatures.
Edward Feser is the author of The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism and Aquinas. He blogs about philosophy here.
RESOURCES
Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False
Edward Feser, “Rosenberg Roundup”
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Comments:
The rational soul cannot be produced except by creation. Now, God alone can create; for the first agent alone can act without presupposing the existence of anything; while the second cause always presupposes something derived from the first cause, as above explained, and every agent that presupposes something to its act, acts by making a change therein. Therefore everything else acts by producing a change, whereas God alone acts by creation. Since, therefore, the rational soul cannot be produced by a change in matter, it cannot be produced, save immediately by God. ST I, 90,3c.
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The moment that we know that the world of our sensory experience is not the entire world, then the Aristotelian viewpoint collapses, leaving us to confront the fact that a closed and complete circle of naive realism cannot be true, not in the sense that we can argue convincingly for abstract metaphysical entities such as "reason", but in the sense that there is more to physics than we can directly experience.
Because of this, we have an inherently different starting point than either Aristotle or Aquinas. We have to explain a physical world which we know to be at least more, and probably different, than what we actually see, and that all explanations involving reified metaphysical concepts are operating from incomplete physical evidence, meaning not that they are false, but that they are unprovable, since we do not experience more than a very small part of what we are trying to explain.
The key to this shift is that the burden of proof for the real and objective existence of metaphysics of any kind now lies squarely with those who assert it. So far they have failed to do so.
"And yet it moves." And yet it can not be moved, for everything that exists in God's creation, The Universe, all that is seen and unseen, exists in relationship.
There is an inherent epistemological bias you have smuggled into this statement; one that has prevailed since the 19th century: natural philosophical inquiry can only gain credibility and validity by approximating itself more and more to the methods of "empirical science". However, this violates one of the most basic principles of rationality: Let the object determine the mode of investigation. To be dismissive of Aristotle's analysis of form, matter, and privation, a pronouncement of universal import, because he didn't know about quarks oscillating under a microscope is categorical snobbery.
Without that starting point there would be no science.
Best,
Richard
But our ability to distort light with a telescope to provide images that are as if naturally viewed does not make those images the SAME AS or EQUIVALENT to the naturally viewed in ways both trivial and profound. We can not have direct natural experience of Jupiter, other than to note it's movements from our position on Earth. Over amplified visual ques distort the natural dynamic of the senses.
My point: it is all well and good that we now know that the planets actually rotate around the Sun and that there are a great many other amazing astrophysical phenomenon, but how does this "knowledge" improve my moral being? It does not. The fact that Jupiter has moons has no bearing on my moral existence. It might not have any significant bearing upon human existence for 1000 more years. In the mean time, this chimerical "knowledge" has been used to debase real natural understanding that is germane to the lives of human beings. Case in point is the regular parading of Galileo, Man of Science (TM) by atheists against as sacred totem against the bogeyman: Christian (which means Catholic) Church.
This is a perfect example of borrowing from Aristotelean notions in order to claim that one has undermined them.
Mr. Marshall is implying that those who accept metaphysics have a duty to succeed in meeting a certain burden of proof in order to advance their cause, and that duty is connected to the proper use of their intellectual powers. But that understanding requires final and formal causality--that these powers have a proper end that we may fail to fulfill--and that because we are beings of a certain sort we can appropriately attribute an obligation to ourselves and those who are like us (i.e. those who share our nature). And because Mr. Marshall is offering this judgment as a universal judgment--one that applies to all human beings whose cognitive equipment is properly functioning--he must know something about "human nature as such."
But the question is whether or not the "objects" you are speaking of really exist. All metaphysics is suspect because it is hard (if not impossible) to place metaphysical "objects" immediately before our eyes as we can food at a feast. There is no a priori reason from "common sense" to grant them any objectivity, it must be argued for.
The fact that I engage in reasoning simply is not sufficient to support the notion that anything called Reason, metaphysically independent of my own activity, exists. When I engage in driving it is also not sufficient to ratify the notion that there is anything metaphysical called Drive that exists either, or a metaphysical object called Eat when I engage in eating.
When we speak of "form", "matter", "privation", "reason", and so on, we are attaching a label to experience, not explaining it. When everybody from Ptolemy, to Augustine, to Aquinas were dealing with the same sensory evidence, such categorizations were, in fact, the only means of even attempting an explanation, once we discover, however, that the world of physical objects contains things that "common sense" has never revealed to us, the terms of the problem of sensory evidence change, and the whole question of epistemology, "how do we know what we know?" rudely butts into the discussion and, by extension, calls forth the method of Cartesian "systematic doubt".
In fact insofar as my own (Buddhist) philosophy bears any relation to any of this, the two points of contact are Descartes and Hume. And, insofar as my biases are concerned you are more likely to find them in Descartes than in any 19th century school of thought. To give the short version, there is no reason whatsoever to believe cognitio ergo sum, thus the independent existance of anything at all, including both perception and a "perceiver" can be systematically doubted also.
Now that's about as far as I can go in a blog comment with this, but the fact that I withhold belief in an objective "subject", "perceiver", or "self" would shape my answers to all of the above responses. This is such a radically different point of view that it is unlikely to lead to a further fruitful discussion of Aristotle. But I am both surprised and pleased that my comment drew forth such sophisticated refutations.
It would be equally hard, I suspect to place mathematical objects there, as well. When was the last time you "saw" a conjoining and splitting topology on a function space? Or a module over a commutative ring?
It is a mistake to suppose that reasoning that begins in common sense must end there as well. It was Aristotle himself, after all, who derived from common sense experience (i.e., sense experiences common to all) that the Earth is a sphere. The common sense experiences were things like the shadow of the Earth on the Moon during a lunar eclipse, the manner in which a ship disappeared over the horizon, the time between sunrise and noon at different locations east and west, and so on. And it was Aquinas who wrote that while the sensible motions of the stars and planets could be accounted for by the theory of epicycles and deferants, "some other theory might also account for them."
And what technology did Galileo invent that showed this was all wrong? He did not invent the telescope (and was not the first to observe or systematically study many of the things he is credited with). He did not invent the method of "demonstrative regress" used to reach many of his conclusion. (He was taught the scientific method by the Jesuits at Padua.) He did not even invent the Copernican math model. For that matter, he did not prove it, either.
Progress in these matters has always involved the discovery of new sense experiences, including instrument-mediated sense experiences. (We measure the height of mercury in a tube, not temperature as such.) Why does that invalidate Aristotelian empiricism?
Worried about the "four causes"? They are making a quiet comeback under new names: "emergent properties" (formal causes), or "attractor basins" (final causes) and such like.
When we attempt to assert the reality of anything similar paradoxes result. Consider your own right hand. When you look down at it, it is obviously an object that is independent of the perceiver. Otherwise how can you be seeing it "down there" in your lap? But when you run your fingers over the surface of textured silk, how can your hand be anything but a part of the perceiver? If your hand were an independent object how could you experience the tactility of the silk?
The starting point on my side comes from questions such as these which expose the paradox of any form of reasoned predication whatever: If you assert that anything exists, you are in error; if you assert that something does not exist, you are in error; if you assert that something both exists and does not exist, you are in error; and if you assert that something neither exists nor doesn't exist, you are in error.
As I said before my own philosophical beliefs really have very little to contribute to the discussion of either Aristotle or Aquinas.
any cause (1st or 3,907,846th) the same as its effect or is it different? If it is the same, how can we support the notion that something causes itself?
No thing can be the aitia of itself. To be a "cause" is to actualize a potential in something. But to actualize a potential, the cause must itself be actual. (If it is not actual, it is nothing and "from nothing comes nothing.")
Not sure what you mean by "1st or 3,907,846th". This cannot be confused with primary causation, which is a logical ordering, not a temporal ordering. All causes other than the primary are classed as secondary. There is no need to number them other than for convenience.
Joseph Marshall says:
If it is different, how can there be any connection between two totally different objects that we can label causal?
That many Late Moderns consider this a mystery is one of the consequences of the breakdown of Western Philosophy. The conundrum comes from assuming that which is to be proven. The danger in believing this sort of thing is that it undermines the natural science enterprise. Everything becomes mere correlation, and the next time you drop a bowling ball from the tower of Pisa it may well flap its wings and fly off to the moon.
Hope this helps.
I still can't see the evidence for the overall process. The granularity of changes (mutations or whatever else happens) can be tiny, even at the smallest possible level of one DNA letter. So the chains of life that came about by these processes should be close to continuous. But we do not see this. We see many similarities but not continuous-like chains of life.
More interesting is that biological objects seem so well suited to their tasks. I have come to think of DNA as like a software program. It even looks designed. In each cell of our DNA is a copy of the whole program with cells displaying markers saying where they are in place and time in making the body we are. So wihin the inital cells producing us and their packaging is an image, subject to its space-time nurturing, of the persons we become.
So I have left any serious respect for neo-Darininan explanations and am asking about design like explanations for origins.
Thomas Nagel's book is dense and he raises good questions.