William James (Clark)

Clark, Gordon H.  Willam James. Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing Co., 1975.

In this little monograph, Gordon H. Clark surveys and analyzes William James’ pragmatism, giving particular attention to James’ early work on pluralism and his later and more popular works on pragmatism.

William James began, if not a full Hegelian, at least as an Idealist before becoming known as a pragmatist.  Seeing that monism and pantheism could not account for the plurality of the world, James sought refuge in pluralism. The question remains: how successful was he?

James defines empiricism as “the habit of explaining wholes by parts” (quoted in Clark 13). He is already off to a perilous start, for Clark points out: “a circle cannot be explained in terms of its arcs because an arc is defined in terms of a circle” (13).

James did not like Hegelianism, but he still wanted “intimacy.” One should quickly point out that intimacy does not mean what it currently means in modern parlance.  With that said, it is not exactly clear what James himself means by it. At this point in the narrative, it probably means something like “connection with.” James goes on to explain his rejection of theism because its God is “wholly Other.” (What James meant was something like the Creator-creature distinction, not Barthianism).

James’ problem now should be obvious: as an empiricist, he wants to explain wholes by parts, but he still wants at least one conclusion of idealist pantheism: union with y. His vague definition notwithstanding, James doubles down: “Not to demand intimate relations with the universe, and not to wish them satisfactory, should be accounted signs of something wrong.”  Clark makes the obvious reply: “But how can anyone be intimate with the universe, or any part of it, except persons and perhaps a pet dog?  To talk of being intimate with a cement driveway…is to use words without meaning” (15).

If James were to continue this line of argument, he might seem to think of himself, still attached or one with the Absolute, as a god.  That is a familiar line in human history.  As Clark notes, however, it is much harder to think of the cement driveway as a god (16). We must leave James’ idealism here, for he eventually abandons it.

Pragmatism

Following Charles S. Peirce, James saw beliefs as “rules for action” (27) and our reactions, particularly the sensate ones, as the consequences of the beliefs. It is probably good for James that he gave up his idealism, for Clark notes that any system of the Absolute, on James’ pragmatism, is only an effect of my actions. “God is merely the things I do” (28). And if realities can be changed like this, “theories thus became instruments, not answers to enigmas” (James, quoted in Clark 28).

If theism suffers from such a view, so does, surprisingly, science.  Scientific laws are now “approximations.” This is not entirely wrong, but James’ inference from it is: objective truth is nowhere to be found (29).  The law of non-contradiction is now an instrument of reality.  (One could  ask, I suppose, whether it was a true or accurate instrument).

Traditional thought had connected the laws of logic with being.  It should not be a surprise to see James, having now relativised logic, attack the idea of substance. Clark here surveys the history of “substance language.”

James defines the soul as “the verifiable cohesions of our inner life” (31).  The following quote, situated in the context of rationalism, is why Gordon Clark was one of the best *writing* philosophers: “Rationalism had supposed that the laws of science were the eternal thoughts of the Almighty, who thundered in syllogisms and reverberated in conic sections.”

Concerning the opposition between spirit and matter, James says, shockingly, they are the same thing. It is not clear why they are so, but one could guess that such a dichotomy means little for the pragmatist when it is time to make future plans. Clark proceeds to attack James on the point whether the pragmatist can truly explain the past. On Clark’s reading, James had reduced “God, soul, and matter to ‘substances,’” “a mere name for collections of qualities and events” (32). If both God and matter are names for past events, then any name could work just as well. More damning still, none of this actually explains the past.  On James’ construction they are the past!

To conclude this part of the analysis, “Sometimes James attaches and intellectualistic content to the concept God and desires it tested in experience; but at other times he argues that every concept is precisely its future effects in human behavior” (33).

Truth

James has problems with the “copy of reality” model of truth (presumably, the correspondence theory). Let us for the moment grant James’ criticisms of this model. He has a more immediate problem with “intellectualist” models of truth: they cannot have practical consequences.  Clark counters with the traditional understanding of God as a spirit infinite, eternal, and unchanging…etc. “Now if such a spirit actually exists; that is, if this idea refers to a true reality, hundreds of practical conclusions follow” (36).

For James, however, ideas are not true, “they are made true by events.” But does this not apply to James’ own proposal?  Must it not be made true by an event, thereby starting out as false? It seems it must.

Here I must offer an interlude: James could have avoided most of the problems in his theory by changing “made” to “discovered.” It is true (!) that many situations in life do not readily lend themselves to a correspondence model.  More often than not, truth is discovered as it is integrated into a larger pattern, as Michael Polanyi would so forcefully argue a half century later.  James, unfortunately, does not take this path.

Conclusion

There is much to James’ credit. He writes better than most philosophers, and in many respects, he is the American philosopher.  Most Americans would not agree that “truth is what works,” but they would probably agree with its converse: if something regularly fails, then there is something wrong with it.  Unfortunately, James’ relativising of logic, among other problems, dooms his system from the start, at least on Clark’s reading.

Heroes of the City of Man (Leithart)

In terms of introductions and outlines to the various classical texts, this book is a resounding success. I have used it in my own classroom. His various chiastic outlines are worth the entire reading of the book.

Thesis: the ancient polis was one of ontological violence. There could never really be peace on earth since there was war in heaven. The Greek worldview was not one of stasis, pace descriptions of Plato. It was both stasis and frenzied violence. The latter was just as necessary. The problem was that this make violence necessary to the ideal world.

Hesiod

If Hesiod is correct, then warfare and violence are part of the natural order (Leithart 20). What governs man: petty gods, an autocratic god, or blind Fate? This is what Gregory Nazianzus had in mind in his famous oration:

“The three most ancient opinions concerning God are Anarchia, Polyarchia, and Monarchia. The first two are the sport of the children of Hellas, and may they continue to be so. For Anarchy is a thing without order; and the Rule of Many is factious, and thus anarchical, and thus disorderly. For both these tend to the same thing, namely disorder; and this to dissolution, for disorder is the first step to dissolution.”

Ancient Epic

Dactylic hexameter (L = long; S = short)

L-S-S, L-S-S, L-S-S, L-S-S, L-S-S, L-S-S

Homer, though, ends each line with two long syllables, a spondee.

A. The Hundred-Handers, allies of Zeus
B. The Titans and their prison
C. The roots of earth and sea
C’ The sources of earth, sea, sky, Tartarus
B’ The Titans and their prison
A’ The Hundred-Handers

Homer, Iliad

The point of life is the heroic ideal. The tragedy is that Hector and Achilles can avoid “disastrous consequences only by renouncing heroism entirely. Neither is willing to do that” (89). Leithart suggests a useful practice would be to contrast Hebrews 11 with the “heroes” in the Iliad. The following chiasms structure the book:

A. Trojan priest demands his daughter be returned (Book 1)
B. The armies gather for battle (Book 2)
C. Duel (Paris and Menelaus); Book 3
C’ Duel (Hector and Achilles) Book 22
B’ Greek Armies engage in funeral games (Book 23)
A’ Trojan king, Priam, asks Achilles to return his son’s body (Book 24).

A. Book 1
B. Books 2-7: 3 days; one of fighting, one of burial; one for building wall.
C. Book 8: one day of fighting
D. Book 9: Embassy to Achilles
C’ Books 11-18: one day of fighting
B’ books 19-23: 3 days; one day of Achilles; one of burial; one for funeral
A’ Book 24.

For the Greeks, virtue is timeless and motionless. Stay in your place forever. The Christian view is obedience to God; grow from glory to glory (103).

The two themes warring in this epic are furor and pietas. Aeneas’s destiny is not simply to found Rome, but to suppress furor by embracing pietas. Understanding furor–rage and passion–(shades of Achilles!) provides a motif for several scenes. Carthage is dedicated to Juno, Aeneas’s enemy, who is “smarting over Paris’ wound.” Carthage’s queen, Dido, ends her life in an enraged suicide. Juno and Carthage are the embodiment of furor.

Peter Leithart (1999: 226) suggests the following outline:

A. Book 1: Juno, Storm, Calm
B. Book 2: Defeat of Trojans
C. Book 3: Wandering of Aeneas
D. Book 4: Tragedy of Dido
E. Book 5: Funeral Games
F. Book 6: Journey to the Underworld
A. Book 7: Peace, Juno, war
F’ Book 8: Aeneas and Evander
E’ Book 9: Night Raid of Nisus and Euryalus
D’ Book 10: Death of Pallas
C’ Book 11: War with Latins
B. Book 12: Victory of Trojans
A. Juno’s Reconciliation

Aeneas’ descent into the underworld is not only important for the narrative, but is typological for much of later Western literature. It is reading too much into it to see it as a death-resurrection, though the pattern is certainly there. In any case, Aeneas emerges a changed man. He is able to leave Troy behind (and furor) by focusing on his destiny (pietas)

Utilitarianism (John Stuart Mill)

Mill, John Stuart.  Utilitarianism.

Despite all of the logical problems in Mill’s proposal, he is mostly astute enough to see them.  He is too good a thinker to allow his position to reduce to a crude Epicureanism. Moreover, even if we reject Mill’s arguments, we must admit at least some force to his claims.  If more people are made happy by an action, that is better than if only one person were happy.  Unfortunately, the ethical options are never that neat.

How do we choose what is a pleasure? Both men and pigs seek pleasure.  By seeking pleasure, how does man distinguish himself from swine? Mill argues he does so by his inherent dignity, allowing him to seek the more noble pleasures.  I actually agree in part, but I do not understand how Mill can make this claim, given his earlier criticisms of those philosophies that base themselves on first principles.  Even more problematic, it is not clear how the utilitarian calculus can make a distinction between what is more noble and what is less.  It is one thing to say we ought to do the greatest good for the greatest number.  It is less clear on how one can know whether a thing is a particular good.

The above discussion places Mill squarely within the classical reflections on happiness. Men desire happiness and they seek, more or less, to fulfill that desire. Aristotle and Aquinas said as much. Where Mill departs is in his naturalistic conception of happiness.  He argues that happiness cannot be intuitive.

The State of the Question

Mill, like Jeremy Bentham, said we should maximize the good for the greatest number of people. Such a pursuit, moreover, is a disinterested one on my part.  As I seek the greatest good, I do so regardless of whether it benefits me or not. We must note, indeed even appreciate, the social aspect of Mill’s ethics.  This is not entirely foreign from Aristotelian discussions of justice.  For example, some virtues I can practice as an individual, but to be a just man I have to have someone else.

Problems

The only being who could possibly have the knowledge to be a Utilitarian is God himself, and he is not one. As Bertrand Russell noted elsewhere, the same problem applies to all consequentialist schools.  Many times I cannot know if an action is really good until we see the consequences of it.  But sometimes I cannot even know if the consequences are good until I see the consequences of the consequences!

A more practical objection says that no one can use the utilitarian principle in the heat of a moral crisis. If one has to make an ethical decision without much time to deliberate, it does no good to engage in a dispassionate calculation of gains and losses. Not only do most people not have the time for that, most do not even have the intelligence.  Mill responds that people have the entire moral history of the human race available to him.  Moreover, most Christians do not have time to read the entire bible before each choice they make.  Still, most people do not have the time and intelligence to evaluate the history of the human race before each act.  And as to Christians, absolute biblical principles are kept to a manageable number (usually ten), so the comparison fails at this point.

Perhaps the worst, albeit probably only a theoretical, problem is that on a Utilitarian gloss there is no reason not to persecute minority groups.  If 50% + 1 agrees to take the property of the wealthy, then that would be the greatest good for the greatest number.  Actually, this is not a theoretical problem; it is one of the practical results of democracy.

Conclusion

Mill’s book, though flawed in numerous respects, deserves careful reading.  The more educated secularist is probably familiar with, and defaults to, Mill’s argument. And his argument is easy to follow.  Mill was an excellent writer and was deeply familiar with the classical tradition.

Kant: Science of Right

Kant, Immanuel. The Science of Right.

Even though Kant wrote many bad things in his life, this is not one of them.  It is surprisingly well-written and relevant.  Kant, like most theorists in his generation, sought to justify, or at least explain, the move from a state of nature to having rights and property.  Similar discussions, with varying degrees of success, are found in Locke and Rousseau.

Kant notes a right action must have freedom of will and the ability to be willed into a universal law. Such a definition, whatever else its problems may be, allows Kant to connect rights with duties.  This implies, among other things, that we treat others as ends, not means.  Moreover, we should be “an end for others.”

What is freedom then?  “Freedom is independence of the compulsory will of another.”  Freedom, for Kant, is freedom from, not freedom to.  Not entirely, though.  His earlier comments about our being an end to others suggest some form of duty towards them.  That is not important for his definition, though.

From here Kant answers the next logical question: what makes something “mine?”  Locke had earlier said when I mix my labor with the land, it becomes mine. Kant does not reject this, but he does add several conditions: my use of something is the subjective condition. This cannot mean anything that I use becomes mine, but it does give Kant a starting place.

There is both a rational and empirical conception of Right. Since rights are first contained in reason, “they cannot be immediately tied to experience.”  There must be some mediating term.  That mediating term, then, is possession.  He does not mean physical possession, but rational.  As a justification, this appears useless.  As it stands, it is useless.  But Kant has more in play.  By linking justification of a right with conceptual possession, he opens the door for a “juridical connection.”  We have moved, if not always clearly, into a communal relation.

What, then, of the state? Kant’s treatment is an improvement over Rousseau.  There must be some will that will bind citizens to respect each other’s rights.  Rousseau’s abstracted “general will” does no such thing.  The state constitutes the nation, but state for Kant, as for many 18th and 19th century Germans, does not mean the bureaucratic apparatus, but “the hereditary unity of a people.”  

Kant does use contract language, if only because such language seems unavoidable.  He notes that “the act by which a people is represented as constituting itself into a state is a contract.” They portion out their freedom only to receive it back again as members of the commonwealth.  I think he means they receive it back metaphysically and practically, not necessarily legally.

Kant does not really decide on whether monarchy or republic is the best government.  Given his Enlightenment convictions, one would expect him to say republic, and that probably is his preference.  But like many Europeans, he probably does not see the two as mutually exclusive.

That is the essence of his argument.  He has an excellent discussion on marriage.  He leans towards outlawing secret societies, though he does not mention the Freemasons or the Bavarian Illuminati in particular.  He also rejects the idea of lotteries, noting, quite correctly, that they are an attack on the poor.

Conclusion

This was a surprisingly excellent book.  Although he does not mention Locke and Rousseau, they are clearly in the background.  His almost “hypostatizing” of Will into a single person anticipates Hegel (and Marx’s inversion of Hegel).

Epictetus (Discourses)

This is a manual for Business Ethics 101. The following metaphor is not original to me, but imagine your life as placed on a wheel with spokes.  If you focus your life in the center, the hub, then when the wheel turns, as it must, you will be moved, to be sure, but you won’t be thrown over the place.

Epictetus exhorts the reader to develop a strong inner life.  This goes beyond merely getting your priorities right.  It means being proactive and never reactive.  It even includes a calculus for business decisions.  Know your worth. 

Epictetus does not paint a rosy picture for the reader.  Having been a slave in a cruel world, he knows how the world can be.  He does not think it will ever get any better.  If Stoicism has sometimes been accused of being resigned to despair, that criticism might have some justification with Epictetus.

He does give us the basics of a Stoic worldview. There is the standard Stoic line on rationality.  Man is midway between beasts and God.  From the former he has a body, the latter a mind.

Purpose

Man’s good is a type of moral purpose, or “a disposition of the will with respect to appearances” (1.8).

On the Gods

When Epictetus uses the term “God,” he can mean the gods, Jupiter, and/or a guardian spirit within us. He believes our souls are “parts and portions of God.”  We also have a guardian genius with us.

As a good Stoic, Epictetus assumes some form of pantheism, albeit not an extreme kind.  All things are united as one (I:14).  He does not mean some form of Eastern pantheism.  His point, so it seems, is to find a reciprocal relationship between heaven and earth.  In fact, “our bodies are intimately linked with the earth’s rhythms.”  We do not have to accept his mild pantheism, but that statement is not wrong.

Epistemology

“Impressions” is the key word in Epictetus’s epistemology. It is not always clear what an impression is. Notwithstanding that, they come to us in four ways: “things are and appear to be; or they are not, and do not appear to be, or they are, but do not appear to be; or they are not, and yet appear to be” (I.27.1).

 The mind forms “ideas that correspond with the impressions” (I.14.8). That seems accurate enough, but Epictetus takes it a step further with his definition of reason: a collection of individual impressions (I.20.5). That does not seem right.

Education

The goal of education is to bring our will in alignment with God’s reality and governance (I.12.15). As long as we understand that Epictetus does not mean the same thing by “God” as one normally does, it is a true enough statement. 

One strength in his approach is that there is not a sharp line between epistemology, education, and ethics.  Epistemology and education dovetail with his use of the term “impressions.”  We all have preconceptions. Our reason makes use of “impressions.”  Getting an education, therefore, is “learning to apply natural preconceptions to particular cases as nature prescribes, and distinguishing what is in our power from what is not” (I.22.9). That last clause connects education with ethics.  The wise man understands what he can and cannot control.

Ethics

The goal of virtue is “a life that flows smoothly” (12).  Even though he does not use the term, he means that we should reach a state of apatheia. We can only do this by having “correct judgments about externals,” as externals are the only things outside of our control (I.29.24).

Analysis

If one wants to read a primary source on Stoicism, this is as good as any.  Epictetus, perhaps in line with his own philosophy of limitations, never gets to the substance of the issue.  These are more conversations than logical analyses, and they should be judged as such.  It even seems that Epictetus commits a logical fallacy.  He writes: “God is helpful. Whatever is good is also helpful.  It is reasonable to suppose, then, that the divine nature and the nature of the good correspond” (II.8.1).  The conclusion is certainly true, but Epictetus committed the fallacy of the undistributed middle premise. We can illustrate it in a Venn Diagram.

Conclusion

Epictetus lacks the nobility of Marcus Aurelius and the poetic grandeur of Lucretius. In some ways, however, he is more accessible than both.

Reforming Education (Adler)

Adler, Mortimer J. Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind.

Provocative writers make you rethink assumptions.  Truly great writers make you a better human being at what you do.  Mortimer Adler is a truly great thinker.  This book is a collection of his key essays on education, what is wrong with it, and how to fix it. Behind every essay is Adler’s commitment to the Great Books program.

We define education as “the process whereby the powers of human nature become developed by good habits” (Adler 17).  An educated person is someone who is able to think through the Great Ideas.  This means that no one will be an educated person upon graduation of high school or college.  All we can reasonably hope to teach are the skills that prepare you to live as a free man. Intrinsic to Adler’s definition are a host of assumptions that will not be granted by today’s academic.  Too bad for them.  Adler assumes there is a human nature that can develop habits towards the Good. That also implies the existence of an objective, knowable Good.

Following that, if education prepares the free man for society, then there must be some end or goal that society should follow.  A good education understands what is good for man at any time in place and/or what is good for man as he is a member of a particular society (44).  As such, education cannot be severed from the virtues.  Adler asserts that the “proximate ends of education are the moral and intellectual virtues” (60). The ultimate end is the good life.

A habit, accordingly, is a development “of powers or fulfillments of capacities” that “can be said to be good if they conform to the natural tendency of the power of capacity which they development” (61).  From one, then, education is quite simple: identify the powers and capacities of a student and develop them towards the Good.

If schooling is simply the perfection of habits so that one may live a life of freedom towards some ultimate End, then we have to change the way we look at schooling.  We simply need to make “young learners” rather than degrees (138). This requires revamping entire departments.  For example, and here I speak as an English teacher, get rid of the English department.  That is the first step in bringing the humanities back to the center. English should rather be “The Great Books” plus rhetoric. Part of this is to get rid of the atomistic approach to teaching grammar.  Also worth considering are the “three negations: abolish all departments, abolish all electives, abolish all textbooks” (163).  If you can only pick one, choose the last one.  There is no point in ever using a textbook in a humanities class.

The goal of the teacher is to be, as we saw in Plato’s Thaetaetus, a midwife to the student’s ideas. This requires the teacher to avoid the pitfalls of indoctrinating lecturing on one hand, and freestyle learning on the other. Rather, the teacher must cultivate the mind of the learner.  The teacher is a cooperative artist, not a sole cause (171).

I do not praise all of the book, though.  Adler’s approach assumes not only the legitimacy of modern democracy, but even its totalizing approach.  He is consistent, though.  If you believe in democracy (or representative government), which at its basic is extending enfranchisement to the whole, then it is hard to see why public education shouldn’t be compulsory.  Of course, I do not think it is, but only because I do not grant his major premise.  

Tom Jones, A Foundling (Fielding)

Fielding, Henry.  Tom Jones, A Foundling. New York: Everyman’s Library, [1991].

The author, Henry Fielding, likely drew upon his extensive experience in legal settings to give us this delightful comedy of errors. Comedy, though, in this case means a happy ending.  The book is quite serious.

 This is one of the first novels in English.  At the time there really was not the category of novel. The author is quite clear it is a history, although it really does not function as one. This allows him to let the reader come to his own conclusions.

He tells the story of a young foundling, Tom Jones.  Tom might be free with his virtue at times, but he genuinely likes other people and will sacrifice his needs for their good. He is like Andy from Parks and Recreation.

It is hard not to love Tom.  He is not perfect, but his imperfections, namely being somewhat loose with his virtue, often come from the lack of a father figure. True, Mr Allsworthy, the functional mayor of the village, has more or less adopted Tom, but he never quite gives Tom the fatherly care he needs.

There is a theme in this work.  Love is a rational passion that seeks the good of its object. Tom must learn to cultivate the rational aspect of this virtue. It takes time and trial and error.  Without the needed father figure, it often involves more error.

The book’s reputation suggests that Tom is jumping in and out of bed with different women.  He is not.  There are only three episodes of such by my counting.  One is implied and the other mentioned in passing.  None of it is any different from the book of Proverbs’ explaining the fools’ walk the wayward woman’s house.

The ending of the book is satisfactory.  Fielding expertly ties all his loose ends.  As regarding Tom’s surprise lineage, it is not what you expect.  You will begin to have an idea of who the father is by the middle of the book.  Pay attention to one key female character (which leads to a hilariously erroneous inference by Jones’s servant Partridge).

On the Heavens (Aristotle)

The primary difficulty with this work is we are so used to a Copernican cosmology that we almost can’t understand what he is saying. His conclusions we can dismiss outright. It might be well, however, to reflect on how he set the stage for cosmology for the next 2,000 years.

His geocentrism appears, and I say it appears because I don’t always understand what he is saying here, to hinge on the argument is that the earth can’t move. We’ll try to unpack that. The heavens cannot move because they are infinite, and an infinite body can’t move in a circle because it would have to move across an infinite range in finite time.

In language anticipating Christian theism, he says heaven is eternal. Well, true. He doesn’t mean by heaven what we mean by heaven, though. What is heaven? Imagine the boundary point between our world and the next (sky, maybe?). Heaven is the substance of the circumference.

Since heaven is eternal, and heaven always has a limit, this means the earth is eternal (283b). This also explains why the earth doesn’t move. If it moves, then it must have begun in time.

Good

He introduces numerous fascinating discussions on the concept of “infinity” that are still in play today (271b). Quite rightly, he notes that an infinite cannot be traversed.

He believes that the earth is a sphere. Sorry, flat-earthers.

Bad

He rejects the idea of a plurality of worlds (278a) since only our world contains the entirety of matter.

He says the universe is spherical. I’m not so sure, given big-bang cosmology. It’s more of a funnel-shape.

“We take it for granted that the earth is at rest” (289b).

He says imagine that there are circles within circles. The circles closest within would take longer in the revolution. You don’t need modern science to know this is false. The Greeks ran track. Any runner knows that whoever is on the outer lanes has to run longer.

He rejects the idea of the earth spinning on its axis (296a).

Augustine’s Confessions

For the most part I will try to avoid some of the more memorable scenes. You probably already know them.

Augustine begins by lamenting his learning of Virgil. Why should he weep over Dido when his teachers did not know enough for him to weep over his own soul? This might seem that Augustine is condemning classical learning, and he probably thought he was, but Augustine’s own life mirrors Aeneas’s, so there is that.

Like Aeneas, Augustine arrives in Carthage. And like Aeneas, Augustine succumbs to its pleasures. He failed to understand that true love was a calm “communion of minds” (2.2). Rather, he sought only to be in love with love.

We also get a profound meditation on the proper ordering of goods. There isn’t just one “flat” good thing in our lives. There is a gradation of goods. We sin by desiring lower goods at the expense of higher. This anticipates his later claim that evil is a lack and/or a perversion of the good.

In books three and four he meets a number of important people. He meets Cicero in a book, and Cicero teaches him to seek after higher things. Unfortunately, he also becomes a Manichee. From the Manichees he learned wrong ideas of God and evil. He thought substances must be physical, and so he could not imagine an immaterial substance (3.7).

He also met Faustus, the leader of the Manichees. Ironically, this would lead him out of Manicheanism. He was underwhelmed. Most importantly, he meets Ambrose in Italy, and in Ambrose’s rhetoric he sees that form = substance.

Although in book seven he was still struggling with Manicheanism, he found the Platonists’ books. This reoriented him to the possibility of immaterial substances. He now saw reality as a chain of being. Things are good, and the lower a good is, the more susceptible to corruption it is. This was a breakthrough. Evil couldn’t exist unless there was already a good for it to corrupt. Evil, therefore, is a lack.

Book 8 contains his famous conversion scene. It is dramatic psychology. You’ll have to read it. It also takes place in a garden. That is typology and very important.

Book 9 contains the baptisms of him, his son, Nebredius (I think), and Alypius.

Books 10-13 are extended meditations on memory, time, and creation.

In terms of reading and appreciating the Great Christian Tradition, this is the classic text with which to start.

Volume 2 of the Syntopicon (Adler)

Mortimer Adler regularly claimed that it was impossible to be educated before the age of 40.  If true, I would also suggest it is difficult to be educated without working through something like his Syntopicon.  The setup is the same as the earlier volume.    There is a ten page essay, topical indexes, and a recommended reading list.  This review will only outline his key topics, the various positions taken, and how the great thinkers interacted with their predecessors, if time permits.

Man

Man is the only subject where the knower and the object known are the same (Adler 1).  Indeed, “the human intellect is able to examine itself.”

The Western tradition is divided on man’s essence.  The standard (and correct) view is that man differs from animals because he is rational.  His use of speech is a consequence of this rationality.  It is not the main difference.  If this is true, then there must be some distinction between reason and sense (5).

Mind

The mind is capable of self-knowledge. This is the difference between sense and intellect.  Senses do not seem to be aware of themselves (172). 

Following Aristotle, we see that if “the soul is the principle of life and all vital activities, so mind is the subordinate principle of knowledge” (173).  And the act of intellect moves as such:

1) conception
2) judgment
3) reasoning.

Monarchy

Adler wisely separates the principle of absolute government from monarchy, since republics and democracies can be as absolutist (205). Monarchy as an idea underwent a transformation in the Middle Ages. It did resemble an absolute system in one sense by giving power to one man, yet it placed supremacy of law in the hands of the people (207).  The only problem with this idea is that given its birth in feudalism, it did not last long in the modern age.

Hegel suggests a robust constitutional monarchy.  In this view the state is more of a corporation. The advantage of this view is that it is quite flexible with modernity and market forces  It doesn’t have any of the disadvantages that plagued medieval models.  On the other hand, it’s not always clear what Hegel is saying.

One and the Many

In line with Aristotle, unity is the first property of being.  All contraries are reducible to things like being/nonbeing, one/many, etc.  Moreover, unity belongs to the individual natural substance.  Man is a substance.  He is not made of other substances.  Machines, though, are.

This is somewhat different from Plato.  Plato’s view had problems.  The idea of the one is also one idea among many.  Plotinus corrected some of these problems.  For him, the one transcends being.  It also transcends intelligence, since knowing requires an object, which would introduce duality into the One.

Opposition

Opposites do not simply distinguish, they exclude.

Plato: Everything has one opposite.  This was his idea in Gorgias and Protagoras on the unity of virtue.  This also illustrates the numerous subdivisions in Western taxonomies.

Aristotle: made the distinction between correlative opposites (double, one-half) and contrary opposites (odd/even).

Hegel: Unites opposites by reconciling their differences.  Every finite phase of reality has its own contrary.  For example, being and nonbeing imply and exclude one another.  They are united in becoming.

Reasoning

The words “if” and “then” indicate that reason is a motion of the mind from one alternative to another.

Plotinus: any form of thinking signifies a weakness.  It introduces duality.  Higher intelligences, by contrast, know by intuition.  Later Christian thinkers didn’t accept this extreme a view, but they did borrow his idea on intuition and applied it to angelic intelligences.

All the praise I gave of volume one also applies to this volume.