Ideas and Consequences Part 1 - Plato's long shadow

Edward Feser explores the philosophical underpinnings of his fellow conservatives in his TechCentralStation essay titled The Metaphysics of Conservatism. Feser's article is long by blog standards, and is followed up by a response from Max Borders, and a counter response by Feser. This multipart series of posts will explore this very important and divisive debate of the ages, without any real expectation, of course, of laying it to rest.

First off Feser recounts the historical development of Plato's Theory of Ideas and its adoption by Christianity into a philosophy that formed the underpinnings of Natural Law Theory, and the philosophical scholl known as Realism:

A brief history of Western thought

Obviously we cannot understand the metaphysics of conservatism without knowing something about metaphysics, and in particular something about the issue with which Plato, and Weaver following him, was most concerned. So let us begin by summarizing the relevant ideas. Is it possible to do so in a way that will make them comprehensible to those unfamiliar with philosophy, yet without oversimplification? The answer, of course, is no, but I will try anyway.

The first thing to say is that the label “Theory of Ideas” is misleading, because (given the way we now use the term “ideas”) it seems to imply that Plato was concerned with something that exists only in the human mind. In fact the opposite is true. Plato’s view is also sometimes called the “Theory of Forms,” and “form” rather than “idea” better conveys what he meant.

Take the example of a triangle, which has a form that distinguishes it from a square or a circle. In Plato’s usage, this “form” includes not only its shape, but all the properties that make it the thing it is: the length of its sides, its area, the fact that its angles add up to 180 degrees, and so forth. Now any particular material triangle (such as the ones drawn in geometry textbooks) is going to have certain properties that are not part of “triangularity” as such, and will also lack certain properties that are part of triangularity as such.

For example, it will have a specific color -- green, say -- and lack perfectly straight sides, even though greenness is not part of triangularity and having straight sides is part of it. So in Plato’s view, when the intellect grasps the form of triangularity, it is not grasping something material, since nothing material manifests triangularity in the strictest sense. But neither is it grasping something mental. For there are certain facts about triangles -- the Pythagorean theorem, for example -- that are entirely objective, and discovered by the human mind rather than invented by it. Moreover, these facts are necessary and unchanging rather than contingent and alterable: the Pythagorean theorem is true eternally, whether or not any human mind thinks otherwise or would like it to be otherwise. “Triangularity” is therefore something that exists apart from either mind or matter, in a third realm of its own: the realm of Forms. And the same thing is true, according to Plato, of the Forms of everything else -- squares and circles, plants and animals, human beings, beauty, truth, and goodness.

It is important to understand that talk about the Forms existing “in” a “realm,” and so forth, is purely metaphorical. Literally they don’t exist “in” anything, since “in” is a spatial term and the Forms, being immaterial, are outside time and space. For the same reason, the “realm” of Forms isn’t literally a place, since that too would imply spatial location. The concepts we apply to material things simply don’t apply to the Forms at all, and the way we learn about material things -- through the senses -- is not how we know the Forms. They are grasped through pure intellect.

Indeed, in Plato’s view the senses don’t strictly speaking give us true knowledge at all, but merely opinion, for what they reveal to us -- material objects -- are merely more or less imperfect copies of the Forms, and are continually coming to be and passing away, whereas the Forms are eternal. The Forms are what most fully and truly exist, and genuine knowledge is knowledge of them.

Aristotle took a view that was similar to Plato’s in many ways, though he thought that forms in some sense existed “in” the material world rather than in a “realm” of their own (even though they were not in his view any more than in Plato’s reducible to matter): triangularity, for example, exists “in” all particular triangles rather than as a thing in its own right. Aristotle also emphasized the idea that a substance -- a statue, a tree, a human being -- is a composite of matter and form.

On this view, known as “hylomorphism,” a tree, for example, is not merely a hunk of matter, but a hunk of matter with a particular form, the form of “treeness,” where this form is (again) not merely a physical property alongside other physical properties of the tree. And the soul, on Aristotle’s view, is simply the form of a living body. A human person, therefore, is on his view a composite of soul (or form) and body (or living matter). By virtue of their forms, things exhibit certain natural functions, ends, or purposes, and it is the fulfillment of these natural functions, ends, or purposes that defines what is good for a thing. This is as true of human beings and their various capacities as it is of anything else.

Now the philosophers of the Middle Ages inherited these concepts from the Greeks, some of them more or less following (and sometimes amending) Plato, others, particularly later in the medieval period, following (and amending) Aristotle. St. Augustine combined Plato’s view that the Forms are eternal and independent of the human mind with the intuition that it is hard to see how they could exist apart from just any mind at all, and concluded that they exist eternally in God’s mind. St. Thomas Aquinas extended Aristotle’s view in several ways, including an emphasis on the idea that the human soul, the form of the living human body, is “subsistent” in the sense that uniquely among the forms of material things, it operates in part independently of matter (in particular, its intellectual powers do) and can survive as a particular thing beyond the death of the body it is the form of.

In general, in debating the famous “problem of universals,” the medieval thinkers carried forward the debate between Plato and Aristotle over the nature of the forms. “Universals” are really just the things we’ve been calling “forms” -- triangularity, “treeness,” humanness, goodness, and so forth -- and are to be distinguished from “particulars,” i.e. specific things (like this or that individual triangle or tree) which might instantiate or exhibit the universal or form. The term “form,” though, tends to be used by those who take the view that, in their different ways, both Plato and Aristotle (and Augustine and Aquinas and many others) took: that universals are real and not reducible to either mind or matter. This is the view about universals that came to be known therefore as “classical realism,” or just “realism” full stop.

So far so good. Feser's lead in does an admirably concise job of summarizing the key points of Plato's theory and its subsequent developments. It is a philosophy that I thoroughly disagree with, but more of that later. Feser then sets up the applicability of this philosophy and the consequences of its abandonment in the Modern age:

This was by no means a mere intellectual curiosity. A great deal rode on it -- and, as we will see, still rides on it today. To take one example, the traditional understanding of the idea that there is a “natural law” that determines what is objectively right and wrong is inextricably tied to classical realism. For “human nature,” as understood by the traditional natural law theorist, is defined in terms of the form that every human being participates in simply by virtue of being a human being. And that means it is something known ultimately and most fully only through the intellect and via philosophical reasoning, not (or at least not entirely or most deeply) through the senses and empirical biology. Moreover, this nature defines certain natural ends and purposes for human beings and their capacities, the realization of which constitutes what is good for them: good objectively, simply by virtue of their participation in the form, and regardless of whether this or that particular human being realizes or (because of intellectual error, habitual vice, psychological or genetic anomaly or whatever) fails to realize it.

To take another, and related, example, a person, being on the view in question a composite of soul (or form) and body (or matter), cannot be identified with either his psychological characteristics alone or his bodily characteristics alone. Moreover, since the soul is just the form of a living human body, for a living human body to exist at all is for it to have a soul, so that there can be no such thing as a living human body -- whether that of a fetus, an infant, a normal human adult or a severely brain damaged adult -- which does not have a soul, and which does not count as a person. For while even a human being who is damaged or not fully formed might not perfectly exhibit the form of the human body (any more than a hastily drawn triangle perfectly manifests the form of triangularity), he nevertheless does exhibit it, otherwise his body wouldn’t count as a living human body at all (just as a hastily drawn triangle is still a triangle, however imperfect). One corollary of this is that every single living human body, within the womb or without, severely damaged or not, counts as the body of a person and as a being having all the rights of a person, including the right to life.

I've never understood this need to appeal to forms or ideas to justify the reality of things that we can see or feel directly. To me this is a philosophy misnamed; it should be rightly called "Idealism", as it suggests that the ideas about things are more real than the things themselves. The human mind posesses a very powerful capacity, that of abstraction. By abstraction, the mind is capable of highlighting singular characteristics of objects, and using these characteristics to classify separate objects according to types, or forms. But Platonic realism breathes life into these abstractions, to the point that they achieve object-hood all their own.

The second bolded quote above shows the semantic shenanigans by which the realist "proves" the existence, through a simple tautology, of the soul. The soul is a name given to the abstract quality that all living people posess. So by definition all living people posess a soul. By a simple substitution of term with definition, the absurdity of this tautology is revealed: "All living people posess the quality that all living people posess".

"Participating in a form" is merely fancy language for having the qualities that would put something in a category. It is sophistry. But I am getting ahead of the narrative:

Now as the Middle Ages wore on, a rival view to that of classical realism developed: the theory called “nominalism,” which held that universals do not, strictly speaking, exist at all. Only particular things -- this or that particular triangle, this or that particular tree, this or that particular human being, and so forth -- are real, and “triangularity,” “treeness,” “humanness” and the like are nothing more than names we happen to apply to groups of things. Moreover, that the things so named are grouped the way they are is merely a function of our interests and needs, and does not reflect any objective or natural order.

As the medieval world gave way to the modern one, and medieval to modern philosophy, nominalism won the day, and modern thinkers like Descartes and Locke abandoned the old conceptual apparatus of hylomorphism, with its appeal to forms and natural ends or purposes as fundamental to the understanding of things, and to the idea of the soul as the form of the living human body. “Mechanism” -- the view that physical things operate on purely mechanical principles, without natural ends or purposes and without instantiating anything like Plato’s or Aristotle’s Forms -- entailed a redefinition of the human body as nothing more than a complex machine, and “human nature” as nothing more than a specification of the principles by which the machine operates, like clockwork.

Now if a living human body does not have a form -- any more than anything else does on the modern view -- then it does not have a soul either, at least as classically defined. Descartes thus re-defined the soul as a kind of non-physical object which is only contingently or accidentally attached to its body, rather than as a form which the body necessarily has to have in order to be a living body at all. One result of this is that the soul came to seem to modern Western thinkers an ever more elusive and mysterious entity, and therefore a dispensable one. Another is that it became harder to see what made a living human body the body of a person, since there is nothing about its being alive that entails (on the modern view anyway) that it has a soul. This problem was only exacerbated by Locke’s own re-definition of a person as a stream of connected conscious experiences, rather than a union of soul (form) and body (matter).

Thus were sown the seeds -- inadvertently, to be sure -- that would eventually develop into the view that neither a fetus nor a Terri Schiavo counts as a person having a right to life. And in the other trends alluded to -- nominalism and mechanism -- we see the origins of the idea that “human nature” is either a purely human construct, or something that exists objectively only as a collection of behavioral tendencies, of no more inherent moral significance than the workings of a clock. We might, as a matter of prudence, want to keep them in mind as a possible barrier to the realization of our desires, but if we could find a way to alter them there would be no objective reason not to do so.

Now here is where the Platonic realists veer off into hysterical fearmongering so familiar to those secular "non-realists" among us who must bear the brunt of our religiously-minded Platonist friends tirades against the consequences of our soulless worldview. As I mentioned above, the "soul" is just the realist's term for defining human-ness. It adds nothing to our understanding, or our valuing of humanness to assume that the qualities that make humans humans reside in some mystical, free floatng, formless "form" rather than in our concrete existence as humans. The realist imagines that noone valued human life prior to Plato's invention of this idea of separating essence and existence into two separate but interacting objects, one material and one immaterial. Furthermore they imagine that this one idea is capable of forcing the idea holder into placing a higher value on human life than he otherwise would.

Contrary to Feser's contention that this notion flows from common sense (I'm getting ahead of the narrative again), it is the ultimate victory of intellectual hubris over organic common sense. Our species would have perished long ago had it been dependent on the development of a cerebral cortex advanced enough for abstract thought in order to properly value its own existence.

One comment about this notion that without a Soul, a person is nothing but a mere machine. This argument drives me up a wall. Does a person seem to be nothing more than a machine? Can a clock do all the things that a person can do? Do clocks fall in love? Has anyone ever fallen in love with a clock? We don't need a philosophical justification for the level of value that we ascribe to our existence. We value ourselves because we are self-valuing beings. It is inbred, it is organic. No theoretical underpinnings required.

This reminds me of a common, cliched comedy routine that has been repeated in many a movie and TV sitcom. Generically it goes something like this:

A man visiting an exotic, faraway land is invited by a local chieftain to dinner. Before him are placed several dishes of unfamiliar content. The man hesitantly begins to nibble at the fare.

American: "Hmm,... this isn't bad. As a matter of fact, this stuff is great! What do you call it?"

Chief: "We call it 'Bskhblakkxxxa'.

American: (stuffing large spoonfuls into his mouth) "Bisblaka huh? What is it made of?"

Chief: "Elephant testicles".

American: "Bleeeech!!!!!" (regurgitates his meal into the chieftains lap).

The food represents human life. We know by our experience that it is something good, something that we value highly. Yet we don't know quite what it is made of. Just like the hot-dogs and sausages we consume daily. The realist whining that if we find out that we're just machines without souls, we won't have any reason to value our lives is like the diner worrying that if he finds out what his hot-dogs really are he will decide that he really doesn't like hot-dogs after all. We don't need to know the recipe to know whether or not we like the end result.