Looking at the Ontological Argument

St. Anselm had written a work called the Monologion. In it, “Anselm offers a treatise on the existence and essence of God making no appeal to the authority of Scripture” (Davies 158). Not perfectly satisfied with it (it was, as Anselm described it, “made up of a connected chain of many arguments”), he decided to write the Proslogion, for he wondered:

if perhaps it might be possible to find one single argument that for its proof required no other save itself, and that by itself would suffice to prove that God really exists, that He is the supreme good needing no other and is He whom all things have need of for their being and well being, and also to prove whatever we believe about the Divine Being. (158)

As for what God meant for St. Anselm, he took a view similar to that of Seneca and St. Augustine and defined Him as aliquid quo maius nihil cogitari potest or “something than which nothing can be thought” (159). Assuming that is what God is not too bad, for it is rather contradictory to picture something superior to utter perfection. From that, St. Anselm seems to deduce God must exist in reality, because given that “God is that than which nothing greater can be thought, he must exist not only in the mind…but also in reality” (159-160).

There do seem to be translation issues, though. The phrase St. Anselm uses is Si enim vel in solo intellectu est potest cogitari esse et in re quod maius est. That can be translated as either “For if it is only in the mind it can be thought in reality as well, which is greater” or “For if it is only in the mind, what is greater can be thought to be in reality”. Both translations imply different arguments. For the former translation, his argument would be as follows:

1. God is something than which nothing greater can be thought.

2. God exists in the mind since even the Fool [a person mentioned in the Psalms] can think of (have in mind) something than which nothing greater can be thought.

3. But God cannot just be in the mind since it is greater to be in reality than it is to be only in the mind and since God is something than which nothing greater can be thought.

For the latter translation, the argument would be:

1. God is something than which nothing greater can be thought.

2. God exists in the mind since even the Fool can think of (have in mind) something than which nothing greater can be thought.

3. But we can think of something which is greater than something existing only in the mind.

4. So something than which nothing greater can be thought cannot exist only in the mind.

Unfortunately, St. Anselm does not make it clear for translators what argument is exactly his. As Davies writes, “he simply draws to a close with an emphatic reiteration of the claim that something existing only in the mind cannot be that than which nothing greater can be thought.” And that entails, for St. Anselm, that that than which a greater cannot be thought exists in the mind alone, this same that than which a greater cannot be thought is that than which a greater can be thought. But this is obviously impossible. Therefore there is absolutely no doubt that something than which a greater cannot be thought exists both in the mind and in reality.

Either way, the argument sounds quite reasonable but the end result is of so high a magnitude that criticism is essential in understanding the veracity of what St. Anselm is saying. Many great thinkers have criticized St. Anselm’s ontological proof, ranging from Gaunilo to St. Thomas Aquinas to Immanuel Kant to Bertrand Russell and others. Yet multiple thinkers, such as Descartes and Spinoza, seem to have been influenced by what St. Anselm believed. Allen Wood of Stanford University points out Descartes’ support of the Ontological Argument from his Fifth Meditation:

Major Premise

Whatever we clearly understand to pertain to the nature of anything can with truth be affirmed of that thing.

Minor Premise

But it pertains to the nature of God that he exists.

Conclusion

Therefore, it can with truth be affirmed of God that he exists. (Kitcher 269)

So who is right after all, the critics or the adherents? In trying to solve this, the main traditional criticisms (Gaunilo, St. Thomas, and Kant) will be discussed in detail.

The aforementioned Gaunilo was a monk that wrote his criticism at a time in which St. Anselm could answer him back, and he certainly did. Gaunilo had two principal criticisms of St. Anselm’s argument. The first criticism is as follows:

I can so little think of or entertain in my mind this being (that which is greater than all those others that are able to be thought of, and which it is said [i.e. by Anselm] can be none other than God Himself) in terms of an object known to me either by species or genus, as I can think of God Himself….For neither do I know the reality itself, nor can I form an idea from some other things like it since, as you [i.e. Anselm] say yourself, it is such that nothing could be like it (163).

It means to say people cannot have God in the understanding because He is so incomprehensible.

His second point attacks the wild conclusions St. Anselm’s proof might entail. He postulates a nonexistent utopian island called “Lost Island.” It is supposed to be better than all the islands in reality. But because it is so, it would have to be accepted as existent on Anselmian grounds because an island that exists in reality is superior to one that exists only in the mind. Is the critique valid? St. Anselm responded:

You often reiterate that I say that that which is greater than everything exists in the mind, and that if is in the mind, it exists also in reality. However, nowhere in all that I have said will you find such an argument. For “that which is greater than everything” and “that than which a greater cannot be thought” are not equivalent for the purpose of proving the existence of the thing spoken of (165).

Davies supplements the passage by mentioning a point on which St. Anselm is correct, namely that someone “can believe that X is the greatest existing thing without needing to describe it as “that than which a greater cannot be thought.” And that which is, in fact, greatest could be very imperfect indeed.” The Lost Island can, in essence, be better. God cannot.

But as pertains to the first criticism, maybe Gaunilo is right in a few things (such as God not belonging to any species or genus). However, St. Anselm may argue, as Brian Davies writes, like this:

1. God is something than which nothing greater can be thought.

2. If we can think of something greater than X, then X is not God.

3. We can think of something greater than anything which exists only in intellectu.

4. So something existing only in intellectu cannot be God.

5. So God does not only exist in intellectu.

And he might add:

6. God is something than which nothing greater can be thought.

7. We can think of something which can fail to exist.

8. Something which can fail to exist is less great than something which cannot fail to exist.

9. So something which can fail to exist cannot be God.

10. So God is not something which can fail to exist. (167)

So it certainly seems as if Gaunilo did not rebut St. Anselm that greatly.

St. Thomas Aquinas was another opponent of the Ontological Argument. He believed that St. Anselm’s definition did not apply to everyone:

Perhaps not everyone who hears this word "God" understands it to signify something than which nothing greater can be thought, seeing that some have believed God to be a body. Yet, granted that everyone understands that by this word "God" is signified something than which nothing greater can be thought, nevertheless, it does not therefore follow that he understands that what the word signifies exists actually, but only that it exists mentally. Nor can it be argued that it actually exists, unless it be admitted that there actually exists something than which nothing greater can be thought; and this precisely is not admitted by those who hold that God does not exist. (Aquinas 11)

Despite different concepts of God for different people, as Kenneth Einar Himma of Seattle Pacific University writes, that does not affect the existence of such a thing, as the label of “God” makes no difference:

The problem with this criticism is that the ontological argument can be restated without defining God. To see this, simply delete premise 1 and replace each instance of "God" with "A being than which none greater can be conceived." The conclusion, then, will be that a being than which none greater can be conceived exists - and it is, of course, quite natural to name this being God (http://www.iep.utm.edu/o/ont-arg.htm#SH2c)

Himma believes that St. Thomas’s second criticism may be flawed. This is when St. Thomas says in the passage quoted above that “granted that everyone understands that by this word "God" is signified something than which nothing greater can be thought, nevertheless, it does not therefore follow that he understands that what the word signifies exists actually, but only that it exists mentally.” Himma writes about its lack of promise in terms of disproving St. Anselm:

"One natural interpretation of this somewhat ambiguous passage is that Aquinas is rejecting premise 2 of Anselm's argument on the ground that, while we can rehearse the words "a being than which none greater can be imagined" in our minds, we have no idea of what this sequence of words really means. On this view, God is unlike any other reality known to us; while we can easily understand concepts of finite things, the concept of an infinitely great being dwarfs finite human understanding. We can, of course, try to associate the phrase "a being than which none greater can be imagined" with more familiar finite concepts, but these finite concepts are so far from being an adequate description of God, that it is fair to say they don't help us to get a detailed idea of God.

Nevertheless, the success of the argument doesn't depend on our having a complete understanding of the concept of a being than which none greater can be conceived. Consider, for example, that, while we don't have a complete understanding (whatever this means) of the concept of a natural number than which none larger can be imagined, we understand it well enough to see that there does not exist such a number. No more complete understanding of the concept of a maximally great being than this is required, on Anselm's view, to successfully make the argument. If the concept is coherent, then even a minimal understanding of the concept is sufficient to make the argument."

Therefore, it may seem to some as if St. Thomas himself might not be able to get rid of St. Anselm’s Ontological Argument.

However, it all may have come to a dead end by the time Immanuel Kant managed to offer a solution. Maybe existence is not a perfection, not a sign of being greater than something else. As Patricia Kitcher of Columbia University writes,

Kant’s critique of the ontological argument is often summarized in a slogan—“existence is not a predicate.” To say that a house “exists” seems very different from saying that it is, for example, “messy.” “Messiness” is a property of some houses at some house, but not of all houses at all times; by contrast all real houses—and cabbages and kings—must exist. Alternatively, only an existing thing can have any properties at all, so existence cannot be considered on a par with “other” properties, and “exists” is not a proper predicate. (Kitcher xvii)

Is that an accurate way to get rid of an ontological argument’s validity? Allen Wood begs to differ. For him, Kant’s only argument is the following (from the Critique of Pure Reason):

No matter which and how many predicates I think in a thing (and even if I think it as completely determined), I still do not add the least bit to it when I posit that this thing is. For otherwise it would not be just the same thing I thought in my concept which exists, and I could not say that it is precisely the object of my concept which exists. If I think in a thing every reality but one, the missing reality is not added when I say that this defective thing exists. On the contrary, it exists encumbered with precisely the same defect I thought in it, since otherwise what exists would be something other than what I thought. (275)

Wood responds to it:

Kant’s argument may, I think, be fairly paraphrased as follows: Let us give the name “almost perfect being” to any entity which has every perfection but one. And let us suppose that we have before us the concept of such a being, only we do not know which reality is the missing one in the case of that particular almost perfect being. Now Kant’s contention is that we are led into absurdities if we assume that “existence” is the reality we are seeking. For suppose it is. In that case, if the almost perfect being we are thinking of existed, it would have the missing reality, and therefore would not be almost perfect, but wholly perfect. But this contradicts the assumption that we are thinking of an almost perfect being, and hence is absurd. Existence, therefore, cannot be the reailty we are looking for. But no restrictions whatever were placed on the reality missing from our almost perfect being. Consequently, if existence cannot be the missing reality, this can only be because existence is not a reality at all. And this is what Kant desired to prove.

…I find it astonishing that this argument has stood up for so long, and that so many philosophers who are otherwise clearheaded and critical have found it convincing. We can see at once that it cannot be correct if we run through it again, this time supposing “omnipotence” (or any other undisputed real predicate) to be the reality missing from our almost perfect being. In that case too we would have to admit that if the almost perfect being were omnipotent, it would have the missing reality, and hence be wholly perfect, contrary to our original supposition. Thus if Kant’s argument succeeded in showing that existence is not a real predicate, it would also succeed in showing that nothing could be one.” (275)

So maybe Kant could not entirely disprove the Ontological Argument. But, then again, “Kant does succeed in setting forth a view about existence and predication which, if it is correct, dies rid us once and for all of the concept of logically necessary existence, and with it the ontological argument” (276). The view is widely accepted, it seems, but there does not seem to be enough of a reason to justify his beliefs. However, if any view puts the ontological argument in trouble it is this one.

Final note on the ontological argument: For the sake of brevity and time, I cannot outline more arguments against the ontological argument or the modern modal version of the argument presented by Alvin Plantinga. But we can still conclude that the ontological argument has never been universally convincing in possibly the same way its diverse “dismantlings” have never been fully convincing. It is one of those offerings history has offered mankind to chew upon for centuries on end.

**Proper citations should hopefully be available soon!**

A Jesuit Speaks on Atheism and Modernity

My own proposition, derivative from the Bible, is that atheism is never the conclusion of any theory, philosophical or scientific. It is a decision, a free act of choice that antedates all theories.

-J.C. Murray, S.J.

Fr. John Courtney Murray (1902-1967) was one of America’s most distinguished theologians. In a series of lectures given at Yale University in 1963, he dealt with “the problem of God”—a phrase he considers “distinctively modern” (1). However, despite whatever looks of modernity it may have, the problem, Murray writes, “is as old as the oldest traditions of the Bible.” The issue is of utmost importance, as is implied in the introduction to this research project. Murray wholeheartedly agrees,

…the problem of God is primary among the fateful human questions that, as Pascal said, “take us by the throat.” The whole man—as intelligent and free, as a body, a psychic apparatus, and a soul—is profoundly engaged both in the position of the problem and its solution. (4)

I intend on focusing in-depth on Murray’s view of modern atheists, focusing mainly on two chapters in particular from his book The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today. The two chapters are “The Godless Man of Modernity” and “The Godless Man of the Post-Modern Age.”

THE GODLESS MAN OF MODERNITY

Murray believes that in the modern age there are two types of “godless man” (86). And by modern age he means what “first begins in the quattrocento with the rise of what Lagarde has called…the laicist mentality; ….through the nineteenth century.” The first sort of godless man is one of “the Academy, bearer of the aristocratic atheism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.” Murray writes that the “dynamic behind his atheism was the will to understand and explain the world without God, meaning by “world,” nature, man, history, society.” The second sort of godless man is the one of the Marketplace, “the bearer of the bourgeois atheism of the nineteenth century.”

Murray hypothesizes the origins of the modern worldview from three pivotal events that took place in the Middle Ages. The first event was “the transposition of the problem of God into a problem for the philosophical intelligence, a formally metaphysical, gnoseological, and linguistic problem” (88). Murray considers this something bold, because the “exposure of the problem of God to rational inquiry was an invitation to betrayal of the tradition of reason.” Such a betrayal happened when modernity decided to separate faith from reason after so much time in unity. Murray believes it “was by this choice that the way was opened to the atheist conclusions of modern philosophy.”

The second event “was the Thomist reception of Aristotle.” Now the universe “was a subsistent order of being” considered “radically distinct from God” and “endowed with its own proper autonomy.” Aquinas apparently would tergiversate the “biblical view of the world as an order of reality outside the order of the divine, revealing God indeed but not containing him” (89). Man was given more importance, giving some reason to the belief of Protagoras that man is the measure of all things. This time, though, it came from the idea of man being “the image of God in virtue of his endowment with intelligence.” Now that the world was man’s to analyze rationally, “there lurked an invitation to betrayal of the tradition.” Then the betrayal happened when one exclusive form of rational truth was accepted, with “one method for its pursuit” and “one measure of the certitudes attained” (90). Further consequences of this event led modernity to consider Christianity a “religion of myths” (91) and to a scientism that “supervened upon rationalism” (90). God, like Christianity, was “relegated to the order of fantasy.”

The third event was “the construction of the problematic of creation” (92) which Murray describes as “the central problem of Christian philosophy.” This problem is two-dimensional because it deals with both a metaphysical and moral side. The focus here will be on the former. Metaphysically speaking, if “God is, and if God is what he is, how can anything else be?” The Scholastics did not manage the problem well, and part of the difficulty is as Murray writes,

Outside the infinite, necessary, eternal, absolute being of God there seems to be no room for another order of being that is finite, contingent, temporal, relative.

The issue led to an invitation to “betrayal of the tradition” yet again. Modernity “decided to consider the problem as a choice between alternatives that really are contrary.” Both alternatives were atheist ones: either God is all that is or the world is all that is. If the former were chosen, one would be advocating pantheism, which as Murray says “pantheism is atheism” (93) because it is “the denial of God as Creator, and if God is not the Creator, he is not God.” Murray writes that the modern will to atheism’s direction goes against “the Christian affirmation that God is the Creator of the world.” The second alternative, on the other hand, is just materialism, which is obviously atheist. Murray summarizes it eloquently in a brief passage:

The material universe, man included, is a self-sufficient, self-contained entity and order. It subsists by itself, and it always has been there—from eternity, even. Somehow or other it managed to originate itself, if indeed here be any sense at all in speaking of its origination. In any case, it serves to explain itself. Beyond this world lies nothing. There is, first and last, no God.

Modernity, thus, is trapped in atheism either way for Murray when it comes to the metaphysical issue of creation.

As for the second sort of atheism, that of the Marketplace, Murray dedicates only a little to. It is worth reading basically the entire definition of it as seen by Murray:

In the Marketplace, said les gens de bien…, we have no need of God; therefore he does not exist. The project of these men was not to explain the world but simply to make a living in it. To them the sole realities of life were economic. The business of business is business, they might have said.... And to the business of business, God is irrelevant. He is not needed for the success of the economic enterprise, which is the only enterprise that matters. (98)

Murray refers to it as “atheism of distraction” and claims that it “served to prepare the way for the later proletarian atheism” and their “atheism of indifference” (99).

THE GODLESS MAN OF THE POST-MODERN AGE

Murray’s idea of post-modern is not the typical one. For him it basically means anything from the time of Marx on. Generally, for someone in our age, by postmodern we mean something else. Post-modern was simply the label Murray gave the present (which is now over forty years ago) due to its new atheisms. Notwithstanding minor clarifications, he believed in two godless men of post-modernity: the one of the communist world revolution and the one of the Theater.

The godless man of the communist social revolution is not an individual per se. Murray uses the term party instead (101). Murray explains and then defines the aim of a man in that party:

The new Marxist man wills to transform the world. By “world" he means all that Marx meant by “nature,” that is, the total system of material production and human relationships that the labor of man has brought into being throughout history. The world is the industrial world, the world wrought by man’s industry. (101-102)

These people are, in a sense, in search of freedom on earth alone.

As for the godless man of the Theater, unfortunately it was too recent a concept by the time Murray gave his lecture. Regardless, by Theater he meant “the world of the public imagination, common impressions, generally shared feelings about things” (102). The man of the Theater is, in some sense, not philosophical. He is interested in man’s “situation” and has an “ethic of the situation” as well. Murray writes,

His postulate is that man has no nature; man is not an essence. Man is only a presence, a sort of process, or , if you give the word something of its primitive Hebraic sense, an existence, a continual “standing forth,” an actual “being-there-in-the-moment” in action and in freedom.

The will of the godless man of the Theater is not that of his predecessor of the Academy—the will to understand and explain the world without God. For him the world is absurd. Still less does he will to change the world; for it would still be absurd no matter what the change. His project is simply to “exist” the godless word…Even more exactly, his project is to “exist” himself, the man who wills to be godless in a world that he sees to be godless through his intention that it should be godless like himself. He wills the absence of God. (103)

Both types of men are very different. However, they do have some similarities. Murray describes six characteristics in detail. For reasons of brevity and time, it is most prudent to simply list those six characteristics:

1. They “share a common problematic” dealing with the issue of evil in the world.

2. They both accept Nietzsche’s (mythical) belief that God is dead. History now becomes only man’s playing field.

3. Both new atheisms are postulates and not conclusions.

4. God is considered not only some “needless superfluity” (106) but a “positive menace to be actively combatted and done away with.”

5. Their active antagonism to God is based on the idea that He opposes man’s freedom

6. Both have a “highly concrete concept of freedom” not based on legalism and the like.

In this same content-rich chapter of Murray’s book, he also offers his conclusion. For the Academy, the big deal was “the intelligibility of God, as allied with issue of the intelligibility of the world” (119). For the post-moderns, though, God is dead, and thus those issues do not matter. Furthermore, for the post-moderns, “the problem of God has come back in its biblical mode of position.” This is so because:

The problem of God today is not posited simply in the order of ideas and affirmation where the terms of argument are essence and existence. Its plane of position is the historical-existential order, where the terms of argument are presence or transparency and absence or opacity. This is the plane on which the problem was posited by the Lord God of Israel when he visited and redeemed his people. This, too, is the plane on which it has again been posited by the man of the Revolution and by the man of the Theater, who have come to visit, if not redeem, us. (119-120)

Murray thus gives an excellent history of the rise of atheism from the modern age to the time of his book. One can say that Murray, though he claims he is not trying to persuade or prove anything (3), does seem to have more sympathy towards the new atheism (amongst the atheisms) since it seems to bring us back to our biblical roots. Now it is just a matter of what is better—knowing God or ignoring him (121). That is where we are at, and we better make a decision (atheism, Murray reasonably believes, is a decision) because this is certainly of great importance.

**I would cite the work in detail if I had the information**

Understanding Plato's Phaedo

What is the soul for Simmias?

For Simmias the soul is a kind of harmony, meaning that it vanishes and dies with the body. He makes the correlation because “a harmony is something invisible, without body, beautiful and divine in the attuned lyre [like the soul], whereas the lyre itself and its string are physical bodily, composite, earthy, and akin to what is mortal [like the body]” (124). In consequence, by following the analogy, the soul dies because when an instrument is broken or destroyed, the harmony supposedly is as well. He is thus claiming that the body determines the soul’s state and recognizes that it is not immortal. You can make the claim that he is a naturalist.

What is the soul for Cebes?

For Simmias, the soul is something that precedes the body but is mortal nonetheless. He is against Simmias in believing that the soul is stronger and more long-lasting than the body. Socrates summarizes his point succinctly: “Cebes, I thought, agrees with me that the soul lasts much longer than the body, but that no one knows whether the soul often wears out many bodies and then, on leaving its last body, is now itself destroyed” (129).

Is the soul corporeal? If yes, in what sense?

For Simmias the soul is corporeal. This is so because it is not beyond the natural realm; it dies the moment the body does and appears the moment it does as well. If Simmias’ ideas were modernized, he would probably sound a lot like the empirical scientists/philosophers that claim everything in the universe is made up of atoms and the like (e.g. Daniel Dennett, Francis Crick). While Simmias may ascribe qualities to the soul unseen in corporeal things, he is still undeniably subjecting it to whatever happens to the body—thus making the soul part of it.

For Cebes the soul is not corporeal in the extreme sense held by Simmias. However, the possibility of a soul’s death makes it corporeal in some sense. By allowing such a possibility, he robs the soul of its divinity and makes for a very bizarre concept.

What is the relationship between soul and body?

The answer to this question is remarkably simple with regards to the views of Simmias and Cebes. If the soul is a kind of harmony for Simmias, then he must believe the body generates the soul. For Cebes, on the other hand, the soul generates the body since it precedes it. In fact, Cebes answers this question directly: “[A] weaver had woven and worn out many such cloaks. He perished after many of them but before the last…The image illustrates, I think, the relationship of the soul to the body.”

Work Cited:

Plato. Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo (Second Edition). Trans. G.M.A. Grube. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2002.

An Aristotelian Linkage to Socrates

Nicomachean Ethics I: Aristotle and the Socratic Paradox

The first book of Aristotle’s highly-regarded collection of lecture notes known as the Nicomachean Ethics is a blueprint of what man’s ultimate aim is in life. It is undoubtedly a daring and ambitious philosophical enterprise. However, Aristotle manages to effectively defend his views on important and controversial topics such as the chief good and the completeness and self-sufficiency it must possess. His views with regards to this chief good are influenced by several strands of thought, but the philosophy of Socrates in particular seems to stand out in the first section of his masterpiece work on ethics. The purpose of this essay will be to survey different ideas brought up by Aristotle in the opening book of the Ethics and to look at how they stem from his engagement with Socrates’ notorious so-called “Socratic Paradox.”

A rudimentary outline of the Socratic Paradox before delving into any further analysis will help illuminate what follows. The so-called “Paradox” appears to consist of two central ideas. First, there is the considerably controversial one found in Plato’s Meno that “all men desire good things” (Meno 77c). Seeing that Socrates believed bad things harm their possessor, the claim leads directly into the second and more notorious idea made in the Protagoras. The statement is the following: “none of the wise men thinks that any human being willingly makes a mistake or willingly does anything wrong or bad” (Protagoras 345e). The overall theory can be seen as paradoxical because it is considerably counterintuitive and seemingly refutable with just a few simple examples of wicked people throughout history. However, Aristotle would not be the sort of thinker to hastily disregard something like the Socratic Paradox, seeing that, in his Topics, he attaches importance to reputable opinions—which are those accepted “by all, or by the majority, or by the most notable and reputable of [men]” (Topics I.100b). Obviously Socrates falls in the latter category among people and thus his theory should not be held at the same level as a charlatan’s or fraud’s. In fact, as is turns out, Aristotle not only considers the seemingly illogical quite idea worthy of reflection, but rather, actually some elements of it.

The first instance of any influence on behalf of the Socratic Paradox on Aristotle’s ethical theory is found in the opening sentence of the Ethics. The sentence runs as follows: “Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim” (NE 1.1094.1-3). Here Aristotle is opening his work with a very contentious claim, though he prudently places “thought to” in the sentence’s first clause in order to declare that he may be referring to Plato and/or Socrates and not stating it as dogma. However, it becomes clearer throughout the first book that Aristotle does at least essentially back up the primordial idea of the Paradox that “all men desire good things.” This is so because it seems to form the basis of his theory of the chief good. His approval of this first part of the paradox, the one found in the Meno, is essentially the extent of his fragmentary agreement with Socrates’ theory; the other part, that nobody does wrong willingly, is of little importance in Book 1, and is combated later on in Book 7 of the Ethics when dealing with the issue of incontinence.

It is worth noting that Aristotle’s first sentence of the Ethics is loaded with more meaning than may be taken from it in the first reading. From it readers observe the incredible impact the first leg of the Socratic Paradox has on Aristotle’s notion of a chief good being the ultimate aim of man. Notice the second clause of the sentence: “and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.” The clause is unusually disjointed with regards to the first part of the sentence. Why does it follow that “for this reason” some aim singularly called “the good” is humanity’s ultimate ambition? It seems to stem from the fact that there is a variety of subordinate goods and a myriad of fields and activities with different aims. Why would there be many goods, art, inquiries, and aims if not to satisfy some self-sufficient good that is to be desired above all others? Aristotle writes that since “there are evidently more than one end, and we choose some of these (e.g. wealth, flutes, and in general instruments) for the sake of something else, clearly not all ends are complete ends; but the chief good is evidently something complete” (NE 1.1097a.25-29). Though it may sound distant from Socrates’ point, it all derives from the same idea mentioned in the beginning that all men desire good things.

Anyhow, this chief good is supposed to be the end of the highest art, the all-encompassing art, which for Aristotle is politics. But unfortunately the words “complete” and “self-sufficient” have been thrown around a few times already in describing the qualities of this chief good so maybe a more detailed analysis of what these notions entail is necessary before delving into what exactly this chief good consists of. Since the chief good by necessity must be the highest good-in-itself as opposed to an intermediary good, it must be “fulfilling.” Aristotle writes “the chief good is evidently something complete” (NE 1.1097a.27-28) and to be “complete without qualification” (NE 1.1097a.35) means being “desirable in itself and never for the sake of something else” (NE 1.1097a.35-36). In other words, this chief good is desire’s dead end. It is also found to be self-sufficient. For Aristotle, something self-sufficient is that “which when isolated makes life desirable and lacking in nothing” (NE 1.1097b.15-16). Now that these important terms have been defined, Aristotle’s idea of what this chief good consists of will become clearer.

In the first book of the Ethics, this chief good that stems from Socrates’ original idea that men desire good things is defined as happiness. The term “happiness,” by the way, should not be confused with the same one people speak of in the English language. This Greek notion of happiness is more encompassing and the Greek word for it is “eudaimonia” but for the sake of ease the English term will be used throughout. Aristotle believes that this happiness as ultimate aim is basically something universally agreed upon as he claims that “both the general run of men and people of superior refinement” (NE 1.1095a.17-18) seem to give it the utmost importance. Beyond happiness there is nothing to want, for, as Aristotle writes, it is “the best, noblest, and most pleasant thing” (NE 1.1099a.24-25). Curiously, this seems to match one of the requirements of the Socratic Paradox, which is the belief that people desire good things because nobody in their right mind desires to live wretchedly. Living wretchedly is obviously the opposite of happiness, so once again some possible Socratic influence in Aristotle’s theory of the chief good becomes apparent.

However, there seems to be an issue with happiness being the highest good. While it may be agreed upon that it is the ultimate aim of human action and behavior, different people have different ideas of what it consists of. The reason for this is because some people are clearly picturing happiness as something that is not in fact complete or self-sufficient. For instance, some may say excellence is “the end of the political life” (NE 1.1095b.31-32), but Aristotle believes that “even this appears somewhat incomplete; for possession of excellence seems actually incompatible with being asleep, or with lifelong inactivity, and, further, with the greatest sufferings and misfortunes” (NE 1.1095b.32-34). Aristotle goes on to state that “a man who was living so one would call happy, unless he were maintaining a thesis at all costs” (NE 1.1096a.1-2). So the error in human thinking seems to be taking these incomplete and insufficient goods as the highest goods.

What could happiness consist of if it is self-sufficient? Aristotle hypothesizes that this may relate to the function of man in general. This comes from the idea that the good of a function or activity resides in the function it has. So if man has any function it is to be an exclusive one. This function would have to involve “the rational element” (NE 1.1098.3-4) found only in human beings. For Aristotle, “the function of man is an activity of soul in accordance with, or not without, rational principle” (NE 1.1098.8-9) However, this would involve a certain sort of accordance with reason, the most excellent one possible. Thus “human good turns out to be activity of soul in conformity with excellence, and if there are more than one excellence, in conformity with the best and most complete” (NE 1.1098.16-18) in “a complete life” (NE 1.1098.19).

In sum, everything in this well-structured exposition of man’s ultimate aim has its foundation in Aristotle’s theory of action and human motivation, a surrogate and edited version of the Socratic Paradox’s first leg. This is so because claiming “every action and choice” aims at some good is in fact almost synonymous with claiming that “all men desire good things.” What saves Aristotle from being trapped in the realm of seeming “paradoxicality,” though, is that he makes little mention of the idea that nobody does wrong willingly, even though he would agree that nobody aims for a wretched life. What also prevents Aristotle’s theory from gaining instant notoriety is found in the intermeshing of “goods” with “aims.” This association of the good with causality makes the previous absurdity of claiming that “every action and choice…is aimed at some good” more difficult to discard because it is less ambiguous than Socrates’ original idea. Aristotle thus manages to strip away the latter element of the Socratic element in the first book of the Nicomachean Ethics and sticks with a more explicative version of the first part in order to arrive at very important conclusions that determine the way we should act and the best way to live.

WORKS CITED:

Aristotle. “Nicomachean Ethics.” A New Aristotle Reader. Ed. J.L. Ackrill. Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 1989. 363-478.

Aristotle. “Topics.” A New Aristotle Reader. Ed. J.L. Ackrill. Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press, 1989. 60-78.

Plato. “Meno.” Plato: Complete Works. Ed. John M. Cooper. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett

Publishing Company, 1997. 870-897.

Plato. “Protagoras.” Plato: Complete Works. Ed. John M. Cooper. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett

Publishing Company, 1997. 746-790.

Reading and the Negation of Solipsism

We can mistrust the senses. Indeed they deceive us all the time. However, we should avoid solipsism.

Other things exist, and we can assume this legitimately, namely, from the act of reading. Reading is a physical and mental act that ratifies the former in the face of the latter. Consider this, to read you have to see [or feel, e.g. in Braille] letters, words, and phrases [while simultaneously in the act of touching/holding a book]. If senses were deceiving and there was not a good reason to believe them, we would not know if, in fact, objects are truly real or just tricks of the senses. However, books seem to trump this issue.

Why is this? Because something written often contains information, and when you do not know that information, it enters your mind once you read it [see, feel, touch—physical] and understand it [mental]. Now how could something foreign enter your mind if it does not exist? The fact that I know now the capital and population of Country X is not something innate, it invaded my mind—because of a physical act [reading]. Now this would entail that my senses were not deceived, there was in fact a book, I saw the right words, and that is why I am informed.

The external should be real. Solipsism may just be a myth. This, anyway, legitimates the power of the senses to about the same degree as self-knowledge, but is ultimately dependent upon it.

Character/Spectator Bonds in Euripides

On Medea’s Character

Euripides’ Medea is a text that supersedes its time. It is intensely psychological in a Shakespearean sense and despite all appearances it is very multidimensional. The premise of the play itself is very simple, as it relates to the audience the story of a married woman who was cheated on by her husband and then tells of her ensuing quest for retribution. The way this woman by the name Medea seeks to do this, however, is something of magnanimous importance. It is through the execution of her subsequent plans that we can best understand the real nature of her character.

To start off, let us analyze in closer detail what occurred with the couple. The nurse’s opening monologue may suffice in accomplishing this. There are some lines where she talks of Medea and her husband Jason:

“And she herself helped Jason in every way.

This is indeed the greatest salvation of all--

For the wife not to stand apart from the husband.

But now there’s hatred everywhere, Love is diseased.

For, deserting his own children and my mistress,

Jason has taken a royal wife to bed,

The daughter of the ruler of this land, Creon.

And poor Medea is slighted, and cries aloud…” (Euripides 1)

Those few lines tell the audience an incredible amount of information that will lead to understanding the root and nature of Medea’s subsequent actions. First of all, notice that by claiming the husband/wife union is of utmost sanctity, there is an implication that its violation is the greatest sin (please pardon the religious lexicon here). Love seems to be deified here as well, made an entity that is now “diseased.” Furthermore, notice the first claim, that Medea helped Jason “in every way.” What is its importance? It is important because traitors generally betray someone who helped them in some way or other, but “every way” is used here alongside the importance given to marriage with the possible aim of emphasizing how extreme Jason’s treason was. It is made even more poignant by making note of the fact that he abandoned his own children as well. So this early in the play we already have an enemy, someone to despise. Obviously that is Jason.

So now Euripides has forced the audience to root for Medea, a woman left alone deserted with her children by a husband that committed a heinous crime. However, the audience is quickly made uncomfortable with Medea soon after she appears beginning due to a set of macabre lines directed at her own children :

“Ah, I have suffered

What should be wept for bitterly. I hate you,

Children of a hateful mother. I curse you

And your father. Let the whole house crash.” (5)

Now the audience has one of three courses to take in following the rest of the play: either they side with this woman and deem her point valid, they oppose her now and thus make Jason the “good one,” or they side with her and pity that she may have lost her mind. This poses a dilemma, for now all her subsequent actions and ideas shall be seen either in a positive, negative, or neurotic light. The challenge is deciding which of those three. Euripides, as a talented playwright, does not make this an obvious decision.

But perhaps those few words coming from Medea’s mouth are not enough to make a decision. Maybe we need to see what she is going to put into action in order to decide if she is right, wrong, or crazy. So what does she decide to do? The following words are chilling:

“And now I shall tell to you the whole of my plan.

Listen to these words that are not spoken idly.

I shall send one of my servants to find Jason

And request him to come once more into my sight.

And when he comes, the words I’ll say will be soft ones.

I’ll say that I agree with him, that I approve

The royal wedding he has made, betraying me.

I’ll say it was profitable, an excellent idea.

But I shall beg that my children remain here:

Not that I would leave in a country that hates me

Children of mine to feel their enemies’ insults,

But that by a trick I may kill the king’s daughter.” (Euripides 25)

As if those words are not terrible enough, she goes back to the comments she made earlier about her children and includes their death as part of the plan as well. In fact, it is an essential part of it. At this point it would seem obvious that the woman is clearly out of her mind. But Euripides is too crafty for making a simple play with even simpler characters.

The fact that she decided to kill her children did not make it a simple decision for the audience to judge her scruples, but rather, it turns everything into a quagmire. There is no denying that this claim that may sound absurd and dangerous, but you need only listen to her defense of the decision to admit it was not blind fury or thoughtless revenge:

“Women, my task is fixed: as quickly as I may

To kill my children, and start away from this land,

And not, by wasting time, to suffer my children

To be slain by another hand less kindly to them.

Force every way will have it they must die, and since

This must be so, then I, their mother, shall kill them.” (40)

Euripides has clearly made this play one where the emotions of the audience are in some sort of rollercoaster, and this is a prime example. For how can someone be so motherly and yet so vicious and seemingly heartless? The manner in which she responds to Jason’s iniquity with regards to the children, though, however confusing, lets the audience finally uncover her character. This is especially the case after she does the deed-- not only after planning it, which may in fact be enough.

So what does the audience uncover about her character? Well, for one, it definitely considers her a frustrating person. Why? Because it wanted her to triumph yet at the same time it did not want her plans to be executed perfectly, as they unfortunately did. The audience can also consider her paradoxical. Throughout the play she seems like a deep-thinking character, but did it ever cross her mind that she could have taken her children with her to Athens? And it is not unreasonable to say that she is also Hegelian in the evil sense, because it seems as if her decision to kill the children instead of Jason himself was made to make him suffer (on page 46 she claims she killed them “To make you [Jason] feel pain”). So in the end what is left is a character full of internal contradictions, one needing proper guidance yet nonetheless sane enough in knowing what she was doing. The audience itself, as shown, experiences these internal contradictions in deciding to side with her or not, and thus Euripides gives everyone a taste of what it is like to be in a serious dilemma and how difficult it is to judge what is right and wrong. Here the spectators and the character share a bond.

Work Cited

Euripides. Medea. Trans. Rex Warner. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1993.

The Felt-Self as a Universe: Towards a Radically New Interpretation of Being (Part I)

The Felt-Self as a Universe: Towards a Radically New Interpretation of Being

A person feels what it is to be oneself. In other words, I am myself and I feel it. I can see other people, but I cannot feel their “selves” like I feel mine. I cannot be-in-them like I am-in-my-self. In short, I feel therefore I am.

I feel therefore I am. I feel I am myself. I am in control of this self. Like a man is in his vehicle, I am in-myself. On the hand, I see other people but I am not-in-them. A man in a vehicle can see other vehicles, but is not in them, in control. The man in the vehicle holds the steering wheel while active and drives where he should want to or can. Alone, he can listen to the radio station of his choice. This is like me thinking, in my mind, unrestrained by any tangible force. However, the man in the vehicle encounters traffic. That is just like my encounter with others. They take up a space I cannot be-in like the private space that is the man’s vehicle.

On Subjugation and Imperialism

The presence of rice pudding incites. It can stimulate the senses to such a degree that a desire to posssess and consume enters into the plenum of reality. Rice pudding, like other foods we would call "snacks" are almost exclusively good in-themselves. With the human propensity to colonize one's tongue on the interconnected components of the rice pudding, we release our will to subjugation. We relish in this dominance, this master-pudding dialectic that almost makes us imperialistic in some regard.

Soon thereafter, the narrative which constitutes daily life for the Western bourgeois- the breakfast-lunch-dinner trinity- appears incomplete. The occidental language game of eating accepts this "snack" even if its purpose is not like the other three, which are not exactly ends in the same context of rice pudding. The paradigm of eating for health is shifted in order to make room for the new desire. It is a protuberance on the order, further corrupted with concepts like "midnight snack." However, it can only be anticipated, for human nature gives in when it wants to control.

We have an image with the symbolic food pyramid. It contains the unhealthy at the top, graphically ruling over healthy consuming. Maybe, one day, there may not even be a bottom to the pyramid with the manifold nature of sweets and other illicit and quasi-nutritional "foods."

Dialogic Ethics

When a group denoted by a certain particularity engages in dialogue and imposes a "dominant discourse"-- are its members to submit to its operational method?

I posit that since the multivocality of radically different Otherness exists--and here occurs a reification of a pluralistic notion--the universal tongue may be impossible. As such, the subjectivity of one's speech and grammar may not reveal but only cover up. Only spiritually, perhaps, can this universality exist-- a language devoid of any catachresis. In this sense, I can be considered somewhat postpositivistic.

However, the fact is that we live in one world, albeit a fragmented one which appears to be constantly in conflict.

Discourse is the way to bridge the gap from the Self to the Other. I call the being-in-myself the Felt-Self which inwardly acknowledges itself yet cannot purely decenter itself in recognizing the outsider, comprised of the none-Felt-Self, which I assume is anything outside.

As such, in dialogue there can only be agreement, always some submission on the part of one or both. Since a pure de(center)ing is seemingly impossible, there is linguistic battle, even if they are ones of solidarity.

But to deviate (the linguistic straying referred to) changes the course of the battle. In short, it constitutes a deceit whereupon the input of the Other is blinded to a further degree than that already imposed by the limits of language.

That demerits the results of a discussion or dialectic and ultimately leaves one Pyrrhically victorious, as the battle was decided by the intrusion of misplaced pieces. Who can feel proud of winning rock, paper, scissors with a real weapon?

This does leave two questions, though: how acceptable are generative metaphors? and have I myself strayed?

Welcome

Welcome to this blog which will hopefully be of interest to all those who like philosophy and things of that nature.