[Serious] Book reports

[Belacqua]

I get that final causality does not require the agent to be conscious in order to be directed to a certain effect, but something about directedness nevertheless does appear to imply some ultimate "goalmaker".

This to me is the most interesting part of Feser's discussion about the Four Causes. It goes against our modern way of thinking, and is especially tricky when people are already on the lookout for religious ideas sneaking in to a supposedly neutral discussion. 

One person I read has claimed that what we call Final Cause is not a pre-ordained end, but just the effect that a thing can do, depending on its potential. So the heart's Final Cause is usually said to be pumping blood, but if you're a cannibal it could also be as the main course of your dinner. 

In this sense, water has any number of Final Causes. It can make things wet; it can make boats float; it can reconstitute your instant ramen, etc. In each case this is what water is "for," though it doesn't mean that God made water with instant ramen in mind. Again, I think it has to do with the actualization of whatever potential it happens to have. 

That said, I do think it is reasonable and not mystical to say that the heart in your chest is there in order to pump blood. It evolved that way. 

I mean, imagine you're giving a beginning anatomy lesson, and you talk all about the heart without saying what it's there for. "It's a muscle; it's as big as your fist; it has four chambers; that's all you need to know." That would be silly. To understand the heart, you have to know what it is good for and why you'd die without it. And all that is true even without an intelligent designer. 

I've had people who were so adamantly against anything being a Final Cause that they insisted the heart isn't for anything -- it's just there by chance, and aren't we lucky? The fact that it is there due to natural selection and not design doesn't mean it's not reasonable to see it as Final Cause.

added a bit later: I also think the word "final" may be misleading. It sounds a bit apocalyptic or something. But the Final Cause of a thing can be enacted (e.g. the heart pumping blood) even when there is another final cause waiting for it down the line (Hannibal Lector's dinner). "Final" is relative -- the end of a particular chain, but not every possible chain.

---

I don't know. It cuts both ways....

Yes, I completely agree that what I reported about love before is only one way of seeing things, and probably not how we experience it in our lives most of the time. 

I guess part of the problem is that the English word "love" has too many different associations, many of which are incompatible. So it's fuzzy right off the bat. 

If you've read Iris Murdoch's books, the kind of irrational passionate love she writes about may be close to the Platonic, but certainly isn't guaranteed to end up with a stable marriage or a non-crazy relationship. 

The analogy I like is with music. Nobody goes to college and studies four years of music theory and music history and learns an instrument and then decides he loves music. You only do that if you already love music, for reasons that you probably can't describe. The love is an irrational attraction that comes first, and we may fill in conceptual details after. 

To me, though, if a person (maybe an android) learned everything there was to know about music and didn't love it, I might say that he didn't really understand it. To know it means loving it, not just passing tests about key signatures. 

This has been my experience with art. Beautiful things hooked me at a young age and I've been working to fill in the details ever since. 

But again, yes: loving art is different from having a crazy girlfriend.

[mordant]

I don't know. It cuts both ways....

Yes, I completely agree that what I reported about love before is only one way of seeing things, and probably not how we experience it in our lives most of the time. 

I guess part of the problem is that the English word "love" has too many different associations, many of which are incompatible. So it's fuzzy right off the bat. 

If you've read Iris Murdoch's books, the kind of irrational passionate love she writes about may be close to the Platonic, but certainly isn't guaranteed to end up with a stable marriage or a non-crazy relationship. 

The analogy I like is with music. Nobody goes to college and studies four years of music theory and music history and learns an instrument and then decides he loves music. You only do that if you already love music, for reasons that you probably can't describe. The love is an irrational attraction that comes first, and we may fill in conceptual details after. 

To me, though, if a person (maybe an android) learned everything there was to know about music and didn't love it, I might say that he didn't really understand it. To know it means loving it, not just passing tests about key signatures. 

This has been my experience with art. Beautiful things hooked me at a young age and I've been working to fill in the details ever since. 

But again, yes: loving art is different from having a crazy girlfriend.

The art analogy is a very good one.

Certain art forms attracted me early on but I have gotten so frustrated "filling in the details ever since" that I have abandoned the pursuit. There is too much of a gap between my appreciation of the ideal and my actual skill at performance and the amount of discipline I'm willing to invest. And my tastes are esoteric enough that they end up being a lot of investment for a relatively solitary pursuit.

The same has been true of my relationships. My own abilities and the reality of Other People are both too limited to realize the irrational ideal. Sometimes it's wiser to let go of dreams. In the way that one's dreams of being a fireman or astronaut as a very young child give way to other pursuits, it doesn't make that shift in focus a bad choice. Sometimes we don't have realistic or even accurate ideals, plus, we way over-discount the value of seemingly "lesser" pursuits. Or as it has been put, "the perfect is the enemy of the good."

[GrandizerII]

In the next section of Chapter 2 of Feser's book, Feser did great at explaining the distinctions between essence and existence. The distinction between essence and nature was also clear though I'm not really sure if the distinction is warranted, but it shows just how precise and technical Aquinas' analyses of these metaphysical matters were.

There were, however, stuff said in this content that may come off to the modern atheist reader as pure word play. The bit about angels not sharing an essence but are each their own species feels sketchy to me, and I'm not really sure if we can make sense of form existing purely without matter. Also, God being that being whose essence and existence are identical felt a bit like jumping the gun, but we'll see some elaboration on this later in the book anyway so no further comment on this for now.

[GrandizerII]

So I just got done reading Feser's section on the transcendentals. A lot of it was clear, but perhaps I should go back and reread it because I didn't exactly get how "truth" or "good" is convertible with "being". Clearly we are not fully "good" or "true", but does this mean we are not fully "being"?

I see the next section is specifically on final causality. Hoping to get more clarity on final causality as I read this next section.

[Belacqua]

So I just got done reading Feser's section on the transcendentals. A lot of it was clear, but perhaps I should go back and reread it because I didn't exactly get how "truth" or "good" is convertible with "being". Clearly we are not fully "good" or "true", but does this mean we are not fully "being"?

I see the next section is specifically on final causality. Hoping to get more clarity on final causality as I read this next section.

You inspired me just now to go and look at that section again. It's a key tenet of several different philosophies, I think, that the Good the True and the Beautiful are just different words for the same thing, and that Being is all of these things. But I have been pretty fuzzy on why anybody should say that. 

Obviously the easy objection is that bad or ugly things have being as well as good or beautiful ones. And I'm sure any number of people will say "Oh yeah, cancer has being -- is that good?" With the implication of "check mate, theist." 

But as always the definitions he's using are not the ones we use. 

As I understand it, "good" here is, as always, related to the actualization of a thing's potential. In this case, a thing is good insofar as it becomes what it is meant to be. The opposite wouldn't necessarily be bad -- certainly not in a moral sense -- but something like unfulfilled or deviated from the goal. Beauty I think is the same -- a thing is beautiful not because of some ideal proportion but because it has achieved that which it was pointing to. True, also, doesn't mean "a statement in accord with the way the world is," but something more like "to thine own self be true." What you really are. 

So let's say I had a strange ugly animal show up on my veranda (as I did a few years ago). It was clearly sick. Much later I realized that the badgers in my neighborhood had some kind of skin disease or mange and had lost their hair. A naked badger is unpleasant. And I think Feser would say it's "bad" and "not beautiful" because it diverges from the complete healthy badger that its DNA points to. 

I also made a mistake for a long time, because the critters tend to come at night. I thought there were two raccoon-dog families, and one was more beautiful than the other. But I was thinking that the badgers were really raccoon-dogs who just weren't as good-looking. Once I realize that they (the healthy ones) looked exactly as badgers are supposed to look, I found them more beautiful. 

"Being" in this case means the extent to which a thing has actualized its potential. So it doesn't mean just that something exists. A hairless sick badger does in fact exist. But it has less being -- in Thomas's meaning of the term -- than a badger which is in accord with the outcome its DNA was aiming for. 

So the terms are transcendental because they really mean the same thing -- different words for the same condition of achieving the fulfillment of potential. 

As in so many other cases, this just makes a lot of the arguments against Thomas's metaphysics go away. Because it means that objections like the one I suggested above -- that sickness also exists -- are objections to different meanings of the words. There may be a hundred reasons NOT to accept any of this, but the arguments I have seen in the past are misdirected, because they are using different definitions than Thomas.

[GrandizerII]

"Being" in this case means the extent to which a thing has actualized its potential. So it doesn't mean just that something exists. A hairless sick badger does in fact exist. But it has less being -- in Thomas's meaning of the term -- than a badger which is in accord with the outcome its DNA was aiming for.

Ok, this might have been why I got confused. Perhaps I forgot about how Feser defined "being" in previous sections.

[Belacqua]

"Being" in this case means the extent to which a thing has actualized its potential. So it doesn't mean just that something exists. A hairless sick badger does in fact exist. But it has less being -- in Thomas's meaning of the term -- than a badger which is in accord with the outcome its DNA was aiming for.

Ok, this might have been why I got confused. Perhaps I forgot about how Feser defined "being" in previous sections.

It's all very slippery and -- to me -- wonderful, just because it's so different. All these words which are so fuzzy to us are for him clear and precise. 

I had forgotten all this part, and was aware of a lack in myself for not knowing why Being is considered always Good. So thank you very much for focussing on this, and making me review what I should have known before!

[Belacqua]

So I just got done reading Feser's section on the transcendentals. A lot of it was clear, but perhaps I should go back and reread it because I didn't exactly get how "truth" or "good" is convertible with "being". Clearly we are not fully "good" or "true", but does this mean we are not fully "being"?

The book I'm reading on Plotinus has some good overlap with what Thomas says about transcendentals. 

I'd been puzzled by the fact that Plotinus says that Being -- the Real -- is Beauty. Now it looks as though he agrees that they are different words for the same thing. 

Contemplatives, precisely, do not attend to the mere matter of the thing but
rather to its unity, its grace. They are freed from enchantment not because
they see all things as indifferent or ugly (as though they were “cynics” in a
more modern sense) but because every real thing is beautiful, and such as to
awaken joy in those who really see it. “They exist and appear to us and he
who sees them cannot possibly say anything else except that they are what
really exists. What does ‘really exist’ mean? That they exist as beauties” (I.6
[1].5, 18– 9). “Or rather, beautifulness is reality.”9

[GrandizerII]

Finally done reading the section on final causality. As usual, there was a lot to take in here, but still want to share my thoughts on this one.

I keep painstakingly wavering between "ok, it makes sense that we can't talk about the natural phenomena of this world without appeal to final causes" and "but no, hold on, I can theoretically make sense of these phenomena without appeal to final causes at all", so I'm just going to let Feser say what he had to say about this topic uncontested and simply concede final causality. He addresses a number of the arguments made by contemporary philosophers and scientists against final causality and does so in a way that makes the other side sound stupid for even rejecting final causality (regardless of the reasonability/compellingness of his counter arguments).

I understand, @Belaqua, you posted an explanation of what final causality is in your view and in the view of others, but my continued issue with Feser is that he still doesn't make clear (to me) what he means by "final cause". What is he saying when he speaks of "purpose", "end", "goal", "directedness"? I get the feeling he is saving what he really thinks final causality necessitates for later in the book when he gets to the proofs for God's existence.

The other thing to point out is that he has yet to address quantum physics and how this could be used as evidence that seems to strongly support Hume's skepticism of causality. There's much content on the role of teleology in evolutionary biology, DNA, in natural cycles, general physics, human thinking and action, but zero notes on quantum physics specifically. Is not the [apparent] randomness entailed by most interpretations of quantum mechanics not worth considering as an argument against the more intuitive causal framework originally proposed by Aristotle? Perhaps Feser eventually does address this later in the book, or even in the next section on efficient causality. At least am hoping this to be the case.

A lot of this section was pretty much providing counters to modern arguments against Aristotelian causality (especially final causality), with some beef noted against modern philosophers and scientists for not taking Aristotelian metaphysics seriously. His attitude against modern thinking certainly was made more obvious in this section. Interesting take on how (according to him) materialistic science was asserted by force and used as a political weapon against Aristotelianism and thus its eventual "success". Also of interest, the part where he notes there is a growing tendency among modern thinkers towards a neo-Aristotelian scheme, the "new essentialism", so to speak.

[GrandizerII]

Finally finished Chapter 2 of Feser's book on Aquinas. The last two sections were on efficient causality and being, respectively.

Feser finally addresses quantum mechanics in the section on efficient causality but does so in a rather unsatisfying way. Feser basically says: so what, nothing in Aquinas's metaphysics necessitates that determinism be true anyway, no biggie. But if things do/can occur in an indeterministic manner, then doesn't this suggest some lack of directionality, and wouldn't this therefore be a problem for Aristotelian causality in general? Granted, indeterminism prob poses no threat to efficient causality perse, but efficient causality rests on final causality (as I remember Feser argued earlier in the book).

Not all popular interpretations of quantum mechanics are indeterministic anyway. The many worlds interpretation, though it concedes prediction with 100% certainty is theoretically impossible, is nevertheless deterministic and still seems to be a threat to Aristotelian causality (since it seems to imply a lack of specific directionality towards one particular outcome).

This is not to argue, however, that Aristotelian metaphysics overall cannot be reconciled with quantum mechanics, only that Feser hasn't provided a proper address of quantum mechanics so far in this book. Perhaps Feser doesn't feel qualified enough to attempt such a reconciliation or he is saving the meaty counter arguments for later in the book.

Regarding the section on being, I think Feser did at least a fair job here addressing the Fregean-style objection(s) to Aquinas's notions of essence and existence.

Feser, however, lost me once again with the angel stuff. I don't think he did well enough at distinguishing between angels and Platonic Forms. Pure forms existing concretely yet independently of matter still doesn't feel like it makes sense.