Aquinas on Truth, Health, and Urine

(FP; Q16; a6) Whether there is only one truth, according to which all things are true?

  Objection 1: It seems that there is only one truth, according to which all things are true. For according to Augustine (De Trin. xv, 1), “nothing is greater than the mind of man, except God.” Now truth is greater than the mind of man; otherwise the mind would be the judge of truth: whereas in fact it judges all things according to truth, and not according to its own measure. Therefore God alone is truth. Therefore there is no other truth but God.

Objection 2: Further, Anselm says (De Verit. xiv), that, “as is the relation of time to temporal things, so is that of truth to true things.” But there is only one time for all temporal things. Therefore there is only one truth, by which all things are true.

On the contrary, it is written (Ps. 11:2), “Truths are decayed from among the children of men.”

I answer that, In one sense truth, whereby all things are true, is one, and in another sense it is not. In proof of which we must consider that when anything is predicated of many things univocally, it is found in each of them according to its proper nature; as animal is found in each species of animal. But when anything is predicated of many things analogically, it is found in only one of them according to its proper nature, and from this one the rest are denominated. So healthiness is predicated of animal, of urine, and of medicine, not that health is only in the animal; but from the health of the animal, medicine is called healthy, in so far as it is the cause of health, and urine is called healthy, in so far as it indicates health. And although health is neither in medicine nor in urine, yet in either there is something whereby the one causes, and the other indicates health.

Now we have said (Article [1]) that truth resides primarily in the intellect; and secondarily in things, according as they are related to the divine intellect. If therefore we speak of truth, as it exists in the intellect, according to its proper nature, then are there many truths in many created intellects; and even in one and the same intellect, according to the number of things known. Whence a gloss on Ps. 11:2, “Truths are decayed from among the children of men,” says: “As from one man’s face many likenesses are reflected in a mirror, so many truths are reflected from the one divine truth.” But if we speak of truth as it is in things, then all things are true by one primary truth; to which each one is assimilated according to its own entity. And thus, although the essences or forms of things are many, yet the truth of the divine intellect is one, in conformity to which all things are said to be true.

Reply to Objection 1: The soul does not judge of things according to any kind of truth, but according to the primary truth, inasmuch as it is reflected in the soul, as in a mirror, by reason of the first principles of the understanding. It follows, therefore, that the primary truth is greater than the soul. And yet, even created truth, which resides in our intellect, is greater than the soul, not simply, but in a certain degree, in so far as it is its perfection; even as science may be said to be greater than the soul. Yet it is true that nothing subsisting is greater than the rational soul, except God.

Reply to Objection 2: The saying of Anselm is correct in so far as things are said to be true by their relation to the divine intellect.

Begging the regulation

One readily recognized example of question begging goes thus:

“God must exist.”
“How do you know?”
“Well, the Bible says so.”
“But why should I believe the Bible?”
“Because the Bible was written by God.”

And we all laugh at the dumb theist, who may have other good reasons for his faith, as he clearly doesn’t realize how silly that argument sounds. Now, claiming that God exists is a bold claim; therefore, the evidence needs to be good if we are going to accept it from an intellectual standpoint. In Monday’s Guardian, one author makes another bold claim: “Liberty is not what it once was.” Forgetting for the moment that he holds John Stuart Mill as the philosopher of liberty, I found the argument a little wanting in general, and I couldn’t help but think of the ‘God’ conversation above when I ran into this section of text:

Mill’s libertarian philosophy is based on two precepts … The first principle asserts that “all errors which (a man) is likely to commit against advice and warning, are far outweighed by the evil of allowing others to constrain him to what they deem his good”. Only cranks believe that now. If it were a generally held view, we would not prohibit the use of recreational drugs or require passengers in the back seats of motor cars to wear safety belts.

Were the paragraph above simply a description of common public opinion there would be nothing fallacious at play — aside from his unwarranted use of the word crank, that is, which appears to signify “someone not agreeing with the majority” for this author. (You know, like all those “cranks” who voted against Bush in ‘04.) But, alas, description is replaced with prescription when the text above is implicitly used as evidence later:

The philosophy for our time ought to concern a consensus about civilised conduct, not extol irresponsible individualism. And it ought to be based on a definition of liberty that is far more meaningful to the majority of mankind than Mill’s notion that freedom is no more than the absence of restraint.

::

The following conversation then took place in my mind:

Daniel: “This doesn’t seem philosophically sound to me.”
G: “You mean you’d prefer a Mill-style freedom?”
Daniel: “Yes; I think I would.”
G: “But that’s preposterous, for the first thing to go would be seat-belt safety laws and anti-drug laws.”
Daniel: “Great! . . .Oh, there’s a problem?”
G: “Well, it’s obvious that only cranks think that, so you’ll need to get with the times, if you want to propose a serious version of liberty. . .”

Dolly the organ machine

The recent scientific achievement of producing a sheep containing about 85% sheep cells and about 15% human cells has, of course, triggered the next round in Christian thought on the subject of ‘playing God’ versus progress. One writer at the Catholic, liberty-friendly Acton Institute blog has written several posts mostly disapproving of the idea of chimeras. His most recent musing critiques the presentation of the breakthrough by the media, and he argues that calling something 15% human is disingenuous, since ‘being human’ is a kind of on-off switch. (I agree with him on this, of course, but he seems to be presenting this criticism as though it’s a part of a larger case against chimeras, which I don’t follow). The author links to his past posts criticizing chimeras, which I’ll have to go through more thoroughly, and he further quotes from the article that ’silent viruses’ are a big concern with the future of animal ogran-growers:

According to reports, Dr Patrick Dixon, an international lecturer on biological trends, warned: “Many silent viruses could create a biological nightmare in humans. Mutant animal viruses are a real threat, as we have seen with HIV.”

Now, I don’t find the critiques of chimera technology that stem from its potentially negative consequences to be compelling. If it is true that human organs harvested from sheep could contain silent viruses, then it follows that scientists (and in addition — or, at least, in a better world — private firms and corporations) will have to be very careful and deliberative in making the technology accessible. This is a narrow critique, however, and only accidentally applies to chimeras in general. Certainly Christians shouldn’t base any substantial objection to chimeras based on silent viruses (or other accidental concerns), because the technology to deal with these problems isn’t far behind the human-organs-in-animals technology itself. The shelf-life on the argument is a good tip that it’s probably not a good one to use in the first place.

The better Christian critique of this genre of science has to do with the following (roughly put, inadequately categorized) concern: What is it that humans, given their nature, ought and ought not to do with creation, given its nature? Nevertheless, I’d bet that there will be more critiques of Dolly the organ sheep based on some abstract claim that science has finally gone too far and is playing God in an inappropriate way.

In my view, any critique claiming that the creation and use of chimeras ‘goes too far’ or is ‘playing God’ with human DNA and animals will have to be firmly rooted in a clear understanding of human nature (and the nature of animals). It is clear that God has given humans stewardship over the use of this world, which I would argue includes (among other concerns) transforming things around us in ways that are beneficial to our life and health. Thus, it seems to me that good stewardship and respect for human nature doesn’t preclude the use of medicines to cure sickness, advanced farming techniques, or air conditioning, for example.

(Additionally, I don’t buy the arguments against birth control that base themselves on an appeal to letting God plan one’s family rather than taking this natural process into our own hands. If I were to take a stand against birth control it would be for the reasons embraced by the Catholic church — namely, that if the proper object of sex is procreation, then it is unethical to strip the activity of its proper end and enjoy the means as an end in themselves, apart from the greater end of reproduction. It’d be the equivalent of chewing up food and simply spitting it out. Since I’m not convinced that procreation is the only proper end of sexual relations, I don’t buy this argument either . . . although I have to admit that I probably would were I Catholic. But enough of this, for now.)

It goes beyond the tinkering with humanity, too. I don’t feel metaphysically threatened by the possibility of creating artificial intelligence, for example — heck, robots doing the grunt work of daily labor for us would be fantastic! Likewise, I don’t see much ethical harm in manipulating the genes of crops to be more productive, disease resistant, etc. As Christians have faced these changes historically, it seems to me that many of the ‘lines drawn in the sand’ have been somewhat arbitrary. However well-intentioned the critiques may be, they generally have sounded to me more like reactions to something new than a principled stance against progress based on a given understanding of human nature.

What might a principled argument against chimeras look like? Well, I suspect that the Acton blog contributor Jordan Ballor is on to something here and here, but I am, of course, not well read enough to engage this debate for now.

I wonder if Mr. Ballor would object to organ-growing technology if it were possible to, say, grow them using animal cells but without using an animal host. It seems to me that, were the technology there, housing a hallway full of kidneys would be far more efficient than taking care of an animal organ-host, which would need far more space — not to mention food, attention, etc. Suppose we take the living animal out of the equation, but keep the gene and cell manipulation — what then?

Aquinas’ four ways

From an e-mail to a colleague:

Sorry to bombard you with e-mails in the last 24 hours, but I thought I’d take 5 minutes to copy and paste the relevant section of Aquinas that you and I have been referencing (and from which I’ve quoted sections). It comes from his commentary on Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics. I’ll put the text from the Ethics first, followed by Aquinas’ commentary, with my gloss in the form of [bracketed] clarifications and a little bit of text formatting. For the ambitious student I’ve included links where Aquinas references Aristotle’s Metaphysics, although you’ll have to scroll down the page to find the relevant chapter of the book that is cited.

Ethics, Bk. 1, Ch. 1:

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, 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. But a certain difference is found among ends; some are activities, others are products apart from the activities that produce them. Where there are ends apart from the actions, it is the nature of the [end] products to be better than the activities [in themselves].

Now, as there are many actions, arts, and sciences, their ends also are many; the end of the medical art is health, that of shipbuilding a vessel, that of strategy victory, that of economics wealth. But where such arts fall under a single capacity- as bridle-making and the other arts concerned with the equipment of horses fall under the art of riding, and this and every military action under strategy, in the same way other arts fall under yet others- in all of these the ends of the master arts are to be preferred to all the subordinate ends; for it is for the sake of the former that the latter are pursued.

COMMENTARY OF ST. THOMAS

1. As the Philosopher says in the beginning of the Metaphysics (Bk. 1, Ch. 2, 982 a 18), it is the business of the wise man to order. The reason for this is that wisdom is the most powerful perfection of reason, whose characteristic it is to know order. Even if the sensitive [sensing, such as eyesight and touch] powers know some things absolutely, nevertheless to know the order of [or relationship of] one thing to another is exclusively the work of the intellect or reason.

Now a twofold order is found in things. One kind is that of parts of a totality, that is, a group, among themselves, as the parts of a house are mutually ordered to each other. The second order is that of things to an end. This order is of greater importance than the first. For, as the Philosopher says in the eleventh book* of the Metaphysics (Bk. XII, Ch. 10, 1075 a 15), the order of the parts of an army among themselves exists because of the order of the whole army to the commander. Now order is related to reason in a fourfold way:

1. There is one order that reason does not establish but only beholds, such is the order of things in nature.
2. There is a second order that reason establishes in its own act of consideration, for example, when it arranges its concepts among themselves, and the signs of concept as well, because words express the meanings of the concepts.
3. There is a third order that reason in deliberating establishes in the operations of the will.
4. There is a fourth order that reason in planning establishes in the external things which it causes, such as a chest and a house.

 

2. Because the operation of reason is perfected by habit [i.e., through habituation], according to the different modes of order that reason considers in particular, a differentiation of sciences arises. The function of natural philosophy is to consider the order of things that human reason considers but does not establish-understand that with natural philosophy here we also include metaphysics. The order that reason makes in its own act of consideration pertains to rational philosophy (logic), which properly considers the order of the parts of verbal expression with one another and the order of principles to one another and to their conclusions. The order of voluntary actions pertains to the consideration of moral philosophy. The order that reason in planning establishes in external things arranged by human reason pertains to the mechanical arts.

 

Accordingly it is proper to moral philosophy, to which our attention is at present directed, to consider human operations insofar as they are ordered one another and to an end.

* [really the 12th book, as the medieval ordering was mistaken]

The Ultimate Foundations of Economic Science

I’m starting to work through Ludwig von Mises’ book, The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science, which is — luckily for me! — available on the Mises Institute’s website, along with about 500 other full-text books. (A breath of fresh air: an Institute that talks the talk of education and awareness about its ideals, and then follows through with action. How many conservative think tanks charge high prices for short journals and other publications? How many offer full text books online for free?)

The description of the book in the Mises store reads thus:

“This volume was Mises’ “ultimate” book in more than one sense. Not only did it deal with the most fundamental, elemental, and primary sources of economic science; it is “ultimate” also in being Mises’ own last book. Appearing when Mises was well past his eightieth birthday, this work brought to conclusion a sustained flow of scholarly output that had spanned exactly half a century (since the appearance in 1912 of his first book, the first German edition of the celebrated Theory of Money and Credit).

“It should not, therefore, be a matter for surprise that this is a book that was clearly written with enormous passion. Although many of the themes dealt with were themes on which Mises had dwelt in earlier works, here we find them drawn together in a manifesto passionately proclaiming the true character of economics. He dauntlessly defended its epistemological foundations from the attacks of its detractors, disdainfully dismissing the pretensions of philosophies of science built solidly on abysmal ignorance of the teachings of economics.

“For decades Mises had patiently and tirelessly developed his system of social thought. He did this during an age in which the tide of philosophical fashion was, to say the least, not running in his favor. Despite the ascendancy of epistemological views that rendered Mises’ science of human action grossly unacceptable to the philosophers of his time, despite fashionable methodological innovations in economics that made Mises’own economics appear to his critics as an obscurantist obstacle to scientific advance, despite ideological currents that led to Mises’ policy conclusions being set down as both benighted and reactionary — despite all this discouragement and disparagement, Mises never faltered. The passion that suffuses the present work provides an insight into what it was that kept Mises writing and teaching during those bitter decades of intellectual isolation.”

Mises’ struggle against contemporary philosophy is a fascinating piece of history, especially in light of the world events through which Mises lived. Socialism was in its prime for most of Mises’ life, and upon earning a PhD in the early 20th century he entered an academic world that was exploring and acclaiming the viability of managed economies, eugenics, fascism, socialism, and many other violent ideas. He could not find a job with a university because of his ideas, both in Europe and in America, with anti-semitism putting the nail in the coffin for the already suspicious capitalist. A great article on the intellectual struggles of Ludwig von Mises can be found here, written by his greatest student: Murray Rothbard.

The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science is a romp through the epistemology of economics (or, as Mises prefered calling it, praxeology). As such, it is a work in philosophy and not of economics itself — it is the justification rather than the explanation, if you will.  Here again Mises stood against the popular general thought of his peers; one such paragraph embodies his philosophical attacks on several schools of thought:

“No thinking and no acting would be possible to man if the universe were chaotic, i.e., if there were no regularity whatever in the succession and concatenation of events. In such a world of unlimited contingency nothing could be perceived but ceaseless kaleidoscopic change. There would be no possibility for man to expect anything. All experience would be merely historical, the record of what has happened in the past. No inference from past events to what might happen in the future would be permissible. Therefore man could not act. He could at best be a passive spectator and would not be able to make any arrangements for the future, be it only for the future of the impending instant. The first and basic achievement of thinking is the awareness of constant relations among the external phenomena that affect our senses. A bundle of events that are regularly related in a definite way to other events is called a specific thing and as such distinguished from other specific things…. Whatever philosophers may say about causality, the fact remains that no action could be performed by men not guided by it. Neither can we imagine a mind not aware of the nexus of cause and effect. In this sense we may speak of causality as a category or an a priori of thinking and acting.”

Makes sense to me. . .

C.S. Lewis on punishment

Via Murray Rothbard in his book, The Ethics of Liberty (which I’m reading right now).  Don’t mind the overkill of “quoted” words, a bad habit that I’m coincidentally trying to purge from myself at the moment:

     Never has the tyranny and gross injustice of the “humanitarian” theory of punishment-as-reform been revealed in more scintillating fashion than by C.S. Lewis. Noting that the “reformers” call their proposed actions “healing” or “therapy” rather than “punishment,” Lewis adds:

But do not let us be deceived by a name. To be taken without consent from my home and friends; to lose my liberty; to undergo all those assaults on my personality which modern psychotherapy knows how to deliver . . . to know that this process will never end until either my captors have succeeded or I grown wise enough to cheat them with apparent success—who cares whether this is called Punishment or not? That it includes most of the elements for which any punishment is feared—shame, exile, bondage, and years eaten by the locust-is obvious. Only enormous ill-desert could justify it; but ill-desert is the very conception which the Humanitarian theory has thrown overboard.

     Lewis goes on to demonstrate the particularly harsh tyranny that is likely to be levied by “humanitarians” out to inflict their “reforms” and “cures” on the populace:

Of all tyrannies a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals. But to be punished, however severely, because we have deserved it, because we “ought to have known better,” is to be treated as a human person made in God’s image.

     Furthermore, Lewis points out, the rulers can use the concept of “disease” as a means for terming any actions that they dislike as “crimes” and then to inflict a totalitarian rule in the name of Therapy.

For if crime and disease are to be regarded as the same thing, it follows that any state of mind which our masters choose to call “disease” can be treated as crime; and compulsorily cured. It will be vain to plead that states of mind which displease government need not always involve moral turpitude and do not therefore always deserve forfeiture of liberty. For our masters will not be using concepts of Desert and Punishment but those of disease and cure. . . . It will not be persecution. Even if the treatment is painful, even if it is life-long, even if it is fatal, that will be only a regrettable accident; the intention was purely therapeutic. Even in ordinary medicine there were painful operations and fatal operations; so in this. But because they are “treatment,” not punishment, they can be criticized only by fellow-experts and on technical grounds, never by men as men and on grounds of justice.[18]

     Thus, we see that the fashionable reform approach to punishment can be at least as grotesque and far more uncertain and arbitrary than the deterrence principle. Retribution remains as our only just and viable theory of punishment and equal treatment for equal crime is fundamental to such retributive punishment. The barbaric turns out to be the just while the “modern” and the “humanitarian” turn out to be grotesque parodies of justice.

Rothbard on Man

I found a curious section, almost a side-note, in Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty today:

“And so man, not having innate, instinctive, automatically acquired knowledge of his proper ends, or of the means by which they can be achieved, must learn them, and to learn them he must exercise his powers of observation, abstraction, thought: in short, his reason. Reason is man’s instrument of knowledge and of his very survival; the use and of his mind, the acquisition of knowledge about what is best for him and how he can achieve it, is the uniquely human method of existence and of achievement. And this is uniquely man’s nature; man, as Aristotle pointed out, is the rational animal, or to be more precise, the rational being. Through his reason, the individual man observes both the facts and ways of the external world, and the facts of his own consciousness, including his emotions: in short, he employs both extraspection and introspection.”

I wonder what Rothbard is getting at when he says that “rational being” is a more precise way to encapsulate human nature than “rational animal.” Aristotle’s definition involves, as always, what he perceives to be the proper genus and species of the thing: Man is an animal with a rational soul. Inherent in this are all of the workings of the body and mind. Strip man of ‘animal’ and we lose eating and sleeping, sense perception, pooping, communication with others, and everything else that seems to (a) keep us alive, (b) allow us to perceive and utilize the world around us, and (c) provide the foundation for abstraction and reason.

If we allow Rothbard the qualifier and consider humans as rational beings — that is, rational being qua rational being — we lose the very foundation that Rothbard upholds in the beginning of the paragraph: “And so man, not having innate, instinctive, automatically acquired knowledge of his proper ends, or of the means by which they can be achieved, must learn them, and to learn them he must exercise his powers of observation, abstraction, thought: in short, his reason.”

Perhaps it is the case that a human functioning in a rational manner is “in short” utilizing reason, but even Rothbard would agree that you can’t get to reason, abstraction, thought, etc. without first acquiring raw sense data — without first observing things in some sense.

Perhaps Rothbard meant “the rational being” to be read as “the rational being,” or in other words, “the [only] rational being,” so as to distinguish us from all of the other animals, plants, etc. But this would work only insofar as there are no other beings that have, or could potentially have, reasoning faculties. (Christians, of course, will submit at least a few more candidates for us to consider as ‘rational beings’). Aristotle restricts humanity’s genus to animals — i.e. enlivened organic bodies — because it is metaphysically possible for non-animal entities to exist exercising reason, such as the late Socrates’ rational soul. (Aquinas takes this concept and runs with it).

Or perhaps Rothbard had none of this in mind, and I’m reading into it. Still, it piqued my interest, as any author can do simply by quoting Aristotle and following it with “or, to be more precise. . .” (Aquinas, who is receiving only parenthetical treatment in this post, effectively does this in his commentaries on Aristotle, but usually does so under the guise of ‘what the Philosopher is really saying here is. . .’ rather than ‘this is almost true, but better still is. . .’)

books

I, Claudius by Robert Graves. A marvelous work of historical fiction woven together from the early days of the Roman emperors. Graves uses Claudius as a pair of sane eyes in an increasingly mad Roman world, and all of Rome’s great achievements and flaws are on display. At the beginning of the story, Claudius reflects on a prophecy given to him from the Oracle at Delphi, and its themes are carefully developed by Graves as the stuttering Cl – Cl – Claudius goes from family idiot and obscure historian to Roman Emperor (and eventually god). (I hope to read its sequel, Claudius the God, soon). A wholly satsifying and beautiful work.

On Memory and Recollection by Aristotle. A short tract (~8 pages) in which Aristotle further develops the faculties of the human soul (picking up where De Anima left off). It contains a key passage on abstraction and several helpful perspectives in understanding how it is that one recalls and remembers. As usual, his biology is a bit wanting; nevertheless the work has its moments of fascinating insight (e.g. Why is it that all animals have some kind of memory, yet only humans seem to be able to recollect?)

What Has the Government Done to Our Money? / The Case for a 100% Gold Dollar by Murray N Rothbard. Rothbard’s essays on money, collected in this volume, have been hailed as the greatest introduction to the subject of money ever written (this assessment is made by Austrians, of course!). The work embodies everything that is great about Rotbhard’s style: clear, concise, uncompromising, and well informed. I am now confident that I did not really know what money was until I read this work — shame on our educational system! For a short primer on money, banking, inflation, and (let’s not forget) government intervention in our money, there is probably no better work.