Thomas L. McDonald, he of the gaming blog State of Play, has a new blog about the effect of technology on morality and religion. It looks like it’s going to be both thought-provoking and fun. Check it out!
Author Archives: wjduquette
A Perfect Spy
Wow. Just, wow.
A Perfect Spy is yet another of John le Carré’s spy novels; and yet, it’s almost completely unlike Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy or the other George Smiley novels. This, far from being the tale of a particular intelligence operation, is a portrait of a man, Magnus Pym. Pym is a spy; and, as it develops, a double-agent. He’s also the son of a con-man, the charismatic, ever-optimistic, frequently broke and frequently opulent Rick Pym. And as it happens, these two things are directly related. Magnus grew up in a chaotic, criminal world, in world in which, heart-breakingly, the word “mother” is almost a generic word for “woman”. He wanted, more than anything else, to be loved, to be approved of, and like his father he soon became a skilled and constant liar. Pym is all things to all men, he is what they need him to be.
We see the whole of Pym’s career as he himself reviews it, from his earliest days to his last, as, finally and at last, gone-to-ground, he tells the truth. And we see also the reactions of his co-workers and friends as they search for him, as the whole house-of-cards comes down. The result is simply fascinating.
This is a long one, at over 600 pages; and it’s the best thing I’ve read in quite awhile. Highly recommended.
No Post Today
I’ve been trying very hard to do at least one post a day; but today I went on a five-mile hike with the boy scouts.
The thing you need to know is that to hike for five miles in the vicinity of our house involves going more or less straight up the side of the mountain…and I’m not really in shape for that. I did OK, but now I Will Rest.
Sweeney Todd
I just got back from seeing Sweeney Todd down at the high school. They did a fine job; I think it’s the best production I’ve seen there.
All Machine and No Ghost?
Descartes saw the mind and body as two distinct things, each capable of existing on its own. This view is called dualism, and it is the source of the phrase “the ghost in the machine”: the body is the machine, and the mind is the ghost. Trouble is, how do the ghost and the machine interact?
In this article in the New Statesman, Colin McGinn talks about “the” five positions on the philosophy of mind, including Cartesian dualism, and does a pretty good job of describing them. But all five positions, as he notes, are flawed; and he begins to wonder if he should call himself a “mysterian”, i.e., one who considers mind simply a mystery.
But I’ll note that there’s a sixth position that he’s ignored: that of Aristotle and St. Thomas, which Ed Feser among others refers to as hylemorphic dualism.
Not a bad article, though. Worth your time.
Final Causes
You might want to look at this and this before continuing.
The final cause is the fourth of the four causes, and it is in ill-repute this days; but I hope to see it rehabilitated. Why is it in ill-repute? Aha! There-in lies the tale.
Consider a rock perched on a cliff. There is a slight earth tremor, and the rock falls, landing at the bottom of the cliff. The material cause is the rock. The efficient cause, or agent, is the tremor. The formal cause is the rock’s new position. The final cause is…what again? The end of the change is simply the new position; there doesn’t seem to be anything special about it.
Consider a green apple that turns red. The material cause is the apple. The efficient cause is also the apple; it is its nature to change color. The formal cause is the form of redness. And the final cause, ah! The final cause is the ripened apple, or perhaps, simply “ripeness”. Aristotle called the final cause “that for the sake of which”; and surely the apple turned red for the sake of being ripe.
Consider the apple tree, which sprouts leaves. The material cause is the tree, or perhaps the nutrients the tree pulls from the soil and from which it makes the leaves. The efficient cause is the tree; sprouting leaves is part of its nature. The formal cause is a leafiness; and the final cause is nourishment, because the leaves turn sunlight into food for the tree.
With living things, we begin to have a notion of purpose: the living thing does what it does to achieve its purpose of remaining alive. Leaves are for producing nourishment. Hearts are for pumping blood.
Consider a man who makes himself a peanut butter sandwich. The material cause is the bread and the peanut butter. The efficient cause is the man himself. The formal cause is the form of a sandwich. And the final cause is eating. The sandwich is made for a purpose. It is a means to an end. The sandwich is made for eating, and eating is made for nourishment. With human action we see not only the objective purpose of a nature, but the freely willed purpose of a person. With human action we begin to see chains of means all leading to some end.
So what is the final cause of that rock falling to the ground? I’ve often heard it said that in a case like this, the final cause is simply the formal cause: the ending position of the rock, perhaps described as a point of minimum gravitational potential. There’s no purpose to the ending position of the rock, not like there is for ripeness or for leaves or for the peanut butter sandwich.
And yet there is—for the rock is part of creation, and creation was created to glorify God. Merely by being a rock, in all the simplicity of its nature, the rock joins in creation’s choir of praise. Merely by falling by force of gravity, it is operating according to its nature and glorifying God. It is a means to that end.
Here, of course, we’ve gone beyond philosophy and into theology; and we’ve seen several reasons why final causes are in ill-repute.
First, because in non-living systems you don’t seem to need final causality to explain them. And the paradigm of science is based on physics, which is all about non-living systems. (But just because physics isn’t interested in final causality doesn’t make it false.)
Second, because final causality is seen as being about purpose, and especially the purpose of a person; and this is seen as leading to theism, which is also in ill-repute in some circles. But I’ll note that in biological systems, i.e., organisms, we clearly see purpose at work. The apple ripens for its own purposes. The heart is clearly for pumping blood. Not that either one is a moral agent on its own. If you’ve heard people talking about teleology, this is ultimately what they are talking about. But the same people who dislike final causes also regard teleology as the statement that God designed everything himself (in the Intelligent Design sense); but philosophically the notion of final causes is much more modest. (Acceptance of final causes does lead, ultimately, to theism; but it doesn’t presume theism on the face of it.)
There’s a third reason, too. The final cause, or end, doesn’t exist when the change begins. How can we call something a cause of a change, when it doesn’t yet exist? Interesting question.
Shadow Magic
I started reading aloud to Jane many, many years ago; and when we had kids I started reading aloud to them; and for the last three years I’ve read to the whole family together every evening. It’s always interesting to come up with something that the whole family will enjoy; and one of the authors we’ve had good luck with is Patricia Wrede. We started with her Enchanted Forest books, a set of fractured fairy tales involving Princess Cimorene, who goes and gets herself captured by a dragon because life in the castle is just too boring; and everybody liked them. Then we read the very different A Matter of Magic, a pair of tales involving sorcery in Regency England that read like a cross between Georgette Heyer and P.G. Wodehouse; and everybody liked them. Then we read the very different Thirteenth Child and its sequel; and everybody liked them. So I went out and found Wrede’s first book, Shadow Magic, the first of the four Lyra novels. And tonight I finished reading it to the family.
And there was great merriment…but alas, a lot of it was at the tale’s expense. I have rarely read such an ineptly put-together fantasy novel. I’m shocked it got published, and I’m amazed at how much better Wrede has gotten.
Mind you, I’m glad to have read it—because as I went along I made mental notes of Things Not To Do That I’m Very Much Afraid That I Might Be Doing, starting with this: just because the characters are well-fleshed-out in my imagination, that doesn’t mean that they are well-fleshed out in the text.
I won’t go into further details, because I don’t like to kick an author when she’s down. But if you’ve ever tried this book and given up on Wrede because of it, give one of her other series a try. You’ll be glad you did.
The Princess and the Messiah
A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs; Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein. Two books I’ve read multiple times; two authors I have greatly respected. But although I gave the tales of John Carter to my sons a few years ago, I rather thought that I’d outgrown Burroughs. Now, thanks to the inimitable John C. Wright, I begin to think I’m outgrowing Heinlein. Checkout Wright’s comparison of the two books, very much to Heinlein’s detriment.
The Monster in the Mist
Amazon suggested that I might like Andrew Mayne’s The Monster in the Mist: A Chronological Man Adventure, and at $0.99 I decided to give it a try. And if I had to describe it in one phrase, that phrase would be “Steampunk Dr. Who”.
The book is set in Boston, in the 1890. It’s been very foggy recently, and people have been vanishing in the fog. Meanwhile, the pretty and competent April Malone has for the past two years been holding down a very strange job. Every day she goes to an unmarked building and lets herself in. Once inside she makes a pot of coffee that no one ever drinks and provides a bag of pastries that no one ever eats. She gets pneumatic tubes containing punched cards that she feeds to her desk, and reads newspapers and academic journals. Sometimes she gets a typewritten letter from one “Mr. S” directing her to take some particular class or hear some particular lecture or learn some particular skill. The why of all this has never been explained to her, but the money is good, and she tries to do her best.
There is a metal door with three lights over it in one wall of the office. She doesn’t know what’s behind it; her predecessor in the position told her that if she ever needs to know, she’ll receive instructions at that time.
One day the lights light up, and out comes Smith. He drinks the coffee, eats the pastries, and wants to know what year it is. Then he looks at some punched cards from the desk, and he and April Malone are off to investigate the recent string of disappearances.
I know nothing about the author or the series other than what I gleaned from reading the book, so what follows is conjectural. But gosh, it reads like Dr. Who fan fiction. Smith is clearly a normal human being, not a “time lord”, and he has no TARDIS; but I found myself willy-nilly picturing him as the 11th Doctor, as played by the inimitable Matt Smith.
What else to say about it? It was a fun story, very much in the vein of the current Dr. Who episodes, with all that that implies, being silly and horrific by turns. Given that, my only serious complaint is that April Malone and Smith both seem a little too present day in their attitudes to fit in 1890 in Boston. There’s one brief exchange about homosexuality, for example, that seems completely out of place given the setting and the participants but that would fit right in in a Dr. Who episode.
Be that as it may, it was entertaining, and certainly worth 99 cents.
More About Change
Last week I talked about the four causes: the four things you can find in any change. The last of the four is the final cause, which you can think of as the reason for the change; and I said I’d talk about that next. But I’ve changed my mind; I want to say a little more about change, first, and how Aristotle looks at it.
Every change has a beginning, a middle, and an end. First, consider a rock perched on a cliff. There’s a slight earthquake (the efficient cause) and the rock is shaken lose. It falls to the ground below, bounces, and comes to rest. We begin with the rock in one place; it moves; we end with the rock in another place. The rock itself is unchanged; but it has lost one form, its initial position, and gained a different form, its new position. Next, consider a green apple that in the course of time turns red. It was green; it changes color; it is now red.
There are a couple of things to note, here.
First, in every such change of this kind the thing loses a form and gains a form, and they have to be two distinct forms. (If they were the same form, no change would have occurred.) These forms are frequently referred to as contraries, because they can’t both be true at the same time. The rock might be here, and it might be there, but it can’t be in both places at once. The apple might be mostly green, or it might be mostly red, but it can’t be mostly green and mostly red at the same time.
Second, Aristotle isn’t concerned with time, with how fast the change occurs. It took me a long time to really wrap my head around this. When we think about physics, time is everything. If drop a ball, how long it will take to hit the floor given the acceleration of gravity? We take a change, and we divide the time it takes into the tiniest possible increments, and we look at just exactly how everything moves during each increment, and we devise a mathematical model (such as Newton’s Laws of motion) that describes the movement that we see.
Aristotle wasn’t doing that. He wasn’t trying to understand the exact progress of a particular change over time, but rather he was asking how change is possible at all? What does it mean to say that the apple turned red? What is involved?
The View from the Foothills 