One of Aristotle’s chief strengths is also one of his weaknesses. His reliance on the World as We Know It as one of his chief premises is a very good thing, because it saves his philosophical world from being too small and absurdly limited. On the other hand, our understanding of the physical world—the understanding we call “science”, though Aristotle would have meant something much broader by that term—has improved significantly over the past two millenia. And that means that some of his works now seem laughably wrong. No one now reads Aristotle for a deep understanding of astronomy, for example. For Aristotle, the “heavenly bodies” traveled in perfect circular orbits, were incorruptible, and were in fact of a different order of being than the Earth on which we live. No amount of respect for Aristotle as a thinker and philosophy can get past the fact that he was woefully wrong on these points. Nevertheless, it was the best “science” available in his day.

The problem extends to his purely philosophical works (in which category I include his Physics), and by extension to the works of Aquinas, because both of them use examples from astronomy, medicine, and other sciences to illustrate their arguments. Many of these examples consequently sound absurd to us today, which gives the impression that the arguments in which they appear are likewise absurd.

It’s often the case, though, that the example is simply an illustration of a general principle. The example might be obsolete, but that doesn’t invalidate the principle, at least not necessarily. In other cases, the problem is one of terminology rather than of sense. Aquinas, for example, knew nothing of genetics or heredity as we now understand it; but he knew perfectly well that some characteristics are passed by fathers to their children. Some of these examples make perfect sense, if you can get past the language.

There are two important things to remember. The first is that philosophical arguments are logical demonstrations based on sound arguments from general principles. The examples are not intended to be evidence driving a probable conclusion; rather they are intended to illustrate the workings of the general principles and hence to cast light on them and on the argument as a whole. What we here is metaphysical deduction, not scientific induction, but many, especially the scientistically minded, tend to read it as the latter and thus discount it.

The second is that Aristotle really was trying to incorporate the best scientific knowledge of the day. If he could have been brought forward to the 17th century and the “Age of Reason”, he (unlike some of his supporters of that era) would have been thrilled to update his scientific knowledge. His metaphysical principles, however, need not have changed.

A few days ago I wrote this post, in which I suggested that the Aristotelian/Thomist view of philosophy was abandoned by Descartes and his successors because it was “too Catholic, too hard, and too high-minded.” In a comment on that post, Karrde described the change in paradigm as a change in philosophical fashion, and that it was perhaps too facile to say that one side was right and the other side was wrong.

He’s right on both counts, and if I gave the impression that I thought that Descartes was wholly wrong, I misspoke.

Descartes was clearly one smart cookie, and it would be hard to overstate his importance to the development of modern science. Mathematical physics, just to give one example, is rooted in analytic geometry and the “Cartesian” plane. Nor do I wish to understate the importance of the scientific method in learning new things about the world we live in. There are really two points I wanted to make.

First, Aristotelian/Thomist thought wasn’t abandoned because it was wrong; it was abandoned because Descartes and his successors were interested in different problems which it didn’t directly address—and then it was said to be wrong because it didn’t address problems it had never claimed to address. It part, this was due to confusions over terminology; when Aristotle or Thomas uses the word “motion” he has something rather different in mind than Isaac Newton. And all the while, there were non-philosophical reasons for wanting to reject it. Many of the modern thinkers weren’t Catholic, and rejected it on those grounds; and in Descartes’ case, he lived in a time and place where I gather it was easy to get in trouble with the Church on intellectual grounds. Peter Kreeft’s book Socrates Meets Descartes points out lots of places in Descartes’ Discourse on Method where Descartes had to step carefully. But the fact remains: AT thought was abandoned, not refuted.

Second, Descartes proceeded by cutting the Gordian Knot; and this, in my reading of history, is usually a bad idea.

The story goes that whilst campaigning in Phyrgia, Alexander the Great was confronted with an oxcart that had belonge to the first king of Phyrgia (Gordias, the father of Midas of the Golden Touch) which had been tied to a post with an ornate knot. It is said that there was a prophecy associated with the knot, that he who untied it would become King of Asia, though this may have been put about by Alexander’s men after the fact. As everyone knows, instead of trying to untie the knot, Alexadner cut it with his sword. In a sense, he recast the problem: rather than thinking about as untying the knot, he thought about it as freeing the oxcart from the post, and then devised the most efficient solution to the new problem. Thus, “cutting the Gordian Knot” is sometimes used to mean “thinking outside the box.”

Descartes was “thinking outside the box” in a very particular way: because the kind of thinking he wished to do was hard to do in the context of AT philosophy (and because its contemporary practicioners were hard to deal with), he didn’t just cut the Gordian Knot; he kicked over the entire oxcart. (Perhaps it contained apples.) And then he started over from scratch.

I certainly understand the temptation. Every software developer, when faced with an old, crufty, hard-to-understand software system, longs to start over from scratch, and rewrite it from the ground up with new, clean, easy-to-understand code. Every social reformer longs to overthrow the old, corrupt establishment, and build a new, fair, utopian society based on the principles he find obvious and unassailable. And Descartes and Hume and Kant longed to do the same thing in philosophy.

But there’s another name for cutting the Gordian Knot in this way; we call it “throwing the baby out with the bathwater.” It’s a way of getting rid of the consequences of old decisions, but the difficulty is that many of those old decisions came about because of real problems—and successfully addressed those problems to the extent that they are now forgotten. When you start over, you’re going to run into all of those problems again, and your new solution is going to have to be adjusted to deal with them.

When this happens in the software arena, you get bugs, delays, and cost-overruns…and sometimes, you get software death-marches. When you do this in the social/political arena, you can get a whole range of problems, up to and including events like the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward in China, where millions died. When you do it in philosophy, as Descartes did, you lose tools of thought that had been devised and sharpened over the course of centuries; and then, of course, you begin to make the mistakes those tools were devised to resolve.

And the tragedy is, it shouldn’t have been necessary.

Somewhat apropos of what I’ve been writing about for the past week, David T. at Life’s Private Book has a post on Jerry Coyne, free will, and René Descartes. Coyne is the fellow I mentioned some while back who claims that free will and consciousness are illusions. His absurd claims have been getting a fair amount of play in the philososphere, and David T.’s contribution is a discussion on practicality of Philosophy.

For Coyne, philosophy is “arcane” and “academic”; it has nothing to say about practical matters like morality. For Socrates and his immediate successors, philosophy is eminently practical—it’s how to lead an examined life, a good and happy life. David T. traces the change to Descartes, who intended to use his new “method” to produce a detailed and unassailable morality on purely rational principles, but who in the meantime made do with a “provisional morality”. But Descartes never completed his project (nor has anyone else); and it is from him, so sayeth the blogger, that we get the notion that our ideas of morality are somehow provisional, open to question, and always subject to revision.

He makes some very good points; go take a look.

This is the ninth in a series of posts on my own philosophical journey; the first post is here.

So, to recap:

First, modern philosophy struck me as nuts.

Then, rather later, Aristotelian and Thomist philosophy struck me as sane.

And then I discovered that although Aristotle and Thomas are often said to be have been proven wrong by Science! (Cue dramatic music) and by Modern Thought! (Cue more dramatic music), they were never really proven wrong; they were simply abandoned as unfashionable or, possibly, inconvenient.

In short, Thomist philosophy is a genuine live option. And so, for the past several years, I’ve been exploring it. I’ll have more to say about that in the coming weeks; there are a number of areas I find interesting, and a number of things I want to talk about. But this series has now accomplished what I wanted to accomplish, which is to point out that studying Thomist philosophy is more than just an academic exercise in the history of philosophy; it’s a return to philosophical sanity.

This is the eighth in a series of posts on my own philosophical journey; the first post is here.

When we last saw them, Thomas and Aristotle had formed a seemingly unbeatable team, so much so that Thomism became known as “the perennial philosophy.” And yet somehow, after Descartes interest in Thomism faded, except within the Church. Philosophers didn’t have time for Thomas and Aristotle anymore. What happened?

You’ll often hear some variant of, “Newton proved Aristotle wrong about physics.” In other words, Aristotle was abandoned the same way science had abandoned belief in the four elements or the bodily humors. He was passé, old hat, been disproved, found wanting.

The truth is somewhat otherwise. So what really happened?

First, Thomism was associated with the Catholic Church. For some, that was sufficient reason to abandon our friends. But second, and more importantly, Thomism suffered from its own success. It had been the philosophy of Christendom for centuries. It had been worked on, and embroidered, and elaborated, and extended, and systematized, and rehashed until it was virtually impossible to come to grips with.

Thomism, I have said, is based on what we know of the world around us. And as such, for it to remain alive it must be possible to take new information into account, to see how it fits in, to adjust the whole. This is hard, and the larger the system is, the harder it is to do. As I understand it, the defenders of Thomism in Descartes’ day were not up to the challenge. They treated Thomism as settled doctrine, as near-holy writ, to be learned, and understood if possible, but not to be meddled with. They were ill-suited to the times.

And then, thirdly, the goals of philosophy had changed. In olden times, philosophers, natural historians, and the like gather information about the natural world for its own sake. Man, as a rational animal, desires to know; and it is fitting for us to learn as much as we can about the world God created, for he created it to be known. But with Descartes the emphasis changed. The goal was not simply mere understanding—the goal was mastery. The question was no longer, “What is the world like?”, but rather, “What can I make the world do for me?”

In short, the perennial philosophy was too Catholic, too hard, and too high-minded.

Part XI

This is the seventh in a series of posts on my own philosophical journey; the first post is here.

So Aristotle, I discovered, maintained a sane connection with the real world; and St. Thomas followed him in this. But how did it happen that there was such a strong bond between the pagan philosopher and a Dominican friar who lived over a thousand years later?

It might surprise those who expect conflict between faith and reason, but the Catholic Church has always insisted that not only are the two things not in conflict, they cannot be in conflict. God is Truth; He is the creator of the world we see around us, and the revealer of the truths we hold by faith. If the two seem to be in conflict, then there’s a failure in understanding some place.

As a result, Catholic theologians in every age have looked to the best thinkers of the age and learned from them. Neo-Platonism was popular in the early centuries of the Church, and theologians from Justin Martyr to St. Augustine to Boethius and onwards from there drew on Plato to aid their understanding of the world and God’s revelation. Scholastic philosophy began in the 8th century or thereabouts, and was based on Plato’s work. Aristotle was pretty well neglected, so far as I can tell, through this whole sweep of time.

And then Avicenna, in 11th century Persia, and Averroes and Maimonides in 12th century Andalusia, began to pay attention to Aristotle, and to try to reconcile his thoughts with Islam on the one hand and Judaism on the other. Their work came to Europe and caused quite a sensation; and because Averroes’ interpretation of Aristotle was manifestly incompatible with Christian revelation, the old Greek was nearly cast out on his ear by the theologians of Christendom.

But not quite, because he made too much sense. St. Thomas studied Aristotle extensively, and had a friend in the Dominican order translate him into Latin from the original Greek. It is often said that Islam preserved Aristotle, and that Christendom received Aristotle from the Muslims, and this is true; but once introduced they went back to the sources. It wasn’t so much that Aristotle had been lost, as that he had been ignored.

St. Thomas’ work was controversial; there were several attempts to condemn it, all ultimately overturned, and much disagreement; but in the end, after his death, he was vindicated, and his philosophy and theology were taught widely throughout Christendom. If popularity were the sign of philosophical truth, then Thomas and Aristotle would win the contest in a heartbeat. There came to be a time when every Catholic priest, and many others who went to Catholic schools, were taught Thomist philosophy; and not just as a hoary old chestnut, something people used to believe, but as the best tool available for understanding God and His world.

And yet Descartes and his successors threw this all away. How come? What happened? What persuaded them that Aristotle was not worth learning from?

Part VIII