Month: September 2020

15. Where it Stands

This series of fragments, anecdotes, random observations, and high-flying speculations has now made it through Greek philosophy. Of course, Plotinus was not the last philosopher to write in Greek; a century after him, for example, Hypatia was publishing philosophical and astronomical treatises, but none of them survive today, and thereby hangs a sad and sordid tale. In any case, I have already omitted enough major figures to fill a philosophical library. Time for a little summing-up of my own.

I said in the beginning (#1) that the history of philosophy was bit like Jurassic Park: the behemoths of the past, interesting and even beautiful on their own, become something quite different when they get together. This metamorphosis confronts us already, here at the end of the Greeks, because when you look at the philosophers I have discussed—look well and long at them, rather glancing quickly as I have here—you see that something is missing from the group: there is no woman in it.

There were indeed woman philosophers in the ancient world—Plato’s mother, Perictione, has left us a few tantalizing pages, and Hypatia herself was prominent enough to be murdered and dismembered by a Christian mob in 415 CE. But the fact remains that 800 years of Greek philosophy contain almost nothing written by women.

This persistent absence of woman philosophers can hardly be an accident. Nor, I think, is it merely the result of ancient and long-lasting prejudice. It is, rather, specially intrinsic to Western philosophy itself, which has always tried to make the realm of rational discussion—the “space of reasons,” as it has come to be called—our space, open only to an in-group.

Plato—perhaps because of his mother—allowed women into his philosophically sophisticated guardian class, and openly claimed that at least a few women could be as bright as any man (Republic 455d). But Aristotle, far from refuting this possibility, does not even mention it. And his concept of being as ousia (#8) provided an enduring vocabulary for this tacit magistricide: women, slaves, and later people of color were assigned the role of matter in human communities; their very nature was to be dominated by gentlemen embodying the human form, reason. And so it remained.

Philosophy was, thus, not indifferent to the prejudices of its day, but structurally susceptible to them. Today’s exclusions of women and people of color is not merely a foul and self-serving habit, like American philosophy’s exclusion of Jews until the mid-20th Century, but was actively considered to be integral to the right order of the universe.

What to do about this? Ultimately, I suspect we will have to euthanize Western philosophy and give birth to a new, post-Western one; but right now, there are a number of things we shouldn’t do.

(1). We shouldn’t deny the exclusions—even to the extent of claiming, for example, that there is a corpus of philosophical writings by women and people of color that needs only to be collected and published. As far as we know now, there are very few writings in the Western tradition  attributable to women before the 17th Century, while people of color were basically excluded until well into the 20th.

All this for at least two reasons.

First, philosophy, unlike its ever-antagonist poetry, has always required a good deal of training, and exclusions already operated on that level: with very few exceptions, women and people of color could not get the education needed to do philosophy.

And second, when they somehow did get the requisite training, the resulting works were assiduously destroyed—like those of Hypatia, which were burned when she was murdered. Where not assiduously destroyed, those works were assiduously ignored, like those of Anton Wilhelm Amo, the 18th Century German philosopher from Ghana whose critique of Descartes might have been of value to the post-Kantians in Germany—if they had bothered to read them.

The great old libraries of Europe, such as the Vatican Library in Rome and the Süleymaniye Library in Istanbul, may have relevant manuscripts in their more distant vaults, but they are well-swept by now, and the outlook is not good.

(2). A common strategy for those who cannot deny their sins is to ignore them. One way of ignoring philosophy’ exclusions, abundant in the specialized hothouses of today’s universities, is to focus merely on this or that individual philosopher, overlooking the fact that he (!) belongs to a tradition that has excluded so many. It is only when you put the behemoths together, as I have noted, that it comes out clearly that they are virtually all men, and mainly Europeans at that.

(3). An understandable reaction to all this is to reject the Western tradition altogether: you can argue that philosophy has always been a global enterprise, with South and East Asia, Africa, and South America having traditions of their own. Which is true—but communication among those traditions was minimal until the modern era, presumably because premodern technologies did not allow for the transfer of writings from one continent to another; all Western philosophers could know of other kinds of thought was rumor and hearsay. Western philosophy thus developed as a distinct and isolated tradition, which certainly impoverishes it. But that poverty, for better or worse, produced today’s Westerners—and Westerners, by now, inhabit the entire world      .

 (4): Veneration of our intellectual ancestors is clearly out of the question. But condemnation is a moral judgment we are not entitled to make, for our moral superiority to our forebears is dubious at best. How do we know that we are not imbibing the prejudice and blindness of our age, as they did of theirs? David Hume was a wretched racist and we see through his racism, but how do we know that we are not committing other sins of our own? We hope to be better people than he was; but part of that is acknowledging that we may in fact be worse.

So Yes, the statue of Hume on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile ought to be taken down; it should never have been erected in the first place. We must remember our forebears, and study their virtues and their vices; but we must not venerate them. Some of their sins and errors live on in us; and we have probably invented a few new ones as well.

14. What Are the Blues?

No answer, of course; they are too many things. They are the cry of an oppressed people, and, as Amiri Baraka argued (in his Blues People), encode its very history. They offer wry wisdom about human predicaments, and became the mother-music of jazz, rock, and rap: America may look European, at least in its more privileged precincts, but it sounds African. And of course– the Blues are just the same three chords, over and over.

Look at this verse of Leadbelly’s:

Well good morning blues, blues how do you do

Well good morning blues, blues how do you do

I’m doing all right, goo morning how are you.

Formally, this is a standard A-A-B, twelve bar blues. The first two lines look the same; but when you hear them, they are not the same at all. Though the first and second lines are often sung on the same notes (Leadbelly does it that way), the instrumental accompaniment to the first iteration moves from the tonic, while that to the second moves from the fourth or subdominant. The music thus tells us what the words do not: the first two lines are in fact not identical, but only similar.

But they are not anything, of course, until the second line is actually there. As with the Homeric simile I discussed in #3, the blues verse compares something already acquired—here, the first line, there the humdrum action of a blacksmith—with something new—here the second line, there the blinding of the Cyclops. Only in the blues, the similarity is much more obvious: it is not even two things that are being compared here, but two phases of one thing.

As it unfolds over time, the verse coheres, not because of an identity, but because of a similarity. The contrast with Aristotle, and so with metaphysics through Kant, is clear: the successive stages of this verse, this blues-thing, are held together, not by the identity of an unchanging essence, but by the mere resemblance of the later stage to the earlier one. And this expresses, I submit, an important aspect of what it is to be in time. For if you are in time you cannot return to precisely what you were before; the circle remains broken. The relation of the two phases is not an identity or a circle, but a path (and the Greek oimos, one of my favorite words.

So path-dependency is incorporated into the very core of the blues-thing, for the second line exists in the verse only as reached from something else that resembles it—the first line.

We are approaching two monstrous insights, explicit statement of which is still almost two thousand years away. First, we see that Plato was wrong to say that changeable things, ta gignomena, are images—resemblances, eikona—of unchangeable identities. In reality, Hegel will try to say one day, what images resemble is only other images. It’s “phenomena” all the way down, and ontology muse become phenomenology in order to keep its spirit.

Second, similarity is in the eyes of a beholder. A similarity, we may say, does not signifcantly exist until it is publicly articulated (#4), and a resemblance is significant only when articulated by someone or something else. A point made by the verse’s third and final line, where the blues—astonishingly—replies, and politely, to the question in the first two, and does so by simply ignoring the fact that the question has been asked twice.

The third line of a blues verse explains, contextualizes, or critiques the first two; here, it contextualizes the first two lines by underscoring their similarity. (For Plotinus, these three functions are not distinct, but merely aspects of the epistrophe. Too bad.).

Once this reflection is articulated, the resemblance between the first two lines is recognized (explained, contextualized, critiqued) and the song moves on. The verse is now over, complete, done with, dead: The blues moves, if not by magistricide (# 7), by “versicide;” its individal verses, moving toward the explanations, contextualizations, or critiquea which hold them together, are revealed to have been moving, from their inception, toward their end. And this, too, seems to be an important aspect of what it is to be in time: to be moving towards your own non-existence. (Nietzsche called this Untergang, going-under: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Cambridge 2006 pp. 159, 233).

What are the blues? Many things, and it is not too much to say that in some of its identities the blue has ontological import. They present an alternative to the metaphysics of identity, problematically founded by Plato (#5) and then fixed by Aristotle (#8). Replacing form and essence with the temporalized notion of path-dependence, they haul meaning—temporary unity and reflection on that unity—out of the remorseless brokenness of time.

Aristotle said that courage is the intelligent mastery of fear. The blues are the intelligent mastery of time itself.

13. Plotinus Gets the Blues

Stephen Toulmin, who was my colleague at Northwestern University for several years, once told me that Neoplatonism is the “secret glue” which holds together the history of western philosophy, and (he didn’t say, but I think) the entire history of the West. (Plotinus was, certainly, the glue which held my career together at its beginnings: my first publication concerned his take on what Plato called “recollection.”)

The main ingredient in Plotinus’ glue was his ambiguous nearness to the monotheism that would win out over the gods of the ancient world, and in so doing would eventually destroy that world itself. The One, the single principle on which Plotinus thinks the whole world depends, often sounds in his writings like the Jewish/Christian God, the Platonic form of the good, and the Roman emperors all rolled into one. Whether it is personified enough to be identified with the biblical God is unclear; but a lot of later philosophers, from Augustine to Avicenna, tried their best.

Plotinus did not set out to be a secret, but I think he did set out to be glue. Whatever his nearness to monotheism, Plotinus was dead set against the various irrationalities he saw in the Judaism and Christianity of his day, and to fight them he made his philosophy into the final summing-up of the Greek philosophical tradition, which by the time he wrote was almost 800 years old. The principles of his unification are simple enough: Plato was right, when understood correctly; Aristotle is generally right when he is compatible with Plato; the Stoics, Skeptics, and other schools are more-or-less right when compatible with the above two.

Plotinus pursues this exhaustively and with much ingenuity, and produces a single hierarchical system structured somewhat like the Rome in which he, North African by birth, lived and taught. There is little in his system, I think, that is true; but his rethinking and harmonizing of a near-millennium of philosophical tradition is stunningly beautiful.

Plotinus also fought the Stoics, whose relatively low rank in his hierarchy meant that they were wrong about many things. In the course of this battle, he recurs somewhere to Plato’s late and surprising suggestion that the forms are changed in being known, and this change in their being is a kind of life (Sophist 248e). This is applied by Plotinus to the intellectual (or formal) realm. For Plotinus, then, the forms (τά νοητά) are not only intrinsically knowable but intrinsically known: being thought (by a suprapersonal Intellect) is a kind of life necessary to the fullness of their Being.

This gets temporalized in the sensory world. A sensory being has its true origin or (as Plotinus has it) its ἀρχή in the Forms. Having gotten its start in the sensible world, i..e having come into being there, a thing becomes an instance of life, pure movement, and takes a variety of distances from its origin (in space, in size, in age, etc.). This movement is thus a προόδος, a “procession.” Being is merely its first stage.

And its last? We might call it, at least in the case of human beings, a complex of death and knowledge, which in the Platonic tradition are closely related. The human soul eventually loses its sensible being, its life, and returns to the forms; Plotinus calls this the ἐπιστροφή, the turning-about. To attain knowledge of the forms is thus to return to their domain, which is also the starting point.

Or, as Plato had it, all philosophy is “practicing death” (Phaedo 803)

The triad being–life–knowledge, moving from origin through procession to turning-about, applies for Plotinus, in varying guises, across the entire sensible world. The cycle of life is one example: the living thing begins as a seed, develops into an organism, and in dying produces new seeds. In that production, what Aristotle would call its “species” (his word is εἶδος, Plato’s habitual word for a form) transfers from one thing (parent) to another (offspring) and in so doing reveals itself to be the enduring and knowable reality, independent of any single sensory embodiment. Humans have knowledge of this; other beings enact it.

Contrary to the Stoics, with their recurrent drawing of definitive boundaries between the (thinking) self and a (purely) material world—between what is “up to us” and what is not—Plotinus thus maintains that knowledge is not independent of being, but constitutes its final realization. As his own philosophy was the final summing-up, and therefore signaled the death, of the Greek philosophical tradition.

It is impossible to overstate how important the Neoplatonic triad being-life-knowledge has been to western philosophy. One example: its association between knowledge and death is adopted in the Preface to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, and is integral to his ensuing discussion of an idealized, and in his view dead, Prussian state.

But there is another kind of place where something like the Plotinian triad appears.

A blues verse has three lines. It begins on the tonic, with a statement:

My baby come a’running, she was holding up her hand.

It proceeds to restate this, on the fourth:

My baby come a’running, she was holding up her hand.

This procession from tonic to fourth continues to the third line, which provides knowledge of what has happened, rising to the fifth and then turning about and returning to the tonic:

Glad to see you Johnny, but I found me a younger man.

The blues is not Stoic: what happens to Johnny is not something outside him, but defines what he is—an elderly reject. The blues is Plotinian–or maybe Plotinus is rethinking a more ancient insight. Maybe he just “gets” the blues.

Plotinus, we know, was an African from Lycopolis, which was probably in Upper (southern) Egypt. The blues is African-American. Both penetrate to the core of the cycle of human life, which began in Africa, proceeded across the earth, and may now be awaiting its deeper understanding—or, perhaps, its death.

12. What’s With the Romans?

When we think of Roman philosophy today, what first comes to mind is a question: why on earth couldn’t they do it better? Why didn’t the energy and ingenuity which propelled the Romans to utter dominance in the known world move their philosophy beyond being a mere set of more-or-less elegant reworkings of Greek insights?

 It’s not that they were just so busy conquering the world that they had no time or energy for philosophical investigations; they did enough to show that a philosophical impulse was there, as it is in almost all cultures. Something about Rome must have restrained that impulse, keeping it from developing into the creativity of its Greek counterpart. We can, perhaps, identify the restraints by considering a few rough contrasts between Greece and Rome.

The most glaringly obvious of these is that unlike Rome, Greece was politically disunited. During the classical period (510-323 BCE), it contained perhaps as many as 300-400 independent cities or poleis, each of them sovereign on its soil.

One result of this multiplicity of political jurisdictions was that if you ticked off the authorities in, say, Athens (as Socrates did) you could always move to, say, Megara (as he refused to do: # 7). This reminds us of something we should never forget: that philosophy, well-pursued, is a radical, and so dangerous, activity. As Tom Foster Digby put it in 1989:

Philosophical works achieve canonical status because they are recognized as exemplars of philosophy as a social practice. In the Western tradition, this practice is purely, directly, and intrinsically radical, for it involves uncovering, studying, and criticizing the root conceptions that inform all of the more narrowly focused intellectual pursuits, as well as social practices generally.[1]

Merely focusing on your basic concepts and beliefs, let alone criticizing them, brings the possibility that those basic concepts and beliefs, and the practices associated with them, might be found wanting. Even if you eventually uphold them all (as Descartes did), you have done something most people don’t like.

Unlike Socrates, a Roman social critic had no place to flee to, for Rome ruled almost the entire world: if you displeased its emperor, you had to flee to the world’s very edges before you were beyond his authority.

Such repression was not merely a matter of governmental muscle. Rome’s centralization of political authority brought a centralization of culture as well. If you wanted to be a famous playwright or sculptor, all roads led to Rome. When it came to philosophy, which by this time required a great deal of preliminary training, the roads led not only to Rome but to some of its larger mansions. Thus, Lucretius was a client of the prominent poet/politician Gaius Memmius; Cicero and Seneca were from families just below the highest, senatorial rank; and Marcus Aurelius actually was the emperor. Among Rome’s best-known philosophers, only poor, lame Epictetus was outside the circle of privilege—he was a slave. But his master, about whom we know nothing other than that he was wealthy enough to have at least one slave, allowed him to study philosophy.

Roman culture was not only unified, but deeply hierarchical. All of these men, except Marcus Aurelius, were dependent on those above them in the Roman hierarchy, whose higher levels they knew intimately. They all lived the same privileged Roman lifestyle (except Epictetus, who observed it at very close quarters). And that lifestyle was not only unified and hierarchical, but deeply grounded in Greek philosophy, which everyone cultured was expected to read in the original. So they all had approximately the same Roman life experience, and the same Greek conceptual tools to articulate it. Small wonder that their thought conformed to their Roman peers, and moved on tracks originally laid down in Greece.

Culture and government can, of course, diverge; not all Roman philosophers were subservient to imperial authority. Beginning with Nero and continuing under the Flavian Dynasty (69-96 CE), certain Stoics systematically irked the emperors. Indeed, Vespasian, first of the Flavians, was sufficiently irked to banish philosophers from Rome (on the usual charge of corrupting the youth), which pretty much makes my point about governmental centralization. But philosophical  criticism of imperial Rome came from within its highest precincts: a number of the banished philosophers were senators.

Finally, Greek society also exemplified a special kind of diversity. Since the Greeks all spoke the same language, and were ethnically pretty homogenous, their diversity was primarily religious: Athena was worshiped at Athens, but other gods in other cities. These alliances could shift, so the Greeks had to compare their gods critically with those of other cities: what if Athena is the wrong goddess to be allied with? Maybe we should join up with Hera instead? Or Ares? Or Zeus?

People therefore had to justify and explain their choice of gods—which required justifying and explaining their basic values and aspirations to others who might not wholly share them. Plato takes this to a new level in the Euthyphro, when Socrates suggests that the holy must be pleasing to all the gods, not just to one or a few: to determine what was holy, you couldn’t just rely on the gods of your own polis, but had to figure out what was pleasing to all the gods of all the poleis. That would have been a philosophical task; Plato accomplished it, implicitly, in his general discussions of the nature of the forms and their common guidance to conduct.

Such issues did not arise in Rome, for its political unity also underwrote an official religion; the Roman gods were to be worshiped because they had overseen the rise of Rome to world domination. Since the gods had given Rome world domination, Romans had no temptation to worship anyone else. Subject peoples were allowed to keep their traditional gods if they wished; but if things got obstreperous their Roman overlords would perform an evocatio, which called forth a local god with promises of a larger temple or cult, endowed with Roman money. This invariably won that god to the Roman side.

Thus, we see two models of human living. One, the Greek model, is politically pluralistic and encourages forms of thought that will liberate individuals from local allegiances; the other is a monolithic system of power that binds each individual to a particular position within that particular system. So it is no surprise that Romans did not think for themselves as some Greeks had done, but conformed to the general and conceptually homogeneous view that surrounded them.

[1] Tom Foster Digby, “Philosophy as Radicalism” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 61.5 (June 1988) pp. 857-863, p. 857

11. Dancing Around the Metaphysical Barn

Plato and Aristotle take opposed positions on the question of where the “principle” of a thing, that which makes it what it is, is located. For Plato, such a principle is a form separate from the thing, in which the thing “participates.” For Aristotle, the principle shapes and organizes the thing from within, as its essence.

So why, if they are so opposed, do Plato and Aristotle, when pushed, turn into one another?

For Plato, forms are things and so must have their principles outside them. Republic 509b tells us that the ultimate principle of all of them, which makes each form what it is, is the form of the good. And this form has no principle beyond itself: it is “sovereign” over the entire intelligible order. Plato finesses this conclusion by claiming that the form of the good has no determinate nature, and so needs no further determining principle, but the fact remains:  to understand the form of the good we must look to it, not beyond it; to that extent, Plato has become an Aristotelian.

For Aristotle, the principle of a thing is to be found within the thing; but what about the set of all material things, the cosmos itself? It is not only a thing, but an ordered thing, with earth at the center and the sphere of the fixed stars at the edge. Where does this unifying order come from?

It cannot come from anything within the cosmos, for everything within the cosmos contains matter, which means it can change. Anything which can change at all will eventually change, incrementally, into something else—at which time the thing it originally was will cease to exist. The world for Aristotle had no beginning in time; so if the principle of the cosmos were within it, like an essence, the cosmic order would have ceased to exist by now (see Phaedo 72b-d for a related argument).

So in Metaphysics XI, Aristotle concludes that the ordering principle of the cosmos is outside the cosmos: the immaterial, purely rational, and so consummately ordered, prime mover. The cosmos, we learn, “loves” the prime mover, but is unable to unite with it; so it imitates it by ordering itself. Whence this “love” (ἔρως), and what is it? We are not told; as Platonic did with participation (#8), Aristotle owes us a theory and gives us a word.

All of which was laid bare by Kant, most spectacularly in his “Third Antinomy.” The thesis of that antinomy states that everything has a cause; and since a cause for Kant at least partially precedes its effect in time, nothing can cause itself. The causes of a thing, the principles which make it what it is, are thus outside the thing, as with Plato.

The antithesis states, by contrast, that some things—free actions—are not caused by anything preceding them in time. To find the principle of a free act, you must look at the act itself, where you will find the atemporal moral law. So the antithesis is, broadly, Aristotelian .

Each of these two contradictory statements, Kant tells us, can be proven. What he doesn’t tell us is that his proofs are reductio’s: The proof of the thesis assumes the antithesis and demonstrates its falsity; the proof of the antithesis does the reverse.

So if you choose the (Platonic) thesis, you will eventually be forced into the (Aristotelian) antithesis, to avoid an infinite regress of causes according to which the form of the good would have a principle outside it, and that principle would also have a principle outside it, and so on…(This argument was known to Aristotle, who mysteriously called it the Third Man.)

If you choose the (Aristotelian) antithesis, you will be forced to adopt the (Platonic) thesis, on pain of locating the eternal order of the cosmos within the cosmos itself, where it cannot be because the cosmos contains matter. Matter brings change, and since anything which can change at all will eventually change into something else, the cosmic order would not be eternal.

These are not arguments (Kant’s “proofs” are notoriously bad) so much as ingrained tendencies. When we look at them that way, we see that Kant has sketched the structure of a metaphysical barn, around which Platonists and Aristotelians had been chasing each other for centuries—right up to the third antinomy itself, which abruptly stops the chase.

It does this by claiming that the thesis belongs, not to reality, but to one faculty of the mind (the understanding) while the antithesis belongs to another faculty, reason. Kant’s solution is not only abrupt, but more than a bit ad hoc (in spite of the hundreds of pages of argument intended to establish it). It also, as we will see, has other, and severe, problems—problems so severe as to impeach Kant’s entire “transcendental philosophy.”

But we also see, already, that if Kant had written nothing other than the “Third Antinomy,” he would have been the most important philosopher since Aristotle. Because it was he who uncovered, buried in the texts of the history of philosophy, an ancient and worrisome structure: the metaphysical barn.

10. Aristotle, Freedom, and Choice

One surprise when you read Aristotle is just how unimportant freedom is to him. It may be our central political value, but Aristotle rarely even mentions it. When he talks about the quality of being free,  ἐλευθεριότης, he just means the ability to spend money wisely: “liberality.” What we want from society is not freedom but justice: fair distribution of resources, fair punishment for misdeeds, and so on.

A lot of people are unwilling to countenance this downgrading of freedom, and seek in Aristotle’s pages a “higher freedom,” the ability to act, not according to desire, but according to reason.

Insofar as we are human beings, we should certainly act rationally, for according to Aristotle reason is our human essence. But in the opening chapters of Book III  of the Nicomachean Ethics, I think we find a more complex and interesting possibility.

There, Aristotle discusses a pair of concepts allied to what was later called freedom: ἑκών, voluntarily or happily, and ἄκων, under constraint or unhappily. Aristotle glosses what we do ἑκών as what we are responsible for. When we act ἄκων, or as we might say unfreely, we are in fact not acting at all, for something else is constraining us. In such cases we are not responsible for what we do.

What is it, then, to be “responsible” for one’s act? For Aristotle, as is typical of him, responsibility has various kinds and degrees; but in the strictest sense, we are responsible for things we choose to do. Freedom is then, most strictly, freedom of choice. How very modern!

Not so fast. What does Aristotle mean by “choice” (προαίρεσις)?

Choice for him—again, in the strictest sense—results from deliberation (βούλευσις). Deliberation, in turn, relates what Aristotle views as the two morally-relevant components of the human mind: desire and reason. Desire is an impetus toward something other than itself (desire, we may say, doesn’t desire desire). The overall name for what it seeks is ἐυδαιμονία, which is often (though controversially) translated as “happiness.” Basically, it denotes, not a feeling (as “happiness” does), but everything in your life going as well as it can.

Reason has (again, as is typical for Aristotle) different degrees and forms. In deliberation, reason begins from one’s overall concept of happiness and, using as premises what one knows about the world and one’s position in it, reasons back from that end through various means to it until it arrives at one’s current situation, determining what one can do here and now that will lead most efficiently to happiness. Since one desires happiness, one will then automatically perform that act. Reason and desire come to agreement, and their confluence produces the action.

When an act is performed after reasoning things out this way, then, it arises from the agent’s entire moral psychology, i.e. as the confluence of its two components, reason and desire. The source of the action is then (in the strictest sense) the person performing it, who is therefore wholly “responsible” for that action. If we go on (as Aristotle doesn’t) and call such an action “free,” we arrive at a definition of freedom: freedom is the ability to express your whole self in your actions, where your “self” is the totality of your desires (or at least the currently relevant ones) plus your reason.

Your desires tell you what you love, and reason tells you what you are good at: Aristotle’s “whole self” is not simply reason or desire, but coincides with what I call the “personal nature” of the individual (# 9). We may say that freedom for Aristotle is the ability to express your personal nature in your actions.

The whole point of deliberating is then to identify the single course of action that will most efficiently lead to happiness. It may happen, however, that deliberating arrives at a number of actions that I can perform right now that all lead, with equal efficiency, to happiness. In such a case, the alternative actually chosen has nothing rational to recommend it over its alternatives, and the choice is merely random. Choosing among alternatives, in fact, is servile:

But it is as in a house, where the freemen [ἐλευθέροις]are least at liberty to act at random [ὅ τι ἔτθχε ποιεῖν], but all or most things have been prescribed for them, while the slaves and the animals do little for the common good…(Metaphysics XII.10 1075a19022, my translation).

Freedom for Aristotle has nothing to do, then, with freedom, as (roughly) the ability to choose one of a number of alternatives, where the choice itself has no previous cause (and so is called an act of ”free will”). That concept of freedom, our concept, has theological, and—as we will see—specifically Christian, origins. It has to, because (as Kant argues) it implies a break in the chains of natural causality: as what Kant called the capacity to begin something truly new, freedom cannot come from nature, which—for Kant anyway—is causally governed through and through.

In the world of quantum physics, to be sure, there are uncaused events, such as proton decay. Kant, though he knew nothing of quantum physics, calls such events “spontaneous.” But, as Hume had already pointed out, who values such spontaneity? It cannot be anything other than a capacity for totally random activity; and who wants to act that way? For Hume, a free action is one that arises from one’s “internal character, passions, and affections”—or from what I call one’s “personal nature” (Hume, Enquiries, Oxford 1902 p. 99). Similarly for Aristotle.

Free choice in Aristotle’s sense requires extensive knowledge of oneself, while free choice in our sense requires only the power to act without cause. And you cannot know yourself without knowing a lot about the world and society you live in. Such knowledge was once summed up as the “liberal arts,” which is not an arbitrary name but tells us that such studies give us the knowledge we need to be truly free.

To say that something has theological, or even Christian, roots does not mean that it is false; but we see that there are at least two problems with the theologically-derived sense of “freedom:” it is an ad hoc revocation of natural causality, and it denies the necessity of self-knowledge. The latter makes it a philosophy which proclaims the irrelevance of philosophy.

9. Aristotle and Tax Avoidance

You don’t have to dig very deeply into American conservative thought before you come across the Rand Fantasy. This is the dream, explored by Ayn Rand in her Atlas Shrugged, that the talented and strong-willed few, who supply the rest of us with food, shelter, clothing, and such meaning as our lives can tolerate, simply stop working, annoyed by bureaucrats telling them how to run their businesses and taxing the wealth they create.

Rand may not be taken very seriously by academics, but beyond the ivory tower, arguments based on the Fantasy course through American society like the bulls through Pamplona. We hear it over and over again: taxes and government regulations must be kept to an absolute minimum, lest the gifted few—more recently baptized “job creators—” simply stop working, or at least stop working so furiously hard.

Rand famously claimed to find nothing of value in the history of philosophy except Aristotle. This is a bit extreme, given her obvious affinities with Nietzsche and his predecessor, Max Stirner (whose main work was actually entitled Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, “The Individual and His Property”); but there is certainly plenty in Aristotle that prefigures Rand. Much of humanity, he thinks, consists of “slaves by nature:” people who are bright enough to understand and follow orders, but not bright enough to figure out which orders to give (Politics I.5-7). The truly bright people, the “great-souled” ones (Nicomachean Ethics 1107b22-1108a3) have what Aristotle calls “active reason,” which enables them to make correct decisions in life. They do great things, and are entitled to great rewards—the greatest being the freedom to live as they think best.

All very Randian–as far as it goes. For like James B. Conant at Harvard (# 6), Rand did not read her favorite Greek philosopher all the way to the end. In particular, she did not understand Aristotle’s theory of human motivation.

While all humans share the species-nature of “human being,” he believes that different people are fitted, by whether by nature or by habituation, to do different things. Thus, some people are good at drinking; and since you enjoy what you’re good at, they love to drink. Others are good at hunting and love to hunt, others at philosophy and, as its very name implies, love wisdom (Nicomachean Ethics 1172a). Each individual, then, has what I will call a “personal nature.” One’s personal nature is the set of talents and aptitudes, partly natural (like height for a basketball player) and partly acquired (like skill in surgery)  that determines what she or he loves most in life, and becomes best at.

Since your personal nature determines what you love to do, it will (like any nature) inevitably manifest itself in your actions. A poet-by-nature, we may say, can no more dispense with writing poetry than a fish could abjure swimming, or a river could flow uphill. Someone whose personal nature makes them love something is willing to sacrifice almost everything else to it—and won’t even regard it as a “sacrifice.”

In such cases, monetary rewards are largely irrelevant. Poets rarely gain significant wealth from their poetry, but they write it anyway. Really gifted teachers often tell me they’d “teach for free,” if they could. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates made incredible amounts of money, but that was not their goal (if it were, Gates would not be giving most of his away).[1] They originally set out to pursue a vision; and what I am calling their “personal nature” is what generated that vision.

So what would Aristotle say about someone who seeks to increase their wealth by avoiding taxes?

He would say that such a person is not doing what they do “by nature.” If they can refrain from their work, then they don’t really love it. Which means that they have not devoted to it the kind of uncompromising and single-minded effort it takes to get really good at something in the first place. Such people can be worthy practitioners in their field, but the heights of excellence are reserved to those who love what they do. And if you love doing something, you’ll do it for free. Eisphoraphobia, fear of paying taxes, is for the second-raters.

One benefit of looking to Aristotle here is that we see how issues of tax avoidance differ from issues concerning government regulation. People who know how to do something really well usually don’t appreciate being told how to do it by others, who are almost certain to know less—not by the government, or by their board of directors, or for that matter by their mother. If the constraints placed on them actually change the nature of the work so much that it is no longer what they love doing by nature, one can certainly imagine them quitting. So the ani-regulation argument is more respectable than anti-tax arguments.

More respectable, but not impregnable. There are people, we know, who are really good at torturing and killing other people (some of them, indeed, make quite a bit of money at it). Not all personal natures are meritorious, and some need to be suppressed—by governmental force, if need be.

I don’t know if Ayn Rand thought that a killer-by-nature should be allowed to kill, but I am quite sure that if she did, she would be wrong. It is up go society to decide which activities it should countenance. Only once an activity has been approved by society can those who are really good at it in virtue of their personal natures be left to conduct it as they see fit.

[1] Jobs put it forcefully: “I was worth about over $1 million when I was 23, and over $10 million when I was 24, and over $100 million when I was 25, and it wasn’t that important,” Jobs said in 1996 PBS documentary. He co-founded Apple in 1976, as a 21-year-old. “I never did it for the money.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/14/steve-jobs-i-never-did-it-for-the-money.html

accessed August 31m 2020

8. Aristotle’s Fix

With Aristotle, philosophy is fixed: a problem with Plato is solved, with the result that certain tracks are laid, a certain intellectual prairie is fenced, and the mental grooves in which philosophy will move for millennia are dug out. Aristotle does this by hammering together two divergent rails of Plato’s system.

Plato posited unchanging Forms and changing sensibles. What holds these two realms together remains a mystery, yet together—somehow—they must be. How else will the forms have title to guide our actions, and how else can soul move between them, as it apparently must?

Plato is uninterested in such questions. His attention goes to the χορισμός, the spacing or separation between forms and sensibles, rather than to their necessary unity. So when it comes to the overall relation between forms and sensibles Plato owes us a theory but, as Aristotle points out (at Metaphysics I.9) gives us just a word — “participation,” μέθεξις.

Some might say (I did, in # 5) that this is a good thing—that it enables Plato to convey the human comedy in its tragic dimension. But Aristotle looks at it from the other side: the “separation” of Forms from the human world leaves them unchained from everything they are supposed to explain. Their whole domain becomes a limitless, philosophically unneeded complication of the sensory world. Individual forms cannot be defined, and morality becomes tragedy;

So Aristotle kills his teacher: he rejects, not the entirety of Plato’s theory of forms, but one of its core components, the separation of forms from the sensible, changing world. The eternals are to be found within the temporals. They are essences, not forms, and now Aristotle has to do what he thinks Plato should have done: not merely describe humans dealing with an unexplained separation, but actually explaining the relation between an essence and the thing whose essence it is. That explanation goes by way of matter, the other major component of a thing. Matter is so cryptic and  unstable that we might just call it everything in a thing which is not its form.

Explaining the relation of form, now essence, to things, now matter, is the core of Aristotelian metaphysics. The treatment extends through the three central and tortured books of his Metaphysics: Zeta, Eta, and Theta. I have followed it elsewhere (Metaphysics and Oppression, Chapter One), and have argued that in the end, the relation between essence and matter is one of domination. Or, seen from matter’s point of view, of oppression.

Essence for Aristotle exercises a threefold domination over matter: it draws a boundary for the thing, excluding most of the cosmos from it while allowing some matter into it; the proper amount varies with the kind of thing it is (elephant essences need a lot more matter than squirrel ones). The essence also establishes and maintains the order of events within those boundaries, arranging or disposing the parts of the thing; and it has the initiative to govern the thing’s interactions with what is outside its boundaries—the rest of the world—when those interactions are as they should be. Thus, a person’s interactions with other people and things are as they should be when they are governed by the human essence, which is reason (λόγος) itself.

  Boundary, disposition, and initiative—or exclusion, control, and isolation—are the watchwords here, the essential features of Being itself, or as I call it (following Aristotle) ousia. The three are found for Aristotle on the level of the human individual, whose essence is reason; in the household, where reason is found in the pater; in the state, where reason solves the conflicts that arise because human individuals have only very partial, and so perspectival, knowledge of the world; and on the level of the cosmos itself, where the ultimate essence, also known as the Prime Mover, orders the movement of the stars and so the passage of the seasons, and so human life.

Aristotle’s model of Being, as I have traced elsewhere (Metaphysics and Oppression), will become an obsession of philosophers. They will, down through the ages, explicate it, justify it, apply it, tinker with it, challenge it, and finally criticize it; but they will never leave it behind. This means that numerous engines of oppression in society—patriarchal households, capitalist factories, slave plantations, totalitarian states—will operate according to philosophical blueprints, established by Aristotle.

Who was only trying to kill his teacher.