The World Philosophy Made

by Scott Soames

  This idea, endorsed by Plato, can be elaborated as follows: To believe that a goal is good is to value it, and to believe that a course of action is good is to place some value on performing it. When one acts rationally, one always performs the action one believes to be best at the time. A reason for action typically includes the end one seeks and the means to secure it. Faced with a range of possible actions aimed at bringing about various outcomes, one assesses the values of the outcomes and judges how likely the actions are to achieve them. If one is rational, one selects the action with the greatest expected return—i.e., the greatest value discounted by the probability of achieving it.

  On this picture, there are two ways you can go wrong—by choosing an end that is inferior to another end you could have pursued, or by assigning an unrealistic probability to an action’s achieving your end. These are failures that, Plato would say, can be minimized by extending your knowledge. The more you know about the good, the less likely you are to pursue a lesser end over a more valuable end. Similarly, the more you know about yourself, others, and the world, the less likely you are to misjudge the probability that an action will, if you perform it, produce a certain result. In short, increasing your knowledge of the relevant evaluative and nonevaluative facts should increase your chance of achieving the best result (even though it may not guarantee that result, because your knowledge may remain incomplete). Since one who habitually performs the best actions has the greatest chance of getting the best results, one who is wise should have the best chance of obtaining what is genuinely valuable. So, it would seem, if you always aim at what is good for you (or at what is morally good), acquiring wisdom should maximize your chances of being happy (or being virtuous). If, as Socrates and Plato thought, there is no fundamental conflict between what is good for you, and what is good full stop, then the pursuit of wisdom may turn out to be the pursuit of both virtue and happiness.

  Although there is much to be said for this view, it leaves the relationship between virtue and happiness unresolved. One worry concerns the premise that we always do what we judge to be best (e.g., for us) at the time. That’s not obvious. Sometimes, one is inclined to think, we may believe, or even know, that a certain action is best, but not perform it because we are tempted by something else. Although Plato and Aristotle had much to say about this, they didn’t settle the issue, which is still debated today.

  Another worry concerns the extent to which doing what one takes to be good for oneself coincides with, or differs from, doing what one takes to be good for others. To get to the bottom of this, one would have to explore what we human beings naturally value most. This is the last item on my list of what ancient Greek philosophy contributed to all who followed.

  (viii)  It conceptualized the problem of achieving virtue and happiness as that of discovering, and coming to understand, the essential elements of human nature, the nature of our relationships with others, and the requirements of our common life with them.

  In addition to wishing to understand ourselves and the world, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle recognized the high value we place on our relationships with selected others, their welfare and good opinion of us, the success of our communities, and the example we set for those who follow in our footsteps. Socrates displayed these self-transcendent goals during his trial, conviction, and confinement before being executed for impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens. Refusing to avoid his fate by quitting philosophy, by accepting exile, or by escaping from prison, he chose to honor his conception of the good life, to inspire others, to respect the laws of Athens, and to protect his friends from punishment.26 Because he valued these things more than he valued a few extra years of life, the virtue he achieved didn’t conflict with his happiness. Not least of those who learned from his example was Plato, who provided the theoretical underpinning and institutional framework for continuing the Socratic search for wisdom. When his teacher gallantly succumbed, Plato had the inspiring exemplar he needed to invest the search for the highest theoretical knowledge with the urgency of a personal quest for meaning.

  Unfortunately, the idea that the highest theoretical knowledge was closely tied to living a good life was not an easy one to keep going. After Aristotle’s death, neither the Academy nor his Peripatetic School, both of which lasted for centuries, were focused on philosophy as a way of life (as opposed to abstract theoretical inquiry) in the way that Socrates was.27 But two other schools were—the school of Epicurus founded in Athens and two other cities around 306 BCE, and the Stoic school, founded in Athens by Zeno shortly thereafter. The latter taught acceptance of everything outside of one’s control and cultivation of a peaceful state of mind. It was, for centuries, more popular than the former, which took the development of refined tastes and the satisfaction of desire to be most important.28

  The Stoics derived their conception of the good from a view of the universe as a vast material thing, a living animal with a mind directing worldly events. To be virtuous was, for them, to be guided by thoughts that agree with those of the World Mind. Since that mind determines every event, and everything it determines is good, whatever happens is for the best. A wise person will therefore accept things, even when they thwart his or her aims. However, this didn’t require renouncing desire. Being parts of the World Mind, one’s desires play a role in determining what happens. Still, since all is for the best, one shouldn’t be too attached to one’s desires, but rather should greet every result with equanimity.

  This view lasted until late antiquity, when Christianity and Neo-Platonism reintroduced immortal human souls as spiritual centers of consciousness—a view against which it was hard to compete. That Stoicism lasted as long as it did is a testament not to its fantastic theory of the world, but to its ability to provide consolation to those in need. As such, it is hard to see it as a legitimate heir to the world-transforming thoughts of Plato and Aristotle, the return of which in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was, paradoxically, due to the intellectual needs of the religion that, with Augustine, had temporarily displaced them.

  CHAPTER 2

  A TRUCE BETWEEN FAITH AND REASON

  The rebirth in Christian Europe of Greek philosophy as the route to worldly knowledge at a time in which religion provided the individual’s guide to living; the Thomistic synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy and Christian theology; the influence of John Duns Scotus, Roger Bacon, and William of Ockham in setting philosophy on an independent, scientific course.

  By the time of Augustine (354–430 CE), the energy derived from one of the founding ideas of Greek philosophy was exhausted. The idea, originating in Socrates and Plato, was that the systematic, reason-based examination of fundamental features of the world that makes advances in theoretical knowledge possible would, when applied to ourselves, lead to our greatest happiness, virtue, and wisdom. The decline of this idea was inevitable. The quest for theoretical knowledge is a collective task incrementally pursued over millennia; the quest for purpose, happiness, and virtue is the urgently personal task of a single lifetime. The two quests aren’t incompatible and the former can contribute to the latter. But they aren’t the same. Thus it’s not surprising that the most long-lasting of the Greek schools, Stoicism, was more successful in articulating ways of coping with life’s disappointments than it was with advancing theoretical understanding of the world, or with grounding its art of living in an informed conception of reality.

  The world Augustine confronted contained no robust Platonic Academy, Aristotelian Peripatetic School, or Stoic School. He was initially attracted to Manichaeism, which saw reality as a perpetual struggle between two warring principles, one for good and one for evil. Although Augustine credited his rejection of this view to Plato, his Platonism was derived from the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus (204/5–270 CE), which, by the beginning of the fifth century, had degenerated into a dizzyingly abstract combination of other-worldly metaphysics with mysticism and obscure religious rituals.1 Lacking the personal God of Christianity, th
e story of Jesus of Nazareth, and the promise of personal salvation, it couldn’t compete with the rising power of the Church.

  In choosing Christianity over Neo-Platonism, Augustine felt free to borrow from the latter in developing his own influential version of the former. It was largely in this way that important elements of Platonism survived in the Christian theology of the next eight centuries. During this period, God was the purely spiritual source of all being, simultaneously identified with goodness, love, truth, and reason; Platonic forms were ideas in the mind of God; the human soul was an immortal spirit, temporarily inhabiting a material body generating illusions and temptations that had to be fought; the goal of life was to ascend, after death, to an ecstatic union with God, and the means to that end weren’t reason and empirical observation, but acceptance of God’s gift of illumination.2 Although Aristotle was not unknown in the Christian Europe of this period, what was known was largely confined to his work on logic.3 Thus, the autonomous, systematic search for objective knowledge of ourselves and the world that had been Greek philosophy was, from the fifth century through the end of the twelfth, all but dead.

  The genius of the High Christian Middle Ages—its foremost contribution to the world philosophy made—was in finding a way to give Greek philosophy a second chance by temporarily relieving it of the onus of finding the meaning of life and charting a path to personal fulfillment. It was able to do this because, by the end of the twelfth century, Christianity was the most secure, well-organized institutional force in Europe, with a far-reaching network of ecclesiastical and educational institutions. The beginning of the thirteenth century saw the founding of the Dominican and Franciscan orders, and the papal charter for the University of Paris, with its faculties of theology, canon law, medicine, and the arts. These took on the task of providing Christianity with what it then lacked, which was the intellectual underpinning needed to establish its place in the system of human knowledge. Thus, it was natural for Christian thinkers to put aspects of Greek philosophy in the service of their religion. Although they had been borrowing from Neo-Platonism since the age of Augustine, Aristotle ultimately became the major force. Comprehensive translations of his work into Latin in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century expanded his theological audience, as had the brilliant expositions and critiques by the great Arab philosophers Avicenna (Persia, 980–1037) and Averroes (Spain and North Africa,1126–1198). By the mid-thirteenth century his influence in the Christian universities of Europe was growing, brought to fruition by Albertus Magnus (circa 1200–1280) and Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274).

  In this period, Christian Europe had no system of natural philosophy comparable to Aristotle’s, so its rediscovery sparked intellectual excitement in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Paris, and elsewhere. Seeming conflicts between Aristotelianism and Christian doctrine appeared, provoking various calls to reject the former, revise the latter, or reconcile the two.4 A distinguished professor and intellectual leader of the Dominican order, Albert the Great (Albertus Magnus) took the path of reconciliation. Like Aristotle, he was a student of nature, noted for his intellectual curiosity and belief in the superiority of careful and systematic observation for gaining knowledge of the natural world, as opposed to armchair deductions of what one imagines reality must be like.5 Though he produced explications of, and commentaries on, Aristotle, his most lasting contribution was his influence on his brilliant student Thomas Aquinas. As Copleston colorfully puts it, “St. Albert was Thomas’s Socrates.”6

  As a philosopher, Aquinas tried to derive as much knowledge as possible from observation and reason. As a theologian, he took some Christian tenets—such as the personal relationship between believers and their creator and the eternal life they were to enjoy—to be truths knowable only by revelation. Since truths can’t contradict one another, he had to make sure that what he believed to have been revealed was compatible with what he derived by reason and observation. It is to his credit that he carried out this task as conscientiously as he did.

  Aristotle provided his framework for understanding the world. Like him, Aquinas took all natural living and nonliving things to be fusions of prime matter with immanent (rather than independently existing Platonic) forms. These things, called individual substances, had essential properties (e.g., being a mountain, being canine, or being a rose) that made them the kinds of things they were, which they retained as long as they existed. The changes through which they endured were additions or losses of accidental properties, which an object was capable of having, but could, in principle, do without.

  Like Aristotle, Aquinas also believed that whenever any natural substance comes into existence, gains or loses accidental properties, or ceases to exist, there must be a reason the change occurred. Sometimes it occurred because another natural change did, which in turn must have occurred for a reason. The two philosophers also believed that no natural change is a reason for itself, that circular chains of reasons—in which C is the reason for B, B for A, and A for C—are impossible, and that an infinite regress of reasons is also impossible. Thus, they concluded, there must be an ultimate, nonnatural reason for every natural change. For Aristotle it was the unmoved mover.7 For Aquinas it was God.8

  Aquinas gives this argument in three forms. In one, reasons for changes are purposes they fulfill. In another, they are (efficient) causes of changes. In the third, they are things on which the existence of the changing item depends. For him, no form of the argument establishes that the universe was created at an earlier time. Although Christian doctrine told him it was, he didn’t think reason alone could rule out the possibility that the universe is eternal.9 What then did he think he proved? What was the independent thing on which all else depended? It had to be something that exists and has many of its properties necessarily. Otherwise we could keep the regress going by asking the same questions about it that we ask about natural objects—Why does it exist? and Why does it have the properties it does rather than different properties? For Aquinas, it doesn’t make sense to ask of anything that couldn’t have failed to exist, why it exists, or of anything that couldn’t have had different properties, why it has the properties it does.10

  Just as Aquinas deployed Aristotelian concepts in trying to prove the existence of a god different from Aristotle’s unmoved mover, so he maintained that the human soul was a kind of Aristotelian form of the body, while affirming an immortality for it that Aristotle couldn’t. With the exception of human beings, Aquinas agreed with Aristotle that the soul of a living thing (which combines with matter to form a living being) is the form of the body, and cannot exist without the body. In the case of a human being, he agreed that one’s humanity determines that (a) one is a human being with a body capable of digesting food, growing, and reproducing, (b) one has sense organs making perception possible, (c) one has the physical and mental capabilities required for physical action, and (d) one is (unlike animals) capable of rational thought, theoretical understanding, and self-governance. From this it might seem to follow that when a human body dies, or ceases to exist, the person’s soul must, as an Aristotelian rather than a Platonic form, also cease to exist. Surely, the soul of Socrates doesn’t, after death, inform a different body, say Zeno’s. Rather, it ceases to inhere in any matter. Since an Aristotelian form can’t exist without inhering in anything, either Socrates’s soul must also cease to exist, or it must have something that distinguishes it from classic Aristotelian forms. In taking the second path, Aquinas modified Aristotelianism.

  Following Aristotle, he held that things, living and nonliving alike, have substantial forms that make them the kinds of things they are (e.g., stones, plants, animals, humans), while also distinguishing different things of the kind.11 However, different categories of things have forms of different kinds. The forms of living things—plants, animals, and humans—are souls. Aquinas says:

  In order to inquire into the nature of the soul, we have to presuppose that ‘soul’ [anima] is what we call the first
principle of life in things that live among us; for we call living things ‘animate’ [or ‘ensouled’], but things devoid of life ‘inanimate’ [or ‘not ensouled’].12

  The souls of plants endow them with nutritive abilities, the souls of animals add the abilities to act and perceive, while human souls add rationality, making abstract thought and understanding possible. Except for human souls, the souls of all living things are Aristotelian forms, which, though immaterial and distinct from matter, cannot exist without informing it.13 By contrast, the rational souls of human beings are immaterial in a second and stronger sense. As an Aristotelian, Aquinas believed that the nutritive functions performed by souls of all living things, and the sensitive functions (perceiving and acting) performed by souls of animals and humans, are always operations of particular bodily organs. Thus, he thought, those functions cannot survive without the bodies in which they are localized. But, Aquinas argued, the rational functions unique to humans are not localized in any bodily organ.14

  His argument is based on two principles: (i) “Through intellect the human being can [in principle] have cognition of [i.e., understand] the natures of all bodies.” (ii) “Any [faculty] that can have cognition of [i.e., understand] certain things cannot have any of those things in its own nature [i.e., it cannot have a bodily nature].”15 For example, the bodily organ for sight, the pupil of the eye, isn’t, and couldn’t be, of any color, since, if it were, its color (like the color of blue spectacles) would distort the perception of colors, making it impossible for us to distinguish some colors. By parity of reasoning, if the rational human soul had a bodily nature, that nature would distort its understanding. Since our rational nature allows us to correctly understand the natures of all bodies, human rationality is independent of bodily processes.16