“Immanent Politics, Participatory Democracy, and the Pursuit of Eudaimonia,” Libertarian Papers 3, 16 (2011).

Here’s the abstract:

This paper builds on the burgeoning tradition of Aristotelian liberalism. It identifies and critiques a fundamental inequality inherent in the nature of the state and, in particular, the liberal representative-democratic state: namely, an institutionalized inequality in authority. The analysis draws on and synthesizes disparate philosophical and political traditions: Aristotle’s virtue ethics and politics, Locke’s natural rights and idea of equality in authority in the state of nature (sans state of nature), the New Left’s conception of participatory democracy (particularly as described in a number of under-utilized essays by Murray Rothbard and Don Lavoie), and philosophical anarchism. The deleterious consequences of this fundamental institutionalized inequality are explored, including on social justice and economic progress, on individual autonomy, on direct and meaningful civic and political participation, and the creation and maintenance of other artificial inequalities as well as the exacerbation of natural inequalities (economic and others). In the process, the paper briefly sketches a neo-Aristotelian theory of virtue ethics and natural individual rights, for which the principle of equal and total liberty for all is of fundamental political importance. And, finally, a non-statist conception of politics is developed, with politics defined as discourse and deliberation between equals (in authority) in joint pursuit of eudaimonia (flourishing, well-being).

Follow the link above for the pdf and MS Word files as well as discussion of the article on the Libertarian Papers website. You can also download the pdf from my Mises.org Literature archive.

Older versions of this article were presented at the Austrian Scholars Conference 2008 and appeared in my doctoral dissertation (May 2009) as chapters six and seven.

Some scholars, particularly postmoderns, argue that hermeneutical interpretation is essential to “the so-called social sciences of human beings.” Hermeneutical interpretation originated, to my knowledge, in Biblical exegesis. It has since been extended beyond this sphere, but hermeneutical interpretation is still thought of in terms of the interpretation of texts, although no longer limited to written documents. Hermeneutical interpretation can be applied to our life stories and to oral narratives as well. In hermeneutics there is the tendency to view a text as not having a single fixed meaning. Furthermore, the meaning of a text is not determined solely by authorial intent.

Hermeneutics involves a tripartite or trilateral relationship between the author, the text, and the interpreter. The author and the interpreter each bring their own particular horizon of experience to the text. To be sure, the author presumably has a certain purpose in mind in writing or creating his text and intends for it to have a certain meaning. The author is operating within a particular historical context, however, in which words and sentence structure and such have particular meanings that can change with time. The author’s life has involved formative experiences enmeshed in particular ideas and events that have had at least some influence on him, much of which he may not be consciously aware. The same can be said of the interpreter, whose historical experience and language-use may be vastly different from those of the author. And, moreover, since one cannot have direct and complete access to the author’s mind, interpretation is necessary.

There exist a number of hermeneutical techniques. Perhaps the most general is simply that of the hermeneutical circle. When the interpreter engages the text, he brings with him his horizon of experience, his own world so to speak, and he will inevitably begin to engage the text from this standpoint. As he explores the text, he will gain an overall understanding of its meaning to him and what the author might have meant it to mean, but successive and more careful readings will likely lead to reevaluations and readjustments of that overall understanding which in turn will affect successive readings. Ideally there will be some sort of fusing or integration or broadening of horizons in this hermeneutical process. One must be open to different horizons, however, for interpretation to occur.

One particular type of hermeneutical technique was developed by Leo Strauss. This technique focuses on esoteric writing, or hidden meanings built into the text by the author, beneath the exoteric writing, or superficial meaning, of the text. Strauss argues that esoteric writing is likely to occur in times of great persecution, in which the author would likely be condemned, punished, and suppressed for expressing his views openly. In such cases, the interpreter must examine the text carefully for esoteric meaning. There appears to be some controversy as to whether and how much historical context matters in such interpretation. While there may be some usefulness to this technique — some thinkers may very well have been circumspect in their writing — I do see considerable danger in it (as highlighted by Pocock and others). The technique could be used carelessly, seems to presuppose infallibility, consistency, and genius where it might not be warranted, and could also be used for elitist, secretive purpose.

Another technique is the focus on narrative by Ricoeur, and narrative and tradition by MacIntyre. In After Virtue, MacIntyre poses for us an alternative: Nietzsche or Aristotle. He argues in favor of Aristotle but, being of a post-Enlightenment mindset, seeks to reconstruct or reinterpret Aristotle without his metaphysical baggage. Like other contemporary postmoderns, MacIntyre is wary of metaphysics and foundationalism, viewing them as having failed to satisfactorily ground ethics and politics and as being largely responsible for the totalitarian horrors of the 20^th century.

In place of Aristotelian metaphysics, MacIntyre proposes narrative life stories and tradition as foundations for virtue and politics. He argues that narrative and tradition can provide stability and coherence to our moral lives as well as internal and external validity checks. He thus interprets Aristotelian virtue ethics and the polis in light of these lenses. A life of flourishing would then be largely socially constructed. Proper action could then be judged by ourselves for internal validity in light of our life stories and traditions and externally by others in our community and by other communities.

The excessively communitarian interpretation of Aristotle aside, I’m not convinced that narrative and tradition by themselves can provide a foundation that avoids the problems of infinite regress and vicious circularity on the one hand and the communitarian specters of paternalism and totalitarianism on the other. What seems to be missing in this postmodern sort of approach to narrative and tradition is a conception of universal human nature and a deep appreciation of the value of individuality and individual liberty.

Another postmodern approach that also pays attention to the social and historical dimensions of human existence is that of Eric Voegelin. Voegelin’s work also evinces a wariness of metaphysical and foundationalist thinking. Wary of modern hypostatizations, Voegelin became focused on actual experiences and the symbols they engender. He warned against hypostatizing either or both of the poles with which human experience is in tension: the immanent and the transcendent. The life of man takes place in the metaxy, the In-Between, between the mortal and the divine. But neither one of these poles should be thought of apart from the experience of tension toward the divine ground of being.

David Corey has recently criticized Voegelin for a tendency to focus excessively on the transcendent at the expense of the immanent; and Voegelin himself seems to admit this in his letter to Schutz (sp?). I think this bias, if I may call it that, in favor of the transcendent, led Voegelin to focus on the apparent Platonic influences or aspects in Aristotle and ignore or overlook Aristotle’s more practical and positive contributions to ethical and political life: namely, Aristotle’s more down-to-earth contributions to virtue ethics, the good life, and practical action in politics.

Jan Patocka’s case bears some similarities to that of Voegelin. He seeks to return to what he conceives of as the true Socratic teaching, a sort of negative Platonism based on Socratic ignorance (or wisdom). He views the metaphysical thinking of Plato and the more Platonic Socrates as objectifying and concretizing, or hypostatizing, the transcendent Idea, which is ineffable and cannot be adequately expressed by rational thought and speech.

I turn, finally, to Nietzsche and Heidegger. Nietzsche’s interpretive method is genealogical or archaeological. Underlying Nietzsche’s genealogical method is his conception of the will to power, and Nietzsche engages in a genealogy of morality that purports to reveal moral systems of both the master and slave type to be manifestations of the will to power of those who advocate them. Thus, Nietzsche would likely interpret Aristotle’s virtue ethics and political philosophy as a form of master morality. The Athens of Aristotle, after all, was supported by the labor of slaves and valued the aristocratic and intellectual virtues of leisure, contemplation, honor, greatness of soul, and so forth. Aristotle, being one of the well-born himself, simply deemed the traits of his social class — his kind — to be good and, by comparison, those of his social inferiors to be base.

Heidegger, on the other hand, identifies Nietzsche as the last of the metaphysicians, and his will to power as the last gasp of metaphysics. Cartesian subjectivity has in Nietzsche been reduced to the will to power and cut off from the world in its everydayness. Nietzsche’s overman is a radically free self-creator, and radically inauthentic and impoverished. Heidegger employs two hermeneutical techniques: the hermeneutics of everydayness and the hermeneutics of suspicion. The hermeneutics of everydayness seeks to disclose Being in man’s everyday experience. The hermeneutics of suspicion seeks to discover and strip away the metaphysical masks that philosophical thought hitherto and the limits of language place on Being. Like Voegelin’s transcendent and Patocka’s Idea, Being for Heidegger is prior to, above, and beyond familiar ontological categories and predicates. Levinas, in turn, criticized Heidegger for privileging ontology over ethics, or one might say at the expense of ethics, which Levinas argues led Heidegger to embrace national socialism, pagan religiosity, and antihumanism.

The cycle of decline from the best regime to the worst is an important aspect of Plato’s Republic, and not merely for the mundane purposes of history and political science. In elaborating the logic of this decline, Plato couples his discussion of the rank order and decline of the five regimes with five corresponding types of man. For this reason it is necessary to understand the philosophical anthropology underlying Plato’s political philosophy as well as the anthropological principle, i.e., that the city is man writ large. Additionally, and perhaps of equal importance as a clue to Plato’s primary purpose in writing the Republic, we are shown (purposefully?) in the discussion of the cycle of decline the utopian nature of Plato’s “city in speech.”

The five regimes in order of best to worst are kingship or aristocracy, timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny. The corresponding types of man are the kingly or aristocratic man, the timocratic man, the oligarchic man, the democratic man, and the tyrant or tyrannical man. Before delving into the cycle of decline and the natures of these different types of regimes and men, it is necessary to briefly explicate Plato’s philosophical anthropology.

Plato identifies three parts of the ideal polis — the guardians (rulers and auxiliaries) and the general populace — and three corresponding parts of the individual soul: reasoning, spirited, and desiring. Plato also identifies four virtues pertaining to the various parts of the city/soul and the city/soul as a whole, which have come to be known in the classical tradition as the cardinal virtues: wisdom (seemingly sophia for subsequent Platonists and phronesis for Aristotelians), courage, moderation, and justice. Plato argues that a certain group should rule in the city and the reasoning part should rule in the soul; the virtue that pertains specifically to this function of ruling is wisdom, or knowledge of the Good (Agathon). The auxiliaries or soldiers, and the spirited part in the soul, also have a virtue peculiar to them: courage. The general populace of the city and the desiring part of the soul do not have a particular virtue assigned to them, but the virtue of moderation allows all parts of the city/soul to exist in concord and harmony. It is the virtue of justice, however, that makes the virtue of moderation and therefore concord and harmony possible, allows the rulers (rational part) to exercise their (its) wisdom over the other parts, and keeps the courage of the auxiliaries (spirited part) in check. Justice is each part doing and minding its own business. A just city/soul is one in which the part that should rule (the philosopher-king(s)/rational part) does so and the other parts perform their own special functions without attempting to usurp or interfere with the functions of the other parts.

Thus, kingship or aristocracy is the regime in which the philosopher-king or kings rule, and the kingly or aristocratic man is one whose rational part rules his soul, according to the Good. It becomes evident in the beginning of Plato’s discussion of the cycle of decline that the existence of the best regime is dependent on an historical fluke. It depends upon the fortuitous confluence of complex and interdependent historical factors. In order for the best regime to come about a philosopher must gain power of the polis, or a king or aristocracy must become philosophers (or bend his/their ear(s) to a philosopher). Moreover, the conditions must be ripe for the populace to listen to and obey the new philosopher-king and he would nevertheless have to contend with existing traditions and institutions. Moreover, even if the best regime were ever to come about, Plato makes it clear that all things, even the best regime, must inevitably degenerate. This tempts one to speculate that Plato’s Republic is not primarily about the best regime but about justice and the well-ordered soul of a philosopher.

In any case, the discussion of the cycle of decline of regimes and their corresponding types of man is also interesting for more practical political analysis and the philosophical analysis of human psychology. To understand the four imperfect regimes and types of man, it is important to point out that only the best regime and the philosopher are unequivocally oriented toward the Good (or the highest good or summum bonnum). The others are oriented toward a lesser good or, to be more precise, something that might be a good in their proper place in light of the Good if they weren’t made to usurp the place of the Good as the telos of the polis/soul. In the case of a timocracy and the timocratic man, this is honor; of oligarchy and the oligarchic man, wealth; of democracy and the democratic man, freedom; and of tyranny and the tyrannical man, power.

The decline of the best regime begins when the philosopher-kings cease to be identified at a young age correctly and educated properly. Those who would have been better suited to the ranks of the auxiliaries might be given an education and responsibility beyond their abilities or the quality of education of the philosopher kings might deteriorate. The spirited part of the city could become dominant, thus changing the constitution of the city with their love of honor and the value they place on courage and victory in war. In addition to honor, courage, and victory, timocratic man values discipline, manliness, fame and good reputation, etc.

With victory in war comes spoils and with spoils comes wealth. A timocracy can degenerate into an oligarchy as those in power become more enamored with the acquisition of wealth than with honor. The oligarchic man is characterized by his love of wealth and the attendant virtues that make its acquisition more likely (especially in pre-capitalist societies): greed, caution, frugality, discipline, managerial skill, and so forth.

An oligarchy might change to democracy as the son of oligarchic man grows up resenting his father’s single-minded obsession with wealth and all the attendant traits that go along with that obsession. Or he might grow up with an easy life, everything provided for him, but perhaps neglected by his oligarchic father, and possess all the traits necessary for spending his father’s wealth but none of the traits necessary for acquiring and maintaining it. The poor, too, are likely to become resentful of their wealthy masters and also lack the traits necessary for acquiring and maintaining wealth but nevertheless possess the desire to have it and all the benefits it can bring. Thus can an oligarchy degenerate into a democracy as the democratic man rises to power, either peacefully or violently or through a combination thereof.

Democratic man loves freedom; the desiring part rules his soul yet there is nothing but desire to distinguish which objects of desire to pursue and nothing to keep desire in check. The freedom that initially accompanies democracy makes it a possible home for all types of men, even philosophers, but according to Plato this very unrestrained freedom inevitably degenerates into mob rule and rampant license, a condition ripe for tyrannical man to step in as a demagogue promising order and change. Tyrannical man is the logical conclusion of this decline in the soul as he is completely a slave to his passions and projects his lack of self-mastery or self-control onto the world as a blind need to control others and satisfy his insatiable appetite.

In Thoughts on Machiavelli, Leo Strauss wrote that “Machiavelli does not bring to light a single phenomenon of any fundamental importance which was not fully known to the classics.” I have not yet read Strauss’s book, so I cannot speak for him regarding what precisely he meant by this statement but I suspect that what he meant bears some similarity to a growing sense within me that the ancient Greeks developed, at least in essence and prototypical form, every or most major philosophical positions that have been advocated at one time or another in modernity. If anything is fundamentally new about modern political philosophy, I think that it lies in the sheer predominance and popular acceptance of certain of these philosophical positions: namely, those related to the positivist-empiricist-historicist paradigm of our age. Modernity is plagued by a host of artificial dichotomies, reified abstractions such as realism-idealism, rationalism-empiricism, mind-body, Self-Other, subjective-objective, science vs. philosophy and foundationless value-judgments, and so forth. Classical or premodern political philosophy might be characterized by the search for right order, modern political philosophy by the search for order simplicitor, and postmodern political philosophy by giving up on the search for order altogether (moral, immoral, or amoral) (but perhaps this last is starting to change?). I find that these are dominant trends only, however; exceptions abound.

To begin with, are the features characteristic of modern political philosophy fundamentally new? The atomism, materialism, and mechanism that underlie a good deal of modern political philosophy and most of the social sciences were present already in ancient Greece in the ideas of such thinkers as Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, and some of the sophists. Social contract theory and state-of-nature theorizing is a distinguishing characteristic of the modern, Enlightenment liberalism of Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Montesquieu, Kant, and Rawls and even critics of liberalism like Rousseau. Plato makes a prototypical social contract argument in the Crito, however, and Aristotle recognizes that the immediate motivation for social and political life, if not its natural end, may be personal advantage. Plato and Aristotle explicitly combated the sophistic view that the polis is an artificial convention, such as Glaucon’s reformulation of Thrasymachus’ argument in Book II of the Republic that justice is a conventional compromise between doing injustice (good) and suffering injustice (bad). There is even an explicit, if not self-conscious, state-of-nature tale in the form of the Promethean myth told by Protagoras in Plato’s Protagoras; granted, this myth was told by Protagoras in order to illustrate why he thinks virtue is teachable and not to justify or explain the origin and purpose of government, but the seeds are there. Moreover, the Greeks and Romans were no strangers to absolutist and amoral (or immoral) arguments such as “might makes right” and “justice is the advantage of the stronger,” nor were they strangers to power politics.

The lines become even more blurred when we consider modern political theorists who shared some of the concerns of Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas about right order and virtue. Even Locke, for whom the origin and purpose of government is solely the protection of life, liberty, and property argued (unlike Hobbes) that natural moral law still applied even in the state of nature, that liberty in the state of nature was not license or “do whatever you please’.” Algernon Sidney and Montesquieu were republicans concerned with ordered liberty and moral and civic (or republican) virtue. If I remember correctly, Strauss, in his “Thoughts on Hobbes’s Political Philosophy,”¹ has argued that the state of nature originally played a role only in Christian theology and was first given a role in secular and political philosophy by Hobbes. We have already seen that this is not quite true; there is an example of the state of nature in Greek myth and ethical/political philosophy even if it wasn’t self-consciously labeled a state of nature and used for familiar social contract purposes. There is another instance of the state of nature being used in political philosophy prior to Hobbes, five decades earlier in fact. One can debate whether this example counts as premodern or modern, but the Spanish Scholastic and Jesuit Juan de Mariana explicitly employed the state of nature to ground his pre-Lockean argument for popular sovereignty and a radical defense of tyrannicide in his 1599 book De Rege. The Promethean myth, Mariana’s account, and modern Hobbesian and Lockean accounts of the state of nature bear important descriptive similarities.

Nevertheless, as I noted in the beginning, I think the primary difference between premodern and modern political philosophy lies in the dominant trend that received philosophical and popular acceptance. The premodern political philosophers whose thought achieved dominance — Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, and others — were primarily concerned with the search for right order. They generally accepted essentialism, teleology, eudaimonism, and natural law-type virtue or deontic ethics. Modern political philosophers tend to be more concerned with the search for peace and order, consequentialist or deontic ethical systems concerned primarily with social order, and are more likely to be rationalists or empiricists and base their theories on reductionist foundations. To illustrate, I will briefly examine the thought of Aristotle and Aquinas on one hand and Machiavelli and Hobbes on the other. Aristotle and Aquinas would probably view the political philosophies of Machiavelli and Hobbes as reductionist and insufficiently concerned with promoting virtue and the pursuit of the good life. Machiavelli and Hobbes have criticized classical political philosophers like Aristotle and Aquinas for being overly concerned with utopias and idealistic regimes, and for having a misguided, idealistic view of the world and human nature.

Aristotle is a classical virtue ethicist who views man’s natural end as a life of well-being, flourishing, or happiness (eudaimonia). Classical supply-side theories of virtue ethics like Aristotle’s start from the question “What kind of person should I be?” not, as in typically modern demand-side theories, “What rules should I follow?” or “What consequences should I aim for?” The good life is a life of reason lived in community with other rational beings. The virtues are traits of character constitutive of the good life that tend to be conducive to man’s natural end. There is not and cannot be an exhaustive set of rules governing human behavior that is universal to all human beings and applicable in every situation. Virtue is right action, a mean between the vices of excess and deficiency, the mean relative to us. The moral virtues are generic principles that guide us in our pursuit or search for the good life. They must be applied to particular situations in light of our individual context. The intellectual virtue of practical wisdom or prudence (phronesis) guides the proper application of the moral virtues to specific contexts. Prudence is not mere cleverness or calculation of the best means for any ends. One might say that prudence without the moral virtues is empty, the moral virtues without prudence are blind. Given that man’s natural end is the good life, and that man is a political being who requires community to pursue that end, the polis is natural and its end is the eudaimonia of each and every one of its citizens. To this end, the constitution and laws of the polis ideally will be designed to promote virtue and discourage vice. Education is extremely important.

The Christian theologian and philosopher Thomas Aquinas sought to integrate Aristotle’s philosophy with Christian theology and medieval political thought. To Aristotle’s intellectual and moral virtues, he added the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity. As a Christian, and particularly one coming after Augustine, Aquinas still held that moral perfection is the natural end of man but that it cannot be fully and perfectly achieved in this life and even then only by the aid of divine grace. As an Aristotelian, however, and living in the high Middle Ages, Aquinas was not so pessimistic as Augustine that he would settle for the purpose of the secular institutions of the City of Man as being purely the maintenance of peace and order (shades of Hobbes) while the Church concerned itself with the salvation of souls. Human law should encourage virtue and discourage vice, but it cannot achieve moral perfection directly and should focus primarily on prohibiting and punishing the worst forms of vice, those that severely threaten the social order (theft, murder, and the like). Even in Mariana, late in the Scholastic-Thomist tradition, we see the end of political society to be not merely peace and order but also living well.

With Machiavelli we see a relatively new scientific method and a focus on realist-practical politics. Machiavelli rejects the search for right order and the best regime as utopian, declaring that none of these ideal constructions of his predecessors have ever existed anywhere and never will. He finds fault with their ethical theories as well, arguing that to follow them is to invite ruin and that they are antithetical to great and successful politics. In place of classical inductive and deductive methods, and dialectic, Machiavelli claims to employ a new method of enumerative generalizations from historical experience to discover an evolving set of maxims that will tend to lead to success in politics. As a pre-Enlightenment thinker, however, and as bold as he is, Machiavelli is not so bold as to claim that he has discovered a means by which man can completely overcome Fortune. Arguing that a prince must know when not to be good, Machiavelli attempts to establish a separate set of rules for political and private life. In politics, the ends justify the means and the principal end is a great and well-ordered commonwealth or republic. Tellingly, Machiavelli’s table of virtues is of the same number as Aristotle’s, eleven, but its composition is markedly different and justice is strikingly missing. All of the virtues and vices in Machiavelli’s table involve reputation, how the prince is viewed by others, and usefulness for success in politics.

With Hobbes we see the hubris characteristic of the Enlightenment in full flower. In the introduction to his Leviathan, Hobbes likens the ability of man to create an artificial man (i.e., the State) to the miracle of God’s creation of man himself. The tone of power and optimism in the capability of human reason to reshape the world and human nature is striking. Like Machiavelli, Hobbes reduces politics to power (but arguably not as consistently as Spinoza) and goes even further, reducing the purpose of government purely to maintaining peace and order and its origin to base human passions: the desire for power over others, fear of death in the unsafe and miserable state of nature, and calculating self-interest. The people agree to install a ruler as sovereign and he is to have absolute power; law is the dictate of the sovereign. Justice is an artificial convention, having no place in the state of nature where force and fraud are the cardinal virtues. The laws of nature are prudential (in the calculating, not the Aristotelian, sense): the first is to seek peace and follow it, but the first right of nature is to utilize any means necessary for self-preservation. The second law of nature is to form a compact and give up all of his rights and some of his liberty when others are willing; the corresponding second right of nature is that if others are not willing, he may do whatever he likes to defend and advance himself. The third law of nature is the origin of justice: that men should perform the compacts they make.

1. I’m not sure if this is the exact title for the essay. ↩

I have received official permission to provide a pdf copy of my chapter, “Freedom Is the Right of All Sentient Beings,” on my website. Technically, I don’t think I really need legal permission; I don’t recall signing over to Open Court the copyright that federal law automatically vests in me as the author. Anyway, download it from that link and enjoy!

The chapter title comes from a quote by Optimus Prime in the first of the recent live action movies. The chapter itself is kind of a condensed and lite version of the Aristotelian-liberal theory of virtue ethics and natural rights explained in more detail in my dissertation, applied to the transformers and to artificial intelligences more generally.

Sources: De Anima III.5, Metaphysics XII (especially 7 & 9), Physics VIII (especially 8-10).

PDF version.

Characteristics of the Prime Mover (Divine Nous)

• First principle
• First mover (logically, not temporally); itself unmoved and unmovable/unalterable
• Substance (and arguably form) without matter
• Self-thinking thought
• Eternal and in eternal possession of its object (thought); therefore always active and never passive, always actuality and never potentiality.
• Simple and one
• Final cause; that for the sake of which; moves others by love; produces movement through infinite time (not a temporal first cause)
• Necessary
• Most good
• Living, insofar as thought itself is the highest expression of life
• No magnitude (and so neither finite nor infinite)
• Without parts and indivisible

The Ordered Universe

• “[T]he universe is of the nature of a whole” (M XII.1). “[T]he world is not such that one thing has nothing to do with another, but they are connected. For all are ordered together to one end” (M XII.10). “There always was motion and always will be motion throughout all time” (P XIII.9), i.e., the universe is eternal; not created or generated ex nihilo. The Prime Mover is the original source of motion in the universe and is the ordering principle that makes the universe a whole. The Prime Mover, God, the Divine, “encloses the whole of nature” (end of M XII.8).

Human Nous and Divine Nous

• Men participate in the divine insofar as they contemplate the higher things (Nicomachean Ethics and M XII.7).
• Can the human soul survive death? In Metaphysics XII.3 Aristotle suggests that it can, “albeit not all soul but [only] the reason.”

Contra Plato (M XII.5-6)

• For Plato everything in the phenomenal world is a mere imperfect, particular manifestation of the Ideas or Forms. Each Idea or Form is universal in the sense of being one. In Metaphysics XII (and also in NE), Aristotle rejects universals of this sort. “The primary principles of all things are the actual primary “‘this’ and another thing which exists potentially. The universal causes, then, of which we spoke do not exist. For the individual is the source of the individuals. For while man is the cause of man universally, there is no universal man” (M XII.5). For Plato, the Agathon (the Good), at least in the Symposium and the Republic and prior to the Sophist, is beyond being. One might argue that Plato’s “mature metaphysics” expressed in the Sophist precludes this, however.
• For Aristotle it is particulars that exist and the forms are always forms of individual particulars. Aristotle’s universals are not physically separable and independently existing things but rather are aspects of the nature of particulars, which we can separate out mentally by a process of abstraction. For example, the universal “‘man’ does not exist for Aristotle except insofar as it can be located in all the individual men who have ever lived, are living, or will ever live. The same might be said of the Prime Mover; insofar as it is the first mover, the organizing principle of the universe, and encloses the whole of nature, it might be reasonable to say (although I’m not certain that Aristotle would agree) that it is the form of reality, the logical structure of reality. Arguably the Metaphysics introduces separable substances, but even so for Aristotle nothing, not even the Prime Mover, is beyond being.

~~~

Now, I’m an atheist, but I believe there is a logical structure of reality. I don’t think my views are entirely inconsistent with Aristotle’s idea of the Prime Mover. For more on this, see Roderick Long’s “Theism and Atheism Reconciled” and “The Unspeakable Logos.”

The following are some excerpts from two sections of one chapter of Veatch’s For an Ontology of Morals: A Critique of Contemporary Ethical Theory. Veatch calls the mentality he describes the proofreader’s mentality because it allows him to make good use of an analogy (see below), but I think “scientistic mentality” is more appropriate and informative.

Veatch starts with the following quotation from Hume:

But can there be any difficulty in proving, that vice and virtue are not matters of fact,. . . Take any action allow’d to be vicious: Wilful murder, for instance. Examine it in all lights, and see if you can find that matter of fact, or real existence, which you call vice. In which-ever way you take it, you find only certain passions, motives, volitions and thoughts. There is no other matter of fact in the case. The vice entirely escapes you, as long as you consider the object.

After quoting from the Trial of Socrates, and before that from Pride and Prejudice, as illustrations:

Now surely no one can consider this account which Socrates gives of his own behavior without recognizing that here was indeed a man of no ordinary worth – brave, but without being in the least ostentatious about it; and with a real sense of justice, from which he was not to be deterred by either threats or blandishments, be they from the Left or from the Right. How then could Hume possibly maintain that you have but to consider a man like Socrates, admitted to be virtuous, to examine his character and behavior in all lights, and you will find that his virtue entirely escapes you? Could it be that Hume was somehow strangely value-blind, or, perhaps, virtue-blind? Or must we not rather explain it by saying that when Hume claimed simply to look at the facts and to find no values in them, he was but displaying what we might call a sort of proofreader’s mentality? It’s as if he had so trained himself as to be able to read letters, words, and sentences, but without heeding the sense or meaning of what is being said at all. Not that such sense and meaning are not there; instead, it’s just that the proofreader in reading an author has no particular eye for the sense, but only for the typographical errors. And so analogously, when Hume insists that, in examining an action admitted to be virtuous or vicious, such virtue and vice entirely escape him, this surely betokens no more than that Hume has no eye for values, not that such values are not really there in the facts at all.

And here’s part of Veatch’s explanation for the mentality (although something is being lost by my not quoting the entire section dealing with the explanation, or indeed the entire book):

The explanation is not far to seek, given the particular ontological account of nature and character of objects that we have here been putting forward. For the so-called properties of an object, in addition to being just what they are as such, are also actualities of prior potentialities in the object. Indeed, in this latter respect, they even have the character of “perfections” answering to that appetitus for completion and fulfillment that any potentiality simply is. Any particular property, ‘a’, in addition to being just itself, namely, ‘a’, is at the same time something desireable, when considered in its relation to the appetitus of a prior potentiality. But so also is it something intelligible when considered in relation to a possible knower or knowers. And no less is it an effect when considered in relation to the causes that produced it. Accordingly, all of these further features of ‘a’ that are, as it were, supervenient and characterize ‘a’, just insofar as it stands in relation to other things – to causes, to prior potentialities, to knowers, etc. – may, of course, be abstracted from ‘a’ so that ‘a’ may be considered just in itself.

Nevertheless, the mere fact that something may thus be considered in abstraction from certain of the features that pertain to it by no means implies that that thing can actually exist in abstraction from such supervenient aspects, or even that one can fail to see that the thing has these, the minute the thing is considered not in abstraction but in its concreteness. Right here, then, would appear to be the source of Hume’s mistake and of his unfortunate blindness. For the mere fact that objective facts can be viewed in abstraction from the values and disvalues that pertain to them certainly does not mean either that they must be so viewed or that values and disvalues are not factual and objective.

(It should not be necessary to point out but will be pointed out anyway that Veatch does not take this to be a one-shot, knock-down argument against Hume; he has others. And these are, of course, merely excerpts from the full argument.)

This disorder, no offense to all those poor deficient souls who suffer from it, might also be called “oughtism” as a play on words with the disorder “autism.”[2. Hat tip to Jon Irenicus of the Mises.com forum for this twist on the “oughtism” joke. It’s a far more fitting meaning than “belief in the existence of oughts” I think. :D] Accordingly, “oughtism” may be defined as “a brain developmental, or just a mental, disorder characterized by an impaired ability to recognize and understand natural values/norms/oughts.”

“Oughtism” may be defined as “a brain developmental, or just a mental, disorder characterized by an impaired ability to recognize and understand natural values/norms/oughts.”

The cure for oughtism lies in developing an understanding of (neo-)Aristotelian philosophy. I may go into more detail on these issues in a later blogpost, but this should suffice to explain the blog title change. However, you are invited to read chapter 4 of my dissertation and the relevant sources I cite therein.

1. No public links are available for the two jokes. Sorry. ↩