The beginning of philosophy

Peter Leithart has some great thoughts on why philosophy must become theological in order to truly fulfill its purpose (the link is here). His argument hinges on the givenness of reality: our lives depend on having received, as little children, things which neither earned nor could have ever provided for ourselves, including not just our physical being but also our language, culture, and ability to reason. For all of this, the fitting response is gratitude--and not only for what we received from our parents, but even for the world itself, for the existence of anything at all. And if gratitude is the fitting response, then to whom or what are we to be grateful?

But let's consider another question: how does one arrive at this realization (namely, that gratitude is the fitting response to our own existence)? As I observe little children, one thing I notice is decidedly lacking is gratitude. It is a tad ironic that during the time when we ought to be most grateful, because we are so helpless by ourselves, we are in fact least grateful. Indeed, gratitude in little children has to be taught; it almost never comes spontaneously.

When is it that spontaneous gratitude emerges? I submit that it is precisely when one experiences loss. This experience can either be personal, as when we endure suffering ourselves, or it can be vicarious, as when we see how others live in far worse circumstances than our own. It is only when we see that what we have cannot be taken for granted that we feel the spontaneous desire to express gratitude.

I would say that the experience of loss is the beginning of philosophy. To put it more starkly, I would say death is the impetus for true philosophy. To realize that we are mortal, that our very existence cannot be taken for granted, causes us to face the most fundamental struggle in human existence: the struggle between gratitude for the life we have and despair over its loss.

Which brings me to something I would add to Leithart's post. Philosophy can either be a eucharistic enterprise, or it can be a process of despair. It can either be a response of gratitude and longing, or it can be a response of defiance, sadness, cynicism, callousness--all of which are really different sides of despair. When philosophy fails to be theological, it is because despair has won out over gratitude.

The modern world, it seems to me, is largely a world shaped by a philosophy of despair, leading to a world of non-philosophers--that is, a world of children who take what they have for granted, and never bother to face their own mortality. It's hard to be philosophical when you're just so damn successful.

But that, of course, is just part of the story. Let's not act like modern philosophy begins with atheistic "presuppositions." No, the battle is not with presuppositions of the mind but with different sides of the human heart. We are all atheists, because we all know despair. And we are all believers, because we all know gratitude--transcendent gratitude, thankfulness just to be alive. The real enemy of philosophy is not atheism, but childishness, which is to say our unwillingness to confront death and to wrestle with gratitude and despair.

No one can remain a child forever. Even we modern people must eventually be theologians.

Dostoevsky on loving one's neighbors

From The Brothers Karamazov:

"I must make you one confession," Ivan began. "I could never understand how one can love one's neighbors. It's just one's neighbors, to my mind, that one can't love, though one might love those at a distance. ... Beggars, especially genteel beggars, ought never to show themselves, but to ask for charity through the newspapers. One can love one's neighbors in the abstract, or even at a distance, but at close quarters it's almost impossible."

I have never read anyone quite so perceptive about the human condition as Dostoevsky writing through fictional characters.

I think this is exactly why we humans are always giving over ever increasing power to governments and authorities: we prefer to love in the abstract rather than in person. Once our noble intentions become embedded within an institutional structure, we are loathe to give it up, even when in fact those institutions no longer do any good. Oh yes, we do have noble intentions. And out of great reverence for those noble intentions we erect the most grand and most absurd idols, only we forget to laugh at ourselves for doing so.

Christian pan(en)theism?

Athanasius makes a rather curious defense of the incarnation against the pagans who claim that being manifest in a human body is beneath God's dignity:

What, then, is there incredible in His manifesting Himself through that in which He is? By His own power He enters completely into each and all, and orders them throughout ungrudgingly; and, had He so willed, He could have revealed Himself and His Father by means of sun or moon or sky or earth or fire or water. Had He done so, no one could rightly have accused Him of acting unbecomingly, for He sustains in one whole all things at once, being present and invisibly revealed not only in the whole, but also in each particular part. This being so, and since, moreover, He has willed to reveal Himself through men, who are part of the whole, there can be nothing ridiculous in His using a human body to manifest the truth and knowledge of the Father. Does not the mind of man pervade his entire being, and yet find expression through one part only, namely the tongue? Does anybody say on that account that Mind has degraded itself? Of course not. Very well, then, no more is it degrading for the Word, Who pervades all things, to have appeared in a human body. For, as I said before, if it were unfitting for Him thus to indwell the part, it would be equally so for Him to exist within the whole.

(Athanasius, On the Incarnation, Chapter 7.)

This is a rather striking argument. Rather than appealing to God's omnipotence and the paradox of the incarnation, Athanasius argues that God is already in everything, so why not a human being? This is not the only argument he makes, of course, but it seems significant that he makes it. It's hard not to see it as a theological misstep, since it would apparently negate the uniqueness of the incarnation as an incomprehensible mystery. If God is manifest in Christ in the way that the mind of a man is manifest in his tongue, then Christ would appear to be just a part of a big whole which God fills.

Then again, it isn't hard to find biblical evidence to support the idea that God fills all things. It just happens to get very confusing when you try to talk about incarnation as a unique event.

Athanasius on the solidarity of mankind

In explaining the effect of Christ's incarnation, Athanasius elaborates a theological anthropology:

For the solidarity of mankind is such that, by virtue of the Word's indwelling in a single human body, the corruption which goes with death has lost its power over all. You know how it is when some great king enters a large city and dwells in one of its houses; because of his dwelling in that single house, the whole city is honored, and enemies and robbers cease to molest it. Even so is it with the King of all; He has come into our country and dwelt in one body amidst the many, and in consequence the designs of the enemy against mankind have been foiled and the corruption of the death, which formerly held them in its power, has simply ceased to be. For the human race would have perished utterly had not the Lord and Savior of all, the Son of God, come among us to put an end to death.

(Athanasius, On the Incarnation, Chapter 2. Emphasis added.)


One wonders, how far does this solidarity go?

Conservative contradictions on immigration

My position on immigration is simple, and in line with classical liberal tradition: anyone who wants to immigrate into the United States for the purpose of pursuing a legitimate line of work and making a living should be welcome. In a free society, the immigration process would simply involve passing through a checkpoint, verifying your id, and allowing the government to keep some documentation of your presence here. (Probably there should be some fee to be paid for these government services.) There would be no restrictions on the number of immigrants allowed to come into the country.

Current law is very different, of course. We have restrictions on the number of immigrants allowed to enter legally on any given year. Conservatives applaud this, and in debates I've heard the likes of Mitt Romney say that would-be immigrants ought to "get in line" and wait their turn.

Whatever their arguments may be (they are probably based on myths) I think it's fair to simply point out the bold contradictions between the conservative position on immigration and other supposedly "conservative" ideas. Here are two big ones.

First, restricting the number of immigrants is an inherently socialist idea, in the true, original sense of the word. "Socialism" in its classical sense means allowing the government to have control of the means of production in a society. Very few people believe in this anymore as a consistent political philosophy, yet on particular issues we sometimes allow ourselves to move in a socialist direction almost without realizing it.

Such is the case on immigration. I hope it does not seem crass to think of people as a "means of production," but in fact people are the most essential means of production. We usually think of production being driven by technology, but the study of economics shows that even with technological advancement, we simply could not achieve the kind of market efficiency we now have without the proper division of labor among people. The most important kind of capital is human capital: the various skills, ideas, and ambitions that are dispersed throughout members of the global population.

So when conservatives argue that the government should be allowed to restrict the number of people who come into our country, they are in fact saying the same thing as a socialist who argues that the government should have control over capital investment.

(On the other hand, for all conservatives' talk about "free markets," conservative opposition to real free market policies is nothing new. See e.g. their historic opposition to ending corn subsidies, their support for trade barriers, and so on.)

Second, moving away from the economics, I propose to compare immigration with no less a controversial topic as abortion.

Just imagine if the government declared that it would set an annual limit on the number of children allowed to be born in America each year. Anyone, therefore, who failed to get a license to bear children would be forbidden to have children, and any woman who got pregnant without a license would be forced to abort.


Does that sound extreme? I don't see how it's any more extreme than a Republican saying that we should put up an electric fence on the Mexican border, or that we should be "shooting these immigrants like feral hogs."

But fine, let's say that these ideas really are too extreme for the average conservative. Let's consider instead the policy of deporting all illegal immigrants. To what may we compare this policy? It is like demanding that every woman who gets pregnant without a license be forced to send her child to be adopted in another country. Is this policy any more acceptable?

Consider the following arguments and try to tell whether they apply to immigration or to abortion: "What if we can't afford them? Shouldn't we take care of people who are already here? They're a lot different from us, after all." We cannot possibly expect people to take seriously the humanity of a child in the womb, when we are unwilling to take seriously the humanity of a person seeking a new life in this country.

(Let me add here a remark regarding those who are in favor of abortion rights. I hope none of what I said will be taken as saying that proponents of abortion rights are akin to monsters who want to slaughter immigrants. I am simply offering a comparison which I think should be particularly unnerving to conservatives, given their usual alignments. That said, I am pro-life, and I do think abortion is disturbing, even when left to a woman's "choice." But I think we can all agree that forced abortion would be a monstrous policy, and I think that many conservative proposals on immigration are similarly monstrous.)

Conservatives stress that this issue is about the rule of law, and that legal immigration should be applauded while illegal immigration is denounced. But the rule of law is not simply about people following laws. "An unjust law is no law at all." No, the rule of law is about treating all people equally according to the same moral standard. There is no moral reason to deny any individual access to a new life in this great country, provided they agree to live peaceably with their neighbors.

If conservatives care about preserving the traditions that have made us great, they ought to consider that the greatest of all such traditions is that of freedom and justice for all people. This tradition, sadly, is always in danger of being opposed by the very people who say they love it the most.

Maximus the Confessor on pleasure and pain

From Ad Thalassium 61:

When God created human nature, he did not create sensible pleasure and pain along with it; rather, he furnished it with a certain spiritual capacity for pleasure, a pleasure whereby human beings would be able to enjoy God ineffably. But at the instant he was created, the first man, by use of his senses, squandered this spiritual capacity--the natural desire of the mind for God--on sensible things. In this, his very first movement, he activated an unnatural pleasure through the medium of the senses. Being, in his providence, concerned for our salvation, God therefore affixed pain alongside this sensible pleasure as a kind of punitive faculty, whereby the law of death was wisely implanted in our corporeal nature to curb the foolish mind in its desire to incline unnaturally toward sensible things.

(I am here using a translation given by Paul M. Blowers and Robert Louis Wilken from On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ, from the Popular Patristics Series.)

This dualism between desire for God and desire for "unnatural pleasure through the medium of the senses" seems to play a strong role in Christian thought. I hear it in sermons all the time. It always goes something like this: you look for satisfaction in all the things of the world, from money to sex to popularity to comfort and ease, but none of these things will ultimately satisfy; only God will satisfy you.

My complaint against this notion is that it is empirically false. In the first place, I don't see the biblical justification in it. We read in Genesis 2 that God gave us all the plants in the garden to eat. How can one argue that this didn't involve "pleasure through the medium of the senses"? When Eve was tempted to eat of the forbidden tree, she saw that it was "good for food." How could she have seen this unless she knew what "good for food" meant?

I also wonder how Maximus and similar thinkers would deal with the entire book of Ecclesiastes, but I'll let that pass for now.

In the second place, I wonder how Christian thought can possibly maintain this dualism in light of a modern understanding of the mind and its "bottom-up" construction. Rather than a sharp division between rational and sensory functions of the mind, modern science shows rational thought to emerge out of the highly complex "lower functions" of a physical mind. In particular, there is not nearly so heavy a distinction between humans and other animals as classical thought would like to maintain.

Personally, I can't help but see this dualism as a form of nihilism. You can't find your ultimate pleasure in food, sex, comfort, or even friendship--no, ultimate pleasure is found in God, you see. Which makes God sound like nothing. For once you remove everything which gives us a direct experience of pleasure, all that remains is a vacuum.

This was always my critique of Anselm's ontological argument. The greatest possible being might simply be a phantom, a nothing, a vacuum. You continue to think of really good things, and continue to reject them, saying there must be something even greater. Until you have nothing left but the idea of something really really good.

Ironically, Maximus spends much of his time countering Origenism, which imagined that the "fall" involved incorporeal beings rejecting God and thus being condemned to bodily existence. Against this, Maximus insisted that we were, in fact, created with bodies (which is the only possible way you can read Genesis 1 and 2, anyway). I wish he had gone further than this.

Against Libertarianism

Whenever you happen to start finding yourself attracted to a particular philosophy, whether political or otherwise, it is important to attack it with all the intellectual might you can summon. Philosophies are powerful forces. They can shape a society for better or for ill. Just as each of us individually should think before he acts, so also society must have some means of contemplating various paths before it takes one. There is no other way for society to do that other than for individuals within it to do the thinking themselves, and engage in conversation with each other.

In that spirit, let me now enumerate my qualms with the philosophy generally called “libertarianism” in our day. Although the history of both that word at the philosophy with which I am dealing is a bit complicated, I will generally take for granted that anyone reading this is more or less familiar with the kinds of ideas I’m talking about. Libertarians believe in individual rights, including rights to life, liberty, and property. They believe in limited government (or, in the case of anarchocapitalists, no government at all) and they think that the mark of a good society is a minimal use of force and coercion. Libertarians believe in free markets and civil liberties: they don’t believe anyone should interfere with what we buy and sell, where we choose to live, who we choose to associate with, what we choose to say or believe, or how we choose to use our own property.

I find that there is much to appreciate about libertarianism, and politically I more or less identify as a libertarian because there is no broader category that defines my political beliefs. However, progress is never achieved by speaking only in generalities. Here I want to nail down some specific major objections (or at least qualms) I have concerning the ideas that usually fall under the label “libertarian.”

1.      Personal Autonomy

My first objection to libertarianism is philosophical in nature. Libertarians often make two claims about personal autonomy. The first is that people are autonomous, and the second is that they should be left to their autonomy. Let me take each of these claims in order.

The first claim: all people are autonomous individuals. This is plainly false. Indeed, there would be absolutely no reason for a market economy if this were true. There is simply no way the number of human beings currently living could actually live if not for the fact that they cooperate with one another. Libertarians who equate free market economics with the idea that everyone should be left alone to fend for himself are only helping the opposition, since everyone knows we can’t simply fend for ourselves and hope to survive.

No one acts independently of all other people. We all make decisions based on the morals, beliefs, and customs of other people around us. This is most obvious when we think of the obvious fact that we all come into this world as children. We learn the most basic skills which enable us to survive from our parents. Only gradually do we gain a greater degree of independence, and this independence is never absolute. Even the most independent among us will have to base his decisions on the decisions made by others.

This is more than an abstract philosophical point. Have you ever noticed how little libertarians have to say about the lives of children? Can a libertarian who supports the legalization of prostitution make a coherent argument against child prostitution? Why is a 17 year-old off limits when an 18 year-old has the right to do what she wants with her body? It is simply impossible to come up with a coherent position if we imagine that at some point people magically turn into autonomous adults.

Indeed, the idea of absolute personal autonomy is what leads to many of the major pitfalls of liberalism, which libertarians hate so much. If all people are simply autonomous individuals, then the only way to prevent them from destroying each other is through a powerful state. In the real world, liberty works precisely because we are not autonomous individuals. Rather, we rely on a highly complex set of institutions, many of which have no formal existence, and which arise through a process of cultural evolution, rather than human design.

The second claim: all people ought to be left alone to make their own decisions. If absolute personal autonomy does not exist, then insisting that society ought to protect it is nonsensical. If our goal is to defend liberty, then we need a definition of “liberty” which refers to something real. Perhaps in the near future, I will provide such a definition of my own. For now, I think it will do to refer to F. A. Hayek’s definition from The Constitution of Liberty, in which he defines a free society as one in which coercion is minimized. Defining “coercion” is complicated, of course, and I’ll simply ask the reader to read his book for some ideas.

2.      Morality

It is common for libertarians to claim that the government should not legislate morality. This is a piece of rhetoric which is also popular among liberals, and it is so pervasive that most people in our country have a hard time seeing just how silly it is. All law is legislated morality. If a law isn’t about right and wrong, it probably shouldn’t be a law!

The objection typically raised to all sorts of legislation is that we shouldn’t use legislation to impose our “personal morality” on others. For instance, Christians who might oppose homosexual practice should not use the law to forbid it. The principle underlying this claim is that all people should be allowed to make any choice they want about their own lives, so long as it does not hurt anyone. This is a worthy principle—don’t misunderstand me—but it is, indeed, a moral principle.

The question is not whether we are going to legislate morality. The question is, what moral principles should guide our legislation? We certainly cannot legislate all morality, as numerous examples will illustrate. For instance, most of us agree that it is wrong to insult other people and hurt their feelings. But no one would suggest that the government should pass a law banning such insults. Why not? Because most of us also realize that such things can easily be resolved without the use of government force, and it would be wrong to use force wherever it is unnecessary--not to mention the waste of resources involved in using such extraordinary means to solve such a trivial problem.

Libertarians have a long intellectual tradition with some good ideas about which morals should guide legislation. Such principles include equal rights for all individuals and the principle of non-aggression. These principles may be flawed or not, but they are certainly moral principles, and they should be compared to other moral principles, rather than treated as above or outside of morality. Essentially, I am not here criticizing the ideas of libertarians so much as their rhetoric.

3.      Property

I have on occasion heard libertarians complain that Thomas Jefferson should have kept the trio “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as “life, liberty, and property.” This fixation on property rights gives libertarianism a decidedly right-wing feel, at least in present-day America. In many ways I applaud libertarians for their emphasis on personal property, but I think it needs to be grounded in a proper moral framework.

In particular, I don’t think human beings are always entitled to use things in whatever way they desire. This is an especially important point to make in an age when we are most aware of the damage we have done to the earth. If libertarians are silent about environmental concerns, then the movement is either irrelevant or possibly even dangerous. Besides, it is hardly self-evident that human beings are entitled to own pieces of land and do with them what we please.

Ownership is not so much a matter of people have power over things as it is a way of establishing parameters for human cooperation. That is why some form of property rights is inevitable, radical left-wing claims notwithstanding. If we are going to have any interaction with the physical world whatsoever, we are eventually going to be faced with the question of how we share it. A political system with no property rights is implicitly a system of collectivist property rights, which inevitably means a powerful governing authority must take charge of setting guidelines for the use of valuable resources.

Libertarians are right to critique collectivist property rights, because such a system must rely on concentrated power and coercion. However, it is also the case the personal property rights depend on coercion. For instance, if a bank has the right to trade a loan for interest on that loan, then in the future it will have the right to coerce me based on a decision I make now. The question the libertarian should ask himself is whether the current system of property rights actually minimizes coercion. Too often libertarians are fixated on the economic question of efficiency and prosperity and not, ironically enough, on the question of liberty.

I happen to think that banks should be allowed to charge interest (yet certainly not without exception). Nevertheless, we ought to recognize that this rule depends on a common acceptance of property rights which have not always been deemed acceptable in the course of human civilization. There might be good reasons for that. Libertarians should not be mere defenders of the status quo, but should constantly be reassessing how well our current notion of property works in favor of liberty. Perhaps it is worth bringing up old controversies in the hopes of shedding new light on our present situation, especially as protestors call for debt forgiveness and tighter regulations on banks.

This concludes my critique of libertarianism, which is not to say I’ve covered every flaw. In future posts, I’ll try to offer something more constructive by suggesting ways in which libertarians could more clearly define a sound political philosophy. I would like to conclude by affirming that I do think liberty is the most valuable trait of our society, and that we ought to work to defend it. But if we don’t take the time to think about what we mean by this, we’ll find ourselves drifting in a direction none of us wanted.