The Free Thinker

The Human Dignity Conspiracy by Peter Augustine Lawler (via Brothers Judd):

The thoughtful evolutionary scientist Daniel Dennett, in his very positive contribution to the Council volume, says that human beings are different enough from the other animals to need morality, and he adds, contrary to Pinker, that we even need confidence in our equal dignity. He agrees with Pinker that claims for dignity have been basically Christian, and that these claims have been refuted by the scientific discovery that everything we think and do has a material cause. Our beliefs in dignity and the soul have the same status as the discredited belief in mermaids. It is no sillier to believe in a half-woman/half-fish that no one has seen than to believe in a half-body/half-soul that no one has seen.[15]

Dennett, however, has a scientific explanation for why we need the scientifically discredited belief in dignity. We are social animals who have brains big enough to conceive of projects that will enable us to live purposeful lives, but there is no scientific basis for the freedom at the foundation of human conceptions of purpose. So we cannot live well without useful illusions—free will, love, dignity, etc. Even the idea that any particular human life matters at all is merely a fiction—but a fiction worth maintaining. We have seen that nihilism has all sorts of undesirable social consequences; therefore, we need to sustain these illusions in the face of what we know about our accidental, material, and evolutionary existences.

Dennett’s ingenious solution to the incompatibility between scientific truth and our need for dignified belief is that we should justify our allegiance to the useful fiction of equal dignity by acknowledging the good life it makes possible. It is indispensable for the habits and trust needed to perpetuate social and political institutions. We can stop all this pointless obsessing over whether the belief is actually true by just admitting that it is not, but science can still explain why we need to believe it anyway.

Dennett’s pragmatic hope that we can stop caring about whether our belief in dignity is actually true is not shared by any other author in the Council’s book. In fact, the pragmatic philosopher Richard Rorty had a simpler idea: let’s call true whatever belief makes us happy. Rorty, of course, never called his approach dignified. Dennett himself is too dignified to deny the truth of what he thinks he knows, and there is some dignity, too, in his humane intention to spare us the consequences of a dignity-free world. It seems he denies the reality of the dignity he himself displays only because to do otherwise would require admitting that human beings are mysteriously free from nature or materialistic causation. Yet in Dennett’s well-­intentioned confusion, he remains stuck with acknowledging that, in some way, we are the only species that can be held responsible for perpetuating both human nature and the very conditions of life on our planet. Is there really no dignity in that?

Very interesting. The attempt to find an account of ethics based in materialism is not one to which I am sympathetic: it seems to me quite clearly doomed, and also unnecessary, since materialism is false. Still, I am surprised that Dennett concedes as much as Lawler seems to be saying that he does. I would have expected him to insist that materialism can be embraced without such a high cost in terms of the tenability of our ordinary moral intuitions and values.

Free will is foundational: we know it by introspection, with certainty. By contrast, Descartes and Hume and Popper and the skeptics are right that all scientific knowledge, i.e., knowledge derived by induction from patterns in sense-experience, is conjectural. To reject free will in favor of "science" is, at best, to reject better evidence in favor of worse. Actually, it is not even that, for the conceit that "everything" is determined by materialistic laws is fallaciously to transpose a working assumption of science into a conclusion of science, though this is not the sort of thing that science could ever validly conclude. Without free will there can be no ethics because you can't be blamed for what you can't help doing. The converse is not true, however: there could be free will without ethics, although we might not be so intensely aware that we have free will if we didn't have morality to give us a strong reason to resist our inclinations. But what an odd world Dennett conceives of, in which humans have a need to live purposeful lives, though there is no purpose in anything and "even the idea that any particular human life matters at all is a fiction!"

An Analogy

Consider the following scenario.

A computer has been set to work on a large series of mathematical optimization problems. Either they are not solvable analytically or the computer does not know how; it solves them (to a specified degree of precision) by means of numeric methods.

An expert mathematician-cum-computer-scientist is told that the computer has been working on the optimization problems for a single day, and he is told that the computer has solved the first x optimizations in the series. He is provided with a cross-section of all the computer's operations for one millisecond. From these he can compile a list of the algorithms that the computer is currently running, but he does not know all the algorithms available to the computer. There may be latent algorithms that are not being implemented at the time.

Having compiled this list, the scientist is then asked: What is the probability that the computer was using only the algorithms observed and recorded in the list to solve the optimization problems?

If, as is common, the algorithms the computer is using involve some amount of random search, the scientist probably cannot determine with certainty whether the listed algorithms would have been sufficient to solve the optimization problems. Even if the algorithms seem radically inadequate to solve x optimizations in one day, the computer might have benefited from a string of lucky guesses.

What the scientist could do, in principle, is assign an ex ante probability to the occurrence of the computer solving x optimizations in one day using the given algorithms. He could deduce a probability distribution for time to solve for each optimization, and then add these distributions to calculate a probability of time to solve x optimizations. In a typical case the scientist might find that the chances of the computer solving at least x optimizations in one day is 99.9999%, or 1E-30%. The scientist might also be able to calculate the odds of the computer solving no more than x optimizations. 

If the scientist assumes that anything that is infinitesimally unlikely did not occur, he may draw one of the following three conclusions: (a) the list of algorithms plausibly explain the computer's degree of success, (b) the computer could not have solved x optimizations in a day with those algorithms and must have used other, more effective ones for part of the time, or been supplied with some answers by an outside source, or (c) the computer would certainly have solved more than x optimizations using the set of algorithms observed, and it must have been interrupted or have been using less effective algorithms for part of the time.

If, on the other hand, the properties of the algorithms or of the optimization problems are not sufficiently well understood, the scientist may profess himself unable to ascertain whether the algorithms are sufficient, or super-sufficient, to explain the computer's success or not.

Evolutionary biology is in a position similar to that of the computer scientist in the example. Life exhibits a certain amount of order. Geology and the fossil record suggest a time scale during which this amount of order is supposed to have emerged. Biologists observe certain processes at work in nature which would tend to alter gene pools over time, and thus to produce order.

But unlike the scientist in the scenario, evolutionary biologists do not understand the properties either of biological order or of the mutation and natural selection processes sufficiently well to estimate the ex ante probability that life as we know it could have emerged in a few billion years. If they did, they might find that it's infinitesimally unlikely that life as we know it could have emerged so quickly, or, on the contrary, that sentient beings would have emerged with near certainty within 100 million years at most. In either case, they would have to conclude that the theory of evolution as taught today can't be true; that some other processes we have not observed or conceived of must account for the existence of life; or perhaps, that some other processes must have been slowing evolution down.

As it is, we're just not in a position to know whether the Darwinist claim that all life on earth emerged through evolution is possible or not. If we did know that it was possible, we still would not know, of course, whether it really occurred that way.

The whole above argument assumes that life is reducible to a material basis. I think we know by the experience of free will that human life, at least, is not. In the past I have also presented a proof of "the necessity of agnosticism about mind-brain supervenience." If the task of a theory of life is not merely to explain its material organization but also how at least one organism, man, possesses a supernatural soul, then it seems clear right away that Darwinian evolution is not a very promising theory. But even if we set that aside, the radically inadequate evidentiary basis for Darwinism makes it, not a bona fide scientific theory, but simply the latest of the creation-myths man has believed in from time to time.

Is Nietzsche Worth Answering?

I was recently reading Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, and among other things I was struck by the respect that Bloom, a cultural conservative who might be expected not to like them, had for Nietzsche and Rousseau.  It is no doubt an indication of the narrowness and bias of my education and self-education in philosophy, but I don't think I've ever encountered a favorable treatment of Nietzsche or Rousseau before.  Bertrand Russell and Paul Johnson, for example, both regard both men with feelings of contempt, disapproval, and occasional horror.  I thought of Rousseau and Nietzsche more or less as sophists and enemies of civilization, philosophical forerunners of the French Revolution and Nazi Germany, respectively.  But Bloom finds it worthwhile to deal with Rousseau and Nietzsche at great length and in some ways sympathetically (especially towards Rousseau).

So I downloaded Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil and have been listening to it.  It seems to me that Nietzsche is a lot like G.K. Chesterton: an unsystematic, aphoristic thinker, sometimes insightful, sometimes merely polemical, but full of unwarranted claims and lacking the scruples of a systematic philosopher.  Nietzsche's elitism may neutralize resistance to his arguments in a manner like that from the story The Emperor's New Clothes: one hesitates to say, or even think, What nonsense, this doesn't make any sense, for fear of feeling the knife-edge of Nietzsche's keen contempt.  But in fact, not only are Nietzsche's grounds for rejecting tradition inadequate, but they are parasitic on tradition.  Nietzsche is, in a thousand different ways.  Nietzsche is forever in the position of the woodcutter who cuts off the branch on which he himself is sitting.

I found this passage in the introduction striking:

The philosophy of the dogmatists, it is to be hoped, was only a promise for thousands of years afterwards, as was astrology in still earlier times, in the service of which probably more labour, gold, acuteness, and patience have been spent than on any actual science hitherto: we owe to it, and to its “super- terrestrial” pretensions in Asia and Egypt, the grand style of architecture. It seems that in order to inscribe themselves upon the heart of humanity with everlasting claims, all great things have first to wander about the earth as enormous and awe- inspiring caricatures: dogmatic philosophy has been a caricature of this kind—for instance, the Vedanta doctrine in Asia, and Platonism in Europe. Let us not be ungrateful to it, although it must certainly be confessed that the worst, the most tiresome, and the most dangerous of errors hitherto has been a dogmatist error—namely, Plato’s invention of Pure Spirit and the Good in Itself. But now when it has been surmounted, when

Europe

, rid of this nightmare, can again draw breath freely and at least enjoy a healthier—sleep, we, WHOSE DUTY IS WAKEFULNESS ITSELF, are the heirs of all the strength which the struggle against this error has fostered.

The rhetorical force of the word "nightmare" is felt by the reader because the reader thinks of nightmares as evil, or bad.  If Nietzsche wants us to be "beyond good and evil," that force is lost.  Elsewhere Nietzsche says that "the renunciation of false opinions would be a renunciation of life," and that "the question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing?"  This seems to suggest-- but Nietzsche never deigns to express a thought so clearly-- that what matters is that ideas be useful rather than true.  By that standard, Christianity, the chrysalis in which the world's most materially successful civilization formed, would seem to be vindicated.  Of course, the real nightmare was the age following Nietzsche in which the "Will-to-Power" which he glorified seized Moscow and Rome and Berlin and burst forth to ravage Europe.  If Nietzsche wants to call two thousand years of Western civilization a "nightmare," one might wish to ask the standard by which Nietzsche judges, but he offers no ground.  My impression so far is that Nietzsche is greatly overpromoted when great thinkers like Bloom and MacIntyre make him their major interlocutor.  You see a brilliant mind at work in Nietzsche's writings, sometimes, but he wastes it on ranting.  He is an incoherent and trivial thinker.

Continuing an earlier discussion:

A formalization might be of use. Suppose there are six relevant circumstances: A, B, C, D, and E. Person P has feasible options F and G. The determinist view is that, if A, B, C, D, and E really are ALL the relevant circumstances, then they must determine that P will choose either F or G. The free will view is that P might, in all the circumstances, choose either F or G. Naturally, if he is asked to justify choosing F, and if A, B, and D favor F over G, he will say he chose F because of A, B, and D. But he might just as well have chosen G, in which case he would say it because of C and E. There is typically no way to quantify the "strength" of the reasons for each choice and say which is "stronger." To this a determinist would say that if, confronted with circumstances A, B, C, D, and E, Person X sometimes chooses F and sometimes G, or if Person X chooses F while a not-relevantly-different Person Y chooses G, then A, B, C, D, and E must not constitute a full set of relevant circumstances. There must be some circumstances J, M, and Q (say) which are also relevant. But what if we hold J, M, and Q constant as well and still observe that when the new list of relevant circumstances are the same, the same person on different occasions, or different but relevantly-identical persons, sometimes choose F and sometimes G? In that case the determinist must search farther afield for circumstances that differed that can be suggested, plausibly or not, as possible causes for the different choices observed. No matter how often he is disproven by showing that any given list of circumstances, the determinist need not despair, for there are always more circumstances he can appeal to if need be. His position is that *some* set of circumstances is sufficient to determine choice; we may never find it, but no matter. Determinism is a leap of faith. Not being one for leaps of faith, I dismiss determinism as an irritating distraction. Of course, one can also deny free will by accepting that the choice is not determined but attributing the variation to randomness. Never mind the difficulty of defining randomness. Common sense recognizes the distinction between chance and choice but this can be put to one side if we like. And if the proponent of free will answers by saying the choice wasn't random because he had reasons for his choice, one can jump back and (forgetting the previous argument) say that that's determinism again. Choice is neither random nor determined. People have reasons for action, which makes choice different from randomness; but a person might fail to act despite having good reason to do so, as often happens. Internal deliberation is not a deterministic process; it involves choice. To ask what is the mechanism of choice is a bit like asking the mechanism by which gravity operates. We observe choice; we observe gravity. Perhaps more fundamental explanations of these phenomena exist, perhaps not, but to insist on finding a mechanism behind everything just leads to an infinite regress. For most purposes they would not be necessary or relevant in any case. There is much that is difficult to understand here, no doubt, but you can only begin to understand it when you take our one, difficult, source of evidence, introspection, seriously. We choose; that's the first fact of our mental experience; reasons play a role, but will and not circumstances ultimately decides; and it is idle to indulge in hypotheticals about whether a long enough list of circumstances could eliminate the scope for choice, for experiment can offer no corrective to intuition. So there is free will; but what is its nature? That's when you can get off the treadmill of sophistries and start to explore the really interesting questions. For example, how is character related to choice? Our character does not make our choices for us. I trust my computer not to lie because it is a deterministic system. I trust my friend not to lie because of his character. But I know that he *could* lie. Our character may help determine the choice set, however. One cannot do what one cannot imagine, and imagination depends on character. Plots of seduction may never even occur to a pure man; shrewd schemes may never occur to a stupid one. Given one's choice set-- the set of imagined feasible responses to a situation-- character may determine the ease with which one chooses certain alternatives. A virtuous man may feel great resistance to lying, while a cowardly man may feel great resistance to standing and fighting at risk of pain and death. Gratitude and blame are responses to choice, and only make sense if there is free will. If you are a robot without free will it is senseless for me to be grateful to you for your services or to blame you for any harms you do me. Of course, one may fail to feel due gratitude to a benefactor or proper blame for cheating or cruelty. One reason this is done is that one may "take someone for granted," forgetting the free will of a parent or a servant and regarding them as indifferently as one would regard a machine. Though culpable, this may be a natural response to something being reliable: If Mommy always makes me pancakes for breakfast, it might begin to seem more like a natural law than an act of will. But consistency is not decisive evidence against the operation of free will. A person may become habituated and act "automatically"-- as drivers stay between the lines of the road without thinking about it-- but a person may also make the same choice, over and over again. And this has implications for theology. Suppose I say that the sun rises every morning not because of a natural law, but because God commands it to rise, again and again, never tiring of it, but always rejoicing in the majestic splendor of its light refreshing and quickening the world. That might give you a sense of insecurity: suppose God should, one day, change His mind. But He will not, "for His mercy endureth forever." Then it doesn't matter, you might say. But it does, I think. If choice, not deterministic causation, makes the sun rise, then gratitude is an appropriate response to every dawning day. And since gratitude, particularly gratitude for something as splendid as a sunrise, is a wonderful feeling, this hypothesis of God's freedom makes the world a pleasanter place.

A Flaw in Dennett's Enterprise

From Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea:

Whenever Darwinism is the topic, the temperature rises, because more is at stake than just the empirical facts about how life on Earth evolved, or the correct logic of the theory that accounts for those facts. One of the precious things that is at stake is a vision of what it means to ask, and answer, the question "Why?" Darwin's new perspective turns several traditional assumptions upside down, undermining our standard ideas about what ought to count as satisfying answers to this ancient and inescapable question. Here science and philosophy get completely intertwined. Scientists sometimes deceive themselves into thinking that philosophical ideas are only, at best, decorations or parasitic commentaries on the hard, objective triumphs of science, and that they themselves are immune to the confusions that philosophers devote their lives to dissolving. But there is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination. (Dennett, 21)

Dennett turns a good phrase there at the end.  But is it true?  Certainly it is true of Darwinist science, as Dennett does a good job of showing in the remainder of the book.  It is less clear that there is any "philosophical baggage" involved in ordinary physics, or chemistry.  A dropped ball falls: we all learn that by experiment/observation, and so does a physicist; and while the physicist learns many more things in the same fashion, his general approach need never depart from common sense.  Of course, a Humean skeptic might regard the inductive process by which this conclusion is arrived at as groundless; and if you want to say that all induction involves the "philosophical baggage," fine: but then it is common sense that takes its philosophical baggage on board without inspection, and science-- or at least, physics or chemistry-- is not distinctive in this regard except in that it travels especially light, and especially far.  That Darwinist theory has to take on far more philosophical baggage than other disciplines is a clue that it is not just another science, entitled to the deference we ordinarily give to Science.  Rather, it combines some brilliant insights with a special kind of ideological enterprise, namely: proving that a materialist worldview is viable, or rather, hinting at a prospectus for such a proof.

Dennett hits on exactly what is so brilliant about Darwin: his theory has contributed to the corpus of human thought a new way of asking and answering the question 'why.'  Aristotle said there were four "causes"; Darwin invented a fifth, and highly interesting and illuminating one.  But while this breakthrough has been understandably exciting for many people, Darwinism as a theory of all life is a case of jumping to conclusions.  There may be arguments-- the argument from reason of C.S. Lewis (Miracles) and others is one, I think-- that prove it is impossible for materialistic, evolutionary processes to have given rise to all life as we know it (ourselves in particular) but at any rate the best that can be justly claimed for the theory is that it might be a possibility.  The epistemology, and therefore the epistemic status, of Darwinian evolution is entirely different from that of physics, chemistry, and other proper sciences.  Not only has it not been exhaustively tested in every detail by experiment; it can probably not even be creditable with being falsifiable in the Popperian sense, or at least, to the extent that any falsification-tests can be proposed, far more parsimonious variations of the theory (making no grand claims about the origins of all life) could probably be framed for which the set of falsifiable predictions made by the theory would be the same.  Unfortunately, we have seen only hints of the needed recognition of the limits of Darwinian theory so far.  Most Darwinism continues to be the combination of brilliant insight and dogmatic table-pounding that is Darwin's Dangerous Idea.

The Domains of Reason, and of Intersubjectivity

As a metaphor for the world we live in, consider a city with very strict privacy laws.  In this city, everyone is entitled to privacy in his own home, and is forbidden to surrender that privacy by admitting anyone else to his home, or sell his home and move to another.  The streets are public: there people meet and mingle and converse.  The houses are private, each accessible only to one.  These arrangements would affect the structure of knowledge in this city. 

Things in the streets, like fire hydrants and stoplights, would be visible to all.  When they were discussed, people could readily allude to specific examples.  If someone suspected that the reports he heard about a fire hydrant or a stoplight was untruthful or erroneous, he could go and check for himself.  Curious, clever people who discovered new things about fire hydrants and stoplights, or discovered facts that overturned eventual wisdom, could demonstrate their discoveries to others.  Everyone who undertook to study them could readily benefit from the accumulated knowledge of others, satisfying himself of its truth by observing the demonstrations.  Establishing terminology and consensus about lawlike generalizations would be straightforward.

Some things in the houses might be common to all of them, e.g., kitchen sinks and showers.  Still, it would be difficult to establish any general rules about these.  If Person A observes that his kitchen sink has properties x, y, and z, he cannot be sure, merely on the basis of experience, whether those are general features of kitchen sinks and showers, or peculiar characteristics of his own.  He can only investigate this by asking other people about their kitchen sinks.  If other people tell him, "Yes, my sink has property x, too," he may conclude that he has discovered a general feature of sinks, whereas if they tell him, "No, mine is not like that," he may decide that property x is a distinctive feature of his own sink.  Yet he may still be suspicious.  On the one hand, if people confirm his claim, he may suspect that they are merely suggestible or polite, and that if he could observe their sinks firsthand he would see something different.  On the other hand, if people deny his claim, he may think he has not explained it well, or his interlocutors are obtuse, and that actually their sinks do have the same feature.

It will be especially frustrating for a man who, having great curiosity about kitchen sinks and showers, studies them in great detail and becomes an expert plumber.  When he expounds his elaborate explications to his less curious and ingenious neighbors, to see if his findings match their experience, they may shrug and say, "I don't know."  He may be fortunate and find other autodidact plumbers to converse with.  But, even if he and his fellow enthusiasts are able to converse productively, he may suspect that his sample is biased, and that it is something strange about the plumbing in these houses that sparked their unusual shared interest.

One barrier to discussing the houses in our city is linguistic.  No one can ever establish the meaning of a term that describes something in the house by saying: "See that? That's a sink."  Instead, they will have to talk about the things in the houses by analogy to things in the streets.  But this is likely to give the discussion a weirdly censored character.  We may suppose that there are drinking fountains in the streets, so conversations about interior design tend to rely on the street experience of drinking fountains to explain the house experience of sinks.  Indeed, very likely, sinks will simply be referred to as (interior) drinking fountains, and if drinking fountains are rare in the streets, the word may almost always be used to refer to kitchen sinks, yet everyone will maintain an awareness of the metaphorical origins of the word.  There may, however, be other features of the interiors where external metaphors are much less satisfactory-- our city-dwellers might find they can only refer to ceiling lamps as (interior) suns, and to carpets as lawns-- and still others where even passable external metaphors are elusive, e.g., wall sockets.

Of course, there will be some interior features that differ between houses.  Jacuzzis, sunrooms, skylights, and wine cellars may confuse or be dismissed by those whose houses lack these features.  Our city-dwellers may fail to develop a verbal distinction between jacuzzis and bathtubs, leaving many bathers driving themselves crazy trying to figure out how to turn on the jacuzzi jets in their ordinary tubs.  Those who are familiar with staircases from sloped parts of the street, but live in one-story houses, may think talk of "internal staircases" is a rather desperate attempt to describe kitchen tables and chairs, and think those who say that internal staircases are really just the same as external ones have an odd notion of what qualifies as a close analogy.

It's a safe bet that knowledge of fire hydrants, stoplights, and cars in this city will progress a good deal faster and farther than knowledge of kitchen tubs, sinks, and lamps.  Car mechanics will gain prestige as their discipline passes from strength to strength, while electricians and plumbers will find the situation increasingly embarrassing.  Their studies may, indeed, attract a good deal of interest at the popular level, on the grounds that plumbing and electricity are important to people who want to live happy lives (e.g., to read books after dark, and to keep clean).  But consensus will be elusive, and there will be a general feeling that while the car mechanics of today certainly know a lot more about their subject than the car mechanics of the past, the same cannot be said with anything like the same confidence of plumbers and electricians.  Meanwhile, there will be some who, observing the way interior studies are always leading to bizarre myths, like the perennial claim that bathtubs have jacuzzi jets, or to insoluble disputes, like the one about whether internal staircases are more appropriate for walking on, like external staircases are, or whether they are merely platforms on which to eat food.  Some critics may question whether there is any reason to believe that "houses" really exist at all, or, if they do in some sense exist, whether they are not reducible to streets.  Some of these critics may be sufficiently sophisticated to scoff at the naive answer, "But I know houses exist. I live in one!"

Readers will have guessed that the houses are minds/souls.  The streets are the domain of intersubjectivity.  My point is that the domain of intersubjectivity is not coextensive with the domain of reason.  We can reason from internal experience in much the same way as we do from our sensory acquaintance with the external world; indeed, knowledge from introspection is immediate and indubitable, while knowledge of the external world has-- as Karl Popper has noted-- an inevitably conjectural character.  But any discussion has a bias in favor of the domain of intersubjectivity, and also, in the domain of intersubjectivity, the accumulation of knowledge is accelerated by efficiency advantages that result from division of labor and gains from specialization.  I think this accounts for much of the interminable character of philosophical discourse.  Philosophy has one foot in the domain of introspection and one in the domain of intersubjectivity.  In the domain of introspection, it is hard to establish consensus.  And the domain of intersubjectivity enjoys a natural advantage, greatly augmented in recent centuries by the advance of natural sciences.  This empowers philosophers who try to abolish the domain of introspection and make the domain of intersubjectivity master (e.g., Daniel Dennett).  Other philosophers, wiser though not more brilliant, carefully and painstakingly reclaim turf for the domain of introspection, but due to the nature of that domain, they can only persuade, rather than prove.

"Mental Thieves"

From Matthew 6:19-21:

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal.  But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal.  For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

St. John of Kronstadt, in his book My Life in Christ, writes:

Here in this world of vanities, in this adulterous and sinful world, our souls and bodies are continually and often imperceptibly corrupted "by moth and rust, and thieves [mental ones] break through and steal" the treasures of the soul, that is: "righteousness and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost."  What is, then, the true remedy against the continual, sinful corruption of these mental thieves?  The prayer of repentance and of faith.  It revives and vivifies our souls, corrupted by seductive carnal desires, and drives away the mental thieves; it is a scourge for them, whilst for us it is the source of power, life and salvation...

I am fascinated by St. John's concept of "mental thieves."  One of the mysteries of this life is that at times our imaginations are capable of such sublime acts of creation, and our hearts of such joyous moods, yet these are constantly being invaded by distractions.  If I were to catalogue all my thoughts in a day, and appraise rationally whether they were worth thinking about, I suspect that 90% of them would be insignificant, often tedious and repetitive, a senseless gnawing on this or that trivial grudge or pet peeve, things that if I could only forget them would not matter at all.  And this is how I spend the greater part of my life!  And yet I know that I am capable of thoughts so much better, which could benefit myself, or others, or both!  Perhaps this is part of what Our Lord meant when he spoke of burying our talents in the earth: letting our minds, which are capable of such glorious works of reason and imagination, sink into swamps of trivial resentments and worries and casuistries.

Sin as Slavery

From the Gospel of John:

Jesus replied, "I tell you the truth, everyone who sins is a slave to sin. Now a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed." (John 8:34-36)

That to sin is to be a slave to sin is apparent in the case of the drug addict, under a physical compulsion to get the next hit.  But in general, the idea that sin is a sort of slavery is highly non-obvious.  If anything, the opposite-- that not sin, but not to be allowed to sin, is slavery-- seems more plausible.  The libertine can have sex with anyone he likes; the monk, and to a lesser extent the monogamist, voluntary submit to a great narrowing of their choice set.  If we are to believe the words of John/Jesus, we must at least acknowledge the existence of a powerful illusion to the contrary.

Is every sin, like drug addiction, an inner thraldom?  Think of a lustful lover obsessed with his mistress; a greedy man obsessed with his money; a vain man obsessed with his beauty and reputation; an ambitious man obsessed with the pursuit of power.  Each is under compulsion.  Each may find his thoughts trapped in a narrow circle.  But then, what is the difference between a compulsion and a desire?  Any desire may cause a man to act, and surely, to be truly free, a man does not need to be without desires.  A simple definition of freedom is the absence of external compulsion.  To extend the meaning of freedom to include an absence of the internal compulsions which are caused by at least some sins is natural enough, but it problematizes the theory of human motivation.

If we define freedom as the size of choice set, we can make sense of the idea that both external and inner compulsions are detrimental to it.  That is, suppose that a person with choice set A, B, C, and D is freer than one whose choice set is only A, B, and C.  If D is taking a walk in the park, it is not available to a prisoner; external compulsion thus reduces the prisoner's freedom.  If D is a course of action that requires a man to live soberly, it is not available to an alcoholic or a drug addict; here sin reduces a person's freedom.  Similarly, if D is faithful marriage, or monastic celibacy, it is not available to an incorrigible slut or skirt-chaser; if D involves a resignation of worldly status it is not available to the ambitious; if ascetic self-denial, it is not available to the glutton; and so forth.

Dualism, the Will, and a Person

I can't say how I came to a belief in dualism (that is, an ontology in which the main ontological distinction is between mind and matter, soul and body, that which is thought and that which has physical existence) because I don't remember a time before I believed in it.  I should say, by the way, that I would not necessarily regard myself as a dualist now; I am perhaps a "dualist-plus": I believe in a physical world and in what I like to call the thought-realm, with neither reducible to the other, but I'm open to the existence of further ontological categories, and to that extent I cease to be a dualist (a two-ist, as it were).  Nonetheless, for most philosophical purposes I'm content to defend dualism, because the same arguments that defend dualism would, I think, be the same arguments that would defend dualism-plus.

If I had to give the most candid reason for my dualism, I'd probably have to give a naive one: Dualism is just obvious fact.  Experience and common sense obviously show that there are, on the one hand, thoughts, and on the other, physical things, and that these cannot interact with each other except with the mediation of the mind, through the will, in the case of thoughts influence physical things, or through the perceptions, in the case of physical things influencing thoughts.  If perception is disabled, physical things cannot influence thoughts-- the flash of a siren can trigger no thoughts in a blind man-- and if the will is disabled, thoughts cannot influence physical things.  Will and perception are mysteries that must somehow be accounted for, of course, but interaction between the physical and the mental remains comparatively rare.  The overwhelming majority of what is happening in the physical world even in my immediate vicinity, let alone the universe, is unperceived by me, while the vast majority of my thoughts never result in any action of the will in the physical world.  Moreover, thoughts and physical things are ontologically incommensurable: a thought-chair is a different thing from a real chair.  A real chair, for example, always has a weight.  A thought-chair does not, unless I have specifically imagined its weight, and even then this thought-weight seems to be rather a different type of entity than the real weight of a real chair.

Because my dualism seems to be a mere recognition of obvious facts, it's hard for me to enumerate "formative influences" for it.  Yet I know that many people take for granted beliefs that an outsider can recognize are contingent in many ways on his environment.  Moreover, I was surprised to find that in the commend thread of my recent post "What is a Person?", all my interlocutors took a line that seemed to have anti-dualist ramifications.  Which makes me think dualism is rarer than I thought, and maybe my own long-held dualist assumptions call for some explanation.  So I guess I would attribute it to:

What is Faith?

Faith is an ongoing mystery for me, and I get excited when I see serious discussions of it in print because I'm trying to figure out what people mean by it. I've written about it before on this blog: see "Sam Brownback on Evolution, and: What is Faith?"; or "Is the Cogito Valid? And: Proof of the Physical World". Non-religious people who see themselves as in the Enlightenment tradition-- my sister and brother-in-law, traditionalist Catholics, would call them "modernists"-- typically regard faith as religion's epistemic original sin, the belief-without-grounds which undergirds and vitiates the whole religious worldview; and there is some truth in this, at least in that many fundamentalist Protestants today seem to see the word "faith" as a license to accept religious beliefs dogmatically and groundlessly. (I remember, long ago, reading with great relief an essay by C.S. Lewis which described faith in quite different terms.)

What is perhaps most distinctive about my understanding of faith is that I see the belief that there are patterns in the world and that there are other people in the world as distinctive faith-propositions, "meta-beliefs" which can be neither justified (rigorously)-- or for that matter even defined-- nor escaped: they are an indelible part of our consciousness.  The contraries of these two beliefs may be called skepticism and solipsism: both would seem to be live philosophical possibilities, difficult or impossible to refute, and yet there has probably never been a single skeptic or solipsist in the history of the world.  I see the belief that there is a God as parallel to the two faith-propositions above: it is difficult or impossible to define, to either prove or disprove, yet it seems to be a deep psychological fact about humanity: the belief in God (or gods) characterizes every civilization and is probably as strong and widespread in the world today as it has ever been even if atheism has a higher profile.  On the other hand, it doesn't seem plausible to regard atheism as a psychological impossibility the way solipsism and skepticism seem to be, even if we should allow for the possibility that people may believe in God "without knowing it," having attitudes or feelings or beliefs that are consistent with and arise from a subconscious theism even as they reject the claims about God that are made by the major religions.

Is my view of faith compatible with my commitment to Russian Orthodoxy? Here is an account of faith from Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, by Father Michael Pomazansky but intending to embody the beliefs of the Orthodox Church rather than his mere personal opinions, a book given to me by my Orthodox godfather for my instruction in the faith: