(Aristotle 2)   Aristotle and the Concern with One’s Honor

    I have been trying to formulate the limits to Aristotelian-style ethics in a thesis. Well, here it is: Aristotelian-style virtue-in-a-just-community-as-our-nature ethics is a necessary but not sufficient condition of our full humanity. It falls short of what we think of as “morality.” It doesn’t get us to a common humanity. It leaves no conceptual space for the absoluteness of Good and Evil. It is ultimately grounded in a high understanding of honor but falls short of love. It blocks out the light breaking in from a dimension beyond our interpreted everyday world, without which we must remain rather shallow than ever profound. (Something like this was the thesis of my long-abandoned doctoral dissertation, but I have never been able to stop thinking about it.

   [We cannot completely share Aristotle’s Greek idea of a community, and thus aspects of his picture of a virtuous man and even his understanding of certain virtues. But his basic approach has been translated into terms befitting a certain kind of Christian community by Aquinas and developed into something extremely insightful by Alasdair MacIntyre.]

 

  We all think that a person who does what he does, who lives as he does, just for the sake of appearances and the effects on other people is superficial. Aristotle agreed.

    In the movie Patton, we see General Patton disobeying orders and making his own battle plan to get to Messina before the British Field Marshall Montgomery. In his own mind, his was the better battle plan. Although his army suffered heavy casualties, he was convinced the casualties would have been higher had he just followed orders. But as portrayed, his main motivation was the fame and glory that would go to Montgomery and not him. He would not have wanted the fame had he not been convinced he deserved it. The fame was not an end in itself. But neither would just being a good general have satisfied him, without the fame. The desire for fame was so great we are at least invited to wonder whether it didn’t distort some of his decisions. I think Aristotle would have been critical of Patton’s desire for fame (as depicted in the movie).

    Much worse than Patton was Hitler’s taking the credit and thus the glory for Germany’s victory in the Battle of France (1940). True, Hitler was not happy with the new-and-supposedly-improved Schlieffen Plan; true, Hitler was open to and ultimately approved the actual battle plan. He deserved credit for that. But he took credit for the actual plan itself – which was made by General Erich von Manstein and his staff – so that he could present himself as the second coming of Frederick the Great to the world. He was worse than Patton because – rather like the narcissist Trump – he cared only for appearance without bothering about the substance. [As a teen, I was susceptible to this. On a camping trip with two buddies from high school, I pretended to other boys we met to be a college football player, just to bask in the “honor” of being seen as someone I believed better than myself, a kind of living out of a compensatory daydream. One of the more shameful episodes of my life, if not the most consequential. Utterly trivial compared with Hitler and Patton, but the same underlying structure: a concern for how you appear before others as a primary motive for acts and how you live.]

   In different degrees, both Patton and Hitler cared about how they appeared before others as something worthy in itself, as the highest value. Fame, glory, and honor – taken as ends-in-themselves, as a reason for living and acting – are “a bit too superficial” to be the goal of a good (ethical) life for Aristotle and us.

   Aristotle has been criticized for the importance he places on ‘proper pride’ or the concern about how others perceive you. I don’t think the criticism is justified, not all of it. Some part of ‘proper pride’ or ‘self-respect’ for Aristotle is connected to his immediate culture. But much of what he says about the right attitude towards how others perceive you is right on. In a genuine community, it matters. Honor, respect, and good reputation are the “greatest of all the external goods.” It is something that – as a member of a community (and it is our natural form of being, to be in a political community).

   We see this most clearly in communities in which life and death are at stake: in the army. I have listened to many stories told by veterans of many wars. It is always the same. When, for example, one soldier cannot leave another behind even though nothing of military significance depends on bringing him back and one must risk one’s life, it is never the case that the main motivation for doing so was glory – say, to win the Congressional Medal of Honor. Soldiers don’t risk their lives to save their comrades or brothers as a means to the end of getting a medal and so basking in the glory of being a hero. [If we knew one for whom this was the motive, there would be no honor in it: it would be self-defeating.] Not to leave someone behind is a matter of honor. It expresses a form of love between soldiers (who may not even like each other personally, who may not even be decent human beings in all respects). The lives of every combat soldier depend on the bravery and competence of every other soldier. If one fails, they could all be wiped out. This grounds a mutual respect (love) that transcends everyday morality. It is like an unconditional duty not to leave anyone behind (all things being equal).

    So imagine someone who doesn’t abandon his brothers and at great risk to his own life brings them back. Imagine he is awarded the Medal of Honor. Winning the medal wasn’t any part of his motivation, but a recognition of the significance of what he did. What should his attitude be towards the medal? Toward the honor? Such soldiers have different attitudes towards it. Some don’t place any great value on it because they experience it as so external to what matters to them: the group of soldiers they served with. Some see it as an impersonal honor, given to one individual who sees himself as nothing but a representative of his unit. It is an honor for his unit of which he is arbitrarily the steward. For others, it means a great deal as a proper recognition for what he suffered and did on behalf of others, though getting a medal was no part of his reason for so acting. He did what he had to do.  

   In no case, however, would such a soldier be indifferent to how others treated him. He may well eschew any hero worship. He may well downplay the heroism of his action before others. But if someone treated him as Trump did John McCain, in effect demeaning the significance of his suffering and his bravery, he would not be indifferent. And we – his community – would not be either. That would be treated as a grave insult to him and the community: both at the same time; you can’t separate the individual from the community in this, which was precisely Aristotle’s point. [Trump is not part of the community, not part of any community. He is incapable of community.] There is no prescribed way to react to such demeaning trash. (Had I been McCain, I would have shot the bastard. But McCain had more dignity and sense.) But we know how unbearable it is to witness an honorable person demeaned and humiliated by outsiders.

   I once met my friend’s father, who I knew was a veteran of Korea and Vietnam. He had a photograph on his wall of the President awarding him a medal. Now it didn’t matter that I thought the Vietnam War was a strategic and moral disaster. It didn’t matter what kind of a man my friend’s father otherwise was (how he was as a father, what his politics were, etc.). I spontaneously felt a kind of deep respect because I knew he had experienced something terrible, something that might have broken my courage or most men’s courage, and he had done something noble in the face of extreme danger. That deserves honor. I feel the same in the presence of such soldiers from other countries than my own. [Only war crimes would negate this feeling. If fact, a soldier is deserving of honor partly because they are in a situation in which the line between crime and non-crime is so blurred, a situation in which keeping your decency is a high achievement in itself.] It would be a violation of the meaning of what my friend’s father had suffered and done to have acted towards him as though he were a criminal or a servant or even a person who had never been in such a situation.

      And he would have a real reason to feel demeaned or insulted had I done so. There is such a thing as an appropriate response to the meaning (the reality) of people and their lives. That is what Aristotle meant by proper pride. And this only makes sense in a community. (Again, Trump as the counter-example: everything for him is transactional. There is no honor. The men who died in combat in the service of their country are to him “suckers and losers.” Where there is no possible community, that is in fact an intelligible response. Trump represents the apotheosis of individualism.)

  I used examples from the military because that is what Aristotle himself believed best exemplified what he was getting at. But it applies any area where there is a community. I once witnessed a history teacher remove a disrespectful student from his class. He was a good teacher, always prepared, who cared about his subject. The open disrespect of this student demeaned not only the teacher as an individual, but teachers in general and the subject of history. The teacher’s anger was justified not primarily because the disrespectful student disrespected him as an individual. As a history teacher, the teacher represented the community of teachers in general and historians in particular. Many people can overlook purely personal insults but cannot overlook disrespect to their community. As a representative of that community and its genuine value, the teacher was justified in his anger. Not to have cared would have signaled that he, the teacher, did not care or did not care enough. That would indeed be a defect of the teacher’s character.

  And it is not superficial to care about one’s reputation as a teacher for the same reasons. This proper care – a care that has nothing to do with egotism or narcissism – is not superficial. It is a response to the meaning of, in this example, the teaching of history, perhaps even the love of teaching and history. Love often implies a protective attitude about what you love, and concern with reputation can be part of that. Individualism is blind to such things.

  I could multiply examples from sports, medicine, law enforcement and justice, politics, and so on. This is not alien to us even today. The difference between us and Aristotle is that this community-being structured the best kind of human life for Aristotle. We experience it, if at all, only as soldiers, teachers, doctors, athletes, etc. – i.e. in fragments of our lives. Most of our lives are determined by mass society in capitalism, with its consumerism, subjectivism, radical individualism, narcissism. The marketplace of products or personalities knows no honor – Trump may be taken as a pure example of a capitalist personality, undiluted by any older community ethos (which many of us still have some experience of). And our moral ideas, such as they are, stem from religion, not from Aristotle, a thoroughly worldly philosopher.

    There is an inside-outside dynamic here. Whether a regiment, a basketball team, a profession (e.g. historians, judges, physicians, etc. - any community devoted to any worthy purpose) or what: there are skills, understanding, and virtues required to be a functioning member - beyond that which is required just to be a human being in a sense. Members owe each other respect on that basis alone. And for those who do exceptional things, an added kind of respect of due. The individual is never just an individual here but a member. Outsiders' perceptions - while they may be due - have a different quality than insider perceptions. I suppose for the hero, the probably quiet acknowledgement of his brothers matters most; for the teacher, the acknowledgement of fellow teachers and students matters most; for the judge the acknowledge of fellow judges as well as legal scholars and lawyers matter most; for the basketball player, the acknowledgement of fellow players and coaches, etc. Honor from the outside community is a function of the significance of the practice for the community at large. The honor is grounded in virtue, and exceptional instances of virtue.

     I am still marking out areas of agreement with Aristotle. Now I can go on not so much as to criticize his thought but to argue that it is not the whole story. And also give Plato his due.

Evil and Understanding: Some Thoughts on Raskolnikov and Macbeth 

                                              Jon Finch as Macbeth in Roman Polanski's film

Understanding Macbeth and understanding an act of mine. if we truly understood that an action was evil, we couldn't do it. That counter-intuitive thought becomes more plausible in the light of remorse.  Of course, we could say to ourselves that murder is evil, and still commit murder, as Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov does in Crime and Punishment.   But a man like Raskolnikov doesn't really know the evil he contemplates until he suffers from the pained recognition of guilt – remorse. “Oh my God, what have I done!” uttered in horrified recognition shows that the remorseful person has understood the evil done; and with such an understanding he never would have been able to do the evil in the first place. His understanding of what he has done comes with an understanding of the reality of human beings as creatures who can be wronged in such ways. To understand the meaning of an act is always to understand something about reality. Through the pain of a lucid remorse a deep aspect of the real world and the human spirit is revealed.

      Macbeth's remorse, however, had a different character due to the clarity and honesty of his foreknowledge of the evil he contemplated. Unlike Raskolnikov, for example, Macbeth renounced pseudo-philosophical justifications or rationalizations. He possessed an understanding of what was involved before his crime that is usually only granted to the evil-doer after the crime if he suffers remorse. Macbeth's murder of Duncan is “premeditated” in the deepest sense possible: He cannot say “Oh my God, what have I done!” in horrified recognition: his courage and truthfulness ensured that he did (terrifyingly) understand precisely what he proposed to do. To understand the evil of murder is just to recoil in horror over the temptation to do it – or to suffer remorse after having done it.  Macbeth does both.

      What further makes Macbeth tragic is that – in a grand way – his fall into the worst evil at the same time precludes final condemnation on our part. To be possessed by deep desires and tempted to realize such desires through evil is a common human fate.  Macbeth's deep desire to be King as well as to overcome the limitations of the human condition (cf. Lear) in fulfilling it reflects his high social standing, his exceptional valor, and his sublime imagination. But this very combination destroys the distance between temptation and action that characterizes Hamlet, for example, and I suppose most of us as well.         

        The sense in which Macbeth was indeed blind and acted in ignorance is so universal that few of us can resist the attraction to identify with him in spite of the hideousness of his crimes.  Macbeth knew he was losing his soul for the sake of his deep desires; he knew the horror of this loss, knew that, when the time came, the horror would be beyond what he could imagine, even if he trusted his courage to endure it.  But what he did mistakenly hope was that the moment, that present at least, when his deep desires were fulfilled, would be glorious.  The glorious present of fulfillment was to be the prize for which damnation is the price – a price only the most valorous could contemplate. That was his trap.

       But the prize and the price are not incommensurable – the Good (or morality) is absolute and can't be weighed against other goods. “Damnation” just means evil can never be a price for anything desired.  The very idea that there is a prize (deep desires) to be traded for Macbeth's “precious jewel” turns out to be an illusion that Macbeth only sees in the end, in utter despair.  Through his sublime imagination Macbeth tries to seal off the present moment of fulfillment – always deferred until after the next crime: as though he could imagine that only the present were real and enjoyable, not care about the past evil or the future despair. But the present cannot be isolated from the past or the future in the play's moral universe. Only gradually does it dawn on him that the prize was a chimera. Having grasped finally the emptiness of the prize, Macbeth “heroically” accepted the final despair that was always the inevitable consequence of evil done. Not only his insight into the evil he did but, at the end, the illusory nature of the enjoyment of the desires for which it was done (here the point of the witches equivocation) complete the revelation of truth. – In a purely private, middle-class way, this is the story of a betrayal of mine: understanding life through literature; understanding literature through life.

 

 

Macbeth cannot pray. I cannot imagine Macbeth praying given the irreversible nature of what he did. Repentance seems impossible. It is as though he married Hell while still in earthly life. Having grasped finally the emptiness of the prize, Macbeth “heroically” accepted the despair that was always the inevitable consequence of evil done. Not only his insight into the evil he did but, at the end, the illusory nature of the enjoyment of the desires for which it was done (here the point of the witches’ equivocation) complete the revelation of truth. Yet even in the face of Hell (the final meaningless of the “sound and fury” soliloquy), Macbeth refuses to repent due not just to the very “courage” that stood in such tension with his conscience, but because the essence of the act, its sublimity, is just that it precluded repentance. Having committed himself in full knowledge of the evil, he would seem false and cowardly in his own eyes to wish all undone at the point when he must pay the price. Or rather: to repent would be to concede that his act lacked all heroic or tragic stature – ‘oh, sorry, I didn’t really mean it’; that his understanding of his act did not manifest who he was, did not disclose a man whose courage put him beyond good and evil, but merely an ambitious man driven shabby justification for a power grab, spurred on by the supernatural assurance of success.

        Compare me: to deny the sublime dimension to my Eros for woman A would mean my betrayal of woman B was just a piece of shabbiness for the sake of all-too-human but reprehensible lust of an aging man for a younger (unstable) woman. There is a structural similarity to Macbeth’s inability to repent. I can repent almost everything, but I cannot think my Eros for A was less than real and profound (as it indeed felt) without at the same time the judgment being forced upon me – ‘you are utterly contemptible’. Contemptible means: better not to have existed, a drag on the universe. 

     There seem to be two Hells: one for those who wish they had never been born; another for those who, to become what they mistakenly imagine they really are, violate the meaning of their lives, of human life. I do believe deep wishes, even deep needs are sometimes in conflict with the real meaning of our lives, and that there is something tragic in this – but that might be a piece of opportunism. Macbeth is a sacred text because it has the power to reveal the depths of the human spirit.

. . .

The sound and fury soliloquy is still the best statement of what Hell is that I have read, the clearest revelation of Hell as final meaningless, as the utter absence of love. It is the end goal of all evil. It is what every evil deed tends towards and embodies, though outside of Shakespeare hardly anyone can look at this truth so clearly (why did Tolstoy hate Shakespeare?). This comes as a response to the news of Lady Macbeth's death and his inability to register any grief at all:

                            Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

                            Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

                            To the last syllable of recorded time;

                            And all our yesterdays have lighted fools       

                            The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!         

                            Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

                            That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

                            And then is heard no more. It is a tale

                            Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

                            Signifying nothing.

I have no idea how to think about Heaven and Hell ontologically. But I do know they are symbols of the human spirit, Heaven at one end, signifying affirmation, love, joy, love of beauty, creative joy, quiet appreciate of the goodness that is at least part of life; at the other end Hell, final despair, the loss of the capacity, even the desire to love and be loved, the inability to care about anything, utter meaninglessness projected from the emptiness and cold of the lost soul onto all of Creation.  Nihilists don't undertake an impartial metaphysical investigation of existence and rationally conclude on the basis of evidence that existence is meaningless, human life a mistake. Rather they carry that meaningless around with them and project it onto existence, make any investigation prove this felt thesis that reflects the state of their souls.

 

 

Judging People from the Past and Very Different Cultures (again)

I will go on with Aristotle when I have finished my reading. Just a short thought today.

 I have written about struggling with making moral judgments about people from the past: how to think about people socialized into the slavery or apartheid culture of the American South; how to think about the people who intensified the bombing (firebombing) of German and Japanese cities, especially when it was clear they were defeated; how to think about individuals such as Robert E. Lee or Winston Churchill, great people in a way but people with deeply flawed characters and moral belief systems.

    One problem: in a sense, I don’t believe in making moral judgments at all, if that means something like deciding whether a person deserves Hell or is radically evil. Human beings lack the wisdom and goodness to make such judgments. Take it as a metaphor if you want, but only God – and absolute Goodness, Justice, and Mercy – could make such judgments. I take Jesus literally: I cannot easily even think of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Trump in Hell, though I can imagine an unimaginably painful Purgatory.  (Of course, I don’t equate Trump with the other three in terms of the blood he has on his hands. He does have blood on his hands though.) A scene from Ellis Peter’s Cadfael, a monk in the 10^th and 11^th centuries – the BBC television version, expresses my attitude toward moral condemnation. A woman had committed murder and Cadfael and his friend Sheriff Hugh Beringar:

 

Cadfael: Whatever was in her might have been best if it had not been maimed. She was much wronged.

 

Beringar: Old friend, I doubt if even you can get Susanne among the fold among the lambs. Now she chose her way and it had taken her far out of the reach of man’s mercy. Oh, and now I suppose you’ll tell me that God’s reach is longer than man’s…

 

Cadfael: It had better be. Otherwise, we are all lost.

 

[I don’t believe we are born guilty. Babies are innocent. The symbolism of babies in Hell (Limbo) in Dante is the perfect picture of the perverse essence of that thought. Knowing the Cadfael character, I think he would agree. “Suffer the children to come unto me.” Children are innocent. But which of us is entirely free of guilt after an adult life in the world? There is a solidarity in this – let he who is without guilt cast the first stone! This is what I take Cadfael to be expressing here, and not the dreadful doctrine of original sin.]

 

...

 

     Secondly, most of us feel uncomfortable blaming someone morally who grew up in a different world and acted under the pressure of terrible circumstances. When I strongly criticize the aerial bombing of German and Japanese cities, even at a stage of the war when its effectiveness in shortening the war was uncertain (it had no effect, as we know now), I don’t wish to blame Churchill, say, in the sense that I would have been righteous and done better in the same circumstances. I do wish to point out an ethical limitation of that culture, however, a kind of meaning blindness. It was morally imperative, imperative in every sense, that Hitler’s Germany be defeated – also for the sake of Germany. If it was rationally plausible that bombing cities (killing children, etc.) only way to do this, it would still be evil but perhaps justifiable. At the very latest, after the establishment of a 2^nd front (or 3^rd front, counting Italy), no reasonable person could believe bombing cities was necessary: Germany was beaten. But in that context it was almost taken for granted that killing enemy civilians and destroying infrastructure was a part of war; it could have, perhaps, shortened the war. The hundreds of thousands of dead children, women, old people – part of war. 

   (Still is for Putin and Netanyahu’s government. Even when you don't intentionally target civilians, you still end up killing them in masses - every individual killed unimaginable unless you are there - as the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan showed: an estimated 432,093 civilians died direct violent deaths according The Watson Institute for International Affairs, at Brown University. Add to this the maimings, the hunger, the dislocation, etc. How can you kill that many people as "collateral damage." I suppose you have to have some understanding for those Israeli's who accuse the US of having a double standard when it comes to their slaughter of civilians in Gaza. I have no words for any of this. There must be a better way to respond to terrorism.) 

     By criticizing that I am criticizing a cultural meaning blindness, a culturally transmitted ethical limitation more than judging the souls of the people in that culture. (Our culture is no doubt also meaning blind in many ways.) Not only the meaning of the civilian lives destroyed but the lives of the bomber crews sent on extremely dangerous missions to kill civilians: I have never been inclined to judge them. (I have talked to two bomber pilots. One a vet from WWII who said his main memory was fear and grief at the loss of so many fellows. One a young air force officer in the 80's - probably had never been in combat - who told me you have to think of the people you bomb as ants.)

 

    Thirdly and most importantly, to condemn past actions and practices does not imply self-righteously, moralistically blaming people from different times and places, from a safe outside point of view. It can also express a need to orient myself (to orient ourselves) to deeds, people, and forms of life we are somehow connected to. This includes defining my moral starting point, my context. It influences how I would respond today to what my government does, for example, or how I need to comport myself to African Americans.

 

   Not every moral criticism is a moralistic judgment. 

. . .

What cultures that disturb me most were / are generally blind to is the meaning of a human life, the meaning of destroying a human life. Blind to the evil involved. To the meaning of grieving loved ones. To the kind of searing remorse people would experience if they did understand the meaning of what they did. Here is some reporting about Robert E. Lee:

On June 24, 1859, the New York Tribune published an anonymous letter to the editor describing how Lee ordered the whipping of three enslaved people as punishment for running away. The New York Tribune was a well-known abolitionist paper in the years preceding the Civil War. They often published sensationalized stories about slavery to build public outcry against the inhumanity of slavery and gain support for the abolitionist movement. This article described how after George Washington Parke Custis had died, his son-in-law, Robert E. Lee, proved to be a strict slaveholder, which prompted the three enslaved people to run away. The letter then describes how the overseer took them “into a barn, stripped, and the men received thirty and nine lashes each, from the hands of the slave-whipper, when he refused to whip the girl, and Mr. Lee himself administered the thirty and nine lashes to her.” 

Another anonymous letter also published in the Tribune claimed “Col. Lee ordered them whipped. They were two men and one woman. The officer whipped the two men, and said he would not whip the woman, and Col. Lee stripped her and whipped her himself.” 

Lee never publicly responded or denied these claims but wrote to his son George Washington Custis Lee in July that “The N. Y. Tribune has attacked me for my treatment of your grandfather's slaves, but I shall not reply. He has left me an unpleasant legacy.” The Lees did not make any further comments about the event until after the Civil War.

I am pretty sure Robert E. Lee never lost any sleep over any of this. If he did, the scales might have been removed from his eyes that prevented him from seeing the true nature of what he did - which is easier for us to see that people of that time and culture.

To talk about the meaning of a person's life is a way of talking about their reality.

 Thoughts on Aristotle - (Aristotle 1)

   I am rereading Aristotle’s Nichomachaen Ethics – in a new translation that 1) really lets Aristotle’s voice come through (or one possible voice of Aristotle), and 2) translates the Greek into a modern English idiom. When I was studying Greek (1978-1982), I read Plato (The Apology, The Republic, The Phaedrus, and fragments of other works) but never read Aristotle and never wanted to.  Aristotle wrote dialogs that were said to be masterpieces of writing. But all have been lost, in events like the fire that burned the great library at Alexandria, first by Christian fanatics and then by Muslim fanatics – a rare area where Christians and Muslims agreed:

 

The second, more famous, burning of the library came at the hands of Theophilus who was Patriarch of Alexandria from 385 to 412 CE. He turned the Temple of Serapis into a Christian church. It is likely that the collection was destroyed by the Christians who moved in. Some sources say nearly 10 percent of the library’s collection was housed in the Temple of Serapis. In the following years, the Christian attack against the library escalated, and the last great pagan philosopher and librarian, Hypatia, was tortured and killed.

 

The final blow came in 640 CE when Alexandria came under Muslim rule. The Muslim ruler, Caliph Omar, asserted that the library’s contents would “either contradict the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, so they are superfluous.” The contents of the library were then supposedly used as tinder for the city’s bathhouses. Even then, it is said that it took six months for all the materials to burn. Practically nothing of the library remains today.

 

In any case, it is the first time I have ever enjoyed reading Aristotle, thanks be to the translator. (It is the Penguin edition.)

 

  I have always been attracted to certain aspects of Aristotle’s ethical thought. Developing good character traits like honesty, courage, a sense of justice, having the self-restraint necessary to handle the desires for food, sex, and money, and training your understanding to know your priorities and the right thing to do. An essential goal of education and upbringing is making these “virtues” into predispositions and, in the end, into spiritual demeanors. Having fallen short of true virtue in my life, I am in a good position to know how important this is.

   You do this by practicing. “We can only learn to love by loving,” wrote Iris Murdoch. That is an Aristotelian thought. It applies to all the virtues. You can only learn to be honest by telling the truth. Paul James lied about brushing his teeth when he was young. He was just too lazy to brush. I caught him, he was ashamed and promised to do better. So when the temptation to lie about such things arises, he controls them with the thought that it is bad to lie – your words will come to mean nothing, you damage your relationship with others who are close to you and upon whom you depend, you feed other vices like laziness, in the end you might forget how to distinguish between truth and lie altogether and become a Trump (a form of being in Hell). Perhaps he understands all that now. In the beginning it was perhaps mostly shame that motivated him to overcome such temptations and tell the truth. That is a paradigm of how one learns to be virtuous for Aristotle.

    This is interesting because you don’t become a good person by studying philosophy for Aristotle. Virtue was knowledge for Plato (and Socrates I suppose) but whatever that means, it does not mean we can take a philosophy course on virtue and thereby become virtuous. We take on these habits, if we are lucky, long before we can intellectually speculate about them. Emotions are essential – shame in the example I just mentioned. I guess some people will think: this is just behavioral conditioning. Aristotle was deeper. He believed it was our ‘natural’ human state to live in political community with others (actually, if you happen to be a man, but I will let that slide for now), and that only virtuous people can function and thrive in a political community. Thus he also believed it was natural to feel pleasure when you overcome a temptation to lie and tell the truth. It is natural to feel pleasure when your family or community acknowledges your honesty and defines you as an honest person. It is natural in a sense to feel disgusted when confronted with a lying scoundrel like Trump. This is healthy in a sense, just as it is healthy and natural to feel pleasure when in the presence of something beautiful. Emotions are like thoughts: they are responses to reality, and can be ‘true’ or ‘false’ to that reality.

    As a parent or teacher, you want your children or pupils to feel the right things. Only then will they be able to understand what it is to be human at a later stage in their development. Compare this response of Trump:

 

When President Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, near Paris, in 2018, he blamed rain for the last-minute decision, saying that “the helicopter couldn’t fly” and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true.

 

Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed. (Jeffery Goldberg, The Atlantic)

 

Most of us feel reverence in the presence of the graves of those who sacrificed their lives for a greater good. For Trump, a pathological narcissist if there ever was one, it is unintelligible that anyone would die for a greater good, which is connected to his inability to feel reverence, which is to say, is connected to his feeling of contempt for the soldiers who fell in combat. A person incapable of life in a political community is what defines a tyrant (Cicero). This is because he never learned that any community has any meaning, value, or reality. In contrast, Paul James’ comparatively insignificant lesson in honesty contained in itself a valuing of his father and his family. His own good is bound to his being an honest person, and honesty only makes sense if relationships, community are real and valuable. Aristotle believed that apart from community you were either a god or a beast, but not human. Trump – not a god – never learned that community mattered, and thus no virtue much less a hard one like physical courage makes sense to him. Perhaps he could be brought intellectually to understand this – or could have been brought while his brain still worked. But unless he can feel reverence at a soldier's cemetery, he won’t understand courage. The emotions are the bridges to understanding. The understanding is contained in the emotions – or not.

 

    One more thing I like about Aristotle. We can only be fully human in a political community. Virtues like courage and justice have their point in the community. They can become fully actualized only in a community. It would be like learning to play the piano from a book without a piano otherwise. Without such a community, one’s words and actions don’t mean anything; they don’t matter. And for Aristotle, the political community that made the highest form of humanity possible was democratic, where

 

Every man had his public duties to perform, at least in the democratic communities, as politician and soldier. The Greeks had a word for those who avoided these duties: the word was 'idiot.' (Aubrey De Sélincourt)

 

Including in politician was being a member of a jury, which the whole assembly was. If that is going to work at all, a high degree of truthfulness, justice, practical wisdom (common sense), and courage must be present. (Contrast the pitiful state of the GOP in Congress now.) These are constantly exercised, just like Paul James having the opportunity to tell the truth about brushing his teeth. What is good for an individual is not something apart from what is good for the polis – the Greek word for the political community that can’t be translated because we have nothing analogous in our world.

     And it is only in a political community that you can reveal who you are, through your words and acts, words and acts that matter to other people, that are taken seriously, that have consequences, that you have to own (contrast to social media today for the opposite). And a big part of who you are is the character you reveal. We can see this in our own experience. Republicans like Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney, and Adam Kinzinger have revealed through their words and actions that they are loyal, that they are people of courage and integrity; people like Lindsay Graham, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and J.D. Vance have revealed themselves to be sycophantic cowards incapable of having an authentic voice, of being taken seriously. Responsibility for the community develops, tests, and reveals character.

       If you are not part of a polis, you don’t have to chance to be “a someone” in the full sense for Aristotle – this is getting out of the Ethics into the Politics, but they are one line of thought. The polis was what made Greek culture different. Their geography made large political and economic entities extremely difficult. Greeks thus developed small political units in which at least every male citizen could have a voice in political and legal affairs – and of course also fought as soldiers in times of war. The polis was “the focus of a man’s moral, intellectual, aesthetic, social, and practical life” (Kitto, The Greeks) in a way a modern nation-state cannot be for its citizens. The polis was “the means by which the Greek consciously strove to make the life of both the community and the individual more excellent than it was before.”

    The size of the polis was not accidental. Aristotle said that a polis of 10 citizens could not work because it could not be self-sufficient but a polis of 100,000 would be absurd because it could not govern itself.  Size is important if all citizens are to have an active voice, to see and be seen. A difference in quantity at some point becomes a difference in quality. The Persian Empire could not be a social or political form that could bring out our true humanity for Aristotle – and neither could the modern national state. Aristotle wrote: “man is a creature who lives in a polis” [the more literal translation of “man is a political animal”]. The thesis of the thought contained in the Politics: “the polis is the only framework within which man can fully realize his spiritual, moral, and intellectual capacities (Kitto).”

      That living in a polis is not practical today is not a refutation of that argument. It became "impractical" when a student of Aristotle, Alexander of Macedonia (so-called the "great" though not great in my mind) put the nail in the coffin of the polis, and thus the virtues in the fullest sense. For Aristotle that must have been equivalent to The Fall of Man. 

    In any case, the loss of meaning, the feeling of impotence, the absence of a community (outside the family) where your words and deeds matter – I guess most of us can relate to that.

 

I have written about what I like about Aristotle. Tomorrow comes my criticism.

Logic Can't Tell You What Is Good or Right: Kant and Spock

Reason, Morals, and the Categorical Imperative. Kant wanted to deal with the problem of human dignity by appealing not to nature but to reason – which is the impartial judge of particular cultural practices. For Kant Reason was not, as it is for me, that part of our mind that can be in conformity or at least harmony with reality but something more narrow, pure reason: Aristotelian logic plus self-evident axioms. These self-evident axioms, furthermore, did not apply to nature. For example, Leibniz took the principle of sufficient reason as both self-evident and as telling us something about reality (i.e. the proposition that everything must have a cause). For Leibniz, Reason (intuition) assured us of this truth. But if like Kant you do not just assume that nature as it appears to us is the same as nature as it is in itself, then the claim that the principle of sufficient reason tells us something about the world itself rests on an assumption that is (no longer) self-evident. Thus it is not self-evident. 

   This attempt to ground morality in "pure reason" arose in part through the challenge of moral skepticism, i.e. the claim that no neutral standard exists to adjudicate conflicting claims given the mechanical universe he presupposed.

    It was also a response to a change in how nature was conceived. Kant took over – uncritically – the paradigm of nature worked out by people like Galileo and Newton. As a Galileo scholar described his idea of nature:

 

The sky is not blue and roses are not fragrant. I just experience them to be so, or they appear to me – affect me – as being like that. The real, objective world is therefore the world of the primary properties, while the realm of subjective secondary qualities is the domain of animals and human beings", and quotes Galileo:" ‘I think that if one takes away ears, tongues, and roses, there indeed remain the shapes, numbers, and motions, but not the odors, tastes, or sounds; outside the living animal these are nothing but names’ (Buyse, 2013)

 

A consequence of this idea is that morals are also projected onto nature or reality and cannot be conceived as a response to anything objectively real. Rape is wrong not because if violates the who and what a woman is, but is a projection of something secondary supplied by us, like odors, tastes, or sounds. Nature is indifferent, inherently without meaning or value. While the modern paradigm of nature seemed unquestionably true to Kant, he could not accept this implication for morality. Thus he tried to give morality a new foundation outside of nature, in pure reason (logic plus self-evident axioms).

    Moreover, grounding our moral or immoral responses in nature missed something essential about morality for Kant. This is complex, but I think what it all boils down to is this: nature, even for Aristotle, is contingent: it is what it is. Conforming our actions and responses to what happens to be the case – what happens to make us happy or to allow us to flourish – is thus also contingent. If our natures were different, morality would be different. For Kant – and he is right, I think – what is moral and immoral would be different. But that makes no sense. Morality is absolute. If it is evil to rape, then it is always necessarily evil.

     While Aristotle could not account for this in his idea of nature, Christian thinkers like Aquinas could, as God was the author of nature. God is absolute Being and Goodness in one. Rape then – as an example of a clearly evil act – violates the nature of a woman as she is created by known by God. [That by the way is an argument for the necessity of God in the grounding of morality.] But Kant rejected the idea of Creation as metaphysical. He didn’t deny it could be true, but he did deny that we could know that it was true. All we can know of nature is limited by the Galilean-Newtonian idea, which he uncritically accepted. Thus the only option to ground morality as absolute was pure reason.

      Thus Kant believed that the power of reason to uncover culturally non-relative truths in science, logic, and mathematics could be applied to morality as well - like Spock.   The issue thus seems to be whether such a neutral standard can be identified.  A good case can indeed be made that mathematical and scientific truths have validity for all human cultures; the idea of a European, Indian or Japanese physics or math seems absurd. But morality is not physics or math.  Reason is universal only to the extent it remains formal; as soon as appeals to the value-soaked world are made, reason cannot be appealed to as impartial judge.     

              Kant argued for a rational moral principle, one that would give us a calculus to tell us whether our actions were truly moral – the categorical imperative:

 

…handle nur nach derjenigen Maxime, durch die du zugleich wollen kannst, daß sie ein allgemeines Gesetz werde (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, p. 68).

 

… act only according to that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.

The categorical imperative was self-evident for Kant and indirectly applied to nature. We know that it must apply to nature for Kant because we experience duty and this experience, uniquely, cannot be doubted in spite of its being an alien in the Newtonian conception of nature. Of course, pure reason - logic -  is independent of a person's values: “All men or mortal.  Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal” is valid for all times and cultures.  Does Kant's rational principle have that same objectivity? Is it irrational for one man to insist that men have more dignity than women, and thus what may be made into a universal law for all men should not apply to women?  Only if one sees men and women as equal in dignity – but that is the very question supposed to be answered by the categorical imperative. A hopeless circularity.

            Put another way:  neither logic nor pure reason will not tell us what is good or bad, and thus what the content of the categorical imperative should be.  If one man believes that women should not be treated as of equal worth, and another man denies this, then both may universalize their beliefs without contradiction: one might claim: “Act so that you never treat a woman as of equal dignity to man, which would be a violation of the natural order of the world.”  If one claims that such discrimination is irrational, then she goes beyond logic and includes purely natural or cultural value-laden claims: it is irrational because it is wrong to treat women as inferior, whereby pure reason can't tell you if it is wrong or right. (I suppose if you could define 'inferior' as something that could be investigated by science - some standard of strength or intelligence - then reason would have something to say. But as morality has nothing to do with how smart or strong someone is - it is just as evil to rape a woman with an IQ of 200 as it would be to rape a woman with an IQ of 100 - this is a red herring.)

     But if “rational” is understood to imply or presuppose particular values, then what is morally “rational” cannot be determined independently of these:  as many conceptions of reason as there are moralities become possible.  Attempting to adjudicate between such claims by appealing to the categorical imperative is thus obviously circular. No independent conception of reason can underwrite one value argument against another. 

   The problem arises by conceiving of nature as Galileo did: as devoid of meaning. Thus meaning is exiled from nature, banned on a non-natural island: namely, in our minds. And there is no bridge from our minds (our morality) to this mechanical nature where we all have our being - contra Kant. Nature - including our bodies -  is on this conception nothing but a blank screen onto which we project meaning even as we project odors and colors. That was also Spock's conception of nature. 

   What is rational depends on what is real and what we can know. Kant's conception of pure reason is a function of his conception of nature and our mind's being cut off from nature, confined to its own representations of nature. Because nature for Aristotle and Aquinas are different from Kant's conception, reason and knowledge are different. To violate the inherent goodness of another human being - as a creature, not necessarily how they live - would be contrary to reason. For Kant it would be to violate a formal rule that only makes sense if you assume what Aquinas did, that human beings are precious in some way. 

   And this is what always frustrated me about Spock: his superstition that formal logic could solve substantive disputes – McCoy was more logical! If peoples, places, or anything else is not intrinsically good in some way, it goodness (that they exist in the first place) is not part of their reality, then no morality. Logic is just as useful to Hitler as it is to Primo Levi. It is indifferent to morals. What is self-evident depends already on a moral attitude. 

 

 . . .

The Second Categorical Imperative. Another example from within our culture using Kant's second formulation of the categorical imperative: “Act so that you treat at all times the humanity in your own person as well as in other people as an end in itself, and never as a mere means to an end. (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, 79).”  For some within our own culture, prostitution is a violation of dignity because it involves human beings (women) being used as a mere objects and not respected as ends in themselves. Others deny it must be such a violation, claiming that dignity is satisfied as long as they consent to the practice, their consent ensuring that they remain subjects and do not become mere objects.

                Reason (actually formal logic), again, cannot tell us who is right here. Whether x or y is right is beside the point; the point is that no independent conception of reason – including Kant's second formulation of the categorical imperative – can help us here. To claim that prostitution is a violation of human dignity might be true, but one can't prove it by appealing to this principle of reason. The question at issue would be precisely whether consensual prostitution involves using women as objects, and only attention to one's values and the particulars of the social context of the practice can answer this.  And so, again, we are back to that part of nature / reality which is soaked in the values, histories, interpretations of human subjects.

               The real question is whether this “failure” implies that ‘there is no morality’ or whether ‘anything goes.’ The trap consists precisely in seeing appeals to value neutral standards as the proper method of argumentation in moral questions. The starting point is our moral response – for example, to evil. For me to say:  “Oh, Mr. Protagoras, I see you are right! And now I know that my subjective feelings about rape or racism have no ground in reason!”  The evident absurdity (and immorality) of this kind of thinking should make us wary of this trap. 

 Problems with Democracy

Truth, wisdom, and democracy. There is no value-free, person-free method guaranteed to crank out truth and wise, just laws. Politics is not, for that reason, subjective in the sense of reducible to personal preferences and prejudices. It does depend on the wisdom, character, spiritual energy, and imagination of the individual – much like being able to judge a performance of Bach or a painting of Rembrandt. About which even the wise can disagree, which is as it should be, since the being of such works transcends any particular attempt to conceptualize them – a metaphor for the finite human mind’s relation to being as a whole, which only God could understand completely. That doesn’t mean we cannot through effort understand something. Indeed, a disagreement between Leonard Bernstein and Herbert von Karajan about how a Beethoven symphony should sound has a radically different quality than a disagreement between either of them and me. Indeed, I am wise enough not to offer an opinion on the matter, precisely because there is a reality involved and I am largely ignorant of it.

       While music, important though I think it is, is not essential, being a good judge of life is. That qualities are not simply given to us as individuals makes it suspect in a ‘democratic culture’ where we are all supposed to be equal in judgment. We aren’t. The level of ignorance and incompetence even in managing one's own life in America is shocking, depressing - not that it is massively better in Europe. If we care about democracy, that must be our goal, to have citizens competent enough to judge intelligently between the alternative ways of dealing with justice and political realities – competent enough also to recognize these realities. Competence must be produced by the political culture, starting with the constitution itself. It belongs to competence to recognize that we are all fallible and thus need both to scrutinize our own beliefs and take those of other serious people seriously. Truth, insight - wisdom - is more important than winning a debate. The high art of 'thinking well' needs to be at the top of educational priorities. The figure of Socrates should haunt every democracy, to which for better or worse there is no humanly valuable alternative. Writing these words, I cringe at the pathetic state of American political discourse.

 

. . .

 

      The United States has reached a critical mass where the people no longer seem able to “govern themselves.” For all the various, familiar reasons – from social media to festering resentments, etc. – large sections of the population have become unhinged from reality and lack even the most basic sense of justice and proportion necessary for a free and open society. And there are no good alternatives to a free and open society. Of these, Trump’s brand of pop fascism his ego-and-greed-driven politics is one of the worst. If I had to choose between non-democratic alternatives, I would rather have military rule, as you are more likely to find individuals who serve the country as a whole and might more honestly strive to reestablish some basic responsibility and competence in government than in Trump’s corrupt and corrupting world. But in the American context, that is pure fantasy, just as is my fantasy of having a caste of wise people above economics and petty politics to guide the country until its citizens become enlightened enough to "govern themselves." This is paternalism and I despise it - but not as much as I despise ignorant puppets and potential mobs on the strings of manipulators like Trump.

     The only argument for democracy that convinces me at the present moment is Churchill's: all other forms of government are worse (as I fear we might soon find out). My ideal of a political community resembling, say, a group of dedicated historians, all decent people of course with no axe to grind, trying with the tools of reason and evidence to find consensus on historical questions like understanding how the First World War could happen - that, too, is a fantasy. But that is how it would have to be in a genuine democracy.

       I have very little hope left for my country. I have more hope, but still not much, that the countries of Europe – the last bastions of anything resembling liberal (small ‘l’) societies – will be able to deal with the crisis caused by America’s movement towards the water's edge. But as I have children, I don’t have the luxury of losing hope. 

      I am still waiting to see a political force capable of turning the tide. Will Europe unite, establish a deterrent to Putin (and Xi), insulate themselves from the consequences of a possible American moral and political collapse, and deal with their indigenous pop fascist lovers? 

     Perhaps it was a tragedy that Biden won the Democratic Party's nomination in 2020 and not Bernie Sanders, who may have been such a political force.  

      Is there any hope of a just and sustainable economy, and thus society, for all people - and thus a partial treatment at least for the world's disease as opposed to just treating all these horrible and complex symptoms? 

 . . .

History. If you look at any political reality, you will be like a dog watching TV unless you know the history as well as the social-economic power structure of that reality.  I’m afraid most citizens are like dogs watching TV when they see the news reports. I know I am in many cases.

    The underlying reality of Trumpism is the attempt to prevent a rollback of corporate-financial control over essential areas of the state. This began under Reagan and proceeded unabated until Obama made tentative moves to reverse it and Biden – under pressure from Sanders’ ‘progressives’ – even more so. Trump has the support of all those interests that want to keep America safe for the super-rich to write the rules we live under. (The culture wars are a sideshow for them, a way to keep the focus off economics.)    The history is much more complicated but involves keeping the resentments, the inferiority complexes of poor and working-class whites focused on race and religion as well as a hatred of ‘the government’ rather than who controls who gets what, when, and how. The support for Trump and billionaires in general today is not disconnected from the sorry show of poor farmers fighting and dying for the ‘right’ of slave-holding plantation owners (millionaires) to keep their slaves; or how playing the race card undermined the promising beginnings of what was called “Populism” in the post-Civil War reconstruction era.  

p.s. Some excellent works of history tell this story. I found these books compelling, for example:

Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age, 2007.

Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists 1861-1901, 1962

Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America, 1978.

Gabriel Kolko, Triumph of Conservativism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916, 1977.

I wish I had the time to read more in history. 

The Most Powerful Evidence Against Christianity. 

That is easy: by the fruit you know the tree. It is the people who call themselves Christians and yet do nasty things great and small in the name of Christ: wars against non-Christians; persecutions of heretics; justifications of usury, wars, and slavery; stealing children from the very arms of their mothers to “re-educate” them. The people who profess the truth revealed in ‘The Good Samaritan’ hate and denigrate immigrants. People who embrace the truth revealed in “The Prodigal Son” look down in scorn on those who fail to meet their standards of pure behavior. People who profess to love the man who gave us the “Sermon on the Mound” worshipping idols: the machines of war and the wealth of billionaires; Trump or some sentimental version of their country. People of the South wouldn’t let a fellow creature of God worship with them because God had created their skin darker, despite the fact that their own people had perpetuated unspeakable evils again the recent ancestors of these same people. I could go on and on and on ad nauseum. To make a list of the crimes of the servants of just the Catholic Church - from the sex abuse scandals, the concordats with Hitler and Mussolini to the conquest of the Americas to the Inquisition to the sacking of Constantinople: we all know this terrible history. 

     And of course on a less drastic note, most of us who want to be Christians fail to love and seek the Good in many ways in our daily life, and somehow all these private failures are like a matrix from which the big failures grow. Few of us can disassociate ourselves completely from this terrible history. Christians themselves have put the dark glass over God’s light, right from the beginning. 'Original sin' does not relativize this evidence. Nor do other examples of human depravity found in non-Christians, of which there are of course many. I see no evidence that being atheist makes it less probable that a person is decent. That fact alone should trouble every Christian.

       I am been blessed to have known some good people who were Christian, and see even that there was some connection between their goodness and their trust in Jesus: my grandfather Lovan and my grandmother Emerson, in very different ways. But the history of Christian people - which to be fair throws up the rare saint from time to time and many cases of ordinary decency - is so dismal compared to the ideals of its teacher: it is hard to see the tree as good when the fruit has been, in general, so bad.

   This was not very original. Others have made the point better. But I feel the need to make myself conscious of it as a weapon against my own tendency to sentimentalize.