Aristotle Believed the Emotions Were Important Instruments of Knowing and Understanding

A contradiction? On the one hand, I believe deep in my heart that part of the human vocation on earth is to bring our minds and hearts in tune with reality. I can only believe that given that I believe reality (existence, being, ‘to be’) is at its core “good, very good,” even in the face of the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” of “the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to,” even of the pervasiveness of evil. On the other hand, I must acknowledge that such a belief cannot be reached by the intellect alone, uninformed by the heart. A belief in reality accessed through subjectivity, emotion? Is that not a contradiction?

       Indeed, I acknowledge such a belief becomes only intelligible to those who love or who have loved; to those who have therefore experienced grief or perhaps remorse; to those who have felt horror over evils that have become real to them (e.g., slavery, genocide, violence against women, etc.); to those who have been distraught over the greed-motivated destruction of natural beauty; above all, to those who have experienced moments of real joy (see below on joy). So I cannot make my belief intelligible to everyone, which would seem to be in tension with the notion that it is a belief about what is real and not just an expression of subjective emotion and wishful thinking. 

        The real, it will be thought, is objective, and what is objective the intellect can prove or support with evidence everyone would acknowledge to be evidence. And then there is the “fat, relentless ego,” the powerful, inborn narcissism that Freud bored in on – for him not the consequence of sin but nature as science understands it. Any emotion – joy, love, grief, remorse, horror – the fat, relentless ego can elicit as a counterfeit response to an idealized, constructed, falsified version of reality – the ego’s own, private Hollywood version of reality. If you cannot give objective evidence or rational proof, then it must be emotional, which is to say subjective, telling us nothing about reality but only the psyche of the person who experiences it. It can even seem a contradiction: I believe x to be real because of emotional experiences a, b, and c. And given that we all at some level know how fragile, and thus how ruthless our ego-consciousness is, we don’t trust it to reveal reality. Rightly. But in every person except for the most pathological narcissist, even in very flawed people as I am and perhaps most of us are, beats a human heart capable of the kinds of revelatory emotions I am talking about. 

        I know the reality of my children not only intellectually. Neither I nor anyone else could profoundly know them from the outside, with the intellect alone. I know them though loving them, even in the flawed way I do love them. Loving them is the conformity of reason in its fullest meaning with their reality; their reality molds the mind, or that part of their reality that can inform the mind does inform it. Without this love, my relationship to them would be like an android’s attempt to understand a poem – having all the information about the poem, being able to say all that might be intelligibly said about the poem, but actually not understanding the poem (from the inside) at all. My children are like the poems in that you can know them – access their reality – only as a whole human being, body and soul, heart and intellect. 

         I don’t claim to know them absolutely, as only God could. Admittedly, therefore, deeper understanding could change how I see them to some extent. But they are real to me, if only imperfectly so. Except for God, all understanding, all knowledge is partial, and so nothing is fully, absolutely real to us. That’s what it means to be finite, mortal. That creates space for unreality (fantasy in the Freudian sense) to colonize us. But I am engaged with the reality of my children themselves, not their mere appearances, not mere social constructs of them – unless I am sentimental or wholly consumed by my innate narcissism. Indeed, the largest wall between mortals and reality is not our finitude, our limited intellects, but our narcissism. (The one insight shared by Plato, the Buddha, Augustine, Freud, and Jesus.) The problem is not a divide between the intellect and the heart, but between a heart-intellect (i.e. reason) to some extent liberated from narcissism and its attendant sentimentality and a heart-intellect that is consumed by narcissism and its attendant sentimentality. The shadows of Plato’s cave come from the fat, relentless ego, not the wellsprings of our hearts. 

      If this subjective truth were only subjective and not truth – as it would be, were the love merely sentimental – then the love we bear our children, our grief, our remorse, our horror over evil done, our longing for justice, our joy and longings, and everything that allows us to see our lives as they really are, would be unintelligible. Life would resemble a stupid soap opera. All love, joy, grief, and horror would be sentimental lies. This is why the attempt to divide the intellect from the heart is an attempt to separate us from reality. How irrational. We would live in contradiction to ourselves. 

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Academic prose and reality. At the university people write plain academic treatises, prose designed to be propositional. A judgment that non-personal, scientific prose is the best vehicle to speak (and think) truly about reality lies behind this style, which is obviously patterned on the style of natural science. So as a student I would read poetry and then in a dry academic paper would try to say what it ‘really meant,’ which to me included saying what the poem implied was true about the world. I naturally thought: why couldn’t the poet just say that truth in plain prose; why the puzzle-solving of trying to figure out the claim in my academic paper? Why all the flowery ornamentation?  I cared nothing for ornaments; I only wanted to learn about the world, about my life. I had taken over the university's assumption that truth was most clearly and appropriately expressed in propositions – plain declarative statements with clear meanings. Poetry that purported to say something true or profound about the world was guilty of using an inappropriate form for its content. 

        As my previous section has implied, that is utterly wrong. Some aspects of reality can only be disclosed through a poetic form because they can only be disclosed to the emotional responses that academic prose deems irrelevant, even a hindrance to the truth. Academic prose is designed to kill emotions, which is appropriate only if the reality being searched for (e.g., gravity) can be found by killing the emotions. As a general principle, it assumes metaphysically that reality can only be disclosed by killing emotions. What I have suggested is that the most profound dimensions of reality can only be disclosed through particular emotional responses combined with thought. In that sense, academic writing puts blinders on students and scholars alike – as it did me. 

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Reality and emotion. Emotions play a different role in these two kinds of understanding. Strong emotions tell us what matters. A passionate activist feels strongly about climate change and its causes. He might get angry over the human beings behind it. He may feel desperation over the lack of action. Still, his passions can get in the way of his work as a scientist, or more positively can motivate him.  They are not part of the actual scientific conclusions. But if the same person, who is say Catholic, reads Genesis 1, he will probably understand it in a different way from an oil executive. Only in and through the concrete lives of the two men – and being men could also play a role – does the meaning of Genesis take shape. 

         This is not to say that each projects their values onto a blank page. I think the pre-judgments of man who loves the earth enable him to better understand the meaning of Creation as told in Genesis. But this is not an automatic outcome. His activism may be thoroughly sentimental while the oil executive may be torn between competing goods. In any case, emotions condition the understanding, for good or bad. Indeed, it is only through the emotion of love that the meaning of the Creation is intelligible – as pictured in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. In the former case, emotions are on the outside of the ‘cognitive content’ of the science work: like a drug, they can only stimulate or interfere. The activist may love the earth, but if he and a scientist who loves the oil companies are both good scientists, their different loves will play no role in their data and its explanation.

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Emotions as convictions (not beyond criticism) about what is real and good. Emotions tell us what we really think is important. We are raised to be part of a world where, among a vast multitude of such spiritual-cultural responses, we may react to pain with compassionate or cold hearts. We take on an attitude towards pain (toward other human beings or animals in pain) by being raised by parents and communities to whom we matter (or to whom we should matter, that being the normative expectation) – we would consider this a deprivation in instances where this doesn’t happen.

       Parents and others show that we matter, for example, when they take joy in us and show this joy – smiling at us, for example, or playing with us as children; also showing their concern when we hurt ourselves and are in pain. “Pity is the conviction that someone is in pain”: this sentence, unpacked, means that our language and culture of pain – our attitude towards pain – has been ingrained in us since birth. It is connected to a great variety of typical gestures, responses, and beliefs about pain – comforting behaviors, compassionate feelings, certain facial expressions, and so on – and can be escaped only with a most radical break from our lives as we know it; and even in the event of such a break in attitude, the new attitude is condition by the first as a response to it. It makes no sense, leaping into the epistemology language game, to say we ‘know we are in pain’ (that adds nothing to ‘I am in pain’; it does no meaning-work).

        The intelligible range of culturally transmitted and individually lived-through, largely emotion-laden responses to pain express convictions about pain impervious to doubt except through a most radical alienation of sense.  “Love is the conviction that the beloved person, belonging, or place is ‘good, very good’.” How one thinks about the Real, the Good, Nature, and so on – is radically different depending on whether one can think only within or only outside of the different forms of love. Emotion is at its best a kind of sonar for locating value outside the submarine-like self. And emotions get translated later into thought, philosophy, and ethics; not the other way around. 

. . . 

 

Grief and philosophy. Grief is the conviction that the beloved person who died was real and loveable. That love was a response to the reality of the loved one; that the loved one was lovable. Conviction, and not a conclusion to an argument or supported by the evidence. Conviction because it is not something we can sanely doubt. We cannot ground these convictions through science or philosophy. Without them, we would cease to be human. Reality transcends philosophy. This is what Wittgenstein believed. 

. . . 

‘True’ and ‘False’ emotions. When a friend does something kind for me, in the pure spirit of kindness and firmly grounded in needs I myself recognize as needs, and I respond with disdainful contempt (all things being equal), that would show either: 1) I did not understand what she did as kindness, a mistaken judgment expressed through my disdainful contempt; 2) There is something deficient in my character – I hear of people speak of emotional intelligence, implying such a thing as emotional stupidity, but I think the resentment could just be a sign that, as Dr. Suess wrote of the Grinch: ‘but I think the most likely reason of all may have been that his heart was two sizes too small.’ An emotion is ‘true’ when it is attuned to the reality of which it is a response; ‘false’ when out of tune with said reality. An emotion that is out of tune with reality reveals something that needs to be changed in the person who responds in this way. A crucial part of upbringing: to lovingly do whatever you can, not only to bring your children to desire what is truly good for them but to feel about things in ways that are deeply in tune with those things. (e.g. learning to want to share and not feel selfish resentment)

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Emotions and Metaphysics. A couple witnesses an amazingly beautiful full moon. (Imagine I have god-like knowledge of their inner lives.) The boyfriend takes notice, and then resentfully fears he will hear some sentimental ramblings from his girlfriend about how beautiful the moon is, etc., all to underscore how aesthetically sensitive she is. His girlfriend, sensing his attitude, remains silent, but thinks to herself of this moon as a blessing; she would not want to imagine her life without the moon.

       Both emotional responses are connected to a metaphysical-religious philosophy: the man’s emotional response is intelligible against this background of belief: the universe is a meaningless collection of particles, forces, and energy; all meaning and beauty are thus necessarily sentimental human projections. The girlfriend’s response is grounded in this metaphysics: she is part of Creation; all things somehow embody the beauty and love of a Creator. Perhaps she doesn’t literally believe in a Creator, but the image is the only way she knows to express the beauty and wonder that has been sown into the very fabric of Being. Their emotional responses also embody an anthropology / psychology, a ‘fore-structure’ of possible understandings based on this. The man believes human beings are basically covetous machines prone to feel-good displays to mask this truth self and others. The girlfriend believes human beings have a capacity to love what is real and beautiful in the world, and that this is actually what makes us fully human. The emotional response also implies different ways of raising and educating children; different ways of organizing society; different ways of relating to nature economically and technologically. Etc. You can have a profound philosophy, but if you are emotionally deaf-and-dumb, that philosophy will be purely an intellectual house of cards. (The girlfriend wisely breaks up with that boyfriend the next day.) 

        Now do this on your own: imagine an animal lover and a meat-industrial contemplating a lamb about to be slaughtered; a loving mother and a woman intent on an abortion contemplating images of the life in their wombs; a native American of a people who lived on the plains in the 18th century and an agro-business of today; a strip miner and Wendell Berry on a river valley; a narcissist anxious to use the death of her dog for a kitschy pet funeral to attract attention and sympathy on Facebook and a person alone with her tears at the loss of her dog. Emotional responses imply a philosophy, and a philosophy conditions emotional responses. 

. . . 

 

True Emotions are windows that open out onto Being. A man never thinks of his wife. He never does anything for her. He is indifferent to her needs. He feels nothing when she dies. But he says ‘I loved her.’ I would have great trouble making sense of this. A pet dog dies. The pet’s owner or human companion suffers “inconsolable grief.” He buries the dog with its picture on an elaborate gravestone. He visits the grave once a month, bringing flowers. Every year he lights a candle and weeps on the day of the dog’s death. He posts all this on Facebook. I would have a hard time believing the man really loved the dog rather than using the dog’s death to put himself on display. I could only think of him as sentimental. But a man could really grieve for a dog, and that real grief partly reveals what a dog is as well as the man. Emotions like grief are judgments about reality and paths of understanding what something is. They can be counterfeit but they are essential to be able to understand many things.

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Purity of the heart and reality. ‘I love the earth’ said by a person who never gave a thought to how their patterns of consumption impacted the earth – empty words. Veganism is the expression of a love for animals, said by a person upon accepting an academy award, say, who in reality was more interested in presenting herself as an animal-lover and contrasting herself with a bad group of meat eaters  – I could only understand that as narcissistic grandstanding, virtue signaling to use the parlance of our time. 

     The reality of animals, the earth, or anything else can only be disclosed by certain, rather rare individuals in purer forms of love. The love discloses like this: it lets us see the animals in a different light; it allows us to really feel the belief that the animals loved can be creatures that really bring out this love, and are not merely brutes on whom sentimental people project their feelings and use for their own psychological purposes. We can only know this of animals when we experience them emotionally as non-sentimental recipients of love. Love is a kind of knowing. The heart can know things, and some realities can only be known by the heart.

. . . 

 

Emotional limits. Many of us can engage with the needs of what is close: our friends, our apartment, our neighbors. But the reduction of the world through the regime of Industrialism-Science-Technology – its genuine benefits justifying the reduction – boggles the ability of a human being seriously, emotionally, intellectually to respond to it. I want to care about all the destruction in the Appalachians, the blasphemous treatment of animals in the meat industry, the cruelty to human beings in sweatshops, and much more. I can’t, except in the most limited and superficial ways. It is too far away from my core – a critique of myself and this society. The most common expression of public emotional responses to all the destruction and injustice: giving narcissists and celebrities a platform to grandstand, which only adds to the impossibility of authentic response (‘if it were really serious, people would not grandstand’).

         And social media makes narcissists – not a moral critique but a description documented by sociologists of the dominant personality structure of people socialized by capitalism – and would-be celebrities out of the masses. The vast and depersonalized nature of the evils, the ways they are superficially represented in the media and exploited for cheap effect, and the ways we are all implicated in our daily lives make genuine emotional response difficult – or only possible for saints. This is a distinctive evil of mass society. It is increasingly difficult to authoritatively speak on these matters because many like myself cannot really speak from the heart. But that is the lesson: speaking with authority comes from living authentically, and living authentically is connected to how real our emotional responses are.  Social forms may help people with emotional depth or may churn out superficiality as though on an assembly line. 

 A Reflection on Human Dignity and the Modern World

Fertility and sex. The pleasures of eating cannot wholly be disconnected from issues of nourishment and health. The potential joys of sex, analogously, cannot be wholly disconnected from the issues surrounding fertility. Nature will have its say in both. The glutton can become addicted to the pleasures of the table, and his health will suffer. He will make himself sick through his addiction to the pleasures of (usually bad, addicting) food. The pleasures of eating should never be reduced to nourishment; but nourishment should not be seen as disconnected from health. Likewise, the purely natural purpose of sex is babies. Likewise, the joys of sex – respectful sex, full of mutual attraction, care, at best love – can be spiritual joys involving the self-giving of one body-soul to another. Sex cannot be reduced to having children. The (spiritual) goodness of loving (or at least respectful) sex remains if the lovers are through misfortune infertile. I think it is present in homosexual lovers who truly love (or at least care about) one another. Nevertheless, to radically sever the cord between the joys of sex and its natural function is to court sexual addition, reduction – lust in the worst sense of that word.

       Technology often cuts the ties between man and nature. In the case of sex, birth control technologies fueled a cultural change in our attitudes toward sex. Not in reality, but under a psychic-cultural illusion we cut the tie between sex and fertility, and felt free to seek its pleasures for their own sake. The present culture of sexual addiction and pornography is largely the result. As greed is good for capitalists, lust is good for those ‘progressive’ folk who see the severing of the tie between sex and fertility as a good thing, another example of man’s conquest of nature – freeing ourselves from nature and community through technology for the sake of pure pleasure: that’s a standard capitalist intrusion.

      Our alleged freedom from fertility, from nature, is an illusion. It is a freedom from responsibility. The joys of sex can't be separated from its dangers. It is not safe. Sex is wild, can't be mined or controlled without terrible consequences. Not just fertility but the emotional power of it. Trying to control it capitalistically, technologically, destroys the meaning of sex within a responsible family and community life. Like with any addiction, sexual addicts are not happy. This supposed liberation has chained them and mines a great power – sex – for facile pleasure at each other’s expense. This culture based on an illusory liberation from nature demeans sex and people. It is significantly responsible for the destruction of the family security so needed by children through divorce. It is responsible for the culture of abortion, for the technologies are not perfect and abortion is the necessary consequence of cutting the ties between nature, sex, and love. It is a way of cutting the ties between sex, responsibility, and joy. If you say A, you must say B, as a German saying goes.

       To put it bluntly: you should never have sex with someone you are not willing to be parents with, unless no chance of pregnancy exists. That sounds like blasphemy today, but I stand by it. The alternative is abortion, a culture of sex predicated on the normalcy of abortion as birth control. Which is of course what we have from our capitalist culture. (I am not referring to difficult cases like rape, incest, health dangers, and the like. I am not referring to the legal right to abortion, which I think has to exist because the state can’t or shouldn’t force a woman to bear a child – our world depends on private, intimate decisions to affirm life and there is no way to change that without doing violence. A woman has a right to chose and with the father should chose to affirm life (all things being equal).  I am referring to cases where the illusion that technology has made sex “safe” enables people for whatever private reasons to adopt promiscuous lifestyles knowing that abortion is always there in the background. Which is crazy because abortion is not safe, neither physically nor spiritually nor mentally.)

 

. . .

 

Today these moral-cultural issues have to take a back seat. The task now is to save the possibility of democracy and an open society. Real-existing liberal (i.e. capitalist) democracies are profoundly flawed – some more than others – due largely to the power of corporations and their technologies, their culture industries and dumb-down-devices. “The economy” creates a social structure and corresponding culture that is inimical to true democracy. But Lord, they are a thousand times better at their worse than living in some pop-fascist regime like Trump would have in which all these debasing forces would be unleashed on a society that unhinged the “base” from reality by scripting it for them (with their consent) and criminalizing anything that pushed back.  I deplore the decision of so-called religious people and institutions – both the Pope-hating right-wing Catholics and the fundamentalist protestants – to embrace this dystopian fantasy as a means to silence the secular folks they hate so deeply. I have no problem aligning myself with anyone of any belief system willing to embrace toleration and rational forms of expressing disagreement to save the chance for a free society.

    But if we do ever have a political community again, a public space where we can discuss these issues using our hearts and rational minds, then I think we need to discuss how the corporate-capitalist culture we are all in threatens the very idea of human dignity. The whole culture of abortion, for example, starting with the idea that my body is my property and I have a “right” to use my property as I see fit, undermines the idea of plurality: that every person is unique, has a soul, has a series of stories unique to their life, has a biography unlike any other.

. . .

What disturbs me as well about the way the abortion debate is framed is what it means for "human dignity" - the sense, emotional and intellectual, that every person is somehow a limit to my will; that remorse would be an intelligible response to wronging anyone; that someone might intelligibly grieve their death; the belief that everyone has someone in them that makes it intelligible to see them in the light of some form of love, if even only pity. Or using a religious picture, that we are created in the image of God, who created us in love and loves us still. It is not crazy to see the unborn as belonging to the category of human creature that cannot intelligibly have any value in Aristotle's way of thinking: like the severely retarded or the incurably insane. There are no worldly categories to keep the unborn among us. 

    Imagine an American woman who is grieving over the loss of a child. Imagine that woman watching TV and observing the "grief behavior" of a Palestinian mother who has lost her child in a bombing raid. The American woman is briefly tempted to commiserate as she is also a grieving mother, then stops and says: "It is different with them. They can always have more." This is a familiar racist attitude. Our grief is genuine because our lives have the kind of meaning that can only come from feeling - more a matter of feeling than intellect - that each one of us is an individual in a special way. Sometimes we speak of a "soul" to capture this difference. 

      Animals are not individuals in this way. They are more tightly bound to their species-character. They can't love and be loved as a soul. You don't tell stories or write biographies about mice. And their lives - the Palestinians - can't mean what ours do for the meaning-blind. "They can always have more" means that they lack the kind of individuality, the kind of meaning that we have. They display grief behavior but it will pass; it doesn't go deep. We love and grieve; they can only "love" and "grieve." I think we all recognize this familiar racist way of seeing other people. "They can always have more." 

   Presumably it would mean something different if one of us - remaining in this racist world - had an abortion and one of them did. Well, the we-group have lives that matter, feelings that go deep (disclose the reality of the kind of individuality we mean with abstract concepts like "dignity"). But in the world of those who feel abortion is morally unproblematic, who believe that the unborn child is not a limit to our will in the way a newborn baby is, who believe it is purely an individual decision whether the unborn child is seen as an intelligible object of love or raw material for the pharmacy industry - in that world no unborn child is part of us, except by decision of the mother. No unborn human being has inborn dignity. At that stage, any mother can always have more. 

    Well, bodies are property, and we are sovereign over our own property, can do with it what we want. Property -whether a car, slave, or unborn child - by definition does not make claims on us to exist, does not limit our will. Who can be a person is not given by nature, is not a question of what is real; we define who can be and who cannot be a person, as long as we have the power to do so, of course. The unborn are completely powerless, like the rest of nature we dispose over. And the aborted fetus is generally raw material, given to the industries profiting from genetic technologies. Stem cells are worth quite a lot on the market. 

   The attitude I am focusing on here, I submit, is based on feelings that do not know of human dignity, feelings and thoughts which see the unborn as the racist sees the demeaned other. When we come to feel that we can always have more, when this attitude becomes the taken-for-granted cultural norm, then we have lost the conceptual space for "human dignity." This is what is at stake, culturally. I have known a woman who, after an abortion, took the body of the fetus and in grief solemnly buried her - having given her a name - in a quiet woods. No putting the stem cells on the market. When our culture can only see that as an act of pure sentimentality, then human dignity will have become unintelligible to our culture. 

   If you think of yourself as a limit to others' wills, if you think of yourself as more than just an exemplar of an original model, a variation of the same species-theme, then it seems obvious that you were just that particular unborn child at one stage of your life. Had your mother decided to abort you and have more, someone else and not you would have existed. If it doesn't matter, then human dignity will have become unintelligible to our culture. 

   I have know mothers and fathers who loved their unborn child. Who named the child, talked to it, anticipated its advent, seeing all the changes in the woman's body in loving ways. When our culture can only see that as an act of pure sentimentality, then human dignity will have become unintelligible to our culture. 

   And when our culture uniformly believes that we or the state, not reality, defines which lives have meaning and which do not, then human dignity will have become unintelligible to our culture. We can always change our definitions. 

  Abortion is the perfect expression of the worldview of capitalist-industrialism, of science-engineering-technology. Whoever of us has the power become the lords and masters of nature, the conquers of nature. The contempt the capitalist feels for the forest they want to log, many of us - feminists included - feel for the body. To see the body as "my property" and thus the unborn child as my property is to be blind to the reality of the body and the unborn child, a reality that only discloses itself in the language of love. This kind of feminism is one of the saddest things I know, for I cannot but see it as a form of extreme contempt for women and their bodies. That many women see capitalism-science-technology as a liberation from nature only reinforces this. 

That is what I will say if I live to see a world free of the toxins that are killing it today. 

 (Aristotle 11)  Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar... / Human dignity is inviolable 

                              The Constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany

 

I said the idea of keep those who fall through the cracks of the world among us as moral equals is other-worldly. I need to unpack this.

 

What kind of people am I talking about? Evil-doers, severely retarded, drunks, those who have incurable mental illnesses, those people who are unintelligible to us because they are so different (e.g. for many Germans and WASP Americans, Muslims; for many Muslims, Europeans, etc.), the homeless, and so on. Deep down we cannot pity such people without a trace of condescension – if we pity them at all: people who think like Trump  want to get rid of them; the ones they define as ‘other’ (migrants) or ‘evil’ (people who don’t vote for Trump).

   Trump is a good example. He is incapable of any selfless spirit act. He cannot be a true friend, husband, father, citizen, lover – and thus not a true human being. His narcissism is pathological. You feed it or serve it’s interests or you are nothing to him. Nothing is real except his perceived interests, and he constructs reality to fit them. His fantasy of what is real and unreal perfectly mirrors this extreme narcissism. Narcissism translates into politics as tyrant (Cicero: the tyrant is a person who is incapable of community or political community). The man – as those outside the cult of those poor, deluded people whose own narcissism, ignorance, and resentment enthrall them to his fantasy (if he found God and spoke the truth to his cult, they throw him over and find someone else) – the man, I say, is unlovable. I could find in me to love almost everyone, only not him. I cannot find it intelligible that God loves him. He seems to be burning in the fires of his own private Hell.

    Trump is a bearer of human dignity. What does that mean? Well, he is owed justice – a fair trial based on evidence. He is owed basic respect (though he denies it to everyone else). There are limits as to what a person can do to him even to save the country from his dark inhumanity. From an Aristotelian perspective, this makes no sense. [Even if you see Trump differently, the basic point remains. Come up with your own example of an utterly unlovable person, even from fantasyland. The point I am making is a conceptual one: it does not depend on a factually/spiritually true narrative. I could have taken the unenlightened Scrooge or even better, the hate-filled Inspector Javert from Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. Perhaps should have.]

    That it makes no sense from an Aristotelian, worldly perspective is the incentive for seeing it as other-worldly. But what can that mean? The other-worldly must be intelligible from within our world; otherwise, it would just be nonsense. Where then does the idea arise that such a wretched, dangerous human being has “dignity” just because he is a human being? It think it’s source is very human. Mothers and fathers still love their wayward children that no one else can love, and many people even want to be hung or even eliminated in the spirit of ridding the world of vermin. Such love is unconditional. Saintly love is like this. (Here I think of the love Sister Helen Prejean showed to the men whose evil deeds put them past man’s – worldly – mercy.) From that the picture of God the Creator as a Being who radiates such love for all his creatures. Seeing a fellow creature as fallen does not put that person beyond God’s mercy at least, even if such mercy remains unintelligible. Thus we cannot in this light see a Trump as vermin, as he himself sees migrants and Democrats - well, almost everyone; it is repugnant for the rest of us to have to share the world with such a contemptuous would-be tyrant. So keeping Trump “among us” depends on a religious deepening of a kind of human love we know of mothers and fathers.

    Another source is what I would call our finitude and fallibility. Or just call it our being subject to the winds of fortune. If Trump’s youth and childhood was as his cousin – a psychologist – describes it, he grew up loveless, subject to a wicked father and indifferent mother who imprinted in his soul a value system of a dog-eat-dog world, the war of all against all.  Indeed, narcissism is the soul's defense mechanism against being deprived of the love we need as children. A value system made for a certain type of narcissistic personality: my win is your loss, your win is my loss; everyone is in it for himself; everything has a price; a person’s true value is a function of his place on a power-wealth-fame hierarchy i.e. a hierarchy of external goods. The value system of Satan, in other words. Deprived of the kind of family and community whose aim is to promote the virtues that allow one to move beyond the private ego (Satan, the fat, relentless ego, the narcissistic self), his soul became a mirror of a toxic tyrant (the parallels to Hitler – also abused by a tyrant father – are striking). Now we can pity such  a man – as long as he doesn’t have his boot pressed against our throats – because we understand that he didn’t choose his life in perfect, angelic freedom. We are all products of our socialization to a large degree. Moving past the contingent circumstances of our socialization also depends on luck – e.g. access to valuable education and role models. We don’t know how we would have developed in such a toxic environment. Don’t judge a man until you walk a mile in his shoes. (Which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to get his boot off our throats.)

   Such attitudes arise because our ancestors were forced to deal with people who slipped through the net of humanity, as defined in different accents by particular communities. Seeing those who slip through in accents of love and pity is, however, only one response. The howling crowds relishing the burning of witches and heretics is another, one that becomes possible when God’s mercy is extinguished.  The horror many feel when even bad people are subject to such horrific treatment – the feeling that no human being, ever, should have that done to them – is the final source of what we abstractly call “human dignity.” It is other-worldly in the sense that it transcends any possible community-based, virtue-based (Aristotelian) rationality. It is absolute in a way that nothing in Aristotle can be. It flows from a sublime love that most people are not naturally capable of, but which nevertheless can move us deep down.

. . .

There is no doubt that the authors of the constitution of the Federal Republic of German felt the need to use the idea of "human dignity" because of the felt horror over all the crimes of the Nazi regime, especially the Holocaust not not only. It sounds like a caricature to say: the Nazis violated the rights of the Poles, the Russians, the Ukrainians, the Sinti and Roma, and the Jews (list not exhaustive). The horror we feel when we see human beings reduced to that condition reveals "human dignity": in the stripping so many souls from their dignity, we see it through its absence, if that makes sense. But human dignity is also abstract. It lives from the kind of experienced realities I have described. When such experiences are no longer intelligible to the broad masses people, when the concept becomes purely abstract and legal, then it is dead. The idea of human dignity is as alien to a Trump or a Putin as it was to the ancient Spartans. When someone like Putin, who knows no human dignity, has to power to mold society and the state, well, the results are obvious. I am not singling out Putin. He has a lot of company. The idea of human dignity has rarely been powerful in American history. The experience of WWII, to a lesser extent of slavery, forced it into the consciousness of some Americans. 

I will include a German version.

...............................

   Ich sagte, die Idee, diejenigen, die durch die Ritzen der Welt fallen, als moralische Gleichgestellte unter uns zu halten, sei weltfremd. Das muss ich nun näher erläutern.

    Von welchen Menschen spreche ich? Übeltäter, Schwerstbehinderte, schwere Alkoholiker, Menschen mit unheilbaren Geisteskrankheiten, Obdachlose und so weiter; auch jene, die uns unverständlich fremd sind, weil sie für uns so anders sind (z. B. für viele Deutsche und WASP-Amerikaner Muslime; für viele Muslime Europäer säkularer Prägung, usw.). Tief im Inneren können wir solche Menschen nicht bemitleiden, ohne einen Hauch von Herablassung – wenn wir sie überhaupt bemitleiden: die Menschen, die wie Trump denken, wollen sie loswerden; diejenigen, die für so einen wie Trump fremdartig (Migranten) oder böse (Menschen, die nicht für Trump stimmen) sind, werden als Ungeziefer („vermin“) gesehen.

 

     Trump ist ein gutes Beispiel. Er ist zu keinem selbstlosen Akt fähig. Er kann kein wahrer Freund, Ehemann, Vater, Bürger, Liebhaber sein – und somit kein wahrer Mensch sein. Sein Narzissmus ist pathologisch. Man füttert sein Selbstbild oder dient seinen Interessen, sonst ist man nichts für ihn. Nichts ist real außer seinen wahrgenommenen Interessen, und er konstruiert die Realität, um sie ihnen anzupassen. Seine Fantasie von dem, was real und was unreal ist, spiegelt diesen extremen Narzissmus perfekt wider. Narzissmus übersetzt sich in die Politik als Tyrannei (Cicero: Der Tyrann ist jemand, der unfähig ist zur Gemeinschaft oder politischen Gemeinschaft). Der Mann ist nicht liebenswert. Ich könnte fast jeden Menschen lieben, nur nicht ihn. Ich kann nicht verstehen, dass Gott ihn liebt. Er scheint in den Feuern seiner eigenen privaten Hölle zu brennen.

      Trump trägt jedoch menschliche Würde. Was bedeutet das? Nun, er hat Anspruch auf Gerechtigkeit – ein faires Verfahren auf der Grundlage von Beweisen, zum Beispiel, wie jeder andere auch. Er hat Anspruch auf grundlegenden Respekt (obwohl er ihn allen anderen verweigert). Es gibt Grenzen dessen, was man ihm antun kann, selbst um das Land vor seiner dunklen Unmenschlichkeit zu retten. Aus einer aristotelischen Perspektive ergibt das keinen Sinn. [Selbst wenn Du Trump anders siehst, bleibt der Grundpunkt bestehen. Finde Dein eigenes Beispiel für einen völlig unliebenswerten Menschen, sogar aus dem Fantasieland. Der Punkt, den ich mache, ist ein konzeptioneller: Er hängt nicht von einer faktisch/spirituell wahren Narrativen ab. Ich hätte den unaufgeklärten Scrooge oder noch besser, den hassgefüllten Inspektor Javert aus Victor Hugos Les Miserables nehmen können. Vielleicht hätte ich das tun sollen.]

 

      Dass es aus einer aristotelischen, weltlichen Perspektive keinen Sinn ergibt, ist der Anreiz, es als weltfremd zu sehen. Aber was kann das bedeuten? Das Weltfremde muss innerhalb unserer Welt verständlich sein; sonst wäre es nur Unsinn. Woher kommt also die Idee, dass ein so elender, gefährlicher Mensch „Würde“ hat, nur weil er ein Mensch ist? Ich denke, die Quelle ist sehr menschlich. Mütter und Väter lieben immer noch ihre fehlgeleiteten Kinder, die sonst niemand lieben kann, und viele Menschen wollen sogar hinrichten, im Sinne davon, die Welt von Ungeziefer zu befreien. Solche Elternliebe ist bedingungslos. Die Liebe der Heiligen ist auch so. (Hier denke ich an die Liebe, die Schwester Helen Prejean den Männern zeigte, deren böse Taten sie über die weltliche Barmherzigkeit hinausbrachten.) Daraus entsteht das Bild von Gott dem Schöpfer als einem Wesen, das solche unbedingte Liebe zu all seinen Geschöpfen ausstrahlt. Einen Mitmenschen als verloren zu sehen, bedeutet nicht, dass er jenseits von Gottes Barmherzigkeit liegt, selbst wenn diese Barmherzigkeit unverständlich bleibt. Daher können wir in diesem Licht einen Trump nicht als Ungeziefer sehen, so wie er selbst Migranten und Demokraten und Republikaner, die ihm widerstehen, oder Unabhängige, die ihn durchschauen, sieht. Trump „unter uns“ zu halten, hängt also von einer religiösen Vertiefung einer Art menschlicher Liebe ab, die wir von Müttern und Vätern kennen.

 

      Eine weitere Quelle ist das, was ich unsere Endlichkeit und Fehlbarkeit nennen würde. Oder nennen Sie es einfach unser Ausgeliefertsein an die Winde des Schicksals. Wenn Trumps Jugend und Kindheit so war, wie seine Cousine – eine Psychologin – sie beschreibt, wuchs er lieblos auf, ausgesetzt einem bösen Vater und einer gleichgültigen Mutter, die seiner Seele ein Wertesystem einer Hund-frisst-Hund-Welt, des Krieges aller gegen alle, einprägten. Ein Wertesystem, das für eine bestimmte Art von narzisstischer Persönlichkeit gemacht ist: Mein Gewinn ist dein Verlust, dein Gewinn ist mein Verlust; jeder ist nur für sich selbst da; alles hat einen Preis; der wahre Wert eines Menschen ist eine Funktion seines Platzes in einer Hierarchie von Macht-Reichtum-Ruhm, d. h. einer Hierarchie äußerer Güter. Das Wertesystem Satans, mit anderen Worten.

 

    Der Art von Familie und Gemeinschaft beraubt, deren Ziel es ist, die Tugenden zu fördern, die es einem ermöglichen, über das private Ego hinauszuwachsen (Satan, das fette, unerbittliche Ego, das narzisstische Selbst), wurde seine Seele zu einem Spiegelbild eines toxischen Tyrannen (die Parallelen zu Hitler – ebenfalls von einem tyrannischen Vater missbraucht – sind frappierend). Nun können wir einen solchen Mann bemitleiden – solange er nicht seinen Stiefel auf unsere Kehlen presst – weil wir verstehen, dass er sein Leben nicht in perfekter, engelhafter Freiheit gewählt hat. Wir sind alle zu einem großen Teil Produkte unserer Sozialisierung. Über die zufälligen Umstände unserer Sozialisierung hinauszuwachsen, hängt auch vom Glück ab – z. B. vom Zugang zu wertvoller Bildung und Vorbildern. Wir wissen nicht, wie wir uns in einer solchen toxischen Umgebung entwickelt hätten. Urteile nicht über einen Mann, bevor du nicht eine Meile in seinen Schuhen gegangen bist. (Was nicht bedeutet, dass wir nicht versuchen sollten, seinen Stiefel von unseren Kehlen zu bekommen.)

       Solche Einstellungen entstehen, weil unsere Vorfahren gezwungen waren, sich mit Menschen auseinanderzusetzen, die durch das Netz der Menschlichkeit fielen, das von verschiedenen Gemeinschaften in unterschiedlichen Akzenten definiert wurde. Diejenigen, die durch die Ritzen fallen, in Akzenten von Liebe und Mitleid zu sehen, ist jedoch nur eine Reaktion. Die heulenden Menschenmengen, die das Verbrennen von Hexen und Ketzern genießen, ist eine andere, die möglich wird, wenn Gottes Barmherzigkeit erlischt. Das Entsetzen, das viele empfinden, wenn selbst böse Menschen einer solchen schrecklichen Behandlung ausgesetzt werden – das Gefühl, dass kein Mensch, niemals, so etwas angetan werden sollte – ist die letzte Quelle dessen, was wir abstrakt „menschliche Würde“ nennen. Es ist weltfremd in dem Sinne, dass es jede mögliche gemeinschaftsbasierte, tugendbasierte (aristotelische) Rationalität übersteigt. Es ist absolut in einer Weise, wie nichts in Aristoteles sein kann. Es fließt aus einer erhabenen Liebe, die die meisten Menschen nicht von Natur aus fähig sind, die uns jedoch dennoch tief im Inneren bewegen kann.

 (Aristotle 10) Worldly and Other-Worldly Ethics; Aristotle vs. Plato

                                                                   Plato (327-428 BCE)

 

Plato and Aristotle are not fundamentally at odds in many respects. But there is a fault line that separates them. It is a fault line that ran through European culture for centuries, though things are relatively quiet along that fault these days. That fault line is the love of the world versus contempt for the world – this “fallen” world we live in and it was no less “fallen” during the lifetimes of Plato and his student Aristotle. It may take a few entries for me to make sense of this fault line.  

    This fault line runs through their respective thinking, starting with their thinking about Being or reality as a whole (seen as a limited whole, sub specie aeternitatis – from the perspective of eternity, as Spinoza and then Wittgenstein put it). Plato's other-worldliness leads to a view of forms as transcendent, abstract ideas - the so-called form, that intelligible aspect of beings that a clear, ego-less mind can apprehend in a limited way - accessible only through purely intellectual contemplation. Aristotle's worldliness results in a conception of forms as immanent, intrinsic to the physical world, and unknowable without our senses. For Plato and Aristotle, the reality of, say, a tree or a circle makes it intelligible, knowable to us – that which makes it what it is, what kind of a thing it is. The reality of the tree imprints our mind when we understand that the word “tree” (or Baum, Boom, Arbor, δένδρον, дерево, Treow, etc. – words expressing the same “idea” or concept): that is, understand that the particular tree we perceive and perhaps find beautiful is intelligible and that other beings are essentially like it. If we are fortunate enough to be in a position to do so, we can refine and deepen this initial imprinting of reality (e.g. of trees) as long as we are fully alive.

   But the difference is where reality-as-intelligibility – as that which discloses or reveals itself – is located, ontologically, for the two fathers of philosophy (as I understand it): for Aristotle, it is in our world, in the things themselves, in trees themselves; for Plato, our world is at best a pale reflection of reality and at worst a bad copy. Aristotelian impetus is to immerse ourselves in the trees we see with our eyes; for Plato, we cannot trust our eyes and must turn inward to the intellect instead, which is the part of us able (with appropriate education and training) to intellectually “see” the real world of ideas that exists in another dimension. Reality imagined in the world suggests a love of the world; reality imaged outside the world implies a devaluing and demeaning of the world.

 

. . .

 

   We observe this Faultline and Plato’s side of it in the famous “Allegory of the Cave.” The allegory begins with prisoners who have lived their entire lives chained inside a cave. Behind the prisoners is a fire, and between the fire and the prisoners are people carrying puppets or other objects. These cast shadows on the opposite wall. Plato would have used the screen for his allegory were he alive today. The prisoners watch these shadows, believing this to be their reality as they've known nothing else. These prisoners do not understand that they are prisoners. They do not understand that the shadows that they take for real are social constructs. These social constructs appear on the cave wall (the screen) only because it is in the interest of the constructors – those with the power to construct – that the prisoners internalize their particular constructs as real. For example, the prisoner’s idea of “trees” are social constructs that mask the reality of real “treeness” i.e. the true and complete idea that only the intellect (nous) can apprehend.

     The idea is that the power holders construct images of the things we experience, including deep concepts like ‘soul’, ‘self,’ ‘human nature’ ‘nature,’ ‘beauty’, ‘pleasure,’ ‘valuable’, and ‘justice.’ The constructions project all the varying particular shadow-images we perceive, and which form our minds and our ideas of things. We take these shadows of constructs for reality, mostly unaware that they are constructs and that these constructs are projections of power and will, desire and fantasy. 

That is a picture of the world for Plato. (Or one way he pictured it, to be precise. He explored and perhaps never settled for a definitive understanding.)

Plato’s philosophy can be understood as an attempt to understand how the wisest, most pious, and most virtuous of human beings – Socrates – could be so misunderstood by his political community (polis) that his peers had him executed for impiety and corrupting the youth. He often understood the political community as the false world as seen from inside the cave of individual fantasy and group ideology. The Republic – the dialog where he presents the Cave allegory – turns from initially exploring the idea of justice to a radical elimination of politics and the political community from human life. What Aristotle argued was the precondition of the possibility of realizing our full humanity – a polis-like community – Plato believed was the Cave we must turn our backs on to have any hope of salvation.

 

. . .

 

   This other-worldliness shows itself in an ethical idea that goes deep for Plato: “a good man can’t be harmed” he has Socrates inform his judges and jurors in the Apology, denying their power to harm him in any way. Plato's Socrates believes a good man cannot be harmed because true harm affects only the soul, not the body, and a virtuous soul remains untainted by external misfortunes. This belief stems from Plato's dualistic view that the soul belongs to an eternal, unchanging realm of forms, and true well-being is achieved through moral integrity, which external circumstances cannot corrupt. Blessedness is the harmony of the soul with this truly real dimension from which human beings are mostly cut off by the physical and political world. External goods are meaningless. In contrast, Aristotle rejects this dualism, seeing the soul and body as inseparable (as the idea of a tree is inseparable from physically existing trees) and acknowledging that external goods and conditions contribute to eudaimonia (flourishing, becoming fully human in the normative sense). For Aristotle, while moral virtue is central, a good life partly depends on favorable external circumstances, making a person vulnerable to harm from misfortunes.

 

. . .

 

The attempt to understand Socrates as a victim of life in the world finds its pinnacle in Plato’s account of his mentor’s death. Facing imminent death in the Phaedo, Socrates delves into arguments concerning the immortality of the soul, but without much sense of urgency and not overly invested in the outcome. It’s like he knows the answer – perhaps he has had a vision of the Good, as portrayed in the myth he concludes the chain of arguments with. It is like he is just curious to see how close human reasoning can get to it. And then the scene that disturbs me. Socrates indicates that he should take the poison. Crito objects, telling Socrates that there is still time and that many prisoners don't take the poison until well into the night. Socrates replies that men cling too desperately to life, whereas he has no reason to fear death. Socrates is brought the cup of hemlock, which he receives quite cheerfully. Socrates offers a prayer to the gods that his journey from this world to the next may be prosperous – a prayer that suggests that life is a disease and death its cure. Then he downs the cup in one gulp. At this point, Phaedo and all the others break down in tears of grief. Socrates chastises them, saying he sent the women away to avoid such a show of tears and urges his friends to be brave. Ashamed by his rebuke, Socrates' friends fall silent. His last words were: “Crito, I owe the sacrifice of a rooster to Asklepios; will you pay that debt and not neglect to do so?” Asklepios is the God of healing. The sacrifice expresses gratitude for being healed. The disease he was cured of? Life in this world.

     This scene, as I respond to it, embodies the following view of the meaning of death:

·        It is a good thing because life is a misfortune, at least to the extent it is not lived in search of the wisdom of its own unimportance.

·        Grieving over the death of a beloved friend is like an irrational superstition, based on a mistake of sorts – the belief that life is good and death is bad. 

·        Facing death does not really involve courage, not in the sense most people understand courage – as the overcoming of the fear of death (or harm) to do the good thing. The fear itself is irrational. It is a matter of knowledge and acting on that knowledge. The knowledge that death is not an evil takes away the fear, a fear that arises only in our ignorance.

What is the consequence of this for me? That I have brought three children, three souls into this prison house, and that the best I can do for them is to teach them to learn contempt for the world and live to escape it for the true world, which is purely spiritual and transcendent. That’s a downer.

    I can fully understand those who embrace Aristotle precisely because he shows us how meaning belongs to this world. I think of a passage from Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Why human? the poet asks.

…because just being here matters, because

the things of this world, these passing things,

seem to need us, to put themselves in our care

somehow. Us, the most passing of all.

Once for each, just once. Once and no more.

And for us too, once. Never again. And yet

it seems that this—to have once existed,

even if only once, to have been a part

of this earth—can never be taken back.

 

Homer, Aristotle, and most of the free Greek world would agree, even if for them “never be taken back” was connected with the idea of being remembered.

    Aristotle’s admirers and Plato’s detractors divide precisely over the question of the value and meaning of this life in only world we immediately know. Martha Nussbaum, for example, criticizes Plato's way of thinking by arguing that his focus on the soul's invulnerability and the devaluation of the physical world and external circumstances leads to an unrealistic and incomplete understanding of human life and morality. She contends that Plato's dismissal of the importance of external goods and physical well-being ignores the complexities and vulnerabilities inherent in human existence. Nussbaum asserts that true ethical and philosophical inquiry must account for the tangible, lived experiences of people, including their bodily needs, emotions, and the impact of external factors on their ability to live a flourishing life. To love anything makes us vulnerable. To love Socrates as an individual man of flesh and blood, doomed to die; to love the Athenian world that was during Plato’s lifetime in its death throes – such loves made Plato vulnerable. On a psychological level, he dealt with the losses by demeaning them.

 

This is an interpretation of Socrates’ life (one that I cannot reconcile with other aspects of Plato’s Socrates). It tells us why as a soldier he retreated before the Spartans while perfectly calm, inspiring the wonder of his fellows. Death was a matter of indifference; life not something to cling to. It tells us why a good man can’t be harmed: because nothing done to him, not even killing him, touches the soul devoted to goodness. This life doesn’t matter once the philosopher has arrived at that insight. It tells us why it is better to suffer rather than do injustice: doing injustice damns your soul; suffering injustice doesn’t. This death scene ties all the fundamental Socratic thoughts together.

. . .

The parallel between the Christian story of Jesus’ execution and Socrates is obvious. Despite the very different worlds and beliefs, the same inability of the world to recognize goodness is there: “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” Darkness. The Cave. The Christian picture is even more extreme. God become human, pure Goodness and Love took on a human face – and was nailed to a cross by the Cave dwellers.

 Christianity was more radically anti-Aristotelian. And “whoever makes himself high will be made low, and whoever makes himself low will be made high.” That people Aristotle embodied the human essence were now the chaff to be burned. All those deprived of human flourishing – the poor, oppressed, children, women, handicapped, etc. – they are the true human beings; they have value and are loved by God.

    The question is: does the ability to keep those of us who fall through the cracks of the world with us – to imagine the least fortunate of us and the evil-doers among us (the “sinners”) as morally our equals – require this devaluation of the world? Once we define a good human life in a way that make a certain kind of community and individual character & achievements - as well as a bit of good fortune - necessary conditions, then we inevitably create a hierarchy of dignity, a "natural aristocracy" as Jefferson put it. (e.g. Lebron James belongs to the natural aristocracy of basketball; Magnus Carlson of chess, etc. - apply the analogy to life as such). As soon as we equate dignity (morality) with equality, such that every member of the species is equal in dignity just by being a member of the species, and is owed equal respect, then experiencing humanity as a hierarchy of worth is immoral - or sinful in religious terms. Which then sets up another kind of hierarchy (heaven and hell) unless God does love all his creatures and it is unthinkable that He would ever shut the door on any (e.g. the parable of the Prodigal Son). Thus in chess or basketball - limited fragments of life - we might accept a hierarchy, but morally and legally the ideal is not to. We just can't live up to that ideal - evidence that it is not "natural" or "worldly" but other-worldly. It is a fantasy, or a leak from another dimension, accessible at times to "the human heart" (through compassionate love). It not a fantasy, it relativizes ethical life. 

(Aristotle 9) Human Dignity and Virtue 

We have analogies to Aristotelian thought in our world but below the level of politics and socially fragmented.  Aristotle, I fear, would see most of us as “barbarians,” and not just because we don’t speak Greek but because, like a flower that cannot blossom because planted in desert soil, we have been thrown into a society which, by and large, prevents us from developing an integrated, virtuous character capable of authentic speech and action, a personality that transcends the purely private ego. Basically, human dignity is part achievement and part endowment, like "dignity" in basketball or physics.  Even though a relative few of us achieve great things in particular activities – sports, music, science, engineering, medicine, etc. – and to that extent transcend the merely human, even these people are fragmented, perhaps schizophrenic in a metaphorical sense. For their personality, once it leaves their practice-community, is part of and thus socialized by the larger anti-Aristotelian society. We are overwhelmingly partly at least pre-virtue ego dominated by private desires for external goods and even seeing intrinsic goods as a means to an end – basketball as a means to money, fame, and women. We would not impress Aristotle.

   And Aristotle, impressive as he is, cannot completely impress us. Aristotle had no concept of human dignity. The Greek world he lived in lacked such a concept. The whole world at his time, as far as I know, lacked such a concept. [And our world is in the process of losing it.] I became aware of this early on in my Greek studies. For example, in one of my favorite dialogues by Plato, The Euthyphro, I was disturbed by the incident that led Euthyphro to prosecute his own father for murder (in Athens, anyone could charge anyone else; the judge and jury were the assembly of citizens).

The victim, as a matter of fact, was a certain laborer of mine, and when we were farming in Naxos he was employed by us there. Drunk and having been provoked by another one of our household, he slit this man’s throat. So my father bound his feet and hands, threw him into some ditch, and sent a man here to inquire of the interpreter of religious law about what should be done. But during that time he paid no attention to the bound man and neglected him as a murderer and thought nothing of it if he died too, which is in fact what happened, since he died of hunger and cold and his bonds before the messenger returned from the interpreter.

I assumed after reading this that Socrates would approve of what Euthyphro was doing, that the father should answer for the laborer’s death. And it took quite some time before I realized that Socrates – here siding with public opinion – believed that Euthyphro’s prosecution of his father was shameful and impious. It certainly wasn’t a noble deed to leave the laborer to die of exposure in the ditch, but that weighed nothing compared to the impiety of prosecuting your own father (cf. That shalt honour thy father and thy mother). Nobody lost any sleep over the laborer’s death and the insinuation is that Euthyphro can only be using it as a pretext to appear before the Athenians as more righteous than they were and perhaps get back at his father for some wrong done to him, real or imaged. Otherwise, his actions would be unintelligible. Granted the laborer had apparently killed someone in anger. But even such as he is owed justice. I offer this as an illustration of a culture that has no concept of human dignity. That fact that is was a slave society and that women were considered pre-rational as a rule is further proof of this.

    Compare my reaction to the death of Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.  I didn’t think that execution was an unjust punishment. But the way it was done and the treatment of the corpse by the mob was inhuman. I later read this view of a witness: “I was convinced Mussolini deserved death ... but there should have been a trial according to law. It was very barbarous.” Moreover, when I read about how the angry mob hung up Mussolini’s body together with the body of his mistress and other fascist party members who had been shot, I was disgusted and actually pitied that evil-doer. This is from Wikipedia:

Their bodies were left in a heap, and by 9:00 a.m. a considerable crowd had gathered. The corpses were pelted with vegetables, spat at, urinated on, shot at and kicked; Mussolini's face was disfigured by beatings. Allied forces began arriving in the city during the course of the morning and an American eyewitness described the crowd as "sinister, depraved, out of control."

Aristotle would probably have considered such behavior vulgar; I consider it – with full understanding of the hatred Mussolini inspired – as evil. That is the difference.

    (Evil done to a person can cause them to lose their soul in hatred and grief – here Dante is brilliant: the scene in the Inferno where Dante comes across two sinners in such close proximity that one is gnawing on the back of the other's neck. Dante offers to tell the sinner's story in the upper world, if the sinner would tell it. He was Count Ugolino, and the soul he feeds upon was Archbishop Ruggieri, who betrayed him in life. Ruggieri imprisoned Ugolino and his four sons in a tower, nailed the doors shut, and starved them all to death. Ugolino is forced to watch his young boys starve one by one. And his hatred for Ruggieri increases with each of his son's death. Once through with his long and passionate tale, Ugolino goes back to feeding on Ruggieri. What a perfect image for how hatred and desire for revenge - even when so understandable - can destroy a soul.)

 

. . .

 

In "Politics," Aristotle describes a natural hierarchy in which men are naturally superior to women. He argues that men are more rational and suited to rule, while women are more emotional and thus should be ruled. He states, “the male is by nature superior, and the female inferior; and the one rules, and the other is ruled.” Thus he believed that women’s primary role was in the domestic sphere, as wives and mothers. He viewed the household as a microcosm of the state, with men as the heads of households and women as subordinate partners. Women's primary functions were seen as managing the home and bearing children. In "Generation of Animals," he posited that women are essentially "mutilated males" and that they contribute only the matter to reproduction, while men provide the form and essence. He believed that men’s semen contains the active principle of life, whereas women’s role in reproduction is passive. Finally, he argued that men are more rational and logical, while women are more emotional and less capable of rational thought. This belief influenced his view that men should govern and women should be governed.   It also clearly implies that – all things being equal – men have more human dignity than women: that is, men are (in general) more likely to become fully human. (I already mentioned his views about natural slavery somewhere.)

 

    Thomas Aquinas adopted many of Aristotle's views on women, particularly the ideas of natural hierarchy, biological inferiority, and distinct roles in society. He integrated these views into his theological framework, reinforcing the belief in male superiority while also acknowledging the spiritual equality of men and women in the eyes of God. Well, at least that. But another example of how Aristotle and Christianity make difficult bedfellows. I think this did untold damage in blocking out God's light from the world.

  It’s not just that the science behind this is wrong. As a scientist, he would presumably accept a better explanation of the data as known to science today. The important point is that human dignity – here I use the term anachronistically – can only be a potential and an achievement for Aristotle. Practically it is something only few can aspire to. Most of us lack full human dignity. Our value as human beings is a function of our character, of developing our highest potentials. Accidents of birth and socialization are decisive. That is not how most of us think.

 

. . .

 

Modern Aristotelians like MacIntyre or Nussbaum (from very different angles: MacIntyre is at least sympathetic to Thomism; Nussbaum is a kind of left-liberal) want to reconceptualize what is valuable in Aristotle in a modern context: that is, a context in which all human beings are thought to have human dignity just by virtue of being human. This is valuable, this attempt. In a worldly sense, Aristotle is right. But if there is nothing but this worldly sense, life would turn out to be a horrible thing, at least for all the chaff that gets burned.

   Still it is like trying to harmonize two different scales. I think we constantly go back and forth between them. Sometimes we judge people from an Aristotelian standpoint. “None of the players care about the name on the front of the jersey,” is a common criticism of the University of Kentucky basketball program these days. That means, they are nothing but private individuals with self-gain on their mind; the program and its good mean nothing to them. That is Aristotelian. And a headline from The Guardian today reads: “The brutality and inhumanity of Israel’s assault on Gaza is no surprise. It’s just what was promised.” That makes sense against a morality based on human dignity (as does the condemnation of the Hamas atrocities of October 7).

  I think both frameworks are necessary. It’s a matter of working it out in practice. But whenever there is a conflict between them, human dignity must win out. “Morality” – a word I am not overly fond of – is predicated on human dignity, on the idea of a shared common humanity. To a worldly naturalist like Aristotle (and many people today) this common humanity is not visible. To me it surfaces in the (different) kinds of evil done by Hamas and the right-wing Israeli government. It shows itself in the mutilated body of a child. That is not sentimental. That is reality showing itself. Hamas and the right-wing Israeli government – standing for a multitude of other cases – are just blind to it. Hate can blind. Hatred is a form of Hell. A soul cut off from reality. But even if the destruction of Gaza is motivated by “rational” security concerns – like Cato the Elder of Rome when he insisted at the end of every Senate meeting that "Carthage must be destroyed" – it is just a different form of Hell.

 

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

 

This dimension of good and evil goes deeper than anything the worldly Aristotle could conceive of.