Nihilism Has Become Chic (McInerny #3)

    I’d like to start with an argument regarding material predication and epistemological predication. No, not ‘prediction,’ even though predication will turn out to be a sort of predictor. Predication is well, making something a predicate, as in, the grammatical subject and predicate. The cat is fat. The cat is angry. The cat is a dragon. These are all instances (one of them is awesome) of predication, in which ‘is’ is the copula (word connecting subject to predicate).

*Kant*

    Kant states that ‘being’ is “obviously not a real predicate.” Meaning, it doesn’t actually saying anything new of anything. It’s a predicate, but only a logical one. It exists in the abstract realm (if you can get more abstract than Kant) of logic and ‘imagination’, as in, “The field is a monster, and, um, the acorn was a cat, and, uh, the flying spaghetti monster is real.” You can say anything of anything that way. Kant gives us what I consider to be a pretty cool example. So, there’s this thing (Thing Z) with a piece of reality missing. It has every feature of reality except one. This missing feature is not added by saying, “Thing Z exists”: duh. If the missing feature WERE added by saying “Thing Z exists,” it wouldn’t be Thing Z anymore, because it would have the missing piece of reality, and anything that has a different piece than the thing before it is, well, different. God cannot be snuck into existence just by thinking of the concept of God. The second thing (the God that you brought into existence) would have something different than the first thing if the second thing is to exist—it would have, namely, existence—but then the thing you were looking to bring into existence (the first thing) would not now be in existence. It is now a different thing, something maybe called “first thing plus existence,” which is NOT “first thing.” Catch Kant’s drift?
    I think Kant is saying that ‘is’ cannot both be a copula (connecting subject and predicate) and a predicate. I don’t have Critique of Pure Reason in front of me and I’m too lazy to search online. Also, if I search online, I’ll get distracted and never get back to my book reportage.
    Anyway, remember way back in the above paragraph when I stated that Kant recognizes that ‘is’ is a predicate, just not a real one? Something interesting happens if we take him up seriously on this, and see what exactly he means by something being a real predicate. (I take that back: I do NOT want to figure out what Kant exactly means by anything—poolside CPR and Critique of Pure Reason do not share initials for nothing.) What is the opposite of a logical predicate? Well, something not merely logical, something not merely imagined, so probably something real: something material.
    Kant discounts Descartes’ ontological proof, stating that trying to sneak existence into God is like trying to increase your funds by adding zeros to the end of your bank statement. Let this analogy sink in for a moment. I understand that much trust is involved, as you first have to trust that I read this analogy somewhere, and second, that this is worth your time. Worth your time. That I read this somewhere. Increase your funds. Done? We focus on the bank statement too much in the analogy, and not enough (and sometimes not at all) on the person writing in zeros—you. You are the one strapped for cash. You are the one who puts in the zeros. You are the one who is trying to figure out if God exists, formulating thoughts and statements about God.
    Anyway, now that Kant is out of the way (Kant is boring), we can talk about McInerny. It will turn out McInerny relies on the value of material predication—that there are truths to be found, and that we find them. But before he gets to this exactly, he lays the groundwork for what’s up with natural theology.

*Friends and Foes of Natural Theology*

    “The Cartesian turn,” McInerny says, “can be said to have ushered in a happy time for natural theology.” The world was proven through God, who guarantees the reliability of Descartes’ senses. Descartes knows God through reason (natural theology), the admittedly odd logic and reason of a doubting self (McInerny doesn’t say this—he never says how the Cartesian turn is, on paper, a good one for natural theology, but I’m guessing that was why). But with Descartes came “the remarkable persistence of the notion that subjectivity, that is, the knowing subject, comes thematically first.”
    McInerny argues that Descartes and his descendants have turned philosophy into something concerned not with the problem of finding truth, but with the problem of determining a match-up between our ideas/judgments, and things outside our mind. The Cartesian turn has led to putting the world into “an epistemological dock.” “The contribution our minds made to the objects of knowledge took center stage”; the fact that an object is intelligible or sensible, able to be thought or sensed accurately, “became constitutive” of it. In pre-modern discussions, the mind’s contribution was not ignored, but it didn’t “swamp the object known” (a nice phrase).
    Philosophy’s task was now to prove that philosophy itself was the problem, and examined itself that way. “We no longer seek to achieve the true and avoid the false. Forget about both of those. The only question is, does it work, is it successful.” Philosophy lost its ‘true-pointing’ function. McInerny discusses philosophers like A.J. Ayer, Wittgenstein, and even Sartre, concluding that in their philosophical ambiance, “language is no longer the sign of thought and thought is no longer the grasp of nature, of essence, of the way things are. We are thrown back on language itself…”
    The culmination of all this for natural theology? Theism can’t be said to be false because it can’t be said to be anything—you have to go through Logical Empiricism and Representationalism and all that before you can, well, speak.

*Atheism is Not the Default Position*

    It is the loss of something. “It does seem true,” McInerny states, “that people usually become atheists by losing their childhood beliefs. The original position was belief, theism, and then, as the alpha privative suggests, it was lost and that result was atheism.” Even though “it could be argued that throughout history the vast majority of philosophers have been theists or religious believers,” the default position in philosophy today is atheism, “the end to which anyone who seriously uses his mind is expected inevitably to come.”


*Radical Chic*

    The nihilistic position has become chic. “The supposed two relata, the terms of the relation”—and judgments and its object—“are really only one,” and this position is held by people in “comfortable university chairs.”
    McInerny goes on to discuss—yup, there’s more—Protagoras. Plato explains Protagoras’ views: “As Protagoras meant when he said that of all things the measure is man, that as things appear to me, then, so they actually are for me, and as they appear to you, so they actually are for you. “ This position leads to believing that “a proposition and its opposite can both be true.” Apply the teaching to itself and you have a similar problem: “you deprive oneself of saying that its contradictory is false.”
    As one counter to the position, McInerny uses the example of the statement “it is raining.” “Most native speakers,” he states, “would assume that they are talking about the weather, not the language, when they say it is raining or it is not raining. It is because rain and its absence at the same time and place are not simultaneously possible that the sentences expressing these relate to one another as contradictories. Logic, as Quine must have said, recapitulates ontology.” Logic is not the guiding principle—things are, and logic reflects things as they are.
    “Few men fail to be impressed by Thomas Reid. They know he is right.” Strong words (but mostly true, I think), regarding Thomas Reid’s ‘Common Sense Philosophy.’ It basically holds that only a philosopher would think of doubting that things exist or that we need to proofs for physical objects and other minds. It’s just common sense. “Such non-gainsayable truths are the foundation on which truths that must be proved ultimately rest.” What is “commonly sensed” is true. People grasp first principles with varying degrees of accuracy and clarity, but they all do so via “an inward light, “ “a gift of heaven” (McInerny quoting Reid quoting Alexander Pope). McInerny gives cool quotes from Samuel Johnson and G. K Chesterton (especially Chesterton)—I’ll only give half of one, to force you to read the lecture: “the first inexplicable term is the most important of all.” Cool. Now you are forced to read the lecture.
    Once the principle of non-contradiction (or, purple suspenders)— ~ (p~p)—is investigated and reflected on, “one regains a correct understanding of words and thought and things in themselves,” and natural theology becomes possible. So, too, a “disagreement between the theist and the atheist…since one of them is right and the other is wrong. Atheists have as much stake in opposing the regnant relativism and nihilism as do theists.”
    Sartre’s purple suspenders have nothing to do the principle of non-contradiction, by the way. I don’t even know what the principle of non-contradiction is. Amirite?

*Natural and Supernatural Theology*

    McInerny (him again?) brings up one of Kierkegaard’s thought-experiments, involving Socratic teachers, non-Socratic teachers, and Jesus Christ. Sound interesting? It is, and it makes me (aka forces me) to read more Kierkegaard. But I’m running out of space. For me, Kierkegaard is one of those philosophers who is so right that it gets kind of boring thinking about his philosophy, because it just is right, and is how I experience my life. In any case, what McInerny sees as a helpful result in the thought-experiment is this: given that “the principle of contradiction remains operative” even in a believer—what a person believes to be true cannot be in contradiction to what the person knows to be true—and given that the person knows the language of revelation and knows the language of the thought-experiment (Danish, or English, or whatever), a person can accept or reject what is being said. But the content of what is being said is such that “the truth and falsity cannot be definitely shown from what we know about the world.” The mysteries of faith float free from reason—according to McInerny on Kierkegaard. BUT—“neither Kierkegaard nor Johannes Climacus is a Thomist.”
    McInerny’s star example: Kierkegaard thinks that “any proof for the existence of X presupposes X,” and that “God cannot be proved because it is impossible to prove the existence of anything.” In some sense this is true, because “we must know what we are looking for, what X is taken to be.” Suppose “X is a star thought to exist at such and such a location in the skies.” McInerny then asks, breathtakingly, “But is there such a star?” Is it possible for there to be a star thought to exist at such and such a location, because wouldn’t we already know that the star exists, if we know its location? Why would ever wonder if “X, a star with these coordinates,” is a star? If this is just a question of logic, we can entertain it for a while but we shouldn’t give it real thought. But what if the star’s existence can be confirmed if it matches up with definite descriptive qualities? It’s going to be a small, yellow dot above that tree. We know the star exists when we know the description of the star is referring to something. Knowing its description does not beg the question of its existence—just like knowing that the world is not merely a random smattering of things does not beg the question of the existence of God.
    Believers who would like to protect God from philosophy and reason claim that it’s “hubristic, even sinful,” to attempt to understand God, and close the gap between God and people. McInerny refers to Romans 1:19-20, and says the fact that “Christianity depends essentially on things we already know is clear from the very fact of scripture.” The language it is written in, which had other uses prior to the Bible; the metaphors and parables it uses, which presuppose our capacity to go from what we already know (pouring water) to “what we could only know under the impetus of grace” (cleansing of sin); and finally, “the Incarnation itself,” relying on what humans can see and hear—a body, a person.
    These are “bi-level features,” and they’re used by Aquinas. LISTEN UP: Aquinas saw that some of the things known about God through revelation were things pagan philosophers could also figure out. These “naturally knowable truths about God that had nonetheless been revealed” Aquinas called preambula fidei—preambles of faith. Preambula fidei include the mysteries of faith—mysteria fidei— but not all the mysteries are in the preambles (but the 'preambles' do not mean you advance from them to the mysteries--rather, the believer "accepts them all at once and under the same formality.")  Aquinas is out to verify the “reasonableness of the believer’s accepting as true what he cannot understand,” and comes to the following argument:

    If some of the things that have been revealed can be known to be true—the preambles—then it is reasonable to accept that the others—the mysteries—are, as they claim to be, true.

    God being one can be known both as revealed and as plain-old figured out. If you can plain-old figure out some of the revealed things, what’s stopping you from thinking it’s reasonable to accept the other mysteries?
    “This is not,” McInerny says, “a proof of the truth of the mysteries of faith, but it does prove that it is reasonable to believe them to be true.” I think something is odd here. Isn’t that what the upshot of a proof is? Coming to believe that something is reasonable to think as true? And I’m not yet clear on the exact difference between knowing something is true, and believing something is true.
    In any case, that ends the first section of his lectures. The second and final section is on “The Recovery of Natural Theology,” where he talks about proofs for God’s existence, and about changing one’s mind versus changing one’s life.

Speaking of changing one's life--Happy New Year!