Mattias Desmet ('The Psychology of Totalitarianism') talks to John Waters

 

Mattias Desmet has been popping up on youtube speaking about the phenomenon of mass formation or the coalescenceof a significant percentage of the population around a perceived situation  that must be dealt with even at the cost of abandoning normal ethical principles.  The covid 19 ‘emergency’ which I have been calling covidology is an example of this zombification.  A lot of people got bitten.

In his conversation with John Waters he covers much of the same ground as he did previously linking the panicked response to the emergence of totalitarianism.  He’s written a book on this ‘The Psychology of Totalitarianism’ which is to be published later this month.  The difference between the usual delineation of the mechanisms facilitating the emergence of a mob mind and this conversation with John Waters is the sympathetic vibration of their strings which brought out what Otto called the non-rational sources of knowledge and awe normally called wisdom.  Aristotle and the Thomists, that band, call it connaturality.  The not-mentioned Jacques Maritain frequently writes about it in ‘The Degrees of Knowledge’- on my book stand at the moment.

Have a look: you’re worth it.

totalitarianism

Modern Moral Philosophy by Elizabeth Anscombe

 I’ve read that this paper is important and I suppose that it is though I have noticed that judicious context elision can negate what is its main purport: to be an engine of stultification. All modern ethical theories are rendered foolish by their unwitting divorce from a philosophical psychology of the person.  The ‘is’ of their oughts is missing in action.  It is this which gives the force to the quotable:

This word ‘ought’ having become a word of mere mesmeric force, could not, in the character of having that force, be inferred from anything whatever.

Anscombe having a Catholic Christian view of morality would be committed to a virtually instinctual grasp of good and evil.  The following through of that impetus leads to a connaturality with the good in the Aristotelian/Thomistic sense of that term.  ‘What the good man deems to be good is good’ (Aristotle iirc)

From 2018:

ethics without god

describes a argumentative trajectory which culminates in a position contrary to that which he first starts out with. Is this an indication of retrocausality in action whereby a power acts from the future on a present situation? The ineluctable power of the truth that is yet to be assented to mitigates the contemporary confusion.

It begins, as American reflections often do, with a story. A student is shocked by Prof. Troy’s admission that he has no religious beliefs. This evokes his comment:

 ‘But Professor Jollimore,’ he stammered, ‘how can you not believe in God? You teach ethics for a living!’

The series of lectures in contemporary Ethics that was being taught made no mention of “the scaffolding of any faith or religious tradition”(T.Jo.) which in itself is a questionable choice. Leaving out the whole history of moralizing up to comparatively recent times is an example of bias and egregious leading. In any case the spontaneous reaction of a student is not a serious basis for a generalisation. I call that a ‘straw boy’. There’s nearly enough of them in the essay to make a full complement of mummers like the Straw Boys of Wexford that go out with the wren on St.Stephen’s Day.

His argument against divine rule is summarized:

Adding God would give us divine rewards and punishments, but that’s only to add self-interested reasons to be ethical, not genuinely moral reasons.

We’re not very far down the page when that hedging locution ‘suspect’ comes on the pitch:

 I suspect that something else is going on, and that in most cases these arguments are just rationalisations for the belief that morality depends on faith in God. The actual explanation, I believe, is something else.

This lateral thought sends him in a direction which subverts his original thesis. Religion is fixed on the personal not the theoretical. There are no impossible computations about universal felicity.

This emphasis on being attentive to concrete reality tallies with the idea that it is the emotions (compassion and sympathy in particular), rather than abstract rational principles, that are doing the motivating when it comes to ethical behaviour.

It is wisdom that enables discernment:

Wisdom, as opposed to knowledge, might seem a somewhat quaint notion in the contemporary world. (Indeed at this point even the word ‘knowledge’ sounds quaint to many people, who prefer to talk about ‘data’ or ‘information.’)

Professor Jollimore quotes that section of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics on connaturality that I have referenced a few times in posts:

‘Actions, then,’ Aristotle taught, ‘are called just and temperate when they are such as the just or the temperate man would do; but it is not the man who does these that is just and temperate, but the man who also does them as just and temperate men do them.’

It would be impertinent of me to remind the professor that for Aristotle the highest form of happiness lies in contemplation. It is divine because the divine nous is absorbed in self awareness as its highest condition. It thinks itself. (cf. Lambda 9 Metaphysics) We become aligned to the divine in following that path.

It is in the summation to his essay that the strange turn occurs:

The idea that morality stems from strong character rather than from obedience to a strict set of rules, for instance, is very much in line with the moral reorientation proposed by Christ in the New Testament, from a view centered on obedience to God’s commandments to one in which love and compassion take centre stage.

We need to:

.....teach ourselves to stop looking at morality as an abstract and isolated set of requirements and demands — an external authority that stands apart from and sets limits on human existence — and see it instead as a set of commitments, enthusiasms, and passions that are woven into the very fabric of our lives.

An exemplar that generates enthusiasm (en theos - god within) is the only force that can draw us out an in-group morality based on obligation to a universal one based on love. Such are the great saints and sages of world religions.

Hey Troy, you’re nearly there.

 

Leaving out Sankara and Aquinas justified.

(from B.S.B. II,i.11)

For this further reason, one should not on the strength of mere logic challenge something that has to be known from the Vedas. For reasoning that has no Vedic foundation and springs from the mere imagination of persons, lacks conclusiveness. For man’s conjecture has no limits. Thus it is seen that an argument discovered by adepts with great effort is falsified by other adepts; and an argument hit upon by the latter is proved to be hollow by still others. So nobody can rely on any argument as conclusive, for human intellect differs.

What are the things that have to be learned from the Vedas according to Sankara?

Although reasoning may be noticed to have finality in some contexts, still in the present context it cannot possibly get any immunity from the charge of being inconclusive; for this extremely sublime subject-matter, concerned with the reality of the cause of the Universe and leading to the goal of liberation, cannot even be guessed without the help of the Vedas. And we have said that It cannot be known either through perception, being devoid of form, etc, or through inference etc., being devoid of the grounds of inference etc.

Now the question arises: is the non-demonstrability of the existence of God/Brahman a matter for rational discourse or not? Sankara continues with his depreciation of reason as a means to firm knowledge in this regard.

For it is a patent fact of experience, that when a logician asserts, “This indeed is the true knowledge”, it is upset by someone else. And what is established by the latter is disproved by still another. How can any knowledge, arising from reasoning, be correct when its content has no fixity of form?

Real adepts will have noticed that I have by careful selection established a specious argument for leaving out Sankara from philosophical study much as Bertrand Russel got away with giving a mere 13 pages to Thomas Aquinas in what has been called ‘a monument to one man’s prejudice, his History of Western Philosophy. You can extract a rationale for this by the following from his work: (from Aquinas on Faith: faith)


Insofar as it conveys vision, cognition is distinguished from faith. This is why Gregory says that things that are seen have cognition rather than faith. According to Augustine in On Seeing God, those things are said to be seen which are present to the senses or to the intellect. But things that are said to be present to the intellect do not exceed its capacity.
However, as far as the certitude of the assent is concerned, faith is a cognition, a cognition by virtue of which it can be called a knowledge and a vision, according to 1 Corinthians 13:12: "We see now darkly through a mirror." And this is what Augustine says in On Seeing God: "If it is not improper to say that we know that which we believe most certainly, then from this it follows that we are rightly said to see with the mind the things that are believed, even though they are not present to our senses."

Selective extracts of both Sankara and Aquinas can cause both to be relegated to exterior darkness when in fact a comprehensive study reveals close reasoning of the highest order.

Peter Geach on Abstractionism

Geach in his Mental Acts impugns the Lockean theory of concept formation which he calls abstractionism. To clarify his position vis a vis the Thomist view of abstraction he added an appendix:

HISTORICAL NOTE ON §11: AQUINAS AND ABSTRACTIONISM*
SOME PEOPLE may have been a good deal surprised at my using arguments adapted from Aquinas to refute abstractionism. Aquinas is very often regarded as an abstractionist, and many of his professed followers are abstractionists; and of course he does use the term "abstractio" for the process of forming concepts. All the same it can be decisively shown that in his maturest work, the Summa Theologica, his views are opposed to what I have called abstractionism.
In accepting the comparison whereby the intellectus agens, the mind's concept-forming power, is likened to a light that enables the mind's eye to see the intelligible features of things, as the bodily eye sees colours, Aquinas is careful to add that this comparison goes on all fours only if we suppose that colours are generated by kindling the light—that the light is not just revealing colours that already existed in the dark (la q. 79 art. 3 ad 2 um). Furthermore he says that when we frame a judgment expressed in words, our use of concepts is to be compared, not to seeing something, but rather to forming a visual image of something we are not now seeing, or even never have seen (la q. 85 art. 2 ad 8 um). So he expresses anti-abstractionist views both on the formation and on the exercise of concepts.
Again, an abstractionist, as we say, cannot allow that we possess 'proper' concepts of the various kinds of material substance in our environment, and it is arguable that he ought to reject the term "substance" as nonsensical. But it is a main thesis in Aquinas's theory of knowledge that what our understanding grasps primarily and most readily is the specific nature (quod quid est) of material substances, in spite of his also holding that the senses are in no way cognizant of this nature. In fact, he greatly exaggerates the ease and certainty of this knowledge; as when he says that the term "stone" signifies the nature of stone as it is in itself, since it expresses the definition of stone, by which we know what stone is (la q. 13 art. 8 ad 2 um). His soi-disant followers who adopt abstractionism have been obliged to reject his epistemology on this cardinal point; how they can think that this departure is not fundamental I have never understood.

I suppose it is the result of the empiricist tendency to believe that if we have got something e.g. a concept, it must be the result of our working on something in order to extract it.

Ed.Feser has a post on concept formation and its implications for materialist theories of the mind. sphexy

Natural Law Critique

Looking at a lot of the reaction to David Bentley Hart’s note on Natural Law I find that James Chastek on his estimable blog
natural law critique
makes many important points. Natural Law theory as a basis for the arriving at moral judgments will perhaps issue in several differing judgments. 'Prelest’ as Hart might put it will ensure this. No single view is sure to issue from the use of unaided natural reason even with the soundest of foundations. You may bring natural law to the ‘public square’ but you can’t make it speak with a single voice.

A commenter gives a very pertinent quotation from St. Thomas Aquinas:

“Although the eternal law is unknown to us according as it is in the Divine Mind: nevertheless, it becomes known to us somewhat, either by natural reason which is derived therefrom as its proper image; or by some sort of additional revelation.”

Here in an ironic form, that ‘somewhat’ is the reflection of the Doctors of the Church, the opposite numbers of those Saints and Sages of the Dharmasastras and scripture itself.