#ed feser

[servus-immaculatae]

Unnatural Lawyering: John Finnis’s brief against traditional Catholic teaching on capital punishment

Ed Feser tells fools who believe that the death penalty is principally inadmissible that they’re wrong

[nonapologia]

Inner Law

"Those who break the rules are trash, but those who abandon their teammates are worse than trash." -- Kakashi

The Kingdom of Heaven is likened to a man on a tightrope.

A man on a tightrope must stray neither to the left nor to the right, and this suggests tight discipline and an unbreakable inner law that produces swift punishment. A man on a tightrope is not stiff, but flexible, in order to remain in balance at all times no matter how the rope may sway. Therefore, the true doctrine is not a static, but a dynamic equilibrium. Else, statements that are understood as saving truths by one mind would refract as destructive falsehoods in a differently equipped mind, and from a single well would issue both clear and poison water. And certainly this has happened in all societies that called themselves a Church but secretly prized *words* over and above *truths*. A man on a tightrope must listen to his own sense of balance, and cannot afford to ignore it completely in favour of people shouting advice from the sidelines.

The things that are essential to mankind, are accidental to one man in particular. The things that are essential to one man, are accidental to mankind, and may be construed as imperfections from it. Therefore, to perfect mankind in a man, one must destroy the man, and to perfect a man one must destroy mankind in him. And so the Scholars have made war on man in order to perfect his mankind. Man is far beyond a lifetime's work to understand; mankind and its meager virtues can be exhausted in a Summa. Likewise have the Scholars have made war against every thing in order to perfect the archetypes of the things. And in the exhaustion that followed this war, men have declared that there is no man just as there is no mankind, there is no Inner Law, there is no up or down, that all is Chaos and we are doomed to perish in it.

A man who stays on his tightrope above the Chaos has balance, and follows the Inner Law particular to him over the Outer Law particular to mankind. The Inner Law is seen in such sayings as those of William Blake: "I was then persuaded, and remain confirm’d, that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God." But what indignation is honest, and what is dishonest? Will the Book tell us? Will the Pharisees measure it? Will we settle the question once and for all? It is like asking what angle the man on the tightrope should lean. There is always a precise and objective answer, and deviation from that answer is instant death. But by the time you Scholars hurry with your measuring-tapes and spirit-levels to ascertain it, the answer will have already changed.

Therefore, in order to feel the Truth, you must by-degrees come to abandon the task of measuring it. By-degrees, because while one is still blind to Truth, the Outer Law is a measuring-stick and a blind man's cane to poke the world with, to avoid the nearby traps and temptations. But in a world where men are blind, the sighted man will appear to move in ways that are dangerous -- suicidal -- immoral, even, for a blind person to move in, even though he sees many more perils and temptations than a blind man sees and must avoid them at a greater distance.

But a blind man who pretends he sees and moves accordingly will fall off the tightrope, and therefore the Outer Law has been writ in stone and carried down on tablets from Mount Sinai unto a blind people. Thus, while they do not see the difference between stone and truth, they may follow the stone, and only when they come to see the difference can they shatter the stone at a single blow and step onto the tightrope.

[nonapologia]

More Possibly-Inaccurate Fisking of Feser

http://bondwine.com/2015/05/15/feser-on-lewis-on-transposition/#comment-190940

Relevant general insight:

In fact, sometimes the sentiments are merely sabotaging and resisting our reason to no good use, but sometimes our sentiments are the only thing remaining to provide us with an unalloyed view of the good, and reveal that we have actually taken a reasonable route from slightly flawed premises to a ludicrous conclusion. This is why discernment of right and wrong is crucial, and why it can only be reasonably conceived as a spiritual quality that does not depend on either reason or the sentiments, but is capable of judging between the two. Resolving only to reason from strict premises consigns one to a life of sheer dumb luck as to whether one's initial premises were accurate or not. Psychopaths are highly reasonable and rarely sentimental, and therefore find it difficult to acquire (during that highly non-syllogistic, sentimental time of childhood) moral premises basic to the rest of humanity, stranding them in a very difficult position -- consider with what careful patience some of them must be reasoned into such principles as that murder is bad, even when otherwise convenient.

[nonapologia]

Nightmare of a Boring Heaven, Feser Edition

I am too exhausted by this type of topic to comment very much on it, but it all started when I saw the discourse linked here...

http://bondwine.com/2015/05/15/feser-on-lewis-on-transposition

... which led me to CS Lewis’ “Transposition” essay, given here:

http://www.cedarville.edu/personal/sullivan/hon3140/readings/lewis-transposition.pdf

Wherein Lewis says (my commentary interspersed in brackets) stuff like:

There is no doubt a blessedly ingenuous faith, a child’s or a savage’s faith which finds no difficulty. It accepts without awkward questionings the harps and golden streets and family reunions pictured by hymn writers. Such a faith is deceived, yet in the deepest sense not deceived,

(The most bloody-awkward admission a writer of children’s stories can make is that he doesn’t take seriously the very same picture of reality that he is foisting on children.)

for while it errs in mistaking symbol for fact, yet it apprehends Heaven as joy and plenitude and love. But it is impossible for most of us. And we must not try, by artifice, to make ourselves more naïf than we are.

(... why not?)

A man does not “become as a little child” by aping childhood.

(Now this does point to a fairly deep issue. Namely, the difference between imitation as fakery and imitation as aspiration. It is clear as day that one can, by certain outward actions, fake sainthood without too much effort. Of course, time and hindsight will wash away the coat of varnish, but in the short term the fakery may well convince those who are lacking in discernment. To those who have some degree of discernment, the fakery will come across as obnoxious pharisaism.

However, the religious life consists of people who are certainly not saints, but are lawfully employed in doing their best to imitate such. The imitation of a saint is least concerned with imitating its outward aspects through artifice and most concerned with artificing its inward aspects (thoughts, deeds, motivations) one moment at a time, even if one lacks them as a definite attribute of one’s being. One does not have to bother with being loving if one can simply cut off hateful thoughts and perform loving acts. Human nature being malleable in the Lord, the imitation of sainthood therefore leads eventually to sainthood.

One can certainly perform the same type of trick with childhood, since a simple faith and a healthy and vivid imagination are precisely inward aspects of one’s life. [The obnoxious profession of that simple faith, not so much.] Similarly with manhood, womanhood, craftsmanship, diplomacy, or any other worthwhile state of being.)

Hence our notion of Heaven involves perpetual negations: no food, no drink, no sex, no mirth, no movement, no events, no time, no art.

(At this point the notion of transpositions comes full circle and contradicts itself. Lewis starts the essay by saying that Earthly delights are suitable analogies for the explanation of Heavenly ones, but ends by saying that the analogy is utterly invalid.)

Now, this mess is further expounded on by acclaimed Aristotelian-Thomist windbag Ed Feser here:

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.ca/2015/05/lewis-on-transposition.html

Lewis also notes how religious people are prone to mistake the earthly images of Heaven for the real thing, and sometimes feel let down when they are told that this is a mistake.  How could Heaven be eternal bliss without eating, drinking, and (my example, not Lewis’s) playing Frisbee with Fido?  Deleting such earthly pleasures from our picture of Heaven seems to leave nothing in its place.  Heaven comes to seem arid, bleak, and boring.  But this is precisely the wrong lesson to draw, comparable to the error the child in the dungeon makes when he is told by his mother that the world outside the dungeon lacks pencil lines.

But wait, there’s more. Feser denies the validity of playing Frisbee with Fido with approximately the same energy as I have been affirming my Puddleglum-nonsense.

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.ca/2015/04/animal-souls-part-i.html

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.ca/2015/05/animal-souls-part-ii.html

However, to my mind this leaves us utterly stuck when we want to talk about Heaven. If there is no literal notion of playing Frisbee with Fido in Heaven, then what actual Heavenly element is Frisbee with Fido an analogy of? Keep in mind that the typical retort to this will be “why do you want there to be a Heavenly analogy of Fido? Isn’t God enough?”

Feser rather oddly compares wanting there to be Fido in Heaven to wanting there to be sex in Heaven; this is rather off the mark, since wanting there to be Fido in Heaven is primarily a desire for Fido’s good rather than one’s own -- in the strict Thomist sense, Fido ought to be allowed to fulfil his natural end. We may observe that the natural ends of Fido involve such things as seeking to preserve his own existence (which fails, as Fido winds up a corpse) and seeking to perpetuate his species (which fails, as the Earth burns to a cinder in the inhospitable fallen universe, and according to Feser no New Fido can walk the New Earth). That Fido is unconscious of his own existential dilemma is no argument for removing the dilemma entirely; a drunkard about to fall off a cliff is likewise utterly unconscious of his impending demise.

On the other hand, wanting there to be sex in Heaven would be motivated in a rather twofold fashion: first, one wants some degree of selfish pleasure (or, at best, affectionate intimacy) and finds it difficult to imagine more intense forms of it than sex; second, one wants there to be reproduction of the human species in Heaven as well as in the sinful Earth, which is a rather more abstract desire that can be fulfilled with some means other than sex.

Of course, it appears we ought not to want anything of Heaven except God. Wanting anything else is spiritual perversion.

This is where religion starts to smuggle the most vulgar utilitarianism in the back door. As Lewis again says:

Against [the loss of all these goods], to be sure, we set one positive: the vision and enjoyment of God. And since this is an infinite good, we hold (rightly) that it outweighs them all.

The use of bracketed “(rightly)” can be taken as a nervous tic that indicates that many people will, in fact, justifiably consider this kind of weighing of incommensurable goods to be nonsensical and pernicious.

That not utilitarian enough for you? Let’s consider what happens when you throw your neighbour into the mix, as suggested by a (presumable) actual Catholic:

Your objection regarding your wife is an emotional difficulty, not a theological difficulty. This is a crude analogy, but it will have to do for the moment: suppose you have a million dollars in your right pocket and a penny in your left. Your left pocket springs a hole and you lose the penny, but the right remains intact and you retain the million. When you get home you notice that you have lost the penny (with an initial sense of panic as you reach into the left pocket) but then sigh with relief as you see that you still have the million. Do you pine away and mourn, weep and lament for the lost penny, or do you experience pleasure that you are still a millionaire and have no sorrow at all about the lost 1 cent-piece?

http://blog.adw.org/2012/07/hell-has-to-be-%E2%80%93-my-response-to-recent-blog-comments-on-yesterdays-post/comment-page-1/#comment-118003

In that case, CS Lewis’ simple faith containing “harps and golden streets and reunions with family members” is not an overly literal metaphor for the reality -- it is a lie that obstructs the reality. For it is presumptuous to count on any reunions with people whose spiritual lives are utterly beyond one’s control. It is preferable to consider one’s neighbours as coins to be traded and bartered for inferior and superior goods.

Of course, none of these intellectual delineations of a boring or intuitively barbaric Heaven even begin to touch and demolish the Puddleglum argument, which is profoundly anti-intellectual and appeals because it is anti-intellectual. The scholastic Heaven is not richer or more subtle; it is just... boring, and Lewis’ own characters and stories testify against it, let alone Feser’s expansion of the principle. Therefore, the necessary correlate of a scholastic religion is transcendent egotism and a runaway focus on Hell-fire as the primary source of motivation, as cold Reason sucks away any more balanced justification for bothering with the Divine at all.