For the Love of What?
On The Problem of Philosophy
Should I fear I am a fool, for I sayeth on my Substack that philosophers have no God?
On Fools and Gods
There are fools and there are fools so it would be wise for me to be clear about the kind or kinds of fool I might prove myself to be. The most notorious fool, no doubt, is the fool of whom the psalmist speaks, the one who “has said in his heart ‘There is no God.’” (Psalm 14) This fool denies that “the God of theism” exists, a God that has created the heavens and the earth and all who dwell therein, a God of infinite goodness, mercy, and understanding; a God of justice and a God of love. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who is not a fool in this or any of the senses I will discuss, tells us that
The God of theism requires of those who acknowledge him unqualified trust and allegiance. When he discloses himself to us, it is as one who speaks only the truth, and what he discloses in word or deed it would be deeply foolish to deny or even to question. That is why the psalmist calls someone who who says that there is no God a fool.1
The foolishness that the denier of this God is guilty of is other than the conceptual confusion that Anselm of Canterbury famously sought to establish, the straightforward muddle of saying of what necessarily exists that it nevertheless does not, the self-own of demonstrating by your claim that God does not exist that you do not actually understand what God is—a being that cannot not exist. The foolishness involved in denying God is considerably more profound than this and deeply consequential for the fool. MacIntyre, again:
I say “if He exists,” but, if he exists, he exists necessarily—that is to say, he could not have not existed. And in this he is unlike finite beings who exist and are what they are contingently, that is, they might have been otherwise than they are and they might not have existed at all. Moreover finite beings are limited in their powers and perfections. God, so understood, is limited in neither.
He is therefore unlimited in his power to act and there is nothing that can be known that he does not know. Nothing happens without his sustaining will and nothing can be thought or said or done of which he is unaware. He is perfect not only in his power and knowledge, but also in his goodness. Of his perfections we can form only imperfect conceptions, but the goodness ascribed to him is such that he is understood to will the good of all finite beings. And finite beings who possess the power of understanding, if they know that God exists, know that he is the most adequate object of their love and that the deepest desire of every such being, whether they acknowledge it or not, is to be at one with God. (pg. 5-6)
To neither believe in the existence of the most adequate object of my love, nor to acknowledge my own deepest desire sounds foolish indeed. Perhaps it is a divine mercy of sorts that so many fools remain unaware, often blissfully but occasionally arrogantly, of their own foolishness. Be that as it may, the first thing that I want to note is that professional philosophers are likely to be fools in this sense, if a recent survey of English-speaking academic philosophers is any measure. For, unlike MacIntyre, who knows that God exists, the majority of his peers neither know nor believe it. And it is decidedly without bliss (at least not as a result from my unbelief), and hopefully without the arrogance I likely once displayed, that I count myself in their number.
Needless to say that I do not believe that I am a fool in this sense (nor, I assume, do my fellow atheists). But it should be obvious that it would be supremely foolish to hope that I am not—to hope, that is, that my belief that there is no God is true. It is one thing to find that the existence of an infinite being that wills the good of all finite beings, not merely as a matter of general principle but on a uniquely personal level—he specifically cares for me—to be incredible, but it would be infinitely more incredible if I were to not want there to be such a being. What care could I possibly have for my own good if I were to be pleased at the news that I will never receive the gift of God’s grace? Pascal was not being unreasonable, it seems to me, when he insisted that we had infinitely more to gain than to lose by accepting his wager. As I will eventually discuss in a subsequent essay, it might be very reasonable indeed to try to convince oneself that God does exist, to take on the airs of belief so as to eventually sincerely believe. But that in due course, for neither of these fools with respect to the God of theism is my immediate concern. There is a different sort of “God” that I am prepared to deny, one that may be peculiar to philosophers. And whether I am a fool to deny this God, or whether it is foolish for philosophers to have such a faith, is the question I want to raise, because this question directs us to another, more fundamental one: what is philosophy for?
On the Prejudices of Philosophers
Philosophers generally have had a complicated relationship with the divine. Parmenides, “the father of metaphysics,” tells us that “the goddess” disclosed to him the truth about what is, but not that she was its source or manifestation. Exactly who the goddess is is a matter of scholarly dispute. Karl Popper, for example, argues that it is “Avenging Justice,” whom Parmenides credits in his dream-like prologue with unlocking “the gates of the ways of Night and Day.” (1998: 77, note 2). Richard McKirahan, Jr. offers a different take, provocatively suggesting that Parmenides’ “mystical experience” might be understood as “the discovery of the power of logic, which is perhaps represented by the unnamed goddess” (1994: 159).2 Both are plausible and neither are conclusive but the point is academic in any case, for whomever she is it is clear that she isn’t describing herself when she tells him
One path only is left for us to speak of, namely, that It is. In this path are very many tokens that what is is uncreated and indestructible; for it is complete, immovable, and without end. Nor was it ever, nor will it be; for now it is, all at once, a continuous one. For what kind of origin for it wilt thou look for? In what way and from what source could it have drawn its increase?
What Parmenides gives us here at the beginning of the Western philosophical tradition is an account of ultimate reality that makes it something other than and distinct from God (or, rather, from any particular god of the Greek pantheon) while describing it in terms that are undeniably God-like (in the decidedly theistic sense). This pattern of analysis was taken up by Socrates and Plato who made a significant addition to it: what ultimately is is now understood to include what ought to be. Among those truths that comprise objective reality are some that are inherently normative. There are facts about how one ought to live and act and the gods are not the source of these truths but are, like ourselves, subject to them, a point Socrates famously tries to get Euthyphro to see when he asks him whether “what is pious is loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved?”.
The force of Socrates question in its original context was due to the fact that the Greeks widely believed their gods to quarrel amongst themselves, and over the very same sorts of issues that humans do. The part of their dialogue where the true significance of this belief is brought to the surface is worth quoting in full.
SOCRATES Come on, then, let’s take a look at what we’re saying: the thing or person that’s god-loved is pious, and the thing or person that’s god-hated is impious; and the pious isn’t the same as the impious, but as opposed to it as it could be. Isn’t that how we’re proposing to put it?
EUTHYPHRO Just so.
SOCRATES And does it appear well put like that?
EUTHYPHRO I think so, Socrates.
SOCRATES Well, wasn’t it also said that the gods fight, Euthyphro? That they dispute with one another, and that there’s enmity among them towards each other? Wasn’t that said too?
EUTHYPHRO It was.
SOCRATES And when enmity and anger occur, my excellent friend, what are the disputes that cause them about? Let’s look at it like this. If you and I were having a dispute about counting, and about which of two sets of things was larger than the other, would the quarrel in this case make us enemies and angry with each other? Or would we resort to calculating and quickly resolve our dispute in such matters?
EUTHYPHRO Just so.
SOCRATES So too if we were disputing what was bigger and smaller in size, we’d quickly stop our disagreement by resorting to measuring?
EUTHYPHRO True.
SOCRATES And it’s by resorting to weighing, I imagine, that we'd settle questions about what was heavier and lighter?
EUTHYPHRO Of course.
SOCRATES Then what sort of thing would we dispute about without being able to arrive at a settlement, leaving ourselves enemies, and angry with one another? Probably you haven’t an answer ready to hand; but see what you think if I say that what we’re looking for is the just and the unjust, the fine and the shameful, the good and the bad. Aren’t these the things we’d get into disputes about without being able to reach a satisfactory settlement about them, so that this rather than any other time is when we become enemies, when we do — not just you and I but all the rest of mankind?
EUTHYPHRO Yes, this is the sort of dispute in question, Socrates, and these are the things it’s about.
SOCRATES And what about the gods, Euthyphro? If they really do get into disputes at all, wouldn’t they do it for the very same reasons?
EUTHYPHRO Necessarily so.
SOCRATES In that case, my noble Euthyphro, among the gods too, on your account, different individuals will think different things just, and fine and ugly, and good and bad; for I imagine they wouldn’t fight with each other if they didn’t get into disputes about these things. Right?
EUTHYPHRO Correct.
SOCRATES Well then: what each side loves is what it thinks fine and good and just, and the opposites of these they hate?
EUTHYPHRO Quite.
SOCRATES Yes, but the same things, you yourself say, will be thought just by one side and unjust by the other — the things at issue between them in the disputes and wars they have with one another; isn’t that so?
EUTHYPHRO It is.
SOCRATES In that case, it seems, the same things are both hated by the gods and loved by them, and the same things will be both god-hated and god-loved. EUTHYPHRO It does seem so.
SOCRATES In that case the same things will be both pious and impious, Euthyphro — on this account.
EUTHYPHRO I dare say they will.
What Plato has Socrates expose here is a problem seemingly endemic to gods, humans, or indeed any life-form whom can reflect on how they are living, contemplate living differently, and could actually come to live differently as result of their (or someone else) choosing to do so. Such beings would need the capacities of memory and imagination, capacities essential to the formation of a unified self extended over time. And if humans are any measure (and they are the only life-form that we have observed possessing these capacities and reflective powers), becoming a unified self cannot take place in isolation, but depends on relatively intimate relations with other unified selves; a self must be nurtured into being by others. There is, therefore, an ineliminable ‘social’ dimension to being a self: to be able to contemplate oneself and one’s possibilities is inextricably bound up with being able to contemplate other selves and their possibilities, and to be acutely aware that other selves can and do contemplate you. Moreover, such reciprocal powers of contemplation lead rather easily, though not necessarily, to a reciprocal willingness to pass judgment on one’s life and the lives of others. It is singularly for the sort of life-forms that satisfy these conditions that such concepts as “the just and the unjust, the fine and the shameful, the good and the bad” could be intelligible let alone of disputed application.
We should note that of all the different kinds of life-forms we have observed, humans are also the only ones who would find concepts of number, size, and weight intelligible, and so might come to disagree about questions of how many, how big, or how heavy. But Socrates finds little to concern himself—or us—about this, as such disputes never become acrimonious because there is in each case some universally recognized procedure for resolving them, one that appeals to an independent, objective measure. That it is disputes about the just and unjust and their kin that cause enmity, anger, and make the disputants enemies tells us that we are here dealing with a different sort of subject matter, what we now broadly refer to as ‘normative’, a subject matter that is either not, or at least not universally recognized to be, measurable in any analogous way. As a result of this meta-disagreement, which persists to this day, there are those who view all normative phenomena as thoroughly human productions, subject to the vicissitudes and variety of the selves involved and the gradually changing settings they find themselves in, while at the same time there is a constant constituency who are confidant that normativity is more equal to mathematical phenomena than it might immediately appear.
For Socrates this higher-order dispute about the nature of normative matters only serves to underline their significance in our lives and that getting these matters right is the problem that any thoughtful human being must address. We, like any other creature, need to eat, secure shelter from the elements, and procreate, but it is normative phenomena that imbue our lives with a significance they would otherwise not have: they give our choices and actions meaning, make our lives worth living, and they make us willing to kill and be killed by those who disagree with us on these matters even when our physical survival is not immediately at stake. For this reason understanding the real nature of the normative dimension of our existence is the ultimate purpose of ‘philosophy’ for Socrates and Plato, for knowing how to live, rather than, say, how to secure wealth and power, is the only sort of wisdom that one should truly love to have.
Of course that there is such wisdom to be had, that one can know how to live because their are truths about how to live, is their (and, by extension, the Western philosophical tradition they help inaugurate) original conceit. And it is this that I am referring to as the philosopher’s God, for the faith in the existence of non-theistic normative order that exists independently has, as I mentioned above, survived for over two millennia. The very same survey that found two-thirds of professional philosophers disavowing theism had almost as many adhering to moral realism. There are, seemingly, as many versions of realism about morality and normativity more generally as their are stars in the heavens. But they all in some sense or other insist that there are truths about what ought to be and how we ought to reason, believe, choose, and act. While these philosophers debate with each other over whether these facts are “natural” or “non-natural”, many find it implausible that they could be “supernatural”. While I am dubious of realism in all its forms (by no means a unique position) I am increasingly coming to find non-theistic normative realism an especially odd view. This standpoint wants to embrace the plans and demands of a God while eschewing that God’s love and mercy. Moreover, these plans and demands are not believed to be issued by anyone or thing; they are just there, fundamental features of the reality we inhabit that, for some reason (or for no reason?) that very same reality permits us to ignore (assuming the contemporary realist does not share Plato’s retributivist views about the reincarnation of the soul). Why hold such a view? Is it, from some dispassionate perspective, an appealing one? To make some sense of it, I believe it helps to look briefly at how this combination of ideas developed at the tradition’s inception.
Protagoras to the Left of Me, Homer to the Right
How are we to overcome quarrels and wars about normativity? In the human case it might seem that we cannot if Socrates’ contemporary, the sophist Protagoras is to be believed. His dictum that “a human being is the measure of all things—of things that are, that they are, and of things that are not, that they are not,” augurs a relativism that threatens to make normative conflict interminable. And we might suspect something similar in the case of the gods, thought it is worth noting that the only other fragment of Protagoras’ writing that has survived suggests he did not spend much time thinking about inter-divinity relations:
Concerning the gods I am unable to know either that they are or that they are not, or what their appearance is like. for many are the things that hinder knowledge: the obscurity of the matter and the shortness of human life.3
Protagoras’ agnosticism aside, the situation for the gods likely resembles that of humans, with each god being the measure of what is and what ought to be. So a war of all against all would appear to be the natural condition for both species of being. Any hope of deliverance from this unhappy fate, therefore, must reside in one or the other of two possible options. One is for humanity—and/or the gods—to speak with one voice and decisively settle normative matters. The other is to insist on, and subsequently establish, that the normative is, appearances to the contrary not withstanding, actually like number, size, and weight in that there is some objective fact of the matter to which we can appeal when we disagree, an independent measure that can be grasped, if not by all, then at least by the enlightened few. The great theistic religious traditions (including their philosophical adherents, such as Augustine, ibn Rushd, Mosheh ben Maimon, and MacIntyre) have placed their faith in some version of the former, whereas much of the philosophical tradition prior to the Christian era and subsequent to the seventeenth century, has plumped for versions of the latter.
That the ‘one voice’ strategy was found more appealing to the religious minded isn’t surprising, as it is, other things being equal, far more promising with divine beings than with humans. For one thing, from our, human, perspective, the thought that there is a hierarchy among the gods, such that a Zeus-type might set the normative agenda and that the rest of the gods would fall in line, is plausible whereas something similar in the human case is a non-starter. The only way to achieve universal obedience to a human would be through ruthless force and compulsion. Might making right. More significantly, of course, is that the one voice strategy is tailor made for religions, such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, that acknowledge only one God.
Unsurprisingly, versions of both strategies can be found in the writings of Plato. The ‘realist’ strategy is most famously and effectively on view in the Republic. After establishing the need for a Guardian class whose wisdom and courage will steer the city away from self-destructive luxury and towards moderation and justice, Plato turns to the task of educating these virtuous future-leaders. The very first thing he mentions is that “the poets” will now be forbidden from slandering the gods by attributing to them wrongdoing or any divergence from what is good and holy:
"Above all," I said, "it mustn't be said that gods make war on gods, and plot against them and have battles with them—for it isn't even true—provided that those who are going to guard the city for us must consider it most shameful to be easily angry with one another. They are far from needing to have tales told and embroideries woven about battles of giants and the many diverse disputes of gods and heroes with their families and kin. But if we are somehow going to persuade them that no citizen ever was angry with another and that to be so is not holy, it's just such things that must be told the children right away by old men and women; and as they get older, the poets must be compelled to make up speeches for them which are close to these.” (378b-d)
Of course telling stories that paint the gods as in harmony is merely a prelude to an education that will culminate in the apprehension of the Idea of the Good, the eternal, transcendent, and perfect pattern that gives everything else its being, meaning and renders it intelligible, bringing knower and known together.
"Therefore, say that what provides the truth to the things known and gives the power to the one who knows, is the idea of the good. And, as the cause of the knowledge and truth, you can understand it to be a thing known; but, as fair as these two are—knowledge and truth—if you believe that it is something different from them and still fairer than they, your belief will be right. As for knowledge and truth, just as in the other region it is right to hold light and sight sunlike, but to believe them to be sun is not right; so, too, here, to hold these two to be like the good is right, but to believe that either of them is the good is not right. The condition which characterizes the good must receive still greater honor."
"You speak of an overwhelming beauty," he said, "if it provides knowledge and truth but is itself beyond them in beauty. You surely don't mean it is pleasure."
"Hush, Glaucon," I said. "But consider its image still further in this way."
"How?"
"I suppose you'll say the sun not only provides what is seen with the power of being seen, but also with generation, growth, and nourishment although it itself isn't generation."
"Of course."
"Therefore, say that not only being known is present in the things known as a consequence of the good, but also existence and being are in them besides as a result of it, although the good isn't being but is still beyond being, exceeding it in dignity and power."
And Glaucon, quite ridiculously, said, “Apollo, what a demonic excess.” (508e-509c)
Plato would likely find MacIntyre’s characterization of God as “the most adequate object of their love and that the deepest desire of every such being, whether they acknowledge it or not, is to be at one with God” as perfectly apt for the idea of the good. But I doubt he would think, as MacIntyre does about God, that the good loves us in turn, or that it wills "the good of all finite beings,” or still less, that “nothing can be thought or said or done of which [it] is unaware.” The very perfection of the idea of the good requires that it be entirely of its own, dependent on nothing else, not even the best god one could imagine.
This detachment of the ideal is on display even when Plato approaches very near to a theistic vision. In the Timaeus we are told of the eternal ’Creator’ God who is the origin and “father” (in the Jowett translation) of the world and everything within it, including the gods of Greek mythology. Yet, while this God is the cause of the world, we are told that he “fashioned it after the eternal pattern,” which exists independently of him. The God of the Timaeus is good because he loves what is good and creates in accordance with it. This, of course, is in keeping with the implied position on divine matters offered in the Euthyphro. But there is something more telling about Plato’s position and his true concerns that emerges as the origin story unfolds. Apparently unwilling to condescend to the work of fashioning mortal bodies for humans, the creator God assigns the task to the gods he has created:
“The part of them worthy of the name immortal, which is called divine and is the guiding principle of those who are willing to follow justice and you—of that divine part I will myself sow the seed, and having made a beginning, I will hand the work over to you. And do ye then interweave the mortal with the immortal, and make and beget living creatures, and give them food, and make them to grow, and receive them again in death.”
Unlike MacIntyre’s God who knows all there is to know about us, our earthly lives with all their joys and sorrows are of no interest to Plato’s God. The priority of the latter is to contemplate eternal certainties, not to experience the fleeting realization of finite potentialities. The objective otherness of the normative, when mingled with a theology born of a skepticism of the Greek poets’ depictions of a pantheon that is all too human in its fickleness and inconstancy, results in a divine aloofness. To dwell on the impermanence the natural world, and of humans in particular, is beneath this sort of deity. That humans and their world should exist is, of course, in some sense a good thing, otherwise the God would not have brought it about. But this act of largesse on the creator’s part is just that, a consequence of his goodness wanting more goodness to exist. Timaeus tells us
God made the world good, wishing everything to be like himself. To this end he brought order into it and endowed it with soul and intelligence. Let me tell you then why the creator made this world of generation. He was good, and the good can never have any jealousy of anything. And being free from jealousy, he desired that all things should be as like himself as they could be. This is in the truest sense the origin of creation and of the world, as we shall do well in believing on the testimony of wise men: God desired that all things should be good and nothing bad, so far as this was attainable.
But since this created world being all good was decidedly not attainable, it could never be worthy of its creator’s subsequent attention. Plato’s God is not present.
I want to end this selective look at the beginnings of the Western philosophic tradition with a few words about Aristotle, who inherited and maintained much, though importantly not all, of the worldview of Plato. Seeing a logical need for an unmoved mover who is distinct from yet sets the sensible world in motion, but also finding the posit of a distinct realm of Ideas, or Forms as superfluous, Aristotle gives us a ‘living God,’
for the actuality of thought is life, and God is that actuality; and God's self-dependent actuality is life most good and eternal. We say therefore that God is a living being, eternal, most good, so that life and duration continuous and eternal belong to God; for this is God. (Metaphysics XII. 7, 1072b28-30)
But this most good God, this divine mind, could not think about humanity’s affairs and fortunes without being diminished in the process. So it contemplates only itself:
Evidently, then, it thinks of that which is most divine and precious, and it does not change; for change would be change for the worse, and this would be already a movement. First, then, if 'thought' is not the act of thinking but a potency, it would be reasonable to suppose that the continuity of its thinking is wearisome to it. Secondly, there would evidently be something else more precious than thought, viz. that which is thought of. For both thinking and the act of thought will belong even to one who thinks of the worst thing in the world, so that if this ought to be avoided (and it ought, for there are even some things which it is better not to see than to see), the act of thinking cannot be the best of things. Therefore it must be of itself that the divine thought thinks (since it is the most excellent of things), and its thinking is a thinking on thinking. (Metaphysics XII. 9, 1074b26-34.)
This is not a God that is concerned for the well-being of your soul!
Aristotle’s thought is a culmination of the developing tradition’s tendencies and tensions concerning the divine. His God represents the intellectual perfection of humankind but does so by stripping it of any taint of desire, emotion, and the dependency that come from attachment to another. His self-sufficiency is such that it allows him to exist in perfect isolation. Feeling no pull from the presence of another, his motion is that of a perfect circle. This is a philosopher’s God, one that humans are not to pray to for assistance and succor, but should rather endeavor to emulate. We are, Aristotle (and Socrates and Plato) teaches us, to try to live as divinely as it is humanly possible to do. We should aspire to become as self-sufficient as we, in our mortal condition, can be. We can achieve this, and therefore our greatest degree of happiness, through contemplation of necessary truths, through philosophy, an activity that can be done with the aid of others, but notably needn’t be:
And we think happiness has pleasure mingled with it, but the activity of philosophic wisdom is admittedly the pleasantest of virtuous activities; at all events the pursuit of it is thought to offer pleasures marvelous for their purity and their enduringness, and it is to be expected that those who know will pass their time more pleasantly than those who inquire. And the self-sufficiency that is spoken of must belong most to the contemplative activity. For while a philosopher, as well as a just man or one possessing any other virtue, needs the necessaries of life, when they are sufficiently equipped with things of that sort the just man needs people towards whom and with whom he shall act justly, and the temperate man, the brave man, and each of the others is in the same case, but the philosopher, even when by himself, can contemplate truth, and the better the wiser he is; he can perhaps do so better if he has fellow-workers, but still he is the most self-sufficient.
…
But such a life would be too high for man; for it is not in so far as he is man that he will live so, but in so far as something divine is present in him; and by so much as this is superior to our composite nature is its activity superior to that which is the exercise of the other kind of virtue. If reason is divine, then, in comparison with man, the life according to it is divine in comparison with human life. But we must not follow those who advise us, being men, to think of human things, and, being mortal, of mortal things, but must, so far as we can, make ourselves immortal, and strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us; for even if it be small in bulk, much more does it in power and worth surpass everything.
(Nicomachean Ethics X. 7 1177a23-35, 1177b26-1178a1)
I suspect many contemporary philosophers would shrink from claiming that their calling is the pleasantest of virtuous activities, mostly out of humility and having convinced themselves that an inherent moral equality among persons more or less extends to their activities and pursuits. But it is the claim that philosophy is to a significant degree a divine activity that they would be particularly embarrassed to endorse. This is so for a variety of reasons, but a significant one is that Aristotle’s ontological commitment to a living mind that only thinks of itself and has no causal interaction with our world strikes them as decidedly unnecessary. If the point is to have a normatively significant reality that is distinct from us, one that we must respond to, and align our thought and behavior with, irreducible, though quite inanimate, normative facts and principles will do.
Of course from the theist’s perspective, Aristotle’s “God” is obviously inadequate, lacking the attributes, other than intelligence, that the deity possesses in common with his human creations, perfectly in his case, imperfectly in theirs. Most troubling is the unacceptable absence of benevolence and concern for our wellbeing. That God loves us and wills our good as a father would his children is a powerful inducement to believing in him (perhaps, as Pascal insisted, a justification for doing so). In any case, the presence of that love renders the theistic outlook radically different from that which philosophers who place their faith in normative realism seem to provide. And it is the absence of that love that gives me reason to disavow that realism.
Objects and Subjects of Love
The Greeks, as is well known, distinguished many different kinds of “love”. Philia, the love that when wedded to wisdom gives us philosophy, is generally understood as the affection and loyalty present within friendships and family (hence Philadelphia, the “City of brotherly love”). Yet this literal translation of “philosophy” has always been in tension with the passionate longing—lust, really—for knowledge and truth with which Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle characterize the philosopher. This sort of ‘love’ is eros, the driving, erotic need for the object of one’s desire that must be heeded if such a lover hopes to find any peace. But however these Greeks understood the nuances both within and between these and the various other forms of love, there is a clear sense for us that there is a profound difference between being in a loving relationship with another person, and loving some thing, such as another person’s body, or money, reputation, or, indeed, wisdom. The most obvious difference, of course, and by no means the least important, is that the latter objects don’t love you back.
To be in a loving relationship involves becoming, to a considerable degree, emotionally interdependent with another person. It involves experiencing the wellbeing of the other, their successes and failures, their joys and trials, as an essential influence on one’s own. Since in a relationship of this kind the care and concern for the other is reciprocated, the two have become a ‘we’, an organically evolving unity defined by a peculiar normative structure that the two jointly create and are subject to. Love of this kind is a wonderous, almost paradoxically profound condition, for far from losing ourselves or dissolving our identity, it is only in the ‘we’ that any of us truly find, or more properly, become who we are. And in our first loving relationship, the emotional bonding we form with our mothers (or someone who adequately performs this role), our very psychic identity—if not physical survival—is at stake.
Of course, as Aristotle insists above, our potential perfection is at stake if we do not woo wisdom like desperate lovers, and so we “must, so far as we can, make ourselves immortal, and strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us”. This is a version of the argument Socrates gives in the Meno that believing that there are truths about virtue and pursuing them makes us better persons than if we did not believe. This argument, which appeals not to specific normative truths but rather the value of having faith that there are such truths, somewhat Pascalian in nature, isn’t one that I am ready to summarily dismiss. Moreover there are important contemporary permutations of it that I want to address in future posts, such as Derek Parfit’s insistence that “without claiming certainty, we ought to rationally believe” that there are “irreducible normative truths” for
If there were not such normative truths, nothing would matter, and we would have no reasons to try to decide how to live. Such decisions would be arbitrary. We would not be the animals that can understand and respond to reasons. In a world without reasons, we would act only on our instincts and desires, living as other animals live. The Universe would not contain rational beings.4
Here Parfit argues that it is our search for normative truths about how to live that makes us rational, raising us above the sort of animal life we would be condemned to otherwise. Perhaps, but I think that what is ultimately normatively fundamental is our relationships with others, and not general truths of some abstract sort that make our lives and choices matter.5 A rather sad anecdote about Parfit makes this point vividly:
It is not that Parfit’s morality is cold. He could be moved to public tears by accounts of the deaths of soldiers in the First World War or the thought that Bach died before finishing The Art of Fugue. But as the philosopher Victor Tadros said, this admirable kind of objectivity came at “the price of the distinct personal relations that we have with those who are special to us.” Parfit deigned to attend funerals, but would not disturb his routine for weddings. He once refused an invitation to have dinner with a group of old friends, including Susan Hurley, who was dying of cancer, because he thought he could not spare time away from work. One of them fumed, wanting to tell him, “Derek, you’re writing a book of moral philosophy, called On What Matters. Well, this matters.”
It might seem unfair to use such a peculiar example as Parfit to support my more general point, but I believe that his underlying philosophical commitment, no different from that of Plato or Aristotle, lends itself to just this sort of perversion of perspective. Whereas to be in a relationship requires acknowledging not only the needs of the other, but crucially one’s need for them, as we have seen the longing for wisdom (and similarly, the love of money and power) is in large part a longing for self-sufficiency. It is a desire to be as complete in oneself and to be as insulated and buffeted, as far as possible, from the impositions and the unreliability of others. Philosophy, so understood, is the desire to have the answers to the questions of life, whether theoretical or practical, within oneself; it is the desperate need to not have to rely on others and to be indebted to no one.
This is a fantasy, and arguably a greater fantasy than the belief that there is a perfect, all-good, all-knowing divine being with whom we can have personal relationship and who will ensure, in a way no human ever could, our eternal happiness. The latter at least acknowledges an inescapable fact—the very fact that the realist philosopher wants desperately to escape from—our radical dependency. If the theist knows anything it is that we are necessarily incomplete: we need to love and be loved by another. The deceptive promise of realism is that the truth will set us free of this need. He who believes that is the greatest fool of all.
But if we are creatures radically dependent on each other, if it is our love for another that makes our lives matter and worth living, if “the truth” is not meant to set us free, then we need to think more deeply about what it’s pursuit is and what it could—dare I say should?—be.
Alisdair MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009. Pg. 13. I should also add that when I first started writing this piece, MacIntyre was still alive, hence the use of “is” rather than “was” in the sentence leading into this quote. As his thinking considerably animated my own on the matters I am discussing here, I choose to speak of him in the present tense for the remainder.
Karl Popper, The World of Parmenides: Essays on the Presocratic Enlightenment. Routledge, 1998.
Richard D. McKirahan, Jr., Philosophy Before Socrates: An Introduction with Text and Commentary. Hackett, 1994.
McKirahan, Jr., Philosophy Before Socrates: An Introduction with Text and Commentary, pg. 364. McKirahan tells us that “There are reports that [Protagoras] was tried at Athens and either condemned to death or banished for his agnosticism regarding the gods, and that his books were collected and burned in public.” 364.
Derek Parfit, On What Matters, Vol. 2. Oxford University Press, 2011. Ch. 36, section 127. (I have the Kobo version, but believe the quote can be found on pg. 619 or 620 of the physical version.
Even Bernard Williams, a philosopher I find myself in much greater sympathy with, warns us “to take seriously the idea that to the extent we lose a sense of the value of truth, we shall certainly lose something and may well lose everything.” Truth and Truthfulness. Princeton, 2002. Pg. 7. To be discussed in a future post.