Vindication of Aristotle
The necessity of purpose
Nietzsche’s greatest achievement was revealing the brokenness of Modern philosophy. It wouldn’t and couldn’t lead anywhere sane. His greatest failure was believing he’d finally found the right way forward – “the will to power”. But Nietzsche’s life and those of his disciples have shown that his solution was also a hopeless dead end.
Diagnosing the problem and doing so in beautiful prose was a worthy deed in itself. It mainly benefited those who had ingested the modern ethos. It worked as a kind of wake-up call, as it still does for many a university student. But soberer minds had always understood that we had the answers all along. The problem wasn’t that Western Philosophy had nowhere to go, but that it had deliberately rebelled against sanity and veered off the path of truth.
The truth, of course, is the Logos of the world, and the most complete philosophical application of the Logos is to be found in the scholastic thinking of Thomas Aquinas, who based his system on the Socratic tradition – particularly the philosophy of Aristotle, integrated with the revealed truth of Christianity.
Logos abandoned
Edward Feser’s book on St. Thomas (Aquinas, 2009) shows how the reasons for abandoning the scholastic tradition were never philosophical or rational. There was no dead end. Certainly there were individual scholastics who could have spent their time on more worthy topics of study than the trivia they delved into – but the method and the philosophical model were never shown to be faulty.
Part of the reason behind the abandonment was that people in the 16th and 17th centuries began to get infatuated with natural science. The issue wasn’t that science contradicted Christianity or scholastic philosophy (it didn’t). It was that people became infatuated by ‘how’ questions, gradually de-emphasizing the ‘why’ questions. Through their obsession with science, moderns grew to prefer mathematics over theology, and mechanical explanations over teleological ones (teleology referring to the inherent purpose of tings).
We moderns, and especially the Richard Dawkins types among us, are in the habit of idolizing the ‘scientific method’. In fact this worship of the method is found at the heart of the issue. Scientific thinking lets the method dictate what counts as reality, rather than letting reality decide what counts as a good method. This amounts to a complete inversion of the ancient and medieval way of thought.
Secondly, modern mechanical, scientistic thinking became popular largely because of utilitarian reasons (it served certain purposes and was effective in what it did), not because it was ever shown to be ontologically superior to the scholastic model. Our ancestors saw inquiry as a quest for wisdom, and understood the true meaning of everything through the lens of the hereafter. In contrast, moderns see inquiry as a tool of power, control, utility, and as a way for increasing our enjoyment.
Third reason for abandoning Aristotelian essentialism was simply political. Any student soon realizes that essentialism is inherently conservative, always the stalwart ally of the ‘ancien regime’. Essences never change, they are never subjective. Men are men and women are women because that is their essence. A king has the essence of the king. A nobleman that of the nobleman. The peasant that of the peasant. An unborn baby that of a human being. Nothing is arbitrary or subject to relativism. Matters are and shall remain as they exist, or were created to be.
As the foundation of one’s understanding of the world, essentialism is anti-change and anti-revolution. It is easy to see how a world where nominalism, liberalism, and the idea of ‘progress’, were making gains, had no room for inconvenient essences. Naturally, when your goal is to upend morality and the social order, fundamentally change our way of life, and to give mankind arbitrary power, essentialism stands in your way.
After all, only in the light of essentialism can you ask what is proper for man to do. What is his proper place? Without it everything is becomes for grabs and open for revolution.
Aside from essentialism, hylomorphism is another key concept behind Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophy. It means the union of form and matter, or essence and structure. In Plato’s model the forms or ‘ideas’ exist in some supernatural realm, as separate from matter. But in the Aristotelian model they are fused together. This fusion is called hylomorphism. This understanding renders a killing blow to materialism, as matter cannot exist without form, and form is immaterial.
Objective truth and objective goodness also find their explanation and justification as the summit of scholastic teleology: Truth results from teleological perfection, or conformity with the divine universals that exist in God’s mind. Similarly, goodness is that which all things desire, i.e. their teleology, their purpose, their proper goal. This also means that evil cannot really ‘be’, it can only ever constitute an absence of teleology: a wrong direction, a perverted goal.
To put it shortly, whenever something is Logos-oriented and in harmony with its teleology, it is good and true. Whenever something veers off from the Logos and its inherent telos, it becomes wicked and false.
False problems
The sad fact is that most of the so called ‘perennial’ problems of philosophy are actually unforced errors of modernity, questions which had perfectly sound answers up until the rise of Modern Philosophy. We moderns got rid of the answers and kept on insisting they don’t exist, looking for them in every possible place except where they were always to be found.
Many an eternal problem is only a problem if you abandon the Logos, i.e. if you abandon Christian theology and Aristotelian common sense philosophy. The issue is perhaps most acutely felt in the field of ethics, because when you decide to get rid of teleology and essentialism, you loose all moorings for morality. Without purpose and essence, a coherent understanding of morality becomes impossible to establish. Good and evil, as everything else, become relative or arbitrary.
But perhaps the most illustrative example is that of causation. A fundamental question in philosophy is ‘why does a thing have the form and structure that it has?’ The traditional answer is, ‘in order to fulfill its purpose’. But in abandoning Aristotle, modern philosophy has abandoned purpose, or the so called final causes. The problem is that without final causes you cannot really understand formal or structural causes, and consequently all causality becomes a hot mess. If causes lack the dimension of directionality and purpose, they break down. Without final causes, there is no necessary link between cause and effect. Not only is this destructive to understanding (and sanity), it is destructive to thought itself, as even inductive argumentation become untenable without Aristotle. Without final causes there is no reason to think that you could draw inferences from the observed to the unobserved, or from past experience to future expectation.
The irony is that the scientific, mechanistic and anti-teleological understanding of the world makes science impossible by definition. After all, the point of science is to find out causal relationships between phenomena and to make predictions based on the past experiments. All of it is based on inductive reasoning, which in a non-teleological system is illicit and impossible. The reality is that we cannot understand how things work if we do not understand why they work.
Another embarrassment for anti-teleological science are the teleological discoveries science keeps on making, the most notable being DNA. It is difficult to imagine a more strictly teleological and goal-oriented phenomenon than the DNA code. It is teleological to the point that it destroys the internal logic of Evolution itself, which after all is supposed to occur without a goal in mind, by natural selection fed by random mutation. The discovery of a strictly goal-driven code at the heart of all living things makes a mockery of such a notion.
The depth of the problem (from the naturalist’s point of view) is that we cannot even talk about DNA without resorting to teleological language. ‘Programming’, ‘information’, ‘instructions’, ‘blueprint’… The point of all these words is to show that DNA is always directed at something beyond itself. It only exists for the sake of an end goal.
The great attempt of Darwin was to eliminate final causes from the realm of biology, which as a discipline had always remained a formidable ally of the old Aristotelian model. The discovery of DNA has utterly wrecked the Darwinian attempt, and shown biology to be even more deeply teleological than our ancestors could have imagined.
Similarly, the mind-body problem is only a problem if you abandon Aristotelian hylomorphism. Likewise, the ostensible problem of the free will finds its solution the pre-Modern philosophical tradition. After all, if all things that exists in the world are fusions of form and matter, what follows is that we too exist as an organic fusion of body and soul.
Given that even while conjoined the soul can operate independent of the body, it can also exist independent of the body, giving credence both to free will and immortality of soul. This makes the human soul a unique kind of form. Other forms are by their nature abstract, but the human soul is ‘subsistent’, it has an independent life of its own, revealed by its functions of free will and intellect, which operate independent of matter.
Furthermore, the anxiety inducing notion that the omnipotence and omniscience of God destroys our free will is also removed: after all, the simple fact the God causes the natural things doesn’t make them unnatural. Likewise, God causing willed or purposeful things doesn’t make them involuntary.
Our modern, neurological solutions to the issue are again faulty. This is because neurology stops at material and efficient causation, never able to touch final causes, which are necessary for any good explanation of anything. Thus, neither can neurology explain itself, nor can it offer an explanation for human behavior in general. The only halfway consistent model that it come up with is ruthless Skinnerian behaviorism, which is nonsensical on the face of it. Again, the ‘unsolvable’ problem is solved when we introduce hylomorphism: if neurology represents matter, and our mind constitutes form, the mystery goes away.
By the way, this realization also debunks the wild modern notions of “artificial intelligence”. According to Aristotelian understanding, it is impossible for a computer or a robot to be intelligent or conscious, because consciousness and intelligence in the worldly sense are always linked to certain animals, and animals have the natural essence of an animal. A mechanical object cannot have a natural essence, and it necessarily cannot be alive, nor conscious, nor intelligent. In the end, the concept of artificial intelligence is a contradiction in terms. Intelligence is by its nature organic and essential, not mechanical or contingent.
Finally, to offer the solution to the perennial problem of ‘voluntarism’, according to Thomistic thinking God’s intellect is superior to his will. This is unlike later voluntarist challengers like William of Ockham and Duns Scotus. Their thinking may be considered a kind of heretical branch of scholasticism, and their influence partly explains why scholasticism began to lose credibility. They thought that God could have established a morality that makes it good to kill babies or lie to your friends, had He only wanted to. Their arbitrary view of God has more in common with Islam than with Christianity.
Thomism maintains that value and goodness are never arbitrary. God could not change the definition of the good life any more than he could change the answer to 1+1. It is all based on his own good essence and knowledge, not on arbitrary will. One could say that the principle of essentialism runs up to the very core of the Christianity. Or in other words, even God himself does not partake in Will to Power.
Ultimate purpose
The most important of all the debunked philosophers of Modernity is Immanuel Kant. His morality can be distilled in the principles that 1) man is a self-legislator, and 2) man is to be regarded as an end in himself. These twin notions effectively explain and underlie modern ethics and lawmaking, our understanding human rights, and together they constitute the foundation for liberal morality.
But their nature is obviously blasphemous, even satanic. From the scholastic perspective, only God has the authority to legislate for us – the Law comes from above, not from ourselves. Furthermore, only God can be regarded as self-sufficient and as an end in himself: the final cause of all final causality. We human beings are His creatures, relational beings targeted at Him, at the goodness that is defined in His person.
The solution to our modern Nietzschean angst is to again realize that we are not here for ourselves, but for the glory of God. He is our end, our goal, our purpose. Only in Him can we find true happiness. What makes Aristotelian philosophy and the Scholastic tradition so very irksome to us moderns is not just the way how they challenge and debunk our prideful self-understanding, material worldview, and liberal moral framework. It’s that they dare do so based not on faith, but on reason! The very thing we moderns so pride ourselves of.
