Author: J.C. Cross

Lewis wrote that the “social planners” have their ideas of what society should look like. They know what men and women need; they know how to improve society. They are the architects of a new utopia, not restrained by old ideas of right and wrong, old ideas of religion and morals. Through science they will create a new replacement for the old superstition.

Lewis was writing in in the 1930s and 40s, when the Nazi scourge was rewriting good and evil. After it, came the horrors of communism, which sought another kind of social engineering that ended in tyranny.

Today, there is a new strain of scientific engineers. Religion is something holding society back. Many of the horrors of the past are considered due to religion, according to the likes of Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris. Even the friendly Neil deGrasse Tyson has a following of mockers of religion.

Part of the new scientific rewriting is due to the information explosion. Computer scientists bequeathed computing power to the architects of the internet, who gave it to the social media giants, who are spreading their own understanding to our Gen Z and Alpha youth. Each generation is weaker than the previous because of what they owe.

Now new planners have also arisen. With the money their forebears–and customers–bequeathed to them, they are now pursuing social engineering of their own. One focus of Big Philanthropy is “food security.” Social engineers like Bill Gates think they know what is best. They believe their money and knowledge make them fit to rule. The proles just need their guidance. They know best.

But even these planners are ruled over by their forebears. They really aren’t free and the planners of yesterday rule over them. Each generation bequeaths to its descendants the powers it wants to. Each generations is under the power of its predecessors.

Lewis is perennially proven right. You can’t just drop all right and wrong and rewrite society as you best see fit. Even though knowledge has exploded and some things have improved in the quality of life, that does not make you fit to rule over others. There is a standard (Lewis called it the “Tao”) that you must eventually appeal to when making decisions. Nothing comes of nothing.

From The Abolition of Man

Lewis gave us a way out. The crisis of the West that started with Bacon said that nature was a quantity versus a quality. Man has reduced nature to a mere quantity so we can control it. We lose quality and the human self in this; the full understanding of reality emerges in quality. We need a new natural philosophy.

Lewis spoke of “men without chests”:
1. Man cuts out imagination.
2. Emotion is left easy to manipulate when it is cut out. No emotional training.
3. The right defense is just sentiments. Appetite and the spirit are mediated by the chest. Emotion must be trained for the middle way of the chest.

Some things can just not be proven, they are self-evident. Lewis suggest that “the Tao” or “the Way” functions as a universal natural law, a doctrine of objective value that cannot be denied. Emotions can correspond to reality or not. Education is required to make someone fully human. He warns that dialectical arguments can have the high cost of objecting to objective arguments.

Man can see a way out by stepping into the Tao. Put on spiritual goggles / glasses to see a richly elaborated life in the Tao.

From The Grand Modern Synthesis

Empiricism and rationality came from Bacon
In the 1780s/90s Truth, Goodness, and Beauty were still sublime. Hume undermined science and morality. Nature became only matter in motion as described in science. There is no true freedom.

Kant gave an alternate view:
1. An account of reality that preserved the scientific view.
2. An account of morality that preserved freedom.

The “Copernican turn” in epistemology said that minds don’t conform to reality. Everything we see is in time (put on our science glasses). Phenomena just have an appearance to us.

The “noumena” is the way things are. We can believe the world is free and we can make choices (put on our morality glasses). Reality conforms to the mind, but it is bifurcated:
1. Science is phenomena as experienced, including emotions, matter., and appearance.
2. Morality and trust in the noumenal world equals freedom.

Persons are not things. Morality has nothing to do with emotions or consequences, it is the Good. Duty is compared against inclination and is a moral law in itself. Where is the moral law?

-The Categorical Imperative is a maxim about universalizing-
1. Can you put a law into nature?
2. Morals are anything that can function as a limit to the will and people are things in themselves versus appearances.
3. Out autonomy can lead us to be self legislators.

Did Kant fail, thereby leading to Nietsche?

From Treatise of Human Nature:

Experiment is experience and observation. Current philosophy was in trouble.
Going from Thales to Socrates, science moved from natural science to moral science.
From Bacon to Hume, a new natural philosophy to a philosophy of human nature.

Like John Locke, the founder of empiricism, Hume wrote on an epistemology that is based on how we interact with the world and information. This new epistemology distinguished between impressions and ideas, their difference being in vividness. Ideas originate in impressions:
1. Complex ideas should be reducible to (basic) impressions. How can you relate colors? Comparisons that help the blind reduce ideas to simple impressions.
2. Principles of association – different kinds of association.

Hume’s Fork (Philosophic Relations)
1. Scientific relations are necessary and invariable. Certitude in simple math versus impressions/facts, which are variable and contingent.
2. Customary relations are matter of fact.

Priority -> Contingency -> Constant conjunction -> Future will be like the past (customary and probable).

The Self is a series of impressions, in flux and moving. But reason can never be the source of a moral action rooted in passion. Not all morals originate in selfishness and passions are just sentiments. There is pleasure in seeing certain kinds of disinterested moral sentiments.

From “The Great Instauration”

Bacon broke ground with the emergence of the Enlightenment. The tenets are:

1. Severe criticism of the previous philosophic tradition.
2. The consequent need for a new philosophic foundation.
3. The new foundation seeks to command nature through production and science. Bacon was a father of scientific technology and his philosophy aimed at relief from want and suffering. His idea of the “New Atlantis” represented a foundation that could not be overcome.
4. Bacon also promoted a new way of knowing, a turn in epistemology. He philosophy was severely critical of natural knowing.

The Novum Organum
1. The end of philosophy will be different; it will command nature.
2. The order of demonstrations reject demonstration by syllogism. Instead, induction will be based on actual observation of nature.
The scholastic flew from observation to general propositions. But the new, scientific philosopher needs to stay close to observation that leads to facts.
3. A new form of induction:
a. Analyze experience by analyzing a whole that is greater than its parts. It takes things down to their constituent pieces.
b. We cannot base common knowledge on trust. We must establish all knowledge scientifically.
c. Information of the senses deceives. True sense is undermined.
d. We need experiments to establish knowledge.
i. Bacon was called a priest of the senses.
ii. We must be aware of the cost of vanity and idols.
iii. Sound science is without fables. Medicines, technology, and epistemology itself must be established through the criticisms of the senses.

RE: Exitous in Summa Article I

Continuing on Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas spoke of the Good being desirable and its privation as evil. Blindness is an example of a material evil. But non-material evil is parasitical.

A ruler’s law is base on his reason, while divine reason is an eternal direction for us.

Aquinas wrote of the Natural Law: free will and reason is juxtaposed with instinct. As rational creatures, we are participants in God’s governance of the natural order. We understand and cooperate in this order. Through Human Law, humans are authorities and creators.

Aquinas also saw Divine Law as coming from divine revelation. This law is opposite grace — which gives us faith, hope, and charity. God made us for a supernatural purpose. Divine law can take us beyond our nature and beyond nature itself.

However, Aquinas also asserted that we can’t know everything without a written law, like the 10 commandments. Humans disagree about natural law, and human law only directs external actions. It cannot punish all evil; that is the domain of God.

In Article II, Aquinas writes of Natural Law as Practical versus Speculative; these are self-evident. We are rational and self-governing (ex nihilo neo fit, nothing new comes from nothing). With Speculative Reason, the first precedent is Being. With Practical Reason, the first precedent is the Good. All human action is toward achieving goods, the things we seek after. Man’s “thou shalt nots” protect the Good. We identify rules secondarily to nature, but responsible freedom and will preserve them.

The Philosopher King, the poet, tells us about the true form of beauty, that is, the Good. In this world, light and the sun are examples of this good. We learn about the three divisions of philosophy:
1) Ontology – the principles of the nature of reality.
2) Epistemology – the principles of the nature of knowing.
3) Metaphysics – the first principles that cannot be proven but are self-evident, like the law of noncontradiction.

Sufficient reason is the reason for everything, which states that from nothing nothing comes. These are how we understand:
1) Inductive reasoning – probability versus universal reasoning/truth of being a bridge to reality.
2) Deductive reasoning – for example, the argument (syllogism) shows that if a major premise is true, and the minor premise is true, then its conclusion is true (an immediate inference). For example:
a) God is the greatest that can be conceived.
b) Existence is greater than non-existence.
c) Existing God must be greater than non-existing God.
3) Dialectical reasoning is not based on proofs, and must be intelligible (look at it this way).
4) Informal fallacies. For example:
a) Ad hominem
b) Straw man
c) Correlation -> causation

How to handle disputations:
Pose a question -> State your objections -> Then state the contrary -> Then give your reasons -> And then reply to objections.

In the well-known parable of the cave, Plato represents those famous prisoners in the cave being subject to the imagemakers behind them.
The Good:
a) The useful
b) The pleasurable
c) The beautiful

The rational soul is a living entity, a directing process for understanding reality. As we ingest food and make it part of us, through intellect we can understand what is outside of us and make it part of us as knowledge, which is spiritual. Using logic we can get to right reasoning.

The ultimate good of Happiness comes from the complete way of a full life. Virtue arises from the practice of perfecting one’s character. Through excellence, we can grasp the good and create the moral life, which is beauty. The moral life is the mean between excess and deficiency; God-like contemplation–or magnanimity–is the most important thing.

The prime mover is the final cause. It elicits love and exists for itself. (From nothing, nothing comes.) But beyond being just the prime mover, God is the Creator with interest in creation. The providential, personal God is being in itself: the IAM, the judge, Providence and nature’s God. This law of nature gives us the moral law.