The rule of flesh

A series of unguided reflections on the passions of the soul, by which I mean, the bodily passions, insofar as they affect the soul. I attempt to set out the rule of flesh, as it may be studied in the carnal writers.

This post may be called the opposite of an opinion on free will. An opinion on free will would be an answer to the question, how does the soul rule the body? This post, instead, is an answer to the question, how does the body rule the soul?

No one should read this; read Thomas’s Treatise on the Passions instead.

0. Contents

1. The senses, as contrasted with reason
1.1. To accept all appearances
1.2. To reject, or ignore, what does not appear
1.3. To reject what is contrary to appearance
2. Desires and pleasure
2.1. Concurrence of desires and pleasure
2.2. Presence of fleshly desires
2.3. Conflict of desires with servitude
2.4. Reoccurrence of fleshly desires
3. Pain
3.1. Presence of pain
3.2. Primacy of pain over pleasure
4. Time preference
5. Compassion
6. Mixed phenomena
6.1. Pluralism
6.2. Equality
6.3. Labor theory of value
7. Speech
8. Notes

1. The senses, as contrasted with reason

The first ruling principle of the flesh are the senses, in general. Traditionally they are five, though now a few more are counted.

To be ruled by the senses, as contrasted with reason, results in a tendency to accept appearances for realities, and to accept only the realities which are apparent. This may be divided into the following tendencies.

1.1. To accept all appearances

That is, to accept all that appears to be true, without sufficient rational inquiry into its reality. This is the cause of superstitions, where the sensible conjunction of two events, or their similarity in some sensible particular,[1] is taken for a real relation between them. It is also the cause of contemporary econometrics and psychology.

1.2. To reject, or ignore, what does not appear

This is the denial of the power of reason to know such things as are not apparent. Such things being held to be unknowable or at any rate unknown, it is then either denied that they exist, or simply ignored, and left out of consideration.

This tendency is sometimes called “empiricism”.[2] As Hume put it:

Whence can any hypothesis be proved but from the apparent phenomena? To establish one hypothesis upon another, is building entirely in the air; and the utmost we ever attain, by these conjectures and fictions, is to ascertain the bare possibility of our opinion; but never can we, upon such terms, establish its reality.

This is the cause of various philosophical errors, most famously materialism, since nothing immaterial can be immediately apparent.

1.3. To reject what is contrary to appearance

This happens when something’s appearance of truth stands as a barrier to rational inquiry into the truth of the contrary.

For instance, the appearance that there are positively existing evils (see §3.1) may prevent someone from engaging in the analysis which leads to the doctrine that evil is an absence of good.

In the physical sciences, certain people to this day reject the sphericity of the Earth on grounds which are mainly of this kind; they believe, for instance, that it would contradict the Earth’s having appearance of flatness, when the horizon is optically inspected.

2. Desires and pleasure

The second ruling principle of the flesh is pleasure, which always occurs at the fulfillment of desires. Pleasure, which is of the flesh, finds a parallel in joy, which is of the spirit; pleasure occurs at the fulfillment of sensitive desires, and joy occurs at the fulfillment of rational desires.

2.1. Concurrence of desires and pleasure

The concurrence of bodily desires and bodily pleasure is equally amenable to two kinds of analysis:

A1. (a) For various reasons, men desire certain things. (b) When they attain those things, the desire is fulfilled. (c) Because of this, they are pleased.

A2. (a) For various reasons, certain things cause pleasure in men. (b) Men expect that, when they attain those things, they will be pleased. (c) Because of this, they desire them.

In both analyses we have various reasons leading men to desire various things and then seek them, at the attaining of which they are pleased. Neither is more compatible with experience than the other.

However, the analysis A2 is, at least apparently, much more proper to bodily desires, whereas only the analysis A1 can apply to intellectual desires.

A2 seems to fit our experience of substitution better, for instance: we desire something and, being unable to attain it, are satisfied by the attainment of something else, which we judge to be similarly pleasurable. In such moments, the flesh strongly suggests to us that the expectation of the pleasure is the cause of the desire, since the desire goes away with the presence of something which is very clearly and apparently pleasurable, but which seems to bear only a remote relation to the reasons which seemed to have led us to experience a desire in the first place.

But in the case of intellectual desires, only A1 is appropriate, since such desires are caused by rational reasons, and we experience this causation. Reason, being self-aware, will not allow herself to analyze such desires in terms of the expectation of future joy; she causes the desires herself, when she cognizes their object under the aspect of good, and she knows that she is causing them.

As such, it is the rule of flesh which is the cause of hedonism; when men are carnal, they opt for the analysis which seems more fitting for the desires of the flesh. Men are hedonists because they are carnal, not the opposite.

It is hedonist analysis which accounts for the prevalence of cardinal utility in economics, whereas the correct economists understand utility in terms of ordinal preference rankings.

2.2. Presence of fleshly desires

Sensitive desires have quite a pointed presence in the mind. We experience them as a nagging feeling which only goes away when the desire is satisfied. And such desires are most commonly the instinctive desires, which have a known function in our preservation, or in that of the species – the desires for food, water, warmth, etc.

This fact, of the overbearance of sensitive desires upon the mind, is the cause of the belief in “needs” as a definite, objective category, and their fulfillment as a primary goal of society.

In fact, the idea of “needs” cannot bear scrutiny, and is unrelated to the determination of action, which is always in accordance with the foremost desire, whether it be such as is considered a “need” or not. The belief in the reality of “needs” is another error caused by accepting a suggestion of the flesh without submitting it to reason.

2.3. Conflict of desires with servitude

When you obey someone else, it appears that you fulfill his desires rather than yours.

This is not actually true, since if you obey him voluntarily, you necessarily desire to obey him. But it appears true, especially when your action is contrary to the fulfillment of your fleshly desires, for the flesh will not listen to reason. When you suffer hunger, exhaustion, or cold to obey your superior, it is then that the flesh screams to the soul that all servitude is slavery, and all slavery is hell.

If the soul listens, she will greatly envy and hate her superior. But never mind this. It is plain that the conflict of fleshly desires with all servitude, what might be called the “disutility of servitude”, is a real and discernible phenomenon.

It is the cause of much, but not all, of the cry for “freedom”, “self-determination” or “autonomy” in the human heart – a freedom which is conceived of as opposed to obedience – which underlies so much of liberal, libertarian and anarchist discourse. It is the cry of the flesh against the rule of the soul.

2.4. Reoccurrence of fleshly desires

Bodily pleasures are fleeting by nature, since they are the result of imperfect enjoyment of corruptible goods.

The soul’s joys, by contrast, are perpetual; she is perfectly united to incorruptible truths.

The illusion, then, to which being carnal subjects us, is to think that it is in the nature of desire to be fleeting; that we must, while we exist, always move from desire to desire, hungering ever more, and never coming to rest – except, perhaps, at death.[3]

This is not true. The soul is immortal,[4] and she is made to see God,[5] who has provided means for her to merit this and achieve it.[6]

3. Pain

Pain is the third ruling principle of the flesh. While it may be thought of as the inverse of pleasure, its relationship with pleasure is not perfectly reciprocal, whence come the particular phenomena which we will analyze.

Pleasure and pain are the images which, in the flesh, correspond to the realities of good and evil – which are perfectly reciprocal, the latter being a negation of the former. The imperfection of their reciprocity in the flesh is just one more mismatch between appearances and realities.

3.1. Presence of pain

Pain, like the senses, has quite a pointed presence in the mind. It has its own character in experience, which cannot be taught through description.

This is extremely well adapted to achieving our survival, which needs us to take pointed notice of certain things so that we might avoid them. It is very poorly suited as an image of reality, though. For the realities to which pain corresponds are not presences, but absences – pain is the image of evil, which is only an absence of good.

This lack of correspondence is the cause of thinking of evil as a substantial reality, as something positively present in the world. The fact that pain is present to the mind is an obstacle which the flesh presents to the spirit’s recognition that evil is absence.

3.2. Primacy of pain over pleasure

Pain is avoided more than pleasure is sought.

This is not really true, of course. It is not clear how a pleasure can correspond to a pain – no one is willing to say that something is as pleasurable as something else is painful, and no one is fully comfortable drawing comparisons of more and less either.

No, we must conceive of pleasure and pain as independent causes, though in inverse directions; and the only way to compare pleasures and pains is through their power to move us to seek them or avoid them, that is, through alternative choices. A pleasure equivalent to a pain, then, would be the chimerical situation where a choice to experience both would be fully indifferent to us.

What is rather true, but is longer to say, is that given equivalent goods and evils, the pain correspondent to the evils is greater than the pleasure correspondent to the goods. When we are guided by the flesh, evils are avoided more than goods are sought – and this is perfectly coherent to say, since evils and goods are strictly comparable, being contradictory opposites.

This is the phenomenon which the psychologists call loss aversion. It is the primacy, in the flesh, of pain over pleasure. It is the cause of decision-making with an unduly extreme preference towards avoiding evil rather than seeking good. Such decision-making is systematically undertaken by such a system as negative utilitarianism.

4. Time preference

All men have time preference, which means that, other things being equal, they prefer the satisfaction of a want in the nearer future to the same satisfaction in the farther distant future.[7]

Men can have a higher or lower, but always positive, rate of time preference; a higher rate means that they exhibit a greater preference for present goods over future ones.[8]

Time preference is largely, if not wholly, an effect of the body. That our body can die at any moment, and that it must be kept alive through consumption, are major causes of time preference; and the rate of time preference is greatly affected by the expectation of future dangers to the body.[8]

Because of this, a man’s rate of time preference is liable to be irrationally high. He can pay little attention to the future, even when it is relatively predictable, simply because the present commands his attention; and he can forgo gains, or take losses, as a result.

Plato says, in the Protagoras,[9] that the wise man will not have time preference. We fail to delay gratification because we think that pleasures and pains which are nearer in time are greater than those more remote; but this is a mere appearance, like the fact that nearer objects appear larger than objects farther away. The wise man does not fall prey to this illusion, because he has the art of measurement, and can measure pleasure by the rule of pleasure, choosing the greater pleasures and the smaller pains regardless of their position in time.

This illustrates that a high rate of time preference, like someone being deluded by sensible appearances (see §1), is caused by the rule of body over soul. As such, it can be avoided through the application of reason and knowledge.

5. Compassion

Compassion is taken here to be a synonym of empathy. They are the Latin and Greek versions, respectively, of the same word.

In the common acceptation, compassion is a feeling; people are said to “feel compassion” for a suffering friend. It is characterized by a kind of “matching” of someone else’s sufferings, or, more generally, his passions. It is what is described by Epicurus in his Vatican Sayings, 56–57:

The wise man feels no more pain when he is tortured than when his friend is tortured, and will die on his behalf; for if he betrays his friend, his entire life will be confounded and utterly upset because of a lack of confidence.

As shown in this quote, compassion is taken to be particularly fitting towards friends. This is perfectly reasonable, given how friends are, ideally, perfectly similar; as such, one friend’s being tortured is something hated by the other friend as much as by himself.

A problem of terms arises here. As I said before, compassion is the name given to a feeling. Now, I contend that this feeling is something we feel instinctively, like hunger or thirst; it is the result of a “social instinct” which we have by virtue of being social animals. That this is so seems to be shown by its apparent presence in certain brute animals, as well as by experiences of feeling it irrationally, as toward fictional characters.

But if compassion is an instinctive feeling, it cannot be a virtue, as it is often called one. And it seems that a due measure of compassion is certainly a virtue, since it is part of charity, which is itself a virtue.[10]

Therefore, I propose “compassivity” as the name of the virtue which regulates the feeling of compassion toward a due measure. The virtue would guide the instinct, like temperance guides hunger; however, while temperance is thought of as a restraint upon hunger, compassivity should be thought of as rather an incitement toward compassion, since it is a part of charity, rather than of temperance or courage.

To name the vices which correspond to excess and defect of this virtue, then, I would begin by saying that the defect of compassivity is cruelty. This is the most fitting word, since the essence of cruelty is the lack of compassion; pleasure in another’s sufferings is only called cruelty when it is viewed as an insufficiency of compassion, whereas otherwise it is only called, say, schadenfreude.

The excess of compassivity also exists, but I lack as good a name for it. I propose simply “hypercompassivity”. It occurs when a man so perfectly matches another’s passions as to even feel a certain way which he knows to be improper, or to lose his patience when a friend does.

Hypercompassivity is the focus here. Since it is not as well-known as the opposite defect, I will first make it clearer that it is a true vice by giving two examples and commenting on them.

B1. Suppose that a man, due to being tortured or afflicted, is so pained that he would even lie or murder to get out of his situation. If his friend is afflicted in the same way, and is also willing to commit such acts to free his friend, then it is hypercompassive of him to feel this way.

To lose the use of reason only because a friend has lost it can only be a vice, although it results from the feeling of compassion. In this case, it appears opposed to the virtue of patience moreso than to charity, though. The next case is clearer.

B2. Suppose that a mother feels such strong compassion toward her child, who is in pain at receiving an injection or another medicine, that she stops the procedure, endangering the future health of the child.

In this case, all should notice that an excess of compassivity, and indeed of compassion, is opposed to charity, though it can appear to be an abundance of it. This is why it is fittingly defined.

Hypercompassivity is the focus of this section because this vice, being a way for a bodily passion to overcome reason, is also part of the rule of flesh. Carnal men are hypercompassive, and it shows in their reasoning. They are unwilling to cause, or allow, another’s suffering, even justly, and even to achieve a much greater good. They think God should be the same way, and they condemn him for not being so; they call this the “problem of evil”.

A different, related vice, which is caused by hypercompassivity, I will call by the name of “equipassism”. It would be the tendency to ascribe the same passions, or kinds of passions, to all men, especially avoiding any claims of general differences in the general character of men’s passions. An equipassist would, for instance, strongly recoil at the suggestion that women feel a different way than men do about some things, or that men from different countries are affected differently by some kinds of acts. He would be unduly sceptical of such claims, until it were shown to him in such a way that he could not respectably doubt it.

6. Mixed phenomena

The ruling principles of the flesh having been elucidated above as exhaustively as I could expound them, I will proceed to explain a few phenomena as being caused by these principles in combination with each other.

6.1. Pluralism

Pluralistic doctrines of truth and religion are generally caused by a combination of empiricism (§1.2) and hypercompassivity (§5). No man is a pluralist about sensible appearances; when it comes to the intelligible world, the pluralist believes that more harm is done by causing a man the pain of being contradicted than by allowing him to go on in his errors, since, after all, all the speculations of reason are “building entirely in the air” anyway. Everyone is equally right because everyone is equally wrong; all have strayed from the certain domain of the senses.

6.2. Equality

The demand for equality among men often arises out of a combination of the conflict of desires with servitude (§2.3) with hypercompassivity (§5). Since servitude causes pain, and carnal man cannot bear the pain of others, he also cannot bear that any one man be subject to any other – even when such subjection is just, and even when it achieves a much greater good. Though, of course, proponents of equality will often deny the justice and utility of subjection.

6.3. Labor theory of value

A labor theory of value, whereby the value of a good is determined by the amount of labor input needed to produce that good, is suggested by the flesh through a combination of factors given here.

The high value of a good is what justifies expending a lot of labor on it, which gives a correlation between labor and value which is often experienced, though not strictly necessary. This expenditure of labor, through the feelings of tiredness and discomfort (and §2.3), is then made apparent to the senses, whereas the reasons which led to the act are not present in the same way, so that empiricism (§1.2) would lead a man to pay regard rather to the expenditure of labor. The belief in “needs”, which is suggested by sensitive desires (§2.2), – which are possibly shortly fulfilled by the product of labor –, may add to this the conception that what makes labor produce value is its being “socially necessary”.

Some conclusions derived through these theories are also highly attractive to carnal men – the desirability of socialism, which is attractive to someone who demands equality, §6.2 – so that it is then no wonder that they are tempted to adopt them.

7. Speech

This blog post is my “fundamental epistle”. I am definitely going to talk about the stuff I wrote in it later. As such, I am going to lay down, in this section, all the new terms I made up during the course of this blog post, as well as some more new terms which I just made up to refer to the stuff in it. This will go in order of section number.

• reality of needs: “needs” as a definite, objective category; a belief suggested by the presence of sensitive desires (§2.2)
• disutility of servitude: the fact that the flesh, through the sensitive desires, will cause pain to one who obeys another’s will (§2.3)
• nonservility, or obedience aversion: the tendency, caused by the flesh through the disutility of servitude, to desire a ‘freedom’ which is conceived of as opposed to obedience (§2.3)
• non-eternity: the belief that “it is in the nature of desire to be fleeting”, and that a man may never come to permanent rest from all desire (§2.4)
• substantiality of evil: the belief in evil “as a substantial reality, as something positively present in the world”, as opposed to as an absence of good; suggested by the flesh through the presence of pain (§3.1)
• excessive focus on pain: while this is a very general term, when I use it it is likely to refer to the tendency to place undue emphasis on avoiding evils rather than seeking goods, which is caused by the primacy of pain over pleasure in the flesh (§3.2)
• compassion: a kind of feeling through which a man “matches”, in himself, the passions which are suffered by another, typically a friend; it is caused by the flesh through the social instinct (§5)
• compassivity: a virtue which incites a man toward compassion; it is part of the virtue of charity (§5)
• cruelty: the vice of defect of compassivity, leading a man to feel insufficient compassion (§5)
• hypercompassivity: the vice of excess of compassivity, leading a man to feel more compassion than is due (§5)
• equipassism: the tendency to ascribe the same passions, or kinds of passions, to all men, especially avoiding any claims of general differences in the general character of men’s passions; caused by hypercompassivity (§5)

8. Notes

[1] This is the preferred explanation of the principles of Babylonian divination, according to Francesca Rochberg:

One of the modern debates about the role of observation in the cuneiform tradition has to do with the origins of omen divination, namely whether the observation of co-occurrences of phenomena led to the idea that one phenomenon (P) could indicate another (Q). The evidence is clear that signs were studied for their appearances, regularities, and irregularities, and the patterns of their occurrence. No evidence for an observational connection of signs to portents, however, can be demonstrated. A variety of non-observational principles can be identified in the texts to explain how a sign was correlated with a portent.

As seen in the examples quoted above, one such principle was analogy. The water inside the gall bladder signifies the flood. The gall bladder wrapped around the “finger” (identified with the band of tissue called the processus caudatus, or possibly the processus pyramidalis) was read as a visual analogue for the king’s taking of an enemy. Not every omen exhibits such analogic reasoning from protasis to apodosis, but in many cases an association by homophony or synonymy will explain the connection between protasis and apodosis. Whatever observational dimension is to be found in the divinatory sciences is restricted to the observation of the signs themselves, not to the form of reasoning known as “after this, therefore because of this” (post hoc ergo propter hoc). Observation itself is an important part of why the omen texts have been classified as “scientific” in modern scholarship, and legitimately so, as the observation of physical phenomena was foundational to the development of knowledge about their intrinsic properties and behavior.

— Francesca Rochberg (2018). Science and Ancient Mesopotamia. In: The Cambridge History of Science (pp. 7–28). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9780511980145.003

[2] For instance, by Bunnin & Yu, who define empiricism thus:

A philosophical approach to knowledge and reality. Its central contentions are that all knowledge or all meaningful discourse about the world is related to sensory experience (including inner sense or introspection), and that the boundaries of possible sense-experience are the boundaries of possible knowledge. Different empiricists have different views about how knowledge is based on sensation.[...]

— The Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy

[3] On that “we go from desire to desire”, see another blog post, which I will link here when it is posted.

[4] This is proved by various arguments here, for instance.

[5] This is proved, for instance, here.

[6] This must be accepted through faith in the Catholic Church, which teaches this doctrine, for instance, here.

[7] Mises, Human Action, ch. 18

[8] Hoppe, Democracy: The God That Failed, ch. 1

[9] Plato, Protagoras, 356a–357e

[10] Thomas says:

Love, which is in the intellective appetite, also differs from goodwill, because it denotes a certain union of affections between the lover and the beloved, in as much as the lover deems the beloved as somewhat united to him, or belonging to him, and so tends towards him.

— S.T., II-II, a. 2, co.

I contend that this “union of affections” is at least partly constituted by compassion; partly, it should also refer to a susceptibility to suffering the same passions when affected by similar causes. “It is proper to friends to approve and disapprove the same things, and to be delighted in and to be pained by the same things”, as Thomas says in SCG, 3, 151.3. (He attributes this latter phrase to Cicero elsewhere – see fn. 10 of page 44 here – but it is actually from Sallust, Bellum Catilinæ, ch. 20.)