Influential minority

Suppose that a minority of people has a strong influence on how the majority votes.

You could think either that:

• (A) This is a bad thing, because this influence presents a strong danger that the people are being fooled into voting for the interests of this minority group instead of their own interests. Without this influence, there is a greater chance that the interests of the majority will decide the laws, which is the ideal.
• (B) This is a good thing, because the majority of people do not know much about laws, so that their only hope of voting in good laws is by being influenced by a group of more knowledgeable people. Without this, they will vote ignorantly, and be governed by bad laws.
• (C) This makes no difference, because a minority can only be popular with the majority by saying what the majority already thinks.

It is probably inevitable that all of these sides will show up whenever there is an influential minority, according to whether someone likes them or not.

Ceptibilism

I have given a fun name to my opinion that words such as “existence” and “knowledge” have exactly two meanings, corresponding to the two mental powers of sensation and reason. Playing on the fact that the former may be called “perception” and the latter “conception”, I have shaved off the prefix, arriving at the neat phrasing that existence is “ceptibility”, i.e., it is indifferent between the conceivable and the perceivable, unless one of the senses of the word is specified. My opinion is that when we say that something exists or that we know it, we mean either that we have perceived it through the senses or that we formed a concept of it. (This is also what we are denying when we deny that something exists, or that we or others know it.) Since we have either conceived it or perceived it, we may be said to have “ceived” it, as a retrogressive coinage.

I think a lot of philosophical debates are very vague because we don’t specify which sense of these words we’re using. Atheists deny that God exists because they are using the word “exists” in the sense of perception, but almost all theists agree that God can’t be perceived with the senses, and they only use the word “exists” in a different sense, although they don’t notice it, because both sides insist on talking about “existence” without defining it.

Only the name is new. This opinion was mentioned before in the following blog posts:

• Descartes’s confusions
• Controverted Questions
• Kantian terminology
• Kant vocabulary equivalence project
• Existence of God
• Glossary

Existence of God

I explain in what sense I understand the sentence “God exists”, and why I think it is true in the sense I mean it.

This blog post was first written as a series of text messages to an atheist friend who thought that he simply had no reason to believe it. I have edited it very little from what I sent to him, so the tone may be unusual.

First, notice that, for most of history, people have thought that they can prove that “God exists” is true from pure philosophy; and I think so too, but you have to understand the words right. It is obviously false if by “God” you mean a bearded man in the sky, for instance; there are many true, and many false meanings of it. I’ll explain what I mean by the words, and why I think my sense is good enough for all the mainstream religions, although some staunch bearded-man-believers would hate me for meaning what I do by it. Alright? ...

0. Contents

• 1. What God is said to be
• 2. That the forms exist
• 3. What the form of the good is
• 4. That the form of the good is God
• 5. Epilogue

1. What God is said to be

OK, so first we have “God”. The most ecumenical senses of the word, I think, are these two.

Sense A: The principle/cause of all other things, which is distinct from them and superior to them. (Wuellner)

This is usually what “arguments for God’s existence” are proving, and the most abstract philosophers have this in common with any religious grandmas. The latter two restrictions would exclude most kinds of ‘pantheism’ from counting here.

Sense B: Something “absolutely perfect” in some sense, usually including being perfectly morally good, all-powerful, all-knowing etc.

This one is also common. I would say that my sense of the word “God” fits both of these two common senses, which is good, since that means I’m not just making up a new sense for the word. I wouldn’t usually define God using these phrases, but what I mean by the word fits both of them. I’ll explain “exists” next.

2. That the forms exist

Now, the funny thing about “exists” is most people never define it, and they just talk about things existing and not existing without explaining what they mean, and I think that is what causes a lot of confusion nowadays. This is especially because I think there are two main senses of the word, so I am going to define both of them.

Sense 1: something exists if it can be perceived with the senses.

I think everyone agrees with this; you and I exist, and so on. I think when people are sure that God doesn’t exist, they are thinking that this is the only sense. But I think there’s the other one too.

Sense 2: something exists if it can be understood with reason.

In this sense, you can say that perfect circles exist, and the set of natural numbers exists, even though you’ve never seen them, but it remains true that married bachelors and other nonsense don’t exist. In this sense, we have to say that unicorns exist, although that’s weird, so we rarely do – to avoid ambiguity, we stick to sense 1 when talking about those.

Now, I think those are really the only senses of “exist”, since we human beings don’t have any other mental powers besides the senses and reason. And almost all the theologians agree that God doesn’t exist in sense 1 – it says in the book of John that “no one has ever seen God” (1:18), but even taking only the usual interpretations of the Old Testament, it is usually held that God doesn’t have any physical body, and the times he “appeared” to people were just visions that represented him. So I think you can only go forward with the proof if you agree that sense 2 is a good sense to use the word “exists”. And if that’s fine with you, then I’ll explain how you can understand one thing that fits both senses of “God”, although maybe you’re beginning to get it already.

3. What the form of the good is

I think the way we understand things is we form concepts in our minds, and those concepts are what we are expressing when we give definitions. Now, I think there is one most important concept that is involved with all the others. Plato called it “the form of the Good”, which is very awesome, but maybe not very useful. Sometimes I say it’s “being”, which is also not very clear. But basically it would be the concept of the “intelligible” or understandable or conceivable – it’s one concept, or form, that includes everything that exists in sense 2. Alright? This concept includes all the other concepts, just like the concept of “animal” includes all your ideas of each kind of animal.

4. That the form of the good is God

Now, if you take this central concept, or highest form, you see that it fits Sense A of “God” in a certain way – it is the cause of all things that you understand, insofar as you understand them, since it is involved in your understanding of all of them. Just like your concept of dog is the cause of there being any dogs in your life, since otherwise you couldn’t understand all those shapes and colors as dogs. So it’s the cause of all things insofar as they are intelligible; if you take sense 2 to be the truest sense of existing, which I think Plato did, then that’s perfectly sufficient. (After all, whatever exists in sense 2 has always existed in sense 2, so that’s a more “eternal” way to exist; and since sense 1 concerns “appearance” to your senses, we can say that, by contrast, sense 2 concerns “reality”.) This central concept is superior to the other concepts because it includes all of them, and it’s distinct from them when taken by itself, although it’s part of all of them.

It also fits sense B of “God”, again, only when taken by itself. This is harder to understand, but the idea is that “perfection” would be something fitting the concept. So a perfect dog is a dog that perfectly fits the concept of dog, while a defective dog would depart from the definition in some ways, e.g., dogs are quadrupeds, and the poor pooch only has three legs. Similarly, a morally bad man is departing from the concept of man because we understand that human beings are rational, and being immoral is irrational. Alright? That’s how classical philosophy works. Anyway, so, every concept perfectly fits itself, of course —the concept of dogness is a perfect dog, although particular dogs aren’t perfect— and if you take the universal concept by itself, it obviously has to include every possible perfection, since it includes every other concept – just like how “animals”, taken generally, can do anything that particular animals can do. So the central concept is absolutely perfect too.

5. Epilogue

That’s how I would understand “God exists” in a way that fits both of the common religious ideas about it. Many people would dislike it, but I think it’s pretty good, and good enough for the main religions. Maybe this leaves you a bit confused regarding prayer and miracles, but I can try to explain if you ask a question. If you don’t want to buy all these theories about how thoughts and reason work, then I guess there isn’t much I can do, but I tried.

Anyway, believing that “God exists” in some sense wouldn’t mean you’re a member of any religion, but you have to believe it in order to even be able to believe that a message is from God, right? So it’s a start.

Although you could technically stop there, if you wanted; there are many philosophers who believe it and aren’t in any religion. This seems less common nowadays than in early modern times, but it’s a thing. (I do have an idea of which religion you should join, of course.)

Judgments

I describe here the division of judgments into kinds from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

First, judgments are divided into a posteriori, or empirical judgments, and a priori judgments.

• A posteriori judgments are divided into particular empirical judgments and inductive judgments.
• A priori judgments are divided into pure a priori and impure a priori judgments.

The rest of this blog post will define each of the kinds in that order, with page numbers from the “B” edition of the Critique in parentheses.

0. Contents

• 1. A posteriori, or empirical judgments
• 1.1. Particular empirical judgments
• 1.2. Inductive judgments
• 2. A priori judgments
• 2.1. Pure a priori judgments
• 2.2. Impure a priori judgments
• 3. Footnotes

1. A posteriori, or empirical judgments

A posteriori judgments are drawn from some experience, upon which they depend; (B2) so, they are always synthetic. Now, “experience teaches us, to be sure, that something is constituted thus and so, but not that it could not be otherwise”; because of this, a posteriori judgments always have no necessity, and no true or strict universality. They may have assumed and comparative universality, as will be explained next. (B3)

1.1. Particular empirical judgments

Particular empirical judgments are empirical judgments about particular things. They are always a posteriori and they lack any kind of universality. They are said to be derived immediately from experience; an example would be your judgment that a bridge has collapsed, made after you have seen it collapsing. (B2)

Not all particular judgments are empirical, because some of them involve a pure concept of the understanding which confers necessity and strict universality to the judgment; see §2.2 of this post. (Prolegomena, §20, fn1)

1.2. Inductive judgments

Inductive judgments may also be called a priori secundum quid, or “a priori in some respect”, but not a priori simpliciter, or “a priori simply speaking”.¹ This is because, while they are not independent of all experience, they may be said to be independent “of this or that experience”, since they involve judging about something before you see it actually happening. For example, you may judge that your house will collapse right after you have undermined its foundation. You know this before actually seeing the house collapse, but only because you know from experience that “bodies are heavy and hence fall if their support is taken away”. (B2)

This is to say that these judgments have “empirical universality”: they are drawn from a general rule, but the general rule is itself drawn from experience, through induction.

Empirical universality is an “assumed and comparative” kind of universality (B3) which is “only an arbitrary increase in validity from that which holds in most cases to that which holds in all”, as in the proposition “all bodies are heavy”. (B4) That is, we cognize that bodies are heavy “as far as we have yet perceived” and arbitrarily decide that this must hold for all bodies.

To emphasize their inferior certainty in comparison with a priori judgments, I tend to refer to inductive judgments as “probable”, but Kant did not do this.

2. A priori judgments

A priori judgments are “those that occur absolutely independently of all experience” (B2), so that they have necessity and strict universality. (B4) They may be either analytic or synthetic, and investigating the latter kind was a major aim of Kant’s. (B73)

2.1. Pure a priori judgments

These are a priori judgments that contain no concepts drawn from experience, (B28) though we still find that all of these are nevertheless only valid in empirical use, (B170) i.e., they may only be used to judge about appearances.

Synthetic pure a priori judgments include all properly mathematical judgments, (B741ff) as well as the various principles of the transcendental philosophy (B25ff; table at B200) and the supreme principle of morality. (Groundwork, passim) Various analytic judgments may be trivially drawn from these by clarifying the concepts that they involve.

2.2. Impure a priori judgments

These are a priori judgments that contain some concepts that are themselves drawn from experience, although the judgments made about them are valid a priori. (B3) This is most clearly the case with analytic judgments about empirical concepts, such as “all bachelors are unmarried”:² although we learn about bachelors and marriage from experience, the judgment that bachelors are unmarried is a priori because it is analytic. Crucially, however, there are other ones, such as the typical judgment that “every alteration has its cause”: although “alteration is a concept that can be drawn only from experience” (B3), this judgment is nevertheless demonstrable a priori, since it is a formulation of the Second Analogy of Experience. (B232ff)

It seems that, in general, although impure a priori judgments concern a concept drawn from experience, they receive the character of necessity and strict universality from a pure concept of the understanding that is involved in them. So, the judgments may even be about particular things, as long as they conceive of those things as being under a universal law. For instance, if instead of judging that “the sun shines on the stone and then it becomes warm”, we judge that “the sun warms the stone”, we conceive of the sunshine under the pure concept of cause, and therefore give it a necessary and strictly universal connection to the heat, making the judgment a priori, though impure. (Prolegomena, §20, fn1)

3. Footnotes

---

1. This name itself does not come from the Critique of Pure Reason, but from the Metaphysik Mongrovius, printed in the Lectures on Metaphysics volume. I quote the relevant passage:

   Something is [...] a priori in some respect <secundum quid> when I cognize something through reason, but from empirical principles, e.g., if I throw a stone horizontally – so that it does not fall straight down – one can determine the curve a priori, but according to laws of gravity, which we cognize a posteriori. (pp. 112–113)

   While the Critique does not use this term, it nevertheless clearly describes such judgments without using the name, as a footnote to the Cambridge edition of the Critique indicates.↩

2. Obviously, here I mean the judgment that “all bachelors are unmarried” made by someone whose concept of “bachelor” is expressed by the definition “unmarried man”. I only even mention this in a footnote because some people try to read the analytic/synthetic distinction as applying to “propositions” being true “in virtue of the meanings of words”, and word meanings are obviously never all that fixed, and those people therefore think they are being very smart by pointing out that “bachelor” sometimes has other meanings, and therefore that the distinction does not work very well after all when used about propositions in this way. I think that, regardless of how other people have used the distinction since his time, this is simply not what Kant was talking about.↩

Catholicism Propounded

Supposing that you want to believe in a religion, this blog post explains why you should become Catholic.

0. Contents

• 1. Clarification of the search
• 2. Unity
• 3. Holiness
• 4. Catholicity and Apostolicity

1. Clarification of the search

First, I’ll clarify what you should not be looking for from a religion. You should not be looking for a guide on moral beliefs, or on related beliefs about your freedom and responsibility, or on whether God exists. These issues are matters of knowledge. Since they are capable of precise definition, philosophy can determine, and has determined, the answers to them with certainty. You may simply read the answers off of a philosophy manual, or even from this blog.

Religions should be sought after for questions regarding the possibility and character of an afterlife, as well as the question of why we live in this world rather than in one of the other imaginable worlds. These questions, although they are commonly asked, are of unclear meaning, and we cannot know the answer to them. We may, nevertheless, believe an answer that we are told, and it is safer and more respectable to pick a traditional answer than to make one up. This is why they have been called “articles of faith”.

Religions should also be sought after for the choice of which religious practices to perform, or of which marvelous events to accept as proper miracles. These are questions which are philosophically indifferent, and although some philosophers have claimed to prove the answer of “none” for both of them, they have done so fallaciously. Once again, it makes sense here to pick a tradition and go with it.

If you are determined to accept no answers to these questions, then you are not looking for a religion. Catholicism is only propounded to seekers.

Given this scope of inquiry, I will explain why Catholicism is the right choice of tradition. This blog post will be organized along the traditional “four marks of the Church”, which have been defined in councils and exhaustively discussed by theologians. I have nevertheless thought that it would be convenient to set up my own presentation of them, which is what this blog post is.

2. Unity

The first thing you are looking for from a religious tradition is that it actually have a single definite answer to your questions. The whole reason you are looking for a tradition, after all, is that you decided not to make the answers up for yourself. If you are not quite sure what a tradition teaches, you cannot be sure that you even belong to it, rather than unknowingly diverging from it on some point.

This is where most other traditions fall short. In every other tradition, different teachers teach different doctrines. You are not sure who is right, but more to the point, you are not sure which one actually represents the tradition. ¶ Some of them have a fundamental text – the Bible, say – which supposedly settles disputes. But it doesn’t, of course. It is not actually possible for a written text to have a definite meaning. Each one will read it as he wills. (This blog post is written, but I am alive, and can answer questions from readers.)

Catholicism has a definite content, at least to some extent. To be sure, it has its share of disputes and controversies among theologians. But some things are beyond dispute. They have been defined by councils and popes, and if you diverge from the definitions about such matters, you will be warned and then excommunicated. There is a clear authority of the Catholic Church, which is the Pope. Rarely, there have been multiple claimants to the papacy, making the authority less clear, but these issues are usually overstated, and did not last long, and at any rate, the claimant popes in question did not teach different things on any point of doctrine.

3. Holiness

The second thing you want from a religious tradition is that the answers it gives you be the right answers. Of course, you can’t know that you’re getting the right answers, and this is the whole reason you looked for a tradition to believe in in the first place. Nevertheless, traditions generally cannot avoid speaking on points of science and philosophy which are, technically speaking, matters of knowledge. You would like these things to be fully correct when you hear them – if the tradition is wrong about those, it may well be wrong about the others. God is truthful, so that no one who speaks for God can say falsehoods while doing so.

Catholicism passes this with flying colors. I cannot, of course, explain every teaching of Catholicism regarding science and philosophy and show that it is right, because it would take too long and some people would not be convinced anyway. I can answer questions if asked about specific teachings, however. If you respect me as a person, you may allow that I might be right on this one.

Besides that, however, it is a central teaching of the Catholic religion, defined in the First Vatican Council, that “even though faith is above reason, there can never be any real disagreement between faith and reason, since it is the same God who reveals the mysteries and infuses faith, and who has endowed the human mind with the light of reason.”

So, you are assured of finding no mistakes. If you seem to find a mistaken teaching about science or philosophy in some official Catholic source, you may rest assured that, in all likelihood, the teacher was merely speaking obscurely or confusedly, and his true meaning did not contradict your rational knowledge after all. You may simply go with what reason tells you, and assume that you still belong to Catholicism. This will work every time.

Supposing, God forbid, that it doesn’t work, and that you get excommunicated for teaching a demonstrable rational truth, this will mean that Catholicism is false. I obviously think this hasn’t happened, and won’t happen. If Catholicism were false, the search for a religious tradition would be made much more difficult, perhaps impossible.

4. Catholicity and Apostolicity

Although most traditions, by far, have no clear unity in the sense explained in §2, some non-Catholic traditions nevertheless do seem to have it. The Mormon Church, for instance, has a central authority, and they can similarly excommunicate you from it for teaching the wrong thing. (Officially, it is called “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints”.) It may be that, somehow, you are not sure of finding any rational mistakes in its doctrines either, so that it isn’t falsified for you on that count. What does clearly rule it out are the other two marks of the Catholic Church, traditionally called catholicity and apostolicity.

In more prosaic terms, these words mean “globality” – geographical universality, the quality of being present worldwide – and antiquity, respectively. The Catholic Church is present all over the world, more or less, and it has existed from since the first century, already claiming continuity with the even older Jewish tradition. The Mormon Church, by comparison, is much more confined to Utah, and certainly does not predate 1830.

Geographical universality, or catholicity (from Ancient Greek καθολικός, “universal”), is important because it means that, from all the groups that are actually teaching anything definite, you are joining the largest group around. The case is similar with the Church’s apostolic antiquity, but across time. We all want to be part of something popular, and if possible, of something that connects us with earlier ages as well. Indeed, sometimes we even think that the true religion should be popular, since it seems dreadfully pessimistic to suppose that the true divine revelation would be stifled or provincial. More practically, supposing that we are wrong at the end of it all, it is less shameful to make a mistake that many other people made. As Augustine said:

Suppose that we have found different persons holding different opinions, and through their difference of opinions seeking to draw persons each one to himself: but that, in the mean while, there are certain pre-eminent from being much spoken of, and from having possession of nearly all peoples. Whether these hold the truth, is a great question: but ought we not to make full trial of them first, in order that, so long as we err, being as we are men, we may seem to err with the human race itself? (De utilitate credendi, §15)

No other religion, from the ones with definite content, will allow you, supposing that you err, to err with the whole human species. Or, at least, with one-sixth of it, by current numbers.

The antiquity of the Catholic Church also means that it most likely was not made up just to dupe you. Joseph Smith benefited greatly from founding the Mormon Church, and his descendants still do so. The Catholic Church only hands down its tradition by rote, because it was handed down to it by a previous generation, and so on throughout the ages of ages. Its priesthood, being celibate, leaves no descendants. Everyone in it is evidently in earnest, for better or worse.

Indeed, in order to believe Catholicism, you do not even have to believe directly in the Catholic Church. Suppose that, taking the Bible as a historical document, you choose the miraculous interpretation of its stories, and believe, as many do, in the divinity of Jesus. Suppose further that you believe that the divine Jesus founded the Catholic Church, which is historically continuous even today with the movement that Jesus founded; and that Jesus promised that the Church would be infallible. This would mean, then, that you have faith in the teachings of the Church only because of your belief in some old miracles and doctrines from ancient history. You don’t have to suppose, from the outset, that the bishops are particularly trustworthy about divine matters, or that the Bible is divinely inspired. No one else is making it this easy for you.

So, supposing that you want to believe in a religion, you should really become Catholic; nothing else makes anywhere near as much sense.

Possible arrangements for a cosmological poem

Suppose that you want to present your cosmological theories to a broad audience. You conceive of a beautiful poem, whether verse or prose: it will present a broad view of the universe as you see it in a brief compass, allowing the reader to marvel at the refined structure of your understanding. There’s one question left to be solved: from where – from what part of the universe – do you begin this poem?

There are a few possible answers, and I have tried to exhaust them here.

0. Contents

• 1. The silent void (Genesis)
• 2. The monad (Leibniz)
• 3. The monadic chaos (Anaxagoras)
• 4. The human perspective (Pascal)
• 5. Other possibilities
• 6. Footnotes

1. The silent void (Genesis)

This poem would begin from a primordial chaos, or void, and get to our ordered universe by a series of separations, or divisions. In the book of Genesis, we have light separated from darkness, then the earth from the sky, then the land from the sea. There are other cosmological myths that parallel Genesis, and the arrangement is well suited to metaphysical and philosophical theories as well, as I have shown by a direct parallel with Genesis just earlier. A modern scientific picture which began with the Big Bang would also suit this arrangement, since before the explosion, all matter was confused in a single place.¹ Such a poem could eventually arrive, by further division, to the simplest elements (“atoms”) that compose things, but it need not do so, and this is a strength for cosmological theories that do not involve any atoms.

2. The monad (Leibniz)

This poem begins, like Leibniz’s Monadology, from the ultimate simplest elements of the universe, and goes on to describe how they fit together to compose all the things that we experience, possibly working up to a broad view of the whole universe – as the Monadology itself does, ending with a view of the universe as the perfectly-governed city of God. More prosaically, many texts in early natural philosophy began with discussions of primitive elements, such as Aristotle’s Physics and Descartes’s Le Monde, although neither of these were properly atomists, so that poems composed to describe them might fit rather into another section.

3. The monadic chaos (Anaxagoras)

This poem begins by describing how the simplest elements work, but then describes them as composing a primordial chaos, which is then somehow separated into the common objects of experience. This is what (I believe) Anaxagoras thought was quite literally happening – a Mind was slowly separating the chaos of elements into uniform parts – but someone could in theory use this scheme as a poetic structure for a different theory.

4. The human perspective (Pascal)

This poem begins with the common objects of experience. It “zooms into” such objects to find their simplest elements; it also “zooms out from” such objects to find the broader universe that they compose. Since the movement in both cases starts from the same place, the order between them is indifferent. This is done in the section of Pascal’s Pensées called “the disproportion of man”. I have quoted it in full (from the public-domain Project Gutenberg edition) in a footnote to this post.² Notably, Pascal thought that there could be entire worlds inside atoms, and that similarly, our whole universe could be a mere atom in a much larger world. I am no historian, but I see this as a vivid picture of the strong effect which microscope and telescope observations were having on the human imagination while they were still novelties.

5. Other possibilities

It is unclear whether a poem could divide a primordial chaos directly into simplest elements, and then compose them into common things. As I envision this, it isn’t quite what Anaxagoras did, and I don’t know if it can really make sense conceptually.

I imagine that you could describe the universe with an elaborate analogy to a common object, but this would have to turn out fundamentally the same as one of the given possibilities.

I think all of these kinds of poems may be read as framing devices for presenting the constitution of the universe, without necessarily meaning anything about its history. Some of them are well suited to certain ideas about the latter, however; Genesis has often been interpreted literally, and Anaxagoras almost certainly meant his theories to represent the literal history of the universe.

I have not read Plato’s Timaeus, so I don’t know if it fits one of the structures here or is something else. Also, I would think that some “metaphysical” poems such as Dante’s and Milton’s won’t fit any of these structures because they are rather moral than cosmological.

With these qualifications, I think the four first sections of this post have exhausted all the possibilities for arranging a cosmological poem.

Genesis as an allegory for philosophy

The story of creation in Genesis can be read as an allegory for the teachings of philosophy, as pursued according to my method. What follows is a survey of such a reading.

0. Contents

• 1. Summaries and project
• 2. The silent void: to set aside all prejudice
• 3. Separations as fundamental distinctions
• 4. Darkness of error banished
• 5. Creation of sensible kinds in logical order
• 6. The life of man

1. Summaries and project

Creation, as summarized by the Catholic Study Bible, is divided into seven days as follows:

1. Heavens and light are made
2. Waters established on their own
3. Dry land made and vegetation added
4. Specific lights fashioned in the sky
5. Fish and sea creatures made to fill the water
6. The animals are created for the land, and then, finally, humans
7. Epilogue— God rests after completing all creation and is in total control

Philosophy, as summarized by Spinoza’s exposition of Descartes, involves these four steps:

1. to lay aside all prejudices,
2. to discover the foundations on which all things ought to be built,
3. to uncover the cause of error,
4. to understand all things clearly and distinctly.

The project of this reading, then, is to interpret those seven days as falling, allegorically, under these four headings. This explains the arrangement of the rest of this post.

2. The silent void: to set aside all prejudice

Genesis begins:

In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth – and the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters— (1:1–2)

Just as creation begins from utter formlessness and chaos, philosophy must begin from nothing: it cannot begin from any preconceived ideas that you may have been raised with, but must instead seek the intrinsically evident “foundations on which all things ought to be built”, which must come from the fundamental distinctions, as is seen in what follows. It was in search of these foundations that Descartes doubted, although his pursuit was, in some important ways, misguided.

3. Separations as fundamental distinctions

Genesis moves on to describe three “separations”, viz.:

1. God separates the light from the darkness. (1:3–5)
2. God separates the earth from the heavens. (1:6–8)
3. God separates the land from the sea. (1:9–10)

Bodily separation is the best possible image for the process of mental distinction, which is what is represented here. Philosophy begins with some fundamental distinctions; the mind’s former chaos is divided into order.

The separation of light from darkness may be taken as the image of the first division, between being and non-being, or, which is the same thing, the conceivable and the unconceivable, the intelligible and the unintelligible. The best metaphor for understanding is by analogy with bodily sight, and light is everything that is visible.

The separation of earth from the heavens may be taken as the image of the second division, between matter and form. The sky, with its constant stars and perfect regularity, was the most constant thing in the life of ancient humans; it is also the source of light. So, it represents form, which is the immutable source of knowledge, as contrasted with the fleeting earth.

The separation of the land from the sea may be taken as the image of the distinction between substance and accident. Although the earth and the sea are both mutable, the sea is constantly moving due to the tides, whereas the earth is more stable, and also more “firm” from our terrestrial perspective. So, it represents substance, which is that which remains unchanging in the apparent things that we understand.

4. Darkness of error banished

With the fundamental distinctions laid down, God goes on to create the living creatures, which represent the sources of our knowledge of sensible things. Those will be treated together in the next section. But in between creating plants and animals, interrupting the series of the living things, God creates the specific lights in the sky, which distinguish the day from the night. (1:14–19)

In the context of Genesis, this interruption establishes a parallel between the first three days and the following three days. As the Catholic Study Bible pointed out in the cited enumeration, the first and fourth day are broadly dedicated to light, the second and fifth to the waters, and the third and sixth to the land. Philosophically, this separation of the plants from the other kinds could be interpreted as signaling their lower importance, as may be explained next.

However, this is the second introduction of light, and a more explicit division between light and darkness than the first time around. It also comes soon after the fundamental distinctions. So, more properly, it may be philosophically interpreted as representing the third step in Spinoza’s Descartes: when the principles have been found upon which all the sciences should be built, it is not difficult to uncover the cause of error, and to distinguish clearly the true from the false. All errors may be traced to a confusion of what the principles distinguished.

5. Creation of sensible kinds in logical order

Having moved the creation of the lights to the previous section, the creation of living creatures may be explained in order. They are created in this sequence:

1. Plants (1:11–13)
2. Non-human animals (1:20–25)
3. Human beings (1:26–31)

It may be noted that this is the precise order into which these three groups are arranged by the division scheme of Porphyry’s Isagoge. I will explain why I believe that this precise division and order may be taken to be philosophically fundamental rather than arbitrary.

The three groups represent the sources of our knowledge of sensible things, which are Aristotle’s four causes. One of the causes is not represented here, which is material cause. Material cause may be said to be represented alike by living and by non-living things, since it means only that a thing, to be known, must be apparent to the senses. Since not all that appears to the senses is understood, this is not a sufficient source of knowledge, though a necessary one; so, it is understandably excluded.

Plants, as the most primitive living beings, represent efficient cause. Since the most intricate features of plants were not yet known, and indeed are still unapparent to most untrained eyes, plants have traditionally represented living beings at their most basic level, and so, the bare fact of having life, understood in a basic sense as animation or self-motion. This is nothing other than an object having its own efficient cause within itself, i.e., that which explains the position of its motions in space and time. Since living beings are capable of moving themselves instead of being moved by something else, they are more understandable to us than non-living beings.

The infrahuman animals, besides being alive like plants, also evidently have senses, and so, represent formal cause. Animals undertake specific motions which they order in accordance with appearances that they receive within themselves, and so, the formal cause of their movements is also within them rather than having to be looked for without them. Animals, understood traditionally as sensitive living beings, are more understandable to us than non-sensitive living beings because they have three of their four causes within their own aspect.

Finally, human beings, which are rational animals, represent final cause. Human beings are able to make explicit connections of their motions to their form, which is to say, to sensibly communicate whether and how their motions are in accordance with their concept of themselves and of the motion. This is nothing other than the final cause of their motions being, to that extent, included within their own appearance, without having to be sought after through further inquiry. Human beings are the most intelligible to our understanding, having all four causes of their motions potentially discoverable within the very manifold that they present to the senses.

Since living beings are created in logical order, from the least to the most intelligible, the creation story is a great allegorical illustration of the sources of our knowledge. Comparing each kind with the previous provides a complete picture of how we come to understand the sensible world. This is as much philosophical sophistication as could be hoped for from the figures of a myth.

6. The life of man

The story of creation is finished, and God has gone to rest. (2:1–3) Some events in the life of the first human beings are also illustrative of things that we know from philosophy.

First, we have the naming of all the animals (2:19–20), which is traditionally associated with science and learning in general. We may assume that, in giving names to all the animals, Adam was also figuring out their place in the system of the world. In case the logical ordering of the previous part had not been clear enough, this explicitly finishes the sequence from Spinoza’s Descartes: the man understands all things clearly and distinctly.

Second, we have the fact that none other than the woman, taken from his flesh and sharing his nature, was a companion suited to the man. (1:20) This shows that human beings engage in friendships in a deeper sense between themselves than they ever could with the infrahuman animals, which is an important teaching of philosophy. Since human beings are rational, they can teach each other and achieve unity of purpose, allowing them to cooperate in ways other animals cannot.

Third, the woman is simply named “Woman” at first. She is only named “Eve”, meaning that she is “the mother of all the living”, after she has sinned. This, together with the fact that the naming of the animals happened before she was even created, is illustrative of the fact that parenthood is opposed to rational inquiry, which is the highest end of human beings. While Adam and Eve must reproduce to fill the earth, (1:28) the story still gives indications of how reproduction is an inferior, though permissible, state of human life, as the Catholic Church acknowledges. (CCC 922)

Kant vocabulary equivalence project

I propose to take the vocabulary from the Critique of Pure Reason and apply a few transformations to it.

1. Whatever is thought by the pure understanding without contradiction, regardless of whether it is given a determinate object in any intuition, may in a certain sense be called “the object of understanding”, insofar as understanding may be spoken of as an act, of which we are the subject and the thought is the object.
2. Since it is “the object of understanding”, whatever can be thought without contradiction may likewise be called “knowledge”. To think a concept is to understand it and know it, and the words may be said interchangeably.
3. Since they are the object of understanding or knowledge, all thoughts that may be thought without contradiction may be said to be “forms”, and the set of all such thoughts to compose an “intelligible world”, in yet a third sense of this term from the two senses given by Kant. (B311–312)
4. The term “exist” is also given a new sense: for a form to “exist” is for it to belong to the set of forms, so that the forms have always existed, since the set of non-self-contradictory possible thoughts has always been the same set. To avoid confusion, the forms may be said to “exist as realities” or to “exist intelligibly” or simply “to be”, while the determinate objects of sensible intuitions may be said to “exist as appearances” or simply “to appear”.
5. Since there are no intellectual intuitions, and things-in-themselves are never thought about as determinate objects, we may ignore the unhelpful sense of the word “knowledge” in which they are said to not be known, and say instead that they are known in the sense given here, as forms; meaning by this, again, only that they are thought about, although indeterminately.

With these translations, I believe that all Platonic theses may be understood in a Kantian sense without doing violence to either philosopher.

Bourgeois vanguard

I define here a movement which I will call the bourgeois vanguard.

Bourgeois ideology generally believes: that the means of production should be privately owned; that the profit motive is fundamental to human cooperation; that the intrusions of government upon industry impoverish society; that violations of property, including foremost the coercion of human persons, are rarely, if ever, justified; that behavior which does not violate property (or coerce human persons) should usually, if not always, be tolerated.

The bourgeois vanguard believes, furthermore: that so-called intellectual property is not truly property, and is generally harmful; that reason is embodied primarily in verbal logical deduction, and only secondarily in empirical science and mathematics; that the methodology of government-funded research is always, a priori, highly suspect; that animal meat and hydrocarbon fuels are commendable constituents of modern life; that it is possible for bitcoin to become a major global money, and that it would be good if it did; that religions can generally be given a liberal interpretation, and that it is good when they are given one.

At the moment, the latter meet mostly in groups dedicated to one of their particular interests. But I notice that these groups have many members in common. The demographic has not been fully explored yet.