George Anastaplo, The American Moralist: On Law, Ethics, and Government, Ohio University Press, 1992. (AM)
Hadley Arkes, First Things: An Inquiry Into The First Principles Of Morals And Justice, Princeton University Press, 1986. (FT)
Leon Kass, Toward a More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs, The Free Press, 1985. (MNS)
Preface
The Problem: “”Scarce Truth Enough Alive””?1
It can sometimes seem as if many modern intellectuals have seen a ghost, and that they have been unnerved by the experience. What so haunts them is the fact that much, especially concerning what is good, fitting, or right, cannot be known with the precision and certainty that modern science, at least, demands. These intellectuals have as a result adopted a public, formal skepticism, a decisive influence of which has been to undermine the moral confidence of the larger community. Formal skepticism does this by aggressively calling into question the validity of—and thereby crippling the community’s capacity to give effect to—its moral judgments, judgments which it has long been thought simply have to be made and acted on if good human beings and decent communities are to be achieved and sustained.2
Such formal skepticism, however, may be an excessive response to the difficulty presented by moral matters. As George Anastaplo has noted, “”It is one thing to recognize that it is often difficult to know what is right or good; it is quite another to conclude from this long-familiar difficulty that it is always impossible to know what is right or good”” (Artist As Thinker, 277). After all, to distinguish between the just and the unjust has always required reflection, but so has distinguishing between the good and the pleasant. Moreover, as Aristotle reminds us, “”…nor is he who thinks four things are five equally wrong with him who thinks they are a thousand”” (Metaphysics, 1008b34–5).
Be this as it may, this skepticism maintains, at bottom, that “”there are only opinions (and quite changeable opinions at that) for which there is no adequate foundation in nature and reason”” (Anastaplo, “”Intellectuals and Morality,”” Oklahoma City Law Review, Spring 1995, 179). Now, to say that “”there are only opinions”” is to say, finally, that all reasons are equal or, strangely, that “”everything is true.””3 Or, as Hadley Arkes puts it, “”To say that ‘all reasons are created equal,’ is to say, in morals, no reason is better than any other—which is to say simply that there is not truth in matters of morals”” (FT, 424). So, from intellectual skepticism derives a moral relativism, according to which all conclusions in the moral realm simply “”become ‘relative’ to the understanding of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ that are dominant in any culture”” (FT, 39). As a result, a community’s confidence in the possibility of any genuinely valid judgments concerning the good is profoundly undermined.4
As if this were not enough, our learning about various cultures is said to demonstrate the absence of a universal, hence natural, moral standard. Although Descartes used to know that when two people disagree about one and the same thing that at least one of them must be wrong, today we “”know”” that since all reasons are equal, and that therefore everything is true, then neither person is wrong. And as is also nowadays well “”known,”” the absence of agreement on a universal standard means that there is no standard, that there is no truth. Anastaplo offers the following analysis of how the intellectuals who have contributed so much to unraveling the mysteries of the universe have also come to undermine the old-fashioned respect for morality:
For one thing, their investigations (as anthropologists, archaeologists, and sociologists) have made us all familiar with a variety of ethical systems…. The accidental, if not even arbitrary, origins of systems of morality tend to be emphasized. All this, and much more, can raise questions about the natural basis of morality….
However, [these social scientists] do not seem to appreciate, or even to look at, the information they have accumulated from other places and ages. That is, they do not properly recognize and study moral things as they naturally manifest themselves in civilized communities….
Consider, for example, the implications of the remarkable similarity in ethical rules and standards that can be observed around the world and across millennia… This similarity, which can develop without any substantial contact between races or peoples in their formative stages, suggests that nature may be a factor here, just as it is for the similarity (at least enough to permit translations) found in the quite varied languages that human beings are naturally equipped for and inclined toward. (“”Intellectuals and Morality,”” Oklahoma City University Law Review, 1995; 181-84).5
Thus, according to Anastaplo, we live in an age of “”aggressive relativism”” (AM,24). According to this relativism,
[M]an is seen as the maker of all that he does and thinks, rather than as the discoverer…. Truths are not believed to have an existence independent of man; they are not grounded in nature, there for all to search out and to know. Rather, they are to be made and chosen, or chosen and made…. (AM,94-5)
Man is thus the maker of the truth, and if there are two men, then presumably of two (possibly incompatible) “”truths.”” For the thoroughgoing relativist, it is as if a fixed, given action can be just, and at the same time and in the same respect, not-just, as if the same figure can be both a circle and not-a-circle at the same time.6 For the relativist, the “”truth”” of such actions or of such figures does not have an existence independent of man; rather, man is the maker of truth, and each man at that.7 This modern relativism can seem not only dubious—and even grounded in falsity—but also positively destructive of reasoning, and especially of moral reasoning, given that it is not men’s reasoning about triangles that is easily perverted, but their reasoning about what is just (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1140b13-17).8
With the ascendancy of this philosophic skepticism and aggressive moral relativism, the concept of natural right has suffered an unwarranted demise. “”Natural right”” is the conception of nature and of the moral order which holds that certain actions may be correctly understood, explained, and defended as intrinsically right, right by their very nature, naturally right. Compared to the intellectually lazy, self-contradictory, and comfortably permissive relativism which obtains today, the natural right proposition signals an approach to moral questions which is more analytically rigorous, more intellectually respectable and compelling, more rationally and prudentially grounded, both more true and more useful.
Aristotle long ago cautioned that one should demand from any investigation only as much certainty as the subject matter allows of (Nicomachean Ethics, 1094b11-12). Many modern intellectuals, not heeding that caution, seem to insist that we may not conclude in the moral sphere unless there is something like mathematical certainty. But this certainty, not surprisingly, simply cannot be had. One need only consider how little absolute certainty we can hope for even in, as we say, having a punishment fit the crime. Reason and prudence should thus temper any demand for scientific certainty regarding the right and the just.
Not captive to such factitious demand for impossible mathematical certainty, students of “”natural right”” do try nevertheless to reason to the morally right for man, to consider how man ought to live so as to be just, to be good of his kind. Natural right thought, what Anastaplo calls the “”vital teaching that there are indeed moral and political standards rooted in nature and discernible by reason”” (AM, xxiii), thus matches moral complexity with complex but common-sense moral analysis.
This natural right approach to the examination of moral questions considers that a position should be embarrassed if it embraces obviously dubious and obviously unsupportable presuppositions, outrageous violations of common sense, and internal contradictions. Even so, natural right has been largely displaced by just such moral opinion. It can sometimes seem as if there is “”scarce truth enough alive.””
Introduction to the Reviews
It is by now, in modernity, an old joke, an old story:
Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. This is your pilot speaking. We are flying at an altitude of 35,000 feet and at a speed of 700 miles an hour. I have two pieces of news to report, one good and one bad. The bad news is that we are lost. The good news is that we are making very good time.
—Anonymous (MNS, 43)
The most worrisome diagnoses of our age use words like “”skepticism,”” “”nihilism,”” and “”abyss.”” As if to stand against such modern dis-integrating forces, a few especially thoughtful people have turned their minds to the question of how we have gone wrong, and otherwise consider if there may be some help for our lamentable situation by recourse to the recovery and reinvigoration of the principles of natural right. Three particularly substantial efforts in this vein have been made in the last two decades: those of George Anastaplo, Hadley Arkes, and Leon Kass. Because these efforts deserve the widest possible attention, I set forward these critical reviews.
Each author—rigorous, lucid, and penetrating—is remarkable in his own right; when the three are read in combination, they provide a comprehensive account of a well-grounded alternative to modern skepticism, nihilism, and the abyss. Each of our three authors works with integrity, trying to find the truth about the important question at hand: how modern moral philosophy has in the first place gotten to its dead-end (Anastaplo); the principles of straight thinking, and straight moral thinking (Arkes); and how we are to draw sound and defensible moral lines in the application, in this instance, of modern baby-making technology (Kass). It is not surprising, there being unity in truth, that the three efforts ultimately support and complement one another. Each author is independently working out part of the very large question concerning “”natural right,”” “”the vital teaching that there are indeed moral and political standards rooted in nature and discernible by reason”” (AM,xxiii). Together, they show the logic and integrity of natural right, and the grounds upon which it merits restoration from its present fallen estate. Their arguments serve as models demonstrating the legitimacy of natural right; each considers how, as the pilot announced, we are lost, but also how we might once again get our bearings and find our way.
In Part I, we review George Anastaplo’s The American Moralist, which(among other things) traces the lineage, the formal intellectual steps in the specifically modern emergence of an impossible, and hence failed and demoralizing, insistence on philosophic certainty. He shows the origins of such an insistence on certainty, and how it has led, instead, to a formal skepticism, and eventually to an aggressive relativism, in modern moral philosophy. As he proceeds with this “”genealogy,”” Anastaplo points out certain dubious critical presuppositions, internal contradictions, and breakdowns in logic within this strain of modern moral philosophy, thereby indicating the way out of the modern moral impasse.
After Anastaplo thus “”saves”” natural right by showing that modern skepticism and nihilism are far from necessary, inescapable intellectual conclusions, and even how they are deeply compromised, I myself—taking what I hope will be deemed a forgivable liberty in this “”critical”” book review—attempt to show in Part II some of the “”elementary”” ground of natural right. This is the next, if much more modest, act of restoration. I try to illustrate the elementary vocabulary of “”natural right,”” what it means to say, in the first instance, that something is by nature. I try to show concretely how it makes sense to say that a human action is, or is not, right or good “”by nature.””
After my plain effort to illustrate the elementary vocabulary of natural right, Hadley Arkes’s First Things provides in Part III the fancier, more refined account of natural right principles. His incisive examples and analysis reveal the internal contradictions of moral relativism, contradictions which expose and embarrass it as an indefensible and untenable way of thinking. Arkes’ analysis also specifically confirms the integrity, coherence, and validity of natural right considerations in the moral order.
Part IV then shows the sustained natural right reasoning of Leon Kass, in his Toward a More Natural Science, on a particular moral question: How far may we rightly proceed with baby-making technologies and capacities? Kass illustrates the wrong-headedness of an untethered (i.e., relativistic) science and medicine, one not grounded in, nor disciplined by, any consideration of the principles of natural right, of what is right “”by nature.”” Kass shows how to draw moral lines, based on the principles of natural right. In answer to the modern doctrine that there is “”scarce truth enough alive,”” our three authors affirm, with Socrates, that “”What is true is never refuted”” (Plato, Gorgias 473b).
Part I
The American Moralist: Escaping the Labyrinth
For those who wish to get clear of difficulties it is advantageous to discuss the difficulties well; for the subsequent free play of thought implies the solution of the previous difficulties, and it is not possible to untie a knot of which one does not know. (Aristotle, Metaphysics 995a26-30)
George Anastaplo does the work of a Theseus in Part I as he shows the “”steps”” we have taken to get into our modern-day intellectual and moral labyrinth, the result of a skepticism which seems, under Anastaplo’s light, neither true nor useful. Anastaplo shows us the steps in, so as to indicate the way out again.
If we could discern what principles and presuppositions inhere in this skepticism—that is, how we got into the intellectual and moral labyrinth—we could examine them, amend any faulty ones, and thus retracing our steps, find the way out. Although many have wandered unawares into this maze, it is only one who has paid proper attention to the way in, unwinding the string from the “”clew”” as he goes, who can then find the way out again. Anastaplo, knowing the ground better than most, has worked out the passageways of the labyrinth. Thus, George Anastaplo is to be our guide.9
Occam
Anastaplo approaches fourteenth-century (William) Occam’s Razor (a principle) on this occasion through twentieth-century Alfred North Whitehead’s The Aims of Education. Together Occam and Whitehead may be said to form “”bookends”” of modern philosophic thought: Occam provides the starting point, so to speak, while Whitehead shows the radicalized issue of such a starting point when not tempered by prudence.
[Whitehead] reminds us in an ‘anatomy of some scientific ideas’ that Occam’s Razor is critical for scientific progress. William Occam announced, Entia non multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. That is to say, assumptions should be kept to a minimum in any attempt to explain any phenomena. Or, as Whitehead develops Occam’s rule, ‘[E]very use of hypothetical entities diminishes the claim of scientific reasoning to be the necessary outcome of a harmony between thought and sense-presentation.’ Thus, Whitehead concludes, ‘As hypothesis increases, necessity diminishes.’ (AM,84)
Anastaplo goes on to observe,
The implications of Occam’s rule have long been appreciated; Occam can be considered to have enunciated in his Fourteenth-Century formulation what had been known since antiquity. But what may be characteristic of modern thought is the extent to which what is hypothesized is reduced in the interest of enlarging necessity—that is, in the interest of expanding the realm of certainty…. But first, consider the form the tendency takes in Whitehead, who reports (Aims of Education 133), ‘The material universe is largely a concept of the imagination which rests on a slender basis of direct sense presentation.’ He adds, ‘But none the less it [presumably, the material universe] is a fact; for it is a fact that actually we imagine it. Thus it is actual in our consciousness just as sense-presentation is actual there.’ (AM,84)
Anastaplo finds one sentence in particular critical to his analysis: “”The material universe is largely a concept of the imagination which rests on a slender basis of direct sense-presentation.”” Whitehead seems to be positing this “”slender basis”” as a disappointing fact of life, inasmuch as our “”knowing”” is, as a result, largely “”hypothetical.”” Such a way of “”knowing”” the material universe is very unsatisfactory; we are forced to “”imagine,”” based on the very little sense-presentation we actually have to go on, and this “”imagining”” seriously diminishes any claim of the reasoning to be “”scientific”” or valid. Whitehead thus describes a very unsatisfactory and unpromising situation with respect to man’s ability to keep assumptions to a minimum, to engage in “”scientific reasoning,”” to make “”scientific progress,”” to know. The insistence that old-fashioned “”knowing”” be replaced by knowing now based exclusively on “”scientific reasoning”” illustrates what modern philosophy has done with Occam; this will turn out to be the first major step toward a deep intellectual skepticism, and, not coincidentally, also the first step into an intellectual and moral labyrinth.
Consider, however, Anastaplo’s response to Whitehead’s analysis—two illustrations which point toward a less skeptical approach.
Take what happens within us: the slightest scrapings of bodily tissue or minute traces of blood can be used as the basis for extensive descriptions (‘concept[s] of the imagination’?) about the body as a whole, about its vital characteristics, about its present condition, and about its likely future. Diagnoses, upon which life-and-death decisions rest, routinely proceed from ‘a slender basis of direct sense-presentation.’ (AM,85)10
Anastaplo, in his second illustration, moves from the microscopic to the “”telescopic,”” and from the very small to the very large:
Or take what happens as we look into the heavens: the slightest glimmer of light (or, in recent years, the minutest particles of dust or the faintest radiation or sound) can be used as the basis for extensive speculations about vast galaxies—about what they have been doing for immense ages past, about their present condition, and about the cataclysmic changes that they will undergo in the ages ahead. (AM,85)
Anastaplo then concludes,
It has long been recognized not only that there is but a slender basis of direct sense-presentation upon which our opinions about the observable world rest and that assumptions or hypotheses should be minimized if there is to be rigorous investigation, but also that a very little can lead to everything. (AM,85)
We can see in these observations, first by Whitehead and then by Anastaplo, that people may come to more skeptical or to more promising conclusions regarding the same “”slender basis of direct sense-presentation.”” Anastaplo, pursuing this epistemological point a bit further, shows that the conclusion need not be toward a deep skepticism:
But the understanding in antiquity of such propositions [the material universe as a ‘concept of the imagination…’] differs significantly from the modern opinion with respect to these matters, especially in that more seems to have been made by the ancients of the natural apprehension of things as the basis of inquiry and understanding. The soul seems to have been conceived of (or, better still, observed?) not as a blank page upon which experience manifests itself but rather as something which by its very nature apprehends, or at least is equipped if not even disposed to apprehend, many enduring things, especially those things known as ideas. (AM,86)11
Thus, the modern, more “”abstract”” way is to be contrasted with an older way, a more common-sense way, which involves a more “”natural apprehension”” of things.12 The common-sense way has a greater appreciation of prudence, which, Anastaplo observes, is keyed to a recognition of what it is that nature ordains for both men and communities.
The prudent man has ends in view by which immediate actions are to be judged and in light of which choices are to be made. Critical here are the ends given by nature, not the choices of means that men make, nor the fact that men are choosing and making. This is to recognize prudence as ‘teleological’—that is, as guided by a standard of excellence, however dimly perceived. (AM,97)
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Nature is thus not simply opaque and unintelligible, and the study of nature, which philosophy undertakes, is not simply futile. Rather, as Anastaplo puts it, important ends are provided by nature: man’s soul is equipped, even disposed by nature, to apprehend “”many enduring things””; prudence, which discovers the best means to the good ends provided by nature, is available to man; and the apprehension of even a little can lead to the apprehension of a great deal. That is, the evidence regarding our ability to know does not lead ineluctably to darkness, futility, and to skepticism. Even so, all-too-many contemporary intellectuals adopt (even “”choose””?) the skeptical view, which in turn leads to a relativism which despairs of (or rejects?) any discernible moral order in nature. Some, even, are then led ultimately to an “”abyss.”” The skeptical view is the view of the day, the reigning orthodoxy: How it got to be the reigning orthodoxy, the “”default”” view of Western culture, we are yet further to explore.
In his Metaphysics, Aristotle observes that “”[T]he most certain principle of all is that regarding which it is impossible to be mistaken; for such a principle must be both the best known…and non-hypothetical“” (emphasis added) (1005b12-14). Aristotle’s appreciation of the “”non-hypothetical”” sounds a lot like the virtue of avoiding the “”assumptions”” which Occam urged should be kept to the minimum, and sounds also like avoiding the “”hypothetical entities”” which, Whitehead warns, diminish the claims to scientific reasoning. Although Aristotle made the point long ago about how difficult it is to achieve “”certainty,”” even as one must strive toward the “”non-hypothetical,”” because of his respect for common sense and prudence (as distinct from the modern tendency toward abstraction), Aristotle’s philosophic endeavor did not lead to an impasse, a dead end, or to “”absurdity”” or “”abyss.”” Unlike those caught up by the impulse of “”Whitehead’s Razor,”” Aristotle went on to discern as a kind of self-corrective principle that “”The minute accuracy of mathematics is not to be demanded in all cases, but only in the case of things which have no matter”” (Metaphysics 995a15-16).13 And, finally, “”[I]t is impossible that there should be demonstration of absolutely everything (there would be an infinite regress, so that there would still be no demonstration)”” (Metaphysics 1006a5-10). Anastaplo shows that the Occam to Whitehead trajectory is, first of all, not necessary, and then not convincing. To the degree that Whitehead and modernity absolutize Occam, the title of this section might well be “”Occam’s Razor, Mistook.”” This initial step into the labyrinth, then, is not intellectually binding on us.
On this note, we turn our attention to Descartes, who, embracing Occam and Whitehead’s Razor while rejecting Aristotelian prudence and common sense, precisely sought a “”demonstration of absolutely everything.””
Descartes
[Dizzy Dean] won one hundred twenty games in his first five seasons as a regular pitcher with the St. Louis Cardinals and was only twenty-six when he broke a toe in the All-Star game in 1937. He tried to come back too soon, and, favoring his injured toe, ruined his arm. The career of Dizzy Dean reminds us of the distortion that can take place, and the considerable damage that can be done…. (Anastaplo, The Constitution of 1787: A Commentary, xvii)
With Descartes’ Discourse on Method, there is a conscious, perhaps a determined shunning of Aristotle’s counsel that we not seek a demonstration of absolutely everything, such that we seem now to have come to the point that there is for us, on the important moral questions, only “”infinite regress, and still no demonstration.”” Occam has enunciated the principle that certainty requires that assumptions be kept to a minimum. We have alluded to the culmination of fourteenth-century Occam in twentieth-century Whitehead’s (radicalized) desire to keep “”hypotheticals”” to a minimum in favor of “”scientific reasoning.”” Now, let us examine how we got from Occam to Whitehead. Enter seventeenth-century Descartes. Descartes is one of the founders of the modern scientific enterprise who, in his attempt to keep such hypotheticals to a minimum, develops an investigational method which sets what may be an impossible example for future philosophic endeavors, and re-orients philosophy in such a way that the self becomes the prism through which formal philosophical inquiry will thereafter proceed. Or, as Anastaplo puts it, the self-centeredness of the inquirer is now to serve as somehow the basis of certainty:
The slender basis in direct sense-presentation of much of modern thought consists ultmately not of observations of the kind I have touched upon, such as pieces of tissue or traces of light, but consists rather of the determined if not obsessive observation of one’s self, of one’s own consciousness. That is, the entrance to reality is quite narrow, consisting of the psyche’s self-awareness. It is on this deliberate self-awareness that certainty depends…. (AM,86)
Thus self-consciousness is the starting place for Descartes, whereas, Anastaplo notes, for someone like Cicero the starting place seems to have been Rome, an enduring community with traditions, laws, and forms. Rome was a city, a public thing, something outside of and larger than Cicero, larger than, different from, and more enduring than any particular self. Anastaplo considers Cicero’s approach, which starts from the “”outside”” so to speak, the more natural approach.14
Descartes’s point of departure, on the other hand, is the self; the sense one has of one’s consciousness, the assurance one has that however uncertain one’s sense perceptions may be, at least one’s awareness of one’s own existence is decisively reliable. That bare minimum provides not only something upon which to build, but also a standard of what it means that something is known. (AM,87)
Anastaplo refers to this decisive awareness of one’s self, this insistent and self-conscious awareness of one’s own existence as Descartes’s, or the moderns’ “”rationalistic approach”” (AM,89). This self-centered, self-conscious, “”rationalistic”” approach, however, may be challenged on its own terms, as was Whitehead’s “”slender basis”” proposition. Anastaplo observes, for example, that “”One might wonder whether this decisive awareness of one’s self, of one’s own existence, does not itself depend on an extensive and deep shaping of the soul by some community”” (AM,87).
One could imagine the influence of Christianity, say, on Descartes’s having come to emphasize the self. Consider Christianity’s teaching that every individual person is made in the image of God, and that the saving of souls takes place one at a time, not by communities; that each is baptized, and each receives the last sacraments, individually; that we all go to our deaths, eventually, but that we go one by one; that each is thus on his own with respect to his ultimate fate; that these matters are settled “”individually.””15 That is, could Christianity’s teaching, emphasizing as it does the individual self, have been an influence on Descartes’s determination that the self-conscious awareness of existence should be the decisive test, the decisive base upon which all certainties could reliably be grounded? If this were to be so, one could wonder if Descartes, in his attempt to get to the “”bottom”” of things in his own psyche, actually got far enough “”down,”” whether he had yet gotten underneath all the layers, whether he had reached even the basis of certainty he thought he had. Indeed, can one get “”underneath”” all the layers? Would it be a constructive way to proceed, if one could? Or, might such an undertaking amount to a kind of “”infinite regress,”” and still produce no demonstration?
Now to speak of “”layers”” might suggest that the layers are merely conventional overlays and that there is a “”tabula rasa”” underneath. Is there? Or might one find “”underneath”” a soul with conventional overlays, to be sure, but also, as Anastaplo has suggested, a soul equipped, even disposed by its very nature, to apprehend many enduring things, especially those things called ideas? Would the attempt to strip away the conventional overlays, as well as all the things which may have been naturally apprehended, be to “”undo”” nature, and thereby actually to be self-defeating?16
One can even argue that Descartes’s wide-ranging doubt and his consequent recourse to a consciousness of self as the basis of certainty themselves presuppose ideas and methods that rest upon assumptions and even certitudes somehow or other generally available to man, as if by intuition. (emphasis added) (AM, 87)
Do we not become aware of, certain of, our individuality, if only dimly so, pretty early on, and by means of a kind of intuition? Could such consciousness or intuition be aided by, or presuppose, certain ideas and methods? Such “”ideas”” that could bring one to an awareness of his distinct self could include the idea of one and the idea of many (e.g., “”I am one, but there seem to be many who are not I.””). Or, the early intuited idea of self and the idea of other (e.g., “”When another hurts his finger, I do not seem to feel the pain that he does.””).
One might also become aware of his distinct self by employing certain “”methods,”” the capacity for which might also simply inhere in the soul by its nature, such as the method involved in distinguishing: (e.g., “”I am neither ‘X’ nor ‘Y,’ but some third thing, someone ‘other.'””); or such method as measuring: (e.g., “”‘X’ is smaller than I, and ‘Y’ is larger; I [as individuated] am of a size between.””). The question which Anastaplo raises for Descartes is, Could not such (naturally apprehended) “”ideas”” and “”methods”” lead people, routinely, to apprehend their particular selves, lead them to intuit, somehow, the individuality of their particular existences? If so, then Descartes’s radical, self consciously painstaking descent into the self, if it did touch bottom, may have touched only a bottom which is routinely available to ordinary men, even if they are only dimly aware of it.
This is all to say that Descartes, adopting in an extreme form Occam’s principle—and putatively relying not at all on anything “”assumed””—in his effort to find solid ground upon which to base a single certitude, would with his “”method”” strip away all the layers of convention which presumably block the way to the self, and do this in a deliberately rationalistic way so as to avoid being influenced by, tripped up by, encrustations on the self. However, as Anastaplo sees it, Descartes himself could well have been inescapably influenced by certain naturally-intuited “”ideas”” and “”methods,”” as well as by something as pervasive, and obvious, as Christianity’s view of man. That is, the “”bottom”” may not be where Descartes thought it was, and his “”rationalistic”” method may not be as untainted, as free of assumptions—presupposed ideas and methods—as he had imagined. Therefore, as Whitehead’s radicalization of Occam could be challenged on its own grounds, so also may the Cartesian approach be challenged on its own grounds. In these ways, the very foundations of modern philosophy, and the direction which it has subsequently taken, may be called into question. It is in this way that George Anastaplo serves as a Theseus: he can lead our exploration of the labyrinth (i.e., provide critical insight into the thought of, say, Occam, Descartes, and Whitehead) and lead us out again (i.e., show how their conclusions can be decisively challenged on their own terms). It is an indispensable service, if we are to escape the unwarranted skepticism of our day, skepticism to which the untempered, purblind insistence on scientific certainty in human affairs, and the unnaturally “”rationalistic”” way of seeking certainty, ultimately leads.
What does modern philosophic thought culminate in? As Anastaplo sees it, the modernity of which thinkers such as Descartes were the progenitors means, among other things, the aforementioned skepticism and relativism; next, and as a result, a dubious emphasis on privacy (deference to the private self whereby all opinions, whether theoretical or practical, are keyed to one’s own judgment, the self thereby becoming the ground for all that one chooses or comes to believe); then hedonism (when one is left free to choose for himself, the dominant tendency is to try to make oneself comfortable); next, and as a consequence, the emergence of small people (all are considered equal by the modernist, and some must even be cut down to a generally attainable size); and finally the emergence of tyranny (small people are more apt to permit, and even to encourage, tyrants, if only out of desperation as relativism and hedonism take their toll of public-spiritedness and sound government) (AM,93-94).17
Nietzsche
A new “”method”” has been prepared by the maxims of Occam and Descartes according to which “”assumptions”” are to be treated, on principle, as unreliable, even as the entrance to reality becomes quite narrow, consisting of the self-consciousness of the individual psyche, which alone can set the standard of what it means to know. The next lineal descendant in this rough history of the troubling modern insistence on philosophic and moral certainty is Nietzsche. For the epigraph to his essay on Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, Anastaplo has a speech of Mephistopheles from Goethe’s Faust. The passage seems fitting, even ominous, given what follows in Anastaplo’s assessment of Nietzsche’s thought:
To me [Mephistopheles] this pretty tale no news can tell;
Some hundred thousand years I’ve known it well.
. . .
Past and pure nothingness are one at last!
Whatboots this evermore creating, when
Things all sweep into nothingness again?
“”There! Now ’tis past!”” From this what can we glean?
‘Tis all the same as though it ne’er had been;
Yet round and round it goes, as though it were.
I, for my part, Eternal Void prefer. (AM,125)
It must seem to Anastaplo that the fatigue, tedium, and despair of Mephistopheles somehow anticipates the modern vision, or is a rough approximation of the vision of Friedrich Nietzsche. Anastaplo begins,
Philosophers so far have spoken a certain way about truth and its pursuit. Nietzsche, we learn, will speak otherwise…. Among the things he ventures is a transformation of what previously was assumed to be good and what was assumed to be evil, with special affection entertained by him for the ‘wicked.’ (AM,125-6)
“”To be wicked”” in this Nietzschean sense “”is to assert oneself; to be good is to be bound by rules, to be essentially like others who are good…. To act or at least to think wickedly is to be an individual…”” (AM,134). For Nietzsche, “”[T]he ‘truth’ is an arbitrary projection and best kept within quotation marks. He can speak of ‘my truths,’ as in Section 231 [of Beyond Good and Evil], suggesting that what is designated as the truth varies from person to person”” (AM,126).18
Then, as if to explain himself, Nietzsche asserts, in what Anastaplo observes to be the central part of Beyond Good and Evil, the “”Natural History of Morals,”” that,
Indeed, if one would explain how the abstrusest metaphysical claims of a philosopher really came about, it is always well (and wise) to ask first: at what morality does all this (does he) aim? Accordingly, I do not believe that a ‘drive to knowledge’ is the father of philosophy; but rather that another drive has, here as elsewhere, employed understanding (and misunderstanding) as a mere instrument. (AM,127)
Anastaplo has earlier observed that for the relativist truths are not there in nature to be discovered, but rather they are to be “”made and chosen or chosen and made.”” This double formulation marks a nice distinction, and here we see that in Nietzsche’s view they are “”chosen and made.”” According to Nietzsche, the philosopher chooses some end, and then “”makes”” a morality to support that end. As Anastaplo explains, for Nietzsche, “”Moralities are to be seen in terms of motivation or what the moralist really wants…in terms of what he is really driving at, no matter what he says”” (AM,127).
Anastaplo then adds,
It has long been evident (consider, for example, the ‘realism’ of Plato’s Thrasymachus) that the role of reason in human affairs is limited, that most men implicitly justify what they want on the basis of considerations they dare not make explicit. But Nietzsche argues, in effect, that the role of reason is far more limited than has ever been suspected. He denies that it has more than a subordinate role even among the philosophers regarded, or at least who regard themselves, as metaphysical and dispassionate. (AM,127)19
Another emphasis upon willing in Nietzsche may be seen in the way moral judgments are talked about. Anastaplo observes,
Much is made of values and valuations—in some twenty sections [of Beyond Good and Evil]…. Does not the term values suggest making and hence willing more than it does finding or discovering?…To value, at least in the sense Nietzsche seems to use, is to allocate praise and blame, approval and disapproval, according to some standard beyond good and evil. One does not submit to something higher, to a standard of perfection; rather, one chooses (that is, constructs) one’s own standards. (AM,128-9)
Nietzsche puts it candidly: “”In the end one loves one’s desire and not what is desired”” (AM,132). Or, as Anastaplo puts it, for Nietzsche it seems to be the “”going beyond”” that matters, “”not what one is going to”” (AM,130). It also seems that it is in this “”going beyond”” that “”greatness”” lies, a “”greatness”” which, Anastaplo argues, “”takes the place of the just, as conventionally understood”” (AM,131). It is in this way that the standard of “”the just”” disappears. This disappearance of “”the just”” will come as no surprise once one notices, as Anastaplo points out, that “”[M]uch of his argument was anticipated in Nietzsche’s Preface by his repudiation of Plato’s ‘pure spirit and the good as such'”” (AM,132). Such “”going beyond,”” such repudiation (of the old, well-established, and comfortable ways?) can be undertaken only by one who yearns for nobility: “”He shall be the greatest who can be loneliest, the most concealed, the most deviant, the human being beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues, he that is overrich in will”” [Section 212] (AM,131).
We must now try to see from Nietzsche’s thought how in lineage he “”follows”” Occam and Descartes. There was in the first instance the impulse to know, with assumptions kept to a minimum, many things with certainty; there was then the resolution of that difficulty by locating the ground of certainty within the self, that which is most knowable. The problem of doubt is settled by recourse to authority as self-centered, by recourse to “”truth”” relative to oneself, that is, by recourse to a form of relativism. Eventually, this small-time individual-based relativism is transformed, is accorded dignity by Nietzsche as he asserts a full-blown, unapologetic, willful, and even “”great”” relativism whereby “”truth”” and “”good,”” seen now as abased impostors, are dismissed as any kind of standard, and a new Truth, the real Truth, one long concealed in the past, the truth of the incontrovertible sovereignty of the will, holding always and everywhere, ascends.
One almost swoons. How can one counter such potent, confident, and aggressive relativism, such will? Well, Anastaplo does this with three swift parries, and does it on Nietzsche’s own terms. The first parry, a set of questions to which all forms of relativism are vulnerable; the second, a terse observation; the third, a playful but pointed literary image of an emphasis on the will taken from Tristram Shandy, accompanied by Anastaplo’s concise analysis of the pertinent scene. First, he asks,
What is beyond good and evil? Is there something to be aimed at beyond?…But, then, why is not that something itself a good?…. Does it come down to personal self-assertion, to an insistence upon differentness?…. Is it the going beyond that matters, not what one is going to? That is, is it the process that is decisive here, or does the direction one moves matter? How does one know that one is going ‘beyond’ rather than falling ‘back’? (emphasis added in this last sentence) (AM,130)
Nietzsche denies “”truth,”” but goes on to assert as truth that he is going “”beyond”” good and evil; the relativist, too, denies truth, even as he asserts, curiously, the correctness, validity, or truth of his own denial. As Socrates long ago wondered (in the Republic), What is one to make of the Megarian who comes up and announces that “”All Megarians are liars””?
Second, there is Anastaplo’s terse observation:
Again and again one gets the impression that Nietzsche strives for effect, that his primary concern may not be with the truth, but rather with changes in the souls of his readers without which the truth does tend to be trivialized…. Much of Nietzsche’s effect depends on ‘shock value,’ on his spectacular departures from what has been said and long accepted by his predecessors. But in a peculiar sense, this too is to be dependent on others, upon what they have happened to say. (AM,134)
And finally, third, Anastaplo refers to Tristram Shandy’s account of the choices before a traveler:
It is a great inconvenience to a man in a haste, that there are three distinct roads between Calais and Paris, in behalf of which there is so much to be said by the several deputies from the towns which lie along them, that half a day is easily lost in settling which one you’ll take.
First, the road by Lisle and Arras, which is the most [round]about—but most interesting, and instructing.
The second that by Amiens, which you may go, if you would see Chantilly—
And that by Beauvais, which you may go, if you will. For this reason a great many chuse to go by Beauvais. (AM,130)
Concerning this playful passage, Anastaplo adds only this:
Only if one goes by Beauvais…may one assert oneself. Is this what Nietzsche’s will to power, his ‘wickedness’ [not to be bound by rules like others who are good] almost comes down to? If Tristram Shandy is to be believed, ‘a great many’ (a herd?) have chosen as Nietzsche advocates. (AM,130)
Is this to be the “”loneliest,”” the “”most deviant,”” the “”greatest””?
In this way, then, Anastaplo deals with Nietzsche squarely, and on his own terms. Nietzsche’s “”beyond”” good and evil implies the very good whose existence he denies. Is Nietzsche’s argument thereby involved in self-contradiction? Moreover, how does one know he is going “”beyond”” and not “”back””? Is there not some standard implied here, some standard of the good, the very good whose existence Nietzsche repudiates?20 Next, Nietzsche’s focus on his “”spectacular departures”” from his predecessors renders him, in some way he may not have fully appreciated, instead of radically free from the past, fundamentally dependent on it. And, finally, in a related point, what Nietzsche has imagined as the road less-travelled, travelled only by the “”greatest”” and, hence, the “”loneliest”” of the philosophers, is, it seems, even in Tristram Shandy’s day—not to mention our own day—travelled by most, a “”great many,”” even a “”herd.”” Do not these internal contradictions pose a challenge to the integrity, the coherence, the persuasiveness of Nietzsche’s thought?21 Given these weaknesses, one could conclude that Nietzsche’s way—one not simply persuasive—hardly need be considered the necessary way for modern philosophy. Indeed, the path laid out by the thought “”progressing”” from Occam to Descartes, and now to Nietzsche, may even be quite dubious.
What is the alternative? Anastaplo points to the alternative when he concludes his essay on Nietzsche with a reminder, “”drawn from Leo Strauss, of the old saying that wisdom cannot be separated from moderation, however venturesome and hence attractive a thinker may be””(AM,134). Such moderation might well apply to the Cartesian “”project,”” the attempt, somehow artificial in its conception, to start with a clean slate by getting to the “”bottom”” of Being, and to the Nietzschean “”project,”” also an attempt to start with a clean (moral) slate, by casting aside all that previous philosophy had ever known about good and evil, in an attempt to get “”beyond”” it, somehow. This modern “”project”” is thus distinct from its alternative, what Anastaplo refers to as, simply, the ancient “”way.”” There was no “”will”” on the part of Aristotle to repudiate all that came before him, even as his reason led him both to profit from and, perhaps, to differ from his predecessor and teacher, Plato, at least with respect to emphasis. The ancient “”way,”” according to Anastaplo the most eligible alternative to the modern intellectual project, also made greater allowance for a more “”natural”” way of apprehending, which can be seen repeatedly in the classic texts: “”He who thinks four things are five is not equally wrong with him who thinks they are a thousand.”” Or, “”It is not because we think truly that you are pale, that you are pale, but because you are pale we who say this have the truth”” (Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1008b34-35 and 1051b8-9). This natural way of apprehending is to be contrasted with the somewhat tortured “”rationalistic”” formulae of the modern approach. Finally, the ancient “”way”” did not strive so to deny or repudiate natural right; indeed, it examined that way of approaching moral questions and found it to be the coherent approach, one characterized by rigor and integrity, and infused with respect for prudence and common sense, and consistent with human experience of the enduring moral questions.
Freud
Just as in syllogistic arguments, granted one absurdity, others must follow, so in moral matters, given one absurdity, others must follow too. (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, IaIIae, Q.19, Art.6)
It has been argued that Nietzsche changed the emphasis from how one knows to how one wills. “”If one emphasizes the will,”” Anastaplo continues, “”the study of how the psyche moves and especially how it wills becomes critical”” (AM,132). With this observation, Anastaplo now shifts his attention to “”Some Questions About The Freudian Persuasion,”” wherein he proposes to sketch “”an Aristotelian assessment of what Freudian psychiatry offers us,”” and thereby to indicate “”what the ancients knew about the proper way of looking at and shaping the human soul”” (AM,135).
First, there is my illustration of what the ancients knew. The truly temperate man, as described in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, simply does not have illicit desires in any serious or significant way. That is, men may be so trained and instructed that they do not have any improper desires that distort in a sustained way their thought or their actions. (I am not talking about fleeting apprehensions of passing beauties, which tend to be much more theoretical or inquisitive than practical or acquisitive in their implications and effects.) Such temperance, it should be added, does not seem to be regarded by Aristotle as rare. (AM,136)
This is to say that the virtue of temperance, first of all, ascertains and acknowledges certain desires of man as licit and others as illicit (e.g., the ordinary desire for food by a human being, given his nature, is licit; that same human being’s desire for a throat as long as a crane’s so as to be able to take much greater pleasure in that food—that is, more pleasure than eating by its nature provides—would be illicit [Nicomachean Ethics 1118a33]). Aristotle’s temperance is thus grounded in nature, is a virtue or excellence according to or by its nature; thus, if one looks to nature, one can find there a guide as to how human beings ought to conduct themselves.22 The ancient virtue of temperance is thus not compromised by the skepticism or relativism of modernity, a skepticism which rejects as an article of faith any possible confirmation of natural right and a relativism that then insures a subsequent moral void. Temperance examines and reflects on man’s nature, and then tests its conclusions for logical consistency, integrity, and practical consequences as it tries to achieve a confident sure-footing with respect to the propriety or impropriety of man’s various desires.23
Next, after distinguishing the licit from the illicit, the virtue of temperance, because of the instruction and training which it provides, equips one to set aside the illicit desires such that they do not distort in a sustained way a man’s thought or action.24 Absent temperance (which by definition is informed by knowledge of man’s proper end), and given modernity’s skepticism and relativism, there is for man, predictably, the “”logical”” slide to hedonism, which “”tends to be shortsighted and fragmented, and ultimately frustrating and destructive””(AM,595). To oppose this, there is the ancient teaching about the desires and the virtue of temperance grounded in natural right.
However, as Anastaplo observes about the “”Freudian Persuasion,””
Modern psychiatry must challenge this ancient teaching on at least two grounds. It must question whether any desires should be labelled improper. In addition, it suspects that the deliberate disparagement of any particular kind of desire as improper reveals an unhealthy repression that is potentially destructive. Psychiatry at times denies, in effect, the authoritative role of reason either in assessing or regulating the desires that men are heir to. (AM,136)
Although Anastaplo does not himself elaborate on this, once again he does show us the starting point. Is not a modern psychiatry which maintains that no desires may be labelled “”improper”” grounded in the skepticism and relativism we have now long been pointing to? As such, is it not vulnerable to the same question that Nietzsche was vulnerable to, and to which all forms of relativism may be vulnerable? To wit, modern psychiatry asserts that one must not label any desires as “”improper,”” and that to do so suggests a form of “”repression.”” That is, modern psychiatry asserts relativism as correct, and then calls any non-relativist a bad name (“”repressive””) if he does not agree. It declares absolutely that there are not absolutes. That is, relativistic modern psychiatry, which asserts that there are no improper desires, implicitly accuses the one who disagrees with it of having an “”improper”” desire to repress. However, on modern psychiatry’s own grounds, it seems improper to call any desires “”improper,”” and thus a desire to label some desires as improper could not itself be labelled an improper desire. To do so would involve modern psychiatry in an internal contradiction. Calling such disparagement of desires “”repression”” might then seem just a way to enforce modern psychiatry’s own normative (i.e., non-relative) standard by a kind of name-calling.
If, as I suggest, this veiled enforcement conceals a sleight of hand, indeed, an internal contradiction, is the “”Freudian Persuasion”” unaware of this contradiction, this limitation? Or is this assertion, this veiled insistence on having its way, explicable as a “”will to power,”” the forceful assertion of a new morality which repudiates standards (at least ones it does not approve of), except, perhaps, the standard of the “”self,”” according to which any desire may be proper if any particular “”self”” so asserts? Again, with the rejection of natural right as a way of liberating the self, we see the debauchery of, the knocking out of the supports from under a coherent, rationally defensible moral life among us.
It may be such analysis as this that leads Anastaplo to observe about “”liberated intellectuals”” that, “”[T]hese advanced thinkers are incapable of any sustained argument, independent of ‘arbitrary’ religious and legal prohibitions, against even such a practice (to take an extreme case) as a routine indulgence in cannibalism”” (The Artist As Thinker, 276). Thus, “”Intellectuals tend to suppress what men have ‘always known’ about such things, including about the distinction between human and inhuman”” (AM,137-8). One suspects that this failing, too, is somehow related to the modern insistence on a “”rationalistic””—that is, a somewhat tortured method—which seeks a philosophic certainty, seemingly available in science, about the good for man as distinct from a more “”natural apprehension”” of things, of the things men have “”always known.””25
Next, in assessing the “”Freudian Persuasion,”” Anastaplo notes that,
The ancients believed, or at least believed it salutary to affirm, something that the moderns tend to deny: a judgment of whether a human activity is natural or unnatural, good or bad, is an essential, perhaps even the most important part, of any description of it…. One must, the ancients seem to say, be at least aware of the highest if one is to make a serious attempt to understand anything, even the lowest things. (AM,137)
Thus, one must be aware of what the fully-enabled human being has the capacity to do if one is to be able to appreciate what it would mean deliberately to blind an infant. Fully to appreciate what damage would be done—to understand the “”low””—one would first have had to understand the “”high,”” that which could have been. Only then can one see how far has been the fall.26 The “”Freudian Persuasion”” does not seem to take conscious account of the “”high,”” or, to put it another way, does not seem to be sufficiently aware of one of its own most critical presuppositions. As Anastaplo asks, “”Does not psychoanalysis itself depend on the assumption that the most disturbed of men can usually be talked to, that reason is somehow vital to man”” (AM,138)? Or, to take note of still another of modern psychiatry’s (unconscious?)presuppositions, Anastaplo asks, Why bother with psychoanalysis,
…if there is not something in the nature of man which demands (or a least permits) an ordering of alternatives, which suggests a hierarchy of better and worse ways of shaping, developing, and preserving both men and their communities? What sense does it make to speak of ‘progress’ if men do not have some sense—if only a dim awareness—of what the very best would be for human beings? (Artist as Thinker, 277)
To seek psychoanalytic “”progress”” implies better and worse, proper and improper, an idea which that same “”Freudian Persuasion”” denies in principle when it disparages the labelling of any desires as “”improper.””
It becomes evident that modern psychiatry—affected as it is by relativism, and thus in principle making the concession to hedonism or perversion, inasmuch as no desire may be thought improper—is unable to serve as a reliable guide in moral matters. The Freudian persuasion, it seems, has descended from that line of thought which traces itself from Occam and Descartes, down through (a Mephistopholean?) Nietzsche and into a moral free-fall, a downward spiral. Thus, a determined, exaggerated insistence on scientific certainty in moral matters (where a more “”natural apprehension”” of things, common sense, and prudence would have known that certainty simply cannot always be had) has led, ironically, to the point that all moral matters are now “”certainly”” up for grabs: we cannot know many things, if “”to know”” means to be able to demonstrate certainty; we surely cannot know in this way about important moral matters. (Again, one has only to consider the impossibility of such certainty even when all we desire is that a punishment fit the crime.) Moreover, the ground for whatever certainty we can hope to have is understood, since Descartes, to be located in (and thereby limited to?) the self. With Nietzsche, “”greatness”” consists of being the most “”wicked,”” “”deviant,”” and insistently individual; of being “”overrich in will,”” repudiating the “”good as such,”” and going “”beyond”” good and evil. And now with Freud, not surprisingly, no one is authorized to deny the legitimacy of desires that are generated from this newly-legitimated individual self. As a result of this modern line of thought, all moral matters are most uncertain and “”relative,”” and therefore we are unable to pronounce and act on them, unable to praise and encourage the one or blame and discourage the other. We suffer moral paralysis because we are in an intellectual labyrinth. Again, however, we need not accept this distinctively modern analysis, for it is not, after all, obviously coherent, and it does contain internal contradictions of which it seems unaware. It also leads to an “”abyss.”” Because it can be thus challenged as neither true nor useful, it may well not merit our endorsement.
Existentialism
Next, Anastaplo turns to “”Some Questions About ‘Existentialism,'”” with an epigraph fittingly taken from Thomas Aquinas, “”On Truth.””
Because justice is a kind of ‘rightness’…or ‘equality’…, justice in its essential nature will depend primarily upon whatever has that measure by which the equality and rightness of justice are established among things. Now the will cannot be characterized as the first rule but rather as ruled, inasmuch as it is directed by reason and intellect. This is not only true for us but for God as well, although the will in us is really distinct from the intellect. This is why the will and its rightness are not the same thing. But in God the will is really identified with the intellect, so that the rightness of his will is really the same as the will itself…. (Q.23, A.6)
This is fittingly adduced because by now (i.e., after Nietzsche and Freud), the intellect and will have so long been detached—or reversed—that the obvious connection needs to be re-stated.
The next phase of modern philosophy makes much of “”subjectivity,”” “”will,”” “”authenticity,”” and “”the absurd.”” Thus, in Anastaplo’s account,
Much is made by some ‘existentialists’ (or should we simply say ‘moderns’?) of the absurd. This seems to be a term used to disparage unrealistic attempts to act well, attempts based on an all-too-human longing to do the right thing. Thus both ancient philosophy and ancient revelation, if not philosophy and revelation simply, are shown to burden mankind with aspirations that are, when properly understood, beyond realization, perhaps even beyond comprehension. This is what Soren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as perhaps Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, can be taken to say
.
There is no objectively determinable way out for the desperate human being of conscience. This can be said despite the life-guiding claims made not only by revelation, but also by philosophy with its reliance on nature. Things are so much beyond objective comprehension (or prudent control, with a view to a knowable or obvious end) that the only source of certainty and guidance resides in the actor himself. Subjectivity, as we call it, is made much of. Decisive, then, is one’s will. One must act, even though he can have no reason to prefer one action to another. (AM,140)
How have we reached this “”absurd”” point, deeper into the labyrinth? To recapitulate: There was Occam’s dictum that “”assumptions should be kept to a minimum in any attempt to explain any phenomena,”” with subsequent thinkers disdaining the Aristotelian moderating principle that certainty cannot be had in all subjects alike (in those, for example, that deal with “”matter,”” whether carpentry or law-making); next, the Cartesian location of the only ground of certainty within the self; then, the consequent abandonment of any reliance on knowing anything as “”objectively”” so, and also, thus, a denial of the possibility of natural right, of a morality grounded in nature and discernible by reason; thereafter, Nietzsche’s unprecedentedly-radical skepticism and relativism, leading to its nihilism and the unabashed assertion of will as the only way to “”greatness,”” taking the place of “”the just,”” available to man; next, the Freudian relativistic unwillingness to consider any desires improper, thereby confirming the standard in the self and making a critical concession to hedonism; and now, with the existentialists, the further ascendance of an admittedly-blind will and subjectivity. About this “”will,”” however, Anastaplo is finally brought to wonder,
What is the character of the will? It does not seem to be reasoning. Can it truly be distinguished from desire? May it not be little more than a spirited or otherwise respectable way of making much of personal ambition and of mere pleasure as one’s guide to life? (AM,143)
This most recent phase of modern philosophy also emphasizes “”subjectivity,”” and we may as well add, a gloomy subjectivity:
A further indication of the importance of the personality and hence of the will may be seen in certain distinctively modern terms made so much of by the authors under consideration: abyss, anxiety, authenticity, fear and trembling, self. Authenticity, for example, may exhibit more concern for the feelings and circumstances of the self, including the roots one sprang from or the abyss
