THE
PROCESS OF THE COSMOS
Philosophical Theology
and Cosmology
A SPECULATIVE ANSWER TO THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE
by
Dr. Anthony Bernard KELLY PhD.
First Published by Dissertation.com, 1999
ISBN: 1 – 58112 – 060 - 5
Copyright, KELLY Anthony Bernard, 1999
THE
PROCESS OF THE COSMOS
SUMMARY 4
Chapter One THE
PROBLEM OF THE MOTIVE FOR CREATION 6
Madigan’s argument 7
Madigan’s claim 9
Assessment
of Madigan’s argument 10
Aristotle’s initiation of the argument 11
Avoiding
Aristotle’s argument 11
The problem of direct Creation 11
Confronting Aristotle’s argument 13
Aristotle’s hidden assumption 14
Is the world
in process? 14
Madigan’s other claim 15
Chapter Two NATURAL
THEOLOGY AND
Chapter Three THE
WORK OF NICOLAI HARTMANN 23
The Teleological nexus and
the Causal
nexus 23
Hartmann’s analysis of Spiritual Being 25
Hartmann’s Ethics and
the role of Values 28
An explanation of these phenomena 32
Hartmann’s antinomies 34
Hartmann’s Ontology 37
Strata and Levels distinguished 38
Hartmann’s analysis of Freedom 42
Chapter Four THE EMERGENCE OF HOMO SAPIENS ETHICUS 44
The Nature
of Man 44
Homo Sapiens Ethicus 46
The
Relevance of Myth and History 50
Emergence of
Spiritual Consciousness 52
The Axial Period 54
Chapter Five THE
PROCESS OF THE COSMOS 56
The Process
of Self-Creation 56
Altruism and
Morality 58
The
Emergence of a Moral Sense 58
The Problem
of Evil 60
Man, Culture
and Deity 61
The Role of
Culture 63
The Good of
Man 64
Chapter Six EMERGENCE
AND THE WORLD PROCESS 66
Emergence 67
Criteria of
Emergent Levels 68
The Emergent
Levels 69
Theories of
Emergent Evolution 71
The Miracle
of Life 77
Miracles and
Emergence 77
The World
Process 77
The Laws of
Nature and Natural Law 78
Chapter Seven THE
EXPLANATION OF THE WORLD 81
Self-Existence 81
The
Emergence of Life 83
Challenges
to Neo-Darwinism 84
Does Life
have an
Intrinsic Ordering Principle? 86
Critique of Harris 90
Other Critiques of Neo-Darwinism 90
Neo-Darwinism and Biochemistry 93
Cosmological Natural Selection? 94
Conclusion 96
BIBLIOGRAPHY 98
This
is a speculative answer to the riddle of existence, but it is not mere
speculation. It presents a consistent and coherent answer to some of the most
profound philosophical questions, such as why there is anything at all and why
there is evil in the world. The
existence of both physical or natural evil, and of moral evil, is one reason
why many cease to believe in God. Such
people can not reconcile a powerful and perfect Creator with an imperfect world
in which evil abounds.
I
argue that with the advance of scientific knowledge, particularly in cosmology,
Natural Theology can now provide an answer to the question as to the reason for
the existence of man and the world.
Aristotle had reasoned from the contingency of the world to the
necessity of a God. He had also
concluded that the world was unworthy of God’s concern, as God could not be
concerned with a world which was significantly different from God himself. Aristotle’s reasoning from the world up to
God, together with his inability to reason down from God to the world,
established an antinomy, in the sense of a contradiction between the
conclusions of two lines of thought, both of which appear to be true.
The
history of subsequent attempts to avoid this antinomy, and to provide an
explanation for the existence of the world, is considered. No such attempt is found to be
successful. A hidden assumption in
Aristotle’s reasoning is exposed.
Aristotle’s conclusion that the world was not worthy of God’s concern
followed from his unstated assumption that the world was complete, rather than
in process.
We
now recognise that the universe and life have both developed in complexity from
more simple beginnings. Teilhard de
Chardin was the first to understand the entire Cosmos as a process, but he
understood it as an inevitable process from Alpha to Omega, rather than a free
process.
Early
in the 20th Century the Emergent Evolutionists had sought to explain
the emergence of the biological and mental levels from the material level,
without success. Nicolai Hartmann’s
subsequent ontological investigations made clear the stratified nature of
reality. Hartmann’s ontology is brought
to bear on the problem of Emergence.
Hartmann’s analysis of ethics and his phenomenology of human nature are
also brought to bear on the problem of the nature and role of man in the
world.
I
argue that the world can be understood as a process involving the possible
self-creation of an entity like God. In
the series of the emergent ontological strata of reality, the physical,
biological, conscious and spiritual strata, each stratum is less rigidly
determined, and exercises greater freedom than does the previous stratum. The laws of nature vary from stratum to
stratum, becoming less deterministic at each new stratum.
The
present human moral-cultural, or spiritual stratum, exercises complete freedom
in relation to the law of this stratum, the moral law. The moral law may command but unlike the
physical law, it can not compel. The
possible outcomes of this process of Emergence could be either the
self-creation of a stratum which is not significantly different from God, or
the self-destruction of humanity. In
this context, Christ could be considered to be a proleptic exemplar of the
final emergent stage.
In
the first chapter I argue that Aristotle was correct in his conclusion that God
could not cause a world which was significantly different from himself. I utilise Patrick Madigan’s account of the historical
development of the question of the motive for creation, set out in his Christian
Revelation and the Completion of the Aristotelian Revolution (1988), in
order to trace the attempts to avoid Aristotle’s conclusion and to provide some
motive for the apparent production of an imperfect world by a perfect God. I argue that logically God could not directly
create a world which was similar to God.
Only a process involving free self-creation at some stage could possibly
produce an entity which was also self-existent, and so not significantly
different from God. I argue that the
imperfect world represents a stage in such a process.
In
the second chapter I utilise the findings of modern Physics and Cosmology to
present an argument from Natural Theology that the world is involved in such a
process of self-creation. This chapter provides an overview of my argument.
In
the third chapter I bring the phenomenological work of Nicolai Hartmann, in
particular his New Ways of Ontology (1953) and his Ethics (1932),
to bear on the thesis that the world is in process and that man has a
significant role to play in that process.
Hartmann shows the stratified nature of reality, with each succeeding
stratum exercising grater freedom, and being less rigidly determined than the
previous stratum. He also shows that the
present moral-cultural or spiritual stratum is completely free in relation to
the application of the law of that stratum, the moral law. Hartmann’s insights, from a non-theistic
perspective, support my thesis that the world process is a process of
self-creation.
In
the fourth chapter I argue that the present human moral-cultural or spiritual
stage of the process of the cosmos is a relatively recent phenomenon. I consider a number of studies of the literature
and history of both the ancient Greeks and the
Hebrews. The transition from a
pre-moral way of thinking to a new way of thinking is more fully documented in
the Greek culture of the Classical period than in any other culture. This change in men’s minds has been the
subject of many conjectures as to its cause.
I argue that the change was the result of a newly emergent moral sense,
and I show that this most recent emergent stage is primarily a phenomenon of
about the first millennium BC.
In
the fifth chapter I argue that the Cosmological evidence of the development of
the cosmos to the present time is consistent with the cosmos being involved in
a process of self-creation. I also
propose a novel resolution of the problem of evil. This resolution is consistent with my overall
thesis.
In
the sixth chapter I relate my thesis to the problem of Emergent Evolution. I survey various approaches which have been
made to the problem of Emergence, particularly the contribution made by Samuel
Alexander who proposed the eventual emergence of Deity. The phenomenon of emergence has never
previously been explained. I argue that
the problem of Emergence is resolved by this thesis.
In
the seventh and final chapter I consider other attempts which have been made to
provide an overall explanation of the cosmos, particularly the neo-Darwinian
approach. These approaches include
Smolin’s attempt to find a form of natural selection in the process of the
cosmos, as set out in his The Life of the Cosmos (1997)
Chapter One - THE PROBLEM OF THE MOTIVE FOR CREATION.
A
brief history of the quest for a sufficient reason for the existence of the
world has been set out by Patrick Madigan (1988). Madigan
argues that contrary to the Enlightenment view that Christianity had diverted and perverted the patrimony of
classical Greek philosophy, the insights provided by Christianity had enabled
the completion of the Aristotelian project to generate an adequate explanation
of the world. (1988,1-2)
Madigan maintains that Aristotle had been unable to complete his project of providing
a scientific explanation of the cosmos.
Aristotle had concluded that God could only be engaged in the highest
activity, that of thinking or contemplation.
This activity could only be directed towards God himself, as the highest
object. It would be unworthy of God to
attend to anything lower than himself.
The world, as it existed, was therefore not worthy of God’s concern.
(1988,3-7)
Madigan’s primary thesis is that Aristotle failed in his original project to provide a full
explanation of the world. He maintains
that Aristotle had realised that he could not succeed in this project because
he could not provide a satisfactory theory of the production of the world from
an immutable God. In Madigan’s opinion,
Aristotle had then sought to avoid the appearance of failure by shifting the
focus of the question from the nature of the ultimate efficient cause of the
world, to the eternity of motion. (1988,42)
In the presentation of his argument Madigan traces the debate concerning
God’s motive for creation, from Parmenides to Aquinas and beyond.
Aristotle had proposed to give a full scientific explanation
of the world. In his terms this would
have meant the identification of the material, formal, efficient and final
causes of the production of the world.
He had established that God was necessary as a first mover to explain
the existence of the world, and he had also established that God could not
cause a world which was significantly
different from himself. These two
conclusions appeared to be contradictory.
Madigan considers that not only had Aristotle failed to
explain the world, he had also discovered that such an explanation was
impossible. While our world requires a
first cause, the attempt to explain the world from this first cause could not
succeed. (1988,16-18)
Madigan shows that the Greeks, from Parmenides on, had been able to reason up to a realm of true
being, or God, but none of them had been able to connect this realm with the
world of appearances. (1988,27)
Plotinus had subsequently argued that the world had been
produced necessarily and unconsciously as an automatic emanation from God’s
nature. (1988,62) No such attempt to
explain creation was ultimately satisfactory.
Madigan then argues that it was only the Christian `good news’ which could provide an escape from
the impasse into which classical philosophy had fallen. His argument relies upon the necessity of
salvation. Madigan argues that while
creation is first in the order of time, it is salvation which is first in the
order of explanation. Salvation is what
provides God’s motive for creation. From
God’s viewpoint, Madigan claims, creation and salvation are not separable, but
should be viewed as two moments of a single divine initiative. He maintains that creation is essential in
order to make salvation, as friendship or fulfilment, possible. (1988,76) Madigan understands salvation as the call to
a relationship with God, although he admits that just what salvation will turn
out to be is, and will remain, a mystery at the philosophical level. However, salvation has to imply some sort of
relationship between man and God, involving mutual recognition and friendship.
(1988,77)
Madigan sees the attempt to provide an adequate explanation
of the world as having moved towards a final stage in its development, when
Thomas Aquinas proposed that God could act simply to communicate
his perfection, rather than acting as a result of the existence of a need on
God’s part. Aquinas had argued that
`every agent, insofar as it is perfect and in act, produces its like’, and he
concluded that it was appropriate for God to communicate his good to others as
much as is possible. (1988,102-4)
Aquinas’
argument, that every agent produces its like, has never been taken to its
logical conclusion that God can only be concerned to produce another entity
like God. Madigan almost reaches this
conclusion but is hindered by his concept of direct creation, concluding that
there is a limit as to how far God’s aim can be achieved when using creatures.
(1988,104) He does not consider whether
there is another way in which God’s aim may be achieved.
For
our purposes, Madigan’s final chapter is the most relevant. He maintains that the integration of the
doctrine of God’s necessary self-love with the Christian good news of Christ’s incarnation and suffering
on man’s behalf, was the significant intellectual advance made by the
Scholastics. Madigan argues that this
integration provided the resolution of the problem of the motive for creation,
a type of resolution that classical philosophy was not able to reach.
Madigan’s account of the argument as to God’s motive for
creation, particularly as put by Aquinas, is detailed.
My question is whether the arguments which Madigan relates and which
have been put over time, warrant a different conclusion from the one he
reaches. I do not argue with his
conclusion that the motive for creation is provided by salvation, understood as
involving some sort of relationship between man and God. The issue is the nature of that relationship
and the process by which it may be achieved.
In order to examine the arguments which have been put over time, I will
set out Madigan’s account in some detail.
Madigan begins with Aristotle’s observation that God needs nothing, and that if he
does produce a world it must be for a sufficient motive. Madigan notes that even the motive of love
will require that the love has to be proportional to the worth of the object of
love. Aristotle maintained that God and
man could not be friends, as God could get nothing from such a
relationship. Aristotle also maintained
that for God to act for less than a proper motive would be inappropriate. This view re-emerged in the Middle Ages, and
inspired a new attempt to provide a complete explanation of the world. Creation was by then understood to involve a
consideration of salvation, which in turn was to be `understood as God’s
interest in engaging in a relationship with beings other than himself’.
(1988,102)
Aquinas’ response to Aristotle was not in the nature of an explanation of how God
had gone about the process of creation, but was an attempt to identify an
appropriate motive for creation. Aquinas
argued that God had intended to communicate His perfection, which is his goodness,
to His creation, and that this desire to share his goodness with beings other
than himself could provide a motive for the creation of the world.
(1988,103) Madigan summarises Aquinas’ conclusion as follows:
Thus,
as far as he can (for like produces like), God will create another `god’, the closest approximation to himself. There is a limit as to how far this can be
achieved, when using creatures; but this still seems the best (or least
inadequate) description we can give of God’s project. God wants to share himself as fully as
possible with some one else, to bring about the closest possible imitation of
and communion with himself. (1988,104)
Madigan asks whether human beings are worth Christ’s condescension, self-sacrifice and self-expenditure
on man’s behalf, and he recognises that such an event seems out of proportion
and unseemly. He notes that Aquinas had already clearly recognised the problem that
God’s love for lesser beings posed for the generation of an adequate account of
the production of the world. The
resolution proposed by Aquinas was that God’s self-regard would move him to
want to share his nature beyond the godhead and with creatures, in particular
with a creature able to appreciate God’s glory and reflect it back.
(1988,105-7)
Aquinas
had argued that the Incarnation would not have been necessary had man not
fallen. Later thinkers including Duns
Scotus and Suarez could not accept this.
They argued that in creating man with freedom, God would have known that
man would sin. Aristotle’s position that God and man could not be friends had
consequently reasserted itself. These
later thinkers had concluded that if God was going to create a world at all, it
could only be to enable Him to receive acknowledgment and praise from the greatest and most perfect being that
creation was capable of producing. For
God to receive praise from any less perfect being would mean that God was
willing to accept that His creation was producing less than it was capable of.
This also would not be compatible with the divine nature, as God could
not be lacking in power to achieve the best possible outcome. (1988,110)
Madigan recognises that the idea that God should sacrifice
himself for man seems inappropriate, and even impossible from an Aristotelian
perspective, as God’s love must be directed to himself as the highest
object. Aquinas’ response to this difficulty is to assert that if
God’s self-love is great enough it will move him to want to share his nature
with creatures, particularly with a creature able to appreciate his glory and
reflect it back. This suggestion of a
motive for creation had first been made by Dionysius the Aeropagite.
God’s motive is assumed to combine both altruism and egoism. His self-love makes him want to call other
beings into existence to appreciate, share and reflect back his goodness.
(1988,106-7) Madigan comments that in
this scenario God’s goodness seems to function as something almost distinct
from God. Thomas does not intend this
but, as Madigan says, `this way of
putting it helps to explain - as well as it can be explained - how God can be
self-contained, and also naturally (but freely) productive’. (1988,108)
The
later Scholastic thinkers had argued that it was only the prospect of the
creation of Jesus Christ which could have moved God to produce a world, the
production of Jesus Christ being God’s intention and purpose from the beginning,
as Jesus Christ is the only creature who justifies the whole enterprise of
creation. These thinkers rejected
Thomas’ idea that God had assumed a human nature because of the needs of fallen
man. They continued to adhere to the
attribution of the motive for creation as consisting in the reception by God of
acknowledgment and praise from the greatest being of which creation was
capable. This being is Jesus Christ as
the pinnacle of creation or the perfect creature. Only this being could have moved God to
produce the world. Madigan quotes Scotus’ argument that God foresaw the union between the Word
and the human creature, Christ, the creature who would owe God supreme love,
even had there never been a Fall of man.
Madigan
comments that Scotus implies that if God could have created Christ without
creating the rest of mankind, he might have done so. (1988,109-11) He notes that it was the opinion of a number
of later thinkers that the world was created in order to produce Jesus
Christ. For Madigan himself, Christ is
the proleptic anticipation of the life-form which should eventually
characterise the world as a whole, although he does not offer any explanation
as to how this might eventuate. (1988,112, note 6) Christ, as the second person of the Trinity,
was present at creation. As the perfect
creature he was also the goal of
creation. As the divine Logos, he was not only the efficient
cause of the universe, but, when united to a human nature, he was also its final cause. In this perspective, the Incarnation was not
the divine response to what Augustine had called our `fortunate fall’, but it would have
happened anyway, even if man had not sinned. (1988,112-3)
Madigan summarises the thinking of the later Scholastics as
having God embark on the enterprise of creation and salvation for himself as
well as for us, the whole drama of sin and redemption, death and resurrection
being the only way God could produce the Christ, as both the proper expression of God himself and
the proper response to that expression. (1988,114) Madigan expresses some reservations as to the
manner of expression of this Scotist strategy.
He suggests that `process’ categories might be found to be more helpful,
as such categories could express the situation in a way which would better
safeguard both divine and human freedom.
This is because process categories are less time-bound, and more true to
our experience. (1988,116) Perhaps the
Scotist strategy could be expressed as the process of the world being best
understood as a necessary stage in the process of the production of the
Christ. This is a theme to which I will
return, together with Madigan’s view that Christ is the proleptic anticipation
of the life-form which should eventually characterise the world as a
whole. Madigan does not comment upon the
inherent contradiction in the concept that the whole drama of sin and
redemption, death and resurrection was the only way that God could produce the
Christ. The contradiction arises from
the concurrent belief that Christ, as the second Person of the Trinity, pre-existed his incarnation as man.
Madigan argues that God’s intention from the outset was to
produce the greatest possible likeness to himself, thus making possible the
most perfect friendship with his creation.
He argues that from the fact of creation we must reason to God having
the intention of our salvation, in the sense of our forming some form of
relationship with God, and that this is a necessary precondition, and the only
possible motivation for creation, in the mind of God. He maintains that any other attempt to
explain creation simply fails. (1988,115 & 118)
From
his examination of the history of the search for a sufficient motive for God’s
creation of the world, Madigan argues that an adequate explanation of the world
only becomes possible by modifying the dividing line between philosophy and
revealed theology. He argues that
salvation, understood as friendship between God and man, is needed to complete
the project of fashioning an adequate explanation of the world. Only when philosophy makes contact with
revealed theology in this way, he maintains, can philosophy’s deeper programme,
the fashioning of a satisfactory explanation of the world, be realised. Philosophy, in Madigan’s view, poses a
question which only revealed theology can answer. (1988,117)
Madigan’s claim.
Madigan then makes his most important claim. He maintains that there is only one possible explanation of the
world, and that explanation is based on God’s self-love. Noting that love must be proportional to the
worth of its object, he argues that the world begins and ends with God’s love
for himself - we are merely enfolded within that love. God loves himself as the highest object. This self-love is expressed in the procession
of persons within the Trinity, but does not stop there. It expands and leads God to call into
existence a world that did not have to exist, a world `called into existence to
acknowledge a love that also did not have to be as strong as it is’.
(1988,119) Madigan argues that because
of the strength of God’s love for himself, and his goodness, the circuit of
divine self-love expands to generate the world.
This expansion was not necessary, but it nevertheless happened. The evidence for this, he argues, is the fact
of creation, from which fact we must also
reason to an intention on God’s part of establishing a relationship with us,
which we understand as salvation.
Madigan argues that the intention of salvation is a necessary
precondition and motivation for creation in God’s mind, because God wants
others to love him as he loves himself. (1988,118) Madigan maintains that the intensity of the
divine nature, as both love and goodness, leads God to call this world, which
did not have to exist, into existence.
In order to fully account for the world it thus becomes necessary to
propose that God also wants to enter into a positive relationship with a being
which is capable of appreciating God’s greatness and reflecting that greatness
back to him. Madigan argues that if the
most important conclusion of philosophy is that God exists, the central message
of Christian revelation is the contingency of the divine
goodness, which must be postulated in any satisfactory account of the existence
of the world. (1988,119-20)
Assessment of Madigan’s arguments.
Madigan does not base this explanation of the existence of
the world, which he maintains is the only possible explanation, on God’s love
for man. He appreciates that God’s
mysterious love of other beings is the true difficulty in generating an adequate
account of the production of the world. (1988,106) This love of other beings is turned by
Madigan into a non-necessary by-product of the circuit of divine
self-love. This divine self-love is the
fundamental factor in Madigan’s argument, as he recognises that love must be
proportionate to the worth of the object of love. This proportionality is Madigan’s primary
problem, as there is no such proportionality between God and man. The generation of the world has therefore to
be the result of the expansion of the circuit of divine self-love. The world is not created from the motive of
love of man. Madigan’s explanation of
the existence of the world, its generation by the expansion of the circuit of
divine self-love, is of a similar order to Plotinus’ device of an emanation of the world from God’s
goodness. It suffers from the same major
disability as does Plotinus’ explanation, in that it does not explain the
existence of evil in the world. Evil
could no more derive from the expansion of God’s self-love than it could derive
from an emanation of God’s goodness. Any
satisfactory explanation of the existence of the world would have to
incorporate a satisfactory account of the existence of evil in the world. Whether such an account could ever be given
has been a matter of doubt. John
Courtney Murray asks how the world can be a place of manifold evil and an arena
of human misery, if an all-mighty God exists, and he maintains that the problem
of evil utterly defeats philosophy. (1964,104)
I will challenge this view.
In
Madigan’s scheme, the world, including mankind, is saved
from being a mere epiphenomenon of the circuit of divine self-love by his
concurrent insistence on God having the additional motive of establishing a
relationship with other beings who could appreciate his goodness and reflect it
back. This motivation, which was
originally proposed by Dionysius the Aeropagite, is argued by Madigan to be a
consequence of the circuit of divine self-love, which contingently expands to
produce the world. The evidence for the
existence of this supplementary motive is derived simply from the fact of the
existence of creation.
Aristotle’s initiation of the argument.
Let
us review the arguments which have been put over time, including Madigan’s argument, to assess their worth. It is clear that Aristotle provided the arguments which initiated the problem
when he demonstrated that if God does produce a world it has to be for a
sufficient reason, and that God could not cause a world which was significantly
different from God. The history of the
problem is the history of the attempts to get around these conclusions of
Aristotle.
Aristotle
also argued that love had to be proportional to the object of love, which ruled
out God’s love for man. The Christian assertion of God’s love for man did not affect
the strength of Aristotle’s arguments.
All that the Christian assertion that God loves man succeeds in doing,
in the context of the question of God’s sufficient reason for the production of
the world, is to indicate that the problem is not as easily dismissed as
insoluble, as it had appeared to Aristotle.
For Christians, at least, there had to be a resolution or dissolution of
the antinomy which Aristotle had discovered.
The question is whether this antinomy has yet been resolved or
dissolved, or whether it has simply been avoided. If it has not yet been resolved or dissolved
then the question is whether it is capable of resolution.
Avoiding Aristotle’s argument.
All
of the subsequent arguments which seek to provide some justification for God’s
production of the world, including Madigan’s, can be seen as attempts to avoid the force of
Aristotle’s arguments, rather than to resolve the conflict
between his conclusions. They seek to
introduce some additional factor to provide an explanation of the existence of
the world, but they do not confront Aristotle’s arguments directly. Thus Plotinus has the Good being diffusive and the world existing
as an emanation from the Good, and Madigan has an extension of the circuit of
divine self-love as expressed in the procession of persons in the Trinity. Dionysius the Aeropagite has man’s role reducing from one of
friendship to one of appreciating and reflecting God’s goodness. Attempts to avoid the dilemma introduced by
Aristotle’s antinomy continue to re-appear, even in Madigan’s argument. This is despite the fact that God’s love of
man is central to Christianity and is an essential part of the Christian
`good news’, which Madigan maintains enables the completion of the Aristotelian
revolution. If the antinomy between the
nature of the world and the conclusion that God could not cause a world which
was significantly different from
himself is to be resolved, it has to be confronted directly, rather than
avoided.
The problem of direct Creation.
Aquinas’ view, following Aristotle, is summarised by Madigan as arguing that God will, as far as possible, create
another `god’, the closest approximation to himself. How far this creation can go is limited by
the fact (in Aquinas’ understanding) that God is directly creating this other
`god’. If man represents the limit of
this creation, it could be argued that the project to create another `god’ does
not get very far. The later Scholastics
sought to avoid the uncomfortable reality of man in general by focussing on
Christ as the one man who justifies creation, not just as
man, but in his role as the second person of the Trinity.
They
reasoned that the world was created as the only way to produce Jesus
Christ. In commenting on this, Madigan
recognises that Christ is the proleptic anticipation of the life-form that
should eventually characterise the world as a whole, although how such a
transition is to take place is not discussed.
Madigan does not challenge Aristotle’s arguments that God could not cause a world
significantly different from himself, that God needs nothing, and that if God
was to produce the world it would have to be for a sufficient motive. He accepts Aristotle’s deduction that love
has to be proportional to the worth of the object of love. Aristotle had
consequently stated that friendship between man and God was impossible.
(Ethics,1159a)
Aquinas had also dealt with the question of the possibility
of friendship between man and God.
Aquinas concludes that it is possible for man and God to be friends,
despite their being infinitely unlike one another. The basis of Aquinas’ conclusion is that
there is a communication `between man and God’ which resolves to God
communicating his happiness to us. (Aquinas, 1952,483) Joseph Bobik, (1986) analyses this approach and points out that
this communication is merely an offer, which opens the possibility of
friendship. He quotes Aristotle to the
effect that a great disparity between two humans will make friendship between
them impossible, despite their common nature, unless the superior shares with
the inferior the knowledge or other goods which provide the basis of his
superiority. (1986,258) He also quotes
Aquinas to the effect that God has decided to share his beatitude with man, and
this communication, this sharing, provides the link out of which friendship
ought to grow. (1986, 258-9) Bobik
concludes, with Aquinas, that whenever two persons have nothing in common, but
the superior offers a shareable gift to the inferior, it then becomes fitting
that the inferior contribute to actualising the friendship. Aquinas regards having something in common as
absolutely indispensable to friendship. (1986, 259-60). In seeking to flesh out this communication,
or sharing, and relate it to those things which human friends have in common,
Bobik argues that Aquinas can only fall back upon humans generally having a
common origin in God, with the only other basis Aquinas can identify applying
only to members of a common faith. (1986,270)
However it is clear that common origin is a circumstance which does not
always guarantee friendship between humans, and even when they belong to a
common faith that fact does not guarantee friendship between them. These factors can provide a basis for a human
friendship to arise, but they can not ensure it.
There
is a more significant fallacy in Aquinas’ reasoning, which Bobik does not
challenge. Aquinas points out that every
friendship is founded in something which the friends have in common.
That
clearly relates to their common possession of whatever it is, at the time they
are friends, as is clearly implied in the passage Bobik quotes from
Aristotle. It is not reasonable to
assume that an offer to share something in the distant future, with conditions,
has the same effect as common possession in the present. The dimension of the obvious gap between
created man and God is a problem for any current attempt to establish the
motive for creation in the postulated possibility of friendship between man, as
such, and God, as the gap between man and God is still too great.
Madigan summarises Aquinas’ conclusion to the effect that God, as far as he is
able, will create another `god’, the closest approximation to himself, as like
produces like. This formula is at first
sight convincing, but it does not constitute a description of man. When Aquinas refers, in Madigan’s later
reference, to God’s self-regard moving him to want to share his nature with
creatures able to appreciate his glory and reflect it back, he is significantly
reducing his earlier criterion of the creation of `another god’, the greatest
possible likeness to himself.
Appreciation and reflection is not likeness, nor is Aquinas’ latter
formulation convincing.
Aquinas’ attribution of the Incarnation to man’s fall, is
not convincing either, as later thinkers realised. These also considered that the motive for
God’s creation had to be the production of a perfect creature, which they
argued had been realised in the person of Jesus Christ, `the creature that uniquely justifies the
enterprise of creation’. (Madigan, 1988,111)
While I do not deny that Jesus is the perfect man, the argument that the
purpose of creation was finally accomplished nearly two thousand years ago
raises the question of man’s present purpose in a still imperfect world. The invocation of Christ to resolve the
difficulty of the glaringly apparent imperfection of mankind, appears to be a
device to avoid accounting for that imperfection. God’s love is held to apply to all men, not
simply to Christ.
Confronting Aristotle’s argument
None
of the arguments which have been considered really confront Aristotle’s argument that God is necessary as a first cause to
explain the existence of the world, and that God could not cause a world which
was significantly different from himself.
Aristotle’s argument appears to be supported by Aquinas’ conclusion, as summarised by Madigan, that God will, as far as possible, create another
`god’, the closest approximation to himself.
While neither of these arguments is presented in their authors own
words, they can serve as a basis for consideration as to how the essential
argument might be confronted directly.
As
represented, Aquinas’ argument is more specific than Aristotle’s, as it speaks
of another `god’ both as created, and as being the closest possible
approximation of the original. These descriptions
are self-contradictory. There can be no
`close approximation’ between a creator God, and any entity which is created or
made. The difference between creator and
created is significant, perhaps the most significant difference which could
ever be discovered between any two entities.
Aristotle
did not speak of creation. His position
that God could not cause a world which was significantly different from himself
is a much more supportable claim. The
concept of cause is a much wider concept than that of direct creation. An outcome can be caused in many different
ways. Is it possible that we have
contributed to the failure to resolve the Aristotelian antinomy by our adoption
of the Hebrew concept of God as Creator, responsible for the direct creation of
man? Has the implied restriction of
God’s causal activity to direct creation, hindered us from recognising that God
could operate in other ways?
For
example, could not God initiate a process involving the possible, but by no
means certain, self-creation of `another god’.
Any outcome of such a process, as a self-created entity, could possibly
constitute an entity which was not significantly different from God.
Aristotle’s hidden assumption.
The
contradiction between Aristotle’s conclusion that God was necessary as a first cause
to explain the existence of the world, and his conclusion that God could not
cause this world, which is significantly different from himself, is only apparent. The contradiction relies upon the empirical
evidence that the nature of the world, as it presents to us, is not worthy of
God’s concern. The world is obviously
significantly different from the nature of a God who could operate to bring a
world into existence. The contradiction
also relies on the unstated assumption that the world, as it appears to us, is
not merely a stage in a process, but is the finished product. The assumption that the world was a finished
product has remained hidden and was never challenged in the context of this
apparent contradiction, although it is now common to see the world as evolving
or in process. The idea of a completed
world was reinforced by the inference, drawn from the Bible, of a completed
creation. Clifford notes the effect
Mesopotamian myths had upon biblical cosmogonies, and he provides an example
which shows how profound was the belief in
If
the world as it appears to us is merely a stage in a process which could
possibly lead to the production of an entity which is not significantly
different from God, the apparent contradiction between Aristotle’s two
conclusions disappears.
Is the world in process?
If
the world is involved in a process which is capable of moving towards the
production of an entity which is not significantly different from God, it is
clear that this can not be a process of direct creation. Whatever is created in a process of direct
creation has to be significantly different from the self-subsistent first cause
which is God. While the possible product
of a process which could produce a world which would not be significantly
different from God, could obviously not be self-subsistent, any such product
would have to be self-created, if it was to be, in essence, not significantly
different from God. Both God as a
self-subsistent entity, and any self-created entity, would be self-existent,
and so essentially similar.
If
there is such a process of self-creation, would mankind have a role in that
process? Mankind is significantly
different from God, but man shares some of the characteristics of God, to a
limited extent. Mankind as such cannot be the purpose of the process of the
cosmos. Mankind could, however,
represent a stage in such a process.
God’s attributes are generally taken to include being personal, free,
creative, all-powerful, all-knowing, self-subsistent, necessary, eternal,
immutable and good. Man has some of
these attributes, to some extent. He is
personal, to some extent free, creative, able to exercise some power and able
to acquire knowledge. To a certain
extent he is what he makes himself, and so is self-creating to some
degree. He is capable of goodness but
also, unlike God, capable of evil. The
extent to which he exhibits any of these attributes is dependent upon both his
own efforts and on the culture within which he operates, a point which I will
consider later. Suffice here to say that
he can contribute something to the self-creation of others both directly, in
the case of individuals he can influence, and also indirectly to the extent
that he contributes to his culture.
If
the process of the cosmos is the process of the possible production of an
entity which is not significantly different from God, which we could for
identification purposes call Deity, we can consider what attributes could be expected
of that Deity. We can also consider
whether it is reasonable to assume that our world is merely a stage in the
process of production of such an entity.
In particular we would have to ask how the attributes of man would
compare with the attributes of Deity, in order to assess whether mankind may
represent a stage in that possible production.
We
may accept that God’s attributes include those of being personal, free,
creative, all-powerful, all-knowing, self-subsistent, necessary, eternal,
immutable and good. The criteria of
Deity would have to be similar to those attributes, except where they could
conflict with the attributes of God. The
areas of conflict would appear to be with God’s attributes of being all-powerful,
self-subsistent, necessary and immutable.
In relation to these latter attributes, we could expect Deity to be
powerful to some extent, and also to be self-created. There would be no conflict between both God
and Deity sharing God’s attributes of being personal, free, creative,
all-knowing and good. We could therefore
expect the criteria of Deity to include being personal, free, creative,
powerful, all-knowing, self-created and good.
Deity would then not be significantly different from God. These criteria of Deity compare with
mankind’s present attributes of being personal, being morally free and enjoying
other freedoms to some extent, being creative, powerful, knowing and, to an
extent, self-creating. Man is capable of
good, but also of evil. It is in this
last attribute of goodness that man is significantly different from Deity,
other differences being differences of degree.
If
we accept the attributes set out above as identifying the criteria by which
Deity could be known, we can now consider how a process of
the production of Deity could operate. A
process generally involves a series of stages, with each successive stage
building upon the previous stage. A
process involving the self-creation of Deity would have to involve the prior
self-creation of a less perfect entity, in as free a manner as possible, from a
series of progressively less perfect entities.
The final less than perfect entity, prior to the emergence of Deity would be expected to exhibit characteristics
which were not significantly dissimilar from the characteristics which Deity
would possess. They could be similar to
mankind’s characteristics of moral freedom, personality, knowledge and the
possession of a potential for goodness.
There would have to be some sort of continuity established between the
prior entities and Deity, so that the goal of self-creation could be
achieved. The process of production of
the prior, less perfect entities, would also need to be as free as
possible. Whether the world is involved
in such a process will be considered later.
Madigan’s other claim.
Madigan considers that all philosophy is part of a deeper
programme, which he identifies as the fashioning of a satisfactory explanation
of the world. He maintains that this
deeper programme poses a question which only theology, in the sense of revealed
theology, can answer. (1988,117) While
this may have been the case at an earlier time, I will argue that with the
advance of scientific knowledge, natural theology can now provide an answer to
the question as to the reason for the existence of the world.
Chapter Two - NATURAL THEOLOGY AND THE MOTIVE FOR CREATION.
Natural
Theology is a type of speculative philosophy.
The task of a speculative philosophy is to provide an understanding of
some aspect of the world, taking account of known facts. Philosophy can not discover any new facts, it
can only show the significance of the facts which others have discovered, and
show how those facts fit into an overall picture.
Aristotle distinguished three types of what were then
considered to be speculative philosophy.
These three types were the mathematical, the natural and the
theological. Theology, in the Classical
Greek world, was natural theology.
Natural Philosophy was concerned with things which exist separately, but
which were contingent and changeable. We
now call it Science. Mathematics dealt
with entities which were changeless but did not have their own separate
existence. Natural Theology was
concerned with what was self-existent, and changeless. (Met. 1026a) Natural theology, as in this chapter, argues
from available facts. It does not rely
on any revelation.
In
their Natural Theology the classical Greek philosophers were able to argue
their way up from the existence of contingent things, to the necessity of a
self-subsistent, perfect being or God.
They had far greater difficulty in arguing their way back down
again. A self-subsistent, perfect being
was necessary for the existence of contingent things, but such a being could be
under no compulsion and could want for nothing.
Why then was there a world of contingent things? The world, as an unnecessary and imperfect
entity, contingent upon a perfect God, should not exist. But the world does exist. This antinomy could not be resolved by the
Greeks.
Plotinus, the neo-Platonist of the Third Century AD, sought
to resolve this antinomy between the necessary existence of a self-subsistent
God, who had no motive to create anything, and the obvious existence of the
world. Plotinus postulated the necessity
of The One, a God which is prior to all existents. Using the metaphor of the light which
emanates from the sun, without diminishing the sun, Plotinus postulated that
Mind or Nous, which is most like the One, had first emanated from the One. The Soul of the world emanates from Nous, and
in a series of emanations, each lower form emanates from the higher. The human soul emanates from the World Soul,
and may eventually rejoin the World Soul.
The One, Nous and the World Soul are eternal, but lower entities are not. Matter is the final emanation which, because
of the downward momentum of emanation, away from rationality, encounters
darkness and gives rise to evil. Evil is
thus considered a privation, rather than a positive thing, just as darkness is
the absence of light. This explanation
of evil was considered by Augustine, who held that while it could sometimes be
accepted, evil was primarily the result of man’s exercise of his free will.
What
was needed to resolve the antinomy between a perfect God and an imperfect
world, was some account which recognised the divine perfection which the Greeks
had insisted upon - a perfection which included the lack of any external need -
but which also provided a motive, or a sufficient reason, for God to make the
world. Christian philosophers maintained that the motive for God
to create the world was love of man. But
Aristotle had already provided an argument which counted
against this proposed solution.
Aristotle had analysed friendship, which is an essential aspect of
love. He had found that friendship has
to be reciprocal and that friendship could be based on either goodness,
pleasure or utility. Friendship based on
pleasure or utility is transient, and Aristotle argues that the only real and
lasting friendship can be between those who are good, and who resemble one another
in their goodness. (Ethics 1156b) This
resemblance in goodness is the crux of the matter. Because there is no resemblance in goodness
between God and man, Aristotle denies the possibility of friendship between God
and man. (Ethics 1159b) By necessary
implication he also denies the possibility of God’s love for man, or for
anything less than man, as the motive for the existence of the world. Christian philosophers also argued that the
motive for God to create the world was love of man in the person of Christ, but
there are difficulties with this argument.
Those difficulties will not be dealt with in this chapter as they go
beyond the sphere of natural theology.
The present question is whether there can be an explanation of the
existence of the world in the terms of a Natural Theology.
We
have at our disposal many facts which Aristotle did not have.
These facts include Big Bang cosmology, the phenomenon of Emergent evolution, and
the evidence of biological evolution.
There is another very important difference between our position and
Aristotle’s. Aristotle lived in a world
which was regarded as being complete, or as moving in a repetitive cycle. We live in a world in which we have been made
aware of extensive and progressive evolution and change, both on planet Earth
and in the universe as a whole. The
world we live in is linear and progressive rather than cyclical or static.
While
we know much more than Aristotle did, we still have to face the antinomy between a
self-subsistent and perfect entity, which can have no need of any imperfect
contingent thing, and the obvious existence of a contingent and imperfect world
which has to be contingent upon that perfect, self-subsistent entity. This antinomy could not be resolved as long
as the world was regarded as complete.
But
the antinomy would be dissolved if the imperfect world we know is merely a
stage in an incomplete process. If the
world, as we know it, is just one stage in a process which could lead to the
production of another self-existent and perfect entity, the world would
necessarily be both incomplete and imperfect.
There would no longer be an antinomy.
The question then becomes one concerning the nature of this process and
of the possible product of the process.
If we consider the possible motive which God could have for initiating a
process which could lead to the production of a more perfect entity than the
world we know, we can see that love or friendship could provide such a motive. This could be the case if the friendship was
to be one between God and an entity which was similar to God, in being both
self-existent and good.
Logically,
God could not simply create such an entity, as the act of creation itself would
remove the possibility of there being a sufficient degree of similarity between
God and the created entity. There could
be very little similarity between God, as a self-subsistent entity, and a mere
creature. However the potential of
friendship could provide a sufficient reason for God to initiate a process
involving the possible self-creation of an entity which was similar to
God. Only an entity which is
self-created could possibly have an appropriate degree of similarity to a self-subsistent
God. The potential production of a
self-created entity which resembles God in goodness, could therefore provide an
appropriate motive for God to act. As
the direct creation of an entity which is similar to God is ruled out on
logical grounds, perhaps the only way in which an entity which is similar to
God, and so worthy of God’s friendship and love, could come into being would be
by a process of self-creation. How could
such a process occur?
Clearly,
God would have to initiate such a process. Equally clearly, the process would
have to be free of direct guidance by God, and any intervention by God in the
process would have to be kept to the barest minimum, otherwise the objective of
self-creation would be frustrated.
One
possible way to minimise intervention would be for God to initiate a process
involving a series of stages, each of which was free to develop or to
evolve. Each of the stages would have to
enjoy the greatest possible degree of freedom which was appropriate to its
development in self-organisation or self-creation. When each successive stage reached its
self-creative potential, some intervention would be necessary to initiate
another stage, again with the potential of further self-creation. Only the final stage in the process, the
stage which had the potential to lead to the emergence of the entity which was similar to God, would have
to enjoy total freedom in its sphere of self-creation. This final stage would have to be totally
free to realise, or to fail to realise the potential of self-creation. The question is whether the cosmos as it now
exists can be understood as exhibiting such a process of self-creation?
A
process comprises a series of ever more complex stages leading to a
product. The history of the cosmos since
the Big Bang presents us with a series of stages which has the
form of such a process. Each one of
these stages is built upon the previous stage and is more complex than its
predecessor. This series of ever more
complex stages of being, also comprises the phenomenon of Emergence, or
Emergent Evolution. Emergence is the
name given to the phenomenon of the initiation of new levels of being which can
not be fully explained in terms of the laws of the previous level or stage. The most readily apparent instance is the
emergence of life from inert matter.
The
first emergent of which we are now aware, is the initiation of physical matter
in the Big Bang. Subsequent
emergents include the initiation of pre-programmed or instinctive forms of
life, the initiation of higher forms of life which exercise empirical
consciousness, or instrumental rationality, and following that, the initiation
of a form of life which is self-conscious and which exercises a moral or
spiritual consciousness. We could
identify these four significant emergent stages as the physical, the
instinctive, the conscious, and the spiritual.
It
appears that these four emergent stages are stages of a process. Each stage in this process appears to develop
or evolve as freely as the nature of the stage will allow. This series of stages also appears to involve
processes of self-organisation or self-creation. The initiation of each new stage in this
series of stages constitutes the phenomenon of Emergence. Every genuine emergent introduces something
completely new and totally unpredictable into the world. The lack of predicability stems from the
introduction of a new complex of laws of nature to accompany each stage. It is this newly operative sphere of laws
which identifies the new emergent and renders it completely unpredictable in
terms of what went before.
I
have argued that the only possible sufficient motive for the creation of the
cosmos is the production, by self-creation, of an entity which is similar to
God. I call this entity Deity. This is the
name which Samuel Alexander, the first philosopher of Emergence, proposed for
the product of the process of Emergent Evolution. For Alexander, Deity was always the next
higher level towards which the cosmic order tends. However Alexander proposed no overall
explanation of the process of the cosmos.
He set out his philosophy of emergence in his major work, Space, Time & Deity
(1920).
Deity, as I use the term, is the possible self-created
outcome of the process of the cosmos. As
it is a process involving freedom, the product of the process can not be
assured.
There
can only be a minimum of intervention by God in this process, if Deity is to be
self-created. This minimum would have to
be restricted to the design of the laws of nature which apply to each
particular emergent stage. The further
development of each stage, its self-organisation or self-creation, has to be a
free process to the greatest possible extent.
At some stage it has to be a totally free process.
Each
successive emergent stage in the process of the cosmos to date, does exhibit a
greater degree of freedom than the previous stage. The laws of nature
applicable to the initial physical stage are deterministic but permit of
contingency. The laws of nature
applicable to the instinctive biological stage are less deterministic, and
instinctive life appears to freely evolve.
The conscious stage of life appears to evolve with even greater freedom,
achieving a greater range of variety than the instinctive stage. These biological stages utilise the laws of
the physical stage in their internal processes.
The freedom of the biological stages to evolve, involves both mutations
and natural selection.
In
contrast to the determinism of the initial physical stage, the deontological
moral law of the present human-cultural or spiritual stage, allows total
freedom. This total freedom relates to
the application or non-application by the individual of the moral law, and not
to the freedom or lack of freedom of the individual, from other motives or
constraints.
The
moral law commands but it does not compel.
At each previous stage the applicable natural law operates
deterministically, even where it permits of contingency or of evolutionary
novelty. The moral law, in contrast to
the law of the previous stages, is not deterministic, nor is it binding in any
way. This total freedom provides the
reason for the importance of the human moral-cultural stage of the process of
the cosmos. It is a totally free stage
as far as the application or non-application of the moral law is concerned, and
it has no pre-determined outcome. Humans
are free to apply or to fail to apply the moral law. Human freedom is thus the most significant
factor in the process of the cosmos, in relation to the possible self-creation
of Deity.
The
product of each stage of the process of the cosmos is not pre-determined,
although parameters are provided by the potential which the appropriate laws of
nature permit. When an appropriate
product of the operation of the laws of a particular stage is brought into
being, this product can provide a platform for the initiation of a further stage
of the overall process. It is here that
an element of design enters. Taking
account of what has freely evolved out of the previous stage, an appropriate
new stage can be initiated, with new laws of nature.
Each
new emergent stage then has the possibility of further self-organisation or self-creation. The number and the nature of the stages
towards the production of Deity can not be predetermined, and each stage has to be
as free as the material of the stage permits.
The process of the cosmos can be understood as one of freedom and
lawfulness, rather than one of chance and necessity.
Each
successive stage exhibits a greater degree of freedom in the application of the
laws applying to the stage, compared to the previous stage, until total freedom
is provided in the spiritual or deontological stage. It can be seen that a further emergent stage,
with appropriate new laws of nature, would be necessary to complete the process
of the cosmos. The final emergent would
be Deity, a self-created entity, similar to God in being both self-existent and
good. This final emergent would only
become possible when and if the moral potential of the present human-cultural
stage is freely realised.
One
key to this understanding of the process of the cosmos is the recognition of
the stratified structure of reality, involving ontological stages or strata
including the physical, the instinctive, the conscious or psychic and the
spiritual strata. This insight into the
stratified structure of reality was made explicit by Nicolai Hartmann (1882-1950).
Hartmann’s insight into the world’s structure was summarised by him in his New Ways of
Ontology (1953).
The
fact that reality consisted of a number of different strata or levels had
previously been grasped by the Emergent Evolutionists, but they had not been
able to explain the phenomenon of emergence, nor had they sought to define the ontological
criteria of the different levels of being.
Hartmann did not consider himself to be an Emergentist. He recognised the phenomenon of emergence but
regarded the various theories of emergent evolution as having merely affixed a
label to the phenomenon, rather than providing any explanation of it.
(Werkmeister 1990,153) Any explanation
of emergence would have to provide a sufficient reason for the phenomenon of
emergent evolution. Hartmann does not
provide one. David Blitz, in the most recent book on Emergent Evolution,
notes that the source of the phenomenon of emergence has always been an unresolved
problem. It is a problem which Blitz
does not seek to resolve. (1992,180)
What
distinguishes the various stages in the process of the cosmos is the laws of
nature which apply at each stage. Each
emergent stage is initiated with its own laws.
Each set of laws is appropriate to the nature of the particular stage,
or rather it establishes the nature of the stage. The laws provide the potential for the
evolution or development of the particular stage. That stage then develops or evolves free from
any further constraint, with each new emergent stage exhibiting greater freedom
in its development than the previous stage.
First
there is the emergence of matter as a result of the Big Bang. Initially
only the simplest elements, Hydrogen and Helium, are produced. The Big Bang also initiates the process by
which stars are formed, and the heavier elements, which eventually form the
basis of life, are produced in those stars.
At some time, at an essentially unpredictable location in the universe,
a planet, which we know as Earth, develops into a geophysical form which can
support life. The laws of physics and
chemistry rule this purely physical or material era from the Big Bang to the
development of planet Earth, but they permit of contingency. Life is then initiated, or as we say, life
emerges on earth. All life is complex,
but initially life is of the simplest form, ruled by instinct. This form of life then freely evolves more
complex and elaborate forms, which are still instinctive or hard wired, by a
process involving natural selection.
Instinctive life has a greater degree of freedom to evolve than did
matter. It can experiment with different forms in different environments.
Then
there is the emergence of conscious life, based on the more evolved
instinctive forms. Conscious or psychic
level life retains many instinctive activities but such life is able to apply
empirical logic or instrumental rationality to some of its areas of
activity. It is able, to varying
degrees, to learn from experience.
Psychic level life has far greater freedom of action than instinctive
life had. Psychic level life includes
Homo Sapiens. Primitive
Homo Sapiens can be said to initially develop mores or rules of conduct, as
distinct from morality, if morality is accepted to be a consequence of the
deontological perception of what morally ought-to-be.
Most
recently there is the emergence of spiritual level life in Homo Sapiens. This is the
form of man which for the first time has a deontological perception of moral
imperatives. This capacity is spiritual
in that it enables the perception by man of something which, when it is
perceived, has no being in the real world.
It is perceived only as an ought-to-be.
This ought-to-be enters the world of real entities only when and if a
person translates it into an ought-to-do.
Man thus becomes `the bridge between the ideal and the real world’, in
the words of Nicolai Hartmann.
There
is evidence of the emergence of a deontological moral value-consciousness in the
Greek world as recently as the Sixth Century BC. The evidence comes directly from Xenophanes. Xenophanes was
an Ionian, born about 560 BC. He was a
philosopher, poet and a rhapsode, a professional reciter of the Homeric
poems. He eventually settled in Elea, in
southern
Xenophanes
expressed his revulsion at the awe in which Homer’s poems were held, declaring that `Both Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods all things that are
shameful and a reproach among mankind: theft, adultery and mutual
deception’. Prior to this time the
immoral activities of the Olympian pantheon had been accepted without
demur.
Xenophanes
appears to have expressed his emergent moral value-consciousness. It could also have been the emergence of this
moral value-consciousness which was responsible for the initiation of science
and Philosophy in
The
emergence of man with a spiritual capacity is the most recent
instance of emergence. The capacity is
spiritual in the sense that it is completely independent of matter. What ought-to-be has no material existence
until its perception persuades some person to bring it into existence. The ought-to-be can only persuade, it cannot
compel. The freedom of spiritual level
man from the operation of the deontological moral law is absolute. I identify spiritual level man as Homo
Sapiens Ethicus.
This
series of emergents, the physical, instinctive, conscious or psychic, and the
spiritual, with each new level being built upon the previous level, and with
each new level exercising a greater degree of freedom than the previous level,
has the form of a process involving increasing self-creation. Each new emergent level only emerges when the
previous level has evolved or developed to a stage where it can provide a base
for the new emergent. The direction of
overall development is clearly towards greater freedom and consequently, a
greater degree of self-creation. The
total freedom of the spiritual or deontological level permits of the total self-creation
of a moral community or culture or, alternatively, of its total
self-destruction.
The
natural theologian, seeking to find a motive for the existence of the world,
has an abundance of evidence. The
findings of modern Cosmology provide evidence of the evolution of the cosmos
and of the solar system and the planet Earth.
There is also the evidence of the evolution of life on earth, together
with the evidence of the phenomenon of emergence. These facts
provide sufficient evidence for the thesis that the cosmos is in process. When Hartmann’s ontology is taken into account, together with his
phenomenology of man, the direction in which this process is moving becomes
clear. Hartmann’s phenomenology provides
evidence of man’s spiritual nature, his perception of the moral ought-to-be and
his orientation towards the Good.
Hartmann’s work will be dealt with at greater length in the next
chapter.
With
the evidence now available, the natural theologian is in a position to
postulate that God has initiated the process of the cosmos with the purpose of
enabling the self-creation of an entity which is similar to God. This is the only sufficient reason which
justifies the initiation by a self-subsistent entity of a process which would
bring imperfect contingent things into being as a stage in a process leading to
the possible self-creation of a self-existent entity. The recognition that the process of the
cosmos is as yet incomplete enables the natural theologian to dissolve the
antinomy which frustrated his predecessors.
He is able to accommodate Aristotle’s argument that God could not love man as such, and
to propose that the process of the cosmos can only be the process of theosis -
the process of the free self-creation of Deity, an entity which is similar to God.
This
is a speculative hypothesis, but it provides the first explanation of the
phenomenon of Emergent Evolution. It is
consistent with the findings of modern cosmology and it resolves the ancient
antinomy between the nature of the world and the nature of the self-subsistent
entity called God.
Chapter
Three - THE WORK OF NICOLAI HARTMANN.
I
now want to turn to a consideration of the work of Nicolai Hartmann. Only
Hartmann’s `Ethics’ (1932), and his `New Ways of Ontology’ (1953)
are available in full in English translation, but his other works are the
subject of many English language papers and an overall exposition of his work
has recently become available in Werkmeister’s `Nicolai Hartmann’s New
Ontology’ (1990). I will outline
that part of Hartmann’s work, as it is available to us, which bears on the
subject of this thesis. As will be seen,
I rely on Hartmann’s phenomenological work to support my thesis.
Hartmann has provided a detailed analysis of man’s spiritual
nature, which is all the more interesting as he was an atheist who, whilst
recognising that man had a spiritual nature, also denied that there was any
spirit beyond man. Hartmann argued that
if God existed, then ethics was an illusion, but if human moral consciousness
existed, then God was an illusion. He
concluded this because he could not admit of a Divine and a human teleology
co-existing. (1932, I, 288) While I have
great respect for his phenomenological analysis of human nature, I have to
differ from Hartmann’s position on the compatibility between the exercise of
human freedom to set and pursue ends, based on a consciousness of what morally
ought to be, and the operation of a divine teleology external to man. God could clearly initiate a process which
could lead to the self-creation of an entity similar to God, which would
require that the entities in the penultimate stage of the process exercise the
freedom to set and pursue ends based upon a consciousness of what morally ought
to be. The divine teleology would simply
need to be other than fully determined.
Hartmann’s view of a divine teleology is obviously based on a concept of
a divine plan of creation which would reduce mankind’s role to that of mere
puppets in a pre-determined play. There
would be a conflict between the human exercise of freedom and such a divine
teleology, but Hartmann would need to show, and not merely assume, that there
could be a sufficient reason for God to initiate such a rigid plan. Hartmann also assumes that any divine
teleology involved in a process of direct creation would be deterministic. This is not necessarily the case. A teleology may have an end in view as a
desirable outcome, while allowing a great deal of freedom in the way that
outcome could be achieved. An analogy
would be a postgraduate thesis in the Humanities, where the telos of a higher
degree may or may not be obtained, and many different routes could be followed
in pursuit of the degree.
A
divine teleology which simply established a desirable objective could also
allow a human teleology to function freely.
A divine teleology which intended a process of the free self-creation of
Deity would, of necessity, have no point of conflict with
any human teleology.
The teleological nexus and the causal nexus
Hartmann argues that the causal nexus, which affects matter,
is superinformable, that is, it is not a closed process but is one open to
further determination. He argues that
the teleological nexus, which man can employ, is not one which is open to
further determination. He maintains that
teleological determination is the highest form of determination, so that no
other form could rise above it and consequently, that if the world was ordered
teleologically by a divine will then, he argues, `the human will would have no
determinative superiority over subhuman processes’. (1953,129) This could be true if the divine will was
rigidly deterministic, driving the process of the cosmos along a predetermined
path towards a pre-set outcome. It would
not be true if the divine purpose was the free self-creation of another being,
which was similar to God. Hartmann does
not consider this possibility, although his work uncovered and identified many
of the phenomena which point in that direction.
The
causal nexus is superinformable by the addition of further causal factors. Hartmann is correct to argue that it is wrong to see the
causal nexus as a direct relationship between a single cause and its effect.
This common but incorrect view of the normal operation of the causal nexus can
be illustrated by a consideration of the procedure of a laboratory
experiment. Every effort is made to
limit the effects of other possible causes from the effect of the particular
cause that the experiment is designed to isolate. In contrast to a laboratory situation, most
naturally occurring physical effects are the outcome of the intersection of
multiple physical causes.
Hartmann argues that instead of a direct relationship between
a single cause and its effect, at each stage of a causal process there are a
number of determining factors which interact to bring about a result. To this multiplicity of causal factors, new
determinants can be added, and it is this feature of causal determination which
enables the human will to play a part, as long as the human person understands
the physical determinants and so is able to utilise them in the achievement of
his will. In fact both the rigidity in
operation, and the openness to additional determination, of the causal nexus,
are necessary to the human direction of events.
Hartmann denies that the teleological nexus is similarly
superinformable, and he maintains that if the world was ordered teleologically,
man would be unable to engage in any useful activity, as he could not insert
his purposes into the course of events.
This
is the basis of his objection to the concept of a God acting teleologically in
the world, which, he maintains, would leave no room for humans to act
freely. He analyses the teleological
nexus as comprising three phases, the setting of the purpose and the selection
of means, both of which phases take place only in the consciousness, and occur
prior to the third phase which is the realisation of the end by the means. This third phase utilises the causal nexus
and takes place in time. (1953, 130-2)
As
Ramsey comments on Hartmann’s analysis of teleology, in the finalistic form of
causality the relation of end and means is substituted for that of cause and
effect. The end or purpose, which is the
last entity in the series, is what determines the nature of the means. Ramsey acknowledges that in a cosmic
teleology, if the final end of the world was to be firmly fixed, any
subordinate finalism of man could not operate.
But, he argues, if the end which is sought is such that some of the
means necessary to its attainment have to possess free-will, then this imposes
a logical limitation on any superior teleological determinism imposed even by
an omnipotent being. (1935, 211-4) My
thesis proposes that the final end of the world is not rigidly fixed, but is
set as a broad overall objective to be attained, if it is attained, in as free
a manner as possible. This necessarily
involves the exercise of human free-will, in which man is one of a number of
potential contributors to the end which is desired, but not determined, by
God. The end desired by God is a
self-created entity, the production of which could logically not be rigidly
predetermined.
Hartmann’s analysis of Spiritual Being.
Regardless
of Hartmann’s anti-theistic bias, his analysis of the nature of
spiritual being, and of the role of man as a spiritual being, is a valuable
contribution to knowledge. As a
phenomenologist, Hartmann is concerned only with spirit as it is found within
the limits of direct human experience.
He maintains that man is the only spiritual being which we can
know. He denies that spirit is identical
with consciousness, although he recognises that spirit and consciousness are
related.
He
distinguishes between human spiritual consciousness, and the consciousness
which some of the higher animals enjoy. The higher animal’s consciousness is
recognised by him as intelligent, to a degree, but it is a consciousness which
is wholly involved in the relation of the animal to its immediate
surroundings. In his ontology Hartmann identifies the stratum of being which possesses a
non-spiritual consciousness, as the psychic.
This stratum of being operates above the biological and below the
spiritual stratum. As a purely psychic,
non-spiritual being, an animal is fully intent on that which it seeks or
fears.
Hartmann
describes the animal’s non-spiritual consciousness as one which is closed in
upon itself, as a central point, so that the animal holds, in its own world, a
position different from that which it holds in the real world. In contrast, human spiritual consciousness no
longer orients the world only to itself, but also orients itself to the world.
(James 1960,210-11)
For
Hartmann, spirit is the specifically human in the human
being, in contrast to the individual’s other material, organic and mental or
psychic aspects. The common limitation
of the essence of man to the rational (in its common meaning of calculative
reasoning), in his view, overlooks the active side of spiritual life which
manifests itself in man’s willing, acting and reacting, loving and hating, and
in knowing, thinking and reflecting. (Werkmeister 1990,157) It could also be said that the common
understanding of the rational is a diminished perception of the nature of man’s
rational principle. It was Aristotle who defined man as the rational animal, and his
original concept of man’s rational principle included that which persuades man
to do what he ought, man’s practical wisdom.
Hartmann also argues that individual humans grow into a
common spiritual sphere which is more than the sum of the individuals which
comprise it, a sphere of historical or objective spirit. While the individual has his own mental life,
Hartmann points out that each one’s thoughts can be thought by others, as
thought is intrinsically objective and can be understood by others. Beliefs, convictions and ways of viewing
things can also be shared, and all of these belong to the sphere of the
spirit. While consciousness separates
people, Hartmann maintains that the spirit unites them. (Werkmeister
1990,158)
Hartmann distinguishes three forms of spirit, personal
spirit, objective spirit and objectified spirit. Only personal spirit has an ethos, exercises
responsibility, and can be held accountable for its actions. It can be at fault or praiseworthy, as it
possesses consciousness, self-consciousness and will. Hartmann regards personal spirit as temporal,
as in his view it dies with the person.
His second form of spirit, objective spirit, is also temporal, but it
has a history, so it is not limited to a single lifetime. It is the spirit of a living group, a
community or nation, which exists and vanishes with the group. This common spiritual sphere, which Hartmann
identifies as a form of objective spirit, appears to be the fundamental basis
of a human culture. The third form of
spirit, objectified spirit, on the other hand, transcends the limits of
temporality. It has become objectified
in some `matter’, as in practical arts or in literature. Spirit, in Hartmann’s view, exists in its
accomplishments. It is continuously
seeking and finding new ways of expressing itself, and is always creative and
in process. (Werkmeister 1990,159-60)
Personal
spirit occupies a unique position as it can see within itself, as
self-consciousness demonstrates. While
the individual organism unfolds what is determined by its DNA, the individual
personal spirit always has to make itself what it is. As with consciousness, it comes into being
anew in every individual and, Hartmann maintains, it is not inherited. It is not the unfolding of what is already
given but it is developed, as practical wisdom, only by the individual’s
efforts. (Werkmeister 1990,162)
Human
spiritual consciousness, Hartmann argues, only begins with man’s escape from the
tyranny of instincts, and is ultimately realised with his achievement of an
objective relationship to the world. The
subject-object relationship is regarded by him as the characteristic creation
of spirit. In its objectification of
things and events, the subject-object relationship is what gives meaning to the
world. The human individual is thus a
creative factor in the world, in a process in which he is both forming and
being formed. Man creates the forms and
structures of a new stratum of being, a world of spirit in a previously
spiritless world, and in the process he himself emerges as a person. Personality, Hartmann argues, is the basic
characteristic of the spiritual being.
The world exists for a person in a more profound way than just as an
object for a subject. The person is not
only aware of events, he is actively involved in them, and he contributes to
his own formation by his activities.(Werkmeister 1990,163-5)
In
the activities by which man contributes to his own formation, he also enters
into relationships of shared experiences with other persons, of joint action
and solidarity, and of common responsibility.
In doing this he transcends his mere subjectivity. In his relationship to others he becomes more
aware, from their reactions to him, of the bases of his own actions. He grows in his self-knowledge in this
process, although, Hartmann maintains, he seldom knows himself fully. All man’s initiatives, effective
interventions and creativity, rely upon the knowledge of self, which Socrates challenged man to acquire. (Werkmeister 1990,165-7)
Hartmann identifies man’s anticipatory insight as one
significant factor which raises him above spiritless consciousness, with its
limitation to the present, which characterises the higher animals. Man’s spiritual consciousness, which provides
this anticipatory insight, is for Hartmann `the Archimedean point’ from which
spirit begins to move the world. Spirit,
he argues, is essential to man, and the superiority of spirit is to be seen in
man’s power to direct the forces of nature, and in his ability to set goals and
to select the means for their realisation.
The forces of nature, Hartmann maintains, cannot oppose the action of
spirit, as long as man understands those forces and respects their nature. It is this superiority of spirit which enables
man to undertake purposive actions. (Werkmeister 1990,167-8)
Hartmann’s
view is consistent with my thesis of human self-creation. Prior to the emergence of spirit, man appears to have possessed only a
spiritless consciousness. Homo Sapiens has existed for at least 40 millennia, perhaps for
one hundred thousand years, but man’s spiritual and intellectual advance is
comparatively recent. Such a
circumstance is consistent with Homo Sapiens being involved in a process of
gradual self-creation. There was
usually some material progress, over the
millennia, in all the cultures of the world, and the pace of that material
development usually increased during the final three millennia BC. However there was little human mastery of
nature, other than the use of irrigation, prior to the scientific
investigations of the physical world which began with the classical Greeks.
While
man’s spiritual nature enables him to undertake purposive action, it is a
different aspect of man’s spiritual nature, his moral value-feeling, which of
necessity has an effect upon the goals man sets himself. This is the feeling by which everything man
observes appears to him to be value related.
For Hartmann, it is an essential characteristic of a person that
he is only able to will that which appears to him to be of value in some
respect, as Socrates had maintained.
At the same time no man is predetermined towards the greater good. He experiences each value as an `ought to
be’, and he has to choose between conflicting values. (Werkmeister
1990,169)
Hartmann maintains that it is man, and only man, as a
personal and spiritual being, who is capable of pursuing values and of
realising what ought to be. Man is the
only moral being, the only mediator of values, that we know of in the
world. Only in men do real determination
and ideal determination come together, and it is man’s task to resolve the
conflict between them. The ability to do
this constitutes his freedom, and it is this freedom, this power to decide for
or against the good, which is of his essence.
Man is the only being in the world for whom moral values have any
meaning. (Werkmeister 1990, 169) In his perception of moral values, and his
power to realise them, man is the one point of connection between the real and
the ideal world. Hartmann sees man as a
citizen of two worlds, the real and the ideal, and it is up to man to unite
them. (Jones 1960, 215)
Man, for Hartmann, is thus a unique creation, with an established
purpose, which is to understand the world and to bring into being a world which
exists now only as an ideal.
Hartmann’s `objective spirit’ is historically real and
developing. It encompasses custom, law,
language, the political life, forms of production, the status of the sciences,
beliefs, morals, knowledge and the arts, and predominant world views, whether
they are of mythology, religion or philosophy.
It is a sphere of spiritual community which transcends individuals and
provides the basis for their growth and differentiation. It provides the unity of tradition. For
Hartmann this spiritual community is the great self-evident fact which we
seldom notice because we are immersed in it.
He gives as outstanding examples of such spiritual communities, the
spirit of Hellenism and of the Renaissance, but he also maintains that the
objective spirit is always the spirit of the particular times. It is part of the real world which the
individual finds already formed and into which he grows. (Werkmeister 1990,
170-4)
Hartmann argues that the individual is normally able to
participate in the common spiritual life of the community, but that it is only
when he contributes to that life that he transcends what he receives. This is clear in the sciences but is regarded
by Hartmann as most impressive in the field of religion. Every spirit of the time, or Zeitgeist,
he maintains, entails a dominant view of the world and of the place of man in
that world. Such an overall worldview is
never solely the product of an individual thinker. It is a common property into which the
individual grows, and to which he may in turn contribute. (Werkmeister
1990,173-9)
While
personal spirit necessarily acquires its initial content by growing within a
community, the development of the historical, objective spirit depends upon the
sharing of those ideas which only individuals can initiate. The subjective spirit of the individual and
the objective spirit of the group are thus both necessary for man’s
development. That which is genuine in
the objective spirit of the community is then separated out in the historical
process. Hartmann here accepts Hegel’s thesis that the objective spirit
in history constitutes the Supreme Court of the world. (Werkmeister 1990,180-3)
This
living historical spirit gives rise to institutions and structures in which it
objectifies itself. These formations,
which Hartmann regards as objectified spirit, are the result of the
personal spirit’s creative activity in its relationship to the objective spirit
of the community in which the individual operates. These institutions and structures can outlast
particular episodes of creative activity.
Instances of objectified spirit, as distinct from objective spirit, may
be found in literature and other arts, which for Hartmann can represent the
objectified spirit at its best. (Werkmeister 1990,184-6) Objectified spirit and objective spirit both
have their source in the operations of personal spirit.
Hartmann’s Ethics and the role of Values.
Hartmann seeks to clarify what is meant by ethics, as being
concerned with norms, with the justification of moral commandments, and with
valuations. He recognises that our
senses are able to provide a corrective of an apriori cognition in other areas,
but it is clear that such a corrective is not available to us in the field of
morals.
However,
he maintains, it is reasonable for us to expect that there should be a
dependable criterion of the good which ethics requires us to pursue.
(Werkmeister 1990, 192-3)
Hartmann asks whether there can be such a thing as a morality
which is universally binding, and also how a philosophical ethics could prevail
over the apparent plurality of morals, to provide a unity of ethics. His response is that there has to be such a
universally binding morality, as ethics presupposes a theory of values, an
axiology. This is because the purposes
of human actions, the oughtness of moral demands and the character of norms,
all have their basis in values. He
maintains that we cannot set anything as a goal, or recognise anything as
imposing a demand upon us, which we do not regard as valuable. In the case of moral values, he maintains
that our appreciation of them develops over time. Because of this process of development he
accepts Nietzsche’s dictum that we do not yet fully know what good and
evil are. He sees our value-consciousness
as a developmental process, as something which grows with the enhancement of
moral life. Our value-apriori, he says,
gives to everything we encounter a value-disvalue accent which is independent
of logic. We have, in Pascal’s terms, an
`a priori ordre du coeur, a logique du coeur’ (the heart’s faculty of the
immediate apprehension of value), which we impose upon things. (Werkmeister
1990, 194-6)
Hartmann also adopts Socrates’ insight that no one does evil for the sake of evil,
but that a person always has something of value in mind when acting. This entails a conflict of values rather than
a conflict of value versus disvalue. The
problem for the individual arises from the pursuit of lower values, which indicates
the need for an order of rank of values.
He maintains that we also have an apriori power of discrimination
between conflicting values, providing an ability to discern the higher value. He admits that it is difficult to express
this discernment of a rank of values in strict conceptual form, and argues that
theories which seek to deduce lower values from higher values, as does Kant’s categorical imperative, are in error. (Werkmeister
1990,197-8)
It
is Hartmann’s view of the nature of values that they are real
only in part, having a place `between Being and non-Being’. He argues that the realisation of a value is
itself a value, and the absence of its realisation is a disvalue. Because all values depend upon persons for their
realisation, this makes each person a value object. The measure of a man’s personality is thus to
be found in his purposive activity for the realisation of values. He argues that this is the ground of the
qualitative superiority of man over every other manifestation of reality in the
world. At the same time he recognises
that there are values which cannot be reduced to activity alone, such as love,
truthfulness and loyalty.
The
Good, in Hartmann’s view, is neither the ideal Being of values, nor is it the
Being of what is valuable. It is the
teleology of values in the real world, that is, man’s purposive action for the
realisation of values. (Werkmeister 1990, 199-203) The Good, Hartmann argues, always lies in the
direction of higher values, and evil in the direction of lower values. All genuine oughtness, in his view, is
positive, and it demands construction rather than destruction, the creation of
the higher out of the lower. The Good
also requires the selection of values in accordance with the principle of the
height of values, an issue which always varies in every experiential
situation. There can therefore be no
fixed table of values. There is no
guarantee that the higher value will be realised, as there is nothing which
compels a man to realise, in the sense of make real, the Good. The possibility of the Good is always,
therefore, also the possibility of evil.
Man’s free will consists in his freedom to choose either good or evil.
(Werkmeister 1990, 202-5)
Hartmann distinguishes three strata of specifically moral
values. The first include the values of
justness, courage, self-mastery, and the Aristotelian virtues. The second stratum includes charity or
brotherly love, truthfulness, faithfulness, trust, modesty and humility. He recognises the role of the Christian ethic in affecting the content of this
stratum. The highest stratum includes
love of the remote, to which he pays particular attention, as well as the
development of personality and of personal love. Love of the remote pertains to the future, as
all morally active life is `life into the future and for the future’. In this connection he credits Plato with the
recognition of the value of a striving which transcends the present, the
passion for an idea, which moves man.
The realisation of envisioned ideals is seen by Hartmann as man’s great
historical responsibility. Love of the
remote develops a human solidarity of a new and greater kind. It is in the form of a process, in which we
recognise our responsibility for the future.
There is no return of the love of the remote. Its moving force is the ethical ideal - the
idea of the human being as he ought to be.
It is a real and creative power in life, an anticipation of new values
and `the vision of a humanity that is in every respect more advanced and more
complete than is the present’. (Werkmeister 1990, 208-9) In the terms of this thesis, the love of the
remote is the spiritual impetus towards the realisation, through a process of
self-creation, of our human moral potential.
This self-creation operates primarily through the agency of a particular
moral culture. Differences in moral
norms between different societies reflect the effects of the moral insights of
individuals within those societies. The
process of moral development which Hartmann adverts to, and Nietzsche’s dictum that we do not yet fully know what good and
evil are, are both consistent with the process of human self-creation. In this process of self-creation no moral
culture has yet attained the ideal.
As
Werkmeister comments, it is the essence of values that they contain an ought,
an ideal ought-to-be, which determines an ought-to-do for man. Values, in themselves, are powerless in the
real world, and depend on a subject for their realisation. In man’s value-determined acts, the
ought-to-be is transformed into an ought-to-do.
The human subject thus becomes the administrator of the ought in the
real world, as the intersection point of two heterogenous determinations, of
the determinations of value and of efficient causality. (1984, xiv-xvi) This ought-to-do is both a collective and an
individual responsibility. At the
personal level spirit confronts itself in the form of self-awareness. It is a categorial novum for each individual,
who must make himself into what he ultimately is. In this emergence of personal spirit, the world itself is also being
transformed. (Werkmeister 1990, 163-4)
Man
is free to ignore this `ought-to-do’.
But, as James comments in relation to Hartmann’s thesis, man’s freedom is a two edged sword. It allows him to either grant or to deny the
claims of value, to choose higher or lower value, moral good or moral
evil. While even the higher animals are
guided and protected by their instinctive natures, man alone is in danger from
himself. All other beings have only to
contend with external threats. But man
bears within himself either self-realisation or self-destruction. (1960,
220-1) Man is able to enhance or to
diminish himself. As Smith comments, it is the peculiar nature of the human
that his structure contains something which is not simply a given, but a power
of determining himself by his choices.
Man is not restricted to the possible realisation merely of a specific
potential, but has an enormous range of choice within his given nature.
(1954,596)
Smith asks why Hartmann appeared reluctant to give more consideration, in
his ontology, to man’s teleological concern for his own being and purpose. Hartmann had readily recognised that man was
`an essential being, well rooted in the cosmos’, and had also acknowledged that
man’s structure provided an insight into the structure of reality. Hartmann had constantly referred to man’s
quest for meaning and purpose, and to man’s rejection of meaninglessness, but,
in Smith’s opinion, Hartmann had avoided treating these particular phenomena
with the seriousness they deserved. (1954, 600)
The
reference to the relation between man’s structure and the structure of reality,
is a reference to Hartmann’s ontology.
Hartmann had argued that the structure of the real world consists of a
series of strata, with the physical stratum as the foundation, supporting the
biological stratum, which is a superinformation of part of the physical
stratum, that is to say, the biological level utilises the matter of the
physical stratum, but extends its potential by the addition of information.
The
biological stratum in turn supports the psychic stratum, which is a
superimposition upon the biological stratum, rather than a superinformation of
it. That is to say, the psychic level
does not utilise the matter of the biological level in the way the biological
level incorporates the functions of the physical stratum, but it is
superimposed upon the biological level.
The psychic stratum in its turn supports the spiritual stratum, which
again is a superimposition as distinct from a superinformation. Man is the only being which incorporates all
four strata of the real, the higher animals only incorporating three. (Hartmann
1953,Ch.9)
Hartmann brings to our attention man’s quest for meaning and
purpose, his orientation towards the future, his value-perception, his
inability to will what does not appear to him to be of value, his perception of
what morally ought-to-be, his recognition that an ought-to-be imposes upon him
an ought-to-do, and his consequent role as the potential bridge between the
ideal and the real world. Man is also
free to adopt or to neglect that role.
These phenomena point to the likelihood that the primary purpose of man
is to realise the ideal ought-to-be, the realisation of which will entail the
completion of the process of the creation of the world and of man’s own
self-creation. It is difficult to
conceive of any other conclusion which can make sense of these complex and
diverse characteristics. Hartmann did not provide an explanation of the genesis
of these peculiar human characteristics, but he realised that their recognition
could lead to theistic conceptions. The
identification of this possibility was enough to make him turn away from the
discussion of purpose in the universe.
James comments upon Hartmann’s opposition to a conception of the cosmos as
purposive, and upon Hartmann’s assumption that if a line of reasoning appeared
to lead to a theistic concept of the world, this in itself provided a
sufficient ground for abandoning the line of thought. (1960, 226)
Stanton
Coit, who translated Hartmann’s early work into English,
acknowledged that the original source of his interest in Hartmann’s work
stemmed from a critique of the German original by Sidney Hook. Hook
represented an antagonistic school of philosophic thought to Hartmann, but he
had conceded that as an analyst of the ideals for and by which men live,
Hartmann had only one great predecessor, namely Aristotle. Hook
regarded Hartmann’s Ethics as the most important treatise on ethics of
the century. (1932, I, 11). In the
Ethics, Hartmann says of man:
`It
is his knowledge of good and evil which puts him on a level with divinity; it
is his ability and authority to help in determining the course of events, to
co-operate in the workshop of reality.
It is his training in his world-vocation, the demand upon him to be a
colleague of the demiurge in the creation of the world. For
the creation of the world is not completed so long as he has not fulfilled his
creative function in it. But he
procrastinates. For he is not ready, he
is not standing on the summit of his humanity.
Humanity must first be fulfilled in him.
The creative work which is incumbent upon him in the world terminates in
his self-creation, in the fulfilment of his ethos.’ (1932, I, 31)
This
statement seems at first sight to sit strangely with Hartmann’s professed anti-theism, but it is firmly in the
Feuerbachian tradition.
Feuerbach
exalted man at the expense of God. He
regarded God as merely the abstracted essence of man, and sought to replace the
love of God by the love of man. He
failed to realise that the status he attributed to man existed primarily in
potential, a potential which is yet to be realised. Even though Hartmann recognised man’s
creative and self-creative role, and man’s role in the realisation of the moral
ought-to-be, he was unable to move forward to the view that man’s purpose in
the process of the cosmos was related to the completion of a totally free phase
of the overall process of self-creation.
If
we accept that the purpose of the process of the cosmos, if achieved, is to produce a self-created God, I would adopt
Hartmann’s statement quoted above in support of my thesis as
to the role which man has in creation.
This role involves, for each individual, the completion of the
self-creation of himself as a person, the making of a contribution to the
creation of a culture in which his humanity can flourish, and finally sharing
in the creation of the appropriate circumstances for the emergence of the self-created Deity. Mankind will somehow participate in the
emergence of Deity, just as all the lower strata of reality participate in
man.
Hartmann accepts Kant’s view that philosophy is the search for the answer to
the questions as to what we can know, what ought we do, and what we can
hope. He regards the second question as
more difficult than the first, as the objects of knowledge confront us
directly, and we are able, in the search for answers to the first question, to
fall back on experience. With regard to
the second question, he makes the important point that the difficulty we
experience in seeking an answer arises from the fact that we are seeking to
understand something which is not yet real, and which can only come into
existence by our own actions. He does
not focus to any extent on the question of what we can hope. (1932, I, 32)
The
question as to what we ought to do, leads Hartmann to a further question, as to what is valuable in
human life. He argues that this question
includes the question of what we ought to do, as we cannot know what we ought
to do if we are not in a position to decide how to act in situations which
require us to decide between competing values.
He
maintains that the question as to what is valuable in human life also has a
wider metaphysical significance, as he recognises that the meaning of human existence
is not exhausted in man’s creative vocation, but is also to be found in the
meaning that the world has for man. In
man alone the world has its consciousness, its `existence for itself’. Man is to the world what no other creature
is. Despite his cosmic smallness, he
enjoys metaphysical greatness, and superiority to other forms of being. He is, for Hartmann, `the subject among
objects, the recognisor, the knower, the experiencer, the participator: he is
the mirror of Being and of the world, and, understood this way, he is the
world’s meaning’. (1932, I, 37-8) I
would go a step further than Hartmann and argue that we cannot know what is
valuable in human life until we know what is the Good of man. The Good of man involves the completion of
the process of the self-creation of Deity, which can be achieved through the perfection of
human moral culture, or as Hartmann might put it, through the perfection of our
objective spirit. The perfection of our
moral culture should provide the platform for the emergence of Deity.
Hartmann affirms that there exists an ethical ideal sphere
which is neither manufactured or invented by man, but which man has the
capacity to comprehend. (1932, I, 226)
Because man has access to this sphere, and so sets up his own ends,
Hartmann maintains that: `Ethics does and must do what in the eyes of the pious
may be blasphemy; it gives to man an attribute of
Divinity. To him it restores what he,
mistaking his own nature, discarded and ascribed to Divinity.’ (1932, I,
282) From the perspective of this thesis
it could not be considered blasphemous to recognise man’s possession of a
spiritual consciousness as an attribute of that Divinity, as Deity, which is in the process of self-creation.
Hartmann does not pursue the origin of the sphere of value to
which man has access. He makes no
proposal as to the origin of matter, life, psyche or spirit, and while he
recognises life, psyche and spirit as distinct levels of being which make up
the stratified structure of the world, he regards their occurrence simply as
mystery. He also has no explanation as
to why man operates as the instantiator of value in the world.
An explanation of these phenomena.
If
it is the case that human moral freedom characterises the penultimate step in a
process which could lead to the self-creation of Deity, we have an explanation which provides a coherent
and consistent explanation of all the phenomena which Hartmann diligently identified. To appreciate this we need only to ask how
God could go about initiating the production of Deity.
If
God’s purpose is to initiate a process which could result in the self-creation
of Deity, as an entity similar to God, this purpose could be
achieved by initiating the processes of the material world, of life and of
psychic life, with each successive stage being initiated when the previous
process had freely produced a platform suitable for the following stage. Once a sufficiently intelligent entity had
been evolved by these processes it would be necessary to provide that entity
with some clear, but merely persuasive guidance towards the good, by endowing
it with novel spiritual faculties, capacities which have no parallel in any
evolved characteristics of any other species, namely access to the sphere of
value, the capacity to distinguish higher from lower values, and an orientation
towards the good - all characteristics which are peculiar to man. These characteristics enable man to exercise
creativity in the spiritual order, including the creation of ethical systems
and of cultures within which man can expand his spiritual potential for
good. Such an outcome is not predetermined,
however, and these same characteristics could also lead, as they have done,
either to the concentration camp and the gulag, or to a more moral society.
Possession
of spiritual faculties enables man, if he will, to develop his personality and
his creativity. The exercise of these faculties
involves the exercise of personal freedom, and enables man to will the
good. Such personal freedom is dependent
upon man not being determined by the good, if the good is to be freely
achieved. Man can be endowed with no
more precise determination towards the good than the firm orientation towards
it, which Socrates discovered in man, together with the possession of a
sense of value, which is also a sense of the relative value of competing
values, if the achievement of a completely moral society is to be a free
process.
The
attribute of personal freedom is recognised by Hartmann as a necessary constituent of a moral being. He raises the question as to how such a
freedom can exist in a world of natural causality. His resolution of this problem is the
demonstration that, together with the order of nature, `a second order, that of
the Ought’, arises as a categorically higher determination than the order of
nature. Ethical actuality is realised by
the operation of both determinations.
This then raises the further question as to how personal freedom can
exist in the face of these two determinations, and whether, if man is free with
regard to one of them, he can be other than determined by the other. (1932,
III, 206-7)
Hartmann maintains that this difficulty can be solved only if
the individual exercises a personal determinant, which provides the freedom to
determine the will, as a third type of determination, higher than the
others. The determination of the ought
is not enough on its own to determine the will.
It
is the third type of personal determination which alone provides personal
freedom. This is the capacity to either
commit oneself, or fail to commit oneself to the determination of the ought. It is only amongst values, of all of
actuality, that such a distinct absence of precise determination prevails, and
this enables man to be the `mediator of the Ought in the realm of existence’.
(1932, III, 208-12) The complete
individual human freedom to determine one’s own will is an absolute
freedom. This absolute freedom is
necessary for the process of the self-creation of Deity to ultimately be a free
process.
Hartmann recognises the operation of human teleology, but
maintains that there has to be a conflict between it and any Divine
teleology. His concept of a possible
cosmic or Divine teleology is of a system with fixed ends, in which the only
attitude proper to man would be fatalism.
He envisages a cosmic teleology as necessarily excluding any other
teleology, including man’s. He maintains
that `A choice must be made between a teleology of nature and existence in
general, and a teleology of man. The alternative
is a genuine and complete disjunction’. (1932, I, 288) At the same time he recognises that human
teleology is not certain, because of failings in human foresight and knowledge,
and also because there is `an interlacing of finalistic trains among
themselves’ (1932, I, 298) as people pursue antagonistic purposes.
Hartmann makes it clear that his argument against a cosmic or
Divine teleology can only apply in the case of such a finalism being a perfect
determination, which would necessarily exclude any other finalism. His hidden assumption is that if there is any
Divine teleology, it can only apply to a process of direct and pre-determined
creation. He does not consider the
possibility of a process of self-creation, of which the individual’s
self-creation is only an aspect.
Hartmann’s argument would not apply to the operation of a Divine
teleology which deliberately initiated such a free human finalism.
Hartmann’s antinomies.
Hartmann concedes that genuine, that is, insoluble
antinomies, prove nothing against the possible co-existence of what is
antinomically divided, and that they may only prove that we are not able to
comprehend their co-existence. He then
examines five antinomies between ethics and religion, in which both religion
and ethics treat of the same subject matter, and which he regards as fatal to
religion. I will deal with each of these
in turn, as they are set out by Hartmann. (1932, III, 262-74)
The
first antinomy concerns the religious tendency to look beyond this world to
another, a tendency which, he maintains, can extend to a point where this world
is regarded as having no values of its own, and where the only values of
inherent worth are to be found in the beyond.
He
maintains that ethics, by contrast, is wholly committed to this life, and that
this commitment is contrary to the religious commitment to the next. I doubt whether this disjunction commonly
exists. Commitment to the next world
does not necessarily imply abandonment of the values of this world, but of the
disvalues of this world. The activities
undertaken by Mother Theresa and her co-workers are a case in point. Hartmann claims that this antinomy is insoluble, as the two
tendencies are strictly contradictory and that one of them must necessarily be
illusory. It can be conceded that a
religious commitment, if it was taken to the extreme of regarding the world as
of no value, would be based upon an illusion.
It is not the commitment of this thesis.
The
second antinomy is said by Hartmann to intersect, rather than coincide with the
first. It is that ethics is concerned
finally with man, that is to say, only with man as its end, while religious
thought is concerned only with God as its end.
He maintains that for anything, even God, to `take precedence of Man,
would be ethically perverted’. But for
religion, he maintains, only God can be the aim of all aims, and that `as
compared with God everything, even man, is nothing’. This antinomy appears to depend upon there
being an unbridgeable gulf between man and God, which was Aristotle’s position, but it is a position which Christianity challenged.
It is a gulf which disappears if man represents the penultimate step in
the production of Deity, a production in which man can freely
participate. It would be a false type of
religious thought which was concerned only with God, to the exclusion of
man. It is not the usual thought of
Christianity, nor of this thesis.
The
third antinomy is concerned with the origin of values. The autonomous natural worth of ethical
values is taken by Hartmann to be the necessary foundation of every system of
ethics. The essence of moral values, he
maintains, is that they `have convincing power in themselves - and are
self-evident’. Against this he places
the religious antithesis that the moral claim of the ought is the will of
God. I would argue that there is no
antithesis. The self-evidence of moral
values has to stem from their foundation in the moral law. There is no necessary antithesis between this
self-evidence of moral values and their origin in a moral law which has its
origin in the will of God. Hartmann
postulates that God might dictate values which did not harmonise with
self-existent values. As God has to
provide the genesis of any purported self-existent values, such an action would
be contrary to logic, and therefore impossible, as God can only do what is
logically possible.
Hartmann’s postulation that values are self-existent, is of
interest in another context. Clouser’s analysis of the essence of divinity (1991, 16ff)
leads him to the conclusion that the divine, in any system of religious
thought, resolves to that which is self-existent. If values are self-existent, rather than
created by God, they hold the place of the divine in Hartmann’s theory.
Hartmann’s next antinomy is the antinomy of providence. In ethics the will has to contend with `the
law of nature on the one side and the moral law (values) on the other’. The will can exercise its function of choice
because the laws of nature determine causally, while values do not in
themselves determine matters. In
religion, the will has also `to cope with the providence of God’. While natural causality is blind, which
allows man to set up ends for himself, divine providence has to be finalistic,
against which providence, he maintains, man’s finalism would be impotent, and
his foresight annulled. Thus Divine
providence, he maintains, would abolish man’s ethical freedom. Here once again, Hartmann assumes a rigid,
rather than a co-operative, Divine finalism - one which seeks man’s good in
conjunction with man’s freedom. There is
no warrant for his assumption.
As
to the meaning of divine providence, it does not have to be as rigid as
Hartmann appears to understand it.
Hartmann maintains that the religious view degrades the
Creator to the level of a blunderer who does not know what he is doing. He argues that with his own Divinity before
him, God must have created a distorted image of the Divine, a world which
completely failed to reflect his glory.
This was the problem which faced Aristotle and later thinkers, as detailed by Patrick Madigan and considered earlier in this thesis. Hartmann makes the common but unfounded
assumption that creation is complete rather than in process, despite his own
analysis of the strata of reality, and of man’s self-creative role, which
supports the view that the world is involved in a process which has already
passed through a number of stages.
Hartmann further maintains that God’s glory could only be reflected in
the foresight and self-determination of man, and he blames God for both giving
man the capacity to sin and then condemning man for exercising that capacity.
(1932, 269)
This
argument, in effect, asks why God would create an imperfect world, as a
distorted image of the Divine. It
carries weight only as long as one assumes that creation has been
completed. It loses its force once it is
realised that creation is a process in which man has an essential role, indeed
the most important role, in the free self-creation of Deity. The world,
with man’s creative assistance, could become as it ought to be.
Hartmann appears to have been the first person to understand
man as the bridge between the moral ought and the actual world, the potential
but free instantiator of value in the world.
It is ironic that he could not see that his own phenomenology of man’s
sense of value could provide an answer to the difficulty he outlines.
Hartmann’s final antinomy is the antinomy of salvation, which
he regards as an antinomy of freedom. He
maintains that the religious relation of man to God is not contained fully in
his dependence upon God’s providence nor in man’s sinfulness before God, but
that it culminates in man’s deliverance by God from sin. This sin, he maintains, is the same moral
guilt of which ethics speaks, although it is not conceived of as guilt before
the tribunal of conscience, but as guilt before God.
He
argues that the essence of moral guilt is that it is a burden which man must
accept and bear, or else be weighed down by it.
But in the religious conception, he argues, there is a second
factor. The burden of sin makes the man
bad, incapable of good and unable to advance morally. It becomes a curse on man, an evil fate. Salvation is then `precisely a taking away of
sin, a disburdening of man as regards sin, a freeing, a purification, a
restoration of man’. (1932, 270) Thus to
religion, he argues, evil is not the bad will or act but the moral state of
being impeded by a load. He contrasts
this to the ethical position that man must continue to bear his guilt, which
lasts as long as the values exist which condemn it, but that this leads to no
incapacity to be good, as the capacity for moral betterment always exists. He argues that ethics regards only an act, a
will or a disposition, as either good or evil.
Guilt then is only a consequence, and its removal impossible. The disburdening of man by salvation, he
maintains, involves the surrender by man of his freedom, a slavishness towards
God. He regards such salvation as an
ethical degradation but a religious elevation and contrasts what he represents
as the religious injunction to do whatever you will, without guilt, with the
ethical injunction to bear the guilt honourably but to ensure that the good
triumphs. He seems to be setting up a
straw man, unless his concept of religion is of a form of licentious
Gnosticism. He quotes in support of his
argument, Augustine’s proposal that man should rise from being able to
sin or not, to the position of not being able to sin, which he objects to on
the ground that it takes away man’s freedom.
In all this he seems to regard salvation as something which happens to a
person in the present, rather than yet to happen in the ultimate emergence of Deity. The antinomy
results only from Hartmann’s peculiar understanding of salvation.
The
capacity to reduce or dissolve Hartmann’s anti-theistic antinomies provides further support
to the thesis which I have proposed, that man is to be understood as engaged in
a process directed towards self-creation, as the penultimate step in a process
towards the self-creation of Deity.
The
fact that Hartmann exhibits a prejudice against theism, as he understands it,
does not detract from his phenomenological analysis of man and the world. Hartmann’s ontology, which is derived from
his analysis of the structure of the world, supports my thesis that the world
is in process.
Hartmann’s Ontology.
Helmut
Kuhn sees Nicolai Hartmann as part of a movement in German philosophy which
revolted against Positivism and which sought to restore significance to
philosophy by reviving consideration of two fundamental questions. One concerned the nature of man as he is,
rather than as an epistemological robot, the `subject of knowledge’. The other concerned the nature of reality or
Being as it is experienced, rather than as the `object of science’. (Kuhn
1951,290)
Hartmann maintained the primacy of ontology over epistemology
on the basis that knowledge is just one among many ontic relations, and that
knowledge is dependent upon the being of both subject and object, whilst their
being is not dependent upon knowledge.
Kuhn states that for Hartmann, Being revealed itself as both one and many, by the
scrutiny of the objects of experience.
Experience offered a diversity, but an ordered diversity - a structure.
(1951,301) Hartmann distinguishes four
strata of Being, the physical, the biological or organic, the conscious or
psychic and the spiritual. These four
ontological strata are not to be confused with complex real structures such as
man, who is the only real being in which all four ontological strata are
represented.
The
lowest ontological stratum is the physical, which is subject to the laws of
physics and chemistry. This stratum
supports the organic, which is also subject to the same laws as the physical
stratum, but in addition, has its own biological laws which are not reducible
to the physical laws. The next stratum
is the conscious or psychic, which in turn is supported by the organic. Again this psychic stratum is subject to some
extent to the laws which apply to the organic stratum, but these do not
entirely dominate it, as it has its own laws.
The highest stratum is the spiritual, which in turn is supported by
psychic life and the laws applying to that stratum, but again is not dominated
by them, as it has its own autonomous laws.
Each higher stratum has freedom in relation to the stratum below
it. Freedom is not peculiar to man. Each stratum is free relative to the stratum
below it. It depends upon the lower
strata but is not determined by them. (Kuhn 1951,305-8)
Hartmann criticises the old ontology, deriving from Aristotle, particularly in its concept of spirit. He points out that the old theory of being is
based upon the thesis that as well as the world of things, including man, there
is a world of essences. He argues that
we need to dissociate ourselves from this doctrine because such a doctrine
invariably involves the hypostasising of universals. Hartmann’s approach is essentially empirical,
requiring that we strictly observe the limitations of our experience in
deriving the categories of an ontology.
These categories are only to be derived by a close observation of
existing realities. This close observation
is to extend to everyday life and practical experience as well as to the
findings of science. The whole sum of
accumulated experience constitutes the starting point for such an empirical
ontology. Hartmann maintains that his
new ontology enables him to determine the nature of spirit, and the activity of
spirit in relation to the being of the rest of the world. (1953,13-24)
Hartmann’s concept of spirit is earthbound and temporal. As his approach is deliberately limited to
the sphere of direct experience, a more extensive, perhaps theological meaning
of the concept of spirit is not open to him.
In strictly observing the limitations of direct experience in deriving
the categories of his ontology, Hartmann appears to commit an epistemic
fallacy, in that he reduces an ontic question to an epistemic one. This is despite his insistence on the
priority of ontology over epistemology.
Phenomenology may necessarily involve an epistemic fallacy, which only
appears as a contradiction in a phenomenologist who maintains the primacy of
ontology.
A
further difficulty Hartmann finds with the old ontology is that it was
fundamentally oriented toward the being of material things and towards the
organism. As a result it had interpreted
psychic life as if it was organic, and it had assigned the spirit to the
kingdom of essences. This move prevented
the old ontology from placing the spirit in the world of reality.
(1953,24) Hartmann basically argues that
the world can only be understood once the different strata of reality are
recognised, and he maintains that most ontological errors follow from a failure
to recognise the existence of such ontological strata. This failure gives rise to the error of
seeking to attribute categories which can be found only in one stratum, to all
strata. Such a violation, he argues,
occurred in Aristotelian philosophy. The
purposiveness which characterises human action was stretched to cover all the
processes of the world. (1953,55) The
problem Hartmann finds in this is the application of principles to fields in
which the discovered principle has nothing to do, and in which such a principle
has never been discovered. The
boundaries violated in this way are the ontic boundaries between strata.
(1953,56) Such violations are a type of
category mistake, the error of ascribing to something of one category a feature
attributable only to another.
Hartmann argues that if the categories of one stratum are
applied without careful examination to lower or higher strata, the world may be
simplified in thought, but the whole world picture can be falsified. This is not to argue that a category cannot
be found in more than one stratum. Causality
operates within the biological stratum as well as the physical, but causality
alone cannot explain complex life processes. (1953,57)
Hartmann derives the four ontological strata of reality
through his analysis. In each stratum,
becoming takes on a different form. (1953,28) Together these four strata make
up the whole of experienced reality.
Hartmann’s four strata are the spatial/physical stratum, the
living/organic stratum, the psychic/conscious stratum and the
spiritual/historical stratum. He finds
that every one of these strata has its own peculiar ontological categories
which nowhere simply coincide with the categories of the other strata. It is the difference between the dominant
ontological categories in each stratum, which distinguishes the strata from
each other. (1953,47)
Strata and Levels distinguished.
Hartmann
also distinguishes the four ontological strata from the
levels of actual structures in the world.
It is a characteristic of the ontological strata of reality that they do
not coincide with the levels of actual structures such as inanimate objects,
organisms or man, but cut across them.
Man, for example, is not only a spirit, he has a spiritless conscious
life as well. He is also an organism and
a material structure. Ontologically, a
tree consists of two strata but man consists of all four of the strata of the
world. The levels of all actual
structures are found to contain one or more ontological strata, in such a way
that the lower strata are always included in the higher ones. Without this distinction between levels and strata
we could not appreciate why inanimate objects, plants, animals and men all have
structures which are in part identical to, and in part completely different
from, one another. Once the distinction
has been drawn, all actual structures can be seen to be stratified from the
bottom up. (1953,48-51)
All
the ontological categories of a particular stratum of reality, together
determine the phenomena of that stratum.
There are also some more general, fundamental categories which are able
to be traced through the whole system of strata. The fundamental categories include both
`determination and dependence’ and `form and matter’. With the fundamental category of form and
matter, all form can be matter for a higher form and all matter can be form for
a lower matter. There is thus a
continuous superimposition of forms, with each form serving as matter for
another form which is superimposed upon it. Nature is constructed on this principle of
superimposition. The atom is the matter
of the molecule, but is itself a formed structure. The molecule is the matter of the cell, and
the cell is the matter of the organism. (1953,65-8)
This
series of superimposition is broken at a number of points by incisions which
interrupt the sequence of superimpositions.
These incisions are found at borders such as that between organic and
psychic life. While the organism
includes atoms and molecules upon which it imposes new forms, the consciousness
which is found in psychic life excludes the organic forms. Psychic life is a higher type of formed
whole. It does not superinform the
organism, it begins a new series of forms for which the life of the organism is
no longer matter. Another such interruption
occurs at the next higher level, the border between the psychic and the spiritual. Psychic acts do not become material for
objective, spiritual structures. These
spiritual structures become disengaged from their psychic substrate. Their mode of being is historical and exists
beyond that of the individual. This
analysis shows that the multiplicity of forms which comprise the world are not
constituted by a simple series of superimpositions. The continuity is broken, as is the unity of
the world. (1953,68-9) It is these
incisions or discontinuities which comprise the phenomenon of Emergence.
With
regard to the fundamental category of determination and dependence, Hartmann argues that cause and effect constitutes only one of
many forms of determination. A more
basic relationship is the principle of sufficient reason. This principle affirms that nothing occurs in
the world which is not contingent, in that it has its ground in something
else. This relationship is also found in
the realm of thought, and in mathematical relationships. In such cases the relationship is not a
causal one. The universal law of
determination asserts that nothing in the world exists by chance in the ontic
sense. Everything depends on prior
conditions and occurs only where these are fulfilled. If all the requisite conditions of a possible
event are fulfilled, they provide a sufficient reason and the event has to
occur. (1953,69-70) Hartmann is concerned here with ontological
possibilities as distinct from mere logical possibilities, a distinction which
is seldom made by physical cosmologists.
Anything can be a logical possibility if it is not
self-contradictory. As a result of the
failure to distinguish ontological from logical possibilities, some physical
cosmologists treat possible worlds, for example, as ontological realities.
In
each emergent stratum the relationship of the fundamental category of
determination and dependence assumes a new form. Hartmann illustrates this at each of the four strata, the
Physical, the Organic, the Psychic and the Spiritual. At the physical stratum we have the causal
sequence, which runs parallel to the stream of time.
At
the organic stratum there is a new determining form which is seen in the
apparent purposiveness found in the self-regulation of the whole, and in the
self-restoration of the individual. The
nature of this determination is not known, but Hartmann denies that it is
either a complex causality, which belongs to the physical stratum, or
purposiveness, which he recognises only at the spiritual stratum. (1953,7) At
the psychic level, the inner nature of the determination is also unknown. Causality is involved in conscious action but
it cannot fully explain the nature of the autonomous tendencies of psychic life
or even the simplest psychic reaction. (1953,70-1)
The
forms of determination at the organic and the psychic stratum, exhibiting
respectively the apparent purposiveness of the organic stratum and the
autonomous tendencies of psychic life, can not be explained by Hartmann. While they
are neither causality nor purposiveness, they might best be understood, as
might the form of determination at each stratum, as the appropriate form of
self-creation at each separate stratum.
At
the spiritual stratum, Hartmann points out, we know the teleological form of
determination intimately. The
teleological nexus is considerably more complicated than the causal nexus. It has three stages, the conception of a
purpose, the choice of means, and the realisation of the purpose. The first two stages take place in the
consciousness while the third takes place in the outer world. The choice of means proceeds from the
conceived purpose to the first act with which its realisation commences. The teleological process is determined by its
end or purpose. There are other forms of
determination operating in the spiritual stratum. One of these is the determination by
value. Values determine the will by
command, but they do not compel the will.
Finally there is the self-determination of the will, by which it decides
for or against the demand of the value.
There is an important, positively determining moment in the free
will. It is a new, unique, and higher
form of determination. The great problem
of the freedom of the will, for Hartmann, is the question of how its
self-determination can coexist with lower forms of determination.
(1953,71-2) I maintain that this free
self-determination of the will is the essential factor in the free process of
the possible self-creation of Deity.
Hartmann poses the question as to whether there can be a
psychic life, or consciousness, without a supporting organic life, and whether
spirit can exist without a supporting consciousness. He rejects such speculation on the basis that
we must have regard to the limitations of our experience in forming our
ontology, and that we only know of spiritual life as supported by the
consciousness of living individuals. We
also know of no consciousness without organic carriers, and no organic life which
is not dependent upon matter. Everything
depends upon something else.
Despite
this dependence, Hartmann insists that the novel aspects of any emergent higher
stratum are completely free in relation to the lower stratum. The autonomy of the higher stratum is the
result of the emergence of higher categories which are not to be found in
the stratum from which it has emerged.
Despite this autonomy he recognises that all higher strata are dependent
for their existence upon the lower. The
animate world existed in a multitude of forms prior to the emergence of
consciousness, and consciousness had existed in early man `through whole
geological periods without the luxury of a spirit’. (1953 85-91) Hartmann does not consider the question of just
when the emergence of a spiritual consciousness occurred in man. This question will be the subject of the next
chapter of this thesis.
Hartmann recognises that while all higher strata are
dependent upon the lower, this dependence, in a relationship of
superimposition, does not involve the essence, but only the existence, of the
higher stratum. Even in a relationship
of superinformation, as in the relationship of life to matter, the degree of
dependence can be compared to the dependence of a novel structure upon its
building materials. That which cannot be
transformed can be superinformed, and the novelty which then emerges is not
determined by the material which forms it. (1953,92-3)
While
recognising the dependence for their existence of the higher strata on the
lower strata, Hartmann also derives a law of freedom whereby the higher
stratum maintains its independence and freedom.
He maintains that all freedom entails some dependence, that all
authentic freedom is freedom `from’ something, and that all freedom consists in
superiority over something else, which superiority is the essence of categorial
freedom. The lower stratum does not
produce the higher, but it supports it, and the higher could not exist without
it. (1953,94-5)
The
problem of freedom is associated with the problem of emergence. Where there
had been no emergence of novelty there could be no freedom. Hartmann points out that freedom enters wherever a categorial
novelty enters. Every higher
determination which raises itself above a lower one is free. In a world which consisted of only one
stratum, freedom would be an impossibility.
In such a world only one type of determination would have to rule all.
(1953,128)
This
relationship of determination and corresponding freedom has been missed in
other philosophies, in Hartmann’s view, because of a prejudice in favour of a
postulated unity of the world, together with the desire to assume that any
category could exist in all strata of the world, once it had been identified in
one ontological stratum. There has
consequently, in his view, been two major types of speculative
metaphysics. Idealist metaphysics sought
to explain everything by reference to the highest form of being, spirit, as is
found in Hegel. Materialist metaphysics
sought to explain everything by reference to the lowest form of being. He maintains that materialism is more fatally
wrong because to try to explain the lower through the higher categories, though
wrong, makes sense. Once its premises
are admitted, this way of explaining the world appears to work. On the other hand the mechanical principles
of materialism are frustrated by their inability to explain the vital processes
of even the simplest of organisms. (1953,98)
Hartmann does not deny that the world has a unity, but he
argues that it is only with the conception of a stratified order that we can
understand the type of unity of the real world which is supported by the phenomena. All ontic unity, he argues, results from the
organisation of an underlying multiplicity. (1953,115) Dealing with the question of emergence, he points out that the categories of organic life,
metabolism, assimilation, self-regulation, self-reproduction, and so on, must
all emerge together. The most elementary
living species cannot maintain itself if any one of these basic functions is
missing. It is this fact that
establishes the qualitative distance between the emergent higher stratum and
the lower one. The categories of any
ontological stratum form a self contained whole. The emergence of one such category
necessarily involves the emergence of the others. (1953,108) The necessity for such a development of
coordinated complexity is clear, but it does not fit the neo-Darwinian paradigm
of an accumulation of minute chance variations.
Hartmann then considers the problem of genesis, which is
associated with the speculative desire for unity. He does not consider that any answer to the
problem will get beyond assumptions and unverifiable hypotheses, but notes that
a problem does not become illegitimate because it is insoluble. (1953,109) The distance between strata does not present
a difficulty to a genetic approach, as the emergence of novelty with higher strata does not disrupt the
continuity of the chain of forms.
However he warns against a scheme which would account for the higher
simply by reference to the lower as it is quite unintelligible how a lower
ontological form could give rise to the higher form unless it already contained
the categories of the higher. Nor could
the higher form evolve out of the lower one unless the highest categories were
already contained in the lowest forms. (1953,110) The higher, emergent, forms can only be
initiated from outside an existent ontic strata, but Hartmann’s anti-theistic
bias prevents his consideration of this option.
Hartmann’s analysis of Freedom.
Hartmann considers that the opposition which is supposed by
some to exist between the deterministic causality of the physical stratum, and
moral freedom, is a mistake. It
overlooks the intermediate determining forms of organic and psychic being, and
the autonomy of each stratum in relation to lower strata.
Freedom
is found, he maintains, wherever a group of higher determinants emerge. The organism, for example, exhibits autonomy
in relation to the laws of physical nature, the conscious animal in relation to
the instinctive organism and the spiritual human in relation to his
non-spiritual ancestors. Every serious
attempt to justify freedom against determinism, in a world which was not
recognised as stratified, had failed.
The concept of freedom could not overcome the teleological determinism
which was often linked with a belief in predestination, nor the scientific
causal determinism which tended to assume the existence of a blind historical
process. Against such determinism,
metaphysics had taken refuge in a partial indeterminism, which allowed some
scope for free will. (1953,124-7)
Kant
had sought to justify freedom by distinguishing an intelligible world of the
thing-in-itself from the causally determined world of appearances. This move implicitly recognised that freedom
could not be justified in any single-stratum world, where a single form of
determination would have to be universal.
But once the world is acknowledged to be stratified, each higher stratum
could be associated with its own form of determination, without suspending the
form of determination of the lower stratum.
Older theories had opposed determinism to indeterminism, but Kant
opposed the intelligible world to the sensory one. His was not an ontological distinction, but
it had moved in the right direction. (1953,128-9)
Hartmann’s ontology, with its recognition that each stratum
of reality is free in relation to the stratum from which it is said to have
emerged, is a vital pillar of my thesis.
Hartmann recognised that it is quite unintelligible to maintain that a
lower ontological form could give rise to a higher form, unless it already
contained the categories of the higher.
Neither could a higher form evolve out of a lower one, unless the highest
categories were already contained in the lowest forms. He demonstrates that this containment is not
the case, but he does not attempt to explain how the higher strata arise, nor
the source of the freedom of the higher strata.
This is not his primary concern, as his approach is descriptive rather
than explanatory. However some
explanation is at least as desirable as is the data which is presented by him,
on both man and the nature of being.
Kuhn notes that the idea of a spiritual God is
inadmissible to Hartmann, and that the only view of religion with which
Hartmann’s philosophy might be reconciled would be one with a non-interfering
God, perfect and inefficacious. (1951,309) I consider that Hartmann’s
philosophy is clearly able to be reconciled with a God who seeks the self-creation
of Deity, and who initiates a process which could result in
such self-creation.
The
most significant stage in such a process, from a human perspective, is the
emergence of a spiritual nature in man which introduces for the
first time a stratum which is completely free in relation to the law applicable
to the stratum, the moral law. Hartmann
observes that mankind had previously existed through whole geological periods
without the luxury of a spirit. (1953,91)
I turn in the next chapter to the evidence of the emergence of a
spiritual nature in mankind, and the question of when that evidence appeared.
Chapter Four - THE EMERGENCE OF HOMO SAPIENS ETHICUS.
Research
by palaeontologists into the pre-history of man has focussed primarily upon
aspects of the fossil record, which include the brain size of various
hominids. There is an unstated
assumption that once we can identify hominid ancestors with a physical
appearance and brain size similar to ourselves, we are justified in claiming
that they are the same as we are. While
this procedure may hold true for other animal types, it does not necessarily
apply to humans. If we ask what it is
that distinguishes humans from other animals, it is at once clear that it is
not just our physical appearance.
Archaeologists seek evidence relating to activities such as the making
of tools and artefacts, and of artistic expression, activities which can
indicate the exercise of faculties which are assumed to be strictly human,
requiring intelligence and aesthetic appreciation. Both types of evidence are to be found in
antiquity, but again, it has to be asked whether they are specific indicators
of full humanity. There is the emergence
of a spiritual nature to be considered.
The question is where and when the distinction between humans with a
spiritual nature and humans `without the luxury of a spirit’, is to be located.
Intelligence
and aesthetic appreciation are not indications of spiritual humanity, as both
intelligence and aesthetic appreciation are to be found in animals. Aesthetic appreciation is well developed in
birds which utilise forms of display, both natural and contrived, in mating and
nesting rituals. Tool making and
language are other possible criteria of the human, but again there is evidence
of both in the animal kingdom. Instances
of such overlap between human and animal behaviour is a primary matter of
concern to Sociobiologists, and is well documented by them. More recently, Gavin Hunt has catalogued
instances of crows making and using tools (1996,249) and the linguistic ability
of chimpanzees using Ameslan, a sign language, is also well documented.
The Nature of Man
The
question to be addressed, therefore, is what is it which incontrovertibly sets
man apart from the rest of the animal kingdom?
The characteristic which distinguishes spiritual man, Homo Sapiens Ethicus, from his Homo Sapiens predecessors is
spiritual rather than material. It is
not something which could leave physical traces, except in the written record
of critical or moral ideas. It is
significant that most early writing is simply a record of commercial
transactions, with a total absence of spiritual content. The spiritual characteristic which we seek to
locate has no substance itself. It
relates essentially to the realm of the moral ought-to-be, and thus to matters
which are initially non-existent in any material sense.
We
have to examine just what is the nature of this unusual and non-material
feature which distinguishes humans from every other form of life. We can begin our consideration with the
definition of man as the rational animal.
We owe this definition to Aristotle, as it was he who first defined man as the rational
animal. But we need to ask just what did
Aristotle mean by rational? The commonly
accepted meaning of rational, at the present time, relates rationality to
reason, and relates reason to the mental powers concerned with drawing
conclusions or inferences. If we examine
Aristotle’s use of the term, we will find that he also relates rationality to
the exercise of reason, but that in addition he relates it to the specifically
human capacity to distinguish right from wrong.
Aristotle distinguishes man as that form of animal life which alone
possesses a `rational principle’, a principle which provides man, and man
alone, with an understanding of what morally ought to be the case, as distinct
from what happens to be the case. It is
this perception, by man, of something which is presently non-existent but which
morally ought to be brought into existence, the perception of what morally
ought to be the case, that distinguishes humans from other animals. Thus Aristotle relates in the Politics
that `Animals lead for the most part a
life of nature, although in lesser particulars some are influenced by habit as
well. Man has rational principle, in
addition, and man only. Wherefore
nature, habit, rational principle must be in harmony with one another; for they
do not always agree; men do many things against habit and nature, if rational
principle persuades them that they ought’. (1332b) This rational principle is one which
persuades man, rather than compels him.
It puts before him what he ought to do, but still leaves him free to
choose whether or not to follow the persuasion as to what he ought to do. Aristotle argues that the proper function of
man is a form of life which is exercised in accordance with the rational
principle which informs his soul, and that the good life is entailed by
choosing actions which comply with the persuasion of that rational
principle. He also argues that there is
an irrational element in the soul, but that this irrational element can be
overcome if the guidance of the rational principle is supported by the moral
advice given by other people. The value
of communal or cultural encouragement to pursue the good is recognised by
Aristotle. (Ethics 1098a & 1102b-1103a)
As
we have seen, one of the more significant philosophical analysts of human
nature since Aristotle, was the German Phenomenologist, Nicolai Hartmann. Hartmann
made man, and man’s place in the structure of the world, the primary object of
his phenomenological research. He
identified man as the one being in the world to whom everything in the world
appears as value-related. Man is not
only capable of understanding what is the case, in his perception of the world,
but he also perceives what, morally, ought to be the case.
According
to Hartmann, man’s moral nature, which constitutes his personality, cannot be
understood solely from an ontological point of view, because man also has an
axiological nature. Man `is a
valuational entity’. His fundamental
nature is definable only by his relation to values, by his attribute of being
the only possible bearer of moral values.
Hartmann sees moral values as genuine `first movers’, in Aristotle’s use
of that term, and he sees man’s creative activity as flowing from his
perception of moral values. (1932, Vol. 1, 270-2) Hartmann’s analysis is consistent with that
of Aristotle but, as may be expected of a later work, more detailed.
Hartmann contrasts the teleological dynamic of the
`ought-to-be’, which is perceived by man, with the blind operation of causality
in the physical sphere. Human teleology,
whether motivated by moral values or disvalues, foresees the end of a
contemplated action, and in carrying out the action, in Hartmann’s view, man
exercises both providence and predestination.
Thus ethics, in Hartmann’s view, `gives to man an attribute of
Divinity’, which attribution in the first place, he maintains, is the result of
man mistaking his own nature. (1932, Vol. 1,281-2)
We
do not need to concern ourselves here with Hartmann’s theological opinion, but we can profitably take
account of his research into man’s nature.
The question I now wish to consider is whether the descriptions of the
essence of man, his possession of a rational principle by which he can
distinguish what morally ought to be the case, as given by Aristotle, and his value-relatedness, by which he perceives
what morally ought to be the case, as given by Hartmann, can be applied to the
`Homo Sapiens’ of Anthropology?
Homo Sapiens Ethicus
These
descriptions of the essence of man, by Hartmann and Aristotle, as the sole possessor of value-consciousness,
constitute a description of a distinct emergent from the earlier Homo Sapiens, man without the luxury of a spirit. I have designated this distinct emergent Homo
Sapiens Ethicus. This is man
with a spiritual nature. It appears that
this description can not be appropriately applied to man before about the first
millennium BC, or slightly earlier, in the case of the Hebrew culture.
There
is clear evidence of the transition from Homo Sapiens to Homo Sapiens Ethicus occurring in the Hellenic culture within the first
millennium BC. This transition is more
fully documented than is the earliest transition of which there is evidence,
which occurred in the Hebrew culture. To
appreciate the transition in the Hellenic world, it is necessary to appreciate
the nature of those humans who lived before the transition. The evidence of this earlier type of human
nature is readily to hand in Homer.
Onians
shows that the characters portrayed by Homer did not consider themselves free
agents, but felt that they were the passive instruments of other powers,
without the ability to direct their own actions. (1951,303) They behave in a barbarous manner towards their
enemies, admire successful theft and perjury, treat their offspring as property
and treat other persons as means to their ends.
All their barbaric behaviour and superstitious practice is portrayed by
Homer without any suggestion that it is in breach of any moral standards.
(1951,3-9)
The
change which occurred within human nature in the Hellenic world of the first
millennium BC has been the subject of much study and many explanations. The explanations are generally
circumstantial, relating to the physical geography of the country, the involvement
in trade, the establishment of colonies, the nature of the agricultural
pursuits, or the form of social organisation adopted by the Greeks. The focus upon the change which took place
within the Hellenic world, rather than in other civilisations, occurs primarily
because of the availability of the evidence of the transition which is to hand
in Hellenic literature. A significant
part of this change in human nature is the change in the moral perspective. This change could be characterised more precisely
as a change from the possession of mores, as established rules, to the
possession of a genuine moral perspective.
This change is clearly evidenced by Xenophanes (c.580-470 BC), who was a rhapsode, a professional
reciter of the Homeric epics, and an early philosophic thinker. He expressed his revulsion against the awe in
which Homer was held in the Hellenic world, and declared that: `Both Homer and
Hesiod have attributed to the gods all things that are
shameful and a reproach among mankind:
theft, adultery and mutual deception’. (Freeman 1962,22) Prior to Xenophanes’ radical statement, the
immoral activities of the gods had been accepted without demur since time
immemorial, and this acceptance continued to be the case in most other
cultures, and amongst many Greeks, for many centuries.
The
earliest record of the primitive Greek understanding of their gods is given in
Homer, who wrote his epics, from earlier sources, about
the ninth Century BC. In the following
century, Hesiod sought to rationalise the genealogy of the gods in
his Theogony. (Hussey 1983,11) While
Hesiod changed genealogies to make them less contradictory, he accepted,
without seeking to change them, the immoral activities of the gods. As Furley and Allen note, Hesiod’s work is in
no way an apologetic, as at that time no doubt had arisen as to the existence
or the nature of the activity of the Olympian gods. Hesiod’s primary aim was to rationalise and
relate the gods to their public cult. (1970,101-2)
In
Hartmann’s terms, the change in consciousness, from a
non-spiritual to a spiritual consciousness, of which Xenophanes statement is direct evidence, represents a change
from what could be expected of the most highly developed animal consciousness,
which he describes as the psychic level, to what he characterises as human
spiritual consciousness. James describes Hartmann’s understanding of the higher
animal’s consciousness, as being a consciousness which is wholly engaged in the
relation of the animal to its immediate environment, and which is directly and
inescapably intent on what it seeks or fears.
It is a consciousness which is closed in upon itself as a central point,
in contrast to man’s spiritual consciousness, which no longer only orients the
world to itself but which also seeks to orient itself to the world, with man
becoming, in the process, the subject of objects. (1960,210-11) It is this initiation of subjectivity among
men, brought about by the emergence of a spiritual consciousness, which enables the
world to be perceived as objective. The
emergence of a spiritual consciousness involved a transition from the
possession by Homo Sapiens of a highly developed psychic consciousness, with no
consciousness of what morally ought to be the case, to the possession and joint
operation of a psychic and a spiritual consciousness. This change enabled man to perceive the world
as objective, and so affected all his activities. The newly acquired perception that something
ought morally to be other than it in fact was, could not fail to lead to the
questioning as to whether the status quo, in areas not directly affected by
morality, should not also be judged as to its appropriateness. The moral transition, which occurred with the
emergence of a spiritual consciousness, thus constituted the new sub-species of
Homo Sapiens Ethicus. The newly
emerged objectivity of this spiritual man soon also gave rise both to
philosophy and to science in the Greek world.
Barnes
takes the view that ethics was not a central interest for the majority of the
pre-Socratics. He mistakenly dismisses
Xenophanes’ moral statements, concerning Homer and Hesiod’s representation of the gods, as implying `a
conventional morality’. (1986,122) What
Barnes fails to appreciate is that Xenophanes’ objection to Homer and Hesiod could
well constitute an example of a conventional morality if it was to be made at
the present time, but that it was a statement which was completely opposed to
the conventional morality, or more precisely, to the conventional mores of the
time that it was made. It was a
statement of a totally new idea in the Hellenic context and therefore anything
but conventional.
There
would have been conventional `moralities’, or more strictly mores, from the
time of the first appearance of Homo Sapiens, but these mores would have only been pragmatic
rules of conduct and of such altruism as was necessary for tribal
survival. They were not concerned with
what ought, morally to be the case, but with the cohesion of the tribe or
society.
Barton
draws our attention, in this context, to the standpoint which the Code of
Hammurabi, early in the second millennium BC, displays. The Code is profoundly utilitarian and is
aimed primarily at the safeguarding of property. It does not legislate from the perspective of
what ought to be the case from a moral point of view, but specifically
sanctions practices we would regard as immoral. (1962,25) Contrary to Barnes, the whole point of
Xenophanes statement was to oppose what was the conventional
morality of the times. More precisely it
was to oppose the pre-moral conventional mores.
MacIntyre,
dealing with the change in the perspective on the world which took place in
The
is-ought gap, or fact-value gap, to which MacIntyre refers, ceases to be a
problem once it is realised that the reasoning faculty is entirely separate
from the moral evaluating faculty, which is the later emergent. There is a hidden assumption in the concept
of the `problem’ of the fact-value gap, that the perception of fact and the
perception of value are both exercises of a single reasoning faculty, which
should be internally consistent. Our
inability to reason from facts to moral values is therefore considered to
indicate either a fault in our reasoning capacity or a strangeness in moral
values. Moral values were considered by
No-one
considers that there is a hearing-sight gap, about which we should become
concerned, or that we should somehow be able to see whatever we hear or to hear
whatever we see. We recognise that
hearing and sight relate to the exercise of different faculties. The reason why the fact-value gap could not
exist for Homer was because the faculty of deontological moral
evaluation had not emerged in the Homeric world.
In
Homer, the term `agathos’ relates to the qualities
possessed by a successful tribal leader, the exercise of which qualities would
not necessarily be regarded now as good in the moral sense. MacIntyre points out that Homeric `moral’
predicates were not applied, as moral predicates are applied now, only when an
agent could have acted more responsibly, and so differently from the manner in
which he in fact acted. MacIntyre
maintains that we cannot even ask whether an `ought’, in the Kantian sense,
implies a `can’ for Homer, because in Homer we are not able to find an `ought’
in that sense. The Kantian ought, the
ought of the categorical imperative, MacIntyre argues, only applies to man when
ought implies can. (1966,7&196)
MacIntyre
assumes that the Homeric terms, which later became moral terms, changed
their meaning because of the `breakdown of a social hierarchy and of a system
of recognised functions’, which, he says, deprived the terms of their social
anchorage. (1966,8-9) However the events
of which Homer had written belonged to an age which had long passed, and were
of a social structure which had disappeared long before Homer wrote. The significant point is that those events,
and Homer’s account of them, both took place before the emergence of a moral consciousness in
Bruno
Snell is probably the most influential researcher into the transition to moral
and objective thinking in the Hellenic world, a transition which he identifies
as the `discovery of the mind’ in Greece.
He also takes a philological approach to the change in men’s minds, and
conducts an inquiry in the realm of intellectual history, seeking to reduce the
problem of what he takes to be the evolution of Greek culture, to the question
of what the Greeks at any given time knew about themselves, and what they did
not yet know. He recognises that this
also constitutes an inquiry into the essence of man. Snell finds a great intellectual gulf between
the Greeks of Homer’s period, and those of the classical period.
(1960,xii-1)
Snell
notes, for example, that the Seven Sages of the early archaic period, in their
exhortations as to how people should conduct themselves, base their advice
solely on pragmatic considerations, such as an appeal to the profit motive,
rather than upon considerations which we would accept as moral. (1960,157) This reflects the same type of mind as was
responsible for the Code of Hammurabi.
David
Johnson agrees that a remarkable event of a mental nature took place in the
Greek world, which he places at the time of Thales, in the sixth century
BC. Johnson characterises the change as
the origin of a new way of thinking, a change to the way of thinking which is
still in current use. In Johnson’s view
it was not a mere change of emphasis or of subject matter, but was the
development of a `whole new mental faculty or organ’, the exercise of which
faculty introduced a new ideal of thought, an ideal `of complete mental
consistency, necessitating a forced choice among incompatible alternatives’. This, he argues, enabled people for the first
time to distinguish literal truth from myth. (1987, 323-4) He discusses Jaynes’ (1982) categorisation of
this change as the development of the ability of people to control their
thought and action freely, for the first time, by the means of an explicit
self-consciousness. Johnson disagrees
with Jaynes’ attribution of this change in the human mind to a change in the
function of the brain, from a presumed previously bicameral brain, in which the
left and right hemispheres function separately, to the brain functioning as a
unity. Very few people agree with
Jaynes’ explanation of the origins of specifically human consciousness, but
many find the evidence he accumulates of the change which took place in the
human mind, in different cultures at different times, intriguing and
challenging. This differential change
indicates that the emergence of a human spiritual consciousness occurred at
different times in different places.
This process is consistent with the view that an emergent only occurs
when the previous stratum of reality has developed to the stage where it
provides an appropriate platform for the new emergent. Different human cultures reached this stage
at different times.
Johnson
sees the changes in the way people thought, as indicating the establishment of
a whole new mental faculty. The
establishment of this faculty, he argues, resulted in the provision of a new
mental ideal, the ideal of a world which one can rationally criticise. I agree that a whole new faculty emerged,
which I characterise as spiritual rather than mental. One can only agree with Johnson as to the
outcome of the establishment of this new faculty, whether it is referred to as
spiritual or mental. This brings us back
to the question of what it is to rationally criticise, which is to ask what it
means for man to be a rational animal.
As we have seen, human rationality has both a logical and a
deontological component. Until the
deontological component emerges, the logical component is engaged solely in
consideration of what is taken to be the case, and not of what ought to be the
case.
It
is clear that prior to the emergence of the deontological component, Homo Sapiens was content to live with what we would regard as
contradictions. Some of these are
adverted to by Johnson, based on the work of
The
emergence of Homo Sapiens Ethicus appears to have occurred in the Hebrew
culture prior to its emergence in the Hellenic world, although the evidence is
not as direct. Early within the first
millennium BC, in the Eighth Century, we have the evidence of the moral
concerns of the Hebrew prophets, Amos and Hosea, which indicates that the
transition to Homo Sapiens Ethicus had already taken place in their culture. The moral ideals these prophets expressed
were not novel. As Bernhard Anderson
points out, these prophets did not seek to introduce new moral ideas, but
sought to recall the people to the moral advances they had made in the past.
(1978,267)
In
The Relevance of Myth and History
One
of the clearest indicators of the nature of the change which had occurred in
the human way of comprehending the world, is the change to the standing
accorded to the myths concerning the gods and concerning human origins. As Eliade has pointed out, in archaic
societies the myth was an important story which was believed to be true, and
which was sacred, exemplary and significant.
Its foremost function was to reveal exemplary models for all human
activity, that is to say, to orient the world, as it was taken to be, to the
individual. However, from the time of
Xenophanes onwards, the Greeks steadily reduced these
significant aspects of myth until by the classical period myth came to mean a
story which had no reality. (1975,1-8)
The Hebrews, on the other hand, had adopted a different approach to
myth. They altered the import of the
myths which they had held in archaic times.
While the stories to be found in the Hebrew Bible can frequently be
shown to reflect the structure of the myths of the area in which the Bible was
written, there is very little narrative in the bible which serves the role of
myth. (Ackerman 1993,540) The use to
which these modified myths were put by the biblical authors was contrary to the
original intention of the myth. The
biblical authors reduced aspects of the myth, which had previously been taken
to be sacred, to the secular. Genesis
makes it clear that the sun, moon and stars, elsewhere revered as gods, were
mere creations of God. The primary
direction of the stories was also changed, from regard and respect for what had
happened in the past, to a concern with what was to happen in the future. The Yahwist author, (J), is considered by
some to have composed his work at the time of Solomon, about the beginning of the
first millennium BC. J, who preceded
Herodotus by about five centuries, has been acclaimed as the father of
history. His Court history, found in II
Samuel 9-20 and I Kings 1-2 has been regarded as the historical masterpiece of
the Old Testament. J presented history
as the unfolding drama of God’s purpose from creation to the conquest of
The
Hebrews, as a result, were the first to adopt an historical perspective, with a
linear time frame from a beginning to the end of time, in place of the more
common ever repeating cycles. This
development of an historical perspective occurred much later in
Xenophanes, in the sixth century BC, adopted and expressed his
new perspective on the world and its relation to God. Jaeger sees Xenophanes as the first Greek
thinker whom we can know as a personality.
Xenophanes verses were not concerned with practical matters, as were
Hesiod’s, but with problems of objectivity, relating to how
man was to orient himself to the world.
Xenophanes had opposed himself to the world of myth by applying his moral
insight to the status of the old, anthropomorphic gods. (Jaeger
1960,38-43)
The Emergence of Spiritual Consciousness
It would appear reasonable to
expect, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, that the emergence of Homo Sapiens Ethicus, man with a spiritual
consciousness, a consciousness of what morally ought to be the case, would
occur at different times among different peoples. The emergence of Homo Sapiens Ethicus would be dependent upon the
cultural level to which a particular Homo Sapiens cultural group had
progressed. There would be no point in a
spiritual consciousness emerging in a psychic level culture in which the
development of the logical or psychic level consciousness was not well
advanced. It is the higher development
of the psychic level consciousness, which connects cause and effect in a
logical manner, which enables Homo Sapiens to act to carry out what he wants to
do in a practical sense. Man needs to
know what he ought to do, and how to do it, in a practical sense, in order to
achieve his practical objectives, before he can be expected to be able to act
effectively to bring into being what morally ought to be.
There is evidence of this
differential emergence of spiritual consciousness,
between the Hebrew and the Greek cultures, and between the Greeks and other
cultures. We could speculate that the
In any event, the Hebrews
appear from all the evidence to have been the first people in which a spiritual
consciousness emerged. This could be why
Hosea represents God as saying of them `When I first found
Eliade points out that after
Xenophanes’ time the Greek myths were exposed
to ever more damaging criticism, aimed at the capricious and unjust behaviour
of the gods, and that this critique was accompanied by an increasingly higher
idea of the nature of God. He also
maintains that the `demythicization’ of Judaisim was the work of the Hebrew
prophets. (1975,147-8) However, the
evidence shows that the morally and logically insupportable content of the
myths had already been destroyed in Judaism well before the prophets, and long
before the Greeks began the deconstruction of their own myths. The Hebrews of the eighth century BC had
already arrived at the point which the Greeks began to pursue with Xenophanes
in the sixth century BC. The Hebrews were
in danger of reverting to old ways, which was what prompted the activities of
the prophets.
There is no reason to believe
that the emergence of spiritual consciousness within in any culture
was an evolutionary or genetic development.
It has no survival value in itself, it simply gives man access to the
non-physically-existent sphere of the moral ought-to-be. A differential temporal acquisition between
different cultures, and apparently between individuals within cultures,
indicates that this emergence of a spiritual consciousness was dependent upon a
sufficiently high level of psychic or conscious level culture, and related
individual development, having been reached.
Culture, in the sense in which I am using the term here, is a construct
of a human group which teaches them, collectively and individually, who and
what they are, and what the world is all about.
In Hartmann’s terms, it is the objective spirit of the cultural
group. It is only when a psychic level
culture has developed to a sufficiently high degree of logical consciousness
that we may expect the emergence of the spiritual consciousness upon which a
moral cultural order may be built.
This is the nature of all
emergents - they rest on the full development of an earlier stage. The development of the psychic level culture
of Homo Sapiens, and the development of the
subsequent spiritual level culture of the emergent Homo Sapiens Ethicus, both rely upon the
individual. The individual is
inevitably, from the beginning, immersed in his culture, but the impetus for
cultural advance is always dependent upon the individual transcending the
culture and affecting its development.
In the process of transition
from a culture based upon a non-spiritual consciousness to one based upon the
possession of individual spiritual consciousness, there will be a phase
containing a mixture of moral and amoral people, of Homo Sapiens and Homo Sapiens Ethicus. It may seem strange to postulate a society composed
of a mixture of individuals, some with and some without a spiritual
consciousness. It will seem less strange
when we realise that there is empirical evidence that there is a series of
moral stages, representing quite different moral perspectives, operative within
all existing societies. Kohlberg has
identified a series of distinct moral stages, operative in all cultures, and
has shown empirically that all normal individuals move through a number of
moral stages, but that not all reach the higher stages. (1981,126) Whilst Kohlberg’s work has attracted
considerable attention, including criticism, none of his critics has rejected
his basic concept of the existence of moral stages. (Kohlberg, Levine & Hewer, 1983,2)
Everyday experience confirms that people have different practical moral
thresholds.
According to Kitwood, the
individual’s morality, in Kohlberg’s terms, grows from egoism through social
constraint towards a condition of moral autonomy. Kohlberg’s final reformulation of the moral stages
focuses on the way the individual regards himself, his relations to others and
his relations to the broader society.
The most primitive stage, Stage 1, is one of undifferentiated egoism. Stage 2 involves reciprocal coordination with
others, but in an instrumental way.
Stage 3 involves an understanding of others’ points of view in a context
of shared agreements, while in Stage 4 the individual is socially oriented and
draws his ethos from the social system.
This is the highest stage that most individuals reach. It is not until Stage 5 that the individual
exhibits an awareness of values which are prior to society, and is able to
exercise a principled moral perspective.
As may be expected, cognitive competence is a necessary, but not a
sufficient condition for moral development.
The empirical evidence shows that transition from stage to stage is
related to age, but only 10 percent of any age cohort reach Stage 5, the stage
of the principled moral perspective, and none of the many individuals tested
have reached this autonomous stage by age 20 years. (Kitwood, 1990,135-9) This autonomous stage is the stage which was
reached by Xenophanes, when he argued against the
behaviour of the Olympian Gods, behaviour which had previously been socially
acceptable. Kohlberg’s empirical
evidence could support the view that society still consists of a mixture of
Homo Sapiens and Homo Sapiens Ethicus, with the latter being in the
minority, although another explanation may be that the social orientation of
Stage 4 may tend to suppress the expression of Stage 5. Kohlberg’s work indicates that the great
majority of people acquire their moral standards from the social system, rather
than from the exercise of a principled moral perspective.
This is an indication of the
need for a principled public morality, if there is going to be a development
towards a more moral culture, the necessity of which I will argue in a later
chapter.
The Axial Period
The differential acquisition of
a spiritual consciousness between different cultures is a matter which has also
been considered by Jaspers. He argues
that an empirical conception of man’s history must either restrict itself to
the demonstration of single regularities, or else seek to achieve a unified
overall view of the process of history.
Jaspers adopts the latter perspective and argues that the empirical
facts support the unified view he pursues.
He seeks to identify an axis of world history, as the point which gave
birth to man, as he is known today. He
argues that this axis of history is to be found in a spiritual process which
occurred between 800BC and 200BC, a time which he styles the axial period. He argues that this spiritual transformation
affected man in
Jaspers argues that it was during
this axial period that man became conscious both of Being as a whole, and of
himself. This was the time of the origin
of spiritual conflicts as such, and of religion acquiring an ethical dimension
for the first time. Rationality rebelled
against myth, and customs and ideas which previously had been unconsciously
accepted, were examined and rejected. He
terms this modification of humanity, spiritualisation. Through this process man became aware of
himself and of his relation to the whole of Being. Jaspers also notes that the gap between what
man usually was, and could become, widened greatly at that time, but that what
individuals became, had an effect upon all.
Up until the axial period, he argues, man had never become truly
himself. (1953, 2-7)
Seeking the cause of the axial
period, Jaspers dismisses the explanations which others had proffered on the
basis that all of them neglect the fact that it was only a few cultures within
the whole of mankind which were affected by the spiritual transformation which
took place. At the same time, he finds,
no arguable hypothesis had been advanced which fitted the facts of all the
cultures which were affected. He regards
the transformation as being in the nature of a miracle, with no adequate
explanation being available within our present knowledge. However, he denies that he is hinting at
direct divine intervention as the cause. (1953,15-18)
I do not have the same
hesitation as Jaspers. I argue that
there is limited divine intervention in the process of the cosmos, which
respects the autonomy of the free development of each emergent stage, but which
is necessary to initiate each subsequent emergent stage in its simplest form,
which then, in its turn, develops autonomously and freely. At the same time, the new emergent stage only
becomes possible when the previous stage freely reaches its apogee.
I
have argued that Homo Sapiens Ethicus emerges from the species Homo Sapiens, but
is to be distinguished from his predecessor by the possession of a moral
value-consciousness. This form of
consciousness is the specifically human faculty by which a person is able to
distinguish what ought, morally, to be the case, from what is in fact the case,
or to distinguish what morally ought to be done from what is proposed to be
done. Homo Sapiens Ethicus of necessity brings a value-consciousness to bear
upon every action and institution. The
moral-cultural emergent stage is the stage presently able to be reached by
nearly all, if not all peoples and cultures.
The emergence of the moral-cultural stage is an uneven one between
cultures, as it relies upon the self-development, or self-creation of an
earlier non-moral culture to a stage where it is capable of providing the
logical-rational basis for the operation of the moral-cultural stage.
Chapter
Five - THE PROCESS OF THE COSMOS.
In
the first chapter I argued that Aristotle was correct in his conclusion that God could not
cause a world which was significantly different from himself. I used Madigan’s account of the historical development of the
question of the motive for creation, to trace the attempts to get around, rather
than to confront Aristotle’s argument directly.
I argued that the perception that the world was significantly different
from God relied on the unstated assumption that the world was a completed
creation rather than a stage in a process of self-creation. I then argued that the world is better
understood as a stage in a process of the self-creation of an entity which is
not significantly different from God. I
labelled this self-created entity, Deity.
In
the second chapter I presented an argument from the perspective of Natural
Theology, to support my thesis that the process of the cosmos is a process of
theosis, the process of the self-creation of Deity.
In
the third chapter I surveyed the work of Nicolai Hartmann, particularly his ontology, which is consistent with
the thesis that the world is in process.
Hartmann shows that the world is stratified, with each succeeding
stratum exercising freedom in relation to the previous stratum. He shows that the present moral-cultural or
spiritual stratum is totally free with regard to the implementation or
non-implementation of the moral law.
Hartmann’s phenomenological approach to the known world and to the
nature of man, from a non-theistic perspective, provides insights which support
my thesis that the world process is a process of self-creation.
In
the fourth chapter I argued that the present human moral-cultural or spiritual
stage of the process of the cosmos is a relatively recent emergent stage. The evidence of the emergence of this stratum of reality is consistent with my
overall thesis.
In
this chapter I will consider the process of self-creation further, and show that
it is consistent with the evidence of the development of the world to
date. I will also consider the problem
of evil. I argued earlier that any
satisfactory theistic explanation of the world would have to incorporate a
satisfactory account of the existence of evil in the world, so that evil no
longer presented a devastating problem for theism. No other theistic account of the production
of the world has resolved the problem of evil.
I will show that this thesis fulfils this criterion.
The Process of Self-Creation.
Each
stage of the development of the world has begun in as simple a manner as the
nature of the stage has permitted. Each
stage has then undergone a development involving greater unified complexity. The development has not been one of
continuous gradual improvement, but has involved great diversity. Within the overall pattern of the development
of a greater unified complexity, there is retrogression, and there are
instances of stasis. The process appears
to involve free experimentation and diversity, rather than the working out of
some pre-determined plan. Each stage has
developed in a manner consistent with its self-organisation or self-creation.
In
the creation of matter, the initial components are simple, relative to the
complexity of the matter which later develops.
While there is a high degree of fine tuning of the forces associated
with the initial components of the Big Bang, the subsequent process of physical evolution is
marked by contingency. Stars are formed
and disintegrate violently, scattering the higher elements which are necessary
for life, and which have been formed within them. This process is repeated, apparently
randomly, and further stars form, some of which have planetary systems.
Eventually
a planet is formed, in one solar system, which is capable of supporting
life. While there could be more than one
such planet in distant parts of the universe, we only know of one, and even our
closest planetary neighbours, the genesis of which was similar to that of our
own planet, appear hostile to life. This
development of a life-compatible planet appears to be as free as such a process
could possibly be. At the same time its
geophysical development is subject to a number of internal controls by an
ordering principle, inherent in matter.
This ordering principle provides the regularity which we experience and
express as laws of nature, in this case the laws or regularities of physics,
including sub-atomic physics, and chemistry.
Life
then emerges on earth. Although all life
is complex, it first appears in its simplest form. Life then undergoes a process of ramification
and development involving natural selection.
The process of natural selection appears to be undirected, although a
number of living forms tend towards greater complexity. This tendency to complexity appears to be the
result of the operation of an internal ordering principle, similar in function
to, and making use of, the ordering principle which is inherent in matter. The operation of this ordering principle,
together with natural selection, gives rise to instinctive plant and animal
forms of increasing complexity. As with
the evolution of matter, the progress towards greater complexity is not
uniform.
Initially
all life is instinctive. Eventually a
form of instinctive life evolves until some of its instinctive actions are able
to be replaced by conscious actions.
This is the emergence of psychic or conscious life. Once again, as with the emergence of life,
the range of animal consciousness is initially at a minimum. Psychic life then undergoes a similar process
of ramification and development involving natural selection, which also tends
towards greater complexity. Over time
there is the development of various types of animals which exhibit a degree of
intelligence, involving the application by them of empirical logic. Some of these animals are social and some
exhibit altruistic behaviour, as the sociobiologists have indicated. E. O. Wilson gives numerous instances of such
behaviour. (1975,121-2) Eventually,
among hominid types, one type develops which is sociable, altruistic,
adaptable, intelligent and cooperative.
This is the evolution of Homo Sapiens. The process
of natural selection, which leads up to Homo Sapiens appears to be as free as
possible. Homo Sapiens initially
possesses a consciousness which is more highly developed than that of other
animals, but which is still that of the psychic stratum. Psychic level cultures develop, of various
degrees of sophistication, eventually developing in the application of
empirical logic until the members of some cultures reach the stage where they
are able to support a spiritual nature.
Finally
spiritual man emerges as Homo Sapiens Ethicus, man with a spiritual nature, based upon
Homo Sapiens. Man, as Homo Sapiens
Ethicus, is distinguished by his newly acquired interest in
moral matters and by his attempts to understand the world. His altruism is of a different order to that
exhibited by pre-moral forms of life.
Human altruism has a moral motivation, as Midgley has shown.
(1978,127) Homo Sapiens Ethicus is also
distinguished from other life forms by his enhanced creativity, and his attempts
to understand and to change aspects of the world.
Some
of the immediate predecessors of Homo Sapiens Ethicus, as Homo Sapiens, will also have exhibited a
degree of creativity, some effort to understand the world and also to maintain
order within their group, but they will not have exhibited any specifically
moral sensibility, involving access to the deontological realm of the moral
`ought-to-be’. Members of Homo Sapiens
will also have exhibited a more highly developed form of basic, non-moral,
altruism towards members of their own community than is found in other species,
as well as a tribal fellow-feeling and rule governed behaviour. All these activities will be well beyond the
primitive altruism and social behaviour demonstrated by non-human species. These developments will have been assisted by
the development of spoken language, and eventually of writing. Homo Sapiens thus develops towards the stage
where this species becomes an appropriate platform for the emergence of a spiritual consciousness.
Altruism and Morality.
It
is important to understand that altruism, even in its highest expression, is
not the same as human morality. This mistake is frequently made. For example Wright reduces human morality to
reciprocal altruism. Having reduced
human morality, which involves the perception of moral imperatives, to a
characteristic of lower animals, he then expresses wonder at the fact that the
human mind which, in his view, results solely from a process as amoral as
natural selection, could make us feel that we are in touch with higher truths.
(1994, Chapter 10) Wright fails to
appreciate that our perception of higher truths, which is our perception of
moral imperatives, is an emergent spiritual ability which is not the result of
natural selection.
The Emergence of a Moral Sense.
In
both the emergence of life, and the emergence of Homo Sapiens Ethicus, the emergence occurs only at the fulfilment
of the previous phase, when the most complete expression of the previous phase
appears to have been freely attained.
Life emerges when matter has reached its maximum development. Conscious life emerges when instinctive life
is not capable of further development.
Homo Sapiens Ethicus emerges when conscious life produces its most
intelligent and adaptable development.
The same type of process from the simple to the complex, involving
ramification and developments including false starts and blind alleys, is also
apparent in the subsequent cultural development of Homo Sapiens Ethicus in its
ethical, social and technical dimensions.
One
of the most significant products of the moral orientation within which Homo
Sapiens Ethicus customarily operates, was the initiation of
philosophy in
What
needs to be asked is why this expression of a new moral sensibility
occurred? What had changed to bring into
disrepute what had been previously accepted as normal? I suggest it was the result of the operation
of a recently acquired spiritual consciousness.
The
same development had occurred much earlier than the Sixth Century BC in the
Hebrew culture. The initiation of moral
teaching throughout the world, and the evidence of the emergence of a spiritual consciousness, was primarily a
phenomenon of the first millennium BC.
A
foundation for the effective operation of a human spiritual consciousness
required not only the perception of moral values and of what ought to be the
case in moral matters. It also required
an understanding of what had to be done to instantiate those values. The foundation for this understanding would
have been provided by a number of prior developments within the most highly
developed cultures of Homo Sapiens. These
included the development of languages, of aesthetic sensibility and of a
concept of material, as distinct from moral, values. The role of language in the development of
consciousness has been traced by Lonergan. (1973,71-89) The development of material values could give
rise to a material `ought’, which could in turn lead to the development of
cities and of irrigation, which developments Lonergan links to the mythical
environment within which these works occurred. (1973, 89-90). The development of an aesthetic sensibility
certainly preceded the emergence of the capacity to perceive the non-physically-existent
world of the moral `ought-to-be’ by thousands of years. This aesthetic sensibility could well have
accustomed those members of Homo Sapiens, within whom it developed further than
in any other species, to function in response to perceptions which were not
wholly accountable in terms of the operation of the material senses. Both the development of material values and
of an aesthetic sensibility could later provide an environment within which the
operation of an emergent moral sensibility, giving rise to moral perceptions,
could function without appearing to constitute too great a discontinuity with
previous forms of thought. While the
perception of moral values cannot be accounted for in evolutionary terms, the
same can not be said of aesthetic sensibility, of which there is evidence among
animals and birds. Again
Having
emerged with a spiritual consciousness, man, as Homo Sapiens Ethicus, continually
engages in the process of his own further self-creation, in contrast to the
largely static cultures of his Homo Sapiens predecessors.
Their individual and communal self-creation was glacial by
comparison. Homo Sapiens Ethicus, in many communities, progressively creates his own
persona, through his own efforts and within the context of his culture. The process of self-creation is more directly
apparent at the spiritual-cultural stratum than at earlier strata, but the
overall direction of development within each stratum, towards greater
organisation and complexity, eventually providing a platform for a further
emergent, is clear. The overall
direction of development is not as clear at the spiritual stratum as it is at
earlier strata.
This
is because the other strata have each already reached the point at which they
have provided a platform for a further emergent, and also because the spiritual
stratum enjoys a greater degree of freedom in self-creation than do the other
strata. The spiritual stratum is morally
free to self-create or self-destruct.
This alternative raises the problem of evil.
The Problem of Evil
We
can distinguish two forms of evil, natural evil and moral evil. Natural evil is evil which results from the
normal operation of physical laws, and is also referred to as physical
evil. As man is creative, it is clear
that if he is to exercise his creativity in the physical order, he must have a
knowledge of the laws of nature. Those laws
of nature must be constant, and so be able to be relied upon. However, it is those same physical laws of
nature which come into play in physical accidents, natural disasters, and other
forms of natural evil. It would not be
possible for the laws of nature to be relied upon by man in the exercise of his
physical and technical creativity, and yet not operate equally reliably in
those circumstances which we recognise as incidents of natural evil. If people are killed by a flood, it is a
natural evil resulting from the operation of laws of nature. Humans, however, can utilise those same laws
of nature to mitigate the effects of flooding.
The laws of nature are constant, and man is free to utilise his
knowledge of those laws to his advantage.
Similarly,
if man is to operate freely and exercise his creativity in the moral order, he
must be able to exercise a free choice between real and apparent goods. It is man’s free exercise of that choice
which can give rise to moral evil. But
if man is to freely achieve the ultimate outcome which my thesis contemplates,
God could not be expected to interfere with the individual’s free choice, even
if the choice, once made, leads to such consequences as the Concentration Camps
of Auschwitz. The most that could reasonably
be expected of God, in leading man towards the Good while respecting human
freedom, would be for him to provide humans with a spiritual nature, involving
an orientation towards the Good, the capacity to perceive the range and
hierarchy of values in any given situation of free moral choice, and to provide
each individual with the opportunity to choose the greater real good. The existence of moral evil is thus a
necessary consequence of man’s equally necessary moral freedom, without which
man could not function as the potential, but free, instantiator of value in the
world. The existence of moral evil is a
necessary consequence of man’s free self-creative role. Man is the only instantiator of value in the
world. He can use this role to complete
the process of the self-creation of both himself and the world. He can achieve this by working to help both
mankind and the physical world become as they ought to be, to provide the
platform for the emergence of Deity. This process
has to be totally free if Deity is to be freely self-created.
My
resolution of the problem of evil can be distinguished from the more
traditional response. This, in the case
of moral evil, is the free will defence, which simply maintains that moral evil
is a necessary cost of our possession of free will, and that our capacity to
freely exercise moral choice is a desirable property. My argument is the much stronger claim that
moral evil is a logically necessary consequence of man’s role as a self-creator. Similarly, in the case of natural evil, the
traditional response to the problem is the free process defence, which simply
maintains that God allows nature to operate freely, rather than maintain, as I
do, the necessity for the natural order to be regular, again in order for man
to be able to fulfil his role as self-creator in his control of the physical
order.
R.G.
Swinburne in his article on the problem of evil (1995), outlines the
anti-theistic argument that an omnipotent being could prevent evil if he chose,
an omniscient being would know how to do so, and a perfectly good being would
always choose to do so. From these
grounds the atheist argues that there can be no God of the kind supposed by
Christianity. An
argument of this kind can only be made on the assumption that the world is
God’s direct creation, and is directly ordered by him, rather than that the
world is involved in its own process of self-creation. My process defence is a superior theodicy
which removes the grounds of the atheist’s argument. An omnipotent being could not prevent evil
occurring in the process of the self-creation of an entity similar to himself,
without negating that process of self-creation.
A perfectly good being, having chosen to initiate such a process of
self-creation, would not logically choose to negate it.
This
explanation of the existence of the world, that the world is involved in its
own process of self-creation, is superior to Madigan’s generation of the world by the expansion of the
circuit of divine self-love. It is also
superior to Plotinus’ device of an emanation of the world from God’s
goodness. Both of these alternative
explanations suffer from the same major disability. They do
not explain the existence of evil in the world.
Evil could not derive from the expansion of God’s self-love nor could it
derive from an emanation of God’s goodness.
Any satisfactory theistic explanation of the world has to account for
the existence of evil.
Man, Culture and Deity.
My
proposed resolution of the problem of evil, that it is a logical consequence of
the process of the self-creation of Deity, has not been suggested before. However the recognition that the creation of
man is not yet complete is also proposed by Hick (1968) as part of his response
to the problem of the existence of evil in the world.
The
difference is that Hick sees man as only the raw material for a further and
more difficult stage of God’s creative work.
Hick’s focus is specifically upon the development of the individual
rather than the social or cultural group, although in drawing an analogy
between God’s purpose for man and a parent’s purpose for her children, he
implicitly recognises the relevance of the immediate cultural setting to the
individual’s development. (1968, 290-5)
Hick
argues that his position, that man’s creation is not yet complete, is
consistent with that of Irenaeus and other Hellenistic Fathers of the Church,
who saw man not as having been created in a finished state but as a being in
the process of creation. Irenaeus had
drawn a distinction between man’s being made in the image of God, which he took
to mean man having been made as a personal and moral being, and man’s being
made in God’s likeness, which he took to indicate a process of gradual
perfection, until man became a finite likeness of God. Hick also adverts, in support of his
position, to Paul’s statements to the effect that we all are being changed to Christ’s likeness, and that God had ordained that man
should be shaped to the likeness of his Son. (1968, 289-90) Hick returns to this Irenaean theodicy in a
later work, noting that the only response that seems at all adequate to the
problem of evil is that our existence on this planet is part of a much longer
process through which personal spiritual life is being brought to a perfection
which will retrospectively justify evils. (1989,118) I argue that man’s potential perfection, and
the process of change towards a likeness to Christ, are both subject to man’s
own activity or inactivity in response to his moral value-consciousness, and
are not subject to some sort of automatic progression.
Hick
also points out that there have to be at least two stages in the creation of
man, the evolutionary stage and the grafting of a spiritual nature onto the
evolved nature, when a creature, which was able to develop a conscious
fellowship with God, had been fashioned.
He sees this latter development as one which could only be achieved
through the willing co-operation of human individuals, involving their actions
in, and reactions to, the world.
Because, in his view, the fulfilment of God’s purpose requires our
self-development, and is a process in the nature of a pilgrimage in the life of
each individual, rather than a process entailing a cultural evolution, he goes
on to argue that this individual development does not entail any corresponding
progressive improvement in the moral state of the world. At the same time he recognises that there is a
moral development in man’s institutions, but he argues that this involves an
accumulation of evil as well as good. He
concludes that God’s purpose has moved within individuals rather than within a
human aggregate. (1968, 291-2)
I
would argue that there has been significant progress in the moral state of the
world, in individuals, societies and institutions, particularly since the
institution of Christianity. One
outstanding example of such institutional progress is the initial development
of the English Common Law, a system which has impacted far beyond its original
domain, and which had a recognisable input of Christian thought. (O’Sullivan,
1950,6-24) At the same time, progress by mankind towards the Good is both
erratic and painfully slow, involving as it does the cultural interaction
between the individual and society. It
will necessarily take many generations, so could not be accomplished overnight
by a single individual, no matter how perfect.
I
do not claim that moral progress is an even, evolutionary, progression. It is not an inevitable evolution towards the
Good, but it is primarily the result of conscious developments. I do not deny that there have been, and are
still in the West, instances of a return to primitive barbarism, such as during
the Jewish Holocaust in
I
would therefore argue against Hick’s view, that the progressive fulfilment of
God’s purpose in the life of the individual does not entail a corresponding
improvement in the moral state of the world.
There is a mutual entailment between the development of the individual
and his culture. It is a role of man to
perfect his culture, in its widest sense, to bring about a world which is `as
it ought to be’ in every avenue of human action, including the material,
technical, social and moral aspects, a world in which every individual has the
possibility of the full self-development of every talent and virtue. Contrary to Hick’s assertion that it is only
individual development which matters, he himself implicitly recognises the
effect of the cultural environment on the individual when he accuses Hume of
confusing what heaven ought to be with what `this world ought to be, as an
environment for beings who are in process of becoming perfected’. (1968, 294)
I
maintain that it is only when the stage of the optimum development of human
culture in every field, but particularly in the field of personal and public morality,
has been attained by man, that the next stage in the process of the production
of Deity can become possible.
My answer to the question as to why the world is not as it ought to be,
is that it is necessary for the world to be imperfect at this stage of the
process of its self- creation. This
answer relies on my argument that man has the role of self-creator of himself
and of the world, as part of the process of the production of Deity.
I
have argued that our human moral value-consciousness has the potential to lead
us to perfect the world and so to provide the basis for the final emergence of Deity to complete the self-creation of the world. Our moral value-consciousness does not
mandate this completion, as we are free to act or to fail to act in accordance
with that value-consciousness. Homo
Ethicus has been provided by evolution and emergence with the means, our
intelligence, the motive, our value-consciousness, and the opportunity, our
life in the world, to provide the basis for the completion of the process of
self-creation. However, the nature of
any such completion is not pre-determined, and we are free to either achieve it
or to fail to achieve it.
Homo
Sapiens Ethicus can thus be understood as the penultimate
stage in the process of production of Deity. We move
towards or away from the completion of the self- creation of the world,
primarily through the agency of the moral cultures which we communally create,
in which we participate and which we, as individuals, are able to modify. We all bear some responsibility for the moral
structure of the society in which we find ourselves.
The Role of Culture
Mary
Midgley demonstrates that man is formed in such a way that he needs a culture
to complete him. She points out that we
have an innate need of culture and we cannot live without it, nor without
creating it. She argues that rather than
standing in the way of the development of the individual, culture provides the
necessary matrix for that development. (1978,286) Obviously, the greater degree of individual
freedom a particular culture permits, and the more responsive it is, in its
traditions and structures, to the operation of our human moral
value-consciousness, the more it will enable individuals to develop and to
realise their good, and also to contribute to the further development of the
culture.
In
a rigid culture, where dissent is not permitted, perhaps not even contemplated,
the extent of possible individual self-development will obviously be more
difficult. The individual’s culture
always provides the background of `normality’ against which he can measure his
development. To the extent that a person’s
culture provides a background that is less than ideal, ideal in the sense of
being both moral and free, it will tend to inhibit individual development. To the extent that the culture provides a
background that is both moral and free, it can foster individual
development. Human culture is a human
spiritual creation which can be developed so that it fosters further human
spiritual development.
While
each individual has the potential to realise the greater good, and so to also
advance the culture, he also has the potential to be misled by those ideas and
customs within a culture which reflect the pursuit of lesser goods. A culture essentially tells its members who
or what they are, and what the world is all about. As Dix’s analysis of culture has shown, the
roots of a culture are to be found in the ideas which the people of that
culture take for granted as to the meaning and purpose of human life.
(1967,7) However, the message which a
particular culture provides as to who or what its members are, and what the
world is all about, is the product of that culture and its members. It is therefore possible for a culture to be
mistaken on each count.
The
variation of moral standards between different cultures reflects the fact that
we have the responsibility to create our own individual and communal moral
standards, with the aid of our moral value-consciousness. This is part of the process of our own
individual and communal self-creation.
We are free as to whether and how we apply, or fail to apply, the
persuasion of our moral value-consciousness in the development of our
cultures. The result is that each
culture develops differently, giving rise to the problem of cultural relativism
in moral matters.
Relativism
questions the ultimate validity of any moral standards. Our freedom as to whether and how we apply
the persuasion of our moral value-consciousness, provides the source of the
difficulty which is experienced in attempting to state secure moral principles. It is also the source of the failure to
devise principles of moral action upon which there is universal agreement. This lack of clarity in moral matters is not
surprising at the present stage of human development. The clarity of the physical laws of the basic
material stratum of the world should not be expected to be a characteristic of
the application, within a particular culture, of the moral law. At the same time, nowhere is the process of
human self-creation more evident than in the process of a culture. There is a reciprocal interaction between any
human culture and its members. Each
individual is influenced by his or her culture, and is able to influence that
culture in return.
The
difficulty which is experienced in expressing secure moral principles indicates
that they are not necessarily readily available to us in a form from which the
right action in any particular set of circumstances can be deduced. This is consistent with our responsibility
for our own self-creation. The
derivation of secure moral principles, and of an appropriate moral culture, is
itself dependent upon our understanding of what constitutes the Good of man.
The Good of
Any
entity is good to the extent that it is as it ought to be. As a moral entity, man is good to the extent
that he is as moral as he ought to be.
Only
when we recognise what man ought to be, can we expect to be able to devise
those communal rules which should promote the attainment of the Good of
man. If it is the case, as I maintain,
that the Good of man is to be achieved through the creation of a human moral
culture such as would provide an appropriate platform for the emergence of Deity, the objective of the creation of such a moral
culture would provide the telos from which appropriate action could follow.
As
Horton and Mendus point out (1994), the failure of many modern approaches to
morality, in the absence of a perspective of the Good of man, has been a
constant theme of Alasdair MacIntyre. In
particular, MacIntyre attacks the Enlightenment project, which he sees as
having been dominant in academic philosophy for some three hundred years, and
argues the need for a return to a teleological perspective such as that of
Aristotle. Teleology
was rejected by science as influenced by the Enlightenment, as it was
considered to be incompatible with the determinism which had been discovered in
the laws of physical nature.
MacIntyre
insists upon the social embeddedness of our conceptions of the good, and argues
that there can be no `view from nowhere’ in morality, no set of moral rules
which can commend themselves to all people, independent of their concept of the
Good. He recognises that the
individual’s moral development must occur within a cultural context, and he
points to the need for a telos which will enable people to distinguish between
what they are and what they ought to be, as Aristotle was able to distinguish
between the way people were and the way they ought to be by appealing to a
telos which was based upon the virtues as understood in his contemporary
society. (1994,3-7)
To
digress for a moment, the Enlightenment project’s rejection of teleology had
been prompted by the apparent conflict between teleology and the determinism which
had been discovered in the laws of physical matter. It can now be seen that it was a category
mistake to apply the determinism, which exists at the physical stratum, to the
biological and psychic strata of being.
These strata are not determined by the laws of physics and
chemistry. The laws of physics and
chemistry are utilised by the teleology of biological entities, rather than the
biological entity being determined by those laws. The rejection of teleology is warranted only
as a methodological approach to controlling laboratory conditions at the
physical stratum. It is not warranted at
higher emergent strata.
Given
the data of the Big Bang, a putative human observer would find it impossible
to predict the diverse consequences over time, just at the physical level. We can now also see that the simple Laplacian
determinist mechanism was not as firmly grounded as was previously thought,
even in the physical sphere.
Contemporary
Chaos theory indicates the possibility of significant physical effects
occurring as a result of relatively minor physical events, and demonstrates the
consequent difficulty in making predictions for complex systems, such as
weather systems, even in the short term.
This theory indicates the necessity of distinguishing between the
determinism of the physical stratum and its predicability. As Belsey points out, the unpredictability of
a system such as the weather is due to the outcome being sensitive to minute
unmeasurable variations in initial conditions and not to the absence of
governing laws. (1995,129)
MacIntyre
also argues, as Horton and Mendus analyse his position, that for the individual
to understand himself, he has to recognise that his life is in the nature of a
quest, in search both of what he is and what he ought to do. This can only be discovered within a social
context of practices and traditions upon which the individual can critically
reflect, and thus be able to make decisions upon their validity. (1994,
9-12) The one thing lacking in MacIntyre’s
position is a statement of just what constitutes the Good of man. This deficiency is supplied by the concept of
man as the penultimate stage in the self-creation of Deity.
We
may criticise aspects of some of the Aristotelian virtues, but at the same
time, with the aid of a more secure telos, based on an understanding of the
Good of man, we can establish more secure virtues for the individual and
society. This understanding of the Good
of man provides a reference point against which particular moral positions can
be judged.
Chapter Six - EMERGENCE AND THE WORLD PROCESS.
A
process can be defined as a systematic series of actions directed to some
end. There is no doubt that the world,
both as the universe, and as our world, the earth, is full of processes. What is in issue is whether the universe can
be understood as an overall process directed towards some end.
As
a significant part of the cultural process, humans have always sought to
understand the world, and have devised explanations, mythical, religious,
philosophical or ideological, which have sought to make sense of the world and
to explain its purpose. Such attempts to
explain the world presuppose that the world is a process, leading towards some
end. However, we can not be in a
position of certainty with regard to any process until we are able to see
either its end, or the end of parallel processes. The regularity of many processes enables us
to say with certainty what their end will be.
In contrast to this regularity, any overall process of the universe is
necessarily unique. It will not be known
with absolute certainty whether it is a process, aiming towards a specific end
product, until the end of any such process is reached, or clearly
foreseen. However it is clear that just
as the physical process of the universe is able to be understood as a process,
even though it has not reached its end, it also appears that the universe
itself is a process, of which that physical process is a part. I have argued from a natural theology that
the process of the universe is the process of theosis. A thesis which provides an explanation of
certain phenomena will earn further support if it provides explanations of some
other puzzling phenomena. This thesis
provides explanations of the problem of emergent evolution, of the problem of
evil, of the problem of why a perfect God would apparently create an imperfect
world, of the problem of the purpose of human value-consciousness, and of the
problem of what constitutes the Good of man.
With
the growth of knowledge which has occurred in the twentieth century we are able
to make a more fruitful attempt at an explanation of the universe than any that
has previously been attempted. In making
this attempt I stand within a long tradition, if not a presently popular
one. The first philosophical project of
the Pre-Socratics was to provide an explanation of the world, `to understand
the origin and nature of the world and our place in it’ (Irwin 1989,4). The project of the Pre-Socratics was also a
theological one, as Vlastos has pointed out.
Vlastos argues that anyone who reads the Pre-Socratics with an open mind
can not help but be struck by the religious note in their approaches, their
major concerns having included the creation of the world, its necessary order,
the origin of life and the nature of the soul. (1970,92)
Socrates in his youth had been eager to learn how
philosophers had accounted for the then known world, but he was not satisfied with the accounts he was
given, as they purported to tell only how things had come about, while Socrates
wanted to know why they had happened. He
did not primarily seek a knowledge of what the previous state of affairs had
been, from which the present state had developed, but sought an explanation of
some end or purpose which the events of the world served. He had hoped that Anaxagoras’ work would
provide an explanation of the world as a design, as Anaxagoras had proposed
that Mind was the foundation of order in the world. He was subsequently disappointed to find that
while Anaxagoras postulated a Mind which initiated motion, this Mind then left
the world to its own devices. Socrates
gave up his hope of an intelligible world order and turned instead from the
outer to the inner world, to discover the order and purpose of human life.
(Cornford 1993,2-4) Anaxagoras also
considered that there was a portion of everything in everything. The growth of living things was then a
function of mind within them, which enabled them to extract nourishment from
their surroundings.
Anaxagoras’
view that mind initiated the motion which separated out the mixture of the
ingredients of the world into their various components, and then left those
components to their own autonomous devices, presages my thesis of the
self-creation of the various strata of reality.
His view that the growth of living things was a function of mind within
them, presages my thesis that the apparent purposiveness of the biological
stratum indicates that the laws of biology are related to the self-creation of that stratum. Socrates’ disappointment with Anaxagoras came about because
Socrates was searching for a direct creator, rather than an initiator of a
process of self-creation.
Contemporary
scientific explanation is in the mode which disappointed Socrates. It asks the
question `how?’, which can never provide the answer to the fundamental
`why?’. However the answer to the question
as to how, can provide information relevant to an answer to the question
`why?’. The two questions pursued by
Socrates, the question of the purpose of the cosmos, and of the purpose of man,
are closely related. Man’s purpose is
linked in my thesis to the purpose of the cosmos.
Subsequent
to Socrates, Aristotle, and other systematic philosophers, particularly
Plotinus, sought to provide a complete explanation of the
world. This is the project to which I seek
to contribute. I have proposed an
explanation of the process of the world which, if accepted, will bring a new
perspective to bear upon other avenues of inquiry, providing an impetus to
further research. My explanation has
taken advantage of the accumulated knowledge which was simply not available to
the earlier philosophers. Most of the
new physical knowledge of the processes of the cosmos is a product of this
century. As Contopoulos and Kotsakis
have pointed out, it was only in the twentieth century that Cosmology became a
science rather than simply a matter of speculation. (1987,1)
The
world has been observed to develop by stages, a type of development which is a
common feature of most processes. The differences
between these stages have also been recognised as constituting the phenomenon
known either as Emergence, or as Emergent Evolution.
Emergence
No
satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon of Emergence has elsewhere been
proposed. Apart from the questions of
how and why the phenomenon of emergence occurs, there is the prior question of just what
distinguishes an emergent from a change which is not an emergent. We need to examine this question if we are to
remove possible confusion from the concept of emergence.
The
paradigm case of emergence is the emergence of life from inert matter. One purported example of emergence, which has
generally been rejected, is the `emergence’ of water from Hydrogen and
Oxygen. What appears to distinguish the
different natures of these two events is that while the combination of Hydrogen
and Oxygen produces water as a result of the normal operation of the laws of
chemistry, no such physical or chemical laws have been shown to produce life
from inert matter. Not only do the
normal operation of the laws of chemistry fail to produce life, but life is the
sphere of operation of a new set of laws, the laws of biology.
It
appears that what distinguishes a real emergent, as distinct from a normal
development, is that at each emergent level new entities come into being,
together with new laws which apply to those entities. This distinction is implicit in the
recognition that there are emergent levels, or strata, in the development of
the world, but it has seldom been made explicit. The clearest example of the phenomenon of
emergence is the emergence of life from inert matter. The phenomena of life can be clearly
distinguished from the multitude of phenomena which occurred within matter prior
to the emergence of life. While the laws
of physical matter also apply to life, which we perceive as having a physical
form, life is also the sphere of operation of biological laws which do not
apply to inert matter. Many theorists of
Emergent Evolution fail to draw this necessary distinction between true and
false emergent phenomena, resulting in some disagreement as to what constitute
the emergent levels.
In
his recent book on the topic of emergent evolution, David Blitz recognises that the nature of the mechanism which
gives rise to the phenomenon of emergence is an unresolved problem. It is also a problem which he admits he does
not seek to resolve. (1992,180) He notes
that there has been considerable debate as to just what constitute the emergent
levels, identifying the six main levels proposed by various emergentists as
being: Space-time, Matter, Life, Mind,
Society and Deity. Only
Alexander has claimed that Space-time and Deity were emergent
levels, while he did not include society as a level. The other emergent evolutionists have
claimed various combinations within the remaining four levels, with only
Sellars claiming all four. (1992,126)
Blitz recognises that emergence is an ontological problem, but he
proposes no criterion by which the levels should be distinguished. He finally indicates his preference for the
four levels of matter, life, mind, and society, in which latter, however, he
includes both insect societies and human moral cultures. (1992,179-83)
Criteria of Emergent Levels
The
only appropriate criteria for distinguishing emergent ontological levels are
the different laws of nature which apply at the different levels. This was recognised by Alexander, the first philosopher of emergent evolution. He noted that each new emergent had its roots
in a lower level of existence. It did
not belong to the level from which it had emerged, but constituted `a new order
of existent with its special laws of behaviour’ (1920,II,46) These laws of
nature, such as physical or biological laws, are generally regarded as
descriptive rather than prescriptive laws.
That is, they describe what has been observed to happen and do not prescribe
what ought to happen. If they are
accurate they will describe what will happen in specified circumstances, but
what then happens does so because nature is orderly, not because what happens
ought to have happened. From this
perspective it is considered that laws of nature cannot be broken, as can
prescriptive laws. If a supposed law of
nature appears to have been regularly broken then it was not a law, but
possibly only a partially correct description of what had been observed
previously. This is clearly an
epistemological perspective on the laws of nature, as it relates directly to
our knowledge of those laws.
We
need to distinguish this epistemological perspective as to the laws of nature,
from the ontological perspective. The
laws of nature are laws, or regularities, which humans discover and
codify. What tends to happen in Science
is that at some level it is found that the formulation of those laws previously
discovered does not cover the whole range of appropriate phenomena, and so the
laws are eventually superseded by the formulation of new laws which will cover
the extended phenomena. This epistemic
variability has to be distinguished from the ontic reliability of the phenomena
at a particular level of reality. When
new levels of reality emerge, they emerge together with appropriate laws. These laws, as ontic entities, do not
vary.
At
the physical level, at which level the appropriate laws are more transparent,
the laws prescribe what specific physical outcomes will be, given particular
initial and boundary conditions. At
higher levels than the physical, outcomes are necessarily less predictable as
the initial and boundary conditions are less predictable and are not as easily
controlled. However, any epistemic difficulty we may experience in
distinguishing and expressing what the laws of nature are, at any level, has no
effect upon their ontic status.
From an epistemological perspective it is true to say that if a physicist