Thoughts on a Postmodernist Debate (and Aquinas’s 5th Way)

First, listen to this (somewhat tedious) debate between Thaddeus Russell and Bob Murphy. It’s on postmodernism and libertarianism.

OK, back? Let’s discuss.

It’s funny – and likely Thaddeus is aware of this, though with Bob I’m unsure — because what’s really at issue is just philosophical essentialism. Now, essentialism itself is sometimes used as a launching point for arguments for God (Aquinas’s 5th way, famously), which would have been nice for Bob to bring up once Thaddeus begun his glib dismissals of Christianity. Because there obviously *is* real, intelligible content and teleological directedness to things of this world — electrons have a certain mass, are attracted to protons; acorns are a certain type of seed aimed at becoming an oak; humans are rational animals, with reason having a natural inclination toward truth, etc — and so, what can account for this?

Now, this (essentialism) is (again, obviously) the correct view of the world. You can’t escape it. For one, you’d have to deny reason altogether just as soon as you dump essentialism (example: if you deny essentialism you reject teleology, and if you reject teleology you can’t then say reason is aimed by truth, at which point you can no longer say anybody reasons any better or worse, because the standard of “better or worse” is meaningless without reason’s teleological target of truth, and so you could no longer give any good arguments for postmodernism, either!), but you’d also have to abandon science and philosophy, which are frequently on the hunt to discern the essential characteristics and manifest powers of things (largely what laws of nature describe). It would also be a miracle that our world so obviously appeared to be essentialist, if it wasn’t. (As an aside, just because we don’t know the complete essence of a thing, or even if we sometimes get it wrong, it doesn’t follow, as Murphy pointed out, that there is no fact of the matter as to what this or that essence is — that because we either don’t fully understand, or sometimes mis-understand, essences, it is clearly a non-sequitur to conclude we live in a non-essentialist world. Furthermore, regarding the whole gender thing, even if other cultures have had different gender categories, and even if we encounter anomalies with chromosomes, there are still only two distinct biological re-productive roles pertaining to humans; only male and female gametes, and that’s it. In other words, speaking of chromosomes rather than biological orientation toward a specific reproductive role just misses the point and confuses the issue. For more on the sex/gender distinction, see here.)

Now, what best explains essentialism — in fact, the only plausible explanation of essentialism — is an organizing mind, which can grasp intelligible content and relate it with other intelligible content – and that’s God. (So yes, to answer Thaddeus, God, in fact, did create man and woman, along with acorns and electrons, etc.) Otherwise you can’t explain essentialism and especially not teleology — certainly naturalism/materialism can’t do it, though some undoubtedly have tried. So, with theism you get essentialism, and with essentialism you get theism. Otherwise you are left with some sort of absurdism (postmodernism or otherwise) which many non-theists have embraced. But absurdism is wrong, so one should be a theist.

Now, for those unfamiliar with the connection between essentialism and God, here’s a quick (though admittedly inadequate) overview.

In Aquinas, Ed Feser puts the crux of argument this way (read the full develop on pages 110-120),

“What then of the vast system of causes that constitutes the physical universe? Every one of them is directed towards a certain end of final cause (telos). Yet almost none of them is associated with any thought, consciousness, intellect at all; and  even animals and human beings, which are conscious, are comprised in whole or in part of unconscious and unintelligent material components which themselves manifest final causality (teleology). But given what was said above, it is impossible for anything to be directed towards an end unless that end exists in an intellect which directs the thing in question towards it. It follows that the system of ends of final causes that make up the physical universe can only exist at all if there is a Supreme Intelligence or intellect  outside the universe which directs things toward their ends. Moreover, this intellect must exist here and now, and not merely at some beginning point in the past, because causes are here and now, and at any point at which they exist at all, directed towards certain ends (otherwise, for reasons examined already, they wouldn’t on Aquinas’s analysis be true efficient causes at all). As with Aquinas’s other arguments, he is not concerned here with whether and how the universe might have begun, but rather with what keeps it as it is at any given moment, a question which must arise even if the universe had no beginning. Hence the Supreme Intelligence of the Fifth Way is not the deistic god that seems to be the most Paley can argue for. Moreover, given his metaphysical assumptions, Aquinas’s conclusion follows necessarily and not merely with probability. In these respects the Fifth Way reaches a much stronger conclusion than the design argument, and does so precisely because unlike the design argument it starts from the recognition of the existence of immanent teleology.”

Whereas Norris Clarke summarizes the central point as follows,

“The ordering of the natural properties of these elements [in the Cosmos] towards dynamic interaction must be constituted prior (priority of causal dependence, not necessarily temporal priority) to their actual operations of interacting, since they interact according to their (already constituted) natures. But this means that they must be ordered toward, constituted in view of, not yet existing future actions, or possible future actions. Now, only a mind can constitute out of possibility a future order, can ‘order means to an end,’ as St. Thomas likes to put it. Only a mind can thus make present in its field of consciousness the future and the possible, which do not exist in themselves and can have only a mental presence. A purely material being without consciousness is locked into the here and now of its place in space and time. To order possibilities with a view to future action is again almost a definition of mind, or certainly one of its most characteristic functions. Thus the cosmos-wide dynamic order of our world system necessarily requires a cosmos-ordering Mind to constitute its order. [W. Norris Clarke, “Is Natural Theology Still Viable Today?,” in Explorations in Metaphysics: Being, God, Person (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), pp. 174-175.]

These are just snippets, of course, of a much larger metaphysical project. And so I encourage deeper reading for the uninitiated, especially since Aquinas’s 5th Way is often misinterpreted as a “design argument,” which it decidedly isn’t.

Naturally, there are other issues I have with remarks Thaddeus makes, most of which are pretty typical of relativists/postmodernists. While Russell admits to backing away from making the more forceful and self-refuting claim of “there is no objective truth,” his more agnostic position is still alarmingly inconsistent, since he frequently asserts positions he clearly holds to be objectively true (whether this or that or everything is a social construct), and some of them normative, such as his telling Bob, “you should be skeptical!” (ironically, he doesn’t seem even remotely skeptical when it comes to his own quite radical skepticism.)

Anyway, that’s postmodernism for ya.

PS – The other slightly annoying thing, and this is related to both parties in the debate, is the notion that God is somehow a conversation stopper. Give me a break. That the debate somewhat quickly pushed up the question of God’s existence just demonstrates, yet again, how critical considerations of ultimate reality are to everything else. God was not only not a conversation stopper for the greatest thinkers throughout history (then and now) but that horizon of intelligibility toward which all questions ultimately converge.

PPS – Jon Reed of Peaceful Separation, my agnostic/libertarian friend, had this to add: