Happy Day of the (Dumb) Ox! Giving the Saint of Intellectuals his Due

Thomas Aquinas 101 in 2009

As millions of mainland and overseas Chinese celebrate the Year of the Ox, I suspect only a small fraction of that number are aware that today, January 28th, is a memorial to Thomas Aquinas, let alone celebrating the event.  That  Thomas has become the butt of jokes for a variety of types ranging from atheists to mystics shouldn’t obscure the fact that the jokes started in his lifetime when he was known by a far different nickname than “The Angelic Doctor” which posterity bestowed on him.  I hope he had a sense of humor.

Far from being a Thomist, frankly, if the Doctor were to appear to me in angelic form in company with, say, the spirit of William of Occam I’m not sure which I would bow to first.  None the less anyone, whatever their religious views, who is concerned with civilization and ideas should have a warm spot for the “Dumb Ox” in their heart.

Atheistic Thomists?

One of the intellectual curiosities of the 20th century was the emergence of “atheistic” Thomists.  This in itself should reasure the timorous that studying Aquinas will not turn one instantly into Ultrajectine fanatic or an infatuated ritualist.  None the less there is something rather snark-like about the alleged sighting of Thomism among certain conservative and libertarian thinkers during the middle part of the last century.  Richard Weaver, who had some genuinely religious sensibilities, is probably a special case of a Southern Agrarian with an appreciation of scholasticism in general.  Much odder was Ayn Rand, who’s philosophy of Objectivism owed no allegiance to any previous thinker apart from Aristotle, as mediated by…none other than the Dumb Ox!

As a result one gets the curious statments which are typical of Objectivist simplification of intellectual history, notably “After Thomas the darkness of the the dark ages began to lift…what Thomas contributed to civilization was the notion: It’s OK to think again.”  Certainly not your typical atheist “black legend”, and no doubt a tribute that neo-Scholastics should be appreciate, but is it tendentious?  Well, yes and no.  There was no sudden lifting of the veil of ignorance with the advent of Thomas, but his work was certainly an integral part of the development of medeval dialectics, a way of thinking which allowed the open discussion of hypotheses and their consequent affirmation or confutation.  By common consent Thomas represents the culmination of this movement, although one suspects Rand herself would have been more tempramentally compatible with Abelard or even Averroes.

Dialectic and Truth

So it would seem that the mode of thinking which Aquinas represents constitutes some sort of benchmark in the development of Western thought, and this would be interesting even if  this was a benchmark on a continuing upward curve toward enlightenment.  However it is not clear that the paradigms which replaced scholasticism were always and in all ways superior to that which reigned in the  dominant schools of the middle ages.  No where is this more obvious than in the corruption of the word “dialectic” itself by Hegel and subsequent thinkers.

Today whenever we hear the word dialect used we are likely to find it associated with one or another ontological adjective, so it might be “cultural dialectic” or “material dialectic” or even if no such ontological theory is presupposed then we have to use an adjective like “Socratic” to designate good old dialectic dialectic.  There are all sorts of historical reasons for this of course, but for the purposes of Aquinas 101, which is about as far as I go, lets just say that for Hegel dialectic is inside of culture, whereas for Aquinas and likeminded thinkers dialectic is a stairway to heaven, a bridge between human subjectivity and the thoughts of the angels.  Don’t worry if you don’t happen to believe in angels, because the modern concept of “an intelligent alien form of life” serves the same purpose.  So when NASA or some other space agency sends a message off into far space, they always try to take into consideration the fact that non-essential aspects of alien life may differ from our own, for example the aliens may not have hair, or their bodies might not be bilaterally semetrical, the only essential is that they be intelligent, and that consequentially a message like 2+2=4, encryptied in sufficiently universal symbols, will appear true and understandable to them.

Of course communication with aliens (or spirits) was very far from the concerns of Aquinas…actually more the sort of thing that his mentor Albertus Magnus would have speculated on.  But Aquinas’ understanding of dialect as a discovery process, lecturing “as if” there were aliens among his auditors, differs specifically from the procedure of Hegel.  For Hegel dialectic does not discover, so much as create truth.  World history is a series of intellectual conversations in which civilizations are engaged one-upping each other, the final one-upping being that of the West, in which Western thought becomes Global thought, an eventuality which can be described as “the end of history.”

However, in spite of the fact that Hegel died in 1831, the Hegelian dialectic has continued to ramble on and create its own nemesis in the form of multiculturalism, the doubt which attacks the primacy and finality of Western values.  If Hegel were alive today perhaps he would convert to Islam and wager that there would be one more (hopefully final) turn of the dialectic which would establish the Global “end” (in the sense of goal rather than annihilation) on the basis of say, Andalusia in the year 1000 rather than 19th century Prussia.  Unfortunately I don’t think the multiculturalists would let him get away with it.  Poor Hegel, in a very real sense he’s deader (as an intellectual, I’m not talking about the spirit world here) than Aquinas who was over half a millenium his elder!

Dumb Ox Howlers

I’m not saying that Aquinas never made any specious arguments, everybody admits that he did.  Well, everybody to my knowlege, and I havn’t visited Rome in several decades.  Still whether or not one agrees with Karl Popper’s “falsificationism” or not, it is a matter of common sense that thinkers who are willing to commit themselves to clear propositions are more likely to be embarassed by posterity than obscurantists, and the Dumb Ox has had many a century for critics to pick holes in his logic.  Thus, no matter how fickle the historical dialectic, the very obscurity of Hegel ensures a certain perrenial challenge.  By way of contrast, the tomes of Aquinas are rather well lit, albeit gothic, mental dwellings where it is rather easy to see what has been jerry built and collapsed and what still stands.

The Wages of Realism

If there is anything radically wrong with the Thomistic style of thinking, then it must have something to do with an excess of clarity and reasoning.  Later I want to explain a sense in which this might actually be true, but for the moment I want to allay the fears which have attached themselves to rationalism in general and realism in particular, realism being the belief that species are real and that we can make sound propositions about a class of individuals which will hold good for each individual in that class.

Again, recalling the Randian’s compliment to Aquinas, I will go out on a limb and say that anyone who hasn’t spent a season thinking like a realist doesn’t know what thinking really is!  Once you learn how to think dialectically (in the scholastic rather than the Hegelian sense, mind you) your mind becomes a veritable Thomas the Tank Engine, or rather thought engine, puffing away at demonstrative logic, not only a really, really useful engine, but also one generative of novel hypotheses and insights.  And why shouldn’t it?  In stead of vague existential, pragmatic or statistical notions swimming around in your internal and external envioronment, suddenly you are possessed of ideas with a capital “I”…thoughts which actually correspond to the classes of objects which you happen to be thinking about.  Best of all you are able to subject those classes to judgments…both cognitively and in the real world.  I assure you, its a tremendously empowering experience!

This, of course, is precisely the danger that people always warn of when it comes to realism, usually with some veiled refernce to the Spanish Inquisition.  After all, the Angelic Doctor was a member of Dominican order, which in those days had some of the connotations which the word “lawyer” has taken on for us today.  But its much, much worse than that.  Any fool might guess how the certainty engendered by  philosophical realism might encourage the development of casuistry at law.  To be sure, rather than simply taking someone out and lynching them on the spot, which up to that time had been the norm, the rise of the philosophical dialectic abbeted “due process” which in today’s America we understand to be nothing more than cruel and inhuman punishment before the sentence.  No more dueling, no more judicial astrology…but rather the insidious developent of pleas, wittnesses, oaths of evidence and the rest of early modern legal paraphenalia.

But as I said, it gets worse, for it wasn’t just the Inquisition itself which was a product of philsophical realism…no the heresies which the Inquisition persecuted were also coined from the same philosophical mint.  The very certitude which possessed the inquisitor was also responsible for generating a multitude of heretical thought-forms.  And so the cycle continued, more intellectuals produced by philosophical realism, more intellectually motiviated heretics sure of their cause, more intellectual inquisitors seeking finer and finer distinctions for prosecuting heretics and so forth and so on.

This was a very compelling narrative prior to the rise of modernity in general and existentialism in particular.  The cultural dialectic of tolerance was supposed to work in the other direction: less thinking, less contention, more good feeling.  The perfect man of this new dispensation was the hippy of the American ’60s, confused and possibly addicted, but most of all happy and not spoiling for a fight.  Well, you can’t have everything, but it was a compromise which everybody was supposed to be able to live with.

The flaw in the argument was this: The inventor of existentialism was not an American hippy of the 1960s, he was a philosopher of Weimar Germany named Martin Heidegger.  Heidegger was that “worst case” mentioned above, in which a happless Hegel gets born into the 20th century, in which the West is already clearly and inexorably in decline.  He can’t throw out the West from his synthesis, the West must survive even though it has been betrayed by the logic of the historical dialect.  The solution is to throw out logic, and to substitute philosophical thought involving ideas with the phenomena of conciousness…henceforth to be called, indiscriminately, “thinking.”  How do you know that the thinking is valid?  If it is my thinking, i.e. Martin Heidegger’s thinking, it is valid.  If you think that it isn’t valid you don’t understand me.  How do we settle argumements in the absence of an ability to communicate rationally?  I think you can figure that one out for yourself.  Hint: Heidegger’s “boss” in the 30′s, the Chancellor of Germany, was a man named Adolf Hiter.

So, for all its tragedies, the 20th century did teach us one thing.  Violence and persecution are not, at least not exclusively, the result of philosophical realism.  Deep and turgid obscurantists seem to be very, very good at violence and persecution.

A Final Caveat

Just to say that the “Dumb Ox” and other representatives of high scholasticism have gotten a bum rap from modernity, is not to say that there is nothing problematic about realist modes of thought.  Valentin Tomberg (you knew I’d have to bring Tomberg into it didn’t you) saw realism and nominalism as synthetic opposites from his Hermetic Christian viewpoint.  To be a pure realist is to risk becoming a head in the cloud intellectual, even if one doesn’t succumb to fanaticism of some stripe.  To be a pure nominalist is to lose ones way in the trivia of everyday life, even if some people label their everyday life a “scientific reasearch paragdigm.”

Personally, I’ve started to get the feeling that William of Occam had the final word.  So far I’ve scrupulously avoided any comment on the content of St. Thomas’ works, restricting myself to what we today call “methodology.”  But as we all know he was discussing God, and the uniqueness of the Christian God lies in the fact that he became a concrete historical individual.  Without giving due consideration to the uniqueness of the individual it is impossible to understand the Christian message, and all we are left with is a lot of dogmas which, in the absence of personal relevance becomes nothing more than excess intellectual baggage.  So in the end we have to learn to speak more like Occam than Aquinas.

None the less, in a world still recovering from the brutality and anti-intellectualism of the 20th century, Thomas remains a very, very useful thought engine.  Or, to put it in less anachronistic terms, a good ox to plow with!