The Disaster of Sacrifice as the Ultimate Moral Standard – Part 3
The following is part three of a four-part series.
Taken from John Immel’s third session at the 2016 Conference on Gospel Discernment and Spiritual Tyranny
~ Edited by Andy Young
Click here for part one • Click here for part two • Click here for part four
(Links to the archived files are found below)
So I left us with a cliffhanger two sessions ago. So let’s start the discussion of the greatest philosophical villains in human history. Do you remember the question? Augustine had a central flaw in his doctrine. Now when I said that, of course the question is when someone says “flaw” they assume that to mean “wrong”. But what I am saying is that Augustine was actually fantastically consistent with his doctrine. He would not have considered this a flaw. However, it turned out to be a flaw because it opened the door later for other people to step in and challenge his root assumptions.
That flaw gave the world one last glimmer of hope; one last place for man to escape the destruction of human sacrifice. If you are an American Christian in the twenty-first century, and in particular within a reformed school with reformed teachers, 90% of what is taught is Augustine, which means 90% of what you believe is Plato. Augustine condemned every expression of human existence, every pleasure, every aspiration, every value. But Augustine left one thing for man to desire – the desire to go to Heaven!
Here is why this is important. For all of the sacrifice that Augustine is trying to lay on human existence, for all of the self-imposed destruction that Augustine is after, he still allows for this highest virtue (going to Heaven) and he says that all of these things that you sacrifice will ultimately impact on some level the ability to get to Heaven. Augustine is not at all consistent in this assertion, but it’s there. The vestige of this possibility is there.
Now here is what this means in practicality. There is still a relationship between action and outcome, so moral action can produce a moral outcome. In Susan Dohse’s session yesterday she was talking about how the church got into the middle of marriage. It was fascinating listening to the old thinkers basically point out that if you were in marriage and you still abstained you could gain for yourself a better salvation by virtue of this sacrifice. This is exactly the concept I am telling you persisted within Augustinian thought. The successive thinkers still believed that there was some form of moral action that man could take that would produce this given outcome. In other words, man could have values and he could choose those values and get a given outcome.
Now this is crucial because this little shred of possible benefit to human existence actually keeps the door open just enough that by the time we get to the 14th and 15th century we have man in pursuit of a different understanding of his own existence. We have man realizing that he can take actions that benefit his life.
That little itty bitty crack starts to get wider that by the time we get to St. Thomas Aquinas we have the re-institutionalization of reason, and so now we have the first formal presentation of Aristotle which is effectively man-centered/earth-centered (much to the chagrin of the Catholics). So here is St. Thomas Aquinas who ultimately lays the theological foundation that makes it possible for man to have his own existence. That was around 1250.
Fast-forward a few years and we finally get to the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment.
Now here’s the thing. The Age of Reason and the Enlightenment might have been successful – there were so many advances in human prosperity, human development, human understanding from effectively the 16th century to the 18th century that the church may never have recovered. They church knew it was on the verge of being laughed out of existence.
Now were are introduced to the first villains.
John Calvin’s doctrine closed the door on human self-interest as such. His doctrine of double-imputed depravity and the corollary doctrine of progressive sanctification eliminates even a trace of self-interest in God’s salvation plan.
Calvin was clear, man can have no trace, no hint, no breath of good inside him. Any aspiration to any value, any good, is proof-positive of total depravity. That’s his logic. So man is even morally condemned for wanting to want to go to Heaven. Philosophically speaking, John Calvin made it morally an existential liability separating the moral from the practical absolutely.
So with Augustine there was a vestige of moral practicality. He could aspire to go to Heaven. Whether God would elect him was another issue, but man could at least wish. But in Calvin, even the desire to go to Heaven was proof of moral corruption.
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
In the course of human history, John Calvin’s work becomes the defining expression of Christianity in the 16th century. And it is my contention that without his philosophical systems saturating the whole of European thought, Immanuel Kant would have remained a fussy little Puritan in Königsberg, Prussia. I will lay Kant’s success at Calvin’s feet.
Without Calvin’s specific brand of total depravity drilled into the minds of European thinkers I submit that intellectuals would not have been theologically predisposed to accepting Immanuel Kant’s premise. In a moment you will see why I say that.
In the 2014 TANC Conference I explained how man climbed out of the primordial ooze of Augustinian thought, through Aristotle to the likes of men such as John Locke. By the time we get to the 17th century philosophers are aware that they need a new start. They need to throw off Augustinian metaphysical and epistemological framework. They know that mysticism and dogmatism wreck everything they touch. Revelation does not work as an epistemological standard. Faith was merely government-enforced superstitions. Dogmatism was really despotism. Despotism lead to oppression and poverty.
This new method of understanding the world was called reason, thus the Age of Reason. The Enlightenment was the full cultural acceptance of the Aristotelian premise. The fundamentals of the Enlightenment were:
- The world is rational
- Man is rational
- The universe is benevolent
- Man can understand the world and master its secrets
Metaphysically this meant man was competent to understand his own world. This was revolutionary. So then politically, men were born free and no longer predestined to servitude. Serfdom dies, slavery takes a mortal blow, man challenges the traditional bastions of power, and people start restraining religious tyrants and mystic despots.
I have already said this repeatedly. Liberty and freedom as you and I understand it is a philosophical achievement. It is not an accident. Which means you cannot couple liberty and freedom with the doctrines of the Dark Ages (read Augustine and Calvin). They are antithetical to one another.
By the 18th century the church, both Protestant and Catholic, knew that it was in great danger of being laughed out of existence. The church needed a “savior”, and his name wasn’t Jesus. His name was Immanuel Kant. Consider the following citation of Kant’s:
“I cannot even make the assumption – as the practical interests of morality require – of God, freedom, and immortality, if I do not deprive speculative reason of its pretensions to transcendent insight.
For to arrive at these, it must make use of principles which, in fact, extend only to the objects of possible experience, and which cannot be applied to objects beyond this sphere without converting them into phenomena, and thus rendering the practical extension of pure reason impossible. I must therefore abolish knowledge to make room for belief.”
~ Preface to Second Edition, Critique of Practical Reason , B XXX
Kant is rough reading, and he is so intentionally with the aim to make you loose confidence in your ability to understand. Let me attempt to translate this for you.
The practical interests of morality require the belief in God. But I cannot even make the assumption of God, freedom, and immortality if I do not deprive reason of it’s pretensions to transcendent insight (read omniscience).
For to arrive at God, freedom, and immortality, reason must make use of principles. Principles can only extend to the objects of possible experience. Reason cannot be applied to objects beyond this sphere – to things in transcendent dimensions – without reducing the things of the transcendent into the realm of possible experience. Or said another way, reason deals with reality, not mystical worlds. Because reason is “limited” to reality, and by existence “pure” reason – reason attached to nothing, limited by nothing, is impossible.
To make it possible for men to once again have religion, I will abolish knowledge to make room for belief.
His whole point here is, because reason is attached to the material world it cannot possibly be omniscient, and because it can’t be omniscient it can’t know God, but without God we don’t have morality. Therefore Kant said it was his goal to destroy reason for the sake of religion. And he actually did a pretty good job.
Kant was a genius. In the world of philosophy, the comprehensive nature of what he did is probably only paralleled by Plato and Aristotle. So he is no lightweight. I am not qualified to discuss the full scope of Kant’s thought. I’m not even going to try. It would be very tedious and would take us weeks to get through. For the sake of this discussion I am only going to give you a summary of what he taught.
The real world is unknowable and reality doesn’t exit. Man makes up his own reality.
Huh? Who would believe that? Well, pretty much the whole Western world. Let me give that in more detail. Man cannot know what Kant calls the “nominal world”. The nominal world is the “real world”. Kant describes this realm as things in themselves, for a whole list of reasons that we won’t discuss. By contrast man does know what Kant calls the “phenomenal world”. Reason knows this world because he makes it up, and he knows this phenomenal world through a whole series of processes that is also beyond the scope of this discussion. His logic goes like this:
Because man has eyes he can’t see things in themselves. Because man has ears he can’t hear the nominal world. Because he has skin he can’t feel. Because he has a tongue he can’t taste. Because he has a mind he can’t know anything.
Kant’s progression of thought goes like this:
Metaphysics – The world is divided between the nominal and the phenomenal
→ Epistemology – Because man has no access to the nominal world, man has no true knowledge.
With this in mind, knowing how all of these ideas integrate, what do you suppose Kant’s ethics are? Here is Kant’s argument. Since man can’t know the nominal world, the “real world”, he most certainly can’t know his real self. So man’s phenomenal self has a moral duty to a set of moral commands. He calls the source of morality the categorical imperative, a non-mythical, non-earthly set of commands.
So here’s a question. If the commands don’t come from heaven and they don’t come from earth, where do they come from? They come from man’s perfectly nominal self, a self which he can’t know. Dizzying, right? Don’t worry about it, the only thing that matters is that man performs his duty to the categorical imperative.
How does man act on this categorical imperative? This is a challenge, because Kant thinks man’s will is handicapped. Kant has his own brand of bondage of the will. You theology aficionados should know that the bondage of the will is the doctrine central to Martin Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation.
“…for the will stands at the crossroads halfway between its a priori principle which is formal (nominal world) and its posteriori incentive which is material (phenomenal world)”
Basically what Kant is saying is your will stands nowhere. That’s his point. Your will is ineffective because it is in neither place. His solution to the will being nowhere, on how it’s handicapped, is what he calls duty. Here’s how it goes. Because the will can’t really do anything because it doesn’t sit anywhere, man has to have a method by which he can take action, and he calls that duty.
“Thus the first proposition of morality is that to have genuine moral worth an action must be done from duty. The second proposition is an action done from duty does not have its moral worth in the purpose which is to be achieved through it but in the maxim whereby it is determined. Its moral value therefore does not depend on the realization of the object of the action but merely on the principle of the volition by which the action is done irrespective of the objects of the faculty of desire…
…The third principle as a consequence of the two preceding I would express as follows: duty is the moral necessity to do an action from respect for law.”
~ Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals
That’s a very wordy way of saying that the only choice you have is to take action on this thing called duty. That action has no intrinsic moral worth. It doesn’t matter what the outcome is. In fact the outcome is antithetical to its moral value.
Now remember what I told you John Calvin did. John Calvin separated morality from practicality. Immanuel Kant has just created the secular version of the exact same concept. Kant is saying that there is no relationship between morality and action. They are hostile to one another. But, O, it gets worse!
“…The submission of [man’s] will to a law without the intervention of another influence on [his] mind…is a far more worthy purpose of man’s existence…the supreme condition to which the private purposes of man must for the most part defer.”
~ Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals
Man’s highest purpose is to be done in accordance with law because it is his duty to act and for no other reason. He doesn’t need a reason because reason is irrelevant to moral action. So now we have a problem. Man cannot know reality, the judgment of his mind is irrelevant, and man’s will to act is morally impotent. How then can man be sure he is taking moral action?
“It is a duty to preserve one’s life, and moreover everyone has a direct inclination to do so. But for that reason the often anxious care which most men take of it has no intrinsic worth, and the maxim of doing so has no moral import. They preserve their lives according to duty but not from duty. But if adversities and hopeless sorrow completely take away the relish for life, if an unfortunate man, strong in soul, is indignant rather than despondent or dejected over his fate and wishes for death, and yet preserves his life without loving it and from neither inclination nor fear but from duty, then his maxim has moral import.”
~ Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals
Your moral value is only apparent if you are in pain. What Kant is really saying is man’s inclination to preserve his life has no moral value, but if a man who is faced with all manner of suffering decides it would be better to die and still chooses the duty to preserve his life, then that man has moral worth. The only way to know if man is doing a moral action is if acting out of duty creates pain.
Think about that for a minute.
Kant’s version of sacrifice then is absolute. He even outdid Calvin in this regard. Calvin said there is no moral action, period. Kant specifically says that moral action is only accomplished by suffering.
Duty = Morality = Soul-crushing PAIN
The result of such ethics is the politics of Sadism. That is the only thing available to you in your own existence. Notice that this places sacrifice as the highest philosophical principle. Human sacrifice is done for the sake of human sacrifice in pain.
By way of comparison, consider the following:
“That person does not deserve to be called a theologian who looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible in those things which have actually happened”
“He deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross.”
~ Martin Luther, The Heidelberg Disputation, Theses 19 and 20
It should be apparent that Kant’s philosophy is the secular version of the exact same body of doctrine that was being rejected out of hand by the intellectual world. Now the intellectuals in Europe and America suddenly have the ability to have the exact same sacrificial doctrine with a legitimate secular twist. We don’t have to claim it was God telling us it’s our job to sacrifice, we can now find an acceptable secular reason why people must sacrifice. And why must we sacrifice? Because our political powers require that they have authority and control over the masses.
Let’s evaluate. Life requires the pursuit of values, but duty requires that man receive no values to any action. Proof of moral action = PAIN. Therefore the ideal moral state is total moral dissipation; total non-value; a total state of self-imposed ongoing agony. Man’s desire must collide with his duty. Man must rebel against his desires. Man must feel pain in the conflict.
Kant’s philosophy is a perfect secular overlay of Calvin’s doctrine. Kant requires that you desire to live at the highest possible level of love and happiness and achievement but relish every wound that strikes those down. Kant is advocating a slow, leisurely, prolonged death by sado-masochism. Kant is advocating self-sacrifice as an end in itself.
Now most people don’t know this background to this next word – altruism. When most people think of altruism they think of generosity. This word altruism was coined by a man named August Compte to describe man’s proper relationship to other men. In Utopia, all men would sacrifice their interest to all other men. Here is the problem, when people hear “altruism,” they think of love, empathy, humanity, or generosity, but this is a profound error.
Altruism really means that man’s first a primary reason for existence is the benefit of other men. His first mortgage on his life is paid to every other person he sees. You don’t have the right to draw breath because somebody else draws breath. Notice that this is not kindness or generosity. It is not kindness or generosity to give $5 to a homeless man. Why? Because the homeless man is entitled to your $5. And for you to be truly moral, you must suffer when you give that $5. You don’t give it to him because it makes you feel good. You don’t give it to him because you’ll go to Heaven. You don’t give it to him for any other reason than you are going to suffer because you gave him the $5 he was entitled to.
It is not humane for a doctor to heal the sick. The sick have the right to his knowledge just because they exist and just because they are sick. And to be truly moral, the doctor should heal the other people while those he loves, the people he values, suffer.
It is not love for a man to dedicate himself to his wife. He must hold all men as equal value, and he must sacrifice his wife’s well-being if he gains pleasure from that well-being. The bottom line for most marriages is that it is my duty to love you even if I don’t love you.
So let’s cut to the chase. Under altruism, man is the property of all other men. Property is the right to exercise power; to dispose of, to keep, to the exclusion of other interests. So if you are the property of other men, then politically they are morally correct to use force against you to dispose of you however they see fit.
This is the secular version that sanctions the ability of people to “raise awareness” about some cause and then compel other people to do what they want them to do. If you moral obligation is sacrifice, and you are the property of other men, then you have no moral right to what you can do, make, be, whatever, it doesn’t matter. Your sole purpose and function in this lifetime is for the disposition of other people. And if some people refuse to sacrifice it is moral for men to kill the selfish people.
How can murder be moral? Under Kant it’s actually very simple. (Actually, this is true under both Calvin and Kant’s moral framework.) As long as the tyrant does not want to kill people, and he does so at no personal gain, and for the benefit of other people, it is moral to kill 7 million Jews. The moral standard basically says you can do any action as long as you don’t enjoy it, indeed if you suffer from it and you do it on behalf of other people it doesn’t matter what you do next.
Here is why this has become so important. Most men couldn’t express their ideas in terms of metaphysics and epistemology. They don’t know what that means, and they don’t care. Most people encounter a philosophical system at the point of ethics. Yet their ethics implies a pre-supposed metaphysical and epistemological framework. That is how they get sucked into the problem.
Most people encounter Calvinism at the moral point. They go to church and are told what is good and moral and what is evil. Eventually they realize that why things are good and bad are directly related to specific metaphysical and epistemological presumptions. Then they go to the pastors, and the pastors assume it is their right to compel them to any given action. It is all consistent through the entire progression.
That’s where we are in American history. And now you understand why I said before that man’s moral choice is either:
Sadism – sacrifice enforced at the hands of others
Masochism – self-inflicted sacrifice.
Here’s what Calvin and Kant really created. Morality is man’s executioner. There is an absolute breach between morality and action. Man can never ever ever ever hold a value. Man must sacrifice his values in the most painful means possible, which means that Kant closed the door on human value with ruthless precision. It is for this achievement that Kant is the true destroyer of humanity, and altruism is the evil that saturates American Christian churches.
…To be continued.
John Immel 2016 Session 3 Archive Video (YouTube) Audio Only (mp3)
Click here for part one • Click here for part two • Click here for part four
From the Reformation to the Third Reich: Protestantism’s Impact on Western Culture – Part 3
The following is part three of a multi-part series.
Taken from John Immel’s third session
at the 2014 Conference on Gospel Discernment and Spiritual Tyranny
~ Edited by Andy Young
The Re-Discovery of Aristotle!
St. Thomas Aquinas
In the previos two posts I have brought you up to the collapse of civilization. That collapse lasts for almost 800 years because Augustine stands virtually intellectually unopposed. There are some medieval theologians and so forth that do rise up, and some of them were pretty smart, but when it came right down to it, they had nothing important to say in the evolution of Western thought. The result is for all of their departures and all of their good ideas, they never abandon the rudiments of orthodoxy.
Then around 1250, St. Thomas Aquinas appears on the scene and reintroduces Aristotle into Western thought in 1250. Aquinas is critical because he integrated the philosophies of Aristotle into Christianity. I cannot understate the importance of this because the re-discovering of Aristotle is what makes the concepts of freedom and liberty as we know it possible. Aristotle is responsible for the coming Enlightenment Era and thinkers such as John Locke. I dare say that the United State would not have happened had it not been for Aristotle.
I want you to notice this timeline. Even with the contributions of Aquinas in 1250 AD, we do not get to freedom, liberty and knowledge until almost 1700! That means that man still spends another 500 years or so in this doleful horror story of the Dark Ages. But it is Aquinas who gives us Aristotle, and Aristotle bails us out of the madness.
The reason I want to talk about Aristotle is because because ultimately I am going to get to the impact of Neo-Calvinism on the United States of America. By the time I get to the next two parts of this series, I want you to be absolutely aware that America is not possible without Aristotle and without John Locke. You must know what you are about to lose and why you are about to lose it. And if you don’t understand this much, then you will never understand why I object so vehemently to Augustine and Luther and Calvin.
Now I’m not going to go over how Aquinas integrated Aristotle into Christianity. That would be a long and tedious project. So I’m just going to start with Aristotle and the elements and roots of Aristotle. Aristotle is the most important figure in all of Western thought. Aristotle was a student of Plato and spent 20 years in Plato’s Academy. For a series of reasons, he left Athens, and eventually, those series of reasons resolve and he came back to Athens and created his own school called The Lyceum. But while he was in Plato’s Academy, he was considered one of Plato’s best students, and he was a committed Platonist.
In the beginning he accepted the premise of Platonism and its full philosophical statement from the beginning to the end. However, during his time away from Athens, he began to rethink, and he decided Plato was wrong, and not just a little wrong, catastrophically wrong. As such, he began to rethink the whole of philosophy and the whole shape and scope of philosophy.
Now in the grand scheme of intellectuals, Plato was a genius on levels that is hard to grasp for people in everyday life. Still, Plato had ideas that came before him that he built on. Aristotle had nothing before him to arrive at his conclusions. Everything before him was exactly the opposite of what he said. So for Aristotle to arrive at the conclusions that he did is illustrative of the capacity of his own genius.
Aristotle objects to Plato’s world of Forms. He rejects Plato’s metaphysics at the root. Plato created a transcendent world where everything you see is actually a shadow of the real thing, of the perfect thing. Those perfect things were actually located in this world called the Forms. There was a perfect table in the world of Forms, and the table that you see is a shadow. It is imperfect and therefore a shadow of this perfect thing.
Aristotle rejected this idea because he believed the Forms are a useless theory because it does not explain this world. This world is filled with particulars, things that move, change, grow and act. Particulars are independent entities that can be categorized by what they have in common, such as a dog, a tree, a man, a remote control. They are self-contained and self-enclosed things, something that exists in and of itself.
This is the world that man needs to understand. Man does not need to know Plato’s static supernatural world.
Here’s an example. This world has chairs, tables, dogs, and Calvinists. Plato says that to understand this world, another world must first have chairs, tables, dogs, and Calvinists. As far as Aristotle is concerned, this creates a useless duplication. All that Plato has done is create a useless metaphor that does not address the root question, how does this world reflect the world of Forms? By what mechanism does this take place? And of course there is no answer, because by definition, all that Plato was saying is this world of Forms is somehow a bright enough light that it casts a shadow here. But yet there is still this fundamental division, which means that man is still living in a world that is somehow functionally unreal.
Here is Aristotle’s major substantive objection. To understand this objection, I need to help you understand the distinction between universals and particulars. I have already defined particulars for you. Aristotle recognized that particulars can be categorized into universals. Universals are what is common to a number of particulars. It is the characteristic possessed by many particulars. What is the common denominator of say table-ness or chair-ness or circle-ness? When men conceptualizes these things, he universalizes the concepts into an abstraction.
Let me see if I can explain this. Consider a remote control for your television. That particular remote controls a particular device, namely your television. You can generalize “remote” into a universal concept. That concept can be abstracted to the nth degree because now you do not have to remember every single remote you have ever see in your lifetime. You can now hold in your head the concept, the abstraction, of 
remote, and it encompasses all of the remotes on the planet. You see, this is an enormously powerful part of human cognition. It is Aristotle’s ability to identify the process of going from a particular to the universal (concept), to the abstraction that gives Aristotle’s metaphysics and epistemology such enormous power.
What Plato did is he took the human mind’s ability to conceptualize a universal and instead said “remote” has a perfect “remote” somewhere else, and that is how we know a “remote” generally. Aristotle says that is silly. What you just did is took the abstraction, “remote-ness”, created universal perfect “remote” somewhere in another world, and then said, oh by the way, this particular remote is only a reflection. So in other words, Plato took the universal and made it a particular. This is a powerful, powerful argument. He pretty much said Plato made up this world that had no function and no purpose and that all that was necessarily important was here and now.
Here’s how Aristotle explains this. We separate common characteristics of entities, particulars, by our selective awareness, by observing the differences among them. We then reduce things to a common denominator. And this is how we go from particulars to universals. When a baby first enters the world, he looks around and sees chair, chair, chair, chair, chair, chair, but he does not understand all of these chairs. At first to him these are all somehow unique and individual events. But eventually, he begins to identify the common denominators of all chairs, and he begins to conceptualize “chair” in general, and then he abstracts to the bigger picture.
Notice Aristotle’s distinction. Just because we can perform the action of abstraction does not mean that the common denominator exists in a separate supernatural reality. Separating things in thought is very different from separating in reality. When man practices this selective process, he is performing abstraction. For example, within your room, you could identify all the shapes of the circle in the room, so you can ignore color, or if it is a part of a chair or connected to the wall you can extract the concept “circle” from each instance. But this mental process does not mean that “circle” is out there somewhere in a Form.
Aristotle called Plato’s world of Forms the “Fallacy of Reification”, literally “thing-making.” Plato is making a particular out of a human cognitive process. This is a brilliant deduction. Aristotle identifies a fundamental flaw by pointing out that this is really nothing more than how the human consciousness works. It is part of the human consciousness identity.
Now you should have some basic insight into how Aristotle conceptualizes the world. Here are the basics. Reality exists. What man perceives is reality. There is no conflict between reality and appearance. Reality is what man observes, and any formulation that says otherwise is error. Particulars are the units of reality. The things you see are particulars. As I said, anything you can physically point at, look at, identify, subtract and blank out everything else and look at, that is a particular. Everything is an individual and a concrete. Individuality is the particular’s irreducible element. The thing that individualizes it is the thing itself.
Here is Aristotle’s distinction, and this is a direct contrast to Plato. Universals are real. Universals are the objects of conceptual thought. Universals are the abstraction of particulars, but only particulars actually 
exist. Let me make a distinction. There was a common tool of debate that was called Zeno’s Paradox. Zeno said you couldn’t actually cross a room because you could not cross distance. You would go to half and then to half again and then to half again and then to half again and to half again, and you could not cross a room by definition. Of course, this is error because it takes the concept of infinity and turns it into a thing. You do not cross infinity. You cross an identity. And the identity is the distance of a room, 30 feet. Aristotle correctly destroyed Zeno’s Paradox by observing that the abstraction “infinity” was not real. We use it as a mental organizer, but it is not in existence like this. So can we cross a room? Absolutely. Why? Because we’re not crossing infinity. We’re crossing an identity, 30 feet.
Side Bar: Most of the conflicts that we have regarding the Neo-Calvinist group and all collectivist ideologies are the failure to grasp the distinction between concretes and particulars, concepts and abstractions. Most of our theological discussion has failed because it has misunderstood these specific distinctions. And the reason the Neo-Calvinists kick our butt so consistently is because they are masters at manipulating the difference between concept and abstraction. I’ll let you mull that over.
Aristotle said matter is the uniqueness of a particular. Form is the universalizing of those things that a particular shares with other things. So he takes over Plato’s concept of form, but he uses it entirely differently. Aristotle noted that you cannot have form without matter, and you cannot have matter without form. This is Plato’s fundamental error; he created a world of Forms without matter. This is the exact same failing in Augustinian doctrine. Augustine’s Form is the heavenly and the universal worldly godly realm. This earth has no Form. Augustine manipulates this to the nth degree throughout the entirety of his ideology.
Aristotle’s Metaphysics
Everybody prior to Aristotle said that consciousness was primary. Some consciousness, whether some variation of man’s consciousness or some divine consciousness, imposed its will on the world and shaped it after its fashion. Aristotle said that is backwards. It is reality that comes first and consciousness engages reality. This is known as the Primacy of Existence, and this is the Copernican shift in philosophy, because it puts reality and consciousness as co-counterweights in the ability to define what is. It gives the ability for objective knowledge.
With the primacy of consciousness, you have no guarantee of objectivity because the first question you must ask is, whose consciousness defines reality? Is it Allah? Is it God? Is it Isis? Or if you are a follower of Hegel, is it the state that defines reality? Can the state impose its collective will on the world? With this, all you have is the term subjectivism. The primacy of consciousness is nothing more than subjectivism. But it is reality first, the primacy of existence first, the correlation of consciousness perceiving that reality that gives you the ability to have objective knowledge; it gives you a plumb line, because man has every confidence that what he sees is.
Man’s obsession to alter reality by the mind is the heart and soul of magic. And this is the primacy of consciousness’ preoccupation. This is how pond scum in the Middle Ages magically became frogs. Everything is and it is not. Everything is mutable and changeable. There is no reality and there is no causality.
Man practices the primacy of consciousness metaphysics all the time. You see something horrible and the first thing you do is start saying, “No, no, that can’t be.” The blogosphere is doing this with Calvinists all the time. They see one more manifestation of Neo-Calvinist abuse and just magically go, “No, that can’t be. It can’t be the doctrine.” They pretend the relationship between ideas and outcomes do not exist. That must mean it is not reality. This is the implication of the primacy of consciousness. They are defining the measure of truth by their own determination at a given consciousness.
Aristotle’s Epistemology.
One of the biggest problems with Plato’s world of Forms is if there is this other world, how does man ever get this concept of “table”? Where does that come from? If he has no ability to perceive it by any means, how does he get it? Well, the historic solution to this was the concept of innate ideas, that somehow man just knew it. Before he was born, man knew it and he remembers it as he grows. All of these things, these innate ideas, all originate pre-consciousness.
If you recall from the 2013 series on the evolution of Western thought, practically every system of thought included the idea that somehow man’s senses and his ability to perceive were impaired or invalid. Aristotle opposed this thought. He said that a man starts his existence tabula rasa, as a blank slate. Man has no innate ideas. The way man gets his knowledge is that it begins with the senses, perceptions. Man’s faculty for understanding reality is his perceptions. All formulations that write off the senses at this point are wrong.
Man sees a rainbow, and he sees it from a distance and it physically looks like it touches the ground. And so he goes to try to find where it is, and of course he can’t find it. And the more he tries to walk towards the rainbow, the harder it is to see the rainbow. Or a similar example is you take a stick. A stick is straight in the air. You stick it in the water and you look at it, and suddenly, the stick bends. The historic criticism was that the senses deceive us. We really can’t rely on the senses.
Aristotle realized that was nonsense. You simply made a crucial error. The senses gave you the correct information, but you interpreted the information wrong. You misunderstood what that information was designed to give you. The stick in the water appears bent because at some point you learn the implications of how water moves and shapes light. The stick didn’t bend. The light coming back at the senses is what changed the appearance of the stick. The same thing is true of the rainbow. A rainbow is the result of light passing through water mist which refracts the light, and so the illusion that you think you see is really the correct manifestation of the entities light and water.
Aristotle’s next epistemological advance was called concept-formation which I have already discussed at length earlier in this article. It is the ability of man to take perceptions and particulars, identify the common denominators between them, and conceptualize abstractions called universals. This is how man brings order to his perceptions and begins to classify reality by identifying identities. It is by this method that man goes from circle to wheel to cart to transportation.
This is how man builds every increasing levels of complexity. He takes the very small, the particular, and he begins to form and shape that until he gets to the broadest abstraction. The order goes this way, perception to conception to abstraction to universal. And I’m going to keep saying this because this is central to the world that we inhabit. Until you understand how this functions, it is very easy to get wrapped up in the Augustinian ideas and their specific effort to divorce the world from reality man’s mind. This is a central attack that we will see over and over again as we progress through this discussion.
To be continued…
Paul's Passing Thoughts 
4 comments