Jacques Maritain Center :
Characters in Search of Their Author /
by Ralph McInernyvideo meliora, proboque,
deteriora sequor
-- Ovid, Metamorphoses vii, 20-21
In this lecture I discuss the difference between changing one's mind and changing one's life. The distinction is important for my purposes because one misgiving about classical proofs for the existence of God seems to be based on the assumption that, if they worked, the one who accepted them would exhibit this by a change in his mode of living. That this is an important and relevant objection is clear from the implication of the Pauline text on which the Christian tradition bases its confidence that the human mind can, by its natural powers, come to knowledge of God. In that first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, Paul links a negative judgment of Roman morals (inexcusabiles) to the Romans' ability to achieve knowledge of God. Their behavior is inexcusable because they should know better, and since they can know that God exists they have a powerful reason for acting otherwise than as they do. The suggestion clearly is that such knowledge, knowledge gained as the result of a proof of God's existence, has moral implications.
We have already referred to the locus classicus (De anima III,10) in which Aristotle distinguished the practical from the theoretical use of mind on the basis of their different aims or ends. When we put our mind to a practical problem -- something to be done or made -- the successful upshot of such reasoning should be the doing or making, not just thinking about them. The end of practical reasoning is thus beyond, over and above, the good of reasoning as such. The good of reasoning as such, the aim of the theoretical use of our mind , is the perfection of thinking as such, truth. It might be said, accordingly, that the aim of practical thinking is the perfection of some activity other than thinking itself.
There are other criteria for distinguishing theoretical and practical thinking which provide a finer grained understanding of their modulations and degrees. The end is the place to start, of course, because then we can ask what sorts of object of thought can be put to the different ends. Not everything we think about has practical import, at least not in any immediate way. The calculation that the sun is 93,000,000 miles from earth does not galvanize us into action as if it were a practical maxim. "What? That far? I'd better hurry." When the astronomer assigns that distance the value of 1 and calculates other celestial distances with it as yardstick, he may be said to be putting such knowledge to use, but the use to which it is put is the gaining of further knowledge. That such calculations become important when space probes are undertaken does not turn them as such into maxims or guidelines for acting. They retain their status as true propositions about the way things are. That practical guidelines may be formed on their basis is of course true and not irrelevant to all efforts to separate, as it is said, fact from value. And of course not irrelevant to the point of this lecture.
Truth is the primary value of thinking, the aim of the activity, its telos. Thinking aimed at an end other than truth is an extension of such primary thinking and presupposes it. It is because such-and-such is the case, that something may or must be done. Nothing is more familiar to us than this supposedly suspect discursive sequence. So also when we distinguish thought and action, we do not wish to deny that thinking itself is an activity (in a secondary sense) that precedes action in the regulative sense of choosing, moving about, making bird houses, and the like.
In the preceding lecture it emerged that, while we may think of a proof as a series of sentences on a page, they cannot as such prove anything , anymore than a musical score can fill the ear with sound. Someone seeks to prove and someone else attends to the proof. The prover seeks to have the addressee reenact in his own mind the process the prover has already gone through and which he is expressing by what he says. When the addressee re-enacts the process successfully, he has acquired true knowledge that he did not previously have. This does not of course mean that what the prover knows and proves is some process going on in his mind and what the learner comes to know is a process going on in his mind -- or in the teacher's mind. The teacher's thinking is numerically different from the thinking of the learner, but when the process of proving succeeds, teacher and learner know the same truth. This may be taken to be a paradigmatic instance of the transfer of theoretical knowledge.
In calling knowledge theoretical we seem inevitably to be referring to a sophisticated activity, formally undertaken by those who have a special talent and opportunity for it. When Aristotle distinguishes the theoretical and practical sciences which make up philosophy, he is indeed referring to rather sophisticated accomplishments. But prior to theoretical and practical sciences, there is theoretical and practical thinking, and this is first of all of the most ordinary sort. All men by nature desire to know. Our initial resistance to this sweeping claim is due to the fact that many, perhaps most, people show little appetite for the kind of cognitive pursuits that characterize lecture halls and laboratories. But if that is true, the reverse is not. Sophisticated and professional thinkers have used, continue to use, and will always use their minds in the way that every human person does. Not all knowledge is science but science presupposes the kind of knowledge in which everyone engages. The theoretical knowledge that is found in the sciences is the fruit of and extension of the theoretical knowledge everyone has of the world around him and himself in it.
The need to make this truism explicit will become clear as we proceed. We must not equate theoretical and practical thinking with theoretical and practical sciences, although the problem of this lecture arises from a scientific effort to prove the existence of God.
In order for our thinking to be immediately or as such (i.e., as thinking) relevant to action, its object must be something we can do or make. That was the point about the distance of the sun from earth. This is not a truth we can do anything about, it is not something we bring about. When I am thinking about a bird house or stealing your wallet, my mind is occupied with something I might make or do. But I can consider such things in a way that would seem indistinguishable from my consideration of things I cannot make or do. For example, I might describe and define a bird house in the same way that I would a robin's nest, as if it were simply an item in the natural world. And I might discuss an act of theft as a vicious act contrary to the cardinal virtue of justice in one of its more specific manifestations. Or I might describe it in a story. Such statements about make-able or do-able things would be assessed in the same way as statements about the things of nature. Either they are true or they aren't.
But there is also what might be called a practical way of considering such agibilia and factibilia. The book I bought -- How To Build a Bird House -- tells me what materials to buy and what tools to have on hand and then, in word and picture, it directs me through the steps which, when taken, result in a bird house. Thus to know something make-able, not in a way that seems indistinguishable from theoretical knowledge, but as the result of a definite series of steps, is to know it as make-able in a far stronger sense. Of course, I may have my feet up, my pipe lit, and be simply savoring the account of how I might make a bird house. I understand the steps, in mind and imagination I make them, perhaps, but my feet remain up and I continue to puff indolently on my pipe. How different is this knowing from that which would be embedded in my action if I had gone down to my work bench, followed the steps, and built a bird house.
Thomas Aquinas, on whose development of Aristotle I am relying here, isolated three criteria for practical knowledge. Practical knowing has as its object something make-able or do-able, one knows it in a practical as opposed to a theoretical way, and the end is the actual employment of this knowledge, which is revealed in the actual doing or making. This enables us to speak of degrees of practical knowing. When the object of our knowing is something make-able, but we are thinking of it as we would a natural thing -- classifying, defining, etc. -- this is practical knowledge in a minimal sense. To know such an object as the result of a series of steps is to have practical knowledge in a fuller sense. But practical knowledge in the fullest sense is that which is at play when one is working at his bench, actually directing the movements of hands, arms, etc. as they saw, hammer, and paint.{1}
The most discussed instance of the relationship between understanding and performance lies in the moral order. Plato asked if one can become what one ought to be simply by taking the fifty drachma course. Is virtue learnable? This a most agonizing problem for the philosopher, since it seems to call into question the primacy of thought, but it is one that everyone has doleful experience of.{2} Paul spoke of not doing the good that he would and doing the evil that he would not. Aristotle says that one does not become good by philosophizing and Thomas says of moral science that it is of little or no value for action.{3} The initial question and these surprising remarks point to a relationship between knowing and doing that has exercised philosophers almost from the beginning, and everyone else as well.
Kierkegaard tells the story of a recruit in ranks who is told by his sergeant to be silent. He replies by saying that he understands what the sergeant wants; he would like the speaker and all others not to speak in ranks. "Shut up!" explains the sergeant. "Ah, yes," the recruit responds, "A command is unlike a question." The story is meant to illustrate the fact that we can understand yet by our actions show that we do not understand. The proper response to a command -- in the marines at least -- is to obey, not produce a gloss on it. So too the proper response to a moral principle is to be guided by it in our behavior. Moral knowledge has good behavior as its aim. Is it possible to have true moral knowledge that does not achieve its goal?
The fact that we are shocked as we are when those whose lives are defined in terms of conveying a moral message themselves violate that message suggests that we expect such knowledge to influence the behavior of the one who has it. How can one act contrary to the knowledge he has? It is tempting to think that if one's behavior is bad he cannot really know what we took him to know. On the other hand we have autobiographical experience of the fact that our actions all too often diverge from what we know they ought to be. Indeed, it is difficult to know what acting badly would morally mean if it did not mean acting contrary to knowledge we are presumed to have.
It could of course be said that knowledge only takes us so far and then either our emotions or will takes over, that there is a leap from the cognitive order into the order of action. Then bad action could be blamed on the freakish operation of will rather than on a defect of knowledge. But if human action is voluntary and voluntary action is a knowing-willing or a willing-knowing, as Aristotle suggests of choice, the bad action like the good must have a cognitive component. If our choice is not governed by our true knowledge of what we ought to do, as a human choice it must be governed by a judgment contrary to that true knowledge.
Can we knowingly do the wrong thing? Aristotle suggests that it depends on what we mean by knowing. Sometimes one is said to know because he is capable of expressing a judgment but is not presently doing so. Someone sleeping on the beach might be said to know quantum physics; but obviously this means that if you wake him up and ask an appropriate question his knowledge could be actualized in his answer. One may be capable of knowing or he may actually be knowing. A second distinction is between knowing in general and knowing in the particular case. I may know and believe that fornication is wrong yet go on to commit a particular act of fornication. In order to do so my judgment that it is bad must be overridden by the judgment that it is good. The former is the grasp of a general truth, the latter a particular judgment here and now.
Such distinctions enable Aristotle to say that we act contrary to our knowledge when our particular judgment of what is right or wrong. But how can we make so elementary a mistake, that is, not identify a particular as an instance of a universal? Aristotle suggests the following model of practical discourse. We bring to a particular situation a fund of general lore as to how we ought to behave. This general lore conveys what is good for us, that is, what will really fulfill our will whose object is our good. On the level of generality, to know about the good is to have true knowledge about it, but the good is the object of desire, not merely an occasion for thought. Practical discourse involves the transition from knowledge of the good to the pursuit of the good known. One whose appetite is not inured to the good of temperance may have true knowledge of temperance and of rules for attaining and strengthening it, but when he seeks to act on this general knowledge the character he has as a result of previous intemperate choices intervenes and his here-and-now judgment is that the pleasure of the act suffices to choose it.
The reasoning of the intemperate man thus goes off the rails because the good he knows is not his good, that is, it is not what he habitually seeks. His actual choice is governed by a particular judgment, as is the choice of the temperate man, but the here-and-now judgment of the temperate man is in conformity with his general knowledge about temperance and its demands and that of the well-informed but intemperate man's is not. His action conforms to an implicit general judgment contrary to the true one.
The reason Aristotle says that one dos not become good by philosophizing and Aquinas that moral doctrine is of little or no value is that they are thinking of the aim of practical knowledge. When true moral knowledge fails to guide our choices, more and more general knowledge would not seem to be the remedy. The Greeks likened what is needed to the exercises in the gymnasium. One must school his appetite when lesser things are at issue if it is to be strong enough to follow true moral knowledge in more demanding situations. Fasting allays concupiscence, in the traditional phrase. If we mindlessly indulge ourselves in small things we will do so in great things as well; and if we deny ourselves in small things, this can affect our behavior when the stakes are high.
One does not have to be morally good to acquire true moral knowledge at the level of generality, nor is he morally good by dint of having such knowledge. The passage from not-knowing to knowing alters our mind. But there is no automatic passage from such general knowledge to particular action because more than general knowledge is involved in action. Our choices bear on particulars seen as good. True moral knowledge is a necessary condition for changing our behavior from bad to good, but it is far from being sufficient.
Forgive me for rattling on about such matters, but there is method in my madness. What I have tested your patience by recalling is important for the question of this lecture but also for the next. In that I will examine the way in which both Kierkegaard and Newman seek to generalize Aristotle's account of practical discourse to cover all discourse, particularly that having to do with knowledge of God. But for the moment, what I have recalled enables me to address the misgiving I pointed out earlier. If a proof for the existence of God is a good one why does it not change the life of the one who accepts it?
A first reply to this is that such a demand cannot reasonably be made even of true moral knowledge that has as its aim to guide our choices. A fortiori it cannot be made of theoretical knowledge. Knowledge of God cannot be thought of as practical knowledge in terms of the account we have given earlier. It is theoretical knowledge through and through. The point of a proof of God's existence is to enable us to move from a state of not knowing to knowing a truth about the way things are. Thus it is mistaken to ask for an effect of such theoretical knowledge that we would not ask even of moral knowledge as it can be learned and taught.
And yet, as the much cited passage from Saint Paul more than suggests, the misbehavior of the pagan Romans was inexcusable because from the things that are made they could come to knowledge of the invisible things of God. When Augustine says that he would know but two things, God and the soul, he clearly sees such knowledge as relevant for life. The negative side of what Paul said to the Romans is the Dostoevskian dictum that if God does not exist, anything goes -- as Cole Porter put it. Clearly theoretical truths have practical implications even though they are not as such principles or maxims to be realized in our choices. That God exists may not have any immediate "therefore" in the practical order, but knowing that God exists entails, in some sense of 'entails,' that our conduct should be of a certain kind.
So too, one who thought it true that there is nothing in man that survives death, that his animating principle, like that of dandelions and elephants, ceases to be when he as a person ceases to be, would doubtless be influenced by this belief in the way he organizes his life. If death is the end, not only our faith would be in vain, but perhaps mush of our morals as well. There are of course good-hearted atheists and pleasant folk, who think of themselves and others as ingenious computers but who nonetheless live exemplary lives. The question arises as to whether they could feel obliged to do so if their beliefs are true. Last October, I recalled what Jean-Paul Sartre said in Existentialsim Is a Humanism. If God does not exist, we have no nature, there are no guidelines of choice antecedent to choice, we are free through and through.
But even on the contrary assumption -- that there is a God, we have a nature, and this entails actions of a certain kind -- our freedom must be engaged. This produces paradoxes, some of them amusing. Aristotle speaks of a man who had false general knowledge of what he ought to do, but lacking the courage of his convictions, acted contrary to his knowledge, and thus effectively did the right thing. Does flawed knowledge plus weakness of will equal good action? Surely not. But the flaw, like Huck Finn's acceptance of slavery as good, and acting contrary to this supposed truth, is at the level of general knowledge.
Those who accept the fact / value dichotomy as good money often argue that practical thinking is autonomous. Practical principles or norms cannot be deducted from theoretical statements about the way the world is or even about the way we are. This may seem to be merely a way of making the point behind our noting that it is wrong to expect a proof for God's existence to have immediate practical import. By speaking of deduction, we are invited to imagine an argument in which the premises are observations about the way things are and the conclusion is that we ought to do something. This is how Hume posed the problem.
But clearly the knowledge that God exists and that the human soul is immortal have practical import. The movement from such truths to judgments -- at however high a level of generality -- about what we ought to do is spoken of by Thomas Aquinas as an extension. How might we understand that?
If God exists and he has made us in order that we might enjoy eternal happiness with him, God is the ultimate end of human existence. As goodness itself and our ultimate good, God clearly has practical import for human beings. You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee. Any object of choice is a good, though not goodness. The formality of goodness under which any particular thing is chosen is our comprehensive good, our ultimate end. It is one thing to say that Guinness is good to taste and other to say that Guinness is good for you. If you were nothing but the capacity to taste, the two might be identical. But the pleasant objects of taste do not themselves exhaust even the things that willy-nilly excite our sense desire. The pursuit of any object is done on the implicit understanding that it is good for me to pursue it. And not just good for my taste; for me to satisfy my desire for Guinness here and now is judged to be good for me. The glutton seeks to make the satisfaction of taste the be-all and end-all of his life, as if anything else were good only insofar as it serves that end. Cujus deus venter est, as St. Paul says.
One must first know that God exists in order to see that he is our ultimate end, that is, the goodness we seek in any object of choice which is perforce a partial good, a participation in goodness. For that matter there are traditional proofs of a first goodness or the ultimate final cause which is a proof of the existence of God. Nor is this a truth only available to religious believers. To suggest that (theoretically) true knowledge of that in which our good consists is not relevant to the discourse which ends in our doing something makes the distinction between theoretical and practical something other than two uses of a continuous act of reasoning.
Students of Aristotle have long been struck by the way in which the discussion of the human good in the Nicomachean Ethics terminates in an identification of our good with contemplation of the divine, Book X seeming to segue into Book Lambda of the Metaphysics. Aristotle is speaking of a good that is attainable in this life by our own efforts. But the Ethics sees theoria as the telos of moral action. And since it is not the task of moral philosophy to prove the existence of God, his existence must be presupposed by this account of our practical life. It may seem merely a feature of it as a common noun that 'good' can be predicated of any and every particular good. This alone does not prove that there is a good over and above particular goods. But 'good' as our comprehensive good is not predicable of any particular good. The way in which our over-all good controls particular choices is to make the raisond'être of any choice the judgment that it is good for me to choose this here and now. To identify the human comprehensive good with the object of contemplation was one of Aristotle's most daring and profound moves, and one that is often misunderstood.
When Aristotle says that the end of mind theoretical is truth and that of mind practical the good, he is not reifying these faculties as if they undertook their activities of themselves. Rather he is drawing attention to different purposes we can have in using our minds. The pursuit of truth is not an activity of some disembodied reason, but something we set out to do. It is a moral act, which must meet the standards of any other moral act. We choose to pursue the truth although what the truth is is not something we decide. The intellectual life is something flesh and blood human beings engage in, in particular settings, at definite times, for ulterior purposes, good and bad. The natural desire to know is not something we choose to have: it is a given. "All men by nature desire to know." The activities of our sense powers to some degree take place whether or not we wish. The desire for pleasure and reflexive movement from the painful are not instinctive acts we choose to have. For reasons no pagan philosopher understood, we seem to be at war with ourselves. =They knew about the war, of course, it was Original Sin they were unaware of.= The life of a human being is a task in a way that the life of no other creature is. The rational direction of our various impulses and inclinations is the most fundamental and abiding instance of that task. The conscious and voluntary pursuit of objects to which we are naturally inclined involves the judgment that to pursue them here and now in these circumstances and in this way is a reasonable course of action, reasonable because such a pursuit contributes to our over-all good.
This is as true of our natural desire for truth as it is of the object of any other natural inclination. There are morally good and bad ways of pursuing the truth and merely the successful achievement of the truth is not a sufficient moral warrant. A human being who pursued truth as if he were a pure spirit with no other obligation would be a morally defective human being.
The question as to the moral import of a successful proof of God's existence prompted us to recall the problematic relationship between even general moral knowledge and our actions. In the course of doing this, we nonetheless were able to respond to the import of the question, which is again supported by our favored Pauline passage. The discursive movement from theoretical knowledge -- e.g., God's existence, the immortality of the soul -- to action is analogous to the movement from general practical knowledge and action. The acting person is a unit, he has but one mind, and it is scarcely odd that, however formally different theoretical and practical knowing are, that a person perceives the relevance of the theoretical for the practical that permits, if he is virtuous, a smooth flow from both theoretical and general practical knowledge to this deed here and now.
But what if natural theology is rejected? How then can the mind relate to God? The existential or moral ambiance within which even abstract thinking must take place was something on which, in their various ways, the two men I shall discuss in my next lecture insisted. Both Kierkegaard and Newman discuss the human or existential setting in which we relate to God and check our tendency to think of ourselves as mere minds. But in doing so they put a remarkable premium on practical knowing.
FEBRUARY 10, 2000
{1} See my Ethica thomistica, rev. ed. (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1997), 38-40.
{2} See the famous lines from Ovid’s Metamorphoses cited at the head of this chapter.
{3} Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 2.4.1105b12-18: "But most people do not do these, but take refuge in theory and think they are being philosophers and will become good in this way, behaving somewhat like patients who listen attentively to the doctor, but do none of the things they are ordered to do. As the latter will not be made well in body by such a course of treatment, the former will not be made well in soul by such a course of philosophy." See Thomas’s commentary, lecture iv, n. 288 and Disputed Question on the virtues in general, a. 6, and 1m.