Summary of “Teleology And Transcendence: The Thought Of Robert Spaemann.” By Anselm Ramelow

Robert Spaemann (1927 - 2018) German Catholic Philosopher

                                                                

It explores the philosophical contributions of Robert Spaemann, particularly his focus on teleology (the study of purpose or design in nature) and transcendence (the idea of going beyond physical or material existence). The work reflects on Spaemann's critique of modern attempts to replace teleological perspectives with paradigms centered on self-preservation. It also delves into how Spaemann's personal experiences, such as his early life challenges and exposure to the dangers of the Nazi era, shaped his philosophical outlook. The text emphasizes Spaemann's belief in the interconnectedness of life's parts and their orientation toward an ungraspable whole.

Spaemann emphasizes the importance of teleology, the idea that natural entities have intrinsic purposes or ends. He critiques modern attempts to replace teleological perspectives with mechanistic or utilitarian views.

A central theme in his work is the distinction between "someone" and "something." Spaemann argues that all human beings, regardless of their stage of development or limitations, are persons with inherent dignity.

NATURAL LAW

 

The nature of a thing, from an Aristotelian point of view, is the form or essence it instantiates. Ex.: it is of the essence, nature, or form of a triangle to have three perfectly straight sides. 

In biological organs, we have things whose natures or essences more obviously involve certain final causes or purposes. Ex.: the function or final cause of eyeballs is to enable us to see. Objections: Ex.: if it is wrong to go against nature, then it is wrong to wear glasses. Again: If homosexuality is genetic, doesn’t that show that it’s natural too.?

To wear eyeglasses isn’t contrary to the natural function of eyeballs; rather, it quite obviously restores to the eyeballs their ability to carry out their natural function. The question of homosexuality’s genetic basis is quite irrelevant; it does not by itself prove anything about whether it is natural. The possibility of a genetic basis for clubfoot doesn’t show that having clubfeet is “natural”. It is obviously unnatural in the Aristotelian sense of failing perfectly to conform to the essence or nature of a thing. No one who has a clubfoot would take offense at someone’s noting this obvious matter of fact, or find it convincing that the existence of a genetic basis for his affliction shows that it is something he should “embrace” and “celebrate”.

Of course, that by itself does not show that homosexuality is immoral either. After all, having a clubfoot is not immoral, and neither is being born blind or with a predisposition for alcoholism. 

Intelligent Design

 

Sir Fred Hoyle

After considering what he thought of as a very remote probability of evolution he

concluded:

“ If one proceeds directly and straightforwardly in this matter, without being

deflected by a fear of incurring the wrath of scientific opinion, one arrives at

the conclusion that biomaterials with their amazing measure or order must be

the outcome of intelligent design. No other possibility I have been able to

think of...[9] ”

Hoyle calculated that the chance of obtaining the required set of enzymes for even the

simplest living cell was one in 10^40000. Since the number of atoms in the known universe

is infinitesimally tiny by comparison (10^80), he argued that even a whole universe full of

primordial soup would grant little chance to evolutionary processes. He claimed:

The notion that not only the biopolymer but the operating program of a living cell could

be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently

nonsense of a high order.

 

What you believe matters.

 

A survey lead by the Catholic professor William D. Antonio found that 88% said that what you do matters, not what you believe.

 As long as I’m good, it doesn’t matter what the church teaches.

What really matters is to be a good person.

It’s a clear favoring of ethics over doctrine.

    Kant said religion comes down to ethics. Kant drove a wedge between doctrine and ethics. Kant approach to ethics had a profound impact on contemporary thought and society.

Kant believed that moral reasoning should be autonomous and independent of external authorities or doctrines. He argued that individuals should use their rational faculties to determine what is morally right, rather than relying on prescribed doctrines.

We can see here his subjective approach to morality. He believed that external doctrines or authorities were a coercion on true moral action made freely and rationally. He believed in a moral law, moral principles that should apply to all rational beings in all situations; contrasting with doctrines, which may be specific to particular cultures, religions, or contexts.

He argued that rational beings have the capacity to discern universal moral laws through the use of their rational faculties. 

In essence, Kant believed that moral principles are not derived from external sources, such as religious doctrines or societal norms, but from the inherent rationality and autonomy of individuals. This rational foundation for morality allows for the establishment of universal and objective moral laws that apply to all rational beings. 

Kant’s approach neglect the reason’s limit and objective truth.

Ethics, however, are in fact funded on fundamental doctrine. So when doctrine becomes marginalized, we are in fact undermining those ethical principles. 

Being a good person is being a loving person. 

What is love? It is not a feeling or a sentiment, not a private subjective conviction. Love is willing the good of the other as other. Love gets you out of the black hole of your own subjectivity, your own ego centrism. If I’m kind to you so that you might be kind to me it is not love, it is just indirect egotism. Real love is I want your good for you, period, no reciprocation required.

Love is a participation in God’s way of being. We can love the other as other as participation in God’s own love. Love we so admire in ethical order is a theological reality described by doctrinal truths. Aristotle’s virtues did not mention love.

To love is to respect the dignity and the freedom and the inherent worth of every individual. This is not self-evidently true. What makes it true is a theological doctrine: every person has been created by God and destined for eternal life.

Taking God out of the equation, one has Socrates, Aristotle, Plato who believed that people should do what they are told, that malformed children can be left to die, that slavery was natural. Then in our time you have Lenine, Hitler, and Mao Tse Tung who with their atheist regimes left 10 of  millions corpses. Lenine said if you want to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs.

What you believe always depends on certain doctrines.

Yes, what you believe does matter.

The Soul Part 2

 

 

 

          When does the rational soul’s presence in the body begin? At conception. For the soul is the form—the essence, nature, structure, organizational pattern—of a living thing, an organism.

Of course, the features essential to human beings as rational animals are not fully developed until well after conception. Rationality, locomotion, nutrition, and the like are present even at conception “in potency” or as inherent potentialities. But a zygote is not a “potential human being” or a “potentially rational animal.” Rather, it is an actual human being and thus an actual rational animal, just one that hasn’t yet fully realized its inherent potentials.

          All of this is confirmed by science. The reason is that the notions of DNA, of the gene, and so forth are utterly suffused with goal-directedness and potentiality. It is no accident that terms like “encoding”, “information”, “instructions”, “blueprint” and the like are often used to describe the workings of DNA; therefore involve directedness of something toward an end beyond itself, and thus final causality.

Being the form of the body, the soul is necessary as long as the living organism is. Hence it leaves when the organism dies, not severe brain damage and not a person’s lapsing into a “persistent vegetative state”. As Plato and Aristotle agree, for something to fail to instantiate a form or essence perfectly does not mean that it fails to instantiate it at all. For a zygote, being a human organism and thus in possession of the form or essence of a human organism(i.e. a rational soul), has the same right to life that any innocent human being has. If one agrees that every innocent human being has a right to life, then you cannot consistently fail to take a “pro-life” position and thus favor outlawing all abortions  (and all forms of euthanasia also) just as you’d favor outlawing any other form of murder.

          The rational soul functions and exists independently of matter, so could not have been generated by  purely material processes. In principle, evolutionary theory could explain how living things got to such a level of complexity that it was possible for an animal to exist which was capable of having a rational soul. We have already shown that there is a God, and that the rational soul, unlike any other kind of soul, is ordered toward the knowledge of God. Thus we have a ready explanation of the existence of rational souls: direct creation by God. An evolutionary process itself, like everything else that exists, would have to be sustained in being by Him from moment to moment anyway. An appeal to God is thus theoretically natural, even inevitable.

          At every point in Aquinas’s account of the soul, as at every point in his arguments for God’s existence, the appeal is to what follows rationally from such Aristotelian metaphysical notions as the formal and final causes of a thing. There is no appeal to “faith,” or to parapsychology, ghost stories, near-death experiences, or any other evidence of the sort materialists routinely dismiss as scientifically dubious.

 

 

The Soul

 

                                                     

                

 

THE SOUL

 

          The distinction between actuality and potentiality, the principle that effects are contained in their causes either “formally” or “eminently,” and that final causality pervades the natural order, in fact have the most dramatic consequences for the debate between religion and atheism.

          We want now to examine how some of these principles were applied by Aquinas and the Scholastic tradition in general to a defense of the immortality of the soul and the natural law conception of morality.

 

The Soul

For Aristotle a soul is just the form or essence of a living thing. One should not think of some ghostly object of the sort that floats away from a body after death. The soul is just a kind of form.

The soul of a plant is what Aristotelians call a “nutritive soul”; and that is just a form or essence that gives a thing that has it the powers of taking in nutrients, growing, and reproducing itself.

 

The soul of a non-human animal is called a “sensory soul” and it is just a form or essence that gives  a thing that has it both the powers of a nutritive soul, and also an animal’s distinctive powers of being able to sense the world around it and to move itself.

When we come to human beings we have what is called a “rational soul” which includes both the powers of the nutritive and sensory souls and also the distinctively human powers of intellect and will. So there is a natural hierarchical relationship between the souls.

 

A thing having certain form goes hand in hand with its having a certain final cause or natural end. A human being has all the ends of the sensory and nutritive soul, but on top of them he has the ends or final causes entailed by being rational and having free will. Rationality has its natural end or final cause in the attainment of truth. Free will has as its natural end or final cause the choice of those actions that best accord with the truth about the human nature being’s own nature or essence.

Morality, according to Aristotle and Aquinas, is the habitual choice of actions that further the hierarchically ordered natural ends entailed by human nature. We have seen that the deepest truth about the world is that it is caused and sustained by God. The highest fulfillment then of the power of the intellect then is to know God. The highest fulfillment of free choice is to live in a way that facilitates the knowing of God.

 

The power of the intellect cannot possibly require a material or bodily organ for its operation. Central to the intellect’s operation is its grasp of forms, essences, or universals, and other abstractions like propositions. The immaterial nature of these things entails that the intellect which grasps them must itself be immaterial as well. How so?

We apprehend the ‘universals’. The form of “dogness” that exists in our minds when we think about dogs is the same form that exists in actual dogs. This is grasping what they are. What they are is determined by their essence or form. If the intellect is a material thing—some part of the brain, then for the form to exist in the intellect is for the form to exist in a certain material thing; for example, for the form of “dogness” to exist in a certain parcel of matter is just for that parcel of matter to be a dog. In that case, if your intellect was just the same thing as some part of your brain, it follows that that part of your brain would become a dog whenever you thought about dogs. “But that’s absurd!” Assuming that the intellect is material leads to such absurdity; hence the intellect is not material.

The thought we are having must be as determinate as triangularity itself, otherwise it just wouldn’t be a thought about triangularity per se, but only a thought about some approximation of triangularity. Material triangularity is only ever an approximation. It follows that the thought about triangularity is not material. Suppose a thought about triangularity consist of some physical representation in the brain somewhere (in the form of a neuronal firing pattern or some such thing). Like any other physical representation of a triangle, this one too would be just one particular material thing among others, not universal at all. Again the idea that thought is a purely a material operation of the brain makes no sense.

Aquinas’s claim isn’t a “soul of the gaps” analogue to “God of the gaps” arguments. He is not speculating that there might be some ghostly objet floating around in there. He is saying that given the facts about universals, and our thoughts about them, it is conceptually impossible (not merely improbable) for the intellect to be material. One thing neuroscience won’t “discover” is that thought is a material operation of the brain, any more than it will “discover” that 2+2=5.

The soul of a man is not a complete substance; only the soul and body (i.e. the form and matter) together constitute a thing or substance, that is, a man. It is the man himself who thinks, just as it is the man himself and not the soul who grows taller, digests his food, and walks around. For this reason human thoughts correlate with certain brain events even if it is not identical to any of them. The operation of the intellect and will constitute the formal-cum-final cause of the action, of which the firing of the neurons, flexing of the muscles, are the material cause.

The intellect itself operates without bodily organ, it does depend indirectly on the senses for the raw material from which it abstracts universals or essences (triangularity from particular triangles). The soul as it does in thought can function apart from the matter it informs, then it can also exist apart from the matter it informs, as a kind of incomplete substance. Potentiality can never exist without actuality; but actuality can and does exist without potentiality, namely in God who is pure actuality.

Similarly matter can never exist without form; but form can exist without matter, and does in this case, at least after death, when the matter of the body is not longer inform by the soul, its form.  The soul as it does, partially operating and thus existing as it does apart from the body even when informing it, does not thereby die. For a thing to perish is just for it to lose its form. But the soul doesn’t lose its form, because it is a form.

 

GOD

    

 

GOD'S EXISTENCE

Here is the conception of classical philosophical theology: of Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, and other such thinkers.

God is not an object or substance alongside other objects or substances in the world; rather, He is pure being or existence itself, utterly distinct from the world of time, space, and things, underlying and maintaining them in being at every moment, and apart from whose ongoing conserving action they would be instantly annihilated. The world is not an independent object in the sense of something that might carry on if God were to “go away”; it is more like the music produced by a musician, which exists only when he plays and vanishes the moment he stops. None of the concepts we apply to things in the world, including to ourselves, apply to God in anything but an analogous sense. Hence, for example, we may say that God is “personal” insofar as He is not less than a person, the way an animal is less than a person. But God is not literally “a person” in the sense of being one individual thing among others who reasons, chooses, has moral obligations, etc. such concepts make no sense when literally applied to God.

Aquinas’s famous doctrine of analogy, on which the language we use to refer to God is not used in the same or “univocal” sense in which it is applied to things in this world (as might describe a fire engine and Stop sign as being “red” in exactly the same sense), but neither is it used in a completely different or “equivocal” sense (the way that a tree has “bark” and a dog has a “bark” in entirely different senses,). Rather, it is used in an analogical sense, as when you say hat you “see” the tree in front of you and also that  you can “see” that the Pythagorean theorem must be true. Obviously you don’t see the truth of the theorem in exactly the same sense in which you see a tree, but there is an analogy between vision and intellectual insight that makes the use of the term appropriate in both cases. Similarly, God is not personal, or good, or powerful, or intelligent in the same sense in which a human being is, but He can nevertheless  correctly be described in these terms if they are understood analogously.

We can know which terms apply by examining the arguments for God’s existence and their implications.