Plato, Aristotle, and Cosmic Teleology

In Raphael's famous painting "The School of Athens," the center of the picture is dominated by Plato and Aristotle. Plato's right arm is raised with his index finger pointing to the sky. In his left hand, he carries a copy of his Timaeus. Aristotle's right arm is extended forward with the open palm of his hand gesturing down to the ground. In his left hand, he carries a copy of his Nicomachean Ethics. Plato's gesture suggests, "It's up there." Aristotle's gesture suggests, "No, it's down here amongst us."

The Timaeus is perhaps the single most influential book of philosophy in history, because it shaped the prevalent cosmological model of the Western world for 2,000 years. It presented an intelligent-design cosmology in which a divine craftsman creates the world according to eternal forms of perfection, and human life is judged by how well it imitates this cosmic model. Aristotle's Ethics almost never invokes any cosmic standards in laying out his view of ethics as directed to human happiness as the flourishing of human nature. In contrast to Plato's preoccupation with mathematical patterns as exemplifying the eternal and unchanging perfection of the true knowledge of Being, Aristotle studied biology as the realm of mortal life and flux that lends itself only to probable knowledge. His Ethics uses biological reasoning in studying the conditions for human well-being.

Platonism often seems to belong to a tradition of transcendental ethics that depends on a cosmic teleology by which human life imitates the perfect order of the intelligent designer. Aristotelianism belongs, by contrast, to a tradition of empirical ethics rooted in the immanent teleology of the human species. Obviously, my argument for Darwinian natural right is on the side of the Aristotelian tradition.

But the situation might seem more complicated than this. At the beginning of Natural Right and History, Leo Strauss insists that the classic idea of natural right as understood by Aristotle depended on a teleological conception of the universe--and particularly the heavenly bodies--so that the natural ends for human beings could be seen as sanctioned by a cosmic teleology. But, Strauss observes, this cosmic teleology has been refuted by modern natural science, which creates an intellectual crisis that threatens to lead us to historicism and nihilism, with no natural standards for human life. And yet, Strauss and his students are not completely clear on this point. Some previous posts on this can be found here, here, and here.

There are some passages in his ethical writings, where Aristotle does seem to be a Platonic transcendentalist. For example, at the end of his Eudemian Ethics, he declares that all human goods are to be judged by how well they promote the "contemplation of God" as the final end. And at the end of the Nicomachean Ethics, his arguments for the supremacy of the contemplative life seem very Platonic. But his arguments here are all remarkably strange in that they contradict what he says elsewhere. So, for instance, he declares that philosophers are loved by the gods, but this contradicts what he has said about the self-sufficiency of the gods in not caring for human matters (1154b25-27, 1179a23-33). It almost seems as if Aristotle is here writing an ironical caricature of the Platonic arguments for divine contemplation.

There is only one place in the Nicomachean Ethics where Aristotle refers to the cosmic system. "It is absurd for anyone to believe that politics or prudence is the most serious kind of knowledge, if a human being is not the highest thing in the cosmos. . . . And if it is the case that a human being is the best in comparison to the other animals, that makes no difference, for there are other things that are much more divine in their nature than a human being, such as most visibly the things out of which the cosmos is composed" (1141a21-41b2). But no where else in this book does he refer to these cosmic divinities.

Clearly, he is referring to the heavenly bodies--the Sun, the planets, and the stars. In his On the Heavens, Aristotle lays out his theological astronomy. But even though he takes this astronomy seriously, he repeatedly reminds the reader that astronomical phenomena are too far away to be directly studied, and so most of the fundamental ideas in astronomy are "hypotheses" that must be "trusted" as having been passed down as ancestral myths (270b1-25, 279a5-32, 284a1-25, 291b24-92a20, 298b7-99a2; Metaphysics, 1074a31-b14).

In justifying his biological studies, Aristotle argues that while studying the eternally unchanging phenomena in the heavens might be honorable and divine, such study is hard to carry out because there is so little observational evidence. By contrast, the perishable phenomena of plants and animals are easier to study because "we live among them." There is intense pleasure in studying biological phenomena because "they are nearer to us and more akin to our nature" (Parts of Animals, 644b22-45a5). This goes against the disposition of Plato and the Platonists because believing with Heraclitus that "all sensible things are always in a state of flux and that no science of them exists," they turned to the abstract realm of Ideas and Forms in the search for perfect intelligibility (Metaphysics, 987a30-b15).

That Platonic search for perfect intelligibility seems to be most fully manifested in the Timaeus. But the strangeness of this book--surely the strangest of all of the Platonic dialogues--creates serious problems of interpretation.

In the dramatic setting of the Timaeus, the dialogue occurs the day after the dialogue of the Republic. Socrates begins this new dialogue by summarizing some of the main ideas from the Republic. Just as Socrates had constructed the best city in speech, Timaeus will construct the best cosmos in speech. The best political order, it seems, needs to be set within the best cosmic order. (Here Timaeus's speech seems to serve the same function as the Athenian Stranger's theological cosmology of intelligent design in Book 10 of the Laws.) In Timaeus's cosmos as created by a providential God acting by intelligent purpose, we see that we really do live in "the best of possible worlds," in the famous phrase of Leibniz (the "German Plato").

But then any careful reader has to wonder about the odd features of this dialogue. First of all, it's hardly much of a dialogue, because two-thirds of it is one long speech by Timaeus. And it's not much of a Socratic dialogue because Socrates does not speak once Timaeus takes off in his speech. Timaeus tells Socrates: "it is fitting for us to receive the likely story about these things and not to search further for anything beyond it." Socrates responds: "Excellent, Timaeus! And it must be received entirely as you urge" (29d-e). So although Socrates seems to give advance approval to whatever Timaeus wants to say, Socrates never speaks again. With the suspension of all Socratic inquiry, Timaeus is free to construct his "likely story" as he pleases, without being challenged by any Socratic questioning.

Socrates identifies Timaeus's story not as a "myth" (muthos) or an "account" (logos) of the cosmos, but as a nomos--a song or a law--perhaps suggesting that this is a fictional story to provide cosmic support for the legal order (29d).

Timaeus's mythic stories are so fanciful and unsupported by evidence or logic as to be ridiculous. For example, all the nonhuman animals are created by the divine artisan by reshaping human beings who deserve punishment for their stupidity. "The tribe of birds was the result of remodeling: sprouting feathers instead of hair, it comes from men harmless but light-minded, and studious of the heavenly bodies yet believing, in their naivete, that the firmest demonstrations about such things come through sight" (91d-e). This scorn for empirical astronomy based on visual evidence contradicts what Timaeus had earlier said about human vision as a god-given gift so that we can see the order of nature and become philosophers (47a-c). There is good reason, however, for Timaeus to reject visual evidence, because we know (at least from Pliny's Natural History) that some ancient astronomers observed novas--new stars--being born, which would refute Timaeus's mythic claim that the stars are unchanging.

The dubious character of Timaeus's mythic cosmology and the absence of any Socratic questioning of his claims has led some scholars--including Straussians like Joseph Cropsey and Catherine Zuckert--to conclude that Timaeus doesn't speak for Plato or Plato's Socrates. But if Plato did not intend to endorse Timaeus's cosmological myth, we must wonder why he wrote it in such a way that it would be taken seriously by many, if not most, readers; and even become the most influential of all of Plato's writings for over two millenia.

One might also wonder about whether Timaeus's myth satisfies a Socratic yearning for moral cosmology. In the Phaedo (97c-100b), Socrates describes his youthful excitement in reading Anaxagoras's claim that Mind rules over the whole order of the cosmos and thus designs everything for the best. Socrates was disappointed, however, when he discovered that Anaxagoras was ultimately a materialist in explaining things as governed by purely material causes rather than intelligent causes. This disappointment with natural philosophy set Socrates off on a "second sailing" where he decided to look for the truth of Being in speeches or accounts (logoi) of things, by examining how people talk about their experience and particularly their moral experience. If this was a turn away from natural philosophy towards moral philosophy, with the understanding that moral life is disconnected from cosmic nature, then Timaeus's moral cosmology would be contrary to this Socratic turn. But then one might say that Timaeus had done what Anaxagoras had failed to do successfully--construct a moral cosmology in which the cosmos is intelligently designed as the best of possible worlds--and therefore Timaeus gave Socrates what he had always wanted: an intelligent-design cosmology that would explain why it is best for things to be as they are.

Cropsey and Zuckert reject this reading of the dialogues, because they argue, instead, that Socrates really teaches that the cosmos is morally neutral, because morality depends upon an anthropology of human care for themselves that has no ground in cosmic nature. If so, this would conform to what I have argued for as the immanent teleology of morality as rooted in evolved human nature.

Lucretius in the Evolution/Creation Debate

From ancient Greece and Rome to the present, one of the fundamental debates in human history has been over a deep question: Is our universe mindful and purposive or mindless and material?  Do we live in a cosmos that was intentionally created by a divinely intelligent designer who cares for us and judges us by his moral law?  Or do we live in a cosmos that arose unintentionally by natural evolution through chance and necessity with no concern for us or any moral law?

Today, this debate is between the creationists or intelligent design theorists, on the one side, and the Darwinian evolutionists, on the other side.  Some theistic evolutionists (like Francis Collins or Owen Gingerich, for example) have tried to take a third position: that the Creator has designed the parameters of certain natural constants so that cosmic evolution is fine-tuned for producing intelligent human life as the fulfillment of the Creator's purposes.

In ancient Greece, some of the pre-Socratic natural philosophers (like Empedocles and Democritus) developed materialist or mechanist explanations for how the world and all living beings in it could have emerged by natural causes without any divine design or purpose.  In some of Plato's dialogues--particularly in book 10 of the Laws and in the Timaeus--this anti-teleological cosmology was rejected as a dangerous atheism that would subvert the moral and political order of human life. Plato's Athenian Stranger (in the Laws) argues that everyone in the political order he proposes must believe that the gods exist, that the gods think about and care for human beings, and that the gods enforce justice by rewarding the good and punishing the bad.  Those people who openly question this cosmic theology should be imprisoned, and if they cannot be persuaded to accept this theology, they will be punished with death.  Plato's Timaeus argued that people should be taught that everything was created by a divine Demiurge or Craftsman assisted by other gods according to a model of an eternally enduring nature, so that the cosmos could be seen as the best of all possible worlds.

Later, Epicurus challenged this Platonic cosmic teleology by developing his own anti-teleological cosmology based on the atomistic science of Democritus.  Everything could be understood as the patterns of order arising from the combining and dissolving of atoms moving in a void, so that all possible combinations of these atoms would arise as worlds coming into being and passing away.  All life is mortal, so there is no afterlife, and no divine judgment of human beings after death. The gods exist, but they live outside the world of human experience, and they do not care for or intervene in human affairs.  All of the organized religions that teach that the gods have created the world and judge human beings both in this life and in the afterlife deprive human beings of happiness by promoting a fear of death and of divine judgment that creates unnecessary and unreasonable anxiety.

Epicureans can be happy because they don't fear god, they don't worry about death, they know that the goodness of pleasure is usually easy to get, and they know that the badness of pain is usually easy to endure.  This is possible because their freedom from religious fears and their understanding of how everything is ultimately explained by natural causes allows them to live out their mortal lives with tranquil minds.

Although Epicurus wrote many books, most of his writing has been lost, and we now have only fragments quoted by other writers.  The most extensive text of Epicurean philosophy is the Latin philosophical poem of Lucretius--De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things)--which he wrote sometime before his death in 55 B.C.  Although he does not mention Plato by name, Lucretius can be seen as defending the Epicurean anti-teleological cosmology against the Platonic teleological cosmology, particularly as it was reformulated by the Stoics.

Christian theologians were able to accept modified forms of the Platonic and Stoic cosmology of divine creation as compatible with Biblical creationist theology, which became the predominant model of the cosmos in Christendom for over 1,500 years.  But Christians had to scorn the Epicurean/Lucretian cosmology of materialist atomism as promoting a dangerously atheistic view of the universe. 

The texts of Lucretius' book were either destroyed or hidden away, until a text was rediscovered in 1417 by Poggio Bracciolini.  Many early modern philosophers and scientists could then see the Lucretian materialist and anti-teleological model of the cosmos as the alternative to the creationist and teleological model of Christian cosmology.

Finally, with the publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of the Species, the Darwinian theory of the evolution of species by natural selection in the struggle for survival seemed to provide a modern scientific version of Lucretian cosmology as an alternative to Christian creationism.  If so, then the debate between evolutionists and creationists today continues the debate between Platonists and Epicureans over whether the cosmos has been intelligently and purposefully designed or not.

As I have indicated in some previous posts, this cosmological debate is also a moral and political debate, because while the Platonic/Christian cosmology of order as a top-down imposition of intentional planning seems to support moral and political authoritarianism, the Epicurean/Darwinian cosmology of order as a bottom-up emergence of spontaneous order seems to support moral and political liberalism.

 But is it really true that the Epicurean cosmology of Lurcretius' book conforms to a Darwinian evolutionary conception of the universe?  Gordon Campbell (a classics scholar) has helped me to think about this through one of his papers--"Zoogony and Evolution in Plato's Timaeus: The Presocratics, Lucretius, and Darwin" (2000)--and one of his books--Lucretius on Creation and Evolution (2003).  Campbell's writing illuminates Lucretius' place in the evolution/creation debate from ancient Greece to the present.

And yet I do disagree with Campbell on four points.  First, I disagree with his claim that the only "fully evolutionary theory" of the cosmos in the ancient world is in Plato's Timaeus (Campbell 2003, 2).  He distinguishes between two kinds of evolution (Campbell 2000, 14).  "Inter-specific evolution" is "the Darwinian model of the origin of species by the gradual accumulation of variation over time leading to the formation of new species."  "Intra-specific evolution" is "the accumulation of variation within a species that stops short of crossing species boundaries."  He claims that Plato is the only ancient proponent of Darwinian inter-specific evolution, because Plato's Timaeus describes an evolutionary process in which the Demiurge first creates human beings and then morally degenerate human beings evolve into four kinds of animals--birds, footed land animals, footless land animals, and fish--with the animals ranked from the more thoughtful animals to the thoughtless animals.

The first problem with Campbell's claim is that what Timaeus describes is not a natural evolutionary process at all, because he asserts it to be the work of divine creation by the Demiurge and the other gods (Timaeus 41a-d, 92c).

The second problem is that it's not clear that Plato or Plato's Socrates endorses Timaeus's story of cosmic creation.  Timaeus's story is so utterly ridiculous that many readers have doubted that Plato takes it seriously.  A. E. Taylor, for example, made this point, but Campbell casually dismisses this and insists that Timaeus's story must be seen as a serious teaching of Plato (2000, 158).  But Campbell doesn't explain the many strange features of this dialogue.  First of all, it's not much of a dialogue.  After some brief exchanges between Socrates and Timaeus, Timaeus launches into a long lecture that takes up most of the book.  Socrates remains silent, which suggests that Timaeus's story cannot withstand any Socratic questioning. Timaeus says that his story will be a "likely myth."  Socrates says that it will be a nomos--a song, a custom, or a law (Timaeus 29d).  So Timaeus's story is not a reasoned account of the cosmos.

Moreover, what Timaeus says is often self-contradictory.  For example, Timaeus says that the best account of astronomy depends on sight--looking at the stars and the Sun--and this shows the primacy of our eyes for our knowledge of the world (47a-c).  But then he condemns as "light-minded" the empirical astronomers who believe that our knowledge of astronomy must begin with what we can see with our own eyes.  Such people are punished by being turned into birds (91d-e).

My point here is that Campbell does not consider the possibility that while Plato might have thought that a teleological cosmology of divinely intelligent design could be a salutary belief for many people, it could not be a rational account of the cosmos for natural philosophers.  Aristotle suggested this in observing that such cosmic myths were little more than traditional folk tales (On the Heavens, 270b1-25, 283b26-284b5, 291b24-292a20, 298b6-299a2; The Movement of Animals, 699b12-31; Metaphysics, 1050b20-25, 1074b1-14).

Not only do I think Campbell is wrong in identifying Plato as an evolutionist, I also think he is wrong in denying that Lucretius was an evolutionist.  This is my second point of disagreement.  Although Campbell is right in noting that Lucretius never explicitly affirms the "inter-specific evolution" of a new species from an ancestral species, Lucretius does at least implicitly suggest that human beings have evolved from an earlier species that was human-like but not fully human, because it did not have the human digestive system that requires food cooked with fire.  Lucretius could not explicitly elaborate this idea, because he lacked the evidence for human evolution that is available today--including the fossil record, the archaeological record, human physiology, and comparative primatology.

In Book 5 of De Rerum Natura, Lucretius explains the origin of all living beings as the spontaneous generation of life from the Earth (5.785-1012).  Just as today we can see the spontaneous generation of worms and cicadas from the Earth, Lucretius claims, we can imagine that at the beginning the Earth was so fertile that it could generate all forms of plant and animal life (2.871-72, 898-901, 928-29, 3.719-36, 5.797-98).  For this reason, Lucretius observes, the Earth has rightly been called the Mother of all life.

At first, the Earth experimented with many monstrous animal bodies with grotesque appearance--such as animals that were both male and female, animals without feet or hands or mouths.  These forms of life "were created in vain," because nature extinguished them.  They died from starvation. Or they could not reproduce. Or they could not compete with other animals.  Only those species adapted for survival, reproduction, and competition were naturally selected for preservation.  Those human beings who lived in these early days were tougher and larger than human beings today.  They lived as solitary foragers and like savage beasts, with no families, no farming, no customs or laws, no use of fire or clothing.  Men and women came together for sexual copulation and then separated with no enduring attachment.  (Here is where Rousseau found his first "state of nature" of "nascent man" for his Discourse on the Origin of Equality.)

Some modern commentators have argued that this Lucretian account of the origin life is refuted by modern science.  One criticism is that Lucretius speaks mythically of Mother Earth as a teleological creator.  Another criticism is that the belief in the spontaneous generation of life was refuted by Louis Pasteur's famous experiments showing that living organisms cannot arise spontaneously from lifeless material.  A third criticism is that the modern fossil and archaeological record shows an evolution from simple forms of life to more complex forms, including a human fossil record showing human evolution over millions of years, which denies Lucretius's claim that all forms of life originated simultaneously and his claim that the first human beings lived as utterly solitary animals who lived on raw food without fire for cooking.

Campbell rightly defends Lucretius against the first two criticisms.  But he cannot defend Lucretius against the third criticism.  Against the first criticism, Campbell can point to clear statements from Lucretius that he uses teleological metaphors--like Mother Earth--to aid his anti-teleological message (2.655-60).  In doing this, Lucretius is like Darwin, who explained that in personifying "survival of the fittest" as "natural selection," he was employing a metaphorical expression that was not to be interpreted literally as suggesting some intentional agency or deity (see Chapter 4 of the second edition of The Origin of Species).  For Darwin, nature "selects" only in the sense that those traits that impede survival, reproduction, and competition tend to go extinct.  Similarly, for Lucretius, those forms of life that cannot survive, reproduce, or compete successfully tend to go extinct.  There is no teleological cosmic plan guiding this evolutionary process.

To answer the second criticism--that Pasteur refuted the belief in the spontaneous generation of life--Campbell rightly points out that while Pasteur's experiments showed that at present life cannot arise from lifeless material, this does not show that originally life could not have been spontaneously generated in the earlier conditions of the Earth.  Indeed, any scientific account of the origin of life from non-life through natural evolution rather than intelligent design would have to be a spontaneous generation of life.  There is today no generally accepted theory for explaining the natural origin of life, and so it remains one of the great mysteries in modern science.  But there is general agreement among scientists that any successful theory for resolving this mystery will have to find a natural mechanism for the spontaneous generation of the most primitive form of life.  For example, one popular theory today is that life originated from 3.2 billion to 3.8 billion years ago in very hot geothermal vents at the bottom of ancient oceans.  Even if this does not prove to be the correct theory, it illustrates the search for a spontaneous generation of the first life forms like that sought by Lucretius.

Campbell does not defend Lucretius against the third criticism--that his assertion that all forms of life that we see today arose fully formed simultaneously at the beginning is contrary to the evidence for the evolutionary history of life as we know it today.  Here, Campbell argues, we see why Lucretius is not truly an evolutionist in the modern Darwinian sense, because here we see that Lucretius believes in the fixity of species: although Lucretius allows for some evolutionary change within a species, he does not allow for evolutionary change by which one species evolves into another.  Species can go extinct, but all of those species that have survived to the present are essentially the same species as they were at the beginning.

Although there is good evidence for this interpretation of Lucretius, there is some ambiguity here, particularly in what Lucretius says about the origins of fire and cooking (5.955-58, 1012-20, 1091-1104).  Lucretius says that the first primitive human beings were tough enough to live on raw food like other animals.  They had no knowledge of how to use fire for cooking.  But then from observing the effects of wild fires and the warming of the Sun, they learned how to cook their food, which was part of a suite of changes that allowed them to live in family settlements that made them fully human for the first time.  In his comments on this section of Lucretius's poem, Campbell observes: "Humans become truly human, and finally civilized when they have been mastered by fire, marriage, and love, and when they in turn master nature with new technologies.  Fire and cooking were chief among these" (2003, 329).  This shows the "process of becoming fully human" (2000, 154-55).

Doesn't this imply that those first primitive human beings who lived totally on raw food were not "truly human" at all, and so what we see here is evolution from a non-human but somewhat human-like animal species to a fully human species?  If so, then this points to human evolution as inter-species evolution.  Lucretius could not elaborate this idea explicitly because he did not have all of the empirical evidence available today for human evolutionary emergence from primate ancestral species.

That evidence--from fossils, archaeology, primatology, and evolutionary anthropology--confirms the truth of Lucretius's insight about the importance for human evolution of controlling fire for cooking.  Richard Wrangham has surveyed this evidence in support of his "cooking hypothesis" for explaining human evolution (Wrangham 2009; Gowlett and Wrangham 2013).  No human societies have ever relied on raw food for most of their diet.  And no human beings have been known to survive for more than a few weeks by eating only wild raw food.  Unlike every other animal, human beings need a large portion of their food to be cooked.  Compared with the great apes, human beings have a reduced digestive system--small molars, mouth, stomach, and large intestine--that is adapted for digesting cooked food.  Moreover, the brain is a metabolically expensive organ that requires lots of energy; and therefore the increase in the size of the brain that characterizes human evolution required a reduction in gut size and energy costs and the consumption of higher quality cooked foods to reduce the metabolic constraints on brain size by delivering increased energy to enlarged brains.  The evidence of the hominin fossils indicates that Homo erectus had such enlarged brains that would have required digestive systems needing cooked food.  There is also some archaeological evidence for the controlled use of fire appearing at around 1.5 million years ago, at the time of the first major increase in the brain size of early Homo.  All of this evidence suggests that what Lucretius describes as a transition from primitive humans living "in a manner like wild animals" (more ferarum) (5.932) without fire and cooking to fully human beings living with fire and cooking was actually an evolutionary transformation from a pre-human species to a truly human species.

According to Campbell, "Lucretius' early humans evolve in response to their changing environment, but they are still unable to cross the species barrier imposed by the atomic laws of nature (foedera naturae); they evolve but remain within their own species" (2000, 155).  Does this mean that there can be a major change in the physiology and anatomy of the digestive system without a change of species?  Or should we say, in the terminology of modern taxonomy, that there has been a change of species but not of genus?

Campbell says that the evolution here in Lucretius is not Darwinian evolution but Lamarckian evolution, because it's the evolution of acquired characters.  Contrary to what Campbell assumes, Darwin accepted Lamarckian evolution.  Today, some evolutionary theorists would say that there are at least four levels of evolutionary inheritance--genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and symbolic (Jablonka and Lamb 2014).  Could we explain what Lucretius describes here as genetic/behavioral coevolution?

Oddly, while Campbell argues that Lucretius was not a Darwinian evolutionist, he also argues that Lucretius was a better evolutionist than was Darwin!  This is my third point of disagreement with Campbell.  According to Campbell, Lucretius suggests that evolutionary adaptation in the struggle for life can occur at five levels--survival, reproduction, competition, competition avoidance, and cooperation.  Campbell thinks that Darwin recognizes the first three levels but not the last two (Campbell 2003, 119-23, 129, 252-61).  I disagree.  Lucretius claims that human beings could not have survived if they had not learned to cooperate: "It was then that neighbors, in their eagerness neither to harm nor be harmed, began to form mutual pacts of friendship, and claimed protection for their children and women, indicating by means of inarticulate cries and gestures that everyone ought to have compassion for the weak" (5.1019-23). 

Campbell sees this idea as confirmed by recent work (by Robert Axelrod and others) on the evolution of cooperation, but he does not see this idea was first elaborated by Darwin in his account of the evolution of the "moral sense" in The Descent of Man.  All of the recent thinking about the evolution of cooperation through kin selection, reciprocity (direct and indirect), and group selection is building on Darwin's thinking in Descent.

Lucretius also recognizes the human domestication of animals as mutually beneficial for the animals and human beings (5.862-78).  Campbell identifies this as "extinction avoidance through symbiosis and the survival advantages of becoming tame" (2003, 129).  This also was well studied by Darwin, particularly in his Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (1868).

My final point of disagreement with Campbell concerns his understanding of teleology.  He is right in seeing that modern Darwinian biology agrees with Lucretius and the Epicureans in their anti-teleological view of the cosmos as a spontaneous order that has not been designed to serve any purpose.  But only obliquely does Campbell recognize that modern biology can affirm immanent teleology while denying cosmic teleology (Campbell 2000, 152, 170-71).  Although the evolutionary process does not serve goals, the organisms emerging from that process do.  Reproduction, growth, feeding, healing, courtship, parental care for offspring--these and many other activities of organisms are goal directed.  Biologists cannot explain such phenomena unless they ask about ends or purposes immanent in the evolved nature of the species.  This allows for a biological understanding of morality as natural right or natural law rooted in the immanent teleology of evolved human nature.


REFERENCES

Campbell, Gordon. 2000. "Zoogony and Evolution in Plato's Timaeus: The Presocratics, Lucretius, and Darwin." In M. R. Wright, ed., Reason and Necessity: Essays on Plato's Timaeus, 145-80. Swansea, UK: The Classical Press of Wales.

Campbell, Gordon. 2003. Lucretius on Creation and Evolution: A Commentary on De Rerum Natura, Book Five, Lines 772-1104. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gowlett, John A. J., and Richard W. Wrangham. 2013. "Earliest Fire in Africa: Towards the Convergence of Archaeological Evidence and the Cooking Hypothesis." Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa 48: 5-30.

Jablonka, Eva, and Marion J. Lamb. 2014. Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life. Revised edition. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Wrangham, Richard W. 2009. Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. New York: Basic Books.


Some of these points are elaborated in other posts here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here., and here.

Catherine Zuckert, Remi Brague, and Platonic Cosmology

Was Plato the first intelligent design theorist?

It is clear that the basic arguments for intelligent design are stated in Book 10 of Plato's Laws. In that dialogue, the Athenian Stranger warns against the dangerous atheism of natural philosophers who explain the universe as a product of purely natural causes. Against them, he argues that lawmakers must persuade their people that the complex, functional order of the universe shows the intelligent design of a divine mind that is benevolent in supporting human morality and law. This intelligent design reasoning provides cosmic support for human moral and political order.

Similarly, in the Timaeus, Timaeus argues that Socrates "city in speech" can be supported by a rational theology of cosmic order, in which the intelligible order of the cosmos manifests the intelligent design of the cosmic craftsman. The moral and political order of human life can then be judged by how well it conforms to this cosmic order of the omnipotent and benevolent craftsman.

Remi Brague--in his book The Wisdom of the World--shows how this conception of a cosmos ordered by Divine Intellect provided a cosmic pattern for human life to imitate, and how this idea runs through much of the history of the Western world until it was challenged by modern thinkers. Brague also shows how the biblical teaching of God as providential creator was assimilated to this Platonic cosmology.

The modern "disenchantment of the world"--based on the claim that the natural universe is indifferent to human moral concerns--means that human life must take its moral bearings from human experience itself rather than from some transcendent order of the universe. For Brague, this denial of cosmic moral order leads to moral confusion if not nihilism.

Many conservatives and Straussians have adopted Brague's reasoning in denying my argument for "Darwinian natural right." The only possible ground for natural right, they claim, is a cosmic moral teleology. Without such a teleology of the universe, any appeal to a moral sense as rooted in evolved human nature will collapse into moral relativism.

But is this really Plato's position, as Brague and others suggest? Brague acknowledges that Timaeus's cosmology reverses the move of Socrates in the Phaedo in turning towards the study of human things separated from the study of cosmic order. Moreover, Brague admits that some readers of the Timaeus have found Timaeus's reasoning so ridiculously implausible that they wonder whether Plato is being ironic. But having noted this possibility (p. 32), Brague moves on without considering its implications. Furthermore, Brague never really explains why anyone should accept this anthropological cosmology--in either its Platonic or Biblical form--as true.

A very different way of reading Plato on this issue is laid out in Catherine Zuckert's new book Plato's Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues. This massive study of all of the Platonic dialogues (888 pages long!) is organized around the dramatic dating of the dialogues rather than the dating of their writing by Plato. Her insight is that each dialogue fits into a dramatic context in which the strengths and weaknesses of Socrates' philosophic approach are assessed in comparison with four other philosophers prominent in the dialogues--the Athenian Stranger, Parmenides, Timaeus, and the Eleatic Stranger.

Zuckert suggests that Socrates distances himself from the cosmological reasoning of the Athenian Stranger and Timaeus. Socrates is skeptical about any claim that human beings can attain full knowledge of the whole, she claims. Furthermore, Socrates also doubts that the order of human life can be governed by the order of cosmic intelligibility. Socratic philosophy, she concludes, will be a search for wisdom that never ends in complete knowledge; and although we will never understand completely the order of the universe, we can understand something about the order of human desires as a guide for human action and thought.

In contrast to Brague's reading of Plato, Zuckert stresses Socrates' quest for understanding human nature on its own terms and his skepticism about appeals to cosmic design. If Zuckert is right--as I think she is--then Socrates is not that far from the skeptical naturalism of David Hume and Charles Darwin.

For some other posts related to this topic, go here, here, here, and .here.

Zuckert's Plato: Teleology and Eternity

The Straussian proponents of Platonic political philosophy reject Darwinian natural right for two reasons.

First, they think it promotes a reductionism that denies the cosmic teleology of natural ends. Second, they think it promotes a historicism that denies the cosmic eternity of natural kinds.

When modern natural science sets aside any teleological conception of the universe, they say, it deprives human purposefulness of any cosmic support and thus leads to a reductionistic nihilism. When modern natural science sets aside any conception of the eternity of species or kinds, it deprives human morality and politics of any eternal standard of human nature and thus leads to historicist relativism.

That's why the Straussians are deeply suspicious of modern science and why they look to Plato's argument that the human good must be judged by a cosmic model of eternal, teleological order.

But as I have indicated in my posts over the last two months, I am not convinced that Plato (or Plato's Socrates) supports this position. As I have suggested previously, I see Catherine Zuckert's new book--Plato's Philosophers--as a helpful guide to these questions as they arise in the Platonic dialogues. By taking up each of the dialogues in their dramatic order--rather than in the order in which Plato wrote them--and by comparing what Socrates says in comparison with what is said by four other philosophers in the dialogues--the Athenian Stranger, Parmenides, Timaeus, and the Eleatic Stranger--Zuckert shows that Plato's teaching about cosmic teleology and the eternity of the ideas is much more complex than is often recognized.

Moreover, she shows that these two topics really are the fundamental issues running throughout the dialogues. The question of cosmic teleology is raised at the end of the Laws. "If no connection can be found between the most pressing concerns of human existence and the order of the whole, we humans would appear to be set adrift in a fundamentally indifferent, if not hostile environment" (145-46). The Athenian Stranger offers a teleological cosmology based on the intelligent design of a divine mind. But, Zuckert observes, his arguments are not very plausible; and Socrates is not present in the dialogue to question him. So we are left wondering "whether we can discover an all-encompassing, intelligible order, and second, if such an order can be found, whether it supports or fosters human happiness."

The question of the eternal ideas is raised in the Parmenides. A young Socrates cannot defend his doctrine of the ideas against the criticisms of Parmenides. In particular, Socrates cannot explain exactly how the unchanging, purely intelligible ideas are related to the changing, sensible experience of mortal human beings. In fact, as Zuckert sees it, Socrates never solves this problem anywhere in the dialogues.

As I have noted in some of my previous posts on Zuckert's book, she generally emphasizes that Socrates never clearly develops a cosmic teleology. "In contrast to Timaeus, Socrates never gives a specific account of the order of the movements of the heavenly bodies or the geometric construction of the four elements" (421).

Instead of finding moral guidance in the cosmos, Socrates looks to human wants and desires. "In contrast to Timaeus and the Athenian Stranger, Socrates never suggests that human beings can discover what is good for them by contemplating the intelligible order of the movements of the heavens. Not moved by the same wants and desires, the heavens cannot tell us what to do" (419).

If this is the correct interpretation of Socrates' position, then Socrates would be close to my position--that human morality and politics depends not on a cosmic teleology but on an immanent teleology of human natural desires. If human beings are by their natural desires directed to certain ends or purposes, then we can see those ends or purposes as intrinsic to their nature, regardless of whether these ends have any cosmic reference. Darwinian biology supports such an immanent teleology because it recognizes the goal-directed behavior characteristic of various animal species, including the human species.

This suggests that Plato's Socrates could embrace a conception of the cosmos as morally neutral, while seeing the species-specific desires of human beings as sufficient grounds for moral teleology. This seems to be the stance of the Eleatic Stranger in the Sophist. The Eleatic concludes that although the gods might have cared for human beings in the past, the gods no longer rule us directly. And so, as Zuckert states it, human beings now live "in a godforsaken universe in which they have to rule and provide for themselves" (714-17). Joseph Cropsey--in his Plato's World--interprets this denial of cosmic teleology as Plato's understanding.

Although Zuckert generally agrees with Cropsey, she occasionally suggests disagreement. In contrast to the "godforsaken universe" of the Eleatic Stranger, Zuckert asserts, Socrates' universe looks like that of Timaeus and the Athenian Stranger. "All three of these philosophers suggest that studying the intelligible motions of the heavenly bodies will help human beings learn not merely how the cosmos is ordered but, even more important, how to order their own souls" (718). But this contradicts what Zuckert says elsewhere in her book about how Socrates never clearly embraces the cosmological arguments of Timaeus and the Athenian Stranger.

Zuckert's confusion here reflects a confusion in Socrates' position. On the one hand, Socrates never develops any precise cosmology comparable to that of Timaeus and the Athenian Stranger, and he never clearly endorses what they say, although he does say that Timaeus represents "the peak of all philosophy." On the other hand, Socrates does show a yearning for some cosmic explanation of everything as guided by "mind" (nous) so that everything is ordered for the best. It seems, as Zuckert suggests, that Socrates wants this to be the "best of possible worlds" (in Leibniz's famous phrase), because if it is not, then this world is in some essential sense accidental, and that would frustrate Socrates' yearning for a cosmic order that is ordered for the best.

But what then about the other big issue--the question of the eternity of species? If Darwin's evolutionary science is correct, then all the species of life come into being and pass away. Species are not eternal or everlasting. This would seem to contradict the Platonic/Socratic teaching that being--what is really real and fully intelligible--is to be identified as eternal and unchanging, as distinguished from the temporal and ever-changing flux of the sensible world.

This identification of the real as what is eternally fixed is Parmenides' teaching. Socrates adopts this Parmenidean position, although he departs from Parmenides claim that being must be one and undifferentiated, because Socrates insists that being must be differentiated into multiple forms or ideas. As Zuckert says, Socrates is a "pluralistic Parmenidean" (684, 688).

But as long as he adheres to this Parmenidean assumption that being is eternally unchanging, Socrates cannot bridge the gap between the unchanging ideas and changing sense experience. The Eleatic Stranger points out that any absolute separation of unchanging intelligibles and changing sensibles cannot explain human knowledge, because human cognition is in motion. "The intelligibility of being seems to require that it somehow be both in motion and at rest" (700). The Eleatic proposes that we understand the world by sorting things into classes according to the ways they are like or unlike one another.

I am on the side of the Eleatic Stranger. Karl Popper--in his The World of Parminides--captures the main thought here: we need to go beyond the Parmenidean search for invariants and see that reality is a mixture of fixity and flux. We need to see, as Popper suggests, that the history of the cosmos shows an evolutionary emergence of variance and novelty. As the Eleatic Stranger argues, we can sort things out according to their enduring patterns of similarity and difference. But these enduring patterns are not eternal.

This is certainly true for our study of human nature. The human species is not absolutely invariant or eternal. Human beings did not exist before the evolutionary emergence of Homo sapiens, and we can expect that some day the human species will go extinct. But for as long as our species exists, there will be natural propensities that characterize us.

And yet the present reality of the human species is not invariant, because each human being is unique in being a product of a unique natural history. Biological history depends upon the variation that comes from sexual mating in which the random assortment of genes results in the procreation of unique individuals. So while we can identify the human species as a range of traits, we know that within that range, there is immense variation expressed in individual diversity. Human nature as we know it is neither absolutely fixed nor absolutely chaotic.

Without realizing it, Zuckert implicitly endorses this Darwinian understanding of the human species in her criticisms of Timaeus's cosmological explanation of the human species. As she indicates, Timaeus cannot account for the unpredictable variation in human beings that comes from human mating and reproduction, because he has to assume that the divine craftsman created human nature as absolutely unchanging. Consequently, Timaeus has to assume that all human beings are born absolutely the same in their natural abilities and traits, which denies the reality of natural individual differences (842). Thus, as Zuckert indicates, Timaeus' cosmology--in its search for eternal invariance--must deny the obvious facts of sexual reproduction and individual identity.

My conclusion from all this is that the Platonic dialogues give us reasons to believe that conceptions of cosmic teleology and the eternity of species are implausible because they contradict what we know by experience. More plausible, I suggest, would be the Darwinian conceptions of immanent teleology and the evolution of species.

Philosophy and Theology in Raphael's "Stanza della Segnatura"

In his book God and Morality: A Philosophical History (2009), John Hare argues that morality is impossible without religious belief--particularly, some kind of theism. In developing his reasoning, he tries to show the importance of theism for the moral philosophy of Aristotle, Duns Scotus, ImmanuelKant, and R. M. Hare. In doing that, he criticizes me for not seeing the theism in Aristotle's teaching. I have responded to this criticism in a previous post.

Hare also argues in this book that Raphael's frescoes in the Stanza della Segnatura--particularly, the School of Athens and La disputa del sacramento--illustrate his view of the relationship between Greek philosophy and Christian theology.

A good website for viewing these frescoes can be found here.

Since I have long been fascinated by Raphael's frescoes, I would like to offer an alternative reading of Raphael's artistic rhetoric in these frescoes. I will lay out my thinking in four steps. First, I will raise four general questions. Second, I will offer a brief survey of the frescoes in their political, philosophical, and theological circumstances. Third, I will summarize Hare's interpretation. Finally, I will answer the general questions, while also answering Hare.

FOUR GENERAL QUESTIONS
There are at least four general questions that we might raise about Raphael's frescoes.

1. How do we judge the rhetorical persuasiveness of a painting as a visual argument?

2. Can such painting teach us something that we could not learn in any other way? Or is painting at best only an illustration of ideas derived from intellectual activity outside of the art of the painting?

3. How persuasive is Raphael's visual argument about Greek philosophy?

4. How persuasive is Raphael's visual argument about the relationship of Greek philosophy to Christian theology?

A BRIEF SURVEY
Raphael arrived in Rome in 1508 at the age of 25. The frescoes were painted between 1508 and 1511. These were originally designed to adorn the walls of the personal library for Pope Julius II. It is unlikely that Raphael's education in philosophy and theology was extensive enough for him to design the Stanza della Segnatura by himself. He probably followed a program designed for him by a humanist scholar. Hare thinks this was Egidio da Viterbo, a prominent orator and Augustinian in the papal court. But I think Christiane Joost-Gaugier makes a good case--in Raphael's Stanza della Segnatura (2002)--that Raphael's program was designed by Tommasio Inghirami, the papal librarian. In any case, whoever helped Raphael was deeply influenced by the Renaissance humanist thought of Pico della Mirandola, Marsilio Ficino, and other Christian Platonists who were trying to unify Platonic philosophy and Christian theology.

Julius II was Pope from 1503 to 1513. He was one of the Renaissance popes during the period of moral and political corruption in the Vatican that provoked the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther nailed his famous 95 Theses to the door of the Church at Wittenburg in 1517. The gross decadence of the Church became especially apparent with the pope before Julius--Alexander VI, the father of Cesare Borgia, who turned the Vatican into a personal source of wealth, power, and mistresses.

One dramatic example of those calling for moral and religious reform of the Church was Girolama Savonarola, a Dominican friar in Florence. His sermons moved the Florentines to establish a Christian Republic. But when he called for a Church Council that would remove the Pope, because he was no longer a true Christian, the Pope excommunicated him and demanded that he be punished. In 1498, he was hanged and burned. He thus became Machiavelli's best example of an "unarmed prophet" who was ruined because he relied on religious belief without military power to enforce his religion.

Julius II came to power with the promise of reforming the Church, but he never fulfilled his promises. He was preoccupied with expanding the political power of the Papacy by fighting wars to secure the power of the Papal States in Italy, which brought factional violence to his fellow Christians.

Machiavelli spoke of Julius as showing "impetuosity and fury" in his military leadership (Discourses, III.9). He was also impressed by Julius's boldness in removing Giovampagolo Baglioni as tyrant of Perugia so that he could replace him with a ruler who would support the Vatican. Julius showed his furious courage in walking into Perugia with his Cardinals, but with only a single guard. Baglioni could have killed the Pope and all his Cardinals. Baglioni was a vicious man who had murdered his relatives and taken his sister as his incestuous lover, but, amazingly, he did not dare to kill the Pope, and he allowed the Pope to lead him away. For Machiavelli, this illustrates how "very rarely do men know how to be altogether wicked or altogether good." Baglioni was wicked, but not wicked enough to secure the glory that would have come from killing the Pope (Discourses, I.27).

Machiavelli lamented that the "wicked examples" of the Papal court had destroyed the Roman religion by not preserving the religion as established by Jesus, and this had ruined Italy by depriving it of its religious support for political order (Discourses, I.12).

In this situation, Raphael's art became a tool of papal propaganda in promoting the glorious display of Julius's grandeur.

The ceiling of the Stanza della Segnatura is divided into patterns of four (a divine number for the Pythagoreans--four elements, four directions, etc.). Over the four walls of the room are four female personifications of philosophy, poetry, jurisprudence, and theology, which indicate the four divisions in the books of the library. Over the School of Athens, the motto is "knowledge of causes." Over the Disputa, the motto is "knowledge of divine things."

The School of Athens represents philosophy on the east wall, while on the west wall, the Disputa represents theology.

The perspectival center of the School of Athens highlights Plato and Aristotle, posed so as to suggest that they are opposed to one another--Plato being more "vertical," while Aristotle is more "horizontal"--and yet the balanced symmetry of the painting suggests that they are complementary sides of the same dualistic reality.

In the center of the Disputa, the Host is at the center of the Eucharist.

Some of the human figures in the paintings are easily identified, but many are not. There are 44 books in the paintings, some clearly identified by their titles, while others are untitled.

Plato's vertical gesture seems to be fulfilled by the vertical movement in the Disputa from the Host through the Holy Spirit dove to Jesus to God the Father and the highest Heaven--as if to suggest that the ascent to Heaven and return to God is the fulfillment of Platonic philosophy.

The Church's theologians had been divided over Plato and Aristotle. Among many of the early Church fathers--especially, Augustine--Plato was seen as the pagan philosopher who foreshadowed Christian theology by his teaching that philosophy was a contemplative activity of ascent to the divine. Plato's Timaeus was combined with the Bible to support the Cosmic Model of the Middle Ages ("The Great Chain of Being").

Aristotle's writings were largely lost in medieval Christendom. But in the 13th century, Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas led a revival of interest in Aristotle.

Renaissance philosophers like Pico della Mirandola argued for Plato and Aristotle as unified in their complementarity--Plato stressing the immortal side of human beings as contemplators of the divine, while Aristotle stressed the mortality of human beings as embodied animals. Christianity could then be seen as the fulfillment of Greek philosophy through the incarnation of Jesus and the ascent to Heavenly contemplation of God.

JOHN HARE
Hare uses his interpretation of the Stanza della Segnatura to support his argument for a divine command theory of morality. He claims that we need to bridge the "moral gap" in our experience: we have an intuition of our moral duty, but we are unable to fulfill that duty without God's assistance.

For Hare, the School of Athens suggests the theistic longings of the Greek philosophers, which unites Plato and Aristotle. Plato's theological cosmology in the Timaeus is echoed in Book 10 of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, where the highest human life is said to be the contemplative beholding of the divine.

According to Hare, this theistic morality and philosophy of the Greeks finds its completion in Christian theism. Christian theism as depicted in the Disputa improves upon Greek philosophic theism in three ways. First, the two semicircles in the Disputa depict a clear separation between the supernatural and the natural realms. Second, we see that God cares for human beings and moves toward them through the Son and the Holy Spirit. Third, what we see most clearly is Jesus as the visibly incarnate union of the divine and human.

MY RESPONSE
Here's how I would answer the four general questions.

1. How do we judge the rhetorical persuasiveness of a painting as a visual argument?

We might consider painting as employing the rhetorical technique of metaphor--an artistic "likeness" of something. Then we would have to judge the truthfulness of the "likeness."

Don't we often see visual metaphors in philosophic texts? Consider, for example, Plato's "divided line" and his image of the cave in the Republic or his "ladder of love" in the Symposium.

In the case of Raphael's frescoes, we have visual references to many philosophers and theologians, and so we can judge the accuracy of these references.

We also have references to 44 books, some of which are clearly identified--Plato's Timaeus, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Euclid's Elements, Augustine's City of God, the Bible, and others. So we can judge the plausibility of how these texts are presented. (Books became especially important in the Renaissance because of the new technology of printing presses.)

2. Can painting teach us something that we could not learn in any other way? Or is painting at best only an illustration of ideas derived from intellectual activity outside of the art of painting?

I'm not sure how to answer this question. But it does seem hard to me to see how painting teaches us anything that we couldn't learn from other sources.

3. How persuasive is Raphael's visual argument about Greek philosophy?

Raphael's depiction of the relationship between Plato's teaching in the Timaeus and Aristotle's teaching in the Nicomachean Ethics as showing both conflict and complementarity is defensible, and it certainly was a historically influential reading of these books.

But doesn't this overlook Aristotle's criticisms of Plato at the beginning of the Ethics? And doesn't this overlook the subtlety of the books? In the Timaeus, Timaeus gives a long speech without any questioning from Socrates (although Socrates does say that Timaeus represents the "peak of philosophy"). In the Ethics, the arguments in Book 10 for the divinity of the contemplative life are remarkably strange and contradictory (as I have indicated in some recent posts).

4. How persuasive is Raphael's visual argument about the relationship of Greek philosophy to Christian theology?

To me, this teaching is utopian in a way that fails to resolve the moral, political, and intellectual problems left to us by Greek philosophy. Let me offer just a few examples of what I have in mind.

At the center of the Disputa, we see the doctrines of Transubstantiation and the Trinity. But why should we expect that Greek philosophers would accept such miracles without skepticism? Don't even Christians disagree about these doctrines? After all, within a few years after Raphael's death, Christendom will be divided over such issues, and they will begin slaughtering one another in religious wars.

In Heaven, we see Abraham with a knife, which reminds us of his faith in being willing to obey God's command to kill his son Isaac. Doesn't this cast doubt on the moral teaching of the Bible? Don't we have to invoke a natural moral sense to correct this biblical story? Hare speaks about this "terrible story" (80). He refers to Duns Scotus, who tries to read Genesis 22 in the light of Hebrews 11: Abraham believed that Isaac would be resurrected if we were killed. But this is not clearly said in the Old Testament text. Moreover, there are other places in the Old Testament where human sacrifice is endorsed (Judges 11:29): Jephthah sacrifices his daughter to Yahweh to fulfill a pledge he had made to Yahweh to secure victory over the Ammonites. Here, then, is the classic problem for divine command theory. (Kierkegaard used the Abraham and Isaac story as an example of the "suspension of the ethical.")

Raphael depicts Heaven, but not Hell. Why not? Does he mean to imply that there is no Hell? If so, he would be denying a fundamental doctrine of orthodox Christianity, and he would be adopting the heresy of Origen.

If Raphael believes in Hell, and if he believes that most human beings will be eternally condemned to Hell, does this mean that the Greek philosophers and all those in the tradition of Greek philosophy will be in Hell forever? If so, doesn't this deny his attempt at reconciling pagan philosophy and Christian theology? Or would Raphael incline towards Dante's solution to the problem by putting the philosophers in Limbo?

Why does Raphael allow himself to be used as a propagandist for Julius II, as a time when the Church was morally and politically corrupt, and Julius failed to act to reform the Church? Is Raphael's utopian vision blind to the corruption of religious authority?

Hare thinks the face of Savonarola appears in the Disputa. But Hare doesn't acknowledge that Julius II failed to support the reforms called for by Savonarola.

Why doesn't Raphael give us some warning about what's to come with the Protestant Reformation? In 1512, at the first meeting of the Fifth Lateran Council, Edigio da Viterbo gave the opening oration in the presence of the Pope. He pointed to the bloodiness of Julius's wars, and he warned that the corruption of the Church had provoked scorn for the Christian religion and a split among believers. Why doesn't Raphael show the same courage in challenging Julius?

Greek philosophy offers us no escape from our moral, political, and intellectual imperfection as human beings. Plato's Republic attempts to construct a utopia in which we could escape our imperfections. But it fails. Any attempt to put the Republic into practice would promote tyranny.

Raphael presents Christian theology as fulfilling Plato's utopia in a supernatural utopia beyond the natural world. But it's hard to see how Christian utopianism is any better than Platonic utopianism.

Maybe Nietzsche was right: Christianity is Platonism for the common people.

Some related posts can be found here, here, and here.

Plato's Teleological Cosmology & Cicero's Socratic Scepticism

I continue thinking about the history of Plato's teleological cosmology, as well as the history of the break from that cosmology in the work of Hume and Darwin.

As far as I know, the three best surveys of how Plato's cosmology--in the Laws (book 10) and the Timaeus--shaped Western cosmology for 2,000 years are Arthur Lovejoy's The Great Chain of Being, C. S. Lewis's The Discarded Image, and Remi Brague's The Wisdom of the World. In all three books, the claim is that there was no serious criticism of that Platonic cosmology until the modern era.

But this ignores the evidence that Plato's intelligent-design cosmology provoked sceptical questioning from the very beginning with Plato's Socrates, and that this Socratic scepticism was continued by Cicero and others, which was then renewed in the Eighteenth Century by Hume and then elaborated in the evolutionary science of Darwin in the Nineteenth Century.

Brague does at least give his reader a glimpse of this sceptical tradition. Brague notices that the cosmology of the Timaeus--with its teaching that the moral and political life of human beings must imitate the intelligent order of the cosmos--overturns the "Socratic Revolution" described in the Phaedo. In his famous account of his "second sailing," Socrates says that, as a young man, he was devoted to "inquiry into nature"--looking for the natural causes of all things. He was excited by a writing of Anaxagoras that proclaimed "Mind" (nous) to be the cause of all things. But then Socrates became disappointed when he saw that Anaxagoras's explanations through material causes did not really give Socrates what he was looking for--an explanation for why it was best for everything to be ordered as it was. So Socrates decided that instead of looking directly at natural things--as if he were looking directly at the sun--he must look at their reflections in the accounts or speeches (logoi) about them. Thus, he turned to examining how people talk about their experiences, hoping that through such human experience, he could ascend to the enduring patterns or forms that explain that experience. Brague writes: "Thus Socrates renounced that unification of experience in favor of considering solely phenomena relating to the polis, that is, the being-together of men. In this way he disconnected anthropology from cosmology and introduced his plan to found an anthropology based solely on itself" (31).

But if so, then, Brague insists, Plato in the Timaeus had to reverse the Socratic Revolution by formulating a teleological cosmology by which all things were governed by cosmic Mind so that everything was ordered in the best and most excellent way. "Plato built a bridge over the abyss Socrates had opened, by positing the Good as the supreme principle" (32).

Brague suggests that this "abyss" opened by Socrates and closed by Plato was not opened again until the modern era, when the moral interpretation of the cosmos was challenged by modern thinkers. But this overlooks the ancient tradition of Socratic scepticism. Brague does recognize Lucretius and the Epicurean tradition as deviating from the cosmological thought set in motion by the Timaeus. But this Epicurean tradition of thought was outside the main line of thought from Plato and Aristotle.

To tell this story, Brague has to ignore Cicero's account of Socratic scepticism. Particularly in his Academics, Cicero shows how scepticism emerged early in the history of the Platonic Academy. Part of that scepticism was the thought that the moral and political life of human beings could not be governed by cosmological knowledge, and so Socrates was right to bring philosophy down from the heavens into the realm of human experience. In this Academics (I.15), Cicero has Varro say: "It is universally agreed that Socrates was the first person who summoned philosophy away from mysteries veiled in concealment by nature herself, upon which all philosophers before him had been engaged and led it to the subject of ordinary life, in order to investigate the virtues and vices, and good and evil generally, and to realize that heavenly matters are either remote from our knowledge or else, however fully known, have nothing to do with the good life." So, contrary to Brague's claim, the idea of the moral neutrality of the cosmos was not an invention of the modern era, because the idea was already there in the ancient tradition of Socratic scepticism to which Cicero belonged.

The best critique of intelligent-design cosmology in antiquity is Cicero's dialogue On the Nature of the Gods. This became the model for Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Hume's character Cleanthes is named after the teacher of the Stoic Balbus, who lays out the intelligent-design argument in Cicero's dialogue. Hume's character Philo (who speaks for Humean scepticism) is named after the teacher of Cotta, who lays out the sceptical arguments in Cicero's dialogue. After allowing Cotta to demolish the intelligent-design cosmology of Balbus, Cicero carefully avoids scandal in the conclusion to his dialogue: "Here the conversation ended, and we parted, Velleius thinking Cotta's discourse to be truer, while I thought that of Balbus approximated more nearly to some semblance of the truth." Similarly, Hume concludes his dialogue by having his narrator Pamphilus say: "I cannot but think that Philo's principles are more probable than Demea's, but that those of Cleanthes approaches still nearer to the truth."

We can see here that Cicero and Hume belong to a tradition of sceptical conservatism that doubts Plato's teleological cosmology, even as it grudgingly acknowledges that this Platonic cosmology might be salutary as a popular "civil religion."

Metaphysical conservatives who believe that moral and political order cannot survive without cosmic support are uncomfortable in the face of this conservative tradition of scepticism. One can see this, for example, in an article published in The Intercollegiate Review in 1968 by Frederick Wilhelmsen and Willmoore Kendall--"Cicero and the Politics of the Public Orthodoxy." They admire Cicero for his understanding of the "public orthodoxy" as "that tissue of judgments, defining the good life and indicating the meaning of human existence, which is held commonly by the members of any society, who see in it the charter of their way of life and the ultimate justification of their society." They see this as corresponding to what Leo Strauss identified as the "way of life" of the politeia or what T. S. Eliot called "culture"--shared judgments about the cosmic meaning of human existence that support social and political order. But they are disturbed by the evidence that Cicero thought that the theological, intelligent-design cosmology of the public orthodoxy was false, even though he might be obligated to avoid publicly denying it.

For Wilhelmsen and Kendall, no public orthodoxy can sustain itself if it is not grounded in some metaphysical conception of the cosmos as intelligently designed as a model for human morality and politics. In the case of Cicero, they see a conflict between theoretical truth (Socratic scepticism) and the customary beliefs required for society. Their solution to this problem is to assert that Christian revelation creates a bridge between transcendent truth and immanent social order. Our Christian faith that God is the source of all order guarantees that there will be no conflict between the truths of the soul and the truths of society. But they leave the reader wondering how this can be "theoretically guaranteed" so as to be immune to the sceptical doubts of Socratic philosophy.

Darwinian science continues the sceptical tradition of Cicero and Hume by showing how the moral order of human life can be based on the natural order of human nature. Even if the natural cosmos as a whole is morally indifferent, the species-specific nature of human beings can support moral distinctions.

If this is persuasive, then we should say that Aristotle was right when he argued in his biological works that in contrast to astronomy, the study of the nature of animals is more open to study, less dependent on traditional myths, and "more akin to our nature" than study of the divine cosmos (Parts of Animals, 642a).

An earlier post on comparing metaphysical conservatism and evolutionary conservatism can be found here.

Aristotle's Darwinian Ethics (6): Hare on Aristotle's Platonic Religion

As a proponent of the divine command theory of ethics, John Hare (a professor at Yale University) criticizes my Darwinian ethics for not recognizing that morality without belief in God is impossible.

In his book God and Morality: A Philosophical History (2009), Hare tries to show the fundamental influence of theistic religion in the history of Western ethical philosophy. He concentrates on four philosophers--Aristotle, Duns Scotus, Immanuel Kant, and R. M. Hare. These four thinkers represent four periods--ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary. They represent four kinds of ethical theory as concentrating on virtue, will, duty, and consequences respectively. And they represent four conceptions of god--God as magnet, God as lover, God as sovereign, and God as model. He pairs each of the four philosophers with successors who abandoned the theological premises of their forerunner. I am paired with Aristotle, Jean-Paul Satre is paired with Scotus, Christine Korsgaard is paired with Kant, and Peter Singer is paired with R. M. Hare.

For the Aristotle chapter, Hare begins with a photograph and a description of Raphael's depiction of Greek philosophy in his sixteenth-century fresco in the Vatican--The School of Athens. Plato and Aristotle stand at the center of the painting. Plato's right arm is raised vertically, and his right index finger is pointing to heaven, while his left hand holds his book Timaeus vertically. Aristotle's right arm is extended horizontally, his right hand is spread out with his palm gesturing down towards the center of the group, and his left hand hold his book Nicomachean Ethics horizontally. The obvious suggestion is that Plato is a more "vertical" thinker, in pointing upward to the heavens or the divine, while Aristotle is a more "horizontal" thinker, gesturing downward towards the human beings around them.

Hare suggests, however, that this difference between the vertical Plato and the horizontal Aristotle is only a matter of emphasis, and that in fact Aristotle incorporates into his thought the vertical dimension of Platonic religion. He supports this with the claim that Raphael was probably influenced by Renaissance thinkers like Marsilio Ficino and Egidio da Viterbo who had sought to reconcile Plato and Aristotle. Some scholars of Renaissance art believe that Raphael was guided by a program laid down by Egidio, who argued that Plato and Aristotle agreed that humanity combined two natures--the sensual nature that is embedded in matter and the rational nature that is free from matter. While Aristotle stressed the material side of human experience more than did Plato, Aristotle showed his agreement with Plato in the tenth book of the Ethics by affirming that the highest part of humanity is pure intellect, which grasps what is divine and eternal by imitating the Divine Intellect.

This introduces Hare's argument that Aristotle agrees with Plato's religion--God as Cosmic Intellect towards which all human beings are drawn by their intellectual love of the Ideas. This is what Hare calls "God as magnet"--the magnetic force of the divine radiating out through the great chain of Being.

Hare offers plenty of textual evidence for this conclusion. For example, in the Timaeus, it is said that God has given human beings Intellect as a divinity that looks up to heaven, while struggling against the mortal desires of the body.

When a man devotes himself to the love of learning and to true prudence, and has exercised himself in these things above all others, then there is every necessity, I suppose, that he think thoughts that are immortal and divine (if in fact he touches on truth); and again, to the extent that human nature admits to a share in immortality, he does not fall short of this; and since he's always caring for his divine part and keeping well-arrayed the divinity that dwells within him, he is supremely happy. (90b-c)

This sounds a lot like what Aristotle says about the contemplative life in Book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics.

We should not follow the recommendation of thinkers who say that those who are men should think only of human things and that mortals should think only of mortal things, but we should try as far as possible to partake of immortality and to make every effort to live according to the best part of the soul in us; for even if this part be of small measure, it surpasses all the others by far in power and worth. It would seem, too, that each man is this part, if indeed this is the dominant part and is better than the other parts; so it would be strange if a man did not choose the life proper to himself but that proper to another. And what was stated earlier is appropriate here also; that which is by nature proper to each thing is the best and most pleasant for that thing. So for a man, too, the life according to his intellect is the best and most pleasant, if indeed a man in the highest sense is his intellect. Hence this life, too, is the happiest. (1177b31-78a8)

But as I have noted in some previous posts, the reasoning offered by Plato and Aristotle for this divinization of the human intellect and the elevation of the contemplative life as divine is remarkably dubious. So the careful reader might wonder how seriously to take this.

Hare is ambiguous about this. On the one hand, he clearly thinks we are intended by Aristotle to take his theological language seriously. On the other hand, Hare admits that this theology of the contemplative life is "in tension" with much of what is taught in the Nicomachean Ethics (17). Hare observes: "Unfortunately Aristotle gets tentative when he starts talking about God" (19). At least initially, Aristotle is drawing from traditional religious opinions--as in Homer's depictions of the gods. But it's not clear whether Aristotle is sincere about this. Sometimes he speaks of gods in the plural, but then he shifts to speaking of God in the singular. He says that God or the gods are so self-sufficient in their lives that they don't care about human beings. But then he says they love philosophers. Sometimes he suggests divinity is inside us, but at other times he suggests divinity is outside of us.

Aristotle indicates that traditionally the gods were originally human beings who were divinized for their heroic deeds by their fellow human beings, which suggests that talk of divinity is just one way of talking of heroic human virtue. Aristotle quotes Homer as having Priam recognize the exceptional goodness of Hector by saying he was a God, and thus "people are turned from humans into gods by a surpassing degree of virtue" (1145a20-24).

Moreover, Hare is never clear as to what difference this confusing theological language makes for Aristotle's ethical teaching. His general argument is that the case of Aristotle illustrates how morality is impossible without God. But Hare never explains exactly how Aristotle's conclusions about morality depend on his theology. The only clear case of this is that Aristotle apparently thinks that elevating the philosophic life over all other lives requires religious language, but the confusing character of his reasoning makes the reader wonder if he is completely serious about this.

Hare tries to argue that my Darwinian Aristotelianism is not really Aristotelian, because it ignores the theological foundation--the "vertical" dimension--of Aristotle's ethics. But, then, he concedes that I and Aristotle are in agreement on the fundamental principle that the good is the desirable, and the human good is the harmonious satisfaction of our natural desires over a complete life, which is happiness (55, 69, 71, 254, 271, 278). And yet, Hare also insists that since I don't accept Aristotle's theistic religion, I can't resolve the tragic conflicts in human desires: "Arnhart is stuck in a difficulty that Aristotle is not" (72).

I argue that sometimes the natural human desires create tragic conflicts between human beings that can only be resolved by force or fraud. For example, in the conflict over slavery in the United States, in which the master's desire for mastery came into conflict with the slave's desire to be free from exploitation, the only final resolution came with the Civil War.

Generally, Hare argues that a religiously grounded morality is free of tragedy. Thus, the theistic teaching of universal love allows theists to overcome tragic conflicts of interest. But Hare is never exactly clear how this works. Does universal love require absolute pacifism and socialism in which all human beings would love one another impartially without any bias towards themselves or those close to them?

Consider the famous case of the Dutch householder hiding a Jew in her attic during the Nazi occupation of her country. When the Nazis come to her to ask if there are any Jews in her house, is it immoral for her to lie? Here, Hare admits, is a tragic situation where the woman must lie but then confess that she had violated the moral law against lying. Hare explains: "Putting the difficulty theologically, the person who lies is breaking God's command, but perhaps (given the situation) in the hope of mercy" (282).

"In a similar example," Hare writes, "some bishops in the early Christian centuries required soldiers who had killed, even in a just war, to abstain for a while from Communion on their return" (282-83). So does this mean that just killing in war is against God's commands? But God will forgive us for our sin of not loving our enemies?

Hare explains: "The position we imagine as ideal is one in which all the people involved, including ourselves, are loved the same. But that is not a position we in fact occupy. It is the position God occupies, if there is a God" (285). It is hard for me to see how this provides any reliable guidance for our moral conduct.

Even with all of his insistence that morality without God is impossible, Hare actually concedes that there is a natural moral sense that allows atheists and believers to understand one another's moral language. Some people might understand the chemical properties of water, while others might not. But they could all talk about "water" with mutual understanding, without having to talk about its chemical properties. Similarly, Hare suggests, theists and atheists can talk about what is "right" or "good" with mutual understanding, even though the atheists will not share the belief of the theists that what is "right" and "good" ultimately arises from God's commands (272).

If that is Hare's position, then he's agreeing with me that while religious belief can reinforce our moral judgments, our morality can stand on its own natural ground as part of our evolved human nature even without religious belief.

Related posts can be found here, here, here, here, and here.

The Evolution of Heaven and Hell (2): Ancient Origins

The intellectual history of thinking about Heaven and Hell is set forth very well in John Casey's recent book--After Lives: A Guide to Heaven, Hell, & Purgatory (Oxford, 2009). One major limitation of Casey's book, however, is that he concentrates on Western culture and ignores the Eastern traditions of rebirth and reincarnation. One good book on the traditions of karmic rebirth is Gananath Obeyesekere's Imagining Karma: Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth (University of California Press, 2002). In this series of posts, I will be looking mostly at Western thought and drawing ideas from Casey's book.

Although the belief that the dead live on as spirits or ghosts might have been common in earliest human history, the ancient Egyptians seem to have been the first people with any clear conception of another life after death in which the dead were rewarded or punished for their conduct in this life. Those who had lived in accord with ma'at--the cosmic order of the universe--were rewarded with eternal happiness. In the earliest periods of Egyptian history, the ascent to heavenly bliss was restricted to the pharoahs and their families, while ordinary people passed to the underworld. Later, the heavenly route was opened to all. Osiris, the god who had been raised from the dead, became the god who offered the hope of resurrection to all those human beings who were not guilty of wicked behavior.

In contrast to this Egyptian belief in an immortal afterlife, the ancient Mesopotamian poem The Epic of Gilgamesh teaches that the search for immortality is hopeless and foolish. Gilgamesh wanders the world in his quest for the secret source of immortal life. But he finally learns that the search for eternal life is vain and childish, and that it distracts us from finding joy in the earthly life that is available to us as mortal animals.

At least until the middle of the fifth century B.C., the ancient Greeks seemed to have been closer to the Mesopotamian view of life and death than the Egyptian view. Ancient Greek mortuary inscriptions say nothing about an afterlife, but instead they speak about the dead person's life, his family, his city, and his achievements--rather like what I see today in the graveyards I visit. Homer's poetry depicts the underworld as a shadowy realm in which the dead take no pleasure in their vague half-existence.

But then the Orphic religion introduced into the ancient Greek and Roman worlds the Egyptian conception of a future life after death where people would be rewarded or punished for their good or bad deeds during their earthly lives. Plato became the philosopher of Orphism in adapting its beliefs to his transcendentalist philosophizing, which distinguished the intelligible world of true Being from the visible world of mere Becoming. The human soul as pure thought was immortal, because it participated in the eternal world of Being. But the soul's attainment of its true destiny could come only after death. In its earthly life, the soul was held captive within the mortal human body. After death, the soul left the body and then would be judged, so that the souls of the good would be rewarded, and the souls of the bad would be punished.

In Plato's Phaedo (69a-70b), Socrates affirms his belief in the Orphic mystic rites by which human beings are purified and initiated into a state of thoughtfulness by which the immortal soul is separated from the mortal body, so that the soul can attain its divine rewards after death. This pure state of the soul is achieved through the purely contemplative life of the philosopher. It's noteworthy that Socrates' interlocutor--Cebes--interrupts him to express the skepticism about any life after death that was apparently common among the ancient Greeks. So it's clear that Plato's Socrates is introducing a new Orphic religion of otherworldly beliefs to overturn the worldly realism of Greek experience.

Plato presents this religious belief in the otherworldly destiny of the human soul through mythic stories. Although they differ in their details, these myths--particularly, in the Laws (885c-907b), the Timaeus, and the Republic (614a-621d)--converge on a common theme: the cosmos is an intelligent order that has been divinely designed to distinguish between good and bad, noble and base, and in the next life, the good will be rewarded and the bad punished. A philosophic life of pure contemplation wins the greatest rewards, because the purely theoretical activity of the human mind participates most fully in the eternally intelligible order of the divine Mind.

But the fact that Plato and Plato's Socrates present this vision through myths rather than demonstrations has led many readers to question whether they really believe what they are saying, or whether they are presenting this only as noble lies.

Augustine suggested that Plato's philosophic theology was probably dissimulation: although Plato did not really believe what he said in his mythic depictions of the afterlife and the divine order, he thought it would be good for common people to believe such things. And yet Augustine (like many of the early Christian theologians) embraced Plato's theology of the afterlife as the closest approximation among the pagan philosophers to the truth of Christian theology. While Plato presented the life of philosophic contemplation as the most divine life, Augustine and other Christians could see this teaching as fulfilled in the Christian doctrine that human nature will be fulfilled in Heaven through the eternal contemplation of God as the ground of Being.

Straussian scholars have stressed the esotericism of Plato's theological cosmology in arguing that Plato knew this cosmology to be ridiculously implausible, but that he presented it only as a noble lie for providing cosmic support for a morality necessary for common people but not for philosophers. According to the Straussians, the true Platonic teaching is that the best life for human beings is a purely contemplative life that is attainable only by a philosophic few, and this purely theoretical life transcends the moral or political life of the many.

The problem with this Straussian reading of Plato, however, is that it ignores the fact that the supposed supremacy of the philosophic life depends upon Plato's transcendentalist cosmology, with its claim that the pure mind of the philosopher transcends the body and participates in the divine realm of the purely intelligible order of the cosmos. If Plato didn't really believe his noetic cosmology, it's hard to see how he could really believe in the superiority of the philosophic life as the only true human good for those few capable of living it.

A few of my previous posts on Platonic cosmology can be found here, here, here, and here.

Leo Strauss's Significant Silence about Aristotle's Biology

I cannot understand Leo Strauss's silence about Aristotle's biology.  In Natural Right and History, for example, there are many citations of Aristotle's writings, and yet there is only brief citation of his biological writing: on page 121, Strauss cites Aristotle's Parts of Animals, 642a28-30.  This citation is in the context of Strauss's account of how Socrates is said to have brought philosophy down from heaven to investigate the human things.  For Strauss this is a turn from philosophy as the study of nature to political philosophy as the study of natural right.  For Strauss, "the primary object of philosophy" is "the heavens and the heavenly bodies," as in the cosmological science of Plato's Timaeus (PAW, 16, 20; "Farabi's Plato," 364-65, 382-83, 390-91).  In making this assumption, Strauss ignores Aristotle's claims in his biological writings that the natural science of living beings--as opposed to physical cosmology--is "nearer to us and more akin to our nature," that Socrates was wrong to identify "nature" with astronomy, and that the cosmic teleology of Plato's Timaeus is indefensible (PA, 642a28-30, 644b22-46a5; Meta, 987a30-b20).  Strauss is aware of what's at issue here, because he wrote in a letter to Kojeve that "the difference between Plato and Aristotle is that Aristotle believes that biology, as a mediation between knowledge of the inanimate and knowledge of man, is available" (On Tyranny, 279).  Apparently, Strauss embraced a dualistic separation between the study of physics and cosmology, on the one hand, and the study of the human things, on the other; and thus he rejected Aristotle's view of biology as the bridge between the physical sciences and the human sciences.  But if this is so, it is strange that Strauss never explicitly defends this position by indicating what he thought was wrong with Aristotle's biology.

In Natural Right and History, Strauss's silence about Aristotle's biology weakens the argument for natural right at crucial points where an appeal to Aristotelian biology would strengthen the argument.

For example, as I have indicated in many posts, Strauss's claim at the beginning of his book that the teleology of natural right depends on the science of the heavens ignores Aristotle's argument for a purely biological teleology.

A second example is the passage where Strauss appeals to "an empirical science of man" based on man's natural sociality.  Strauss writes:

The phenomenon of admiration of human excellence cannot be explained on hedonistic or utilitarian grounds, except by means of ad hoc hypotheses.  These hypotheses lead to the assertion that all admiration is, at best, a kind of telescoped calculation of benefits for ourselves.  They are the outcome of a materialistic or crypto-materialistic view, which forces its holders to understand the higher as nothing but the effect of the lower, or which prevents them from considering the possibility that there are phenomena which are simply irreducible to their conditions, that there are phenomena that form a class by themselves.  The hypotheses in question are not conceived in the spirit of an empirical science of man.

Man is by nature a social being.  He is so constituted that he cannot live, or live well, except by living with others.  Since it is reason or speech that distinguishes him from the other animals, and speech is communication, man is social in a more radical sense than any other social animal: humanity itself is sociality.  Man refers himself to others, or rather he is referred to others, in every human act, regardless of whether that act is 'social' or 'antisocial.'  His sociality does not proceed, then, from a calculation of the pleasures which he expects from association, but he derives pleasure from association because he is by nature social.  Love, affection, friendship, pity, are as natural to him as concern with his own good.  It is man's natural sociality that is the basis of natural right in the narrow or strict sense of right.  Because man is by nature social, the perfection of his nature includes the social virtue par excellence, justice; justice and right are natural.  All members of the same species are akin to one another.  This natural kinship is deepened and transfigured in the case of man as a consequence of his radical sociality.  In the case of man the individual's concern with procreation is only a part of his concern with the preservation of the species. (128-29)

Strauss is drawing here from Aristotle's famous passage in Politics (1253a7-38) about man as being by nature the most political animal.  But Strauss does not indicate that for Aristotle this "empirical science of man" is part of the biological science of political animals, which Aristotle lays out in his biological writings (HA, 488a8-14, 553a26-54b26, 588b23-89a9, 614b19-26, 623b26-29a30).  If Strauss had done that, he might have raised the question as to whether modern Darwinian biology supports this.  And he might have noticed that in the Descent of Man, Darwin agrees with everything that is said in the above passage--the inadequacy of hedonistic utilitarianism in explaining the human admiration for excellence, the natural sociality of human beings, the importance of language in distinguishing human beings, the moral sentiments ("love, affection, friendship, pity"), and the naturalness of moral judgement as rooted in human nature.  Moreover, Strauss might have noticed that the modern idea of emergent evolution recognizes that the higher phenomena of the living world are irreducible to the lower phenomena of the physical world.

Both Aristotle and Darwin saw that the natural sociality of human beings was an extension of the first social bond between parents and offspring.  The affiliative bonding of parents and children is extended over ever-larger groups.  As compared with other animals, the extended period of offspring dependence on parental care and the complexity of the social learning during this period manifests the connection between human sociality and human rationality, in that human reason is adapted for navigating through the intricacies of human social life.  The Darwinian understanding of this link between rationality and sociality has been deepened by contemporary Darwinian scientists exploring the "social brain" hypothesis.  The fundamental conclusion of this Aristotelian and Darwinian understanding is that human beings are by nature the most rational animals because they are by nature the most political animals.

If "man's natural sociality" is "the basis of natural right in the narrow or strict sense of right," then Aristotelian and Darwinian biology supports natural right by explaining the biological nature of this natural sociality and the natural rationality to which it is tied.

A third example in Natural Right and History of where Strauss is unreasonably silent about Aristotle's biology is in the account of Locke.  Strauss assumes that Locke's political philosophy rejected the rule of nature in favor of the rule of convention.  This reading of Locke is mistaken, because it fails to recognize that in criticizing the Platonic naturalism of eternal essences, Locke is defending a biologically empirical science of natural history that points back to Aristotle and ahead to Darwin.

I have elaborated this last point in a previous post.

My general conclusion is that Aristotle helps us to see that the study of the human things and of the human quest for natural right is a biological study of human beings compared with other animals.

"In the works of nature, purpose and not accident is predominant; and the purpose or end for the sake of which those works have been constructed or formed has its place among what is beautiful.  If, however, there is anyone who holds that the study of animals is an unworthy pursuit, he ought to go further and hold the same opinion about the study of himself" (PA, 645a25-28).