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.

On Holloway, "Strauss, Darwinism, and Natural Right"

Leo Strauss thought the crisis of natural right arose because the teleological view of the universe that supported classic natural right has apparently been refuted by modern natural science.  I have argued, however, that a Darwinian understanding of the immanent teleology of life, including human life, can resolve this crisis by supporting a Darwinian conception of natural right.  Carson Holloway has criticized my argument for failing to recognize that any conception of natural right depends on a  "religiously informed cosmic teleology" that is denied by Darwinian science.

In one of his papers--"Strauss, Darwinism, and Natural Right"--Holloway suggests that Strauss himself agreed with him on this.  This paper was published in The Human Person and a Culture of Freedom, edited by Peter Pagan Aguiar and Terese Auer (Catholic University of America Press, 2009), 106-129.  It can also be found online. 

Although I disagree with Holloway's general argument, I do think he has correctly pointed to a strange kind of religious or quasi-religious teleology in Strauss's writing about natural right.

Holloway accurately restates my claim that while modern natural science--and particularly Darwinian science--denies any cosmic teleology, it can affirm an immanent teleology that sustains natural right.  "That is, Darwinism demonstrates how a purposeless cosmos can give rise to purposeful beings, beings with an internal teleology from which we can derive natural standards of right" (108).  If we understand the human good as the desirable, and if we see that the evolutionary process has endowed human beings with at least 20 natural desires, then we can see the fullest and most harmonious satisfaction of those natural desires as a standard of natural right inherent in the teleology of human nature.

Holloway responds to this by suggesting that Strauss would not have accepted this as a resolution of the problem of natural right, because Strauss saw classic natural right as concerned with human excellence or perfection, which transcends the concern in Darwinian natural right with mere human decency or ordinary goodness.  What distinguishes human perfection from human decency is that while human decency is "anthropocentric," human perfection is "cosmocentric" (114).  "Humanism is not enough," according to Strauss, because to understand natural human perfection, we must look up to the "superhuman" and not down, as the Darwinian evolutionist does, to the "subhuman" origins of the human.  We must see, as Strauss says, that man is not "an accidental product of a blind evolution," but the result of a "process leading to man, culminating in man," and "directed toward man" (128).

In Natural Right and History, Strauss distinguishes American social science from Catholic social science in how they handle this issue: "Present-day American social science, as fare as it is not Roman Catholic social science, is dedicated to the proposition that all men are endowed by the evolutionary process or by a mysterious fate with many kinds of urges and aspirations, but certainly with no natural right" (NRH, 2). 

Holloway observes: "Strauss exempts Catholic social science from this difficulty presumably because it posits a cosmic hierarchy in light of which these various 'urges and aspirations' can be evaluated and a cosmic teleology in light of which they can be seen as products of an evolutionary process guided by a benevolent cosmic intelligence.  Darwinian naturalism, however, rejects such notions and is therefore left with only the (seemingly inadequate) fact of these various aspirations and their unintelligent origins" (118).  So, without the cosmic teleology guided by a "benevolent cosmic intelligence," Holloway argues, my Darwinian natural right as grounded on the natural desires of an evolved human nature has no way to rank those various and conflicting desires according to any natural standard of human perfection.

My first response to this is to point out that Holloway is completely silent about my emphasis on the need for prudence and habituation in organizing our often conflicting desires into a coherent pattern as conforming to our conception of a whole life well-lived (see Darwinian Natural Right, 23-24, 36-49).  He is also silent about my claim that while the generic goods of human life as set by the 20 natural desires is a universal standard for the human species, the ranking and organization of those generic goods requires prudence in judging how this can be done to conform to the nature of each individual.  The naturally good life for a man like Socrates, for whom the natural desire for intellectual understanding must be ranked at the top, is not the naturally best life for those who are not Socratic philosophers.

Apparently, Strauss disagreed with me here.  For he thought that the philosophic life of Socrates was the only naturally good life, and that all other lives--the merely moral lives of ordinary decency--were actually lives of misery and delusion.  Moreover, this ranking of the philosophic life as the only naturally good life was, according to Strauss, rooted in a transcendent cosmic order.

Holloway notes the "certain otherworldliness" in Strauss's "transcendent" conception of the philosopher as standing at the peak of a cosmic hierarchy (110-12).  But Holloway does not reflect on how strange this is. 

How can this "transcendent" conception be consistent with Strauss's denial of Platonic metaphysical dualism and his insistence that Plato was not a Platonist?  It is true that in some of the passages cited by Holloway, Strauss does seem to endorse the cosmology of the "Great Chain of Being" that dominated Western culture for two millennia through the influence of Plato's Timaeus.  But this seems to contradict Strauss's claim that this Platonic cosmology is Plato's exoteric teaching, not his esoteric teaching.

If there is a "benevolent cosmic intelligence," as Holloway indicates, would Strauss say that this is the philosopher?

In his 1948 lecture on "Reason and Revelation," Strauss has a dialogue between "the philosopher" and "the theologian."  Here is one passage:

"The philosopher: denies that human self-assertion and love of truth are incompatible.  For we have a selfish need for truth.  We need the eternal, the true eternal (Plato's doctrine of eros).  The kinship between philosophia and philotimia:  lasting fame possible only through knowledge of the truth.  The most far-sighted selfishness transforms itself into, nay, reveals itself as, perfect unselfishness.

"The theologican: philosophy is self-deification; philosophy has its root in pride." 

 "The philosopher:  if we understand by God the most perfect being that is a person, there are no gods but the philosophers (Sophist in princ: theos tis elengktikos).  Poor gods?  Indeed, measured by imaginary standards. --As to "pride," who is more proud, he who says that his personal fate is of concern to the cause of the universe, or he who humbly admits that his fate is of no concern whatever to anyone but to himself and his few friends." (163)

 I don't think Holloway agrees that "there are no gods but philosophers."  Does this even make any sense at all?

Strauss's assertion here that philosophers are as gods reminds me of Nietzsche's warning in Human, All Too Human (sec. 164) that any belief that some minds are "superhuman" (ubermenschlich) is a "religious or half-religious superstition."  Of course, Nietzsche himself later in his life affirmed the philosopher as the Ubermensch; and that was the Nietzsche that attracted Strauss, who was completely silent about Nietzsche's evolutionary science and democratic liberalism in Human, All Too Human.

I will come back to this strange "otherworldly" Straussian conception of the philosophers as gods in my comments on Arthur Melzer's new book--Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing.

Strauss's "Reason and Revelation" lecture was first published in Heinrich Meier's Leo Strauss and the Theological-Political Problem (Cambridge University Press, 2006).  It can also be found online.

I have a previous post on this lecture, also here, where I note that Strauss puts Darwinian evolution on the side of philosophy as opposed to revelation.  I have written many posts over the years responding to Holloway and commenting on Strauss and the problem of natural right.  Here is one.

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.

Leo Strauss, Darwinian Natural Right, and the Platonic Roots of Intelligent Design Theory

As I indicate in Darwinian Conservatism, the arguments for "intelligent design theory" as an alternative to Darwinian evolution were first stated in Book 10 of Plato's Laws. Leo Strauss's book on Plato's Laws raises questions about intelligent design in Plato's political theology. Those questions suggest the possibility that there might be a natural moral sense in at least some people that does not depend on the cosmic teleology of Plato's intelligent design theology. And if so, that suggests the possibility of justifying natural right as rooted in a moral sense of human nature shaped by natural evolution, which would not require an intelligent design theology.

In Plato's dialogue, the Athenian character warns against those natural philosophers who teach that the ultimate elements in the universe and the heavenly bodies were brought into being not by divine intelligence or art but by natural necessity and chance. These natural philosophers teach that the gods and the moral laws attributed to the gods are human inventions. This scientific naturalism appeared to subvert the religious order by teaching atheism. It appeared to subvert the moral order by teaching moral relativism. And it appeared to subvert the political order by depriving the laws of their religious and moral sanction. Plato's Athenian character responds to this threat by developing the reasoning for the intelligent design position as based on four kinds of arguments: a scientific argument, a religious argument, a moral argument, and a political argument.

His scientific argument is that the complex, functional order of the cosmos shows an intentional design by an intelligent agent that cannot be explained through the unintelligent causes of random contingency and natural necessity. His religious argument is that this intelligent designer must be a disembodied intelligence, which is God. His moral argument is that this divine designer is a moral lawgiver who supports human morality. His political argument is that to protect the political order against scientific atheism and immorality, lawgivers must promote the teaching of intelligent design as the alternative to scientific naturalism. Two thousand years later, William Jennings Bryan developed these same four arguments for intelligent design as superior to Darwinian naturalism. Recent intelligent design proponents such as Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, and Bill Dembski have elaborated these same four arguments.

What's Strauss's position? Often it seems that Strauss and his students agree with Plato's intelligent design theology. They argue that natural right--as the alternative to moral relativism and nihilism--depends upon a cosmic teleology in which the cosmos has been intelligently designed to aim at certain ends that set the standards for natural right. And yet it sometimes seems that Strauss and his students regard this intelligent design teleology as only a "noble lie."

The latter is suggested by Strauss's book on the Laws. Strauss says that this is Plato's "only political work" and his "most pious work" (pp. 1-2). In Book 10, the Athenian character lays out the different classes of those guilty of impiety--those who deny the intelligent design theology--and indicates how they will be punished. Strauss notes that some of the atheists "have a character by nature good, hate the bad men, and through loathing injustice do not do wrong" (p. 155). Strauss then goes on to raise questions: "what happens to the atheist who is a just man and does not ridicule others because they sacrifice and pray and who to this extent is a dissembler? . . . One could say that he will become guilty if he frankly expresses his unbelief--but what if he expresses it only to sensible friends? Can one imagine Socrates denouncing him to the authorities?" (p. 156)

Does this imply that Socratic philosophers with "a character by nature good" could be good even without believing in the cosmic teleology of intelligent design theology? But if many people cannot be good without believing in the intelligent design theology, would the Socratic philosophers be obligated to dissemble by not openly declaring their atheism?

Why not then say that religion and intelligent design theology might be useful to reinforce morality, even though morality might be rooted in a natural moral sense for those without religous belief? Could that natural moral sense be a product of the natural evolution of the human species? That was Darwin's position, and I see no reason why it could not be adopted by conservatives as a sensible account of morality and religious belief. Conservatives could defend this as Darwinian natural right.

A Darwinian Reading of Cropsey's Plato

Against my argument for "Darwinian natural right," many of my critics have insisted that any defensible conception of "natural right" requires a cosmic teleology in which human ends can be understood as fulfilling the natural ends of the cosmic order. Since Darwinian science cannot support such a cosmic teleology, they conclude, it cannot support the idea of natural right.

My response has been to point out that even if human ends cannot be sustained by cosmic nature, those ends can be sustained by human nature. And insofar as Darwinian science explains the evolutionary emergence of a natural moral sense rooted in human nature, such a science supports an immanent teleology that is sufficient grounds for natural right. Some of my many posts on this can be found here, here, here, here, and here.

Many of my critics on this point are Straussians who think they are following Plato in arguing for a cosmic teleology of moral ends. I believe, however, that Plato (or Plato's Socrates) is actually close to what I have in mind in defending an immanent teleology of human nature as understood by Darwinian science.

In some ways, Joseph Cropsey's book Plato's World: Man's Place in the Cosmos (1995) confirms my thinking about the link between Plato and Darwin on this point. (Many years ago, Cropsey was one of my professors at the University of Chicago.)

The most persistent theme of Cropsey's book is "care." Human beings are said to care about their existence within an uncaring world of nature and without any divinity to care for them (2, 7, 62, 64, 110, 114, 118-21, 125, 127-31, 136-38, 145-47, 151, 155-57, 160, 164-65, 170, 180, 212, 218, 222, 225). At times, this sounds more like Heidegger than Plato. Cropsey never mentions Heidegger in this book. And yet, for Heidegger, the being of human being understood as Dasein is defined as "care" (Sorge), and "care" is grounded in historical temporality. Cropsey seems to be suggesting that Heidegger elaborates what is implied in the Platonic dialogues. This impression of mine was confirmed when I saw that Catherine Zuckert in her review of Cropsey's book also spoke of "the evocation of Heideggerian themes--the temporal limitations of human knowledge, the centrality of the confrontation with death in the definition of human existence, and the importance of care." (Aren't these all Humean and Darwinian themes as well?)

Cropsey indicates that for Plato the primacy of human care shows itself in the need for a human conquest of nature. According to Cropsey, Plato did not believe that nature could provide "the criterion and incentive of human excellence," because Plato actually anticipated the modern teaching that nature is "indifferent or unfriendly to our well-being until we learn to exploit it" (185-86). Cropsey's Plato thus affirms "the moral neutrality of nature" (210).

Although Cropsey does not explicitly associate "care" with any particular Greek word, he implicitly links "care" to two Greek words--epistatike and epimeleia (138, 151, 156, 160). The second word is used by Socrates in the Apology (24c, 31b, 36b-c) when he claims to "care" for the Athenians by trying to persuade them to "care" for virtue rather than for money and power. Both words are used by the Stranger in the Statesman (305e, 308e, 311c) when he speaks of the statesman as the one who "cares for" his city by weaving the diverse characters of his people into a common fabric.

Cropsey says that human caring has neither natural nor divine support. Here is where I disagree with Cropsey. Even if one grants that cosmic nature is uncaring, why not say that caring is natural in the sense that it is rooted in human nature?

After all, Cropsey indicates that caring for their existence is natural to all human beings in some manner, and a special kind of intelligent caring is natural to Socratic philosophers (110, 121, 125, 129-31, 147). Although Cropsey depicts philosophy as a struggle against nature (157, 161, 176, 185), he also makes much of Socrates' philosophic caring as dictated by his nature (157, 161, 185). He describes Socrates as having "an innate inclination toward right and good" that is part of his nature, and this shows us "that nature sends the better angels of caring and nobility as well as the afflictions of cruelty and baseness" (157). According to Cropsey, the Socratic philosopher is "guided by his understanding of the good for the humanity he has insisted was an object of his caring" (212). But where would this philosopher get his understanding of the human good if not from his understanding of human nature (218)? How could we even identify "an innate inclination toward right and good" in Socrates if there were no natural standard of "right and good"?

Cropsey says that human nature does not clearly support human care because of the natural conflict between the indispensable virtues of hardness and softness. "Courage or manliness or aggressiveness (andreia) is in conflict with restraint or accommodation or passivity (sophrosyne), each being a virtue or a part or kind of virtue" (139). True statesmanship is "according to nature" when it contrives a union of these virtues that "conflict by nature," which requires "weaving by which the hard-natured and soft-natured are united as warp and woof to form the protective web of state, procuring the mingling that uncorrected nature would preclude" (139-42). Statesmanship as weaving is the artifice that overcomes "the conflict in equivocal nature between the aggressive and the accommodating virtues" (170).

What does Plato mean in calling this statesmanship "the truly genuine political art in accord with nature" (Statesman, 308d)? Cropsey would say that although the materials are natural, the political order that is woven out of those disorderly materials is an artificial construction of the philosophic statesman. Like other students of Leo Strauss, Cropsey interprets Plato as denying Aristotle's claim that human beings are political animals by nature.

But I would say that what one sees here is the trichotomy of political order as manifesting natural inclinations, cultural traditions, and individual judgment. A fundamental insight of Aristotelian and Darwinian political science is that human political nature must be nurtured through custom and judgment.

If the philosophic weaver cannot look to human nature for guidance, where does he find the pattern for the cloth? How does he know that the best pattern must include an interweaving of courage and moderation? Plato's Stranger explains that the combination of courage and moderation is necessary for the survival of a city in war and peace (Statesman, 307e-308b). Cropsey suggests that "his implication is that the natural reward of survival is conferred on those regimes that sit most bearably on their subjects because the polity respects the law and keeps undivided counsel." Therefore, "survival is the natural reward that signals the presence of true and authentic statesmanship (136).

Doesn't this indicate that the standard for the political weaver is by nature? Given the nature of human beings, they cannot live together in stable political communities without some combination of courage and moderation. Darwin recognized this in his account of how group selection in war contributed to the evolution of cooperation and the moral sense.

Nature can provide no standard for the philosophic statesman if nature is irrational. Cropsey seems to think that the irrationality of nature is indicated by the fact that certain kinds of geometric relationships require irrational numbers for their numerical expression (111, 125). But this makes no sense. These geometric relationships--such as that between the diagonal of a square and its sides or that between the radius and the circumference of a circle--are regular and thus intelligible relationships. Indeed, the wondrous intelligibility of such geometric patterns would seem to manifest the rational order of nature.

If the pattern for the political weaver is purely artificial, as Cropsey suggests, we are left with many questions. Does the weaver simply invent his pattern arbitrarily? Or is his pattern only a modification of a pattern that he has inherited from others? Does the weaver weave himself into and out of his own pattern? Or has the weaver been woven into someone else's pattern?

Cropsey claims that Socrates is the model statesman. If so, was he produced by the pattern woven by Athenian political weavers? According to Cropsey, "Socrates is under the influence of an unfeigned if subdued patriotism that is born of the understanding . . . that the human authority erected in political society is our nearest guarantee of prosperity in an uncaring milieu" (160).

Socrates realizes, however, that "human authority" is not sufficient to sustain the right opinions of the multitude of people. Socrates as the superior human being who cares for humanity cannot speak simply in his own name, because "the natural human suspicion of human superiority gives rise to the urgent need for a presence and a judgment above suspicion." Therefore, Cropsey concludes, Socrates had to create a new religion as a "noble lie." "His own care for the Athenians seems to reveal itself in his effort to conceal from them their human loneliness and to make up for it, as far as possible, with a simple theology of the nameless god. . . . What could better illuminate the paradox of the human condition than this act of human caring for man on the part of one who teaches that the oblivious deity is diligent in righteousness" (165)? In the words of a more recent philosophic weaver of noble lies, "Only a god can save us now."

Cropsey speaks of Socrates's "new religion without theophany" as "a religion of reason and justice rather than faith and charity" (177). But it seems to me that "a religion of reason and justice" might well be a natural religion in the sense of a religion adapted to human nature, a religion that might be the product of natural human evolution.

If nature were not the standard for the Socratic weaver, then the pattern of his weaving would be set not by reason and justice but by will and power. This might be Cropsey's view of the matter. But I do not think it is Plato's.

Nietzsche and Darwin

For a long time, it has been hard for me to understand Friedrich Nietzsche's relationship to Darwin and Darwinism.

On the one hand, Nietzsche seems to embrace Darwinism in declaring that everything has evolved--including human nature--because what appears fixed is the evolutionary product of selection carried out long before the 4,000 years of history that we are familiar with. So, there are "no eternal facts." Moreover, he seems to agree with Darwin in denying any cosmic teleology, in affirming that there is no purpose, no reason, no divinity in the apparent design of the cosmos, because it has all emerged by natural evolution. Human values, therefore, cannot be rooted in any cosmic order of rational or divine intention. Rather, values arise as the evolved conditions for human life.

On the other hand, Nietzsche often criticizes Darwin and Darwinians (especially Herbert Spencer) for failing to see that life is governed not by a "struggle for existence" but a "will to power," and for failing to see that apparently altruistic behavior is ultimately egoistic. Moreover, in arguing for the "will to power" as a cosmic force that rules the whole universe, Nietzsche seems to assume a cosmic, vitalistic teleology that contradicts his acceptance of the Darwinian attack on cosmic teleology. His teleological conception of the "will to power" resembles Leibniz's pan-animism, which manifests the influence of the cosmic teleology in Plato's Timaeus.

My thinking about this has been helped by some recent books--particularly, Gregory Moore's Nietzsche, Biology, and Metaphor (2002), John Richardson's Nietzsche's New Darwinism (2004), and Robin Small's Nietzsche and Ree.

Moore's book is a "historical" study of how Nietzsche's biological thinking was shaped by the biological ideas that he picked up from his extensive reading of nineteenth-century science. Richardson's book is a "philosophical" study of how Nietzsche's ideas can be made plausible by putting them into a Darwinian framework, despite the fact that Nietzsche himself never lays it out in this way. Small's book is a "biographical" study of how Nietzsche's thinking about Darwinism was influenced by his friendships with Paul Ree and Lou Salome. (Nietzsche, Ree, and Salome called themselves the "holy trinity" when they were trying to set themselves up as a household of free spirits who would share ideas and perhaps more. This strange menage-a-trois was made famous by the picture they staged in May, 1882, with Nietzsche and Ree pulling Salome in a cart with her holding a whip. That explains the true meaning of Nietzsche's remark about "when you go to a woman, take a whip"!)

There is no evidence that Nietzsche read any of Darwin's major writings, although it is probable that he read Darwin's article "A Biographical Sketch of an Infant." But Nietzsche did pick up Darwinian ideas from his reading of Friedrich Lange's History of Materialism, Spencer's Data of Ethics, John Lubbock's Origin of Civilization, and Walter Bagehot's Physics and Politics. He learned a lot about Darwinian ethics and psychology from Ree, whose writings lay out a Darwinian view of morality as a product of natural evolution. He also read extensively and carefully various books by scientific critics of Darwinism.

Nietzsche's acceptance of a Darwinian view of the cosmos and human nature as products of evolutionary history is clearest in his writings in the "middle period" of his life--Human, All Too Human, Dawn, and the first four books of the Gay Science. This was the period of his close friendships with Ree and Salome, who reinforced Nietzsche's interest in natural science and especially Darwinian science.

In both their style and their content, these middle writings are more moderate and sensible than Nietzsche's early and late writings. This sensible moderation comes from a Darwinian naturalism that is free from the romantic transcendentalism of his early writings or the ecstatic poetry and cosmic teleology of the "will to power" in his later writings.

Richardson does a wonderful job in restating Nietzsche's ideas in the most systematic and cogent manner by putting them into the framework of a Darwinian science that works through three levels of selection--natural selection, social selection, and self selection. Natural selection explains innate animal values. Social selection explains acquired human values. Self selection explains the possibility for a superhuman transvaluation of values by heroic individuals.

Richardson concedes that Nietzsche himself never lays out his thinking in precisely this way. But Richardson's argument is that this is the best way to make Nietzsche's thinking plausible.

Although I agree with much of what Richardson claims, I disagree on various points. First, he insists that the Nietzschean account of "social selection" and "self selection" goes beyond the Darwinian inclination to reduce everything to natural selection. But I would argue that Darwin and the Darwinian tradition generally recognizes the importance of social selection through cultural learning and self selection through individual judgment. These three levels correspond to what I have analyzed as a hierarchy of natural order, customary order, and deliberate order. In the study of morality, this would correspond to the three levels of moral sentiments, moral traditions, and moral judgments. Similarly, Frans de Waal distinguishes the three levels as moral sentiments, social pressure, and judgment/reasoning. (Occasionally, Richardson himself acknowledges that Darwin allows for social evolution through cultural learning and that this is an important part of modern coevolutionary theorizing.)

Although a Darwinian science recognizes "self selection" in the deliberate judgments exercised by individuals, it also recognizes that this deliberate choosing is constrained both by nature and by culture. This recognition of the severe restraints on the self-choosing freedom of even the most "free spirits" is evident in Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human. But this moderation falls away in his later writings as he looks up to the superhuman freedom of the "overman." Occasionally, Richardson admits that freedom as self selection is never complete or absolutely unbounded (103, 115-16, 170, 188-89, 215, 218, 261, 267, 270). I would stress this point. And I would also stress that the extremism of Nietzsche's later writings comes from a tendency to heroic transcendentalism that ignores the sober limits on human nature and human society that are prominent in the more Darwinian stance of his middle writings.

Richardson sees that the "dominant" view of "will to power" in Nietzsche's writings assumes, at least implicitly, a cosmic teleology and anthropomorphism in which a cosmic mind rules over all. I agree with Richardson that a "recessive" view of "will to power" as a product of natural selection would be more plausible. We could say then that the natural disposition of living beings to expand, increase, and dominate--to enhance their power--has arisen by evolution because it enhanced their fitness. The desire for power is teleological, because it is directed to ends or goals, but the teleology here is immanent rather than cosmic. This desire is not the product of some cosmic intelligent design such as that set forth in Plato's Timaeus. This desire can be explained as the product of a selective process--natural selection working on inherited variations and social selection working on cultural variations--that does not itself have any "purpose."

Nietzsche's inclination in his early and late writings towards a cosmic teleology of eternal values reflects the religious longings seen by Salome. In his middle writings, he shook off those religious longings under the influence of Darwinian science. But they returned in his later writings. So, for example, the Nietzsche of Human, All Too Human declares that "man has evolved," because "everything has evolved; there are no eternal facts" (sec. 2). But the Nietzsche of Beyond Good and Evil looks to "the eternal basic text of homo natura" (sec. 230).

In his article on Beyond Good and Evil, Leo Strauss stresses the importance of this appeal to eternal human nature. This raises the question of whether Strauss--like Nietzsche--yearned for an eternal cosmic order that would support human values.

In his Untimely Meditations (ii.9), Nietzsche worries: "If the doctrines of sovereign becoming, of the fluidity of all concepts, types and species, of the lack of any cardinal distinction between man and animal--doctrines which I consider true but deadly--are thrust upon the people for another generation with the rage for instruction that has by now become normal, no one should be surprised if the people perishes of petty egoism, ossification and greed, falls apart and ceases to be a people; in its place systems of individualist egoism, brotherhoods for the rapacious exploitation of the non-brothers, and similar creations of utilitarian vulgarity may perhaps appear in the arena of the future."

Some of the Straussians agree with Nietzsche's fear of the deadliness of Darwinian science. For example, Harvey Mansfield warns: "Darwin was not a nihilist, but he prepared his generation and later generations for nihilism. His theory of evolution not only denied the eternity of the species but also undermined all eternities, all permanence of meaning" (Manliness, 83). Mansfield presents the "manly nihilism" of Nietzsche and Teddy Roosevelt as a rebellion against the Darwinian teaching that there is no purposeful and eternal cosmic order of nature to provide standards for human excellence and importance (86, 89, 93, 105, 111, 121). Nietzsche looks to the manliness of the "overman" (Ubermensch), while TR looks to the manliness of the "leader" (Fuhrer).

But isn't there something dangerous about the extremism of this vision of redemptive leadership? Far more healthy, I suggest, is the moderation of Nietzsche's Darwinian science in Human, All Too Human.

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.

Cosmic Teleology in Big History?

 

 

Here are two models of the universe.  The first is Dante's Christian model, which was generally accepted in Christendom until the 18th century.  Dante's model has the Earth at the center.  Circling around the Earth are the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.  Beyond that are the fixed stars, and then finally the chrystalline sphere of the Primum Mobile and the Paradise of Heaven.  Beneath the Earth are Purgatory and Hell.

The second model is by Thomas Digges, originally published in 1576.  Digges was an English mathematician and astronomer, who was the first person to explain the Copernican heliocentric model in English, although he modified the Copernican model in two ways.  Like Copernicus, Digges has the Sun at the center.  Circling around the Sun are Mercury, Venus, and the Earth, with the Earth identified as "the great orb carrying the globe of mortality, his circular period determining our years." Beyond the Earth are the orbits of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.  Unlike Copernicus, Digges described the orbit of fixed stars beyond Saturn as including Heaven: "This orb of stars fixed infinitely up extends itself in altitude spherically, and therefore immovable the palace of felicity garnished with perpetual shining glorious lights innumerable, far excelling over the sun both in quantity and quality the very court of celestial angels, devoid of grief and replenished with perfect endless joy, the habitacle for the elect."  He also departs from Copernicus in that beyond the fixed stars are stars scattered throughout endless space.  Remarkably, unlike the Christian model of Dante, Digges's model does not include a place for Hell.

Both of these models assume that the cosmos is the created and purposeful design of God, who cares for the destiny of human beings as intelligent beings created in God's image, who are mortal in their earthly life, but who will live eternally in the afterlife, either enjoying eternal bliss or suffering eternal punishment.  Both of these cosmic models show a cosmic teleology in that human beings find themselves in a universe purposefully created with them in mind, and in the light of which human life has some cosmic meaning.

Does modern scientific cosmology allow for such cosmic teleology?  And if it does not, does that mean that modern science cannot support any natural teleology that can give some meaning to human life?

Early modern scientists like Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton were theists who thought the cosmic laws of nature studied by scientists were the laws of God, and thus the cosmic order manifested God's purposeful direction.

But today, many (perhaps most) natural scientists think that science must be atheistic, and so it cannot affirm the cosmic teleology of the divine creation stories.  In short, human beings can find no cosmic meaning for their lives, because the cosmos as understood by modern science is utterly pointless.

Recently, however, the proponents of Big History have argued that while the modern scientific account of human history within the history of the whole cosmos cannot support the cosmic origin stories of the Bible and other religious traditions, modern scientific cosmology can tell a scientific origin story that will allow human beings to understand the meaning of human life in the cosmos. 

In Big History: Between Nothing and Everything (2014), David Christian, Cynthia Stokes Brown, and Craig Benjamin argue that the scientific origin story of Big History can "give us a powerful sense of meaning" (2), and if this new origin story is taught to high school students around the world, this could provide us with a shared global understanding of our human place in the universe that could help us confront the greatest threats to human existence on earth today--such as nuclear war and global warming.  Bill Gates has supported their project for providing material for high school teachers to teach Big History.  So that, while previously children were taught the religious origin stories of their various societies, which explained the cosmic meaning of their lives within their social order, the new scientifically grounded Big History can teach children around the world an origin story that depends on scientific evidence rather than religious faith, and which can sustain a global ethics comprehensible to human beings in all societies, who otherwise disagree in their religious beliefs.

By contrast, some scientists today claim that science and religion are compatible, and that the modern scientific understanding of the cosmos, and of the human place within the cosmos, supports the cosmic teleology of the theistic origin stories.  For example, Owen Gingerich is Professor of Astronomy and of the History of Science, Emeritus, at Harvard University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; and he argues that a scientific history of the cosmos shows evidence of divine purposefulness, because the physical and chemical constants of the universe seem to be fine-tuned for the emergence of a world hospitable to intelligent life.  Thus, science can sustain a cosmic teleology in which human life gains meaning as the fulfillment of God's purposes.  He has laid out his reasoning in two books--God's Universe (2006) and God's Planet (2014). 

Many other prominent scientists have made similar claims about how the fine-tuning of the universe supports a theistic view of human life as the fulfillment of divine purposefulness.  This is a new version of the old argument from design (first stated by Plato)--that if nature looks like it has been intelligently designed, then this must point to a divinely intelligent designer.

Christian, Brown, and Benjamin do not mention such scientific theism as an alternative to their position.  Although they do not explicitly say so, they imply that modern science must be atheistic.  They certainly make it clear that the Biblical origin story must be rejected as false (12-13, 57-58, 60, 64).

My position falls somewhere in between Gingerich and the Big History folks.  I agree with Gingerich that modern science does not dictate atheism, because scientific answers to questions about how things work fall short of answering questions about why they work that way, which are the questions that open up the possibility of divine purposefulness.  Questions about first causes point to the problem of ultimate explanation--that all explanation depends on some ultimate reality that cannot itself be explained.  All explanation presupposes the observable order of nature as the final ground of explanation.  To the question of why nature exists, or why it has the order that it does, there are only two possible answers.  Either we say this is a brute fact of our experience: that's just the way it is! Or we move beyond nature to nature's God as the creator of nature, but then we cannot explain why God is the way He is.  In looking for an ultimate explanation, we must stop somewhere with something that is unexplained--either an uncaused or self-caused nature or an uncaused or self-caused God.

Here, Gingerich says, we move from scientific physics to philosophical or theological metaphysics.  The practice of modern science, Gingerich observes, requires a methodological naturalism that looks for purely natural causes to explain everything, but it does not require a metaphysical naturalism that denies that there is any supernatural reality beyond nature.  And while the scientific account of the cosmos cannot prove the cosmic teleology of divine purposefulness, the scientific discovery that the cosmos is fine-tuned for the emergence of intelligent life makes it at least plausible to believe that this shows a divine purpose at work in the cosmos.

To reach this conclusion, however, Gingerich's view of cosmic history must stop at the present moment, with human intelligent life dominant over the Earth, and thus he refuses to reflect on the cosmic future and the likelihood that in the distant future all life will almost certainly be extinguished, because in that case we might as well conclude that the cosmos has been fine-tuned for eternal death.

Christian, Brown, and Benjamin do reflect on the likelihood that in the remote future the cosmos will be dead, and thus the emergence of life, including intelligent life, can be seen as only one short moment in the early history of the cosmos.  But they do not reflect on how this subverts their claim that Big History is the story of progress in increasing complexity that reaches its highest complexity in the intelligent life of human beings and human collective learning.

My argument is that rather than looking for some cosmic teleology of the universe, we should be satisfied if we can see the immanent teleology of living species, including the human species.  Cosmic teleology is the conception of all of nature as a whole in which all beings serve a cosmic purpose set by an intelligent designer or creator.  By contrast, immanent teleology is manifest in the internal purposiveness of organisms in their generation, their structure, and their activities.  Darwinian biology rejects any cosmic teleology by which the universe as a whole would be seen as ordered to some end or purpose.  Evolution by variation and natural selection explains the purposiveness of species without reference to any forces guiding nature to secure some cosmic scale of perfection.  And yet, although the evolutionary process does not serve goals, the organisms emerging from that process do.  Reproduction, growth, feeding, healing, courtship, parental care of the young--these and many other activities of organisms are goal directed.  Biologists cannot explain such processes unless they ask about ends or purposes immanent in each species. 

Human beings show such immanent teleology in that the evolved human nature of Homo sapiens includes natural desires and inclinations that are directed to goals or ends, and we can judge the happiness of a human life by how well those goals or ends are satisfied.  I have argued that there are at least 20 natural human desires, and that we judge societies as better or worse depending on how well or how poorly those societies provide the conditions for the harmonious satisfaction of those desires.  This is not a cosmic standard of the good, because this standard of the good is relative to the human species.  Nor is this an eternal standard of the good, because the human good exists only as long as the human species exists.  And modern scientific cosmology teaches us that human beings will exist for only a brief moment in cosmic history.  But for as long as that human species exists, even if it seems fleeting in the huge expanse of cosmic history, the human good is a natural reality.

This is not enough for Gingerich.  He rejects the Biblical literalism of the scientific creationists who claim that science confirms the six-days-of-creation story in Genesis, because he doubts that this poetic story was meant to be a literal history of the origin of the cosmos, and because he doubts that any empirical science could confirm such a story.  He also rejects Intelligent Design Theory (like that promoted by the Discovery Institute), because he sees no scientific evidence that God had to intervene miraculously to create each form of life that could not have arisen by a natural evolutionary process,  And yet he is a theistic evolutionist, who believes that God did have to act as First Cause of the laws of nature: He knew how to make a universe that could make itself.  So he agrees with the Intelligent Design theorists that the evidence of design in nature points to divine final causes.  But he does not see that they have provided any mechanisms for the efficient causes necessary for any scientific explanation (God's Universe, 73).  I have made the same point against the Intelligent Design theorists: what they offer is not a scientific explanation unless they can explain exactly when, where, and how the Intelligent Designer created all the irreducibly complex forms of life.

Although Gingerich does not believe that science can prove the existence of God as First Cause, he does believe that there is evidence of fine-tuning or the anthropic principle that becomes comprehensible only if one believes that this fine-tuning is the purposeful work of a Creator.  There are many parameters of physics and cosmology that are set at precise values, such that if there were even a slight deviation from these values, the universe would not be hospitable to any form of life or to intelligent life.  There can be as many as 34 of these finely tuned parameters.  For example, if the expansion rate of the universe had been slightly larger, no stars and planets could have formed; and if it had been slightly smaller, the universe would have collapsed before any stars and planets could have been formed.  The nuclear energy level ratio of carbon to oxygen is set precisely, so that if it had been larger, the universe would contain insufficient oxygen for life, and if it had been smaller, the universe would contain insufficient carbon for life.  If the earth were closer to the Sun, it would be too hot to sustain life.  If it were farther away from the Sun, it would be too cold to sustain life.  Just as Goldilocks found the bowl of porridge that was neither too hot or too cold but just right, it seems that the universe is just right for the emergence of intelligent life. 

Gingerich sees only two possible ways to explain why the universe is so precisely fine-tuned for the evolution of intelligent life on Earth.  We either say that this all happened through an astonishing sequence of accidents.  Or we say that it was intentionally planned by the Creator.  Gingerich thinks the latter is much more plausible, because it is easier to believe that the Creator intentionally set the finely-tuned parameters of the universe to make it inevitable that not just life, but intelligent human life would emerge on a planet just like the Earth.  He endorses the statement of Paul Davies "that the laws of nature are rigged not only in favor of complexity, or just in favor of life, but also in favor of mind.  To put it dramatically, it implies that mind is written into the laws of nature in a fundamental way" (God's Universe, 38).  It's as though nature has been designed so as to be hospitable to minds that can contemplate nature.

It is easier to believe that the universe's being finely tuned for intelligent life is purely accidental if one believes in the multiverse theory accepted by some scientists today.  If our universe is only one of many universes, and if each of those universes has a different set of natural laws and natural physical and cosmological parameters, then we might imagine that through a random evolution of universes, at least one universe could have arisen like ours hospitable to intelligent life.  The problem with this, however, as Gingerich and other scientists have observed, is that this is a purely imaginary conception, for which we have no observational evidence, because we have no way of stepping outside our own universe.  For this reason, many scientists think the theory of multiverse is not a scientific theory at all, because it is not empirically testable.

Even if from the standpoint of the present moment, we as intelligent beings can look back on 13.8 billion years of cosmic history and see ourselves as the purposeful peak of that fine-tuned evolutionary history, which is what Gingerich does, we might wonder about the remote future of the cosmos.  Is the cosmos so fine-tuned for life and intelligent life that such life will continue forever?  Gingerich never asks that question or considers what scientific cosmology would suggest about the distant future of the cosmos.

Although Gingerich quotes from Paul Davies as saying that the universe seems rigged to favor the emergence of not just life but intelligent life, he does not quote Davies' remarks about what the universe will look like in the very remote future.  He imagines "an inconceivably dilute soup of photons, neutrinos, and a dwindling number of electrons and positrons, all slowly moving farther and farther apart.  As far as we know, no further basic physical processes would ever happen.  No significant event would occur to interrupt the bleak sterility of a universe that has run its course yet still faces eternal life--perhaps eternal death would be a better description."

So if we look at the entire history of the cosmos, we see that during the first 10 billion years, there was no life; and then after a few billion years of life, the universe became eternally dead again.  So now life, including intelligent life, seems to be only a momentary event in cosmic history.  Now, it seems that the cosmos has been fine-tuned for an eternity of mindless death.

Or would Gingerich dispute this scenario of the universe as eternally expanding into an utterly dead universe?  Would he defend what John Barrow and Frank Tipler, in The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (1986), call "The Final Anthropic Principle (FAP): Intelligent information-processing must come into existence in the Universe, and, once it comes into existence, it will never die out."  Or would Gingerich agree with Martin Gardner's flippant remark that this should be called the "Completely Ridiculous Anthropic Principle (CRAP)"?

Of course, one way to preserve human intelligent life forever would be for human beings at death to pass into an afterlife, going either to Heaven or Hell.  Gingerich recognizes that Heaven is included in Digges's Copernican model of the universe, but Gingerich does not say whether this could be compatible with modern scientific cosmology.  He does suggest, however, in one of his articles, that if one accepts the multiverse theory, then one might imagine that Heaven could be located in one of those alternative universes. Dinesh D'Souza, in Life After Death: The Evidence (2009), has elaborated this idea.  But as I have argued in some other posts, it is hard to imagine how any of the traditional conceptions of human immortality--such as the mind living separated from the body or the resurrection of the body to eternal life--make any sense.

Gingerich writes: "I accept as a final cause that the physical constants have been fine-tuned to make intelligent life in the universe possible and that this is evidence for the planning and intentions of a Creator God" (God's Planet, 152).  The planning and intentions of the Biblical God include not just making intelligent life in the universe possible, but divine judgment of human intelligent life in the afterlife so that the saved are eternally rewarded in Heaven and the damned are eternally punished in Hell.  This is conveyed in Dante's cosmic model.  It is only partly conveyed in Digges's cosmic model, which has a place for Heaven, but not for Hell, which shows the modern decline in the belief in Hell.  Does Gingerich's modern cosmic model have places for both Heaven and Hell in the afterlife, and if so, can this be compatible with the modern scientific conception of the cosmos?

Christian, Brown, and Benjamin offer no prospects for eternal life in the afterlife, and they actually see the remote future of the universe as eternal death.  Relying on the work of Nikos Prantzos, in Our Cosmic Future: Humanity's Fate in the Universe (2000),  they paint a bleak picture:

"In the very remote future, countless billions of billions of billions of years from now, the universe will start getting more and more boring.  The gaps between galaxies will increase so that observers will see fewer objects in the skies until eventually each galaxy will seem to be a self-contained universe of its own.  Star formation will cease, and the number of stars will start diminishing until finally there will no longer be any stars at all.  And no stars will surely mean no planets, no biospheres, and no living organisms.  The universe will be dead again, and any complex structures will be slowly broken down, beginning with living organisms, progressing to planets, and eventually to stars.  The Goldilocks conditions that made it possible to create planets and life will no longer exist.  The universe will become a place inhabited by clouds of chemicals, including, perhaps, great lumps of iron.  Where there are clumps of matter, they will either form black holes or eventually get gobbled up by black holes, which will graze on the slim pickings left in an increasingly empty universe.  Eventually, gazillions of gazillions of years from now (gazillions is not a technical term, by the way, but we hope you know what we mean), even the black holes will leak energy and begin to evaporate.  The universe will get simpler and simper and bigger and bigger forever and ever and ever and . . ." (304)

They say that this "bleak picture" should actually be "quite satisfying" to us if we see that what this means is that "we have the good fortune to live in the springtime of the universe," before it collapses into perpetual disorder without complexity or life.

What they call the "Goldilocks conditions" seem to correspond to what Gingerich and others call "fine tuning."  But here the finely tuned conditions for the emergence of ever greater complexity in cosmic history, culminating in the complexity of intelligent life, disappear in the remote future.  This seems odd, because after Christian, Brown, and Benjamin have organized all of their Big History of the universe around the theme of increasing complexity leading to intelligent human life, they point in the last three pages of their book to an endless future history with no complexity or life. 

In David Christian's TED lecture, he concludes his "big history of everything in 18 minutes" with the "near future" (the next 100 years), and he is silent about the "remote future" (the death of the universe many billions of years in the future).  Does this show that the proponents of Big History would rather ignore the remote future of the universe, because that contradicts their story of progress towards complexity and intelligent life?  Is this myth rather than science?

Now it seems that there is no cosmic teleology of progress, because it all ends in perpetual dead disorder.  If this Big History gives us any "powerful sense of meaning," it must be not a cosmic meaning but the immanent meaning inherent in the striving of living beings including ourselves.

Bertrand Russell expressed this thought well:

"That all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction . . . and the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins--all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand"

"I am told that that sort of view is depressing and that if people believed it, they would not be able to go on living. . . . But nobody really worries about what is going to happen millions of years hence.  Therefore, although it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out . . ., it is not such as to render life miserable.  It merely makes you turn your attention to other things."

So how do we explain the powerful but illusory appeal of the cosmic teleology of fine tuning the universe for intelligent life?  Perhaps the best way of explaining this comes from Douglas Adams's account of "puddle theory":

"Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact, it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!'  This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be all right, because this World was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for."

And, indeed, Christian, Brown, and Benjamin argue that Big History should teach us about the fragile vulnerability of human life in its dependence on life-sustaining ecological conditions, and thus we need to be on the watch out for threats like global warming.  But they also suggest that no matter what we do, we might survive for a few more centuries, or even thousands of years, if we're lucky, but as billions of years pass, the Sun will begin to expand, and the Earth will be too hot for any kind of life.

But if we could imagine ourselves somehow being there to observe the end of all life and the approaching darkness of cosmic death, we could say: Well, it was good while it lasted.

Some of my other posts on Big History can be found here, here, here, here, here., and here.

Some posts on teleology can be found here, here, and here.

Some posts on immortality can be found here, here, here., here, here, and here.

Some posts on Intelligent Design Theory can be found here, here, and here.

Todd May and "The Good Place": Can Aristotle Give Us Human Meaning in a Silent Universe?

NBC's philosophical comedy series The Good Place has a podcast for each episode hosted by Marc Evan Jackson (who plays Shawn in the show).  In the podcast for Chapter 19 ("The Trolley Problem"), Jackson interviews William Jackson Harper (who plays Chidi, the professor of moral philosophy) and Todd May (one of the moral philosophers who has been a consultant for the show).

May says that Michael Schur, the creator of The Good Place, first contacted him by email, because Schur had read his book Death, The Art of Living.  They talked a lot through Skype sessions, and May then flew to Hollywood to talk with the writers.  Schur liked to quote May's remark from his book on death that "Mortality offers meaning to the events in our lives.  Morality helps to navigate that meaning."  Human life would not be better without death, May argues, because the inescapable fact of death gives moral weight to our decisions about how to live the mortal life that we have.

That theme of mortality might seem to contradict the setting of the show in the afterlife, where people live immortally either in the Good Place or the Bad Place.  But May notes Schur's remarks about how in thinking about the show he decided that it was not really about any religious conception of an afterlife, because it was actually about "the ethical conception of the afterlife," in which imagining an afterlife with rewards for the good people and punishments for the bad people is an artful--and entertainingly funny way--to think through moral philosophy.

It should not be surprising, therefore, that Schur sought out May, a devoted atheist who thinks moral philosophers today must find "human meaning in a silent universe"--the subtitle of his book A Significant Life (University of Chicago Press, 2015).  This might appear to contradict the role of those in The Good Place who are immortal beings in the afterlife who judge the goodness and badness of human actions.  But in much of the show--as in the episode on The Trolley Problem--the struggle with moral dilemmas is carried out within human experience without any appeal to any transcendent or divine standards of right and wrong.  Certainly, the interesting discussion of this episode in the podcast is all about how human beings make choices and try to justify those choices based on their human reason and emotions.

This has led me to wonder whether May's Significant Life could be read by viewers like me who are looking for a philosophic exploration of the questions raised by The Good Place.  Does he really show us how to find "human meaning in a silent universe"?

Or, perhaps, we should first ask how he knows that the universe is silent--that the natural order of the cosmos tells us nothing about how we should live, because the cosmos is indifferent to human beings, who have arisen as only accidental products of an evolutionary process that does not care for or about human beings.  Apparently, the answer is that May thinks he knows that to be true because that's what the existentialist philosopher Albert Camus said--that we need to confront the absurdity of the human condition in that we have been thrown into a universe that gives no meaning to our lives.  Camus is the first philosopher May cites--on the second page of his book--and he just assumes that Camus is right about our need to live within the indifference of the universe.  But isn't it very unphilosophical to accept such a claim without offering reasons or evidence supporting the claim?

Although he does not elaborate the point, May does suggest that if we accept the truth of Darwinian evolution, we must accept that we are "cosmic accidents" or "evolutionary contingencies" in an indifferent universe (15, 175).  But he offers no argument to prove that this is a necessary conclusion from Darwinian science, and he is silent about those scientists who defend theistic evolution, which is the subject of some posts (here, here, and here).

Schur seems to agree with May in taking the existentialist teaching about the absurdity of human life as obviously true.  In fact, Schur has said that when he was 11 years old, he stayed up all night reading Woody Allen's Without Feathers, a collection of some comic essays, and he knew then that he wanted to become a comedy writer like Allen, whose comedy is full of existentialist angst about the absurdity of the human condition in a world where God is dead.  Schur became a writer for NBC's Saturday Night Live.  He then went on to become the creator and writer for the comedy series The Office, Parks and Recreation, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine.  Having been so successful with these series, Schur was given a free hand by NBC to devise The Good Place in any way he wanted, which allowed him to try something daring.

In the first Good Place podcast, Schur explained the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism on his plan for The Good Place.  His first idea for the show was to have Eleanor die and be sent to The Good Place by mistake, so that she has to hide the fact that she should really be in The Bad Place. When she reveals the truth to Michael in the middle of the season, he then must help her to avoid being sent to the Bad Place. But Schur foresaw that that storyline would lose its interest by the end of the first season.  So he devised a shocking twist that he took from Sartre's play No Exit--where three people are condemned to the Hell of living forever together in a room where they torture one another through their personal conflicts: "Hell is other people."  And so in the final episode of the first season of The Good Place, we discover that Michael has deceived them (and the viewers), because Eleanor and the others have not been living in The Good Place but in The Bad Place, so that in their conflicts with one another, they have been torturing themselves.

And yet despite the agreement of Schur and May with the existentialist's dark view of the absurdity of human life in a silent universe, they both look for some philosophic way to find human meaning and morality in a universe where there is no cosmic or divine support for human purposefulness.  In his podcast interview (near the end), Schur indicates agreement with Peter Singer's utilitarianism, although he admits that he cannot agree with some of Singer's extreme views.  Schur embraces Singer's utilitarian claim that the greatest happiness of the greatest number of sentient creatures is the good, and therefore we are obligated to be charitable in helping to alleviate the suffering of our fellow human creatures.  This utilitarian morality is displayed in The Good Place, but it is also cast into doubt by the Trolley Problem.  Chidi admits that while he accepts the rational principle that killing one person is justified to save five people, he is emotionally resistant to killing one person for the sake of harvesting his organs to save the lives of five people who need organs.  Here his moral emotions teach him the principle of double effect, which I have taken up (here  here, and here).  I have also criticized Singer and utilitarianism (here, and here,).

The Trolley Problem

Unlike Schur, May does not turn to utilitarianism as a way to render human life meaningful.  Rather, May begins A Significant Life by summarizing Aristotle's account in the Nicomachean Ethics of how the moral and intellectual virtues can bring happiness (eudaimonia) as the fulfillment of human longing.  When I first saw this, I wondered whether May would agree with my defense of a Darwinian science of Aristotelian liberalism, which I have laid out in various posts (here, here, and here).  Alas, I soon saw that May had missed the mark.

May argues that Aristotle's ethics cannot make human life meaningful for us for three reasons, which arise from three mistaken interpretations of Aristotle.  First, May says that we cannot accept Aristotle's assumption that meaningfulness comes from a cosmic teleology--that meaning "is always there, inscribed in the nature of things, part of the furniture of the universe," part of "a rational cosmic structure."  Aristotle begins the Ethics by saying that everything acts for its end--its telos--which is its good, and so to live according to our human telos is to fulfill our human good (11-12, 21-22, 26).  May asserts that none of us today can believe this.  "The problem for us is that we are not Aristotle, or one of his contemporaries.  We do not share the framework of his time.  The universe is not ordered in such a way that everything has its telos.  The cosmos is not for us as rational a place as he thought" (12).

There are two dubious claims here.  The first is the assumption of historicist relativism: that every philosopher's thinking is determined by the cultural beliefs of his time, and so there is no trans-historical truth.  "We do not share the framework of his time."  We must share the framework of our time, which is different from Aristotle's time.  The most obvious problem with this is that it is self-refuting:  if there is no trans-historical truth, then historicist relativism cannot be true.  We are Cretans declaring that all Cretans are liars.

May's second dubious claim here is that Aristotle's natural teleology is a cosmic teleology--that if living beings have natural ends, this must have been determined by a cosmic order of purposefulness.  May is completely silent about Aristotle's explicit rejection, early in the Ethics, of Plato's Idea of the Good--the Platonic belief that whatever is good for any being must conform to the transcendent Good of the Cosmos.  Oddly, then, May's claim that Aristotle's ethics depends on the cosmic morality of "a rational cosmic structure" assumes that Aristotle is not an Aristotelian but a Platonist!

Aristotle was a biologist, and his biological science shaped his empirical science of ethics in the Nicomachean Ethics as rooted in an immanent teleology rather than a cosmic teleology.  In contrast to Plato's attempt to ground ethics in a moral cosmology, Aristotle grounded ethics in a moral biology.  (Actually, as I have indicated in some posts, it is not always clear that Plato's Socrates accepted the moral cosmology of Plato's Timaeus or Plato's Athenian Stranger.)

A Darwinian evolutionary understanding of ethics supports the empiricist tradition of ethics that runs from Aristotle to David Hume and Adam Smith to E. O. Wilson.  This empiricist tradition of thought sees ethics as rooted in human experience--in human nature, human tradition, and human judgment.  By contrast, the transcendentalist tradition of ethics, from Plato to Immanuel Kant looks to a transcendent conception of the Good as somehow woven into the order of the cosmos--a cosmic God, cosmic Nature, or cosmic Reason.  A Darwinian science of ethics can show how the moral order of human life arises as a joint product of natural desires, cultural traditions, and prudential judgments.

If I am right about this, this would show--contrary to May's historicist relativism--that modern Darwinian science can confirm the truth of Aristotle's ethics.

I have elaborated these points in posts here, here, here, here, here., and here.

May's second reason for saying that Aristotle's ethics cannot render human life meaningful is that his concept of eudaimonia or happiness is too objective or impersonal to allow for individual diversity: Aristotle's eudaimonia "is a way of being that is the goal of any human life" (26).  May suggests that Aristotle does not recognize how the meaningfulness of my life might rightly differ from the lives of others.

But this ignores that fact that in his Generation of Animals, Aristotle distinguished between three levels of inherited traits among animals.  An animal species, including the human species, shows generic traits shared with some other animals, specific traits shared with members of the same species, and temperamental traits that differ among individuals of the species.  Thomas Aquinas adopted this biological idea from Aristotle as showing three levels of natural law corresponding to generic nature, specific nature, and temperamental nature.  So while we can recognize the generic goods of human life that generally characterize human nature, we can also recognize that the proper ranking and organization of those goods for each individual human being will vary, and that will require prudential judgment.  The study of such individual variability belongs to the biological science of animal personalities.  (I have written about this here and here.)

May's third reason for why he thinks Aristotle's ethics cannot render human life meaningful is that morality and meaningfulness are so different that a good life in Aristotle's terms could be a meaningless life.  Meaningfulness, May contends, comes not from moral values but from narrative values: we can understand our lives as stories with narrative structures and themes that give them meaning.  In trying to explain this separation of meaning from morality, however, May has to contradict what he says about Aristotle's ethics.

The narrative values that make our lives meaningful, May says, arise from the fact that our lives have trajectories that arc from birth to maturity to death, and so the meaning of our lives arises from the narrative themes of our life stories.  But May says that he first saw this idea of life as a trajectory with a storyline in Aristotle's ethics (3, 61, 63).  And in fact Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics has many illustrations from poetic storytellers like Homer.  So May seems to contradict himself in claiming that Aristotelian morality cannot comprehend the meaningfulness that comes from the narrative values of storytelling.

Storytelling as a way of exploring the moral meaning of human life is manifest in television comedies like The Good Place.  Aristotle wrote about the art of storytelling in his Poetics, concerned primarily with tragedy, and in a book on comedy that has been lost.  If you read Aristotle's Poetics and then listen to the podcasts for The Good Place, you will see that television writers and actors are practicing Aristotle's art of storytelling in a way that both entertains and instructs their audience as they explore possible scenarios for human beings striving for moral meaning in their lives.

But in trying to separate the meaning of our stories from the morality of our lives, May adopts Susan Wolf's understanding of meaning as different from morality, which she sums up in one sentence: "Meaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness."  She elaborates this idea this way: "A person's life can be meaningful only if she cares fairly deeply about some thing or things, only if she is gripped, excited, interested, engaged. . . . One must be able to be in some sort of relationship with the valuable object of one's attention--to create it, protect it, promote it, honor it, generally to actively affirm it in some way or other" (51).

If one accepts this idea of meaning, May observes, then a good life according to Aristotle's ethics is not necessarily a meaningful life.  A good person could do good deeds "without feeling absorbed by what he or she does," without "a sense of engagement" in one's good life.  One could be good in being an selfless altruist in sacrificing one's own well-being for the good of others.  And thus one would be living a good life but utterly alienated from and bored with one's life, a passive life without any active intensity, and therefore one would be living "an alienated but moral life," which would b e a meaningless life (52-53, 91, 111-12).

What May says here, however, contradicts what he says about Aristotle's ethics.  As May says (correctly), for Aristotle the good or flourishing life is "an ongoing activity" (energeia in Aristotle's Greek).  The good life is "active and engaged with the world."  "It is an ongoing expression of who  one is."  "It is one's very way of being in the world" (5).  A good life is dedicated to "self-cultivation" (8).  A good life in Aristotle's understanding, therefore, cannot be "alienated" or lack "a sense of engagement."  If this is so, then May cannot say that a good life can be a meaningless life.

Moreover, May admits that the narrative values of a meaningful life largely coincide with what Aristotle identifies as the moral and intellectual virtues.  So, for example, courage is a moral virtue for Aristotle, and "a courageous life is one we might admire not only as a morally worthy life but also a meaningful life" (76).  We can say that "where a person is engaged with her life and is living morally, the meaningful and the moral will likely coincide" (112).

Still, May wants to insist that morality and meaningfulness can diverge in some cases.  One of his examples of this is Lance Armstrong.  Armstrong is famous for his success as a professional road racing cyclist, who showed the narrative values of "courage, commitment, and intensity" in surviving testicular cancer and then winning the Tour de France multiple times (106).  But Armstrong is also infamous for lying about his practice of illegal doping.  So we are ambivalent about someone like Armstrong: we admire him in some ways, while condemning him in other ways.  Armstrong's life, May contends, is both meaningful and immoral.

But wouldn't Aristotle rightly say that Armstrong is partly moral--in displaying the virtues of "courage, commitment, and intensity"--but partly immoral--in displaying the vices of dishonesty and cheating?  His life is not fully admirable because it is not fully moral.

As far as I can tell, May gives us no good reason to doubt that Aristotle's virtue ethics is the best philosophic framework for understanding the human pursuit of the good life.  He also gives us no good reason to doubt the possibility that Aristotle's ethics can be supported by modern evolutionary science.

So as The Good Place continues its run, we will have to wonder whether a Darwinian and Aristotelian science of the virtues can best explain the human struggle with the meaning and morality of life that this show depicts.

We should also consider how a liberal social order secures the freedom of thought and speech that allows us to openly think through these deep questions of life through popular culture.

Finally, we should question the common claim of the critics of liberalism that the degrading effects of bourgeois liberalism are evident in popular culture--particularly, in TV programming.  Shows like The Good Place should force us to consider the possibility that there has been a steady increase in the cognitive complexity of popular culture in modern liberal societies.  Does watching television make us smarter?  I have written about that here.