Author: Kleiner

My grades are in, so I have officially changed hats from teacher to stay-at-home Dad.  (I might add that being a parent of young kids has only deepened my view about the teleological striving in human nature).  This post and video are totally unrelated to philosophy, but I think the new Toyota “swagger wagon” ads are funny takes on those of us who find ourselves tooling around town in minivans (a few of the other ads are linked at the end of the video):

So look for me ‘rolling hard through the streets and the cul-de-sacs’ in my Toyota minivan this summer with my two (soon to be three) future Philosopher Queens in tow, and know that I’ll still be rocking Thomas Aquinas along with Thomas the Train.

A common theme in the push for financial reform has been an attack on financial practices where people “make money without actually producing anything.”  Obama has made this remark any number of times, and Christopher Dodd just made the remark on Meet the Press.

Reminds me of Aristotle and the widespread medieval view that usury (interest) is immoral. (I posted this  years ago, but it seemed worth repeating as we consider financial reform). Aristotle writes,

“There are two sorts of wealth-getting, as I have said; one is a part of household management, the other is retail trade: the former necessary and honorable, while that which consists in exchange is justly censured; for it is unnatural, and a mode by which men gain from one another. The most hated sort, and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself, and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term interest, which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural.”  Politics X

Here is Aquinas’ argument:

“I answer that, To take usury for money lent is unjust in itself, because this is to sell what does not exist, and this evidently leads to inequality which is contrary to justice. Onorder to make this evident, we must observe that there are certain things the use of which consists in their consumption: thus we consume wine when we use it for drink and we consume wheat when we use it for food. Wherefore in such like things the use of the thing must not be reckoned apart from the thing itself, and whoever is granted the use of the thing, is granted the thing itself and for this reason, to lend things of this kin is to transfer the ownership. Accordingly if a man wanted to sell wine separately from the use of the wine, he would be selling the same thing twice, or he would be selling what does not exist, wherefore he would evidently commit a sin of injustice. On like manner he commits an injustice who lends wine or wheat, and asks for double payment, viz. one, the return of the thing in equal measure, the other, the price of the use, which is called usury.

On the other hand, there are things the use of which does not consist in their consumption: thus to use a house is to dwell in it, not to destroy it. Wherefore in such things both may be granted: for instance, one man may hand over to another the ownership of his house while reserving to himself the use of it for a time, or vice versa, he may grant the use of the house, while retaining the ownership. For this reason a man may lawfully make a charge for the use of his house, and, besides this, revendicate the house from the person to whom he has granted its use, as happens in renting and letting a house.

Now money, according to the Philosopher [Aristotle] (Ethic. v, 5; Polit. i, 3) was invented chiefly for the purpose of exchange: and consequently the proper and principal use of money is its consumption or alienation whereby it is sunk in exchange. Hence it is by its very nature unlawful to take payment for the use of money lent, which payment is known as usury: and just as a man is bound to restore other ill-gotten goods, so is he bound to restore the money which he has taken in usury.”  (Summa, II-II, 78.1)

My summary:

What Aristotle and Aquinas after him are doing is distinguishing between what is natural and what is unnatural (good and bad), and here they make a distinction between natural and unnatural commerce. Here is the basic argument:

A distinction is drawn between two types of goods, fungible and non-fungible (those are actually Aquinas’ terms for them). Fungible goods are goods that are destroyed (consumed) when they are used. Food (wine) is the best example here. Food is destroyed when it is used, it cannot be returned and does not naturally make more of itself when used (from bread one does not get more bread, in fact, when you ‘use’ bread you have less and less of it).

Fields and flocks are examples of non-fungible goods (in the passage above Aquinas mentions houses). They are not destroyed when they are used. Quite to the contrary, they are naturally reproductive (they naturally produce surplus value in their use, as in the case of a flock producing wool or more sheep, a field yeilding a crop year in and year out). For this reason they can be rented.

Aristotle thinks that money is a fungible good because it does not naturally create more value. It is unnatural (immoral) to expect money to create surplus value out of itself. For that reason, money is good solely as a means of exchange. With money (as with wine and wheat), there is no distinction between the thing itself and its use, and so one ought not add an additional usury fee. In other words, lending money at interest is wrong.

Of course at issue in the current debate is not interest per se, but wild speculative financial practices that make money by not doing anything but playing casino games with Wall Street money (shorting and derivatives come to mind).  The Democrats’ focus on “making money by actually producing things” is not only good populist rhetoric, it is good Aristotelian social philosophy.

Here is an interesting NYTimes article on Jurgen Habermas (long a defender of Enlightenment rationality) and his changing views on the role of religion and the possibilities of secular reason.

An npr story (To the Best of Our Knowledge) this morning that might interest environmentalists (in particular I have in mind Sandi, who posted on a kind of mystical environmentalism in the Avatar discussion on this blog).  James William Gibson has written a book called “A Re-enchanted World: The Quest for a New Kinship with Nature” about the spiritual and “re-enchanting” quality of contemporary environmentalism.  Click here to get the podcast, the relevant episode is called “Radical Gardening.”

“The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization, and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’ Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations.” —Max Weber.

Weber uses the term “disenchantment” instead of “secularization” for a reason – he is interested in the subjective experience of the modern scientific age.  The world is being transformed into a causal mechanism and what is lost is the poetic, the “magical”.  Any of my students who have read Heidegger with me know that he has lots to say about all of this (the error of technological thinking which treats all things as mere objects in a causal chain which are open for manipulation and the need to re-learn thinking which is poetically open to mystery).

What is telling about the new language of “sacred environmentalism” is not so much whether they get the sacred and transcendent right (they don’t).  I am interested in something much more important and much deeper than “getting it right”, I am here interested in the lived human question.  What is telling about the implicit and explicit language of the sacred and all of the other religious trappings in environmentalism is that it speaks to the radical impoverishment that human subjects experience in a world reduced to efficient cause.  The problem is two-fold.  As Weber himself noted, disenchantment results in a world with no objective grounds for conviction.  “We know of no scientifically ascertainable ideals” is how he put it.  The other impoverishment concerns the lived relationship between immanence and transcendence.  The desire for transcendence is a natural desire in man (I don’t say this as a “nature” claim as much as a phenomenological description), and it is not surprising that people go looking for it in nature.  To the offense of some of my conservative religious friends, I actually have considerable sympathy for those interested in finding locations of transcendence in the natural world.  In a sense (to borrow a term from Levinas), I think animals, plants, and even landscapes or ecosystems have a “face”.  This is why I remain deeply interested in natural theology, though I think of natural theology as more of a “mystical” exercise than a “rationalist” enterprise seeking to prove something.  Natural theology does not seek to prove, it seeks the intimacy of personal understanding.

The error of deep ecology and other movements of spiritual environmentalism is that they misunderstand the sign.  A sign is something that points.  To have an authentic experience of transcendence the sign must be understood to point to a “Beyond”, a Beyond which informs and saturates the immanent phenomenon (I thinking of Marion here).  Though, strangely, Marion points out that when the sign functions as an icon (Gibson uses the word “portal”), one does not so much experience the visible as pointing out to something “Beyond” as he experience a “Beyond” pointing at him through the visible.  I think this goes a long way in explaining the mystical experiences people have in the natural world and the feeling that they are being drawn into, indeed “called” into, something greater.  Many environmentalists speak in this way.  The trouble, though, for spiritual environmentalism is that their language of transcendence is much too weak.  Connecting up with a “larger world” (which is how spiritual environmentalists usually speak) is just more immanence since that language misreads the sign and fails to actually read the sign as having real transcendent significance.  I actually think they are having the experience, but lack the language to articulate it.

But the natural world is capable of being such a icon.  Marion’s work on idols and icons is particularly informative here.  The difference between an icon and an idol is not really in the object, it is in the intentionality of the subject with respect to the image.  One thinks again of Heidegger, the question for us now that is most thought-provoking is the question of thought – how do we and how should we think about things?

But the purpose of this post is not to dwell on where things go wrong (that mere environmentalism is bad theology).  Rather my intent heres is to focus attention on the thirst, the deep desire for transcendence.  I have repeatedly made the point on the SHAFT blog that scientific atheists don’t need argument, what they need is a “baptism of the imagination”.  They need to read poetry.  Hell, read Nz – who is an extremely “spiritual” atheist, if I might use that turn of phrase.  Nz is not closed to human questions which only have poetic (and hence incomplete) answers that are shrouded in mystery.  But what it really comes down to, though, is not reading but being.  Gibson rightly speaks of needing to give sufficiently deep attention to the world.  Go on a hike, hell go outside and look long and deep at a weed, and ask yourself if the rationalism of scientism really explains everything you are experiencing.  Saying that it can or will makes the error that I finally have a great name for: “the science of the gaps” argument, an argument that simply (like god of the gaps args) fails to recognize the nature and limits of a discipline (mode of thinking).

Of late the Vatican has been putting online these really cool virtual tours of different Vatican sites.  Here is the one for the Sistine Chapel.  You can click and drag around for a 360 view and zoom in and out.  Super cool.

Reminds me of a few remarks by Pope Benedict (back when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger):

“The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely, the saints the Church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb.”

And also this remark on Bach:

“… For me an unforgettable experience was the Bach concert that Leonard Bernstein conducted in Munich after the sudden death of Karl Richter.  I was sitting next to the Lutheran Bishop Hanselmann. When the last note of one of the great Thomas-Kantor-Cantatas triumphantly faded away, we looked at each other spontaneously and right then we said: “Anyone who has heard this, knows that the faith is true”. The music had such an extraordinary force of reality that we realized, no longer by deduction, but by the impact on our hearts, that it could not have originated from nothingness, but could only have come to be through the power of the Truth that became real in the composer’s inspiration. “