Just Thomism

1.) X transcends Y, Z if X has all the perfections of Y, Z in a more perfect, more unified way

(Examples: the friendship of virtue is both pleasant and useful, but more perfect and unified than friendships of pleasure or virtue. The human soul has everything a soul needs to be sensitive and nutritive, but is a numerically unified, more perfect soul.)

2.) God, the universal cause of being, transcends necessary and contingent causes.

3.) Therefore every act of the divine will with respect to created things has the perfection of both necessary and contingent causes, even those perfections which are opposed in created causes of those diverse kinds.

Perfections of the necessary: rational certitude, knowable in advance, arising from the essence of the agent.

Perfections of the contingent: preserving the reality of freedom, allowing for all degrees of being, arising from the highest powers of the highest agents.

[T]he divine will is the cause of being universally, and universally of all things following upon a necessary and contingent manner. [God] himself, however, is above the order of both the necessary and contingent, just as he is above all created being. So necessity and contingency in things are distinguished not by relation to the divine will, which is the common cause of both, but by how they stand to created causes, which the divine will ordered appropriately to their effects, namely so that there are unchangeable causes of necessary effects, but changeable causes of the contingent.

[V]oluntas divina est universaliter causa entis, et universaliter omnium quae consequuntur modum necessitatis et contingentiae. Ipsa autem est supra ordinem necessarii et contingentis, sicut est supra totum esse creatum. Et ideo necessitas et contingentia in rebus distinguuntur non per habitudinem ad voluntatem divinam, quae est causa communis, sed per comparationem ad causas creatas, quas proportionaliter divina voluntas ad effectus ordinavit; ut scilicet necessariorum effectuum sint causae intransmutabiles, contingentium autem transmutabiles.

De Malo 16. 7 ad 15.

Thomas’s first look at God is though a proof for His existence, which concludes to one who causes change without changing. Natural things, by contrast, cannot cause like this, but are made different by causing.

God is therefore who we first discover as not needing to be different given X as opposed to ~X. Put in possible worlds language, an unmoved mover is the one necessary to cause X in one world and ~X in another while being the same in both. It’s just this fact that establishes his causality as supernatural and uncreated. It’s obviously true that if I cause something in PW-alpha that I don’t cause in PW-beta, that I am different in those two worlds. This suffices to prove I’m not a divine cause. 

Notice we insist it’s God’s causing things that demands no change in him. There is no problem with natural things as either changing causes or unchanging non-causes. The only way to conclude to a cause outside nature, however, is by concluding to an unmoved mover, and the only way to prove God exists at all is by concluding to a cause transcending the natural order.

Because change necessarily involves privation (per accidens) and therefore loss, God is also an akinetic cause of change in the platonic account of divinity as a supreme or per se good that causes other things. Again, because change is diversity of states, God is an akinetic cause when conceived of as a neoplatonic One.

If I am personally responsible for the principle of the action, I am personally responsible for the act. But the principle of my action is a thought I both abstracted and consented to personally. The principle was also formed with contributions from (a) my nature, (b) from circumstances for which I was not personally responsible, and (c) from habits and circumstances for which I am personally responsible.

It is peculiar to the limitation of causality that a necessary effect is only caused if one begins with necessary materials with all impediments to their action removed.

Example: If I want something I let go of to necessarily hit the floor, that I must start with a heavy object (that necessarily falls when released) and remove all impediments between where I’m holding it and the floor. I can’t start with something that doesn’t necessarily fall (like a flying bird) nor can I drop it on an impediment and hope for the best. This constitutes a limitation in me.  

Given God wills X, X necessarily happens. But it does not follow that he therefore works with necessary objects, either by creating all such, or by undercutting or thwarting contingency (by clandestinely determining to contingent to one outcome.) Nor does it follow that contingent creatures had insurmountable impediments to achieving some goal they failed to achieve.

If determinism is an outcome arising in nature from necessary natural causes, divine causality, even where its outcomes is necessary, is not a determinism.

-Say I experience evil or anxiety and assent intellectually to some good willed by God that justifies them, but am incapable of assenting with joy, and my anxiety and sorrow remains, because I cannot see what that justifying good might be. As a rule, of course, I can’t see that good. My sorrow is therefore caused by a disordered desire for knowledge. 

-There are persons whom I know, as a matter of course, I can tell my problems and have them solved; and even if I knew no such person, I know that there exists a word through which all things come to order and are made clear, and some empowering of the heart giving domination over what previously overcame oneself.

-Reality divides into being and the desire for being.

-Postmodernity sees historical facts as value-laden and reason as demanding a tradition. This concedes too much to liberalism. What it should say is that the speculative order is not wholly independent of the moral order.

-First with Mandeville, but continuing through Kant’s defining politics as the attempt to build a system that would work for a race of devils, liberalism sees its project as the independence of reason or science from the demands of prudence and justice.

-One of the easiest argumentative structures to see in neoplatonism is division, an attempt to exhaust the alternative answers to a problem in all their particulars. This is arguing inductively. 

–Every multitude participates in the one. The given is a multitude. A multitude of what? If “of multitudes” there is still one form being gathered. If you were commanded to go out and gather only multitudes of cans or bottles (in, for example, a liquor store), you’d pass over all the singles.

Proclus, however, sees instead a contradiction in composition from an infinity of infinities.

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A recent article in Nova et Vetera (can’t find the online link, sorry) argued that the modern West is characterized by four revolutions describable by four slogans:

1.) Reformation – Christ, but no Church

2.) French (and American) Revolution – God, but no Christ. 

3.) Soviet Revolution: Reason, but no God. 

4.) Sexual Revolution: No reason, no God, no Christ, no Church. Just desire and power. 

The various slogans deal with restrictions or checks on state power, or at least norms we can appeal in giving structure and meaning to state policy. If true, the Enlightenment appeal to science and reason should now sound quaint or rearguard, and those who try to advance it will find themselves refuted and dismissed by a power of censorship and taboo which needs no appeal to science or reason in order to enforce policy.  Any attempt to bind this power with an axiom, no matter how self-evident, (like “the human race should survive” or “we should try to limit policies that cause a great number of people to suffer” or even “the planet should not be utterly destroyed.”) seems arbitrary and ungrounded. (Assume I argue this from an advocate’s point of view) After all, what does reality care about axioms or “rationality?” Enlightenment rationality was colonialist, racist, heteronormative, etc. Forget it! And no we’re not contradicting ourselves by denying one truth while asserting another. The denial or rationality is not an axiomatic system. There is no textbook with an Enlightenment-sounding title like The Elements of Anti-Colonialism: A Systematic Analysis Reduced to Natural Laws. Rationality is not being met on its own terms or engaged on the field which it built to do battle – the whole field is being torn up, paved over, and repurposed to an entirely different project.

The different project uses state power to refute, debunk, or deconstruct state power, where a state is a locus of loyalty and patriotism centered around religious-ethnic identity. Ethnic uniformity is now systematically dismantled, or, in what amounts to the same thing, ethnic identity is praised in groups with minimal prospects of state power. Religious identity is sometimes denied in its principle by encouraging atheism or some forms of agnosticism, but more often it is neutered by cutting any link between religious belief and social belonging, so that “religion” becomes essentially private or, at most, practiced fervently only in groups with no prospects of state power.

The project of using state power to refute state power unfolded from the logic of horror at state power, which became impossible to miss after the wars of 1914-45 and the subsequent age of global connection and nuclear weapons. When “a state” connotes “a system in which one man can end all life on earth in 90 minutes in response to what might well turn out to be a computer malfunction,” then of course the refutation of states becomes at least intelligible, and perhaps even sympathetic.

For all that, the human race is unavoidably social, and deserves to survive. Right?

Several factors contribute to undervaluing marriage in industrial society:

1.) Industrial society defines success as success outside the home (in “the Real World”), but marriage is essentially domestic.

2.) Industrial society has an unbroken record of success in subjecting all tasks to the scientific management by which it makes more things, and make them better: cars, crops, medicine, tools, etc. But marriage refuses to be industrialized and subjected to scientific management. Moms and dads want to fall in love, couple, and raise kids without licensure, bureaucratized supervisors, etc.

3.) Industrial society struggles to recognize the value of care. It nowhere enters GDP, or adds to stock prices, or affects trade surpluses, etc. But marriage is centrally (and in an industrial society entirely) about care.

4.) Industrial societies make children pure liabilities, and in no way assets.

5.) Industrial society is largely allergic to gender roles, or at least the logic of such societies (though not their practice) points toward gender role minimization. But marriage is essentially undefinable except through familial gender roles: Mom, dad, sister, brother, Grandpa, Grandma, aunt, etc.

By visualizing spirits in a place you overlook, and tacitly negate, their priority in being.

If you seek what is prior in being absolutely, you cannot find it limited to a place, nor as the (even infinite) sum of things limited to place. Whatever is so limited is, to the extent of its limitation, posterior in being.

The opposite of such limitation is to be an indivisible reality giving being to limited things divided from each other. 

The first such reality is life, present at any point in the living as well as in the whole. The animal lives, its organs live, its cells live, the parts of its cells live, etc. There is the same whole life in any part of the living, and so there is an undivided reality giving rise to things divided in themselves. Here again, the located gets its being from what is wholly present at a location without being limited to that location.

On a higher level of life knowledge arises, first as sensation then as intellect.

(1) As known, contradictions exist simultaneously, since as known, (p and ~p) are relatives and so co-exist, as much as doubles and halves or greater and smaller. Unless taken as co-existing, they are not contradictories, but “p,” for example, means just “any claim” not “one of two contradictories.”

(2) In reality, contradictions cannot exist simultaneously. This is precisely what is known about them in (1.)