Re Kant, as mentioned before, I didn't have space to really take on many thinkers in depth. But here is why I think Hume is a good model:

- The anthropology of economics holds to this mold. To be sure, in theory the intellectual appetites and irascible appetites are contained in "utility," which encompasses all desire, but this tends towards a deflation towards pleasure/pain. Smith was, of course, a close friend of Hume. But economics has been massively influential in public policy and in the development of the established (now global) social order.

- Computational theory of mind suggests something very much like "all thought is ratio." The model of the Turing Machine does not include any notion of intellectus, quiddity, etc. Obviously, some proponents try to get around this with appeals to emergence. However, CTM tends in this direction and has been the dominant paradigm in cognitive science, etc., for a long time. Bayesian Brain theories would be another example; everything is mere induction. Eliminitive materialism would be another. Marxist anthropology shows some similarities here too.

-The dominant, now hegemonic political ideology of the West, and now the whole global order is liberalism. But liberal theorists tend towards very thin anthropologies that avoid the intellectual appetites (or "bracket them out"). Obviously, there are continental objections to this, I cite Han. Yet while perhaps more widely read, I think they are less influential. The Anglo-empiricist model is influential not through philosophy but through economics, liberal political theory, public policy, cognitive science, etc. Utilitarianism has also had huge influence, and makes similar suppositions.

Just for example, Rawls has a very procedural notion of reason, and his anthropology is still thicker than much earlier utilitarianism. Nozick had a slightly thicker anthropology, but it's still thin. Fukuyama brings in thymos, but not really the intellectual appetites, and arguably he brings it in hamstrung by his other commitments.

Another thing the paper is missing is an expansion on the idea that the more a particular participates in the universal "stream" (to use imagery from Dionysius the Areopagite) the more fully it is particular. The intellect's participation in universals, and intellectual knowledge, makes it more particular, because knowledge And understanding are required for self-determination, which is required for true unity (particularity). Consider that all amoebas are quite similar. All dogs are more similar than all men. Angels are more particular than men, being each an individual species (in Aquinas).

The same idea is in play with knowledge and virtue. All those plagued by vice and ignorance are in some ways similar. Dante is able to respect history and particularity in a way similar Sufi texts like The Conference of the Birds don't, because of the recognition that perfection makes people more fully persons. More perfected persons are more particular because they are more free, more self-determining, and more fully what they are and not a bundle of warring external causes (and idea going back to Plato's psychology). There is a sort of ascent of the particular in the stream of the universal.

This helps Dante's philosophy of history in that Providence is not at odds with freedom and particularity, but its full realization. Solovyov is useful here because he takes some of the insights of Hegel re the rational unfolding of history, and has a similar view to Dante on the telos of history, and yet he isn't committed to a sort of providential over-determination. History is the meeting ground of truth and falsehood, the stage of cosmic drama, and not merely a proving ground for individuals. There is an element of perfection and freedom that involves the communication of goodness to others (agape descending, eros ascending) that is realized in history, through human beings' mutual empowerment of one another in the ascent Dante lays out. This is clearest in the Commedia in the roles of Beatrice, St. Lucy, and Mary. But this can be more or less actualized in the polis, and obviously a thin anthropology would be a barrier to any notion like this, even a secularized one.

Really great piece of work here. Well-written, substantive, and intriguing to me. I don't have any deep criticism to offer (but have some thoughts below). It speaks for itself well. In that vein, and in agreement with your observation that "it is better for everyone when this knowledge is attained by anyone," here is a sort of abstract of the knowledge that has been attained by me. My highlights from the essay:

…this deflation of reason—and of man’s “intellect,”…

One can hardly rejoice in a calculator…

…Modern conceptions that make both love and knowledge an entirely internal affair.

For Dante, man’s rational soul, far from being a mere tool, is central to what man is and how he “lives a good life.” Second, reason plays a central role in Dante’s conception of self-determination and human freedom. Finally, whereas today we are apt to see “love” as something irrational, and perhaps just one element of “a good life,” Dante sees love as the central thread running through the human experience (and indeed the entire cosmos).

Knowing involves a union of knower and known.

“carnal knowledge,” with all its erotic connotations, gets far closer to the older view than the sterile formulation of “justified true belief.”

…fundamentally an encounter with the other, not the conquest of the other by the self. It is not the “grasping” and “possession” of the other…in the modern ethos, but rather a union, an offering of the self to the other as a gift…

Yet this knowing does involve an internal dimension, a penetration of the self by the other. To know [ ] requires “knowing by becoming.”

…in Dante’s context, ratio refers specifically to discursive reason, the step-by-step thinking by which we move through arguments, or plan future actions. In Hume’s Treatise for instance, it is obvious that this faculty is primarily what Hume takes as encompassing the whole of “reason.”…

…Intellectus is the faculty of intuitive understanding; it is contemplative, receptive, and rooted in insight… The acquisition of human knowledge begins and ends in intellectus, but proceeds by discursive ratio…

…the intellect capable of both ratio and intellectus was itself just one of two components of the “rational soul,” which was composed of intellect and will.

This collapse of three distinct concepts into one word [‘reason’ as ratio] is itself a sign of the deflation…

His initial despair at finding himself lost is lifted when he spies the sun lit hill above him (a symbol of goodness). He knows where he needs to go. The Pilgrim possess synteresis, an innate knowledge that the good is preferable to evil (and truth to falsity). However, as he attempts to climb the hill under his own power he is forced back...

…a misordering of loves. It is to fail to know things as they are, to be attracted to the worse over of the better. This condition arises when the rational soul (intellect and will)—the part of man that can know and desire the Good as Good (28)—is subjugated by man’s lower faculties.

Free, rational beings, by their very nature, must possess a capacity to disfigure themselves in this way. Otherwise, they would lack agency. To be truly self-determining, they must turn themselves towards the Good, transcending their own finitude with the aid of grace, whereas a turn towards finite goods is a turn towards “nothingness.”

Rather than seeking the Good on account of its goodness (because it is known by the intellect as good), the damned allow their desires for finite goods to triumph over the pursuit of the necessary telos of all rational creatures

Hell is much more diverse than Purgatory and Paradise. It has more divisions …This is because the damned pursue multiplicity rather than the unifying First Cause and First Principle. Rather than seeking the Good on account of its goodness (because it is known by the intellect as good), the damned allow their desires for finite goods to triumph over the pursuit of the necessary telos of all rational creatures (the Good and the True, sought as such).

To seek finite, material goods is to seek goods that diminish when they are shared. The pursuit of such goods sets up a dialectic of envy and competition between men.

sin, which drives us downward and dissolves the person in multiplicity, … love, which unifies the person, and ultimately the entire whole cosmos.

…it is through the shedding of vice and attainment of virtue that we become free.

Finite things are good precisely to the extent that they reflect the divine light. Hence, finite things are all stepping stones…rungs on a “ladder up to God.” …finite goods are meant to be used, not enjoyed for their own sake. To descend down the ladder in order to possess one of its rungs is thus a confusion of what is truly most worthy of love. This is a failure of the intellect to recognize worth, or of the will to follow the guidance of the intellect.

…love is what motivates everything we do.

‘There are, as you well know,
two kinds: the natural love, the rational.

Natural love may never be at fault;
the other may: by choosing the wrong goal,
by insufficient or excessive zeal.’

…an attraction to the “worse over the better,” involves a projection of goodness onto what lacks it. This is a failure of the “rational love” that is conditioned by the intellect. It is to love things more or less than they are worthy of being loved.

Dante does not subscribe to a simplistic notion where things are simply “good or bad” in themselves. The intellect must guide the person precisely because goodness is defined in terms of proper ends…

…another important element in the pre-modern vision of reason. For Dante, man cannot slip into a dispassionate state of “buffered reason” where he “lets the facts speak” whenever he chooses. We are either properly oriented towards Truth and Goodness or we are not;

…man’s intellect and will is subject to the pernicious influence of the unregenerated passions and appetites until “the rule of reason” has been positively established.

Repentance represents a self-aware reflection on our own thought processes and choices, the ways in which they fall short, and a renewed commitment towards the pursuit of “what is really true” and what “is truly best” for their own sake.

Man’s rationality is emancipatory… It is only by questioning what is “really true” and “truly good” that man moves beyond his current beliefs and desires, and so transcends what he already is…Without this capacity of reason, we cannot turn around to question if the ends we pursue are truly good, and so we cannot properly align our loves through a turn to repentance and healing.

…the damned who appear to possess something like the Humean notion of reason. The damned are motivated by inchoate desires…

what puts sinners in conflict with one another. The pursuit of what is “truly good” and “really true” unifies us with others. Knowledge of the true and the best is not something that diminishes when shared.

Endnote:
John of Damascus’s matter of fact claim that: “neither are all things unutterable nor all utterable; neither all unknowable nor all knowable. But the knowable belongs to one order, and the utterable to another; just as it is one thing to speak and another thing to know,” to see that labeling both modern and pre-modern views “correspondence theories” papers over a great deal of difference.

My thoughts:

1. I agree with Leon (and Wayfarer I think), and had to think around this idea to move past it: "Utterances are acts, yet it is substances—things—that primarily possess being, and so it is people (and God) who primarily possess truth." I think you addressed this in your reply to Leon, but I mention it again because I think it should not just be restated, but expounded upon. It gets at something that is essential to understanding what truth is, and that modern thinking avoids. Truth is being, known in the person. Things have being regardless of whether any person knows them (perhaps only because God knows them, but that may be another topic). But the truth of things is in the person who knows these things. (I don't know if I said this clearly, nor that I didn't get this idea from you anyway, but I think this one-liner deserves more attention.)

2. Here is another concept that I wished you spoke more about: "Hell is much more diverse than Purgatory and Paradise. It has more divisions …This is because the damned pursue multiplicity rather than the unifying " and "sin, which drives us downward and dissolves the person in multiplicity." Driving this home with more analysis and concreteness seems would really hammer home the fact of the modern deflation and flattening of what we know and how we know. I don't have much to offer (which is why I wished you said more!) but this struck me as an important insight again, deserving more attention.

3. Last comment, and I have no idea how to accomplish what it asks, but if you could somehow secularize the language of the piece, I think more people could receive it, and even internalize the points and allow themselves to really challenge "modern" sensibilities and notions of reason. The piece needs the concept of sin. The piece needs the concept of God. But perhaps for sin it could refer to stunting one's own growth, or turning against one's self and self-defeating acts, or taking ignorance as if it was knowledge, or pride as something to be proud of... Instead of refering to "sin" refer to limit and the as yet unperfected (unpurged)... maybe? For God, my only thought is what you often said, which is "Good" or "Truth" and "Beauty" and "Love", so maybe just use them more.
It's not that such a revision would improve the piece, just essentially not turn away many who, I think, would benefit from really reading it.

Last point, just the other day my father and I were talking about dying and going to heaven, and discussing how precisely an individual is "called by name" by God and saved as that unique individual, and yet, perfected and made ready to be in the presence of God - how am I still "me" and yet "perfect as my heavenly father is perfect"? How is it that, in paradise, I will "sin no more" and yet still be me? Even the angels can sin, so why will I never again choose to do so, and yet still be me? You address this:

He must, in a new term Dante coins for the poem, be “transhumanized.”(49) This is not a knowing we can strive for. We can only prepare ourselves to accept it as a gift. Thus, Dante’s most important lesson to us might be that such a gift can only be accepted freely. That is, it is only when we acknowledge our rational appetites, our desire for Goodness and Truth, that a proper ordering of our loves and true freedom is possible.

I'm going to print your piece out (in a large font for the old man's eyes) and share it with my father. He'll like it for many of its insights, but this great reference to transformation, Dante's "transhumanized," will be inspiring. Defeating vice, championing our appetites, and striving for virtue, with practice and much grace, will allow us to grow, and grow into a, God willing, perfected version of ourselves, that has no mind for vice, and humbly remains fixed on the Good and the True. So each of us remains the individual, particular person God loves and calls by name, but can become the person God intended us to be, the person that recognizes that our sins have only interrupted and stunted and defeated who we actually are. (See I don't know how not to say "sin" and "God" either, so good luck with that comment!)

Thanks for all of the good work you do around here. Your voice is important.

1. I agree with Leon (and Wayfarer I think), and had to think around this idea to move past it: "Utterances are acts, yet it is substances—things—that primarily possess being, and so it is people (and God) who primarily possess truth." I think you addressed this in your reply to Leon, but I mention it again because I think it should not just be restated, but expounded upon. It gets at something that is essential to understanding what truth is, and that modern thinking avoids. Truth is being, known in the person. Things have being regardless of whether any person knows them (perhaps only because God knows them, but that may be another topic). But the truth of things is in the person who knows these things. (I don't know if I said this clearly, nor that I didn't get this idea from you anyway, but I think this one-liner deserves more attention.)

Agreed. I worried about the length of the introduction, but it would be a good place to introduce the similar argument for why freedom should primarily be thought of as possessed by persons, not actions.

2. Here is another concept that I wished you spoke more about: "Hell is much more diverse than Purgatory and Paradise. It has more divisions …This is because the damned pursue multiplicity rather than the unifying " and "sin, which drives us downward and dissolves the person in multiplicity." Driving this home with more analysis and concreteness seems would really hammer home the fact of the modern deflation and flattening of what we know and how we know. I don't have much to offer (which is why I wished you said more!) but this struck me as an important insight again, deserving more attention.

Yeah, there is something I like to call the "Anna Karenina Principle," based on the opening of Tolstoy's novel: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in his own way." In terms of moral and intellectual virtues, there are many more ways to have bad habits than good habits, just as there are generally many more ways to do something wrong than correctly, e.g. many more ways to treat cancer in a way that is ineffective than cure it, to break a car than fix it, etc.

Both virtue and vice are habits, yet we do not tend to think of vices in terms of “cultivation” because:

A. It is not something we try to promote, although no doubt bad environments can promote it; and

B. Since there are many more ways to not act in accordance with reason than there are to act in accordance with it, it is much easier to enter a state of vice than virtue (and this goes along with the persistent theme in many of the Patristics, that man’s nous has been “darkened” by the Fall and is in need of healing to achieve any move to a state of virtue).

Given B, man is in need of aides to help him attain to virtue instead of vice, e.g. laws, rewards, honors, education, ascetic labors, etc. (and we might add here the holy sacraments and repentance). We do not, as modern political and economic theory often seems to assume, just become free by avoiding great misfortune and turning 18. Rather, as the philosopher-slave Epictetus points out of his own era, most masters are slaves to their own passions, appetites, and ignorance. As Saint Augustine says in The City of God: "a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but what is worse, as many masters as he has vices" (note that Augustine is not here denying the need for political freedom in the way it might seem; he is quite concerned with it in the City, but also pessimistic about any true "commonwealth.")

We should note two caveats here. First, virtue as “action in accordance with reason,” can be read far too narrowly if we assume this is something like the Enlightenment project centered on the abstract “rational agent” for whom moral action consists in avoiding the violation of universal moral maxims suggested by procedural reason. Rather, to “act in accordance with reason,” is simply to act in accordance with what is known as good, to reach out towards the Good itself by attempting to actualize it in one’s own being. In doing “the right thing” we are avoiding action that is ultimately unjustifiable, and so, in a sense, unintelligible. Moral action is a sort of tendency towards Being (the actuality known by reason), whereas vice is a slide towards unintelligibility and nothingness (evil being a privation of the Good that is known by reason).

Second, along with the point above re truth and freedom, it is primarily people, not actions, that possess virtue. A focus on action is isolation obscures an important element of freedom, that the virtuous person enjoys acting virtuously.

Being able to act in accordance with reason allows us to respond better in all situations. As Aristotle has it, a virtue is in a way the universal vis-a-vis right action (a principle). It transfigures the multitude we face in fortune into a unity. Likewise, virtue insulates us from bad fortune, by making our happiness less dependent on external goods, while also making us more able to attain and share those goods we do require. The virtuous person is more self-determining because they are able to unify themselves in pursuit of the ends they see as truly best, rather than being led around by diffuse passions.

The pursuit of virtue makes us free in another way as well. It allows us to have the desires we actually want to have, i.e., a second-order control over our own appetites and emotions. The eliminativist philosopher and writer R. Scott Bakker has a short story called Crash Space about a technology that allows people to have immediate control over their own emotions and desires through an app interface (using a cybernetic implant in the brain). The story, which is rather disturbing, shows how this capability could easily spin out of control into total disinhibition and violence, since what we desire—and so how we would choose to manipulate our own nervous system with the app—would depend on our prior manipulations of the app, leading to a run-away process whereby we lose all contact with what we truly think is best.

As sci-fi as this scenario is, there seems to be a real world parallel between this and recreational drug use and the way vice leads to our desiring vice (or virtue to more virtue; "For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath - Matthew 13:12).

At any rate, what the story underscores is that there is some element of freedom in being able to “desire what you want to desire” and “feel how you want to feel.” However, this is only “freedom” if these choices are not limited by pre-existing ignorance and passions, but rather occur according to what we know as truly best. And indeed, this is exactly what habituation in the virtues accomplishes. The virtuous person comes to enjoy doing good. Their desires and emotions have become harmonized with their reason (making the person more fully one, and so more fully free).

Peter Thiel actually had a surprisingly insightful comment on this in an interview on transhumanism, that according to Orthodox Christianity, it doesn't go far enough: "transhumanism is just changing your body, but you also need to transform your soul and you need to transform your whole self." Dante agrees, hence his being the first in history to pose the question of "transhumanization." "Dispassion" is not the absence of feeling in the Patristic tradition, but their regeneration and right orientation, to be free of passions that force themselves on us from without, against our will, or as Bakker would put it: "to cease to be ruled by the darkness that comes before [the light of understanding]."

But a key point here is that the unity of virtue doesn't equate to a "lack of freedom." It's actually the perfection of freedom. The slide into multiplicity and potency offers 'more options,' but if it's something that is ultimately worse, and chosen out of weakness of will or ignorance, then it isn't freedom. Really, it's the exact opposite. Growth in virtue makes us more fully unified, more fully ourselves, and more fully persons; it is precisely the destruction of a sort of "false consciousness" in sin, a false individuality, that personhood is realized.

3. Last comment, and I have no idea how to accomplish what it asks, but if you could somehow secularize the language of the piece, I think more people could receive it, and even internalize the points and allow themselves to really challenge "modern" sensibilities and notions of reason. The piece needs the concept of sin. The piece needs the concept of God. But perhaps for sin it could refer to stunting one's own growth, or turning against one's self and self-defeating acts, or taking ignorance as if it was knowledge, or pride as something to be proud of... Instead of refering to "sin" refer to limit and the as yet unperfected (unpurged)... maybe? For God, my only thought is what you often said, which is "Good" or "Truth" and "Beauty" and "Love", so maybe just use them more.
It's not that such a revision would improve the piece, just essentially not turn away many who, I think, would benefit from really reading it.

Yes, this is always a tension with Christian philosophy, and it's unfortunate. I could point out a bit more how much of what Dante says does not depend on explicitly Christian revelation. He has key Islamic commentators in Limbo with Aristotle and Plato because he read them and greatly appreciated them. What Dante is drawing on can be found, perhaps not as fully developed, in many strands of Pagan thought and certainly in Jewish and Islamic thought, and even to a surprising degree in Eastern thought.

Will that help a committed secularist? I am not sure. The move to privatize all such thought in the domain of politics seems to have followed on to philosophy. There are the secularists who will instantly dismiss it as "woo" for mentioning God, but there are also those who will simply take it as something that ought to be bracketed into the category of "taste," and which thus cannot ground any philosophical ethics. I think a different sort of paper is needed for that issue. Christian philosophy cannot really be expected to do without "sin" any more than Hindu or Buddhist thought should be expected to drop their own terms.

I'm going to print your piece out (in a large font for the old man's eyes) and share it with my father. He'll like it for many of its insights, but this great reference to transformation, Dante's "transhumanized," will be inspiring.

Great, I hope he likes it!

On a related note, I came across a great explanation by Rowan Williams of why "love for all men equally" is not something that washes out particularity and freedom, but rather the greatest recognition of it:

This may help us to make sense of one specific set of Maximian ideas clearly of great importance in the Centuries on Charity and rather open to misunderstanding in the contemporary intellectual context. Cent. I.17 and 25 touch on a theme that will recur several times in the text: the imperative to love all human beings equally, as God does. God loves human beings because of their nature: as we read later on,6 ‘Perfect love does not split up the single human nature, common to all, according to the diverse characters of individuals.’ At first sight, this may look like a recommendation to what we might think of as an impersonal sort of love, indifferent to the need of specific persons and reducible to benevolence towards humanity as a whole. This is in fact completely contrary to what Maximos argues: to love human beings in their nature is to be awake to the very particular things that make each of them more or less in tune with that nature and to respond accordingly.

What matters is that we should not begin by assessing the claims of human beings to be loved on the basis of individual characteristics; love is not a reward if we understand it in the light of God’s love. And if we put this together with the repeated emphasis in the Centuries on what ‘dispassionate’ love means, the point becomes still clearer. Nothing is by nature evil or unlovable, because all things come from the loving will of God, embodying particular reflections of the one Logos in their diverse logoi, and thus have the potential for mutuality or reconciliation; but when we view them through the lens of passion, self-serving self-referential desire, we do not see things as they are, in their nature. The basic theme is familiar from Evagrios’s treatise On Thoughts 87 with its seminal distinction between angelic, human and diabolical awareness of things, where the angelic consciousness knows things in their essences and the initially ‘neutral’ human consciousness has to beware of slipping into the diabolical knowledge that sees things only in terms of their use to another self. Love must be grounded in the recognition that all things are what they are by nature in virtue of their participation in the Logos: nothing can take away their ‘entitlement’ to love, because they are all capable of growing through the exercise of their proper eros towards their destiny. All are struggling towards mutuality, the fullest possible action of reciprocally sustaining each other’s lives by the gift of their own. Our own love for any other person or indeed any other finite substance is rooted in our own longing to become ‘natural’, to be in perfect mutuality. My eros aligns itself with theirs.

Passion-free eros is the desire that the other be itself – but not in quite the Levinasian sense of abjection before the other because this is rooted in an ontology for which there is no being-for-the-other abstracted from the pattern of mutual life-giving. Passion is thus what is fundamentally anti-natural, what seeks, consciously or not, to frustrate the natural desirous movement of all finite substances in concert. Maximos can put it even more vividly in the Centuries on Theology II.30, where he speaks of how my failure to grow as I should into my nature is a diminishing of Christ. And in defining passion as a moment of frustration or stasis, we are reminded of the crucial point that at no moment in time is any finite substance or agent yet fully natural. To love their nature is to love both what they already are as logos-bearing and to love the unknown future into which their eros is moving them – to love the ‘excess’ of their being, what Loudovikos would see as their ‘eucharistic’ future as perfected gift.8 All things are en route towards this future, and thus en route towards – as we put it earlier – a universal culture; and, to go rather beyond what Maximos himself says in so many words, this is to say that all things are always already on the way to language, to being understood and spoken, being present in the ‘priestly’ discourse of human beings who make connecting sense of the logoi of what they encounter.

Loving what is true or real, free from the distortions of passion, is loving what is grounded in the Logos; hence the paradox asserted in Centuries on Charity III.37 – ‘he who loves nothing merely human loves all men’.9 To love what is ‘merely human’ must here mean loving simply what is contingent in this or that individual, what does not belong to their nature as related to God. Universal love is love for the individual as related to the infinite act that sustains it through its particular logos, its specific reflection of the one divine Logos. Proper Christian love thus ‘dispossesses’ itself of its object in more than one sense. Not only does it seek to see and know the object without passion (without self-referential desire), it recognizes that the true being of the object is always in relation to something other than the beholder prior to the seeing or registering of this particular other by the beholder. Thus there is always some dimension of what is encountered that is in no way accessible to or at the mercy of this particular beholder. It is in acknowledging this relatedness to a third that a relation of love involving two finite subjects becomes authentic and potentially open to the universal.

What is in relation to the ‘third’ is precisely what exists in and by the action of that ‘third’, which is the nature of the subject in question, the project defined by infinite act that is now working through by its own particular mode of eros towards its ultimate purpose. If our love is conditioned by the specific point currently reached by the other subject, it will not be universalizable; it will not be love for the whole project, nature realizing itself through eros. It will be love for a fiction, for the unreal object that is just another finite substance or ensemble of finite substances conceived in abstraction from God and logos. We cannot properly love an unrelated object; if we start from that particular fiction, we rapidly come to regard the other as available for our possession because it is cut off from its ground in God/logos/nature. Our relation to it is no longer truly eros, because we have isolated it in our thoughts from its own desirous movement towards its natural place in the universal network of mutual gift. It cannot be gift to us any longer, and we cannot relate to it in gift-like mode. But if the relation is one of my eros communing with the eros of what I love – desiring the desire of the other, but not in competitive and exclusive mode – the possibility of that ‘eucharistic’ interrelation noted already is opened up to us.

But the truth of things is in the person who knows these things. — Fire Ologist

Right, and therefore a formal argument written out on a piece of paper is not true (or even valid) in the most primary sense. Truth primarily exists in the mind. The formal argument is just an aid to get truth into the mind.

Yeah, there is something I like to call the "Anna Karenina Principle," based on the opening of Tolstoy's novel: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in his own way." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Cf:

Again, there are many ways of going wrong (for evil is infinite in nature, to use a Pythagorean figure, while good is finite), but only one way of going right; so that the one is easy and the other hard—easy to miss the mark and hard to hit. — Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, II.6

I came across a great explanation by Rowan Williams — Count Timothy von Icarus

:up:

Where did you come across it?

Christian philosophy cannot really be expected to do without "sin" — Count Timothy von Icarus

I agree. However, along the lines of some existentialists (ie. Camus and the "absurd animal"), I think there is a sort of non-sectarian way of viewing sin as a somehow less religiously off-putting brokenness. Human beings are something, but something that IS broken. We live, but with a certain festering wound. We have a nature, plus something unnatural (or better, minus something), and that is our nature.

In the end, it is sin, or sin causes this natural/unnatural condition that is man. And I wouldn't want to be asking you to hide this truth (and so, lie). So maybe this has to remain "Christian philosophy" (which I would also call theology, or under its umbrella). It would probably take significant effort to truly sterilize the theological from essays like yours, and may also impress relatively few additional admirers of its content.

I only mention it because in many parts you are walking this tightrope between the secular and theological already, and I think the thesis overall regarding the deflation of reason straddles the line completely intact (meaning, you don't need God or sin to demonstrate and compare reason as ratio only versus reason as intellectus that includes ratio, and will).

the "Anna Karenina Principle," based on the opening of Tolstoy's novel: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in his own way." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yeah, another point that will stick. Good stuff.

That one concept is what I needed to flesh out that 'the damned dissolve into multiplicity' more.

It made me think of modern liberalism's knee-jerk forgiveness of sin by homogenizing multiplicity. There are more minorities or poor people in prison because they are all just victims of a system that is against them and not each in unique circumstances perpetrating unique vices and individual choices. So liberalism might agree with a sort of unifying Anna Kerenina Principle, but use the principle to misjudge individuals, misjudge what is good about these individuals and misidentify where the good comes from (ie. 'he only stole to care for his family and because he had no choice'), all to twist public policy.

Proper Christian love thus ‘dispossesses’ itself of its object in more than one sense. Not only does it seek to see and know the object without passion (without self-referential desire), it recognizes that the true being of the object is always in relation to something other than the beholder prior to the seeing or registering of this particular other by the beholder. Thus there is always some dimension of what is encountered that is in no way accessible to or at the mercy of this particular beholder. It is in acknowledging this relatedness to a third that a relation of love involving two finite subjects becomes authentic and potentially open to the universal.

But if the relation is one of my eros communing with the eros of what I love – desiring the desire of the other, but not in competitive and exclusive mode – the possibility of that ‘eucharistic’ interrelation noted already is opened up to us.

This is on another level. Rowan knows his love. Love entangles desire, possession, non-possessing beholding, the wholly other, and a recognition of all of these going on in the beloved as well.

The formal argument is just an aid to get truth into the mind. — Leontiskos

So if philosophy seeks 'thinking well, and what it is important to think about,' formal argument is a tool to confirm or aid thinking well, but it is the truth, in mind, where any import might arise. We don't ever find importance in a perfect tool, until the tool is being used and produces truth.

Oops, forgot that, it's in Looking East in Winter: Contemporary Thought and the Eastern Christian Tradition pg. 51-54

- Yes. :up:

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- Thanks. :up: