Love and Knowledge: Innate Moral Grammar
I’m half-remembering (and probably mixing up) a quote here, “there’s nothing new, just a lot of things we’ve forgotten”. (I’m thinking Aristotle, but it sounds more like Plato). There’s an awful lot of things that we’ve been forgetting. I think the deeper point is that knowledge as such doesn’t set us free or save us, this is the kind of thing that lies behind the naïve idea of progress. Well, we shouldn’t be so bewildered that that promise has not been delivered, no matter how much technical means we have at our disposal. 'Formerly’, Einstein argued, 'one had perfect aims but imperfect means. Today we have perfect means and tremendous possibilities but confused goals' (Einstein quoted in Roger Garaudy, The Alternative Future 1975:39).
So there is no mystery why our knowledge is misfiring or being diverted into destructive channels. Times change and knowledge increases, but I hold to something that may be called the implicit philosophy, something that looks to our natural dispositions to the good. And that doesn’t depend on the quantity of knowledge at all, not in ourselves or in our society. The stock of knowledge may increase, but many decision makers fail to act on that knowledge, because they let other aspects of a situation cloud the moral dimension. But moral knowledge, knowledge of what we ought to do, I hold, is in some way innate – a capacity we all have. Experience, habit, prudence etc develop that capacity and allow us to build up the moral virtues. This is difficult to generate when civil society has fractured into an atomistic and private existence, we fail to develop that character. Instead, we are socialised into being what? Consumers in the private realm. This is the ego as a prison. I’m thinking of Aquinas now, that knowledge is not a virtue in the truest sense, because it lacks appetitive content. To be a virtue, knowledge would have to make one positively desire to grasp the true and the good. It doesn’t. Hence our bewilderment as to why so much knowledge has yet to deliver on its promises. It won’t and it can’t. Not on its own. “Having knowledge does not make one want to consider the truth; it just makes one able to do so." (QDVC 7c). Along with the ability to act well, we need, above all, the will to act well. Aquinas describes the intellect as "following the will." The underlying disposition "more truly has the nature of a virtue inasmuch as it gives a person not just the ability or the knowledge to act rightly, but also the will to do so" (QDVC 7c). That will comes from within, something we are born with. The application comes from a social context or habitus which activates and canalises our innate moral capacity, builds the right character.
But, getting back to implicit philosophy, I think Aquinas is even more interesting here in that moral “knowledge” itself is not all important. More important is how we all of us make use of what we already know, that inner moral sense we are all born with. It’s not that knowledge is unimportant, just that it doesn’t make a person more virtuous. We all have this natural law within, and are all of us capable of applying this law to the variety of situations in which we find ourselves. The good person qualifies as good not on account of acquiring knowledge and being aware of calculations and consequences in the application of knowledge, but by virtue of understanding the right thing to do, drawing upon what is within, and holding to doing the right thing. Wrongdoing may be a result of forgetfulness, ignorance, etc but that unwitting wrongdoing itself results from a failure at some other level.
As for why our rulers fail to act on knowledge, well, the imperatives of money and power certainly overshadow any ethical dimension of action. Any ignorance here is a wilful ignorance, diverting our knowledge into destructive channels. I’ll admit to being a bibliophile and I am constantly amazed at the stock of knowledge in the world, beautifully written and brilliantly researched books and papers and articles on every subject. And the obvious question arises, surely we can be doing better with all of this knowledge at our disposal. We can. But in the end, it gets back to this, before the knowledge we may acquire from books and texts, we should seek the knowledge written into our hearts. We can, with the biologists, call it an innate moral grammar. In his Epistle to the Romans, the apostle Paul alludes to the concept of Natural Law and contends that it is written on the human heart. This law, he infers, transcends manmade laws and is accessible by human reason because it is innate and intuitive. (Romans 2:14ff). The knowledge of right and wrong is written within. This law transcends human-made laws, but is accessible by human reason because it is innate and intuitive. Natural law, then, is not the law of nature in the sense of biological or ecological principles but nature as seen through the eyes of reason. Things go wrong in the world when we ignore all of this, our rulers certainly, but we may all err in this way. The the closer to power we get, it seems the more forgetful we become. We need to redefine what we mean by power, and come to see power more in terms of healthy growth and flourishing. And that would be to see ourselves, our agency, will and purpose, as playing consciously creative roles in the ceaselessly creative – and rational – universe.
This implies a coincidence of self-knowledge and knowledge of the universe. We come to know both ‘who’ we are and ‘where’ we are. But the real meaning is more than this. It points to a love of self, a love of others, and a love of place that takes up where knowledge leaves off. Philosopher John Gray is critical of both Christianity and the Enlightenment as being based upon a doctrine, a delusion even, of progress. The Enlightenment replaces one Messiah with messiahs of its own, scientific advance, technological innovation and industrial revolution. This, according to Max Weber, led to disenchantment, a word which, in the original German, means a ‘dis-godding’, a rationalisation and a secularisation. On this modern terrain, Nietzsche would announce the ‘death of God’. But if Gray’s thesis is correct – and I think it is – we shouldn’t be so quick. It is easy enough to understand the ‘death of God’ through the advance of knowledge and know-how. Much more difficult to extirpate are the theological assumptions hitherto attached to God. These become unmoored, and become attached to the new idols of money, commodities, state power, bureaucracy, the nation etc. For Gray, the progressive mentality of the Enlightenment derives from Christianity; the concerns of the Enlightenment are indefensible without those Christian underpinnings. The result is not quite the disenchantment that Max Weber theorised, but the robbing of value from the natural world and its reinvestment in the human-made world, a new religion of man-made artefacts, what Marx identified as the world of alien power, human social powers in alien form. Here lies the violence of abstraction that characterised the modern world.
As Derek Sayer writes:
"The ultimate measure of the awesome power, and the fundamental violence, of unfettered abstraction is to be found in the millions upon millions of nameless corpses which this most vicious of centuries has left as its memorial, human sacrifices to one or another of Weber's renascent modern gods. War itself is not new, modernity's contribution is to have waged it, with characteristic efficiency, under the sign of various totalizing abstractions which name and claim the lives of all."
Sayer 1987: 154/5
Weber’s renascent gods are Marx’s alien powers, human powers taking alien form against them, exerting an external force that thwarts human will and value.
Marx believed the situation to be redeemable. Marx, that is, is as much a part of this Christian based doctrine of progress as the social relations and assumptions he criticises. Salvation is something that belongs to the human species and is something that is worked out through the historical process. This makes Marx very much a part of the Enlightenment project, capable of justifying itself only with the Christian foundations in place. (Gifford, Paul et al, Eds, 2000 Years and Beyond: Faith, Identity and the ‘Common Era’, pp. 41-42.) Shedding those grounds means that progress is made dependent upon a secular messiah or messiahs, upon human powers and products. The presumption is that the greater the advance we record in knowledge, the more we advance as a species. Here, Gray objects: ‘Knowledge does not make us free. It leaves us as we have always been, prey to every kind of folly.’ (Straw Dogs, p. xiv). Weber emphasised the extent to which the rationalisation of the world through the advance of scientific knowledge brought about the dissolution of an overarching objective ethic. Instead there is a polytheism of values. Gray agrees, the advance of knowledge does not bring about a consensus on values. Gray, 2000 Years and Beyond, pp. 46-50). It brings about the opposite. In my own work, I have argued that Marx has the antidote to the rationalistic desolidarisation of Weberian modernity. Gray denies the capacities of any species, including the human species, to act in concert in order to achieve conscious control of its fate. (Straw Dogs, p. 48). ‘There can be no such thing as the history of humanity, only the lives of particular humans.’ (Straw Dogs, p. 48). I disagree, but for my arguments you will have to turn to my books, particularly on Marx. I also subject Gray to close criticism in my Immanence, Transcendence and Essence (2013). Here, I am more interested in Gray’s scepticism with respect to knowledge. I believe Gray has identified a real flaw in modernist thinking here. The assumption that the constant, endless expansion of human knowledge, and with it technical capacity and know-how, results in “progress” can certainly be challenged. Anyone raised on Hegel and Marx and dialectics would know this. I think the question then becomes one of the balance of moral character and human knowledge, and whether knowledge has any role to play in human betterment. I think it does, but only in alliance with other things, the human character, the emotions, sympathy etc. I have focused here on Aquinas. He, in my view, found a role for both knowledge and love, reason and faith. For St Augustine, any human improvement that may be possible comes not through changes in what we know, but in changes in what we want. I’d still go with Aquinas here, with his emphasis on the acquisition and exercise of the virtues in the appropriate social habitus showing is how we can make the necessary changes in what we want. It is in this sense that we open our hearts and minds to the transcendent hope, the realm where love takes up where knowledge leaves of, and achieve a real change in our characters, our desires and our wants. (For more detailed argument on this, see my Aquinas, Morality and Modernity. The Search for the Natural Moral Law and the Common Good, (2013).
The quote ‘love takes up where knowledge leaves off’ derives from the Summa Theologica, IIa IIae, q.27, a.4, ad.1.
The Latin reads, "Et ideo ubi desinit cognitio, scilicet in ipsa re quae per aliam cognoscitur, ibi statim dilectio incipere potest."
In English, "And therefore...love can begin at once where knowledge ends, namely in the thing itself which is known through another thing."
This argument is an answer the objection that since we cannot love what we do not know, we cannot really love God, since we cannot know God in this life. Thomas responds that we can love more than we know, since the order of love and the order of knowledge do not necessarily correspond. A child, for instance, may love his or her mother more when young than when an adult, the love grows colder as the knowledge becomes greater. God can be loved in this life through the Church, and the sacraments, virtuous life, etc., any greater knowledge of God can only come after. This is a love that is beyond knowledge. In the Commentary on 1 Corinthians, Thomas identifies love with friendship and unity, things which transcend knowledge. To know someone or something is not the same as loving them; love, therefore, transcends the limitations of knowledge and takes us into another dimension.
‘If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.’
Romans 12:18
If we do live in a creative, self-organising universe, then we will indeed settle into place if we do our best to avoid harm. Be a friend to all animals, human and non-human. For those who consider the above to be a little far-fetched, reactionary even in its critical view of modernity, just consider that when E.F. Schumacher wrote his follow up to Small is Beautiful, his Guide for the Perplexed, he based himself largely on Aquinas. I think we need to do much more than this. But there are insights here worth contemplating. Knowledge alone is not enough. We need that transcendental hope.