The Triumph of abstraction over reality : against human rights

Below I reproduce MATT DINAN's reveiw of Natural Law and Human Rights: Toward a Recovery of Practical Reason by Pierre Manent found HERE :

“Modernity” is a relational, even reactionary, term of distinction. The Latin modus means “just now,” as opposed to “back then.” To be modern means to live in the past pluperfect, to have rejected some antiquity, whereas previous epochs were not only less self-consciously epochal but also seemed to have no problem with allowing one to be world-weary. One of the distinguishing characteristics of the modern world is that we are expected to show enthusiasm for it. Even critiques of modernity must reckon with the marvels of modern technology. 

Natural Law and Human Rights, the new book by formidable French political theorist Pierre Manent, provides another framework for understanding the proliferation of these critiques of modernity. Manent advances the atypical view that the modern crisis is one not of reflection but of action—that the modern problem is precisely the belief that our problems can be solved by thinking about them. Thus, the book addresses a theoretical discourse—human rights—that seems unfashionable on the intellectual left, and proposes to replace it with natural law, a theoretical tool that feels out of step with an increasingly populist right. 

But in his focus on political action, Manent correctly identifies that though academia and intellectual magazines may speak Foucault, the worlds of government, policy, and law speak the language of human rights. Concerned by the incompatibility of such language with the necessary grammar of political action, Manent offers instead a novel formulation of natural law designed to recover the “archic” (i.e., rule-based) character of human agency.

Natural Law and Human Rights follows the familiar arc of the “crisis of modernity” genre. There’s the exposition of the contemporary crisis; the fingering of the culprit (usually concentrated in one figure, image, or concept); the historical narrative (which joins culprit to crisis); and a final section devoted to some alternative or indicating what is needful. Almost universally, the strength of such books lies in two of these four elements: the identification of the crisis and the description of the culprit. This book is no exception. 

The crisis, in this case, is the way in which our regnant political discourse “stimulates our desire to judge while at the same time constraining our faculty of judgment.” Human rights presents itself as superior to law but is unwilling to condemn injustice in the cultural other “since judgment would risk leading to the conclusion that this way of life is inferior, which goes against the principle of equality that lies at the heart of the idea of human rights.” Manent’s example is the European propensity to condemn political positions held by traditionalist Christians about abortion or LGBTQ+ equality while refraining from judging similar perspectives held by non-Europeans. Manent argues that the tension persists because there is no alternative: Human rights discourse smuggles in a robust concept of nature, even as it criticizes the possibility of a natural basis for human things.

The “culprit” in Manent’s story is the view of nature developed by the early theorists of modern natural right. When thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau had recourse to a “state of nature” in order to locate humanity’s natural freedom and equality, they did so by “reducing us to the most impoverished common denominator,” heavily emphasizing “the separate individual” and “the fact of separation itself.” The bearers of rights are no longer recognizably “human,” but defined “by the fact that they are identical, or similar, and separate.” It then follows that, as Hobbes puts it, the differences in “manners” and “customs” are mere labels applied to a denuded substratum. Therefore, Manent writes, that which has been “constructed” by and onto the separate “individual living being” can be “deconstructed” as necessary. 

More radically, it now becomes the vocation of the human sciences to undertake “an unceasing effort to authorize and encourage the individual living being to recompose all the significant elements of the human world in order to make them conform to the idea that he has of himself.” This process of mediation is the transformation of the various qualities of human existence into concrete human rights. The law of the Sabbath, or the mere observation that rest and leisure are necessary and good, becomes the human right to paid vacation. But knowing my rights does not tell me much about what makes for a life well lived: The image of the good life is presented only negatively.

The central chapters of Natural Law and Human Rights duly provide a historical narrative connecting culprit to crisis. Manent’s analysis of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau covers well-worn ground in the political theory literature, and scholars interested in how context contributes to the development of political ideas will find little of interest here. Nevertheless, Manent’s interpretation of what is perhaps the central passage in Machiavelli’s The Prince is fresh and daring. 

Describing the ways in which he has departed from the orders of others, Machiavelli writes, “And many have imagined republics and principalities that have never been seen or known to exist in truth; for it is so far from how one lives to how one should live that he who lets go of what is done for what should be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation.” One standard interpretation of that passage is that Machiavelli is leaving behind the imagination of things and turning, instead, toward the effectual truth—the truth as revealed by cause and effect, the truth that gets results. Manent, however, reads against the grain: Machiavelli is describing the significant gap that exists between what I do and what I believe I should do. The natural response to such a failing is an attempt to “close” the gap, to try to better align my words to my deeds. But don’t we usually fail to attain the good ends we set out to achieve, precisely because we are seeking our preservation instead of our ruin? 

For Manent, in observing this gap, Machiavelli is offended not by its practical consequences but by its theoretical ones, by what Manent somewhat infelicitously calls humanity’s “gnoseological failure”: We fail not so much in doing as in correctly understanding our own actions. Rather than attempt to close or prevent this gap between law and action, Machiavelli, in Manent’s telling, elaborates “a nonpractical view of action—an action greater than action, or in any case an action no longer subject to the limits that spring from the fact that action is naturally produced by an agent.” 

The possibility of human agency is determined no longer by what is just and noble, nor by the constraints imposed by my resources or my character, but by my ability to respond to events as they present themselves. I am no longer myself, but a generalized—and generalizable—theoretical agent, whose freedom does not quail before the law. The gap between ought and isdisappears because the realm of practice does. In this way, the uncertainty of any practical undertaking is dislodged by the certainty of theory. In a strange twist, the apparent “realism” of Machiavelli is actually a pivot toward the complete eclipse of practice by theory.

The rest of the central narrative of Natural Law and Human Rights develops the far-reaching consequences of modernity’s “theoretical hypertrophy,” its abstraction from the human things to the separate individual being. Manent focuses on Hobbes’s role in systematizing the “gnoseological” decision of Machiavelli. Hobbes defines politics not by thinking about what politics is but by attempting to answer theoretical questions about nature. He thus locks in Machiavelli’s turn away from practice in the interest of a separate individual who must scientifically reconstitute the human world, reproducing the supposedly theoretical state of nature in the modern social state. Bringing about the lonely freedom and equality of the state of nature definitively closes the gap between law and life. 

But as any student of modern political thought can tell you, Machiavelli and Hobbes mark only the beginning—what Leo Strauss calls the “first wave”—of modernity. When Manent brings up Rousseau, he does so not to discuss Rousseau’s “discovery” of history, but to emphasize his continuity with Hobbes. Manent does not address later modern thinkers, but it is not difficult to see how such thinkers remain essentially within the same modern project that was inaugurated by Machiavelli. The turn from nature to history inaugurated by Rousseau is a way of further closing the gap between law and action. The historicist emphasis on the contextual roots of action further complicates human agency. The “gap” between law and world ceases to exist if the human world is determined by historical necessity. Indeed, the definitive closure of the gap comes in Hegel’s compact and imperious dictum that the actual is the rational, and by Marx’s transposition of this observation onto material conditions. When Nietzsche’s Zarathustra says we must look at all of history and say “Thus I willed it,” he is only making explicit what is barely implicit in Machiavelli. 

The final stage in any critique of modernity is the alternative, or the way forward. This is the most perilous moment in the genre, when, having attempted to knock down the modern edifice, the critic must lay a foundation for a new one. Manent aims to revitalize action through a novel conception of natural law. Whereas such accounts usually rely on a theory of natural teleology, Manent recognizes that to undertake such a conceptualization is to remain “a prisoner of the theoretical view that it shares with the philosophy of rights.” Manent instead provides a sort of Aristotle-inspired phenomenology of action or agency, observing that “there is no human being who is not moved by the pleasant, the useful, and the honest (the just, the noble).” An agent’s motivations are not open to revision or manipulation; we may disagree about which objects are truly useful, pleasant, or noble, but we remain bound by nonnegotiable categories. 

By focusing on these motives for action, Manent tries to avoid a “dogmatically explicit” list of dos and don’ts and leave room for the “play” appropriate to practical life. Thus understood, natural law always “leaves room to deliberate and then to choose.” Rather than resolve into a passive understanding of the separate, autonomous being, real choices are always made, Manent shows, by distinct persons with characters and histories, and within the context of actual political communities. Affirming natural law in Manent’s sense grounds us in a human world that is given, not made by us. By realizing the solidity of human motivations, we can begin to develop the prudence required for good judgment, and even Christian conscience. Manent calls this a “gentle slope” from “is” to “ought.” His goal for all of this is a sober and dignified vision of a practicable, attainable, distinctively human life: “Where the natural law is concerned, humanity in its ordinary or current conditions is not this mass of perdition that the law condemns, but so many actors who take much and often fall short, who are ceaselessly straying further from and coming closer to this law of nature that does not define an ideal, but helps us to find the point of equilibrium and the optimal rule for a happy life, that is to say a reasonably pleasant, useful, and noble life.” 

Natural Law and Human Rights thus contributes to the critique of modernity with the observation that modernity is not only a theoretical distinction about the relationship of law to life, but a decision in favor of the authority of theoretical distinctions over the prescientific experience of human life. In an insidious way, we understand ourselves as relentlessly pragmatic, realist, or empiricist, when in fact we mediate our naive experiences of life through the lens of theory. Modernity needs to be revealed to us, because it so successfully hides its true character, insulating itself against revision and correction. 

Controversial though it may be, this claim seems sound—we are given over to reflection in such a way as to lose the appearances, the phainomenai, of human life, so that the various options of how we might live it are hidden from us. Manent’s focus on recovering the prediscursive character of human agency does little, however, to help us understand specifically how to go about effecting this recovery. The problem is that such an approach would seem to require that he refrain from some of the specific judgments he does make on contemporary controversies—about the redistribution of wealth and the relation of modernity to questions of gender and sexuality, in particular—which are not supported by the modest concept of natural law he defends in his book. Nevertheless, Manent provides a framework within which such prudential questions can be meaningfully arbitrated. But, more importantly, the space his practical view leaves open for forgiveness when we attend to the reality of the gap between law and life lowers the stakes of such discussions, and creates a space in which we might venture being wrong.

Reprinted from The Hedgehog Review 22.2 (Summer 2020). This essay may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission. Please contact The Hedgehog Review for further details.

How is Science possible ? Whitehead answers.

Although his estate for years claimed this essay was destroyed in a fire, apparently that was a lie. Just published this year, Whitehead’s first lecture at Harvard, delivered in September 1924, focuses on the metaphysical possibility of modern natural science, below is most of it, but can be read in it's entirety HERE


You can also hear it read on youtube below

In this lecture we want to elucidate what science is in itself. We ask what is the true character of this great unexpected movement of human thought issuing in modern science. How does it arise, and what is it now that it has arisen?..

If we look to the nature of things, the truth is that all things are interconnected. There are no autonomous entities or groups of entities. If the human body is composed of com- pounds of carbon, it will behave as compounds of carbon do behave; and we must call in the chemist to inform us upon that question.

In conformity with this principle of unity, we must hold that Philosophy and even Theology are capable of rendering services very necessary for Natural Science, in so far as those two sciences have themselves arrived at any formulations which are sufficiently true. Furthermore, there is some cause to believe that even medieval Western Theology, obstructive as it has been over details, has in a general way in the past rendered incalculable service in fostering the scientific spirit. At the present time, there is in every country a corps of eager scientific workers. Our present epoch is a stage of utilisation, which issues in our general support of science, and in our keen sense of its importance. But this attitude is very recent.

It is true that, wherever men are civilised, there is the stage of wonder, of romance. But how does romance pass into precise investigation, and thus generate science. The spur to this transition is the unconquerable belief that there are great simple truths dominating the complexity of appearance. Without such a belief, what is the good of precise investigation?

It would be natural to believe that things happen one way one day, and another way another day, and that all the order there is lies on the surface of things, such as the succession of the seasons. In the great civilisations of Eastern Asia, civilisations older and more continuous than ours, when men wondered they retired to mountains and to monasteries, and continued to wonder. There was nothing else to be done....

The pursuit of science presumes that the nature of things is adjusted in every detail with inflexible rationality. For example, we know something of the molecular nature of chemical elements, and we observe the complexity of the lines in the spectra due to light from these elements. Throughout Europe and America our spectroscopists are searching with the most detailed analysis to discover the correlations between the characteristic atom of a substance and the characteristic spectrum it emits. 

But why should there be any such correlation to be discovered. We do in fact believe that there is one, simply and solely because we believe that there is in every detail a rational adjustment in the properties of connected things. If a thing behaves one way at one time, and another way at another time, we believe that there are other determinate factors, which we have overlooked, to which the variation is due. Now there can be no justification for this ultimate motive towards scientific investigation, except our knowledge of something in the very nature of reality which justifies it. It is the weakness of Hume’s philosophy and of its modern derivatives that it gives no such justification. Furthermore, it gives no reason to believe that, because scientific generalisations have been discovered in the past, there are any more to be discovered in the future. Nor does this philosophy even give any reason to suppose that the generalisations which worked in the past will continue to work in the future.

The motive towards science must include an intimate conviction in the ultimate rationality of things in their minutest detail. A Cambridge mathematician once expressed this to me by the outburst—‘I assume that there is a fundamental decency of things’. Speaking generally the men of Asia generated but little science because they had a weak hold upon this fundamental decency of things. Their Theology presented them with a God either too arbitrary or too inert to make the Universe safe for decency. 

The men of Western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries inherited from the middle ages the impression of scholastic theology with its insistence upon the rationality of the nature of God. Indeed it was over-impressed upon them, so that they thought that they could deduce the motions of the planets from their knowledge of that nature, a knowledge which they sadly over-estimated. But as soon as it was realised that there was no substitute for looking at the facts, modern science was generated by this union of the method of observation with unquestioned belief in the decency of the Universe. Without Scholastic Theology it is not likely that, so far as science is concerned, Western Europe would have surpassed Eastern China. It all depended on the habit of mind which came from a belief in an active rational God who attends personally to every detail.

We are, most of us, not in a mood to receive our ideas of Providence from Scholastic Theology. But our trust in science demands a metaphysic which equally supports this belief in the coherent rationality of things.

It is one of the many great merits of Immanuel Kant as a Philosopher that, being also a Scientist, he realised that meta- physics has to satisfy this condition. You will not ask me, in an aside in this lecture, to explain the general character of the Kantian solution.

The principle on which he proceeded was to ascribe to our process of cognition, a function analogous to that exercised by Mrs. Grundy over morals in the social world and by the late Mr. Bowdlear in his edition of Shakespeare. According to Kant we never know the real things, but only an édition de luxe which has been expurgated into rationality.

But although nobody, so far as I am aware, takes seriously Kant’s exact theory of things in themselves, I cannot understand how anyone who lays emphasis on the problem which he set himself to solve, can doubt but that his work forms a turning point in the progress of metaphysics. The process of cognition is merely one type of relationship between things which occurs in the general becoming of reality. The becoming of relationships between things requires that the things which become related should be such as to be capable of these relations. Accordingly the fact of any particular entity form- ing an element in a united Universe which is in the process of becoming, imposes upon that Universe the obligation of being patient of it. Thus every particular entity, by reason of what we may call its relational essence, imposes upon the rest of things a certain systematic character whereby they tolerate its possibility of reality. Kant worked out this theory for the particular case of an entity capable of the relation of cognisance in the capacity of cognisant. He asked, How is cognisance possible? I suggest to you the more general question, How is any particular entity possible having regard to the relationships which it presupposes? It is along this line of thought that—at least in my opinion—metaphysics will be able to deal with another, and very analogous, problem for which science looks to metaphysics for explanation; I mean the problem of Induc- tive Logic.

Why are the generalisations of Inductive Logic sensible procedures? I do not mean what are the particular precautions to be taken in order that these generalisations may carry the greatest weight. This latter problem was discussed by Mill in the famous second volume of his Logic and also by Venn in his Inductive Logic, and later by statisticians such as Karl Pearson. The problem which I am thinking of is the more fundamental one, Why should these generalisations carry any probability whatsoever, however carefully they are conducted? I have no doubt but that they ought to carry about the amount of probability which all men in practice ascribe to them. It follows therefore that a meta- physical description of the nature of things must account for the fact that inductive reasoning can give knowledge respecting the Universe.

The point is this:— How can our knowledge of one fact A give us any knowledge of another fact B which is not included in fact A? As Hume points out, it is no good protesting that no cautious reasoner does depend for his induction on one fact only. In the first place, if the one fact A can give no information of any kind as to fact B, it is quite obvious that 100 facts, A1, A2, . . . A100, each of which separately has no bearing at all upon B, cannot in conjunction afford any information as to B. Hume affirms this position, and I cannot see any escape from it. Accordingly, the consideration as to how to generalise with comparative safety from a large number of particular facts—the sort of consideration which was undertaken by Bacon, and Mill, and Karl Pearson— affords no answer to this problem. We have got first to solve the preliminary problem, as to how one particular fact can afford information, however/slight, about any particular fact. When we have settled this point, there can be no difficulty in understanding that 100 relevant facts can afford much more information when properly analysed. 

But the root question is, How can one fact be relevant to another fact which is not included in it? Science collapses if you once admit an independent atomicity of facts.

In the second place, you do not get out of the difficulty by introducing probability. If fact A is entirely irrelevant to fact B, it can make nothing probable as to B. You can never get rid of your question, as to how particulars can be relevant to other particulars.

Thirdly, you do not get rid of the difficulty by saying that in practice nobody doubts it. We are all agreed there. We are only asking that a metaphysical description of the general nature of the Universe should account for this procedure, which is essential to science, and which is such that nobody doubts it.

Fourthly, no help is to be got by basing your trust on past experience. You can in this way explain—as Hume explained— your habit of making these generalisations. But when you are convinced of the truth of this explanation of the habit, you ought to find your belief in its rationality rather weakened than otherwise. Apparently there has been a run of luck, and the human race has slid into indefensible habits of thought. Furthermore, if the present is irrelevant to the future, the past was irrelevant to the present. Accordingly, our memory, which is a present fact, is merely delusive if we take it as giving [no] knowledge of the past. You cannot evade accounting for the relevance of a particular fact A to another particular fact B. The answer which I would give in outline is that the becom- ingness of reality is a process of exhibiting the togetherness of things, and that this togetherness is essential. 

Accordingly, any one entity X which is realised requires of the rest of real- ity a patience of the entry of X into that togetherness. From the point of view of X, I call this the significance of X, and from the point of view of the rest of the Universe, I call it the patience of reality for X. Now a fact A is a complex of many inter-related entities X1, . . . Xn together with their relatedness in A. Thus in some way or other, such a complex entity as A has significance as to the constitution of all reality, and in particular, may well have important significance as to the possible constitution of some other fact B.

The Togetherness of Things

I wish to make it evident that the first step in the Philosophy of Science is the consideration of the togetherness of things. As we look around—either in perception or thought—we do not find things in isolation. For example, we do not find one horse, out of time and out of space, disjoined from the rest of creation. Zoology does not take its start from the examination of such isolated entities. There could not even be a horse without time and space. The very idea of a non-temporal, non-spatial horse is nonsense. It is not wrong; because it has no meaning at all, and cannot arrive at the dignity of rightness or wrongness. What we mean by an individual horse requires time and space in order to show its points.

But time and space simply exhibit aspects of the way in which things are together with each other. Thus, to say that a non-temporal, non-spatial horse is an unmeaning collection of ideas, is merely another way of saying that there can be no such thing as a horse apart from its togetherness with other things. I am not talking of where a horse will be happiest, or survive longest, but of the general character of the togetherness which is necessary for the very being of a horse. For example, a horse is happy when galloping over grass downs, it could exist for a few seconds under water at the bottom of the English Channel, and for a very small fraction of a second somewhere between the Sun and Sirius, even if those two stars were blot- ted out. 

But, apart from its systematic togetherness with the electromagnetic field required by its electrons, there can be no horse even for a billion billionth of a second. A certain systematic type of togetherness is required for the very being of a horse. Apart from that, it cannot even proceed to die. The happiness of the horse, producing its continued survival, issues from conditions of reality which retain the horse as a realised value in the system of things. It is in this sense that I call every individual entity ‘abstract’. Because every such entity presupposes a definite togetherness with other things. This togetherness must have a certain general systematic character in order that there may be such an entity at all—for example, a horse requires spatial and temporal relations with other things. But also in every particular instance, the togetherness will have accidental characters which might be otherwise, though they must be definite. For example, a definite horse at the present moment is either in London in the Strand opposite Charing Cross, or in South America, or on the surface of the moon, or somewhere else. It must have definite relations to other things in time and space; and what those other things are is somewhat accidental, though there is usually a historical explanation.

When we consider an entity by itself, we ignore this togetherness except those aspects of its general systematic character which are necessary to give meaning to our thoughts. But no definite horse at a definite moment is living indefinitely in ‘any environment.’ There is no such thing as ‘any environment’. The definite horse requires a definite environment. We ignore that, though it must be there. I am elaborating an obvious idea. For the idea is obvious, if I have expressed myself with any clearness, though the history of the philosophy of science shows that it is very necessary to elaborate it. The brilliant, and deserved, success of the Aristotelian system of classification has in the past somewhat obscured this essential togetherness of things. 

Classification directs attention to an entity in isolation. The entity is cross-examined as to its predicates, which are its own peculiar property, and is then assigned to its proper genus and species. Thus the pro- cedure of classification ignores the primary consideration of togetherness. Half the difficulties of philosophy result from an exaggerated emphasis on the abstract entity as though it were capable of independent reality. The predicates of an entity are in general merely a one-sided way of expressing its relation to its environment. These predicates belong to the environment just as much as to the entity. For example, the grass is not green apart from its environment: since the light in the environment is required for this greenness. Accordingly classification, by ignoring the environment, has badly misled philosophy.

Classification does not express the origin of science in the very nature of things. The predication of qualities and the resulting classification are very useful and highly technical devices, but they cloak the fundamental idea which lies at the base of science. This idea is that every entity must be studied in its environment; and that this environment has partly a systematic character required by the very essence of the entity, and partly an accidental character, which must be determinate, but which is not determined by the mere consideration of the entity. The togetherness of an entity with the accidental items of its determinate environment is what we mean by the expe- rience of the entity. (By experience I do not mean cognition). The total environment of an entity can be discriminated into a fluent environment of changing parts. The way the entity is connected with the succession of its partial experiences is what we mean by the behaviour of the entity. It is one purpose of science to determine general truths concerning the behaviour of entities as their partial experiences succeed each other. It is another purpose of science to determine the systematic char- acters of the types of togetherness required by various types of entities.

The Process of Realisation.

This togetherness of things takes the form of a process of realisation. Reality is not static: it is a process of becoming. This fluent character of the togetherness of things was already emphasised in Greek philosophy: All things flow, said Heraclitus. Indeed the fact is too obvious to escape notice. But unfortunately things which are too obvious often escape receiving their due emphasis. The result is that there has been a tendency to give an account of reality which omits this essential processional character of the togetherness of things. It is then held that what is processional cannot be real. The fluent togetherness of things is then given a lower place as mere appearance, and we are left with a world in which the appearance which passes is contrasted with the reality in the background, exempt from passage.

This train of metaphysical thought has the unfortunate effect of separating philosophy from science. For science is concerned with our experience of the passage of things in their fluent togetherness. Whereas, on this metaphysical theory, philosophy is concerned with the ultimately real which lies behind the superficialities which lie within the scope of science. 

According to the view which I am putting before you there is nothing behind the veil of the procession of becomingness, though there is much pictured on that veil and essential to it which our dim consciousness does not readily decipher. Indeed the metaphor of a veil of appearance is wholly wrong. Reality is nothing else than the process of becomingness, of which we are dimly conscious. Every detail of the process is open for con- sciousness, though in fact our individual consciousness is only aware of a very small fragment of what is there for knowledge.

Relativity

The process of becoming real is a process of making real the togetherness of things. It follows that there are degrees of reality according to the completeness of realisation of togeth- erness. It is the connections which are realised. In a sense the idea of reality does not apply absolutely to the things thus connected, but only relatively. Thus by reason of the reali- sation of a type of togetherness between A and B, A is real for B and B is real for A. But it is nonsense to speak of A as absolutely real in itself, or of B as absolutely real in itself. A and B are individual existents with a relative reality each for the other. This relative reality of B for A is the becoming of B for A: namely B becomes a reality for A: that is to say, the individual quality of B—what B is in itself—becomes significant for A, and affects the character of A’s experience: thus the Universe is what it is for A because of the realisation for it of B’s individual character. Thus realisation means at bottom the making real of value. 

It is the achievement of valuation, and valuation is a one-sided view of realisation. The process of becoming from the standard-point of A is the breaking in of B’s character upon A. Then A is real because it is a term in this process and so is B. But the true reality is the achieve- ment of this relation between A and B. There are stages of reality and degrees of reality of an entity A, according to the completeness with which A’s individual character has ejected itself into the entities of its environment, and according to the completeness with which A on its side has received the injection of the characters of those entities. A mere absence of any such transfusion of character—value spells nonentity. Every existence is somehow envisaged from the standpoint of reality, and to that extent has some element of reality in its basic individual existence. But, an existent is not fully absorbed into the becomingness of reality unless the realised valuation is reciprocal, so that its mere formal experience has gained a realised significance for it.

This is the doctrine of the complete relativity of reality—at least, it is a doctrine of relativity, expressed from a realist standpoint in philosophy. An entity is not merely abstract by reason of its general requirements of togeth- erness with other entities; this is its formal experience. But in the fluent becomingness of reality, even the intrinsic essence or character of an entity is not for itself alone: it becomes a value for other entities. Otherwise, this transition of individual essence into value for others constitutes the relative character of reality. It is here that contingence arises, and we meet the last problem to which I shall draw your attention in this lecture.

An entity enjoys all the formal experience which its significance requires. This is the basis of the necessity which reigns throughout nature. But its real experience, its experience of the becomingness of value, has for us an air of contingence.

Why are we all here in the exact way we are, immersed in this special realisation of the becomingness of real values? Or to put the matter in a more limited special form, Why have the events of today followed those of yesterday in the exact way in which in fact they have? Why not in other ways? Cannot we discern some ground for the determination of the process?

Science seeks to discover what are the factors in the present which determine the direction of this process of achievement. Now the present reality can be analysed into valuation as display, which is the realisation of the intrinsic charac- ter of the sense-data, such as colour, sound, bodily feelings, and into valuation as directive, i.e., into a distribution of character directive of display. This character distribution is what may be termed the physical field. It is the electromagnetic field of electrons, protons, and the field of activity which they stand for. This directive field is intertwined from the present to the future; so that the present being what it is, the future is thereby determined to be what it will be. Whereas the field of display in the present can be definitely determined as that display in the present without refer- ence to the future. The physical field on the other hand is nothing but the way in which in the present the foundations of the future are being laid. The display in the present can be definitely expressed in terms of the physical field in the pres- ent: but the physical field in the present cannot be adequately analysed except in terms of what it transmits into the future. For example, the theory of the retarded potential exhibits [in] an electron nothing else than a process of transmission into the future.

Thus the display of the present is connected with the display of the future, by means of the connection of the display of the present with the physical field of the present, and the connec- tion of the physical field of the present with the physical field of the future, and the connection of the physical field of the future with the display of the future.

But—and here is one great problem—, is not this physical field a mere myth, based on no knowledge? I do not believe in this mythical theory. It is difficult to understand how the scientific machinery of thought ever arose, if there is no direct discernment of the physical field. It is a clear fact of scientific history that the machinery arose from a gradual making precise of objects which mankind has always imagined itself to have direct immediate knowledge of: I mean chairs, trees, stones, and other objects of perception.

If mankind does in any real sense observe such objects, then the scientific objects merely claim to be merely a more precise rendering of perceptual objects which are somewhat vaguely observed. But if no such perceptual objects are really observed, and if the so-called perceptual objects are merely our ways of recollecting classes of sense-data, then the scientific physical field is based upon no direct knowledge and must be treated as a useful mythical method of expressing somewhat complicated relations which hold directly between sensedata. 

For example, when you see a cricket ball coming swiftly towards you, and you catch it, and it stings your hands, the introduction of the ball is mere myth on this latter theory. There is a dot of colour in the sky approaching you, and this is succeeded by a sort of bumpy feeling, and this by a tingling stinging feeling; these various sense-data having certain definite spatial relations.

This account seems to me to be very unconvincing. If you are a school-boy with an important catch coming your way, it is not the colour you ever think of: it is the object exhibit- ing the colour. These objects are the most insistent things in our experience. They are vague in definition, but insistent for apprehension. You may forget the colour of the ball, but the ball imprints itself on your memory. Why on earth does one worry about the myth? How account for its vividness and universality?

One theory as to the status of the perceptual object—for example, of the cricket ball—is that such an object is merely the class of its appearances. There is a certain flux of sense- data, such as, patches of colour, sensations of touch, and other experiences, all associated with the various locations of the ball. These sense-data—it is said—are all we know of the ball, and are in fact the ball itself when we have added to them the sense-data which might have been observed but which in fact have escaped notice. This is the class-theory of the status of a perceptual object. The theory has been advocated by Bertrand Russell, and was put forward by him in his Lowell Lectures on Our Knowledge of the External World. It is a theory with strong reasons on its side, and I will examine it with more care in subsequent lectures. But I am growing increasingly sceptical of it.

The class theory would make the school-boy, in the agony of catching, have his mind occupied with a class of sense-data such as the redness of the ball when it was a new ball at the beginning of the match. Whereas such a thought never enters into his mind. He is thinking of the ball as a unique entity which is the control of display, but he does not classify the display which in its main outlines is not interesting him.

According to the alternative theory—I mean the control theory—the perceptual object is a persistent character inher- ent in the flux of reality which expresses the selective control by which a definite process is achieved. There is an element of display even in this character, since its individual reality breaks in upon us, and we have a discernment of it. This discernment is insistent and in a sense vivid, yet it is vague. In the endeavor to cure this vagueness science introduces its mole- cules, its atoms, its electrons and its protons. This procedure of science is entirely analogous to the analysis of the total volume of sound in a concert hall into definite notes, and each note into its fundamental tone with its harmonic overtones.

Both lines of thought, the class-theory and the control- theory present great difficulties and secure certain philosophical advantages. I cannot at this final stage of my lecture consider them further.

I will conclude with one reflection. Neither in Science nor in Philosophy, nor in any branch of human achievement do we reach finality. The data of crude evidence upon which Philosophy works is provided by the general state of civilised thought at the epoch in question. In one sense Philosophy does nothing. It merely satisfies the entirely impractical craving to probe and adjust ideas which have been found adequate each in its special sphere of use.

In the same way the ocean tides do nothing. Twice daily they beat upon the cliffs of continents and then retire. But have patience and look deeper; and you find that in the end whole continents of thought have been submerged by philosophic tides, and have been rebuilt in the depths awaiting emergence. The fate of humanity depends upon the ultimate continental faith by which it shapes its action, and this faith is in the end shaped by philosophy.

How Renaissance art led to modernity and the mathematization of the cosmos.

Johannes Hoff’s The Analogical Turn: Rethinking Modernity with Nicholas of Cusa is remarkable, he posits an “alternative modernity” in which Renaissance accounts of space, perspective, and perception leads to modernity’s narcissistic hyperreflexity, and use of analytic rationality and individuality. He instead offers Cusa’s doxological epistemology” - doxology = right praise - where one loves to know.

Here is a part of John Betz’s take on the book, and a snippet of Hoff’s response, found HERE :

“…modern dialectics have blinded us to reality—either in the way that modern scientific rationalism tries to extort from creatures a univocal meaning they have never had, or in the way that postmodernism denies that creatures have any intrinsic meaning at all that is not a function of culture, the will to power, or the play of différance. In short, both of these extremes—“the univocity of modern scientific rationality and the ambiguous equivocity of post-modern pop culture” (xv)—have rendered reality opaque. And so we need to go back to Cusa’s analogical rationality if we are to go forward into an apocalyptic future in which the world will be seen for what it is, a transparency of divine things, and one can “see in every creature an image of the divine amabilitas”

Hoff traces back to the work of Cusa’s contemporary and fellow priest, Leon Battista Alberti (1406–72), who “applied the mathematical methods of Euclid to the art of painting” . On the face of it, there does not seem to be anything problematic here: Alberti’s mathematical mapping of perspective can subsequently be seen in the geometrical art of Piero della Francesca, who is best known and admired for his paintings of gospel scenes (e.g., The Baptism of Christ from 1450). Nevertheless, Hoff sees a problematic turning point here that will subsequently define the “world picture” (in the Heideggerian sense) of the modern age.

The problem, as he sees it, is that the vanishing point of the work of art mirrors that of the viewer, eo ipso “putting the latter in the position of a sovereign observer who can control the space of his perception as if it were nothing but a mirror image of his subjective position” (48). In other words, from this point on, Hoff argues, modern perspective is defined not by a “being seen” (as one is seen by the gaze of an icon) or by a misty seeing of the invisible through the visible—one could just as well say, of the infinite through the finite—but by the dominant viewer (the new and only topos noetos) and this viewer’s imaging of reality in narcissistic terms, according to his conception of it. In short, reality is now configured in my image and according to my representation of it. Thus, according to Hoff’s genealogy, the “winged eye” of Alberti (which appears on the flipside of his portrait medallion) leads directly to the “thinking I” of Descartes’s cogito —and thence, one might add, to the synoptic transcendental ego of Kant.

At this specular point a distinctly modern perspective is established (which for Hoff is also the presupposition of modern individualism).

.....the symbolic universe of the Middle Ages gives way to the “digital universe of Descartes and Leibniz” . Corporeal entities, as for Descartes, come to be regarded as “nothing but ‘extended things’ (res extensae) that can be represented analytically, based on functions and equations, without remainder” (; and so, inspired by visions of a mathesis universalis, matters of symbolic concern are “pushed aside in favor of simpler strategies of scientific progress”

Thus, as Hoff keenly observes, it was ironically modern artistic innovation...

.....he nevertheless maintained that “mathematical comparisons can only provide us with conjectures and not precise descriptions of our analogical world” (67). In other words, anticipating Kurt Gödel mutatis mutandis by nearly half a millennium, Cusa argued that because the world is structurally analogical, and opposites coincide in God alone, an exhaustive mathematical account of reality is impossible. In short, nothing can be pinned down and mastered; the Continental, Hegelian desideratum of a complete system and the Anglo-American desideratum of a final analysis are equally impossible. 

For in our world, in which everything is “enmeshed in the comparative logic of excedens (exceeding) and excessum (exceeded), of larger and smaller” (68), “nothing has the analytic ‘property’ [of being] one with itself. We may make rational conjectures about the identity of individual substances, but they are never analytically precise”

..

Whereas, on the modern model, which funds “the liberal societies of the modern age,” “every singularity is identical with its essence” and thus a “one” unto itself, for Cusa “nothing but God is One and identical with itself” .

....but, as Hoff notes, as analogical singularities, “the uniqueness of created individuals is neither analytically accountable nor conceivable as a ‘property’ that creatures ‘have’” . Rather, “the miracle is that every creature and every person is a singularity, not despite, but exactly because it owes everything it is to a giver whose perfections cannot be owned” . Indeed, rather than being one’s own property, according to Hoff’s Cusa-inspired metaphysics I cannot but “receive the gift to be one with myself” .

But, once again, such a metaphysical vision is inaccessible to the modern man, who is immured in his modern perspective—the perspective of “the modern Narcissus,”1 who puts himself “in the position of the eye point of a mathematically generated picture” , and precisely thereby makes his eye unreceptive to the light of the vision of God. As Hoff puts it, quoting Kleist, “it’s just a pity that the eye molders that is called to the vision of glory"

- John Betz

Now here is Hoff’s partial response to the above :

“The Cartesian promise that everything will straighten out if we only stick to the linear principles of representational security and analytical rigor has failed on every level of philosophical, mathematical and scientific research.

In the wake of thinkers as different as the early Romantics Ludwig Wittgenstein, Kurt Gödel and Martin Heidegger, we have learned that scientific reason is not reducible to true or false propositions.

I have outlined this more extensively in my publications on the necessity of replacing the radicalized phenomenological reduction (or epoché) of Foucault and Derrida by a “doxological reduction.”3 The above summary of Cusa’s method built on this research when it distinguished between two aspects of “truth” that interfere with each other and undermine every attempt to think in straight lines:

Our selection of true propositions (truth2) is regularly crossed by acts of wonder and praise (truth1) that guide our decisions about what deserves our attention and what does not.

If every knowledge starts with the commitment to a truth that transcends our reflexive comprehension, then it is no longer possible to draw a clear demarcation line between the straight lines of evidence-based, secure thinking patterns and the tentative, helical lines of walking paths that are sensitive to delusive shortcuts and attentive to performative indicators and narratives that structure the space that we inhabit.

As Michel de Certeau has pointed out, only subsequent to the fifteenth century did the “maps” that guide our cognitive and spatial movements become “disengaged” from the nonlinear “conditions of the possibility” of space.

( In another place, Hoff puts the matter like this, “…philosophers resisted the inclination to draw a clear demarcation line between the scientific cultivation of rational arguments and the religious cultivation of the symbolically charged spiritual practices that guide our attention”)

Cusa built on this Dionysian tradition—although he emphasized more than Albert (and in line with Aquinas) the unity of theology and philosophy: As in the case of doxological acts of prayer and praise, our intellectual power is a gift that we receive from the “father of lights.” And this gift is never received passively. Rather, the gesture of attentive receptivity coincides with the gesture of return: To receive the gift of the father of lights is tantamount with the realisation that my whole being is a gift that actualizes itself through acts of giving.”

- Hoff

The Christian Platonist Cudworth on materialism and atheism - by D. Hedley

Cudworth was a Christian member of the Cambridge Platonsist's in the 17th C, The following is a portion of 'Gods and Giants: Cudworth’s Platonic Metaphysics and his Ancient Theology" by Douglas Hedley, 

Cudworth on materialism and atheism

The Cambridge Platonists were the first Platonists to accept modern science. Cudworth notes of Ficino that he “lived before the restoration of this mechanical philosophy, and therefore understood it not” (A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, 37). The curious historiography is not an exercise in the study of history but a rather convoluted justification for the fusion of atomism and Platonism. Ancient philosophy is discussed because of the contemporary significance of atomism, and not least the philosophical deployment of the new science by Hobbes and Descartes. Cudworth discusses Gassendi (cf. TIS, I, 105) or Hobbes (ibid., I, 108–109) and explicitly refers to res extensa and “extended substance, body or matter in the philosophy of Descartes” (ibid., I, 117–118).

 Cudworth was building on Pierre Gassendi’s seminal work. Gassendi (1592–1652) was the key figure for the dissemination of Epicureanism in the 17^th century. Levitin writes: “The historiographical obsession with labelling Cudworth a Platonist has obscured the fact that the contemporary with whom he engaged most on the issue of matter theory was Gassendi” (Levitin, Ancient Wisdom, 355). It is true that Cudworth draws upon Gassendi’s work but he is far from supporting the Frenchman. Philosophically, Cudworth is utterly opposed to Gassendi:

We may observe the Fraud and Juggling of Gassendus, who…extols and applauds Epicurus, as one who approached nearer to Christianity than the other Philosophers, in that he denied the World to be an animal; whereas according to the language and Notions of those times, to deny the Worlds animation, and to be an Atheist or to deny a God, was one and the same thing (TIS, II, 175).

One might note that Cudworth accuses Gassendi of “Fraud and Juggling” and that his atheism was cognate with his denial of the animating presence of the Divine in the world. Cudworth’s key hermeneutical principle is that “All great errours have ever been intermingled with some truth” (True Notion of the Lord’s supper, 1). 

The problem of ‘atheism’ is a defining question for the Cambridge Platonists as a group. Henry More published his Antidote Against Atheism in 1652. Smith’s Select Discourses, published posthumously in 1660, contains chapters on atheism or the soul’s immortality, where he attacks “the Epicurean herd”, presents the true metaphysical and contemplative man in whom the soul has already attained to communion with the Divine Nature (Smith, Select Discourses, 17). 

The splendid frontispiece of the 1678 first edition of  The True Intellectual System of the Universe constitutes a visual image of Cudworth’s thesis (the engraving is by R. White after a painting by Jan Batista Caespers). On one side we see the “Theists”, including Socrates, Pythagoras and Aristotle, contemplating or gesturing towards the heavens. There is a wreath with the word “Victory” inscribed upon a column behind them. On the other side are the wilting atheistic ancients, Anaximander, Strato and Epicurus, appearing somewhat dejected and gazing downward. Next to them we see crumbling wreath bearing the word “Confusion”. The presence of Pythagoras rather than Plato expresses what Gerson calls the Ur-Platonism thesis.

As we shall see later, much of the controversy depends upon the philosophical questions about the nature of mind and cause. One aspect of this is the acceptance of atomism or corpusculareanism. This is not an argument for claiming that the ‘Platonism’ is diluted or misattributed. The sundering of atomism from Democritean fatalistic atheism was a central aim of the True Intellectual System (cf. Clucas, ‘Poetic atomism in seventeenth-century England). Cudworth cites Posidonius, Sextus Empiricus and Strabo in attributing the doctrine of atomism to a Phoenician called Moschus and the first Greek atomist was Pythagoras. Democritus and Leucipus, however, took atomism as a materialistic theory. They “derive the original of all things in the universe from senseless atoms…so that there could not be any God…” (TIS, I, 33–34). 

Lloyd Gerson in his recent book From Plato to Platonism has argued that Plato’s own Platonism, so to speak, was produced out of a matrix he calls “Ur-Platonism” (Lloyd Gerson, From Plato to Platonism, 9–19). On Gerson’s account, Ur-Platonism is the conjunction of five robust refusals: the rejection of naturalism, nominalism, mechanism, materialism, relativism, and skepticism. Gerson plausibly and powerfully represents Plato’s Platonism as the endeavour to attempt to develop a coherent alternative to the various forms of skepticism, relativism, materialism, mechanism, nominalism and naturalism that flourished in Antiquity and which remerged with great force in the Renaissance and Early Modern period. 

Cudworth’s position overlaps neatly with Gerson’s approach. Through Hobbes’s radical nominalism and mechanistic determinism, Cudworth could harness anew the ancient arguments employed by Platonists against Stoic materialism and Epicurean reductionism and the skepticism of Sextus, not the least the problems linked to mind and causality. This is the age of Hobbes and Spinoza, and the de facto atheism of these critics of traditional theism. Plato in the tenth book of the Laws presents mechanistic materialism, what we would call reductive materialism, as the source of atheism. Plato’s counterargument is that the harmony and order, i.e. techne of the universe cannot be the product of accident, tyche, and requires a governing mind. This is the position that Aristotle presents in book twelve of his Metaphysics, as do all Platonists afterwards, not least Plotinus and Proclus. Only a top down metaphysics, in that sense a theological metaphysics can explain a genuinely intelligible universe.

The subtitle of The True Intellectual System is significant: Wherein, all the reason and philosophy of atheism is confuted: and its impossibility demonstrated. The true intellectual system is concerned with the question of the existence of God, in which Cudworth endeavours to show that monotheism is natural to mankind, yet the confusion of atheism can be traced to very ancient sources. One of the quotations is from Book 10 of the Laws 887d: 

φέρε δή, πῶς ἄν τις μὴ θυμῷ λέγοι περὶ θεῶν ὡς εἰσίν; ἀνάγκη γὰρ δὴ χαλεπῶς φέρειν καὶ μισεῖν ἐκείνους οἳ τούτων ἡμῖν αἴτιοι τῶν λόγων γεγένηνται καὶ γίγνονται 

Well now, how is it possible, without getting angry, to argue for the existence of gods? Clearly, one necessarily gets cross and annoyed with these people who put us to the trouble and continue to put us to the trouble of producing these explanations (The Laws, 414).

One might perhaps sense some of Cudworth’s own frustration at the length of his own endeavour to defeat atheism, a target he depicts in dramatic terms as “a certain strange kind of monster, with four heads, that are all of them perpetually biting, tearing, and devouring one another” (TIS, I, 143). The emergence of powerful critiques of theism in Hobbes and Spinoza and the development of Neo-Stoicism and Neo-Epicureanism drove Cudworth to the opinion that Plato was right that the metaphysics of atheism needs to be challenged. Cudworth viewed the essential debate in the mid to late 17^th century as an instance of Plato’s perennial conflict of the Gods (friends of forms) and the Giants (materialists) in the Sophist 246a–c:

Wherefore the same Plato tells us, that there had been always, as well, as then there was, a perpetual war and controversy in the world, and, as he calls it, a kind of gigantomachy betwixt these two parties or sects of men; the one, that held that there was no other substance in the world besides body; the other, that asserted incorporeal substance (ibid., I, 35).

Cudworth views all forms of atheism as emerging out of “pneumatophobia” or “a fear of spirit and a near superstitious reverence for matter as the only numen” (ibid., I, 200. See Kroll, The Material Word). The motivating idea of the entire True Intellectual System of the Universe is whether matter should be understood as derived from mind or the other way around. The atheist position, and here Cudworth is agreeing with Plato’s diagnosis of the atheist in book 10 of the Laws, is that “all animality, sense and consciousness, is a secondary, derivative and accidental thing, generable and corruptible, arising out of particular concretions of matter organized and dissolved together with them” (ibid., I, 202–203). The debate about atheism and theism is inextricably linked to the problem of the “stubborn necessity of matter” (ibid., II, 594) and the claim that “the divine Mind and Wisdom hath so printed its seal or signature upon the matter of the whole corporeal world, as that fortune and chance could never possibly have counterfeited the same” (ibid., I, 602). 

Materialism seemed in part vindicated if nature could be explained in exclusively physical properties of location, shape and size without recourse to immaterial or spiritual causality. The radical Cartesian sundering of spirit and extension seemed to threaten the intelligibility and presence of the Divine. The existence of spirit on the Cartesian model, and indeed the supreme spiritual Divine substance, was thereby shut off from the physical world. 

Cudworth observes: “They make a kind of dead and wooden world, as it were a carved statue, that hath nothing vital nor magical at all in it. Whereas to those, who are considerative, it will plainly appear, that there is a mixture of life or plastic nature, together with mechanism, which runs through the whole corporeal universe” (ibid., I, 221). The physical world is likened to a physical artefact, wholly distinct from its source and maker, or without any transcendent informing principle. Henry More is cited with a reference to his Enchiridion Metaphysicum as an expert defender of the thesis that “all the effects of nature come to pass by material and mechanical necessity, or the mere fortuitous motion of matter, without any guidance or direction, is a thing no less irrational that it is impious and atheistical” (ibid., I, 220). 

The upshot and conclusion of all is, that [according to the Atomists] there is no such scale or ladder in nature as Theists and Metaphysicians suppose, no degrees of real perfection and entity one above another, as of life and sense above inanimate matter, of reason and understanding above sense; from whence it would be inferred, that the order of things in nature was in way of descent from higher and greater perfection, downward to lesser and lower, which is indeed to introduce a God (ibid., III, 341).

It is not philology but metaphysics and theology that provides the motor of Cudworth’s thought. He is intent on employing the riches of an ancient tradition in order to contribute to the debates of his own age. Philology is the ancilla theologiae and the aid to metaphysics. Other philosophers saw Cudworth as an expert guide. Locke endorsed the “Accurateness and Judgement” of Cudworth’s narrative of the “Opinions of the Greek Philosophers” (Hutton, ‘Some Thoughts concerning Ralph Cudworth’, 146). 

Hume’s Natural History of Religion is another example. In the case of Hume, history is employed in a manner diametrically opposed to Cudworth. As to the “theists of antiquity”, “polytheism is the original religion of mankind” (sentence?). Cudworth’s genealogy of religion is turned on its head. Rather than history supporting ‘orthodoxy’, history becomes an organ of critique. And it is buttressed by Hume’s naturalism: “What a peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we call thought, that we must thus make it the model of the whole universe?“ (Hume, Dialogues and Natural History of Religion, 50). It is hard to conceive of Hume not writing with Cudworth’s ‘system’ in mind, whether he is criticizing causation or received histories of monotheism. George Berkeley was a great admirer of the “learned Dr Cudworth”. He notes:

Proclus, in his Commentary on the Theology of Plato, observes there are two sorts of philosophers. The one placed Body first in the order of beings, and made the faculty of thinking depend thereupon, supposing that the principles of all things are corporeal; that Body most really or principally exists, and all other things in a secondary sense, and by virtue of that. Others, making all corporeal things to be dependent upon Soul or Mind, think this to exist in the first place and primary sense and the being of bodies to be altogether derived from and presuppose that of Mind (The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, V, 124). 

Berkeley may have been thinking of a passage like:

Mind [...] is a greater reality in nature, [...] the things, which belong to souls and minds, to rational beings as such, must not have less, but more reality in them, than the things in inanimate bodies. [...] it being impossible for a greater perfection to be produced from a lesser, [...] from whence things gradually descend downward, lower and lower, till they end in senseless matter“ (TIS, III, 434–435).

The issue for Cudworth is that of rational explanation of the universe, and a top down explanation that avoids the randomness of Epicurean and Neo-Epicurean theories of nature. 

Nature, transcendent Causality and Divine Will

Le Clerc noted that “Cudworth also correctly and excellently remarks that the being, whose property it is to make another being commence its existence, must not only be possessed of all the perfections which the being produced by it is supposed to enjoy; but must also have a power of action by which it can be the cause of something” (TIS, III, 133–134). The theism advocated in Cudworth’s The True Intellectual System of the Universe is distinct from the ‘mechanic theism’ of Descartes. Cudworth is the inheritor and exponent of a form of Neoplatonic theism that could be called “mystical monotheism” (I am using the terminology of Kenney, Mystical Monotheism: A Study in Ancient Platonic Theology). 

Plotinus, Scotus Eriugena and Eckhart would all constitute instances of the downplaying of creatio ex nihilo in favour of creatio ex Deo. The whole world is Deus explicatus (cf. TIS, I, p. 515). Cudworth’s discussion of the ‘Pagan Theists’ and ‘Theologers’ should include some consideration of the thorny problem of the metaphors of procession or influx or emanation. The much-used (but little understood) word ‘emanation’ does not correspond to any one Greek philosophical term but a group (some might say cloud) of metaphors in Plotinus and other Neoplatonists (usually of light, water or seeds). 

The roots of this language lie in the materialistic Stoic theory of the fiery breath that comes from and returns to the sun. Plotinus, however, always rejects the pantheistic implications of such Stoic language. It is the correspondence or analogy between the κόσμος νοητός and the κόσμος αἰσθητός that is crucial. It is important to bear in mind the distinction between the intelligible cosmos (κόσμος νοητός, kosmos noetos, sometimes νοητικός, noetikos, Latin mundus intelligibilis) and the physical cosmos (κόσμος αἰσθητός, kosmos aisthetos or in the Latin mundus sensibilis). This contrast between an intelligible world and the physical cosmos is of Platonic provenance, and was firmly established in Middle Platonism, drawing especially upon Plato’s Timaeus 27d-47e. 

The κόσμος νοητικός is the eternal world of ideas, while the κόσμος αἰσθητός is the image of that in the changing physical world. In medieval philosophy the Book of Causes (Liber de causis), and the manifold commentaries written on it, employs the language of procession, influx or emanation. Cudworth wishes to sustain the vision of a universe originating in its transcendent Cause and suffused with the energy of that First Cause into the lower levels of Being as “radii Deitatis” and “rays of the Deity” (TIS, I, 515). “God expanded or unfolded, and when they call the creatures, as St. Jerome and others often do, radios Deitatis, ‘the rays of the Deity’ System (TIS, III, 80–81).

The Neoplatonic structure of Cudworth’s thought, as opposed to some more generic ‘Platonism’, can be seen in the stress upon the following four tenets of ‘emanative power to create’. These can be listed as:

1. Procession or causality is a movement from the greater to the lesser: 

In the things Generated from Eternity, or Produced by way of natural Emanation, there is no progress upwards, but all Downwards, and still a Gradual Descent into Greater Multiplicity…’ That which is Generated or Emaneth, immediately from the First and Highest Being, is not the very same thing with it, as if it were nothing but that Repeated again and Ingeminated; and as it is not same, so neither can it be Better than it. (Plotinus, Enneads, 5, Bk 3, chp 15). From whence it follows, that it must needs be Gradually subordinate and Inferiour to it (TIS, II, 391.).

Cudworth refers explicitly to Plotinus but equally he could have taken this from Proclus: “Accordingly every cause properly so called, inasmuch as it both is more perfect than that which proceeds from it (prop. 7) and itself furnishes the limits of its production, transcends the instruments, the elements, and in general all that is described as a by-cause” (Proclus, Elements of Theology, 73).

2. That which processes from its source is both like and unlike its originator. The Wisdom of God furnishes ‘its Stamps and Signatures every where throughout the World’ (TIS, III, 597) or ‘Nature is not the Divine Art Archetypal but Ectypal’ (ibid., I, 281). 

The natural order, for Cudworth, is reflecting its transcendent source, both distinct from its origin and yet participating in it.

3. The reflection in the effect of the cause is present since the effect is coterminous with the transcendent cause, just as the mirrored image depends upon the presence of its source. Cudworth says that “the Plastick life of Nature is but the mere Umbrage of Intellectuality, a faint and shadowy Imitation of Mind and Understanding; upon which it doth as Essentially depend, as the Shadow doth upon the Body, the Image in the Glass upon the Face, or the Echo upon the Original Voice” (ibid., I, 172).

4. The Source remains unreduced by its procession. The frequent misunderstanding of Neoplatonism as pantheism rests upon the failure to appreciate this point. Cudworth writes of God as the “fountain of love and goodness” (ibid., III, 463) and as “fountain of life and understanding” (ibid., III, 453). Yet the Divine is not abated by its procession. In part this is due to the doctrine of divine ideas. The mind of God contains all that is and can be and is the noetic paradigm of the physical cosmos: 

The Mind of God is nothing but the intelligible essences of things, or their natures as conceivable, and objects of the mind. [...] So that the true meaning of these eternal essences is indeed no other than this, that knowledge is eternal; or that there is an eternal mind that comprehendeth the intelligible natures and ideas of all things, whether actually existing or possible only, their necessary relations to one another, and all the immutable verities belonging to them. [...] that there is one eternal unmade Mind and perfect incorporeal Deity, a real and substantial Ghost or Spirit, which comprehending itself, and all the extent of its own power, the possibility of things, and their intelligible natures, together with an exemplar or platform of the whole world, produced the same accordingly’ (ibid., III, 401).

Proclus might seem like a philosophical apologist for Greek polytheism and an unlikely ally for Cudworth. Cudworth is not without some criticism of Proclus “who had some peculiar fancies and whimsies of his own, and was indeed a confounder of the Platonic Theology, and a mingler of much unintelligible stuff with it” (ibid., 510). Yet Cudworth’s use of Proclus as his ally has its justification. Proclus’s vision of intelligible deities, his ‘henadology’, constitutes a level of reality subordinate to the ineffable and unparticipated One. 

The seminal importance of Proclus for the works of Dionysius the Areopagite has long been recognized. Moreover, his influence upon Western theism was enormous through the Arabic paraphrase of his theology (with some elements from Plotinus) called the Book of Causes (Liber de causis), a text, based upon Proclus’s Elements of Theology, translated from Arabic into Latin in the twelfth century, and attributed to Aristotle. Hence a Neoplatonic text was viewed as the culmination of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Albert the Great commented upon it, as did Thomas Aquinas (on the subsequent history, see Calma [ed.], Neoplatonism in the Middle Ages: I. New Commentaries on Liber de causis). The metaphysics of the Book of Causes is a model of absolute causality. The transcendent cause is the archetype of the world and as infinite plenitude. There is a hierarchy of perfection and a gradual descent from the greater to the less. Moreover, the effect participates in the cause like the image in the archetype.

Just as the cosmos is a theophany of the transcendent Principle, so too the different religions are all reflections of a true monotheism. Yet this is different from what Assmann designates as “cosmotheism”, which Cudworth in fact critiques. Cudworth explicitly rejects the idea that matter is self-sufficient – this Stoic materialism is cognate with the foundational error of Stoicism that matter can generate mind without a transcendent intellect superior to the world. This is also linked to the monstrous error of determinism. As an Origenist (and Plotinian) Cudworth is radically opposed to Stoic determinism. Cudworth’s own adherence is to a radical dialectic of immanence and transcendence: a Platonic via media between radical transcendence and Stoic immanence. 

Hence the question is not merely the conflict between theism and atheism joined to the problem of mind. It is also about the kind of theism at stake. As Lutz Bergemann has recently argued, Cudworth’s metaphysics is a philosophy of power: God, as Plotinus insists, is δύναμις πάντων, the power and source of all/to all and yet not arbitrary power (Lutz Bergemann, System aus Transformation). Indeed Cudworth explicitly uses Plotinus’s magnificent treatise On the Freedom and the Will of the One. In this remarkably theistic treatise, the causal source of the physical cosmos is the immaterial abounding transcendent cause and is also presented through the image of the King (ὁ βασιλεὺς).

 In VI 8, 15 (cf. Leroux, Traité Sur la Liberté, 305), Plotinus writes: 

“It is this, then, and not something else, but what it ought to be; it did not happen to be like this, but had to be like this; but this ‘had to be’ is principle of all things that had to be.” 

Cudworth adds θεός (Theos) to the Greek. The passage reads: ”θεός ὅπερ ἐχρῆν εἶναι· οὐ τοίνυν οὕτω συνέβη, ἀλλ´ ἔδει οὕτως· τὸ δὲ «ἔδει» τοῦτο ἀρχὴ τῶν ὅσα ἔδει: 

God is essentially that, which ought to be; and he therefore did not happen to be such as he is: and this first ought to be the principle of all things whatsoever that ought to be” (TIS, III, 463) 

One might legitimately object to Cudworth’s resolute harnessing of Plotinus to the theistic camp, but Cudworth can draw upon a precedent in Ficino and others in identifying the supreme principle that is both transcendent and immanent in the cosmos with the Christian godhead (on Ficino’s momentous synthesis of Plotinian metaphysics and Christian theology, see Ficino, Marsilio. Platonic Theology). The supreme being is absolute freedom but this is not to be understood in a crude anthropomorphic manner: “God’s will is ruled by his justice, and not his justice ruled by his will; and therefore God himself cannot command what is in its own nature unjust” (TIS, III, 494. Cf. ibid., III, 512).

 Indeed, the mistake of the atheists is to confuse this anthropomorphism with the genuine concept of God: “In the next place, this wish of Atheists is altogether founded upon a mistaken notion of God Almighty too, [...] His will is not mere will, such as hath no other reason besides itself; but it is law, equity, and chancery” (ibid., III, 494). This is not the voluntaristic power of the ultra-Calvinistic deity but “the abounding fecund energy that is the μέτρον πάντων or measure of all that is both ‘measureless to man’ while the gauge and boundary of Being, (omnia in mensura et numero et pondere disposuisti, “Thou hast ordered all things in measure, and number, and weight”, Wisdom, 11,21). (See W. Beierwaltes, 'Augustins Interpretation von Sapientia 11, 21'). 

While “some fanaticks of latter times have made God to be all in a gross sense, so as to take away all real distinction betwixt God and the creature, and indeed to allow no other being besides God” (TIS, I, 513), there is no diminishing of the cause in its procession into the physical cosmos. The Cause, while not exhausted or lessened by it procession, remains within its effect. Yet the paradigm of divine immanence, Cudworth insists, is “a very ticklish point and easily liable to mistake and abuse” (ibid., I, 515). 

While it is unlikely that Cudworth would have read Spinoza’s Ethics, with its strident Deus sive natura, it is most likely that he was apprised of its existence by Van Limborch and Cudworth quotes Spinoza in the True Intellectual System as ”that Late Theological Politician” (ibid., III, 4; cf. J. Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 152). Sections of Spinoza’s Ethics were in circulation in 1663 and a full draft by 1665 (cf. Nadler, Spinoza: A Life, 225). Spinoza regards the notion of the will of the Divine as an evident absurdity.