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On Natural Desire (primarily to Coyote-but welcoming anyone)

On Natural Desire (primarily to Coyote-but welcoming anyone)

Postby Kolbitar » January 25th, 2008, 1:55 pm

On Natural Desire (primarily to Coyote-but welcoming anyone)... (This can also be seen as a continuation of my first post On Natural Desire ... to salanor, which I promised at the end).

I'm going to post ...to Coyote in three parts... (I'd ask anyone who'd like to respond to hold off until all three parts are finished... thanks.)

Part I.

I think we all agree that determining the meaning of the equality of man is pivotal, and not only to this discussion; its theme is a golden thread running through the American fabric, stitched over time by an unforgettable line of successors. The framers “embalmed” the equality truth in The Declaration of Independence, Abraham Lincoln hallowed it in his Gettysburg Address, and Martin Luther King reclaimed it in his I Have a Dream speech; in addition, as some of you have intimated, the Constitution backs it with the consent of the governed and the full force of law -- most specifically in the Fourteenth Amendment.

Coyote, you write, “…I always took (we are all equal) as a legal statement”; likewise, cyranorox writes, “…the Constitution defines [men] as equal before the law.” Now, both statements are correct as they stand, but the important question is from what does the legal status of its truth derive? Is the Fourteenth Amendment solely a product of “social contract,” or does it stem from immutable and inalienable rights? Is it something we grant if we want, or something we ought to grant no matter what?

I think it is emphatically clear that the spirit and conviction behind the Declaration, the Gettysburg Address, the I Have a Dream speech; behind these and all similarly momentous events of human history underscore a visceral allegiance to timeless and objective truth, to an absolute and binding standard of justice; and that our Constitution is a mere humble (though noble) and derivative reflection of these spirited facts. Men and women die for the conviction that these truths are, in fact, truths; that they are more than just kind gestures, which are nothing but some pretended equality our whim calls “law.”

It is a sad fact that the truth “all men are created equal” was slow in becoming a practical reality, but is no less true for that reason. Lincoln writes, “The assertion that ‘all men are created equal’ was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain; and it was placed in the Declaration not for that but for its future use.” Lincoln’s problematic (though certainly not unreasonable) assumption is that future users would understand the assertion; that “all mean are created equal” would maintain its meaning for us within its intellectual context -- but it hasn’t. There are other similarly problematic phrases, which, though they remain active in public discourse do so only as shallow relics with mere sentimental value; thus, besides causing great confusion, they have descended from a generally accepted cohesive philosophy to the mere art of political rhetoric. The “Laws of Nature” is a case in point. “Self-evident” is another. “Inalienable rights” is another. But perhaps the most widely used, misunderstood phrase of them all, next to “all men are created equal”, is “the pursuit of happiness.” In order to really understand and, in the spirit of Lincoln, unfold these truths, I think we must look to their sources; I think we can do this most clearly with the “happiness phrase,” which gives us a key insight..

Mortimer J. Adler, discussing the term “happiness”, points out that “Thomas Jefferson and other signers of the Declaration had read Aristotle and Plato -- this was part of their education.” He goes on, “ Both Aristotle and the Declaration use the word "happiness" in a sense which refers to the quality of a whole human life -- what makes it good as a whole, in spite of the fact that we are not having fun or a good time every minute of it.” This understanding of “happiness” was taken for granted at the time, it was commonly accepted: one can trace it back to the influential thinkers of the past, such as St. Thomas, Boethius and St. Augustine – then on to Aristotle and Plato.

Boethius, for instance, gives us a succinct definition of the pursuit of happiness, which ties in directly to the question of equality. He writes (summing up Plato and Aristotle), [happiness is] "a life made perfect by the possession in aggregate of all good things." So conceived,” says Mortimer Adler, “happiness is not a particular good itself, but the sum of goods."

It should be clear, on any account, that the conception of happiness found in the Declaration assumes no possible conflict between various pursuits of happiness; it assumes a common end, a common good, for everyone, which includes the potential happiness of everyone else.

END Part I
Last edited by Kolbitar on January 25th, 2008, 2:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.
The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare tomorrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before. --Chesterton

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Postby Kolbitar » January 25th, 2008, 2:00 pm

Part II.

Here’s a quick three part summary of Part I: First, our authoritative fathers of freedom, such as Jefferson, Lincoln and King, have treated the equality of man not as some whimsical legal contract, but as if it is a fact (of nature and/or of nature’s God) from which legal implementations then, and only then, derive their just existence.
Second, the proposition is universal and is always there for “future use” as the basis for the potential expansion of true freedom – “when circumstances allow.”
Third, there’s an inner logic uniting the terms used in the Declaration, which has deeper roots in a philosophy stretching back through medieval Christendom to ancient Greece. Concepts like the equality of man, the Laws of Nature, Happiness, inalienable rights; these are all characteristics of what the authors took to be objective reality – a reality serving as the foundation for constitutional law.

When we take the three points of our summary together, I think we are sufficiently equipped with a method for both understanding and applying the proposition of the equality of man to various circumstances. Therefore, I will first attempt to apply this method to understanding the equality proposition by offering an illustration (again, the method must be consistent with finding equality as an inalienable Law of Nature, preceding “equality before the law”).

For the sake of discussion let’s pretend we can create perfect triangles in reality, and that we can create many different types of perfect triangles; triangles of all manner of sizes and colors at either right angles or various degrees of acute or obtuse angles. Every triangle we could create would be different yet each would share the same essential nature with every other triangle, the same essential nature would define each as a triangle. Therefore if I said all such triangles are created equal when clearly some are larger and/or more to our liking in shape and color, then in what way could I possibly assert that all triangles are created equal? Well, if I went on to define their essential nature and said "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all triangles are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inherent properties, that among these is the property that the sum of angles is always 180 degrees"; if I put it that way it would make perfect sense to talk about equality.

In the same way, when we talk about man and the equality of man we are talking about man's essential nature, we are talking about what each person shares with every other person. The first and most general thing each person shares is the desire for happiness (which depends on life and liberty). But is the desire for happiness too general to mean anything? Well, we do know, from the fact that happiness is an equal and inalienable right (certainly according to the Declaration) that it must be a common goal or the common good. But this, in itself, somewhat begs the question: is happiness defined by an assigned equality, or is equality essential to happiness? That is, regarding the latter, is the potential happiness of another essential to my happiness, or, regarding the former, is it convenience (the social contract we’re arguing against)? I’ll address the issue from the Declaration itself, first, and then tackle the “begged question” afterwards. Note, however, that we’ve already gone deeper into a digression for which the Declaration really had no time or taste. It is therefore necessary to use its own principles, assumptions, and sources in order to employ Lincoln’s prophetic “future use”.

St. Thomas Aquinas stands as one of the great figures in the philosophical tradition between Aristotle and the Declaration (Aquinas almost single handedly, by the weight of his sanctity and wisdom, established the Aristotelian tradition as the natural basis for understanding the theology of Catholicism). He has some relevant things to say; he says, for instance, that, in addition to our fundamental desire for happiness, which is the first principle of morality, there are four basic and essential human inclinations: Self-preservation, procreation, community -- starting with the family though also implying society, government and a cumulative human history -- and rationality (knowledge and free will). Why is that relevant? The Declaration, as we said, assumes a common goal, which is human happiness; in addition, the equality of man consists in man’s innate potential to participate in this common goal. Now, aren’t these inclinations which Aquinas lists simply properties of the pursuit in general, which are necessary to attain our common goal? In other words, can the common good, happiness, be reached without the existence of inclinations (and means to their attainment) for human beings to preserve themselves, procreate, unite in community, and grow in moral and intellectual virtues? Of course not.

Therefore, in the context of the aim of a common good our inclinations are natural -- part of Natural Law -- only in so far as they tend towards and sustain it (the common good). For example, heterosexual marriage is an equal good, good for all; it is established in a natural need of the common good, thus governmental “special” treatment of it is not inconsistent with the equality principle – the government is merely recognizing it as a natural need and promoting its importance. Conversely, if the government were to o.k. homosexual marriage they would not be recognizing a natural need of the common good, they would be fabricating a right not in accord with the equality principle. In other words, in doing so they would depart from natural law and be effectively working on the principle that might makes right, which is a whimsical “principle”, thus hardly a principle at all.

Now, when people hear the phrase “natural law” they tend to think, perhaps, of animals in nature. For instance, animals have the instinct for self-preservation, procreation, and they even exist in groups or packs, or communities. However, that’s where the comparison must stop: we are not mere animals, we are rational animals. Jefferson, again following Aquinas and Aristotle, elsewhere writes, “We believe that man (is) a rational animal, endowed by nature with rights, and with an innate sense of justice.” Our intellects and wills set us apart from our mere animal instincts, so that human happiness involves the intellectual and moral virtues.

The relevance of our rationality (intellect and will) in human happiness is that only by it can we answer the questions I raised earlier, “is happiness defined by an assigned equality, or is equality essential to happiness? That is, regarding the latter, is the potential happiness of another essential to my happiness, or, regarding the former, is it convenience (the social contract we’re arguing against)?” Up to this point I’ve been arguing natural inclinations in the context of the Declaration, which assumes a common good in its happiness clause; but the argument still invites those same questions (though the answers certainly have been hinted at, even touched on).

END Part II
Last edited by Kolbitar on January 25th, 2008, 2:21 pm, edited 2 times in total.
The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare tomorrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before. --Chesterton

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Postby Kolbitar » January 25th, 2008, 2:01 pm

Part III

In Part II we argued from within the Declaration, with help from sources, to determine the general properties of the common good, which outline our pursuit of happiness; what we have left to do is to tie this together with the “natural law”, also referenced in the Declaration, in order to say that it’s not merely convenience or good grace by which we “contract” liberty for, for example, the property-less, African-Americans, and women; that liberty for all is, in fact, a law of nature, which we absolutely and imperatively ought to reflect in our Constitution.

Concerning liberty; I think most people have at least a vague understand of the difference between liberty and license. I think most people tend to think of “liberty” and equality at least implicitly in these terms:

“Liberty to act on one’s behalf must be fenced off by the equal liberty of others, so that freedom for one individual doesn’t become oppression for a second.” –Evans


I don’t think I’ve ever read a more concise and wonderfully put definition of what liberty for all must look like (this is one of those quotes where an author fits into prose what you’ve always believed but never thought of with such explicit and communicable precision). However, despite its wonderful virtues (and it has more, as you will see -- I’m not merely explicating a redundant point) our question remains: is liberty for all established in an “ought” of natural law as opposed to the convenience of social contract?


I left off Part II speaking about our rationality -- our intellect and our will; that herein lies the basis for discovering the difference between what’s natural for man and what’s natural for animals. The difference is that man not only has instincts and inclinations, he knows about them, and can arrange them according to an outline, according to a “pursuit.” But this “pursuit” is not spontaneous, we have warring tendencies within us, tendencies which have to be disciplined, which take a tremendous effort to tame. Here’s an illustration: Let’s imagine millions of people suddenly transported to an undiscovered country -- the result would be chaos; this raw state would need a governing body to establish and maintain peace, or harmony. In order for this government to be a fair government, it would have to, as we said, “fence off liberty to act with the equal liberty of others.” It would have to tame, so to speak, those “tendencies” which would oppress others in order to have peace. This is precisely what man has to do at an individual level, with the inner disharmony of his soul: we have to fence off the liberty of warring tendencies within ourselves, which would otherwise oppress us, would keep us from attaining what is truly good for us. In a word, we have to practice Virtue.

Before we touch on virtue, there’s a tacit distinction we have to bring to light. Only what is truly good for us can belong to the desires of our essential make-up, for “the good” defines our essence, it is our first principle and our end. But sometimes we don’t have desires for what is truly good for us, that is, sometimes we don’t feel good desires. Conversely, we often feel those desires which we know are not good for us if we follow them. The anorexic clearly doesn’t feel the desire to eat, but the need itself is still there. Certain persons can feel healthy, though their body is riddled with cancer, and they have the need for health. The mere presence of a felt desire, or the lack of one, does not necessarily mean anything in itself. Therefore, we can draw a distinction between natural needs, which are sometimes conscious, sometimes not; and conscious desires, which are not natural. We can call the former needs and the latter wants. With this distinction in mind, let’s take a look at “Virtue.”

Virtue, in general, is a habitual disposition, a trained habit of the will, an over-all tendency of the entire being. The Cardinal virtues are traditionally known as Wisdom, Moderation, Courage and Justice. Wisdom involves the governance of desires towards the end of "a life made perfect by the possession in aggregate of all good things." Moderation is just that, moderating desires. Courage is sticking it out when certain desires (which include aversions) become inordinate. And last, Justice. But before I get to a definition of Justice, I think it would be instructive to note a dilemma, which Plato touched on, called the Ring of Gyges.

To keep it short, the Ring of Gyges dilemma boils down to this, If I can get away with anything – even by the help of a magic ring which can make me invisible – , why should I be just towards other people? The answer, as Mortimer Adler notes, is that justice is harmony of the soul, it is the outcome of mastering desires, of quieting their conflicts, through the other virtues, which makes justice existentially inseparable from them. Tuning yourself, so to speak, to desire what is truly good for you will prevent any desire, which would seek to harm -- which would be out of tune. Since we have to train our desires in order to quiet them, and since we share an identical (though distinct) essential nature with other human beings, then we cannot act against another without also acting against ourselves. Violating justice reveals warring desires, not inner harmony naturally tending us towards the good (again the common good is inescapable, because our common nature is just that – common). In so far as we’re equal, we must keep our individual natures aligned and tending towards the common good.

Let me explore this point a bit further, it’s critical. We can say this: I know that I am a human being seeking happiness; I cannot deny this, so that, neither can I deny that, since you are a human being, you also seek happiness (just like I cannot deny that a thinking substance assumes the principle of non-contradiction when thinking): there’s an implicit recognition – I am not essentially different from you, we are equal in nature, or essence. By virtue of this equality I possess a very real position of insight, which puts me in an inescapable relation to all human beings with whom I am equal. Now, part of my happiness lies in the practice of virtue, in the inner harmony regulating warring tendencies. [Therefore, my pursuit of happiness, even if I say I want to be a hermit and live completely isolated from society, friends, and family; my pursuit of happiness never the less assumes that virtue is a universal ingredient – it is part of what makes us equal. Now, it may be true that I can live on my own as a hermit completely isolated from all members of the human race with whom I am equal in nature; however, I cannot maintain that this practice is a universal ingredient of happiness, so it does not stem from my essential nature. Therefore, I cannot set it up, in itself, as the final good towards which I’m training myself in virtue; it may be a part of the pursuit, of the training process, but it can neither conflict with the end, nor be the end in itself.] You can look at it this way, Justice, which is harmony of the soul, which is a universal ingredient of happiness, reveals its absence in a person who is acting against another’s pursuit of happiness; this is the case simply because that person, by virtue of his rationality, is universally in all people due to his position of insight -- like the imaginary conscious acute triangle who excludes the obtuse triangle from the definition of triangle is revealing that he doesn’t understand his own nature--; thus, for a person to act against another’s pursuit is to act against his own, revealing true disharmony, despite what he may temporarily “feel”. The obvious conclusion to all of this is that, when we factor in our rational nature, we cannot escape the common good as the context of our pursuit of happiness.

Let me borrow a familiar illustration. If I am a (Euclidian) triangle -- one of those triangles we mentioned earlier -- then I share with my fellow triangles the properties that define me as such. I may be obtuse, and I may be green, but I can still objectively say of all my fellow acute, yellow triangles, and of all my fellow right, orange triangles, and all the rest of them, that they, in fact, must have -- despite all of our differences -- angles equal to the sum of 180 degrees. What I cannot say is only my family of obtuse, green triangles, which, for sake of illustration, we’ll say are the only triangles I ever knew; what I cannot say is that only obtuse, green triangles have angles equal to the sum of 180 degrees. That would be a false generalization. Likewise with ethics. If I am of a human nature which is obligated to pursue a happiness which is objectively and clearly definable to a certain extent, then by virtue of sharing that nature with all other human beings I can say, objectively speaking, that they too are obligated to pursue happiness in a definable way, to a certain extent.

In regards to homosexuality, the idea may be advanced that practicing homosexuals, so long as they are personally attaining inner growth, are, “by their fruit”, showing the practice to be in accord with the pursuit of happiness, that is, the common good. But again, we must be cautious here, for as we’ve noted the absence of a felt natural desire, or the presence of a felt unnatural desire, does not in itself mean anything. The position of insight we have --from within human nature, underneath the common good -- not only tells me what others “ought” to do, it gives me a point of reference to better understand myself, and my own lack of felt needs as well as deceptive desires. In this sense “No man is an island, entire of itself...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee"; nor should I “send to know” how my personal growth is doing apart from the standard of the common good, which is like fixed heavens over a vantage point we all share.

In sum, here’s how the argument progresses: Liberty depends on the common good which depends on justice which depends on equality, which depends on natural law. In order for me to say whether the Constitution is just, I must have a fixed standard – the Laws of Nature. Equality is the link between the Laws of Nature and justice, and the common good is the link between justice and liberty. Natural law = equality = justice = common good = liberty for all.

I think a denial of this model, tacitly or explicitly, is a default admission to the philosophy that might makes right. I also think that homosexual acts are contrary to the standard of the common good, and that people arguing their goodness have no basis for their view in natural law – certainly not for same sex marriage. The bottom line is that the nature of the common good, since it includes procreation and the stability of the family, conflicts with what would be the nature of homosexuality. The nature of the common good, reflecting our individual natures – our very core beings--, cannot be to have naturally sterile sex, plain and simple. To say it would, would be to say the common good reflects sterility as part of our individual natures. Obviously that is not true. The only other possibility would be to claim that the homosexual individual is somehow removed from the demands of the common good, from his link and obligation to it – thus to effectively claim inequality. But you simply cannot do that for justice (his need for harmony of the soul) and his position of insight as a rational being bind him to the universality of happiness, thus to the affirmation of the essential ingredients of the common good as such, which defines our pursuit. On the other hand, part of our rationality involves the use of reason to check our natural physical tendencies, through virtue, and that is the difference between choosing celibacy (self-control of a natural desire) and acting on an unnatural desire like the homosexual tendency.

END
The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare tomorrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before. --Chesterton

Sober Inebriation: http://soberinebriationblog.blogspot.com/
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