Man, Like the World, Has an End: Existential Readiness in Yves Simon's Thought

ALTHOUGH ARISTOTLE USED THE NOTION OF HEXIS or habitus to encompass both intellectual and practical realms of human activity, he distinguished between a hexis or habitus related to scientific knowledge and a hexis or habitus that related to the moral realm. Virtue, at least in the manner that we modernly use it, pertains only to the moral habitus. The scientific habitus (or for that matter the artistic habitus) is value neutral. Both art and science can be used for both good or evil. "With science, as with art, one can do as one pleases." Simon, 69. These hexeis or habitus do not have necessarily the disposition to goodness, to reliability, to imperativeness, to oughtness that the moral hexis or habitus displays.

Aristotle points to this distinction in an interesting way. The rational part of man is divided into to, one containing the rational principle proper (τὸ μὲν κυρίως καὶ ἐν αὑτῷ), and the other rational part being "obedient to its as a child to its father" (τὸ δ᾽ ὥσπερ τοῦ πατρὸς ἀκουστικόν τι). The moral habitus is, as it were, imperative. It has the voice of command of a father to his child. Nic. Eth., 1103a.

We seem to have become aware that science and art are value-free. They do not provide the means for their own governance, and are utterly incompetent to self-govern. Both science and art can be used for good or evil, and, though they can define what is good or evil from a purely technical or particular way, they cannot define what is good and evil from a largely, human use.* Unfortunately, our recognition that science and art are value-free has led many to think that as a consequence they ought not to be governed by any other standards except their particular standards. Thus scientists enter into realms like in vitro fertilization and experimentation on human embryos with reckless abandon, thinking they must do something because they can, and never pose the question of whether they ought to do something irrespective of the fact that they can. Similarly, we have artists that demand absolutely freedom from any restrictions, including moral restrictions, and so put out works that are offensive, immoral, and morally corrosive. There is a moral enormity in Pablo Picasso's view that "Art is never chaste. It ought to be forbidden to ignorant innocents, never allowed into contact with those not sufficiently prepared. . . . Where it is chaste, it is not art."** Far better, more artistic, and more authentically human is Pieter Breugel's message in his wood print "Following the Vice Unchastity." Breugel understood that vice darkens the mind, and hence also darkens art. LVXVRIA ENERVAT VIRES, EFFOEMINAT ARTVS. Lust enervates the strength, and weakens the arts. Luxurÿe stinckt. Sÿ is vol onsuuerheden. Sÿ breeckt die Crachten, en Sÿ swackt die leden. Unchastity stinks, it is full of dirt. It breaks one's might, and weakens limbs. All this is as graphically represented by Breugel as boldly as anything Picasso ever painted:

Pieter Breugel's Following the Vice Unchastity (Luxuria)

Simon contrasts the scientific habitus with the moral habitus, the former which relates to science, the latter which relates to moral virtue. To do so he uses the notion of "readiness," and distinguishes two kinds: qualitative and existential. Simon, 71. Science and virtue both contain a "qualitative readiness," and this is why Aristotle finds hexeis or habitus as encompassing both science and morals. However, virtue involves a sort of readiness which science does not, an "existential readiness," which Simon equates with "finality" or to the teleological question. Simon, 72. "Whenever we think of finality," we confront teleological questions which ask us what the purpose, end (telos), or meaning of an act or thing is, and so "we inevitably think of the good." Simon, 72. Therefore, the distinction between scientific or artistic habitus and moral habitus is that the latter inevitably is linked to the good, whereas for the two former, it is not.

Finality (or existential readiness in Simon's words) is found in all things, animate or animate. It is thus found in the affinity between Silver (Ag) and Chlorine (Cl), in the purpose or function of kidneys, of the pancreas, or of the gall bladder, or in man, or even the entirety of the cosmos, as a whole. There is, however, a sort of veil between us and the finality of things that are inanimate. We are somehow shielded from knowing, in any adequate way, the finality between Silver and Chlorine's combination, or any chemical process or affinity for that matter, or in the finality or purpose behind natural disasters such as earthquake, or a plague, or the eighteen men who died at the falling of the Tower of Siloam (Luke 13:4).

[T]hose who believe that finality is not totally irrelevant to our efforts to know the world invariably support their arguments with examples from the world of the living. Yet finality may not be the exclusive property of living things, and I rather think that there is finality wherever there is movement or process. The only trouble is that we do not know and may never know what most movements and processes in nature are good for. . . . [t]he good, or goodness, or a process--which is its finality--is most easily perceived in an among living things. . . . Thus while I remain convinced that wherever there is movement or process there is finality by metaphysical necessity, I also believe that in our common efforts to understand inanimate nature, we can do better with existential readiness [as a concept]. Because even the most stubborn mechanists cannot help recognizing this readings whenever they turn in nature . . . .

Simon, 72-74. There is therefore an analogous relationship between the finality of the movements and processes of inanimate nature (which we have difficulty knowing) and the movements and processes related to animate nature (which we have less difficulty knowing). The ancients (that is those before the 17th century and the Enlightenment, or die Aufklärung, or la Lumière when mechanistic notions of reality began their prevalence) recognized this overlap, and so they used the term "virtues" to refer both to the natural existential readiness (or finality) of both animate and inanimate movements or processes. Simon points to such a use of the term virtue in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (act II, sc. ii):

The earth that's nature's mother is her tomb;
What is her burying grave, that is her womb;
And from her womb children of divers kind
We sucking on her natural bosom find,
Many for many virtues excellent,
None but for some, yet all different.
O, mickle [great] is the powerful grace that lies
In herbs, plants, stones, and their true qualities;
For naught so vile that on the earth doth live,
But to the earth some special good doth give;
Nor aught so good, but, strain'd from that fair use,
Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse:
Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied,
And vice sometimes by action dignified. . . .

Thus virtues broadly understood are found in rocks, in herbs and plants, as well as in man. All the world, and each part of it, even the most rude, then, tended toward an end. And all life had meaning, purpose, an end given to it under the design and watch of the Providential God, the Creator and Father of all. The world, of course, was then "enchanted," or perhaps more accurately not yet "disenchanted" by intellectually clumsy men whose intellectual hands were all thumbs, and the natural law (understood in its most generic, broad sense) encompassed both inanimate objects and animate objects, including that rational animal, man. "In fact, seeing natural as well as human virtues grounded in 'natural laws' is a usage that stretches all the way back to classical antiquity." Simon, 74. Post-Enlightenment moderns divide the "laws of nature" from the "natural moral law," and there is cause for these two to be distinct, and in this regard they are not different than classical man. Yet the division that modern man has made between the "laws of nature" and the "natural [moral] law" has gone too far, the cut has been made too deep, so that nature has nothing to teach man, and man is separated from nature as a whole. Kant, it would appear, seemed to have nailed the last nail on the coffin of classical and traditional thought:

In the classical view, there are enlightening communications and similarities between these two worlds. In Kant, the emphasis is almost exclusively on their contrasts, on what sets them apart. I do not say that you cannot find in Kant some qualified recognition that morality may have something to do with nature. He is after all a profound thinker, and such people never get locked in absolutely untenable dogmatic positions. But there is little doubt that when Kant speaks of the starry skies above and the moral law within, he wants to bring out not what they might have in common but what sets them apart. By contrast, in Shakespeare no less than in Aristotle, there is continuity between the laws of nature and the laws of morality, and the 'virtue' of a physical thing is so called because of perceived resemblance to moral virtue. They are both seen as instances of existential readiness, which makes for trust, confidence, dependability, reliability, and indeed predictability.

Simon, 74-75.

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*For the distinction between the particular and human use of something, see the blog posting A Good Man is Hard to Find: Nature and Use.
**Pablo Picasso, quoted in Antonina Vallentin, Pablo Picasso (ch. 11, p. 268) (1957).

Virtue and its Substitutes: Emerson: Virtue is as Plant Does

RALPH WALDO EMERSON HAD A PRODIGIOUS TALENT: Writing. "He is a gifted writer, who can take a blank page of pager, pick up his pen, and as if by a miracle the page is soon covered with intelligible sentences," Simon admits. (One might also say some unintelligible sentences are part of intelligible sentences.) But Emerson suffered from prodigious intellectual and moral lapses: an unsound theology (pantheism), a lack of organization and system in both thought and in writing, and an absolutely disastrous moral recipe (spontaneity) based upon his pantheistic theology which divinized self, and de-divinized God, making us all God or each of us gods.

To encapsulate Emerson, to grasp his thought in the area of virtue, is almost hopeless as catching a sprite with a mousetrap, or taming a drop of water on a hot, greasy skillet. To read Emerson is to enter into a circular river, with shallows, shoals, rapids, and waterfalls, going deliciously round-and-round but not ever really getting anywhere. For Emerson it seems to be movement and not end that is important. Emerson is therefore as self-defeating, self-imploding, self-contradictory as a Buddhist Christian. He may be called Liberalism's (pan)theologian.

Emerson's notion of virtue is Thoreauian, but it comes with the additional twist of rank, proud pantheism which informs all that Emerson writes about moral virtue. Simon notes that Emerson also sports the Rousseauian "novel meaning of 'virtue'", but "makes this natural spontaneity proceed directly from a divine cause." Simon, 4. Spontaneity is the virtue of virtues for Emerson, because it is the spark of divinity in us. It is God in us that seeks to come out an express itself. Any curbing of such spontaneous self-expression--even by something like a traditional virtue or traditional dogma--is squelching God in Emerson's view. Society, in particular, is a wicked demon, and "is everywhere in a conspiracy against the manhood of everyone of its members." Simon, 5 (quoting Emerson) His recipe for virtue: non-conformity and inconsistency.

This is, of course, as foolish as a teacher of chefs suggesting that to his students that they cook Sunday morning pancakes not by following any recipe, but by following their spontaneity, so that if a particular student gets the urge to fix some flapjacks using rubber, hot sauce, and curdled milk: he ought to go right ahead and do it. He is a great chef, and anyone who tells him otherwise, including those retching on his pancakes, are in a conspiracy against him. After all, to be a great chef is to be misunderstood, for "to be great is to be misunderstood." Simon, 5 (quoting Emerson). But this is pure Emerson:

And so it goes: a commonplace followed by genuine insight followed by a half-truth followed by sometimes arrogant, sometimes unperceived contradictions.

Simon, 5.

This lack of system in Emerson clearly frustrates Simon, and it does suggest a sort of flippant lack of responsibility, a will-o'-the-wisp attitude to truth on the part of Emerson. But you won't find systems, or even the desire for systems in someone who says something like Emerson does in his famous essay on "Self Reliance":

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you, in your private heart, is true for all men, that is genius. . . . Great works of art have no more affecting lessor for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good humored flexibility the most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side.

Simon, 4-5 (quoting Emerson)

In the area of virtue, Emerson appears to have one overriding or characteristic doctrine: he opposes the spontaneous to the voluntary. Spontaneity is placed opposite will. Spontaneity is sacrosanct "intuition," will and reason are "tuition." To "involuntary perceptions," "a perfect faith is due," but not so for the "voluntary acts of his mind." Simon, 6 (quoting Emerson). In his essay on "Spiritual Laws" Emerson states that "our moral nature is vitiated by any interference of our will." Simon, 7 (quoting Emerson). Clearly, for Emerson, the will (and reason) is only something that is used to curb spontaneity. If spontaneity is the sole human good, it follows that the exercise of will is, by definition, evil. It seems unquestionable that Emerson deifies spontaneity as the moral principle:

The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we inquire the reason of self-trust. Who is the Trustee? What is the aboriginal self, on which universal reliance is grounded? What is the nature of the power of that science-baffling star, without parallax, without calculable elements, which shoots a ray of beauty into trivial and impure actions, if the least mark of independent appear? The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct.

Simon, 6 (quoting Emerson) This is quite clearly a recipe for disaster. It is like giving the keys to the Porsche to a drunk teenager and suggesting he try to see fast he can drive it on a winding and treacherous mountain road in icy conditions. Emerson is cavalierly irresponsible. His doctrine represents a collapse of the notion of virtue:

People represent virtue as a struggle, and take to themselves great airs upon their attainments, and the question is everywhere vexed when a noble nature is commended, whether the man is not better who strives with temptation. But there is no merit in that matter. Either God is there or he is not there. We love characters in proportion as they are impulsive and spontaneous. The less a man thinks or knows about his virtues, the better we like him.

Simon, 7 (quoting Emerson). This, of course, means we should like the dissolute, the dissipated, the intemperate more than the steady self-imposed discipline of the Roman Stoic, or more than the dedication of love and purity of the Saint who governs his life and exhibits full compliance with all natural and theological virtues. In short, this is to reverse standards: Emerson is calling black white and white black, virtue vice and vice virtue. This is the devil talking, only talking through smooth Emersonian prose.

Spontaneity in Virtue: Proving Emerson False

(One might note, also the false Emersonian opposition between spontaneity and virtue. The good in some spontaneous impulse is measured with reference to the natural law and virtue; spontaneity is not the standard. And so spontaneity may, in a particular case, be horribly evil, and in another particular case, give rise to wonderful good. Moreover, to suggest that the Saints are not spontaneous is travesty. One could look through the annals of hagiography and cull out countless spontaneous acts of generosity and charity which mark the life of the Saints. Three which come immediately to mind: St. Martin of Tours offering his military cloak to the beggar, St. Francis of Assisi's kiss of a leper on the lips, and St. Maximiliam Kolbe offering his life in exchange for the life of the Jewish father and family man , Franciszek Gajowniczek at Auschwitz. I'll bet none of Emerson's spontaneous acts came close to achieving such tremendous moral beauty.)

Clearly, Emerson, like Rousseau, uses the word "virtue." But he does not mean "virtue" as traditionally understood. He takes the word virtue and uses it to his purposes. He jerry rigs the word virtue, sort of like the TV show character MacGyver who is able to improvise all sorts of things with the common place. Virtue's MacGyver, Emerson is able to improvise virtue from everything else but virtue! Unfortunately, what might work with gadgets in the unreal world of Television, does not work will with morality in the real world. So Emerson may say: act virtuously; but what he really is saying is: act viciously.

Perhaps, cutting to the quick, the best comment is Simon's observation that, though unquestionably stated in a "powerful way," Emerson's "spontaneous" morality based on pre-will, pre-rational instinct, is really advocating that we abide by "essentially the same force by which a plant grows and all things exist." Simon, 7.

Removed of its literary trappings, Emerson's doctrine is theological babble. He says, "ye are gods." But what he really means is "act like plants."

Virtue and its Substitutes: Rousseau and Natural Impulse

“THE NATURAL LAW IS THE ORIGIN and principle of all virtues and their acts," says William of Auxerrre in his Summa aurea. For the next various blog postings we will focus on the concept of virtue, relying on the French philosopher Yves R. Simon's The Definition of Moral Virtue (New York: Fordham University Press, 1986). This slim book was edited by Vukan Kuic, and its basis is a series of lectures given by Professor Simon at the University of Chicago in 1957. As William of Auxerre suggests, virtue ethics and the natural law are closely aligned; indeed, traditionally, it was impossible to conceive of one without the other. Modernly, virtues--like the natural moral law--remain largely out of favor, although they have some signs of resurgence, spurred by the works of Alasdair MacIntyre, especially since the publication of his works After Virtue and his Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. Their modern rebirth in secular Academia may be laid at the feet of two women: one a Catholic and the other an atheist: G. E. M. Anscombe (in particular her 1958 essay, "Modern Moral Philosophy" (originally published in the journal Philosophy, vol. 33, no. 124 (January 1958)), and Philippa Foot, who published a collection of essays entitled Virtues and Vices in 1978 (recently republished by Oxford University Press). Virtue was also popularized by William Bennett, U. S. Secretary of Education under President Ronald Reagan who wrote his bestselling book, The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories (1993). Of course, within the moral tradition of the Catholic Church, and within cultural conservatives, the notion of virtue, which is fundamentally human, never lost favor.

Simon identifies virtue with one of its fundamental indicia: dependability or a lack of conditionality. Virtue has staying power, a staying power which human nature as we find it, with its impulses, its foibles, its emotional flux does not. Virtues, are, of course, also part of human nature and support it, but in a manner of speaking they are imposed over those predispositions or tendencies in us which tug against moral right, sort of like a muzzle over a biting dog. They are acquired; they are obtained a posteriori, by habitually learning and doing right, as it were, not a priori, as if innate and spontaneous. Viewed positively, virtues may be considered a sort of dampener which resists the downward dug or bad and temporary impulses. Viewed negatively, the virtues may be considered as a sort of insulating boundary between an errant impulse and objective right. But before we look at virtue, we begin by focusing on modern replacements for virtue, for just as nature abhors a vacuum, so does the absence of virtue create a vacuum in the moral man. Something, a substitute, sometimes one which shares at least superficially in some of the qualities of virtues, but which is yet a counterfeit, will step in. Simon identifies three such substitutes or rival versions of what is required to perfect man and take him to happiness: the theory of natural goodness, social engineering, and what he calls psycho-technology.

Traditional virtue found an enemy in the romantic naturalists such as Rousseau (1712-1778). This may be confusing and hard to believe because, especially with respect to Rousseau, the word virtue was never far from his lips or his pen, though, understood in any traditional sense, the notion of virtue seemed to be far from his heart. The traditional notions of virtue for the likes of the Rousseauians appeared to them to be conventional strictures that squelched the natural and spontaneous good that was within man. The dogma of original sin or a realistic anthropology or assessment of the human condition was not part of their thinking; instead, they adopted a highly-optimistic view of man that stressed natural spontaneity. This is, of course, fatal to the traditional notion of virtues as acquired qualities of the mind or of character. Though natural, virtues must be built into us; they are sort of a secondary nature.

Now spontaneity is not, in itself, an evil thing. There is not much attractive in those who are conventional for convention's sake any more than there is anything attractive in those who are spontaneous for spontaneity's sake. But spontaneity (like convention) has no measure of right and wrong, no ratio ordinis, by which it is internally measured. Spontaneity (like convention) must be measured by something extrinsic to it. To suggest that spontaneity in itself is the measure of good, and that any habitus of virtue that resists or inhibits such impulses in any particular case must needs be a restriction on man's freedom and happiness is the kernel of Rousseauian error.

Rousseau, the "Cartesian" Moralist
What the "light of natural reason" was to Descartes in intellectual knowledge,
"natural spontaneity" was to Rousseau in the moral realm.

There is, to be sure, a distinction between the habitus of virtue and social convention. It may be that a social convention, one leastwise that is not directly tied to the habitus of virtue, improperly restricts a perfectly good spontaneous desire. Perhaps a conventional notion that one must raise a family suppresses the spontaneous vocation toward the monastic, celibate life. This is perhaps the truth that Rousseau seized upon and exploited. However, it is an error to equate, to make coterminous, virtue with convention. It is also an error to say that convention and virtue are always and everywhere opposites. Even where virtue and convention overlap (and that seems to be less the case modernly), to squelch spontaneity because convention demands it is hugely different from squelching spontaneity because virtue demands it. Virtue is perennial, and perennially human and good; convention is contingent, and conditionally human and good. Virtues, in other words, are built upon the foundation of the natural moral law. Conventions may or may not be, since they are conventionally-based on customs or the positive law, and not naturally-based on natural law. Yet they both govern or influence behavior and so are found playing on the same field, as it were, the field of morality. To confuse convention and virtue is to confuse team players; it is to neglect the difference between the jerseys of the home team with the jerseys of the visiting team. That blindness will make you a very bad player on the field of morality.

Rousseau's moral teachings are, in Simon's view, analogous to Descartes's intellectual teachings. What Descartes did in the area of speculative reason, Rousseau did in the area of practical reason. Descartes desired to free the human intellect from what he saw as the shackles of tradition, specifically the natural, Aristotelian scholastic philosophy of the time. The construct of the philosophers had to be scrapped in Descartes's view, and one had to seize the "natural light of reason," la lumière naturelle, a natural light which, unconstrained by the accouterments of the schools, would once again allow man to gain true knowledge. As Descartes expressed it in a letter to R. P. Mersenne dated October 16, 1639: "pour moi, je n'ai pour règle des miennes [i.e., de mes vérités] que la lumière naturelle," as for me, I have no other rules [in regard to truth] other than the natural light [of reason]."* Intellectual tradition or patrimony of thought, then, was to be disdained not because it was untrue, but simply because it was traditional. Rousseau applied that very same form of thinking to the matter of morals.

According to Descartes, therefore, the main problem in the progress of knowledge is how to get rid of and stay away from false ideas that not only come from bad teaching, and from old wives' tales, but are generated by our imagination running wild in childhood. . . . For the understanding of Descartes, this is a crucial point. . . . What [the mind] really needs is to recover somehow the natural, native power and light of reason, impaired by bad education, by vulgar opinions, and perhaps most of all by childhood fantasies.

Simon, 3. What Descartes tried to do with regard to the intellectual knowledge, Rousseau tried to do with respect to moral knowledge. In a sense, the Cartesian intellectual optimism was recruited to the moral realm, and there became the Rousseauian natural optimism, a natural optimism which is so attractive to the lazy, to those with moral acedia.

True, Rousseau and his followers never stop talking about 'virtues.' But if we go beyond mere words, we quickly realize that what they are after is not to work for it but rather to tap in the individual a natural spontaneity toward goodness, which they take to be antecedent to both rationality and social order.

Simon, 4.

Thus, though Descartes and Rousseau had different material interests (intellectual knowledge versus moral knowledge), their formal interests were the same (extracting their underlying subject matter from any restrictions, conventional, traditional, dogmatic, etc.) The problem is, of course, that one does not want to throw out the baby with the bath water. Why throw out the virtues in the name of getting rid of convention?

In a manner of speaking, if the notion of virtue is thought of as expansive, in the manner of Aristotle, then Rousseau and Descartes were battling the same thing: virtue. "Aristotle . . . attributes both moral and scientific progress to acquired qualities which he calls virtues." Simon, 3-4. Viewed in this manner, Descartes and Rousseau were battling the same thing: virtue. One did this by hailing back to the supposed "light of natural reason," the other by hailing back to supposed unspoiled "natural spontaneity."

Rousseau's thinking continues on its vicious path. He is read with great avidity or perhaps cupidity today: Rousseau's thought "continues to operate in our society at a deep, mostly unconscious level as a substitute for a genuine theory of virtues." Simon, 4. In summary, however, we must not forget that "rather than an acquired quality of mind or character, 'virtue' for Rousseau means nothing more than 'natural spontaneity.'" Simon, 4.

In other words, if we want to begin learning about virtue, one of our first virtuous acts would be to throw away any reliance upon Rousseau. There is too much of the devil that smolders within his pages.

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*Ouvres Philosophiques De Descartes (Paris: August Desrez, 1838), 562.