I haven't read Charles Taylor's book, but so far I do agree with a more Aristotelian paradigm. Otherwise, humanity is just living in a never-ending illusion of purpose. He is a cosmic accident that will become extinct any time in this dangerous, violent universe. 

Mysterious Brony wrote:

I haven't read Charles Taylor's book, but so far I do agree with a more Aristotelian paradigm. Otherwise, humanity is just living in a never-ending illusion of purpose. He is a cosmic accident that will become extinct any time in this dangerous, violent universe. 

I was purposely vague about our relation to meaning in the alternative narrative since it's meant to cover a very broad set of secular stances. A through-going Nietzschean, for instance, has available to say that meaning is *real* as an epiphenomena of creative human will, which is itself more deeply a product of will-to-power, which is the ground of grounds. It's not illusory, any more than human beings are illusions; it's just that it reflects nothing like the Platonochristo transcendent intellectual order and that it's metaphysically contingent, not necessary, and certainly not eternal or holy in the ancient sense. (This is basically the Heideggerian reading of Nietzsche shared more or less by Charles Taylor as well. There are other readings, but it gets at the heart of one of the most powerful metaphysical ones.)

The point is that the secularist needn't deny the reality of meaning, in some sense of "real" (though he may, and this is where Feser's whole "naturalism -> materialism -> elliminativism" critique is defficient with respect to secularism as an historical situation. Naturalism is merely itself a contemorary version of a bigger narrative whose sole goal is not to eliminate purpose or meaning in *any* sense, but to deny it the kind of higherarchical soverinty you'll find for it in say Proclus or Aquinas). He merely need only deny the full ancient understanding of real: realis sub specie aeternitatis dei (Etz correct my conjugation here) however that's to be cashed out. But this is just the real fight of the modern non-secular metaphysician- to revive that understanding.

Last edited by iwpoe (11/21/2015 2:55 am)

iwpoe wrote:

DanielCC wrote:

Thesis Two has to be rejected by most Naturalists, though some like Smith and Evan Fales attempt to tie it in with their Aristotelian Ethics

I do wonder if they can *really* reject it practically speaking. If you utterly reject it, I suspect you are in a performative contradiction re your naturalist commitments, unless you consider them fully arbitrary and no better than any other (which no naturalist does).

Of course few would ultimately admit that they do - instead they appeal to some notion of subjective meaning e.g. happiness and then attempt to transplant that into some form of axiological objectivism (otherwise known as squaring the circle).

Folks like Smith agree that the views mentioned above fail and claim that there is an ultimate ontologically founded objective meaning, however this meaning is purely immanent to biological activity.

iwpoe wrote:

DanielCC wrote:

For my part I am not especially interested in arguing for One. Leave Mechanism to its doomed fans, to the Dennetts and the Searles of this world. Far more attention should be lavished on Two, that is arguing that ultimate objective meaning must in some way be transcendent (immortality as the sphere of endless self-realization) and not immanent as Aristotelian ethics might have it. 

A hybrid view seems possible to me: immanent tele are coordinated in terms of a transcendent ultimate objective telos. Christian Aristotelianism does hold something along those lines, I take it? It's how the independent study of nature is to be made reasonable, since it hardly makes sense to think you can really focus on just the study of Plants if you truly *must* apprehend their place in a greater metaphysical order.

They do but in a way which verges on the ad hoc. The suggestion of our immanent tele being directed towards an ultimate transcendent end is in tension with otherwise central Christian ideas such as the distinction between the Natural and Supernatural orders and the nature of Grace. This is why Thomas is so keen to deny that human beings have any natural capacity for the Beatific Vision. For the orthodox Catholic at least notions like Original Sin and eternal non-retributive separation from God begin to look very suspect if union with God is considered a natural end as opposed to a gratuitous gift.  
 
I am not questioning the necessity of immanent teleology as a fundamental feature of the world, only the extent to which we derivation of axiological meaning from that teleology. Aristotelian ethics are predominantly immanent in aim, they focus on ‘this worldly’ ends in the form of social flourishing wherein that is understood in a sense derived from biological and zoological facts.
 
One can claim that in terms of ultimate metaphysics one cannot have immanent teleology and therefore Aristotelean ethics with a transcendent ground – this is after all the claim the Fifth Way seeks to establish – but that strikes me as irrelevant to the discussion at hand. A Utilitarian who endorsed the PSR Cosmological Argument could equally claim that Utilitarianism implicitly implies the truth of that argument since if there are to be contingent agents in the first place there need be a necessary being to ultimately explain their existence; their opponent though will just point out that these begs the question in favour of the PSR argument’s truth which is precisely what they deny.  Likewise the atheist or even ‘Deist’ Aristotelian will just deny the reasoning from immanent to transcendent teleology and keep the ethics without having to make any revision to said ethical system in itself.