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One of my core criticisms to Plato and later Aristotle is not a criticism of Aristotle qua Aristotle, but in the way people give this almost religious reverence

One of my core criticisms to Plato and later Aristotle is not a criticism of Aristotle qua Aristotle, but in the way people give this almost religious reverence to the particular words they use. As if by saying that >Telos, or finality, also gives morality its proper and objective ground: what is morally right or wrong follows, ultimately, from one's nature. I have some intuitive understanding of what telos is and why it matters. If I'm understanding you correctly, morality is defined by outcome, but the "tragedy of the crudeness of materialism" is that we can't know the final outcome of anything. Then what good is knowing about telos anyway? I'd argue that Scholasticism, that is, the marriage of Middle-Ages Christianity to the truthy-sounding gobbledygook of Aristotle, set the case for the moral authority of the church back a thousand years.

prewett 2y ago
Not the parent, but as I understand it the post is saying that morality is not defined by outcome, but rather by consistency of the object's purpose. A sentient chair choosing to fall apart when you sit on it is being "immoral", opposed to its purpose. > I'd argue that Scholasticism, that is, the marriage of Middle-Ages Christianity to the truthy-sounding gobbledygook of Aristotle, set the case for the moral authority of the church back a thousand years. a) maybe the Roman church; I don't think the Eastern Orthodox embraced that. And the Protestants more or less junked it, too. b) "truthy-sounding" is awful dismissive for something that took Europe by storm when Aristotle was re-discovered. Modern thought has rejected Plato and Aristotle, and especially Post-modern thought, but does Aristotle sound "truthy" because you've bought into modern/post-modernity or because he's poor quality? We might have reject Plato/Aristotle because us moderns are so much more enlightened than the ancients. Or we could have a serious case of hubris. Given that large segments of the West are espousing that gender and even species--previously seen as immutable--are mutable, we're either seriously wrong and headed for disaster, or we've discovered something seriously novel. c) I'm not an expert on Scholasticsm, but as far as telos goes, the Christian telos for humanity is to become like God--to love each other sacrificially as Christ loved us, and to participate with God in creating/stewarding the material world. It's the most expansive telos I'm aware of, and I don't think I've even properly grasped or expressed it.
- petsfed 2y ago
  a) Yeah, that's fair. Everything I know about Eastern and Russian Orthodoxy could fill 2 post-it notes, if I write big. b) It is dismissive, because Aristotle's solutions should be dismissed. He and Plato before him are very good at identifying problems, but then they both present quasi-mystical solutions to those problems. The grandparent talks at length about how materialism (that is, that we are made of matter and therefore have material concerns) completely denies us knowledge about what telos actually is. This might be my scientific instrumentalism showing, but if we postulate some entity X, and then say, because of the nature of the universe, we can never actually determine what X is then why do we care about X? That is, if a person dies before they can (as you say) love others sacrificially, did that person live a bad life? Or was their purpose to die early, to serve as some sort of lesson? How can you know? Can you even know? That's what I mean when I say "truthy-sounding". It seems to wrap things in a nice neat little box, it certainly sounds profound, until you really look at it and realize, oh no, that didn't solve anything. I'm not going to rise to the gender bait, but the concept of species is mutable, because speciation occurs on such long timelines that its impossible to point to just one generation and say "cousins from this branch are definitely species A and cousins from that branch are definitely species B". I'm strongly of the mind that "discrete species" is a lie we tell ourselves so we don't have lose too much sleep trying to reconstruct the extended family tree of all life on earth.
  - geye1234 2y ago
    I'm responding a bit late to this, but anyway... Your definition of materialism is not what the term commonly means. Clearly we're made of matter and have material concerns; everybody is a materialist under that definition. Materialism-as-commonly-defined goes much further and says that matter, and therefore material concerns, are all there is. Quite different. The telos is nothing mythical or hooey. It's utterly anodyne: it's what a thing does, or how a thing acts. The telos of an acorn is to grow into an oak tree. The telos of water (one of them) is to dissolve salt. We know this because if you put salt in water, the water dissolves it; it doesn't turn it into sugar. Dissolving salt is what water does. The fact that we could describe the chemistry of how this happens in far more detail doesn't undermine the point. Nor does the fact that water has more than one telos. And if you say this is trivial, I almost agree with you: it's supposed to be. Materialism is objectionable (as it pertains to this discussion) because it denies the telos, by saying that everything can be defined in terms of matter, and nothing else. This is a mistake: the telos cannot be reduced to matter. "What a thing does" is not the same as "what a thing is made of". Even if you want to say that the former is entirely caused by the latter -- which I would not entirely disagree with, though I'd want to clarify -- it does not follow that the former is the latter. Human beings, like everything else, have a telos, which is happiness.* Happiness in this context doesn't mean an emotion, in the way that most people mean it. It doesn't mean delight, pleasure or even joy, although all of these result from it. It encompasses notions such as flourishing, or fulfillment, or beatitude, or rest, and still can't be reduced to any of these. A proper discussion of it would take too long. But everybody wants to be happy. Unlike acorns and water, we can choose whether or not we move towards our telos. An acorn may fail to grow into an oak tree, but it obviously has never has a choice in whether it does so. If an acorn is crushed, it probably won't grow into an oak tree, and is to this extent a bad acorn. By contrast, a human being can choose his actions: he can choose actions that tend towards his telos, or that tend away from his telos. A deliberate action is good to the extent that it brings about our telos (which is happiness), and bad to the extent that it fails to do so. This is both 'morally good', and good in the more general sense, in that sense that an acorn or even a car is good. The great grandparent's point was that if you undermine telos, you undermine any objective basis for morality. And this is true. It isn't even limited to materialism. If someone says we must follow God's commands, he can't explain without telos why we must do so, though he may describe incentives for our doing so. Morality would still be absurd. That's what I mean when I say "truthy-sounding". It seems to wrap things in a nice neat little box, it certainly sounds profound, until you really look at it and realize, oh no, that didn't solve anything. I'm not sure what you mean by this. Nobody is saying "we know about telos now, we don't need to investigate anything else". Least of all Aristotle! Nothing in the notion of telos undermines the need for empirical investigation. If you can show me a line of Aristotle that even hints at this idea, I'd love to see it. * I take some issue with the grandparent's definition of happiness, but I think we'd both agree that happiness is humanity's telos

prewett 2y ago

Not the parent, but as I understand it the post is saying that morality is not defined by outcome, but rather by consistency of the object's purpose. A sentient chair choosing to fall apart when you sit on it is being "immoral", opposed to its purpose. > I'd argue that Scholasticism, that is, the marriage of Middle-Ages Christianity to the truthy-sounding gobbledygook of Aristotle, set the case for the moral authority of the church back a thousand years. a) maybe the Roman church; I don't think the Eastern Orthodox embraced that. And the Protestants more or less junked it, too. b) "truthy-sounding" is awful dismissive for something that took Europe by storm when Aristotle was re-discovered. Modern thought has rejected Plato and Aristotle, and especially Post-modern thought, but does Aristotle sound "truthy" because you've bought into modern/post-modernity or because he's poor quality? We might have reject Plato/Aristotle because us moderns are so much more enlightened than the ancients. Or we could have a serious case of hubris. Given that large segments of the West are espousing that gender and even species--previously seen as immutable--are mutable, we're either seriously wrong and headed for disaster, or we've discovered something seriously novel. c) I'm not an expert on Scholasticsm, but as far as telos goes, the Christian telos for humanity is to become like God--to love each other sacrificially as Christ loved us, and to participate with God in creating/stewarding the material world. It's the most expansive telos I'm aware of, and I don't think I've even properly grasped or expressed it.

petsfed 2y ago
a) Yeah, that's fair. Everything I know about Eastern and Russian Orthodoxy could fill 2 post-it notes, if I write big. b) It is dismissive, because Aristotle's solutions should be dismissed. He and Plato before him are very good at identifying problems, but then they both present quasi-mystical solutions to those problems. The grandparent talks at length about how materialism (that is, that we are made of matter and therefore have material concerns) completely denies us knowledge about what telos actually is. This might be my scientific instrumentalism showing, but if we postulate some entity X, and then say, because of the nature of the universe, we can never actually determine what X is then why do we care about X? That is, if a person dies before they can (as you say) love others sacrificially, did that person live a bad life? Or was their purpose to die early, to serve as some sort of lesson? How can you know? Can you even know? That's what I mean when I say "truthy-sounding". It seems to wrap things in a nice neat little box, it certainly sounds profound, until you really look at it and realize, oh no, that didn't solve anything. I'm not going to rise to the gender bait, but the concept of species is mutable, because speciation occurs on such long timelines that its impossible to point to just one generation and say "cousins from this branch are definitely species A and cousins from that branch are definitely species B". I'm strongly of the mind that "discrete species" is a lie we tell ourselves so we don't have lose too much sleep trying to reconstruct the extended family tree of all life on earth.
- geye1234 2y ago
  I'm responding a bit late to this, but anyway... Your definition of materialism is not what the term commonly means. Clearly we're made of matter and have material concerns; everybody is a materialist under that definition. Materialism-as-commonly-defined goes much further and says that matter, and therefore material concerns, are all there is. Quite different. The telos is nothing mythical or hooey. It's utterly anodyne: it's what a thing does, or how a thing acts. The telos of an acorn is to grow into an oak tree. The telos of water (one of them) is to dissolve salt. We know this because if you put salt in water, the water dissolves it; it doesn't turn it into sugar. Dissolving salt is what water does. The fact that we could describe the chemistry of how this happens in far more detail doesn't undermine the point. Nor does the fact that water has more than one telos. And if you say this is trivial, I almost agree with you: it's supposed to be. Materialism is objectionable (as it pertains to this discussion) because it denies the telos, by saying that everything can be defined in terms of matter, and nothing else. This is a mistake: the telos cannot be reduced to matter. "What a thing does" is not the same as "what a thing is made of". Even if you want to say that the former is entirely caused by the latter -- which I would not entirely disagree with, though I'd want to clarify -- it does not follow that the former is the latter. Human beings, like everything else, have a telos, which is happiness.* Happiness in this context doesn't mean an emotion, in the way that most people mean it. It doesn't mean delight, pleasure or even joy, although all of these result from it. It encompasses notions such as flourishing, or fulfillment, or beatitude, or rest, and still can't be reduced to any of these. A proper discussion of it would take too long. But everybody wants to be happy. Unlike acorns and water, we can choose whether or not we move towards our telos. An acorn may fail to grow into an oak tree, but it obviously has never has a choice in whether it does so. If an acorn is crushed, it probably won't grow into an oak tree, and is to this extent a bad acorn. By contrast, a human being can choose his actions: he can choose actions that tend towards his telos, or that tend away from his telos. A deliberate action is good to the extent that it brings about our telos (which is happiness), and bad to the extent that it fails to do so. This is both 'morally good', and good in the more general sense, in that sense that an acorn or even a car is good. The great grandparent's point was that if you undermine telos, you undermine any objective basis for morality. And this is true. It isn't even limited to materialism. If someone says we must follow God's commands, he can't explain without telos why we must do so, though he may describe incentives for our doing so. Morality would still be absurd. That's what I mean when I say "truthy-sounding". It seems to wrap things in a nice neat little box, it certainly sounds profound, until you really look at it and realize, oh no, that didn't solve anything. I'm not sure what you mean by this. Nobody is saying "we know about telos now, we don't need to investigate anything else". Least of all Aristotle! Nothing in the notion of telos undermines the need for empirical investigation. If you can show me a line of Aristotle that even hints at this idea, I'd love to see it. * I take some issue with the grandparent's definition of happiness, but I think we'd both agree that happiness is humanity's telos