Being more than whatever

Jacinta Allan is currently the Premier of the Australian state of Victoria. She was asked by a journalist about Donald Trump's executive order declaring that only two genders would be recognised, male and female. 

Her response included the following:

Every Victorian should have the right to practise their faith, whatever that faith may be...and to love who they love and to be who they are....we've got to focus on supporting people to be who they are, to love who they want to love, and to practise their faith, whatever their faith may be.

 

Jacinta Allan is a Labor politician, and therefore a social democrat. Nonetheless, what she is saying here is foundational to a liberalism that goes back hundreds of years. It is the type of thinking that is shared by all kinds of liberals, both of the right and the left. It is a deeply flawed way of looking at things.

In the late 1500s and early 1600s, Europe was devastated by religious wars that had no clear winner. This led ultimately to a focus on religious tolerance, but it also helped to usher in a new metaphysics, devised by men like Thomas Hobbes.

In this metaphysics, there are only individual desires and aversions. Something becomes the good because we desire it, evil because we are averse to it. Each one of us is determined differently, and so we have different subjective goods that are known only to ourselves. We are self-interested in the pursuit of our own individual goods. Freedom is not so much freedom of will to choose between different goods, but a freedom of will to pursue, without external constraint, the particular subjective good determined for us. The good exists at the individual level: we only contract to form associations and governments so that our peaceful and secure individual existence might be upheld. 

Once you adopt this metaphysics, certain things follow. For instance, there is no longer an "essence" to different types of creatures. There is, in other words, no longer a certain quality given to us as part of our created nature that we might develop along and try to perfect. Nor is there a "telos" or a "final cause" - there are no common ends or purposes to life that we have been created for. Nor do we need to cooperate with others to fulfil aspects of our own nature: we do not need to contribute to a common good in order to realise our own individual good. There is only our own individual good upheld via individual rights or via our contract with the state.

So when Jacinta Allan says that we have a right to "be who we are", she is adopting the mental framework of the Hobbesian metaphysics. We are supposed to assume, in accepting her comment, that there are no qualitative differences in what we might be. One thing is as good as another. Nothing is more, nothing is less. Nothing is higher, nothing is lower. Nothing is more meaningful, nothings is less meaningful. We are just individually determined to be....whatever. And who can say what we are? Well, it is known only to ourselves, so my declaration that "I am x" settles the matter.

There is a passage from St Paul that I think is relevant here. He wrote "I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do." (Romans 7:15). Paul attributed this inability to do what he really wanted to do to the presence within him of sin. It is a recognition that it is easy for the human personality to be disordered by uncontrolled desires or impulses - by our vices - so that we do not really live up to being or doing what we know we really should do or be. 

So it is glib to say that people should just be who they are. This does not recognise that what we are in practice can be disordered by our own inability to be virtuous and to live up to the standard of the good, or even just to standards that we set for ourselves. And there is a danger that, in being told to be "who we are", we collapse into our own disordered self and begin to identify with our own vices.

Nor is it the case that "who we are" is something arbitrary and unknowable to others. We have a created nature as men and women which gives us what used to be called a "quiddity" - qualities that make us distinct in our being, an inherent nature. These are now usually termed essences. As I mentioned earlier, modern metaphysics tends to deny the existence of these essences. The classic articulation of this is from Judith Butler, who denied that the masculine or the feminine were real qualities within male and female nature:

... gender is a performance ... Because there is neither an “essence” that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires; because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all. Gender is, thus, a construction...

And yet we do, in our everyday lives, recognise a feminine quality in women and a masculine quality in men. And we do want to admire feminine qualities in women and masculine qualities in men: in fact, when we are young and romantically minded we are likely to idealise and love the more attractive expressions of these qualities, and actively seek them out in a spouse. They are real to us in a way that matters, and they can even inspire in us a sense of a transcendent good that ennobles human life.

It is true that such essences are likely to be expressed a little differently according to our individual personalities. But they are not infinitely elastic. There is a limit where we might say of a woman "she is acting mannishly" or of a man "that is coming across as effeminate". There is a range, but also a point at which the quality is lost or diminished.

So if we have this given nature, one part of our telos in life is to develop it so that we might express our own potential being more fully and so that we might embody an aspect of a transcendent good in who we are. 

Who we are and what we do might also be guided by our understanding of objective moral goods. If there are standards of what is morally right or wrong, then our actions and how we identify ourselves should ideally conform to these. A Hobbesian mindset is blind to this because it rests upon the idea that there are only subjective goods, so that when we desire a thing, that thing then becomes the good. So someone with a Hobbesian mindset can blandly assert that a person should just be whatever it is that they happen to be at a particular moment in time, but someone with a sense of objective moral goods would want that person to continue to develop toward a better self that is more in line with moral goods - in part, because this is how we grow to be more fully ourselves.

We might also aim in a positive way toward a certain understanding of purity. By this I do not mean abstaining from any sexual experience. What I am referring to is that as well as developing along the givens of our nature, so that we more fully express our higher potential, that we also have the task of maintaining intact aspects of our original form. The point here is to retain our integrity in what we choose to be or to do, rather than damaging or degrading or making something lower of ourselves. It can sometimes be difficult to get back what we have lost. Again, people need encouragement in this task, rather than the false reassurance that they should just be whatever. 

Finally, Jacinta Allan's approach also fails because it does not recognise that many of the more important things we want to be or to do can only be achieved at a supra-individual level. I might want to be a loving husband, respected within my family. I cannot achieve that alone at a purely individual level. I need a quality wife for this to be realised, and my chances of meeting such a woman will depend, in part, on what happens within the culture, which is itself the product of the choices of many thousands of individuals. 

The message of just be whatever is not going to help me much here. If we all just follow our own individual desires, seeking our own subjective goods, without much concern for our significant social roles, or our impact on the wider society, or of what is required of us to uphold our role in creating a good society, then we will operate within a lower trust society in which it becomes more difficult than it needs to be to realise the goods that are most important to us. 

We exist as part of larger social bodies; our well-being depends on the functioning of these bodies; part of our identity and sense of belonging derives from these bodies; and therefore it is right that we cultivate qualities that allow us to successfully and loyally discharge our duties to these bodies. We need to be more than "whatever".

Hobbes & the metaphysics of modernity

It is commonly assumed that modern politics - secular & liberal - is not based on metaphysics. From this is derived the belief that we should keep metaphysics out of politics, particularly metaphysics of the Christian variety. For some Australians, for instance, it is troubling that our PM is a member of a Baptist church.

The dictionary definition of metaphysics is as follows:

a division of philosophy that is concerned with the fundamental nature of reality and being and that includes ontology, cosmology, and often epistemology

What is obvious from this definition is that all politics, including those of liberal modernity, must be based on a set of metaphysical assumptions. What matters then is not the impossible aim of excluding metaphysics, but trying to get the metaphysics broadly right, so that a human community is not thrown off course.

I have recently read Michael Allen Gillespie's The Theological Origins of Modernity. One of his arguments is that liberalism is based not so much on a rejection of Christian metaphysics, but developed from the theological debates that took place in the West following the adoption of a nominalist world view from the fourteenth century onward.

Gillespie sees Descartes and Hobbes as being two key proto-liberal thinkers. In order to demonstrate the metaphysical assumptions involved in the development of liberal thought, I'd like to focus on Gillespie's treatment of Hobbes. I think it is clear from his explanation of Hobbes's thought, that Hobbes was not operating neutrally from within a metaphysical vacuum, but rather that the edifice of Hobbes's thought was built upon a series of metaphysical assumptions about the nature of the cosmos; a theory of knowledge; the nature and purposes of man; the relationship between God and man and so on.

Hobbes

Gillespie begins with an account of Hobbes's physics. As interesting as this is, for the purposes of brevity I am going to skip it and focus on one aspect only of Hobbes's thought, namely his anthropology. There is enough in this alone to demonstrate the metaphysical commitments of the early modern philosophers.

It was Hobbes's view that men are "complex automata". As such, we do not have free will. Instead, we are moved by our passions (which are aroused by the impact of external objects on our bodies). If we have no free will then we cannot strive for moral perfection. Instead, our happiness depends on satisfying our bodily desires.

What are these desires? Only the most rudimentary desires, such as seeking to preserve our own lives, are basic to men. As a nominalist, Hobbes was committed to the idea that we are radically individualistic beings with idiosyncratic passions. To quote Gillespie "Thus, while we all desire to exist, what any one of us wants to exist for or wants out of existence can only be specified by the individual. The happiness of each individual thus depends upon his getting what he wants, and this is related to his power...Such power is the basis for what Hobbes believes is rightly called freedom".

You can see already how the underlying philosophy colours the meaning of terms like "freedom". With Hobbes the concept of freedom is stood on its head. We are free, according to previous ways of thinking, when we are not slaves to our passions. With Hobbes, we are free when there is nothing to impede our passions. As Gillespie puts it:

There is no freedom God bestows on us with an infusion of his will. Hobbes believes such pious hopes merely subordinate us to the passions of priests and religious fanatics. Humans are bodies driven by passions, and to be free for Hobbes is to pursue the objects of our passions without external constraints. This is practical but not metaphysical freedom...While we are thus predestined to be the kinds of beings we are and to have the passions that we have, this does not affect our freedom because it is precisely these passions that define our identity.

You can see how this overlaps with modernist thought. Moderns tend to identify freedom with an absence of external constraints; they tend to define their identity around their idiosyncratic passions; and in the English speaking tradition there has long been a hypersensitivity to the idea of priests representing an external tyranny. What is different, perhaps, is that moderns tend to combine, in an unprincipled way, the voluntarist idea that we create who we are as an act of our own will with a materialist and determinist view of the cosmos. 

For Hobbes the next step is to emphasise the significance of power in being able to pursue our desires unimpeded:

The degree of our freedom depends on our power...Our power depends on the strength of our bodies, the number of our supporters, the extent of our external resources, and above all on our capacity to reason. For Hobbes reason means something different than what it did for his predecessors. It is not a separate power that can discern the appropriate ends of life and guide us in a proper direction. It is thus not teleological but instrumental, the spy and scout of the passions. It thus helps us to maximise the satisfaction of our desires but not to train, direct or control them. To live by right reason, for Hobbes, is thus not an end but a means. Indeed, the purpose of deliberation is not to moderate the passions, as Petrarch believed, but to increase our power to get what we want.

This too is recognisably modern. You see it when women defend the unconstrained display of sexuality as empowerment. Note too the way that concepts like "reason" so readily change their meaning when placed within a different metaphysics. 

The unfolding of Hobbes's thought leads to a particular take on what the ends of human life are:

We are neither superhuman nor depraved. We are all only individual beings, determined by our idiosyncratic passions. Good and evil for each of us is thus measured not by our progress toward a rational, natural, or supernatural end but by the vector or our desire. No direction is naturally better than any other. Good is what pleases us, evil what displeases us, good what reinforces our motion, evil what hinders it. Or to put the matter in different terms, good is an increase in our power and evil its decrease...Each person in Hobbes' view is thus a self-interested individual who seeks to maximise his own power and satisfaction. 

It is interesting how enduring this view of man has been. In the later twentieth century, for instance, both the left and the right of politics adopted a game theory which required individuals to act in a self-interested way, just like Hobbesian man might be expected to act.

What does it mean to envisage a society made up of millions of idiosyncratically individual actors, each attempting to further his own power so that he has the means to satisfy his desires? First, given that our needs are limitless, there is an impetus to master/conquer nature to provide the resources to satisfy these unlimited wants, thereby providing conditions that might provide security. Second, in a state of nature, men will compete for finite resources; the natural condition of man is therefore a war of all against all.

Conclusion

This is obviously not an exhaustive account of Hobbes's thought. I hope it has shown, though, not only that metaphysics matters, but that liberal modernity is undergirded by its own metaphysics. We live in a society that has been shaped over time by a metaphysics that has been in place for some centuries now.

The alternative does not need to be an attempt to base politics on the metaphysics of any one particular church and its theology. We do, however, need to "unconceal" the metaphysics on which modernity is based and challenge aspects of it. This includes its nominalism; its reductive anthropology; its reduction of authoritative knowledge to either an apodictic science or to whatever grants power/mastery over nature; and its generally base understanding of human ends/purposes.