More on the natural after a considerable delay caused by travels (England) and the beginning of a new semester.
I suggested in my last that something’s being natural in the order of being has not much to do with its being natural in the order of knowing. I suggested, too, that there is equally little by way of intimacy between naturalness in the order of being and naturalness in the order of seeming: that what is the case about you or about the world need have little to do with how the world or yourself seem to you.
An instance: you may seem to yourself to be generous and yet be miserly; you may judge yourself open-handed and yet be tight. Another instance: you may seem to yourself to be captain of your soul and master of your fate and yet be a creature, radically dependent for all you have and are upon unmerited gift; you may judge yourself autonomous and yet be a beggar.
Let’s now attend to the order of catechesis or formation: by this I mean the causal nexus that produces in you your occurrent or dispositional seemings and judgments. (A seeming or judgment is occurrent if it’s active in you at the moment; it’s dispositional if it’s inactive but would become so were the circumstances to be appropriate. A pianist is always one dispositionally but only sometimes one occurrently.) Almost everything depends upon this: the world does not seem like anything to you until you have been catechized; you make no occurrent judgments about it until you have been catechized. From catechesis — hearing, learning — flows everything else. It is a remarkable (biological, genetic, natural-in-the-order-of-being) feature of humans that we require catechesis for almost everything, and that we can be catechized into almost anything.
Empirical investigation is relevant here, more so than a priori philosophizing. The range of dispositional and occurrent seemings and judgments possible for us can be determined best by studying those that actually occur. And I think it uncontroversial to say that a very wide range of such does occur. The world can seem to us like a gift of the benevolent Lord; or it can seem to us like a theater of naked power. We can seem to ourselves like dependent creatures or like aspiringly divine despots. We can judge other human beings as objects there for us to torture, or as images of the Lord there as gifts to be loved. And so, infinitely, on.
It follows at once that introspection is useless for discovering your nature, as, too, is looking at the world. There is no luminosity there, nothing about the world or yourself that coerces you into being right about them. What’s needed is good catechesis: and just as much of it will be needed to come to right conclusions about your nature — who and what you are — as to come to wrong conclusions about the same. That you are what you are — human, creaturely, adeodatus – provides you with no tendency to be right or to see rightly.
Argumentative appeals to the natural, therefore, have no persuasive purchase. To present them as if they did, or even as if they should, is to perform a contradiction. This is because the offering of such argument is itself catechetical while occluding that condition from those at whom it is directed — and, all too often, from those who offer it. To think otherwise is to have succumbed to the confusion of the true with the luminously true, as those who composed the Declaration of Independence did in judging that the truths they proclaimed were not only true but self-evidently so. What I’ve written in this post and my last does not perform this contradiction. That is because it is aware of its own catechetical function, understanding itself to lure by display rather than to coerce by knockdown argument.
How do we Catholic thinkers perform when we speak of the natural? Sometimes, I fear, we are confused, and lapse into a sub-Christian mode of discourse by appealing to what is natural in the order of being as if such appeals ought carry conviction even to those whose catechesis has gone badly. Instances and comment to follow.
