Henry Veatch: Realism and Nominalism. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1954.

Henry Veatch: Rational Man: A Modern Interpretation of Aristotelian Ethics. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1980 [1962].

 

David Hume disrupted philosophy by arguing that ‘is’ implies no demonstrable ‘ought.’ The mere fact that a thing is by nature or by convention does not tell me whether it is good. Natural laws may describe gravity, the growth of a tree, the traits of horses and humans, but they cannot tell me what I should do or become. Nature tells me what pleasures and pains me, not what is right. Similarly, no civil custom or law justifies itself; political society may reward me or punish me, but it cannot prove that it is right to do so. When writing about matters of good and bad, right and wrong, Hume could offer nothing other than experience as the criterion to which I should attend, claiming there is no other. When considering politics, he interested himself primarily in ruling institutions, which shape the experience of citizens and subjects, and history, which recounts the experiences of previous generations for the instruction of subsequent generations.

Evidently, Hume must understand nature to be devoid of purpose. Like Hobbes, he recognizes material, formal, and efficient causes in nature, but not final causes. To put it in historical terms, he shares Hobbes’s rejection of Aristotelian philosophy. That is the fundamental reason for his denial of any connection between ‘is’ and ‘ought.’ Nature, what is, can generate no such thing as an ‘ought.’ Those who claim otherwise therefore fall into both logical contradiction and groundless ethics.

Henry Veatch has his eye on that claim, both as a logician and as a moral philosopher. But he begins well before Hume, considering the major philosophic controversy of the generation before Thomas Aquinas: ‘realism’ vs. ‘nominalism.’ He does so for no antiquarian reason. “Realism and nominalism may well be perennial issues in philosophy” (RNR 1); “today, no less than in the 12th century, there is a realist-nominalist controversy raging” (RNR 2). And this makes sense, inasmuch as the philosophic atmosphere, as it were, of that century resembles that of the mid-1950s: In the twelfth century, philosophers “knew little else in philosophy save logic”; for their part, today’s philosophers are “all pretty much agreed that the only really serious discipline in philosophy is logic” (RNR 2). Then as now, philosophers bind themselves with “logicism” (RNR 2).

Veatch contends that “the current issue of realism vs. nominalism may be in large measure understood in terms of, and perhaps may even be said to have been caused by the rather uncritical use by modern logicians of a certain basic scheme, or ordering pattern, that quite literally dominates the entire vast corpus of modern mathematical logic” (RNR 3). This pattern begins with Gottlob Frege’s understanding of logic in the mathematical terms of function and argument. In any mathematical equation, there is a constant and a variable—for example, in ‘2x’ two is the constant, x the variable. Frege “proposed to generalize these notions so as to make them applicable far beyond the confines of mathematics in the narrower sense, extending them to the analysis of concepts and propositions in logic” (RNR 5). He translates these terms into logic by calling the logical equivalent of the constant the “function,” the x-factor the “argument.” To analyze the sentence, “Caesar conquered Gaul,” he treats “Gaul” as the function or constant, Caesar as the argument or x-factor.

This sets up “the vast and elaborate quantification theory of modern logic, a theory, which it is claimed, almost infinitely surpasses the old subject-predicate theory of traditional logic in range and power” (RNR 8). In subject-predicate theory, “Caesar conquered Gaul” means just that. It registers “a simple one-place function.” But in quantification theory, anything could replace the function, “Gaul,” just as any number could replace the two in “2x.” “The propositions envisaged in quantification theory will involve besides one-place functions, two-place, three-place, four place and so on up to n-place functions!” (RNR 8-9).

Bertrand Russell, for one, became so enamored of quantitative logic that he dismissed subject-predicate logic altogether, holding it “unable to admit the reality of relations” (RNR 10) Why so? Because subject-predicate logic limits itself to only one thing in relation to one other thing; it is cramped by concreteness. Quantitative logic, like numbers, ‘abstracts from’ the particulars: “The true function of logic as applied to matters of experience,” Russell writes, is to “show the possibility of hitherto unsuspected alternatives,” to “liberate the imagination as to what the world may be” (RNR 11). As Veatch puts it, in Russell’s view quantitative logic “provides an inventory of possibilities, a repertory of abstractly tenable hypotheses” (RNR 11). Veatch may be a bit too much of the gentleman to remark that this sort of thing fit rather well with Russell’s socialism, an imaginary construct of what the world may be, abstractly considered. With quantitative logic in hand, a philosopher might do seriously what Plato’s Socrates did ironically: make a city in speech plausible.

In considering realism and nominalism in his thirteenth century, Aquinas distinguished ens rationis and ens naturae, while connecting this distinction to a distinction in logic. Reason, he argued, finds what he calls “intentions” in natural things “insofar as they are considered by reason” (RNR 12). By “intention” he means such attributes as genus and species. One doesn’t find such ideas as genus and species by means of one’s senses’ perception of things; the ideas “rather are consequent upon reason’s consideration of the things of nature” (12). Logic, thought guided by the principle of non-contradiction, does discover the genus and species of things by comparing one thing to another, observing that (for example) a diamond is not a ruby, a sheep is not a goat, because their attributes in some respect contradict one another, whereas a diamond and a ruby are both minerals, a sheep and a goat both animals, because their attributes in some respects are identical to one another, do not contradict at all. Veatch observes, “if the subject matter of logic is the sort of thing which St. Thomas here suggests that it is, then it is quite obviously not the sort of thing that Lord Russell says it is” (RNR 12). They are things of different species. “Liberating the imagination, or drawing up inventories of possibilities, or contemplating unsuspected alternatives as to what in the eyes of God or the devil or Lord Russell the world may be—all this is all very well, but it simply isn’t the business of logic,” since what Russell wants logic to “disclose and reveal are real possibilities; they are not mere intentions in the sense of beings of reason” (RNR 13).

Thomas’s distinction between the natural things and logical “intentions” addresses the realism-vs.-nominalism question he inherited from his immediate philosophic predecessors by connecting reality to names in a logical, and indeed Aristotelian way. Logical intentions have nothing to do with things in the natural world, real or possible, as immediately perceived by the senses. “It is only as things come to be known, or better, it is only insofar as in coming to be known they acquire a status as objects of thought or reason… which otherwise and just in themselves they would not have at all” (RNR 14). If the “subject” we consider is hydrogen, and by measuring it we determine its atomic weight as 1.008, “we make ‘hydrogen’ the subject of a proposition and we predicate ‘having an atomic weight of 1.008’ of it” (RNR 14). Reason “may be said to find in hydrogen, insofar as hydrogen comes to be known and is made an object before the mind,” its atomic weight, the predicate of the sentence ‘Hydrogen has an atomic weight of 1.008’ (RNR 15).

Moreover, “logical intentions, in addition to being consequent upon reason’s consideration of nature, are also instrumental to reason’s consideration of things” (RNR 15). That is, they are “the tools and means of human knowledge,” not only their products; “or better, they are produced in the process of knowledge, precisely in order that through them such knowledge may be made possible” (RNR 16). In nature, “hydrogen is neither a species nor a subject, but in its condition of being known and as an object before the mind, it takes on these purely logical features or ‘intentions,’ as they are called” (RNR 16). The mind classifies hydrogen with respect to it being “a species of a genus or a subject of a predicate” so that “we may thereby come to know that hydrogen really is an element or that it does in fact have an atomic weight of 1.008” (RNR 116-17). “The main instruments of traditional logic—concepts, propositions, and arguments—are, in form and structure, simply relations of identity” (RNR 17). As “tools,” they ‘dig out’ the characteristics of natural objects not perceived by the senses alone, characteristics nonetheless real, albeit real in a different way than sensually-perceived reality. “It is only intellectually or in the mind that what-a-thing-is is abstracted from the thing itself and then reidentified with it in a logical proposition,” such as ‘a sheep is a mammal'” (RNR 17). Through the tool, instrument, device of logic, the mind relates “a thing to its own ‘what,'” causing the thinker “to recognize what that thing is in fact and in reality” (RNR 18). “The relation of identity that the mind sets up between subject and predicate in a proposition is an intentional relation precisely in the sense that through it the mind or reason is able to intend things as they are in themselves and in reality”; when I say what a thing is I am ‘identifying’ it through language (RNR 19). That’s why I might be mistaken and, if my proposition is illogical, why I must be mistaken; I can’t show you how a thing can be or do opposites at the same time, with respect to the same part, in relation to the same thing. A subatomic particle may manifest itself as a wave or as a particle, but not at the same time, by means of the same observation.

Not so with Frege’s quantitative logic. It isn’t “intentional” in the Thomistic sense, for two reasons. First, “the relation of a function to its argument or arguments is not a relation of identity”; therefore, “the function can in no sense be regarded as representing what the argument or arguments are’ (RNR 19). ‘2x’ tells me nothing about what ‘2’ is. The person who speaks or writes ‘2x’ has formed no such (Thomistic) intention. As Veatch puts it, the sentence “Milwaukee is north of Chicago,” in which “Chicago” and “Milwaukee” are the arguments and “north of” is the function, tells me nothing of “what Milwaukee and Chicago conjointly are” (RNR 19-20). Second, “unlike the relation of identity between subject and predicate, the relation between argument and function is not one whose nature is simply to be of or about something else” (RNR 20). The relation of Milwaukee to Chicago in the sentence refers not to the ‘whatness’ of either city, but to “the order of parts in a whole.” It does not tell me what that whole is—if, for example, Milwaukee and Chicago form part of a ‘metroplex.’

Returning to the question of realism and nominalism as they reappear in modern philosophic thought, Veatch observes that for Russell the word or symbol that is the “argument” in the proposition (say, Milwaukee, Chicago, Socrates) stands for an irreducible “particular”; the function sign (say, north of, or Plato) stands for a universal or a relation. In the sentence “Socrates was older than Plato,” “Socrates” and “Plato” are the particulars, the “arguments,” and “being older than” is the relation or universal (RNR 23-24). What does such a sentence, so understood, signify? It means nothing about ‘what’ the particulars are, but rather states (one aspect of) their relation to one another. Veatch calls this “logical atomism,” meaning that both the particulars and the universal/relational exist “outside of and along side” of one another (RNR 27). Russell himself soon saw that this means a word in a logical proposition, and therefore the logical proposition itself, need not have any relation to reality at all. A word of course “contributes to the meaning of the sentence in which it occurs,” Russell writes, but that is a feature of language, not necessarily of any reality beyond language (RNR 31).

Russell thus went from the quasi-Platonic realism of Frege, in which numbers “peopled the timeless realm of Being,” toward nominalism. W. V. Quine takes that final step, denying that there are any abstract entities at all. The word “appendicitis” “is a noun,” he writes, “only because of a regrettable strain of realism which pervades our own particular language” (RNR 35-36). As Veatch puts it, Quine regards “all supposedly ‘descriptive’ words as if they are ultimately and in principle no different from ‘logical’ words” (RNR 36). “This certainly sounds like nominalism”; “the function-argument scheme has indeed given rise to an extreme nominalist type of semantics” (RNR 37). Quine can deny that the ‘function’ side of the proposition, the ‘universal’ side, refers to any objective reality, arguing that “in any proposition involving a function-argument structure, while both parts of the proposition may be presumed to be meaningful and significant, still in asserting the proposition as a whole, what one asserts to exist are only the arguments and not the function” (RNR 40). One cannot, by means of logical propositions, understand anything that is ‘out there.

Thus “modern logicians and semanticists have found themselves forced into one or the other of two very embarrassing alternatives” (RNR 45): either Quine is right, and logic is only a language game which tells one nothing about any reality beyond itself, or one must admit that ‘Milwaukee’ means a particular city, ‘Socrates’ a particular person, ‘north of’ a real direction, ‘older than’ seniority in years—an alternative that re-presents quantitative logic as a realism depending upon a leap of faith (which doesn’t sound entirely logical).

But (Veatch argues) this only indicates that philosophers have entangled themselves in a pseudo-problem. “The entire trouble would seem to stem from the use in modern logic of a schema like that of function and argument, which turns out to be radically non-intentional, and hence not adapted to the proper purposes of logic at all” (RNR 46). Subject-predicate logic avoids this problem altogether because to use logic as a tool, instrument, device “certainly does not imply that one means or signifies by it a real universal entity existing extra-mentally, as the realists would seem to hold; nor is the only alternative to this the nominalistic one of supposing that in using a universal concept, one does not thereby mean or signify anything real at all” (RNR 47). If I assert that “many Wisconsin barns are red” I don’t mean that many Wisconsin barns are redness. I’m not saying that any particular barn or set of barns is the idea of redness, or indeed that it is the idea of barn-ness. Nor does such an assertion commit me to the idea of the Ideas in the supposedly Platonic sense of an ‘extra-mental’ set of realities above and beyond the particulars. In using language to form sentences I intend to bring out, some aspect of the particulars I am talking about; using language logically signifies an intention to correct errors in my perception of those particulars, to re-cognize them. As Thomas puts it in the Summa contra Gentiles, “although it is necessary for the truth of a cognition that the cognition answer to the thing known, still it is not necessary that the mode of the thing known be the same as the mode of its cognition” (RNR 51). In this, Thomas follows Aristotle, that logician who does not need ‘Platonic’ ideas in order to reason about things.

“Somehow,” Veatch concludes (with a hint of exasperation) “one wonders whether, if only this simple and rather obvious principle of intentionality had been observed by modern logicians, there would ever have been the current and seemingly futile dispute between realists and nominalists among modern semanticists” (RNR 51). But what about modern ethicists? To use a recently-invented, Greek-sounding word Veatch avoids, has this ‘epistemological’ debacle twisted them in the wrong direction, too?

Can Ethics Be Logical?

Lord Russell famously answered with a resounding ‘No,’ having taken the ways of mathematical logic for those of logic as such and concluded that in ethics all we have are emotions (as in the fear behind his Cold-War slogan “Better Red than dead”) and that in politics all we have is imagination powered by emotion (as in The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism). In Rational Man, Veatch demurs, deploying Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics to refute not so much Russell as the existentialist ethics of William Barrett in his then-recent book, Irrational Man and also the language-philosophy stance of Charles L. Stevenson, who, in his 1944 book Ethics and Language, consigned substantive ethical questions to the realm of less-than-philosophic souls. Veatch intends not to explicate Aristotle but “to use him in a modern effort to set forth and justify a rational system of ethics,” an application of Aristotelian ethics to modern circumstances (RM xiii). “This book will have to do with just such normative questions as the currently regnant intelligentsia has come to regard as not philosophically respectable” (RM xxvi).

Unlike Aristotle, whose ethical philosophy leads directly to political philosophy (a term he may have invented), Veatch promises to duck social and political questions, as in current circumstances so many ‘realists’ skip ethics entirely, jumping immediately to matters of society and politics, conceived simply as field of ‘power relations.’ Such Realpolitik thinkers, ‘Left’ or ‘Right,’ find unintended allies among linguistic philosophers. But what if philosophy has more to offer than language games, however rigorously played? “To most people it must seem that ethics has to do with more than just the meanings of words and the uses of language” (RM 2). What if they are right? Even if to think well about ethics one will need to clarify terms, among other acts of hygiene?

Everyone wants to live well. And, after any number of blunders, most people see that living well requires “an art or technique that one must master, a skill that one must acquire before one can do [the act of living] well, or perhaps even do it at all” (RM 3). In an effort to help in this, optimistic parents send their children to college. But, “Let’s face it: modern learning does not have anything to do with living, or being learned with being human” (RM 4). In considering the lives of philosophers, Kierkegaard “trembles to think of what it means to be a man” (RM 5); Socrates replies that to philosophize one must know oneself and learn how to live. One must find a good way of life—a thought Socrates shares with the founders of major religions, such as the God of the Bible, who very much insists on His way, demanding that His people abjure the ways of Canaanites, Egyptians, Persians, and indeed all others but His own.

In adjuring men to master Fortuna, to conquer nature, modern philosophy, the science it has produced, and the technology that science has produced offer “a truly amazing example of the relevance of knowledge to life” (RM 10). When modern science attends to human nature, it goes so far as to claim to control the lives of non-scientists, reducing human life to a set of “functions” (RM 10)—exactly what one would expect of a project animated by quantitative logic. But who is doing the animation? What is their character? “What is needed for ethics is knowledge not of how to control nature, but of how to control oneself” (RM 10), not only others. In this sense, ethics must precede politics, self-government preceding political rule. What can quantitative logic teach about self-government?

Not much. “Isn’t it a truism nowadays that morals and ethics are relative matters, that is to say, matters of opinion, not of knowledge?” (RM 13) “Ethical relativism has become almost a sine qua non of the educated man, a sort of badge of the modern intellectual,” who maintains that one’s opinions are always ‘relative’ to, even determined by, one civilization, culture class, physical environment, biology, psychological drives. As proof, the intellectual points to the diversity, the contradictory multitude, of moral principles. But this is no proof of anything but the manifoldness of human ways, a fact as well known to Moses and Aristotle as it is to Lord Russell and Professor Stevenson. “The mere diversity in human moral standards does not in principle preclude the possibility of at least some of these standards being correct and others incorrect” (RM 14). Indeed, “the whole world might be wrong and a single individual right” (RM 15), as any number of philosophers (and not only prophets) have started out by thinking.

Ethical relativism follows from Hume’s is-ought dichotomy. The denial of this dichotomy leads relativists “to label their opponents ‘absolutists'” (RM 19n.). Linguistically considered, ‘absolute’ does oppose ‘relative.’ No one calls the knowledge of modern scientists “a purely relative matter”; yet no one calls it “an absolute knowledge,” either. “And if scientists can enjoy an immunity from the dilemma of relativism or absolutism, why may not moral philosophers as well?” (RM 19n)

Some ethical relativists hope that relativism will bring forth greater toleration of differing opinions, and of those who hold them. The anthropologist Ruth Benedict believed so. But, then, so did Benito Mussolini, whose ghost-writer (probably the philosophy professor Giovanni Gentile) wrote for him, “Everything I have said and done in these last years is relativism by intuition…. From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable” (RM 20). Toleration, meet intolerance, each of you standing on the same leg (as do so many of the ‘post-modern’ Leftists whom Veatch, Benedict, Mussolini, and Gentile never lived to see).

All of these would-be relativists face the same dilemma, as well as one another. “No human being can stop with just having convictions, he also has to live and to act. But to act is to choose and to choose is to manifest some sort of preference for one course of action over another. However, to manifest any such human preference means that, consciously or unconsciously, implicitly or explicitly, one has made a judgment of value as to which course of action is the better or the wiser or the more suitable or preferable.” (RM 22)  Benedict holds on high the banner of toleration; Mussolini self-assertion; “liberated youth” their “impulses and inclinations”; skeptics (Hume) “the standards of the community of which [he] is a member” (RM 23). All of these standards rest on “a glaring non sequitar: “Since no course of action is really better or superior to any other, I conclude that the better course of action for me to follow would be thus and so'” (RM 23). Obviously, there is “no possible way in which the denial of all standards of better and worse can itself be transformed into a kind of standard of better or worse” (RM 23). To get out of this impasse, one will need not self-assertion, whether spirited or dispirited, but self-examination.

“Back to Socrates and Aristotle,” then (RM 27). Back, as it happens, to the facts, and to a consideration of facts prior to asserting the ethical equivalent of realism-vs.-nominalism, namely facts-vs.-values. Aristotle observes that every art and every investigation aims at some good (else why undertake it?). Is there a supreme good at which all our actions, taken together, aim? Since all beings have a nature, a set of characteristics defining what they are, the good for each kind of being must be the perfection of its nature. This means that ‘values,’ as they are called, “are simply facts of nature” (RM 29). It can’t be good for water, as water, to evaporate, although sometimes its evaporation may be good for other beings, or for nature as a whole. The distinctively human good, the one fulfilling the definition of what a human being is, “will involve what might loosely be called the maturity or healthy condition of the whole man, or of man in his total being” (RM 29). Further, “since man is a being capable of intelligence and understanding, and consequently of planned and deliberate behavior on the basis of such understanding, it may also be presumed that the way in which a human being attains his appropriate good or natural perfection will be rather different from that of a plant or an animal,” by “a conscious recognition of what the human end is and by deliberately aiming at this proper end” (RM 29). Such recognition, according to Aristotle’s subject-predicate logic, comes from using the “tool” of logic, by reasoning.

Veatch illustrates this by a hypothetical which seems as if it were inspired by the late Franklin Roosevelt. Suppose that a person comes along who begins by “remind[ing] us of how precarious our existence is,” and then offers us a deal: From now on, he will see to it that we will enjoy “freedom from fear, freedom from want, freedom from worry,” on condition that “we shan’t know what is going on” (RM 32). In short, life under the soft despotism of administrative statism, ideally conceived. Would we take the deal? We might, “in moods of defeatism, of misery, and of utter hopelessness,” such as many experienced during the Great Depression and the Second World War. But in less dire circumstances “by and large no man in his senses would prefer the existence of a contented cow, however well fed and well cared for, to the existence of a human being with at least some understanding of what is going on” (RM 33). And as a matter of fact, modern rulers usually do not make their offer explicit, shrewdly assuring that the ruled are clever, informed, wise—the very opposite of those deplorable ignoramuses over there—”while in fact depriving them of the reality of all genuine knowledge and understanding,” or at least trying to (RM 33).

Some, following Hegel, will say that human beings don’t want to know so much as they want to be ‘recognized,’ esteemed by their fellows. In running for Congress, the young Abraham Lincoln admitted that such was his ambition. But was that what Lincoln really wanted? “Why do we seek recognition so avidly?” “Because such praise and respect from our fellows somehow serve as reassurance to ourselves that maybe we have accomplished something or amounted to something after all” (RM 35). If so, then recognition or reputation, honor, is only a proximate end; we seek a sense of “our own worth, our own real achievement and perfection” (RM 35). Following Aristotle, Veatch conducts his readers toward self-examination, toward self-knowledge, by his very argument for self-knowledge as a constituent of human perfection. To perfect something or someone, one first must know what it or he is.

What the English would call a ‘horrible’ lurks here. “It would appear that the good life for man, as Socrates and Aristotle envisage it, would turn out to be none other than the academic life, the life of the professor!”—”the pathetic reality of present-day academic life” (and mind you, Veatch is writing in 1962, years before the inmates took over the academic asylums) (RM 36). Perish the thought, preferably by refusing to allow thought to perish, even in academic groves. “Socrates is always careful to stress that the kind of knowledge and wisdom in which human perfection consists is the knowledge of ‘Know thyself’ and the wisdom that makes for the improvement of the soul,” whereas “there is something about nearly all modern science and scholarship that seems to make it not merely impertinent, but actually antithetic to anything on the order of Socratic wisdom” (RM 37). As Veatch’s readers have already seen, the misapprehension of the distinctively human characteristic, reason, and particularly of its tool, logic, has helped to make this so.

Here Veatch ventures a rare departure from Aristotle. In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle proposes two kinds of human perfection or excellence: “the practical life of man as possessing reason” that aims at discovering and at walking along the right way of life; and then, in Book X, the theoretical life, the life of the philosopher (RM 38). But although discovering the right way of life does require (finally if not initially) theoretical reasoning about what a human being is, such knowledge aims at living the right life, not merely thinking about it. “Knowledge for its own sake can never be the be-all and the end-all of human existence, nor can the chief good of man ever consist in the mere possession or even the exercise of knowledge”; it must rather consist “in its use in the practical living of our lives under the guidance of such knowledge and understanding as we possess” (RM 40-41). That is human perfection or excellence, full humanity. “The intelligent man, in this sense, is the good man or the man of character, and, vice-versa, the good man, in the sense of the man who has attained his full perfection or natural end as a human being, is the intelligent man,” who has achieved eudaimonia or happiness understood not as a ‘feeling’ but as a condition (RM 41). Happiness is “not a matter of subjective feeling on the part of the individual, but something objectively determinable,” just as the health of an individual isn’t a matter of feeling healthy (RM 42). If one feels contented by some condition that is “anything less than what as a human being he is capable of and what… he is naturally ordered and oriented toward, then we should certainly say that such a person had settled for less than he should have, or that he didn’t know what was good for him” (RM 43). We would say, as Socrates says of some interlocutors, he has a wrongly-ordered soul.

A modern scientist might reply to Veatch by saying that disease is no less natural than health, that nature has no end or purpose, that life and death are indifferent to nature, equally part of nature. Veatch answers, as he does to logical positivists, that modern science excludes consideration of natural end a priori. The ‘method’ of modern science, dovetailing with the method of mathematical logic, excludes considerations of ‘what-ness’ and ‘who-ness.’ But such considerations are exactly what ethical thought requires. This does not make ethical thought irrational; it only makes it unscientific. I once asked an atheist, who found the notion of God unscientific and therefore rationally inadmissible, if his little daughter knew him. If so, she could not know him scientifically, having no knowledge whatever of his chemical composition, his DNA, or nearly anything other things modern scientists can measure beyond his size, shape, and (to some extent) behavior. “The possibility of explanation in scientific terms must involve the exclusion a priori of all such data as do not lend themselves to the particular procedures of scientific testing and verification” (RM 46), as the possibility of explanation in mathematical terms must involve such exclusion of all things do not lend themselves to the particular procedures of mathematical measurement and proof. But these exclusions do not preclude reasoning in other ways, ways which (as Aristotle says) fit the things being considered.

One might reply to Veatch by remarking that all of this depends upon the nature of nature, as it were. What or who are you knowing? Is it or he (or He?) good to know? Veatch, with Aristotle, answers that human being not only has a good but is itself good ‘for itself.’ God might reply, ‘Not so fast, sinner.’ But God will then offer the grace which makes nature better than it now is. And even a mere philosopher might justify his own way of life, in reasonable terms, by explaining that he too requires self-knowledge, and in knowing himself he knows that, qua philosopher, qua lover of theoretical and not only practical wisdom, his perfection consists in attempting to know the whole of nature, including its First Cause. The philosopher’s good is not exactly the same as the good of the practical man. It comprehends, or at least seek to comprehend, more than a good life in the social and political world. The scientific and mathematical ‘universes’ are not necessarily “the only reality there is” (RM 47). But does this leave “in the utterly unsatisfactory situation philosophically of having to acknowledge that truth is not one, but many”? (RM 48).

Whether by natural reasoning or divine revelation, knowledge of the human good requires that human beings think ‘pre-scientifically,’ pre-mathematically. In the words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Everything I know of the world, even through science, I know from a point of view which is mine or through an experience of the world without which the symbols of science would be meaningless” (RM 48). “We must first re-awaken this experience of the world,” Merleau-Ponty continues, “for science is its second expression. Science does not have and never will have the same kind of being that the perceived world has, for the simple reason that science is a determination or explanation of the world” (RM 48). This latter claim could (and did, in Merleau-Ponty’s case) lead not to Aristotelianism but to a historicist apology for tyranny, to a claim that morality consists in going with the ever-changing, Heraclitean flow issuing in a universal despotism. With Aristotle, Veatch rather doubts that, and would concur instead with Leo Strauss (who equally called for a return to ‘naive’ or pre-scientific understanding as the foundation of all knowing, including scientific and mathematical knowing) in recognizing that historicism is only another ‘ism,’ philosophically interesting but mistaken, and sometimes calamitously so. Accordingly, Veatch valorizes not Stalinism or Maoism but the less grandiose task of “try[ing] to return, in some sense at least, to the things themselves,” to “a return to this world as it is before scientific knowledge,” to “the concrete world of ordinary human experience” (RM 48-49).

What happens if we do? “Living intelligently involves seeing things as they are and seeing oneself as one is, amid all the confusions and misrepresentations due to one’s own passions and predilections and prejudices” (RM 56). In so living, one finds the passions to be double-edged—often clouding the mind but also providing a useful mental shorthand, as the pain of a bee sting causes wariness of bees, around which one exercises caution ‘without thinking,’ from then on. “Without emotions and passions, a human being would not be human, but a mere clod, lacking the dynamic quality that is requisite for the attainment of human perfection” (RM 59); if passions run too high, they overpower thought altogether. “The virtuous man is the man who knows how to utilize and control his own emotions and desires,” the one who governs himself (RM 59). Fundamentally expressions of desire or aversion, emotions imply judgments of good and bad; this is why Aristotle puts such emphasis on the definition of virtues as means between extremes, and on the particular virtue of moderation. To understand courage (for example) as the mean or the middle between rashness and cowardice implies that the courageous soul leaves itself room for making a reasoned judgment of how to conduct itself in each circumstance which arises. Moderation, which ‘hits the middle’ regarding physical desires, is the virtue needed most often, addressing the ordinary challenges of our daily lives. Virtue understood and exercised as “the mean” also enables us to avoid judging simply according to habit derived from “mere social convention” (RM 61). It enables even a non-philosophic soul to ‘ascend from the Cave’ of social opinion. And it should not go unnoticed that “the mean” isn’t quantifiable; there is no mathematical formula we can devise to get us to hit it, except with respect to bodily goods, care for which requires us first to intend to hit the mean in the first place.

Aristotle identifies magnanimity or greatness of soul as the crown of the moral virtues. Veatch ‘democratizes’ it somewhat, calling it “self-respect” (RM 62). “The man who manages to live well will be the man who has a just estimate of himself, being neither overly complacent about his capacities and achievements, not, at the other extreme, overly lacking in a sense of his own dignity and responsibilities” (RM 62). Veatch criticizes the tendency of many Americans toward “indifference or even… disgust for the purposes and responsibilities of life,” men who preen themselves on such evasion (RM 62). In academia, this attitude results in “your man of learning secretly delight[ing] in picturing himself as a sort of composite Ernest Hemingway, Jean-Paul Sartre, and perhaps Pablo Picasso,” while in reality is “only a Sir Walter Elliot” (RM 66), that model of vanity readers meet on the first page of Jane Austen’s Persuasion.

Ethics consists in the art of living well, but it is more than an art. Aristotle warns that in the arts an intended mistake is not so bad as an unintended one, but in ethics, which involves practical wisdom as well as art, an unintended mistake is worse. That is because in ethics you need more than know-how; “in addition, you have to do” what you know (RM 71). If you know what to do but fail to do it you “would certainly not be a good man” (RM 72), unless unfavorable circumstances prevented a good course of action. What is more, “there just can’t be any knowledge of this sort of thing without doing” (RM 72), developing a desire to do the right thing, cultivating good “habits of choice” (73), having “learned how to let his choices and preferences be determined by such knowledge and understanding as he may have, rather than to proceed simply from chance feelings and impulses of the moment or from long established but mechanical habits of response” (RM 74).

Is the “examined life” possible? Is it the good life for human beings, or are human purposes irretrievably irrational? Yes, it is possible and good because the good life is “the natural end toward which a human being is oriented by virtue of being human,” a “fact of nature” discoverable by reasoning although not created by reasoning (RM 79). That human nature requires deliberation and choice for its fulfillment becomes obvious in considering the many examples of persons lacking in self-knowledge, unable “intellectually to see or know the truth about [themselves], as in not being willing or disposed to see this truth” (RM 83). Such persons may be no less, and even more, intelligent than we are, but what a mess they have made of their lives. This underscores Aristotle’s remark that “in a science such as ethics the end is not knowledge but action” (RM 84). Choosing to do what’s right is harder than knowing what’s right; deliberate habituation in right action—”the repeated performance of just and temperate actions”—is more moral than moralizing. Generally speaking, “in the final analysis our human failures are ultimately due not to the fact that we don’t know what we ought to do, but rather to the fact that we don’t choose to act on our knowledge” (RM 97). Virtue “is more a matter of abiding by one’s knowledge or remaining constant to it, instead of letting it be forever displaced by numberless counter-opinions and judgments that are determined by our passions and whims of the moment” (RM 102). The fact that we may not do this, that we may indeed choose inconsistently, drifting from one opinion to another, one impulse to another, one course of action to another, indicates the human capacity for freedom of judgment. “It is not because of ignorance that we fail, ultiomately, it is because we don’t choose when we could choose” (RM 108).

As for the force of circumstances, “for most of us, most of the time, our adversities and ill fortune are not such as to leave us completely without resources” (RM 115). Rather, “the important thing is how we take our good fortune, or our ill fortune. That is what determines whether we are well off or not, not the good or ill fortune itself” (RM 116). Circumstances seldom allow us to choose the best; they often prevent us from choosing what is especially good, but they always allow us to choose the better or the worse, until incapacity or death wrest choice from us.

Behind the flaccid relativism of thinkers like Russell and Barrett stands Nietzsche, mocking the Last Man whom they comfort with their egalitarian niaiseries and proclaiming grandly, “God is dead”—”God” meaning not only the God of the Bible, and the gods of all books deemed holy, but any “objectively grounded moral order anywhere in the universe” (RM 129). “The purpose of [Rational Man] is to suggest that in Nietzsche’s terms, God is not dead after all, that nature itself, or at least human nature, does involve a moral order, which it should be the concern of human beings to recognize and act upon” (RM 129). Less stirring thinkers than Nietzsche have also supposed that nature offers no real moral support to human beings. Utilitarians, for example, make reason instrumental to the desires. Utilitarians commit what might call the fallacy of misplaced sociality. Their concern for the greatest ‘good’ for the greatest number—good being defined as pleasure—rests on the assumption that “morals or ethics involves only their relations with others and never their relations with themselves” (RM 130). They typically ignore the question of whether pleasure is good for oneself or, if so, what pleasures are good. Further, they “have always had some difficulty in showing why anyone has any obligation to think about others” if hedonism should rule us all. John Stuart Mill argues that we take pleasure in altruism, an argument Veatch finds “dubious, to say the least” (RM 132). It might be more accurate and kinder to say that it is idiosyncratic; what Veatch has in mind, however, is that pleasure is no guarantee of self-knowledge, that one might, on hedonic grounds, take oneself to be happy if permanently deluded with drugs or some other illusion-producing device.

Mill also argues, it should be noted, that some pleasures are better than others, that it is better to be Socrates satisfied than a pig satisfied—assuming of course that one is a man, not a pig. But it also should be noted that in this claim he begins to move a bit closer to Aristotle, and away from Jeremy Bentham. The twentieth-century philosopher and contemporary of Russell G. E. Moore condemns Aristotle for committing what he calls the “naturalistic fallacy.”

Moore wonders why “a natural tendency” should “necessarily be a tendency toward the good” (RM 137). As Paul the Apostle observed long before him, Moore that some men aim at evil, adding that some aim at things morally indifferent. He concurs with Hume: One cannot logically derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is.’ “Aristotle’s definition of the good is held to be mistaken, not because it does not fit the facts, but because it violates the logical canons of good definition: it attempts to define something not in terms of what it is”—a thing—”but in terms of what it is not”—a value (RM 139). That is, to define a fact as a value is to fail to define it at all, to fail to construct a proper definition in the first place. Veatch rejoins that this refutation ranges too widely. “On the same principles just about any definition of anything must also commit a fallacy,” since if you define A as A you’ve produced a tautology, but if you define A as B or C then you’re defining it “in terms of what is other than A, and this violates the principle that everything is what it is and not another thing” (RM 140). “This is far more than Moore himself ever bargained for” (RM 140), limiting the definition of ‘fish,’ for example, to ‘fish.’ If Moore means simply that it is contradictory to say ‘A is not-A,’ or ‘a fish is a not-fish,’ then the question remains, is a so-called ‘value’ a not-is?

The fact/value distinction, progeny of Hume’s is/ought distinction, depends upon “an excessively static and atomistic conception of facts” (RM 145). But is there (in fact, one is tempted to say) “any fact at all that does not suggest all sorts of possibilities of how it might become other and different?” (RM 145). On the contrary, “the whole of reality is shot through with the distinction between potentiality and actuality, between what is still only able to be and what actually is,” between the imperfect and the perfect, the incomplete and the complete, the empty to the full” (RM 145). When Aristotle says ‘the good’ he means “the actual as related to the potential” (RM 145). A mangled hand cannot fully serve the purpose of a hand; a mangled soul cannot fully serve the purpose of a soul. The fact that mangled souls aim at evil or at least defective ends illustrates the point. It is only if he remain within the limits of quantitative logic and/or nonteleological modern science that we must deny that this is so. But the denial may be the product of the limitations of our way of thinking, which restricts rational thought too much.

The existentialism of William Barrett, Jean-Paul Sartre, and other Nietzsche epigoni attacks not only Aristotelian ethics but any rationalist ethics. According to existentialists, “reason cannot tell man anything about how to live or what to live for” not because reason cannot be used for such a purpose but because there is no “ethical truth” to be discovered in the first place (RM 150). Faced with a universe devoid of meaning, human beings can only give meaning to their otherwise meaningless lives by freely choosing the way of life they happen to prefer. This argument replicates the is/ought distinction in its own way, holding up “disinterested, impersonal objectivity on the one hand and a committed subjectivity on the other” (RM 155). Veatch rejoins, choice alone can’t make the choice right. “The issue is whether one can ever choose rightly without knowledge” (RM 155). To deploy the term ‘commitment,’ as such thinkers do, sounds impressive, but why should Sartre prefer his commitment to communism over Hitler’s commitment to fascism? Merely because it is his commitment? This would elevate love of one’s own to unsuspected moral heights. Is ‘my own’ worth of a human being, given the nature of human beings? Is it worthy of my own potential? How, on the basis of existentialism, can I know?

Sartre satirizes what Aristotle esteems as the spoudaios, the serious man. Such a man “tries to hide from himself that it is human freedom which decides on moral values,” that “if man is not the creator of being, he is at least the inventor of moral values”; such a man “takes refuge in the spirit of seriousness” in an attempt “to evade moral responsibility” (RM 155), which requires us not to follow our true nature or to obey divine law but to invent values ‘against’ an indifferent, amoral nature and to admit that divine law is human, all-too-human. But if there is no God—in the broad sense of no personal god or gods and no nature with moral content—then to act as if there were is nothing more than what Sartre calls “bad faith.” Veatch rejoins, to claim that God is dead is to claim “a certain understanding, a knowledge of what the score is” (RM 157). This must be “a morally relevant knowledge, a knowledge that indicates what we should do and what our responsibilities are in light of the facts” (RM 157). “Must not the very dialectic of their own position catch the existentialists up into the logic of ‘Know thyself’ and of the examined life, and ultimately into the ethics of rational man?” (RM 157) And to do that is at least tacitly to acknowledge one’s humanness, one’s givenness, one’s nature, to try to understand what it is, rather than escaping into imagining oneself as a Nietzschean superman, beyond good and evil, or into imagining a socialist utopia as a real future regime.

“While in their capacity as scientists,” Veatch concludes, “men can attain a knowledge of nature that is literally limitless in its own dimension, yet in respects to other dimensions such a scientific knowledge of nature is both narrowly defined and rigorously restricted, not merely in fact, but in principle” (RM 158). Much the same is true for quantitative logic. Meanwhile, however, “men merely as human beings,” not as scientists or mathematicians, “can, by exercising their intelligence, achieve a kind of commonsense understanding of their own nature and of the nature of the world they live in which is different from scientific knowledge, and for which scientific knowledge is no substitute” (RM 158).

 

William Shakespeare: The Taming of the Shrew.

 

Performed at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Summer 2007.

Performed at the Michigan Shakespeare Festival, July 22, 2017.

 

In front of an alehouse on a heath—a wild place in a wild place—the indignant hostess confronts Christopher Sly. A tinker or itinerant pot-maker, Christopher Sly lives up to the reputation of his profession, then held to be an occupation for drunks. He doesn’t live up to either part of his name, except in the way he puns off the name of his family: “Let the world slide” (Induction i.5). But as to the rest, he is neither a providential nor a provident man. Not Christlike—innocent as a dove, prudent as a serpent—not Machiavellian—vulpine and lion-like— he could not be less a ruler than he is. Incapable of rule, including self-rule, he seemingly cannot be ruled, at least not by the poor Hostess, whom he refuses to pay for some ale glasses he broke. Unjust, a man who will not pay his debts, like all drunks he harbors too much anger as well as too much appetite in his soul. Aristotle might call him the the least political man imaginable, and therefore not fully a man at all, since man is the political animal.

A better ruler, called only “Lord,” chances by, with his retinue and his hunting dogs. [1] Seeing poor, passed-out Sly, he likens him to a swine but recognizes him as human, a “drunken man,” under the Circean spell of ale (Induction i.34). But as a true ruler, the Lord not only judges men aright, he knows what to do with them. Take him back to my home (out of the wild, back to civil society) and make him “forget himself” (which is indeed a favor, given the character of his ‘self’) (Induction i.38). Like a stage director in a play, the Lord directs his men to hang “his fairest chamber” with “all my wanton pictures”; “balm his foul head with warm distilled waters”; scent the air by burning “sweet wood”; when he awakes, have music ready, “a dulcet and heavenly sound” (Induction i.44-49). Sight, touch, smell, hearing: four of the five senses will ‘argue’ for a new identity; eroticism, especially, brings a man out of himself, redirects his thoughts to the loved one (or ones, as there is more than one wanton picture). The Lord does not appeal to Sly’s taste, inasmuch as it inclines to the taste of ale. Let that sleeping swine lie.

“If he chance speak”—show a telltale sign of humanness—tell him a noble lie (Induction i.50): Address him as His Honor, ask him for a command; will you wash yourself, will you dress yourself, and how? Tell him he is a hunter, a horseman, a husband whose lady “mourns at his disease,” which is lunacy—a dreamlike condition from which he has just now awakened (Induction i.60). “Do it kindly, gentle sirs”; kindly means naturally, as he must be called back to his true, human, nature by natural means (Induction i.64). The Lord induces his men to look at it as an amusement, “pastime passing excellent, / If it be husbanded with modesty” (Induction i.65-66). Husbandry or agriculture works with nature; modesty or moderation works with care. He instructs his page, Bartholomew, to dress as a woman and pretend to be Sly’s wife, and to tell him he’s been deathly ill for seven years. Later, one of the Lord’s servants more than doubles the number to fifteen. With fine comic timing, a troupe of actors arrives, looking for work, which the Lord is happy to give them, inviting them to join in with “some sport in hand / Where you cunning can insist me much” (Induction i.89-90). But above all he needs them to rule themselves throughout the stage business. Don’t act ‘out of character’ in my play, lest my stagecraft fail. “Haply my presence / May well abate the over-merry spleen, / Which otherwise would grow into extremes” (Induction i.34-36). The true ruler’s presence moderates the passions of those he rules, civilizes them. He rules by natural means (water, sweet smoke) and mostly by art (wanton pictures, music, a play); Sly is very far from being ready for a real and civil life. He needs a comprehensive moral education.

The Lord and his men carry out this plot. Awakened but far from ‘woke,’ the patient asserts his identity: “I am Christopher Sly; call not me ‘honor’ nor lordship” (Induction ii.5). Reverting to his favorite appetite, he swears he “never drank sack in my life,” sherry being a gentleman’s drink, unlike his preferred ale, the drink of the people (Induction ii.7). For food he wants salt beef. He even gives his lineage, far from aristocratic, dating back only so far as his father, plain Burton Heath, a name that suggests the wild and inhuman part of nature where Sly was found. Son Christopher has been something of a changeling—peddler by birth, cardmaker by “education,” a keeper of a tame bear “by transmutation,” and “by present profession a tinker” (Induction ii.16-19). “Score me up for the lying’st knave in Christendom,” English Christendom’s finest example of the Cretan liar (Induction ii.23-24). To this, the Lord adjures him to “Call home thy ancient thoughts from banishment, / And banish these abject lowly dreams” (Induction ii.29-30). He commands Apollonian music, the opposite of Dionysian drunkenness. With judgelike authority, the Lord proclaims “Thou art a lord, and nothing but a lord,” with “a lady far more beautiful/ Than any woman in this waning age” (Induction ii.59-61).

That arrests the man’s attention, begins to reform his self-knowledge. “Am I a lord and have I such a lady?” (Induction ii.66). Do I dream now or have I been dreaming? Surely, “I do not sleep: I see, I hear, I speak;/ I smell sweet savours, and I feel soft things” (Induction ii.68-69); with a boost from wishful thinking, his senses convince him, as planned, even as common sense could not—he having little of that to work with. He calls for ale again, but now only the weakest kind. The Lord’s men ignore that, instead bringing in his ‘wife,’ Bartholomew, who tells him the doctor has left instructions for her not to share his bed with him, lest his illness recur.  The actors, whom the Lord encountered out on the heath, will cure his understandable melancholy at having his eros first aroused, then denied. They will stage a play, “The Taming of the Shrew.” This play-within-the-play will have its own play (or plays) within it, as the several levels of noble lies are arranged to lead not only a drunkard but all of Shakespeare’s audience (each of us likely drunk with some impediment to wisdom and the other virtues) to clear-eyed thoughts, through the senses but beyond them.

In the play we meet Lucentio (“Light”) and his servant Tranio. They have journeyed from Lombardy (specifically the city of Pisa, “renowned” for its “grave citizens”) (I.i.2). Lucentio would leave the home of a merchant father, foregoing citizenship for the liberal arts, the way to the philosophic life. “Here let us breathe, and haply institute/ A course of learned and ingenious studies” (I.i.8-9), especially the study of “Virtue and that part of philosophy” which “treats of happiness/ By virtue specially to be achiev’d” (I.i.18-20)—the philosophy found in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Ah, but as Tranio may know, the Ethics might lead to the Politics, or, if not to politics, then to Stoicism. “Let’s be no Stoics nor no stocks”—restraints—”I pray,/ Or so devote to Aristotle’s checks”—his moderation—”As Ovid be an outcast quite abjured” (I.i.31-33). Logic, yes; rhetoric, very well; “music and poesy” by all means; even mathematics and metaphysics (I.i.36): But ‘pray’ “Fall to them as you find your stomach serves you. / No profit grows where is no pleasure ta’en” (I.i.37-38). Epicurean Tranio has a mind rather like an American college student; he likes a curriculum with as many ‘electives’ as possible: “In brief, sir, study what you most affect,” what you want (I.i.40). If you would flee political life, select from Aristotle’s books as you please, but avoid the stern apoliticism of the Stoics and embrace the pleasurable apoliticism of the Epicureans. In Plautus’ play, Mostellaria, from which Shakespeare borrows him, Tranio is a clever slave, as indeed he is here: a man of wit, a fixer, but of ‘slavish’ character—low, pleasure-preferring, given to manipulating the low side of other souls, bending them to his own inclinations. “Gramercies, Tranio, well dost thou advise,” replies Lucentio, as he inclines toward becoming a genteel version of Sly (I.i.41).

An object for erotic desire enters immediately. A Paduan gentleman, Baptista Minola, has an apparently unmarriageable daughter, Katherine, “rough” and shrewish elder to studious, beautiful and modest Bianca. Hortensio and Gremio (the latter an unsuitable suitor, a comical old man exemplifying a stock figure in Italian comedy) would court Bianca, but Baptista will not marry his younger daughter until he finds a husband for undesirable Katherine. Upon seeing Bianca, Lucentio falls in love, too. He devises his own ‘play’ or plot to win her, proposing to present himself as a tutor in order to gain access to Bianca. Meanwhile, Tranio will assume Lucentio’s identity in Padua, a plausible imposture because faces alone don’t distinguish master from manservant. Nature makes no such distinction, at least physically; they can change clothes, even as a clothing change was part of the ‘play’ on Sly, and even as actors in plays change into their costumes, into their assumed identities—to sleep, perchance to dream, not of some Hell but of a person and of things outside their ordinary selves. And so, perhaps, to learn. Shakespeare himself served in his company as plotter, ruler, and player. And he learned as he went, from histories and light comedies to tragedies to The Tempest. Lucentio announces that he has another, undisclosed, purpose in his plotting, but does not say what it is.

This is to say that the Lord presents the changeling Sly with a play about changelings played by actors (themselves by definition changelings). The play will invite Sly to change, to reorient his soul, even as his condition has been changed for him by the Lord.

Veronese gentleman Petruchio and his servant Grumio (not to be confused with old man Gremio) have arrived in Padua to visit his “best beloved and approved friend,” Hortensio (I.ii.3). (The root of “Hortensio” means “garden”; there is perhaps a hint of apolitical Epicureanism in this university town.) His father having died, Petruchio seeks in Padua not the liberal arts but a fortune and a wife, preferably in the same person. Hortensio tells him he knows a prospect, unfortunately “shrewd and ill-favoured” (I.ii.58) but assuredly “rich, and very rich” (I.ii.61). As manly and thumotic as Lucentio is ardent and ‘intellectual,’ Petruchio replies that “wealth is the burden of my wooing dance” (I.ii.66). Therefore, “Be she as foul as was Florentius’ love” (an old hag who nonetheless turned into a beautiful woman, by magic), or “old as Sibyl,” or even “as curst and shrewd / As Socrates’ Xanthippe or a worse”—philosophy lingers in the background, even with Petruchio—all’s well that ends well, wellness being defined by him as wealth (I.ii.67-69). [2] He too has a plot: He will disguise himself as a music teacher to gain access to Baptista’s household, then take things from there.

Lucentio (having assumed his new identity as tutor “Cambio”) and Gremio pass by, discussing their own plots to win Bianca, overheard by the two friends. But Hortensio doesn’t know everything, as he assumes that Gremio really is Lucentio, and that he must be a rival to Petruchio for the hand of Katherine. Of course there’s no real conflict, as these suitors aim at different women. This becomes clear as Petruchio discourses on Katherine, “an irksome brawling scold” (I.ii.184) whom he nonetheless intends to woo: “Have I not in my time heard lions roar?” and the winds howl at sea, seen the “angry boar chafed with sweat” and “the great ordinance in the field,” indeed the greater “thunder in the sky” (I.ii.196-201)? Hunter (like the Lord), sailor and soldier, perhaps unfearful of Heaven’s lightning itself, why should Petruchio fear “a woman’s tongue” (I.ii.204)? He will proceed to vindicate his boast.

Lucentio’s servant Tranio enters, playing Lucentio, and proposes that he, Hortensio and old man Gremio, Bianca’s suitors, deal with one another “as adversaries do in law—/ Strive mightily, but eat and drink as friends” (I.ii.275-275). It is a fine proposal for a comedy, and also sets up Tranio’s two gulls for the deception needed to give his master the decisive edge in his contest to win the lady.

Baptista’s house is the setting for the beginning of Petruchio’s celebrated taming of Katherine, who’s been acting insufferably toward her father and Bianca. Suspecting her blameless sister of desiring Hortensio, rich old Gremio, or both, she strikes her; when Baptista reprimands her, she turns on him, accusing him of favoring Bianca and vowing revenge. Baptista’s deranged household thus consists of a weak father, a rebellious and unsisterly daughter, and a decent young woman who for now must suffer them both. Padua, a place of liberal learning, features serious deficiencies in at least one of its ruling families. Families being the foundation of cities, of political life, Padua may be a university town with a government problem.

The several suitors arrive, and Petruchio executes his strategy, which is to contradict Katherine at every turn. Goading her by calling her by the diminutive, ‘Kate,’ he taunts her by praising her as pleasant, gamesome, courteous, slow in speech, yet “sweet as springtime flowers” (II.i.239). With broad irony, he lauds “her princely gait” (II.i.252) and her likeness to the virgin goddess, Diana—the way of a princess ambitious for rule but unfit for it, an impediment to the continuation of her own family and therefore in contradiction with her own ambition. He turns to romantic language, the language of courtly love, into a vehicle of infuriating mockery. For once, the lady is at a loss for words, speech being the coin of politics. She can only sputter, as her father offers her hand in marriage. She recovers her speech sufficiently to protest to when her desperate father, objecting to this impending marriage to a man she judges a “half lunatic,” “mad-cap ruffian” and “swearing jack” (II.i.280-281). Her taming has just begun; Petruchio exits, off to Venice to buy wedding-clothes, but not before describing his betrothed as “temperate as the morn,” the virtue associated with wise rulership in the play’s Induction. As Caton observes [3], Petruchio proceeds with Katherine very much as the Lord did with Sly, in principle if not in practice: To tame the immoderate and unruly soul, he subjects it to the opposite of what it wants, contradicting it at every turn. Unlike the Lord, he does not do so gently, as it were behind the back of his ‘student.’ Public shaming, not private illusion, must be the way to amend a soul drunk not on ale but on the will to power.

Gremio and Tranio (as “Lucentio”) end the scene by arguing over which of them deserves Bianca, appealing to Baptista’s love of wealth by describing their riches, real and alleged, respectively. Tranio outbids Gremio, but now he needs to produce the rich father he claimed. The two self-announced suitors appeal to the father. The two secret suitors, the real Lucentio (as tutor “Cambio”) and Hortensio (calling himself “Litio,” playing the role of a music-master), will make their approaches to the daughter. Both men pass love notes to Bianca in the course of ‘teaching’ her. She prefers “Cambio,” who rightly strikes her as the truer man, beneath the disguise. Hortensio proves the accuracy of her judgment by immediately thinking of shifting his love to someone else.

Long before the actress-queen in Hamlet, Katherine shows herself a woman who protesteth too much, chafing at Petruchio’s absence after having tried to order him to go away. It is this hitherto well-submerged sense that she hasn’t been living well in her father’s household, that she somehow wants and needs a husband stronger than her father, that makes her curable, that will enable Petruchio’s strong medicine to work. When he arrives, disheveled, clever but unwise Tranio begs him to “see not your bride in these unreverent robes,” to “go to my chamber, put on clothes of mine” (III.ii.108-109). Petruchio is not a man to be ‘dressed’ by another, advised by a very clever but less prudent (and less manly) man. The lady will be marrying him, not “my clothes” (III.ii.113), he replies. What she sees will be what she gets. Tranio suspects method in this madness, which continues at the wedding, when Petruchio avers to be “master of what is mine own,” a wife who “is my goods, my chattels,” and “my house,” and indeed his household stuff, field, barn, horse, ox, ass—”my any thing” (III.ii.225-228). Because she is his own, however, the man of military valor will defend her as his own, against all comers: “Kate, I’ll buckler thee against a million” (III.ii.235). He rules her by virtue of his nature, not by the dubious virtue of ‘clothes,’ that is, of convention, changeable appearance. Moderate Bianca, who needs no such taming, remarks that her sister, “being mad herself,” has been “madly mated” (III.ii.240). Thumos has yielded to the superior thumos.

Nor is Petruchio done. The shrew has yielded, but perhaps not wholeheartedly—and if not wholeheartedly, then not for long. Reversing the tactic of the Lord, he takes Katherine from the city to the country. Sly is a human being ‘countrified’ by ale, a drunk passed out on the heath—in a ‘state of nature,’ as later writers would put it. He needs to be civilized gently, by means of seductive illusions, removed to civilization to live a noble lie for a time, in order to learn the truth about his real nature. Katherine, an uncivilized denizen of eminently civil, indeed liberal-artsy, Padua, needs not the gentle atmosphere she has learned to exploit but roughness, exposure to harsh truths, crushing defeat by someone who plays her own game better than she does. She needs exposure to a state of war. Petruchio abuses the servants; she pleads for them, thereby getting out of herself, as did Sly under the rule of the Lord. As one of the servants remarks, “He kills her in her own humor,” even as the Lord kills Sly with kindness (IV.i.169). Like Sly, she “sits as one new risen from a dream” (IV.i.170). In both cases, it is a dream induced in order to bring the patient back to reality. “Thus have I politicly begun my reign,” Petruchio replies (IV.i.172). Unlike Lucentio, like the Lord, Petruchio is a political man. But Caton is wrong to think that he is a Machiavellian one. [4] Petruchio rules her not as a tyrant, for his advantage alone, but for her own good. That is, he rules her as a parent rules a child, replacing her hapless father in founding a new household. “Amid this hurly I intend / That all is done in reverend care of her” (IV.i.187-188). Here he reveals his true nature; he had claimed to be interested only in a rich wife, but now we know he wants a good one. Right rule is a kind of practical wisdom: “He that knows better how to tame a shrew, / Now let him speak; ’tis charity to show” (IV.i.194-195). Like his near-namesake Petrarch, Petruchio knows how to address a woman. Courtly Petrarch shows how to address a gentlewoman; Petruchio shows how to address an ungentle and indeed unkind one.

He soon teaches her how to beg, instead of her habitual commanding. He starves her body, taunting her by offering and then taking away both food and clothing. Enforced bodily suffering requires recourse to the mind, and indeed, as Petruchio instructs her, “‘Tis the mind that makes the body rich; / And as the sun breaks through the darkest clouds,/ So honour peereth in the meanest habit” (IV.iii.68-70). Her thumos, misdirected toward prideful libido dominandi, must be redirected toward the natural honor of a human being, founded in its distinctive nature, the capacity to reason. “O no, good Kate; neither art thou the worse/ For this poor furniture and mean array” (IV.iii.175-76). As with Sly, she must learn her true ‘identity,’ her nature, stripped of convention. When she continues to murmur in rebellion, Petruchio even ‘makes’ time stand still: “It shall be what o’clock I say it is” (IV.iii.191). (Newton supposes time a constant, but Petruchio anticipates Einstein.) He soon makes her call the sun the moon, and then the sun again. Like the Lord, he bends his patient’s perceptions of nature to his will, so as to break her ill-will, and by so doing bring her to see nature aright.

Back in the city, in front of Baptista’s house, Tranio finds in an elderly “Pedant” passing by the perfect type for the needed role of Vincentio, Lucentio’s ‘rich father.’ As a smart casting director, he gives the old fellow motivation, gulling him into believing that his life’s in danger, telling him that he must assume the role of Vincentio for safety’s sake. Pedants and the elderly alike tend to have timid souls. His master and Bianca plot elopement; this is the additional plot Lucentio had hinted at, earlier, as he deployed the decoy ‘Lucentio’ to distract Baptista’s attention from the doings of the real one with Baptista’s daughter. But his, their, plot takes a twist when his real father meets Petruchio along the road and learns from him of the impending marriage. The elopement proceeds, but the young marrieds must now return to Padua, and to their fathers, neither of whom is a happy man for the deceptions. Petruchio and his Kate (herself now openly in love) can now watch the show with amusement, as the quiet, seemingly docile couple have made themselves the center of controversy.

They all gather not at father Baptista’s house but at Lucentio’s; as the Bible and nature both command, the newly-married couple cleave to one another, form a new household. There, Lucentio can offer his guests hospitality, bring “our jarring notes” to “agree” (V.ii.1). “Feast with the best, and welcome to my house” (V.ii.8). (At last, Kate will be fed.) “Pray you, sit down; / For now we sit to chat as well as eat” (V.ii.10-11). This is the first time anyone in the play sits, comes to rest. To eat is to serve the body; to speak is to exercise the mind; the jarring notes of body and soul can now agree in the newly and rightly constituted household, where the newly and rightly constituted household of spirited Petruchio and Kate are welcome guests. When Baptista, Petruchio, Lucentio, and Hortensio (successfully married to a rich widow) make a playful bet on whose wife is the most obedient, Petruchio wins; Kate’s love of victory, redirected, can now contribute to a re-founded, better household than the one she left for marriage.

She makes her victory speech to the ladies, when commanded by Petruchio to “tell these headstrong women / What duty they owe their lords and husbands” (V.ii.135-136). This she proceeds to do, but not in her former way, by her once-characteristic habit of berating. She reasons with them. Her rhetoric depends upon an account of human nature. She teaches them that nature, shared by men and women, has also has differentiated them. She will prove a better Paduan lecturer than many a university prof, then and there, now and here.

“Unknit that threatening unkind brow” (V.ii.136). As always in Shakespeare “kind” means natural, as in grouping natural objects according to their kind, their species. Some parts of nature are also kind in our sense, but not all—as for example the heath from which the Lord rescued Sly. Why is a threatening brow unnatural in a wife? Kate offers four reasons: It wounds your husband, your rightful ruler; it blots your beauty; it ruins your “fame,” your reputation; it is neither “meet” nor “amiable” (V.ii.140-41). Like a dirty fountain, no one will drink from it. That is, if a wife will share a household with her husband, any attempt to inspire fear will fail, if he is a real man, the kind you want for a husband. Your way with him must go through attraction, through your beauty and your amiableness. You will be better off if respected by him, and by others; your honor, even the honor of your family, depends on it.

Properly, your husband is your sovereign, but both a gentle and a kind one, one who “cares for thee” (V.ii.147). He does this by committing his body to “painful labor both by sea and land” (V.ii.147). You stay “warm at home secure and safe” (V.ii.151). In justice, you owe in return for his care “love, fair looks, and true obedience,” the duties a subject owes his prince (V.ii.153). Why so? To disobey “his honest will” makes the wife a “graceless traitor to her loving lord” (V.ii.158-160). But why are these sharply distinct ‘roles’—our own contemporary term suggests playacting—natural?  By nature, women’s bodies are “soft and weak and smooth,” ill-fitted for painful labor both by sea and land, at least in comparison to the bodies of men. Undermine your husband and you weaken his ability to defend you and the household you share with him. The bodies of women are fitted for living in soft conditions, not for “toil and trouble in the world (V.ii.166). Our hearts should be correspondingly soft, Kate urges—harmonized with those of caring husbands, as the Apollonian music heard by Sly might do to his shrewish, unruly soul. Therefore, she reasonably concludes, wives should curb their willfulness and do their own natural duty, even as husbands do theirs.

“Why, there’s a wench!” Petruchio rightly exclaims (V.ii.180). He commands a kiss, and receives one. “We’ll to bed” (V.ii.184), as their marriage is now of a kind as may prove a just, natural, secure foundation for a family.

As for his brother-in-law Lucentio, in victory Petruchio can be magnanimous, great-souled: ‘Twas I who won the wager, though you hit the white”—punning on Bianca’s name—and “being a winner, God give you good night!” (V.ii.186). Whereas thumotic Petruchio presents the matter in terms of victory, Lucentio presents it in terms of thought: “‘Tis a wonder, by your leave, she will be tam’d so.” Philosophy begins in wonder. Lucentio came to Padua to study philosophy, the crown of the liberal arts. Tranio has failed to side-track him. Lucentio needs the example of his spirited, shrew-taming friend to spur him to philosophy, away from a slack epicureanism. Fortunately, his own wife will need no taming, so the young Socrates, if that is what he proves, will have no Xanthippe to harass him. In forming an alliance, and by forming it at Lucentio’s house, Petruchio and his new friend will strengthen the city or cities in which they live. They have formed an alliance between philosophic reason, practical reason, and spiritedness that mirrors not only a well-ordered regime but a well-ordered soul.

What can ale-soaked Sly learn from this play? He can learn how to order his soul rightly He can learn to tame his inner shrew, the anger that lies beneath his drunkenness, the anger that must have made his soul drunk before he touched a drop of the brew. He can learn to get out of his own passions and appetites, away from his longtime identity, aspire to self-rule instead of self-indulgence, make a change that puts an end to his changeling ways. Although men and women have very different ways, by nature, as human beings they struggle with the same anger, the same libido dominandi, while remaining capable of the same capacities to reason and to love, justly and wisely. There is the foundation, in families, for good cities. If Sly heeds the lesson, he will no longer let the world slide, but join in the task of ruling it well, if only by ceasing to be unruly.

 

Notes

1. See Hiram Caton: “On the Induction of The Taming of the Shrew.” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 3, Number 1, Summer 1972, 53.
2.  Florentius appears in the Wyf of Bath’s Tale, a tale about the proper nature of a wife. A young knight and “lusty bachelor” in King Arthur’s court, Florentius rapes a maid and faces death by beheading. Arthur’s wife, Guinevere, calls the king to an act of just mercy: He consents to her ‘plot,’ that Florentius will have a year and a day to discover “what thing is it that women moost desiren.” Florentius goes on the quest, but eventually despairs, as some women tell him they want riches, others honor, or “jolynesse,” or “riche array,” or “lust abedde,” or flattery, or attention, or “bisynesse,” or freedom (meaning to do as they like). And so on. Near the end of his period of reprieve, he comes upon more than two dozen ladies dancing in the forest, ‘in nature,’ who vanish, leaving behind an “old wyf,” foul as she can be—worse than the much-married Wyf of Bath herself. She agrees to tell him the answer to the queen’s question, in exchange for his promise to grant her a wish. The answer, he will tell Guinevere, is “Wommen desire to have sovereynetee / And for to been in maistrie him above.” All women, or at least “worldly women,” harbor this libido dominandi, which Katherine exhibits openly. In exchange for this answer, which Guinevere approves as the correct one (Arthur acceded to it in granting her original request), the old wife demands marriage to Florentius. Understandably, the young knight resists, at which point the old wife offers him another bargain: You can have me “foul and old” but true and humble or young and fair and take your chances. Having now learned what women really want, Florentius leaves the decision up to her: She rewards him by changing into a woman both “fair and good.” They seal their marriage with a kiss, as indeed Petruchio and Kate will do, at the end of the play.
3.  Caton op. cit., 53.
4.  Ibid. 57-58. Both the Lord and Petruchio aim at the good of the one they govern, not simply at their own good, as does Machiavelli’s prince.

Henry B. Veatch: Two Logics: The Conflict between Classical and Neo-Analytic Philosophy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969.

 

If modern science aims at the conquest of nature, must it not finally aim at the conquest of human nature? And if it aims at the conquest of human nature, must it not somehow conquer reason, long held to be the distinctive human characteristic? To conquer reason, must it not prove reason inadequate? And if it needs to do that rationally, does that convict science of incoherence, ruin its status as ‘science,’ that is, as knowledge?

Or does modern science and the modern philosophy that generated it and continues to support it merely need to posit a different kind of reason, a different form of logic, against the ‘classical’ kind, enunciated by Socrates and elaborated by Aristotle? Nietzsche at times seems to take the first path, attacking reason itself, whereas more ‘mainstream’ philosophers—Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein, and a host of academic followers of one or more of them—take the second, wider path, proposing a new kind of logic while challenging the capacity of classical logic to answer the question it attempts to answer, namely, ‘What is…?’

Veatch takes his title from C. P. Snow, whose 1959 lecture, “The Two Cultures,” had just been reprinted with an addendum. Snow contrasted the culture of scientists with that of “literary intellectuals,” observing that (for example) were Albert Einstein to meet T. S. Eliot they would listen to one another with mutual incomprehension. This would not have been the case, had met Alexander Pope (assuming that one of them brought along a good translator). Veatch remarks that in contemporary intellectual life things have gone beyond two cultures; there are actually two logics now, one for the humanities and another for the sciences, including mathematics. By broadening the field from literary studies to the humanities generally, he brings in the question of the purpose of philosophy, now classified as among the humanities but formerly encompassing the sciences, too. His book engages the celebrated Battle of the Books by conceiving it as at core a struggle for the soul of philosophy, and therefore of philosophers. He astutely sees that political science, founded upon political philosophy, as a sharply-contested part of the battlefield. Whereas formerly “the student of political science had to pore over his Plato and Aristotle, his Machiavelli and Bodin, his Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau,” if present trends continue “the political scientist of the near future will have to know statistics and the latest computer techniques.”

To put it in Jonathan Swift’s original imagery, the spiders war against the bees. “The achievement” of modern analytic philosophy “might be said to consist largely in its having determined both in detail and with some precision the proper requisites of a genuine and unmitigated spider-logic,” a logic whose proponents moreover regard as superior to “the more traditional bee-logic.” Veatch intends “to show that a bee-logic has a proper integrity of its own,” and indeed that modern analytic logic “ought to be subordinate to the properly architectonic knowledge of the more humanistic and philosophic variety.” Like Socrates, Plato, and above all Aristotle, author of systematic treatments of logic, philosophers should begin “by accepting what we are presented with in our everyday experience and analyzing it with a view to disclosing the principles and elements and causes that are directly there and present in it.”

Take modern physics as seen in Newton’s Principia Mathematica. Is it not “passing strange” that its logic, “for all of its elaboration, provides no means either for saying or for thinking what anything is?” But ‘we moderns’ don’t find it strange at all. Aristotelian causality focuses on the internally-generated actions of a thing—the four causes—without ignoring (moderns claim) the importance of the circumstances in which the thing finds itself. ‘Modern’ or Newtonian causality focuses on the external relations among things—planets as they orbit the sun—that is, on systems or networks. Later philosophers have extended this approach to logic. “The logic of all modern knowledge could very properly be said to be a logic of how things work, how they behave, what their relationships are to other things, what verifiable or falsifiable consequences they may have, how they may be manipulated, what uses they may be put to”; the question of what things are has been pushed aside. Spiders are “concerned only with their networks, and not with what their networks describe,” although it should be observed that real spiders do aim at catching real flies.

Why? According to modern logic, “no subject-predicate proposition can ever involve an affirmation of what something is,” because “nothing ever is its property or quality as such.” To say “That leaf is green” literally means that a particular leaf is greenness, that the leaf is the color green; what an absurdity, since “a thing is a thing and not a property.” But, as former U.S. president Bill Clinton once said, following Aristotle in his epistemology if not in his ethics, that depends on what ‘is’ is: “In an Aristotelian context the ‘is’ relationship can never hold between a substance and one of its accidents.” In this case, the substance (that leaf) “may well be green, but it can never be the quality of greenness itself” because its greenness is accidental to its nature, its ‘being,’ as a leaf. A leaf might be green, but it might also be red or brown. The fact of its ‘leafness’ does not necessarily entail the fact of its color. “If it could,” then “a substance would in effect cease to be a substance and become what it is not, viz., an accident, or more specifically a quality.” Therefore, “it is of the utmost importance not to confuse the logical relationship of subject and predicate with the ontological relationship of substance and accident; the former involves an ‘is’-relationship, the latter does not.”

As distinct from classical “what-logic,” modern “relating-logic” may be seen in Wittgenstein’s adjurations, “Look not for the meaning but for the use” and “Treat of the network, not of what the network describes.” If philosophers treat logic, and especially logical analysis, as a relation “not a dissection”—that is, not as analysis, in the ordinary meaning of the term—they imitate modern natural science, which defines planets (for example) in relation to other planets and to the sun, doubting that it can go very far into the substance of objects that are so far away. Turning to ethics and politics, the “traditional conception of the humanities” held that they offered “a knowledge at once theoretical and practical, of what man is and of what it means to be human.” Modern-scientific attempts to define ‘humanness’ rely on such methods as the ‘personality test,’ which establish correlations between certain questions and certain character traits—a correlation “between a true or false answer to a given question and the sort of behavior that has been defined as being characteristic of the trait in question.” So, if the answer ‘Yes’ to the question “I like pickles” correlates with the trait of dominance, the person who answers ‘Yes’ to that question (and to other questions so correlated) will be described as a ‘dominant personality type,’ although the preference for pickles may in fact be entirely accidental to the trait. This may well turn out to be a tolerably accurate way of predicting human behavior (hence the move toward a ‘behavioral’ political ‘science’), but when extended to logic it can only cause trouble.

What is more, in ethics and politics such empirical/relational techniques may fail precisely on the basis of their intended usefulness. In reading the memoirs of the Earl of Clarendon, “we might on the basis of our understanding of the Earl’s character venture a prediction as to what would be likely to happen to him, or even as to the likelihood of his coming to a tragic end. But this would in no wise be on the order of a scientific prediction. In fact, it could not even be compared with a prediction as to the angle of refraction of a light ray, given the angle of incidence.” I don’t need to know what the light ray is in order to get good results in terms of predicting its behavior. To attempt to predict what became of the Earl by applying the scientific technique would likely lead nowhere. “It is precisely the virtue of properly scientific predictions that they can be made, and even ought to be made, in the absence of any knowledge of the ‘whats’ of the things in question,” but not so the Earl, or ourselves; for ethical and political purposes, including predictions, we need very much to know what sort of person he, and we, are. “However irrelevant the intelligibility of a what-logic may be for scientific purposes, it is not therefore necessarily irrelevant for all purposes.” Indeed, “there are certain kinds of questions which a context-logic is in principle incapable of providing answers to, and a kind of intelligibility in respect to which only a what-logic can give satisfaction.”

Veatch disposes of the historicist objection to ‘what-logic’: that it is “the result of nothing more than a historical accident, viz., that the basic sentence form of Indo-European languages just happened to be of a structure not unlike that of subject-predicate.” In the half-century since Veatch wrote, we know that in fact thinkers in non-Indo-European languages taught themselves to reason, too, but Veatch addresses the matter in principle, observing that “there is no reason to suppose that there might not be any number of alternative ways of symbolizing the form or structure of the logical tool that comes into play whenever we attempt to understand things for what they are.” If we find one, good. And Aristotle’s writings themselves “came to be transmitted to the Latin west” through Arabic-speakers; “Arabic is not an Indo-European language” and in fact lacks “a subject-predicate form of sentence structure.”

What is the subject-predicate relation, exactly? It is “one in which the subject term in the statement stands for what we are talking about, or are concerned to know about, and the predicate signifies what we take such a subject to be, or what in our judgment it is.” Within this definition there is room for subdivisions: genus (Socrates is an animal); differentia (Socrates is rational); species (Socrates is a man); property (Socrates is a language-user); and accident (Socrates is snub-nosed). To say “A modern logician is a human being” (a claim about ‘whatness’) doesn’t mean the same thing as to say “If x is a modern logician, then he is a human being” because the modern logician in question might be an angel or a demon. What-logic requires you to know the subject-matter, whereas the relating-logic works with letters or symbols. Thus Kant defines an “analytic judgment” as one in which “the predicate B belongs to the subject A, as something which is covertly contained in this concept.” Modern analytic logic ‘abstracts’ from being, effectively unpacking one side of the sentence in the other side of it—it expresses a necessity, and very nearly a tautology. To say “All bodies are extended” is merely to say that the notion of extension is contained in the notion of body. Further, “if such a necessary truth, supposedly about extended bodies” (or whatever else), “is not dependent upon our knowing anything at all about such bodies, then surely cannot be a truth about extended bodies.” If, by contrast, we take “All bodies are extended” as a what-statement, then we are talking about “the very nature of such bodies” as objects in the physical world that we are seeking to know.

“The challenge which the notion of analytic truth poses for a what-logic is not simply that of an alternative logic. Rather, the decisive challenge lies in the fact that the proponents of analytic truths invariably assume that what-statements are nothing but analytic, that they are directly and properly reducible to analytic truths indeed, that there are no proper what-statements at all, and hence no such thing as a what-logic of any kind.” The challenge, Veatch argues, rests on a non sequitur. To speak abstractly, to speak of concepts, is to speak ambiguously. A ‘concept’ might mean an “idea or concept in the mind which means or signifies something other than itself” or “that which is thus conceived or mean or signified, i.e., the object that is so meant or conceived.” There is no logical reason to suppose that a true statement about the notion necessarily amounts to a true statement about the thing. “What could ever have possessed Kant, not to mention almost the entire company of contemporary analytic philosophers, to have supposed that because a truth was a necessary truth, in the sense that its denial would be self-contradictory, it could not therefore possibly be a truth about the world?” They “commit the fallacy of confusing use with mention.” The distinction between objects and concepts of objects remains “a necessary and inescapable distinction.”

“Things are what they are,” and “our knowledge and understanding of things can ultimately come only though a recognition of this.” Put differently, “it might simply be said that nothing can be or exist without being something,” without being something “necessarily, and not just contingently.” Much-decried ‘essentialism’ is, well, essential to human thought. A figure said to be a triangle either is or is not one, and to suppose otherwise is to contradict oneself—never a sound move in logic. Further, “what-statements being assertions about the world rather than simply about words or concepts, it is clear that what gets analyzed in such a statement is no mere concept, but rather the thing or entity which that concept is a concept of, or to which it ‘refers,’ to use Kant’s term.” Truth-statements stated in what-logic might turn out to be false; ‘man is a rational animal’ might be right or wrong, in terms of what man is. Truth-statements stated in relating-logic cannot be false, because in that case ‘man is a rational animal’ means that ‘rational animal’ is already packed into the concept, ‘man.’

Veatch hastens to add that none of this means that modern relating-logic has no place—that it is an illegitimate path for the human mind to walk. What-statements “must be subject to a dual criterion, so far as the conditions of their truth are concerned”: first, are they coherent analytically; second, are they consistent with our experience in the world. “We have only to step outside the philosophy classroom and into the open air of everyday human existence to realize that the things and events of the world are what they are necessarily and self-evidently; but for us to know what motion is, or what hydrogen is, or what the color red is, or what we ourselves as human beings are, we can do no other than accept the tutelage of experience, both in its initial promptings and in its continuing corrections.”

Although relating-logic does have an important place in philosophy, because it now enjoys dominance among academic philosophers Veatch devotes a chapter to its “exigencies and disabilities.” “What must the enterprise of human knowledge and understanding be like, so long as one restricts oneself simply to the instruments and devices of a relating-logic and solemnly forswears the use of what-statements altogether?” Wittgenstein sets down the rule: “Grammar is autonomous and not dictated by reality.” It is pure convention. You enjoy absolute freedom to ‘define your terms,’ but, having defined them, the analyst must stick strictly to unpacking what he, or perhaps his society, has loaded into them. If I define ‘planet’ as an object moving in a circular orbit, that’s it. In relating-logic, “it is not merely the relation of things to other things that is the means of their being known and understood, but rather our human convention whereby things are related to other things that are the resource of knowledge.”; “all necessary connections are confined exclusively to the sphere of the linguistic and the logical,” “represent[ing] only our human devices for relating and connecting things, and not any real connections or relations in things themselves.” This radicalizes Hume, who “was at least concerned about necessities in fact.” Relating-logic suspects that “people, in thinking they are talking about real necessities or real impossibilities in things, may in fact be talking only about rules for the use of certain words.”

This, Veatch counter-argues, exemplifies “the fallacy of inverted intentionality.” He means that “a statement of first intention is construed as a statement of second intention; and yet the condition of the second intention is that the statement of the first intention be taken at face value.” For example, to say, as one analytic philosopher does, that the statement, ‘a thing cannot be red and green at the same time’ “is but a veiled grammatical rule for the use of ‘red’ and ‘green'” is to invert the intention of pointing out such a contradiction. ‘Red’ and ‘green’ have no meaning aside from their meaning in the real world, unless one assigns a purely arbitrary definition to those terms. To do that would be to make it seem “as if the very forces of nature had been drained of their force.” If, as Wittgenstein asserts, “meaning simply is use,” use in language only, “determined by our grammatical rules,” then logicians have disqualified logic from participation in science—that is, science understood as the attempt to gain knowledge of the world and/or (in modernity) to gain effective means of controlling the world. “The question is how a logic which cannot serve as a means either of description or of explanation can possibly be considered as an organon or as an instrument of knowledge and understanding.” Such a logic, Veatch allows, “can perhaps be of some slight use and value” in science. Here he has recourse to remarks by philosopher of science Ernest Nagel, who argues that even if we could perceive molecules (for example), “molecular theory would still continue to formulate the traits of molecules in relational terms”—that is, “in terms of relations of molecules to other molecules and to other things” and “not in terms of any of their qualities that might be directly apprehended through our organs of sense”—in order to allow scientists to understand and to predict “the occurrence of events and the relations of their interdependence in terms of pervasive structural patterns into which they enter.” Insofar as scientists direct their study at understanding relations, relating-logic makes sense, since in effect the ‘game’ they are investigating is really a pattern in nature; if it were not, if it were merely a verbal construct, a grammar, then it could not predict anything in the real world, but would lead only to conclusions about our own arbitrary or conventional concepts.

What, then, should the status of ‘what-logic’ be? After all, “the very idea that a knowledge of essences is possible is enough to inflame all the right-thinking, right-minded philosophers of this world.” “With this we are brought face to face with both Hume and Kant.”

To say that “each thing is what it is and therefore has its proper nature or essence or character,” is to say something that “holds only if the thing in question is truly one thing or one being.” The worry that we can’t be sure if we are contemplating a thing that has an essence bothers them in a way that it doesn’t bother (for example) Aristotle. Aristotle is comfortable with a “frank recognition of fallibilism” in our attempts to understand nature. Hume and Kant, by contrast, claim that the everyday world “is not, strictly speaking, given to us as such in experience” but rather “must be in some way or another either inferred from or constituted out of what is given.” Veatch replies, why assume so? Why assume that human understanding infers, or orders, or even constructs and fabricates what it takes to be reality” “Why should not its primary role be, rather, one of apprehension and description?” Why should it not be what it seems to be? This turns epistemological skepticism back on itself. This leaves room both for ‘common sense’ and for error.

So, when Bertrand Russell tells us that when we see a man walking down the street, all we ‘really’ see are “patches of color arranged in various patterns and succeeding one another in various ways,” there must be “something amiss” in his assertion. He has confused “an epistemological ultimate with an ontological or metaphysical ultimate.” “Just because I can be sure that a certain sense datum exists even when I can’t be sure about anything else, does it follow that such a datum can exist without anything else?” It does not follow; it is “a non sequitur.” Similarly, when Hume denies the principle of causation as a logical necessity, he elevates the correct logical denial of the principle of post hoc ergo propter hoc beyond its pay grade. If something that didn’t exist suddenly did, would we not rather think that “there must be some reason or cause for its having done so.” “Written on the very face of any contingent event or happening is its very dependence on at least some outside cause or causes.” And so “while Hume may have awakened Kant from certain of his dogmatic slumbers, he at the same time lulled him into still others.” As an aside, one might wonder if the intervention of Christianity between Aristotle’s time and Hume’s (and earlier, Descartes’s) may have so raised the stakes respecting the need for certainty in knowledge that it induced modern philosophers to raise the epistemological bar too high, to claim that philosophic ‘method’ could deliver surer results than the Holy Spirit Himself. But I digress.

The radical character of relating-logic brought Karl Popper to the conclusion that Newton himself was mistaken in supposing that his theory could in any way have been derived logically from his observations. Einstein concurred, calling “the fundamentals of scientific theory” “purely fictitious,” “free inventions of the human mind,” not abstractions from experience at all. Veatch comments, “What we observe here is the phenomenon of a what-logic being displaced by a relating-logic,” a denial that induction of causes and effects from the nature of objects is logical. According to Hume and his philosophic progeny, “since full-bodied objects like apples are never given in experience, then it is clearly impossible that from repeated experiences of objects like these one could ever by a process of induction arrive at a knowledge of what such objects are.” Induction can only be deployed in the attempt “to relate things to others as ’causes’ and ‘effects,’ rather than to lead to an understanding of what they are in their very natures,” or from those very natures.

Kant takes the logical next step. If “the given data of experience do not come to us in intelligible patterns,” and if no such patterns can be “abstracted or deduced from the presented data,” then “the order of nature” doesn’t disclose “nature in itself but rather an order which we human beings bestow upon and endow nature with.” Veatch calls this the “foundation stone of almost the entire edifice of contemporary philosophy of science.” Moreover, as “free creations and inventions of the human mind” the categories “through which we order our world and thus render it intelligible” as a ‘world’ “are held to be variable and subject to change, one set being used at one time and in one age, perhaps, and another at a different time and in a different age.” Here historicism, the philosophic doctrine of the historicity of reality, begins. Ptolomaic astronomy and Copernican astronomy, Newtonian physics and Einsteinian physics, are only “different ways of organizing the data of our experience to make them fit into a particular ordered pattern of a universe,” the ordered pattern itself being both conventional and changeable over time. In politics (one might note) this enables Kant to imagine that his wish for perpetual peace might be instantiated. If historicism is true, why not? The authors of The Federalist would have replied that human nature likely prevents such a “visionary” scheme. But now human nature is out the window.

Veatch makes a further, and crucial point. One way to avoid “falling into the fallacy of inverted intentionality” would be to renounce intentionality itself. In effect, this has been done by those forms of historicism that posit historical determinism. Just as extreme Calvinists reject human free will in favor of a providentialism ‘totalistically’ understood, so too do Marxists (for example) and ‘race theorists’ reject free will for ‘laws of History.’ Human intention is not only ineffectual but illusory, they contend. Similarly, literary scholars might deny that the intention of the author of a poem or a novel matters, that (most recently and radically) the reader should be free to ‘deconstruct’ and ‘re-imagine’ a literary work into whatever framework suits the current Zeitgeist. In 1969, literary studies had yet to become the morass they would soon be, but Veatch does see the effects of the critique of ‘what-logic’ in the visual arts. “It was reason,” the Surrealists charged, “that exercised its dictatorship upon men, forcing them to observe and abide by a supposed rational in things.” But according to the latest reasoners, “such order is not really there; it is only imposed by reason.” Therefore, “Let man free himself from this dictatorship of reason”; let Kantian Transcendentalism become frankly sur-real, a warrant for the valorization of dreams, intoxication—warrant for a madness that is the only true sanity, given reason’s suicide. The resulting “antics” have “never been reported of our revered contemporary logicians—not even of Bertrand Russell,” although here one might demur, in view of Lord Russell’s antic private and public lives if not of his academic work, which was more copious than idiosyncratic.

Returning to history, Veatch insists that at least there it seems that the distinction between what-logic and relating-logic needs to be retained, at least insofar as philosophers claim that historical laws exist. But this too faces challenge from Popper and others. Their critique aims at the establishment of such laws understood as scientific findings; the laws in question must be relational, not substantive. But why, Veatch asks, must historical explanation be scientific? “In our lives all of us derive, from history and from our everyday experience, a kind of knowledge and understanding” that amounts to practical wisdom, a “knowledge of the world in which the universal tends to be neither clearly articulated nor clearly exhibited” in the manner of, say, the law of gravity. Such knowledge, as Socrates came to see, forms “the source or seed-bed of philosophy and of all the humanities”; dialectical reasoning may correct it, but it can never begin anywhere else. You can get to a logically ‘cleaned-up’ understanding of the world through common-sense, through experience of the world, but never by eschewing such knowledge altogether. In this, Aristotle was right to make the phrase ‘political philosophy.’

From ‘history’ so understood one can derive ethical lessons from facts, pace Max Weber. The supposed fallacy of deriving ‘ought’ from ‘is’ simply registers the dominance of relating-logic over what-logic. “Why not say that the virtue and vice of human actions escape us, not because virtue and vice are not matters of fact, but rather because of the way we approach such actions the way we look at them,” Veatch writes, ending his sentence with a period and not a question mark. When we call so-and-so “a stuffed shirt or a pompous ass, just what do we mean by this, if not that he is quite obviously and as a matter of fact a rather poor specimen of a human being?” The judgment of so-and-so “turns entirely” on “a more basic judgment as to what man is and what it means to be human.” To put relating-logic to work for purposes of moral judgment commits us to the aforementioned fallacy of inverted intentionality.

Veatch concludes by observing that “with respect to the humanities, while our neo-analytic philosophy may concede them no end of value in terms of the aesthetic, and also perhaps the moral, uplift which those who cultivate them may experience, there must be no pretending that the pursuit of these disciplines can yield anything that in any proper sense may be called knowledge,” inasmuch as “in the context of a relating-logic all necessary connections involve only analytic truths and reflect nothing of the way things are in fact and in reality” but are “no more than devices or constructs of our own that enable us to get from one point to another in the cognitive process.” As would be seen in years following 1969, when Veatch wrote, what can be constructed can be deconstructed, completing the process of nihilism or indiscriminate ‘democratization’ of thought itself. Stronger souls will then take that opportunity to impose their own impassioned constructions upon others, thereby undermining social and political democracy in the name of social and political democracy.

Veatch hopes for a compromise, whereby relating-logic stays within the realm of scientific theory, if not practice, and what-logic rules everywhere else. Relations do matter in nature itself, and so relating-logic may help to clarify our thoughts respecting those relations, so long as its practitioners do not suppose that it means that such a logic refutes what-logic. When considering Newton’s apple and the gravitational law he once was imagined to have derived from its fall, “we do not have to suppose that the initial common-sense knowledge of apples from which we started out has now to be given up or considered outmoded.” Just as what-logic cannot tell us much about relations—it cannot discover the Second Law of Thermodynamics—so relating-logic cannot tell us much about ‘whatness.’ “Recognize the difference between the two logics and abide by it,” Veatch recommends. In philosophy (taking the example nearest to his heart), one wants to know “not just what man is but what the very nature of things is.” “What other instrument would do for this purpose than precisely something on the order of a what-logic?” Indeed, “what philosophy is competent to know as regards man and the nature of things is something that the sciences are totally and in principle incapable of granting.” Scientific knowledge is knowledge, but not “knowledge in any primary sense, much less the paradigm of knowledge.” We only suppose so because we confuse “social position with genuine merit,” the prestige of modern science with the actual science or knowledge it brings. This means that the logic espoused by those overly impressed with the results of modern science remains enmeshed in the conventions philosophers have intended to move beyond, whether in the Platonic ascent from the city or the Baconian critique of the idols.