When I started this blog a few months back I'd originally wanted to use it to read Orson Pratt and his theology. This wasn't because I agree with Pratt. Far from it. I frequently find his theology naive at best. However he was one of the few to delve into certain issues. I think him a useful gateway into thinking about LDS theology. So what I want to do is start a weekly reading guide to Pratt's thought along with commentary. To start with I thought I'd address J. P. Moreland's The Absurdities of Mormon Materialism. I've touched on it before but want to use it to start out the conversations on Pratt.
Now Moreland is using Pratt as a jumping off point to analyze Mormon materialism. I'm not sure this is the wisest starting off point. I think that for 20th century Mormons, the writings of Talmage, Widstoe, and Roberts are probably more significant. Notably at least Roberts was a dualist not that different from the sort Moreland expouses. However even if Pratt's significance is perhaps overstated, one can't neglect the role he had in developing Mormon thought and more particularly Mormon readings of Joseph Smith.
The main complaint Moreland has against Pratt is that Pratt confuses substance with material substance (265). He also reads Smith as asserting this, thus arguing that Pratt's reading of Smith is the natural and logical one.
In tracing the thing to the foundation, and looking at it philosophically, we shall find a very material difference between the body and the spirit; the body is supposed to be organized matter, and the spirit by many, is thought to be immaterial, without substance. With this latter statement we should beg leave to differ, and state that the spirit is a substance; that it is material, but that it is more pure, elastic and refined matter than the body; that it existed before the body, can exist in the body; and will exist separate from the body, when the body will be mouldering in the dust; and will in the resurrection, be again united with it. (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, 207)
While Smith does here (and elsewhere) use substance to mean material substance I think we err as reading this in too broad of terms. In the regular common sense language of most people substance does mean material - perhaps more in line with prime matter if we adopt a more Aristotilean perspective. But Moreland certainly appears correct that Pratt's materialism is following in the steps of Smith's own thought. Moreland adds that "[i]t may well be that Smith was groping for a way to express some traditional form of substance dualism that would be immune to skeptics' criticism but was only able formulate a crude substitute." (265) I think Moreland is actually on the right track, although I'd take exception to his mention of "traditional." Clearly by traditional Moreland means either a Cartesian or Thomist sense of dualism. While I think Smith wants a dualism he clearly also wants a dualism that is still materialist in some sense.
I think there are alternatives that provide just this. During the Renaissance, for instance, we find philosophers attempting to remove the hold of Aristotle over philosophy who offer thoughts remarkably similar to the trends of Smith's thought. One good example is Bernardino Telesio. Telesio taught that even plants had spirit. Further spirit was a
a kind of tenuous, subtle body, and must be regarded not merely as the form of the body, as Aritotle believed, but rather as a thing existing by itself. It is located primarily in the brain, but from there it is diffused through the entire body. An animal thus consists of spirit and body as of two distinct and diverse things, and the spirit is enclosed in the body as in a cover or organ. ...The spirit has sensation because it is acted upon and changed by external things, and is aware of these changes and passions that affect it. Thus the spirit perceives external things insofar as it senses its own changes and passions, which are in turn caused by those external things. (Paul Oskar Kristeller, Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance, 99)
As in Pratt, all sensation is ultimately derived from a sense of touch. Like Pratt, Telesio moves in a nominalist way, seeing universals coming out of the similarity (or grouping) of individual things.
Perhaps paralleling somewhat the later tripartite ontology of Mormon thought (intelligence, spirit, and body being different things), in Telesio we also have two kinds of souls in human souls. This roughly parallels neoPlatonism in that we have the lower, sensible soul, and a higher divine soul. This higher soul has a
different faculty of thinking that is particular to it. ...Consequently, man has a twofold desire and a twofold intellect. One intellect perceives things divine, belongs to the infused soul and is peculiar to man. The other intellect perceives sense objects, belongs to the spirit, and is possessed also by the animals. We might better reserve the name "intellect" for the former, and call the latter the faculty of knowing and remembering. On account of his twofold desire, man possesses free will, which is not shared by the animals. The intellect of the infused soul is incorporeal and has no corporeal instrument; it is merely passive and potential in relation to its objects. It receives the forms of its objects and it is related to intelligible things in the same way that perception is related to sense objects. (ibid, `100-101)
Telesio in his materialism adopts not only elements of neoPlatonism but also Stoic materialism with its idea of a material spirit permeating matter tied to heat and cold. (Fire and Air in Stoicism) Most significantly and of most interest in connection to Pratt, Telesio moves strongly in the direction of classic atomism, demanding the possibility of a void or vacuum as well as the container model for space and time which later became characteristic of Newtonian materialism. Indeed Telesio is the philosopher who comes up with the modern notion of space (spatium) thus laying the groundwork for Newton. As we find in Pratt, we have a strong hylozoism or even panpsychism.
The main puzzlement in Telesio is his apparently neoPlatonic inspired two souls. As I mentioned, we can find similarities to this in later LDS thought where we have a independent "intelligence" separate from the spirit. However for Pratt the only difference between an intelligence and a spirit is that a spirit is a collection of intelligences behaving as an organic whole. Later thinkers make intelligence an independent immaterial substance. (Roberts, among others) For Telesio though this higher soul appear how we come to know divine things, which Teleisio believes are not sensible. (He isn't that close to Mormon thought) All thinking takes place in the lower soul, unlike some others. It is this direct knowing of the divine that is the role of the higher soul. Further it is, as we mentioned, primarily passive in nature. Contrast this with Roberts whose notion of intelligence relates to thinking and is basically a Cartesian soul or mind.
I bring up these lengthy parallels primarily to point out that Pratt and perhaps Smith are hardly alone in their approach to souls. Certainly material souls are ubiquitous in the ancient world as seen by Stoicism. A skeptic, however, need only ask for evidence for any immaterial entities. For any immaterial entity it seems reasonable to simply say that there is a material entity with the faculties ascribed to the immaterial object. So if Moreland is right that Pratt's ultimate argument is question begging, it does seem that there is a lot of common sense realism in it. What is the reason for accepting an immaterial soul if we can't conceive of such a thing? Moreland even recognizes this problem.
...whenever a thinker allows for the possibility that there is such a thing as thinking mater and uses mental properties to characterize matter, if that thinker is not careful, he or she will have no way to give content to the notion of immaterial spirit and will come perilously close to using "spirit matter" or "thinking matter" as just an other term for what dualists mean by "immaterial spirit." (249)
As Moreland notes, Pratt even brings up this point. The entities we encounter clearly think and clearly have extension. Why postulate that these are separate substances instead of different properties of one substance? Pratt offers the argument of "conceivability" in various places in "The Absurdities of Immaterialism." Can we conceive of an immaterial substance? If we can't, why should be believe it exists when we can conceive of thinking matter. (Indeed the latter being the common sense way we speak about each other) Even if we conceive of there being an "I" separate from our body, in this common sense folk language we still think of "I" as being in the world. i.e. extended in space and time. While Moreland doesn't note it, this line of reasoning is undoubtedly the influence on Pratt of Scottish common sense realism.
Now Moreland perhaps improperly characterizes this epistemological argument of Pratt's. He suggests that Pratt is implying that "everything, including existence itself, must be sense perceptible. This follows nicely from Pratt's theory of reality, since on that theory everything that exists should, at least in principle, be sense perceptible (given that it has extension, shape, and solidity). This seems incorrect though and imputes to Pratt a stronger nominalism than he appears to have ever asserted. For instance space and time, being containers, are not perceived. Rather we perceive matter in change and infer a container for them. To further suggest that Being itself is snese perceptible for Pratt seems very difficult. Rather Being would be again an inference from things seen. This may appear a subtle difference, since the things conceived still arise from sense data. But there is a difference between a thing being conceivable from sense perception and being perceived itself. I suspect one could still make Moreland's argument, but I think one would need more evidence than what he provides or what we find in Pratt's main writings.
What is surprising is that Moreland himself moves in this direction, using the example of a square circle. We can't conceive of a square circle. Now Moreland argues that we arrive at this due to considering the properties independent of any conception. The properties of a circle is to be round and to be a square is to be non-round. However how many people actually think that way? I think here Pratt's common sense realism is more in accord with how people actually behave. When asked to conceive of a square circle they simply can't get a mental image. They rarely work through syllogisms or logic. That appears to be a procedure only philosophers engage in after the corruption of a univeristy education. Thus I think that Pratt's argument is fairly persuasive if one buys into common sense realism.
Of course Moreland is right in that in terms of purely logical contradictions, Pratt establishes no such thing. As such he is merely question begging. However I truly believe that this was never Pratt's intent. Rather he was making an argument in terms of the Scottish common sense realism he'd been exposed to on his LDS mission to Britain. Further if one buys the idea that reality is knowable, there is something to be said for the conceivability argument. The weakness in it is that reality actually can be quite hard to conceive, as wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics demonstrates. However Moreland's ultimate argument ends up being an exegesical one. How do we read the Biblical text? If you read it as requiring immaterial souls then one simply accept it as a matter of faith. If, however, there is no such compelling or necessary reason for the belief in immaterial souls, one can easily ask why we should postulate them. From a common sense point of view, there appears no reason to have them.
For those who waded through my digression on Telesio and so forth there is a blog with a similar discussion going. It's catalyzed by the recent Harry Potter film and the apparent material souls in it. (I've not seen the film so I can't speak to it)
In other news Kevin Winters has his latest version of his Moreland review up. Since he's hoping to get it published I'll not link to it. (Although it's fairly easy to find via Google) He takes a similar approach and I especially enjoy his comments on phenomenology. We've been quibbling over on LDS-Phil about other elements. Blake Ostler chipped in and I think we now have a pretty big disagreement over emergence in Pratt. So I'll probably be blogging on that sometime this week. For those interested in the topic, I've blogged a little about it before.
I've closed comments in order to avoid spam since I don't check this older blog as much anymore.
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