Quick Hit on Alex O'Connor's Interview With Ed Feser

Happy Holidays! Let's debate God's existence.

Alex O’Connor (or, the one really good thing to come out of New Atheism) recently interviewed Ed Feser. It was great, you should watch it. Feser’s argument has generated a lot of my subsequent thinking about God, and I would probably say it was the argument that really pushed me from atheism to the Spinozist pantheism I would defend now. For what it’s worth, my (in retrospect, somewhat confused but still sort of interesting) rebuttal to Feser can be found here.

I don’t have a ton to say about the substance of Alex’s rebuttals against Feser’s Aristotelian argument. Personally I’m quite comfortable with the idea of actual infinity (in fact, as a Spinoza fan and therefore a fan of infinities everywhere you look, I need to defend it quite strongly), so trying to get Feser to commit to actual infinities doesn’t really weaken his argument for me. I did think it’s a bit odd that Feser at one point seemed to equate “existence” with “existence in physical space,” since the whole point of his argument is to prove that God exists, and necessarily exists outside of physical space. This seems like a contradiction, and I don’t know how it squares with a claim like “potentialities are real,” given that potentialities, whatever you want to call them, are probably not physical. Feser also defines angels as something that has a mind without a body, and simultaneously affirms that they exist. But given that this isn’t a philosophical paper and this wasn’t even really a debate, I probably shouldn’t expect Feser to be using these terms too precisely. Perhaps he meant something else.

So while I don’t have too much to say about the arguments which were raised, it did get me thinking a bit about the merits of Feser’s Aristotelian metaphysics in comparison with the fairly hardline rationalism I’ve since adopted. There is enough terminological overlap between the two that they can effectively communicate, so it was interesting hearing how Feser applied these concepts that evoke subtly different associations for me. I wrote this comment on the Youtube video, which I think is worth publishing here (slightly edited):

A problem I'd raise with the potentiality/actuality framework is that it seems to bear a strange relation to essences, which are a part of the Aristotelian view Feser is defending. I think this problem leads us to a monist alternative.

If we accept that there are some essential qualities of things without which the thing itself would be taken away (for instance, the essence of God is pure actuality for Feser, such that if it were taken away, He would not be God), it seems like adding this list of potentials to it would involve adding potentials which would destroy the thing itself-the coffee cup has the potential to be destroyed, the chair has the potential to burn, a human being has the potential to die, etc. This would require that the essence of a thing would contain self-negating propositions, so we would be able to say "it is an essential potentiality of this human that he can actually die." But the definition of an essence is that without which the thing is removed-an essence always affirms that of which it is an essence, to violate that principle would be for essence itself to violate its own, well, essence. It would be like saying that 1 contains a potential 0 in its essence because there is always a potentiality to subtract 1 from it.

It seems more correct to say that the essence of each thing is its power (its persistence in its being, the expression of that essence), and therefore all its negating or even just accidental properties are an interaction with other essences and are in no way essential to the thing itself. For instance, if we take as our example a red coffee cup, what we are treating as an essential quality (redness) is not an essential quality but actually an interaction of two essences: the coffee cup and the visible light spectrum, with the result being a perceived quality of redness, which has its own essence. The redness is not actually a part of the essence of the cup, and thus all its potentials to become some other color (by painting it, or perhaps seeing it in the dark) are not essential to it or properties of it, but are in fact distinct from it, ideas which partly follow from but are not themselves properties of it in any way. This would better explain how something could destroy something else-the potentiality for its destruction does not exist in it, but in the things that could destroy it.

So God would be better understood as being purely actual only if He were in fact the only thing that exists and therefore the only thing that can exercise any power, and would necessarily do so with absolute freedom without anything which could impinge upon or violate his essence. This would be the monist view that Feser is trying to avoid.

The main objection I can see to this argument could be that potentials are not a part of the essence of something to begin with, and so Feser doesn't need to commit himself to this in the first place. But this would seem hard to maintain, because at least some potentials are clearly essential: imagine a chair that lacked any potentiality for being sat upon, for instance, or a coffee cup that had no potential to hold liquid. This would clearly violate the essences of these things-if they lacked them, we would be talking about something that is not in fact either a chair or a cup. So if potentials exist, they are part of essences. We could say the two are distinct but the potentials follow necessarily from the essence, but what does it then mean to say that x "has" this or that potential derived from its essence? What principled line could be drawn between those potentials and the self-negating ones that I think Feser needs to avoid?

Feser himself does discuss essence and existence in the interview (I hadn’t finished it when I wrote this, because I am quite trigger happy), but I don’t think he said anything that really touches this argument. We agree that essence and existence are different for all finite things—it is not a legitimate claim to say that “it is in the essence of man to exist,” for example, because to have an essence presupposes existence, and the only source for existence is God, that which (in Feser’s terminology) is purely actual or (in Spinoza’s terminology) whose essence is existence. My claim is not that an essence cannot negate its own existence (nor can it affirm it); essences simply cannot negate themselves, the properties without which the thing itself would be destroyed (altered into some other essence, or essences)

I’ve been trying to bridge the divide between Spinoza and Aristotle’s thought on change for a while, and just why it is that Spinoza doesn’t speak in terms of potentiality and actuality (apart from the straightforward fact that he inherits his vocabulary from Descartes). I think this discussion helped me work out why Spinoza wouldn’t find potentiality to be the right way to think about change, which is really just a natural consequence of his monism, which is exactly what Aristotle was trying to refute in the first place. Perhaps atheist philosophers might see some value in Spinoza’s metaphysics as they work out various theories about why potentiality seems not quite right (“existential inertia” certainly bears a cousinly resemblance to Spinoza’s refusal of the self-negation of essences).

As a final note, my dream debate would be to see a discussion between Feser and Michael Della Rocca, either on God or more broadly on Pluralism vs. Monism, Aristotelianism vs. Parmenideanism, or Thomism vs. Spinozism. Doesn’t that sound fun? Sadly, it does to me!