Maverick Philosopher

One Person, Two Natures

A reader inquires,

The Creed of Chalcedon (A.D 451) set forth the following dogma, among others: (my emphasis)

".. one and the same Christ ....to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son . . ."

The deliberate  language of 'two natures' in 'one Person' is really remarkable. When you find some time, can you give me a bit of direction in determining, first - what it is for a person to 'have a human nature' and second - depending on that answer, is there any way to explain the concept of a person having two 'natures'? I even find the statement that human persons have both an 'animal nature' and a 'human nature' troublesome. There is a category mistake  that I sense but cannot yet explain.

The reader poses three questions.  After answering them,  I will pose a fourth question that the reader doesn't explicitly ask.

Q1. How can a human person have both an animal nature and a human nature?  I don't see much of a difficulty here.  If man is a rational animal (Aristotle), then Socrates, in virtue of being human, is an animal.  Now he is both animal and human essentially as opposed to accidentally.  Thus Socrates could not have existed without being an animal: he could not have been inanimate, say a statue or a valve-lifter in a '57 Chevy. And he could not have existed without being human: he could not have been nonhuman like a cat or a jelly fish.  Whether or not every essential feature of a thing is part of its nature, every nature is essential to a thing that has it.  So I see no problem in saying that Socrates has both an animal nature and human nature, where the latter includes the former, though not conversely.  Nature N1 includes nature N2 just in case it is impossible that something have N1 but not have N2.

Q2. How can a person have two natures?   This is answered above.  Humanity and animality are distinct -- the first includes the second, but not conversely -- but there is nothing to prevent one and the same individual substance from having both of them. 

Q3. What is it for a person to have a human nature?  On the Boethian definition, a person is an individual substance of a rational nature.  So the question might be: How can a rational individual -- an individual being that has the capacity to reason -- also be human?  Well, I don't see much difficulty here.    Not every person is a human being, but every human being is a person.  So humanity includes personhood. 

Q4. How can one and the same person have two seemingly incompatible natures? I suspect that this is the question the reader really wants to pose.  There is no obvious problem about one person having two natures if they are logically compatible as they are if one includes the other.  The problem is that while humanity includes animality, humanity appears to exclude divinity.  Among the marks of humanity: animality, mortality, mutability, passibility; among the marks of divinity: spirituality (non-animality), immortality, immutability, impassibility. 

According to Chalcedon, one and the same person is both fully human and fully divine.  Now, necessarily, anything human is passible, thus capable of suffering.  But, necessarily, nothing divine is passible; hence nothing divine is capable of suffering.  So if one and the same person is both human and divine, then one and the same person is both capable of suffering and not capable of suffering.  This is a contradiction. Herein lies the difficulty.

The reader needs to tell me whether this is the problem that is exercising him.  (Note that the problem can be developed using attributes other than passibility.)

I wonder whether the reader would be satisfied with the following strategy and the following analogy.  Christ qua human is capable of suffering, but Christ qua divine is not.  This removes the contradiction.  Analogy:  Obama qua president is commander-in-chief of the armed forces, but Obama qua citizen is not.

I am not endorsing either the reduplicative strategy or the analogy.

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Ad Ignorantiam and the Law

The day before yesterday I wrote,

In a criminal case the probative bar is set very high: the accused has to be shown guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.  Here too there seems to be a legitimate appeal to ignorance: if it has not been shown that the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, the conclusion to be drawn is that he is not guilty.

We will have to examine this more carefully in a separate post.

Herewith, the separate post.  Plainly, the following is an invalid argument:

1. It was not proven beyond a reasonable doubt that it was Smith who killed Jones.

ergo

2. Smith did not kill Jones.

Examples like this appear to support the idea that some appeals to ignorance (or arguments from ignorance) are reasonable and non-fallacious.  According to Douglas N. Walton,

. . . the criminal law presumes that a person is not guilty if he has not been shown to be guilty.  This is an ad ignorantiam form of argument, but it can be reasonable in the context of the rules of argument in the criminal law.  (Informal Logic: A Handbook for Critical Argumentation, Cambridge UP, 2007, 20th ed., p. 47)

I wonder if this is right. Which better represents a criminal process that terminates in an acquittal?  Is it the above argument or the following argument?

1. It was not proven beyond a reasonable doubt that it was Smith who killed Jones.

ergo

3. The presumption of Jones' innocence has not been defeated and Jones is in the eyes of the law not guilty.

I now think it is the second argument.  But note that (i) the second argument is valid, and (ii) there is no appeal to ignorance in the second argument.  The validity of the second, enthymematic, argument is obvious when we make explicit the tacit assumption, namely, that

4. If the accused in a criminal proceeding has not been proven to be guilty of the crime with which he is charged beyond a reasonable doubt, then the presumption of innocence has not been defeated and the accused is in the eyes of the law not guilty.

So the second argument is (formally) valid.  It also does not represent an appeal to ignorance.  One is not arguing that:  Jones is not guilty in reality (as opposed to in the eyes of the law) because it has not been proven that he is not guilty.  One is arguing  that the presumption of innocence has not been defeated.  The following are different propositions:

a. Jones is not guilty

b. Jones' presumption of innocence (POI) has not been defeated.

It ought to be obvious that they are different.  They are logically independent.  Each is consistent with the negation of the other.  Thus the following sets are consistent dyads: {Jones is guilty; Jones' POI has not been defeated}, {Jones is not guilty; Jones' POI has been defeated}.

Conclusion

According to Walton, ". . . the criminal law presumes that a person is not guilty if he has not been shown to be guilty.  This is an ad ignorantiam form of argument . . ."  I think this betrays a misunderstanding of the notion of presumption, and in particular, presumption of innocence. 

The presumption is not that a person is not guilty if he has not be shown to be guilty; the presumption is that he is to be treated as if not guilty, if he has not been shown to be guilty.  In the case of O. J. Simpson, almost everyone agrees that he is guilty of murdering Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.  Yet he was found not guilty.  Obviously, there is a difference between being not guilty (being not guilty in fact) and being found not guilty (being not guilty in the eyes of the law).  The presumption of innocence was not defeated in that trial.  But that is consistent, as I argued above, with the accused's being guilty.

It is therefore a mistake to think that the POI procedural rule embodies an appeal to ignorance. And since there is no appeal to ignorance here, there is no reasonable or non-fallacious appeal to ignorance.

UPDATE:  Dave Bagwill writes,

 

My grand-dad did not mince words, nor did he suffer fools. When I tried to trick him with verbal technicalities, he would accuse me of "trying to pick the fly shit out of the pepper".

 He would have said that about your latest post 'On Ad Ignorantiam and the Law', but he would have been wrong. You made some very fine, fine distinctions in that post that really cut to the heart of the matter. Thanks, and well done. (I've used that book by Walton for years and generally found it useful.)

You're welcome, Dave.  My response to your grandfather would be to make yet another distinction, one between hairsplitting and the drawing of necessary distinctions, and then distinguish different kinds of hairsplitting.

One sort of hairsplitting is  to make distinctions that correspond to nothing real, distinctions that are merely verbal. The 'distinction' between a glow bug and a fire fly, for example, is merely verbal: there is no distinction in reality. A glow bug just is a firefly. Similarly there is no distinction in reality between a bottle's being half-full and being half-empty. The only possible difference is in the attitude of someone, a drunk perhaps, who is elated at the bottle's being half-full and depressed at its being half-empty.

But this is not what people usually mean by the charge of hairsplitting. What they seem to mean is the drawing of distinctions that don't make a practical difference. But whether a distinction makes a practical difference depends on the context and on one's purposes. The truth of the matter is that there are very few occasions on which the charge of hairsplitting is justly made. On almost all occasions, the accuser is simply advertising his inability to grasp a distinction that the subject-matter requires.

Walton may be the premier writer on informal logic.  His book is apparently well-thought-of.  2007 saw the 20th edition.  I'd guess there have been editions since then.

 

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Saturday Night at the Oldies: The First-Person Singular Pronoun

Before we get on to songs with 'I' in the title -- the word, not the letter or the Roman numeral -- we pause to note the passing of Jack Bruce, bass player for Cream who died a week ago.  It is appropriate, therefore, that we should begin with

Cream, I Feel Free

Cream, I'm So Glad

Simon and Garfunkel, I Am a Rock

Beatles, I'm a Loser

Beatles, I Feel Fine

Beatles, I am the Walrus

Beatles, I Call Your Name.  Nice cowbell.  Mamas and Papas' version.

Who, I Can See for Miles

Muddy Waters, I'm a Man

Peggy Lee, I'm a Woman

Patsy Cline, I Fall to Pieces

Country Joe and the Fish, I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag

Beatles, I Don't Want to Spoil the Party

Sarah Vaughan, I Got Rythm

Sonny and Cher, I Got You, Babe

Petula Clark, I Know a Place

Barbara George, I Know

Dusty Springfield, I Only Want to be With You

Petula Clark, I Couldn't Live Without Your Love

Peggy March, I Will Follow Him

Ivory Joe Hunter, Since I Met You Baby

Lenny Welch, Since I Fell for You

Skyliners, Since I Don't Have You

Flamingos, I Only Have Eyes for You

Beatles, If I Fell

Beach Boys, When I Grow Up to Be a Man

Beach Boys, I Can Hear Music

Beach Boys, Then I Kissed Her.  The answer to, and no match for, the Crystals' Then He Kissed Me.

Band, When I Paint My Masterpiece

Timi Yuro, I'm So Hurt

Brenda Lee, Alone Am I

Eddie Rabbit, I Love a Rainy Night

Dylan, The Band, et al., I Shall Be Released

Tom Petty, I Won't Back Down

U2, I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For. Read the lyrics.

Arlo Guthrie, I Want to be Around

Bob Dylan, I Want You

Brenda Lee, I'm Sorry

Pter, Paul, and Mary, If I Had a Hammer

and these are only some of them.