Another Review of Brad Gregory

Rather late in the game, a new review of Brad Gregory's Unintended Reformation has appeared, here, by Michael Horton.

He is quite dismissive of the Scotus Myth, even mentioning the names of scholars that actually know things about Scotus (!!!).

O'Regan: Scotus the Nefarious

The following is a quotation from an article in the Newman-Scotus Reader:

Cyril O'Regan, "Scotus the Nefarious: Uncovering Genealogical Sophistications," p. 637-38.

This Essay has provided a sketch of what amounts to a montage of negative constructions of Scotus which do not evince serious engagement with his thought and in fact discourage it (a) by suggesting that it is fatally flawed from the ground up and (b) implicating it in lines of modern discourse which are either demonstrated or assumed to be pernicious. My aim has not been so much to defend Scotus' actual positions as to protest against the apriorism of each of these individual schemes and their cumulative ideological effect which is to make impossible a hearing of what Scotus has to say.  We are talking here about procedural fairness denied a thinker, but we are also talking about the way in which superficial engagements with a thinker's thought and superficial readings of the history of effects compromises the claims of the discourses being supported and in the process also serve to undermine the very enterprise of genealogy.

[...]

Although indirectly, the essay is a form of plea for the unaligned for opening up the plurality of the tradition This was the instinct of Gilson when he wrote his book on Scotus over sixty years ago. The fact that the instinct gets compromised in the performance is hardly unimportant, but it is not constitutive. What is needed is another Gilson in the very new situation, a new century with more derogatory discourses, a new century in which scholarship has considerably changed the textual landscape what belongs to the historical Scotus and what does not, a new century in which while there is much highly technical work done on Scotus, there is no book that takes a comprehensive look at the work of Scotus and shows its comprehensiveness, its seriousness, and its beauty.

The Fall of Thomism

Two recent essays by D.Q. McInerny on the fall of Thomism, here and here.

Here's one from a while back, on attacks on Thomism. Happy reading.

Modern Life

In these days in which we live, when existence has become a thing of infinite complexity and fate, if it slips us a bit of goose with one hand, if pretty sure to give us the sleeve across the windpipe with the other, it is rarely that we find a human being who is unmixedly happy. Always the bitter will be blended with the sweet, and in this mélange one can be reasonably certain that it is the former that will predominate.

A severe indictment of our modern civilization, but it can't say it didn't ask for it.

-Wodehouse, Uncle Dynamite

Around the Net

The following is a quote from a First Things essay by Edward Oakes, SJ on Newman's idea of a university:

Precisely as a science that is obedient to a supervenient revelation and yet must use reason to reach its conclusions, theology is inherently volatile, and within it a legitimate pluralism must be recognized. Thus, theologians are bound to disagree about reason’s proper role in submitting to revelation, and differing positions on that initial point will legitimately generate different schools of thought. One is no less Catholic if one agrees with Duns Scotus on the univocity of being over against Thomas Aquinas’ preference for the analogy of being, despite the fact that a large majority of theologians competent to have an opinion on the matter prefer Thomas over the Scot. Nor is one less faithful to revelation if one prefers Plato over Aristotle—or at least we must say this: If one wants to argue Aristotle’s precedence over Plato, this position will have to be decided on strictly philosophical, not theological, grounds—a point on which the medieval theologians were all agreed.

Oakes is a Balthasarian, I believe, so such statements as admitting that one is no less catholic if one sides with Scotus is probably not so remarkable as it would be if he were a straight-laced Thomist. Many are the real-time conversations in which Thomists have tried to convince me that the Church requires us all to be Thomists (surely an odd appeal to authority from a group that regularly attacks nearly all non-Thomists for not respecting the faith-reason distinction). But it is a rather remarkable statement given the current climate in post-modern theology, in which the "narrative" of "univocalist ontology" generally relegates Scotus to the category of monster.

Regarding said narratives, the beef some of us have with them is that they don't deal with arguments. What is actually interesting about Scotus is that he makes good and interesting arguments. It's not about system-building (though there is a system), or reconciling authorities, or building a giant mosaic of the fathers, but about arguments. Revelation supplies the data, the cold hard facts that can't be ignored, and reason supplies arguments. That is the appeal I, and I suspect my co-blogger Michael, finds in Scotus. And this is also the source of our irritation with some species of modern theology: they deal with vague notions of how general ontologies and onto-theologies somehow "lead" to other nasty conclusions like the holocaust or abortion, and quote nary an argument on the way.

The Fourteenth-Century Metaphysical Shift

Today’s entry will discuss Matthew Levering’s book, Participatory Biblical Exegesis, which seeks to restore a view of “reality as participatory-historical (providential and Christological-pneumatological) as well as linear-historical” [p.16] to its rightful place in theology. Now, a disclaimer: I am not concerned with Levering’s concern, reconciling theology and biblical interpretation. I am only interested in the role he assigns to Scotus in the unravelling of the above-mentioned view of reality. Levering is one of the lesser sons of the Cambridge Phantasists, a member of the american neo-thomist biblicists. These folks don’t read primary sources (other than Aquinas) with any more care than their parent across the water, however, though this is not so uncommon today. I say lesser, because he participated in the 2005 congratulatory volume of Modern Theology devoted to Pickstock, in which in a footnote he claimed that the abandonment of Thomas’ participation metaphysics is what got the Great Whore from Revelation thrown into the lake of fire, and knowing what such people usually say about Scotus’ role in said abandonment, one can draw the obvious conclusion. Yet another example of the age-old Thomist trick of forcing everying to bow the knee to Thomas by means of some authority other than the strength of Thomas’ own arguments. So I think I rank Levering slightly above Fr. Barron and Brad Gregory as far as accuracy, truth, and general scholarship is concerned (for in some of his notes he cites genuine scholarship on Scotus’ ethics, even if it is not reflected in the text of his book), but slightly below them as far as fantastical and ungrounded claims are considered.

My previous entry that contained the lengthy quote from A.D. Trapp was supposed to be the first part of a series on the fourteenth century, which was inspired by this post here, but this will probably be the final entry. I will follow my usual practice of quotes with comments.

“The Catholic exegete and theologian Francis Martin has shown that biblical interpreation requries an account of historical reality informed by a scriptural metapysics rooted in relation of “participation” that is creation. [...] Conversely, certain metaphysical presuppositions are inadequate to Christian biblical interpretation. It seems to me that Catherine Pickstock describes just such a set of presuppositions in recounting the impact of Duns Scotus’ thought.” [there follows a long, stupid paragraph from Pickstock]

So, okay. The thought of Scotus is incompatible with Christian biblical interpetation. We’re off to a good start.

“Although the positions of the theological movement in which Pickstock is a prime mover have been criticized for historical sloppiness, her central claims here—that the fourteenth century marks a shift away from the patristic-medieval understanding of “participated-in perfections” and that Scotus, although not a nominalist in the twelfth-century sense, plays a crucial role in this development—find broad scholarly agreement among experts on late medieval thought.”

Hmm. Nice move. He both distances himself from the Cambridge Phantasists and deflects the criticism directed at them, and yet manages to still affirm their conclusion: Scotus=bad. Note that he only denies Scotus is a twelfth-century nominalist, leaving open the idea that he is a fourteenth-century nominalist—which he is not. This paragraph is followed by a page-long endnote of citations. But the experts cited are to a man post-modern theorists; there is not a medieval scholar among them. Perrier might count as a pomo thomist, but that’s hardly an unbiased wordview, and his essay in the Pickstock congradsfest is quite hostile to Scotus. Oddly, in the note on the critics of the Cambridge Phantasists, the articles of Richard Cross are not mentioned; these are quite devastating as far as the representation of Scotus is concerned.

“Olivier Boulnois, the preeminent contemporary interpreter of Scotus’s work, refers to “the Scotist rupture”. The human will for Scotus mirrors the freedom of the divine will, and Scotus denies that the will is an appetite that seeks its fulfillment or perfection. Scotus also rejects the telological framework of “final causality” as “a flight into fantasy (fugiendo finguntur viae mirabiles).” The patristic-medieval tradition prior to Scotus intepreted reality in terms of participation (Platonic) and teleological nature (Aristotelian).”

I would rather characterize Boulnois as the most prominent french post-modern theorist who is the least hostile to Scotus. He certainly isn’t the top Scotist scholar, unless Levering means the top scholar who interprets Scotus through a post-modernist lense. I would say the German Honnefelder is far more prominent, and indeed, so are various scholars from other countries. I assume the following characterizations are derived from Boulnois, and if they are, he is certainly undeserving of the praise heaped on him here (perhaps a subject for a later post). Scotus does not deny the will is an intellectual appetite, only that taken in this sense the will cannot be said to be free. Don’t ask me where this bullcrap about final causality comes from. I’ve read literally thousands of pages of Scotus, and never seen this before. As to participation, well, I’ve come across maybe one paragraph on participation and Scotus did not rule it out. I suspect, however, it is rendered irrelevant by Scotus’ doctrine of intrinsic modes, just like a few other underdeveloped and primitive theories like spiritual matter, and essence-existence composition.

“In contrast to Aquinas, who unites these two approaches [of course!] through a metaphysics of creation, Scotus brings about a “strange fragmentation” in which goodness no longer has its Platonic participatory character. For Scotus, too, God does not know creatures in knowing himself (the strong sense of participation), but rather knows creatures as a conceptual object of the divine mind. While participation remains in Scotus, it does so in a deracinated form: representation rather than exemplarity.”

I’m really not clear on how God’s self-knowledge counts as participation, which I take is how Levering interprets Aquinas’ view that divine ideas are God’s knowledge of his own essence as imitable. And in any case, God does know creatures in knowing himself; the whole bit in Scotus about instants of nature in which the quiddities of created things are generated by the divine intellect, comes about through God’s act of knowing his own essence. I don’t see how this can be an either/or situation; creatures are objects of the divine mind because God knows himself. Aquinas and Scotus are actually quite close on this issue. The last bit is more interesting. Scotus does seem to leave out exemplarity in his account of the divine ideas (though in any case I don’t think this is properly related to participation); but this is precisely the aspect of this theory that was rejected by his immediate and otherwise most enthusiastic followers: Francis of Meyronnes, Petrus Thomae, and William of Alnwick, and in the 18th century, Mastrius. So how can this be the seeds of bad things to come if he was not followed here by the members of his own school?

“Lacking a rich account of participation and analogy, reality is “desymbolized”: human time is no longer understood as caught up in a participatory relationship with God, and history becomes a strictly linear, horizontal, intratemporal series of moments. After Scotus, human freedom may submit to the divine will, but thereafter on the grounds of God’s obligating power rather than on participatory-teleological grounds.”

I don’t think any of the scholastics thought of time and history in this way, nor does there seem to be a necessary connection between time, participation, or voluntarism. Nor does Scotus reject analogy, as I’ve said many times. But I suppose it’s “weak” if he never talks about it. Point to Levering.

p.20: “Does the shift toward understanding human freedom and history as a non-participatory reality—the “rupture’ identified by Boulnois—begin, therefore, with Duns Scotus? That question must be left to medievalists, but it does seem that we can identify in his work certain metaphysical patterns that remain influential today. The question for us is how to assess the theological effects of those patterns.”

More sleight of hand. Maybe it was really st. Francis, or Bonaventure that leads to Scotus that leads to nominalism that leads to humanism that leads to protestantism that leads to Hitler (or whatever. Abortion, The Secular, etc.). But this minor question is the terrain of the medievalist. Hmm. But the mere medievalist does not supply any of the interpretation of Scotus, O no precious. Just the question of where onto-theology begins. Maybe the medievalist can also tell us what these “patterns” are? And where might these ideas be influential today? If Scotus leads to Ockam, then it’s Ockham’s views that are influential today, not Scotus’.

p.37: “Aquinas belonged to the last generation of high-medieval theologians. After the deaths of Aquinas and Bonaventure in 1274, and Albert the Great six years later, theological rationalisms [note the plural] gained ascendancy in the late-medieval universities. As a result, whereas before 1274 the leading theologians had all commented on the Bible, afterward this practice became rare. Describing this situation... [long Hans urs von Balthasar quote, universities allegedly running back and forth between averroism, and nominalism laying the ground for the break of protestantism, blah blah blah] ... It is telling that the greatest theological minds of the period, Scotus and Ockham, did not write commentaries on the Bible, and their formal theological writings relatively infrequently appeal to Scripture or the Fathers.”

This is the first time I’ve seen 1274 as the end of high-medieval theology. And Scotus was born before 1274, in any case. Levering could use a dose of history here. University requirements did not change in the 14th century. To become a master one had to spend a year lecturing on the Bible. One can imagine that when one has to get through the whole bible in a year, one sticks to the literal sense and probably isn’t going to publish the results. But it depends what one means by “leading theologian”; there were numerous 14th century biblical commentaries as well, even from among the dominican nominalists at Oxford like Holcot. So that’s something of a bogus claim. There are records that Scotus wrote several biblical commentaries, but these were probably all destroyed by the prots inspired by Scotus’ evil nominalism. I’m not sure about this “infrequency” claim. The fathers and scripture show up as authorities all the time. But, and perhaps this is what Levering is getting at, the office of the theologian wasn’t primarily seen as reconciling contradictory statements of the fathers and scriptures and forging a harmony between them. It was rather answering the question at hand. Augustine, Hilary, and Damascene are among Scotus’ favorites, but he is not primarily trying to provide exegesis of them. It is also interesting to point out that Scotus and Ockham had very different careers than Aquinas. Aquinas became a master in the mid-1250’s, and died in 1274; so he had a twenty-year career as a master, teaching in various places and writing commentaries. Scotus became a master in 1305 and died in 1308. He had no time to write anything other than Sentence-commentaries. Ockham never became a master, but became embroiled in controversy with the pope and ended his days writing polemical treatises. So Scotus and Ockham might easily have written biblical commentaries had their personal circumstances been different, on top of their evil univocalist voluntaristic ontologies (and Scotus probably did).

Final Summary:

Doctrinal claims:

1. Scotus denies the will is an appetite (false)
2. Scotus denies final causality (false)
3. Scotus denies analogy (false)
4. Scotus favors representation over exemplarity in the divine ideas (true)
5. Scotus didn’t write biblical commentaries, and cited the bible and fathers “infrequently” (needs qualification)

Historiographical/interpretive claims

1. Scotism is incompatible with Christian biblical intepretation (yawn)
2. Scotus causes the fourteenth century shift away from participation (one would have to examine an actual text of Scotus to prove this)

So there you have my thoughts on Levering’s book. To be fair, this material is in his initial chapters, where he is summarizing the results from other pomo theologians, and not the main point of the book. But he is a fairly popular guy for an academic, and since the book is probably read by academics and armchair theologians alike, I thought the view of Scotus should be noted for its errors. And it is quite common among this set to lay out their “narrative” of how Scotus ruined the world before going on to the issues they really want to discuss. But if their foundation is false, their results are questionable as well; since academics aren’t willing to discuss these false foundations, I will do it myself.

This, however, leads the initial question still open: was there a metaphysical shift in the fourteenth century? There does seem to have been one, probably in the 1290’s. When one reads Aquinas and Bonaventure, one rarely comes across them citing contemporary opinions. But later, the main point of the exercise is criticism of contemporary opponents and advancing one’s own views. Rather than “aliqui” or the nefarious “quidam”, we get authors who name names. I suspect a lot of this comes from the correctoria controversy, in which specific arguments were made against Thomism, whether by William de la Mare, or Giles of Rome, which were refuted by close citation and rather acrimonius argumentation. The climate after the 1277 condemnations was then very combative, and the lines were fairly clearly delineated of who was on what side. But none of this has much to do with Scotus, though he may be more extreme than most in his endless attacks on poor crazy Henry of Ghent who never met a platonist he didn’t like. The Trapp article is relevant here, for in the fourteenth century itself the division was seen as between Bonaventure, Aquinas and Scotus (the via antiqua) and Ockham and his followers (the via moderna). As I’ve written many times, it is rather hard to determine the “responsibility” to be assigned to Scotus for Ockham, as the latter generally rejects all of Scotus’ arguments. Ockham as well is looking back to the twelfth century, and as such is rather reactionary. Indeed, I cut him from my dissertation for being too conservative; his theory of divine attributes is basically just the common opinion of the twelfth-century. Ockham saw himself as restoring the tradition interrupted by the radical innovations introduced by Aquinas and culminating in Scotus. So the historiography is far from clear, and our post-modernist theorist friends are not interested in the reality of the situation, being content with the polemical and politically-motivated nineteenth-century thomist theory of the rise and fall of philosophy understood as co-extensive with thomism.

Sokolowski on Deconstruction

From his Introduction to Phenomenology, p. 225:

"Deconstruction should also be mentioned in a survey of the phenomenological movement, albeit with some embarrassament, the way a family might be forced to speak about an eccentric uncle whose antics are known to everyone but whom one tries to avoid mentioning in polite society. Jacques Derrida's first writings were translations and interpretations (highly questionable interpretations, to be sure) of short works by Husserl, but he soon abandoned Husserl and moved into wider philosophical fields.... I would also claim that Husserl has a much more subtle treatment of absence and difference than Derrida gives him credit for, one that recognizes these phenomena but does not fall into the extremes of deconstruction. One of the most appropriate comments I have heard about deconstruction was made in a lecture by the Scottish literary theorist Alasdair Fowler; he observed that deconstruction in moderate sips provides a welcome correction to traditional literary theory, which might have become a bit too tidy and rationalist, but that in the United States it became absorbed into a political ideology and hence developed beyond all proportion."

Once More from Husserl

There are only two escapes from the crisis of European existence: the downfall of Europe in its estrangement from its own rational sense of life, its fall into hostility toward the spirit and into barbarity; or the rebirth of Europe from the spirit of philosophy through the heroism of reason that overcomes naturalism once and for all. Europe's greatest danger is weariness. If we struggle against this greatest of all dangers as "good Europeans" with the sort of courage that does not fear even an infinite struggle, then out of the destructive blaze of lack of faith, the smoldering fire of despair over the West's mision for humanity, the ashes of great weariness, will rise up the phoenix of a new life-inwardness and spiritualization as the pledge of a great and distant future for man: for the spirit alone is immortal.

--Husserl, "Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity"

By the way, in this lecture Husserl makes it clear that for him "Europe" is just synonymous with "the West" - he explicitly includes America and the British Commonwealth nations in "Europe".

Husserl is the modern philosopher for whom I have the most sympathy and admiration. By "modern" I mean that his philosophizing arises out of post-Cartesian modernity and its break with the philosophical tradition of antiquity and the middle ages. (So I leave out modern Catholic thinkers like Maritain or Lonergan.) He knows very little about mediaeval philosophy and rarely mentions it. Nevertheless his insights seem to me more harmonious with the tradition - and at the same time complementary -than anyone else I know. This isn't to say that I endorse everything either in his philosophy or in his claims about transcendental phenomenology; that would certainly be rash (for one thing, although I've read the Logical Investigations, Cartesian Meditations, Experience and Judgment, as well as the Crisis - some of these twice - and a good bit of secondary literature, still there's a vast amount of his writings I'm pretty unfamiliar with, and I can't claim to fully understand every bit of what I've read). From the perspective of the reactionary ontotheologian it's hard to see how the phenomenological method, despite its strengths, can really give us the whole of philosophical truth, or ground a complete metaphysics, rather than just that corner of metaphysics studying esse objectivum. Still I do think he has a lot to offer, and not just in the occasional-golden-nugget-in-a-pile-of-dung sense (like with Nietzsche), and that's a big relief, when most modern philosophers make me either chuckle or shake my head in disgust.

Crisis

The true struggles of our time, the only ones which are significant, are struggles between humanity which has already collapsed and humanity which still has roots but is struggling to keep them or find new ones.

. . .

But now we ourselves, we philosophers of the present--what can and must reflections of the sort we have just carried out mean for us? Did we just want to hear an academic oration? Can we simply return again to the interrupted vocational work on our "philosophical problems," that is, each to the further construction of his own philosophy? Can we seriously do that when it seems certain that our philosophy, like that of all our fellow philosophers, past and present, will have its fleeting day of existence only among the flora of ever growing and ever dying philosophies?

Precisely herein life our own plight--the plight of all of us who are not philosophical literati but who, educated by the genuine philosophers of the great past, live for truth, who only in this way are and seek to be in our own truth.

. . .

Thus no one was ever made conscious of the radical problem of how this sort of naiveté actually became possible and is still possible as a living historical fact; how a method which is actually directed toward a goal, the systematic solution of an endless scientific task, and which continually achieves undoubted results, could ever grow up and be able to function usefully through the centuries when no one possessed a real understanding of the actual meaning and the internal necessity of such accomplishments. What was lacking, and what is still lacking, is the actual self-evidence through which he who knows and accomplishes can give himself an account, not only of what he does that is new and what he works with, but also of the implications of meaning which are closed off through sedimentation or traditionalization, i.e., of the constant presuppositions of his [own] constructions, concepts, propositions, theories. Are science and its method not like a machine, reliable in accomplishing obviously very useful things, a machine everyone can learn to operate correctly without in the least understanding the inner possibility and necessity of this sort of accomplishment? But was geometry, was science, capable of being designed in advance, like a machine, without an understanding which was, in a similar sense, complete - scientific? Does this not lead to a regressus in infinitum?

--Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology

First Principles

Last weekend I met up with an old college friend to play Go and hang out. We ended up playing less than planned and instead arguing philosophy for five hours or so. In the ten years I've known him his opinions and lifestyle have undergone a radical shift: he's gone from being a Washington State conservative creationist evangelical to an enthusiastic but temporary Episcopalian to a Washington D.C. liberal materialist atheist. This particular night the discussion began when he casually mentioned that he wished it had been made clear in our undergraduate program that pretty much all of pre-20th century philosophy had been decisively refuted by modern science. After this a lot of conversation was spent with him simply delineating his new positions and with me trying to find some first principles we could agree on which could constitute a starting-point for a real debate. In the end I couldn't find any.

This was rather disturbing and I had a very odd feeling throughout the conversation. Here was an old and close friend telling me that he couldn't admit it as true in any strong sense that there was a tree outside the window, or that the conventional notion of a 'tree' had any extramental correlate, since what we called a tree was simply an arbitrary bundling together of those aspects of sensible phenomena which happened to interest us at a given moment; that there was no unity in the object itself, since there was no object itself, since all self-identity was an illusion; that there was no true identity of any kind, and that every single aspect of the world was simply in constant flux, and so we couldn't identify the unity of an object by the unity or continuity of its operations, since these were also illusory; that therefore the continuity of motion and the unity or identity of any act also had to be abandoned; and, finally, that he knew all this beyond any doubt because it had been established by "Science".

I tried to suggest that if all this were true then the foundations of science would themselves be undermined, and with them all his confidence in what "Science" supposedly teaches, but he didn't bite. Sure, science is just a series of useful stories we tell ourselves in order to render the world more functional - so what? They're the best stories we have, and they work just fine. I suggested that his picture of the world reduced literally everything to absurdity, including the meaningfulness of calling something an illusion when there is no "me" from moment to moment to have the illusion and no definite and intelligible reality for me to have illusion about: nowhere to see through the illusion to. He was unfazed. Yes, that's the way things are. Since what we call "thought" is simply an algorithm executed by our brains for maximum consciousness-efficiency, why should we expect it to have some correspondence to reality?

So I have to admit that I'm not a good enough Socrates to get anywhere beyond this. What do you do when your interlocutor doesn't mind if his position is, by any reasonable standard, absurd? After hours of argument I couldn't find a single thing we could both agree was true. Not even "I am thinking this thought" or "The people having this conversation now are the same people who were having it an hour ago." I'm tempted to say that at this point there is simply a philosophical breakdown, that there is nowhere to go from here.

Eustacius a Sancto Paulo on Intelligible Being

More from Ariew's Descartes and the Last Scholastics, p. 44. Perhaps there might one day be interest in Petrus Thomae after all. This is from Ariew's chapter on Descartes and Scotism, in which he takes Gilson to task for glossing over differences in 17th century scholasticism (ie assuming they were all Thomists). But the following is some pretty clear Scotism, albeit of the Petrus Thomae and Alnwick kind, as I am not sure Scotus used this distinction much himself, if at all.

"To understand what is meant by objective being in the intellect, one must note the distinction between objective and subjective being in the intellect. To be objectively in the intellect is nothing else than to be actually present as an object to the knowing intellect, whether what is present as an object of knowledge has true being within our outside the intellect, or not. To be subjectively in the intellect is to be in it as in a subject, as dispositions and intellectual acts are understood to be in it. But since those things which are in the intellect subjectively can be known by the intellect, it can happen that the same thing can at the same time be both objectively and subjectively in the intellect. Other things which really exist outside the intellect, though they are not subjectively in the intellect can be in it objectively, as we have noted. But since all these things are real, they have some real being in themselves apart from the objective being in the intellect. There are certain items which have no other being apart from objective being, or being known by the intellect: these are called entities of reason."

On the Internal Combustion Engine

This curious device, in its motor-car form, affords some pleasures, either minor and inferior, or druglike and obsessive. It may have some practical uses, though one suspects that these consist rather in alleviating problems whose radical cure lies elsewhere; and certainly from the supposed profits a multitude of new problems and disadvantages have to be deducted. But the motor-car is, essentially a mechanical toy that has run off the nursery-room floor into the street, where it is used as irresponsibly as before and much more dangerously. It is a dubious piece of ‘escape mechanism’. For of course it would not be made in ‘mass’ (which means that it would hardly be made at all), nor would millions be made out of its purchases, but for its invention at a time when we have made our towns horrible to live in—a process which it has itself accelerated. The motor-car attracts, because it enables people to live far away from their noisome and inhuman ‘works’, or to fly from their depressing dormitories to the ‘country’. But it cheats: for the motor-factories, and their subsidiaries (garages, repair-shops, and pumps), and the cars themselves, and their black and blasted roads, devour the ‘country’ like dragons. This is the splendid gift of a magician: he offers to a caged bird that has defiled its cage and perch—what? a little length of chain so that it can flap to a near-by twig and foul that. Magnificent! This is freedom! And the made the chain hundreds of the magician’s prisoners sweat like morlocks. This is Real Life . . .

--J.R.R. Tolkien