W. Norris Clarke was a Jesuit philosopher who taught at Fordam, dying in 2008. His books are still used as textbooks, so I thought it useful to comment on his characterization of Scotistic univocity. The following text is from his book The One and the Many, p. 45. For some discussion of Clarke's views, see this.
The Analogy of Being vs. the Univocity of Being. Some metaphysicians in St. Thomas’s own time, e.g., Duns Scotus (d. 1308), and William of Ockham (d. 1347), with their followers to this day, defended the univocity of the concept of being against Thomas. Both were leaders in the strong development of logic at the end of the Middle Ages (anticipating many of the developments of modern symbolic logic), and logicians tend to be uncomfortable with flexible ideas, “systematically vague concepts” like the Thomistic analogy of proper proportionality, especially as applied to being in God and creatures. And since their metaphysics were “essentialist,” i.e., focussed on being as essence (not including the act of existence as part of its content), it was hard for them to see how the concept of being could be applied to different essences without breaking up into several distinct concepts ceasing to have the same meaning at all, hence useless as a valid term in any syllogism or other logical argument, where all the terms must remain strictly fixed in the same meaning. Therefore, to retain any unity at all, being always had to be a univocal concept, even applied to God and creatures with their immense diversity as finite and infinite. But they had to pay a heavy price for this apparent logical clarity: they had to make the concept of being so extremely abstract as to empty it of practically all content and make it merely an empty linguistic marker standing for both God and creatures but, as Ockham explicitly admitted, expressing nothing common at all between God and creatures! The result was to render God considerably more remote and inaccessible to human reason than St. Thomas’s God, with important repercussions for the philosophy, theology, and finally spirituality of the late Middle Ages.
Comments:
1.The first thing to note here is that Clarke reads Scotus and Ockham (though he does not distinguish between them) though the lens of Thomism, specifically the real distinction of essence and existence. Hence the label "essentialist", inherited from Gilson. The claim here is that Scotus and Ockham ignore existence and are talking about being as a purely non-existential essence. Wolter, way back in his transcendentals book, commented on this claim of Gilson to the effect that it was an ingenious account of what Scotus would have said if he were a Thomist. But of course, Scotus is not a Thomist. Scotus denies the real distinction of essence and existence.
2. Clarke does grasp that part of the concern of univocity is to have valid syllogisms. He, Clarke, seems to think that being does not have a distinct concept, however, given that he thinks Scotus was also motivated by discomfort with vague ideas. This is a matter of debate among Thomists themselves, historically and today. Some agree with Scotus that there is a distinct concept of being that includes nothing else, some, like Clarke, think you can't separate the concept of being from the concept of God or of something in the categories. One then has to "stretch" created being to get a notion of the divine. Scotus, as we know, did think being had a distinct concept.
3. The heavy price of univocity. Here I think Clarke's explanation goes awry. He claims that Scotus and Ockham make the concept of being abstract and empty, just a linguistic marker, but also that it stands for God and creatures. Of course, the concept of being, as such, does not stand for God and creatures. As it is included in the concept of God and the concept of a creature it is univocal, but of itself the concept of being is neither the concept of God nor the concept of a creature. Clarke does not give a reference to the remark of Ockham's that he claims is explicit, to wit, that there is nothing common to God and creatures. This seems to clinch matters for Clarke, we arrive at basically a contradiction, being is univocal, but there is nothing common (which equals univocal, anyway). This appears to be a garbled awareness on the part of Clarke to the problem of the reality of the concept of being. This is the problem that the concept of being, qua abstract and univocal, signifies no corresponding reality outside the mind. This runs against the common notion from the Aristotelian commentary tradition that concepts map directly onto things. Normally, Scotus would agree; but to get to concepts of the transcendentals, you have to abstract from the concept you have derived from the actually existing thing. That abstraction does not correspond to the reality outside the soul. And note, this is a different sense of the word 'abstraction' than you get in Aquinas or even when you are talking about the three acts of the Aristotelian intellect. There is abstraction from the phantasm, that gets you the concept of a nature, say catness. To get being, you abstract from this nature, present in the intellect as an intelligible species, by stripping off the modes of finitude and so on. So in the end, considering God and creatures as they exist outside the soul, there is nothing in common. But one can abstract from the concept of a creature to the concept of being, which can also be applied to God.
4. The alleged result is to make God more remote and unknowable. But since we have now seen that Scotus does not hold that the concept of being is both pure and contains the concept of God and creatures, the result doesn't follow either. Scotus himself, interestingly, defends the univocity of being not in metaphysics, but in the context of describing the natural knowledge of God. Not only being is univocal, but all the transcendentals, general divine attributes, are as well. So a lot more is known, both by an intellect trying to have a general cognition of the divine nature, as well as scientifically by means of forming valid demonstrations. Indeed, it has always seemed to me that Scotus is the affirmative theologian par excellence, who ought rather than Aquinas to be paired with Dante. But that can wait for another day.
5. Repurcussions. The alleged effect of rendering God more remote has repurcussions many later areas of life. The usual Thomist claim from the 20th century, disagreement with our man leads to societal decay. I've always been rather struck that the ones who trumpet this the loudest, the RO crowd, are by practice theologians who supposedly believe in sin, or at least weakness of will. sin seems to me to be a far better explanation than that of univocity for the apparently inevitable march from Scotus to whatever modern thing you don't like. If I were to have lived during the reformation period and watched christians killing each other over the proper definition of the eucharist I would probably try to set up a non christian secular state of skepticism as well. To be fair to Clarke, this is not the focus of the discussion, just a throwaway line at the end.
10 comments:
Aren't most, if not all, contemporary Thomistic engagements with Scotist univocity basically throwaway lines?
Pretty much. They use the Thomist textbooks, not primary sources. The general attitude is that they are engaging with modern thought rather than that backward medieval stuff. It's hard to show how relevant you are to analytic or continental philosophy if there are major medieval objections to your position.
How does that make it difficult, major medieval objections? The big assumption is that they don't matter after Aquinas -- except as a kind of useful foil if it is Ockham.
This time, univocity separates us completely from God. But often, univocity makes God just another being and destroys proper reverence. Oh, well-
You characterize Duns Scotus (and Ockham) as describing:
being as a purely non-existential essence
Don't all agree that being is not an essence? I assume this was a casual word choice
on your part.
It seems that rejection of being as a concept leads one to the notion of being as an absolute, blinding intuition. If God is pure,unbounded being, I'm not sure how one, i.e., Clarke, could separate God from being.
I also think of Gilson when trying to understand Clarke; of Gilson and the mystical confusion of twentieth century Neoplatonist Thomism a.k.a. "esse."
Matthew, given that there are major objections to basically every Thomistic doctrine I would say it is a problem. To deal with them you would have to engage medieval thought a lot more, and do more advanced scholastic metaphysics. As it is, a lot of the thomist-modernist material tends to be exposition for moderns. like the Clarke book, really. To get rid of the medieval objections you just recapitulate Aquinas, then move on to phenomenology.
James, I have been meaning to write something on the God as being problem for a while, ever since Al Kimel and the Maverick philosopoher were debating over it. Maybe I will yet.
on essence/existence there was a wide variety of positions. Even if one thinks that Scotus posits a formal distinction there, formal distinctions are generally thought to obtain between inseparables. And there was also a movement assigning being an essence, talking about the quiddity of being. You get this in non Scotist independents like Marchia, and several Scotists will talk about the quiddity of being (John of Reading, Bonetus, probably Mayronis), whereas some are more circumspect, such as Petrus Thomae, who calls being 'essentiative' without it being an essence, and Scotus himself, who calls it quidditative without being a quid.
Yes, I am wrestling with the complexities of Duns Scotus' understanding of existence/essence in Lazella's book, "The Singular Voice of Being," in which he makes full use of the last two distinctions you note. Too important (and dense) a exposition to read only once. Or twice. The Quidditative seem to exist "formally" in a way ontologically prior to their relationship to God or being. But I don't understand yet in what sense this term is meant. Logically? Platonically? Doubt it. In a sense of pure possibility? This would tempt an "activation" sort of notion for Creation, in which certain possibles are chosen for being. Divine ideas seem to function in this way for Aquinas, in the sense that all possible beings (or at least the ones that will be realized)have rationes in the mind of God. The effort to think through all the possibilities in this general vein has long seemed an important goal for a scholar, and an indispensable goal for a teacher.
James, why do you think it an indispensable goal for a teacher?
So it depends... being is quidditative without being a common nature. But for the common natures, the divine intellect generates lots of formal parts that can then be combined in various ways... animality and rationality, etc. The divine will then chooses among these essences in the divine intellect and actualizes some of them. In some other passages, however, it sounds rather that all individuals are contained in the divine essence, which is able to represent them to the divine intellect which then hands them to the divine will for actualization.
But for being, it doesn't exist anywhere as such; that is an abstraction from an actually existing thing, such as God or a creature. Being isn't prior then to God, even logically, even though one can abstract off the intrinsic mode of infinity and conceive being as such.
But the notion of being as quidditative but not a quiddity is bit hard to grasp. And this was the occasion of a split among the most creative scotists. Mayronis and Bonetus hold being is a quiddity, and Bonetus goes on to write a metaphysics centered on that notion, in which he argues that being is univocal over being in the mind and being in the world. Peter Thomae rejects this bonetan position, in part I think because he does not hold being to be a quiddity.
Matthew asks:
James, why do you think it an indispensable goal for a teacher?
where by "it" we mean, "The effort to think through all the possibilities in this general vein."
I cast the answer in a personal vein. In studying metaphysics, I found it very difficult to construct a "grammar" of the subject, that is, a systematic explanation of which claims and questions that can be constructed with the terms peculiar to scholastic metaphysics. What questions using these words make sense? AN Whitehead develops a metaphysical language in Process and Reality, the very language in which the book is written. He teaches you to speak "process" by beginning with basic or elementary claims and working systematically. The aufbau, or building-up, is discursive in nature; it does not make the "essentialist" error of using Euclid's geometry as a paradigm.Perhaps the aufbau of Scholastic metaphysics needs to utilize questions, not statements; beginning with basic questions and exploring the various possibilities of constructive or fruitful ways to answer them. There are books on scholastic metaphysics that do proceed in this manner, but they construct only limited aspects of a full metaphysics.
These are merely the reflections of a theoretical physicist, one very conversant with formal languages for technical description, who began his study of scholastic metaphysics at the age of 40, after years of studying and teaching formal descriptive languages in the hard sciences.
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