Eric Perl on Neoplatonism

Eric Perl is a prominent neoplatonist author. He has some Plotinus translations with commentary out there that look interesting. But he doesn't like Scotus.  I give some quotes below that might be of interest to or foster discussion by our readers.


Quote 1:
From Thinking Being: Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition, p. 6:

In this perspective, we must concur with those who hold that the principal break in the continuity of western philosophy comes not between ancient and medieval, nor between pagan and Christian, nor even in early modernity with figures such as Galileo and Descartes, but rather between the Platonic and Aristotelian tradition up to and including Aquinas, on the one hand, and the modes of thought represented by Duns Scotus and William of Ockham on the other. It is here, not in the sixteenth or seventeenth but in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, that modernity in a philosophical rather than a merely chronological sense truly begins. With Scotistic univocity, the first principle becomes a being, subject to a conceptual grasp and included within the whole of reality as a member of it, as is not the case for the One of Plotinus or the God of Aquinas. Between Scotus' God who is an infinite being (ens infinitum) and Aquinas' God who is infinite existence (esse infinitum), the difference is of world-shattering proportions. it is precisely here that 'metaphysics' in the pejorative, postmodern sense begins, with the reduction of the first principle to a conceptually representabile being and the fading from view of the very question 'Why are there beings, rather than nothing?' And the Ockhamist denial that things really have 'whatnesses' in virtue of which they are what they are, a repudiation of the very foundation of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, already carries with it the divorce of thought from being, the loss of intelligibility, the move toward consciousness as 'subject' and being as 'object' and the failing of the vision of all things as the presence and manifestation of the divine.

He gives a single reference to Scotus, shockingly a quote, though he doesn't cite an edition or translator:

Duns Scotus, Opus oxoniense, I, 3, 1: "I say, then, first, that not only can a concept naturally be had in which God is conceived as it were accidentally, for instance, with regard to some attribute, but also a certain concept in which God is conceived by himself and quidditatively".

Comment: as is usual with modern philosophers who are non specialists, it is univocity that ruined good traditional philosophy. For these people, it is more important that philosophy be a tradition than that it be an activity in any way related to arguments. Scotus' arguments are not quoted nor shown to be false, it is just taken to be obvious since the author disagrees with the conclusions of Scotus' arguments. The quote also has some ambiguities. "reality" is not defined. If by "reality" you mean creation, then Scotus would deny that God is part of reality or within the horizon of reality if you prefer to talk in that fashion. But if by "reality" you mean the totality of existing things, then Scotus would agree, even if he would qualify it and say that God and creatures agree in no reality. 

Perl does not provide exegesis of the quote. It is clear that he interprets it as implying that since we can grasp God by a concept that we totally and completely grasp God in a concept, and that there can thus be no divine transcendence. But Scotus would deny this as well, saying instead that even if we grasp God quidditatively we do not have full comprehension of the divine essence, which, since it is infinite, always exceeds our finite minds. Also, the concept that we form of God, infinite being, only imperfectly represents the divine reality, since 'infinite being' is a complex concept and God is simple. This too does not warrant a mention.

Perl's central thesis is that thought and being are parallel, and Scotus, or at least Ockham are a threat to this. Univocity might seem a threat to this, since, in Richard Cross' words, the concept of being is a "vicious abstraction", ie. it does not correspond to any extra mental reality. But the concept of being is the result of an operation (abstraction) performed on the complex concept of a creature, which itself is based on an extramental thing. So Scotus also believes in the parallel of thought and being, but this doesn't mean that we can't perform mental operations the products of which might not themselves be directly parallel. At least, perl would need another argument to show this. Maybe he has one and I will find it as I read his book. We will see.

I am always somewhat bemused by the intense hatred of Scotus by modern neoplatonists, especially in theology. naturally, it is univocity they focus on, which is opposed to the de facto hero of theology, Thomas aquinas. But for centuries Scotus has himself been seen as part of the neoplatonist movement, given the extreme platonism of his doctrine of the Ideas. Renaissance platonists, such as Ficino, numbered him among their own school. But all such niceties have been forgotten these days.

Here's a quote from a different book that caught my eye, and though it is implicitly directed against Scotus, it seems to implicitly embrace univocity of being.

Quote 2 (copied from the David Bentley Hart discussion group on Facebook)

The disjunctive presupposition that 𝘦𝘪𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 God chooses between possible alternatives 𝘰𝘳 he is necessitated to create situates God within a total framework of possibilities, as though the logical conditions of possibility and impossibility were prior to and more universal than God, conditions to which even he is subject. This presupposition envisions God either as confronted with a multiplicity of logical possibilities among which he can choose, or as subject to a logical law such that there is only one possibility open to him.

This is precisely the "ontic" conception of God that Plotinus, and Dionysius, are concerned to avoid by declaring him, "beyond being." God is not a being, subject, as are all beings, to the conditions of logical possibility such as the principle of non-contradiction. This is not to say that God can violate that principle; on the contrary, it would be more accurate to say that for the Neoplatonists, God or the One 𝘪𝘴 the principle of non-contradiction. For what is that principle but the very condition of intelligibility and therefore of being?

"To be is to be intelligible" means that to be is to conform to the laws of thought, which necessarily apprehends its object as determined by certain attributes and (therefore) as excluding the contradictory ones. The unity, the identity, and therefore the being of any thing consists in its uniformity to this law. That law, therefore, is an expression of God as the unity, the identity, the being of beings.

God is not a being, contained within a framework of possibilities determined by an abstract logic independent of himself. Rather, he is that framework within which all beings are contained, and hence he cannot be considered 𝘦𝘪𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 as a being who chooses among a multiplicity of logical possibilities, 𝘰𝘳 as a being confined by principles more universal than himself to a single possibility.

—Eric D. Perl, 𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘺: 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘕𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘵𝘰𝘯𝘪𝘤 𝘗𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘰𝘴𝘰𝘱𝘩𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘋𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘺𝘴𝘪𝘶𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘈𝘳𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘢𝘨𝘪𝘵𝘦, Ch. 3, "Goodness, Beauty, and Love"

On this quote, see the various posts from the past few months (Foxal, Mayronis, Petrus Thomae) on the principle of non-contradiction. To make God the principle itself, or make it somehow apply to God, is to concede the field to univocity. The reason is that the PNC is the first complex principle; it can be broken down into the first incomplex principle, the notion of being. To posit the PNC as applying to God and creatures is to posit being as common to God and creatures. Unless you want to destroy the PNC by making it apply in a different,unknowable way in God, it must be univocal.

Musings

As is well known, the two main doctrines in which the contemporary postmodern theological homogeneous hegemony faults Scotus are analogy and participation. I have responded to these charges in the "fundamental positions" series. Scotus is not interested in Thomistic analogy at all, but rather Henrician. His discussion is on the order of concepts, not reality. The Thomists, nouvelle theologists, Cambridge phantasists, Balthasarians and other hegemonists assume Scotus affirms univocity in the same sense that Aquinas rejects it. As for participation, it just never comes up. Scotus seems to just assume it's true on the "real", that is extramental, level.

Now the above-mentioned crowd (which includes Brad Gregory, who teaches at the premier American Catholic university and who - the rumor has it - has been promoted to a position of even higher prestige) generally takes Ockham as the logical development of Scotus' ideas. Which is a little strange doctrinally, as Ockham argues against Scotus all the time. Now maybe you might say, well, but he just takes things farther than Scotus was willing to go with 'potentia ordinata, absoluta' etc. Perhaps, perhaps, but then Scotus just goes farther than Aquinas is willing to go with the same distinction (this crowd never gives an explanation of how Scotus' use of potentia ordinata/absoluta is bad but Aquinas' use is good). But a far more likely guide to the "inheritance" if you will of Scotus is the (ahem) Scotist school (yes yes, debate over medieval schools is intractable, but there was a self-conscious Scotist school by 1320, the year of Pierre Roget' and Francis of Meyronnes' debate). I've started some preliminary research on F. of M.'s views on analogy and participation, and will report more on him later. (in the meantime, see this earlier post).

But another character springs to mind, the inestimable Petrus Thomae. I have been laboriously editing his QQ. de ente for the past three years (there are hundreds of isolated accidents per ms. per question). This work is probably the first independent treatise on the transcendentals ever written (depending on how one balances the relative chronologies of Peter thomae and Francis of Meyronnes, who also wrote a Tractatus de transcendentibus). Whether or not it was the first, it certainly is the longest. Francis of Meyronnes and John de Prato both weigh in at under 100 pages, while Petrus thomae's work is ca. 600. And what are the contents? Lengthy discussion of early 14th century critics of Scotus, massive quotations and discussion of the entire previous tradition concerning univocity and analogy, from Aristotle, Boethius and their commentators up through arabic philosophy to early 13th century authors such as Grosseteste, and yes, Aquinas.  Significantly for my present musings, Peter is all for the analogy of being (he has ten or twelve grades of analogy) as well as participation.

So perhaps Scotus' legacy consists in more rigorous versions of analogy and participation?

More on Postmodernism

A great example of the "narrative" of Scotus' ruination of the world:

Joseph M. de Torre,  "Thomism and Postmodernism", in Postmodernism and Christian Philosophy, 248.

From the nominalism and voluntarism of William of Ockham (1300-1350), already adumbrated by the formalism of Duns Scotus (1266-1308), to the skepticism of Montaigne (1533-1592) and Francisco Sanchez (1522-1623), there was a logical development, aided by the so-called religious wars occasioned by Protestantism and, in the previous century, by the Hussite revolt in Bohemia as well as the lingering conflict with the Moslem Turks. The attention of philosophers was diverted to politics, economics and experimental sciences with the consequent weakening in metaphysical insights.

No footnotes or proof of any kind is offered. It is a rather hysterical tirade about how all Thomists before the 20th century were infected with Scotus' "formalism" and "essentialism" and how we must all return to the actus essendi to redeem the world. Oh well, what do you expect from a conference paper delivered at the top-secret invitation-only Maritain conferences at Notre Dame? I only post this as the best summary of the narrative of the decline of philosophy that began the instant someone first criticized Thomas Aquinas.

Scotus on Participation

It's a common claim made by contemporary intellectuals of various disciplines (I have in mind the Brad Gregorys, Fr. Barrons, the Cambridge fantasists, etc.) that Scotus denies participation. They never bother to cite a text of course, because none of these people have ever bothered to read Scotus. The claim is usually linked to univocity. To hold univocity is to automatically reject analogy and particpation. I've talked about analogy before, how Scotus holds analogical concepts but just isn't interested in talking about them. I've known for a number of years that the same is true of participation, but I never bothered to write any of the passages down. This time I did and offer for your delectation an unequivocal endorsement of participation.


Reportatio II d. 16 q. un. (Wad.-Viv. 23, 70-71):

Ad aliud alterius Doctoris dicit unus Doctor quod nihil agit per essentiam, nisi solus Deus, et ipse semper agit. Vel potest dici quod 'per essentiam' potest accipi dupliciter: aliquando ut distinguitur contra illud, quod est per participationem; aliquando ut distinguitur contra per accidens. Primo modo, dico quod nihil est per essentiam nisi Deus, quia omnis veritas, et entitas creata est talis per participationem, et isto modo agens per essentiam semper agit. Secundo modo agens per essentiam, hoc est, non per accidens, non semper agit necessario.

To the other [argument] of the other doctor, one doctor says that nothing except God alone acts through essence, and he always acts. Or it can be said that 'by essence' can be understood doubly: sometimes as it is distinguished against that which is by participation, sometimes as it is distinguished against 'per accidens'. In the first way, I say that nothing is by essence except God, because every truth and created entity is such by participation, and in that way an agent always acts through its essence. In the second way an agent by essence, this is, not per accidens, does not always act necessarily.

Not much, sure, but clear enough to show that simply because Scotus does not talk a lot about a particular feature of the philosophical tradition does not allow us to infer that he rejects it.

Hauerwas on Univocity

A fascinating quote from Tracy Rowland's article in the Oxford Handbook of the Trinity, p. 590.

Modernity, drawing on the metaphysics of a transcendent god, was the attempt to be historical without Christ. Postmodernity, facing the agony of living in history with no end, is the denial of history. In the wake of such a denial, the only remaining comfort is the shopping mall, which gives us the illusion of creating histories through choice, thus hiding from us the reality that none of us can avoid having our lives determined by money. Money, in modernity, is the institutionalization of the univocity of being that Scotus thought necessary to ensure the unmediated knowledge of God.

This from a god of this age.  I suppose such comments aren't worth responding to, as this just more of the same drivel we've seen many times from the pomo crowd. So just one brief comment: Scotus did not argue for univocity in order to guarantee the unmediated knowledge of God.  "Unmediated" knowledge would be the direct vision of the divine essence had by the blessed in the next life.  Univocity is a property of terms or concepts used in syllogistic discourse.  What Scotus was actually trying to do was to avoid fallacies of equivocation when making theological arguments in this life.

Robert Prentice and Illuminationism

Since we have gotten back onto the topic of narratives of late, I offer one from Robert Prentice.  Now in the current common opinion of Thomists, Historians, Theologians, and Philosophers, before Scotus there was a nice, warm, caring, generally happy golden age of participation-analogical metaphysics that the Bible, Fathers, Doctors, and the common man on the street singing his troubadour songs all held in common.  Then the evil univocalist onto-theology was introduced by Duns Scotus, which created the "secular".  Contrast this with:

Robert P. Prentice, An Anonymous Question on the Unity of the Concept of Being (Attributed to Scotus), p. 109 n. 6:

Platonism, Neo-platonism, Gnosticism, all incorporated some form of divine illuminationism within their systems. The theory of reminiscence, e.g. in Plato, is basically an expression of the idea that the divine world is the proximate source of true intelligibility and personal possession of truth. Aristotle's theory that the agent intellect performs the work of illuminating the sense world to render it an intelligible one is actually an extension of Plato's reminiscense theory by explaining the 'mechanics' of how reminiscence could take place, as one can discern by the reading of chapters 4, 5, and 6 of Book III of Aristotle's De anima. Moreover, there is not lacking a sense in which chapter 5 can be interpreted in which the Agent Intellect is a divine agency existing separately from men, which performs the function of "intelligibilizing" the sensible world after the manner of the God of reminiscence. It is then understandable that with St. Augustine, still processing reality in the Neo-platonist mould, a Christianized version of the reminiscence theory and of the agent intellect should surface in Christian illuminationism. It is then psychically comprehensible that the illuminationism of Augustinianism became factually involved with the substance of the faith itself. Hence when the conscious manifestation of the "pagan" psychic roots of the seemingly Christian theory of illuminationism was brought to the attention of the then current scholasticism by means of the "strange" theories of Averroes who posited that there was an Active or Agent Intellect existing apart from man, an understandable conflict between the unconscious cultural formation and the surfacing higher conscious rationality should take place. It is only in this sense that one can find a proportional answer to the violence of the doctrinal controversies turning around the agent intellect during the dozen or so years incorporating the condemnations of 1270 and 1277 of the Latin Averroism of Siger of Brabant. When one examines some of the 13 theses condemined in 1270 and, above all, some of the 219 condemned in 1277 by Stephen Tempier, Bishop of Paris, in the name of the Christian faith, one must look elsewhere than in the faith for the explanation of the particular condemnations. The whole conflict was a result of an emerging conscious secularized vision of reality detached from the illuminationism rooted in Hellenized Platonism pitted against the threatened unconscious attachment to an entrenched cultural vision. In a definite sense, St. Thomas' tract De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas represents a historical step in the process of the desacralization of knowledge.

Buridan contra Fundamentalism and Postmodernism

The meaning of a word has never obliged us [to construe words only in their proper senses, and to concede or deny propositions only according to what is required by their proper senses]. On the contrary, sometimes we must construe words their proper senses, and sometimes in improper senses, as in parabolic or ironic [expressions], or in other ways even more removed from the proper senses. For example, if we read the books of learned authors such as Aristotle or Porphyry, we must construe their words according to the senses those authors have imposed upon them, even if these are improper senses. And so we must concede that, strictly speaking, those words are true because they are true as construed in those senses. But even so, we must say that they have been imposed in such senses, and that if they had been imposed in their proper senses, they would be false. And if people reading the books of learned authors were to construe their words differently than they believe them to have been imposed by their authors, they would be insolent and cantankerous, and unworthy to study or read the books of the philosophers. In the same way, we must say that every word of the Bible and the Gospels is strictly speaking true, and we must construe these words in the senses in which they have been imposed and according to which they are true. And those who do otherwise are mistaken, as well as being blasphemers, or perhaps even heretics. But even so, we can correctly state in connection with many of these words that they are false, if imposed and construed in their proper senses.

The passage is from Buridan's Questions on Porphyry's Isagoge, and the translation is lightly adapted from Jack Zupko's book John Buridan (pages 18-19), which I intend to mine for my next post as well. I find the passage noteworthy for two reasons. First, it shows that the right relationship between doctrinal or biblical formulations and scientific was not worked out under pressure of advancing modernity and the onslaught of independent empirical science, but by philosophy when science was still in its nascent stages and both philosophy and science were flourishing under the purview of the undivided Catholic university. The whole Galileo issue could have been resolved easily by reference to Buridan here (or one might add to any number of other doctors); the reasons it wasn't were cultural, political, and personal, rather than because the Catholic Church was stuck in "dark ages" thinking. The thinking of the high middle ages was in general much more sane, moderate, and temperate than most of that emanating from the post-Reformation battles.

The second thing that strikes me about this passage is its implicit condemnation of much of modern and postmodern academia, of which one besetting sin is its fascination with mining old texts in the service of contemporary "relevance." We can't read an old book properly unless we care about the same things its author cared about, but with our presentist solipsism, narrow-mindedness, and progressive triumphalism, scholars (as much as Hollywood screenwriters) are constantly tempted to read them primarily in the light of our own political, cultural, or ideological concerns. The other day I reread Tolkien's classic lecture Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, which makes the same point, namely that Old English scholars had up until his day used the poem as a data mine for their own interests, without caring about what the poet cared about. The result was that the poem was devalued as scholars pined after the poems they wished had been written instead. Buridan's passage reminds me that you're not going to read Beowulf correctly if you think monsters are stupid and a waste of time, no matter how much you're interested in what it tells you about the Ingeld legend, Scyld Sheafing, or Geatish architecture. And it seems to me that classicists, medievalists, philosophers, scholars of all stripes fall prey to this data-mining temptation across the board.

"Inspired Metaphysics"

From a review by Mark Wenzinger of Inspired Metaphysics? Gustav Siewerth's Hermaneutic Reading of the Onto-Theological Tradition by Andrzej Wiercinski.

Much of continental "post-modern" philosophy stands in great need of being disabused of its prejudiced notion that ancient and medieval philosophy is simply onto-theology that seeks only to valorize "presence" by suppressing absence and alterity, all in order to secure a foundation of mastery and control over the totality of the contexts in which human life is lived

[...]

.... Inspired Metaphysics serves as a valuable introduction not only to the thought of Siewerth in particular, but also to the hermeneutic manner of reading both the Thomistic and continental traditions in general. Not the least of the book's many merits is its exposition of the unfortunate manner in which Siewerth himself, seeking to distinguish Thomistic metaphysics from that which Heidgger took to be onto-theology, failed in hermeneutical charity by being content to demonize Scotistic metaphysics as the source of Western philosophy's alleged forgetfulness of Being. In like manner, as Wiercinski points out, much of contemporary Catholic theology likewise fails hermeneutically by uncritically accepting Heidegger's equation of metaphysics with onto-theology and an alleged valorization of "presence", a term that is in fact highly equivocal and that need not at all be understood as Heidegger himself understood it. Contemporary Catholic theology therefore needs to find its own way back to a hermeneutically sensitive appropriation of Scholastic thought, which would involve first, the effort to recognize Thomism and Scotism as mutually complementary, rather than mutually exclusive, manners of philosophical and theological thinking, and second, the effort to recognize the continuity as well as the discontinuity that obtains between the Scholastic and continental traditions.... The goal of Inspired Metaphysics is precisely to make philosopher and theologian alike better capable of engaging in the ongoing conversation that ought never to cease both within and between the Scholastic and continental traditions.

[...]

Not the least of Wiercinski's contributions to the facilitating of dialogue both between philosophy and theology and between the medieval and continental traditions is his recognition of the baneful effect of Siewerth's reductive and misleading critique of the ontology of Duns Scotus as thought that valorizes conceptually unitary "presence" at the expense of ontological difference and that therefore initiates Western philosophy's forgetfulness of Being. Wiercinski accomplishes for Scotus what Ferdinand Alquie accomplishes for Descartes: a "metaphysical rehabilitation" that shows that Scotus and Thomas can be related to one another in a complementary rather than in a reductively oppositional and antagonistic manner. Wiercinski indicates the possibilities for the renewal of ontology in a post-Heideggerian age that could arise starting with a dialogical reading of the Thomistic and Scotistic metaphysical traditions.

Historiographical Fiction

As for internal criticism, which is so necessary and excellent so long as it uses one document in order to criticize another, eliminating from them what only appears to be true in order to discover what is really true, it loses all its value from the moment that it substitutes the point of view of the observer for that of the things observed. We have seen the birth of the "Critical Spirit" and all the pedantic fiction with which it encumbers history, fiction which at its best is not even entertaining. For it is characteristic of the "Critical Spirit" to be itself the measure of historical reality. When an event surprises it, the event loses the right to have taken place.

--Etienne Gilson, Heloise and Abelard

Happy Easter, readers all.

Davide Panagia

Time to reopen an old can of worms, pomo appropriations of "univocity". As generally seems to be the case among this crowd, the underlying interests and motivations are political. To see how much Scotus cared about politics, read Wolter's translations of "Political and Economic Philosophy" and compare it to the size of On the Will and Morality. I've never been sure how to deal with this sort of thing; it's completely false, driven by contemporary concerns about which Scotus knew nothing, completely unfounded in the texts of Scotus himself, a truly bizarre mating of 19th century Thomist historiography of the strict Leonine observance with contemporary liberal protestant theology/philosophy. Any criticism I offer will naturally be construed as "just history" not theology or philosophy. I think I would be content if instead of taking a misunderstood conclusion of Scotus and applying it to all sorts of issues that didn't exist in Scotus' day, they would first try to give an accurate explanation of what Scotus was trying to do, and then, say, and I know this is truly revolutionary, actually discuss the validity of the argument.  Anyway, here is another idiotic example. I'm experimenting with Fr. Z's format here.

From The Poetics of Political Thinking p.58:

"For Duns Scotus, the idea of negation compels the metaphysical question of relation[Actually, scotus' most detailed studies of relation are in Ord. IV where he talks about the eucharist. Apparently, in some of his philosophical commentaries he developes a theory of relation highly dependent on Simplicius]: How does multiplicity relate to Being? What force is it that relates beings to Being?[Not a distinction found in Scotus, unless by Being you mean that entity whose intrinsic mode is infinity, and being an entity whose intrinsic mode is finite] Duns Scotus's answer is that a "univocity of Being" enables an association between disparate entities, but not on the basis of analogy. Rather, Being relates to beings through predication: "God is thought of not only in some concept analogous to that of the creature,[this is a quote from scotus who here admits that he holds the analogy of being] that is, one entirely different from  what is predicated of a creature, but also in some concept univocal to himself and to a creature.[recall that Aquinas' "Analogy" is Aristotle's equivocity] And lest there be any contention about the word 'univocation,' I call that concept univocal that has sufficient unity in itself that to affirm and deny it of the same subject suffices as a contradiction." In contrast to the Judeo-Christian claim that we are all made in God's image,[So Scotus is outside the Judeo-christian tradition? oh, wait he also thinks we are made in the image of God and devotes several questions to it in the same volume of the critical edition as the univocity material is found; so this is slander and misdirection. I get it.] Duns Scotus argues that our similarity to God exits because all beings possess univocity; [How do beings/Beings "possess" univocity? Now it sounds like a concrete thing, not a property of concepts] God, then, is not merely analogous to other beings but is univocal both to himself and to others. The first sentence of the passage teaches us that God is univocal of all creatures[sic. what does this even mean? English please](i.e., present to all creatures [totally out of the blue; divine presence to creation is an entirely separate issue; I thought we are talking about predication]) and "entirely different from what is predicated of a creature." By retaining the principle  of absolute difference between Being and beings,[this "principle" is the commonly accepted distinction between univocal terms and equivocal terms, going back to Aristotle and mediated through Boethius; if you're going to go after Scotus, go after him for not using Aristotle's defintion of what univocal terms are] Duns Scotus makes difference in itself the first quality of Being.[Actually, being/Being can't have qualities because qualities are found in the categories and being is a transcendental, which means it is supracategorical. What being does have is passiones/attributes. Lets talk about them if that's what he means] Associations,[what are associations and where did they come from? Aquinas doesn't talk about them] then, cannot be premised on analogy, since Duns Scotus is not positing a resemblance between God and beings.[wait...i thought the whole point was that he creates a univocalist ontology and makes everything the same?] Rather, he is positing univocity of Being that asserts the radical difference between particulars while relating them to one another." [I get it; Scotus' univocity is really just another form of equivocity...but what does this say about Aquinas' analogy, which is just a weaker form of equivocity than univocity]

There follows a discussion of Deleuze's uses of univocity and his claims that they are rooted in Scotus, though he doesn't use any of the same terms in the same sense, "Scotus" is as much a cipher in Delezue as it is for the Cambridge Phantasists. The following is the summary of what Deleuze is doing:

"The principle of univocity marks both an ontological turn in the conception of difference and a "minor event" in the history of philosophy. By weaving that historical thread from Duns Scotus, thhrough Spinoza, to Nietzsche, Deleuze presents a counterhistory of metaphysics that illuminates the "banality of the negative." Importantly, this historical trajectory is also part and parcel of his overturning of Platonism--to the extent that Plato, in the flash of an instant, was the first to confuse difference with negation by denying simulacra their proper place among philosophical claimants."

This model of the history of philosophy is, I suspect what motivates RO. But why not just criticize Deleuze? It would be far more of a blow to him to show his view of history is bogus, than accept his views on certain things and then try to counteract them by, say, getting rid of every discipline except theology. What would Thomas say...

Feigned Erudition

"Many men" (saith Seneca) "had been without question wise, had they not had an opinion that they had attained to perfection of knowledge already, even before they had gone half-way," too forward, too ripe, praeproperi, too quick and ready, cito prudentes, cito pii, cito mariti, cito patres, cito sacerdotes, cito omnis officii capaces et curiosi, they had too good a conceit of themselves, and that marred all; of their worth, valour, skill, art, learning, judgment, eloquence, their good parts; all their geese are swans, and that manifestly proves them to be no better than fools. In former times they had but seven wise men, now you can scarce find so many fools. Thales sent the golden tripos, which the fishermen found and oracle commanded to be "given to the wisest," to Bias, Bias to Solon, etc. If such a thing were now found, we should all fight for it, as the three goddesses did for that golden apple, we are so wise: we have women politicians, children metaphysicians; every silly fellow can square a circle, make perpetual motions, find the philosopher's stone, interpret Apocalypsis, make new theorics, a new system of the world, new logic, new philosophy, etc. Notra utique regio, saith Petronius, "our country is so full of deified spirits, divine souls, that you may sooner find a god than a man amongst us," we think so well of ourselves; and that is an ample testimony of much folly.

--Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

Heidegger and Scholasticism

I've been leafing through a book for my historiography paper, and came across the following quotes. It's from McGrath, The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy. The author is basically a thomist with Heideggarian sympathies. His section on Scotus is horribly inaccurate, but then, in post-modernism, accuracy isn't valued. I'll post on that another time. This is fairly self-explanatory.

"Heidegger's twenty-year polemic with Scholasticism can be summed up in the following three theses: (1) Scholasticism makes certainty (apodictic judgment/scientia) the proper mode of access to beings. This epistemological relation is theologically established in the Scholastic interpretation of divine creation as an act of judgment; (2) Scholasticism sets up world as product and delivers to modernity the conceptual paradigm it needs to get technology off the ground. That each of these accusations applies to most forms of philosophical theism should not be overlooked. Heidgger's polemic with Scholasticism is rooted in a more basic opposition to the notion of divine creation."

Milbank

On that note...try this gem from Milbank. I won't subject it to the usual ridicule. The Cambridge Phantasists are clearly committed to a hyper-negative theology, almost as a first principle. So of course they won't like the ten lines Scotus devotes to criticizing negative theology.

Milbank, "Beauty and the Soul" in Theological perspectives on God and Beauty, p. 3:

"In the High Middle Ages, the possibility and experience of seeing the invisible in the visible, or of seeing the invisible as invisible (this is the necessary other aspect), was generally assumed and pervaded life, art and understanding. Therefore, there was no specific discipline of "aesthetics," which only arose in the eighteenth century. Beauty took care of herself.

By contrast, one mark of modernity is that we still, indeed, acknowledge the invisible, yet we only stand on its brink, and only acknowledge it as unknown. We continue to see the invisible as invisibile, but we have lost the counterpoint: seing the invisible in the visible. In consequence, we only see the invisible as visible in the sense that we are blinded by it: seing what we see when we close our eyes. Bedazzlement now no longer betokens an excess of saturated form. Thus Duns Scotus's famous rebuke to Dionysius: Negationes etiam non summe amamus misunderstands, certainly, the Dionysian hyper-positive divine provocation of negation of our highest conceptions (even of divinity itself) yet may apply, indeed, to the modern cult of the sublime. Without this cult, we moderns remain agnostic concerning the unknown; with this cult, we hypostaize and consecrate the unknownness as the force of nullity."

Not terribly interesting, to be sure, and totally out of context (a charge which I often accuse "them" of); but I was tickled by the passage as it is one of my favorite quotes from Duns Scotus, a passage which I incorporated into my recent Derrida paper. Like Scotus, and obviously under his influence, I am becoming more and more critical of negative theology. And participation as well, for that matter.

Derrida

Here's a quote from his 1968 essay Differance:

“Différance is not only irreducible to any ontological or theological--ontotheological--reappropriation, but as the very opening of the space in which ontotheology--philosophy--produces its system and its history, it includes ontotheology, inscribing it and exceeding it without return.”