The Materialistic Metaphysics of William of Ockham - Part 1
"From the greatness and beauty of the creatures,
by analogy, one comes to know the Author."
Sap 13,5
"To on pollachòs legòmenon"
Aristotle
"Disce elevare ingenium,
aliumque rerum ordinem ingredi"
Card. Gaetano
A Paradoxical Metaphysics
The expression "materialist metaphysics" may seem like a contradiction in terms, as it is difficult to understand how a metaphysics, etymologically meaning "beyond physics," could be reduced to physics, that is, the science of material things. Yet, if we consider Ockham's conception of metaphysics, we realize that things are precisely as described.
Naturally, we must take the term metaphysics here in the broad sense of "a comprehensive view of reality," something that none of us can do without, because everything one thinks is thought within the framework of the conception they have formed of reality, whether materialist or spiritualist in nature.
In this sense, we can say that everyone has a metaphysics. Thus, Ockham, by his admission, has a metaphysics, and consequently a philosophy of being; but here it is not the being as being, not the being in a universal sense, but rather this particular being, the individual material being, determined and concrete, existing here and now, the object of my sensible experience, one among all such beings.
Thus, for Ockham, the object of metaphysics is the individual being currently in existence. This consideration is certainly praiseworthy, as it implicitly presupposes the perception of the act of being. However, this focus pertains more to interpersonal encounters, narrative, history, or chronicle than to metaphysics itself.
Certainly, metaphysics does pay utmost attention to the act of being or singular existence, but its object, being, is not limited to singular existence. It is far broader. It is primarily substance, that is, the subsisting subject (suppositum) of an essence in the act of being, whether possible or actual. Furthermore, being is not merely subsistence, or being-in-itself, which pertains to substance, whose pinnacle is the person; it is also inherence in substance, being-in, which pertains to accident.
Moreover, the concrete individual is an agent in act or in potentiality. But the metaphysician does not merely aim to grasp the agent in act or motion; rather, he seeks the origin, the principle, the cause of becoming, of the transition from potency to act, from the possible to the actual. Not only action, but also the acting subject enters the horizon of being. Not only the mutable, but also the immutable, which is its presupposition and foundation, enters the horizon of being.
Metaphysics, furthermore, must be capable of grasping nothingness, from which being is drawn or created by the Creator; it must grasp being at the root of becoming, the motor behind the motion, the cause beyond the effect, the end beyond the means, reality beyond appearance, the real beyond the ideal; the thing beyond the phenomenon, the foundation beyond the founded, the participated (per essentiam) beyond the participant (per participationem), the principle beyond the principled, the whole beyond the part, the eternal beyond the temporal. Metaphysics seeks pure being, beyond its participations, imitations, derivations, and creations.
His Conception of Metaphysics [1]
Called to look upwards,
No one knows how to raise their gaze
Os 11:7
To understand how Ockham conceives of metaphysical knowledge, we must first understand his view of knowledge itself. He understands it, in a Platonic sense, as a form of seeing. This view is also present in St. Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, but they were aware that Plato draws an analogy between physical sight and intellectual vision. Just as the healthy eye immediately sees the house before it without the need for representations, the eye of the spirit must form a concept (eikòn in Plato, nòema in Aristotle) of the house, because the mind is not always proportionate to the object, or the object is absent. Thus, the idea of the house is not the extramental house, but rather the house within the soul.
According to this conception of knowledge, metaphysics for Ockham consists in the intuition of the individual existent as experienced through the senses (cognitio intuitiva). This makes it clear that he esteemed the act of being (actus essendi) of the existent. Such an appreciation for the actus essendi approaches the Thomistic conception; however, Ockham limits himself to the actus essendi of the individual, without considering the actus essendi as such in its universality. Thus, for him, metaphysics is merely a global and approximate consideration of the collection of individual existents designated by the common name ‘being’ (ens).
In this way, Ockham rejects as unnecessary conceptual mediation, demonstrating that he holds a view of knowledge that is overly simple, and we might say, materialistic, by equating every form or level of knowledge with external sense perception. According to him, the intellect and the object are sufficient for the act of knowing, without the need for representations or images.
It is not that he disregards the abstract work of the intellect (cognitio abstractiva) and, by extension, the ideal or rational being (ens ideale vel rationis). Quite the opposite. It is simply that, for him, this is only relevant to logic and mathematics, which do not engage with reality, as he understands it, which is singular. These disciplines concern forms produced by thought or methods for organizing rationally the data of experience and working with it technically.
It follows that Ockham overlooks the exemplary function of the idea, so dear to Bonaventure and Scotus, and this has detrimental effects in theology, particularly regarding the divine ideas and, consequently, the relationship between science and will in God. For Ockham, God creates without relying on the idea of the creature to be created. God does not create what He has conceived, what He knows or thinks, but what He wills; thus, He does not will what He sees as good, but what He wills is good, and so He sees it as good, even if it is contrary to human reason.
Although Ockham professes verbal allegiance to the principle of non-contradiction, his thought in practice often disregards the demands of logical necessity. Owing to his empiricism, he is unable to demonstrate with certainty fundamental truths (bold emphasis added by the translator)—such as the immortality of the soul, the absoluteness of the moral law, and the existence and attributes of God.
Based on this empiricist, logicized, and mathematized epistemology—realist, yes, but closed to spiritual substance—Ockham calls «being» the name that designates the totality of individual sensible beings. Thus, he does not obtain by abstraction a universal concept of being, open to the spirit, which would be the object of metaphysics, because, for him, the being, absolutely multiple, has no real universality. Instead, in metaphysics, there is only the name «being», by which we designate the totality of beings.
For him, the many beings have nothing in common with each other; they are simply different from one another and are not unified by a single reason of being, but only by the name «being», with which we designate them. The multiplicity, for Ockham, is not unified by the One, but is, in itself, a multiplicity. There is no unity immanent in the many, because they, though different from one another, are already united in themselves. It is clear how such a principle leads in theology to chaotic pluralism, to the denial of monotheism, to the affirmation of polytheism, and the replacement of religions by religion, under the pretext that one is different from the other.
Indeed, for Ockham, as is well known, the universal does not exist in reality; it does not exist in individual beings, but only as a name. Thus, the concept is not the mental and abstract representation, derived from experience, of a real unum in multis—that is, the essence of a thing, immanently always identical to itself in the individuals of the same genus or species. Instead, it is only a mental being around which we gather the individuals of the same species, just as in a wardrobe we gather all the overcoats, which we make use of. The predication of the universal (unum de multis) is not the predication of a single essence of many, but of a single name of many.
With all this, Ockham does not deny the transcendental predication of being above genera and species. However, the Ockhamist transcendental—here we are again—is nothing more than the predication of the name verum, res, unum, aliquid, bonum, and pulchrum, referred not to being as being, which is an emptiness, but to the concrete totality of beings collectively and confusedly taken in a single glance.
Thus, the misunderstanding of the true universal sense of the metaphysical being leads to the collapse or disintegration of the transcendentals in Ockham. The verum is not founded on being but on the good, which prevails over being; the being is this particular being (aliquid); the real being (res) is reduced to logic and language; the transcendental unum is reduced to the numerical one; the relation is a mere being of reason. Therefore, metaphysics is partly devoured by physics and partly by logic. Being is either materialized in physics or volatilized in logic and reconsidered according to the being of reason formalized in language.
Moreover, Ockham states that being cannot be defined, because it would require resorting to a broader genus, of which being would be the difference. However, he admits, there is no broader genus, because being is the most expansive of all. But Ockham does not realize that being does not need to be defined, because everyone spontaneously knows what it is, since the notion of being is the first, in which all other notions are resolved, and which is presupposed in everything; hence, everything we think and say, we think and say about being. Thomas, indeed, defines being as id quod est or id quod habet esse. But what could these expressions mean for one who cannot go beyond the experience of the senses?
The True Notion of Being
Furthermore, we must note that the concept of being, unique among all concepts, implicitly contains its differences, unlike the genus, to which the differences are extrinsic. For this reason, being is not a genus but stands above all the genera and is a transcendental. This means that it is not a univocal concept but an analogous one.
To say that the notion of being is analogous means that being is polysemous or multivalent in a way that no other concept is. As Aristotle says, it "is said in many ways" (pollachòs legòmenon). It is necessary to distinguish being from the mode of being and thus meaning from the mode of meaning. Each individual being has its way of being and being meant, different from that of another. Up to this point, Ockham follows. Where he fails, however, is in understanding that there are transcendental, generic, and specific modes of being, which compel one to move beyond the narrow point of view of the individual and open the mind to the boundless field of being.
Ockham misses being as such, being confined to this particular being, and tends to reduce being to this particular being. This is the mark of an intellect too bound to sense and incapable of abstraction. This creates a significant difficulty for him in understanding spiritual, metaphysical, moral, and religious values. Yet, he was a theologian and a religious man; for this reason, it is surprising that he displays such a lack of sensitivity to a world of values, in which he should have felt perfectly at ease and which should have constituted the center of his interests and life. What sense does it make to do theology in such conditions?
With all this, it must be noted that Ockham is not so materialistic as to ignore the notion and primacy of the spirit, which, for him, the individual subject ultimately is God. It is difficult to understand how, in such a metaphysical climate, the notion of a free and omnipotent God and, consequently, human freedom remain intact. It seems to be a residue of the Franciscan formation he received, which survives, albeit with difficulty, in the skeptical and pagan intellectual world that William imprudently allowed to enter his mind, coming into contact with the alluring and dangerous atmosphere of the Oxford University: that inflation of science which St. Francis would have fled from like the plague.
True openness to the spirit arises from a mind not limited to mere experimental science, but attentive to the signs and calls of transcendence, which understands being in its analogical value. Indeed, we observe that the most different or disparate beings fall under the same notion of being, so that, just as it spans the world of matter, it also allows elevation to the world of spirit and the divine.
It certainly has its unity or identity; it is recognizable, but it is not the absolutely precise unity of the univocal, whether it be genus or species. Instead, it is the relative unity of a real variety or plurality that tends toward the one or derives from the one. It is a plurality of meanings, similar or dissimilar to one another, all ordered with proportionality and harmony to a supreme analogate, which constitutes the semantic reference for the unity of meaning of the concept. Thus, we have the degrees of being, knowing, living, acting, perfection, virtue, and so on.
Analogy satisfies the need for unity and identity of meaning, proper to univocity, aimed at ensuring that the syllogism works and does not have four terms. But for such unity, univocity is not always necessary, as Scotus believes; it may suffice that many different meanings relate to the one (pros en, says Aristotle), as happens in analogy.
The universality of the analogical notion also abstracts, like every universal, from the inferior, but not completely, as the genus does; rather, it implicitly contains them within itself. Thus, metaphysical abstraction prescinds from matter, but at the same time does not exclude it. It does not reject matter, but it is not laid upon matter either. It is high without forgetting the low. It dwells in heaven without forgetting the earth.
The analogate is plurisignificant, like the equivocation, but there is a great difference! In the analogate, the analogates are well distinct and in harmony with one another, for example: vegetative life, sensitive life, rational life, angelic life, supernatural life, beatific life, divine life. It is always life, but with such abyssal differences!
The analogate is polysemantic without being confusing, like the equivocation. It unites by distinguishing, whereas the equivocation assembles chaotically, randomly, without order and unity, and confuses. The equivocation is a name that conceals within itself meanings that are disordered and contradictory. The word 'dog' can refer to the barking animal, the dog constellation, and the dog of a gun: all things that have nothing to do with each other, except by distant comparisons.
The Defects of Ockham's Metaphysics
Unfortunately, Ockham, who would have done well to listen to Thomas Aquinas on this matter, exacerbates Scotus' univocism and rejects the analogical notion of being. As we have said, for him, being is reduced to nothing more than the collection of individual sensible beings, indicated by the common but equivocal name "being," which contains nothing universal, but only something common, much like a common room is not called universal, but simply capable of hosting many people.
The concept of being in Ockham is univocal, not in the Scotist sense of the simple concept, but precisely in the sense of abstracting everything, so that in the end, nothing remains. For this reason, it has no objective content, but is merely a name used to designate the set of specific and concrete beings. This is the same process that Hegel will follow, with the difference that while Ockham is a realist and does not deny the concrete, he at least has the honesty to stop at the void filled by the name. Hegel, in contrast, in addition to reducing being to thought, pretends to have discovered becoming as the opposition of being to nothingness.
Ockham thus admits a concept of the universal being as void, because for him, any content is singular or otherwise determined, and would thereby nullify the universal. At the same time, he understands the term 'being' as equivocal, seeing it as a sign for individual beings, each of which, in its singularity, has nothing in common with the others.[2]
Thus, for Ockham, being is like a container that is empty in itself, but can and must be filled with determined beings, that is, with the various particular sciences. In this way, being is only the name that designates the container "being"; it is like the label "glasses" that we place on a drawer that contains glasses.
However, being a theologian, Ockham does not forget the question of how to predicate the being of God and creatures. He, however, rejects the analogical notion of being, which is the one that allows the human mind to ascend to God from earthly things, creating a bridge between the mind and God. He is a supporter of negative theology without the support of positive theology, which, as St. Thomas notes, invalidates negative theology itself, because it is like someone who says that an elephant is not a lemon, without saying what an elephant is, or like someone who peels a banana and throws away the banana.
Ockham, besides not knowing the foundational operation that establishes the notion of being with its first principles, also does not know the abstracting-ascending operation, which imperfectly abstracts the form from the matter (abstractio formalis) [3] — whether imaginable (mathematical) or sensible (physical) — and leads to the analogical notion of being proper to metaphysics. Instead, he believes that a horizontal abstraction of the universal from the particular (abstractio totalis) is sufficient.
Thus, in Ockham, metaphysical knowledge does not transcend that of mathematics and physics but remains at their level, so it cannot reach the plane of pure spirituality. The chemist, the carpenter, the butcher, the physicist, the logician, the mathematician, and the grammarian are on the same level of knowledge as the metaphysician. Under the pretense that the notion of being is within everyone's reach, he overlooks the fact that, unfortunately, our intelligence, as a result of original sin, to progress in truth, must enter through the narrow door of discipline and purification, taught by metaphysics.
In fact, for Ockham, the paradigm of science is experimental science. For this reason, metaphysics and theology do not rise to the level of science and do not attain its certainty because their conclusions cannot be empirically verified and are not necessary. The very principle of causality does not ensure the necessity of conclusions because cause and effect are individual beings without a necessary connection.
The same applies to the principle of finality. We observe that a certain phenomenon recurs, but we do not know whether it will always do so (quia), because we cannot know with certainty why things happen in that way, nor why they could not be otherwise (propter quid).
Here, Hume is already prefigured by several centuries.
The propter quid demonstration is merely conditional: if… then…
God probably exists, but it is not certain. Ockham considers only the truths of faith to be certain. Certainly, that is a great thing. But these truths are devoid of their rational support and apologetic foundation, so their certainty is fragile and they can easily bend toward heresy or dissolve into apostasy.
Therefore, Ockham does not recognize the degrees of being that form the degrees of knowledge. The epistemological transition from simple apprehension of essence to the affirmation of being in judgment is missing. Consequently, the act of being, as the actualization of essence, the potency of being, does not appear. Hence, Ockham does not ascend to God as Pure Act. He preaches a “negative theology,”; but without the presupposition of a positive theology, grounded in the analogy of being, it is unclear what he denies.
Thomas, with his good sense, at the end of the ascensus ad Deum, also denies that we can predicate the being of God, but he specifies that it concerns being within the limits in which we conceive it. Otherwise, by denying being tout court, one ends up confusing negative theology with atheism.
The mind, therefore, unfortunately, in Ockham fails to ascend from the material substance, composed of matter and form, to the spiritual substance, pure subsistent form. He does not see the real distinction between substance and accidents, and thus cannot ascend to God as pure Substance.
In Ockham, God does not justify what He does because the reason surpasses the understanding of our reason, but simply because He has no reason. God creates without ideas. Isn’t such a notion irreverent? In any case, this is consistent with Ockham’s famous thesis that, if God willed, He could legitimate adultery.
One might ask what becomes of the exemplary role of the divine Word, crucified, a devotion so dear to Franciscan spirituality: Christ, the Truth made person, per quem omnia facta sunt (John 1:10), Christ, the Thought and Image of the Father, in Whom and through Whom the Father designs and creates all things, so that they have their truth and consequently their goodness.
What remains of Christ in Ockham? Christ in Ockham risks no longer appearing as the crucified Logos for our redemption, but is almost reduced, in an Arian-like manner, to an anarchic and revolutionary common man, struggling for the earthly liberation of humanity from the yoke of the powerful, including the Pope.
A balance
In Ockham, designating replaces conceiving, the word replaces thought, the concept replaces the real, as in idealism, because conceiving is no longer knowing; that is, it is no longer a representation of the real, but a simple mental entity that signifies a single entity immediately intuited by the senses. Therefore, even Ockham’s realism is untrustworthy and winks at idealism. In essence, he already foreshadows Hegel in reducing reality to logic and, in fact, like Heidegger, to language.
The consequence is that metaphysics resolves itself into an organization and formalization of the logical-grammatical-syntactical language and a synthetic or interdisciplinary view of the methods of individual sciences. The logical being of reason replaces the real being, and semantics becomes metaphysics. As Father Orlando Todisco OFM Conv says, it is the passage 'from ontology to the philosophy of language' [4]: no longer attention to real being, but to the syntactical and logical correctness of language, understood no longer as an expression of being, but as a nominal and linguistic sign of the whole of entities.
Translator’s note: Father Orlando Todisco is a contemporary Italian philosopher and theologian in the Scotist tradition, formerly Professor of Metaphysics and Theoretical Philosophy at the Pontifical Theological Faculty “San Bonaventura” (the Franciscanum) in Rome. He is known for his rigorous engagement with John Duns Scotus and for bringing classical Franciscan metaphysical concerns into dialogue with modern questions about language and epistemology. He is a scholar whom I hold in high regard; at present he is retired and suffering from ill health, which has limited his ability to continue his work publicly.
Ockham's thought teaches us a valuable lesson: it helps us understand how materialism and idealism correspond to, imply, and call upon each other. They interact, one reacting to the other, without escaping the vicious circle within which they are condemned as enemy-friends to repel and confuse one another.
From this perspective, the history of English philosophy is extremely instructive. This perverse circle begins with Ockham, and from here, there is a continual and overlapping succession of coarse empiricism and ethereal spiritualism: from the crude materialism of Hobbes to the empiricist idealism of Locke, to the theological immaterialism of Berkeley, which is a particularly interesting case of the mutual interplay between idealism and materialism (bold emphasis added by the translator). Indeed, for Berkeley, matter does not exist simply because he has materialized thought by reducing intellect to perception (esse est percipi), as Hume would later do.
From here, the subsequent English empiricism will unfold, influencing even Luther ("sum occamicae factionis"), Renaissance hedonism, French sensationalism, the 18th-century libertines, Comte's positivism, and eventually Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein, with their ties to the Vienna Circle of the 1920s, not to mention existentialism up to Heidegger. After all, what is this "existence" and this "being-there" (Dasein), if not once again the individual, incomprehensible and empirical, of Ockham? And what lies at the foundation of the Freudian libido, which today glorifies lust, causing immense destruction of souls and grave scandals, if not once more the absolutized individual of Ockham?
Ockhamism entails the inability to distinguish between material and spiritual substances, for it reduces the intellect to the senses and refuses to accept anything that is not an object of sensory experience or at least imaginable. Should abstract entities like logic and mathematics be accepted, it is not to attain knowledge of the metaphysical being, which for Ockhamism is nothing more than a wandering in the void, a tasteless manna, but rather to impose rational order on the data of experience, establish linguistic rules, and drive economic activity, as well as the progress of science and technology.
In Ockhamism, there is no ascent from sensible experience to the world of the spirit. And if the world of the spirit, and even the Christian faith, is acknowledged, it is conceived as a meteor that inexplicably falls from the sky, either as an a priori datum of intuition, an immediate datum of consciousness, or an empirically immediate fact, thus reducing it to the level of sensible data.
Ockham reduces knowledge to power, theory to praxis, thereby in some way anticipating Marxist pragmatism and the liberation theology of Leonardo Boff. The moral consequence of this is that the criterion of good and evil will no longer be an objective, spiritual, universal, transcendent, and eternal value—a consideration of an ideal model derived argumentatively from the data of the senses and the natural inclinations of the human person—but the contingent attraction or repulsion that the sensible appetite of the individual subject experiences in contact with various objects of experience.
Under the pretext that God is free to do or ordain whatever He wishes, and that the creature is contingent, the consequence will be that all the laws of nature and man will no longer have anything certain or necessary, but will become contingent, changeable, and uncertain.
Ockham reduces the existence of the creature to its single essence. He is right in considering the existence of the created world as contingent. But we must remember that essences possess necessary characteristics, without which they would be destroyed; and based on the human essence, man is subject to laws of conduct, transgressing which he fails to reach his end. Instead, for Ockham, even essence changes and ultimately loses its necessary characteristics, putting its very existence at risk.
It must therefore be remembered that even God, the supreme guardian of these laws which He has established, could not transgress them or command their transgression without failing in His wisdom and goodness, which is impious to even consider. Hence, the impiety of Ockham's idea, according to which, if God so willed, He could command adultery.
Ockham is right to distinguish between God's absolute power and His ordained power, the former being what, save for the principle of non-contradiction, God could do if He wished; and the latter, what God has effectively and historically arranged according to the current plan of creation and salvation. But it is necessary to bear in mind that even de potentia Dei absoluta, God cannot command sin. Nor does Ockham’s argument hold that if God commanded adultery, it would not be sinful, for it is unthinkable that God would command something contrary to His wisdom and therefore to His will.
(End of Part One)
Fr. Giovanni Cavalcoli OP
Fontanellato, August 14, 2019
source:
https://padrecavalcoli.blogspot.com/p/la-metafisica-materialista-di-guglielmo_28.html
Notes:
[1] According to Alféri, in Ockham, metaphysics becomes a "ghost." I find this exaggerated. I prefer the judgment of Father Tyn, who suggests that Ockham places metaphysics "on the path to dissolution." We are not yet at Hume or Comte, or the Vienna Circle; however, this is the endpoint of Ockham's premises. Ockham himself lived in a European climate of Christianity, in which metaphysics would still be considered a science for centuries. But the Ockhamist worm will continue its path towards today’s desolation, which may be the dawn of a new rebirth after the Second Vatican Council.
[2] Alessandro Ghisalberti, Introduzione a Ockham (Introduction to Ockham), Laterza Publishers, Rome-Bari, 1976, p. 28; William of Ockham, Scritti filosofici (Philosophical Writings), Nardini Publishers, Florence, 1991, p. 165; T. Tyn, Metafisica della sostanza. Partecipazione e analogia entis (Metaphysics of Substance. Participation and Analogy of Being), ESD Editions, Bologna, 1991, pp. 243, 256-257.
[3] On this type of abstraction, cf. B.-M. Simon, Esiste un’intuizione dell’essere? (Does an Intuition of Being Exist?), ESD Editions, Bologna, 1995, p. 62; J. Maritain, Sept leçons sur l’être et les premiers principes de la raison spéculative (Seven Lessons on Being and the First Principles of Speculative Reason), Téqui, Paris, 1933, pp. 88-96.
[4] O. Todisco, G. Duns Scoto e Guglielmo D‘Occam – Dall’ontologia alla filosofia del linguaggio (G. Duns Scotus and William of Ockham – From Ontology to the Philosophy of Language), Libreria Universitaria, Cassino, 1989.