Part Three - What is Realism
The Precursors of Idealism: Scotus, Ockham, and Suarez
The oldest testimony of idealism in the West—apart from the more ancient Indian idealism, which we shall not consider here—is that of Parmenides in the 6th century B.C., with his famous principle:
to autò to noein kai to einai — thinking and being are the same thing.
This is connected to another principle:
Being is; non-being is not.
These two foundational principles can carry a valid meaning: the first may signify that truth consists in the correspondence between thought and being—that is, when I am in the truth, what I understand is precisely that which exists. Otherwise, I would be in error. The second is the principle of identity: being cannot both be and not be simultaneously and under the same aspect.
But the idealists understood the first principle as if it meant to affirm the identity of the real with the ideal, and the second as if it meant that being is one and only, hence asserting the univocity of being. Thus, it has happened that the tendency to conflate being with thought and to understand being in a univocal sense has become like an underground river which occasionally resurfaces in the history of philosophy.
Two eminent cases in the Middle Ages are those of St Anselm and St Bonaventure. As Christians, they were firmly convinced of the externality of things and reality, created by God, about their ideas. They knew well that there does not exist only one entity, that absolute being is not the only being, but that many beings exist, each different from the other, and that God is distinct from the world.
And yet, while Anselm believed he could demonstrate the existence of God, supreme Reality, not from the created effects in the world, but starting from his idea of God, Bonaventure had a concept of being—which he called “pure being”[1]—by which he believed he could demonstrate that God exists simply by carrying this idea to its ultimate consequences. In the end, without realizing it, he identifies God as pure Act of being—hence pure Being in this sense—with his idea of pure being, which is nothing more than a supreme abstraction that, while containing everything, also abstracts from everything. It is nothing other than the most abstract and universal logical concept or schema of the common being, which has nothing to do with the realistic concept of being as act of being—that is, the being by which God is ipsum Esse per se subsistens. Logical pure being, not being real, cannot be a personal being as God is.
But it is possible that, while Anselm did not intend to prove God's existence based on reality but merely to reflect on the idea that, if God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived, then He cannot not exist, Bonaventure may have expressed himself poorly and intended precisely what Thomas Aquinas meant by ipsum Esse.
Yet, setting aside these historical precedents, it remains that Cartesian idealism, far from being—as Descartes wished to present it—a radical refoundation of philosophy upon new grounds capable of providing a certainty that had hitherto been sought in vain, is in reality the failed outcome of a prior process of decline, and simultaneously the arrogant starting point of a philosophical path which, once taken to its conclusion, would lead to the catastrophe of thought and civilization—as demonstrated by the two World Wars of the past century. And, since we have not yet freed ourselves from this deleterious philosophy, today we run the risk of a third and final world war. Not only that, but we are heading towards a catastrophic trajectory that could lead to a crisis even worse than the one that Descartes represents as the apex.
Already, in the Middle Ages, we observe a series of gnoseological-metaphysical theses gradually diverging from Thomistic realism, attributing ever greater importance to the idea or the concept, which tends to replace the real. Correspondingly, there is a progressive loss of awareness of the primary importance of the real, which begins to be reduced to the ideal or the conceptual.
After the powerful Thomistic synthesis—of sense and intellect, of essence and being, of universal and particular, of abstract and concrete, of one and many, of possible and actual, of real and ideal—it was not the disciples of Aquinas, who have remained faithful to this synthesis to the present day (encouraged by the Magisterium of the Church), but rather certain philosophers, who were no longer able to comprehend the elevation, universality, radical depth, and flexibility of Thomistic realism. They lost sight of its analogical conception of being, of the real distinction between essence and existence, and thus they separated what Thomas had wisely united.
On one side, with Duns Scotus, they became excessively fascinated by the power of the mind to generate concepts; on the other, with William of Ockham, they narrowed the horizon of the intellect to what is sensible, conceiving metaphysics no longer as the science of universal or common being, but as an experimental intuition of this particular being present to, or appearing before, the senses.
The decline of metaphysics after the Thomistic apex also entails the loss of the sense of being (esse), as Thomas had defined it: not merely the affirmation of existence, predicable univocally of all that may exist, but act, energy, perfection, and fulfilment of essence, according to various degrees of perfection—just as Plato had already intuited through his doctrine of participation. In this view, being is subject to gradations, of which the highest is the divine. This is why the Bible refers to God as the “Most High”[2].
A thing either exists or does not exist. Certainly, non-being is opposed to being. Yet evil exists, but as a privation of being. Nothingness is non-being; but if we know what it is, then in some sense—as an idea—it exists. Ideas exist, but they do not have being. The essence of things exists in God, but in itself does not yet have being unless God grants it. Non-existence is certainly non-being; yet non-being does not necessarily mean non-existence.
An idea exists, but it does not have being—that is, it is not real. If something is, that means it exists. Conversely, something can exist as possible, without possessing being in reality. Therefore, full realism does not rest content with mere possibility, with the ideal, with essence or existence, but strives for being, for it is there that the truly real is found.
This is why the decline of metaphysics entails that thinking, understood as the mere production of ideas or the formation of concepts, tends to separate itself from the real and to close in upon itself. Conceptualising is preferred over the intuition of the real. A more perfect concept, that is, a univocal one, is preferred to one that is more perspicuous, though imperfect—namely, the analogical concept.
It seems that the object of knowledge and metaphysics is not so much the external real, but rather what the intellect forms within itself of the known real—that which Suárez would call the conceptus obiectivus, and to which Descartes would attribute such importance as to ontologise it: that is, to regard it as an effect in the mind of the action upon it by external things. Hence, Descartes believes he can demonstrate that he is “not alone,” but that other things exist beyond himself, because they cause in his mind the “objective reality of ideas” (cf. the conceptus obiectivus), that is, the ideas of things[3].
The decline of gnoseology—and consequently of metaphysics—begins with Duns Scotus, who fails to grasp what the analogous concept[4] is, as discussed by St Thomas, and fails as well to understand why there should be any need to add being to essence, if essence already possesses it on its account[5].
This thesis will be taken up and made his own by Suárez, who will attempt to reconstitute the two halves of metaphysics: the essentialist and the existentialist, the rationalist and the empiricist—halves which had been split apart by the conceptualism of Scotus and the nominalism of Ockham. Yet he will not succeed in doing so, because—as Garrigou-Lagrange insightfully observes[6]—failing to recover the Thomistic synthesis, Suárez now sides with Scotus against Ockham, and now with Ockham against Scotus.
As for Scotus, he demands of the metaphysical concept a degree of perfection which it can only possess in mathematics, logic, or physics. In metaphysics, he is driven by an exaggerated desire for precision, comprehensibility, simplicity, clarity, and univocity. Yet the finite being and the infinite being are not added to being as differences are added to a genus, for outside of being there is nothing: there is nothing to add to being, because being is everything, and all things.
It is the very notion of being itself which can be predicated analogically of the creature and the Creator, given both the similarity and dissimilarity of the one to the Other. God and the creature do not differ by something external to being, something that would be added to being, but differ within being itself.
As Gilson has demonstrated, Scotus is influenced by Avicenna’s notion of essence as indifferent both to existential singularity and to logical universality, and preceding them. Thus it happens that, for Scotus, the object of metaphysics is being (ens) understood as essence, independently of existence and therefore irrespective of its being real.
Now, since the object of our intellect is the essence of being, grasped in the concept, it becomes immediately evident that in Scotus, the concept of being comes to the forefront and acquires disproportionate importance in comparison with the realist gaze directed at real being. From this arises a prioritization of essence in the intellect, which comes to outweigh being. The possible appears broader than the actual. The perception of the act of being (actus essendi) as the perfection of essence, as the potency of being, is lost. Yet the act of being is analogical and diversified, whereas essence is univocal and always the same. Consequently, the concept of being is no longer analogical but univocal.
Scotus does indeed recognize the analogy and diversity among real beings, but being bound, as he is, to Avicennian essentialism, he cannot see how one might have an analogical concept of being; for him, such a notion would give rise to equivocation and confusion. This is understandable, if—as he does—one fixes one’s attention exclusively on the essence of being.
But if we consider that every real being is different from every other, then to conceive of this fact we require an analogical notion—purified or pluriform—that can admit and implicitly, though confusedly, acknowledge such differentiation. What is needed is not a rigid but a supple reason, open and capacious, capable of navigating the diversity of being while still maintaining an imperfect conceptual unity. The Greek prefix aná signifies precisely this movement of the intellect as it seeks to follow the plurality, complexity, and gradation of the real.
By contrast, a generic univocal notion excludes difference and diversity, with the result that they are cast outside of being and reduced to nothingness. Something of this kind was already present in the Parmenidean notion of being, and it is not impossible that Avicenna drew from it. As a Muslim, he was bound to the notion of divine unity, which presupposes a concept of being that excludes all plurality—hence the Qur’anic rejection of the Trinity in God.
Thomas distinguishes a real essence from a real being of that essence, which is its act of being (actus essendi), given to it by God if He creates it. The first is essence as the potency of being outside of God; the second is the act of being of the essence. The essence is therefore really distinct from its act of being, because it possesses it if it is created; and does not possess it if it is not created, remaining thus a possible essence. Without the act of being, the essence does not exist outside of God, but exists in God, identical with God.
Whereas Thomas speaks of the real being as composed of essence and being, Suárez, following the line of Scotus, will speak instead of possible essence and real essence. While for Thomas, the real is the composite of essence-as-potency and being-as-act, for Suárez, the real is simply the actual essence. No act of being appears to perfect it, and thus being itself seems not to be grasped. What appears to be grasped is only the essence, at the expense of being. The essence is apprehended in the concept, and reality begins to distance itself from the concept. This paves the way for the Cartesian problem of whether—and how—it is possible, once in possession of the idea, to attain the real.
Scotus seems unaware that in metaphysics, what truly matters is conceptually apprehending the ens (the being), even if the concept is imprecise, confused, indeterminate, not entirely unified, or complex. Nevertheless, it remains certain and truthful. We can attain no more than this, and thus it must suffice—we must content ourselves with it. To seek to simplify, to render more precise or more unified, does not bring us closer to the being, but rather causes us to see it more poorly; instead of seeing the being, we end up seeing only our impoverished concept of the being. It is as though, to see more clearly in the fog, we attempt to switch on the car’s headlights—only to see less clearly than before.
We must accept this imperfection of the concept. Otherwise, instead of apprehending the real—that is, the ens or the thing as it is—we host it in our mind, yes, in a fine lodging, but one far too small for its infinite dimensions.
By contrast, the analogous concept, while possessing a certain unity and coherence sufficient to avoid equivocation, is—thanks to its boundless potential for internal diversification and pluriformity—capable of reaching, accommodating, and representing truthfully, albeit imperfectly, everything and anything, whether real or possible, whether God or creature.
What happens in the absence of such a concept? One is no longer able to conceive of being as being, in its proportionate and diversified unity, but confuses it instead with the commune ens—the common being.
What we are dealing with here are gnoseological or metaphysical shortcomings or errors, which do not presuppose pride or arrogance; indeed, such errors are often found in eminent minds, even of saintly life. This reminds us that idealism is also composed of theoretical errors or misunderstandings—unintentional and understandable—within a domain of inquiry such as the operation of the intellect, which is exceedingly difficult to grasp.
Thus, we observe a logical interference within the ontological in the univocal concept of being in the Blessed Duns Scotus; a substitution of language for being in the metaphysics of Ockham; the idea as primum cognitum rather than the sensible being in Descartes; the conceptus obiectivus, the object of the concept and not the being, in Suárez as the object of knowledge; and finally, the idea of being and not the being itself as the object of the intellect in Rosmini.
William of Ockham perceives the fact that what exists is the singular being, but he fails to move from the concrete to the abstract. For him, the universal being does not exist; only the individual, empirical being exists. Therefore, for Ockham, metaphysics does not have the universal being as its object, but merely the word being, as a term which stands for (suppositio) the singular existing being. Thus, for him, this empirical entity is being. Ockham translates Scotus’ notion of haecceity into the singular empirical datum, replacing the intellect with sense perception.
For Ockham, the intellect does not need any species, concept, idea, or mental entity produced by the intellect to know the real outside the intellect; it suffices that it directly intuits the singular being present through experience. Certainly, God is not a being accessible to physical experience, but neither is He purely intelligible. He must instead be the object of imagination to have a link with the real, which for Ockham is the singular sensible being.
For Ockham, being does not exist; only beings exist. The multiple exists on its own and by itself, without needing to be unified except by the common name that designates it and stands in its place; but there is no unum in multis, no universal. The one is not the being-one, but only the number one. God is one, not in the sense that He is the only being who exists by essence, but merely in the sense that He is one in number.
Nevertheless, for Ockham, the existence of metaphysical language remains; hence, the necessity endures of organising and regulating the logic of language, even though its content is not the concept of being, but merely the word being. In any case, it must concern a sensible being, since for him nothing exists that is not verifiable through empirical experience. The principle of Berkeley is already prefigured here: esse est percipi—nothing exists that is not an object of the senses. Berkeley believed that with this axiom, he was excluding matter, yet in fact, he was submerged in it up to his neck.
For Ockham, the concept is a mental fiction relative to a common name that designates a group of entities similar to one another. Thus, the difference between man and animal is not a difference involving two objective abstract and universal notions—the genus animal and the specific difference rational—but is rather an empirical datum, contingent and mutable, designated by the conventional name “rational.”
For Ockham, a man without reason could very well exist—consider present-day robots—and likewise a speaking animal. He would have no difficulty accepting Darwin’s theory of the transformation of the ape into man. Or again, for him, an intelligent being could exist that is physically different from what we know as man—consider, for instance, the theory of extraterrestrials.
He is also a distant precursor of Walt Disney’s animated cartoons. For Ockham, God is not a pure spirit, but rather the grand, venerable, and fearsome "Ancient of Days" (literally, "the Elder or Ancient of Days") described in Daniel (7:9). The Holy Trinity is not constituted by three "subsistent relations," but rather signifies a trio of persons like ourselves, united by mutual love. Jesus Christ is not God understood as an infinite spirit, but as a man of extraordinary goodness, such that there is none other like him.
Ockham is unable to grasp or conceive of the purely intelligible being, the proper object of metaphysics, and thus fails to form an idea of the spirit. His God is not the Subsistent Being, the "I Am," but rather an imaginary character, fickle and paradox-loving, who provides for the world whimsically, without regard for human certainties, which, according to him, are contradicted by divine freedom. Morality is a mere convention ("covenant") established by God, who, if He wished, could establish the opposite. There are, therefore, no absolute ethical obligations; just as God is free to change His will, so each person is free to act as they see fit. Luther will believe that this is the biblical God, with all the consequences that flow from such a conception of God.
Ockham amplifies and exacerbates the Scotist voluntarism, for although Scoto moderates it with the doctrine of the universal, which grounds the universality of the moral law, Ockham, by removing from universality the rule of speculative truth, abandons the question of truth into the hands of a divine will whose freedom replaces intelligible necessity. Thus, the principle of non-contradiction collapses, and the notion of being shifts from the extreme of Scotist univocity to the opposite extreme of equivocity.
Thus, the Lutheran irrationalism is explained, in which faith does not confirm reason but destroys it. This also explains the absurdity of a God who saves those who do not repent and sends to hell those who consider themselves innocent. The equivocity of being is also the source of a permanent conflict in both thought and personal and social action, as demonstrated by the proliferation of Protestant sects from then to the present and the immense tragedy of the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries.
With Luther, the tragic consequences in the fields of theology, morality, and faith of Ockham's ideas become apparent, for Luther declares himself a disciple of Ockham. In the confrontation between Luther and the Thomist Cardinal Gaetano, two Christians who should have been united by faith, we see the two paradigmatic figures, the symbolic images of the conflict between Ockham and Saint Thomas, and the clear demonstration of the impossibility of reconciling Thomism and Occamism, metaphysics with foolishness, realism with empiricism, spirituality with materialism.
But behold, in the climate of renewed unity within the Church thanks to the grand work of the Tridentine reform, after the noisy departure of the Lutherans, we witness the painful phenomenon of the wars between Catholics and Protestants, which will continue until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.
But at least within the Catholic Church, scholastic philosophy regroups around the common faith, the authority of Saint Thomas is affirmed, and at the same time, the Jesuits, born under the shadow of the Council and with the enthusiasm of knights of faith, promote their master, Francisco Suarez, who joins the ranks of the Dominican Saint Thomas and the Franciscan Duns Scotus. The influence of Ockham remains, as he is at the origins of Luther’s theology.
( Note from the translator: Francisco Suárez, S.J. (1548–1617), was a major Jesuit philosopher and theologian of the so-called "Second Scholasticism." Though deeply influential in Catholic thought and political theory, his project was marked by an effort to synthesize elements of Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham. In doing so, Suárez reinterpreted the Thomistic doctrine of esse (act of being), subordinating it to essence, and introduced a conception of being that emphasized possibility over act. His metaphysics, while attentive to Thomas, is here critically assessed as ultimately diverging from Thomistic realism by resolving being into a merely conceptual or potential order.
Blessed John Duns Scotus (c. 1266–1308), a Franciscan theologian, is known for his subtlety (Doctor Subtilis) and for shifting metaphysical focus from the act of being (esse) to essence, viewed as a formal possibility. He defended the univocity of being and prioritized individual “thisness” (haecceitas), thus paving the way for a metaphysics more concerned with conceptual structure than existential act. In this text, he is presented as an important precursor to Suarez’s privileging of essence over existence.
William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347), an English Franciscan and early nominalist, radically minimized metaphysical abstraction, affirming that only individual beings exist and that universals are merely mental constructs. He denied the real distinction between essence and existence. For the Author, Ockham’s legacy leads to a loss of metaphysical realism, where being is no longer a participated act but a label applied to what is singularly posited or conceived.)
Suarez embarks on a grand and perhaps too ambitious enterprise: to reconcile, through immense work, the scattered fragments (disiecta membra) of the decayed scholastic philosophy, to launch what will be called the second scholasticism. But here, Suarez attempts a reconciliation between the three masters—Thomas, Scotus, and Ockham.
Suarez oscillates between Thomas, Scotus, and Ockham. He is attentive to the Aquinate, but, like other Thomists, is unable to be his true and faithful disciple. Perhaps with a hint of presumption, he attempts to reconcile with Thomas his adversaries, such as Scotus and Ockham. But failing in the understanding of the Thomistic essence, he ends up, on one side, leaning toward Scotus by resolving being in essence, giving more importance to essence than to existence; and on the other side, he leans toward Ockham, when, by removing reality from essence, he focuses on the singular existence, arguing that being is nothing but a possible realized.
Thus, for Suarez as for Ockham, essence is not a reality, a thing, but a simple possibility, a thinkable, the conceptus obiectivus. It matters not whether it exists or does not exist outside of us and outside of God, or as Suarez says, “outside of its causes.” He indeed states:
"The essence of the creature, that is, the creature in itself and before being produced by God, does not possess any real being by itself, and in this sense, if we set aside the being of existence (esse existentiae), essence is no reality, but absolutely nothing." [7]
This does not prevent him, however, from considering the essence real before it is created. But here immediately appears the Scotist Suarez, who asserts:
"This essence is called real, even before being produced, not because it possesses in itself true actuality, but because it can become real by receiving from its Divine Cause a true entity. This possibility only expresses, on the part of essence, the non-repugnance to be produced; whereas on the part of the extrinsic Cause, it signifies the virtue of producing it." (ibid., 2,2).
In this way, he does not distinguish essence and being as potency and act, but only as possible and existing. Suarez makes extensive use of the pair "possibility" - "existence," with which he tends to replace the Thomistic distinction between essentia and esse, and since he gives existence the meaning of the simple negation of nothingness, for Suarez, the possible becomes a broader and more real being than the actual, which adds nothing to the possible, but rather restricts it, even though he acknowledges that it is through divine power that the possible is created, that is, it passes from possibility to actuality.
However, for Suarez, "the being in act and the being in potency are distinguished as being and non-being in an absolute sense" (ibid., 3,1), because essence has no reality; it is only a possibility. The real is what he calls "real essence," that is, actuated by God, outside of Him. But one might wonder how much reality existence has for Suarez, if it is true, as he claims, that in the act of being created, it does not add new reality to essence, but is the simple actualization of essence as possibility. For this reason, for Suarez, the distinction between essence and existence is not real, but only of reason, because "it is not a matter of two realities, but of one alone, which is considered and compared by the intellect as if they were two" (ibid.).
Being, for Suarez, does not add anything real, no perfection or real fulfillment to the reality of essence, as in Thomas, but is only the essence realized "outside of its causes," that is, as a created being existing outside of God. Here, there is nothing of Thomistic realism regarding essence and being, but Ockham and Scotus make their appearance, as we have, on one side, the Scotistic essence without the act of being, and on the other, the mere individual possible figmentum mentis according to Ockham's way of seeing.
Thus, realism languishes and before the mind’s eye appears a conceptus obiectivus, an interior object, produced by the mind, the univocal, clear, and distinct essence, which tends to attract all attention to itself at the expense of the external reality, which is the true reality, the effect of divine creative power.
It is true, for Suarez, that the conceptus obiectivus is still the representation of the thing, the external reality. But once the interest in the actus essendi, in esse as the act of being-able-to-be-such, the act of essence, is suppressed, how much can the certainty of external reality remain? Or perhaps will the entire object of knowing become the conceptus obiectivus elevated to the heights of the Absolute Idea or the Hegelian Concept?
From which principles does idealism arise?
The idealism that opposes realism is not that of Plato, but that of Descartes. The Platonic idea is indeed in the mind, but it is a sublime and most certain vision of the supreme, universal, eternal, and perfect reality, the source and criterion of truth and judgment, the light and supreme good of the intellect, and an inspiring stimulus for practical and contemplative love.
The ideas, on the other hand, that Descartes speaks of, in his questioning of the foundation of knowledge and certainty, are his ideas, the ideas he has in his mind, produced by him. He starts from the false belief that not the sensible things, but these ideas, are the immediate object of his intellect.
Moreover, he expresses the entirely unwarranted conviction that it is a "deception" to believe that "there are things outside of me, from which those ideas proceed and to which they are entirely similar" [8]. Thus arises the false problem of whether those things exist and how to prove that they exist—things which the ideas seem to represent, if indeed they represent them truly—and how to know this if these supposed things lie outside, and I can only reach them through these ideas.
How can we trust these ideas? How can we reach these things and verify if the ideas correspond to them? How can we access reality? This muddle into which Descartes gets himself and which he would like to pass off as critical acumen clearly shows that he does not know at all, despite his philosophical studies [9], how and why we have ideas in our minds.
He did not know that we affirm the existence of ideas, not to ask how and whether we can reach external things through them. The real problem of knowledge is entirely different: since we become aware that we know things and have them in our minds through ideas, to explain this fact, we admit the production by our intellect of mental representations of things, which we call ideas or concepts.
The study of ideas, therefore, gnoseology, is not aimed at determining how or whether we can reach things, but serves only logic, to organize concepts and judgments—that is, these ideas—to reason correctly and truthfully in our assertions and demonstrations of rational knowledge.
We are conscious and certain that we know things outside of ourselves. The problem is not whether things exist outside of us. This is entirely evident to a sane and clear-minded person. There is no doubt about it, and even less reason to argue that we are mistaken.
The critical problem of knowledge is, rather, knowing how this happens. And so, the doctrine of ideas is developed. But what lies at the root of Descartes' distorted discourse? Do we find a sincere desire for truth? Is there an adherence to evidence? Or is it a case of doubting what is indubitable? And why? For what purpose? With what results?
How did such an aberrant idea come to Descartes' mind?
Cartesian idealism does not arise from a sincere desire for truth, but, as Father Fabro has pointed out, from a decision of the will. The cogito (I think), says Fabro, is a volo (I will). In Descartes, it is not an act necessitated by reality, but a willing that reality be as one wants it to be. Reality is not what lies before me, the ob-jectum, but is what I want it to be.
(Note from the translator: Fr. Cornelio Fabro (1911–1995) was an Italian Thomist philosopher and member of the Congregation of the Stigmata of Our Lord Jesus Christ (Stigmatines). He is best known for his original interpretation of actus essendi in St. Thomas Aquinas, his distinction between essentialist and existentialist Thomism, and his systematic critique of modern atheism and German idealism. Though a central figure in mid-20th-century European Catholic thought, especially in dialogue with existentialism and Marxism, his works remain largely untranslated and thus relatively neglected in the Anglo-American philosophical and theological landscape.)
Thus, idealism is linked to voluntarism. The intellect alone is not sufficient to establish truth. The will must contribute. The will completes the work of the intellect. Without the contribution of the will, the intellect would not know how to grasp the truth. Now, we must be clear on this point. If by this it is meant that we cannot grasp the truth unless driven by the will, then this is certainly true.
But if we mean to say that the very act of knowing or grasping the truth is, at least partially, an act of the will, this is false. The will desires what the intellect has apprehended with its irreplaceable powers, what it has accepted as true. On the other hand, the will only moves toward an end previously known. No knowledge, no will. Therefore, it cannot, by itself and independently of the intellect, determine the desired end.
Voluntarism is, however, the principle of Cartesian idealism, which will lead to German idealism. There is already a beginning of this in the way Duns Scotus conceives of divine will[10]. In Platonic idealism, on the contrary, I conform to the idea that transcends me as reality, and I do not, as Descartes does, place my idea, produced by me, as the principle of reality. Here, the idea as thought is always at play, but in the case of Plato, this thought is divine and subsistent, the rule of the real and our thought. In the idealism that will emerge from Descartes, however, it is my idea that aims to be the principle of being and the real.
Nietzsche's voluntarism can be seen as a modern expansion of Cartesian voluntarism. As Heidegger[11] points out, it is expressed in Nietzsche's metaphysics, where being is the "will to power."
Descartes’ attitude arises from a spiritual factor that does not originate in the intellect but in the will—even though, subsequently and undoubtedly, in many cases involving idealists, what would come into play was a serious defect of intelligence, caused by unconscious or involuntary factors, dictated by mental limitations or by the influence of the imagination. Nor can the influence of the devil be entirely excluded, as St Paul warns us (1 Tim 4:1).
What gives rise to doubting what is evident? Or to judge as error that which presents itself as evident? From what can this stem, if not from an enmity towards the truth? What is it, then, if not a rebellion against the truth already known? And what truth is better known than evident truth?
He who is ignorant of a truth and mistakes it for something else may be excused—but not the one who sees it face to face and rejects it. This does not arise from humility; it does not arise from an intellect that unintentionally fails in its aim; it does not stem from a misunderstanding or an involuntary error, but from a deliberate intention of the will not to submit to the real. It arises from pride. It arises from the refusal to submit one’s intellect to the reality created by God. No external reality, independent of the ego, is accepted; rather, all reality must be deduced from the ego, founded upon the ego, and originating from the ego, for the sake of the ego: the famous Cartesian cogito.
I should like to ask Descartes: how do you know that we are mistaken in taking ideas as representations of reality, if you do not refer to that very reality which alone can tell you that you are wrong? Then how can you doubt or even ignore that reality to which you must necessarily refer to claim that we are mistaken in believing we know reality as it is? With his absurd thesis, Descartes denies the very principle—that is, the reality—which he must presuppose to give any value to what he asserts.
End of Part Three (3/4)
Fr Giovanni Cavalcoli OP
Fontanellato, 5 December 2022
Source:
https://padrecavalcoli.blogspot.com/p/che-cosa-e-il-realismo-terza-parte-34.html
Notes:
[1] Itinerario della mente a Dio, Edizioni Patron, Bologna 1969, ch. V.
[2] Cf. the magisterial work by Cornelio Fabro, La nozione metafisica di partecipazione secondo San Tommaso d’Aquino, SEI, Turin 1950.
[3] Meditazioni metafisiche, III meditation, Edizioni Laterza, Bari, pp. 100–104.
[4] Although Scripture clearly states that God can be known only through analogy with creatures (Wis 13:5), Genesis teaches that man was created in the image and likeness of God, whereby the human being is different, only analogous and not identical or equal to the divine being.
[5] “Non capio quod aliquid sit extra causam quin habeat esse proprium” (Opus oxon., IV, 43, 1,7). One must respond that the created essence, distinct from the divine cause that creates it, certainly has its being, at least a possible one; otherwise, it would be nothing. But the point is that, as created, it must receive being from God if it is to exist outside of God. This means that if it had being from itself, it would be God, because only God is His being. The finite essence in God is God Himself, but to exist outside of God, God adds being to it; otherwise, it would not exist. Therefore, the created or creatable essence by no means implies in itself the possession of real being. Hence, being is distinct from essence—not as one thing from another, but as the act of being (esse ut actus) from the potential-to-be, which is not the same as the distinction between possible and actual (esse in actu), because here we are speaking of the thing itself, the essential reality in God, identical with God, conceived by God, which passes from possibility–creatability to being-created–actuality, that is, it acquires the act of being outside of God and becomes a real being composed of essence and existence.
[6] Dieu. Son existence et sa nature, Beauchesne, Paris 1950, p. 584.
[7] Disp. Met., 31,2, 1.
[8] Meditazioni metafisiche, Edizioni Laterza, Bari 1968, p. 95.
[9] One must wonder what Descartes learned in one of the most prestigious philosophical colleges in Europe, run by the Jesuits, if he shows himself capable of posing such foolish questions. Nevertheless, Gilson’s hypothesis that he poorly digested Suárez’s conception of knowledge is quite plausible.
[10] Cf. Battista Mondin, Ontologia metafisica, Edizioni ESD, Bologna 1999, p. 44.
[11] Nietzsche, Edizioni Adelphi, Milan 2013.