October 2020 – Philosophy Scare

22. Static Twins II: Locke

Like Spinoza, Descartes, Hobbes, and other modern philosophers, Lock evicts ousia from nature, condemning from the outset “fruitless inquiries after substantial forms, [which are] wholly unintelligible and whereof we have scarce so much as any obscure or confused conception in general” (Essay p. 14). But, also like the others, Locke hardly escapes ousiodic structure in the human realm. As Harold Noonan has put it,

Although Locke’s notions of substance and matter are so manifestly unaristotelian, something like Aristotle’s substantial form holds a prominent place in his thought, at least with respect to living creatures.[i]

The trifold structure of ousia in fact animates Locke’s account of the bedrock denizen of the human world, the property owning individual; and human communities exhibit the same structure, though in weakened forms.

The weakenings, to be sure, are manifold. In the earlier thinkers I have discussed, and in many others besides, power was legitimated from above–by the superior rationality of free citizens, for Aristotle; by God himself, for Aquinas and Spinoza. For Locke, by contrast, the authority of government comes famously from below, from the consent of the governed.

Moreover, the ordering or dispositive power of the commonwealth is restricted to negative rather than positive listing—it defines and punishes transgressions, rather than establishing and enforcing positive norms. And third, that power is dispersed, into distinct legislative, executive, and “federative” powers (T2 ¶¶ 143-145).

All very well. But in discussing the legislative itself, Locke breaks revealingly into ousiodic, indeed Aristotelian, terms:

…’tis in their Legislative, that the Members of a Commonwealth are united and combined together into one coherent living body. This is the Soul that gives Form, Life, and Unity to the Commonwealth…The Essence and Union of the Society consisting in having one will, the Legislative, when once established by the Majoritie, has the declaring and, as it were, the keeping of that will. The Constitution of the Legislative is the first and fundamental Act of Society…(T2 ¶ 212.; emphasis in original).

Soul, form. essence, act: once again we watch a modern philosopher succumbing to the categories of an Aristotle he claims to despise.

Further weakenings of legislative power follow. For one, the Legislative is merely intermittent: unlike a form, the activity of which provided the kernel of stability in a thing, the Legislative need not always be at work, i.e. in session (T2 ¶ 143). Its intermittence makes it porous, for it means that legislators spend part of their lives living as ordinary citizens. Third, legislative power is not a fully dispositive power to order tout court, but (in addition to being negative) is defined as a “limited fiduciary Power to act for certain ends” (T2 ¶ 149). It functions, in fact, according to the overall principle of salus populi suprema lex, the well-being of the people is the supreme law (T2 ¶ 150; Chapter XV passim). The salus populi, in turn, is centered on the preservation of property (T2 ¶¶135, 222.

The commonwealth thus exists for the sake of private property.

This brings us to Locke’s concept of ownership. Here, the weakenings in his account of the commonwealth suddenly vanish and ousiodic domination breaks out in full force. Thus in Chapter V of his Second Treatise, Locke writes that both reason and revelation tell us that nature has been given “to Mankind in common” (T2” ¶ 25). But God gave the world to humans in order that it be used “for the Support and Comfort of their being—” and the use of nature is individualistic. Consider Locke’s prime example, at T2. §26, of natural appropriation:

The Fruit, or Venison, which nourishes the wild Indian…must be his, and so his, i.e. a part of him, that another can no longer have any right to it, before it can do him any good for the support of his Life (T2” ¶ 26).

Beyond its patronizing treatment of Native Americans, this example instates eating as the primary example of the use of nature: we use nature paradigmatically, it suggests, by incorporating it into our bodies. So property, for Locke, first comes about through the establishment of boundaries: nature that was originally Ours is apportioned into Mine and Yours.

This boundary, we see from the above quote, is inviolable: if something is mine, others have no right to it at all, and it cannot be taken from me. In the example above, the inviolability is furnished by my body’s boundary: since what I ingest becomes part of me, what nourishes me can nourish no one else. The ground of private ownership is thus the individuality of the user’s body.

It is not as if ownership consisted in the recognition by my fellows of my right to use an object (IT2” ¶¶ 28-30). Rather, it is conceived strictly as a binary relation between the owner and the owned. When we move beyond eating, this relation is established by labor: we gain title to something by laboring on it. As Locke puts it (taking as example acorns gathered by someone), it is

labour [that] put a distinction between them and common. That added something to them more than Nature, the common Mother of all, had done; and so they became his private right (T2” ¶ 28).

Similarly for land: the person who tills it “by his Labour does, as it were, inclose it from the Common.” Labor is thus a formative activity which results in the extension of ownership from the boundaries of my body to include everything which that body’s activity reshapes: the initiative of the working body, the way it affects nature outside it, becomes dispositive power once that nature is owned.

Just as the state broke forth for Hobbes with an unjustified absolutism, so does the individual ownership of property for Locke. The lack of justification follows from the absoluteness, as it usually does: absolutes are rarely, if ever, justifiable. The absoluteness, in turn, is what happens to a particular kind of ousia–state, individual–when it no longer countenances any other kind.

[i]Harold Noonan, “Locke on Personal Identity” Philosophy 53 (1978) pp. 343-351, p. 344.

21. The Static Twins I: Spinoza

It was a truth universally acknowledged until at least 1807 that while words and worlds may change, philosophical truths must not. When the unchanging substantial forms of the ancients and medieval were evicted from nature, nature lost its foothold on permanence and so could no longer be a source of philosophical truth. The last redoubt for unchanging truth was therefore the mind, which was (and, alas, still is) amenable to being construed as static, a domain of unchanging truths.

This, I think, was a trap; but it was one which philosophers were, and are, glad to be in. When you are caught in that trap not only is the mind static, but what comes into it from outside—experience—is also just so much static: static on the line. Experience is then a set of random vibrations which is too unstable to convey anything meaningful; its changes are worthy only of being ignored. Of all the philosophers who fell into this trap around this time, I will discuss two: the Static Twins, Locke and Spinoza.

Arriving at his own thought via a critical confrontation with Descartes, Spinoza pushes a characteristically vehement modern rejection of ousiodic forms: they are “clearly absurd”, “childish and frivolous.”[1] Which leaves him with the companion notion of substance, which is just an ousia with a boundary but without a disposing form (see Metaphysics and Oppression). And here Spinoza goes decisively beyond Descartes, for he claims that to be a substance, a thing must be wholly independent of everything else—even of God. Cartesian finite substances, dependent on God alone, therefore, cannot exist. Instead we have “modes,” which inhere in a single divine substance (Ethics Prop. 14). If the divine substance is unchanging and so static, the modes are static in the other sense: so fleeting that their changes can be ignored, leaving only their unchanging nature as “experience.”

The universe for Spinoza is of infinite extension, which does not keep him from saying that it, and all the things it contains, are “in” God as in another (Ethics I Prop. 15). Spinoza’s God has in fact the widest of boundaries, for they contain everything that is. They are therefore strictly inviolable, for there is nothing outside to violate them. What was implied in Descartes (#18) is manifest in Spinoza: the entire universe is included within the boundaries of a single giant ousia. And not merely the extended universe: for in denying finite substances, Spinoza is taking issue with Descartes’ view that individual minds are, though to a lesser degree than God, substantial in nature.

The extended and intellectual universes are thus ontologically parallel for Spinoza, and both show a radical absence of nesting. For Aristotle, individuals are nested in ousiodically structured households and households within ousiodically-structured poleis. For Spinoza, as for other moderns, no ousia is contained within another ousia. The absence of nesting is, apparently, a defining characteristic of modern philosophy (#18).

The inherence of modes in the divine substance is therefore total: the modes amount merely to its own parts, and nothing can act upon anything except as the divine power ordains. In this way the divine substance not only generates its modes but orders them, thus exercising perfect disposition over the entire universe. Ousiodic disposition thus finds its most thoroughoing form in Spinoza’s determinism, just as boundary found its widest conception in the infinitude of the physical universe.

The state, like the individuals it contains, is a mode and so has a divine right to exist and to act:

It is clear…that the right of the state or sovereign is nothing but the right of nature itself, and as such determined by power; not however by the power of a single individual, but by that of a people which is guided as if by one mind. In other words, it is clear that what is true of each man in the state of nature is true likewise of the body and mind of the whole state–it has as much right as it has power and strength. Hence the more the commonwealth exceeds a citizen or subject in power, the less right he has. ..and consequently a citizen does nothing and possesses nothing by right unless he can defend it by the common decree of the commonwealth. (Tractatus politicus III.2)

Might doesn’t make right; it is right. An individual, being much weaker than the state, cannot oppose it. The sovereign alone has the power/right to regulate the conduct of individual citizens, and to provide for the defense of the state from outside forces. But the state itself is a mere mode, and its actions, like all actions of modes, are ultimately caused by the divine substance. Thus relocated to the divine, supersensible level, ousia is in a position to structure the human world.

If only the divine substance can truly act, for example, only the divine substance can be truly free. As did Descartes, Spinoza has defined substance in terms of independence, and this means that substance for Spinoza is associated with freedom: to be free is to be able to act from one’s own nature alone (Ethics I Def. 7). Since only God is independent of all other things, only He acts in that way (Ethics I Prop. 17)

The final part of the Ethics, “Of Human Freedom,” is then devoted to showing how the human mind, in becoming free, assimilates itself to God’s. This turns out to mean, as the “Preface” to Part Four tells us, controlling the affects. Spinoza here has just told us that emotion is merely confused thought, and it is thought, not emotion, which is an attribute of God. We control our affects by converting them from emotions into thoughts: from confused ideas into clear and distinct, or even “adequate” ones (Ethics V Prop. 3). Adequacy, in turn, means seeing individual things, the objects of our ideas, in their full causal context, which is ultimately that of all creation. The vision of a thing in the context of all creation is, of course, God’s. As our finite mind gains ever more adequate cognition, it becomes more like God’s mind, approximating the inviolable boundaries and perfect disposition of the divine ousia–a name Spinoza never says.

[1] See Benedict Spinoza, Part I of “Appendix Concerning Metaphysical Thoughts”, in Spinoza, Parts I and II of Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy, at Spinoza, Opera (C. Gebhard, ed.) Heidelberg: Winter, 4 vols. 1925, I 249; Spinoza, “Letter to Oldenburg of July 1663, IV 64; the pagination is givn marginally in The Collected Works of Spinoza (Edwin Curley, ed.) Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.

20. Hobbes’ Hidden Aristotelianism

Was Thomas Hobbes a lousy speller or a good one, but only by the standards of his time?

And I belieeve that scarce any thing can be more absurdly said in naturall Philosophy, than that which is now called Aristotle’s Metaphysiques; nor more repugnant to Government, than much of what hee hath said in his Politiques; nor more ignorantly, than a great part of his Ethiques (Hobbes, Leviathan Cambridge 1991 p. 370).

Hobbes here condemns Aristotle’s thought as vigorously we condemn Hobbes’ spelling. The old Greek contributes absolutely nothing, it would appear, to Hobbes’s philosophy: not to his physics, his ethics, or his politics.

But old folks persist. The very subtitle to Leviathan: “the Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill,” contains words which sound suspiciously like Aristotle’s account of ousia (#8). Could Hobbes, while thinking that he is rejecting Aristotle, only be reinstating his basic metaphysical structure—without, apparently, even knowing it?

Hobbes spells out (!) his argument thusly:

The only way to erect such a Common Power, as may be able to defend [people] from the invasion of Forraigners, and the injuries of one another, and thereby to secure them in such sort, [that] they may nourish themselves and live contentedly; is, to conferre all their power and strength upon one Man, or upon one Assembly of men, that may reduce all their Wills, by plurality of voices, unto one Will….By this Authoritie, given him by every particular man in the Common-Wealth, [the sovereign] …is inabled to conforme the wills of them all, to Peace at home, and mutuall Ayd against their enemies abroad. And in him consisteth the Essence of the Common-Wealth (Lev. pp. 87f).

So a commonwealth must able to distinguish its inhabitants from “forraigners” and to fend off “invasion,” which for Hobbes is synonymous with causality itself, for causality is nothing but the “invasion” (incursus) of one body by another, i.e. the displacement of one body when another body intrudes into the place it occupies (de Corp. VI. 6, VIII. 19, IX.5, pp. 23, 65, 72). So the commonwealth must have a determinate boundary.

Within that boundary a single authority, the sovereign, exercises a power so absolute as to be able to “conform” the wills of everyone else to peace (thus exercising what I call disposition over those wills), and to mutual aid in war (a case of what I call initiative). It is thus entirely in keeping with Aristotelian usage for Hobbes to call the sovereign the “essence” of the commonwealth; the sovereign plays the role of form in Aristotelian ontology (again, see #8).

In keeping with an unsavory philosophical tradition, I will call the sovereign a “he.” But a sovereign, I will note, can for Hobbes be a he or a she, or a they—sovereignty is not tied to gender, and can be vested in any number of people as long as they act in a unified way

The extended discussion of sovereign power in Leviathan Chapter XVIII expands upon this reappropriation of Aristotle in a total of twelve points. According to the first two of these, the people cannot overthrow their sovereign and get a new one, nor can he relinquish his position—because he is their unity, and without him they are not “a people” but merely a “multitude.” Sovereign power can end only where the sovereign no longer has the power to fulfill his part of the covenant–and Hobbes phrases this requirement in terms of an analogy to the ousiodic structure of the human individual:

The Soveraignty is the Soule of the Common-Wealth; which once departed from the body, the members do no more receive their motion from it (Lev. p. 114; emphasis added).

Boundary is further determined and consolidated in the third point, which asserts that anyone who protests against an act of the sovereign is, literally, an out-law:

he must either submit to their decrees, or be left in the condition of warre he was in before; wherein he might without injustice be destroyed by any man whatsoever (Lev. p. 90).

In fact, the sovereign’s dispositive power goes far beyond what is required for preserving peace; it is a power to maintain social order in general. The sovereign has the right to decide what can be taught in society (#6) and sets up the regulations which govern the apportionment of property (#7), of offices (#10), of rewards and punishments (#11), and of honors (#12). He also decides the lawfulness of smaller groups which may form within the society (Lev. pp. 115-123)

The sovereign’s dispositive power over his subjects is so extensive that he cannot injure them: whatever he does to his subjects will not count as an “injury.” There are thus no standards for the right exercise of his power other than those he himself sets (## 4, 5). Sovereignty, in short, is “power unlimited” (Lev. p. 115), and the relation of subjects to sovereign has a familiar air of ancient domesticity:

As in the presence of the Master, the Servants are equall, and without any honor at all; so are the Subjects, in the presence of the Soveraign (Lev. p.93).

When we confine our gaze to Aristotle’s and Hobbes’s strictly political doctrines, the polis and the Commonwealth look very different. Curtis Johnson has summed their differences up as follows: for Aristotle, the state exists by nature, and humans are by nature political; the aim of the state is the good life. For Hobbes, the individual is by nature inimical to others; the state exists by convention, and its aim is security.[1] But when we look to the metaphysical bones which underlie these very different bodies politic, we find them both to be versions of ousiodic structure, exhibiting the three ancient traits of boundary, disposition, and initiative. The form of the Hobbesian commonwealth is the sovereign, exercising both dispositive and initiatory power. Its inhabitants are the matter.

Though Hobbes’s political structure thus has the classical features of an Aristotelian ousia, the justification for them is different indeed. It is not for Hobbes, as for Aristotle, written in all of nature that for any community there must be a single archê. Nor is it a metaphysical or rationalist truth about some ideal realm. Ousia has neither natural nor supernatural warrant–and seems, in fact, to break out, in Chapter XVIII, with no warrant at all.

[1]Curtis Johnson, “The Hobbesian Conception of Sovereignty and Aristotle’s Politics” Journal of the History of Ideas 46 (1985) pp. 327-347

19. Descartes’ Guiding Dogma

Descartes begins with one of the guiding dogmas of modernity: that the nature of the mind can be understood independently of anything else. As is often the case, the doctrine contains a certain amount of ontology masquerading as epistemology. If I can understand the nature of mind without understanding anything else, then the mind would be what it is if other things were different than they are—even if they differ to the point of becoming nonexistent. The dogma thus implies that mind can exist independently of anything else. It may in fact require other things in order to exist, such as a body—but that has no effect on its basic nature. Essence (here, of the mind) and existence are as separate for Descartes as they were for Aquinas.

Thus, at the beginning of the Meditations we find the cogito: I think, asserted without any specification of what I think. What are the objects of thought? If they are things in the world, and if to understand a thought includes knowing what it is a thought of, then my thoughts, and so my mind, cannot be understood without regard to objects in the world. The objects of thought must therefore themselves be thoughts: ideas.

Descartes’ own way of articulating this ontological implication of his guiding dogma is to say that a substance (such as the mind) does not depend for its existence on any other substance except God. This is stated later in the Meditations (III. ¶26), but is, I suggest, implicit from their outset.

If the mind is independent of all things except God, then a couple of further things follow. First, thought cannot be dependent on language—unless language is God. Some German Idealists (e.g. Hegel: see my The Company of Words) will take this kind of tack, but not Descartes. One problem with it, for monotheists such as Descartes will claim to be, is that languages come in the plural: we don’t think in language, but in a language, and for some reason there are always other languages around.

So language is not God, and thought cannot be bound to it. We don’t think in words, but in ideas, which are not words but (conveniently enough) word-meanings. This enables Descartes to drive a wedge between two meanings of the ancient Geek λόγος, thought and word. And it opens the way to the view that mathematics is a kind of thinking—indeed, is thought itself. For mathematics eschews words—but it is full of ideas.

Communication is now utterly distinct from thought, and we circle back to the guiding dogma: our minds are not dependent on other peoples’ minds or what we learn from them.

Moreover, if thought is mathematical, thinking is something only a select few can really do. Thus, in his “Reply to the Seventh Objections,” Descartes writes that “Only wise persons can distinguish between what is conceived clearly and what only seems and appears to be such” (Édtion F. Alquié, Garnier Vol. II 1967 p. 960).

This fits right in with philosophy’s ancient drive to exclusivity, its desire to make the “space of reasons” our space (#1). It is still traded on by philosophers today, in the wake of people like Hans Reichenbach: unless you think like we do, you are not fully rational.

The guiding dogma surfaces yet again with Descartes’ claim of continuous creation, the view that the activity by which God sustains the world from moment to moment is the same as the activity with which He created it. This follows from God’s immutability, Descartes’ open allegiance to which is elusive but presumably follows from his claim that “in the case of God, any variation is unintelligible” (Principles I.56) and a couple of other texts. If God acted one way in creating the world, and acts another way when He sustains it, He would hardly be immutable.

However Descartes gets to it, continuous creation means that because a being is dependent only on God, it is not dependent on previous states of the universe—including previous states of itself. The “just now” that Augustine feared (“make me chaste, but not just now”) has come to be ontologically basic; and the Latin for “just now” (modo) gave its name to this whole approach.

On the “modern” approach, and in particular in light of its view of continuous creation, nothing is path-dependent, and to understand anything is to explain it in terms of God alone. If God is immutable, then to understand anything is to reduce it to something immutable—a doctrine at least as old as Plato. The doctrine of continuous creation thus works out to a denial of empirical causality. The question then is whether later philosophers who deny causality—such as Hume, who located it entirely in the mind—fully escape the theological roots the denial has in Descartes. Is path-independence a theological notion?

Finally, the guiding dogma threatens to place Descartes in a position which is not only implausible, but unendurable, a mind which has access only to itself. Such a mind is prey to the paranoid fantasy of an Evil Demon, which infects it with false ideas; and even if we escape that fantasy, it seems that the mind may be completely alone, bereft of its body and of all human relationships. Hence the desperation with which, in the later Meditations, Descartes seeks to restore the world to knowledge, by appealing to divine veracity: if I am all there is, then God, in presenting me with the ideas of external things and people, is deceiving me—which He would never do.

We thus get the modern project that Hegel characterized as “throwing a bridge” between the mind and reality—a project which came to be called “epistemology.” Epistemology came inevitably (given the desperation on which it is founded) to be the first and basic philosophical discipline.

Modern philosophers, engaged in this project, differentiated themselves according to the side of the chasm from which they threw their bridge. The “rationalists,” like Descartes, worked from the side of mind, in virtue of their guiding dogma; the “empiricists,” such as Locke and Hume, worked from the side of nature, from the givenness to the mind of what is not the mind (i.e. “experience”). The contrast between the two came to be viewed in terms of the kind of thinking each side valorized rather than of the kind of objects they claimed could be known. The fact that both sides were trying, in their different ways, to vindicate a special kind of object, ousia, was covered over, and the social importance of philosophy was lost.

18. The Births of Modernity

In the 1600’s, philosophy, and so Europe, came to look different. Just what brought the transformation about remains controversial; indeed, it even remains undecided whether the new epoch of philosophy was its third (following on Ancient and Medieval, as most people think, bobbing in the wake of Hegel, who was famously enamored of triads) or the second (as I think, rating the persistent dance of the Metaphysical Barn more important than the transition from the Greeks to the Christians).

My amalgamation of the medieval to the ancient is rooted in the fact that the medieval world, like the ancient, was ousiodically structured: it consisted of kingdoms, armies, fiefdoms, villages, parishes, dioceses, households, and the like, each resting within its boundaries and each organized and controlled from the top by a unified agent—indeed often, in theory anyway, by a single person. The whole arrangement looked to ancient Rome for its inspiration, as Rome had looked to Athens.

But now, in the 17^th Century, it teetered.

For Aristotle, whose metaphysics dominated European social structures even during the long eclipse of his writings, the status of ousia as a model for all social institutions was justified by its being the basic structuring principle of the natural world:

In all things which are composed out of several other things, and which come to be some single common thing, whether continuous or discrete, in all of them there turns out to be a distinction between that which rules, and that which is ruled; and this holds for all ensouled things by virtue of the whole of nature…(Politics I.4).

All very fine—until the rise of science evicted ousia from the natural world. Galileo, who died in 1642, recognized that atomism was more compatible with modern mechanics than Aristotelian essentialism: a stone falling to earth is not striving to realize its heavy essence, but is merely being acted upon by gravity. Similarly, Newton discovered, for the earth itself.

If nature was not ousiodic , how could it underwrite ousia in the human world? Aristotle’s strategy collapsed, and modernity was born.

Some, such as Heidegger, have maintained that modern philosophy came about through a hubristic elevation of the human mind to a position akin to the one formerly occupied by God. Others suggest that the social and religious turmoil instigated by Martin Luther in 1453 eventually made philosophical certainty imperative, and that the surrounding confusion required that such certainty be sought in the individual mind—a hope realized when Descartes came across the cogito, the absolute certainty that I have of my own thought. These claims are all very well—in history, the more explanations we have the better, as long as they are consonant with the known facts—but left to themselves, I think they underplay two things.

First, the elevation of mind went along with a reevaluation of matter, which lost form; unformed yet somehow clumped matter, i.e. bodies, became basic to nature. Heidegger was half right, then: the elevation of the human mind he advocates for was in fact paired with the scientific eviction of form from nature.

Second, this double development provoked the new problem I mentioned above, a problem too basic to too many things to be seen clearly: if ousiodic structure could no longer be found in nature, what entitled it to play its traditional role in structuring the human world? How could Europeans continue to have their traditional kinds of families, states, churches, and so on in a world which had literally been de-formed by modern science?

Two general strategies emerged. Some philosophers concluded that since a natural justification for ousia was impossible, a supernatural one was required. Daniel Garber indicates how it worked:

Descartes rejects the tiny souls [essences] of the schools only to replace them with one great soul, God, an incorporeal substance who, to our limited understanding, manipulates the bodies of the inanimate world as we manipulate ours (Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics p. 116).

Descartes thus divinizes ousia in a monotheistic way and relocates it to the level of the entire universe. The strategy will survive him: Spinoza will absolutize it, and Leibniz will loosen it.

The other move was to abandon the entire project of formulating an overall justification for ousia, while salvaging various individual cases of it. Here we get Hobbes’ account of Leviathan, the modern state; Locke’s of the individual property owner; and Hume’s of the individual mind. All retain ousiodic structure, but only on one level of what had been the cosmos. The other levels are de-formed into mere matter, to be manipulated at will.

So the homo economicus of Locke steps forward in contrast to the homo politicus of Hobbes, and both confront the Humean individual, who overturns the entre ancient morality of reason: “reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them” (Treatise p. 415). Ousiodic structure is still here, guiding Hume’s metaphor of master and slave, but it has been turned on its head.

These two opposing strategies—the divinization of ousiodic structure on the one hand, and its piecemeal abandonment on the other—were born together, out of the need to justify ousia as the structuring principle of the (European) human world after it had lost its status in nature and could no longer do the job in the old way. Their common birth, which was the birth of modernity, meant that the new, modern world was inherently conflictual.

It has remained so: Hobbesian homo politicus and Lockean homo economicus, for example, continued their confrontation all the way into the Cold War. This abiding conflict should not conceal the common concern of the parties to it with ousia, or the even deeper question which that concern raises: are modern theories of the state, the economy, and morality any less fantastic than the ancient theories of nature they supposedly replace?

17. Aquinas’ Polyphony

By the 12^th Century Christian philosophy was almost a thousand years old; the Christians had almost as much philosophy behind them as did the Greeks at the time of Plotinus. Whether all that thinking had helped them understand the murky parables of a certain Jewish carpenter was a difficult matter. But some things were getting clear in Paris.

Two mysterious 12^th-century composers attached to the cathedral of Notre-Dame, Léonin and Pérotin, were introducing what amounted to harmony into Gregorian chant. The idea that voices singing different notes could be pleasing to God was to have enormous consequences, not least (I submit) on the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, who arrived in Paris from southern Italy in 1245.

Reading Aquinas is a chore second only, in its mind-numbing difficulty and its endless length, to what must have been the job of writing him. The format is unvarying: he lines up authorities on both side of a question, states reasons for their positions, then identifies his own view and his reasons for it, refuting those authorities who disagree with him. A small conceptual shift then produces the next question, and the process is repeated. The questions follow each other, creeping in their petty pace from hour to hour unto the last syllable…of recorded truth.

But as they do, as you work along all this, a vision begins painfully to emerge. In particular, Aquinas’ technical and tortured discussions of the actus essendi, the act of being, attempt to explain what Aristotle could not: how essence comes to inhere in matter. Plato required that a form be the same for everything that “participated” in it: justice is always justice, wherever it is found.

It is thus a crucial aspect of the relation of participation that many things can participate in one form; but since Plato never clarifies the nature of participation (#8), we don’t know how that is supposed to work. When Aristotle converts form into essence by placing it within things, he agrees with Plato that all humans have exactly the same essence, humanity. But if that essence is one, how can humans be many?

For Aristotle, the answer is matter. That a single essence must bound, organize and control the differing matters of different beings means that the form’s activity itself modulates according to the matter in which that essence is, and the result is different individuals sharing the same essence. One essence acts in different ways at different places and times. Not very clear, but at least it’s an explanation.

But if essence “dominates” matter, then matter must, as we saw (#8), “resist” essence. It is the varying resistances offered by matter in differing times and places that modulate the activity of the single essence which controls them and so enables the one to become many. Such is the case for Aristotle, at least; but for Aquinas, essence comes from God. Resistance to God is sin, and only conscious beings can sin.

So Aquinean matter is inert, and cannot resist essence. Which leaves essence, so to speak, with nothing to do. Let me put it this way: for Aristotle, essence is in matter because essence is active, and its activity is to dominate matter. For Aquinas, essence is more passive: it does not dominate matter because matter does not resist it. So something else must “place” essence in matter.

Who is that something else? You know who. It is God Who places an essence in a number of bodies by constituting an actus essendi, an act of being—a notion for which Aristotle had no use. Because it pluralizes form, the actus essendi is not common to a number of things, as is the essence it posits in those things. Each act of being is unique.

The details escape me; let them go. The upshot is that the universe consists of an enormous number of beings, each unique at its core and each beloved of the God Who made it, and Whom it honors, just by being itself.

And the whole of reality, we might say, is like a giant choir in which each being sings its single note to God Himself, in an infinite polyphony.

This is surely one of the most powerfully beautiful ontologies ever formulated. And if it bears any truth at all, we moderns are in very serious trouble. For since we are not God, our manifold and growing interventions into the world God made are not improvements on His work. We are merely converting the divine polyphony into a cacophony which is, if human at the outset, virtually diabolical at its end. Every forest we cut down, every meadow we pave, every river we dam, and every lake we pollute becomes an insult to the God Who made them all.

Human interventions into nature must therefore be limited to those which enable us to be as God intended us to be—to those that enable us to be what we really are.

But who are we, really?

16. Augustine

The arrival of Christianity in the West brought profound and complex—and sometimes violent—shifts in values, as well as in beliefs. The body intensified from being a laborious distraction, as Plato viewed it, to become a seething locus of sin and temptation—not merely “bad” but “evil,” as Nietzsche would later put it. And yet Christians also maintained that every single human had been made “in the image and likeness of God;” humanity was now unified, instead of being split into Greeks (or Romans) and potential slaves.

But a question: if humans are images of the divine, how can the body be evil? Answer: if the imagery is not corporeal, but lodges in some component of the human being that is psychic or mental, and so opposed to the body. The human image of God is thus necessarily invisible. What can it be? i what invisible component of the human being does its likeness to God reside?

The problem came home for Augustine, a Christian from Hippo in Africa, when he tried to explain his belated conversion to Christianity. Motivation for this could not come from his bodily desires, which he well knew would have to be abjured should he become a Christian (da me castitatem et continentiam, he pleaded, sed noli modo: grant me chastity and continence, but not just now, Confessions VIII.7). Nor could it be a deliverance of reason, for reason clears up mysteries, while Christianity is founded on a mystery—that of the Incarnation (quid autem sacramenti haberet…ne suspicari quidem poteram, Confessions VII.19). But according to the ancients (after Aristotle anyway), reason and desire are the only two factors in human nature which can cause human actions. (Plato had complicated things slightly with τιμή, ambition—but is not the desire for honor merely, in the end, another desire?)

The sheer fact of Augustine’s conversion could only mean that Aristotle was wrong: there was something else in Augustine, a principle of action independent of both reason and desire—and therefore, it seemed, independent of natural causality altogether. Being independent of nature, it must be a direct gift from God; and, if free will is a direct gift of God, it must be that in virtue of which a human being is the image of God. We are thus made in the image of God, not visibly, but through something interior to us: what would come to be called “free will.” So free will received the job of establishing human likeness to the divine, and in such moderns as Descartes and Kant would assume the role of ousiodic form in the human self: the order of the mind;s various faculties would be maintained by an act of will.

But did Augustine discover free will, or invent it?

God, it seems, causes me to have free will in the first place, but if the choices I subsequently make really are free, even God does not cause them. An act of the free will thus has no cause beyond itself—it is in this respect causa sui, cause of itself, which is only fitting for what makes me, an image of God.

An act of free will is thus an uncaused commitment to a course of action, and this has implications for what choice itself is. When there is only one pathway forward, our choice of it cannot be free; so what we do freely must be something selected from a wider set of alternatives, other possible courses of conduct. This kind of choice, the uncaused selection of one alternative from a broader array, then becomes “choice” itself.

We do, i think, make choices in roughly this way. When I am in a cheese shop, I may see three or four cheeses which look equally appetizing and cost about the same. My choice among them is unmotivated, random. It does, to be sure, have causes—the color of one of the cheeses may remind me of a favorite sweater, for example—but these factors do not explain the choice: they do not help my justify my decision. The resemblance of a cheese to my sweater does not reduce the mystery of my choice of it.

What Augustine has done, I suggest, is apply this model of uncaused but trivial choices to a momentous one—the choice of a religion. Other models are possible: for Aristotle, such a choice would be made by taking one’s concept of happiness (eudaimonia), reasoning back to one’s present situation, and doing what, in that situation, would lead most directly to happiness (#10). No need, here, to choose among alternatives; only one course of action need be on the menu, because at, least sometimes, only one most fully manifests the moral identity (reason plus desire) of the (Aristotelian) chooser.

To be sure, such moral choices may on occasion require selecting among alternatives—there may be several courses of action which lead equally directly to happiness. But that is not a requirement for the choice to be moral, or the action to be free, for a “free” action is not one which results from a free choice, but one which manifests the moral identity of the chooser.

What Augustine has done, then, is what Homer did with his metaphors: he has fixed upon an existing similarity and elevated it into a social truth.