On a broader arc, we will begin to see here in detail why Heidegger’s claims about “Western metaphysics” are so wrong.
After his fascinating detour on what could legitimately be called the 13-century science of perspective, Boulnois adds another dimension to the dossier of medieval theories of representation, summarizing intricate Franciscan views about sensible and intelligible “species”. Duns Scotus’s defense of intelligible species will distinguish him from his Franciscan colleagues.
Boulnois not only shows strong explicit connections between representation and “presence” in several important medieval authors. His archaeological investigation of the larger conceptual world around Duns Scotus shows specific historical sources in medieval philosophy for what numerous 20th-century writers have taken to be uncritical modern notions of “objects”, and for the reduction of being to objects, which Heidegger claims typifies “Western metaphysics” as a whole.
I’ve long been fascinated by the 14th-century controversies over species. The rather limited modern scholarship that exists on this point most often frames it in terms of a debate between nominalism and realism about universals, understood as competing theories of what kinds of things there are. That is one aspect, but these disputes also deeply involved the theory of knowledge; what might in a very broad sense be called issues in phenomenology; and a kind of psychology, concerned with details of the functioning of the soul in matters of perception and thought.
Indeed in this section Boulnois does not even mention nominalism. But before leaving it aside though, for another angle on the larger picture it is worth recalling that nominalism radicalizes one side of Aristotle’s assertion (often read as a criticism of Plato) that concrete real things have a kind of primacy, and generalities have a kind of secondary status. Modern scholarship has given most of its attention to the nominalism of William of Ockham, who indeed did belong to the Franciscan line that will be discussed here. But Duns Scotus and non-Franciscans like Walter Burley mounted a strong defense of the realist alternative, to which modern scholarship has been less attentive. Realism here is meant not in the ordinary practical sense, but in the sense of an assertion that universals and other beings of reason have a kind of “reality” of their own, even if we do not literally believe in Platonic forms.
Until the last few decades, the study of Latin philosophy was dominated by Thomists who tended to see Aquinas as towering over others, and focused on him as the leading representative of a “moderate realism” that avoids the respective excesses it sees in both nominalism and Platonism. But Thomas came too early to participate directly in the 14th-century debate, and the major defenders of the realist side, like Scotus and Burley, did not visibly appeal to Aquinas.
The American pragmatist Charles Pierce provocatively referred to himself as a “Scotist realist”, but did not write substantially about Scotus, which left his references somewhat mysterious. I am still skeptical about this.
Boulnois sets the stage by summarizing relevant views of Aristotle, Augustine, and Avicenna.
“Nonetheless, the vision of an image resides ‘not in the eye, but in one who sees’ [Aristotle, On Sense Perception]. ” (L’Être et représentation, p. 67, my translation throughout).
This is a nice example of Aristotle’s thoughtful minimalism. “One who sees” refers simply to a whole human individual or other living being in ordinary experience. (Living beings are hylomorphic wholes, whose division into soul and body is a derivative abstraction. “Soul” for Aristotle is neither a speculative entity nor an object of faith, but a way of speaking about the life and character of living beings.)
Boulnois continues, “Not only is the theory of representation deployed in the order of signs and that of images, it concerns knowledge. It rejects all the problems of perception in the perceiving subject, and opens up a scission between the object and the form that resembles it in the knowing subject” (ibid).
“Theory of representation” here refers particularly to the 13th and 14th century views he will be discussing.
What is meant by “knowledge” in this passage is not what I call knowledge in the strong sense — a major feature of which is that it can and will explain itself and respond substantively to questionings — but rather a more general and personal kind of “experience” of knowing that is not involved with dialogical challenge.
As to the rejection of problems of perception in this 13th and 14th century tradition, the qualifier “in the perceiving subject” is essential. Insofar as the account of sensible species is mainly causal, the place of questions of interpretation in our experience of sensibles is greatly reduced. But even if we ultimately reject it, this causal account of perception should be recognized as a substantial theoretical development in its own right.
The scission or cut that he speaks of is not unlike the rift between mind and world in the later and better known representationalism of Descartes.
“How is this scission elaborated? How are we to understand the mode of being of each of these two terms [object and form], and how shall we interpret their correspondence?” (ibid).
In future posts, the notion of object introduced here will undergo some very interesting elaborations. Boulnois briefly recalls the elementary account of sense perception in Aristotle.
“In sensation, a mutation intervenes; a new image surges in the soul. Aristotle distinguishes a form and a matter in sensation: ‘For each sensation, it is necessary to know that sensation is the receptor of sensible forms (aistheton eidon) [which Boulnois here, following the Latin, translates as sensible “species”], just as wax receives the imprint of gold or brass, but not as gold or brass’ . By perception, the soul receives the impression of a form or sensible species (eidos), without the matter that it informs, in the place in which it is inscribed originally’ [quoted from On the Soul, book II] (p. 68).”
In this account of sensation and perception, we have a perfectly non-spooky example of a form’s relative independence from matter. I think Aristotle meant “impression” as a kind of metaphor. But taking it more literally allowed the Latin theologians to overlay Aristotle’s metaphor with Stoic-influenced medieval causal accounts of sense perception.
Boulnois turns to the Augustinian context, so important for the Franciscans. Augustine takes orientation from concerns far removed from those of the Stoics, for whom nothing exists apart from body. In the 13th and 14th centuries, these extremely different views were fused together in a series of remarkable syntheses.
“Augustine adopts this remark, but seeks to make it agree with another: since the spirit is immaterial, nothing of the sensible can act on it. It is the soul that perceives, that produces a sensation in itself when it perceives the sensible body. Sensation is neither a brute sensorial shock nor the simple reception of an image, but rather its production by the soul encountering a material object presented by sense. [quote from Augustine:] ‘While the image begins in the mind, this same image is not produced by the body in the mind, but by the mind itself with a stupefying rapidity.’ This suddenness shows that it is not the bodies seen that produce the images in the mind, but indeed the mind in itself, in its intellectual nature. There is no action of the body on the mind, but an autoaffection of the mind by itself. [quote from Augustine:] ‘The soul undergoes something by the very operations [of sensation], and nonetheless it undergoes nothing from the body, but is acted on by itself.’ Just as the soul cannot bring bodies themselves into its spiritual nature, in sensation [quote from Augustine:] ‘it rolls into itself their images, and delights within itself in these images made by itself. It gives them something of its own substance to form them’. The mental image resolves the drama of Narcissus: in the incapacity of possessing the object, the soul produces an image, in which it finds its satisfaction. Unable to play in a complete image of itself, it monetizes this impossible plenitude, coining multiple images where it is with itself. Thus in sensation the soul forms in itself the images of the things known, in order to possess a spiritual equivalent of the same nature as itself. It recovers from the constitutive alienation of the object. This image has for its subject of substantial inherence the soul, and not the bodily organ of sensation” (pp. 68-69).
This influential Augustinian view, which treats perception as an activity of the soul, is the direct opposite of the passivity of sense perception that the Latin tradition attributed to Aristotle. The “other view” preceding Augustine that Boulnois alludes to is presumably that of Plotinus, who was Augustine’s most important philosophical influence.
I think that for Aristotle, the commonly cited passivity of sensation is only a first approximation that — like other seemingly definitive introductory statements in Aristotle, such as the account of substance (ousia) in the Categories — is intended to be superseded upon more thorough investigation, like that for ousia which Aristotle carries out in the Metaphysics. On closer inspection, at the very least the work of synthesis in the “common” sense — which enables us to experience things and the world in coherent and meaningful ways — is active.
“The specific vocabulary of repraesentatio is developed in parallel to this, in the Latin translation of the Treatise on the Soul of Avicenna. Avicenna holds that there is a conservation of sensible species on the plane of imagination: while raindrops succeed one another, singularly and distinctly, sensed separately the one from the others by the external senses, we perceive a continuous line constituted by their series. Thus the common sense or imagination constitutes this straight line in a first perceptive synthesis. It centralizes the forms received by the five senses, thus transposing sensation into perception. But this synthesis is temporalizing: at the moment when the drop falls, the common sense perceives the drop [quote from Avicenna:] ‘as if it found itself there where it was, and also there where it is, and thus it sees a rectilinear extension (distensio recta)’. While the external sense perceives the thing there where it is at a given instant, the common sense constructs a continuity, that is to say an extension that is of the same nature as the temporal extension of the soul (distensio animi according to Augustine). It does not perceive the thing there where it is, but it perceives it in the mode of ‘as if’: as if it were in two distinct places, and in the relation of the two instants, past and present, as between these two places, here and below, in a synthesis that apprehends them as distinct and unifies them in the movement of their dissociation. Because we must call upon a schematism, the objects of sensation pass, but the phantasm retains them in a continuous presence, [quote from Avicenna:] ‘even if the thing that has already passed has been destroyed’. In the fleeting and discontinuous frame of the sensed world, it separates a form, which is not the fixation of the external object, but an ‘as if’, a substitute, a redoubling in continual permanence — a first representation” (pp. 69-70).
In passing, we see here that Avicenna developed a more explicit account of the synthetic functions Aristotle attributes to the “common” sense. This has intrinsic interest in its own right, but I will not pursue it here.
In the Latin Avicenna, “The word [representation] appears in order to describe the apprehension of an external object by the imagination, precisely to distinguish it from the act of thought. Representation governs the status of the image, and indeed of the imagination. This is why it guarantees the separation between intellect and sensible imagination: intellect knows itself, directly and without an organ, as distinct from the imagination, which does not represent itself, but [quote from Avicenna:] ‘only represents an image taken from the senses’. In a remarkable manner, [Avicenna’s Latin translator] Gundissalinus translated numerous Arabic terms that describe the act of imagining by ‘repraesentare‘, as if he wanted to unify the vocabulary of imagination under a single concept. The term designates the action by which the estimative faculty, a sort of first sensible judgment, recalls with a great ‘speed’ (as in Augustine) the forms that are in the imagination, and re-presents them [quote from Avicenna:] ‘in such a way that it is as if it saw the things to which the forms belong’ ” (p. 70).
But for the Latin Avicenna, representation (repraesentatio) belongs to the imagination, rather than to thought, as it will for Scotus.
Avicenna’s neoplatonic rather than Aristotelian view that “intellect knows itself, directly and without an organ”, not only in God but also in the human, was welcomed by Latin Augustinians.
“The encounter of the two Platonisms, those of Augustine and Avicenna, is effectuated at the same time as the translation of the latter by Gundissalinus. But it is above all affirmed in the 13th century, in what Gilson called ‘Avicennizing Augustinianism’. As William of Auvergne underlined, following Augustine: the intellect does not receive material forms, and nonetheless perception depends on the sensible. How is the difficulty resolved? The response is found in occasionalism. ‘New thoughts or dispositions supervene in the intellectual substances’, by sensible ‘occasions or excitations’. Science begins with sensible experience but is not derived from it, since its nature is intellectual. The sensible is a condition sin qua non, but it is not the only principle of knowledge. It is indeed the soul that thinks, but when it applies itself to sensible objects, it passes through the intermediary of images. [quote from William of Auvergne:] ‘Properly speaking, signs do not transmit a light of science, nor the things themselves, but they excite our souls to apply themselves to things.’ There is indeed a transposition of sensible images into intelligible ones, a transposition that is the very status of representation” (pp. 70-71).
This limited “occasionalism” in the account of perception needs to be sharply distinguished from the generalized occasionalism that makes absolutely everything depend in a direct and total way on divine will. It is the total and unqualified character of the latter that effectively abolishes all worldly intelligibility and causality.
“Thomas Aquinas strives on the contrary to explain perception in line with the account in Aristotle: ‘the soul thinks nothing without a phantasm’. Our intellect thinks the forms in sensible images, because it must turn itself toward sensible experience to receive the objects of thought, and to take from it the forms that are thought. Being the instrument of a bodily knowledge, the phantasm also permits the abstraction of intelligible species. The nature of a stone can only be known completely when it is known as existing in the particular. For we apprehend the particular by sense and imagination. [quote from Aquinas:] ‘To know what is in individual matter, but not insofar as it is in such a matter, is to extract a form from the individual matter that the phantasms represent.’ Representation here is simply the relation of substitution and the resemblance assured by the sensible image. The intellect, turned toward this sensible image representing the thing known, abstracts its nature. Thus the intelligible species is necessary; form abstracted from the thing, it allows us to see the intelligible structure of the sensible, and not only its exterior image.”
“Avicennism or Augustinianism? In any case, the Franciscan line rejects intelligible species: the body cannot by itself directly produce anything in the mind, not even a simple and spiritual intelligible species, which suits the simplicity of its subject, since its causality is that of a corporeal and composite being. On the other hand, it is necessary rather to think that the body acts on the soul by way of a natural liaison (colligantia), by an inclination and a formal union toward the soul to which it is related. This concord between the body and the soul, this harmony introduced by the Creator, is such that the action of the one rebounds on the other, so that the diverse powers of the soul concur in one sole and same act. The impression produced in the body arouses a movement in the soul that corresponds to that in the body, but it is only the occasion, since their metaphysical distinction prevents there being causality of the body on the soul. To think the relation between soul and body, the Franciscan school proposed diverse solutions: the object is an occasional cause or exciter [John Peckham and Roger Marston]; or a simple cause sin qua non [Olivi]; or it is limited to inclining the soul to know [Mathew of Aquasparta, Henry of Ghent]. In all these cases, there is no direct causality of the soul or of the body by itself in the production of knowledge. For Olivi, this is explained by a concurrence of two causes of different orders. It is thus that many people row a single boat, adding their forces together, producing one sole and same movement of the boat. [quote from Olivi:] ‘Each collaborates in pulling the boat, yet none is the total cause.’ Knowledge is the occasional union of concordant partial causes, which produce a single effect. The model is also that of carnal union: as in the union of man and woman, the species is engendered in memory following an immaculate [sic] conception; the species [quote from Olivi:] ‘is engendered in the maternal womb of the intellect itself’. The species, engendered in the womb of the intellect, is the fruit of a copulation between memory and intellect” (pp. 71-73).
All the great Franciscan theologians are strong voluntarists, a position I regard as truly horrible in its consequences. But their arguments about perception and intellection are quite subtle and interesting.
“Perception is susceptible to a double interpretation: physical for the transmission of information, phenomenological for sensation; sometimes as the reception of an act coming from a movement, sometimes as total and apperceptive knowledge of an intentionality. — Bacon knows only a multiplication of material species: ‘species are a material and natural being in the medium and in the sense’. These also transmit spiritual qualities (in the material sense of Stoic spiritus), and perceptions [apercues] by the intellect”. [quote from Bacon:] ‘This spirituality is contrary neither to corporeity nor to the materiality we find in material and bodily things’. If the sensible species is the resemblance to the substance that caused it, it transmits the intelligible intentio. [quote from Bacon:] ‘This is why the sensitive soul can perceive the substance by its species.’ Knowledge presupposes that the sense and the intellect are modified by a sensible effect or a material impression. But in the intentional multiplication, it is the form that acts. In this sense, the species is not only material, but spiritual or intentional: it can act on the sense organs and the powers of perception. [quote from Aquinas:] ‘The form is received in the patient without matter, insofar as the patient is rendered similar to the agent according to the form, and not according to the matter. And in this way, the sense receives the form without matter, since the form has being in a different way in the sense and in the sensible thing. For in the sensible thing, it has a physical (naturale) being, and in the sense an intentional and spiritual being’. The sensible, for example color, at first has a natural being in its objects. But it has an intentional being for the soul. The sensible cause produces an intentio; it intentionally engenders a similar [form] in the medium, then in the organ of sight, by an act of illumination. Thus at first the sense considers the external sensibles, then the rational soul perceives the intentiones that are in the imaginative power and that glow in the phantasm [citations to Henry of Ghent]: glowing, shining, appearing; this expression is almost a pleonasm; we cannot separate the brilliance from what is shown in it, the appearance of the form from its appearing, the phainomenon from the phantasma” (pp. 73-74).
As with representation, the vocabulary of “intentions” comes from the Latin translation of Avicenna. “Apperceptive” is a later term, only introduced by Boulnois by way of description.
“How do we articulate a knowledge already constituted by the laws of optics with the functioning of thought? Beyond the reception of the sensible species, subject to the general laws of perspective, how does representation emerge for the thought that receives it? — Henry of Ghent focuses on three problems: 1) ‘color is other than the species of color’; what we know, beyond the sensible species, is color: how do we sustain the claim that the material species transported by the luminous ray is at once a visual image (the species of the color) and the object rendered visible (with its color)? Why redouble the object with its species? 2) ‘The species of color is abstracted by a quasi-real separation, and by a generation or multiplication of the species in the totality of the medium in which they are found, between the thing and the point of the eye where the visual power is exercised.’ But where is the abstraction situated: is it already prefigured by the separation of the material species emitted outside the subject, or must it be accompanied by an intellectual act, which separates the intelligible species from its material substrate? 3) The operation of the intellect in any case produces only the intellection of the universal. How do we guarantee that this universal corresponds to the singular perceived by the sense? And how can the sensible singular act on the intellect, when the sensible cannot act on the intelligible?” (p. 74).
Boulnois’s phrase “knowledge already constituted by the laws of optics” is quite striking. On this account, a kind of “knowledge” in experience comes before thought, and has its own constitution that is independent of thought. This is one way in which the theory of perspectiva will be applied.
Henry of Ghent was the senior theological consultant in the proceedings that led to the reactionary condemnation of 1277 (though he is said to have had reservations about parts of the final version). Here he appears in a more interesting light.
“For Henry, the same representation is at play in sensation and in thought. [longer quote from Henry:] ‘Such is the process of the act of vision: in the first instance, material light falling on a particular material color radiates outside it. Second, abstraction produces a species of the color without matter. Third, the medium by this species provokes an act of vision…. Fourth, the light of the intellect radiates on the particular phantasm, thanks to which the imagination (phantasia) exists in act. And in this way, it abstracts a universal phantasm from the particular. It poses it before the possible intellect, as the proper object that affects it…. [It allows it to know] the universal thing of which it is the species, so that it is not abstracted from this universal thing, but is a particular phantasm abstracted from a particular exterior thing, since in this way it exists as universal.’ Henry starts from the phantasm as sensible, and means to resolve the noetic problems starting only from the particular representation in the phantasm. It is the light of the agent intellect that separates the universality already present in the phantasm.”
“Thus precisely because the sensible species is already a representation, knowledge has no use for intelligible species. Criticizing the analysis of Thomas Aquinas, Henry from the start rejects intelligible species in the beatific vision, then in all knowledge, which generalizes the argument and turns it against Thomas: [quote from Henry:] ‘The presence of the object is the cause of the presence of the species, and not the inverse: in effect, it is not because the species is in the eye that a white object is present, but the inverse; indeed the first representation of the object is not by a species; as a consequence, it is superfluous to posit a species by reason of the presence of the object.’ If we knew only by representations, our knowledge would fall into idealism. The thing itself is presented to sense and intellect; it has no need of a species to mediately take its place” (pp. 75-76).
A strong thematization of presence is here asserted and developed by Henry of Ghent in a direct and explicit way that is quite unlike the implicit dependence on presence that Heidegger tendentiously claims to find already in Aristotle. We will see more indications like this.
“No more does knowledge have need of intelligible species for Olivi. Nonetheless, knowledge is not effectuated by the naked essence of the cognitive power, but through a mediation. If only for rendering an account of memory, it is necessary to posit the retention in sensible memory of remembered species of sensible objects, [quote from Olivi:] ‘as for universal objects, as when someone thinks the general or specific quiddities of sensible things and absent things taken universally. In effect, these sensible things taken universally cannot be represented by an imaginative species’. In all acts of knowledge, sensible and intelligible, [quote from Olivi: ‘a view (aspectus) is required, having for its actual term an object (super obiectum actualiter terminus)…. This is why, when the exterior thing is not itself presented directly for this view (non obicitur aspectui), it is necessary that there be [… in its place] a species in memory, which is only the principle of the cognitive act as a terminative and representative object.’ In the absence of a real object, knowledge turns its regard toward a substituted object, which is not the causal principle of its vision but the term of its view, and which by its triple status of substitute, effect, and resemblance recalls the absent thing. The sensible species takes its place, it represents it, but only as the term of its view and not as a cause” (p. 76).
These are quite sophisticated accounts.
“If the occasion allows the division between sensation and thought to be preserved, representation allows their continuity to be guaranteed, and the transposition of one into the other. Knowledge is not produced by its object. It is rather the object as term that is produced by the soul under the form of a substitute. [quote from Olivi:] ‘For knowledge or thought of absent objects, it is necessary that a species take the place of the object.’ Even if the thing is not present, the object of its view remains, and the species takes the thing’s place: [quote from Olivi:] ‘It is necessary that an image of the thing be made the object of our regard and be its term.’ The substitutive presence of a representation allows the absence of the cause to be made up for. If the object is lacking, a function of presence gives thought its term: [quote from Olivi:] ‘The thought of an absent thing cannot occur without the cooperation of a presented (praesentialis) object’. The power cannot by itself render its objects present, unless it could render them all present, without limit, and make itself equal to God. It receives its determination of a presence, direct or substitutive. [quote from Olivi:] ‘It is necessary that either the object be presented to it, or that it it be represented in an imagination in such a way that the act of knowledge is applied to the object itself or to its image configured or assimilated to it. And this configuration is the specific reason of the act itself.’ The need for presence manifests the constitutive finitude of the human: it is filled by a representation” (pp. 76-77).
In Olivi too, we see a very explicit thematization of presence.
“On [the matter of the existence of intelligible species], Scotus detaches himself from his Franciscan predecessors. While maintaining continuity with the Baconian theory of the sensible species, he renews the intelligible species, which he like Thomas Aquinas judges to be necessary. The presence of the object to thought does not render vain that of the species. [quote from Scotus:] ‘The object relative to a power has in first place a real presence, that is to say such a proximity that it can engender this species in the intellect, which is the formal reason of intellection. In second place, by the species thus engendered, which is an image of its generator, the object is present under its status as knowable, or as represented’ ” (p. 77).
Here we see Scotus too explicitly thematizing presence.
“In a first moment, the form of the intellection by which the object is presented in intuition is already a species. But its matter is the real presence of the object. In a second moment, the species is imprinted in memory: it is the image itself in its status as image that is perceived; the representation is known as such. The species is indeed the cause of the presence of the object, contrary to what Henry of Ghent affirmed: it is the cause of its presence as thinkable, abstract, independent of the existence of the object — the cause of its real status. This thesis is fundamental: it clears the way for a new acceptation of truth as ‘objectity’, since it leads to clearing the way for a double presence of the object — the real presence of the thing, and the objectual presence of the represented. The thing receives a being as object insofar as it corresponds to a representation” (pp. 77-78).
Boulnois’s use of the term “objectity” implicitly recalls some translations of Heidegger’s Objekität. Heidegger not implausibly considers this “objecthood” to be the product of an objectifying attitude, in which an object is presented for a subject as something external (a view that finds its ultimate expression in modern technology).
But Heidegger writes as if he himself were the first to recognize the alienating aspect of a subject-object duality, which is ridiculous. He then proceeds to blame this alienation on a monolithically bad “Western metaphysics” that he claims to trace back all the way to Plato and Aristotle.
There is no greater obstacle to responsible and insightful “historiography” than this kind of sweeping, ahistorical, monolithic negative interpretation.
And ironically, this kind of gesture — which purports to invalidate all previous philosophy with one blow — owes its fashionable status to none other than Descartes, from whose subject-object dualism Heidegger claims to be the only one who can save us.
In an upcoming post, we will see in much greater detail how a concept of objecthood or “being an object” comes to plays a novel, central, and very explicit role in the work of Duns Scotus, on whom Heidegger wrote his dissertation. In light of his early concentration on Scotus, Heidegger should have been in a position to be aware of this. But as far as I know, Heidegger never even mentions the historical role of Scotus and his near-contemporaries in his frequent later allusive, broad-brush denunciations of Western metaphysics.
Boulnois on the other hand sees a great originality in Scotus on this point.
“Scotus’s argument is polemical: the position of Henry is not tenable. According to him, the same sensible representation, presented in the light of the phantasm, represents a singular thing, and in a second light, that of the agent intellect, it represents another, the universal; thus glowworms appear in the light of day as colored objects, and at night as luminous sources. But according to Scotus, the representation, the sensible species, is at first a thing that is presented in its proper light. Without this the same species, if we placed it in different media, would change its nature: in the vibration of the air, it would represent a sound; in the illuminated air, a color. Quite the contrary, there is a ‘unity of the representation and of the object representable by it’: the representation is not simply a thing that would entertain diverse relations to diverse objects, but its relation to this or that object is constitutive of its being as a representation. The same species, that is to say ‘the same representation’, always represents the same representable, and according to the same reason. Put under a greater light, an identical representation represents no other thing, but the same thing more clearly: the same species of black or white better reveals what it represents in the sun than by moonlight; and reciprocally, the glowworm gives rise to two distinct representing species, that of a colored body and that of a luminous source, which represent diverse objective beings, diverse aspects of the same being. We cannot follow Henry, for whom whereas the phantasm reveals a representation of the singular, the light of the agent intellect reveals a representation of the universal. The sensible species represents the singular, and in the light of the agent intellect it represents it more clearly, so the intellect can think it better. But it in no way represents the universal. It never represents the universal qua universal, whatever light illuminates it. It is necessary to produce another representation and another relation of representation to be able to perceive the universal. The remarkable trait of this refutation is its systematic interpretation of the theory of species, sensible or intelligible, in terms of representation. The denuding of the sensible species never allows knowledge of the universal if it is not already given to us as a representation. If with Henry of Ghent we enter into a theory of representation at the level of the phantasm, it is necessary to go all the way and admit a second, intelligible form of representation. Thus we cease to see the phantasm as the appearance of the very nature of the thing. The agent intellect produces an intentional form. It is not limited to bringing to light the content of the phantasm, as Henry believed. And Scotus insists: if we hold absolutely to preserving the vocabulary of illumination, it is necessary to specify that this light is productive, that it is an efficient cause and not the denuding of a formal aspect of the phantasm” (pp. 78-79).
Like Aquinas, Scotus apparently chooses to overlook Aristotle’s clear explanation of what it is to be a “source of motion or change”, and substitutes for it the very non-Aristotelian notion of what came to be commonly called “efficient causality”. This explicitly makes creation the primary model for worldly causality. Where Aristotle emphasizes the diversity of causes of one thing, this dubious application of the creationist model encourages the reifying view that each thing or state of affairs in ordinary experience has one “efficient” cause that is responsible for its being in the sense of existence.
We will see in a moment that the Latin term causa efficiens is already applied to what is called a “cause of existence” in the 12th-century Latin translation of Avicenna. But this has a different meaning in Avicenna, for whom creation is a necessary eternal emanation from the Necessary Being. The mainstream of theologians writing in Latin assumed that God’s act of creation must be understood as free in a very strong sense, and not as governed by any necessity.
For Aristotle, the primary and essential source of motion or change that causes the bronze statue to come to be as what it is, is the art of bronze-casting (Physics book II ch. 3; Metaphysics book V ch. 2). For Aristotle, granted that there is a real production involved, nonetheless the maker of the cast, the one who pours molten bronze into it, and their actions and tools are all merely “accidental” or incidental contributing causes of the real production of the statue, which is due primarily to the art of bronze-casting. Real production is causing something to come to be what it is, or causing it to have the form that it does.
If we were to apply Aristotle’s own concept to the creationist context that Aristotle never considered, the “source of motion” would then be something like God’s wisdom, and more particularly the content of that wisdom. Leibniz would later take this path. But the Latin tradition generally regards the content of divine wisdom as inscrutable to humans.
Avicenna in the Metaphysics section of his great work The Healing (translated to English as The Metaphysics of The Healing) openly claims to have improved on Aristotle’s Metaphysics. For example, Avicenna says that the discussion of these topics should start with God, pointing out that Aristotle does not do this. He proceeds to begin his own work with a very original account of God as the Necessary Being. While usually putting their own notions of God in place of Avicenna’s, his Latin readers welcomed the general idea of starting with God, and of amending Aristotle to refer to the Creator.
In place of what Aristotle prefers to calls the “sources” (archai) of motion and change, Avicenna substitutes what in the Latin translation was called the causa efficiens or “efficient cause” as the cause of a thing’s existence.
Where Aristotle emphasizes that sources of motion and change are usually complex and plural, in this later tradition there seems to be an assumption that the cause of a thing’s existence ought to be simple.
Where Aristotle emphasizes that “cause” is said in many ways, Avicenna, Aquinas, and Scotus effectively assert the preeminence of Avicenna’s cause of existence over all the Aristotelian ones.
The Latins generally follow Avicenna in substituting a non-Aristotelian cause (what would be aitia in Aristotle’s Greek) of existence for what Aristotle prefers to call the arche (“source” in Sachs’s translations) of motion and change. For Aristotle, nature (physis) is the source (arche) of motion and change in natural things. Real production is the coming-to-be of a form.
For Avicenna and the Latin tradition — historically far more influential on this point than the text of Aristotle — real production is causing something to have being in the sense of existence. This is what in Latin was called efficient cause. The preeminent example of real production for the Latin tradition is God as Creator making something from nothing.
Avicenna was translated to Latin earlier than the major works of Aristotle, and the Latin terminology forged by his translator Gundissalinus was then used by later translators of Aristotle.
The Postmodern Peripatetic 