Perspectiva

Boulnois sees the Arabo-Latin theory of perspectiva or perspective as inducing a new concept of representation, beyond that found in the Augustinian tradition, that becomes very important in scholastic thought. Over several upcoming posts, we will see a rich interplay between historical notions of resemblance and representation. This makes it hard to sustain the simple picture of these as two globally opposed paradigms.

“The theory of representation does not end in an analysis of signs. The image too takes the place of something. Following Roger Bacon, every image is first of all a sign. But every sign is not an image. The step from signification to resemblance must be taken with rigor. Species are the natural signs of objects, which owe nothing to arbitrariness or convention, but signify their object in virtue of a causal necessity, by their very nature and without imposition. That the image is a natural sign, Bacon had established against Aristotle. Nonetheless, the image does not refer to the original in virtue of a simple inference, but ‘by reason of conformity, of the configuration of one thing to another in its parts and its properties, like images, paintings, resemblances, etc., the species of colors, of flavors, of sounds and all things… In the same way, all the things produced by artisanal work are signs of art itself, and of the impressions and resemblances of these things existing in the soul of the artisan’ [quoted from Bacon’s De signis]. Thus while inference is perceived by a complex mental operation, resemblance offers itself to us in a simple perception, as referring to the original that it imitates” (L’Être et représentation, p. 55, ellipses in original, my translation throughout).

The idea that an image is “more” than signification is striking. But at the same time, it is supposed to be something we can simply perceive. The account of perception here makes perception univocally passive in relation to species. (By contrast, whatever passivity of perception there is in Aristotle is not a strong univocal theoretical perspective. His basic account of the five senses treats them as passive. But sensation is not the whole of perception, as his tantalizing remarks about the active role of the “common” sense in organizing perception and experience make clear.)

Aristotle did not have a theory of natural signs, an explicit general theory of resemblance, or a developed theory of perspective. These are scholastic innovations that have both positive and negative characteristics. From another point of view it might be considered good, for example, not to have a theory of natural signs. But particularly the theory of perspective is a significant accomplishment. For now, I’ll follow Boulnois in letting these views speak for themselves.

The mention of inference as “perceived” is striking. Inference here is not so much an act of intellect as an entailment or implication that is, broadly speaking, “perceived” in things.

Conformities between things “in their parts and properties” could begin to sound like the isomorphism that Brandom singles out as distinguishing a new notion of representation in Descartes. The systematic correspondences between geometry and algebra that Descartes famously highlights are rigorous and exact in a way that analogy in general is not, however.

“The description of images goes much further than general semiotics. Beyond the relations of inference, the mind can come to the knowledge of a resemblance, which establishes par excellence the nature of the sign, as Augustine saw: ‘All desire a certain resemblance in signification, such that signs as far as possible resemble the things signified.’ If the sign is constituted in an image, this is by a surplus of sense: the natural sign is more than a conventional sign, but the image in its turn is more than a trace, more than a simple natural sign. In its plenitude, the image does more than refer to a simple signified. It has its proper thickness; multiple and heterogeneous, it resembles what produces it. Beyond the deciphering of semiotic implications, the sense of the image is deployed up to the play of identity in difference. By this, the iconic privilege of resemblance envelops a whole noetic; it requires a new articulation of image and sign, of resemblance and causality, of object and sense.”

This is an impressively positive view of images. Here we are far from Plato’s critique of imitation. We will see the term “imitation” used in a positive way as well.

The association of resemblance with multiplicity, thickness, and heterogeneity in a “play of identity and difference” here is noteworthy. We are accustomed to stereotypes of medieval views as one-sidedly hierarchical in their reference of everything to God.

The connection of resemblance with efficient causality in the halfway modern, non-Aristotelian scholastic sense is another new development.

“Under the name of the theory of representation, it remains to think at once the unity and the division between a semiotics of inferences and a noetics of images. What is an image? In what does the image differ from resemblance?” (p. 56).

“To clarify the status of the image, the Middle Age relies on the Augustinian theory of the forms of correspondence (convenentia). Augustine in effect distinguishes three connected aspects: image, equality, and resemblance. [quote from Augustine, De diversis questionibus:] ‘For where there is an image, there is a resemblance, but not necessarily an equality; where there is an equality, there is a resemblance, but not necessarily an image; where there is a resemblance, there is neither necessarily an image nor an equality’ ” (ibid).

Boulnois further develops this triangular contrast, treating Augustine as representative of earlier medieval Latin thought.

“The image presupposes a productive principle, and reveals a causal dependency. It implies a resemblance, but not an equality, since it can be deficient in relation to the original, and not express all its traits. Thus in the mirror is found an image of the person it “expresses” (expressa est). Nonetheless it does not exclude equality: an image can be adequate. Equality also implies a resemblance, but not an image. Thus two similar (pares) eggs are equal and resemble one another: all the traits of the one are in the other. But they are not images of one another, for neither is taken from the other or is the expression of the other.”

“Finally, resemblance implies neither an image nor an equality. It is a generic particular trait, without expression or adequation; a pure fact, that of having common traits, but in a transversal manner, without depending on a principle. Insofar as it is an egg, every egg resembles all other eggs; but the egg of the partridge, while insofar as it is an egg resembling the egg of the chicken, is neither its image nor its equal” (p. 57).

This “transversal manner, without depending on a principle” again addresses the multiplicity and heterogeneity in resemblance that he commented on earlier.

“This system opposes the image, causal dependency, and resemblance as a transversal fact, but authorizes a combination of the three concepts. It allows relations to be defined between the Father and the Son (image, resemblance, and equality); between God and the human (image, resemblance, without equality); between two individuals of the same species (resemblance, equality, without image); between the original and its reflection in a mirror (resemblance, image, without equality). Trinitarian theology, anthropology, metaphysics of species, noetics of reflection are tied together around this theory of resemblance, which is oriented toward an end: the theology of the image of God in the divine Trinity, the only case where all three properties, image, resemblance, and equality, are present” (ibid).

For Augustine, metaphors of the Trinity abound, and shed light on other knowledge. He famously used an analogy of the interrelation of three faculties he attributed to the mind — memory, understanding, and will — to make it more intelligible to humans.

“For the Son, image of the Father, constitutes a perfect equality of God with himself. And if there is an image implying perfect equality, it is that which characterizes the relation of parent and child; they are identical generically and specifically, and the parent is the principle of the child. [quote from Augustine:] ‘From the parent is taken (expressa) the resemblance of the son, even if we properly call it image, and it can be taken to the point where it is properly called an equality, except that the parent precedes him in time…. But in God the condition of time does not apply…. It follows not only that the Son is the image of God, because he comes from him; not only that he is the resemblance, because he is the image, but again that he is equal to him’ ” (pp. 57-58, ellipses in original).

“More resembling than resemblance, more essential again than the conception, equality is the accomplishment par excellence of the image. Thus the image culminates in the reproduction of the identical. The theology of resemblance is accomplished in a metaphysics of adequation. It is indeed possible to order the world according to degrees of resemblance, to the point where it contracts into the primordial equality of God with himself” (p. 58).

But all this is by way of contrast to the developments of the 13th century. Here Boulnois returns to his major theme of the status and uses of representation. And in a moment, we’ll get to the fascinating subject of perspectiva.

“From Bonaventure to Henry of Ghent, the authors of the 13th century transpose this system of resemblances into more or less accomplished forms of representation. For Thomas, all effects in some measure represent their cause, but in diverse manners. Certain effects ‘represent only the causality of the cause, and not its form, in the manner that smoke represents fire’. These are signs of inference, which represent as a ‘trace’ (vestigium), for the trace shows the passage of something, but not the nature of that which has passed. Others ‘represent the cause according to the resemblance of its form, as the engendered fire represents the engendering fire, and the statue of Mercury represents Mercury’ — and this representation is called ‘image’, because it participates in the same form. The trace, sign of inference, constitutes the first degree of representation. But the image constitutes the second degree, since it implies a community of form. To cover the entire surface of the thinkable is to follow a system of traces and images, starting from the investigation of adequate representation” (p. 58).

“Over a vast surface of signs and inferences, the order of the image is detached by a turning that is proper to it. It is imposed within the vaster framework of an episteme dominated, at the end of the 13th century, by the paradigm of perspectiva. This discipline includes at once a geometrical optics, a theory of vision, and a psychology of perception. It is inscribed progressively in the disciplines of the quadrivium [the part of the liberal arts that includes arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy], taught in the faculty of arts. Medieval perspective rests on a certain number of simple principles, deployed by the main Arabic, and later Latin, theoreticians of this discipline: Al-Kindi, Al-Hazen, Avicenna, Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, and John Peckham.”

“1) Light by its nature follows a rectilinear trajectory from its source to its destination, passing closer and closer through the intermediary points in the medium that propagates it. It is possible to interpret the propagation, reflection, and refraction of light according to laws of equal proportionality, the laws of geometry.”

“2) The same law extends from punctual sources to extended objects. In effect, each point of an illuminated or colored object radiates independently following straight lines. Light can integrally transmit an image of the object in each of its points, and thus constitute a coherent figure. This form, species, or resemblance is transmitted by transparent media in act to polished surfaces, from which they are projected. The experience of a dark room proves this: when light passes through a small opening, the image takes the form of the luminous source, and not that of the opening. The luminous rays are transported according to the geometrical laws of figure, color, and all the visual qualities of the object. ‘It is necessary to give all the causes of natural effects by lines, angles, and figures…. A natural agent propagates its power by itself to the receiver, whether it acts on the senses or on matter. This power is sometimes called a species, sometimes resemblance, and this is the same thing’ [quoted from Al-Hazen (Ibn al Haytham), De aspectibus]. Resemblance is emitted by the thing and transmitted by light, according to the laws of geometry.”

“3) In this visible image, the closer the points are to the center of the luminous cone, the more they are affected by the radiation of many points, and the more they receive an intense radiation. This is the phenomenon of the penumbra.”

“4) The eye itself is one optical system among others. Vision is effectuated by images (species) propagated from the visible object to the eye. It is produced by a pyramid of rays that has for its base the object, and for its summit, the eye. The rays penetrate the organ of vision, the lens of the eye; by geometric projection, they give birth to a proportional image of the original, which is precisely the visual impression. The lens effectuates the perception of every object thanks to the perception of each of its points, but the more powerful and efficacious rays are those that are perpendicular to the surface. Thus visual sensation is nothing but the reception of the species induced by the visible according to its proper laws.”

“5) The eye is an organ destined to receive images, and not to form them or to emit a ray that is then reflected by the object. Vision is the reception of the form of colored bodies on the surface of the lens. It is an information, or a faithful passive impression, produced by a real form emitted by the object.”

“6) The form deposited on the lens is transmitted to the brain by the vitreous humor and the optic nerves. The nerves are hollow tubes full of animal spirits, which form a medium capable of conducting by a series of forces the very image of the object (including its color and configuration) to the brain, the stronghold of internal sense. But the final perception takes place after the meeting of the two optic nerves, which superimpose the images from the two eyes in a cavity of the brain. This is the only place where species are no longer propagated in a rectilinear manner. Besides the proper and common sensibles (size, figure, and movement), the species equally transport complex qualities, which are transmitted by sense, but discerned by the intellect” (pp. 58-61).

Bacon’s major work in this area is entitled The Multiplication of Species.

“We underline here that the species are propagated in being multiplied. It is not the same accident that migrates from one subject to another, but its conforming copy. The object engenders the species of light and color in the point adjacent to the transparent medium that surrounds it, which does the same, and so on. The continuous multiplication of species follows the rays issued by all the points of the surface of the object, until it encounters an opaque obstacle: a quality numerically distinct, but specifically identical, is transmitted to the subject immediately adjacent, until it reaches the ultimate receiving subject. The species or resemblances thus transmit the accidents of the object to the eye, where they are impressed. The transmission of the image passes by the actualization of the medium in potentiality (the diaphanous), to the sense organs and the cavities of the brain that house the internal senses. Thus it is the same visible form of the object that is transmitted by the exterior transparent medium and the apparatus of vision (vitreous humor, optic nerve, which constitute a transparent internal medium). The concrete image of the object is neither reversed nor encoded: — it is not reversed, because the rays are refracted by the posterior surface of the lens without intersecting, as distinct from the inverted images in dark rooms; — it not encoded, because it is the same visible image, transported by the diaphanous medium”, that is emitted by the object, received by the lens, transmitted by the optic nerve, and seen in the brain. Medieval perspective is binocular. It applies to moving eyes that can inspect objects part by part, and converge on a mobile observer, capable of evaluating the relative position of objects in relation to her own body.”

“The same geometry governs the propagation of light and the projection of images in all the optical systems: the shadow cast, the dark room, are all subject to the same laws. Perspective is a paradigm that presides over the destinies of the propagation of light, of vision, and of knowledge. It at once furnishes the law of the visible and the content of visual images. It is given for a passive registration of the real, by a natural and necessary reflection. Resemblance is objective; it founds, in the order of nature, the projections of shadows and light, of measures and images. It organizes the regime of representation in the register of the visible.”

“But the paradigm extends beyond optics: the propagation of species follows the same rules for auditory and olfactory species. Thus the objects of perception multiply the sensibles proper to each sense. The propagation of the real species in a physical medium explains the causal effect of the exterior object on the sense organ: the sensible qualities do not act directly on the organs of sense, but at a distance and by the species; then the species are centralized by the common sense, combined and separated by the imagination, to recompose an image of the exterior object. Beyond the visual image, the law of representation governs every sensation, instructs every form of knowledge before governing every species of thought. The species is the immaterial subject of causal activity, which traverses all the media, and which applies its effect as a resemblance of an original efficient cause. Roger Bacon gives expression to the universal principle of causality: ‘Every efficient cause acts by its proper power, which it exercises on the adjacent matter, as the light (lux) of the sun exercises its power on the air…. This power is called resemblance, image, species, and it is designated by many other names…. This “species” produces all action in the world, because it acts on the sense, on the intellect, and on all the matter of the world, to engender things.’ Every cause radiates resemblances. Things operate at a distance in engendering the species that are similar to them, so that nature is a system of similitudes: each point in the world emits a species that expresses it, and the world is constituted by the resonance of all these expressions.”

“Thus the resemblances are not produced by perception, but transported by light, even if no one perceives them. An autonomous structure, similitude organizes nature, founds the general expression of substances, institutes the relation of the world to itself, without necessarily passing through the medium of an act of knowing. Action at a distance, magnetism, the influence of the stars on the earth, the reflection of an image in the mirror, the imitation of God by the human intellect, all these operations are rays of resemblance. By it, the world curves its spirals on itself. Similitude is the new name for the order of the world. The world, garden of resemblances, represents itself to itself” (pp. 61-63).

Now we come to an important distinction.

“Contrary to perspective in the Renaissance, medieval perspectiva does not designate the place of a subjectivity. It does not impose any privileged point of view. Space is an atmosphere in which objects are situated in relation to each other without any common measure, and without the predominance of the eye of the spectator. The order of the visible world is not a symbolic form that determines the proportions between objects, but an attribute of bodies, an immanent structure. Medieval perspective does not have for its object quantifiable extension, but figures and bodies. Olivi thus says that the distance of the object from the eye, which is the index of the position of the object, is not a thing, and does not produce any representation of itself. It is not visible by itself: ‘The quantity of intermediary space cannot be represented by the species of the thing that exists at the end of that space.’ The only representable quantity is that of visible form, and not that of space. Space is only the envelope of bodies and the archipelago of figures, a differentiated, discontinuous system of finite extensions. Space is not a homogeneous form, a continuous quantity, but the emergence of figures, the source of the appearance of similitudes: anisotropic, heterogeneous, it is oriented and centered by the subjects that are emitters of species, in a general heterotopy. In the invisible frame of transparent media, resemblance renders visible, as it were jerkily, the diaspora of the world.”

“The tree of identities and differences comes first of all to find a home in the space opened by perspective. It is this order of resemblance that metaphysics will tighten, replace by its proper convenentia, by an order of congruence, a hierarchized order of identities and differences, where the diverse is unified by a measure of extension that is more vast, generic, transcendental, or conceptual. These resemblances, which go by numerous names — images, resemblances, idols, phantasms, simulacra, forms, intentions, passions — are distributed over three levels:”

“– Perception is a global knowledge of figure, at once a perception of the form of the whole, of the relation of this form to its parts, and of the relations among the parts. [quote from Al-Hazen:] ‘The power to distinguish distinguishes all the forms that come from it. It distinguishes the colors of the parts, the diversity of the colors, and the ordering of the parts among themselves.’ “

“– Knowledge of a species is engendered by its cause. It is indissolubly the effect and the resemblance of the agent on the patient, but without destroying it, without total conversion of its matter. [quote from Roger Bacon:] ‘The patient rests in its specific nature, but it is rendered similar (assimulatum) to the agent by the species.’ The species presupposes a substrate able to receive and be modified by it. All knowledge is a knowledge by species, since in the act of knowing, the soul is rendered similar to what it knows, while remaining substantially identical. Knowing is only an effect of resemblance, an effect induced on the organs of sense, on the internal sense and on the imagination. The matter of the sensory organ and the nature of the sensitive soul are the subjects of the affection constitutive of knowledge. The species representing a thing and the thing of which it is the species have the same specific nature, even if their mode of being differs. The representation by species is again an effect of resemblance. It guarantees the order of the world, and maintains the classification of species.”

“– Intentio. [quote from Avicenna:] ‘Intentio is what the soul apprehends in the sensible, even if the external sense does not apprehend it at first.’ The external sense apprehends the exterior form, but the intentio is perceived by the internal sense. It is thus, says Avicenna, that the lamb apprehends, behind the exterior form of the wolf, its intentio, that is to say the reason why it should be afraid and flee, which the sense cannot do. Intentiones have an ambiguous status: they are at once the res [thing] sent by the object, and the result of an intellectual operation of abstraction. The intentio refers to a thing aimed at (intendere), but it is not itself that thing: imagination can apprehend a thing by an intention when the thing has disappeared. This vocabulary, taken from the Latin translation of Avicenna, refers to the concept, to the form of the essence as secondary substance (mana), but here, in the sense where intentio is definitional form, less perfect and less real than the thing it defines. The species [quote from Roger Bacon:] ‘is called intentio in the common usage of the physicians; they say, in the reason of the weakness of its being in relation to the thing, that it is not truly a thing, but more an intentio of the thing, that is to say a resemblance.’ Sensation, at once global and distinctive, makes particular properties appear, which define the objective aspects of the thing seen. [quote from Al-Hazen:] ‘It distinguishes generally all the intentiones of the thing seen, which appear by vision and by the total form of the thing seen, composed of these intentiones.’ Thus the total form integrates, aggregates for perception many real aspects, which we can separate, analyze in it — the intentiones, which make it the object of an abstraction.”

“The image sensed becomes the image thought. Perception deposits an image, and renders objects present to the mind. This process guarantees a real, causal, connection between mundane reality and concepts. Principle at work in nature and in science, in perception and in the concept, perspective extends to phantasms and concepts, beneath the division between imagination and logical thought. It serves as the model for a whole coherent tradition, which claims a new form of truth, the philosophy and theology of representation. Perspective institutes a physical, perceptive, and noetic correspondence between objects in space and their representation. Perceptive and psychological mechanism, it allows access to the world by an ensemble of images, the representations already produced by the world itself.”

“In the order of natural causality, the sensible species represents the object that caused it. That is why it allows the inverse trajectory: starting from the image, we can infer its object in a probable way, thus building a science. In the order of artificial causality, it signifies (and implies) the art of the artisan, but it resembles naturally, not its cause but the object it represents. If causality goes from the thing to the species, there is a natural relation (at least probable and constant) of resemblance, which goes from the species to the thing. Words and species refer to things: words are not the species of things, because they are imposed arbitrarily, but they engender a species in relation with the thing which the word was imposed to signify. The vocal sound is not caused by the species of the thing (or else there could not be many languages), and it does not signify it directly, but it is coordinated with it, since the one like the other refers in a convergent manner to the thing. Knowledge and signification are two different relations to the thing, but they presuppose one another. The species is a natural sign that is adjoined to the conventional signification of language. The order of resemblance and the order of signification are two distinct pieces, but articulated the one to the other in a system of general semiotics.”

“Perspectiva is not only a description of natural causality in the domain of the visible, but the general grammar of resemblance, which institutes the order of things in the register of representation. The order of representation is an objective regularity, universal, determining from outside all the process of perception, of knowledge, and of thought. Law of objective configuration, it builds an ordered, coherent, and finite world. And if the observer belongs to the order of representation, it is as a subject in the in the sense of a receptacle, one support of representations among others: the eye is a subject of representation in the same way as water, air, or the wall in a dark room, for example. If it sees, it is because it is installed in the visible, considering it from a certain place, at the summit of a cone of rays, and bombarded with a bundle of images. It is not a luminous consciousness facing the dazzling tapestry of the visible, for it belongs to the world as one of its parts. Representation brings on the scene the human in the theater of the world” (pp. 63-67).

Next in this series: Species, Object, Cause of Existence

A Triangular Relation?

In the previous post, we saw a sharply binary model of signifier and signified being applied by Roger Bacon and Duns Scotus. At least in Bacon’s case, this goes hand in hand with a new kind of “direct” realism that aims to deal directly with things in the world, and repudiates the subtleties of the indirect account of knowledge and meaning by way of concepts and the passions of the soul that was broadly shared by Aristotle, Augustine, and Boethius. But Scotus complicates the picture considerably by also promoting a triangular model that includes concepts understood in a certain way. Scotus also argues for a non-psychological approach to concepts.

“Does the sign signify the thing itself or the concept in the soul? — We have said that for Scotus, the great semantic controversy of the Middle Age, more fundamental than any other, is constituted by the following question: Is the vocal sound the sign of the thing or of the concept?” (Boulnois, L’Être et représentation, p. 35, my translation throughout).

“The line of the English Franciscans seems to have developed this theory long before him: for Roger Bacon, linguistic signs have been arbitrarily instituted by humans to directly indicate the things themselves. Words are not related to things by means of a conceptual interpretation. A new, radically non-Platonic way of thinking language arises: instrument of communication, it ‘takes the place of’ (supponit pro) the thing, and not the idea of the speaker. What is more, it exercises a representative function uniquely defined by its capacity to refer to present and existent things. For Roger Bacon, the name signifies solely the thing on which it has been imposed. It can only refer to things (even if it can signify connotata, by inference). But at the same time, there is a relation between the vox [vocal sound] and the species in the soul. The vocal sound is its proper presentification, but it makes the representation of a thing arise in the mind. It makes the thing be conceived, or makes it arise in the soul. Thus the sign in a single gesture refers to the thing and recalls a representation. The vox is not a concept, but a thing that signifies another; it signifies a singular thing in the present, without involving essence, and no longer passes by way of the intellectus to arrive at the res [thing]. There is a sort of collaterality of the sermo [spoken word] and the intellectus that both refer to the res” (ibid).

Scholastic accounts of language typically focus on proprieties of naming. Implicit in this approach is an account of meaning that begins from individual terms. Broadly speaking, this approach has an affinity to modern bottom-up theories of semantics, which aim to put together a picture of the world in a compositional way from individual terms taken as given.

In the early 20th century, Saussurean linguistics developed an alternative approach that treats the signifier in a relational way, such that each signifier is understood in the first instance as identified by its difference from other signifiers, independent of its nominal reference to a signified. This led to an incipient “deconstructive” analysis of individual terms in the broad current of 20th-century European (especially French) “structuralism”, which then came to be explicitly thematized in developments that Anglophone writers came to refer to as “post” structuralist.

From a completely different starting point in a pragmatist reading of analytic philosophy and German Idealism, in the late 20th century Brandom developed an “inferentialist” semantics that begins from whole sentences as the minimal unit of assertion, and focuses on explaining the “material” inferential properties of propositions in terms of normative assessments of proprieties of concrete assertion, rather than in terms of universal formal rules. Brandom understands the meaning of concepts inferentially, in terms of their use or functional role in assertions, and emphasizes the non-psychological character of meaning understood in this way. From this point of view, concepts are not to be identified with individual terms, and instead have a holistic character, such that each concept involves other concepts.

In sharp contrast to both of these as well as to Aristotle and Augustine, Scotus develops his triangular model of signification in a way that aims to be consistent with a primacy of individual things, and with a direct association of words to things.

“[I]n his first commentary on [Aristotle’s] treatise On Interpretation, [Scotus] maintains, like Boethius and Thomas Aquinas, that the vocal sound signifies the concept, which resembles the thing or ‘represents’ it. The vox immediately signifies the species, the representation of the thing in the intellect, but it mediately signifies that which it represents, which is to say the thing itself. But in the second commentary, closer to Bacon, he holds that the vocal sound directly signifies not the conceptions of the intellect, but the thing itself. When Aristotle and Boethius say that the name directly signifies the passions of the soul, it is necessary to understand by this not the concept, or the resemblance in the soul, but the thing that is conceived. This second version is evidently a radical revision of Scotist semantics. It is also the definitive position of the theological works” (pp. 36-37).

“Following Bacon and [Peter] Olivi, Duns Scotus breaks with the Boethian interpretation of signification, but he does so with a nuance, integrating the Aristotelian semantics; the verbal sign (verbum) is directly the sign of both the thing and the concept, but it is in the first instance the sign of the thing, and then the sign of the concept. The sign comes from a direct causality of the thing and signifies it directly. Nonetheless there is a logical anteriority of the concept, for it is on it that the linguistic sign depends. Scotus formulates his response in the vocabulary of his own theory of causality. The concept, the written sign, and the phoneme are all three ordered effects of the same cause: the thing itself…. Writing, the vocal sound, and the concept are signs, situated on the same plane, none of them exercising any causality over the others, and they signify the same signified” (p. 37).

If the sign is in the first instance the sign of the thing, it is difficult to see how the concept can be logically anterior to the relation of sign to thing. But Scotus apparently wants to assert both, and also that the concept is a kind of sign, and that the sign is a kind of thing.

“[T]he word, the concept, and the thing no longer form a series, but a triangle…. The play of natural causes, the weight of institution, and the semantic relation are articulated with one another, but remain autonomous…. The concept is the first, natural effect of the thing itself. It is it that is first of all a sign of the thing, and not the vocal sound or writing. It constitutes the object of logic, an anterior object, more fundamental than vocal sounds, and supposed by them…. If there is a science of things, metaphysics, and a science of words, grammar, logic occupies an intermediary and central place, as the science of concepts” (p. 39).

Scotus wants to give metaphysics a new status as a rational science, in a strong sense that is independent of Aristotle. Meanwhile, he also explicitly rejects Aristotle’s thesis that logic is a tool for clearly expressing meaning and not a science with its own subject matter, which Brandom has recently revived under the name of logical expressivism.

“Noetics studies the concept insofar as it constitutes an aspect of the mind (mens), where it is found as an accident in a subject. Logic, on the contrary, considers the concept as sign, insofar as it refers to a signified. This is the ambiguity of representation: we consider in it either the thing that represents, or the thing that it represents, the being of the representing or the being represented…. Logic is distinct from psychology…. The aim of thought is not reducible to its psychic reality” (pp. 39-40).

Boulnois does not point it out here, but Scotus’s assumption that the concept is in the mind “as an accident in a subject” is directly opposed to Augustine’s strong contention that the mind should not be seen as a subject in which knowledge and love inhere as accidents.

“In this triangle of word, concept, and thing, the concept is described as a sign, and reciprocally the cognitive act is itself a semiosis. Duns Scotus breaks with Augustine and Boethius, who reserve signification to vocal sounds and writing. He participates in what C. Panaccio has called a general movement of ‘semantization’ of thought. Logic, conceived as a rational science, a theory of signs or of ‘signifying reasoning’ (ratio significandi), is no longer a subalternate discipline, concerned with the expression of thought. Because thought is signifying, logic becomes a theory of thought itself. Nevertheless, it does not fall to it to resolve the problem of the place of thought. Concepts are natural signs, not conventional ones: they are combined in propositions according to logical rules, the structure of which subtends all possible oral or written propositions, even if they are not proffered. They constitute the elements of a universal mental language, of a general grammar and of a pure theory of communication. This language is for Duns Scotus a subjacent condition of all oral enunciations and effective writings” (pp. 40-41).

Thus apparently the treatment of concepts as a kind of sign is closely related to the non-Aristotelian idea that logic is a science with its own subject matter.

“But above all, this ideal possibility is real: it is accomplished par excellence in the domain of angelic communication. Angels communicate with the aid of intelligible signs, which is to say pure concepts, without phonetic or graphical support. Each angel directly causes a concept in another, by an immediate communication. It is on this occasion that Duns Scotus formulates a formal theory of pure thought” (p. 41).

If concepts are natural signs and signs are real things, then concepts are real things.

“The sign establishes a double relation. On the one hand, it is the image of the thing that caused it; on the other hand, what is more important, it signifies it: the concept is a real object, which has a natural existence, belonging to a causal chain; but it bears a resemblance to the object it represents. This resemblance is produced by the concurrent double causality of the thing itself and the intelligible species conserved in memory. — Is it necessary to say that the concept preserves the transparency of representation, while the conventional sign loses it? For a concept, does representare signify a ‘resemblance to’, or simply: ‘taking the place of the presence’ of an object, which was already the sense of the word in Peter of Spain? Does the representivity of the concept for the intellect come from its resemblance to real objects, or from its dependence on a cause?” (pp. 41-42).

Given Scotus’s insistence that the sign refers directly to the thing, it is surprising to read that “We cannot pass directly from the representation to the thing” (p. 43). But our act is different from the reference of the sign, so technically there is no contradiction.

“But even in maintaining that the relation of cause to effect is first, Scotus does not go to the point of abandoning resemblance: both are real aspects of intellection. Even if it supposes the causality of the object, semiosis is a complex process that is not reduced to it, since it supposes a play of resemblances. The sign is recognized more than it is produced” (ibid).

In a way, the play of resemblances resembles the mutual dependence of signifiers in the Saussurean tradition.

That the sign is recognized more than it is produced is a nice injection of good sense that stands in obvious tension with the foundation myth of signs as imposed and instituted “at will”. But the user of a sign is usually not its institutor.

“The phoneme homo no longer signifies the concept of the human: like the concept, it signifies the real human, even if it depends on the concept for this. The three forms of signification (formal sign, oral sign, written sign) are parallel, even if their terms are ordered according to a serial dependency. The signification of the concept is a natural relation between the intellect and things. The signified of phonemes and graphemes remains the thing itself, but it depends on a conventional relation.”

“In this Scotus directly opposes Aristotle, for whom the vox is a sound emitted by the mouth of a human being, accompanied by an imaginative representation. Words are not the tools of knowledge, but of communication” (p. 43).

I think that knowledge in Plato and Aristotle (and Hegel and Gadamer and Habermas and Brandom, among others) implicitly has a dialogical (and therefore in part communicative) character. Gadamer has highlighted the dialogical element in Plato and Aristotle. The “communicative reason” elaborated by Habermas involves a dialogical view of knowledge. It is only “monological” conceptions of knowledge that do not involve an element of communication.

“In itself, the written or oral sign is only an ensemble of sounds or letters, which causes nothing more than the knowledge of itself. The imposition of the sign describes the passage from concept to sign, and reciprocally interpretation allows a reascent from the sign to the intelligible concept that subtends it. The process of interpretation follows a trajectory inverse to that of imposition. It is thus a contingent process of association” (p. 45).

“In the moment of imposition, the imposer associates sense and intellect, in relating a perceived name to a conceived thing. In the moment of interpretation, the hearer recalls the relation between the name perceived in the present, and the past thing that she knew more or less distinctly” (p. 46).

I don’t think of interpretation as happening in a moment. It is not only dialogical, but also involves mediation, concepts, and an extension in time. In the same way, only in a very improper sense is jumping to a conclusion a kind of judgment. But Boulnois is summarizing Scotus here, not necessarily asserting this in his own name.

“Signification cannot take the place of knowledge. There is no transparency between the sign and thought” (ibid).

Knowledge implies a knower in a way that formal signification does not. But the dialogical expression and elaboration of knowledge is closely interwoven with the dialogical elaboration of signification and meaning.

“But what is it that is signified? The thing, yes, but in what sense of the word ‘thing’? According to [Scotus’s] Questions on On Interpretation, not the thing in its singularity and its existence, but the thing as quiddity [what Aristotle calls the “what it is”], indifferent to singularity and universality, to existence and nonexistence: the thing as it is seen by the mediation of a concept…. According to this semantic, signification is no longer an intelligible correlation between the signifying and the concept” (pp. 46-47).

Indeed, “thing” is said in many ways. Thing as quiddity and thing as object are almost mutually exclusive. I use “object” in a deflationary way as a relative term, as in “the object of”, not as naming something that is assumed to be a free-standing thing in its own right. I don’t actively use the term “quiddity”, but I think of it as a more static and self-contained projection of essence, which in its more proper usages is not something self-contained. Brandom says that a concept is not the kind of thing we could have just one of. I think of essence in a similar way. All articulation is inter-articulation, involving more than one term.

“From now on, signification can be thought independent of the scope of the concept.”

“Linguistic signs signify directly, without passing through the concept. They can signify a thing more precisely than intellect can conceive it. The circulus vini, a sign that indicates the presence of new wine in the inn, causes nothing new in the intellect of the one who perceives it. It is an arbitrary sign, constituted by a convention…. Convention is limited to establishing a relation of reason between two things, two physical realities: the sonorous matter of the phoneme (the vox) and the reality signified (the res). To be valid, this relation-convention supposes the knowledge of the two terms…. A weak and confused knowledge of the thing suffices for us to be able to use a sign, and to signify in a suitable way. We can signify in a way that is more precise than we conceive” (pp. 47-48).

Signification is a “formal” concept, in what seems to be Scotus’s distinctive sense of the term “formal”, which is neither Platonic nor Kantian, and also not to be understood in terms of modern logical or mathematical formalism. The formal status of signification is what allows it to be “more precise” than the knowledge we actually have. But as Hegel reminds us, formal precision (in any of these senses) is not always a virtue when applied to real things.

“Duns Scotus is inspired by the analyses of Olivi to establish a relation between semantic representation and juridical representation, the sign and the law.”

Peter Olivi was another important 13th-century Franciscan, and another strong voluntarist.

“A sign can be speculative or practical. The speculative sign leads to knowledge; it allows a concept of the signified to be formed in the intellect, but its characteristic tells us nothing of its real existence; for example, homo is the sign of a concept, and allows the knowledge of an essence, of a nature in general, whether or not a human exists. The practical sign implies the existence of its signified; it is the sign of an existence, and not of a simple possibility…. Since the practical sign signifies the advent of an effect, and this effect depends on the ordered power (that is to say on the free voluntary disposition) of someone who can cause it, only the author of this effect can give this practical sign certain being. It suffices that the institutor is disposed to regularly produce the signified of the sign she institutes…. Contracts, pacts, and promises are examples. The practical sign pertains to a juridical order instituted by humans. It depends on a law…. The sign belongs to the domain of the will of a free agent, who is self-determining in limiting herself to the order she institutes. This one, in proportion to her political power, can engage in rendering real what she has disposed in the order of signs” (pp. 48-49).

To me it seems preposterous to say that the sign belongs to the domain of the will of a free agent. A sign belongs to a field of reciprocal determination that is independent of anyone’s will. (See also Hegel on Willing.)

“The practical sign is an ordination of power. In this sense, it belongs to the theology of absolute power and ordained power. In Duns Scotus, these two concepts apply to every free agent: absolute power includes all that a free being can effectively do, de facto. Ordained power includes all she can do in conformity to a law, de jure. The institutor is an absolutely free agent, who self-determines freely in choosing this or that order” (p. 49).

An earlier book by Boulnois develops the history of the theology of absolute power and ordained power in detail. A later book treats the history of theological voluntarism in the Latin tradition.

For Scotus “It is will that founds the truth of the practical sign, and not the inverse” (p. 52).

But “there are signs of which we are not the institutors, and that we receive as fully established by an alien will…. We are under the law of signs, and they do not always depend on us” (ibid).

Next in this series: Perspectiva

Scotist Semiotics?

Still slowly working on a re-reading and partial translation of Olivier Boulnois’s L’Être et représentation (1999), we have already gotten a hint that Latin scholastics such as Roger Bacon and John Duns Scotus used some of the very same key terminology as the 20th-century Saussurean structuralists, but seem to have held a diametrically opposed view on the specific matter of the relation of signifier and signified. Boulnois does not explicitly mention the more recent French context. The last post was in part about what is called “signification”.

As a university student in the late 70s, I was tremendously excited to learn about French so-called “structuralism”, which seemed to support my own primitive insight that “relations are prior to things”. In this context there was a lot of talk about signifier and signified, growing out of the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure. Together with the American pragmatist Charles Pierce, Saussure is considered to have originated modern semiotics, or the study of signs. For a while, semiotics was high on my horizon.

A key point in the Saussurean tradition, which grew very big in postwar France, was that there is no direct relation of the signifier to the signified. Instead, it was said in effect that we are signifying animals who live and thrive in a sea of signifiers, and build meaning out of differentiation.

For Saussure, the signified is not the referent but the concept. What the concept really is was not discussed in detail. Saussure himself seems to have seen it as falling under what he called psychology and social psychology, which was a rather conventional view when he was writing in the early 20th century, but this plays no real role in his theory.

What is essential is the detachment of signification from reference. For Saussure, the sign is a two-leveled thing that consists of (sensible) signifier and (conceptual) signified. But in relation to its referents in the world, the sign is “arbitrary”. The sound or word “tree” has no inherent relation to a tree. I am not concerned to argue for or against Saussure here, just setting the stage.

For Roger Bacon, signs refer directly to things. For Scotus, “The sign leads immediately to the signified. Between them, we must not ask about any intermediary. It attaches only to a single signified: the present thing itself. It represents it” (p. 26, my translation throughout, emphasis in original throughout)

Here we see an explicit strong positive valuation both on presence and immediacy, and at the same time on representation. Representability will be Scotus’s minimal criterion of being. I see all three of these claims as deeply problematic, but that does not mean they can be simply and categorically rejected.

“This theory is unfolded in four theses:

“1) Every sign is a thing, and reciprocally every thing can be a sign; it is thus that the father is a sign in relation to his son. ‘The sign is said relative to a signified, as “father” relative to a “son”; and it is also necessarily the sign of something, which is its foundation.’ A sign is at the same time the manifestation of something, and refers to an other. It is necessarily a real foundation, even if it also implies a relation of signifying/signified. On the one hand, it brings an information to the sense, the sensible species (visible, audible, etc.), or to the cognitive power (the intelligible species); on the other, it produces a knowledge of something else” (ibid).

The sign thus brings a (participial or ongoing) “information” or informing form to sense or intellect.

The notion of forms being somehow transmitted, and of their being a kind of thing that can be transmitted, has an interesting ambiguity. The image of species as discrete things flying through the air seems hard to sustain. And yet, there is a sense in which form is not locked up in one thing, but can be “communicated”. And what we call the thing — not merely stuff or an object, but participial “information”, or some form as a happening — is grounded in the becoming or manifestation associated with a present participle.

This manifestation is the mark of reality, which is not just a collection of ready-made objects or truths but a process of being manifested. This goes beyond mere presence as a snapshot or image capable of being mastered, and beyond mere representation as referentially standing for something. This is the sense in which objectivity as a happening involving essentiality goes far beyond the mere being of objects mastered or possessed.

I have always thought it was a happening or unfolding (or happening-as-unfolding, as distinct from happening as a mere punctual event — procession or “emanation”) like this that the neoplatonic talk about something beyond being aimed at — not mere being-there or a necessary support for it, but a nonpunctual unfolding of unmastered essence that is precisely not to be identified with “Being”, or with the putative object of “ontology”. And on the other hand, I want to think that ordinary being is already nonpunctual or outside of itself, and thus strictly transcends both representation and event, at very the same time that it is susceptible to genuine understanding and criteria of reasonableness.

“2) Every sign supposes an inference. Here Scotus recollects the Aristotelian heritage, in line with the unification aimed at since Albert the Great. Taking the theology of sacraments as a point of departure, and trinitarian theology as an example, it is not limited to the model of the linguistic sign. The sign permits an inference, which starts from the posterior to go back to the inferior [sic]: if b, then a. A thing signifies another if its existence entails that of another, be it anterior or posterior. Indeed it becomes the element of a reasoning by inference or likelihood (enthymeme). One same theory of the sign is to provide an account of signification and of inference. It allows a unified theory of semiotics as cognitive science to be constructed. The linguistic sign is only a particular case, thought on the model of inference. It functions not as a code (according to a biunivocal correspondence), but according to relations that are more numerous and more complex” (p. 27).

Quite unexpectedly, we have here not only an emphasis on inference in the context of signification, but it is contrasted with a mechanical code or biunivocal correspondence in a way that makes it sound like what Sellars and Brandom call material inference. But for Brandom this grounds a non-representationalist account, whereas Scotus, as we will see over the course of a number of upcoming posts, is arguably the arch-representationalist of the whole Western tradition.

“3) Scotus aims to provide a general and unique theory of the sign. To be a sign, it suffices to be a thing. But what is a ‘thing’? Not always a sensible, physical, material reality: for him it suffices to have a formal being, a reality sufficiently unified and positive to be able to be opposed to the term with which it is in relation, to become the foundation of this relation. The sign is the real term of a real knowledge. Unlike a sensible thing, a sign is first of all a formal object, a possible object of knowledge. ‘This is true not only of the sensible sign, taking “sense” [in Augustine’s definition] strictly, for the corporeal sense, but again it is true for the incorporeal sense, taking sense generally, for any cognitive power.’ The senses are not only sensibility (here, in the organic sense), but knowledge in the broad sense — intellection. The sign is not always sensible; it can be immaterial, and consist in a concept or an intelligible species. Like Bacon, Duns Scotus integrates in the theory of the sign the intelligible signs that are the concepts of the soul. But he envisions also the case of the angels, who communicate and transmit species or purely intelligible representations. By a philosophical decision, Scotus generalizes the status of the sign. The subtle Doctor gives an indifferent definition that is neutral and transcends genres. He conceives a transcendental semiotic” (pp. 27-28, brackets in original).

The idea of “formal distinction” — roughly, that there can be a “real” difference in definition where there is no difference in “being”, whatever that is — seems both plausible, and by no means inherently tied to the objectionable claims that will is superior to reason.

I’m still grappling with the suggestion that a concept could be a sign. That concepts are inferences, or at least are closely associated with inferences, seems plausible enough, and certainly better than the idea that a concept is a mental image. Brandom identifies concepts with rules we adopt to govern inference. That signification is closely related to inference also makes sense. But while it makes sense that a concept would be immaterial, I find it hard to affirm that the same would be true of a sign.

“4) The sign concerns the category of relation. Bacon had already remarked that ‘the sign pertains to the category of relation’. By itself, the sign brings about the knowledge of something else. It is constituted by a relation of inference to the thing signified. Does it go the same for signification as for knowledge? For Bacon, the sign represents something to someone: it implies two relations, in the accusative and in the dative, toward the signified and toward the interpreter, and it is the second that is essential. But Aristotle himself describes knowledge as a relation, and remarks that the destruction of the thing known entails that of the corresponding knowledge. Does the sign still signify when its signified disappears? The first, traditional, position consists in dissociating the truth of enunciation from the truth of the sign, and says, like Anselm, that there is a ‘true sign’ even when it does not signify something. Quite the contrary, for Bacon the sign loses its value as a sign. ‘If we cannot conceive anything by a sign, it is void (cassum) and vain, it cannot be a true sign; but it is only a sign according to the substance of the sign, and it does not have the status of a sign: it is thus that the substance of the father remains when his son is dead, but not the relation of paternity. And whatever vocal sound, the circle of wine or an other [sign], imposed in act in relation to a thing and instituted for it, can represent it and signify it, if what it signifies does not exist in act, it is not a sign in act.’ If the thing that it represents is absent, the sign represents nothing, it is indeed not a sign. It must receive a new institution” (pp. 28-29).

This use of Latin substantia seems very far indeed from Aristotle’s ousia.

Earlier, Boulnois had contrasted the radicality of Bacon’s direct realism with traditional views. He said that Bacon’s notion of the sign — in contrast with either that of Augustine or that of Aristotle — involves only two elements, omitting the mediating role of concepts or of the soul. Here it sounds like Bacon on another level does still leave a role for an interpreter. But perhaps an implicit distinction is being made between interpretation as immanent to the level of content (which a direct realist would presumably reject), and a transcendent dimension of something like the person of an interpreter standing over and above any content, which may be related to the voluntarism we will be hearing about shortly.

“The distinction between the kinds of sign is at the center of the semiotic theory: it brings out the principal articulations, and in particular allows the relation of signs in general to linguistic signs, of semiotics to semantics, to be thought. In Scotus, the relation signifier/signified is organized along three divisions” (p. 30).

Much more than a simple division of the subject matter is going on here.

“1) The relation signifier/signified can be natural or conventional. The natural sign manifests a real relation that is found in nature, while the conventional sign translates a relation of reason, which only exists for the intellect that establishes it. This opposition recovers the division between two kinds of inferential signs. The non-linguistic natural signs imply a causality and a real relation; the instituted signs, of which linguistic signs are a part, imply an intellectual decision, and indeed a relation of reason. The conventional (ad placitum) sign has only a relation of reason with its object; it is a second intention, a simple perspective of the mind with no objective correlate. Scotus gives as an example ‘the voice and the gestures of the monks’ who have taken a vow of silence. These signs ‘could signify other things, if it pleased the institutors’, for what has been instituted at will can be revoked at will. — But the natural sign better reveals the essence of the sign: ‘The natural sign signifies more truly than the conventional sign’. In effect, the natural relation of the thing to its sign is a real relation, implying a first intention: an aspect of the thing has exercised a direct causality on what signifies it. For example, the relation of smoke to fire and that of the thing to the concept are real” (pp. 30-31).

The vocabulary of first and second intentions comes from Avicenna. Roughly, first intentions are supposed to refer directly to concrete real things and genera like “horse”, whereas second intentions refer to abstract concepts like “subject” or “genus”. For Avicenna, Scotus, and others in the scholastic tradition, second intentions generally have a second-class status and valuation in comparison to first intentions.

Whether there really are such things as natural signs is a question that will have to be considered. Of course insofar as there are natural things, or phenomena that we agree to call natural things, there “are” such natural things as smoke and fire. We can probably agree too that smoke is in some sense “caused” by fire. But that that inference from smoke to fire is truly naturally given, and not in any way due to us, is quite debatable.

Scotus’s talk about the will of the institutors of a language is also problematic. It can be fairly said that the state of a natural language at a given time is not the product of anyone’s will, individual or collective. Even more generally, real history is not based on a foundational moment. It is the cumulative compound of many accidents.

“Duns Scotus nonetheless does not relate signification to knowledge, but to will. Speech is an ordered communication, which makes manifest certain signs of a mutual will…. Language does not express a knowledge, but rather indicates a will…. What we understand, what is said, manifests what the speaker wants to say. It is inscribed in the space of reciprocity (mutuae voluntatis), and not that of monologue or meditation. Finally, it has communication in this space of interlocution as its aim. Language agrees with the human as a being who is not limited to reason, but who is given a will” (p. 31).

The invocation of mutuality and reciprocity and a “space of interlocution” here is an important surprise that makes this more interesting. This overlaps with the concerns of Hegel, Gadamer, Habermas, and Brandom.

I use the locution “I want to say that x” from time to time myself. Right now “I want to say” that while to speak of a definite will in the sense of intending this and not that is a perfectly good distinction, claims that there even is a power of pure arbitrary choice — let alone that it is superior to intellect — ought to be rejected. What the speaker according to herself wants to say is indeed a part of the story of meaning, but it is only a part.

“Signs suppose an institution on our part. They follow from a voluntary decision, and in no way from a nature of signs. The order of signs is not in the nature of things. Established, stopped, they found a status, a state, or an order among the participants in discourse. But the instituted sign can efficaciously represent an invisible reality: a will. It thus represents an intellection, but under its highest form, as will, and allows the willed effect to be produced. The sign thus instituted has a double function: it guarantees the certitude of recognition, it allows the efficacy of its operation. The model is thus that of a pact (pactio), whether it is a matter of a firm engagement (sponsio), a guarantee (fideiussio), or an oath (juramentum). The efficacy of signs comes from a pact between the liberties they represent” (pp. 31-32).

We can see that there is a high-level analogy between this notion of the “institution” of a regime of signs and the common early modern foundation myth of a social contract. Like the social contract, which is supposed to ground strong claims of political sovereignty — and unlike Hegelian mutual recognition, which is always in process and open to another chapter — the institution of signs for Scotus putatively has an “always already founded” status.

As is common in the scholastic tradition, efficacy here is also unequivocally associated with efficient causation, which is treated as the most primary kind of cause, whereas in a purely Aristotelian context efficient causes are subordinate, which implies that efficacy cannot be simply identified with efficient causality. Moreover, for Aristotle himself, something like the art of building is more truly an efficient cause than the architect or the carpenter or the hammer or the hammer’s blow.

“2) The signified can be permanent or intermittent. The sign that always has its signified is a ‘true sign’ in the sense of saint Anselm. It is also called ‘efficacious’ because it implies an efficient causality between the event and its sign. Reciprocally, for the one who depends on it, it always leads to a knowledge. It has no need of an interpreter, and always does what is expected of it: it always realizes its proper operation. The necessary sign can only appear accompanied by its signified: the eclipse is the true sign and efficacity of the interposition of the earth, since it is always the effect. This signification, which rests on a necessary inference, is necessary and always true. Thus all the natural signs are efficacious signs” (p. 32).

From an Aristotelian point of view, I have already expressed some skepticism about the claim that there are natural signs, but in the Catholic tradition it is commonly held that the sacraments, unlike linguistic signs, are efficacious in themselves, and Scotus is giving voice to this.

“But among the conventional signs, certain are efficacious (the sacraments), while others are not. The latter do not always imply their signifieds, but are sometimes true, sometimes false, that is to say neutral. This kind of sign is falsifiable, it is enunciated in variable propositions, and its signification is contingent. It is not efficacious, not having the power to realize its signified: in a proposition, it is not in the power of the speaker to make it so that the sign is accompanied by the thing it signifies. The sign is thus not true by itself, but is an exterior adequation to its signified. The ambivalence between the truth of the sign and truth of adequation mark the division between the conventional sign in general and the efficacious sign” (ibid).

The notion of efficacy here also seems be an all-or-nothing proposition — either total or inapplicable. I think there is a kind of efficacy of signs, but it is never total.

“3) Again we can distinguish signs according to their relation to a temporal signified. Some refer to the past (commemorative signs), others to the future (predictive signs: prognosticum), and others finally to the present (deictic signs: demonstrativum). For Scotus language is a commemorative sign, while the sacrament is a demonstrative sign” (pp. 32-33).

The “commemorative” status of linguistic signs is presumably supposed to be a kind of reference back to a founding event or will. Again I think of social contract theories.

Husserl also speaks of “deictic” expressions, but gives the term the nearly opposite meaning of indexical or occasional, as contrasted with ideal. Something like Husserlian deictic expressions are called “floating” signifiers in the Saussurean tradition, because they have no fixed reference.

“According to Thomas Aquinas, every sacrament has an omnitemporal signification. It is the sign of the past, of the present, and of what is to come (it recalls respectively the Passion of Christ, source of all grace, the present which is the gift of grace, and the glory to which every grace destines the human). Its signification contains an essential presence, present to all the dimensions of time. For Scotus, on the contrary, the sacrament is a demonstrative sign. Like every sign, it has an intentionality pro praesenti. It refers to the present and to it alone. It is in this sense that it is a representative sign: the representational function of the sacrament as sign implies the realization of the signified at the instant of its utterance, and indeed the temporal presence of the object represented. It has a deictic dimension that is demonstrative, in contrast to memory and the promise. Representation is first of all a form of presence.”

Aquinas and Scotus are both doing things with presence, but it seems as though presence in Scotus is contracted to a punctual status that is connected with a punctual or all-at-once view of representation. The strong association of representation with presence is also important.

“Duns Scotus cannot accept the thesis according to which the verb in present tense signifies the instant at which the utterance of every enunciation is completed, or all the conclusions that depend on it. ‘When it is uttered, the verb cosignifies time in the same way that it signifies [the signified]’: as a consequence, when it cosignifies the present, it only refers to the instant of its utterance. When no indication comes to specify a proposition, the time of the enunciated in the present is that of its enunciation. The intention of the speaker comes to coincide with the rhythm of the phrase. Expressed temporality follows lived temporality. In the same way, by the force of discourse, the demonstrative pronoun hoc [this] signifies what it shows the instant it is proffered” (pp. 32-34).

For Brandom, pronouns like “this”, far from being indissociable from immediacy, are anaphoric back-references to something said before.

“Three metaphysical principles are interlaced in the Scotist semantics: the primacy of the will for justifying the institution of signs, that of univocity for establishing their ideal state, and that of presence for explicating their temporal reference” (p. 34).

Next in this series: A Triangular Relation

Signification, Representation

The next section of Boulnois’s L’Être et représentation, barely over a page in length, begins to develop the relation between signification and representation.

“What is a sign? What is signification?”

“If, according to Bacon, the sign and the concept represent, we cannot directly identify signification and representation. Signification is not a special case of representation. But by another detour, we will come to concentrate representation in intellection. If the sign is a thing that, as Augustine says, presents itself to sense, it also presents an other to the spirit — it presents and it represents. The Baconian analysis opens the way for the formula of Scotus: ‘Signifying is representing something to the intellect’. Signification is a representation. In every proposition, the term represents in act all the signifieds. The sign is a substitute for the thing, which allows it to be rendered present to thought so that the latter can conceive it. It implies two distinct relations, to exterior things and to the concepts of the intellect.”

“This distinction recalls the distinction between reference and the semantic field, or, in medieval terms, between supposition and signification. In simple supposition, a term supposes for what it signifies: it recalls all the supports designated by its signification. On this point two interpretations confront one another. For one tradition of logic (called ‘Parisian’), supposition is the act of taking the place of the referent, of being an intentional and semantic back-reference (supponere pro). For another tradition (called ‘Oxonian’), supposing is being the subject of a predicate in a proposition, according to an extensional and syntagmatic presentation (supponere sub). This delimitation seems insufficient, for it obliges us to consider Scotus as Parisian more than Oxonian! He declares in effect ‘The common term supposes for all the supports’ that it recalls. Thus, the common term, ‘when it is not specified by some added [term], supposes absolutely [for] its [common] signified’. Supposition reveals itself as strictly indifferent, with neither priority nor pre-eminence of one support over the others: the term supposes ‘equally for all the [individual supports] that are equally related to its signified’. This indifference is also an indifference to their existence or nonexistence: the term ‘supposes for all the supports, existent or nonexistent’. It refers equally to each one of them. Every universal is distributed in its inferiors, since all the supports are of the same kind and of the same degree supports which the common term recalls. The theory of representation recovers the concept of supposition and takes over the whole weight of the reference of a term in a proposition” (pp. 24-25, my translation, brackets in original).

Next in this series: Scotist Semiotics?

Signs, Concepts, Things

Aristotle, Augustine, and Boethius each in their own way discuss signification as a triadic relation, with the soul or concepts in between signs and things. The 13th-century Franciscan Roger Bacon diverges sharply from this older view, arguing instead that signs refer directly to things. Bacon, who with Albert the Great was the first European to lecture publicly on the major works of Aristotle, is said to have initiated the study of Greek and Arabic optics (perspectiva) in the Latin-speaking world. The 1978 discovery of a manuscript of his lost work De Signis (On Signs) has raised scholarly awareness of his semiotics.

Boulnois has previously mentioned that Bacon treats concepts as a kind of sign. Here he contrasts Augustine and Aristotle with Bacon.

“Augustine thinks signification as a triadic relation between a thing, the sensible species perceived by the senses; another, the signified; and an interpreter, the mediating thought…. From the outset, Augustine distinguishes ‘natural’ signs from ‘given’ signs (data). Natural signs do not involve a voluntary production, but correspond to a natural causality: footprints recall the passage of an animal that produced them, smoke the fire that caused it. But the ‘given’ signs presuppose the intentional activity of a living being” (L’Être et représentation, p. 18, my translation throughout).

I like the idea that there is always need for interpretation.

The idea of natural signs is fascinating. These would have to be distinct from the sensible and intelligible “species” whose existence and role were debated by medieval authors. Whereas species are a kind of images or likenesses of things, smoke is not an image of fire, and tracks are not the image of an animal. The natural signs are each interpretable as effects of a particular kind, that point to a particular kind of natural cause. This implies the existence of a natural causality that is real in the sense of being in the things and not imposed by us, even if its particulars require interpretation.

Meanwhile, “given” signs do reflect a sort of imposition, even if the imposition is not the act of an individual. In contrast with the natural signs, they are said to be voluntary. The main example seems to be the words and expressions of a language. Relative to an individual, they are pre-given; but relative to a historical community, they mean what the community in fact takes them to mean.

“Augustine articulates this theory of the sign to that of language and intellection, notably with the idea of the verbum cordis [word of the heart], mental language, interior word, thought fixed on a word, definitional image of the thing in thought: ‘Even without sounding words, the one who thinks speaks in his heart’ ” (p. 19).

On this view, thought is understood as a kind of speaking in one’s heart. Subjective meanings attributable to speakers of spoken language are to be explained in terms of a “mental language” that is different from, but analogous to, any particular spoken language. This is different from the view that speaking in one’s heart is enabled by an interiorization of spoken language, without the need to posit a separate mental language.

Boulnois contrasts Augustine’s view with Aristotle’s “semiotics of inference”.

“But a completely different definition of the sign, of Aristotelian origin, interferes with this…. Here the sign is a proposition, the point of departure for reasoning by inference, such that it founds a demonstration…. The sign is the antecedent of a conditional proposition or of an inference” (ibid). “The sign, which in Augustine grounds a relation between two things, in Aristotle founds induction between two propositions” (p. 20).

Neither of these is equivalent to the simple view that signs stand for things directly, which is closer to what Bacon will defend. Boulnois is reading Augustine as saying that a sign is or grounds a real relation between two things, and Aristotle as saying it is or grounds a relation of implication between two assertions. But for both Aristotle and Augustine, the sign refers primarily to some kind of relation, rather than simply to a thing.

“Besides this semiotics of inference, Aristotle develops a complex semantics at the beginning of the treatise On Interpretation…. The symbolic relation is constitutive of language, but it can also be expressed in the vocabulary of the semeion [sign], of logical inference, which allows a passage from sensible expressions to concepts…. But by the intermediary of the concept, indirectly, signs refer to the thing” (pp. 20-21).

Aristotle and Augustine each develop their own kind of indirect or mediated or “moderate” realism.

“The Aristotelian definition of the sign as a principle of inference is reprised by Peter of Spain…. Whereas Augustine only envisages signs as presenting sensible species, Bacon wants to account for the intelligibles evoked by Aristotle — the concepts. But he makes them representing signs” (pp. 22-23).

Here Boulnois does connect signs with species in Augustine’s case, but their relation is still not one of identity. Many of Augustine’s medieval readers would likely have interpolated a notion of species (e.g., a sensible species of smoke, for smoke) into their understanding of Augustine’s account. In this way we might say that a sensible species of smoke is a sign of fire (“is” of predication, not “is” of identity). But smoke as a sign of fire is not the same as the sensible species of the smoke.

“This reorganization rests on the concept of representation, already used by Peter of Spain: when a sign represents, it constitutes a term in a proposition, and recalls many intentional objects (the signifieds), or it ‘supposes for’ them. With the concept of representation, expressing a theory of supposition (or of reference), Peter of Spain gives himself the means to unify the general relation between sign and signified (signification in Augustine), and the conventional relation between the vocal sound and the thing named. Avoiding here the mediation of the concept, he brings together under a single vocable the natural relation of the concept to the thing and the conventional relation of the vocal sound to the concept. In reprising this vocabulary, Bacon integrates in the same term of representation the relation of the sensible sign to the thing signified and of the concept to the thing known. He takes sides at the same time against Boethius, in posing that the signified of the concept is the thing itself and not an intermediary concept. Thus while Boethius ordered semantics by noetics, the theory of representation puts them on the same plane” (p. 23).

Direct realism was actually a radical innovation, as Boulnois points out.

“Bacon thus can unify all the relations, natural and conventional, between vocal sounds, intellections, and things, under the general concept of the sign. Even though he recognizes that Aristotle concentrates in the treatise On Interpretation on conventional signs, vocal sounds, it is necessary to produce a universal theory of signs, including intellections, vocal sounds, and writing” (pp. 23-24).

One abstract theory of signs and things signified is used to cover both natural and linguistic cases.

“Starting from this Baconian innovation, it will be necessary to examine the challenges of this response to the great semantic controversy over the sign. If the concept is a sign and if the sign represents the thing itself, in what way do the great semantic questions play out based on this fundamental decision? From this foyer can be explained the natural character of the concept, the convention of the linguistic sign, and the importance of an imposition inscribed in a juridical and political order” (p. 24).

From this standpoint, concepts are assimilated to natural signs, whereas linguistic signs are arbitrary and depend on convention. Concepts on this view are individually self-contained. They are what they are independent of any articulation by us. It remains that they must be naturally or supernaturally given to us. The implicit notion of any concept in Aristotle, on the other hand, depends not only on its form, but also more generally on what is (or would be) well said by us, which is to say on its articulation in language, which must be understood against a background of other articulations in language.

Next in this series: Signification, Representation

Being and Representation Revisited

Michel Foucault in Les mots et les choses (literally Words and Things, 1966; English tr. The Order of Things), the book that made him a celebrity in France and raised the brewing French controversy over so-called “structuralism” and humanism into high gear, argues that there was a major paradigm shift from resemblance to more abstract representation at the beginning of the classical age (17th century). More recently, Robert Brandom has focused more specifically on Descartes’s analytic geometry as based on a global isomorphic representation of geometry in terms of algebra, which replaced the medieval paradigm of resemblance.

Certainly the notion of representation plays a fundamental role in both Descartes and Locke. Foucault made a huge impression on me when I first read him around 1979, and — as witnessed here — Brandom is one of my current leading lights. But Foucault and Brandom are both just wrong about the middle ages being simply dominated by a paradigm based on resemblance.

While I have several times referred to L’Être et représentation [Being and Representation] (1999) by Olivier Boulnois, I have yet to more substantially work here on this important book, which details the rise of the notion of a “science” of metaphysics as ontology — closely associated with an abstract notion of representation, not reducible to resemblance — in the later middle ages. This offers a vital corrective to the rather ahistorical global generalizations commonly applied to these topics.

On Boulnois’s account, which involves a cast of many, the leading character in these developments will be the theologian John Duns Scotus (1266-1308). Boulnois is a leading scholar and translator of Scotus.

I would note that this substantial work on Scotus also seems to thoroughly invalidate the thinly documented valorization of the Scotist univocity of being by Gilles Deleuze. It is hard to think of a writer more viscerally opposed to the representationalist paradigm than Deleuze. Deleuze’s other valorizations of Spinoza and Leibniz and the ethical notion of affirmation in his early Nietzsche book influenced me in the past. But to my knowledge, Deleuze never even mentions the central role of representation in Scotus and its strong connection with univocity. I felt betrayed when I discovered this.

“To represent means at once to ‘make present’, ‘stand in place of’, ‘resemble’. Precisely, in the Middle Age the vocabulary of repraesentatio is used frequently, in all of these senses” (Boulnois p. 7, my translation throughout).

The point here is not to deny that resemblance plays a major role in medieval thought. It is rather that — as with several other notions commonly associated with modernity, such as a psychological Subject — the later middle ages already saw substantial and systematic use of a more abstract notion of representation.

“Already in Tertulian, the statue of Hercules ‘represents’ Hercules … it indicates his presence in absence — it takes his place. To represent is in a certain way to make present, and Maxim of Turin uses these two terms as synonyms. The liturgical use of the term follows naturally…. A new turn appears in the Cistercian order with Aelred of Rievaulx, as a meditative exercise that makes Christ present in the imagination” (ibid).

In spite of the visual or visualizing character of these uses and their association with notions of resemblance, there is clearly more going on here than just the application of a criterion of resemblance. We see explicit theoretical development centered on the notion of representation.

“But the text that durably imposed the vocabulary of representation seems to be the Latin translation of the De Anima [On the Soul] of Avicenna: the expression appears at least seventeen times in this work…. It is indeed repraesentatio that bears all the difficulty of the platonizing noetics of Avicenna…. In this way the problematic rejoins the central difficulty of another Platonism, that of Augustine, which has to understand how the soul, always spiritual, can have sensible images without losing its spiritual nature…. [T]he problem of representation obliges us to explore the confluence of Augustinianism and Avicennism” (pp. 8-9).

Representation is a fundamental concept of Avicenna’s elaborate psychology, which combines Platonic, Aristotelian, and medical elements. (Avicenna was the second greatest medical authority in the middle ages, after Galen.)

The historical importance of the adoption of Avicenna by later medieval Augustinians was already pointed out by the great Thomist scholar Etienne Gilson in the early 20th century.

“The Middle Age explains repraesentatio by its equivalents: stare pro (taking the place of) — signs take the place of things that cause them and to which they refer; supponere pro (supposing for) — in a proposition, the terms take the place of the thing to which they refer; similitudo, species, imago (being a resemblance, an image) — the sensible species, the phantasm, the concept representing the object they resemble; supplere vicem (playing the role of) — abstractive knowing takes the place of the object” (p. 9).

The role of signs in thought and language was already discussed by Roger Bacon in the 13th century. The theory of “supposition” was an important and sophisticated Latin innovation that anticipates modern referential semantics. Theories of “species” were another major non-Aristotelian Latin development, possibly derived from Stoic physiological-epistemological theories of phantasia.

“We need to ask ourselves about the logical, optical, and noetic status of representation, corresponding to the functions of the sign, of the sensible image (species or phantasm), of the concept. Taking the place of, being the image of, resembling, conceiving are diverse regimes that need to be studied in their own right. Then we need to rearticulate these terms one to another, and ask ourselves how the representation of being is constituted successively as a semantics, an eidetics, and a noetics. In a theory where concepts are themselves signs, where they also have sensible species for content, these three dimensions form a coherent system” (pp. 9-10).

His reference to the “representation of being” here anticipates what we will see as the Scotist approach to being in terms of representation. Roger Bacon treats concepts as signs.

The Latin middle ages saw huge development in logic, semantics, the theory of signs, optics, and noetics. Scholastic interest in logic is well known, and we have seen at least a taste of medieval noetics in the disputes about Aristotelian intellect. There was major development in geometrical optics in the Arabic-speaking world, and in the medieval and Renaissance Latin world. Representability is the minimal criterion of univocal being in Scotus.

“But it is also necessary to examine its genesis. What form of concentration allowed signification, knowledge, and thought to be re-expressed using only the concept of representation? And what changed in the notion of representation to make it possible to represent all things in a unique way? Researching the origin of a metaphysics of representation is not to write the history of the concept of representation, but the genealogy of a new structure, the thinking of being by representation” (p. 10).

Here I think he is onto something important. These discussions have a multi-dimensional aspect that is clearly not reducible to a notion of simple resemblance.

We will see that a “metaphysics of representation” and a “thinking of being by representation” are especially characteristic of Scotus, but not only Scotus.

Metaphysics “gets a new formulation in the tradition that goes from Roger Bacon to Duns Scotus, often identified with the English Franciscan school of the 13th-14th century. I hope to show that this is too restrictive, because the problematic plunges its roots further in the Augustinian and Avicennan ground and overflows this school, since we find important elements in Thomas Aquinas or Henry of Ghent” (ibid).

“With these distinctions made, it will be possible to measure the mutations of metaphysics that result. It gets its modern status as a science thanks to the concept of being, which allows Henry of Ghent to know all things in one sole act of thought, and in Duns Scotus replaces the analogy of being by founding its univocity: the unity of metaphysics rests on a noetic unity. We need to investigate that which gives priority to the concept, a unity engendered by intellect, with the power to represent all its meanings in its stable identity” (ibid).

By “modern” here, he means early modern. It is important to note that the disrepute of metaphysics and widespread talk about surpassing it came later. The early moderns generally claimed to have a new and better metaphysics. This will turn out to have Scotist and other scholastic roots.

I did not recall Boulnois’s use of “concept” in this context. This will be something to watch. In the context of univocal being and intellectual intuition of individuals, “concept” has a completely different sense than it does in Hegel or Brandom. By “concept” here, he seems to mean a mental representation that could be simply given as an atomic thing. It is important to note that the term “concept” can also be given a non-mentalist, non-representationalist, and relational rather than atomic interpretation in terms of conditions of use and consequences. This is a fundamental theme in Brandom’s work.

“This study aims at the same time to propose a new interpretation of the history of metaphysics. With the conceptual unity of being, it seeks to understand that which constitutes the invisible foyer and hidden sub-basement of modern philosophy” (ibid).

“This study is centered on the affirmation, more Avicennan than Aristotelian, that the ens can be apprehended in a unique concept, which leads to the univocity of the ens. The object of metaphysics thus becomes the first object of thought in the order of conception (first adequate object: being) and not the first object in the order of perfection (first object by eminence: God)” (p. 12).

Ens is the present participle of the verb esse, “to be”. Implicitly it refers to an individual entity, a particular “being”. This will be related to claims of knowledge by intellectual intuition of individuals as individuals. In this context, claims of univocity go hand-in-hand with claims to univocally know by intellectual intuition. “Concept” here seems to be tied to intellectual intuition, whereas in Kant and Hegel the two are sharply opposed.

“Contemporary studies of ‘modern metaphysics’ from Suárez to Kant (Schulmetaphysik) show that the classic articulation of metaphysics into metaphysica generalis and metaphysica specialis rests on a discreet but decisive acceptance of the univocity of the concept of being, particularly in Suárez. Thus modern metaphysics acquired the status of a science and a univocal constitution thanks to the concept of ens in Scotus, which replaced the analogy of being. The univocity of being comprehended in a unique concept remains the principal turn in the history of metaphysics…. This structure imposes itself from the 14th to the 18th century, passing through the work of Suarez and Wolff” (p. 13).

The bad idea here is that a being has a concept, straightforwardly and univocally. This is antithetical to Aristotle, for whom the very beginning of wisdom is that things are said in many ways. I have occasionally invoked “beings” as objects of Aristotelian phronesis, which is all about grasping particulars in an open way that is not locked in to a univocal “concept”.

Next in this series: Signs, Concepts, Things

Power and Its Shadow

Omnipotence has been a problematic concept introduced by theologians in the monotheistic traditions. It has affected traditional metaphysics, the theory of knowledge, and politics. It has deep historical connections with political absolutism.

Ethics in the Socratic tradition take as a starting point something like the Kantian autonomy of reason, coupled with an agnostic but sympathetic view of religion.

For the Latin scholastic theologians, the autonomy of philosophical inquiry is only relative. But most stop short of a completely unqualified omnipotence, and do endorse a relative autonomy of philosophy. There is a long tradition of “faith seeking understanding”. This allows for a socially beneficial relation of benevolent mutual respect between theological and philosophical discourse.

For several centuries in the later middle ages, the main vehicle for expression of Christian theology consisted of meta-commentaries on the 12th-century theologian Peter Lombard’s commentary on the Bible, known as the Sentences. Lombard’s work was one of the foundations of Latin scholasticism. Over 1400 commentaries on it are known. Lombard was a student of the great Peter Abelard, but backed off from Abelard’s more controversial views.

Here I will largely translate and comment upon a brief survey of omnipotence in the Sentences commentary tradition by Olivier Boulnois. This introduction to his edited volume La puissance et son ombre: de Pierre Lombard à Luther (1994) touches upon many points of “historiographical” interest. The French volume focuses on Lombard’s distinctions 42-44, which are the parts dealing with omnipotence. It includes translations from Lombard himself, William of Auxerre, Hugh of Saint-Cher, Albert the Great, Bonaventure, Aquinas, Augustinus Triumphus, Duns Scotus, Durand of Saint-Pourcain, William of Ockham, Gregory of Rimini, and Martin Luther. My aim here is only to partially translate and comment upon the introduction by Boulnois, which is entitled “What God Cannot Do”.

“Can God walk, speak, lie, sin, die, make a mistake? Can he restore virginity? Do other than what he does? Create other worlds?…. Can God annul the most fundamental eternal truths or change them?” (p. 11, my translation throughout).

First, it should be noted that there is not just one concept of omnipotence. Its meaning has been the subject of great controversy in the past. We will see several competing versions in what follows.

Second, the medieval theological mainstream in fact recognized that there are some things God cannot do, or at least will never do. The great scholastics recognized that omnipotence has be qualified in some way in order to be at all defensible, even if they would not themselves phrase it that way. Their arguments are about where and how to draw the line.

“[T]o ask what God cannot do is to research the limits of the possible, and to pose a question that bears on one of the principal senses of being in Aristotle” (pp. 11-12).

The last is a reference to potentiality (dynamis in Aristotle’s Greek), which in the Latin tradition is mainly understood as a kind of power.

“The fundamental question becomes: what does the proposition ‘he can’ signify? To respond, it is necessary to articulate three concepts: power [puissance], ability [pouvoir], possibility” (p. 12).

Puissance and pouvoir can both mean power, but with different nuances. Puissance is standardly used to translate the potentia of the Latin tradition. Pouvoir is used to express ability, and also political power.

Boulnois asks, “With what power [pouissance] are we concerned here? With Aristotle’s being in potentiality (intermediate between being and non-being)? Or with the effective power [pouissance] to make be what is not? But doesn’t that presuppose power [pouissance] in the first sense?” (ibid).”

“Effective power to make be what is not” recalls the theory of creation in Aquinas.

Boulnois continues, switching to the other French term for power, “With what model of power [pouvoir] are we confronted? With the generosity of an overcapacity that dispenses in accord with its own goodness? With the arbitrariness of always-revocable decrees? With the fixation of laws in conformity with which power [pouvoir] must itself act to act legitimately?” (ibid).

Here we begin to see the connection with political power.

“What form of the possible do we encounter? This is the whole problem of modality: in the logical sense, everything noncontradictory is possible; but isn’t it necessary to add a second form of possibility, real possibility, that which can be effectively realized by causes?” (ibid).

Possibility and necessity are both modal concepts. I still need to write more about the ethical significance of modality. While preparing this post I dashed off another quick note.

“For the problem of omnipotence bears on the limit conditions of an order of the world and an order of discourse” (ibid).

Claims of omnipotence have a global impact on how we understand everything else, which is literally explicit in the very term. (“Omni” is Latin for “all”).

“The situation of the question of omnipotence in the organic unity of the Sentences leads to thinking the possible in terms of divine omnipotence, and not the inverse” (p. 15).

When two terms are identified or linked, questions of the order of explanation can acquire a large importance. Here this involves the relation between philosophy and theology.

“Peter Lombard analyzes divine power in a double way” (p. 16). “From then on, the question turns on the status of the possible in the divine understanding: does what is impossible for God come from God (as Henry of Ghent believed at one time) or rather from the inconsistency of the thing itself (Duns Scotus)? Or again, is it necessary to say that the question has no sense, it being given that there is a strict reciprocity between the reality of the possible and divine thought (Ockham, reprised by Luther)?” (p. 17).

“But the evolution of the interpretation explains the modern contradiction between divergent points of view: a God who is the cause of the possibility of eternal truths (Descartes), or is submitted to the necessity of the best of [all] worlds (Leibniz), or again is identical with the necessity of all his attributes (Spinoza)” (p. 18).

Omnipotence in Descartes underwrites a theological voluntarism. Infinity and a very different kind of omnipotence are the most important properties of Spinoza’s God, who is also equated with Nature. Leibniz uses another nonstandard kind of omnipotence, explicitly developing his metaphysical views in terms of a highly rationalized form of creationism.

“For the problem of omnipotence is first of all a problem of exegesis” (p. 19). “If God can do anything, isn’t it necessary to say that he can lie, be mistaken, be put to death? Doesn’t one go to the point of making God a bad power? Augustine strives to resolve the difficulty: ‘And its inability to lie is a great power of the Word’. As a consequence, divine omnipotence does not consist in being able to do all, except in an inadequate sense…. Thus omnipotence is defined simply as God’s power to not be prevented from doing all the good that he wills. Augustine carefully avoids defining omni-potence as a power to do all” (p. 20).

We are teetering on the edge of paradox here. It is precisely the qualifications of what initially seems like the unqualified par excellence that allow an ethical perspective to be recovered. At the very least, this is in great tension with the motif of unqualified power.

“If God cannot do something, that is because it is not a true power (walking, sinning, being mistaken are marks of imperfection)…. If all that God cannot do is only weakness and negativity, God will be in himself every positive power. ‘He can do all that power can do’. Divine omnipotence has become the infinite affirmation of power” (p. 21).

For the 11th-century monastic reformer Peter Damian, according to Boulnois, “The origin of nature is not subject to the same laws as nature. Creation ex nihilo affords a striking illustration of this: ‘Nature itself is made against nature’. Nature thus becomes identical to the will of God: ‘Nature itself has its proper nature, which is to say the will of God” (pp. 24-25).

“The whole question of modality is raised here…. For Aristotle, only the future is contingent…. But for the theologian, who speaks of the possible insofar as it is the object of divine power, even if a thing is, insofar as it is, it can not be…. Even if an event is realized, at the very moment when it is real, it is not necessary. For it could not be if it were not willed by God” (p. 25). “The restoration of [virginity, according to Damian] resembles a new creation, and it is not subject to any mundane law, even that of contradiction…. All power and all knowing are coeternal with God, sovereign creator of the world” (pp. 26-27).

Again modality comes up. The idea that the present state of the world is contingent is reasonable in itself.

Among the most radical claims associated with omnipotence is that God can change the past. Up to a point, it seems to me that we should affirm the contingency of the present as well as the future, but it is also very possible to go too far in this. What is challenging to specify is how to draw the line between good flexibility and bad arbitrariness.

For Aristotle, Boulnois says ” ‘That which is, when it is, and that which is not, when it is not, is necessary’. This principle does not bear only on a necessity of discourse. It also implies a real necessity. For Aristotle, the possible is nothing but being in potentiality, that is to say being which tends toward existence, and which at the end of an infinite time, will end by coming to be. There is what could be called a statistical interpretation of modality, according to which that is possible which was, is, or will be in an infinite time. Indeed it is a temporal interpretation, according to which there always will be a state of affairs in which the contingent is realized. Relayed by Maimonides, this principle is the basis of the celebrated ‘third way’ of showing the existence of God in Thomas Aquinas” (p. 32).

Aristotle’s “statistical” modality is not statistical in the numerical sense. He defines the necessary as that which is always true. “Always” may not be entirely air-tight. He also explicitly speaks of things that are true “for the most part”, and sometimes of things that are always true or true for the most part.

Boulnois continues, “The motif of this disequilibrium can be easily designated: it is the primacy of presence in all metaphysical analysis of manifestation. While the [more traditional] theologians, following Augustine, envisage temporality as a triple manifestation of the divine power in the past, present, and future, Bonaventure, in the manner of the Aristotelian metaphysics, places himself in the perspective of the thing in its evidence enunciable by the finite subject. He goes on to invoke an important argument: between the thing and its form of presence (be it a presence of the past or an existence in the present instant), there exists an analytic relation…. The presence of the thing is included in all manifestation. On the other hand the future, which is not yet, is not analytically included in the content of the thing that comes to be” (pp. 32-33).

There really was a “metaphysics of presence” in Latin scholasticism. The error is to attribute it to directly to Aristotle.

“From this point on, Thomas Aquinas, Giles of Rome, and Ockham pose only the question of the necessity of the past…. They no longer ask if the same question can be extended to the future. The reference to Peter Damian conceals a mutation of the problematic: instead of being posed from the transcendent freedom of God, the possibility of the contingent will only be envisaged starting from the human experience of the present. The ontology of the contingent becomes the possibility of finite freedom” (p. 33).

“All the commentaries on the Sentences, following the line of Peter Lombard, preserve the memory of the condemnation of Abelard by the council of Sens. In the spirit of this council, it is not permitted to think that God is necessarily determined to act and can only do what he does. The council Fathers, led by Bernard of Clairvaux, see in this prohibition a line that is not to be crossed. The omnipotence of God requires us to think that he can do what he does not do, omit what he does not omit, do what he does in another manner or at another moment, or similarly omit it. The divine omnipotence thus appears as sovereignly free, indifferent between acting and not acting” (pp. 33-34).

This is the point at which the thesis of omnipotence becomes dangerous.

“Peter Abelard himself was moved by a metaphysical principle, the principle of reason. God can only do what he does, because ‘God does nothing without a reason’…. Abelard does not admit that God can act against the order he has decided to follow…. God cannot go against his proper wisdom and his proper rationality. Reason imposes itself on him in being the form of his freedom. In a sense, Abelard is quite simply faithful to the patristic tradition that orients divine action toward the good. But he systematizes to the point of paradox, in limiting divine freedom by his wisdom” (p. 34).

The whole question about whether or not God can act “against” what he has “decided” is artificial, because it assumes an anthropomorphic and temporal notion of “decision”. If God is pre-eminently the Eternal as Augustine says, the temporal metaphor of decision is inappropriate.

“Peter Damian makes an equation between divine omnipotence and human freedom: what is possible for the human must at least be possible for God” (ibid).

This argument clearly depends on an anthropomorphic analogy. What is called “possible” for the human depends in part on the particular character of human finitude. It is not at all the same as what would be called “possible” for an eternal neoplatonic God exempt from all finitude. Frankly, it is not even clear that it is appropriate to speak of possibility in relation to God at all. Aristotle says that the first cause is pure act and entelechy. Augustine very strongly associates God with the eternal.

“As Peter Lombard well saw, contrary to the censors of Abelard who ignore the point, the position of Abelard is equally motivated by the principle of the best. As with Leibniz later on, the principle of the best follows from an interpretation of the principle of causality…. Abelard in turn follows the principle of causality, attested by Plato: ‘Nothing comes to be without a cause’. But he reinterprets it in the light of Christian theology, for which the cause of the created resides in the exemplary reason, the divine idea, model, or archetype by which God thinks the creatable before instituting it. It is in this sense that Augustine writes: ‘Who would dare say that God created things without reason?’ For Abelard, as a consequence, the world is created in a universal order, and in it no event escapes divine providence: nothing that appears contingent or due to chance comes to be outside of his prescience or his wisdom. Reason itself is a means of revelation. Despite the apparent disagreements between the Bible and Plato, a more profound reading of these two texts allows us to reconcile them, and to underline the identity between the rationality of God and his freedom” (p. 36).

“For in this problematic cause and reason are synonyms: ‘ratio vel causa‘, writes Peter Lombard…. The position of Abelard is indeed an important stage in the constitution of the principle of reason, between Plato and Leibniz. In Plato, the principle of causality, exterior to the demiurge, and the principle of the goodness of the cosmos are enunciated separately. For Abelard, the principle of reason has become interior to the divine wisdom, and conforms to the primacy of goodness. For Leibniz, finally, the principle of reason is no longer divine, but is identified with essence in general: every substance is the sufficient reason of its accidents” (p. 37).

“Without a doubt, the condemnation of Abelard played a decisive role here. We recall that Heidegger speaks of a ‘time of incubation’ of the principle of reason, already formulated since the birth of philosophy. But he does not respond to the question he himself raises” (p. 37). “In all the rigor of their terms, the condemnations of the council of Sens, in rejecting the application of the principle of reason to God, preserved the principle of reason in an incubator” (p. 38).

“If God creates a world, he cannot create it without what makes it a world: its order, the harmony of its parts…. God cannot create without: 1) what makes it a totality: that which is required for the achievement of a universe; 2) what makes its parts compatible with one another: the conditions of existence of creatures, one in relation to another; 3) what permits each of its parts to have sufficient consistency to possess the perfection of an essence and that of existing. The creation of a world results in the positing of a finite order, governed by the mathematical or musical principle of the harmony of the all, that is to say a certain proportion between the parts” (p. 39).

The strong notion of the coherence requirements of a world in Leibniz removes the usual arbitrariness from the notion of creation.

“This common problematic leaves room for a whole gamut of individual positions, from Albert the Great to Ockham. For Albert the Great, ‘if one places oneself in the point of view of being’, starting from the things that really exist, no better order is conceivable…. For Bonaventure, … God can make either a world different by its substances (but which is not really better, because it is incomparable), or a world different by its accidents (but that is really the same as this one)…. For Ockham, on the contrary the most probable position is ‘that which admits that God can make another world better than this one and specifically distinct from it’ ” (pp. 39-40).

“Can God change eternal truths?…. Descartes raises this question” (p. 40). “God does not know truths as true unless he wills that they be so” (p. 41). “This debate has a long medieval history” (ibid).

Hugh of Saint-Cher is credited with originating the distinction between absolute and ordained power.

“Hugh of Saint-Cher [distinguishes] two aspects of divine power. As conditioned, it cannot be contradictory…. In the measure that the order of the finite is subject to the principle of contradiction, God cannot make two opposed propositions [both] true. But in itself, the same power as absolute is not subject to the principle of contradiction: nothing can limit its power” (ibid). “In this he anticipates in an unheard-of way the motifs and the difficulties of the Cartesian position, even if he does not like [Descartes] speak of creation or of eternal truths” (p. 42).

“Thomas Aquinas poses the same question, but he responds in a completely different way…. The divine power can only make what is possible, that is to say what is in the nature of things. The nature of simple essences and the principle of non-contradiction are the source of all their proprieties, and the divine power is in a way limited to these possibilities” (pp. 42-43).

Here Aquinas comes across as much more sensible than some of the others. In significant measure at least, he upholds the reality of secondary causes. A concept of God construed in a way that would invalidate all other concepts and reason itself seems fit only for sectarians.

“Subsequently, the debate develops in another form: is the impossible impossible because God so decided, or is it impossible by nature…? Henry of Ghent at one time held the first thesis, but ended up retracting it. Duns Scotus maintains an order that supposes the distinction of diverse moments…. It is only logical contradiction between the parts that grounds the formal impossibility of the thing, and indeed the divine intellection of that impossibility. There is an irrevocable anteriority of the possible and indeed of the impossible to the divine intellect. Possibility is imposed on God in the same way it is imposed on the human (that is to say in a univocal way)” (p. 43).

This is an important qualification about Scotus. Although he was regarded as a realist in the controversies about nominalism and realism, he generally comes across as an extreme voluntarist. But Boulnois is a leading Scotus scholar who has translated 2000 pages of Scotus and written a large book about him, so I assume he knows what he is talking about.

“For Ockham, on the contrary, power and the possible are correlatives. There is in the first instance an absolute real identity between divine intellect and will. And in addition, there is no anteriority of the possible to the intellect. The possible not being other than the non-contradictory, all the possibles are independent. No limit of the ontological consistency of the possible restrains the divine power…. Ockham accepts all the consequences of the identification of the absolute possible with the divine power…. There is neither an anteriority of the impossible to the divine omnipotence (Scotus), nor an anteriority of omnipotence to the impossible (Henry of Ghent), but a strict correlation” (pp. 43-44).

Once again, when two things are assimilated together, it may mean that one is being reduced to the other. For instance, I hold that there is no separately existing thing called will — that Aristotelian intellect, practical judgment, and wisdom better explain the freedom that some want to supernaturally explain by will. Ockham on the other hand is a voluntarist who sees will everywhere, and seems to deny that modality is anything real.

“An other is not always a world. It is only after Bonaventure that the theologians come to speak of a possible other world” (p. 46).

This is fascinating. I never would have guessed that Bonaventure would partially anticipate Leibniz on the subject of worlds.

“For Scotus, the order fixed by God appears to be necessary from the point of view of every inferior agent, when it acts according to that order…. In the order instituted by God (nature), starting from contingent hypotheses, the laws of nature are necessary for the finite. They draw their necessity from the fact that it is God who invests them with their legality” (p. 47).

From this point of view, necessity only comes about from divine will. Sheer will conceived as a brute fact is thus said to come before justice or wisdom. This undermines all criteria.

“For Aristotle, the concept of world is that of a totality: there is only one possible world, and it is a fortiori the best” (p. 48).

But the argument that this is the best world because there is no other is a very weak one that Aristotle does not himself make, because he does not consider alternate worlds, and also does not consider the world to be created.

“For [Peter Damian], even a good that is never produced is in the power of God, the reason for its retention residing in the secret of his good will. His analysis results in distinguishing two poles in the divine power: on the one hand, the omni-potence taken in itself, which no im-potence can encumber, and on the other hand the order in which it is exercised, and which can explain that omnipotence is not manifested…. Thus, Peter Damian constructs the conceptual armature between two poles, which later took the name of absolute power and ordained power” (p. 53).

Peter Damian was an 11th-century monastic reformer who campaigned vigorously against corruption in the Church. He advocated solitude and ascetism, and reportedly introduced practices of flagellation that were regarded as too extreme by some. In the early 20th century, it was argued that Damian exempted God from the principle of non-contradiction, but this has been rejected by later scholars. He wrote a treatise on omnipotence arguing that God can restore virginity, but according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, he neither claimed that God can change a past event, nor that God can contradict himself.

What will become the distinction between absolute and ordained power allows appearances to be (mostly) saved while the claim of absolute power is maintained. I would note that this is an elaboration of Augustine’s reconciliation of miracles with natural causes, which treats natural causes as God’s established habits that are not invalidated by miracles. It will often be expressed using Aristotle’s notion of things that happen in a certain way “for the most part”, but there is no indication that Aristotle intended this as a way of leaving room for miracles. What happens for the most part in Aristotle involves variation in the way that the order of nature works out in particular cases, not suspension of it or exceptions to it.

“The ordained power has for object that which has been preordained, or disposed by God. It is a preordination of the possible in the divine understanding, and not the order of the real outside of God. Indeed it coincides with his prescience…. The ordained power does not presuppose order and is not determined by it; on the contrary, it is it that determines it in determining itself: it prefigures it, it is the pre-supposition of order. It is the pre-order” (p. 55).

According to this view, the order of the world corresponds to the “habitual” operation of creation. The habitual order is subordinate to the power of creation that produces it. The habituality of the created order is real, but it also has real exceptions in the form of miracles.

According to Boulnois, “Absolute power and ordained power form a couple of concepts, a dialectic, such that we never find one without the other. There is no theology of absolute power without the theology of ordained power. What we find instead are different ways of thinking this dialectic” (ibid).

“The object of absolute power is identical to the object of divine wisdom, to the totality of what is possible for God. The object of ordained power is identical to the object of the principled will of God” (pp. 55-56).

“For God does nothing without prescience. His action is subordinated to the order predetermined by him, and can never depart from that order. As a consequence, operative power is subordinated to ordained power; and reciprocally, God never operates directly by his absolute power. Absolute power taken in itself, naked, is not operative” (p. 56).

It was I and not Boulnois who earlier brought Augustine’s justification of miracles into the discussion. I much prefer Aristotelian natural variability to the Augustinian theory of miracles. But on the older view Boulnois is characterizing here — that God never acts directly by his absolute power — it would seem that there could be no exceptions to the ordained order. This seems consistent with Augustine’s rigorous view of eternity, but it is in tension with Augustine’s justification of miracles.

It appears that Duns Scotus (1266-1308) was instrumental in changing the traditional Augustinian pattern in these matters. Boulnois is a world-class expert on Scotus, so he is well qualified to point this out.

“While reprising these classical elements, the interpretation of Scotus breaks with his predecessors, for three reasons: 1) The theory of absolute power and ordained power is extended to every free being. 2) In reprising the distinction between fact and principle, Scotus conceives the two members of the distinction as two ways of acting and not simply as two powers. God intervenes in fact by his absolute power to modify what is in principle the course of things. 3) Even when he has chosen an order, at the same time and from the same point of view, God can do that which he did not decide upon. The divine power is open to an array of synchronic possibilities, and the state chosen in fact does not exclude other possibilities” (p. 56).

Each of these three points is significant: 1) Beliefs about human free will come to be patterned on a pronouncedly voluntaristic interpretation of divine omnipotence. 2) Fact is for possibly the first time asserted to be more decisive and more inclusive than principle or essence. Reason must accommodate presumed facts, rather than governing their interpretation. 3) Far from being stably grounded in eternity and essence, order of all kinds is now treated as fundamentally contingent and revocable.

In 20th-century scholarship, the emergence of such “modernist” views was most often associated with William of Ockham, who as the arch “nominalist” in accounts of the 14th-century debate about universals has been treated as diametrically opposed to the more traditional “realism” attributed to Scotus. But according to Boulnois, Scotus was the decisive innovator with respect to these views about will, fact, and order.

“It is this interpretation that seems to have had the most influence on subsequent medieval thought.”

“There are two models, fundamentally distinct: 1) A logical model, for which absolute power is the power capable of the totality of possibilities (of all that is non-contradictory), and the ordained power corresponds to the choice of a particular order. 2) An operative model, for which divine intervention de potentia absoluta is a possibility of modifying in fact that which is in principle the course of things. What is outside of order is not disorder but fact.” (ibid). “For Scotus, the model is no longer a logical model, but an operative model. He no longer distinguishes two forms of power but two forms of action (according to the law and outside the law)” (p. 57).

What is described as the traditional view here tends to make order overly strong, presuming it to be capable of explaining all facts, while the “modernist” view makes fact overly strong, tending toward a proto-fundamentalist denial of the need for interpretation, and at the same time shrinking the scope of order so that fact always exceeds it.

As Boulnois argues more generally in his big book on Scotus, L’Être et représentation (“Being and Representation”, 1999), this historic transformation is too large to be attributed to a single figure, but Scotus is nonetheless at its center. Modern large-scale interpretation of the history of Latin philosophy has generally centered on Aquinas, who was canonized as a saint in 1323, and specially declared by the Pope to be central to Catholic philosophy in 1879 after the rise of neo-Thomism.

(From a broad point of view, the “moderate realism” of Aquinas has much to recommend it, but one-sided emphasis on Aquinas has obscured the real diversity and complexity of Latin philosophical views and the important role of numerous others, including Scotus. The pragmatist Charles Pierce rather casually called himself a Scotist realist. Heidegger wrote his dissertation on Scotus, but in later work tended to reject Latin philosophy with a very broad brush, without addressing important historical detail.)

“No more than his predecessors does Scotus say that God acts by an absolute power, but only that he can act otherwise than he does (and it is in this that his power is absolute). This has no immediate operative content…. Duns Scotus does not say that God acts by his naked absolute power, but precisely always, according to a beautiful oxymoron, ‘in the manner ordained by his absolute power’. What characterizes the position of Scotus, more than the operative model of absolute power alone, is at the same time the extreme opposition of this dialectic between the two concepts and the possibility at every instant of one toggling to the other. To safeguard divine freedom, Scotus creates an infinite oscillation between an instituted juridical order and a de facto power that is nonetheless not disordered and immoral” (ibid).

What Boulnois calls a beautiful oxymoron in Scotus, the de facto claim of an infinite oscillation between order and fact — evinced by the phrase “ordained by his absolute power” — seems to collapse the evolved distinction between ordained and absolute power. Perhaps this is why Scotus was called the “subtle doctor”. But the implications of this position are not at all subtle. They are quite dramatic.

“What characterizes the end of the Middle Age is at once the inflation of arguments resorting to absolute power and a fragmentation of models allowing it to be thought” (p. 58).

Boulnois cites Avignon Pope John XXII’s blunt declaration that the absolute and ordained power of God are the same thing. John apparently used this to justify a politicized claim that salvation can only be achieved through the institutionalized sacraments of the Church. “All that which is ordained by God is irrevocable” (p. 59). This was a time of bitter conflict between the Avignon Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor Louis IV. It was under John that Aquinas was canonized as a saint. John was also the one who formally declared witchcraft to be a heresy.

We saw above that William of Ockham also emphasized the inseparability of absolute and ordained power. But he apparently used it to argue for the opposite practical conclusion, that law and ordained power can always be surpassed by fact and absolute power, and that salvation can be achieved through faith alone. Under the protection of Louis IV, Ockham accused the Pope of heresy.

(From the point of view of the logical pragmatics I have discussed in reading Brandom, the formal identification of two things with different connotations can be interpreted as a reduction of one to the other, or of the other to the one, or as a nonreductive combination of the two. Different connotations imply different pragmatics or conditions of use.)

Boulnois says that Ockham interprets the thesis of the nonseparability of the nominally distinct powers (absolute versus ordained) in terms of its consequences for the power’s object (the world), rather than in terms of its subject (God).

“John XXII insists on the fact that the identity of divine power entails the invariability of the order chosen by God…. For [Ockham], the theory of John XXII comes back to saying that the order of the world cannot be other than it is. From this it follows evidently that no creature can do what it does not do…. He sees in this a resurgence of Greco-Arabic necessitarianism, an error condemned in 1277. And to say that humans can only be saved by the institution is not only an error, but a heresy: in fact, many humans are saved by their faith without being baptized” (p. 60).

“Greco-Arabic necessitarianism” is another exaggeration. Among the Greeks, the only real necessitarians are the Stoics. Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes do all seem to slant things in the direction of objective order and necessity, but the radical voluntarism of Ghazali seems to have been more historically influential in the Arabic tradition.

“For Ockham, order is always a de facto order, a complex of contingent and revocable singularities. It is thus the object of ordained power; but what God can do (in principle), even if he never does it, is the object of absolute power. There is here an extraordinary cross-chase in relation to Duns Scotus. What the one calls the object of ordained power, the other calls the object of absolute power, and vice versa. The fact and the principle exchange their role” (ibid).

On Boulnois’s account, Ockham is a less radical voluntarist than Scotus.

“For Ockham, it is necessary to thus understand the distinction ‘power to do something’: the expression is sometimes taken according the laws ordained and instituted by God, and of these things one says that God can do them by his ordained power. In another way, ‘power’ is taken in the sense of power to do anything that is not self-contradictory, that God has ordained that he will do or not do, and of these things, one says that God can do by his absolute power. The ‘ordained power’ indeed does designate the order established by God, as in Duns Scotus. But the ‘absolute power’ designates not his de facto power, but only everything that is not contradictory: it has a logical sense and not an operative one (since it designates what God does not do); he returns quite simply to the traditional sense admitted before Scotus” (pp. 60-61).

“[Ockham’s influential student] Adam Wodeham explicitly cites two interpretations of absolute power…. Adam Wodeham clearly thinks ordained power as an order instituted regularly and capable of dispensation, like Scotus and Ockham. But he is also aware of the existence of two models for thinking absolute power: that of Duns Scotus, for whom the power to do the contrary of the established order is absolute, that is to say autonomous and absolutely capable of acting; and that of Ockham, for whom the absolute power of God is subject to the logical principle of contradiction. For Scotus, even when God has ordained the contrary, he can do something by his absolute power. For Ockham, God can only act by his absolute power if there is no contradiction with what he has ordained” (p. 61).

“As a consequence — and contrary to received ideas — the great epistemological rupture of the 14th century was effectuated by Scotus more than by Ockham…. [Scotus] is infinitely more revolutionary, in admitting that God has a de facto power that is other than the power in principle without being immoral. Nonetheless, the position of Ockham and that of Scotus converge on one point, essential for theological ethics: even if, by the ordained power of God, the human can only be saved by baptism and entry into the institution, by the absolute power of God, the human can be saved without Church or charity…. One of the distant consequences of this hypertrophy of absolute power will be the possibility, vigorously enunciated by Luther, that there is a predetermination indifferent to good and evil” (p. 62).

Luther argued for justification by faith alone, traced all authority solely to the Bible, and tended to emphasize its literal word.

“It would be exaggerated to make the new theory of divine power bear all of the motif of the metamorphosis of theology after Scotus. It would also be exaggerated to try to reduce everything to the new theories of intuition or of the primacy of will. First of all, Scotus is only the spokesman for a whole generation of thinkers who each contributed to the restructuring of theology” (p. 63).

But these caveats address only certain over-simplifications of the historical interpretation Boulnois develops.

“It is the triangle of power, knowledge, and will that is modified in its entirety. In the human as in God, power [pouvoir] becomes a power [puissance] to act in principle or in fact. Power remains a capacity to act according to an order (interpreted juridically as a law), but it also becomes the capacity to act outside the law or against it. Furthermore, for thinking of the problems of beatitude from the side of common abstractive knowledge, there developed a theory of intuitive knowledge of the singular contingent. Finally, for the Franciscan theologians above all, freedom of the will is an innate quality” (p. 63).

On the threshold of modernity, new voluntaristic super-powers are attributed both to God and to the human. The alleged fact of voluntaristic will is no longer constrained by an orientation toward the good.

“As a consequence, willing is no longer tautologically willing the good. But reciprocally, what God wills is ipso facto the good. On the edge of the new theology of omnipotence, the theories of intuition and of will will be adjoined, to construct a new model of practice and of epistemology. With this new device, it is the whole harmony between the transcendentals, being, truth, and the good, that is disrupted. The objects of power, of will, and of knowledge are no longer necessarily aligned” (pp. 63-64).

“Conceiving divine intervention de potentia absoluta as a real possibility led to an undermining of the intelligibility and predictability of natural phenomena. The order of the real no longer appears except as a descent into particularity in the ocean of possibles. This disjunction has a paradoxical consequence: philosophy is all the more free to expound the necessity of the order of the present world, while the theologian makes contingency surge into this world here, when he does not invoke an infinity of other possible worlds. The present order can become an absolute, and the absolute can contain an infinity of other orders. The order and the absolute are disseminated in an indefinite variation of hypothetical orders. The order and the absolute are no longer articulated; they pass one into the other” (p. 64).

As Boulnois says, treating divine intervention in the world by absolute power as a real possibility tends to undermine intelligibility. I would add that this undermining of intelligibility undermines ethics as well.

“This renewal of the problematic figures an evolution of theology. It makes God less and less human, less and less reached by knowledge of the order of the universe, less and less oriented toward the norm of the good. Divine omnipotence thus founds a ‘skeptical’ movement, which has consequences for the theology of justification (from Scotus to Luther). The order of salvation appears more and more contingent…. The equilibrium between the order of the world and the omnipotence of God attained in the Sentences of Peter Lombard ended up a victim of its own success. After being articulated with nature, the supernatural becomes omnipresent, and finally suspends all autonomy of the order of nature. There is no longer a consistent finite order. Omnipotence figures a more and more uncertain order of the world, and results in a complete concealment of God and his plans from the human. God is so unknowable that his attributes are founded in the brilliance of his omnipotence, reachable only by faith, and not allowing any certainty to exist. Following this metamorphosis, God, the object par excellence of theological intelligence, who was at first thought of as ineffable, will be finally named as incomprehensible. The world will appear as a labyrinth of axiomatics and exceptions, in which individuals are toys” (pp. 64-65).

This omnipresence of the possibility of supernatural intervention, outside the order of nature — and the correlated suspension of all autonomy of the order of nature — are what undermine intelligibility.

“It is now the model of political power [pouvoir] that serves to think the divine power in an identical, univocal sense, even in a particular case: all power can be exercised either juridically, or de facto” (p. 65).

“By a cross-chase of which history has the secret, these ‘absolutist’ arguments will serve later for the exaltation of monarchic power against pontifical pretensions. In Jean Bodin, they serve to describe the absolute power of the prince. This theory leads to a reinforcement of political absolutism — and simultaneously to an evanescence of the predictability of the law of nature” (p. 66).

“The theme of absolute power grounds the work of Duns Scotus in three dimensions: ontological (the action of every free agent), juridical (the king and his realm), theological (God and his decrees). This origin reveals a structural correspondence between the modern concepts of individual freedom, of divine power [puissance], and of political power [pouvoir]” (ibid).

“The black sun of omnipotence shines with a paradoxical light. When power wants to be without shadow and without limits, it accumulates within itself the night in which all evils are absolved; it endorses dark things and obscurity. On the contrary, the power that is incapable of evil and excludes it is a pure light without darkness. It does not suppress the shadow, or assume it, or absolve it, but dissociates it from itself and separates it from its sharp light. But for this it must be a power capable of lacking power” (p. 68).

Realism, Nominalism, Modality

There is an important intersection between the 14th century debate about realism and nominalism and contemporary questions about the status of modality in logic that ought to be of interest to non-specialists. Both of these topics probably sound obscure to most people. At sound-byte level, the first is about the status of universals, and modality is something we implicitly presuppose any time we try to reach for something “more” than allegedly pure phenomena or mere appearance.

Both sides of the medieval debate often wanted to enlist the support of Aristotle, who took a remarkably even-handed approach to these questions we have yet to clarify. The debate was often invested with a great moral significance, and provoked a number of intemperate claims. But at the same time, both sides were able to use the technical vocabulary of the theory of “supposition” — along with shared familiarity with Aristotle — to discuss semantic issues of concrete meaning and word use in detail, in terms both sides could in large measure agree upon. This led to a very high quality and sophistication in many contributions to the debate on both sides.

On some slight acquaintance, many modern readers can easily sympathize with nominalist critiques of the premature and illegitimate use of universals. We may think of vulgar platonism, excessive abstraction, reification, alienation, and so on. On the other side though, there are premature and illegitimate claims that universals can be explained away entirely. But Hegel’s Frau Bauer could not even recognize her individually named cows, if there were no such thing as legitimately reusable reference, naming, and vocabulary. I think most people should be able to see that there are two sides to the coin here.

If we ask how legitimate repeatabilities in ordinary language are constituted and used, something like modality inevitably comes into play. It now occurs to me that Brandom’s emphasis on the priority of hypotheticals over alleged categoricals in real-world material inference — a point to which I am deeply sympathetic — really calls for something like the notion of modality that he develops.

Aristotle on Friendship

Philia, commonly translated as “friendship” or “love”, is one of the summits of Aristotelian ethics. It embodies a kind of reciprocating good will, grounded in fondness and a kind of identification with the other, and it motivates us to do good. Aristotle discusses it from many angles. This is a historical background for Hegel’s ideas about mutual recognition. I’ve selected a few core passages to comment upon.

“And friendship seems to be present by nature in a parent for a child and in a child for a parent, not only in human beings but also in birds and most animals, and for animals alike in kind toward one another, and especially among human beings, which is why we praise those who are friends of humanity. And one might see among those who travel that every human being is akin and a friend to a human being” (Nicomachean Ethics, book VIII ch. 1, Sachs tr., p. 144, emphasis added).

He considers familial bonds as a kind of friendship grounded in nature, not only among humans but among other animals as well. As the feeling of commonality in human communities, friendship has political significance. He explicitly suggests that we ought by default to see every fellow talking animal as a friend or potential friend.

“And friendship seems to hold cities together” (ibid).

“Cities” are a figurative way of referring to human society in general. Just above, he explicitly mentions every human being.

“And when people are friends there is no need of justice, but when they are just there is still need of friendship, and among things that are just, what inclines toward friendship seems to be most just of all. And friendship is not only necessary but also beautiful, for we praise those who love their friends…. Moreover, people believe that it is the same people who are good men and friends” (ibid).

Without much effort, friends naturally tend to treat one another better than justice would demand. Friendship motivates us to do good.

“[Friends] have goodwill and wish for good things for one another, not being unaware of it” (p. 146).

“[T]here are three species of friendship, equal in number to the kinds of things that are loved; for in accordance with each, there is a reciprocal loving which one is not unaware of, and those who love one another wish for good things for one another in the same sense in which they love. So those who love one another for what is useful do not love one another for themselves, but insofar as something good comes to them from one another. And it is similar with those who love on account of pleasure, since they are fond of charming people not for being people of a certain sort, but because they are pleasing to themselves. So those who love one another for what is useful have a liking based on what is good for themselves, and those who love for pleasure have a liking based on what is pleasant to themselves, and the other person is loved not for what he is, but insofar as he is useful or pleasant. Therefore, these are friendships of an incidental kind, since it is not insofar as the one loved is the very person he is that he is loved, but insofar as he provides, in the one case, something good, or in the other case, pleasure” (ch. 3, p. 146).

Even in the friendships based on usefulness or pleasure, there is a “reciprocal loving”.

“And those who wish for good things for their friends for their own sake are friends most of all, since they are that way in themselves and not incidentally” (p. 147). “And people wish for good things for those they love for those others’ own sake, not as a result of feeling but as a result of an active condition” (ch. 5, p. 150).

Kant’s emphasis on treating other people as ends in themselves has its origins here.

“Now the friendships that have been discussed consist in an equality, since the same things come from both people and they wish for the same things for one another” (ch. 6, p. 151).

“But friendship seems to be present in loving more than in being loved…. And since friendship is present more in loving, and those who love their friends are praised, the virtue belonging to friends seems to be loving” (ch. 8, p. 153).

“And it is especially in this way that those who are unequal might be friends, since it could equalize them” (p. 154).

While there are also friendships among unequals, in which a kind of proportionality to circumstances stands as the next best thing to equality, friendship between equals clearly serves as a kind of model. This equalizing role of friendship is why it is closely linked to justice.

“Now it seems, as was said at the beginning, that friendship and justice concern the same things and are present in the same things; for in every sort of community there seems to be something just, and also friendship. At any rate, people address their shipmates and fellow soldiers as friends, and it is similar with those in other sorts of communities. To whatever extent they share something in common, to that extent there is a friendship, since that too is the extent to which there is something just. And the proverb ‘the things of friends are common’ is right, since friendship consists in community” (ch. 9, p. 154 ).

Aristotle uses the figure of speech that “the friend is another self” (book IX ch. 4, p. 168). We both tend to see our friends as like ourselves, and more often form friendships with those we are disposed to see as like ourselves. As is often the case, he moves back and forth rather fluidly between definition and description, and between more and less proper or exact senses of the word. Thus the same term serves here as a universalizing ideal and there as a distinguishing criterion.

All the Way Down

Once of the things I’ve most appreciated about Brandom has been his unwillingness to reduce normativity and value judgments to non-normative factors. Repeatedly in Making It Explicit, he speaks of norms “all the way down”. There is even a subheading for “all the way down” in the index entry for “norms” (p. 732). But in conjunction with this, he repeatedly suggests that the relation between pragmatics and semantics, while symmetrical in many respects, also includes an asymmetry, according to which it is more appropriate to say that normative pragmatics grounds representational semantics than vice versa. This is in distinction both to common views that privilege representation over inference and semantics over pragmatics, and to the purely symmetrical view of semantics and pragmatics that he seems to propound in Reasons for Logic, Logic for Reasons.

The symmetrical view can be seen in the favorable light of other symmetries that Hegel argues for in his campaign against “one-sidedness”. But it also implies that there is no sense in which normative pragmatics ought to be seen as coming before representational semantics.

Brandom’s 1976 dissertation, which is partly framed as the elaboration of a new form of pragmatism, makes links between the pragmatism it advocates, and a priority of pragmatics over semantics in philosophy of language. But as mentioned above, this year’s Reasons for Logic, Logic for Reasons, while applying inferentialist explanation to semantics in new ways, and while remaining as much as ever committed to an inferentialist order of explanation in general, nonetheless seems to back off from claiming any priority for pragmatics over semantics.

My worry is that this new symmetry and parity between pragmatics and semantics could end up weakening the commitment to “normativity all the way down”. The new thesis of full symmetry builds on his previous analogy between normativity and modality or subjunctive robustness, which I take to be sound. It may be that normativity all the way down does not really require the relative priority of pragmatics over semantics that Brandom claims in the dissertation and Making It Explicit, but I think more on this needs to be said.