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.

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”.

Ethics and the Dogma of Free Will

The last post treated Olivier Boulnois’s discussion of ethical deliberation and proairesis or “resolution” (which I formerly called “choice”) in Aristotle, which grounds Boulnois’s “genealogy of freedom”. Here are a few highlights of his discussion of how the very un-Aristotelian notion of free will emerged in the later tradition, along with parts of his conclusion.

Elsewhere I have used the common translation of Latin liberum arbitrium as “free will”, but more literally it is something like “free arbitration”, which is what a free will is characteristically supposed to do. In the context of this “archaeological” discussion where the terms appear side by side, the distinction matters.

Frequently, talk about will is fraught with ambiguity. Good will — and more generally, definite will as intent subject to interpretation — is a completely different thing from the indeterminate will conceived as a power of decision ex nihilo that is being criticized here, but the two are often mixed together.

“Voluntas did not always mean will, if we understand by that a directing principle of the powers of the soul, trigger of action and repose, and capable of contraries. The word is attested in classical Latin, in the sense of ‘favor’, ‘good disposition’ ” (Généalogie de la liberté, p. 254, my translation throughout). “[The Greek boulesis], which Cicero translated as voluntas, designates a sage emotion, a rational desire, the superior form that desire takes when the [Stoic] sage is no longer subject to passions” (ibid).

In the Stoics, we can see the beginning of an evolution toward modern concepts of will. But the Stoic usage properly applies only to the ideal of the Stoic sage. It is not yet a faculty of the soul that all humans are supposed to have.

According to Boulnois, the next major step was taken by Alexander of Aphrodisias, in late 2nd to early 3rd century CE. Standing near the beginning of the Greek Aristotelian commentary tradition, Alexander is the most historically influential of the Greek commentators. Relevant here are his arguments against Stoic determinism, in the non-commentary treatise On Fate.

“Is it necessary to define freedom as freedom of the will, or free arbitration? The problem of free arbitration, understood as a completely undetermined power to resolve [or choose], arises from Alexander of Aphrodisias, in a metaphysical rereading of Aristotle. In effect, Alexander is responding to a non-Aristotelian problematic, that of [Stoic] determinism. To do this, he establishes a connection between the concept of proairesis and the rejection of the cosmic determinism of the Stoics, thus giving birth to a ‘libertarian’ interpretation of decision, indeed to the concept of (undetermined) free choice. Where Aristotle affirms that we generically have the capacity to act or to not act, Alexander holds that we singularly, in each conjuncture, have the possibility to act or not, and to act otherwise. This is to say that proairesis becomes a faculty of choice independent of the state of the world — a free arbitration. And it is this concept, called ‘Aristotelian’ by Heidegger but in fact Alexandrian, that imposes itself, as well in [the early Augustine of the Treatise on Free Will] as in scholasticism, up to Descartes. It becomes necessary for this to consider not only action, but an interior power of choice. Free arbitration thus becomes free arbitration of the will” (p. 472, emphasis in original).

“In inventing a libertarian conception of action, Alexander [of Aphrodisias] founds an ethic centered on the capacity to choose for oneself a thing or its contrary, without depending on a preceding cause” (p. 248).

“The concept of free arbitration had already received its certificate of nobility from [the early Christian theologian] Origen…. But he implied no metaphysical thesis on determinism and indeterminism. It is Augustine who submits the concept of free arbitration to this problematic, and discovers the power of the will, in his Treatise on Free Will” (p. 253).

“But it is Augustine who made [voluntas] the founding concept of Western ethics, in joining it to that of free arbitration (liberum arbitrium). He made it the free arbitration of the will” (p. 255, emphasis in original).

“The Treatise on Free Will was at first conceived as a treatise on the good, in which Augustine demonstrated the divine goodness and the origin of evil, in opposition to the Manicheans. But to exonerate God, it was necessary to make the human will responsible for evil” (p. 256).

“The association of the will proper and free arbitration … suggests that the key of the fault [of original sin] resides in a power of choice belonging to the will. Evil does not come from nature, but from that will, in its exercise of choice…. Thus the first occurrence of [the phrase] free arbitration appeared at a crucial moment of reflection on the origin of evil” (p. 257, emphasis in original). “It is the human who is culpable, and God is innocent” (p. 259). “Willing is always in our power; in this consists our freedom” (p. 260).

“Augustine inherits the turn made by Alexander of Aphrodisias. Freedom of action has become a freedom of choice. And the power of choice is identified at once with the principle of assent to representations and the triggering principle of action: the will. Instead of a casuistry, instead of founding responsibility in the meeting of our beliefs and our desires, on the one hand, and on the circumstances of action, on the other, Augustine prefers to construct a unique and hidden inner principle, which is situated in an invisible part of the human (her soul); this principle is will, endowed with a free arbitration” (ibid).

Also influential in this context was the late 5th to early 6th century CE Roman Christian philosopher Boethius.

“In Aristotle, the problem of willing action and that of prescience of the future are totally disjoint. The first is treated in a reflection on ethical responsibility, the second in the framework of a logico-linguistic analysis of statements about the future” (p. 159). But “Boethius elaborates what will become the key argument: if the future is necessarily determined, free arbitration perishes, along with all moral responsibility” (ibid).

In the high middle ages, such arguments were developed to a fine pitch by the Latin scholastics. This turns out to be interrelated with the scholastic turn away from Aristotle’s own very innovative meta-ethical emphasis on the primacy of explanation by final causes, to a new privileging of a transformed notion of efficient cause that is closer to early modern mechanism than it is to Aristotle.

” ‘The final cause is not productive. That is why health is not productive, except metaphorically’ ” (p. 116). “At the end of the 13th century, Henry of Ghent and Duns Scotus understood this passage in an absolute manner. They deduced that the final cause produces nothing, that it is not really a cause” (p. 117). Henry of Ghent wrote, ‘The good that is known, insofar as it is represented in the intellect, moves the will only in a metaphorical way’ ” (quoted, p. 117, emphasis in original).

Though highly sophisticated and genuinely original, this scholastic devaluation of the final cause completely undoes what Aristotle himself highlights as his most important accomplishment in first philosophy (the detailed working out of a unique “final causes first” way of thinking and understanding, which orients itself through a hermeneutics of “that for the sake of which”). The scholastic reversal of Aristotle’s distinctive emphasis on final causes (in favor of putting a transformed notion of efficient causality first) puts a value-neutral notion of sheer power in top position in place of the good at the origin of things. Not only the first cause but also human agency are re-visioned in terms of this creative misreading of efficient causality as not just the means by which ends are achieved, but as a primordial value-neutral driving impulse, or (in the case of God) a value-neutral supreme power of creation from nothing. In philosophical anthropology, this is accompanied by a devaluation of Aristotelian teleological “intellect” in favor of the new voluntaristic notion of will, as the human analogue of creation from nothing.

“For Henry and Scotus, our passage means that the intellect and its object do not move the will…. But this interpretation, which reduces finality to the conjunction of a representation and a subjective will, is a hazardous extrapolation: Aristotle speaks here only of the need to distinguish between a productive cause and a final cause (the aim pursued is not the efficient cause of movement). And all the rest of his thought implies a teleology, that is to say a motion by a final cause, even for the beings that have no representation” (ibid).

“The will ceases to be simply the excellence of good humans (as with the Stoics). It implies a mentalist theory and a causal theory of action. — 1) Mentalist: because all action is explained as the exterior deployment of a mental state…. –2 ) Causal: the will is the cause of action…. Action becomes the effect of the will” (pp. 260-261, emphasis in original).

“At first, the fundamental definition of freedom is strictly ethical. It consists in the absence of constraint and of ignorance, independent of any metaphysical position on determinism or causal indeterminacy” (p. 473). “For at the origin, in Aristotle, [desire and logos or discourse] are clearly distinct…. The aporia arises when in an articulation that is not ontologically clarified, we confuse desire and the logos in the concept of ‘will’ (since the Stoics and Augustine). Successfully to rethink this articulation is the challenge and the task of an ethics. This imposes on us the task of destroying this metaphysical confusion that obstructs the philosophy of action” (p. 475).

The reference to “destruction” might sound a bit shocking, but it refers back to Boulnois’s methodological preliminaries. There, he said

“In the element of thought, destruction and construction are one sole and same act…. My approach is a form of ‘discursive dissolution’: through dissolution, we approach the resolution of the problem.”

“To solve: resolve, destroy. Here it is not simply a matter of ‘deconstruction’…. Can we again philosophize after analytic philosophy? If the analytical method has a virtue, it is to conduct a rational reflection on problems, and to accept that they can have a solution” (p. 20, emphasis in original).

“It is undoubtedly impossible to give a complete analytic interpretation of the problem of freedom. It is likewise impossible to give a complete history of the diverse statements responding to the question. But paradoxically, what is impossible separately becomes possible conjointly.”

“I will reconstruct the principal sources of the doctrine of freedom, and of its intrinsic aporia. I attach myself particularly to the work of Aristotle….”

“When Aristotle affirms that an action ‘accomplished willingly engenders praise and blame, while an action accomplished unwillingly only engenders compassion (suggnome) and perhaps pity’; when Descartes declares that the freedom of indifference is ‘the positive faculty of determining oneself for one or the other of two contraries, that is to say to pursue or to flee, to affirm or to deny’; when Nietzsche demands, apropos of the eternal return: ‘do you will that again and innumerable times again?’, not only does it not concern the same thesis, but above all it does not concern the same question” (pp. 20-21, emphasis in original).

He devotes a whole subsection of the introduction to “the legitimacy of the middle age” as a field of scholarly endeavor.

“In studying the middle ages, we indeed study the hidden face of our history…. To choose the long path, which passes through the Middle Age, is to choose multiplicity and discontinuity” (p. 22).

“[T]here are not two eternal conceptions, one determinist, the other libertarian…. an alternative of which both terms were unknown to Aristotle, who envisaged neither free arbitration (but solely willingness) nor determinism (but only cause and responsibility)” (p. 23).

“This study supposes that we first research the origin and the structure of the question of free arbitration, then we examine the sense of action from Aristotle, as well as its obliteration under a theory of free arbitration” (ibid).

In the conclusion, he says

“The problem of free arbitration, or of the freedom of the will, is a metaphysical artifact for two reasons:”

“1. The will was introduced by the commentators on Aristotle through a complex series of translations and projections, such that rational desire (boulesis) became a will, which renders the primordial sense of action and of practical reason incomprehensible.”

“2. Freedom is not essentially a power of the soul, but a social and ethical aptitude.”

“To go further in the elucidation of the problem of freedom, it is necessary to destroy the concept of will, as the mental and causal principle of human actions. As Wittgenstein well saw, for this it is necessary to confront a radical analysis of action without reproducing this term (anachronistic in relation to Aristotle). For the idea of an interior principle, capable of contraries and cause of action, not only conceals an internal contradiction, but is a fiction that occults the different levels of action in which we are responsible.”

“We have given an account of the actions of which we are the authors. To be responsible for an action, it is necessary to be a cause. This signifies that the agent has the power to act, and for Aristotle, this is a bivalent power, to act or not to act in general. Aristotle never says that, in some precise conjuncture, given the beliefs and representations of the agent, she must have the power to do a thing and its contrary, and to not do what she does. For that is not the question: that is not what makes ethical responsibility; we are responsible for actions of which we are generically the origin; action depends on us, it is ours, when we are not constrained by an exterior force. That is also why we cannot excuse ourselves (exclude ourselves from the cause), by arguing that faulty action was necessarily brought about by our desires…. For our desires are part of us, and our action is not imputable to another…. To speak of a ‘weakness of the will’, is precisely to render the phenomenon incomprehensible” (pp. 175-176, emphasis in original).

“It is only through confusion with the problematic of future contingents that the metaphysical question of the contingency of choice emerged…. For Aristotle never claimed that our capacity to act or to not act now depends uniquely on us” (p. 477, emphasis in original).

“Free arbitration becomes the condition of responsibility, which makes free arbitration a necessary but indemonstrable condition of ethics. — This argument has a double inconvenience: first of all, it requires the admission of an indemonstrable principle; then, in making free arbitration the condition of morality, it prevents us from seeing the converse, that ethical orientation is constitutive of its concept” (p. 478).

“Fundamentally, freedom does not reside in a subjective power to determine oneself. Neither the term ‘will’ nor its functions exist at the origin, in Aristotle: we find neither a power that centralizes the other faculties of the soul, nor a principle of assent at the source of action….. It is ethics that founds freedom, and not freedom that founds ethics” (p. 479, emphasis in original).

“Freedom is not a postulate of practical reason; it is practical reason. And the human is not born free, but she may become so” (p. 481).

Turn to a Subject

This continues a reading of Jean-Baptiste Brenet’s Transferts du Sujet (2003). Up to now, broader themes related to the common modern assumption that there must be a univocal “Subject” behind all the varied appearances and experience of subjectivity have remained mostly in the background. Now they are beginning to move to center stage. How did we get to a point where it seems natural to attribute all our particular thoughts, feelings, and perceptions to a tight unity called “the Subject”?

Plato famously likens the soul’s unity to the rather loose one of a city. Meanwhile the Aristotelian word translated as “subject” (hupokeimenon) has no specifically psychological meaning. It is a much more general logical term that applies to anything that in a quasi-syntactic way “stands under” something else. Brenet uses the Heideggerian term “subjectity” to distinguish this older meaning.

Augustine insists on the active character of the soul, as an image of God and analogue of the Trinity. Contrary to Aristotle, he attributes an immediate reflexivity to the soul or mind. But he sharply rejects the idea that the soul or mind is a “subject” (subiectum). Augustine argues that this would make things like knowledge and love inhere in us as mere properties or predicates.

But in the 13th century, the Latin translation of Averroes’ Long Commentary on Aristotle on the soul raised the question what is the Aristotelian “subject” of thought? Augustine’s followers began to insist on exactly what Augustine rejected. This is the point at which the term “subject” acquired a psychological meaning. Brenet points out its adoption by the Augustinian William of Auvergne, whose work Brenet previously translated to French.

“[W]hen the reading of Averroes began, the notion of ‘subject’ was already on the scene. An exemplary witness is the work of William of Auvergne, bishop of Paris between 1228 and 1249. William asserts not only that the human soul is the ‘subject’ of thought, but that it knows itself reflexively as ‘subject’…. [I]t is the knowledge that it knows, and the knowledge that it knows as the subject of knowledge. This is not a deduction that from acts of knowledge oriented toward objects conjectures the existence of a power serving as their substrate, but indeed the knowledge of the self as that subject” (Brenet, Transferts du sujet, p. 333, emphasis added, my translation throughout).

According to Brenet, William takes up Avicenna’s metaphor of the flying man. “If since birth a man were suspended in the air, without use of any of the senses, he will nonetheless necessarily think, and think of himself as thinking, as a spiritual substance, as receptor and substrate of the intellectual forms. Besides the recurrence of the word subiectum, attributed to the soul in this spiritualist conception of the human, the great interest of William of Auvergne’s psychology lies in the combination he makes of this notion of ‘subject’ with the dynamic one of ‘agent principle’ (principium agens). The thinking soul in effect is not pure passivity…. It must be actrix and effectrix…. (this is why William, a firm adherent of the principle of the indivisibility of the soul, rejects the division within it of an agent intellect and a receiving intellect). The sensible is nothing but an occasion for an immanent act of intellection, which excites the soul to produce its own proper concepts from itself and within itself. William cites the joint authority of Augustine and Boethius here…. When it thinks itself, as a result the soul apprehends itself as the receptacle of a self-engendered knowledge; it is like the water of the sea or a river that welcomes the fish to which it gives birth” (p. 334).

“This is a captivating double aspect for us: first of all because, having been said of the human in a fundamental sense (the human is her soul, and it is first of all as subject….), the subiectum in William of Auvergne is intimately related to an idea that our modernity retains: an active power of foundation, a causal determination of acts…. Secondly, because William of Auvergne injects the concept of the subject into an Augustinian analysis of cognitive processes or of spiritual knowledge that a priori does not tolerate it. We know in effect that Augustine rejects the model of ‘subject’ as support of accidents, for thinking the relation that is maintained between the spirit and its faculties” (pp. 334-335).

Brenet summarizes the view of Augustine:

“The spirit knows that it understands and thinks, it knows itself entirely in its proper substance; and it is not as ‘subject’ that it is present to itself; it is that being of which the very essence is to know itself; it is not as attributes that its spiritual powers are manifested, since they each reveal to the spirit its own being or substance. Neither intelligence, nor memory, nor will, etc., is a quality in the spirit, inhering in it. The spirit is made in the image of God, who in the proper sense does not subsist (God is not susceptible to being the subject of accidents that affect their bearer). It is the model of the Trinity itself that allows the relation of the faculties and the spirit to be thought. That is to say, the circumincession of the Persons, or perichoresis (perichoresis being the mutual immanence of the Persons of the Trinity)” (pp. 335-336).

“It is thus necessary to think the relation of the powers to the spirit as like that which the divine Persons have to God. In the ‘perichoretic model’, to take up the expression of Alain de Libera, the spirit and its faculties, while being distinct from one another, are essentially one. The paradigm of inherence of qualities in the subject is indeed inoperative in this context, and its rejection leads to the expulsion of the Aristotelian notion of hupokeimenon [underlying thing] from the field of psychology” (p. 336).

“From this angle, William of Auvergne’s theory of the soul breaks the project that wants to be Augustinian at the heart. In elucidating the unity of the mens [Augustinian “mind”] with the subiectum, that is to say the infallible intuition that gives the soul knowledge of itself as ‘subject’, the Parisian bishop did much more than enrich a vocabulary. He crossed two models that the Middle Age up to that time had kept distinct: a theory of the me as clear presence to self, and a theory of the subiectum as being sub-jacent. He introduced subjectity in the soul, and conferred on the thinking human, active in this production, the new status of support of mental acts” (pp. 336-337).

“Having once raised the preceding considerations, we can better appreciate the anti-Averroist solutions of Durand de Saint-Pourcain and Herve Nedellec, who both affirm that the human thinks only as subject of the intellective act…. Before the problem posed to the Latins by the duo subiecta [two subjects] of Averroes, there was already question of the human-subject of thought” (p. 337).

“What effectively characterizes the anti-Averroist conception that John of Jandun confronted, and what is progressively put in place, is a new articulation of ‘human’ and ‘subject’…. It is not only a matter of saying, like William of Auvergne, that the soul is the subject of intellectual sciences, and that it thinks itself as such. It is not only a matter of posing, with Thomas Aquinas, that that by which the human thinks can only be her substantial form. It is necessary from now on to ensure, like Durand de Saint-Pourcain and Herve de Nedellec do, that the human can only be thought in her status as subject of the intellective act” (ibid).

“One says not only that the human thinks, and that she is the subject of her thought, but that she thinks insofar as she is the subject, on this condition alone. ‘Subject’ is not the term that one predicates of the thinking human (in supposing the necessity of a sub-jective power, assuring the possession of acts of knowledge), neither is it how she intuits herself, but rather it is the very thing on which the propriety of her acts in thought depends. Otherwise said, it is less the appearance of the subiectum in the field of psychology that we remark on here, than its place in the anti-Averroist project of the Latins. The notion of subject, applied to the human, becomes the centerpiece of the offensive. Where did this come from? What authority justifies that one has recourse to a ‘subject’ in the conceptual construction of these responses? None other than that, evidently paradoxical, of the Long Commentary itself. It is from the text of Averroes that the Latins take the idea that they oppose to him” (p. 338, emphasis in original; see “This Human Understands”; “This Human”, Again; Averroes as Read by de Libera).

“The faulty reading of the theory of ‘junction’ and of the duo subiecta brought about the appearance of two things: on the one hand the attribution to the human, by the inclination of her images, of the title of subiectum; on the other hand the idea that the individuality of thought depends on this status. This is to say, combining the two: that the human only comes to think under her subjective condition, insofar as she is subject, if not of thought, at least of the intelligible species that lead to it. It is this articulation that the Latins preserve, while denying that it can be realized in the system of Averroes. They denounce in him the impossibility of a thing whose importance was invented by their misunderstanding. It is in the work of the Cordovan, interpreted crookedly, that this adjunction was brought out that was supposed to rationally justify the multiplicity of acts of intellection, in spite of the unity of the intellect” (ibid).

“As a consequence, the pivotal role of this transposition of subjectity into the human is not attacked, any more than it is in Thomas Aquinas. When the Aquinate reproaches Averroes for making the human only a being that is thought, and not a thinking one, in truth he has no issue with it being said that the image is the ‘subject’ of the intelligibles, and indeed with the placement of the human so that she thinks as the subject of universal species: he does not contest the idea of the human-subject, but the fact that reason is given for a doctrine in which individual images, and ultimately the individual herself, are nothing but furniture for the act of intellect. Averroes claims that the thinking human is (also), by means of her images, subject of the intelligible, but this is theoretically impossible for him, since the image has to be abstracted and by it, in it, the human can receive nothing of the universal” (ibid, emphasis in original).

Brenet is not saying that images and the individual are mere furniture for Averroes, but recalling that according to Aquinas’ critique, they would be.

“In fact, Aquinas does not insist on the term subiectum — which after a few years became, notably among other Dominicans, a decisive philosophical element that was believed to take Averroes at the stronghold of his own logic, and show that it is incapable of satisfying its principal postulate: contrary to what [Averroes] says, the human is not the subject of the intellecta in actu, and the intellect in which the intelligibles are truly subjected has nothing to do with the human or the individual” (pp. 338-339).

“When we look at the 70 years that separate the entry of the Long Commentary into the Latin language from the intellectual activity of John of Jandun, we are as it were constrained to ask why the notion of ‘subject’ came to play a preponderant role in regulating the problem of the individuality of thought. Why is it all based on a certain arrangement of the triad human-subject-thought? How, in the paradoxical opposition to the noetics of Averroes, did the matter of intellectual individuation become in part constituted or effectuated in the University as the question of the subject? The idea of the human as subject of acts of thought was not the already available counter-argument, and the evolution of formulae from Thomas Aquinas to Durand de Saint-Pourcain or Herve Nedellec is revelatory of the intense elaboration that took place, up to the vindication of a human subjectity for thought” (p. 339).

“While Averroes posed the question of the noetic subject of thought, the Latins, based on his text, problematized that of its personal or human subject. This came down to transposing subjectity into the human, to placing into the terrain of subjectity, insofar as it is human, the problem of the humanity of thought, that of her individuation, that of thought’s appropriation by singular persons” (p. 340).

“This human who thinks, Socrates, is the body composed with intellect: an aggregate, a whole that unites the soul that cogitates and that which thinks. When thought is produced, intellect is not only a separate intelligence whose act passes on occasion by the intermediary of human images and is joined by humans who are humans without that; on the contrary, ‘it’ enters into the definition of each person. Even if in a non-substantial way, ‘it’ is constitutive of what individuals think. Otherwise said: in its separation, intellect is a part of the thinking human; and from this angle the humanity of the latter participates as ‘intrinsic operator’ that exists as her form” (p. 341).

“Thomas Aquinas says that a thing only acts by its form? John of Jandun too! Durand de Saint-Pourcin says that an individual can only think if the subject of thought is aliquid hominis [something human]? John of Jandun too! Certainly they don’t strictly understand the same thing: because this form and this subject are for John an ‘intrinsic operator’ without substantial support, because it raises an issue for personal immortality, etc.; no one denies the importance of these disagreements. Nonetheless, John shares this idea that it is necessary to include intellect in the human, and not only unite the latter to thought. We can see the effect of [Siger of Brabant’s] De anima intellectiva, but not only that; it is the effect of a previous Latin problematization that poses the subjection of the concept in the human as the condition of her proper thought. One could say also: which required that intellect in its entirety be an intellective soul. If we say that Averroes decentered the subject, John of Jandun recentered it: this thought is mine if that which it operates as thought is ‘of’ me” (ibid).

I have frequently commented on the non-Aristotelian character of the common scholastic term “intellective (or intellectual) soul”. Here we see its motivation.

“With Siger of Brabant, John constructs his response in two stages: he shows first that intellect-operans intrinsicum, along with the body, is a part of the thinking human; then, playing anew with the cosmologico-noetic analogy, that the act of a part can be referred back to its whole. On the basis of the human-aggregatum, the second function of the celestial comparison is in effect to indicate that the act of a part can be attributed to the composite — a way of maintaining with Aristotle that ‘it is the human, by her soul’ who thinks, and not only the soul” (p. 342).

“Vision is only in the eye, in the organ that receives the seen, and nonetheless we say that the human sees…. When the human thinks, the intellect is operans intrinsicum for her” (p. 344).

“In his questions on the Metaphysics, John defends the idea of an effective unity, a unity realized by the production of an effect” (p. 346).

“The exclusivity of human being follows from the affinity that the cogitative, the best of the sensory faculties, has with intellect” (p. 349). “The intellect does not abstract the brute image, the image of brutes, it requires a preliminary refinement…. The human intellective soul is the first of the separate forms, the most distant from the First, and the cogitative is the last and most spiritual of material forms” (p. 350).

“More exactly, without the existence of bodies the intellect cannot accomplish its end, which is the thought of the pure intelligibles, junction with the separate beings and with God” (p. 352). “Without the body, which conditions the engenderment of the intellect in habitu, the intellect, deprived of adeptio, cannot really be intellect…. Intellect depends on the human species, conceived as an uninterrupted succession of multiple supports of images, and not on this or that one in particular” (p. 353).

“The cogitative is a sensitive soul, the perishable form numbered with the humans, inherent to the body. It is its individual proper form, which also constitutes its specificity. Moreover, and without contradiction (on the contrary, because the order of the universe requires it), the human has a second substantial perfection, which is aggregated to her body in thought…. The human is not only a cogitating body, the bodily individual, but the whole formed by the operative unity of intellect with the body” (p. 357).

“For one who asserts that the possible intellect is unique, it remains to find solely in the particular organic faculties of humans the reason justifying the diversity of their thoughts” (pp. 358-359).

“A human thinks if she produces the act of thinking…. [T]he vocabulary of junction is succeeded by that of production, and the idea of a continuatio with the intelligible in act is succeeded by that of a production of the intellective act itself” (p. 361). “It is in the individual herself that thought is produced, and it is the internal dimension of its engenderment that makes a thought her own…. In estimating that junction with the intelligible in act is equivalent to production of the act of thought, that this production is the act of the human and that it occurs within her, John distances himself [from Averroes]” (p. 363). “John’s position coincides on an essential point with the anti-Averroist theses of certain great doctors of the School…. In spite of all their oppositions, John supposes no different thing: the human produces thought, and it occurs in her” (p. 364). “More generally, the act of intellect is attributed ‘denominatively’ to the human, in the measure that the last is in some way the cause” (p. 366).

“What governs the question of individual thought is not a doctrine of continuatio like that of Averroes: it is the idea of an intellectual production founded on a theory of the ‘subject’: a theory of the human as subject of the actus intelligendi, such as is elaborated at nearly the same time, in thinkers like Durand de Saint-Pourcin or Herve Nedellec” (p. 368).

Next in this series: Adeptio

Meaningful “Seeing”

We ordinarily “see” things with the appearance of immediate meaning — for instance, not just patches of color but recognizable objects and individuals. We experience these as having properties that we expect to hold under various conditions that do not apply at present. We also seem to immediately apprehend subtler aspects of situations that presuppose what Kant and Hegel called “reflection” to discern and express at all. This goes far beyond any simple passive registering of sense data.

The Stoics tried to bridge the gap between a theorized passivity of perceiving and knowing and the already meaningful character of experience in a naturalistic way, by positing some kind of material transmission of “phantasms” from objects to the perceiver.

Variants of this were adopted by many Latin scholastics under the name of “sensible species”. By analogy, Aquinas and others argued for the real existence of “intelligible species” that could be passively received by the intellect.

However, medieval nominalists already anticipated modern empiricism in rejecting both sensible and intelligible species, and medieval Augustinians argued for a much larger role of active powers of the soul in the apprehension of meaning.

Kant and Hegel broadly agree with the nominalist and empiricist critique of the theory of passive transmission of species, and with an abstracted version of the Augustinian thesis of the role of active capabilities in perception and knowledge.

How this all relates to Aristotle involves many subtleties, some of which are mentioned in Aristotle on Perception.

Direct and Indirect “Knowledge”

For now, this will be the last installment on Alain de Libera’s Archaeology of the Subject. Though he has promised another four and a half volumes, I’ve reached the end of what has been published so far. Here I’ll briefly summarize the remainder of volume 3 part 1.

After analysis of an anonymous Averroist text of the 1270s that criticizes Aquinas in sharper language than that employed by Siger of Brabant, de Libera briefly discuses substance dualism and the plurality of substantial forms in the later Augustinian tradition. He documents the beginnings of the shift toward modern usages of “subject” and “object” in the 13th century. He notes the large difference in connotation between Aristotelian ousia and Latin substantia, glossing ousia as what something is in its depth. (I’ve been continuing to use “substance”, with Aristotle’s own gloss from the Metaphysics of “what it was to have been” a thing.)

He then turns to a long and delicately nuanced review of Aquinas’ compromise between Aristotle and Augustine on the soul’s knowledge of itself. The title of this chapter in French is a pun: by homonymy, it suggests “The Subject Supposed to Know Itself”, but literally, it is “The Subject Supposed to Have Itself”.

At summary level, Aristotle holds that all self-knowledge is indirect, while Augustine holds that the soul directly knows itself through its essence. But de Libera points out that there are elements of directness in Aristotle, and elements of indirectness in Augustine. He emphasizes that “knowledge” is said in many ways, from mere undifferentiated awareness to the strong knowledge that was called “science”. If we want to discuss claims about self-knowledge, we need to distinguish what kind of “knowledge” we are talking about.

In the final chapter, de Libera again mentions the Franciscan Peter Olivi, who in the 13th century criticized the representationalism of the medieval theory of “species” in the name of direct realism. Olivi also further sharpened Augustine’s claims that the soul directly knows itself by its essence. According to de Libera, while Olivi was far less influential than Aquinas, it was the interaction of their legacies that ultimately led to the modern notion of the human subject as agent and ego. Toward the end, de Libera again mentions the 18th century Scottish philosopher of common sense Thomas Reid, who was completely unaware of medieval Augustinian criticisms of representationalism, and re-invented direct realism.

Once again, we have to be careful about too easy assumptions regarding “isms”. Here, it turns out that both advocates of representationalism and advocates of direct realism may make strong appeals to immediacy and presence. The difference is that in modern terms, representationalists appeal to the alleged immediacy of mental representations, whereas direct realists appeal to the alleged immediacy of external objects. I read Aristotle as acknowledging a modest role for immediacy in common sense apprehensions, but as rejecting the idea that immediacy has any kind of privileged status in knowledge. I read Kant, Hegel, Brandom, and Ricoeur among others as strongly supporting this Aristotelian view.

Earlier, de Libera had noted a common Franciscan criticism that for both Aristotle and Aquinas, all self-knowledge is inferential. These days, I would take that as a compliment. In my youth, I uncritically absorbed a large bias toward immediacy myself. Immediacy was supposed to give a truth hidden by ordinary alienation. But in more recent years, I have become sympathetic to Brandom’s thesis that all apparently immediate knowledge is just that — apparently immediate, and that a kind of inference actually is the most primitive source of knowledge.

Something from Nothing?

The idea of something from nothing always seemed to me like pulling rabbits out of a hat. Taken in a piecemeal sense, it would seem to be completely arbitrary, and arbitrariness leads to all sorts of bad things. Nothing good is arbitrary.

Leibniz defended creation from nothing and particular providence, while insisting that God does not intervene arbitrarily in the world. Already Augustine had said that what are called miracles are only exceptions to the usual course of nature, and that God never contravenes nature in an absolute sense. This leaves room for debate as to what kinds of exceptions can occur.

If God is the pure To-Be that gives being to beings as Aquinas says, creation from nothing would seem to mean only that the giving of being is not a case of “making from”. But why is this not just called Being giving being? What does “nothing” have to do with it? Of course, the doctrine of creation from nothing long predates Aquinas, and Aquinas was a consummate diplomat in matters of doctrine. Common doctrine is not a simple matter of truth, as the dogmatists would have it; it is a kind of social compromise that helps keep the peace. Preserving accepted phrases while giving them new meaning is a time-honored diplomatic move.

Aquinas’ notion of creation was likely also in part developed to oppose the dualist teachings of the Cathars, according to whom the physical world was created by an evil power.

I have considerable sympathy for the eternity of the world, or alternatively some sort of eternal creation, such as Aquinas recognized to be logically possible. More sophisticated accounts of creation like those of Augustine and Aquinas explicitly include the creation of time, so that there would be no “time before creation”, even though they affirm a beginning. I have trouble distinguishing a beginning outside of time from eternity.

Aquinas on the Act of Thought

In a few very dense pages, Alain de Libera summarizes a number of key theses extracted from the works of Thomas Aquinas pertaining to the act of thought (see also “The Subject” In Medieval Times; Origins of a Subject-Agent). According to de Libera, these principles — which represented a significant departure from Augustine’s insistence that the human soul should not be viewed as a “subject” in the sense of something standing under something else — attained a wide currency in Latin scholasticism. They laid the groundwork for the modern notion of “the subject” as active mind and ego.

“Thought is an action (actio) or an operation (operatio) called ‘intellectual’ (intellectualis) or ‘intelligible’ (intelligibilis) because it is the deed of intellect and treats of the intelligible, and unites these two dimensions in its proper actuality. Intellectual has two senses: subjective and causal. Contemplation, also called theoretical thought, the knowledge of the intelligible, is intellectual because it takes place in the intellect itself, which is to say that, relative to the body, it is atopical or utopical [without place], because the intellect itself is not located in the body; the other actions called intellectual are so in a causal sense; they are called such because they are directed or imposed, that is to say commanded, by the intellect and executed by means of a bodily instrument — with respect to which, in distinction from the act of thought — they are localizable and localized: this is the case, for example, with walking and riding, two actions called imposed.”

“…There are two kinds of actions: one remains internal to the agent, begins and ends in it (it is called: manens [remaining] or consistens [consisting] or quiescens in agente [resting in the agent]); the other is exercised on another thing or an exterior matter (it is called: exiens [coming out] or progrediens [moving forward] or tendens [tending] or transiens in alterum [passing into another] or in materiam exteriorem [into the matter of exteriors]). This duality prolongs the Aristotelian distinction between immanent action and transitive action…. The distinction, massively utilized to theorize the difference between the psychic (where immanent causality reigns) and the physical (where the transitive reigns), is also applied within the physical sphere, notably to light….”

“…Only that which is in act acts (Nihil agit nisi secundum quod est actu). This fundamental thesis, which lays the foundation of the articulation between actio and actus [action and act], introduces itself in diverse other formulations, such as: Omne agens agit, inquantum actu est [every agent acts, insofar as it actually is], or Unumquodque agit secundum quod est actu [each one acts according to what it actually is]. We will call it ‘the principle of the actuality of the agent’.”

“Numerous principles arise from this or assume its validity. This is the case with [the principle that] that by which something first operates is the form of the operator; the principle of the subjection of action in the power of the agent… and the subjective principle of action [actions belong to something standing under them]” (Archéologie du sujet vol. 3 part 1, pp. 53-56, my translation). De Libera goes on to mention additional principles such as “attribution of action to the principal agent” (pp. 56-57); “action is a function of the being of the agent” (p. 57); “determination of action by the nature of the agent” (ibid); “determination of action by act” (ibid); and “actuality is a determination of the act of an agent” (ibid).

The bottom line of all of this seems to be that thought is the action of an agent. Neither Aristotle nor Augustine treated thought in this way or had this kind of view of action and agency, but a long medieval and modern heritage makes it seem like common sense to many people. Aristotle spoke of intellect as coming to us “from outside”. He was certainly very interested in practical doings, in process, and in being-at-work, but did not reduce these to the discrete “actions” of discrete “agents”. Activity, I want to say, is something different and broader than this. (See also Not Power and Action; Aristotelian Actualization; Aristotelian Subjectivity Revisited).

“The Subject” in Medieval Times

According to Alain de Libera in the second half of Archéologie du sujet vol. 1, Thomas Aquinas was instrumental in developing a view of the soul that was neither Aristotelian nor Augustinian, and that paved the way for the modern concept of “the subject” as an agent, long before Descartes. De Libera says that Aquinas did this in part by introducing the different, very abstract Aristotelian notion of subject (hypokeimenon, “thing underlying”, with no connotations of mind or agency) into the Augustinian model of the soul as an image of the Christian Trinity, and simultaneously introducing the Augustinian biblical Word into an Aristotelian model of abstractive knowledge. Aquinas also drew indirectly on Plotinus, and directly on his teacher Albert the Great’s use of pseudo-Dionysius. In doing so, he effectively removed the stigma Augustine had placed on treating the human soul as a “subject”.

Aristotle had suggested that there is a kind of identity between thinking and what it thinks. It is perhaps not accidental that we use different senses of the same English word “thought” for both. These should not be equated with subject and object in the modern sense; they both occupy parts of a kind of middle ground between what we call subject and object.

According to de Libera, Plotinus developed a kind of identity between three terms (nous, noeisis, noeton — intellect, intellection, intelligible object). His intellect and intelligible object are already somewhat closer to what we call subject and object. In between, he placed an act of thinking or intellection that was to have a kind of identity with both the intellect and the intelligible object.

Plotinus’ notion of act is also quite different from that of Aristotle. Aristotle calls the first principle a kind of pure act that is not an action in the ordinary sense, and has nothing else behind it; for Plotinus, the first principle is a power, and every act is the act of a power. For Aristotle, the first principle is also an end only; for Plotinus, it is both the end and the origin of all things.

The persons of the Trinity are supposed to have a sort of mutual immanence to one another that is completely unlike the case of something underlying something else. De Libera notes that Plotinus and his student Porphyry already used a similar concept of mutual immanence in their discussions of intellect. Augustine ranked his reading of Plotinus as a formative experience second only to his conversion to Christianity.

From the Christian neoplatonist pseudo-Dionysius, Albert the Great drew the notion of a “whole of powers” that is different from either a universal whole or an integral whole.

De Libera notes that the classic formula of the Trinity in Greek — one ousia, three hypostases — was confusingly translated into Latin as “one essence, three substances” or as “one substance, three persons”. By substitution, the coexistence of these two translations yields the obviously self-contradictory formula, “one substance, three substances”, which graphically illustrates the equivocation in medieval usages of “substance”.

(In deference to common usage, I have continued to use “substance” for Aristotle’s ousia, even though I think it is a terrible translation. “Essence” is better, provided we recognize that Plato and Aristotle had views of essence that were not “essentialist” in the sense of treating essences of things as pre-given or as something to take for granted.)

De Libera speaks of the need to parenthesize modern notions of subject and object in order to understand Augustine’s opposition to treating actions and passions of the soul as attributes of a substance. Conversely, for better or worse, Aquinas’ legitimation of this way of viewing the soul brings us closer to modern views. (I think Aristotle would have shared Augustine’s opposition to this formulation, but for different reasons. I think Aristotle regarded the whole human being — and not the soul or the body taken separately — as a “substance”.)

Aquinas introduced emphasis on both what de Libera calls an Aristotelian structure of subject-powers-activities and a pseudo-Dionysian structure of essence-power-operation into a Latin-speaking theological context that had been mainly dominated by Augustine. What I would call this double infusion of additional neoplatonic elements is said by some to have resulted in a more dynamic and relational way of viewing things. (In agreement with Gwenaëlle Aubry, however, I think Aristotelian potentiality is very different from neoplatonic power, even though they use the same Greek word.) Combined with Aquinas’ serious embrace of a version of Aristotelian hylomorphism, this infusion led to a simultaneously more positive and more dynamic view of worldly existence than had been common in the Augustinian tradition, which also helped lay the seeds of modernity.

A broadly neoplatonic view of the world in terms of powers and operations-of-powers thus turns out to have been very important for the emergence of the modern subject-as-agent (as well as, I would argue, the rise of the specific modern notion of causality). De Libera notes that Heidegger ignored both neoplatonism and theology in his famous account of the rise of the modern subject. Meanwhile, Aquinas’ legitimation of the treatment of actions and passions as attributes of a soul-subject-substance — coupled with the interweaving of such attribution with imputations of responsibility — seems to have contributed to a stronger notion of a self as something with univocal identity and sharp edges.

Origins of a Subject-Agent

How did the modern equation of subjecthood and agency come to be? How did the notion of “I” or ego come to be substantialized? An extremely influential argument of Heidegger makes this an innovation of Descartes. Alain de Libera argues that this is too hasty, and that the groundwork for this identification was actually laid in the later middle ages. I’m continuing a high-level treatment of de Libera’s extremely important “archaeology of the subject“ (see also On a Philosophical Grammar).

Answering this question will involve an extended historical odyssey through complex interactions between Aristotelian and Augustinian views, and much more. De Libera sees Aquinas in his polemic against Averroes raising four interrelated questions of a more fundamental nature: Who thinks? What is the subject of thought? Who are we? What is man? The second of these seems to have been first asked by Averroes. The other three are largely attributable to Aquinas and his contemporaries, in their reactions to Averroes.

Several points of Aristotelian interpretation (What is substance? What is form? What is act? What is an efficient cause? What is the soul?) will be relevant to answering these, as will Augustine’s meditations on personhood and the nature of the Trinity. De Libera notes that John Locke — a major contributor to modern views on “the subject” — was deeply involved in debates on trinitarian theology. He also discusses Franz Brentano’s modern revival of the medieval notion of intentionality. The medieval version was closely bound up with a notion of “inexistence” or “existing in” of mental objects (forms separated from their matter) in the soul.

In the Categories, Aristotle gives substance the logical sense of something standing under something else. This influenced the Greek grammarians who formulated the notion of a grammatical subject. But in the Metaphysics, he treats this as only a starting point that is quickly superseded by an identification of substance with form or “what it was to have been” a thing, before moving into an account of substance as potentiality and actuality.

De Libera notes a historic division among readers of Aristotle’s treatise On the Soul between those who interpret the soul as an attribute of the body, and those who treat it as a substance in its own right. The latter position has different meanings, depending on whether substance is taken in the “standing under” sense or in the sense of form. De Libera will be particularly interested in the consequences of a further family of positions that make the non-obvious equation of human actions and passions with attributes of the soul.

He notes that “category” in Greek originally meant accusation, and relates this to Locke’s characterization of personhood as a “forensic” notion. We have here to do with subtle relations between attribution, inherence, and imputation with respect to actions and passions in relation to the soul. But what is an action? Must we explain an act in terms of a substantial subject’s power of efficient causation in a late scholastic sense that is far from Aristotle’s? (See also Expansive Agency; Brandomian Forgiveness.)