Tag: Etienne Gilson

Grammatical Prejudice?

In several of his works, Nietzsche attacks the “grammatical prejudice” or “superstition of logicians” in positing a doer behind the deed. For example:

“‘[T]he doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed — the deed is everything. The popular mind in fact doubles the deed; when it sees the lightning flash, it is the deed of a deed: it posits the same event first as cause and then a second time as its effect. Scientists do no better when they say ‘force moves’, ‘force causes’, and the like” (Genealogy of Morals, 1st essay, section 13, Kaufman tr., p. 45).

One of the more obvious targets of this polemic would seem to be a certain stereotypical Aristotelianism. Such a view would take Aristotle’s more superficial characterization of “substance” [ousia] as the “underlying thing” as a final truth. As Nietzsche points out, this view has very wide diffusion, and has come to be regarded as common sense.

We have seen in some detail, however, that in his more advanced thought in the Metaphysics, Aristotle explicitly inverts this popular prejudice, and makes act [energeia] the criterion of what is a substance most of all [ousia malista]. As Goethe said, “In the beginning was the deed”.

Contrary to Nietzsche though, this does not make of substance a mere fiction. For Aristotle, substance is ultimately a result rather than a starting point. It turns out to be a derived concept, rather than an elementary one as may first appear. But as a result and as a derived concept, it has legitimate use.

Even the great 20th century Thomist Etienne Gilson suggests in his Being and Some Philosophers that we should think of being as a verb rather than as a noun. I too keep harping on the fact that all the many “senses of being” Aristotle enumerates in book Delta of the Metaphysics are senses of the connective “is”. But this is not the end of the story either.

The next thing we should notice is that what Aristotle principally enumerates and emphasizes in book Delta and elsewhere are the senses of being in which we say something “is” something (else) in accordance with one of the categories. These are transitive (connective) senses of “is”, associable with the formation of propositions that could be evaluated as true or false. Behind Aristotle’s talk about being is a guiding concern with normative saying and intelligible explanation of what properly speaking “is” the case. With his Thomistic roots, Gilson on the other hand emphasizes an intransitive sense of being as “existing”.

In numerous passages in the Metaphysics, Aristotle does indeed use “being” in an intransitive way, but my contention is that this is by way of summary or a kind of shorthand, which should be understood as presupposing and referring back to something like the enumeration of senses of being that we actually find in book Delta, all of which I would contend are transitive.

The only apparent exception in Delta is none other than being in the sense of in-act and in-potentiality. This occurs at the very end of the enumeration, and can reasonably be interpreted as shorthand for the longer expressions used earlier. Moreover, the detailed discussion of being in-act and in-potentiality in book Theta is about something (transitively) being something definite in-act or in-potentiality. In Delta, I think the brief mention of being in-act and in-potentiality is to be understood as wrapping a modal dimension around the more basic saying of “is” in the senses of the Categories. (Here I have passed over other senses of being that Aristotle himself says are less important, but none of these corresponds to what the scholastics and the moderns call existence either.)

Perhaps Gilson is right that Aquinas can be read as a sort of “existentialist”. But relatively speaking, I think Aristotle himself is closer to the analytic and continental philosophers who have emphasized the importance of language, meaning, and discourse. (See also Being as Such?.)

Heidegger, Sartre, Aquinas?

The heyday of existential Thomism is well past, but Etienne Gilson and others were certainly not wrong to take note of a close connection, despite other large differences.

Heidegger in Being and Time (1926) famously claimed that philosophers since Plato had been preoccupied with questions about beings and had lost sight of the central importance of Being writ large. Many 20th century Thomists partially accepted this argument, but contended that Aquinas was an obvious exception, citing Aquinas’ identification of God with pure Being. Heidegger rejected that identification, and would have insisted that Being was not a being at all, not even the unique one in which essence and existence were identified. Nonetheless there is a broad parallel, to the extent that Heidegger and Aquinas each in their own way stress the dependency of beings on Being.

In some circles, Aquinas has been criticized for promoting a “philosophers’ God”. But according to Burrell, Aquinas argued in effect that on the assumption that there is only one God, the God of Summa Theologica and the God of common doctrine must be acknowledged to have the same referent even if they have different senses, like Frege’s example of the morning star and the evening star.

Sartre in his 1945 lecture “Existentialism is a Humanism” put forth the formula that “existence precedes essence”. Aquinas in Being and Essence had argued that God has no essence other than existence. Sartre argued in effect that the human has no essence other than existence. In his context, this is to say either that the human essence consists only in matters of fact, or that there is simply no such thing as a human essence.

Sartre’s use of the word “essence” reflects a straw-man caricature of bad essentialism. Whatever we may say that essence really is, contrary to Sartre’s usage it is supposed to be distinguished from simple matters of fact. On the other hand, in formal logic, existence does reduce to matters of fact.

What Aquinas, Heidegger, and Sartre have in common is that they all want to treat existence as something that transcends the merely factual and formal-logical. Speaking schematically, it is rather the analogues of essence that transcend the merely factual in the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions. Thus Aquinas made a major innovation in inventing a new, unprecedented concept of existence that transcends the factual. I’m inclined, however, to sympathize with Dietrich of Freiberg’s argument that the concept of essence could already do all the work that Aquinas’ new supercharged concept of existence was supposed to do.

What is important for practical purposes is that there is something that transcends the merely factual. I think the close connection of “essence” with form and ends makes it an ideal candidate. The big difference between form and ends on the one hand and facts on the other is that logically speaking, facts can be arbitrary, whereas any form or end or essence necessarily implies some nonarbitrary order.

For Aquinas, God is simultaneously a fact and more than fact, and is unique in this regard. Nothing else has this dual status. Sartre transferred this unique dual status to the human. By contrast, the neoplatonic One is strictly more than fact — in traditional language, the One as source of being was said to be “beyond being” altogether. The 20th century theologian Paul Tillich quipped that it could be considered blasphemy to say that God exists (because “existence” is mundane and factual).

The “To-Be itself” of Aquinas, while profoundly innovative with respect to previous tradition and certainly not strictly Aristotelian, is nonetheless arguably more Aristotelian in spirit than the neoplatonic One, insofar as it is less ambiguous about the goodness of the actual world. Plotinus struggled mightily to reconcile a commitment to the goodness and beauty of this actual world with an ascetic tendency to devalue all finite things in face of the infinite One. In Aquinas there is still some tension between the reality of secondary causes and the absolute dependence of everything on God, but I think it is fair to say that the way Aquinas sets up the problem makes the reconciliation easier to achieve. This was a huge accomplishment. Nonetheless, taking into account other factors like assertions about the place of omnipotence and sheer power in the scheme of things, my overall sympathies lie more with the neoplatonic “strictly more than fact” perspective, and even more so with Aristotle’s more modest view that the “First” cause is strictly a final cause.