Olivier Boulnois’s deep “archaeological” investigation of the evolution of the concept of representation in Duns Scotus and his near-contemporaries has important implications for interpretation of the origins of distinctively modern thought.

Heidegger, Foucault, and Brandom have all seen Descartes as the main instigator of a paradigm shift that reoriented Western thought around the concept of representation and the subject-object distinction. But on the side of the subject, a very thorough case has been made by Alain de Libera and others that the distinctive characteristics of the broadly modern notion of a “subject” of consciousness had already emerged in the late 13th century.

Boulnois’s L’Être et représentation [Being and Representation: A genealogy of modern metaphysics in the era of Duns Scotus (1999)] makes a similarly thorough case for a late 13th century origin of the modern notions of object and representation. I will never again be able to innocently use the word “objectivity” for a kind of moral quality concerned with fairness in judgment — as I have been prone to do — without feeling a need to worry about these other connotations.

For now at least, this post will conclude my translations from Boulnois’s important book. It will take us to the end of his second chapter. The other four-fifths of the book move on to other topics, including Scotus’s concept of “concept” and its relation to Augustine’s trinitarian-theological model of human memory, intellect, and will; Scotus’s famous theory of the univocity of being; Scotist arguments for the existence of God; the role of Suárez in conveying broadly Scotist ideas into early modernity; and finally, how some of this shows up in Kant.

In future I may come back and address two interesting and somewhat unexpected views of Scotus that Boulnois brings to light later in the book. One is that the soul of the wayfarer never has full, immediate self-knowledge. The other is a notion of pre-existing divine ideas that seems as though it might put some limit on Scotus’s otherwise extreme voluntarism. (Although Boulnois has elsewhere astutely criticized voluntarism; purported voluntarist readings of Aristotle; and strong versions of omnipotence such as the one Scotus advocates, in this book he limits himself to sympathetic exposition.)

He begins this section by recalling the way that Aristotle’s only recently translated account of human knowledge of sensible things was understood by his Latin readers in the 13th century.

“For the noetics of the last third of the 13th century, the question of the mode of being of the object of knowledge is posed along the lines of [Aristotle’s] On the Soul. When I perceive a thing in itself, a doubling is produced. It is necessary to distinguish two aspects: the thing outside of me (object of perception), and the knowledge I have of it by an act of the soul (place of perception). The soul is the support, or the subsistent subject of the knowledge of the object. Thus the real being in nature is not the same thing as the being in the soul (ens in anima). The latter is first of all a ‘quality of the soul’, that is to say an accident that happens to my thought, and that only has subsistence through my thought. But this accidental being is secondary and imperfect in relation to the substance perceived, while the substance itself is perfect and primary. In contrast with this accomplished being, the mode of being of knowledge is that of being incomplete, lessened, diminished, ens diminutum” (pp. 88-89, my translation throughout, emphasis and ellipses in original throughout).

This is not so much Aristotle’s own view as a thoroughly Latinized account, which for instance already assumes the new Latin terminology and viewpoints of “subject” and “object” that have no place in Aristotle.

“As a consequence, the being of thought is doubled. A prefiguration of objective being, it can be considered under a double point of view, as object of thought or as form of thought. In the first case, it is a matter of what we think, of a vis-a-vis for the inspection of thought. In the second case, it is a matter of that by which we think, insofar as thought is in the thinker, according to its diminished being. Roger Bacon underlines this duality: ‘The being in the consideration and the conception of intellect can be in two ways: either as a species and a habit of thought existing in the intellect, or as accidents in a subject, that is to say like a thing in the measure that it is conceived and considered in act.’ Knowledge is a ‘way of conceiving’, a bifid aspect of our intellectual activity: it simultaneously recalls a being in the intellect and a being of the exterior object. The reality considered is only attained by means of a concept or a mental form” (p. 89).

There is a partial precedent in Aristotle for this doubling that becomes so prominent in the Latin context. Aristotle’s concern for how this or that is properly said simultaneously addresses both norms of linguistic practice and how things really are. Aristotle seems to delight in using expressions that can reasonably be read in either of these two ways. I think this is a deliberate strategy on his part.

But as Boulnois makes clear, the role and meaning of the doubling in the 13th-century context are quite different. Whereas Aristotle wants to show us that there is a deep relation between the ways we express things in language and the ways in which we understand reality, his Latin readers draw lessons about the need to distinguish between the thing in the soul and the thing in the world. The Latins partially anticipate what in Kant becomes the notorious problem of the “thing in itself”.

“This ambivalence is not anodyne. For sure, it designates knowledge either as a part of the soul, or as recalling the thing outside of me. But precisely, this ambiguity does not recover that of the thought in me and the thing outside of me. The notion of object comes to be interposed in this serene correspondence: what thought attains is no longer the thing in itself (that it aims at, and to which it refers), but the thing thought (that it signifies under a determinate form). [quote from Bacon:] ‘Certain habitus are in the soul, under the reason of the habitus, and thus they are in themselves in the soul or in the human. There are others that are under the reason of the object, because they are made object (obiiciuntur) to the intelligence, and truth and falsity are of this kind.’ Truth has come under the regime of the object. It is no longer the sensible reception of the thing itself, but the correspondence between the object pursued by the activity of the intellect, delineated by a form immanent to that activity, and its form conserved in the soul by a doublet in reduction. The being of the thing thought can no longer return to the being of the thing in itself. The plane of objectivity is detached from the surface of the world” (pp. 89-90).

Here we have also an explicit articulation of a correspondence theory of truth. This is not simply because Boulnois uses the word “correspondence” in his account, which may be an interpolation. Rather it is because of what is being said about the relation of truth to what among the Latins is now explicitly called an “object”.

“The object is the reason under which a thing appears similar to its form in the soul. What is produced by thought in the intellect has a double mode of being: as form received or disposition acquired (habitus), it is a reality in the soul, but it is also an object for thought; it thus has the mode of being of an object. Truth is identified with objectity in its double aspect — falsity is a defective relation between these two aspects, a division between thought and the object. Truth has passed under the regime of the object, but the being of the object has no clearly assigned reality. What is the term of an aim of the soul, if it is not confirmed by a relation exterior to the soul, identical to the thing itself, or confounded with the concept the intellect takes of it?” (p. 90).

The answer to this rhetorical question is the object. The Heideggerian term “objectity” here is definitely an interpolation, but the variants of the Latin term “object” that appear for the first time in the 13th century clearly are attested in texts from that time. The notion of intentionality derived from Avicenna seems to call for a notion of something in the syntactic place of the object of an intention, regardless of what we call it. I keep thinking too of Husserl’s intentional objects, as a kind of model for how to think the nonempirical, non-naturalistic status of objects in Scotus.

The term “object” refers originally to the object of an Avicennan intention, not to a thing in the world. But Boulnois elsewhere lists a number of different kinds of things that Scotus refers to as objects, including objects of perception. Yet it seems that there is also supposed to be a univocal meaning of “object” that is applicable in all these cases. The way this is all supposed to fit together may have something to do with Scotus’s thesis of the pre-existence of universals in memory, before any intellection in act. This also reminded me of Husserl’s “passive synthesis”.

“In this perspective, what poses a problem is less the doubling than the continuity between the two senses of object. How is it the same reality that we consider from different points of view, sometimes as an immanent part of the soul, sometimes as a transcendent intentional content? What guarantees to us that it is indeed the same being that we consider as a diminished accident in the soul or as an object for it? Can we think the intelligible species otherwise than as a species received in sensation and transmitted to the intellect? To respond to these questions, many theories confront and compete with one another” (ibid).

“– At the beginning of the 13th century, the theory of spiritual being came down to saying that sensible species carried by light transport information under the form of a material spiritus. The species are received in the one sensing and transformed into a spiritual, thought reality. Thus the transmission of form in a medium is spiritual, like that of light in the diaphanous medium. And the form known is no longer the material form, like the concrete form of a colored body, but the pure, intentional form, that of color, detached from all corporeity. It will be necessary to redouble the mode of being of perception, to distinguish between the material transmission of information, and that which is recognized by the pure intentionality of the faculties. In one same perception, the soul perceives at once a (material) reality and its (intentional) signification” (p. 91).

“– The theory of esse intentionale [intentional being] prolongs that of esse spirituale [spiritual being], but consists in saying that the sense undergoes the effect of this or that quality, and in conformity to its logos. The sense receives not the concrete singularity of the thing, but the sensible quality that defines its intentio, its rationally defined essence. The intention designates at once the form of the thing, the immediate emanation of a species, and the image of the form of which it is the species. The theory of intentio translates at once causality and resemblance: the intention is caused in the medium and in the sense by resemblance to the model that is its cause. It nonetheless does not permit thinking a knowledge that is detached from physical causality and does not depend on the causality of the mind” (pp. 91-92).

“– At the end of the 13th century, the theory of esse obiective [objective being] seeks to remedy this difficulty. The apparatus of representation reverses natural causality in being objective. It allows to be considered no longer the sense of the physical production of an image, but the sense of intentional reference by which the image refers to its original. All the art of painting rests on such a theory. [quote from Giles of Rome:] ‘A canvas is called image as a painting, not in that the canvas is itself an image, but because a painting is on it that is an image.’ It is neither the support nor the surface that makes the representation. They are only its material subject. But the representation comes from the traits of resemblance introduced by art on the support. [quote from Giles of Rome:] ‘And in the same way, knowledge is called a word, not because it is itself a word, but because it has a being in the word.’ It is not the real status of the concept taken in itself that makes it a representation, but its character of resemblance founded on a real term relating it to the object. Knowledge is not in the term that represents but in the relation, in the intentional system that permits the representation in the soul to refer to its object in the world. The system of representation is the path of similitude, beyond its physical support” (p. 92).

In this way, knowledge becomes completely separable from naturalistic determination.

According to Boulnois, the new 13th-century theory of “objective being” does not originate with Scotus, but he is the one who develops it to the fullest.

“For Henry of Ghent, objective being designates the being known of every thing in the intellect. He precisely develops this theory in connection with angelic knowledge: the angel undergoes no sensible impression. As consequence, what is present to angelic thought is not imprinted in it, but present as the term of an aim — objectively. Thus being as being, insofar as it is conceived, is aimed at objectively, and is the first of all concepts. Being and truth have passed under the yoke of objectivity, because they are known under a concept” (pp. 92-93).

According to this way of thinking, to be objective or to be an object is precisely to be the term aimed at by an Avicennan intention. More generally, it is always possible to take the term of an aim in a purely relative way, as whatever the aim aims at, without prejudice to whatever characteristics it might have independently.

(This is not the place for a long digression, but I think Hegel and Brandom each develop an alternative concept of “concept” that does not put being and truth under a “yoke of objectivity”.)

“It is the act of representing that allows the passage from being to objective being: the constitution of the object is not passive, but active. Scotus continues on this path. He removes the domain of the objects of thought from their empirical origin and from natural causality, to give them an intelligible dimension. He thus radically separates the domain of worldly reality and that of objectivity; that of natural causality and that of intentional aim; that of efficiency and that of formality. The object is not the species that moves the intellect, but the term it aims at. [quote from Scotus:] ‘The object is by itself the mover of the intellect’, according to which the intellect is assimilated to the object, [quote from Scotus:] ‘indeed the object is the mover of the intellect according to the formal and absolute being of the object, and not according to the being it has in the phantasm, insofar as the latter designates (denotet) something different than the formal being of the object; but the formal being of the object agrees perfectly with the object in the thing itself; thus the object, insofar as it is in the thing itself, is a sufficient mover for the intellect’ ” (p. 93).

The objectivity of the object in this view is not simply the reality of the thing, as we might infer from common speech. All the troublesome and polysemic aspects of the reality of the thing are here conveniently excised.

“The force of the Scotist position is to distinguish two orders in representation, two sorts of intentionality: — the representation of the particular sensible thing in a particular sensible species (esse intentionale); — and the intentional aim of the object in its objectity, that is to say as the term aimed at in conformity with the mental word, which is ‘that in which the intellect is assimilated to the object’ (esse obiective). At that moment, the object is aimed at intellectually according to a certain ratio [reason] that is really in the thing. There is an active solicitation by the intellect, which pursues an intelligibility in the thing. And reciprocally in the measure to which this intelligibility is really in the thing, we can say that this thing, under the angle of this objectivity (or intelligibility) is the secondary moving cause of the intellect that thinks” (ibid).

The second sort of intentionality here partially anticipates Husserl’s usage, in which intentionality no longer refers to anything empirical. Husserl’s great diligence in avoiding unsupportable spiritualist claims about his postulated nonempirical intentionality shows that such a combination is at least possible.

At the same time, intellect is here given an active role not only with respect to intelligible content, but also in sense perception in ordinary life. This is worth dwelling upon at length, because highly respected and respect-worthy writers have lent their support to a summary judgment that human intellect was universally viewed as passive in pre-modern times.

Finally, the real thing is at the same time allowed a causal role in sense perception. It is not wrong to call that an Aristotelian position, though of course that is not the end of the story for Aristotle. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the book, Boulnois cites several texts from Augustine that Scotus uses in order to argue that Augustine himself explicitly treats the thing perceived as playing a secondary co-determining role, alongside the active role of the human intellect. I did not recall this.

The combination of all three of these elements is impressive.

“The formal being of the object is an a priori that competes with the phantasm in the formation of the intelligible species. [quote from Scotus:] ‘The formal mover of the intellect is the object itself in itself, according to its causes and its properties, but not the phantasmatic being, which signifies the representative species insofar as it is other than the formal being represented.’ The intellect aims actively at the formal object, and attains it directly as the intelligible nature (or is moved by it), thus constituting the mental word by itself, even if it does so in the present state with the concomitance of the phantasm. The formality of the object is constituted a priori in thought, and not received from experience” (pp. 93-94).

Earlier, Boulnois positioned the a priori in Scotus as contrasted with both innate ideas and divine illumination. That there is another alternative is an appealing prospect, but I am doubtful about any a priori constitution of objects, and about whether Kant would accept this way of speaking. There are several subtle syntactic distinctions related to this question. In Kant there are a priori concepts and arguments and judgments, and Kant seems to have regarded the completely general concept of “object” as a priori. Toward the end of the book, Boulnois suggests a Scotus-Suárez-Wolff-Baumgarten genealogy for Kant’s notion of an object in general. But if we speak without qualification of an a priori constitution of objects, this seems to refer to objects in general, and thus to include particular objects. But while the completely abstract notion of object might be a priori, it is hard to see how any particular object could be constituted a priori.

What Boulnois is calling the formality of the object here is what Scotus calls formal being. This was a new concept in Henry of Ghent and Scotus.

Numerous sources seem to treat formal being in Scotus as immediately following from his notion of formal distinction, but I have serious doubts about that transition. That there is such a thing as formal distinction — according to which things can be really inseparable but definitionally distinct — seems very reasonable, but there is a serious question also of how this is to be applied. For example, Scotus apparently holds that the distinction of essence and existence is purely formal, but that of soul and body is real (he rejects Aristotelian hylomorphism). But someone might defend Aristotelian hylomorphism, or doubt the claim that essence and existence can be reduced to the same plane.

“Everything thus rests on the ambiguity of the very status of representation: the latter is at once the act of conceiving and perceiving the object (the act of representing), and the resemblance of the thing perceived (the representative thing). Representation as substitutive object, or the resemblance of the thing, is the result of a real perceptive trajectory. It is imprinted solely by the body that is represented, which is the partial cause of it, while the act of representing is an operation of the soul, sustained by the exterior presence of the object. Species permit logical predication. They are also Porphyrean objects (universal classes). But if they are sensible qualities, how can they at the same time be the immaterial representations of objects? It will be necessary to distinguish two senses of representation: the passive reception of a sensible object in the possible intellect, and the active elaboration of thought expressing the definition of the object in the agent intellect” (pp. 94-95).

“The universal only has real being in the measure that it is present in a form, so that the agent intellect produces another real term from the species representing the singular. The universal is represented in the mental image, because it is the original aimed at in a univocal and expressive manner, as Hercules is represented in his statue. The term of the activity of the agent intellect is indeed something real, a form given existence, that formally represents the universal as universal. This representation has for its intentional correlate a ‘represented being’, the objective being to which it refers. This represented being is only a diminished being, since it is not really present in the representation, but it is the obvious referent of it. When knowledge is no longer the reception of a form similar to that of the thing perceived, but the engendering by the intellect of an interior word or of a concept, knowledge is made by representation. The mode of being of the knower becomes a representation, the mode of being of the known, the objective being of the represented” (p. 95).

It may be that some of the scholastics identified knowledge in general with the simple reception of a form, but that is not true for Aristotle. In Aristotle I don’t think it is true even for knowledge of sensible things, though it might be true of simple perception.

The notion of a mental image is problematic in this context. “Mental” is not an Aristotelian term, but has an Augustinian provenance, and there is no image in Aristotelian intellect. In an Aristotelian context, I would expect anything that is called an image to be associated not with intellect, but rather with imagination. But Boulnois seems to be implying that it is nonetheless appropriate to call the medieval intelligible species an image. Sensible species seem to have a Stoic origin, but both sides of the debate for and against intelligible species only arise in the scholastic tradition.

The term “mental” here reflects the Augustinian mens or “mind”. This has sometimes been equated with Aristotelian “intellect”, but the two are described in very different terms. Augustinian mind is much more like what the scholastics called intellectual soul (for which Augustinian mens — along with some original ideas of Avicenna — was the main inspiration). Even if we were associating “mental” with Aristotelian intellect, it would not be right to associate an image with it (since images belong to imagination, broadly construed).

“The act of giving the mental image the status of a representation is already sketched by Thomas Aquinas and systematized by Henry of Ghent. But the great originality of Duns Scotus consists in making this representation a reproduction: not the image acquired or received by the sense, such that the imaginary repraesentatio becomes intelligible, but a real production by the intellect, distinct and separate from the reception of the sensible phantasm. Duns Scotus can adopt the adage according to which ‘the act of knowing is a participation in the object by a resemblance to it’. The intelligible species guarantees that knowledge is not a simple transversal similitude, but an intellectual image in causal, essential dependence on the form of the object. It is ‘not only a resemblance, but the imitation and reception of the form of the model (exemplatio passiva). But he adds immediately, ‘I don’t mean to say resemblance by communication of the same form, but resemblance by imitation, as the copy (ideatum) of the idea’. Image, participation, resemblance yes, but never the donation of a form, and always by copy and reproduction. Knowledge is not the direct communication of a form, but the imitative representation, the production, in a different mode of being, of a copy in the image of the thing itself, its original. The mental image is not in the prolongation of a being-received. It is constituted in and by the intellect. Representation is an imitation of the object: the eidos (whether we translate this word by idea, species, or form) is not attained in itself, but in its objective conformity to the representation, starting from its imperfect givenness in the image of the object, that is to say in its ‘objective being’ ” (pp. 95-96).

Later, Boulnois will say that knowledge for Scotus is to be identified not with a representation, but rather with a relation involving the representation. That seems more sound. Here and above he is speaking about the “knowledge” involved in the experience of perception.

The technical concept of real production is another scholastic innovation, tied to the new non-Aristotelian notion of efficient causality. The idea of a constitution “in and by the intellect” is at most implicit in Aristotle; it fits more easily into an Augustinian or Avicennan context. It is arguably consistent but not obvious that such constitution is a real production.

The “mental image” or intelligible species in Scotus is sharply distinguished from the sensible species. Aristotle neither affirms nor denies such a thing. I believe the reason Aristotle is so minimalist on topics of this sort is that he wants to avoid speculation, and does not think we have the means to know whether propositions of this sort are true or not. That would be consistent with his rejection of immediate self-knowledge.

Although generally more Augustinian than Aristotelian, Scotus according to Boulnois sides with Aristotle in rejecting immediate self-knowledge.

(Boulnois also says that the Latin notion of intellectual intuition is principally grounded in the tradition of perspectiva, which he also says assumes in its geometrical-optical theory that there is an irreducible multiplicity of points of view, no one of which covers the entire field. It was only in the Renaissance that realism in painting came to be associated with the portrayal of everything from one single point of view. And the decentered multiplicity of points of view typical of medieval painting was apparently echoed in the multiplicity of perspectives in medieval geometrical optics. Though I’m still doubtful about any intellectual intuition, these qualifications are both interesting and important.)

“The agent intellect operates less by abstraction than by transferring the object from the order of the sensible to the order of the intelligible. From the singular sensible impression, it makes an intelligible universal. Duns Scotus likes to deduce this transformation from the texts of Aristotle, but it is clear that he has abandoned the Aristotelian horizon, for which the transformation of thing into known object follows the schema of power-act, or matter-form” (p. 96).

When he says “transferring the object”, it sounds like it is the same object, but it cannot be, because he emphasizes that it is a new production.

The way he mentions abstraction here as a competing theory seems to imply something like Averroes’ somewhat reified elaboration of Aristotle’s remarks.

Boulnois is documenting the late 13th-century emergence of an explicit and fully abstract concept of object. It is thus appropriate that he mentions the term “object” only in connection with the transfer theory.

The reference to Scotus “abandoning” the Aristotelian horizon might be to Scotus’s development. The idea that scholasticism as a whole was dogmatically Aristotelian is a prejudice based on misinformation. The most pro-Aristotelian scholastics, like Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, incorporate major non-Aristotelian elements. Albert and Thomas themselves were as much Avicennan as Aristotelian, and several other things as well (pseudo-Dionysian?). On a historical level, there was thus no purely Aristotelian horizon to be abandoned. Orthodoxy remained Augustinian, until centuries later when it became Thomistic. In 1277, three years after the death of Aquinas, the elderly and ill Albert the Great felt compelled to travel back from Cologne to Paris to defend Thomas against his anti-Aristotelian critics, who seemed to have the upper hand.

“Now, in the horizon of Avicenna, it is a matter of the production of the object in a new mode of being-represented, which is spiritual and no longer corporeal. The intelligible is no longer in-potentiality for intellection. It exists really in act and as a form. Thus the same term of representation and the concept that accompanies it change their sense. It is no longer a matter of the synthetic presentation of the thing itself in the imagination (in conformity with the etymology of the prefix re-, which on its face indicates a gathering), but of the production of a presentation that takes the place of an absent thing (in the sense in which the prefix re– equally signifies a repetition). Representation is no longer presentation, but reproduction. By reason of the distinction between sensible and intelligible, the form thought is no longer what communicates ‘the common act of the sensing and the sensed’ ” (ibid).

In general, it is by no means obvious that production excludes synthesis. But in this Augustinian-Avicennan context, production is conceived on the model of the creation of something from nothing, whereas synthesis works with pre-existing materials.

Boulnois shows that Henry of Ghent and Duns Scotus developed their original ideas against the background of the Latin Avicenna. He also notes that Avicenna was translated to Latin and much discussed before the major texts of Aristotle were translated. The views about presentation that he mentions as being superseded came from earlier theologians, not from Aristotle.

From the Latin translation of Avicenna through the earlier Franciscans to Duns Scotus, there is a non-Aristotelian, broadly Augustinian tradition that wants to make the intelligible categorically and not just relatively independent of the sensible.

“The support of all intellection is a reality in itself, an absolute entitas [entity]. ‘Intellection is not exclusively a relation.’ And neither the intellect nor the object taken in itself suffices to found the intellection in act. Thus the doubling is complete: ‘Knowledge in the intellect is not immediately caused by the object as exterior, but by something interior […]. For our act of intellection we have an internal object, even though for sensing we have need of an external object.’ We think when we want, even though we do not sense when we want, because a representation of the object is unceasingly present to our intellect by way of memory. Knowledge is not produced directly by the object, but by its representation… The act of knowing is not related to the exterior thing but to an image that resembles it, an imitation in me that corresponds to the thing outside of me” (p. 97).

The explicit concept of an abstract object is a new invention. Once the notion of object is formulated, the sensible thing can be metaphorically called an object as well, and this can come to seem completely natural. But it is the object in memory independent of present sensation that is primary for Scotus. Although the object is new, the active role in constitution that he attributes to memory is Augustinian. Scotus writes as a very original and creative “Avicennizing Augustinian”.

“The representation is no longer a simple resemblance that can refer to many sorts of objects under different angles, like a work of art that signifies in a polysemic manner. The more fundamental model of representation, according to Duns Scotus, is the hoofprint of a horse in the dust of the road: a partial impression that allows the animal that passed by to be recognized, because it includes a partial but precise resemblance to the animal represented” (ibid).

This is emblematic of the transition Boulnois is documenting here. Scotist representation is univocal. The object rises hand in hand with a new notion of strictly univocal representation.

“The trace (vestigium) of the hoof indicates the passage of a horse. The trace is in effect a relation of impression/expression. As the causal impression of the object in a moved body, it expresses the form significatively because it maintains a relation of partial resemblance with the object. Perfect representation will be total representation, the image of the horse, empty or full, under the form of the molding or of the statue. The trace is a partial representation; the total representation will be an adequate image. The trace, although partial, refers to the singular animal, without representing anything common to many individuals. The noetic ideal is that of an exhaustive representation, a very perfect resemblance, a reproduction of all the characters of the object. Representation is not polysemic, but univocal. It is not only a resemblance, but the imitation of a model; it relates to it as one of its copies” (pp. 97-98).

In Roger Bacon’s terminology, as we saw before, the hoofprint is a natural sign. Like all natural signs in this way of thinking, it is the effect of an efficient cause. From it, the passage of a horse can be inferred. To this Scotus adds an insistence on its univocity. Here we are at the veritable sunrise of the object.

“The being of the object in the species, by reason of which the intentio is called spiritual, is only its being as an image, or as a representation, referring to the thing it represents, but at the same time distinguished from it. This being of resemblance is a spiritual being, which does not prevent it from having a material being. As a being of resemblance, of imitation, it does not suppress the material being of the form said properly, that of the sensible species, in the thing itself, in a propagating medium, or in perception. Whether it is a matter of the thing itself or of the phantasm changes nothing. That being there does not have the spirit for its subject. The contents of thought are not identical to mental acts. The order of representation is the law of similitude that organizes all the traits of resemblance. It exercises no physical causality, and does not imply that its subject is intellectual. The order of representation is not related to a spiritualist ontological thesis affirming the existence of an immaterial intellect, but to a pure inscription of resemblance. If knowledge distinguishes between real being and intentional (or diminished) being, it is necessary to abandon the identity of nature between the concept and the object (the principal advantage of the theory of representation)” (p. 98).

The object is here posited as a representation, rather than as a real thing.

“Objective being is characterized by its difference from real being. We have an objective being of the realities that are aimed at, or produced by an operation of intellect, as with all logical intentions. The optical and geometric paradigm is reversed. What intentional being has already become in the era of Duns Scotus is revealed in this switch: intentional being is already a logical and psychological being. Its status is that of the representation of objects and of universals” (pp. 98-99).

“Objective”, represented being becomes the new model for being in general. What is called “real being” no longer plays this role. In this usage, “objective” does not imply “real”.

“Duns Scotus speaks of objective being to designate the status of every object, whether it is a matter of an object of a perception, of a memory, of a concept, of a knowledge, or even of the object of divine prescience. Nonetheless, all these occurrences are articulated around an originary moment, the moment when the perception of the sensible thing is present to the soul and makes the object appear in its form of presence, in its characteristic species, which is to say at first a sensible one. The ulterior moments, of the intelligible in potentiality or in act, or of science, apply to an object already constituted. The only decisive moment is that of the constitution of the object of intellection, indeed before it” (p. 99).

Here “object” is extended to cover this whole space. The presence of the sensible object that leads to the sensible species is associated with an “originary moment”, but then the “only decisive moment” is the constitution of the intelligible object, which is posited to have no dependency on the sensible.

“Objective being is the being of the thing insofar as it is represented, the image of the thing in its mental state. It is the same being (esse) that is considered in the intellect (objective) and as it exists in reality (subjective). There can be a correspondence between the one and the other, but they do not have the same effective status. The one is the other, but according to an intentional or formal identity. Take for example the statue of Hercules: in the marble, Hercules has only an objective or representational being. It is not Hercules, because it is his statue: they do not have the same reality. But it is Hercules, since all his traits are reproduced in it: they have the same form. The objective content of Hercules is indeed present in his representation, on the condition that it is a faithful reproduction. This theory of art as reproductive representation is rather remarkable, and is inscribed in a movement of the longue durée [long term; pun on a key term of the Annales school of history]” (ibid).

This 13th century division into objective and subjective gives each a quite different sense from the later one we are accustomed to. It is not quite a 180 degree reversal on the side of the objective, but it does seem to be on the side of the subjective. Subjective is used in the sense of the Aristotelian hypokeimenon, or what “stands under” something else, which is then identified with what exists in reality, while what is objective is the “content” apprehended by intellect.

“But it is also a theory of intellection. The concept can have an objective content identical to the universal, even if it is formally distinct. The universal is objectively present in it, or again it is represented in it. That is to say it has for content the universal outside of it, to which it refers intentionally. In the cognitive process, it is necessary to distinguish three aspects: the intellect, a real power and efficient cause of the act of knowing; the image or intelligible species, as an accidental form really produced in it; and what the image has for content: the objective being of Hercules. According to objectity, the species is identical to Hercules; according to form, they are distinct” (pp. 99-100).

Again, the term “objectity” is an interpolation. But in any case, objective being now seems to reflect a “content” that is close to the later distinction between content and form; thus the species of Hercules is said to have the same meaningful “content” as Hercules himself, but not to be the same form.

In the conventional terms of the most common reading of form and matter in Aristotle, we would say that the form of Hercules and the form of his statue are the same, while their matter is different. Form in this sense is limited to a visible Gestalt, or what the Latins called a sensible species.

“Presence is said in two senses: the real presence of the object to the power, and then the presence of the object, even if it can be absent, and this presence requires something in which the object shines” (p. 100).

This second “presence of the object, even if it can be absent” is the presence of a representation, which is said to be “objective”.

“The real presence of the object is the real efficient cause of the species in which the object is presented” (ibid).

Again we see the non-obvious association of the first kind of presence with the new Avicennan concept of efficient causality, and with the “action” of the real thing.

“But in this second presence, the presence of the species, the object is the formal cause. The knowable object is not effectively or really present in the intelligible species, but it is like the landlord of the object specified by its representation. Representation has a formal being of presence, while its reference to the corresponding object is of the order of objective being” (ibid).

Here “effective” is treated as interchangeable with “efficient”. From the point of view of the Avicennan and Latin efficient cause, the entire scope of what is really effective is to be explained by efficient causality, which is raised above all other causes. For Aristotle by contrast, it takes all four of his causes to cover the whole field of what is really effective.

“The invention of the concept of objective being and the analysis of representation in terms of the production of an interior word react on one another, and are conjugated for transforming noetics. Knowledge undergoes a change of paradigm. It is not only intentional transitivity that justifies our knowledge of the object. For sure, Thomas Aquinas admits that the known is in that which knows in the mode of the knower: there is an immanence of intellection to the mind that knows. But this being-known does not have a being that is real, proper, and subsistent. It is nothing else than the relation of opening to the thing. Its mode of being is not objective being but relative being: the esse ad, or being with a view to. What is known by the concept is not the thing in its pure quiddity, but the reason for being of the thing (ratio rei): the concept ‘is not that which is thought, but that by which we think, just as the species of color in the eye is not what we see, but that by which we see’. The concept is an invisible mediator, without ontological thickness or proper opacity, where all being consists in separating itself to turn my regard toward the intelligible essence of the thing. Direct transitivity is anterior to the reflection by which we measure our relation to the thing and apprehend it” (pp. 100-101).

This might be the first explicit historical use of the term “concept”. It does not have the same meaning that it does in Hegel or Brandom, where it does have what Boulnois here calls ontological thickness. In the current context, it seems to be a transparent correlate of a representation.

“Direct transitivity” involves the relations by which the object is constituted. We saw above that Scotus wants to put the constitution of objects before any actual thought. Scotist objects are constituted within Augustinian memory, and only appear to Scotist intellect as already constituted. Memory plays the role of the Father in Augustine’s analogy of a trinity in the soul. This always already constituted nature of objects in memory for Scotist intellect plays something like the role of the more “metaphysical” pre-established harmony in Leibniz; of the always already accomplished transcendental-psychological synthesis of imagination in Kant; and of “passive synthesis” in Husserl.

“In the Scotist theory of abstract representation, the species or the word is not only that by which the object is perceived, it is that which the intellect sees or thinks, the representation in which the original is represented and perceived. Moreover objective being, ignored by Thomas Aquinas, implies a mode of being that is restricted but autonomous, which confers on the intentional object an objectivity internal to the mind, that of being represented. The system transposes the consequences of the Avicennan theory of essences into a theory of knowledge. Avicenna, at least in the interpretation of Duns Scotus, distributes a triple mode of being of essences: taken in itself, the essence is a neutrality and an absolute solitude. We can say nothing other that equinitas est equinitas tantum (the essence of the horse is nothing else than the essence of the horse); but the essence can receive existence and become a singular thing by that fact: this horse here or that one there; and finally, it can be universal in my intellect, since it can be attributed to many things. It is the elaboration of a representation that allows the universal to be thought. A representation of the universal, distinct from that of the singular received in the phantasm, is produced in the intellect. It is it that contains the traits common to all the individuals of a species: their universality” (p. 101).

This amphibious character of the intelligible species reflects the dual character of thought, as activity and as content.

The connection here between being an object and universality is an intriguing and original suggestion about the nature of universality. “Representation [as an object] allows the universal to be thought.”

On the other hand, I find the Avicennan idea that an essence is an absolute solitude that simply is what it is, almost unintelligible. In Leibniz something similar is said of the monad, but this is mitigated by the monad’s inclusiveness, by which every monad contains the whole universe from a particular point of view. And in Plotinus, each form in the intelligible realm is said to contain all the others.

“Duns Scotus says that the object has two ways of being present: ‘in itself or in the intelligible species’: either in the direct intuition of its existence, or as the objective correlate of a representation. From the experience of the singular thing, intelligence produces a determinate intelligible — in its being as object, according to Duns Scotus. After the reception of a sensible species, which is related to the singular existent thing, the act of knowing is related to the universal nature, engendered in the intellect according to an esse obiective. ‘What is the reason for the indetermination thanks to which the object that has its first being in the intellect is completely universal? I respond that it is not the thing by itself, since it does not in itself have such an indetermination […] Nor is it the possible intellect, since it cannot receive [an effect] in a way that is more indeterminate than the object can produce. It is the agent intellect, concurrently with a nature that is in some way indeterminate in itself, that is the integral productive cause of the object in the possible intellect according its first being.’ The being of the object is so constituted as to allow intelligible correspondence between the universal in us and the nature that really corresponds to it in the singular thing. Objective being is universal being in the intellect. It has its own proper structure and autonomous reality” (pp. 101-102).

Now the object “in itself” seems to be usurping the primacy of the real thing. Objective being is now said to have an autonomous “reality” of its own. Perhaps Scotus means to say that objective, represented being is more truly or more properly “being” than real being, since the objective is universal and the real is particular.

“The intellect, a real and efficient (but partial and concurrent) cause of the intelligible species, relates to the content as to a veritable thing. As a consequence, it relates to the object without depending on exterior things, without receiving an information from emanated species, other than in a secondary and accidental manner. It represents it independent of its presence or absence, and of the relation of causality induced by that presence. It relates to it intentionally without depending on it causally. The esse obiective of Scotus, by reason of this detachment from the chain of causality resting on the transmission and the denuding of sensible species, opens on another order than the theory of the species expressed by Thomas or Henry of Ghent. By this disengagement, the noetic and logical order no longer depends on the sensory and psychological path of the species. Representation rendering the object present is the seat of an intentionality, of a tending of mental acts toward the represented (the universal). In objective being, representation always renders present an intentional object, whether it really exists or not. It aims at a universal, and this works without the presence of the thing itself” (pp. 102-103).

For intellect, on this account the relational content of a concept plays a role analogous to that played by the sensible thing in perception.

“Thus opens a distinction between intuitive and abstractive knowledge. The knowledge of the object is no longer regulated by the object and the different phases of the intellectual purification of the object. The question of truth as adequation gains a new acuity” (p. 103).

Now the sensible thing — previously contrasted with the object — is referred to (at least by Boulnois) as an object.

Knowledge is no longer regulated by the sensible real thing, but by what I would construe as an integrity or coherence of intentional relations. The odd thing is that this coherence is nonetheless viewed in terms of an adequation or correspondence between knowing and the object.

“Duns Scotus in effect distinguishes two kinds of relation between the act of knowing and the corresponding object. 1) That of measure to measure. 2) That of union with the term with which it is united, which we can also call a relation of attention to the other. They correspond to the distinction between abstraction and intuition. In abstraction, this second relation has no place of being; to know abstractly is to measure. But what is measuring? It is to have, thanks to another thing (measure), a certainty of the determinate quantity of the object. There are two relations of certainty: that of the thing to the intellect where the certainty is produced, and that of the thing to the measure thanks to which the certainty is produced. The last is a real relation, because it is a matter of a comparison of two things, the measure and the measured. Even if it is the intellect that compares them, the measured depends on the measure, according to a real relation between two real things. And since the measured is the object known, and the measure, the measure of knowledge, the dependency passes through two objects: ‘a dependency of the object as known on the object as “that by which it is known”.’ For sure, intellection is the measure of the object by the intellect, which is regulated by it. But the adequation of the measure to the measured is a real relation between two subsistent things. The relation is now deployed in a real, objective, homogeneous space” (ibid).

The relation of measure to measure can be construed purely in terms of “objective” relations like those between commensurable quantities, for example that of a number to another number, which are viewed as determinately subsisting, independent of any act of knowing. But Boulnois glosses this as one of two kinds of relations between the act of knowing and the object.

The mention of “union” with a term on the other hand recalls the inseparability of Aristotelian intellect from what it thinks. This is glossed as the other kind of relation between the act of knowing and the object.

In both cases, it is hard to see how the gloss applies, unless we construe the act of knowing as not presupposing a separable and pre-existing “knowing subject”.

Before, we were contrasting objective being and real being. Now there is mention of a homogeneous space that is said to be both real and objective. This may be related to the idea that the intelligible species, while not depending on any “real” or natural causality, is nonetheless a “real” production by the agent intellect operating as a real efficient cause.

“Here again, the model of light is essential. Aristotle remarked that ‘the agent intellect is like a light’. Light does not cause the object, it reveals it by shining on it. Just as light transforms color in potentiality to color in act, the intellect converts the intelligible in potentiality to an intelligible in act. The object is intelligible in act before intellection. It is only a terminative object, indeed preconstituted. It is the a priori of all thought” (pp. 103-104).

On this model, the agent intellect would “reveal” an object preconstituted in memory, and not be its cause. But then how is this object a “real production”, with the agent intellect as its efficient cause?

“An objection arises. Isn’t it necessary to say that intuition transgresses the limits of abstract representation? That intellect attains the evident knowledge of the object in its very being, without its formal substitute? To this three reasons are opposed: 1) Duns Scotus thinks representation as a preliminary condition of intuitive intellection, indeed as its theoretical sub-basement in the more general order of the functioning of the intellect. 2) The moment of intuition coincides with the production of an expressed species, or of a conceptual word (that is to say a representation that is definitional rather than imagined). 3) This real production can in its turn be preserved in memory: it is not the thing itself. We see that it will be vain to oppose representation (abstract) and intuition (concrete): intuitive intellection is the perception of a representation preliminarily elaborated by memory” (p. 104).

At a very general level, the idea that representation serves as a precondition and substructure for intellectual intuition somewhat resembles Kant’s argument that the very same categories that govern thought also govern the unconscious processes of the synthesis of imagination.

“If the object of perception or of the phantasm is imaginary, the object of an intelligible species is an intelligible object. Objective being is identified with being-represented. What is really engendered is representation, but what it implies, objective being, can be called metaphorically engendered, since it only exists by reference to this, and has a corresponding status. The being of the object is the measure of the being of the representation in the soul: they are of the same nature, phantasm, intelligible species, intellection in act, or acquired science. Thus the being represented in the object and the being of the representation in the soul correspond with and imply one another reciprocally. Objective being is defined as the vis-a-vis of representation, representation as what gathers and constitutes the thing in a unique reason, an object. The object is always the object of a representation, and representation is always representation of an object. The theory of objective being, in insisting on the double ontological status of the object and the representation, reifies representation in a substantial manner. It is not only an act but a thing, and indirectly substantializes the object. The latter is what stably corresponds to the representation, metaphorically engendered by thought” (pp. 104-105).

“Rooted in the medieval debate between Augustinianism and Aristotelianism, the Scotist analysis of knowledge opens up major ontological consequences. The production of sensible images obeys the laws of perspective: every body immersed in light imprints on the eye its resemblance, the sensible species. To explain perception, a certain Augustinian tradition (Henry of Ghent, Olivi) refuses to admit a total and direct causality of the object on the sense. Thomas Aquinas on the contrary showed the necessity rejected by Henry and Olivi. In renewing the doctrine of intelligible species while maintaining the autonomy of the intellect faced with the sensible, Scotus produces a new synthesis. Added to the singular representation of the sensible species, the intelligible species integrates a part of sensible causality, but becomes a real reproduction of the object in the soul. Thus for Scotus, being in general is attained by the point of view of the ‘objective being’ produced by the agent intellect — as represented being” (p. 105).

Thus being in general is reduced to the univocal and represented being of objects.

Back to beginning of this series: Being and Representation Revisited