Power and Its Shadow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here we begin to see the connection with political power.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adeptio

This will conclude my treatment of Jean-Baptiste Brenet’s account of the unexpected thought of the 14th-century “Averroist” John of Jandun, which confounds and unsettles quite a number of stereotypes. One of the surprises is that this seemingly obscure chapter in the history of medieval philosophy turns out to be a significant episode in the formation of what in recent times have been regarded as modern concerns pertaining to the so-called Subject.

(Let me just briefly suggest that to be humane — to seriously care about people — and to develop concrete accounts of human subjectivity need not be tied to the frequent modern assumption that whatever is ethically important about human beings must be expressed in terms an account of the human as Subject.)

Here it is a matter of what in the Aristotelian commentary tradition came to be called “acquired” intellect (adeptio for the Latins). The point is that what is called intellect in the Aristotelian sense is not reducible to something we are born with. What we have from nature and for the most part live by is a kind of imagination. Within John of Jandun’s elaborate account of the nature and progress of so-called acquired intellect, we encounter both a “metaphysical” or “cosmic” dimension and an elevated concern with the status of human individuals.

Brenet writes, “What the ‘state of acquisition’ signifies [for John] is only a momentary union, a transitory contact and not a stable terminal state. The human sleeps, drinks, and eats, and is not a philosopher when she does so” (Transferts du sujet, p. 379, my translation throughout).

“The image not being an obstacle, it is a matter of seeing what happens with adeptio” (p. 380). “It is important not to confound the order of being and the order of knowledge. The agent intellect is in effect an invariable forma informans [informing form] of the possible intellect. That is to say that in its substance, it is always united to it in the same manner. The only relation between the two that can be modified is that of knowledge: it falls to the possible intellect to know the agent intellect better and better. What is adeptio, as a result? Not only the formal conjunction of the agent intellect with the possible intellect, but the perfect knowledge of one by the other. The agent intellect is acquired when the intellect in potentiality comes to think substance: it knows it in what it is, and not only in the punctual acts that it causes. In short, adeptio is produced when the human intellect knows itself” (p. 381).

Brenet points out that John’s distinction between substance and knowledge in this context is not to be found in Averroes. It seems to me also that this identifies knowledge of substance with a very immodest claim of immediately reflexive human self-knowledge that has no place in Aristotle.

We note that at the end of the above he says “the human intellect”. Up to that point, we might have been reading an account of al-Farabi, who substantially elaborated the elaboration of Aristotle on this point by Alexander of Aphrodisias. The way John and other medieval writers speak about intellects can sound rather “metaphysical”. But after the initial controversies over the translations of Averroes, it became obligatory among the Latins to stress the human element.

John of Jandun in his day was famous and notorious for his defense of Averroes against theological objections. But Brenet documents how deeply John is affected by what might be called the theologically motivated “humanism” of the Latins, summarized in the slogan “this human thinks”. This does not eclipse the “metaphysical” dimension of the discourse about intellect, but rather is layered on top of it.

For John, “This knowledge of self on the part of the intellect, independent of phantasms, subtracted from all intermittences of cogitation, is always there, since always, in the same manner. It is radically different from that which can fall to this or that human, even if in a sense it serves as a model of cosmic success toward which tend those who work to actualize philosophy” (p. 383).

Brenet observes that “this idea is faulty from the start, since for the Cordovan [Averroes] there is no sense in conceiving a cosmic bond between the two [intellects] that operates without the intermediary of individuals and their images” (p. 385). Averroes stands out among the medievals for his rejection of neoplatonic emanationism. John back-pedals on this.

“Each time an abstraction is produced, as a consequence, the possible intellect thinks itself, and thinks the agent of that abstraction. It knows itself as that which informs the intellectual act, then it knows the operator of that act. It knows the subject of thought, it knows the (efficient) cause of it. As imperfect grasp of its substance, the intelligere seipsum [self-understanding] of the intellect accompanies the thought of the world; as achieved thought of itself, it conditions the contemplation of God. In sum, the knowledge of self intervenes at two points in the process that leads to happiness” (p. 391).

Here we have self-knowledge of intellect identified with an imperfect knowledge of substance that seems more achievable. But he speaks of an efficient cause of the intellectual act, which is again problematic.

“The insertion of the problem of knowledge of self into a theory of intellect was inevitable for John of Jandun. It suffices to cross the Nicomachean Ethics and the Metaphysics: from the first, he takes it that happiness resides in contemplation, that God is nothing but this contemplation, and that the human, to be happy, should strive to do like God, in contemplating the divine realities; from the second, he takes it that for God, contemplation comes down to thinking oneself. The First principle subsists as Thought that thinks itself, and the happy human comes to see with this self-knowledge” (p. 393).

Here we seem to be back on more or less Aristotelian ground again. At this point he is neither claiming super-powers for the human, nor reducing intellect to something explainable by efficient causes.

“[John] divides the knowledge of self in two: in imagining an eternal rapport of thought between the agent intellect and the possible intellect, outside of all relation with humans, he misunderstands the essence of intellectus, and loses what is really posed in the text of Averroes: the existence of the philosopher” (pp. 393-394).

“The acquired intellect [adeptio] is the intellect that thinks itself” (p. 394).

“John speaks for Averroes, but like Alfarabi…. In disputing on junction with the separate substances, John [recovers] the program of the Parisian scholastics of the 1240s, where it was a matter of completing Aristotle with the Book of Causes, Avicenna, and Alfarabi…. John holds that the acquisition of the agent intellect does not take place on the level of the intellection of the pure intelligible. For John that is only a stage that rehearses (and does not crown) an ascent to the supreme intelligible. As a consequence, what Averroes poses — i.e., that once joined to the agent intellect, which has become for us our form in act, we ‘effectuate by it the action that is proper to it’, John interprets according to a model that is not Averroes’ own, a cosmological and emanationist model of thought in which it is via the agent intelligence, the lowest of the separate Intelligences, that the human soul accedes to the superior forms and to God. Adeptio is the necessary condition of a re-ascent into being, which according to him is involved in the cosmic gradation of forms between the first Cause and the world of bodies. At the end of her first journey, that of theoretical apprenticeship that ends in the abstraction of the intelligible of the world, the human thinks the agent intellect, then the nearest immaterial substance of a superior degree, and so on. In this way, knowledges that mimic in their order the causal articulation of these substances that pilot the world are assembled in a chain. As a consequence, adeptio is not the last word of noetics. It inaugurates metaphysics, passing the preliminary that is abstractive knowledge. For John, the ‘acquired intellect’ represents a kind of extreme point of two worlds” (pp. 395-396, emphasis in original).

“Averroes nonetheless does not mean this. The formal junction with the agent intellect for him equates to an immediate and total access to the pure intelligible. Under these conditions, how are we to understand the fact that John insists on a progressive ascent, when the text he is reading seems to be satisfied with a direct union with the principle of thought. And what sense should we give to this difference?” (p. 396).

Here for once John’s view sounds more plausible than the one attributed to Averroes. Nothing in Aristotle is “immediate and total”. Plato too is more careful. Immediacy and totality are inventions of later monotheistic theology, belonging to the same order as miracles and omnipotence.

“The term ‘adeptio‘ (Arabic istifada…) is Farabian [from al-Farabi] in origin, and for the Second Master designates the state of ‘acquired’ intellect (‘adeptus‘ or ‘acquisitus‘ in other translations), that has arrived at the ultimate degree of its achievement, where the agent intellect becomes form for the intellect said to be in act, itself a form of the potential intellect. This ‘acquired’ intellect is at the same time identical to the agent intellect, and different from it in that it is the realization of it in the human. At the same time that it is the highest form of the human, it is also contiguous, in the emanationist hierarchy of beings, to the last in the order of separate forms, the agent intellect that is the tenth and last of the celestial Intelligences emanated from the One. This characteristic allowed thought that ascends to the intelligible not to have the stage of ‘acquisition’ as its ultimate term. Rather it was possible, using it as a springboard, to ascend beyond the most eminent of the forms related to matter, to ascend, stage by stage, the whole hierarchy of the separate Intelligences, even to the contemplation of the One, even if this idea is only suggested by Alfarabi, for reasons no doubt related to religious censure. On the other hand, for Averroes, who repudiated the emanationist system of the oriental philosophers, the notion of ‘acquired intellect’ could no longer have this significance. In fact the Cordovan sometimes uses the notion of adeptio for his own proper account, as a synonym pure and simple of the continuatio-copulatio [two key terms for the relation between intellect and the soul in the Latin translation of Averroes], and sometimes in a polemical context he refers to the Farabian sense of the term, in order to reject its pertinence and to deny that ‘acquisition’ is a stage of the actuality of intellect distinct from ‘junction with the agent intellect’, the ultimate end of human knowledge. But precisely, it seems that John of Jandun could not measure the consequences of Averroes’ break with the emanationist model of Farabian origin” (pp. 397-398).

”John’s misunderstanding is explained if we refer back to the idea of an intellect ‘coming from outside’ or ‘acquired from outside’, of which Aristotle speaks in [The Generation of Animals] II 3, as well as the Arabic tradition that was the outcome of the Greek reading posed by Alexander of Aphrodisias in his [On the Intellect]. For the latter, the extrinsic intellect is the agent intellect of Aristotle. Otherwise said, it is strictly the same intellect, but under another name. An error was introduced in the Arabic text of Alexander, which gives aql mustafad (literally ‘acquired intellect’) for nous o thurathen [intellect from outside]” (p. 398).

“Alfarabi gave this notion a sense that it did not have, that of the final perfection of the human, delivered by the agent intellect but distinct from it…. We progress from the acquired intellect to the agent intellect, from the agent intellect to the immediately superior celestial intelligence, etc., up to the First. But for Ibn Rushd [Averroes] it doesn’t go the same” (p. 399).

“For John of Jandun, the Rushdian theory of formal junction to the agent intellect is overcome by another doctrine, of Farabian inspiration, of the ascension of the ladder of the separate beings” (p. 400). “According to John of Jandun, Aristotle defines human happiness as an actus sapientiae, as the act of theoretical wisdom that consists in contemplating the divine realities, God and the separate beings” (p. 401).

“John deduces that Aristotle and Averroes do not strictly speak of the same thing, and proposes to articulate their two positions. He does this by distinguishing two modes of knowledge, two ways the human can have the knowledge of the supreme substance that is God. The first is an intuitive and simple knowledge of the divine quiddity. The second, more rich, more extended, is discursive…. Adeptio is an example of the first, and the actus sapientiae the second…. Relative to the other intuitive knowledges, it certainly constitutes the final degree, but it is only a preparatory stage for the ultimate knowledge that the metaphysician obtains when he demonstratively unfolds the folded ensemble of the essential characters of God” (p. 402).

It is noteworthy that John treats discursive knowledge as higher than intuitive knowledge. I hold this to be true for both Plato and Aristotle, as well as for Kant and Hegel.

“Each in their order, these two stages constitute maximal goods. But they remain ordered toward the accomplishment of a discursive knowledge of the divine essence, the only absolute felicity” (p. 404).

For John, “The achieved state is not the work of anyone in particular. The perfection of knowledge is not the lot benefiting an elite. It is not a privilege. It is not simply incarnated: the totality of philosophical knowledge only results from the integration of partial knowledges. One could thus compare knowledge to the silver in circulation on the earth: this silver is indeed a sum, a capital in which humanity partakes, but never the wealth of one alone. Indeed philosophy is not reserved for the fine flower of humanity, it is not this activity that divides the humans and separates their species in two (the brutes and the simple thinkers on one side, the philosophers on the other); on the contrary, it is the fruit that engenders the combination of their efforts” (p. 424, emphasis in original).

This anti-elitist conception is another aspect of John that I find admirable.

“Almost at the same time, this idea of a collective actualization of intellect is found in the Monarchia of Dante. The latter posed that there is an end common to every human society, the universal end of the human species to which God has destined it by nature. It is a matter of a ‘proper operation’, an operation, ‘which lends itself neither to the individual alone nor to the family alone, nor to the town, nor the city, nor the realm taken apart from others’. What is it? Constantly reducing to act all the power of the possible intellect. Knowledge by this intellect is in effect the specific activity of the human species: outside of the human there are only being, life, and sensation that serve minerals, plants, and animals just as well; and above them the intellectual nature of God and the separate substances has something particular so that it is never potential but always in act; there is only a self-knowledge that is never eclipsed. As a consequence, only the human is in potentiality to knowing; and only the ensemble of human beings accomplishes it” (p. 425).

“In reality two things are posed, and this is the central thesis of the Monarchia that profoundly distinguishes Dante from John of Jandun: the participation of all the humans is necessary to actualize the possible intellect’s power of thinking, and to allow humanity to attain its end; but this ‘multitude’ is only possible in ‘peace’. No peace, no universal human society; and only the ‘temporal monarchy’ is capable of eliminating wars. As R. Imbach notes, this means that the actualization of the possible intellect in Dante not only has a social dimension, it has a ‘political dimension’. It is by the just political organization of the world that the human comes to attain her proper end at every instant: the perfection of knowledge, because it is from the monarchy that humankind acquires the power to think in common” (pp. 425-426).

This political dimension was somewhat similarly developed by John’s friend Marsilius of Padua.

“Dante takes from Aristotle’s Politics how to conceive this last point, but it is to the Long Commentary of Averroes on the treatise On the Soul that he makes reference, when he maintains that the (possible) intellect cannot remain in potentiality…. The philosophy of Averroes in effect marks a rupture with the fundamentally neoplatonic attitude that sustained the conception of intellectual perfection among his Arabo-Moslem predecessors. For Averroes, the existence of the community is a necessary condition for the existence and maintenance of philosophy” (p. 426).

It is this dimension of Averroes that inspires Marsilius and Dante.

“What Averroes confronted was an Islamo-Andalusian tradition of praise of philosophical ‘solitude’, illustrated in his time by Avempace [Ibn Bajjah] (d. 1139), then in an undoubtedly more radical way by Averroes’ elder the doctor Ibn Tufayl, in the novel Hayy ibn Yaqzan…. It is with this conception, and those who maintain it, that Averroes resolutely breaks….The community participates in the achievement of philosophy” (p. 427-428).

This too I find quite admirable. It is not individual genius but dialogue and discourse that grounds philosophy.

“On the question of thought, [in John] the doctrine of Averroes certainly meets its demise almost in its totality. John retains almost nothing: neither his conception of the accomplishment of intelligere, nor that of its attribution, nor that of its final perfection. But two new ideas, at least, proceeded from this decomposition. The first is the more powerful, without doubt, and it determined John’s philosophical production: it is that of the individual who experiences herself as the author of a thought produced in herself. But second is beautiful, asssuredly, and it concludes this part: if it is no longer a question of the subordination of society to a group of people in whom total knowledge is incarnated, it is that of an immanence to the human species of its proper destiny” (p. 432).

“According to [John], subiectum in the case of the image does not mean ‘support’ for Averroes but ‘object’; the image is the mover of the species and not vice versa. He judges incomplete the first opinion: that the human individual does not think only because her image is the cause of thought, or of the intelligible species; but he rejects the other absolutely: the image is not the place of thought, one of its two places, and it is not such a localization that gives reason, according to the Commentator, either for individuation or for the attribution of intelligere. This second critique revolves around a fundamental passage of the Long Commentary. We have read it closely to bring out three things. First, there are reasons that justify the Rushdian formula of the duo subiecta [two subjects] of thought. Here we can see the lexical trace of a youthful theory, since the Cordovan took from Avempace the idea that images are spiritual forms serving as a substrate for the intelligibles in each individual. But we must recognize above all that the idea of the ‘two subjects’ or, more precisely, the designation of the image as subiectum, was grounded in the very letter of the De Anima of Aristotle. Certainly Averroes elaborates in his manner the Aristotelian analogy between intellection and sensation, combining in a single paragraph elements that the De Anima treats separately, but it remains that it is in the Stagirite that we find the term hupokeimenon used for the sensed ‘object’, and that he indeed would agree that the subiectum of the Long Commentary should not be weighed down with a local determination it absolutely does not have. If Averroes maintains that conceiving by the intellect is accomplished by the intermediary of the ‘two subjects’, it is above all because, like Aristotle, he compares the intellective process to sensation, and because he reads in the De Anima that the sensible is subiectum. The latter designates the object of sensation; in the same way that the image is the mover of thought, and not its receptor. Besides, in the Long Commentary, the rupture with Avempace is explicit: the image is the subject-mover of the universal in act, and only the material intellect receives it. It is absolutely not a question of a bilocation of the intelligible. If we speak of a substrate, the intentio intellecta has but one, the (material) intellect; and the fact that the intelligible is in potentiality in the image in the Long Commentary has nothing to do with the determination of that image as subiectum. Also, Averroes never claimed that the intelligible species was in the image, its subject of inherence, and that the human by this comes to thinking in person. In making the image one of the subjects of thought, he did not designate a sub-jection of the intelligible in it, any more than he intended to conceive of a transitive subjection of that intelligible in the human as support of images. The model of the duo subiecta has no worth from the Rushdian point of view if we do not systematically assimilate subject and substrate. His ‘theory’ of the two subjects is not a topic. His idea of individual intellection is not governed, on the basis of a conception of the image-substrate, by a theory of the human as hupokeimenon of thought.”

“As a result, it appeared clearly how the Latin misinterpretation by other important authors such as Herve de Nedellec and Durand de Saint-Pourcain was situated…. And paradoxically, the solution they opposed to the doctrine of Averroes appears intimately related to the principle their erroneous critique had extracted from him, that is, the idea that the human only thinks by being in a certain manner the subject of thought. This is the second thing we have raised. Where Averroes problematizes the question of the noetic subject of thoughts (the ‘problem of Theophrastus’, which bears on the being of the material intellect, related elsewhere to that of the intellective process within which the image-subject is the mover of the concept, his Latin critics believed they read a theory of the bilocation of the intelligible that made the human who imagines a second ‘substrate’ of thought, having from this position the possibility of thinking in her own right. In fact this was inexact, and in any case the Latins contested that that would be possible in the system of the Commentator; but the problem of the human subject of thought had emerged” (pp. 440-441, emphasis in original).

“This suspended the question of the attribution of intellection in favor of the human as substrate of that act: this the Latins will hold onto, in order to maintain that the human only thinks if she herself is the subject of thought, or if some part of her can be (which from their point of view implied that intellect could not be separate and unique, as in the Rushdian system). Thus authors like Herve or Durand denied that the system of Averroes could satisfy the principle of [what Heidegger callled] subjectity, insofar as intellect was cut off from the humans and the image could not serve as the place of the universal, but they were re-launching for themselves the principle that their misinterpretation had quite simply invented” (p. 441, emphasis in original).

“[John’s] displacement appeared remarkable to us: while he with good reason notes a misinterpretation of the word ‘subject’, applied to the image, he seems nonetheless to subscribe to their principle, produced in this faulty reading, requiring of the human that she be the subject of thought in order to think in her own right. And this is the sense of his inclusion of intellect in the thinking human, of his partition of the human being that repatriated the receptor of thoughts for each, insofar as she thinks. This ‘recentering’ as well is only the first face of a new idea cut in reality from two sides. Averroes’ theory of continuatio is in effect reinscribed in another disposition; it is rethought as a theory of productio. Averroes writes that the human thinks in the measure that she joins herself to the intelligible in act by her images (which constitute potentially the formal part), but John translates that the human thinks insofar as she produces the act of thinking, and that intellect is thus aggregated to her; she produces it in herself: my thought is through and through made in me” (pp. 442-443).

As I have noted before, this kind of creative misinterpretation anticipates (what I would call the error of) Descartes with his cogito.

“Although he aims to save the Long Commentary from the Latin attacks that castigate the inability of the Cordovan to rationally ground the psychological fact, the Parisian master, inheritor of the quarrel between Thomas Aquinas and Siger of Brabant, constituted a theory that finally differed in nearly all respects from that of Averroes, and which left behind the two ‘canonical’ models of ecstasy or of ‘prolongation’. It was a complex theory, as witnessed by his use of denomination (‘thinking’ denominates the individual at the same time as subject, by ‘her’ intellect, and as cause, by her image). It is also a theory that we willingly call Latin, where in the field of psychology there is imposed a certain articulation between ‘human’ and ‘subject’ that other thinkers (William of Auvergne, Peter Olivi) had already in their manner put in place. In defending the idea of the human aggregate, in integrating intellect into the human, in posing that the thinking human is active and that it is within herself that she produces her thought, John of Jandun, the prince of the Averroists, is effectively in solidarity with the sliding, on Latin ground, that transformed the question of the noetic subject of thought into that of its personal or human subject. How did ‘subject’ become so to speak the privilege, indeed exclusive, of the human? To this question that Heidegger posed, the study of the Averroist crisis from now on provides an entirely new response” (p. 443).

“Finally, after the study of the theory of intelligere and that of continuatio, we passed to the transfer affecting the theory of adeptio, the ultimate junction with the separate beings and with God. In John’s re-reading it is in the responses to a series of objections that the transformation it is subjected to becomes manifest. On four major points, the Rushdian doctrine of perfection is undone and re-done otherwise: the necessity of the image, once the stage of theoretical accomplishement has been attained; the rapport of the two intellects with one another, when one is acquired by the other; the after-junction, i.e. the passage of the intellect adeptus to the thought of the pure intelligibles; and finally, the harmony of the adeptio of Averroes with the actus sapientiae of Aristotle” (ibid).

“John is hesitant at first where it concerns knowing whether it is still necessary to imagine once we have come to think perfectly. He responds in the affirmative, no doubt because he does not conceive the ultimate junction as a stable state but as a transitory contact that it is necessary to regain each time. He makes a great effort to clearly conceptualize intellectual access to adeptio, and notably to reconcile the abstractive process expounded in the Long Commentary (which leads to perfect junction by abstraction from all the mundane intelligible) with that presented in the commentaries on the Physics, where we pass from caused movement to the moving intelligences, i.e. to the pure forms. On the question of the relation between the two intellects, agent and possible, he develops a theory of the self-knowledge of intellect: it is in the order of knowledge and not that of being that the information of one by the other progresses, such that there is ‘acquisition’ when the intellect knows itself perfectly” (p. 443-444).

“John is led in his exposition to alter the text of Averroes: on the one hand, and it is the effect of the disputes to which he was contemporary. He introduces distinctions that are not found there: the ontological and gnoseological relations between the two intellectus, the intellect taken insofar as it is separate and insofar as it is united to us, the different phases of auto-reflection (the reception of the species, then the consideration of the species, then that of its receptive power, then that of the substantial subject of that power, etc.); on the other hand there slips away from him in his interpretation of a capital text on the continuity of knowledge a fundament of the Rushdian noetics: the position of the existence of the philosopher. He thus develops a different theory of ‘acquisition’ from that of Averroes. Besides, the term adeptio was not completely suitable to the doctrine of the Commentator, and this lexical floating equates in reality to a sliding of the foundation. On the question of the after-junction, in fact John is more Farabian. He opts for an ascent of the ladder of separate beings, on the basis of the acquired intellect conceived as a springboard for ascending by stages up to God. Indeed he aggregates to the Rushdian model of theoretical accomplishment another model, in solidarity with an emanationist conception of the universe that relegates to second-class status the formal junction to the agent intellect, the latter perceived as nothing more than a means, a preparation for the enjoyment of a yet greater intellectual perfection. This evidently has effects on his conception of happiness: on its nature, its sharing, its possibility, as well as on the harmonization one could make of the Long Commentary of Averroes with the Nicomachean Ethics or the Metaphysics of Aristotle. John posits that adeptio is not the ultimate degree of beatitude, but solely that it conditions the discursive practice of metaphysics, which concerns the essential predicates of God. The completely happy human is the metaphysician of Aristotle, who must, in order to be such, have known the acquisition of which Averroes speaks. As a result, John develops a typology of happiness that distinguishres between the successes that the individual knows according to the stages of her ascent. In this process, the direct junction to the agent intellect and the fiducia philosphantium [philosophical faith] have only a relative value for the human” (p. 444).

“The end of the analysis again changes what is given. When John disputes on the sharing of ‘felicity’, he says it is difficult to earn, notably by reason of the moral exigence that places the intelligent life above the right life and its severe discipline; but it is nonetheless possible, and it is necessary to see what is proper to the philosopher, to whom falls the premier place among the humans of the city. Nonetheless, when John passes to the explication of a strong proposition of the Commentator, who maintains, he writes, that ‘philosophy is always perfect in the major part of its subject’, he concludes that the ‘subject’ of accomplished philosophy designates the humans, and that there is not — or so rarely that one returns like the mythical phoenix — an individually perfect philosopher. Only philosophy is complete at every moment, if we add together all the particular knowledges of individuals on the earth. Against the eventuality of personal successes, John indeed opts for the idea of an ahistorical totality, without progress, complete in permanence, which confers to science a conservative or patrimonial dimension: philosophy is actualized collectively, from all eternity, if we integrate the sum of partial knowledges. Whatever we may fear, the spirits never desert to the point that the number of brutes surpasses the number of thinkers. After having constructed a theory of individual intellection in solidarity with the Latin problematization of that intellect that makes the human the ‘subject’ of thought, and having at the same time completely decomposed the theory of the continuatio that Averroes develops, John makes humans the ‘subject’ of philosophy, and undermines one of the basic principles of [Averroes’] doctrine of the ultimate perfection: the necessary and permanent existence of the philosopher. Surrounded by professionals like himself, John of Jandun is probably beholden to the theoretical model of the universitas, and to the distinction dear to the artists [secular professors] of the end of the 13th century, between the unity of truth and the fragmentation of knowledges. No doubt he did not have the idea of a philosopher-king like Averroes with his imam-philosopher. If specialization is the grand word of the thought of the university (and there was no Almohad university), John finishes here with the thesis of the integration of partial knowledges, which acquires a striking anti-elitist bearing and excludes making the ‘artist’ the metonymy of the philosopher, on a ‘globalized’ vision of philosophical actualization, inspired not only by this or that scholastic debate but, more profoundly again, by the institutional framework that was his own” (pp. 444-445).

So he adds both an unfortunate conservative dimension and a laudable anti-elitism.

“In displacing the question of the noetic subject, to the point of losing it in that other problem of the intellect forma corporis [form of the body], in ruining, without having been able to demonstrate the intellectual illumination of the phantasm, that of his imaginary subject, and finally in articulating as he does ‘human’ and ‘subject’, sometimes for producing a theory of individual intellection that slides from the concept of junction to that of internal production, sometimes for saving the idea of a total accomplishment of knowledge that integrates the fragmentary participations of each, John of Jandun properly annihilated the Long Commentary of the Cordovan. The epigones, we know, are not always the most faithful to the masters they claim to serve. We have said also, from the beginning, that John is not Rushdian. But here the division is abyssal” (pp. 445-446).

“Contrary to what [the great 20th-century Thomist] Gilson could allow to be understood, the emancipation of philosophy in the 14th century is not entirely made in the form of a condemnation (or abandonment) of Aristotelianism. Gilson saw in the current incarnated by John of Jandun a frankly ‘conservative’ movement, or ‘an obstinate and limited Aristotelianism’. The description of the ‘transferences of the subject’ has seemed to show us the contrary” (p. 448).

Typical modernist historiography fails to recognize things like the existence of an “emancipation of philosophy in the 14th century”. On this point, I have to sympathize with the Thomists. However, Brenet also points out a notably anti-Aristotelian element in 20th-century neo-Thomist historiography that is in accordance with both traditional theological and modernist anti-Aristotelian prejudice. In the modern period, there has often been a sort of unprincipled bloc of theologians and modernists, who in this regard are united only by their quite differently motivated hostilities to Aristotle. Brenet finishes by remarking that his investigations have also shown “how philosophy continued to advance within Aristotelianism, and not (or not only) against it” (p. 449, emphasis in original).

“The question of the subject does not exist, any more in the modern epoch than in this period of the Middle Age. We have been able to see, on the other hand, what problem of the subiectum applied to the human (what determination or assumption of the individual as subject) is posed in [John’s] rearticulation of the Rushdian noetic. A question of the human subject of thoughts arises, which requires that [what Heidegger called] subjectity place itself in the human (and for some, already, in ‘the’ me), if we want to accurately reflect intellectual personality” (p. 448, emphasis in original).

Causes: Real, Heuristic?

The neoplatonic and scholastic traditions tended to treat causes as hypostatized real metaphysical principles, either inferred or simply given. Modern science in its more sophisticated statements has generally treated causes in a more heuristic way, as useful for the explanation of lawful regularity in phenomena.

I read the “causes” or “reasons why” in Aristotle as a sort of hermeneutic tools for understanding. This would encompass the kind of explanations employed by modern science, as well as much else that is helpful for understanding things in ordinary life, and for realizing our potential as animals involved with meaning and values.

Aristotle’s Metaphysics treats causes in Book V, in the context of “things said in many ways”. I will here quote the short first chapter, which introduces causes indirectly through the related concept of arché (governing principle, beginning, or as Sachs translates it, “source”):

“Source means that part of a thing from which one might first move, as of a line or a road there is a source in one direction, and another one from the opposite direction; and it means that from which each thing might best come into being, as in the case of learning, sometimes one ought to begin not from what is first and the source of the thing, but from which one might learn most easily; or it means that constituent from which something first comes into being, such as the keel of a ship or the foundation of a house, and in animals some say it is the heart, others the brain, and others whatever they happen to believe is of this sort; or it means that which is not a constituent, from which something first comes into being, and from which its motion and change naturally first begin, as a child from its father and mother, or a fight from insults; or it means that by whose choice a thing is moved or what changes changes, in the sense in which the ruling offices of cities as well as oligarchies, monarchies, and tyrannies are called sources, as are the arts, and among these the master crafts most of all. Also, that from which a thing is first known is called the source of the thing, such as the hypotheses of demonstrations.”

“Causes [aitiai] are meant in just as many ways, since all causes are sources. And what is common to all sources is to be the first thing from which something is or comes to be or is known; of these, some are present within while others are outside. For this reason nature is a source, as are elements, thinking, choice, thinghood, and that for the sake of which; for the good and the beautiful are sources of both the knowledge and the motion of many things” (Sachs translation, pp. 77-78).

What is emphasized in the notion of “source”, which Aristotle uses to provide insight into that of “cause”, is what is ultimately — or at least relatively ultimately — behind something, not that which is immediately behind it. By contrast, what I have been calling the “modern” (common-sense, not properly scientific) sense of “cause” is supposed to “operate” in an at least relatively immediate and direct (proximate) way.

The Quest for Identity

Volume 1 of Alain de Libera’s archaeology of the subject was subtitled (in French) Birth of the Subject (2007). Volume 2’s subtitle translates as The Quest for Identity (2008). Here he will ask, What is it that constitutes the “Me”?

In the hands of the scholastics and early moderns, the subject acquires the personal status of an agent, accountable for her thoughts as well as her actions. De Libera speaks of a “double parasitic relation” of the subject and the person, from whence issued the modern concept of a personal subject. In early modern inquiries into the permanence of the individual “me”, the subject seems to be effaced before the Self and the Person. It persists nonetheless, he says, under the mask of the person.

A series of unexpected itineraries will range from the theology of sacraments to early modern philosophical satire. Historic concerns with puzzles of personal identity will be reviewed together with the scholastic ontology of action and the notion of “extrinsic denomination”. He aims to consider “events in thought” — not a being or a single truth or a determinism that could follow a chronological order, but what he calls a traversal of possible itineraries.

He will ask how the subject — described in an anonymous 1680 French compendium of metaphysics as a simple receptor that de Libera, recalling Aquinas’ brutal critique of Averroes, likens to a wall’s relation to colors on it — became the all-purpose concept of psychology and ethics, of politics and of right, of linguistics and literary criticism? How did a term that had nothing to do with personhood become the modern name of the person? He aims to address these questions via a cross-section of different temporal rhythms, seeking in a nonlinear way to understand an event of thought he calls the “chiasm of agency”, or the installation of the “I” as subject-agent of thought.

He notes that Heidegger and Brentano both highlighted the fact that in scholastic philosophy, “subject” and “object” had close to the opposite of their modern meanings, and this will complicate the inquiry. The development will be much more intricate than a simple reversal.

He begins with two questions asked by Shaftesbury in 1711, in what de Libera calls an ironic arbitration between Descartes and Locke: “But in what Subject that thought resides, and how that Subject is continu’d one and the same, so as to answer constantly to the supposed Train of Thoughts or Reflections, which seem to run so harmoniously thro’ a long Course of Life, with the same relation still to one single and self-same Person; this is not a Matter so easily or hastily decided, by those who are nice Self-Examiners, or Searchers after Truth and Certainty.” (Shaftesbury, quoted in vol. 2, p. 18, footnote).

Shaftesbury mocks the cogito ergo sum of Descartes, reducing it to the tautology “if I am, I am”. According to de Libera, Shaftesbury thinks the real questions are: “What is it that constitutes the We or the I? Is the I of the present instant the same as that of every instant before or after?” (p. 19, my translation throughout).

“In a few lines, Shaftesbury passes… from the scholastic universe of the subject understood as subject of thought… to the universe of the We and the I…, and implicitly to the Lockean response — consciousness, the Self-in-consciousness — and to [Locke’s] criterion of memory. But the latter is no less problematic than the former” (ibid).

As de Libera generalizes, “The archaeology of the subject is in large measure the archaeology of the person” (p. 22). Trinitarian theology and the so-called “mind-body problem” are only disjoint for us. They were not for the later scholastics. How do we even understand statements like those of the Renaissance Thomist Thomas Cajetan (1469-1534) that “the soul as long as it is in the body exists as a semi-nature [but] separated from the body, it exists as a semi-person” (p. 23)? This will take patient archaeological investigation.

Declining to engage in metaphysical debate, Shaftesbury had opted for a moral solution: “I take my Being upon Trust…. This to me appears sufficient Ground for a Moralist. Nor do I ask more, when I undertake to prove the reality of Virtue and Morals” (quoted, p. 20).

De Libera asks, “In a word: why is it necessary for us to posit a subject in addition to ‘ourselves’ to account for the fact that we are what we are, think what we think, and do what we do?… What is it that constrains us to make our acts or our thoughts the attributes of a subject?” (p. 24).

He acknowledges at the very beginning that this second volume did not follow the plan announced in volume 1. I confess that in the main body of this one, I often felt lost in the trees, so to speak, and no longer able to see the proverbial forest. Volume 3 resumes the thread of the main argument, and I will devote more space to summarizing it.

The remainder of volume 2 first addresses some recent English-speaking philosophers on personal identity, notably P. F. Strawson and Amelia Rorty. It goes on to discuss at length the debates occasioned by John Locke’s innovative attempt to explain personal identity in terms of a continuity of directly experienced consciousness, elementary self-awareness, and memory that does not depend on any postulated underlying substantial soul. I’m not a Locke scholar, but I noticed that the explicit wording of some of the arguments seemed to appeal to a sameness of consciousness as opposed to the criterion of continuity I would have expected, as when Locke seemed to be willing to grant the counterintuitive consequence that Socrates dreaming and Socrates awake could be two different “persons”. The difference between waking and dreaming could also be approached as a relative discontinuity, however.

In accordance with de Libera’s interest in the historic “soul-body problem”, there is a lengthy coverage of debates as to whether Siamese twins are single persons or two persons sharing one body. He then goes back in time to medieval debates on whether a two-headed baby should baptized with one name or two.

There is some additional coverage of Locke’s “forensic” approach to identity, which puts moral culpability for actions in first place, over psychological or metaphysical considerations. Some of Locke’s critics argued that notwithstanding Locke’s intentions, he actually weakened moral responsibility, as when he granted explicitly that Socrates waking is not responsible for the thoughts of Socrates dreaming. Both sides of the discussion assumed what Brandom calls a “contractive” notion of responsibility (see also Expansive Agency; Brandomian Forgiveness).

Finally, de Libera discusses the history of the concept of “external” or “extrinsic” denomination — basically, ways in which “accidental” properties are taken to refer to things. This is distinguished from both “formal” and “causal” denomination. In the case of my seeing of a wall, according to many medieval and early modern authors, the wall does not act on me in any way, so the wall would be only denominated externally or extrinsically. Many also held that I do not act on the wall in any way in seeing it either, so I would also be only denominated externally or extrinsically. In this context, de Libera discusses the Scottish philosopher of common sense Thomas Reid (1710-1796), as well as the work of Samuel Clark (1675-1729) and various critics and followers of Descartes. He then goes back to Cajetan.

In conclusion, de Libera speaks of a “chiasm of denomination” that is closely bound up with what he previously called the “chiasm of agency”. He sees a veritable revolution in the treatment of thought contents as something other than external or extrinsic denominations of persons. At the beginning of volume 3, he finally relates all this discussion of denomination back to the medieval controversy over the views of Averroes on intellect and imagination.

Next in this series: The Act of Thought

Suarez on Agents and Action

Among the greatest of the Latin scholastics, Francisco Suárez (1548-1617) was a profoundly original and highly sophisticated theologian-philosopher who significantly influenced early modern thought, and also produced monumental summaries of several centuries of Latin scholastic argument. A full third of his gigantic Metaphysical Disputations was devoted to an extremely detailed and systematic discussion of causality. A large volume entirely dedicated to efficient causes has been translated to English, and a web search popped up several secondary discussions. My comments here will be very high-level, mostly based on those.

In this scholastic context, traditional Aristotelian terms like cause, being, and substance are all given very different explanations from the nonstandard but hopefully both more historical and more useful ones I have been giving them. Latin scholastics tended to have a somewhat neoplatonizing, substantialized notion of Aristotelian causes. A common view was that any cause must be a substantial entity of some sort, whereas causes in the common modern sense are events, and I read Aristotle himself as identifying causes with “reasons why”.

Suárez held to the view of causes as substantial entities, and apparently went on to argue that all causes give Thomistic being (esse) either to a substance or to an accident in a substance. This influx or “influence” is described as a kind of immaterial flowing of being that makes or produces, without diminishing the agent. In the case of an efficient cause, this influence occurs through action, and the substantial efficient cause is called an agent. (By contrast, in the above-linked article, which has brief additional remarks on Suárez, I quoted Aristotle saying in effect that an agent’s action is more properly an efficient cause than the agent, and that something like a technique used in an action is more properly an efficient cause than the action.)

Suárez’s metaphysical emphasis on actions producing being in things has been characterized as transitional to a modern, event-based view of causality. While Suárez himself held to the idea that causes were substantial agents, early modern mechanism indeed seems to have kept his emphasis on action but moved to an event-based view.

It seems to me to have been a historical accident that mathematical natural science arose on the basis of an event-based view. While mathematics certainly can be used to develop precise descriptions of events, any mathematical analysis relevant to this can also be construed as a “reason why” rather than a mere description. On the frontier of analytic philosophy, Brandom is again suggesting that a consideration of reasons actually circumscribes — and is necessary to underwrite — consideration of events and descriptions. This suggests a new motivation for recovering Aristotle’s original reason-based view.

The Style of Albert

Along with the more Augustinian Roger Bacon, in the mid-13th century Albert the Great was among the first of the Latins to lecture on works of Aristotle newly translated from the Arabic. Reportedly, he dressed as an Arab while doing so. In the late 20th century, Pope John Paul II singled out Albert as a patron of the reconciliation of science and religion.

Albert was also the teacher and mentor of Thomas Aquinas. Commentaries on Aristotle by the young Aquinas include lengthy sections largely borrowed from the commentaries of Albert. After Aquinas had died at a relatively young age, some of his teachings were included by the bishop of Paris in the sweeping condemnation of 1277 (see Errors of the Philosophers), and the elderly Albert traveled from Germany back to Paris to defend his student.

Unlike Aquinas, Albert developed a pattern of distinguishing between purely philosophical and theological discourses. He would say, “now I speak as a philosopher”, and then “now I speak as a theologian”. There was still significant overlap between the two, but this lent authority to the idea of allowing space for purely philosophical discourse. Some later scholastics preferred Albert to Aquinas for this reason.

Among the German Dominicans, there was a significant “Albertist” school. The independent-minded Albertist Dietrich of Freiberg (1250 – 1310), who also made scientific contributions, criticized Aquinas for misusing Aristotelian concepts in his theological account of the Eucharist. Contemporary scholars like Alain de Libera and Kurt Flasch have also brought to light broadly Albertist roots of the profound Christian neoplatonic spirituality of figures like the great Meister Eckhart (1260 – 1328). (See also Fortunes of Aristotle.)

Scholastic Dialectic

Latin scholasticism actually evinced more concern with fine points of philosophical argument than any broad philosophical tendency prior to modern analytic philosophy. Many authors followed a pattern in which some assertion would be introduced, followed by arguments for and against the assertion, followed by replies of each side to the arguments of the other, thus simulating a formal debate. Only then would the author conclude with “I say…” and give his own reasons. This resembles what happens when people play chess against themselves, still trying to win every time they turn the board around. It promotes a kind of intellectual honesty and thoroughness.

In the 2nd century BCE, the skeptical Platonist Carneades had bewildered the Romans by arguing both sides of a question with equal vigor. Latin scholastics did take a position by the end of their discourses, but scholars have sometimes wondered if all of these conclusions should be taken at face value, because sometimes earlier arguments for an opposed point of view seem stronger. For some authors, making a strong case for an argument and then appearing to reject it may have been a way to preserve controversial arguments for posterity.

This was a particular historical form, broadly influenced by both Platonic and Aristotelian dialectic. Various conventions in the use of natural language were developed to promote unambiguous interpretations of logical meaning. The style in which arguments were presented can sometimes seem imposing due to its complex semi-formal character, particularly in authors like Aquinas, but the spirit of debate was quite lively.

I have noted that the Arabic tradition had tended to downplay the role of dialectic and practical judgment in Aristotle, in favor of stricter deductive “science”. The Latin tradition absorbed this reverence for deductive science, while re-establishing a strong role for a kind of dialectic.