Being and Representation Revisited

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next in this series: Signs, Concepts, Things

“Intellect” and the Body

The Latin scholastics invented strongly univocal concepts of “substantial form” and “intellectual soul”, and read them back into Aristotle. The work of Jean-Baptiste Brenet shows how this is interwoven with the prehistory of the modern notion of a psychological subject as a knower and agent.

In the book that served as his doctoral thesis, Brenet develops a case study of the “prince of the Averroists” John of Jandun, who turns out to be closer to his Latin peers than to Ibn Rushd (Averroes) himself. Brenet has also published French translations of Aquinas’ questions on soul and body from Summa Theologica, as well as a work On the Intellectual Soul by the English Averroist theologian Thomas Wilton, whose theses we will see are disputed by John of Jandun.

Averroes had insisted that it is only equivocally that intellect is said to belong to the same soul that is said to be the form of the body. According to Brenet, John of Jandun wants to avoid two extremes. The first, which he associates with Alexander of Aphrodisias, in effect makes the human intellect entirely material, by insisting on the univocity of Aristotle’s definition of the soul. The second, represented by Themistius, treats intellect entirely as a transcendent principle, and absolutely denies that it is the form of the body. This latter view is often mistakenly attributed to Averroes. But in any case, John of Jandun reverses this emphasis, and pushes for a more “Alexandrian” solution. He searches the text of Averroes in order to highlight all the passages where Averroes says or suggests that intellect, in spite of its transcendent dimension, is nonetheless also in some meaningful way ours.

“Against the noetics of Averroes, to which he opposes in the first instance the experience of personal thought, Thomas Aquinas maintains in his De unitate intellectus that intellect is ‘a power of the soul that is the form of the body’. He even comes to write in this polemical context that ‘intellect is the form of the body’. It is this ‘information’ that, according to him, confers to each of us a principle for thinking that is our own” (Brenet, Transferts du Sujet, p. 35, my translation throughout).

Siger of Brabant had argued against Aquinas that the relation between intellect and the body is not one of substance, but rather is a kind of operational unity. Intellect is not the substantial form of the body, but is properly called a sort of “intrinsic mover or operator” within the soul. John of Jandun “is a child of this inaugural dispute. He inherits words and formulas from it, but not only that: he subscribes to the scholastic idea and its expression, that it is the form of the body that gives thought to the human” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“In fact Averroes, who paid extremely close attention to the exact problem of the being of intellect in potentiality, did not really seek to know in what sense intellect, without qualification, could be the form of the body. On the one hand, it is in effect the perfection of the human [i.e., the composite of soul and body] that interests him; on the other hand, he nearly always proposes a divided approach to the question” (p. 46).

“Not only must we not speak vaguely of the relation of intellect to human individuals, but things do not go the same way with each ‘intellect’. What is involved may be the thought of an infant, or that of a sleeping person” (p. 47). “The essential of [Averroes’] Long Commentary is developed in the third book, in the arborescence of modes of possible junction for the human, when Averroes details the diverse degrees of mediation that lead to the immediate information of the intellect, acquired at the end of the theoretical stage of thought: at this moment, the agent intellect has become directly our form” (ibid, emphasis in original).

(Here we have explicitly an immediacy that is not originary, but rather is a product of mediation. Hegel was not the first to raise such a possibility.)

John follows Siger of Brabant in modeling human intellect on the celestial intelligences that were believed to move the spheres by which the motions of the stars were explained. Like Siger, he uses Averroes’ commentary on Aristotle’s On the Heavens to derive conclusions about human intellect that conflict with what Averroes says in his more famous Long Commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul.

“If intellect is the form of the body, it is so insofar as it is an ‘operator’. Every form is a giver either of being or of operation: the intellectual soul is precisely forma dans operationem” (p. 72).

Not without some irony, Brenet observes that “If we abstract away the corruptibility of the individual body, as well as its composition, if we neglect the fact that intellect has need of the image and needs it in its primary operation, we can justifiably say that it is a ‘form’ analogous to the celestial intelligence that is the mover of a sphere ” (p. 84).

“Between an immaterial form and a body that are ontologically separate, there can exist a relation in the order of act, a purely functional relation…. Even if it is separate from its Intelligence in its being, [the celestial sphere] is united to it in a certain way, i.e., to recall what John says himself, ‘at least as subject‘…. subjectum or ‘place’: the sphere-subject gives place to movement, the act of the Intelligence has a place in this sub-jection ” (p. 85, emphasis in original).

“Certainly, the Parisian master could say, the anti-Avicennan and anti-Platonic empirical orientation of the noetics of Averroes means that the implication of the body in the elaboration of thought must be strong, but intellect only has need of the human body for making thought, and not for being there” (p. 86).

“If the celestial sphere is indispensable as subject-receiver of the act caused by the Intelligence, insofar as it receives movement, how can it be compared to the human body, which does not receive thought from the intellect and is not, in this sense at least, the ‘subject’?” (p. 87).

Note well that intellect is not said to be “received” by the human here. In this Averroes differs from Alfarabi and Avicenna.

“We do indeed find a cosmologico-noetic analogy in Averroes, but Averroes does not reason in the same way. He does not found noetics on cosmology, he does the inverse, and goes from analyses of the human intellect to say something about the celestial Intelligences” (pp. 87-88). “John of Jandun seems to reverse this relation when he layers noetics over cosmology” (p. 88).

For Averroes, this raises the “problem of Theophrastus [Aristotle’s collaborator and immediate successor]”: How can we say that the material intellect has no form of its own, and yet that it is a being?

“Nothing can be in act that we call a ‘this’, which is to say a body or a faculty existing in a body, like the sensory faculty. The absolute denuding of its being is the condition of its receptivity to universals; in order for it to potentially be the intelligible, there can be nothing of its own in its being-in-potentiality” (pp. 89-90).

Here he is effectively saying that no concrete particular can be “in act” in the Aristotelian sense. Being a particular involves accident, and accident is incompatible with pure act.

“If the material intellect is by definition ‘that which is in potentiality all the ‘intentions’ of universal material forms, and is not any being in act before having conceived it, it is excluded that its nature could be that of (prime) matter, that of the separate forms, or that of a hylomorphic composite” (p.91).

(I am inclined to think that the notion of prime matter (i.e., matter abstracted from the form with which it is ordinarily said to be inseparable, and supposedly having no properties of its own) is an interpolation due to Alexander of Aphrodisias.)

“As a consequence, the subject of the intelligibles… constitutes a being sui generis…. The interpretation that Averroes gives in the Long Commentary rests on a double rejection of the readings of Alexander of Aphrodisias and of Themistius” (p. 92).

Brenet quotes Averroes, “Alexander explains the demonstration of Aristotle concluding that the material intellect is not passive, that it is not something of which one says ‘this’, (aliquid hoc), that is to say a body or a faculty [existing] in the body, as intending the preparation itself [for the reception of intelligibles] and not the subject of the preparation. That is why he writes in his book On the Soul that the material intellect more resembles the preparation that is in the tablet that has not been written upon, than the prepared tablet itself” (pp. 92-93, brackets in original). Averroes continues, “But it is impossible to show the nature of the preparation proper to the intellect without having recourse to the nature of the subject, since the preparation proper to each subject is parallel to (currit cursu) the perfection and the form of the subject” (p. 93).

Brenet continues, “Otherwise said, Aristotle could not speak of the receptive power of the material intellect without considering the very essence of that intellect…. Averroes in effect rejects the idea that a form adjoining a corporeal substrate can be other than inhering in and mixed with it: an intellect-disposition of the body can only be a corporeal form whose implication in matter renders impossible any apprehension of the universal” (ibid).

Logical and epistemic access to universals is for Averroes neither natural nor supernatural. I like to call it “ethical”.

“As a consequence, contrary to what Alexander of Aphrodisias maintains, the material intellect is really or substantially the subject of the intelligible; it is not the accident of a support; it cannot be reduced to a pure disposition attached to the material composite” (p. 94). “Themistius errs too, because he makes the material intellect a substance in which is found the disposition to receive the intelligibles” (ibid).

“Averroes bases his conceptual elaboration upon the being of the material intellect, and it is this that governs his cosmologico-noetic analogy, i.e., a reflection on the subjectity of the subject of universals. His question is not: Is the receptive intellect a subject or not? but rather, What subject or what being must it be?” (pp. 95-96).

“Averroes and John of Jandun do not defend the same thesis. John holds that the intellectual soul is to the body of the human as the mover-intelligence is to the heaven it moves, whereas Averroes maintains that the ‘celestial body’, i.e., its ‘soul’, is to its intelligence and to the separate forms of the universe, that which the material intellect is to the agent intellect and to the intelligibles it receives. This does not mean that John’s idea, which remained very current throughout the Middle Age, is absurd, impossible, or absolutely contrary to what Averroes wanted to say” (p. 104).

“In not working on the problem of the ‘fourth kind of being’, John truncates cosmology and unbalances its relation to noetics…. The master of arts develops his reading of Aristotle and Averroes from the angle of a question that the Cordovan does not pose: what is it that unites intellect to the human body? Like Siger when he was cornered by Aquinas, he is already dominated by the will to find the kind of union that will allow us to say that hic homo intelligit [“this human understands”], or that homo formaliter intelligit [the human formally understands]” (p. 109).

“[Averroes] does not ask himself about the act that unites intellect and the human, but first of all about the very possibility of any intellectual act, about its material possibility. Under what conditions is the intelligible received? Where can it be received? These are his questions. He wants to determine what is the subject of thought, independent of seeking to know who thinks, which far surpasses the question of human consciousness and that of individual intellection” (ibid).

In a footnote, Brenet quotes Jean Jolivet: “The contingency of individual knowledge, the empiricity of its constitution, are overlooked by a globalizing conception of being, of thought, and of their adequation. Transposing the matter into modern terms (with the required precautions), one could say that Ibn Rushd elaborated a philosophy not of consciousness but of the concept, that puts itself on the same side as Aristotle, properly understood, but also that of Spinoza, Hegel, Marx” (p. 109n).

The “Averroist” theologian Thomas Wilton “judges that the agent intellect is neither a forma inhaerens nor a forma informans, but that it intervenes solely as forma assistens” (p. 116).

But “For the Parisian master, … our intellect is constituted by the possible intellect and by the agent intellect, and the latter is united secundum esse [in being] to the first. Clearly opposed to Thomas Wilton, the master of arts goes so far as to say [the agent intellect] is our form informans” (p. 117). “This comes back to his conception of the intellectus possibilis and of the intellectual soul: John in effect rejects the idea that the possible intellect should be in act, … just as he denies the fact that the agent intellect is not part of the human soul” (p. 118).

Next in this series: Imagination, Cogitation

Form and Things

I use the word “thing” in a very general sense for anything at all — real, ideal, or imaginary; abstract or concrete; including properties, actions, processes, and adverbial characteristics.

Kant controversially wanted to assume that things of all sorts have definite ways that they objectively are “in themselves”, i.e., completely independent of our experience and knowledge of them. But for him, there is inevitably a gap between our knowledge and reality. Every attempt to ignore or overleap that gap he called dogmatism. This was his way of practicing what I have called epistemic modesty, or the ethical virtue of avoiding unfounded knowledge claims. When we don’t know, we go ahead and act based on the best beliefs we have, while in principle remaining open to the possibility that our belief may require revision.

Hegel and others have worried that there is something wrong with Kant’s way of expressing the situation — with this gap between knowledge and reality that is inevitable and even virtuous for Kant. Some of Kant’s remarks make it sound as if reality as it really is and our experience could be two entirely nonoverlapping realms. If this were true, Kant’s position could be seen as leading to skepticism, or the conclusion that genuine knowledge of reality is impossible.

Kant himself would have resisted this conclusion with all his might. He does believe we have genuine knowledge; he just wants us to be very careful about what we claim to know. For Kant, genuine knowledge does not require access to things in themselves; rather, it keeps within the bounds of possible experience. It minimally designates an objectivity toward experience, consisting in the absence of dogmatism and an unceasing effort toward unity of apperception.

Hegel agrees with Kant in opposing dogmatism and emphasizing the effort toward unity of apperception. His strongest opposition to Kant’s talk of things in themselves assumes that “in themselves” means “in isolation”, as it would under the Wolffian view (rejected by both Kant and Hegel) that all knowledge is analytical. Hegel emphasizes that unities of apperception are not just individual but also shared. At the same time, he revives the Aristotelian idea that thoughts should be distinguished as forms or meanings shareable in principle with any rational being, and that as such, they are whatever they are independent of subjective presentation. This makes it quite reasonable for Aristotle and Hegel to claim that the form or meaning that is properly being thought is the very same as the form or meaning that is being thought about.

An analogous identity certainly does not apply to experience or consciousness. To assert that would be dogmatism in Kant’s sense. The thought that Aristotle and Hegel identify with form or meaning is not a kind of consciousness. The most fundamental characteristic of consciousness for Hegel is the separation of subject and object, whereas in thought proper there is no such separation, only a succession of forms. In Hegel, the gap between consciousness and its objects takes the place of the gap between knowledge and reality in Kant, and similarly commends to us a practice of epistemic modesty in life.

Another dimension of epistemic modesty in Aristotle and Hegel has to do with the non-univocal character of form in Aristotle, and with Hegel’s repeated warnings about the “falsity” of all fixed representations. Form is said in several ways in Aristotle, e.g., sensible form, mathematical form, linguistic meaning, and the life or soul of a living being. Of these the first two are univocal, but the last two are not.

From the point of view of form, we take a deflationary view of “things”. Things — like the thing in itself in Kant — are in a strict sense indexes delimiting our ignorance rather than univocal “objects” of knowledge.

The fact that our ignorance is delimited means it is not total. We do have knowledge, but insofar as either proper knowledge or Hegelian spirit has “objects”, those objects lack univocal identity.

Thoughts on Teleology

Teleology is another subject on which my perspective has changed drastically over the years.

After a youthful fascination with Plotinus, my main interest turned toward the diverse group of writers loosely associated with French “structuralism”, several of whom were very interested in Spinoza. For some years, Spinoza became the great philosopher I identified with most. I had not explicitly thought much about teleology before, but Spinoza’s very sharp critique in the appendix to book 1 of the Ethics impressed me greatly. At the time, I did not trouble myself over whether it was fair to the historic Aristotle. I defended without reservation the strong determinism of Spinoza and the Stoics, emphasizing an understanding of the causes of things as the main path to enlightenment. At this time also, some contemporary writers on mathematical “chaos theory” were proposing what they called a superdeterminism, which would allow for deterministic explanation of all sorts of nonlinear phenomena, by an innovative separation of the notion of determinism from its traditional connotations of predictability. I had not yet begun to question what I have been referring to here as the “modern notion” of causality. My great preoccupation was with defending the possibility of ethics within a deterministic context.

My deeper engagement with Aristotle began initially with problems of things “said in many ways”. In my professional work as a data modeler, I was very concerned with the ambiguities of common-sense apprehensions of things, which I wanted to overcome in Platonic fashion. The univocity that Aristotle treats in a balanced way I initially saw more one-sidedly as an ideal to aim for in the quest for knowledge, though without underestimating the difficulty of attempting to treat everything in a univocal manner, or as comprehended by a single grand, consistent theory. Meanwhile, my personal interests were focused on questions of the interpretation of the history of human cultural development.

Gradually, I became more and more impressed with the importance of what I came to call “objective ambiguity” in history — the idea that this was not just a defect of our understanding or interpretation, but that the most objective reality of the concrete world may often reflect mixed or “in between” states of things. Eventually, I came to recognize that Aristotle, perhaps more than any other of the great philosophers, deeply thought about this and took it into account. I became aware of the arguments of Leibniz that all necessity is hypothetical, then realized Aristotle had already said that all necessity in generated things is hypothetical.

As Spinoza said, strict causal necessity rules out the “play” in things that leaves room for teleological explanation. But I have become convinced that that “play” in things is not something to be explained away as a mere appearance. Hypothetical necessity respects both the element of (conditional) necessity in things and this inherent “play”. It now appears to me as a priceless Aristotelian mean, and a kind of Hegelian synthesis of determination and play or flexibility.

The way Aristotle applies hypothetical necessity to determination by ends removes the mystery from final causes. Aristotle emphasizes the alternative that Spinoza ignored — that teleology need not be the product of conscious aims of a supernatural being or beings “intervening” in the natural order. In Aristotle’s non-reductionist view of the intelligibility of nature, natural things are shaped by inherent “tendencies” to seek certain states that are nonetheless not strictly determining. (See also Aristotle on Explanation; Ends; Equivocal Determination; Free Will and Determinism.)

Act and Action

Still pursuing roots of the modern “subject” in medieval Latin scholasticism by way of Alain de Libera’s Archéologie du sujet, I’ve reached the point where de Libera reviews Bernard Lonergan’s detailed account of act, action, and related terms in Aquinas. The most noteworthy conclusion is that Aquinas distinguishes “act” from “action” in opposite ways in different texts, when he combines it with his other distinction between cases of immanent and transient action. This confusion appears not to have originated with Aquinas himself, but rather with the Latin translations of Greek texts that he used.

In any event, the way these distinctions are deployed by Aquinas is to say the least highly fluid, which is to say that any attempt to interpret them univocally would result in contradictions. (Burrell, who considers the analogy of being a later development attributable to Cajetan, nonetheless suggests that there is an analogy of action in Aquinas.)

De Libera constructs a table of Latin terms (vol. 3 part 1, p. 325) used by Aquinas for the Greek energeia (literally “in-actness”, for which I’ve been using the conventional translation of “actuality”) in the agent and in an external product, respectively. Energeia may be actus in the agent and actio in the product, or vice versa. It may be operatio in the agent and either actio or factio in the product. It may be actio in the agent and factio in the product.

“What it is necessary to understand in this context is that for Aristotle it is one and the same principle that accounts for act, whether in the agent or the product. That principle is form” (ibid, my translation, emphasis added). According to de Libera, for Aquinas too form is the principle of both the act that remains in the agent, and that which passes to the product. (Burrell reads Aquinas in a relational way that avoids de Libera’s suggestion of something passing between agent and product. The idea of something passing between agent and product suggests Suarez’s later explanation of efficient causation by “influence”.)

De Libera takes note (pp. 327-332) of the Latin translation of the influential definition of praxis (ethical action or practice) in the treatise On the Nature of Man by the 4th century CE Syrian bishop Nemesius of Emesa used by Aquinas. In Greek, Nemesius says “praxis is energeia logiké“. The Latin translation by Burgundio of Pisa says “gestio is actus rationalis“. But the same translator rendered the same Greek sentence in The Orthodox Faith by the 7th century monk John of Damascus as “actio is operatio rationalis“.

This might seem like a complete muddle. But if we take act as form as the guiding thread as de Libera suggests, it may be possible to get something coherent out of it. On the other hand, some adjustment would still be required if we also accepted the identification of act with action and of action with an efficient cause. If act is supposed to be understood as form and end and action as the efficient cause or means by which an end is accomplished, then act cannot be identified with action.

It is one thing to recognize the limits of attempting to apply univocity and formalism in logic to the real world, and quite another to affirm a contradiction. But this is a quite delicate area, and sometimes there are arguments whether there is truly a contradiction or merely an implicit distinction between cases. The answer to this depends on interpretation, and every interpretation is subject to dialogue.

De Libera says that Burgundio’s translation of John of Damascus “introduces nothing less than the ‘modern’ vocabulary of action” (p. 327). Thus it seems that Aquinas ends up with an unstable combination of Aristotelian and “modern” meanings for act and action, but the instability was already present in the sources he used.

Pure Difference?

A common theme here is the conceptual priority of difference over identity. I think that identity is a derived concept, and not a primitive one (see also Aristotelian Identity).

The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) in Difference and Repetition and other works argued that a pure notion of difference is by itself sufficient for a general account of things. In information theory, information is explained as expressing difference. In Saussurean structural linguistics, we are said to recognize spoken words by recognizing elementary differences between sounds. In both cases, the idea is that we get to meaning by distinguishing and relating.

Deleuze initially cites both of these notions of difference, but goes on to develop arguments grounded largely in Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, whom he uses to argue against Plato and Hegel. His very interesting early work Nietzsche and Philosophy was marred by a rather extreme polemic against Hegel, and in Difference and Repetition he announces a program of “anti-Platonism” that reproduces Nietzsche’s intemperate hostility to Plato. Nietzsche blamed Plato for what I regard as later developments. Neither Plato nor Aristotle made the kind of overly strong assertions about identity that became common later on.

In The Sophist and elsewhere, Plato had his characters speak of Same, Other, and the mixing of the two as equally primordial. Hegel took great pains to elaborate the notion of a “difference that makes a difference”. But Deleuze wants to argue that Plato and Hegel both illegitimately subordinate difference to identity. His alternative is to argue that what is truly fundamental is a primitive notion of difference that does not necessarily “make a difference”, and that come before any “making a difference”. (I prefer the thesis of Leibniz that indiscernibility of any difference is just what identity consists in.)

This is related to Deleuze’s very questionable use of Duns Scotus’ notion of the univocity of being, both in general and more particularly in his interpretation of Spinoza. For Deleuze, pure difference interprets Scotist univocal being.

I frankly have no idea what led to Deleuze’s valorization of Scotus. Deleuze is quite extreme in his opposition to any kind of representationalism, while Scotus made representability the defining criterion of his newly invented univocal being. It is hard to imagine views that are further apart. I can only speculate that Deleuze too hastily picked out Scotus because he wanted to provocatively oppose the 20th century neo-Thomism that had considerable prominence in France, and Scotus is a leading medieval figure standing outside the Thomist tradition.

For Deleuze, univocal being is pure difference without any identity. Difference that doesn’t make a difference seems to take over the functional role that identity has in theories that treat it as something underlying that exceeds any discernibility based on criteria. I don’t see why we need either of these.

I think Deleuze’s bête noir Hegel actually did a better job of articulating the priority of difference over identity. Hegel did this not by appealing to a putative monism of difference and nothing else, but by developing correlative notions of “difference that makes a difference”, and a kind of logical consequence or entailment that we attribute to real things as we interpret them, independent of and prior to any elaboration of logic in a formal sense.

In Hegel’s analysis as explicated by Brandom, any difference that makes a difference expresses a kind of “material” incompatibility of meaning that rules out some possible assertions. This is just what “making a difference” means. Meanwhile, all positive assertions can be more specifically analyzed as assertions of some consequence or entailment or other at the level of meaning (see Material Consequence). Every predication is analyzable as an assertion of consequence or entailment between subject and predicate, as Leibniz might remind us. It is always valid to interpret, e.g., “a cat is a mammal” as an inference rule for generating conclusions like if Garfield is a cat, then Garfield is a mammal.

What is missing from Deleuze’s account is anything like entailment, the idea of something following from something else. This notion of “following”, I am convinced, is prior to any notion of identity applicable to real things. Without presupposing any pre-existing identities of things, we can build up an account of the world based on the combination of differences that make a difference, on the one hand, and real-world entailments, on the other. Identity is then a result rather than an assumption. Meanings (and anything like identity) emerge from the interplay of practical real-world entailments and distinctions. It is their interplay that gives them definition in terms of one another.

Deleuze was a sort of ontological anarchist, who wanted being to be free of any pre-existing principles. While I agree that we can’t legitimately just assume such principles, I think this is very far from meaning that principles are irrelevant, or actually harmful. On the contrary, as Kant might remind us, principles are all-important. They aren’t just “given”. We have to do actual work to develop them. But if we have no principles — if nothing truly follows from anything else, or is ruled out by anything else — then we cannot meaningfully say anything at all.

Being and Representation

In L’Être et représentation (1999), Olivier Boulnois documents the emergence of “metaphysics” in its distinctively non-Aristotelian modern sense among various 13th century authors, including Roger Bacon, Henry of Ghent, and Siger of Brabant, leading to its decisive formulation by the Franciscan theologian John Duns Scotus in the 14th century. Avicenna had already claimed that metaphysics is about “being in general”, whereas Aristotle himself had emphasized that “being is said in many ways”, which implies that there is no “being in general”.

Boulnois suggests that the 13th century authors just mentioned paved the way for Scotus’ innovations by already treating being as a concept. We are so used to that, that it is hard for us to grasp what Aristotle means in suggesting that “being in general” is not a proper concept at all.

Scotus argued against Aristotle that there is a unifying, logically minimal criterion of being, and it is representability. To be representable is to be “not nothing”. Unicorns and other imaginary creatures are representable, whereas Aristotle would not have called them beings. Scotus’ concept of representation seems to be purely logical; to have a representation of something is not necessarily to have understanding of it. For Scotus, God and creatures are equally representable, even though creatures, as finite, can be properly understood by the human mind and God, as infinite, cannot. Whereas Aristotle never speaks of an infinite being — only of a perfect one — Scotus’ generic concept of being is very explicitly indifferent to distinctions between finite and infinite.

It is one thing to acknowledge representation as a logical concept among others, and quite another to give it the kind of special first place status that Scotus does in his ontology, and that Locke does in his epistemology.

Boulnois says it is with Scotus that metaphysics became linked to what Kant later called ontotheology. While separating metaphysics as the account of being from theology as the separate account of God, Scotus also made God indifferently one of the objects of metaphysics, along with all the other beings. The combination of these changes actually brought metaphysics closer to revealed theology, and helped it to be perceived as the safe handmaiden of the later Latin tradition, rather than as independent philosophical theology that some found threatening.

If one speaks of a subject of representation, it could be — in a sense of “subject” closer to that of Aristotle — that in which something stands for something, or it could be — in a modern sense — the one who represents. “In the context of representation, the soul is not the content of its thought, but rather has a representation, distinct from itself” (Boulnois, op. cit., p. 152, my translation).

It seems that for both Scotus and Locke, the mind has representations. The soul in Aristotle is thoughts and feelings and capabilities, not something standing behind them. (See also Repraesentatio; Ontology; Being, Existence.)

Secondary Causes

One of the many things I like Aristotle for is his clear concern for what are sometimes called “secondary” causes. As usual with Aristotle, “cause” means any kind of explanation or determining reason; explanation is in general not univocal; and things are the way they are due to the combination of many causes. Secondary causes for Aristotle play an irreducible role in the overall determination of things. This is part of what I recently called the dignity of finite beings.

The way in which secondary causes operate is pluralistic; there is no single, seamless matrix of causality in the world. Instead we have a superabundance of meaning. Determination is always grounded in actuality, but actuality is never the whole story. We get a better grasp on things by taking counterfactual potentiality into account.

Secondary causes may be either “moved” or “unmoved”. If the form of an animal’s leg joint counts as an unmoved mover, the number of unmoved movers in the world is truly vast. There are also a vast number of moved movers.

Even though there is a great deal of practically meaningful determination in the world, neither God nor physics comes anywhere near completely determining human reality. The world has both real determination and real play in it. See also What and Why; Interpretation).

The Importance of Potentiality

I think modern philosophy generally is handicapped in its thinking about the empirical world by its lack of a notion like Aristotelian potentiality. To build context, I need to first say a bit more about the role of actuality.

The modern concept of a factual, existing world is relatively close to Aristotelian actuality, but the first big difference is that it is not paired with anything. The modern concept of a factual world is something that is supposed to be complete in itself, whereas for Aristotle, actuality in the world is always complemented by some correlative potentiality. Aristotle did not consider actuality alone to be sufficient to account for the world as we experience it.

To say that something is actually X is to judge that it has achieved and is stably continuing to achieve a full expression of what it is to be X, which means it is actively fulfilling that for the sake of which X’s do what they characteristically do (see also Entelechy). This kind of judgment is inherently normative. In thinking about it, it is important not to set the bar too high — Aristotle thinks it is true of many things. But it is not true of all existing things.

Actuality also does not exactly correspond to a state of things, but rather expresses what is effectively operative. This is semantically a bit deeper than a notion of state. At the same time, it does not have state’s strong implications of complete determination. It also does not have the monolithic unity of a state. Actuality in the world consists of many coexisting things. Further, it is not intended by itself to provide all the resources needed to account for change and what happens next. This is related to the fact that for Aristotle, the operative determination of things is not entirely univocal. (See also Equivocal Determination.)

Enter potentiality. For Aristotle, all necessity is hypothetical, dependent upon conditions. Potentiality in general occupies the space of what is not univocal in the determination of things. For Aristotle a potential X will “naturally” become an actual X if no other cause stands in the way (which is sometimes a big if; e.g., we could legitimately say that the motivated high school student is a potential doctor who would become an actual doctor given the opportunity, but she may not even have to opportunity to go to university),

But the same being or thing may be potentially many things. A block of stone may be potentially a statue of Hermes, and at the same time potentially a bowl. A devout student might at the same time potentially be a doctor, a mother, and a nun. Potentialities of the same being or thing may be either mutually exclusive (like being a statute and being a bowl, or being a mother and being a nun) or compatible (like being a mother and being a doctor).

A being or thing’s potentiality in general (as distinct from specifically being potentially this or that) corresponds to multiple concrete possibilities of realization that are already implicit in current reality, but are not necessarily all compatible with one another.

At the same time, this is a far more specific notion than mere logical possibility. Potentiality is closely dependent on whatever actualities have already been concretely achieved.

At the same time, it occupies the real gaps or holes in what is determined about the future of each thing. For each aspect of things where there is not univocal determination, there are instead multiple potential alternatives. This correlates with the fact that, for Aristotle — in contrast to Poincaré’s classic formulation of modern determinism — the present does not completely determine the future.

Poincaré famously claimed that from the state of the universe at any arbitrary point in time, its entire future is completely determined. This resembles the Stoic notion of fate, transferred to a modern event-based model of causality. For both the Stoics and Poincaré, the world is completely univocally determined. Like Aristotle, they emphasized the intelligibility of the world and of change in the world, but they made the very strong assumption of complete univocal determination. Aristotle did not.

Aristotle’s notion of intelligibility is broadly semantic and normative, whereas Poincaré’s is mathematical. With semantic and normative interpretation, there is always a question of how far we develop the account, which in principle could be extended indefinitely. It thus naturally lends itself to an account of incomplete determination, corresponding to some stopping point. Aristotle does not claim any more determination than he can show.

Poincaré’s approach, by contrast, requires that we assume there is a complete univocal determination of the world by mathematical laws, even though we can never even come close to knowing enough to show it. This assumption leaves no room for anything like potentiality.

Some philosophers have also denied the relevance of potentiality, either implicitly (like Spinoza) or explicitly (like Nietzsche).

The modern factual world is usually considered as something that just is, without modal qualification, but I have increasingly begun to doubt whether for Aristotle there is any non-modal account of the world. I read actuality and potentiality both as modal concepts, and most things in the Aristotelian world as parsable into actuality and potentiality.

What’s important about this is that potentiality is not just some mysterious “metaphysical” concept that we could maybe do without. It is a distinct logical/semantic modality supporting multiple virtual alternatives for the same thing. It allows us to intelligibly account for the incomplete determination we really experience, rather than treating real-world incompleteness and ambiguity as if it were a kind of flaw. Through its relation to actuality, it is also tied to normative evaluation. (See also Structural Causality, Choice; Values, Causality; Structure, Potentiality.)

Equivocal Determination

Even though in hindsight it is possible to find reasons why things turned out as they did, the past does not completely determine the future. In general, ahead of time, multiple outcomes are possible. There are many possible ways to meet a requirement, need, or desire, and there are chance intersections and collisions of different, mostly independent vectors of determination. This is all to say that the determination of things is in some measure equivocal (i.e., not univocal). (See also Efficient Cause; Free Will and Determinism; Kantian Freedom.)

A related point is that there is such a thing as objective ambiguity in the world. This means not just that we are unsure or conflicted about something, but that the best or most complete evidence available in a particular case may have more than one reasonable interpretation. (See also Aristotelian Identity; Things in Themselves; Copernican; The Epistemic Modesty of Plato and Aristotle.)