The Problem Of Particulars Among The Pietistic Philosophers: Aquinas, Scotus, And William Of Ockham

Among the most fundamental distinctions made in philosophy is between the categories of the universal and the particular. In the theory of universals, objects are divided into things that can be predicated on other things, which we call universals, and things that cannot. For instance, there are around 7.9 billion bipedal creatures we call human beings present on Earth: each of them is a particular, while human itself is a universal. Thus, I can say Bob is a human and Joe is a human. I cannot, however say, Bob is Joe, or Joe is Bob, as particulars cannot be predicated on other particulars. One can see, however, that there is nowhere one can point and say this is man in the same way that, despite the existence of the Amazon rainforest, one cannot truly say this is a tree of any particular tree rather, there are merely a number of overgrown woody shrubs that people have elected to call trees. Philosophers have differed over what is the exact nature of these shadowy universals, and have roughly divided into three camps: the realists, who affirm that there are indeed universals, the nominalists, who maintain that only individuals exist, and the conceptualists, who posit that we cannot say there are only individuals, but rather, people form mental concepts of things, although they do not reach the level of independent existence in the world posited by the realists. As we shall see, the medieval pietistic philosophers Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274 AD), Duns Scotus (d. 1308 AD), and William of Ockham (d. 1347 AD) all had their own takes on this problem.

St. Thomas Aquinas

Aquinas believed, in contradiction to Plato, that universals did indeed exist in the world around us they were no mere shadows cast on the walls of the cave of worldly existence. Rather, in affirmation of the worldliness of Aristotle, Aquinas maintained that these universals were indeed extant in the world, not as independent entities, but as composites: matter and the universals (of the forms) came together to produce what Aquinas called a substantial form. Thus, a person was not merely an individual Zayd is not simply Zayd, he is Zayd the man. Aquinas, however, realized the danger inherent in the naturalism of Aristotle, wherein the world could exist as a separate, independent whole, and thus posited that the world of individuals through the Platonic notion of participation, an action that he credited to God. Universals came into the world when God, as it were, imparted the universal essences of things onto specific, worldly objects God allowed the objects of the world to participate in their other-worldly forms. All things, then, are irrevocably linked to God we stand with one foot in the world of existence and the other in the ineffable world of essence. In this conceptualization of universals manifesting in the world was heavily reliant on the theories of Ibn Sin (d. 1037 AD), who argued that every created being has both an essence and an existence generated by God. Existence is what we observe with our senses in the world, manifests as the multitudinous particulars of different objects, whereas Essence is not empirically observable, but instead is cast upon creation by God.

Aquinas took this conception of Ibn Sin and applied it to explain the multiplicity of particulars in the world. He believed that the universals were not mere generic essences, but manifested in a multiplicity of ways concordant with the alterations of matter: thus, the universal building had a set understanding, but had individual realizations. He also clearly believed that the categories of existence and essence were separate, and answering the question Does X exist? was necessarily separate from answering the question What is X? He gives an example of the human being and the phoenix we can understand the essence of both categories before making a judgement on whether our next-door neighbours or the mythological creatures of the ancient world exist. It is worth noting, however, that this distinction between being and essence is applicable only to the created world when it comes to God, no such distinction can be made, for God is pure being He simply IS. God, to Aquinas, transcends the categories of substance and accident, potentiality and actuality, matter and form no such distinctions can be made when dealing with God, who, in to Aquinas, is The Truth.

Duns Scotus

Duns Scotus, was likewise a realist in regards to universals he, like Aquinas, argued that we can truly argue for a vision of humanity beyond the multiplicity of particulars. However, in contradiction to Aquinas and Ibn Sin , Scotus argued for what he called a univocity of being, meaning that there was in fact no distinction between the categories of existence and essence. He argued that, in order to conceive of the essence of a thing, we must first conceive of its existence, meaning that in reality, the essence of an object as predicated on its existence. Furthermore, the system of thought of Scotus was marked by an emphasis on individualism: one can see how, in the system of Aquinas, the uniqueness of individuals is subsumed into the all-encompassing universal category of the universals, in a way that God is limited to producing human beings (and other creations) according to universal blueprints. Thus, in contradiction to the determinism engendered by the fixed universals of Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas, Scotus argued that each thing had its own unique nature, or haecceity, meaning that Zayd was no mere composite of flesh and some abstract universal notion of humanity he was his own person.

This meant that, while universals did exist, they were as numerous as the number of individuals through the theory of haecceity. Thus, Socrates was indeed a composite individual: he is composed of both the individual matter that distinguishes him from other humans, and the individual form that led to him being different. This concept of individuation applied to non-living items as well: the differences in matter, between a mountain and a desert, for instance, were the result of the unique properties that impart it with an essence of its own although said essence was not necessarily discernible to us. He also, in contradiction to Aquinas, argued that universal categories found in the divine attributes of justice, goodness, and unity, applied to God univocally rather than merely analogously: they had a real existence in God, rather than simply being words used to imperfectly describe the ultimately sublime divinity.

Scotus, in his theory of individuation, posed a strong challenge to the Aristotelean theory of hylomorphism, in which being was conceived of us a marriage of matter (what truly is in the world) and form. While earlier philosophers, including Aquinas, contended that every atom in existence must necessarily be a reflection of form, Scotus contended that in some cases, matter does not necessarily reflect a universal form, and likewise, not all created substances consist of matter: angels, for instance, are purely spiritual substances, but nevertheless fall into the category of being, however veiled they may be from the eyes of men. Furthermore, he argued that substances were not necessarily married to forms on a one-to-one basis, rather, a singular substance can have a multiplicity of essences: the human being, for example, has both a bodily essence and the spiritual essence of the soul, with the both essences informing the way in which we approach life.

Scotus theories must necessarily be viewed in relationship to his theology. As was mentioned, he believed that prior theories of hylomorphism and essence/existence placed inexcusable constraints on the volition of God. If hylomorphism is strictly true, then God s creative ability is impaired: He cannot create matter devoid of form, nor form devoid of matter. The arrangement of soil in a particular area, the particular shape of clouds, and other such phenomena are instances in which the form of matter cannot be said to be knowable by men. Furthermore, he emphasized that God chooses to create what He wills, and thus, the world in which we exist is but one of a number of possible worlds. In contradiction to both Aristotle and Aquinas, he did not confine potentiality to the category of existent things rather, the non-existent golden mountain, though it is not existent, has an objective potentiality, contrasted with what he calls the subjective potentiality of Aristotle.

William of Ockham

In absolute contradiction to both Aquinas and Scotus was William of Ockham, an English philosopher who, though he shared the same religious convictions, conceived of universals and particulars in a way that entirely precluded universals from any tangible existence. Universals, to Ockham, did not have fixed, eternal forms that applied to creation from the birth of stars to the crack of doom rather, they merely existed in the minds of men to make sense of the multiplicity of the created world. Like Aristotle, William of Ockham stressed the importance of concrete particulars in opposition to abstract forms: we can observe the multitudinous children of Adam, differing in their colours and tongues, yet nowhere is some vague notion of humanity to be found in reality. Thus, Ockham argued that nothing truly existed except individual beings. His conception of things was a sort of proto-empiricism that placed importance on what is real and directly observable above all else therefore, the proper object of knowledge was not some unobservable universal hidden behind the cosmic veil, but instead, the particular that could be readily studied through the instrument of the senses.

Ockham is perhaps best known for his eponymous razor, taken from a statement attributed to him that entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. He employed a certain reductionism in his arguments against what he viewed as superfluous, and needlessly technical conceptualizations of past philosophers. In particular, Ockham employed his razor to shave away the theory of haecceity dominating the system of thought of Duns Scotus. While Scotus has argued that each individual, in addition to having a universal human nature, has their own individual nature because otherwise, we would be mere replicas of each other William contended that such a distinction was unneeded: individuals are simply individuals sans universals, and there is no need to further individuate them to explain differences between people. For Ockham, it was not a challenge to explain the multiplicity of individuals what required true explanation was the universals. Once again employing his reductionist approach, he shaved away eight of Aristotle s ten categories of substance, quality, quantity, relation, place, time, position, doing, having, and habiliment: only substance and qualities were real.

This, while ostensibly simplistic, has a degree of logic behind it to be found it the structure of human language itself. The error of prior philosophers, according to Ockham, was in believing that every human word must necessarily correspond to a real entity. Thus, to him, questions of what-ness, where-ness, and when-ness, were as arbitrary as coming up with categories of and-ness and but-ness. Most surprisingly, considering his emphasis on the empirical and observable, he rejected the category of quantity. This occurs as a result of his wider theory of accidents, and he gives an example: if a metal rod is heated and expands, it is not its accident of length that changes rather, it is simply motion in which one part moves from another. This conceptualization excluded shape from the category of quality, but curiously, considered changes in colour to be real differences in quality, despite the fact that both shape and colour represent the mere arrangement of atoms. In summary, we can say that Ockham viewed reality only in regards to what truly is and how it can be described: our mental conceptions, regarding how objects relate to each other, when and how events occur, and where a thing presently stands, were mere conjugations of the intellect to make sense of the world.

One can see how, in the conceptualizations of each philosopher, ontology was approached in an attempt to strengthen the theological inclinations of the philosopher in question. For Aquinas, the most important aspect in his hylomorphic theory of participation was the link to God in establishing the participation between matter and form his chief concern was in affirming the dependency of all creation to God. As for Duns Scotus, he was largely concerned with protecting the attribute of divine will, which he had viewed as under attack by a theory of universals that disqualified God s creative power to bring forth an infinite number of individuals. Finally, William of Ockham s arguments against the formal distinctions of previous philosophy served the goal of confining human thought to the category of what God had actually created, rather than squandering the gift of our intellect on dissecting reality beyond what it truly was. Ockham, however, in what may seem ironic in retrospect, may have planted the intellectual seeds for ideas of empiricism that led to the very downfall of Christendom, as his famous razor would be turned against God himself, when modern thinkers realized that a monomaniacal focus on what is observable to us can be employed against a non-observable God.