Ridling Zaine. Philosophy: Then and Now. A look back at 26 centuries of thought
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Ridling, Philosophy Then and Now: A Look Back at 26 Centuries of Thought
238
stormy controversialist Peter Abelard, who was the foremost dialectician of
his time, the Boethian Realism was attacked. But according to Abelard, more
than mere words were required to justify universality; in his view, universals
were concepts signifying real things and had their ultimate basis in the divine
ideas, as in the Augustinian tradition.
Medieval Realism
The approach of the early medieval thinkers to the problem of universals
was made from the side of logic. But it soon involved theological issues,
which, when added to the much deeper study of its metaphysical backgrounds
made by Boethius, led the scholars to place the relevant questions in a
different setting. The natures or common essences of things came to be
scrutinized from a threefold viewpoint: as existent in sensible things, as
existent in the mind, and as absolutely existent in themselves. This subjected
the problem to metaphysical investigation. In that setting, Aquinas allowed
neither being nor unity to be attributed to the nature taken absolutely. Duns
Scotus, however, accorded it a lesser unity than that of the individual and gave
it a kind of being proportionate to this real specific unity, but which required
unitive containment of the nature by the individual. In these different ways the
nature, so taken, provided the ground for the universal that existed only in the
mind. Views incorporating this feature have been called moderate Realisms,
though the designation is open to the same objection as it is in its application
to Aristotle (see above, Distinctions among the Realisms). In later Scholastic
tradition the currents became badly confused, and unending controversy raged
on the various kinds of universals and the respective status of each type.
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Modern Realism
In the familiar formula cogito ergo sum (“I think; therefore, I am”)
proffered by the first notable modern philosopher, René Descartes, methodical
thinking was rooted in thought itself, thus raising the problem of how any
material world outside of thought could be reached philosophically. In
Descartes and a half century later in the British Empiricist John Locke, an
external origin for sensations was accepted, though without any thoroughly
philosophical justification. Rather, the denial of an external world was
regarded as too absurd to be countenanced. In this perspective Locke’s
philosophy displayed a commonsense Realism. According to one of Locke’s
contemporaries, the Cartesian Nicolas Malebranche (known for his claim that
God’s will is the true cause of motion), religious faith guaranteed the external
world. The Cambridge Platonists, a sober group of 17th-century moral and
religious Rationalists, in a similar atmosphere of faith and with a Cartesian
understanding of sensation, acquiesced in the external existence of sensible
things while, against a Neoplatonic background, they accorded a respectively
greater reality to the objects of intellectual cognition. For Berkeley, an early
18th-century Empiricist and Idealist, the scriptural guarantee was lacking
because matter was nowhere mentioned in the revealed descriptions of the
sensible universe; accordingly, in his view, no sensible world outside
cognition was left. But in David Hume, whose teachings marked the climax of
the Empiricist movement, even the cognitive subject, or soul, vanished.
Facing the impossibility of a genuine philosophical justification for
arguing to an external world from the starting point of mind or idea, Claude
Buffier, an early 18th-century French Jesuit, and, shortly later, the Scottish
Realists leaned explicitly on common sense as the motive for accepting the
world’s external existence. The most prominent exponent of this school was
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Thomas Reid, an opponent of paradox and scepticism. And John
Witherspoon, who was called from Scotland to the presidency of Princeton
University, held that “the impression itself implies and supposes something
external that communicates it, and cannot be separated from that supposition.”
Consequently, the attempt of the viewpoint of Berkeleian immaterialism “to
unsettle the principles of common sense by metaphysical reasoning” could, in
his view, never produce conviction.
Major Issues and Evaluation of Realism
From the foregoing survey of the historical development of Realistic
thought, the major issues upon which Realism focusses attention stand out
clearly. For both speculative and practical reasons, men wish to distinguish
sharply between what they call reality and what they recognize or suspect to
be merely products of their own cognition. Accordingly, the ancient Platonic
concentration on specific and generic natures and, in Aristotle, the essential
role played by the universal in reasoning led to a close scrutiny of the way in
which these natures exist. Undoubtedly, they exist in human thought. For the
Realistically inclined thinker, however, their crucial role tends to demand
counterparts if human thinking is to bear on what really exists. Still more
drastic are the post-Cartesian philosophies in which the existence of external
things themselves does not enter human cognition in direct confrontation.
Finally, the mathematical and scientific constructs, which have been so
fruitful in man’s struggle for mastery over nature, seem to require for the
realistically minded thinker some counterpart in the things themselves in order
to provide an adequate philosophical explanation of their success.
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When the issues are faced in the foregoing manner, some lines of a
procedure common to the various explicit Realisms emerge upon which it
may be possible to base an evaluation. Universals, sensations and perceptions,
scientific formulas and laws are all found to be existent in cognition. From
that sure starting point, attempts are made to show that objects either
corresponding to them or identical with them exist outside the mind. That
pattern seems to be the general procedure followed in any way of thinking that
has spontaneously given rise to the notion of an epistemological Realism and
that can, with historical and philosophical significance, be labelled such. As is
likewise apparent from the foregoing survey, this way of thinking follows a
dubious procedure: Realism is not primarily a doctrine of the existence of
things but rather a doctrine of cognition. In Realism, cognition is regarded as
the object most present to itself; i.e., a man knows his own thought processes
more intimately than anything else. But the genuine Realist seems unwittingly
to take the material thing as his model in conceiving cognition. No external
object can be more present to a material thing than that material thing itself. If
cognition is conceived after this analogy, it will be what is most present to
itself, and will have to be the starting point from which the Realist reasons.
This starting point seems to offer no exit. The objects reached from it can be
only internal products or occurrences in the mind, for it offers nothing more
basic from which to reason than the cognition itself. Any philosophically
genuine Realism seems, in consequence, prone to failure in its basic objective.
Accordingly, Realism, in the senses responsible for the epistemological
use of the term, has long since ceased to inspire vigorous debate. In a Platonic
tradition that continues in modern thought, however, Realism in respect to the
natures of things is by no means dead. In regard to the Cartesian problem of
the world’s external existence, representative Realism seems to have shared
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the fate of the sense-datum and to be quite inoperative outside of the wake of
neurophysiological writings. But attempts at direct Realism are still made. In
the scientific field the opposition to conventionalism and to retaining a merely
instrumental status for laws or theories has remained a lively issue. Moreover,
modern means, such as the electron microscope (which shows molecules in
real existence) and the hope of being able to see atoms foretoken a greater
correspondence of scientific constructs with the structure of reality than had
previously been demonstrated. But this verification process consists in a
comparison of reality with thought rather than in any attempt to reach reality
from cognition alone.
Scholasticism
From the time of the Renaissance until at least the beginning of the 19th
century, the term Scholasticism, not unlike the name Middle Ages, was used
as an expression of blame and contempt. The medieval period was widely
viewed as an insignificant intermezzo between Greco-Roman antiquity and
modern times, and Scholasticism was normally taken to describe a philosophy
busied with sterile subtleties, written in bad Latin, and above all subservient to
the theology of popery. Even the German Idealist Hegel, in his Vorlesungen
über die Geschichte der Philosophie (1833-36; Lectures on the History of
Philosophy, 1892-96), declared that he would “put on seven-league boots” in
order to skip over the thousand years between the 6th and 17th centuries and,
having at last arrived at Descartes, said that now he could “cry land like the
sailor.” In those same first decades of the 19th century, on the other hand, the
Romanticists swung the pendulum sharply to the opposite side, to an
indiscriminate overestimation of everything medieval.
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Today, scholars seem better able to confront the medieval epoch, as well
as Scholasticism – i.e., its philosophy (and theology) – without prejudgments.
One reason for this state of affairs is the voluminous research which has been
devoted to this era and which has revealed its true nature, not only as a
respectable continuation of the genuinely philosophical tradition but also as a
period of exemplary personalities quite able to stand comparison with any of
the great philosophers of antiquity or of modern times.
Nature and Significance
Scholasticism is so much a many-sided phenomenon that, in spite of
intensive research, scholars still differ considerably in their definition of the
term and in the emphases that they place on individual aspects of the
phenomenon. Some historians, seeming almost to capitulate to the complexity
of the subject, confine themselves to the general point that Scholasticism can
only be defined denotatively as that kind of philosophy that during the
European Middle Ages was taught in the Christian schools. The question of its
connotation, however, remains, viz., What kind of philosophy was it?
The answer that Scholasticism was “school” philosophy and, in fact,
“Christian” school philosophy can be understood only by examining the
historical exigencies that created the need for schools. The search thus leads
the inquirer back to the transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages – a point
which, according to Hegel, was marked by the symbolic date CE 529, when a
decree of the Christian emperor Justinian closed the Platonic Academy in
Athens and sealed “the downfall of the physical establishments of pagan
philosophy.” In that same year, however, still another event occurred, which
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points much less to the past than to the coming age and, especially, to the rise
of Scholasticism, viz., the foundation of Monte Cassino, the first Benedictine
abbey, above one of the highways of the great folk migrations. This highly
symbolic fact not only suggests the initial shift of the scene of the intellectual
life from places like the Platonic Academy to the cloisters of Christian
monasteries, but it marks even more a change in the dramatis personae. New
nations were about to overrun the Roman Empire and its Hellenistic culture
with long-range effects: when, centuries later, for example, one of the great
Scholastics, Thomas Aquinas, was born, though he was rightly a southern
Italian, his mother was of Norman stock, and his Sicilian birthplace was under
central European (Hohenstaufen) control.
It was a decisive and astonishing fact that the so-called barbarian
peoples who penetrated from the north into the ancient world often became
Christians and set out to master the body of tradition that they found,
including the rich harvest of patristic theology as well as the philosophical
ideas of the Greeks and the political wisdom of the Romans. This learning
could be accomplished only in the conquered empire’s language (i.e., in
Latin), which therefore had to be learned first. In fact, the incorporation of
both a foreign vocabulary and a different mode of thinking and the
assimilation of a tremendous amount of predeveloped thought was the chief
problem that confronted medieval philosophy at its beginnings. And it is only
in the light of this fact that one of the decisive traits of medieval Scholasticism
becomes understandable: Scholasticism above all was an unprecedented
process of learning, literally a vast “scholastic” enterprise that continued for
several centuries. Since the existing material had to be ordered and made
accessible to learning and teaching, the very prosaic labour and “schoolwork”
of organizing, sorting, and classifying materials inevitably acquired an
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unprecedented importance. Consequently, the writings of medieval
Scholasticism quite naturally lack the magic of personal immediacy, for
schoolbooks leave little room for originality. It is therefore misleading, though
understandable, that certain polemicists have wrongly characterized
Scholasticism as involving no more than the use of special didactic methods
or a narrow adherence to traditional teachings.
First of all, if the major historical task of that epoch was really to learn,
to acquire, and to preserve the riches of tradition, a certain degree of
“scholasticity” was not only inevitable but essential. It is not at all certain that
today’s historians would have direct intellectual access to Plato, Aristotle, and
Augustine had the Scholastics not done their patient spadework. Besides, the
progress from the stage of mere collection of given sentences and their
interpretation (expositio, catena, lectio), to the systematic discussion of texts
and problems (quaestio, disputatio), and finally to the grand attempts to give a
comprehensive view of the whole of attainable truth (Summa) was necessarily
at the same time a clear progression toward intellectual autonomy and
independence, which in order to culminate, as it did in the 13th century, in the
great works of Scholasticism’s Golden Age, required in addition the powers of
genius, of men like Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas.
On the other hand, the moment had to come when the prevalent
preoccupation with existing knowledge would give way to new questions,
which demanded consideration and answers that could emerge only from
direct experience. By the later Middle Ages, procedures for exploiting and
discussing antecedent stocks of insight had been largely institutionalized, and
it was an obvious temptation to perpetuate the dominion of those procedures –
which could lead only to total sterility. It is widely agreed that this is almost
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exactly what did happen in the 14th century in what is called the “decline” and
disintegration of Scholasticism.
History and Issues
Roots of Scholasticism
From the beginning of medieval Scholasticism the natural aim of all
philosophical endeavor to achieve the “whole of attainable truth” was clearly
meant to include also the teachings of Christian faith, an inclusion which, in
the very concept of Scholasticism, was perhaps its most characteristic and
distinguishing element. Although the idea of including faith was expressed
already by Augustine and the early Church Fathers, the principle was
explicitly formulated by the pivotal, early 6th-century scholar Boethius. Born
in Rome and educated in Athens, Boethius was one of the great mediators and
translators, living on the narrow no-man’s-land that divided the epochs. His
famous book, The Consolation of Philosophy, was written while he, indicted
for treachery and imprisoned by King Theodoric the Goth, awaited his own
execution. It is true that the book is said to be, aside from the Bible, one of the
most translated, most commented upon, and most printed books in world
history; and that Boethius made (unfinished) plans to translate and to
comment upon, as he said, “every book of Aristotle and all the dialogues of
Plato.” But the epithet that he won as “one of the founders of Scholasticism”
refers to quite another side of his work. Strictly speaking, it refers to the last
sentence of a very short tractate on the Holy Trinity, which reads, “As far as
you are able, join faith to reason” – an injunction which in fact was to
become, for centuries, the formal foundation of Scholasticism. Instead of
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“faith,” such concepts as revelation, authority, or tradition could be (and,
indeed, have been) cited; and “reason,” though unambiguously meant to
designate the natural powers of human cognition, could also be granted (and,
in fact, has been granted) very different meanings. In any case, the connection
between faith and reason postulated in this principle was from the beginning
and by its very nature a highly explosive compound.
Boethius himself already carried out his program in a rather
extraordinary way: though his Opuscula sacra (“Sacred Works”) dealt almost
exclusively with theological subjects, there was not a single Bible quotation in
them: logic and analysis was all.
Though called the “first Scholastic,” Boethius was at the same time
destined to be for almost a millennium the last layman in the field of European
philosophy. His friend Cassiodorus, author of the Institutiones, an unoriginal
catalog of definitions and subdivisions, which (in spite of their dryness)
became a source book and mine of information for the following centuries,
who, like Boethius, occupied a position of high influence at the court of
Theodoric and was also deeply concerned with the preservation of the
intellectual heritage, decided in his later years to quit his political career and
to live with his enormous library in a monastery. This fact again is highly
characteristic of the development of medieval Scholasticism: intellectual life
needs not only teachers and students and not only a stock of knowledge to be
handed down; there is needed a certain guaranteed free area within human
society as well, a kind of sheltered enclosure, within which the concern for
“nothing but truth” can exist and unfold. The Platonic Academy, as well as
(for a limited time) the court of Theodoric, had been enclosures of this kind;
but in the politically unsettled epoch to come “no plant would thrive except
one that germinated and grew in the cloister.”