NOMINALISM (1) - AND A THOUGHT ON RAIMOND GAITA

 

It has always made me wonder how Nominalism was almost become so powerful in analytical philosophy (including logical positivism) given its counter-intuitive consequences. I want to think about Aquinas vs. Ockham today, modern Nominalism later.

 

As I understand it (I am no real scholar), medieval nominalism limits universals/essences to protect God’s freedom. But how do essences limit God’s freedom if essences, as Aquinas maintains, have their address as ideas in the mind of God? What happens to the intelligibility of Creation/Being if we regard them as human projections? If you treat essences or universals as real structures, or even as divine ideas, I think the nominalist would argue, you risk turning them into something like independent principles. This matters to Ockham because, given his standards for what counts as a good explanation, “independent principles” threaten three things he takes as non-negotiable: divine simplicity and freedom, epistemic discipline, and explanatory economy. If universals (even as “ideas in God”) start to behave like real structures that do explanatory work, they begin to look like quasi-entities that rival God’s will and outrun what we can justify.

    Ockham’s priority is a very strong doctrine of divine freedom: God is not determined by anything distinct from Himself. Or rather an interpretation of this principle, for Aquinas would also agree with it understood in a different sense. But for Ockham if you say there are determinate “contents” like human nature, goodness, justice – even “in God” – the worry is that they will function as standards God must conform to in creating or commanding. Even if you add (with Aquinas) that these ideas are identical with God, are only aspects of God’s simple Being, Ockham hears talk that operates as if there were many fixed patterns that guide or constrain. So better to avoid positing such structures at all and say that God knows and wills this individual order freely. That keeps all determination on the side of divine willing, not in a stock of intelligible patterns that might look like internal necessities.

     Moreover, Ockham restricts what can count as reason and thus knowledge. We have intuitive access to individuals, not to shared essences. If universals are treated as real structures, we are claiming knowledge of something we never encounter through our senses. That implies talk that feels explanatory but isn’t anchored in understanding. Thus he prefers concepts (mental signs) that track similarities among individuals, without reifying a shared “nature” behind them. This keeps philosophy tied to what can be clearly conceived and justified, not to posits that go beyond experience.

     And then there is Ockham’s famous razor. If individuals plus concepts suffice, don’t multiply entities. Real universals (in things or as structured divine ideas) become explanatory extras. And once admitted, they tend to grow from a helpful shorthand to indispensable principles to quasi-independent constraints. Ockham would stop that slippery slope at the start.

    Furthermore, even granting divine simplicity, talk of “many ideas” (humanity, horsehood, justice, etc.) invites a picture of plurality inside of God’s mind. Ockham is wary of any language that proliferates metaphysical distinctions and then reassures us they are “only aspects.” His solution is to

avoid positing a structured inventory of universals altogether, conceiving of God’s knowledge and will without that metaphysical apparatus.

 

    I need to make this more concrete to understand it. Here some concrete examples.

 

Apple

 

a)   Thomistic conception

 

You pick up an apple. It has a nature: it is the kind of thing that grows on trees, nourishes animals, ripens, decays. Its “appleness” is not just in your mind; it explains why seeds produce apples rather than pears, why it nourishes in a certain way, why it has a characteristic taste and structure, etc. Thus to understand what an apple is already to understand something about what it is for (nutrition, growth, life). The intellect is responding to something real in the thing however imperfectly apprehended.

 

b)   Nominalist

 

You pick up many similar objects and call them “apples.” There are only individual things. “Apple” is a concept we form because of resemblance and usefulness. There is no shared “appleness” in the things themselves. The classification is intellectually efficient but not metaphysically interesting. The Thomist thinks you are discovering a real structure; the nominalist thinks you are organizing experience.

 

 

Agape (self-giving love)

 

a)   Thomistic

 

Think of a mother caring for a sick child through the night. This is not only behavior we label “good.” It is an instance of a real perfection of human nature in the sense that self-giving love fulfills what a human being is. Hence, “Agape” names something intelligible in reality: namely, a participation in goodness itself, ultimately grounded in God. And this is why such acts feel not just approved, but fitting, right, luminous.

 

b)   Nominalist

 

The same scene. We call this “good” because God wills such actions, or we have learned to approve them. But the goodness is not necessarily readable from the structure of the act itself. It depends on divine command or established order. So the act is good because it is willed as good – not because it fulfills an intelligible nature in the same strong sense; not because it is attuned to a reality (the child) independent of the mother responding in a loving way.

 

Under the Thomistic view, for example, cruelty contradicts what a human being is: that is, it is intelligibly bad. For Nominalism, however, cruelty is wrong because it is prohibited (by God or human norms). Intelligible vs. imposed.

 

 

 

Beauty

 

a)   Thomistic

 

You see a beautiful painting or hear a piece of music. Beauty is not just subjective pleasure. It has intelligible features: proportion, clarity, integrity., and more. These criteria are present in our language as rules of use for the application of the concept. But more deeply, beauty is a way in which being becomes radiant to the intellect. So when something is beautiful, we don’t just like it. We experience it as fitting, harmonious, complete, radiant. Beauty feels like a disclosure of something radiantly real.

 

b)   Nominalist

 

You encounter the same object. “Beautiful” names a response: pleasure, preference, cultural formation. There is no need to posit a real property of beauty in the thing or a deep structure that grounds the judgment. It is a subjective reaction, saying more about us than reality. Hence, beauty becomes something like a refined projection or classification of experience.

What is really at stake is one and the same question in all three cases: i.e., Is the world intrinsically intelligible, or only intelligible for us? For Aquinas, intelligibility belongs to being; we discover it. Ockham seems rather inclined to locate intelligibility to thought/language. Simply put, we organize experience and construct quasi-metaphysical like projections that go beyond what (his conception of) reason allows and threatens to involve us in theological mistakes.

 

. . .

 

Obviously, if I thought Nominalism plausible, I would not be so attracted to Thomas and the various extensions of Thomas in contemporary philosophy. I suspect Catholic philosophers do tend to caricature Ockham and don’t take seriously enough the problems that motivated his thought.

      It seems that if Nominalism were true, then how we classify things would have no ground in reality, which seems to open the door to an arbitrary voluntarism that would be a reductio of the position. For example, we could define fish as any animal that lives in the water, and whales would be fishes. Or we could make being red a necessary condition of being fruits, and then many kinds of tomatoes and certain kinds of apples would be fruit, other kinds of apples and tomatoes and oranges not. Nothing in reality to coform to for the mind. This flies not only in the face of common sense but science as well.

     Ockham was not an idealist, however. He posited that particulars were real. As such, there are real similarities and causal regularities between apples and tomatoes.  but no intelligible form? How can that make sense?  “Similarity” and “regularity” seem to demand intelligibility. In virtue of what are these things similar? Not just that they are similar, but why? If the answer is just that, as a matter of brute fact, they just resemble each other, then “resemblance” starts to look either unexplained or a disguised appeal to a shared feature (which looks like a form again). The same with regularity. Why do these events follow this pattern? Why do causes produce these effects? If the answer is that’s just the regularity we observe, then we have description but not explanation, or pattern but not intelligibility of the pattern. So Ockham’s nominalism seems to imply that there are patterns, but no reason for the patterns beyond their occurrence. Which starts to raise the spector of Humean regularity and “all propositions are indifferent” (alle Sätze sind gleichgültig) thought of the Tractatus. The world becomes intelligible in a thin sense mirror a thin conception of reason (we can track patterns) but not in a deep sense (we understand why those patterns hold).

    For Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, the thought is that patterns are intelligible because they arise from what things are. Similarity is grounded in shared form and regularity is grounded in natures acting in determinate ways. No mysterious extra layer to be cut off by Ockham’s razor. It is just the explanation: the pattern is intelligible because it expresses the being of the thing. That is at least more in tune with common sense.

   Ockham would of course respond that the Thomist then turns an explanatory need into an ontological commitment. He would be content with particulars behaving in stable ways and leave it at that. Given that he (and his modern successors like Goodman) think that Nominalism can give a coherent account of language and the world, it avoids introducing entities we do not clearly grasp. (My own difficulties with essence I have confessed.) If similarity and regularity are real, but have no intelligible ground, in what sense are they more than brute coincidence? That is the crux. Nominalism is a thin ontology followed by thin explanations, which don’t do full justice to our experience of the world. Like the world on a black-and-white screen instead of the real world colors, sounds, smells, tastes, and feelings. Is reality intelligible through what things are, or only (reductively) describable through how they behave? Nominalism can describe the world effectively, and science can proceed within it. But if a person with a live mind asks why these patterns, why this similarity, why this order and not another, and the nominalist answers that is just how things are, I resist that.

 

. . .

  

A moral example. Love of one's child is a response to the independent reality of the child (Gaita). Neglect or cruelty would be a violation of the child's being. On what grounds could Ockham speak of the independent reality of the child? He could only cite some law of God? Is this also unfair to Ockham?

 

   Ockham of course affirms that the child is a real, individual being (i.e.not a projection, not constructed) and has its own existence and causal powers.

Thus the child’s reality is independent of our concepts. That part aligns with Thomas’ and Raimond Gaita’s insistence that we encounter another human being. What Ockham does resist is agreeing that this implies that the child has a nature that grounds obligations in a deep, intelligible way. Rather, such obligations for him (I think) are either grounded in God’s command that we care for children or in some natural or social inclination such that abuse or neglect violates what is normally expected of us. But in neither case are we bound to appeal to an intelligible essence that grounds moral necessity.

 

    I assert (with Gaita) that love is a response to the independent reality of the child. Cruelty is a violation of the child’s being. This I must also assert that the child’s reality is independent, which Ockham could affirm. And that the child’s reality demands a certain response, i.e. the meaning and the norms are in the child, grounding its authority, so-to-speak. Being and goodness are internally connected.

   Within strict nominalism, the child is real, but its being does not in itself carry an intelligible moral demand. So the step from “this being” to “therefore must be loved” needs supplementation by God’s will or human tendencies and practices, assuming we can speak of the human in a way that connects to human reality/human nature within nominalism. But if cruelty to a child is not just prohibited but a violation of what the child is, then moral reality is grounded in the being of the child itself. If moral reality is grounded in being, then a purely nominalist account is insufficient.

 

. . .

 

Footnote on Gaita

    What Raimond Gaita does, I think, is to show that the authority is not imposed (by law or practice), but disclosed in the encounter. Thus the child is not just real, but seen as someone whose reality calls for love. That gestures, with Aquinas, toward the idea that being and value are internally connected. Gaita is consistent with Thomas Aquinas at the level of what is seen (i.e., that being and value are internally connected) but he refuses to turn that insight into a metaphysical explanation. He wants to preserve the authority of the encounter without translating it into a theory. I don’t think Aquinas is a theory in that sense but just an obviously implication for what the child means to what the world must be like for the child to mean what it does (as opposed to being just wishful thinking).

   The child calls forth love. Both Gaita and Aquinas would reject the idea that this is merely projected, just socially constructed, or is reducible to preference or utility. Both affirm the child’s reality is such that love is the fitting response. In that sense, Gaita is indeed consistent with Aquinas: value is not added to being; it is disclosed in it. Ens et bonum convertuntur (being and goodness are convertible).

   But Gaita resists explaining why being and value are connected. He avoids saying that this is because being participates in divine goodness, or because of a metaphysical structure of form and finality. His point is rather that to demand such an explanation risks distorting what we are trying to understand. For him, the key is seeing rightly, not theorizing further. The explanation doesn’t add anything to the disclosure of what one experiences. The love of the child has its own authority independently of any philosophical account.

    In not wanting to tell us what the world must be like for this experience to be real (as opposed to necessarily sentimental, etc.), he was clearly influenced by Wittgenstein. Gaita’s concern seem to be that philosophy often invents “explanations” where none are needed, thus turning lived realities into abstract theories. He also fears that if you ground the child’s value in a theory, you risk making that value seem dependent on accepting the theory.

Whereas he wants to say that even someone who rejects all metaphysics – including Thomism and Nominalism – can still see the child’s worth. So I would sum it up by saying that Gaita’s account is consistent with Aquinas in affirming that being calls forth goodness, but he stops short of giving a metaphysical account of why this is so to preserve the immediacy and authority of moral experience. Drawing a line that philosophy should not cross.

   Is “stopping short” enough? I still might want to say that if the child’s reality truly demands love, that demand must be grounded in something non-contingent (God, the Good). To leave it unexplained leaves the door open for philosophers to claim it is ungrounded and thus subjective, a human wish rather than a disclosure of the real. For if a disclosure of the real, that is already a metaphysical “theory” in some sense that supports the experience and well as any description of it. Gaita would say the demand does not need further grounding, just as his being moved by the nun’s love and what it revealed about the moral reality of the severely debilitated psychiatric patients she cared for did not require a prior belief in or conversion to Christianity. Aquinas would say (and I guess the nurse, too) that the intelligibility of the nun’s love ultimately points to a source. Is Gaita’s philosophical restraint intellectual honesty or an unfinished thought? I can’t make up my mind. (see A Common Humanity, the chapter on "Goodness beyond Virtue" for the story of the nun who worked in the mental hospital).