The Vanishing Point: A Left-Hand Path Reading of Philosophy by Denys Spirin - HTML preview

Chapter 6

The first rung lifted perceived items out of perception and made them the ground of the world. The second rung takes patterns extracted from the comparison of phenomena and places them on the foundation instead. The substrate is now a family of concepts, or an ordered structure of them.

This rung is where philosophy became recognizably philosophical. Water, air, and atoms belong to what the later tradition would call physics or cosmology.

Forms, universals, essences, categories, and the dialectical development of the Idea belong to metaphysics proper. The move onto the second rung established philosophy as a discipline distinct from the study of nature, and the philosophers understood themselves to be doing something more serious than their predecessors.

Plato was treated at length earlier. What matters here is a feature the earlier discussion did not emphasize: the realm of eidos is flat. Forms are simply there, self-identical, none more fundamental than another except for the Good, which illuminates the rest.

Aristotle refused the separate domain. Forms do not reside in an intelligible heaven; they are in the things themselves, inseparable from the matter they organize. A horse is a composite of matter and form — the former makes it this horse, the latter makes it a horse. The correction looks decisive: the Platonic du-plication of the world into a visible copy and an intelligible original is collapsed back into a single reality.

But the ontologization has been moved inside the thing. Aristotle embeds the form in the substance as its essence, which is discovered by the intellect through abstraction. It is not generated by abstraction: it was there before the intellect arrived. The subject drops out at the same juncture as in Plato.

A predicate that can be attached to a thing falls into one of ten categories, presented as the exhaustive framework of what can be said about what is. Yet the 25

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categories are a product of the analysis of predication, a pattern extracted from the structure of linguistic apparatus and presented as the structure of being.

The unmoved mover sits at the top of the system: pure actuality, thought thinking itself, the final cause toward which everything moves. This is a sixth-rung ontologization, but of a peculiar kind. The Platonic Good illuminated from above; the God of the Abrahamic traditions commands and loves. Aristotle's God does nothing. He contemplates himself, and the cosmos moves toward him by desire, the way a beloved moves to a lover. The meta-position of the subject has been projected outward, stripped of will, and fixed as the motionless center of the Universe.

Plotinus absorbs all of this into a single hierarchical system. The One stands at the top, beyond being and every determination. It emanates Nous, the intelligible domain in which the forms reside as an ordered manifold. Soul comes third, mediating between the intelligible order and the sensible world. Each level is more real than what emanates from it, and the emanation runs by a necessity internal to the One — neither choice nor accident.

The move was received by the tradition as a deepening of Platonism. It is also a more thoroughly disguised ontologization than Plato's. Flat domains invite suspicion: the question why these forms and not others? has no good answer, and the reader can notice that the list of forms runs suspiciously close to the dictio-nary of abstract nouns in philosophical Greek. A hierarchical domain deflects the question. The ideas are now arranged by an internal principle (proximity to the One) and are so saturated with internal relations, that the domain stops looking like a human inventory and begins to resemble a terrain that philosophy is mapping. Once the land has its own geography, the question whether anyone drew it becomes harder to raise.

Recursive distinction among the concepts of the philosophical tradition yields comparisons; they induce meta-patterns: some concepts are more general, some presuppose others. These relations are real as products of the distinguishing subject. Plotinus raises them and positions them as an internal structure within the domain.

THE VANISHING POINT: A LEFT-HAND PATH READING OF

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The hierarchical version is harder to dislodge than the flat one, and the Neoplatonic tradition dominated late antique and early medieval thought for centuries. Once the reader has accepted that there is a domain at all, the internal richness of the hierarchy makes it feel furnished rather than posited. The same pattern will appear at every subsequent move on this rung: increase the internal complexity of the ontologized region, and the act of ontologization recedes further from view.

For Maximus the Confessor each thing has a logos, a principle that constitutes what that thing essentially is. The logoi are grounded in the single Logos, which is Christ, and the whole domain subsists in him as a person. Creation unfolds from the Logos and returns to him through the ascent of the rational creature.

This design is technically remarkable. Where Plotinus gave the domain a hierarchy, Maximus turns it into a person. An impersonal source can be questioned in a way that a personal source resists: why this emanation and not another? has no answer from the One, but why these logoi and not others? has — because the Logos wills it so, and this will is the love that calls creation into being and draws it back. Questions that would undermine it are transformed into issues of faith, in a register where the original philosophical objection no longer applies.

Maximus completes the fusion of the second and sixth rungs that was already beginning in Augustine, whose divine ideas located the Platonic forms in the mind of God but left the fusion mechanical rather than christological. In Maximus the forms are not just in God's mind; each of them is a mode of the incar-nate Logos. The ontologized domain of concepts and the ontologized meta-position of the subject are fused into a maximally stable system. A philosophical critique directed at the domain of concepts reads as an assault on the person of Christ. The cost of dislodging the ontologization rises to a level almost no par-ticipant in the tradition will pay.

The Latin Middle Ages carried out the identical strategy through its own debates. The realists of the eleventh and twelfth centuries — William of Cham-peaux in his material essence realism, Anselm, and the line that would run to the high scholastic synthesis — ontologized the domain of universals as really existing, either in God or in the things themselves or in both. Aquinas devel-

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oped the most polished synthesis: universals exist ante rem in the divine intellect, in re in individual things as their forms, and post rem in human minds as concepts abstracted from experience. Each of these positions is a local variant of the same move, adjusted for compatibility with Aristotelian metaphysics.

The response came from the nominalists. Roscelin of Compiègne held that universals are flatus vocis — breath of the voice, and nothing more. Ockham corrected the crude version. Universals are mental concepts — intentiones animae, natural signs in the mind that signify individuals. The whole domain of real universals was dismantled. What replaced it was a conceptualism that relocated the universal into the subject's cognitive operations — a move that transfers the ontologization from the second rung into the first.

The countermove clears the space, and another substrate becomes the king. For the nominalist, the individual thing carries its own essence without needing a universal to confer one on it. But the thing now has to do all the ontological work by itself, and the question of what makes it the individual gets pushed into the thing's haecceity or its bare particularity or its position in causal networks.

Each of these is a new ontologization on the first rung to compensate for the one just dismantled.

Nominalism also paid a price the realists did not. Once universals lose their ontological status, the grounds of knowledge become opaque. If the concept human is only a shared name, the question of why this name applies correctly here and incorrectly there admits no answer. Ockham and his successors answered with divine voluntarism: the order among individuals is the order God willed, and human cognition tracks it because God arranged things so. The ontologization has been moved into the will of God — again.