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Subjectivity, Objectivity, & Intersubjectivity
A New Paradigm for Religion and Science
By Joseph A. Bracken Templeton Foundation Press
Copyright © 2009 Joseph A. Bracken
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59947-354-3
CHAPTER 1
THE INDIVIDUAL IN A WORLD OF UNIVERSALS
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The Swiss philosopher Karl Jaspers suggested many years ago in The Origin and Goal of History that humankind went through an "axial period" from 800 BCE to 200 BCE during which time human beings began to free themselves from a tribal mentality, in which the interests of the individual were routinely subordinated to the survival needs of the group, to a new sense of individual self-awareness and personal liberty. Among those "axial" thinkers were Socrates and his disciple/scribe Plato. Certainly the analogy of the cave in Book VII of Plato's Republic has had an enduring influence (for better or for worse) on the subsequent history of Western philosophy. The dualism between appearance and reality—that is, shadows on the wall of the cave representing ever-changing sense experience versus the universal forms of things seen in the light of the sun (human reason)—has been both enthusiastically embraced and strongly resisted over the intervening centuries. Idealists and materialists have argued ever since about what's really real and the ultimate source of human knowledge. Scientists, for example, have tended to be implicit materialists because of their insistence on empirical verification of abstract theories. Humanists, on the contrary, in their ongoing search for meaning and value in human life, have tended to be outspoken idealists.
In this chapter I indicate the historical roots of this contemporary clash of cultures within the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle in the ancient world and in the heated debates among medieval thinkers about the status of universals. Plato was understandably fascinated by the newly discovered power of the human mind to penetrate beyond appearances to the form or essence of the thing in question and then to use that elusive definition to put order and coherence into one's personal and community life. Aristotle, being by temperament more empirically oriented, converted the Forms that for Plato existed apart from material reality into substantial forms, the inner principle of existence and activity for individual things. But the substantial form still invariably represented what the individual thing had in common with other similarly constituted things and not how it was genuinely different from those other things. For example, if one seeks to determine what makes human beings different from one another, the alleged substantial form (humanity) is of little value. All the distinguishing physical characteristics of a given individual (e.g., being tall or short, fat or thin, with black, brown, white, or yellow skin) are in Aristotelian terms "accidents," contingent properties that apply to many other human beings. The particular "thisness" of that individual, that which makes him or her as an individual different from other human beings, somehow remains beyond rational comprehension. Hence, even though he was much more aware of the importance of individual things than Plato, Aristotle too lived in a mental world dominated by the search for universals in the world around him.
Still another reason that Aristotle was preoccupied with the issue of universals, of course, was his interest in explaining the reality of change in the world of nature in terms of universal causal principles. W. T. Jones comments as follows:
Aristotle believed that in order to understand any individual thing we must know four aspects of it, each of which operates to determine its nature. We must know (1) the material out of which it is composed (the material cause); (2) the motion or action that began it (efficient cause); (3) the function or purpose for which it exists (the final cause); and (4) the form it actualizes and by which it fulfils its purpose (the formal cause).
While Aristotle certainly wanted to explain the reality of individual things in terms of these causal principles, he found himself once again dealing with the individual existent in very general terms. Admittedly, to see something in terms of its relation to everything around it is a great help in understanding what it is in itself or in its particularity. But its individual "thisness" still remains elusive to full rational comprehension, given its explanation in terms of causal principles applicable to everything else that comes to be and ceases to be.
Why is this the case? Does it represent an inevitable limitation in human knowledge, or is something else at work here? Here I introduce a key component in my overall thesis for this book, namely, the distinction between objects of thought and subjects of experience. Objects of thought are invariably universal in scope since they abstract from the full reality of an individual existent and focus on some attribute or property that the individual shares in common with others of the same class. You and I as objects of thought for one another are both human beings; being human is what we have in common on the level of abstract thought. But as individual subjects of experience, you and I are quite different; we each have our individual approach to being human as manifest in our words and actions. Moreover, I cannot fully understand you in your particularity without becoming you and thereby losing my own personal identity. The same, of course, is true for you in your efforts to understand and deal with me.
By "subject of experience," of course, I do not mean a grammatical subject of predication in a sentence but an existential subject that is both active and passive in its relations with the world around it. That is, it is first receptive to its environment and then has an impact upon that environment by reason of its response to that initial stimulus. Unlike an object of thought, therefore, which has a determinate reality in the mind of the observer, an existential subject or subject of experience is indeterminate since it never stays precisely the same from moment to moment. Its identity keeps changing as it receives new environmental influences and responds to them in ever new ways. Each time that it responds, of course, it becomes for the moment determinate and can be an object of perception or reflection for other subjects and even for itself if it possesses self-awareness. But proper to the notion of subject of experience is potentiality, the power to be other than what it is right now. By way of contrast, proper to the notion of object of thought is de facto actuality, determinate reality lacking in potentiality or the power to change.
But is this not an unnecessary dichotomy? Is not everything in this world necessarily both subject and object? Agreed, but which of the two enjoys ontological priority over the other? Depending upon one's choice here, a radically different worldview emerges. As I elaborate in later chapters, the Anglo-American philosopher Alfred North Whitehead clearly gave priority to subjects over objects. That is, in his major work Process and Reality, he claimed that "the final real things of which the world is made up" are actual entities, momentary self-constituting subjects of experience. Each such subject of experience has an objective component, its reality as a "superject" once its process of self-constitution is completed. But, says Whitehead, once it is self-constituted and becomes a superject, it ceases to exist as a subject and a new subject of experience must take its place in order for the cosmic process as a whole to continue.
All this is explained in greater detail in subsequent chapters of this book. For now, it is only important to note that, while Plato and Aristotle were surely aware of their own individual subjectivity, their own reality as ongoing subjects of experience, unlike Whitehead they evidently gave ontological priority to objectivity and actuality in the world around them rather than subjectivity and potentiality. Both, to be sure, recognized the fact of change in the world of nature and tried to deal with it in different ways. Plato relegated change to the world of appearances, in sharp contrast to reality as represented by the mental world of the Forms. Aristotle, as noted above, was more empirically oriented and thus more accepting of the inevitability of change and becoming in this world. But in virtue of his causal scheme sketched above, Aristotle focused on the goal or final end for all changes, a state of permanent being or rest in which the entity in question would finally achieve full actuality. Hence, Plato and Aristotle both gave ontological priority to objectivity over subjectivity in their respective worldviews and found themselves as a result unable philosophically to explain the reality of the individual existent in objective terms. They implicitly lived in a mental world of universals or intelligible forms, and the individual existent (e.g., themselves as individual human beings and other subjects of experience) could not be adequately defined and explained in terms of objective characteristics shared with other subjects of experience.
Presumably Plato and Aristotle felt no frustration on this point since their respective philosophical agendas lay in another direction. Plato was eager to escape the world of appearances so as better to contemplate the unchanging world of intelligible forms. Aristotle was interested in the individual things of this world but only insofar as their coming and going (generation and corruption) could be explained in terms of his causal scheme. Yet causal explanations are always formulated in terms of laws or universal principles. The individual existent is only important as an instance of the empirical verification or falsification of some universal principle. That is, if the causal principle seems to explain the existence and activity of an individual existent a sufficient number of times, then the principle is considered empirically verified and treated as a law. If anomalies occur in which the causal principle seems not to be operative, then the causal principle is totally abandoned or at least significantly modified. In both cases, however, the individual existent in its particularity is ignored. In a thought-world dominated by the working of causal principles, its unique particularity is a distraction. In order to rise to the level of a causal explanation, one has to ignore individuating characteristics of the individual existent and focus on what the individual existent has in common with other individual existents under similar circumstances. Attention to the unique particularity of the individual existent is best left to artists of various kinds rather than to philosopher-scientists in search of universal principles.
Moving now to the thought-world of medieval thinkers, one can say that one of the major issues in that era was clearly the reality of universals, with realists and nominalists taking radically different positions on the matter. As W. T. Jones points out in his history of Western philosophy, however, early medieval thinkers were not well versed in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. In late antiquity Boethius had translated Introduction to Aristotle's Categories, written by a disciple of Plotinus, Porphyry, together with a modest number of Aristotle's own works on logic, and it was largely Porphyry's text that became the starting point for early medieval speculation on the nature of universals. Boethius himself distinguished between "composition" and "abstraction" in the formation of new ideas from sense experience: "Composition (as in the composition of horse and man to form the centaur) produces a false idea, whereas abstraction produces an idea which is true [e.g., the idea of a straight line], even though the thing conceived does not exist extra-mentally in a state of abstraction or separation." Boethius thus prepared the way for an Aristotelian approach to the doctrine of universals, namely, that universals are real but do not exist outside the mind in the same way that they exist in the mind. Ironically his initial successors in early medieval times were nearly all Platonists, holding to a doctrine of ultra-realism in this matter. Humanity, for example, in their view must exist outside the mind in the same way that it exists within the mind, namely, as the unchanging reality of which human beings are the changing and imperfect representations.
John Scotus Erigena, for example, and other Christian Platonists seem to have held this opinion even though logically this implies a form of monism. In the end, only one universal human being exists, with all individual men and women as its partial embodiments. For that matter, if God is identified with Being, then only God exists. Inevitably, there arose among other medieval thinkers a reaction in the form of conceptualism (universals exist only in the mind) or even pure nominalism (universals are words used to organize experience of individual entities). Frequently cited as a nominalist is Roscelin (c. 1050–1120) although, as Frederick Copleston notes, it is hard to know what Roscelin really held about the reality of universals, given that his views are only known through the writings of his opponents, for example, Anselm of Canterbury, John of Salisbury, and Peter Abelard.
Peter Abelard (1079–1142) in his student years listened to the lectures of both Roscelin and William of Champeaux, an ultra-realist, and sought to find a middle ground between them. Although accused by Bernard of Clairvaux of being a covert nominalist, Abelard clearly wanted to distinguish between words as physical sounds and words as symbols—that is, as logical referents to something real apart from the mind of the individual human being. Through a process of abstraction, "The nature [humanity] is set free, as it were, from all individuality and is considered in such a way that it bears no special relation to any particular individual but can be predicated of all individual men." Ultra-realism in the treatment of universal ideas is thereby refuted since the word has an objective reference to something real that exists one way within the human mind and quite another way in things outside the mind. Within the mind it is an intelligible form applicable to many individuals; in sensible things it serves as a principle of existence and activity for individual entities in their particularity.
Two other moderate realists of the twelfth century were Gilbert of Porrée and John of Salisbury, both of whom agreed with Abelard that universals exist one way in the human mind and another way in sensible things apart from the mind. But in terms of the basic issue of this chapter—namely, the reality of the individual existent in a world of universals—Gilbert is more interesting, for he distinguished between logical universals devoid of all individuating characteristics and concrete universals, universal forms that have become individuated within particular entities. There is the form of humanity in general and the form of humanity in the person of Socrates. Pushed to its logical extreme, of course, this distinction between logical and concrete universals results in conceptualism, the belief that only particular individuals exist and that universals have no objective referent outside the mind of the observer. Yet, in my judgment, better than others Gilbert realized that the full intelligibility of the individual entity eludes explanation in terms of universal concepts applicable in principle to all the members of a given class. As Copleston comments, Gilbert's doctrine of universals was heavily criticized, but on theological, not strictly philosophical, grounds. In distinguishing between God (Deus) and divinity (Divinitas), he seemed to introduce a fourth reality, a semi-independent divine nature over and above the divine persons, into the traditional doctrine of the Trinity.
With his customary precision and attention to detail, Thomas Aquinas mediated in his Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard between the ultra-realist and the conceptualist position on the nature of universals. There is, in the first place, the universal prior to instantiation in individual creatures (universale ante rem). In this sense, the universal is an idea in the mind of God, one of the multiple ways in which the unitary reality of God is revealed in creation. Then there is, second, the universal as the essence or principle of operation of individual entities in this world (universale in re). Third, there is the universal as an abstract concept in the mind of the human observer (universale post rem). As Copleston comments, the foundation for Thomas' understanding of the doctrine of universals is the universal as existing in individual entities. Given this presupposition, one can derive by a process of abstraction the universal concept existing in the mind of the human observer and one can infer the prior existence of the universal as a possible created imitation of the divine essence in the mind of God.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Subjectivity, Objectivity, & Intersubjectivity by Joseph A. Bracken. Copyright © 2009 Joseph A. Bracken. Excerpted by permission of Templeton Foundation Press.
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