More on Descartes' Relation to the Scholastics

David Clemenson, Descartes' Theory of Ideas, Continuum 2007, p. 5:

The philosophy of cognition contained in these texts [Descartes' Jesuit textbooks at La Fleche] is mainstream Scholasticism, but it is not the Thomism of the great Dominican commentators Cajetan and Poinsot (John of St. Thomas). The intellectual tradition of the Franciscan order, especially Scotism, exerted an important influence on Jesuit cognitive philosophy, including that of Fonseca and the Coimbran school. Not that the Jesuits were doctrinaire Scotists. But they do reject Aquinas, in favour of Scotus or his early fourteenth-century Franciscan successors, on at least three controversial points in the philosophy of cognition: (a) the possiblity of a direct and immediate (human) intellectual perception of singular matter-form composites (and not just of universal forms, as Aquinas thought), (b) the possibility of direct intellectual cognition of non-existent objects and (c) the doctrine of objective or intentional esse as an intrinsic denomination of the perceived object. Descartes sides with the Jesuits (and thus the Franciscans) on each of these points.

See! Brad Gregory and Fr. Robert Barron were right!

Men Great and Mediocre

"I wish I could make clear from the very beginning that in criticizing great men, as I shall do, I am very far from forgetting what made them truly great. No man can fall a victim to his own genius unless he has genius; but those who have none are fully justified in refusing to be victimized by the genius of others. Not having made the mathematical discoveries of Descartes and Leibniz, we cannot be tempted to submit all questions to the rules of mathematics; but our very mediocrity should at least help us to avoid such a mistake. There is more than one excuse for being a Descartes, but there is no excuse whatever for being a Cartesian."

—Etienne Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience (New York: Scribners, 1937), 7.

Eustacius a Sancto Paulo on Intelligible Being

More from Ariew's Descartes and the Last Scholastics, p. 44. Perhaps there might one day be interest in Petrus Thomae after all. This is from Ariew's chapter on Descartes and Scotism, in which he takes Gilson to task for glossing over differences in 17th century scholasticism (ie assuming they were all Thomists). But the following is some pretty clear Scotism, albeit of the Petrus Thomae and Alnwick kind, as I am not sure Scotus used this distinction much himself, if at all.

"To understand what is meant by objective being in the intellect, one must note the distinction between objective and subjective being in the intellect. To be objectively in the intellect is nothing else than to be actually present as an object to the knowing intellect, whether what is present as an object of knowledge has true being within our outside the intellect, or not. To be subjectively in the intellect is to be in it as in a subject, as dispositions and intellectual acts are understood to be in it. But since those things which are in the intellect subjectively can be known by the intellect, it can happen that the same thing can at the same time be both objectively and subjectively in the intellect. Other things which really exist outside the intellect, though they are not subjectively in the intellect can be in it objectively, as we have noted. But since all these things are real, they have some real being in themselves apart from the objective being in the intellect. There are certain items which have no other being apart from objective being, or being known by the intellect: these are called entities of reason."

Thomism as Protestantism?

As a post a while back made clear, I recently read Joseph Owens' An interpretation of existence. One thing that struck me forcefully at a number of places throughout the book was the peculiar and familiar character of some of his statements. Consider the following passage:

. . . But the genetic leap to judgment as a distinct synthesizing cognition that apprehends an existential synthesizing in the thing appears for the first time in Aquinas. It ushers in a profoundly new metaphysical starting point. Nor is there any evidence that it was understood or appreciated by his successors. The distinction between simple apprehension and judgment did become a commonplace in Scholastic tradition. But the logical background of the distinction proved too dominant to allow the metaphysical import of the Thomistic texts to make itself felt. . . . The Thomistic insight that the judgment itself was the original knowledge of the existential synthesis eluded the attention of the later Scholastic thinkers. The notion that the intellectual activity of synthesizing was itself the knowing of existence escaped them. In Kant's penetrating scrutiny, however, the notion that a synthesis underlies conceptual knowledge reappears . . .

There seems to me something uncannily like what the Protestants like to say about St Paul here. Substitute "Paul" for "Aquinas", "Scripture" for "Thomistic texts," "Scholastic tradition" for "Christian tradition," and what do we get? Paul says something which everyone forgot about or misinterpreted for centuries until Luther rediscovered its true meaning, enabling him to discard all previous Christian tradition at his whim and thereby making it unnecessary for Protestants to even become familiar with the contents of that tradition. (By the way, Owens is by no means the only Thomist who talks like this. I recall both Gilson and Maritain saying very similar things.)

And this is just what many (most?) Thomists do! Like Protestants, they read their sacred texts in isolation from both the historical context of the texts themselves and from the way that the later tradition read them. Thomists tend not to read other scholastics, or not much. Instead they read Thomas in the context of contemporary philosophical and theological thought--like Protestants!--and, lacking the proper context and really appreciating Thomas for his "relevance" to our own concerns rather than for his own sake, they (first subtly, then increasingly drastically) distort Thomas' thought itself, all the while maintaining its supremacy--like Protestants!

The other thing that struck me in Owens' book was this: several times he mentions Heidegger's suggestion in the latter's Introduction to Metaphysics that "being", however interpreted, holds "the spiritual destiny of the West." Owens uses the phrase with approval and makes Heidegger's question his own epigraph. Now here's the funny thing: I was recently also reading Heidegger's book and it stuck me that the very same Protestantlike element pervades Heidegger's own thought! Just replace "Paul" or "Aquinas" with "the Greeks" and take as our texts the Presocratics, and make the tradition the tradition of all Western philosophy, and don't we have almost the exact same claim, namely that the "true meaning" of the original insights were almost immediately forgotten and abandoned by every successor, who mouthed the relevant words under a devastating and ruinous interpretation, until a lone genius prophet rediscovered the Gospel for himself and brought it back to the world? Isn't Heidegger just Luthor redux?

Coincidence? Or is this where the Thomists learned to talk like this? Or am I nuts?

One might in fairness note that many many philosophers have made similar gestures ever since Descartes, though not usually as radically as Heidegger. But if so this may simply reinforce my long-standing suspicion that modern philosophy is in large part simply the rationalistic flip-side of Protestant thinking.

Descartes and Scholasticism

Back to our regularly scheduled programming with some Descartes. I've been reading Ariew's book Descartes and the Last Scholastics in my continuing attempt to discover what "really" happened to scholasticm: was it really laughed to death, or what? In any case, here are some quotes from Descartes on scholastic-y topics, univocity and the knowledge of substance, from his Principles of Philosophy.

Part 1 n.51: "what is meant by 'substance' - a term which does not apply univocally to God and his creatures

In the case of those items which we regard as things or modes of things, it is worthwhile examining each of them separately. By substance we can understand nothing other than a thing which exists in such a way as to depend on no other thing for its existence. And there is only one substance which can be understood to depend on no other thing whatsoever, namely God. In the case of all other substances, we perceive that they can exist only with the help of God's concurrence. Hence the term substance does not apply univocally, as they say in the Schools, to
God and to other things; that is, there is no distinctly intelligibile meaning of the term which is common to God and his creatures. "

Note that he doesn't quite ask the question the way an actual scholastic would (Ariew says that during the time Descartes wrote his major works it had been over 20 years since he had ready any scholastic material, and that prior to writing this treatise he requested a few manuels from his friends, manuels which turned out to be Scotistic as the dominant school at Paris at the time was that of the Scotistae). A scholastic, at least during the 13th and 14th centures would ask if being was univocal to God and creatures, substance and accident. Clearly, in this passage Descartes denies that the term substance is univocal to God and creatures. Pickstock has claimed that Descartes and Kant were basically regular old scholastics in virtue of (evil) Scotistic influence, etc., which seems absurd as his whole project is to supplant scholasticism; but perhaps in supplanting it he was also highly conditioned by it. In any case, this is not all that relevant here. One wonders what Scotus would make of this. He clearly thinks the human mind can form concepts that are univocal to God and creatures, and distinguishes four grades. But they are all transcendentals, that is they transcend the categories. The answer would then hinge on whether one thought that being a substance was a pure perfection. I've never seen Scotus say that it was, but I suppose being a substance is better than not being a substance so there may well be a transcendental sense of the term substance, though again, I am not entirely sure Scotus would agree on that. I also doubt that the scholastics would make such a use of dependence and substance; I've read plenty of discussions about substance being being per se yet even Scotus doesn't hasten to add that only God is substance in the true sense (which sounds more like a Thomistic position, in the manner of predication per prius et posterius which Scotus singles out for attack in one of his main arguments for univocity).

Here is the other passage, which may betray more Scotistic influence than the above:

n.52: "The term substance applies univocally to mind and body. How a substance itself is known

But as for corporeal substance and mind (or created thinking substance), these can be understood to fall under this common concept: things that need only the concurrence of God in order to exist. However, we cannot initially become aware of a substance merely through its being an existing thing, since this alone does not of itself have any effect on us. We can, however, easily come to know a substance by one of its attributes, in virtue of the common notion that nothingness possesses no attributes, that is to say, no properties or qualities. Thus, if we perceive the presence of some attribute, we can infer that there must also be present an existing thing or substance to which it may be attributed."

I'm not sure how useful this actually is; his argument that substance is univocal to mind and body is based on a common concept; is this common concept that of substance? It seems rather in his own words to be the fact that they both need divine concurrence in order to exist. But this would make everything univocally a substance, even accidents. I don't know what this is supposed to mean. In any case, we seem to be closer to Scotistic territory here, as Scotus does make the controversial claim that we do not know substance qua substance. Rather, we have a common notion of being common to substance and accidents that allows us to infer substances underlying the accidents that impinge on the senses.

Stay tuned for more "Posts of Interest!"

Uh-oh

"...a nation's civilization and refinement depends on the superiority of the philosophy which is practised there."

-Descartes, Preface to the French edition of the Principia philosophiae

Cartesian Jabs

Here's a bit of Descartes on the scholastics that I came across, again from the objections and replies (GB 31 p.169):

"For more credence should be attached to what one man ... says, if he alleges that he has seen or learned something, than one should give to a thousand others who deny it, for the mere reason that it was imossible for them to see it or become aware of it. Thus at the discovery of the Antipodes the report of a few sailors who had circumnavigated the earth was believed rather than the thousands of philosophers who had not believed the earth to be round. Further, though they here cite as confirmation the Elements of Euclid, saying that everyone finds them easy to apprehend, I beg my critics to consider that among those men who are counted the most learned in the Philosophy of the Schools, there is not one in a hundred who understands them, and that there is not one in ten thosand who understands all the demonstrations of Apollonius or Archimedes, though they are as evident and as certain as those of Euclid."

I didn't realize the idea that until the so-called age of discovery everyone, especially intellectuals, thought the world was flat actually goes back this far. Just to mention, Scotus, in a passage I didn't bother posting he used the roundness of the world in an example comparing the certainty of demonstrations when comparing sciences like astronomy and astrology. The jab about geometry is interesting as well; I remember Albert the Great did a commentary on Euclid, but have no idea how it was taught later and in Descartes day, or if his criticism is justified.