bricks and ghosts

August 11, 2012 at 10:00 am (Uncategorized)

-To look at a snow pile, a porcelain basin, etc. and try to decide the question whether you are looking at white or looking at whiteness. Some turning to the words is inevitable, but it shouldn’t be the dominant note.

-How should the words be dominant? What is it for them to be so? Is this just to put the emphasis on what we hear about white and whiteness as opposed to placing the emphasis on what we see? Are these two senses, like all senses, radically distinct and incapable of unification?

-This is one model: white exists, whiteness is a concept. We divide the two by the sharp line of existence. This leads to a bricks-and-ghosts ontology: concrete terms are solid, substantial, and real, just as they are signified; abstract terms are ghosts that haunt the mind and, as such, have no real relation to the world. If you ask what is real about whiteness, you can say nothing other than white.

-Some medievals: Whiteness is a principle, a by which. Suddenly, it becomes prior in reality. Meister Eckhart said htis most clearly, but St. Thomas arguably said it even more forcefully. Redness (Rubrocity….) just is this particular red. (cf. commentary on Metaphysics VII.)

-The reality/just a concept or bricks-and-ghosts ontology was Ockham’s. He wasn’t so much against universal terms (he was not at all a “Nominalist”, believing that a universal term was nothing but a collective idea. Ockham is not Berkeley or Hume), but he was violently and persistently against the idea that there could be any real being to an abstract term – and to be a principle was a real being (It is even a real priority, though among those who understand the matter through hylemorphism, there is a tendency to say that principels are less real, since the composite of the principles is real) Somehow, Ockham convinced us. We’re all Ockhamites now. Should we be?

-Ockham was not a Nominalist, but it is an open question whether he could have logically avoided it. To deny any reality at all to the abstract term raised the question if we can allow any reality to the term in the mind. To abstract means to take something from, or consider something while not considering another thing. But if we deny any reality whatsoever to the abstract, how is it even abstracted? Note: to say the only reality of wholeness is a particular whole is to make exactly this denial.

-Is it our revenge against our Ockhamism that we tend to replace things with our sciences of them? A theology student will say he wants to write something about Christology when he means he wants to write about Christ.

-Our puzzlement or forgetfulness of this is so extreme we speak of “instantiated concepts” or “instantiated properties” without wondering. We make existence itself a concept. Whatever is, is an instance of the concept of itself. Is this radical anti-Ockhamism? Or just the incoherent degradation of a now-forgotten answer to a long forgotten question?

-God is signified both by concrete and abstract terms, to indicate his existence and simplicity. So how do we understand that his simplicity exists or that his existence is simple? Can we? How can we see that there is no intrinsic contradiction here?

-Consider Ockham, born today and saying all the same things. Except now he is positioning himself as a middle, moderate position between those extreme dogmatists, St. Thomas/Scotus and Berkeley/Hume. Lesson: “moderation” can be in fact just the fist step of the slippery slope.

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