The success of Christianity was in effect the triumph of idealism. Platonism, which ruled the first thousand years of Christianity, was interpreted idealistically by the philosophers of the Church. St Augustine, who was more responsible than any other for bringing Platonism into the Church, interpreted the Greek philosopher along idealistic lines. There are older justifications for this. The Garden of Eden and the Fall are instances of idealistic mythologies, although the entire Old Testament cannot be interpreted in this way. In any case, under the Christian domination the heaven of otherworldliness was held to be superior in reality, and the things of this earth mere shadows of sensibility not worth living for. The history of Christianity, until the agitation in metaphysics which marked the thirteenth century, was that of the application of an unchallenged idealism. Abelard saw the value of nominalism but thought it too extreme a position. So in opposition to Roscellinus, and also to the idealism of William of Champeaux, he enunciated the doctrine of conceptualism, in the effort to recognize both the validity of universals and their non-existence apart from actual physical particulars, except as concepts in the mind. The attempt to discover a solution to the controversy between realism and nominalism in the psychological doctrine of conceptualism should prove most popular with the modern outlook which seeks to find an answer to every problem by referring it to psychology. The reason is that explicitly at least the problem was not solved but dropped. Implicitly, it was solved in favor of nominalism, as we shall note. Conceptualism failed to gain any great headway even in Abelard’s time because it represents a midway position that falls back into nominalism by not admitting to universals any real and independent position. It has hardly satisfied anyone; and the effort to prove Aristotle a conceptualist has been ill-advised. Aristotle, it is true, often sought to correct the idealism of Plato and his followers, particularly his nephew, Speusippus, who, as we have seen, was often guilty of making the level of essence alone real; but the Aristotle who wrote on logic, at least, was on the whole a modified realist and no historical progenitor of Abelard’s. When we speak of realism we are apt to confuse the realists, who believe in the equal reality of the two universes of essence and existence, with the idealists, who believe in the sole reality of the universe of essence. Similarly, when we speak of nominalism we ordinarily do not consider that there are two kinds of nominalists. The realists and the idealists both accept the reality of the universe of essence, but they differ radically in their belief concerning the reality of the other universe—so radically in fact that we must consider their positions to represent separate philosophies. Thus there are, as we have seen, three philosophies: idealism, realism, and nominalism. Nominalism has two subdivisions, which historically are so important we must consider them. These are: materialism and subjective idealism. Materialism, which we have already named in connection with nominalism, is almost a literal reading of that position. It states that reality belongs to atoms in motion and the void. The mind and all mental things are, according to materialism, epiphenomenal. Subjective idealism, or solipsism, asserts that the mind and mental things are alone real and that nothing else has independent existence. Thus the two forms of nominalism: materialism and subjective idealism, are also violently opposed. Medieval scholasticism was better in many ways than pre-medieval intellectual chaos. The Aristotelian strait jacket imposed upon cultures, western and eastern, by Aquinas (1225-1274) for the Christians, by Maimonides (1135-1204) for the Jews, and by al-Ghazzali (1085-1111) for the Moslems, was also a bar to further development and hence earned all systems a bad name. No order which makes the claim to be all-inclusive can justify itself once there are facts or theories which it cannot explain. Nominalism arose as the protest against systems which had proved irrational. It is not inherently opposed to systems, only to closed systems. But of course there is nothing innately closed about a system. The open system is the hope of the world. The controversy between realism and nominalism was effectively settled in the Middle Ages, though the solution came from outside the Christian tradition. When Christianity took over and adopted the idealistic philosophy of Neo-Platonism, as set forth, for instance, by Plotinus and St. Augustine, the realistic philosophy migrated to Alexandria and Byzantium, not so often in explicit and candid form but usually implicit in the assumptions and method of natural science and in the maintenance of interest in mathematics. Hence it was an Arabian philosopher, one who was both medical scientist and metaphysician, who first solved the difficulty. Neither school, he decided, had hold of the entire truth, but each was partially correct. Universals have their status ontologically ante res, epistemologically in rebus, and psychologically post res; or, as we should now say, universals exist ontologically before things, epistemologically in things, and conceptually after things. Universals have an a priori being but are known only a posteriori; that is to say, universals exist prior to actual physical particulars but are perceived in them, and human knowledge of universals (i.e. concepts) are derived from the actual physical particulars by the process of knowing. Albertus Magnus, Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas accepted Avicenna’s solution, though in general metaphysics only Duns Scotus asserted the implications which were inherent in it. Avicenna’s solution, in effect, while appearing to consist in a compromise between the positions, actually subordinates that of nominalism in admitting its limited validity; and is thus a decision in favor of realism. But the settlement of the problem had no immediate good effect, for nominalism won out most completely and realism went underground, at least for the time being. --James Feibleman Ontology, pp. 46-49 --Painting: Archangel Raphael with Adam and Eve (1808) by William Blake
Posted on: Sun, 18 Jan 2015 19:41:54 +0000
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