An Irony Nestled within the Currents of Thought Sheltered beneath the Canopy of Postmodernism.
One irony residing in those currents of thought gathered under the umbrella of postmodernism is that their seed was sown in the fourteenth century, drawing from a fruit that had first sprung in Ephesus—the land of Heraclitus—after the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ, through the hand of St John. The apostle’s capital wisdom is evident in the Fourth Gospel in the formulation: “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God.” It is precisely the semantic richness of the term Logos—which simultaneously denotes the sacred and rational order manifested in the universal hierarchy (from hieros and arkhein) and the spoken word—that enabled John to reconcile Greek rationality with biblical revelation. Western thought is born, as a synthesis of Jerusalem and Athens, from the “Logos made flesh”; that is, from the assertion that the absolutely universal (God) can also be absolutely concrete (the Crucified), because only that which has the power to represent all that is particular is absolutely concrete, while only that which has the power to represent all that is abstract is absolutely universal.
Consequently, the two are identical. This paradoxical affirmation constitutes the cornerstone upon which the edifice of Catholic reason is erected. It grounds the claim that God lacks nothing proper to Him; that is, that He is perfect (from perficere) as pure act. Put otherwise, the omnipotence of God does not reside in the mere arbitrary exercise of His potencies. God, as Pure Act, is the structure of Reason (the Logos), whose essential norm is the Good. Therefore, God can do all things except cease to be God; He is not free to deploy His will in such a way as to turn the good into evil or to alter the nature of things in a chaotic fashion.
St Augustine grasped this clearly when he observed that the natural order is created by God to reflect the divine order, and that the qualities of the physical world are accessible to human reason. Reason can thereby demonstrate the logical inconsistency of Manichaean cosmogony, which would require the coexistence of two physical laws in the cosmic duel between the will of the Kingdom of Light (the Good) and that of the Kingdom of Darkness (Evil). In this way, Augustine concluded that the regularity and predictability of astronomical phenomena testified that the divine will expresses the divine intellect. Both the divine intellect and the divine will are thus expressions of God’s perfectly good nature, so that evil cannot exist within God nor be wrought by God. Consequently, God has no freedom to cease being God by acting against His perfect nature.
We see, therefore, how both Augustine of Hippo and his successor Thomas Aquinas raised their monumental theological works upon the rational pole of the Logos. They held that the pole of God’s will is subordinate to that of divine reason. Reality therefore exists independently of any consciousness that might perceive it, and emanates from a God whose very nature is truth.
The influence of this worldview on the ethical and moral life of Western civilisation cannot be overstated. Not only does it continue, however implicitly, to form part of the cultural inheritance of Catholicism, but—a contrario sensu—it stands as the inverted image of the efforts to establish irrationalism across every domain since the fourteenth century. The first significant assault came from the English theologian and Franciscan, William of Ockham, whose central argument held that the rationalist doctrines of ontological realism were unacceptable because they limited the will of God. As the supreme Being, God must be free to determine His acts unrestrictedly, arbitrarily, and autonomously.
Unlike Augustine and Aquinas, Ockham astutely shifted the balance toward the verbal pole of the Logos, engaging battle on nominal terrain (that is, the names of things). To this end, he denied the major premise: he rejected the existence of universal realities (res universales—objects enjoying real existence in the mind of God), contending that such universals are merely names we assign to similar particular objects. In other words, for Ockham these kindred objects share a common nature only by virtue of the mental concepts we apparently ascribe to them, not by any intrinsic properties of the objects themselves.
To defend his thesis, Ockham appealed to linguistic analysis, thereby laying the first stone of logical positivism in its subjective idealist variant. His strategy consisted in referring to the truth-conditions of assertive sentences—specifically those in which the subject is a singular term, is in the present tense, and bears no modal qualifier such as “perhaps,” “certainly,” or “some.” Ockham’s key assertion was that “it is sufficient and necessary for the subject and predicate of a true proposition to be equivalent” (as in the sentence “Socrates is a man”), which holds true by virtue of the identity of supposition between subject and predicate, rather than because the predicate signifies an inherent universal.
In other terms, for Ockham subject and predicate must be names of the same object; in short, synonyms. From this springs the well-worn “Ockham’s razor,” alluding to his intention of reducing sentences—cutting them with a blade—until they remain mere chains of nominal identity, mere tautologies from which universals are excluded. These universals are denied any natural reality and are understood simply as abstract concepts.
With this manoeuvre, the English Franciscan tilted the scales of truth toward the question of the adequacy of language to reality (that is, the verification that a given syntagma is linguistically meaningful, without reflecting upon its signification). The efficacy of this line of attack lies in its assumption that whatever cannot be empirically verified lacks meaning in the eyes of positivism. Thus verses such as “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” are held to be meaningless. According to positivist logic, they can only be true if rendered in indirect discourse (e.g., “Genesis 1:1 holds that ‘in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’”), so that when the verse is subordinated to the main clause, the conditions of verifiability are satisfied—at the price of cancelling all religious meaning.
The consequences of this inductivism (not far removed from Carnap’s neopositivist verificationism and analogous to Quine’s postulate that “no entity without identity”) were, at first glance innocuous, yet devastating, and they persist among us. Fundamentally, removing universals from philosophy gravely impedes discussion of those classes of things endowed with an inherent telos that defines their natural perfection—such as “being” (the present participle of “to be”). In this, Ockham anticipates Hume’s empiricism, which held that philosophical conclusions are not necessarily true: they neither reflect nor capture the essential nature of humanity, much less the nature of the universe. Although this philosophical method amounts to little more than answering the question of what truth is by supplying a grammatical theory of truth derived from an interpretation of individual words, it has served, since its promulgation, to conceptualise the essence of things as identical with the things themselves—that is, from the particular, from the different—yielding a cosmogony that is merely a sum of individualities.
In this Ockhamian world, necessity and universality belong to the order of thought, while the real world lacks immanent rationality and is confined to the particular and contingent. The chief corollary of nominalism is that knowledge is not participation in the divine: human intellection (from inter-legere, to read between the lines) is limited, a fortiori, to apprehending what God has categorised through His will, which is a law unto itself and just by antonomasia. This renders unnecessary any reflection upon the intrinsic nature of universal, abstract things. From this, following Duns Scotus, Ockham deduces that since man is made in the image of God, the primary nature of man lies in the separation of the acts of free will from the intellect. If God is not limited by universal things, the will is independent of the intellectual presentation of the good, rendering voluntarism radical in the human person.
Moreover, in Ockham’s refutation of the possibility of knowing the reality of relations by natural reason (relatio realis; Logos), there is implicit also the rupture of the logical relation (relatio rationis) between the Good and Right. The disconnection of intellectual participation between man and God serves as the basis for man’s becoming self-sufficient, equipping himself with a positive normativism whose legitimacy emanates from radical will, only partially moderated by a natural law theory that remains, in the last instance, contingent. Let us recall that, according to Ockham, there are no moral truths that God cannot change, for the contrary would imply that His omnipotence has limits other than those He imposes upon Himself.
It is not difficult to follow the thread to the centre of the present postmodern labyrinth. There we encounter a secularised version of Ockham’s anti-essentialism, expressed in formulations such as “things possess no determined natures apart from those we ourselves construct.” If the medieval nominalists undermined the then-prevailing theonomy, contemporary post-structuralists now seek to impose a heteronomy (from nomos and heteros—alien law) upon all functions of reason. In both cases, this is achieved by manipulating the Logos as language at the expense of the Logos as reason, denying—through language games—that the intransitive objects of knowledge remain invariant with respect to our knowledge of them.
Reducing the religious to a form of cultural anthropology naturally leads to the impasse of Franz Overbeck’s meta-theological dilemma. As Leo Tolstoy expressed it in his Confession, the insufficiency of empiricism consists in the fact that, in order to produce positive knowledge, it must necessarily omit from its inquiries the consequent phenomena of a social, ethical, artistic, or historical kind. It therefore cannot answer the question of an ultimate cause, nor satisfy our innate inclination toward the Absolute, our urge to absolutise ourselves.16 “God is the ideal of humanity, man projected to infinity and eternised in Him,” wrote Miguel de Unamuno, as the concave reflection of St Augustine of Hippo’s “in the inner man dwells the truth.”17
It is evident, however, that we tend toward the pure quest for ultimate, plural, and relational realities—that is, toward the transcendentals: the universal and superior properties of “being qua being,” such as Truth, Beauty, Goodness, or Qualia.
It is to this, ultimately, that Augustine and Unamuno allude in the passages cited above, discerning that if the ultimate transcendentals and the human transcendentals constitute a real plurality, then truth resides in the innermost depths of the human being, and we can therefore rise cognitively—we can auto-transcend ourselves.
Contemporary philosophers such as the Indo-British Roy Bhaskar and the Spaniard Leonardo Polo felt themselves interpellated by this challenge and took the bull by the horns in developing a transcendental anthropology as an alternative to the methodological foundations of positivism and the epistemological foundations of post-structuralism. Bhaskar’s work found expression in his Critical Realism, a current that reclaims the validity of transcendental realism and firmly rejects both scientistic positivism and postmodern interpretivism.
Bhaskar draws a sharp distinction between the “real” world and the “observable” world on the basis that, although the “real” cannot be observed, it exists independently of human perceptions, categories, and constructions, and causes actions and events that are observable.
Our scientific understanding is mediated by constructivism and epistemological relativism, which give rise to the “epistemic fallacy” of reducing what we say is real or exists (ontological statements) to what we can understand of the “real” (epistemological statements). Bhaskar maintains, therefore, that ontology enjoys a certain autonomy from epistemology and interpretation—a position shared by the Spanish philosophers Alejandro Llano and Fernando Inciarte, who hold that “truth as adequation refers to immediacy; the theory of truth as coherence, to mediation: the former works with concepts (through simple apprehension); the latter with judgements. Consequently, the former remains in abstract forms, while the latter seeks their imbrication in reality. The former is true—and only true—the latter is never only true. But the latter, with its non-truth, takes account of the deficiency of the world and assumes responsibility for it. Only through the latter is the former true.”
They coincide here also with the German philosopher Stekeler-Weithofer, who postulates that “without a logic of being and appearing, not only is metaphysical faith naïve, but so too is every scientific assertion.”
Upon these foundations there arose in England a realist social theory, led by Margaret Archer, who advocates an analytical dualism of culture and its relation to free will understood as “the will to persevere in being and the will to transcend.” Archer’s theoretical framework accounts for reality as open to the intentionality of the subjects who inhabit it, so that they are not predetermined by social structures.
Nevertheless, the properties of such structures are emergent, deriving from personal transcendentals, and they contain universals. It is therefore unavoidable to discover the intersections between the transitive and the intransitive—between the “inductive” procedures of positivism and the “deductive” path of ontological realism—if we wish both to transcend the reduction of reality to a given situation and to construct a social system detached from all historical circumstance.14
In synthesis, Critical Realism methodically articulates, with a view to sociological praxis, the view that human affairs cannot be fully captured solely by analytic a priori judgements—which, though necessary and universal, possess explanatory but not cognitive-extensive powers—nor solely by synthetic a posteriori judgements—which, though expansive, are neither necessary nor universal. The anthropological conception of Critical Realism links it to Leonardo Polo’s school of thought, especially his later investigations in transcendental anthropology, which challenge Ockham’s nominalism. Polo maintains that “human life has no nominal meaning, nor is man a being; the human person is not the one who lives, but the living who.”
Consequently, in agreement with Bhaskar, he holds that human consciousness is unobjectifiable, since the existence of consciousness is “more” than any objectification applicable to the person. In the words of Roger Scruton, “the identification of any object in the first person is ruled out in the enterprise of scientific explanation.
Polo gives a twist to Ockham’s arbitrarism by affirming that freedom is a personal transcendental, and that without freedom there is no will; freedom is not a characteristic of spontaneous will but is conditioned by freedom itself. Freedom, that is, is not a property of the will but of being, and is therefore radically personal. Following Jacques Maritain and Edith Stein—and with them Boethius—Polo maintains that the person is an individual substance of a rational nature; a unitary and complete whole whose fundamental aspects are individuality and subsistence. The personal being is therefore in potency to know all things, because the innate habit of reason—which always knows universals—is unrestrictedly expansive. Hence the importance in Polo’s philosophy of the concept of the mental limit: the notion that the present is only human, and that our mental limit is therefore the mental present—the presence of all that there is before man as human knowledge. This limit we can abandon when it yields no more, because the act of knowing stands outside time and, consequently, outside existential space.
In Leonardo Polo’s transcendental anthropology, the object of knowledge (understood as a field, not as a thing) indicates the known as such by knowing it positively. Yet this object does not correspond to its extramental reality, because it is mere intentionality (proper to artefacts such as maps, scores, and poems, which refer to places, phenomena, or mental states exterior to themselves). It is not, then, that which we conceive, but that by which we conceive. It is thus partial knowledge, detached from material reality and situated within the mental limit that we must cross in order to understand the human essence beyond the circumstantial—to exit Wittgenstein’s bottle.
