The Gnosiological Position of Duns Scotus - Part I of II

By Mário Ferreira dos Santos

Duns Scotus performs, in the history of occidental philosophy, a role not always well understood or fairly judged. The famous "doctor subtilis", who in part follows the platonic thread through Avicenna, conquered a position as prominent as that of Thomas Aquinas, never mind that, as we had already said, his valour has been in large part obscured because of the controversy between thomists and scotists. These reproduce, for clearly corresponding in the level of our culture, the opposition between platonics and aristotelics, in greek culture; between the partidarians of Avicenna and Averroes, in the arab culture.

Only a dialetic vision will permit to conciliate the positivities of the two thoughts that follow different vectors: the one of the interiorization, going in the direction of the univocity of the ideas, of Duns Scotus, and the one of the exteriorization, searching the analogy of being, through the effects to the causes, as the one of Thomas Aquinas.

One can even say that these two vectors are invariants in the philosophy.

And the incomprehensions, that the disciples protrude, the distinctions, which stress, and the conflicts, which abyss, are more products of an unilateral comprehension, fruit of the sectarian spirit of school, which create diverse perspectives, than properly those of the true thought of these great masters, which a dialetic disposition of the thesis would easily allow a conciliation.

It is true that, in this book, we won't be able to undertake this study, which we transfer to other works of coming publication. What interest us now to stress is the contribution of Duns Scotus to the solution of the gnoseological problematic. As it wouldn't be possible to treat of his ideas, without preceding this for a clear diposition of his philosophy, before examining his thesis, we will make a explanation of his fundamental ideas, if not global, at least in those points which can interess our studies.

In general, the thomists consider Duns Scotus as an extreme realist. However, the reading of his work, well too soon would show us two thesis which are clearly anti-realistic, as goddly stressed by Maréchal:

1) a metaphysics thesis: the individuation of sensible objects, founded exclusevely upon the last formal difference, the "haecceitas";

2) the corresponding psychological thesis: the intellectual perception, immediate and primitive, of the material individuals, species of confuse intuition of the "singular" by the intelligence.

For the analysis of these two thesis, we would first need to examine the rôle featured by Avicenna.

THE INFLUENCE OF AVICENNA

It's in the "Ontology" that we have studied what means essence and existence. We may, however, examinate what is the position of Avicenna in face of these intrinsic principles of being.

"Essentiae vero rerum aut sunt in rebus aut in intellectu; unde habent tres respectus." (Indeed, the essences of things are either in the things themselves our in the intellect; consequently there are three situations):

Therefore, we have:

1) the essences considered by themselves, extra mentis, out of relations with understanding or with things; that is ante rem;

2) essences included in things, in singular things, that is in re;

3)in the thought, that is post rem.

The three situations of the essence, which correspond with the diverse positions in the face of the problem of universals, are here embodied by Avicenna, who admits the three classical affirmations, not only this or that.

Everything that exists has an essence. It is this essence the principle of its being what it is.

Well, the essence is one, she is herself, she doesn't confound herself with another one, which is other than the first. But she can't altogether be confounded with the properties that derive from her, which are consequence of the presence of the essence. It is not of man'essence to laugh. To laugh is a property of that one.

To Avicenna, the essence is neither singular nor universal. The singularity or universality are determinations that the thought attribute to her, and are "accidentals" to her, for, in herself, she is not singular or universal:

"To take an example of the order of genus, we will say that animal is by himself something, and that it is the same, either we regard the sensible or the intelligible in the soul.

In itself, animal is neither an universal nor a singular. Veraciously, if it was, by itself, universal, in a manner that the animality, as long as animality, were universal, it woudn't be possible that there were any particular animal, but every animal would be universal. If, on the contrary, by the mere fact of being animal, animal were singular, it couldn't be other than singular, that is, this one to whom belongs the animality, and no other singular could be animal. So that, taken by itself, animal isn't but this intellection, animal, in the thought; as long as it is conceived as being animal, it is not but animal, and nothing more; but if, besides, it is conceived as an universal being, or singular, or something, we conceive, then, besides this animal, something accidental to the animality."

This famous quote from the "Logic" of Avicenna put us before his thought with all possible clearness.

Synthesizing his ideas to our manner of seeing and exposing, according to the "Theory of Tensions," we would have that:

1) the essence, ontologically considered, is an ontological schem, not of a noetical (from Nous, spirit) content, but instead of a metaphysical quidditas, ante rem, independent of man's thought, an arithmós tónos in the being, not subsistent by itself (without ensity), but subsistent in the being, as a possible essence.

Form that informing the matter becomes subsistent in the supositum, in the kipokeimenon, on the matter, and therefore exists. In this case, the essential mode of being foregoes the existencial mode of being. The existence isn't but an "accident" of the essence, something that happens to the essence. But this forego isn't chronological, as thomists pretend, because the world of essences isn't the world of time, but of eternity, where there are no backdatings or successions.

When suffering the accident of existing, the essence temporalizes itself in re, in the thing, without however losing its metaphysical arithmós tónos. If everything that exists has a form, has an essence, which is the principle of (the thing) being what it is, and not something else, this essence was possible. So it was that its existence happened.

It was possible in the being, where it had an essential being, because if it hadn't an essential mode of being, not having an existential one yet, it would be mere nothing, and, in that case, it couldn't have appeared existentially. Therefore, it was a gradus metaphysicum of being. And inasmuch so, it wasn't universal nor singular, because the universal or the singular belong to the world of existences in themselves, not of essences in themselves. So, this essence, in itself, doesn't individualize nor universalize itself, because it is one, unique, always the same, immutable in the being. As an essential schem, it is an ante rem mode of being.

Animal non est nisi animal tantum = animal isn't but animal, or to say it better, animal is nothing but animal. This famous formula from Avicenna, which was expressed in his exclamation: ipsa equinitas non est aliquid nisi equinitas tantum. The equinity is nothing else but the very equinity.

If essence, whereas essence, existed, it would have an unity of existence. This a propriety that accompanies inseparably the existent substance, for the unity doens't exist in itself, it depends on the being of whom we say it is one.

Well, the essential schem doesn't have (as an ante rem which it is) an existent substance, for it is subsistent as possible in the being; it is only essential.

The essence is a being, a quiditative being, and, as such, it is real, but it is not, by itself, a being of existence; it is only an essential being. Its reality consists in its conformity with an exemplary model, which is its existence in God, says Duns Scot in synthesis.

The essence, as a reality, is an essential schem in the Being, an exemplay model. It has an essential unity (hence, it is a structure, for being correspondent to the exemplary model).

Duns Scot will show, next, that this quiditative unity is smaller than that of the individual and bigger than that of the universal. Its unity, then, is the one of the indeterminate nature respecting both the individuality and the universality, but determinable to both. And it doesn't lose its essential unity when receive any of these determinations. It is its indetermination that allows its communization.

This way, the essence as such is univocal, because it is always the same. As the being is the most formal of all essences, its predication is always univocal.

But, attention, and here it is important in order to avoid the confusions between thomists and scotists, this univocity is only metaphysical: this univocity just happens on the essential order.

The essence, as long such, has a possibility of subjective existence, and this possibility is given to it by the individualization. But the latter doesn't trust it upon existence, despite being, however, the last formal condition of its possibility.

Hence, the essential scheme has an unity and an individuality in the Being. But individuality is a condition, a propriety. The unity can't exist in iself, because it requires the being of whom we say it is one.

The unity doesn't enter in the definition that includes just the near gender and the specif difference. The quidity, therefore, is essentialy what fits in the definition, which distinguishes it from others, but it is not the definition that confers it its reality, this is confered by its quiditative being, by its essential scheme.

This way, man's essence is the humanity, as the one of the horse is the equinity. But this horse is not just equinity, because Duns Scot shows us (which is a logical consequence of his philosophical position) that, since the quiditative being is not an existential being (it is only an essential being), other quidities, formally distinct in the order of the quiditative being, can enter in the composition of an existential being (of an existent), without breaking the unity of its being of existence.

It elapses, then, that:

a) the essential unity is one;

b) the existentil unit, of the existent, is another, which includes quiditatively, in itself, the essences, forming a new unity (a new tension, a new scheme, the scheme of the concrete existential singularity, therefore), which is not broken by the presence of the other unities.

The quiditative being (the essential scheme) has an unity from its essential order, that is consequentialy quiditative, which, as we have already seen, distinguishes itself from the unity of the individual as from the one of the universal.

The individualizing act (haecceitas) belongs, therefore, to the quiditative and formal entity, but, by itself, it is not a form, for, if it were, it would determinate a new species; the individualizing act is, in its form, the essence's last atualization.

Hence, Peter is, as gender, animalitas; as species, rationalitas and, as individual, petreitas.

The animalitas, as gender, differentiates him from other genders, as rationalitas differentiates him as species from the other species contained in the gender, as petreitas differentiates itself from the other individuals contained in the species. In Pter, therefore, the quidity, the essence humanitas, knows its last actualization, which is the individual, the last determination.

This way, the unity of essence, in the diverse orders in which it happens, is always an accident of it.

2) The essence, ontically considered, in re, in the individual, is the concrete scheme of the same, what makes this individual to be what he is and not something else.

This essence universalizes itself in the beings of the same species, where it is an individual and concrete scheme, but that becomes...

3) a being of reason (post rem), the noetical scheme, abstract, developed by the mind.

These two last aspects are the ones that interest us most, because the others belong to the field of Ontology, whre they will be treated apropos.

The essence in the Being, as thought of God, is a possible while it doesn't actualize itself as an existetnt. While possible, it has its esse, its possible being. Man, on the divine understanding, is a possibility of being endowed with an actual existence. This possible is the common nature, the essence indifferent to the universality of the concept, the ontological essential scheme, possible only, indifferent too to the singularity of the existent. The creation is the act through which that essence "accidentalizes" itself on the actual existence, acquiring the singularity.

The essence, for Duns Scot, has its degrees of intensity, which are its intrinsic modes (modus intrinsecus). Everything that combines with the essence are essence's intrinsic models, and it doesn't vary anything in its formal reason.

The white light may vary its intensity without failing to be white light. The intensity is an intrinsic mode of the white light, or a gradus. Hence, the finite and the infinite are two intrinsic modes of the being, because the being, as being, is univocally the same always. As infinite differs infinitely in its modality of the finite.

Duns Scot considers accident to be everything that is strange o the quidity., to the essence, beyond the classical definition that it is properly something that subsists in another as in a subject.

The being of the essence has metaphysical priority over the the being of the existence, that is, it has a "nature priority". The subject can't exist in its "priority", which is the existence, but the essence has, by "nature", priority over the existence.

What is first by nature is axiologically superior. The existence is an intrinsic mode of the essence, and therefore distinguishes itself from it.

But what species of distinction? The distinction is formal, say the scotists. The formal distinction is considered by the thomists as a mere artifice, because the essences, as everything else, either are actually distinct, in re, or in the human mind, conceptually. Therefore, where would the formal distinction fit?

It would be naive to think that the scotists didn't consider this difficulty. But, as the distinction is a theme for the ontology, there we will study it, mostly the formal, which requires we have already neatly established certain ontological aspects.

But, since we comprehend the quidity, metaphysically considered, it is easy to to comprehend, in light of what we have studied till here, that the distinction is merely formal, and formalis ex natura rei, that his, its origin is in the thing's nature, independently of human's thought, extra-mentis.

Let us cite Fuetscher: "Some think that in order to eliminate that distinction the following dilemma is enough (referring to the thomists): a distinction either depends on the knowledge (conceptual distinction) or is independent from the same (real); there is no middle term... Hence, the scotist formal distinction disgust them, because it is neither dependent nor independent from the knowledge.

Actually this critique demands little effort -- continues Fuetscher --, but it is holy innacurate. The scotists expressly affirm that the formalities (quidditates = essences, as such) distinguish themselves independently from the thought; in this sense, they are not a middle term between real and conceptual. Actually, they really distinguish themselves. For that reason, the formal distinction is called ex natura rei too, and this way expresses the independence of knowledge. Very well: if we compare between themselves all the things that distinguish themselves ex natura rei, we find may grades. With independence from the thought one distinguish two men, but also body and soul, in the same man. And according to many scholastics, equally independent from the knowledge is the distinction between subject and mode (wants to refer to Suarez): and according to the scotists, the distinction between animalitas and rationalitas in the man. But the two last latter distinctions are considered as minor ones in comparison with the formers; not for being less independent from the knowledge, but because of the nature of the thing itself that is distinguished ex natura rei. That's why they receive their names of modal and formal distinctions. Thereby, the term "real" admits two aceptions. In the first, it menas the same as "independent of the thought" = ex natura rei; in this sense it doesn't admit neither more nor less, and the scotists don't say the contrary. The other aception is fueled by the proclivity of the diverse objects which distinguish themselves ex natura rei, which divide themselves in two or three groups: res -- modus -- formalitas.

It corresponds to them the real, modal and formal distinctions, all of them exist independently of the thought. To all of them opposes itself the conceptual distinction, which is of two classes: the onde grounded on the objects and the one with no ground, that means, totally elaborated by the thought." (Fuetscher, Acto y potencia, pág. 53).

THE COMMON BEING

Grounded in the avecinnian essence, Duns Scot establishes three states of the being:

1) in re, the essence on the singular real, is the physical state of the being; concrete scheme;

2) post rem, the essence conceived by the thought as an universal or a singular, contitutes its logical state: abstract-noetical scheme;

3) ante rem, the essence by itself, without any determination, is its metaphysical state: eidetical scheme, essential (therefore, ontological).

In this case, the univocity of the being belongs only to the metaphysical state. Put on the logical plan, it emerges with the determinations of singularity or universality, which engender relations of equivocity and analogy.

Understood this way, the polemic between scotists and thomist loses its raison d'être, becoming a steril dispute of schools, according to the unilarities of the respective perspectives.

The univocity, as belonging only to the essence in its metaphysical state, is understood as the beings of a same essence, as such, are univocals, because the essence, metaphysically considered, as such, is only what it is.

Well, considering so the matter, the scotist univocity in no way contradicts the thomist analogy, but even completes it. In the "Ontology", when we analyse decadialetically the analogy, this teme will become so clear that, we are sure, the controversy won't find fundamentals but in a mutual bad comprehension of both positivities, the thomist and the scotist, which perfectly know a dialectical concretion, as we shall see.

Those are divergences consequent of the two vectors already pointed out, which actualize themselves in the position more empirist and extroverted of Thomas Aquinas and in the position of Duns Scotus, more platonical and introverted, which accounts for a psychological explication to the controversy, allowing a dialetical conciliation by the concretion of the positivities, what we will do and demonstrate when the opportunity comes.

For Duns Scotus, therefore, the object of the metaphysics is the being in its metaphysical state, the pure essence.

The physicist would study the quidditas rei materialis, the quidditas of the material thing, the quidditas in re, while the metaphysician would study it in its metaphysical state, in quid.

The entitas, the entity, is the propriety of everything that possesses the being, in any sense and in any level; here a scotist maximum rule. The inteligibily (the capacity of being intelligible) always follows the entity. The being is the first object of the human intellect (this was the avicennian afirmative that Duns Scotus develops in its magistrals works). And as such, the intellect is able to know everything that "is", as long it is. Everybody comprehends the being when think the being. It is an adequate and proper object to the human intellect. And for being so, intelligible, as the same always, our knowledge so is "univocal".

But in what sense and what measure it is so, it is a theme, not only gnoseological but also ontological, that Duns Scot develops in marvellous pages of phlosophical subtlety in its most eminent sense. because it is not a subterfuge, a recourse, but a clearing of hues, which elevate the phylosophy to one of its highest tops.

Ii is the being the first in the reality. It is also the first notion which is conceived by our intellect, because every knowledge is a knowledge of the diversilly modified being. If to everything that we can attribute the being, the being is hereby univocally attributed, it is not, however, attributed in the same way to everything.

Everything that is intelligible includes the being, but includes it in two different ways: by virtue of the "primacy of the comunity of the being", and by virtue of the "primacy of the virtuality" of the being. The being is the first to everything that is common to it and to everything that it implicates. The being is atrributed as being of its essence.

But here are certain determinations of the being, which considered by themselves, are not the being, but only qualifies it. For example, act and potence are not beings, but in everything it is necessary both.

Act and potence are ultimate differences of the being (differentiae ultimae), while the "transcendentals", like the good, the true, and the beautiful are ultimate proprieties (propriae passiones entis). As to these differences that determinate the essence of the being qualifying it, the being is univocal only in relation to the primacy of the virtuality, because it implies them, while they, taken precisely as themselves, "are" not, as Gilson clarifies.

In this way, the being is not univocally predictable from its ultimate differences, because, if it was, they coudn't be its "differences", because they would essentially be the being and it would be necessary to add further determinations, which, not being univocally the being, would serve to differentiate it. As we can't back ad infinitum, there is, hence, the intelligible which is not directly the being, but is qualification, its determination. If they were univocals, and at the same time differents, we would fall to an absurd. And if so, we could only of the being that it is being, what would lead us to a total indetermination.

The concept of the being is a simple concept, because the being is only itself, therefore indefinable. To jump out of total indetermination, we would need a composed concept, a concept endowed with two concepts, forming a new unity. One would stay in front of another as in the relation of act and potence. One would represent the role of the determinant and the other of the determinable.

The concept of determinable is of the being that, by virtue of its universal community, doesn't contain by itself any determination: the potenciality. But for this determinable to fail being such, it requires a determinant, with which it composes itself, a determinant that is, by itself, as pure as that, but that immediatily is pure act, as that is immediatily potence. In this way, a concept that is not absolutely simple, must be combined and reductible to a determinable concept and to one determinant concept.

This resolution "must" stay in absolutely simple concepts, that is, an only determinable concept, that does not include anything of determinant, and an only determinant concept, that does not include any determinable concept.

The only determinable concept is the concept of being and the only determinant concept is the one of its ultimate difference. These are the concepts immediately distinct and one doesn't include the other: nulla differentia simpliciter ultima includit ens quidditative, quia est simpliciter simplex, (no only ultimal difference includes the quidditatively being, because it is simply simple).

Duns Scot calls concept simpliciter simplex the one that is not resoluble in multiple concepts, as the concept of being and the one of ultimate difference, he calls simplex the ones that can be redutible to diverse concepts, although concipi ab intellectu actu simplicis intelligentiae, although conceived by the intellect in a simple act of intelligence, as, for example, the concept of species.

If we have prolonged ourselves so far it was in order to show in what gound is the univocity of being founded upon to Duns Scot. We treat other aspects of this doctrine which suddenly invade the terrain of the being in the opportune places and works.

.....

From Mário Ferreira dos Santos's Teoria do Conhecimento (Theory of Knowledge)

The translation from portuguese is mine.