James Chastek, The Modern problem as a denial of categorical relation

There are widespread beliefs that a.) William of Ockham was a Nominalist and b.) The school of Ockham consisted in a denial of universals. One doesn’t need to get very far into the lit to figure out that both beliefs are false: “Nominalism” was a term invented by those who wanted to discredit a school and which Ockham never self-applied; and Ockham himself insists that there are veritable universals in the human mind. One is tempted to let Ockham off the hook in the celebrated controversy of the objectivity of thought, but in fact all that we have done is forgotten the original reason why the Ockhamist school was blamed for denying objectivity: its denial of categorical relations. All of the same lit that absolves Ockham of Nominalism and denial of universals confirms that he denied the real relations outside of the mind, and that everyone in his school held to this. But this is what the Thomists who fought against Ockham objected to, and they saw in his denial of real relations a denial of the objectivity of thought. As John of St. Thomas says:

[H]ow does the understanding form pure respects, if it has only absolute things or relations secundum dici as the pattern on which to form them? Relations formed by the understanding therefore will be mere figments, because they do not have in the order of being independent of cognition pure and true relations on whose pattern they are formed.

A note first: a relation secundum dici is something that is properly in the category of substance, quantity, quality, action or passion, but which is spoken of and understood with a certain relation to another. Man has an essential relation to society- even qua man- but man is not a relation, but a substance; a number has a relation to a unit, but a number is not a relation but a quantity, etc. In other words, if there were only relations secundum dici all relations would reduce to a category other than relation. Considered objectively and entitatively, therefore, all being would either be 1.) a subject, or 2.) something whose whole reality was being in a subject. For St. Thomas and the Thomists, there is a third possibility: there is an accident whose very existence is to be to another. The whole reality of this accident is not its being in a subject (this belongs to it only as an accident) but in its being towards another. Indeed, this “being to another” is exactly what is formal to it.

Notice that, if one denies the reality for this third sort of being, then all being is either subject X or something wholly existing to subject X. The sort of existence that is now called “intentional” is simply impossible. All reality either is a subject or points inward to its subject, and so we are left utterly befuddled how one would get to an object, or how any of our concepts or signs could refer to an object. All this sort of existence clearly points outward to another. Note carefully- and this is absolutely critical- signs need not be in the category of relation. This is why John of St. Thomas does not say that the signs or concepts are relations but that they are formed on the pattern of relation. But when we recognize the reality of categorical relation, the “problem of objectivity” becomes a non-sequitur, for it simply is not the case that all reality is exhausted either by subjects (like a mind) or things that wholly point inwards to that subject as modifications of it. Once we recognize the reality of relation as something we could use as a pattern to form a concept, asking how a mind gets to an object is like asking how a father gets to a son. Some reality is simply to another- and we do not invent this reality ad hoc to explain knowledge, rather we come to the problem of knowledge knowing that there is more to reality than a subject and its modifications.

Thus, while Ockham is not a Nominalist, nor does he deny that the mind has true universals, we Thomists still argue that his teaching on relations, if followed to its logical conclusion, leads directly (and almost immediately) to the celebrated modern problem of objectivity, and ultimately to the post-modern denial of the possibility of any non-arbitrary connection between signs and concepts on the one hand and reality on the other.

When we notice the significance of Ockham denying universals, we see more clearly why he is the father of the via moderna. After all, the soul of modern thought is not so much an explicit teaching on universals, but a struggling with the “problem of objectivity”. For we Thomists, this problem is not a pseudo-problem, or a “Cartesian turn” that caught everyone unaware with a deadly objection, or a mental illness that needs to get purged by backgammon, kicking a stone. Most of all, it’s not a problem that we explain away by saying that the objectivity of thought is just obvious or proved by some mysterious intuition of objectivity. Rather, the problem of objectivity is simply the inevitable consequence of the (usually tacit) belief that all that exists is either a subject, or something whose whole being is a modification of that subject. Sad anther way, it is a consequence of the (usually unproven) denial of the reality of categorical relations.