Welcome to the Problem of Universals

Look around you. Take inventory of your environment. Every specific thing you see is called a particular. Particulars are singular objects.

These particulars have qualities: length, width, height, texture, odor, color, and sound. So you see a blue couch and a blue hat. This is the only quality that these two particulars share. But since they share the color blue, does that mean that blue is necessary to have a couch? Is blue required to have a hat? If we remove blue, does that mean we no longer have a couch? If not, does that mean Blue-ness is something independent of a couch? If Blue is independent of couch, does that mean that Blue-ness is a particular, that it is a singular object? If Blue is a particular, where then is Blue-ness? You can put your finger on a couch, but touching blue poses a challenge. Does this mean that Blue-ness is not “real”?

Welcome to the Problem of Universals.

You walk down the road and meet Tom, Dick, and Harry. They are different in every particular–height, weight, color, sound, and smell–yet you know they are all men. What then is Man-ness?

How does Man know what Man-ness is? Is it something he forgot in preexistence and then “remembered” when he saw the particular? Did man identify the “essence” of Man-ness and then create a concept for the purpose of categorization? Or is Man-ness our idea of Man and we attached that name to a particular? Or maybe Man-ness is not attached to anything but is rather an arbitrary construct of the mind. These questions can be asked for anything: House vs House-ness, Horse vs Horse-ness, Cooking pot vs Cooking pot-ness. Seeking to understand the correct answer to the above questions is Philosophy’s central fight. It dates back to Plato and the Sophists. And when Aristotle arrived on the philosophical scene, he offered yet a third theory of Universals.

From 335 BCE Philosophy has been concerned with this fundamental divide in human knowledge. On one hand, Man has objects that he experiences that are singular, concrete, and particular. On the other hand, Man has “objects” of thought that are somehow conceptual and abstract. So Man has particulars and concepts. Or said another way, Man has Concretes and Universals.

How are particulars and universals related?

What part of existence is action, quantity, and mathematics?

The movement of a rock through the air seems to imply that there is a life force within the rock moving the rock. Or does it?

What of numbers, geometrical shapes, and equations? 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 is the number of sheep man has to eat before he has no food. It would be good then to keep the sheep inside a rectangle to keep them close at hand. So understanding the quantity 4 and the geometric shape of rectangle is tied to man’s survival. Yet these “things” seem to be completely separate from particulars, but somehow they are invaluable to understand existence.

How can Man validate his Universal knowledge if he can only have intimate knowledge of particulars by experience, i.e. by perception?

Sounds like a sticky wicket, right?

What is the answer?

Four answers have been offered in human history.

 

Extreme Realism

Heraclitus (535 – 475 BCE) said that the world was in endless flux, existence was disintegrated, and the Sophists (circa 5th century BCE) concluded that man can know nothing because everything was chaos.

Plato said this perspective was unacceptable and sought to offer an integration of Man and existence. In the Euthyphro, Socrates, asks for a definition of piety. (1) He makes a distinction between individual pious things, or pious actions, and the “idea itself.” He wants to look at piety so he can then apply what he sees to the actions of men. He wants to identify the concept piety to put his finger on it like a blue hat.

Plato offered this solution. What is “real” must possess unity and immutability. (You see that this is central to how he answers Heraclitus.) But then he said that the sensible world, this world, is made up of the contingent, the particular, and the unstable. (And you see that he conceded, at least on some level, Heraclitus’ premise.) The solution then is Plato’s development in philosophy. The “real” exists outside this world, or superior to the sensible world. Plato called the “real” the eidos or idea. The idea is immutable, existing independent of the material, changing world. So the idea is an entity, a particular, that correspond to human concepts. These ideas existed in the world of Forms. It is here that piety “exists.” What man views on earth is but a shadow of the model. And this is true for the whole of this world. Every particular is merely a reflection of the perfect model. So the world of Forms is the world of Universals.

But the question must arise how then does man observe a hat and know it is a hat? If this world is merely a shadow of a real world, how then does man know he has got the right universal applied to the right shadow of his existence?

Plato’s answer was that Man, before birth, had access to this real world. And then, sometime after birth, during an encounter with a chair–or a hat or a couch– man’s memory is inspired to remember what he forgot. This explanation is called Innate Ideas. Man innately understands the relationship between the shadow world particular and the perfect world Form. So it is a pre-existing consciousness that makes possible the translation of particulars to Universals.

Plato’s formulation for Universals remained until Christianity objected to the concept of pre-existence. The Christian theological solution was to adopt Plato’s theory of Universals and merely eliminate pre-existence. Man does not exist before birth, but at birth God grants general revelation such that man can have an intuitive or spiritual understanding of this super-naturalist world. So Christianity maintained innate ideas but shifted the source of innate ideas to the imputation of revelation. Christian theology maintained that Universals are objects in a “pure” reality, above human experience. This was a metaphysical necessity because the world of matter was infused with sin and corruption. The perfect transcendent world is the “real” world. The earthly material world is a false evil replica. Universals are real. This world of particulars is a vapor.

Plato’s theory of Universals is called Extreme Realism.

 

Moderate Realism

Aristotle started his philosophical life as a Platonist, fully committed to the whole of his mentor’s formulation. But some years later, after leaving the Plato’s school called the Academy, he saw fundamental flaws in Plato’s theory of Universals. His criticism was that Plato offered no explanation on why or how the world of Universals interacted with the world of particulars. Innate ideas (pre-existence or post existence) does not explain how the Universal’s “shadow” is cast into this world. This poses a central problem: If Plato’s theory is correct, then Universals are fully separate from the world of particulars, which means they are separate from the whole of human cognition.

Aristotle offered his own explanation to the problem of Universals. He said that only particulars exist, but Universals are real. Particulars exist, but Universals only exist in particulars. The distinction is that Universals are not things. They are not particulars, but rather the product of human cognitive integration; they are the foundational objects of conceptual thought.

Let us take a closer look at Aristotle’s formulation. Everything is particular, and it is concrete; everything is a “this.” The “this” has a certain nature, but it also shares characteristics with other “this,” and these characteristics are a “such.” Particulars exist as a metaphysical compound comprised of two elements: a primary substance and a secondary substance. The secondary substance is a “such.” The “such” is used for classification, and the classification is the universalizing element. Universals are the product of particulars and shared by all representatives of a class. So everything is comprised of an individualizing element and a universalizing element.

Aristotle used specific terms for these elements: For the particular, individuating element, he uses the term matter. This is the Greek word enérgeia, that is the English word energy and might be best understood as the potential or the possibility within the particular. The secondary substance of a particular is (borrowing from Plato) form. When Aristotle speaks of a particulars “form” he is identifying the ousía, which is a Greek word that means “essence” or “being.” (2 See Trinitarian note)

Aristotle further explained that action, motion, and quantity are specific to entities. It is important to grasp this point: Prior to Aristotle, the ancient world made no conceptual distinction between hat and hat-ness, or blue and blue-ness, or big and big-ness. So to ask an ancient Greek philosopher, “Do you still have a blue hat if you remove blue from the hat?” and he would respond with no, because the blue and the hat are, in his mind, both synonymous. The Greeks may have made common sense distinctions in day-to-day life, but action, motion, quantity, color, and temperature, et cetera, were synonymous with the particular. So Aristotle’s formulation was a profound metaphysical and epistemological shift. In The Categories, he takes great pains to make the distinction between the particular and attributes. Aristotle’s conclusion: There was no such thing as action for action’s sake, or motion for motion’s sake, or number for number’s sake. There is no such thing as walking unless something is walking. There is no such thing as breathing unless something is breathing. There is no such thing as big unless something is big. There was no such thing as blue unless something was blue. There is no such thing as 5 or 500 without 5 or 500 something. Aristotle’s conclusion was that change, motion, and quantity are names for what entities do.

Notice how this contrasts with two of Aristotle’s predecessors. For those who heard my 2013 TANC presentation, they will remember Heraclitus and the Heraclitian flux. Matter is always changing. The stuff of existence is always changing. It has no form. You cannot step into the same river twice. And so it is with the whole of existence. Everything is becoming. It can be said that Heraclitus had a world of matter without form, leaving man adrift in an ocean of chaos.  And to answer Heraclitus, Plato introduced a world of Forms divorced from matter, so he as form without matter, leaving man adrift in an ocean of chaos.

Aristotle’s solution is to integrate existence into a comprehensible whole. His foundational formulation said that matter must always be accompanied with form. It was this dual compound that man encountered in reality. Man’s means of correctly identifying the reality he perceived followed from the following axioms: The law of Identity, the Law of Non Contradiction and the Law of the Excluded Middle.

The Law of Identity in Aristotle’s words:

 If, however, [a definition .e.g. Man, Horse, A] were not limited but one were to say that the word has an infinite number of meanings, obviously reasoning would be impossible; for not to have one meaning is to have no meaning, and if words have no meaning our reasoning with one another, and indeed with ourselves, has been annihilated; for it is impossible to think of anything if we do not think of one thing; . . .

The Law of Non Contradiction in Aristotle’s words:

 It is impossible, then, that ‘being a man’ should mean precisely not being a man, [ . . .] And it will not be possible to be and not to be the same thing, [. . . ] but the point in question is not this, whether the same thing can at the same time be and not be a man in name, but whether it can be in fact.

The law of the Excluded Middle in Aristotle’s words:

 But on the other hand there cannot be an intermediate between contradictories, but of one subject we must either affirm or deny any one predicate. This is clear, in the first place, if we define what the true and the false are.

It is from this point that all effective human cognition flows: all fundamentals of logic, all of man’s conceptual capacity, all of man’s reason, and–most importantly–man’s capacity to grasp the world in which he lives. Existence is comprised of primary substances or particulars exhibiting their nature. The particulars possess qualities; action is a product of their nature in relationship to all other particulars. A is A, and man is a rational animal whose primary means of integrating the world is through reason.

But man’s means of knowledge extends beyond the merely perceptual. Man’s knowledge expands in direct proportion to his Universal knowledge. Conceptual knowledge (Universals) makes possible propositional knowledge.

The primary form of propositional knowledge is deductive reasoning: a + b = c. Aristotle called this a syllogism.

For example: All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

Implied in propositional knowledge is inductive reasoning: All S = P.

For example: All living creatures are mortal, therefore all men will be mortal.

The power of induction is the ability to generalize without having to encounter every member of a class. The result is that Man’s knowledge was virtually limitless because he, through deduction and induction, can integrate his existence into an ever-expanding grasp of concepts through the identification of Universals.

Aristotle’s theory means that Universals are a product of the process of abstraction. Abstraction is by definition a process, specifically, the iterative process of deduction and induction. Universals are the outcome of the integration of perceptual knowledge with conceptual knowledge. Universals are a product of human cognition.

(This is why the validity of reason and perception become central to the philosophical debate in Western thought through the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment. The Rationalists said that Reason was effective, but the senses were suspect. The Empiricist said that the senses were effective, but reason was suspect.)

Aristotle’s view of Universals is called Moderate Realism. This implies that it is a mediated variation on Plato or a middle position between Plato and something else, or a lesser “realism.” This stems from Saint Thomas Aquinas impact on this category of Universals. It is my understanding that it was Aquinas that formulated the “moderate” position because he wanted to blend Aristotelian thought with the Church’s Platonism. So technically, this could be called Thomisitic Realism.

I would offer that this is an unfortunate label by which Aristotelian Realism is subsumed. Strictly speaking, Aristotle’s theory of Universals is based on a “real” existence in direct contrast to Plato’s shadow world and the world of Forms. So, Aristotle is the true advocate of Realism, but I’m a few hundred years late to seriously impact this label. Therefore, I will have to be content to call this position Moderate Realism.

 

Nominalism

The medieval world was a slurry of contradictions because conceptually, man had regressed almost to the point of animism. (Animism is the belief that trees and rocks posses an interior force, an interior life that causes them to move through the air when thrown.) The medieval world was dominated by demons and devils and ruled by superstitions. With Plato’s world of Forms at the philosophical base of Augustinian doctrine, a world ruled by a cosmology of archangels, cherubim, seraphim, angles, demons all engaged in a heavenly war, whose fate were determined by the Virgin Mary’s intercession to her crucified son Jesus made perfect sense. The chair man perceived might be a chair, but it might also be a demon in the shape of a chair who sought to beguile the weak to take their ease and find pleasure in sitting. The people dying with black patches of skin might be God’s “goodness” visited on sinful man, or it might be a disease brought on by rats.

Who can know which is which?

No mere mortal can know these things. Only those called of God to lead the sheep to eternal life can know the truth. It was the job of these mediators to stand between the transcendent world and this world of torment, pain, and death: to translate the world of God’s Universals for the ignorant masses. But such a world stands in direct contrast to a world of identity, e.g., particulars that act in accord with their nature. So when Saint Thomas Aquinas reintroduced Aristotle into Western thought, the medieval world encountered the first substantive objection to the cosmology that ruled everything.

The Law of Identity and its corollary, the Law of Non Contradiction, means that there can be no contradiction. If A is A, then A cannot also be B. Or if a chair is a chair, it cannot also be a demon. But in a world ruled by angles and demons, A MUST also equal B. To have Demons in the shape of chairs, or gargoyles aligning churches to frighten the evil spirits from the chancel, the Church needed a justification for contradictions. And this is exactly why nominalists sought to banish Universals from the philosophical equation.

After the reintroduction of Aristotelian thought into the philosophical conversation, the medieval theologians were confronted with the implicit or explicit contradictions between reality and Christian doctrine. The central criticism of Aristotelian thought was that it was too formal, too “cold” that it led man to restrict God’s existence. The enduring appeal of Plato’s Forms was that a Form could be different from the object of experience. This was, in essence, the foundation of Augustinian Theology: the whole of reality was interpreted through the prism of the crucified Jesus. And it was for this reason that Aristotle was such a direct threat to the whole of medieval thought. The answer to Plato’s world of Forms (and the answer to Augustine’s cosmological structure) had already been achieved. Aristotelians had ready answers.

In the 13th century, a new theory of Universals arose. Its leading champion was William of Ockham (1295-1349). The solution to the problem was to wipe out universals qua universals. Nominalists insist that only particulars exist. Man perceives particulars, but only the “brute” fact. Universals are not perceivable—man has no means of abstraction—therefore they do not exist. Man does not see a hat or a couch. He merely thinks of a picture of a hat or a couch. There is no hat-ness or couch-ness. By contrast, God is omnipotent; his power in every realm is absolute. He has no moral or existential obligation to conform to mere human cognition. He owes no man a justification for anything; therefore, God can make contradictions real.

It was at this point in Western history that Christianity accepted the Muslim premise that GOOD is whatever God wills it to be. The logic seemed sound: If there are no universals, and only brute fact, man had no ability to identify contradictions. Whatever man saw as a contradiction was merely a product of his metaphysical inability. God could make whatever he wants, to be whatever he wants, whenever he wants it. So in modern Christian parlance, “God is good all the time. All the time God is good.”

Have you ever heard John Piper say something to the effect: “Whatever God does is Good?” or “If one molecule is out of God’s control, he is not sovereign.” Or “Good is whatever God says it is?” These are the bumper sticker version of William of Ockham’s nominalism. Man should not judge the moral value of circumstance because he cannot fathom universals like virtue or good or evil. Man is limited to his perceptions. Full stop. The conceptual, the universal, is the province of God alone.

This rebellion against Universals (of the Platonic or Aristotelian kind) could have been short-lived had the proponents of nominalism remained committed to validating Christian mysticism. And for a brief period, during the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, it seemed that Aristotelian Realism (Moderate Realism) was going to prevail. But John Locke (1632-1704), a British Empiricists, introduced nominalism into the philosophical discussion in the name of reason.

It will be no surprise that Locke was heavily influenced by William of Ockham. He began his metaphysical discussion with Ockham’s premise: “All our knowledge [is] about external sensible objects, or about the internal operations of our minds.” Locke defined an “idea” as merely being an image, or a picture, and these ideas are individual and concrete. The word Nominal comes from the Latin word nomina which means picture or puffs of air; hence, the name of this category of Universals is called Nominalism.

Locke argued that: “The mind makes the particular ideas received from particular objects to become general.” So, for instance, there is no difference between a horse and a statue of a horse. Locke developed a distinction between “nominal essence,” e.g. the nature of things, and “real essence,” the real nature of things. The dividing line between these two “essence” was man’s grasp of each. Man has a limited grasp of the nominal essence but no grasp of “real” essence.

Locke considered himself an advocate of reason, and historically, he is seen as a champion of human cognition. However, his formulation was not a consistent defense of reason. Indeed, it laid the first foundation for its subsequent invalidation. And a man named Bishop Berkeley wasted no time in mounting an effort to further invalidate Man’s conceptual faculty. Bishop Berkeley (1685-1753) took William of Ockham’s premise that God could “sovereignly” create whatever he wanted, however he wanted and then sought to eliminate what he saw as the real problem in the discussion of Universals. The real problem was a material world.

Berkeley’s logic followed like this: If there is no material reality then it does not matter what man knows because there is nothing to know. The “pictures,” the nomina, of particulars in the minds of men are merely images of divine imputation. The only reality is the transcendent reality, perfectly governed by a transcendent God. No longer were people of faith to be tripped up over contradictions. Bishop Berkeley removed contradictions because there was no material world. Whatever man saw was imputed by divine intent.

The third and final nail in the Realist coffin was hammered in by David Hume (1711-1776). Hume took Locke and Berkeley’s formulation to the logical conclusion: man cannot epistemologically identify a “necessary cause” between perception and conception. The result was absolute: there is no such thing as deductive or inductive reason because man cannot perceive causation between particulars. The pictures in man’s mind are merely convenient conventions, but they are tied to nothing. They are less than puffs off air.

And it is in this fashion that Hume “solved” the problem of Universals and their relationship to reality. Or maybe better said, the problem is now merely a psychological question.

What delusion motivates man to turn mere sensation, of a world that does not exist, into a concept?

 

Conceptualism

It was to answer the question above (among others) that inspired Immanuel Kant to enter the field of philosophy.

Metaphysically, Conceptualism is the same as Nominalism. They both banish reality to an unknowable realm. Berkeley said that there was no reality unless it was perceived. Kant said there was a noumenal world and man could never know “things in themselves.” At the root, they both metaphysically agree. But the conceptualists have a psychologistic theory that attributes what man “sees” in reality as merely structures imposed by man’s preconscious mind to create reality, i.e, the phenomenal world. In sum, Universals are the internal mechanisms of human cognition, or universals are concepts.

Let me back up a tick and give you an example. Conceptualism made some brief appearances throughout history before its formal presentation in Kant. Zeno, (Circa 450 BCE) postulated that sensation was the principle form of knowledge and thought was merely collective sensation. Zeno explained the dynamic this way: Hold the hand out with fingers separated. This represents the multiple sensations bombarding human experience. Now close the hand into a fist. This limits the sensation into one concept. The only way to return to the sensation was to open the hand. The moment the fist closes, the concept is no longer attached to the external world that created the sensation. The result is that Man can never know if his sensations have any real value. He can only know the concept in his mind.

Kant’s conceptualism merely dispenses with the hand and the fist. He divides existence between the noumenal world and the phenomenal world. Man can never know the “real” world. The world of Man’s creation is the world of concepts applied to whatever conventions man chooses. Kant thought this an obvious conclusion since some thought structures are imposed on the human psyche. There is nothing “natural” about an automobile. Such a construct is obviously an object of human conception for fully human purposes. Can it really be said that there is a Platonic Form of an automobile? Is this how man is to conceptualize the objective existence of the abstraction automobile?

Further, concepts like space and time, the medium in which man frames perceptions, seem to defy being obtained by experience. It seems obvious that such “universals” are the product of self-imposed representations that are created by our mental organization. Kant took great pains to then apply the above logic across all categories of knowledge. In much the same way that Time and Space are constructs, the whole of science is merely the data created by the structural categories of the human mind. Its value is only for our consciousness, but it has no relationship to the world outside us.

The result was that Man has no justification for identifying a correspondence between the noumenal world (things in themselves) and the phenomenal world (the world of Man’s creation). Universals have no contact with external things, since they are produced exclusively by the structural functions (a priori forms) of our mind.

 

 

Now, I suspect that what is conspicuously absent from this article is the always unique John Immel perspective. Many of you will read this far and the question that will leap to mind is “What is the point?”

In this instance, the point is informational. You, dear reader, need to know this foundation. I encourage you all to read and re-read this article. The Problem of Universals is central to the whole philosophical arena.

I will let you, dear reader, ponder the implications of each solution to the problem of Universals. Here are the four categories in summary.

1. Platonist (aka extreme realists) – Abstractions exist as real entities. They are archetypes from an “other” worldly reality. What man perceives is an imperfect reflection of the archetypes. But man’s perceptions inspire man to remember the Form that they knew before birth, .e.g., innate ideas.
2. Aristotle’s heirs (aka Moderate Realists) – Abstractions exist in reality, but they exist only in concretes. The Universal is merely the metaphysical essence, and our concepts refer to this essence.
3. Nominalists say that our ideas are only images of concretes, and those abstractions are merely names which man gives to arbitrary groupings of particulars because they vaguely resemble each other. (Christians are nominalists, right?)
4. Conceptualists accept the nominalist position: Abstractions have no basis in reality. BUT Man holds concepts in our minds. Concepts “exist” in our minds but not in reality.

 

 

*   *   * *

(1) Point of clarification: Plato used fake dialogues, typically with Socrates as the hero, to make his points. So while Socrates is talking, Plato is the author of the dialogue.

(2) Trinitarian note

I didn’t want to take a detour in the middle of the article, but I also didn’t want to let this specific factoid pass. It is Aristotle’s use of ousía that is the foundation for the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. You will remember that he used the word ousía to describe the essence of a thing, the true substance of an existent.

The famous Christian fight over the doctrine of the Trinity began in 325 AD. This fight took almost 50 years to resolve, mostly because until 325 the “orthodox” position was that Jesus proceeded from the Father but was not co-equal with the Father. They were two different beings and the son was subordinate to the father. Again, this was the “orthodox” position that was considered fully validated by proof texts and tradition (aka orthodoxy). However, this opened a can of theological worms. To solve the theological problem, the opposing view, the Homo ousia faction, insisted that Jesus and the Father were of the same substance, i.e., homo ousia. And now you know where they got their mental framework. They specifically used Aristotelian metaphysics as the foundation of Christian doctrine. The doctrinal conflict of co-equality was really a philosophical debate centered in the problem of Universals.

The case could be made that without Aristotle’s specific metaphysical argument, the doctrine of the Trinity founded in 325 AD would not exist.

Well, it took Aristotle AND Constantine’s threat of summary execution to create the doctrine of the Trinity. But hey, pagan influence and government force have always been at the center of Christian doctrine.

 

Editorial note:

During my research for this article, I struggled to identify the leading advocates of Conceptualism. I often saw them referred to as either nominalists or conceptualists. For example, some articles discussed William of Ockham as one of the early proponents of nominalism, and then other articles insisted that he was among the earliest advocates of conceptualism. Another example is Immanuel Kant. Elements of Kant’s formulation are as nominalistic as David Hume’s, but Kant’s conclusion is that Man makes up his own phenomenal world. He creates his world out of whole conceptual cloth. I even read one commentator that said Kant was not a conceptualist all the while discussing his conceptualism and parsing distinctions that were little more than implicit contradictions.

What then does this all mean?

Does this mean that conceptualism is a subset of nominalism?

Are the two definitions so ambiguous as to cause confusion? This seems very likely, since having a theory of definitions in a nominal world poses a specific challenge.

Can it be that conceptualism is a class of its own? But then how can people refer to classification once they reject Aristotelian Realism?

I found it tough to tell the difference betwixt the two positions because they metaphysically overlap. I found it a challenge to summarize the two positions in such a manner that they were distinctive. Nominalists say that only particulars exist and then use the invalidation of universals to invalidate the whole of reality. Conceptualists say that there are no particulars and then use the invalidation of particulars to invalidate the whole of reality.

So what then is the real difference? I think I identified the root distinction between the two positions.

Does reality exist?

The Nominalists and Conceptualist both say no, there is no external material reality, but Conceptualists say that man can make one up.