← Classical Stuff You Should Know
Classical Stuff You Should Know
292: Nominalism and William of Ockham
00:58:24
That's just, like, your opinion, man.
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A
Hello, and welcome to Classical Stuff youf Should Know, a podcast about books and classical stuff and things you should know. My name is Thomas Magbee. I am joined, as always, by Mr. Graham Donaldson.
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B
Hello.
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A
And Mr. A.J. hannenberg.
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C
That's me.
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A
And today we're talking about one of my favorite things from growing up.
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B
Oh, my word.
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A
I. I always looked forward to when the book fair would come to school and that we would get. They would open up the books, we'd look around and we'd say it was probably like 30 books. It's nothing huge. But it always felt to me like just. It was like a carnival. Right. Being brought out. We're talking about the Scholastic Book Fairs.
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B
We were talking about the Scholastic Book.
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A
Fairs, and I'm very excited. Do people still do those? Is that still, like. Veritas doesn't do that?
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B
No, we do have a book fair. We have a book fair.
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A
Does Scholastic come out?
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B
No. No.
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C
It's.
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B
I don't know, canon or press or. Wait, really?
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And they come and show their books.
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C
Yeah, we fill the Lyceum up.
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A
That's super cool.
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B
And the kid. And the kids.
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A
We didn't used to do that.
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B
We didn't used to do that. Yeah, it's recent.
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A
That's awesome. That's really cool.
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B
No, we are not talking about this classic book fair, but we are talking about one of the debates that tore the Middle Ages apart. One of the philosophical debates. Actually. It is an important philosophical debate for our times, gentlemen. It's not just a scholastic thing of the Middle Ages. Although it does start there. Okay, cool. But this is. How do we perceive reality. Oh, my God. And make sense of the world around us? I swear, it's. It's important.
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C
Eyeballs, right?
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B
Yeah. Okay, so there are. So we're going to be talking about. Not so much about a William of Ockham. William of Ockham is the guy who's associated with sort of starting this. What's known as nominalism. And most people know William.
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C
I'm not gonna lie. Nominalism sounds like.
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B
Like a cat eating something.
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C
So boring.
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B
What?
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C
Oh, I just. It's just the name of it. And I, like. I don't know. I have no reference.
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A
It's like a culinary thing. It's like nom nom. Like, you're.
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B
Like you're eating like AJ Is doing right now.
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C
Nominal. Doesn't that also mean, like, it's running just fine?
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B
No, nominal means you talk about things in nomina. You give names to things. This is what it means.
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C
Let's get into it.
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B
You like it. But, AJ how do you know William of Ockham? The only thing that people remember of William of Ockham is the shaving gun. That's right. So he's part of the grand philosophical tradition of William of Ockham and Mr. Galette and Mr.
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C
The other razors Schick. And so nominal does mean something very small or trifled, which is, I think, why this sounds boring to me. Right? Like.
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A
But in nominal, it's not.
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B
I will try to make it important. Okay, before we get into that, let's do a little review. Plato and Aristotle, they, when it came to understanding reality and. And knowing things, they are in a school of thought that often gets called as realism because they believed that things, the categories of things, existed. So Plato believed in the theory of the forms, and the theory of the forms was that there is a. A formness of something that exists metaphysically somewhere in some other place. So, A.J. your bucket of hummus that is sitting in front of you, we. It is hummus, but because it is participating in the form of hummus, and that form of hummus is itself a real thing. In fact, play would say it's an even more real thing than that hummus. The chair you're sitting on, we know it as chairs because it has the form of chair, and the form of the chair exists in some sort of metaphysical realm where the forms of chairs exist. And even those forms are subcategory forms of the form of the good. If this is confusing to you, we've talked. We've talked about Platonism in other podcasts. This is. That is a hard question or an extreme version of this realism, that there's a world of the forms, that things exist. Aristotle has a softer version, but he still has a formal idea to things, that there's something that exists in the chair that is universal, a form of the chair. It may not exist in some sort of like, metaphorical repository of forms floating out in the ether somewhere, but we call it chair because there's something about it that has a chair ness to it. And that chairness is real human beings. We know a human person. So AJ Is a man because he participates in manliness.
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C
Darn right.
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B
That he there is the. He has the form of man inside of him, right? And so this ended up being the basis for all sorts of things. In Western philosophy. There was a form of government, there was a form of ethics we call something good or bad because it participates in the form of the good. Virtue is, there is a realness to justice, there is a realness to courage. And those things exist independent of their accidental, not accidental. Independent of their individual things. They participate in the formus. Are we. We tracking. I don't want to gloss this because we've talked about this before, and I want to get to the other stuff.
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C
We're great.
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B
We're good. Okay.
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A
Yep.
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B
And eventually. So this is a way of thinking about the world that sort of has a. An abstraction quality to it that Western philosophy, when it is describing reality, can say that the things that we observe in reality can be abstracted to a schema in our brains that we can. We can think about. Plato says it exists in, like, the metaphysical realm. Aristotle says that it exists within the actual structure, body of the thing. But they have this universal to them, and that's how we can understand things. So if you came across. So if we discovered a new continent and we came across this, like, species that came up to us and they were walking and they, like, raised their hands and waved and they said, hey, how's it going? We would say we would spend some time trying to figure out if they were men. And we would say they are. And they participate in the form of man. They are as much men as any other man, and they are part of the form of man. This is. This is foundational. Plato, Aristotle, realism, William of Ockham. Pardon me, I'm losing my voice a little bit. William of Akin comes in and he says, all of that is just made up.
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C
Cool.
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B
It doesn't exist. Only individual things exist. Universals like man or chair or red or, you know, justice. You know, universals are just the names we give to things we see in the world. They don't exist outside of the realm of human ideas. And so this. So Occam's razor is don't over complicate things. Basically, are you. You Things don't need to be explained through more. If you can explain something through less complicated means, that is the way you should explain it. It's often paraphrased as the simplest idea or the simplest explanation is the. Is the best. And there's something to that. But it's. His razor is much more formal in that if something doesn't need a more complicated explanation, we should not do that complicated explanation. So very basically, he says that a universal concept of human being doesn't exist. A universal concept of justice doesn't exist, A universal concept of triangle doesn't exist. Or all we have is just the individual things that we see. And then we as human beings, in order to try to make sense of the world. We give names to these things, nomina, which is why it's called nominalism, to help explain stuff. So in other words, so, like, names are just. What does he say? Yeah, we're basically just as human beings, we are pattern recognition machines. We recognize patterns, and then we make generalizations and abstractions to those patterns and claim that they are universals of those patterns. But in reality, all we are doing is just. Just describing the phenomena, the patterns, the pattern, the similarities exist. But the schema that we use, the maps that we create with our words to describe reality, are just inventions. They don't exist in reality. This is sort of nominalism in a nutshell. We tracking.
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A
Yes.
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B
Any thoughts so far?
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A
I have a lot of questions about what exist means in this question.
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B
That's fine. That's fine. A lot of this relies on God.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Okay.
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C
So we're talking. We're talking like it's not just names of individual things, but when we slump something into a category. So when I see something with three sides, I say, that's a triangle, because it has things that I recognize. And it's not just. So we're talking names of categories as well. Not just like or qualities, names, just categories.
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B
Yes. All we have is just the individual thing.
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C
But didn't Aristotle also talk about categories, like.
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B
Yeah, and he's so. William of Ockham has. And I had to read it in undergrad, and I swear I never would again. William of Ockham has a long response to Aristotle's categories, which is as. Now, that is about as fun as it sounds. It is not. It is not an enjoyable, enjoyable read, unless you're really into this. But he debunks the categories. He says that it is an over complication. It is, actually. William of Aachen says that the universalization of things into categories is too much of a simplification. So he says, okay, we go and we look at that oak tree outside and we say, we know it is an oak tree because it participates in the form of oak tree. But William of Ockham says that oak tree's existence has so much other relational aspects to it that we don't need to have universal forms to describe it. And in fact, we would have to almost universalize everything. That oak tree has a special orientation to the sun. It has its own soil structure. It has its relationship with the other plants around it. That oak tree also has a relationship with the animals and birds that live in it that are eating or not eating its acorns. It has the, like the temperature of the atmosphere. It has all, all of these things work upon the oak tree to create that own individual tree itself. It is not participating in some grand category of oak tree. It is its own thing that is like, that is in relationship with everything else around it. And so what William of Ockham is trying to do is he is trying to avoid the problem of universals, which says, okay, well that oak tree participates in, in the form of oak tree, in the form of green, in the form of soil, in the form of sunshine, in the form. It's like it's participating in these universalized forms of all of these categories. William R. Says, those are just words we're using to describe that thing. But they're not category. They don't exist in and of themselves. They're just inventions of the human mind.
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C
Isn't he burning the porch he's sitting on? How can he talk about anything? He is making generalizations and talking about categories.
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B
Yeah, he's saying, how can he do that? He says, that's fine.
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C
This is what we do.
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B
But you. This is just what we do. In order to make sense of the world, we just give names to it as part of our God given rational faculties, but they don't exist.
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C
So he's. But the names like generalizations and individual things, like he is using a lot of those names even as he talks. So how can he use that name?
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B
So language is.
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C
So he is basically saying, everything I'm writing is nonsense.
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B
No, he's saying that everything that we use is just words to try to describe our experience. And so this. You're getting onto the central problem of nominalism, which is like, how do individual people communicate? And he says, and how does he.
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C
Communicate his ideas, expecting that they'll have any connection with reality if reality does not connect with the words?
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B
We understand the words. Reality exists. There are individual things exist. That tree does exist. And it's just that tree is, does not exist also as a universal of tree. There's not something in that tree that is the universalness of tree.
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C
So how can we say tree?
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Because it's similar to other trees.
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C
So there's the universal.
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B
No, it's not. It's. We just describe things in terms of similarities.
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A
It's not a universal. It's like you've seen a thousand trees in your life and you have.
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B
We have created in our minds a category of trees.
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C
So is he contending directly with. With Plato's forms?
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B
Because. Yes. Yeah. Yes, yes.
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C
Okay. He's not, not necessarily Aristotle who's seemingly saying the same thing.
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B
He even goes after Aristotle because he, I think, would even question the idea of form, of tree.
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C
But form, meaning, category, category.
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B
But it's just a human invention.
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C
But if we're describing a thousand trees we've seen, we're putting them in a category that we are treating.
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B
We are inventing the category of tree. Yeah, but that category does not exist somewhere.
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C
Aristotle was. The categories themselves existed somewhere else.
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B
Not even exist in somewhere else. They. They maybe all exist in the tree. Plato has this, like, idea that there's like a big vat of forms, a.
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C
Big separate thing, which is kind of ridiculous.
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Aristotle just says you. If you want to think about it molecularly, like Aristotle says, everything inside of it has a form that. That produces it into the. Into the tree. And it's something spiritual or metaphysical.
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And.
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And then that's the form of the tree.
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Okay, so Occam is saying it's not metaphysical.
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Occam does say that metaphysical things exist. He just says that there's no universal categories.
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C
Okay. I mean, if he's just saying, like, we're just using descriptors to talk about things that have certain traits, like, I'm fully on board.
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B
Yes. Now, the problem is, is. Is that all you can do with Occam is when you say, like, do, like every person we meet, how can we say that they are a human being? Well, he says, well, they are similar to the human beings that we've seen. And so theoretically, like, you could come across somebody that presented as a human being, but is in fact not a human being, but tricks you. And you think they're a human being when really they're not a human being. But it's just because they're so similar to human being. William would say that we. The only reason you're thinking is this is because you're thinking in terms of categories, not in terms of. Of individuals. Individuality.
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C
Does he. So he says there's no category, no category of man.
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You just have individuals. And we've categorized them.
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C
Commonality. So even if. With similarities is what he says, even if something acts. Grows like similarly and can mate with things of the similar category, he says there's no category of.
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B
We would say that isn't. That is an individual. And that is. And we would. He even says that is an individual man. But it is not. But there is no universal category of man.
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C
If we're talking about metaphysical. I'm so angry at him. Yeah, it seems like, awesome.
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B
Let me see if I can get some other. So there's. In other words, there's no objective reality behind words. Is.
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C
That's not fair then this is my point. How is he talking like.
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B
So William of Ockham has to. Has to rest everything. He couches everything on God's will. So. And this is where once people stop believing in God, nominalism kind of devolves into just sort of like solipsism power games. But William Bakkem doesn't go there. William of Akim says that like God doesn't think. God doesn't have universal concepts of humanity. God has created each individual thing. A.J. thomas and Graham. And he has created us. And we are similar, but we're different. We're individuals and we don't all participate in one thing. We are individual things. And he has individual relationships with each of us. And God has individual relationships with each and everything that he's made. He doesn't have relationship with humanity. He has relationship with individual and the cat. And the universal categories of humanity do not exist. And they don't exist as in God's mind. All that exists is the real individual thing. And we as human beings, in order to try to have relationship with one another and make sense of the world, we bring language to things to try describe, to try to understand individuals. But. But so he would kind of deny laws of nature. And.
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C
Yeah, this feels like distinction without a difference to me when I say Jesus died for all men's sins. I know he doesn't have a relationship with all humanity. Each of like he is dying for each individual's sins.
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B
Correct.
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C
Which is I think what Occam is pointing out. But that's what I mean anyway. Like, I mean that there's a bunch of individuals who all have similar qualities and Jesus died for all of them. Like, it seems like he is trying to say, no, it's this different thing. But that's what we mean when we talk about man is like a lot of people with similar qualities.
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B
Now the thing is, Occam is trying to hedge against problems that arise from having too much of this schematic thinking of the world. Too much. If we. So this is the. The problem with the hyperrealism of Plato and Aristotle is that you can begin to think the map is the territory. Because what we are doing when we observe the world around us is we are categorizing things into categories to make sense, to be able to. To describe things to one another and makes. And to understand things. Oh, that plant is a tree. And I recognize it and understand it as other trees. And I can therefore apprehend that tree through putting it into these categories. This is all fine, well and good, but there is an extreme that can come when you begin to. To have. Schematize the entire world. It can sort of like a hyper realism can turn into like almost a. A control over nature. You. You apprehend things in order that you can have control over things, you can manipulate things. And this is what William tree.
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C
So I can burn it.
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B
That is a tree. So I know what it is. And because I know what it is, I can manipulate it to my own desires. Okay. Okay. Whereas William of Ockham comes in. He introduces a. Like a. Not a seed of doubt, but he introduces a humility to the world. This is often how Occam is phrased, is that he introduces hum. The world where it's like that tree is similar to other things that you've seen. But you can't. Your attempt to apprehend the tree using formal schema to put the tree into a category could be wrong. And if you are wrong in that, you could be like thinking the tree is something when it is in fact not. And then you could actually be misusing the tree. Right. We could. There could be more to the formal idea of what a tree is that we don't realize. And so we. So the problem is like if, if we go back to Aristotle. So Aristotle has this view of like some. Let's use the most controversial Aristotelian view that he has. And he says some people are natural leaders and some people are natural slaves. This is an Aristotelian thing he puts in book one of politics. And so Aristotle has this view that there are. There is a form of the human soul that is for command, and that's a type of person. And there's a form of a human soul that is for following and that is a type of person. And if you look at that, if you look at the world and say, like, yeah, I kind of see that around me. There's some people with A type personalities and some people that are more B type personalities. And maybe Aristotle's right. And there's these two kinds of people. And that is the formal reality of the human person. You can now be using that schema. You can now be using that map that you've created about humanity. And you could be functioning out of that map and you could be doing something that is in fact not in. That is like maybe violent to human beings. Occam comes in and says, all you have is the individual person in front of you. And as soon as you start putting them into categories, you are maybe like disembodying them from the, the, the, the totality of their context to put them into a category through which then you can either you end up maybe misusing, you disregard them, or you are just flat out wrong. So if, if in the, if the Platonic and the Aristotelian had this concept of like, you use things to try to apprehend reality so that you could understand it, manipulate it, organize it. William of Akram is often associated with. We are trying to comprehend the individual reality of every individual thing. It does end up sounding a little woo woo and it is a little like Eastern mysticism. It's like that tree is not an oak tree. That tree is that thing right there that has a lived history that has like it's, it has its, the, its own unique context that exists. The thing we call a triangle doesn't exist. We have two pieces of wood and a stone wall that is creating that shape on the side of that cathedral that is like, you know, unique to this place, space, time. And if God has a relationship with triangles, he has a relationship to that individual structure, not the abstracted category of triangle. This is what William of AAM is saying.
- [21:52]
A
Thoughts so far makes sense.
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B
We may sort of shift, we're going to shift gears towards the problems with both these in a bit, but I want to make sure we like lay this groundwork.
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A
I think you have explained it because. Yeah, you're going to get into an issue of then like, how do you. Okay, I'm going to see two trees in my life. Like what can I say? Nothing about those two things other than my own experience with them.
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B
Now the thing, this is the problem. What you. All you can do is you can speak about them. The words that you use to talk about the similarities of the trees are just your own comprehensions of those individual trees. And our desire to make patterns is natural. And in fact, William of Ockham says it's even good. It's the way that we communicate with each other. But it's not reality, it's not real. It's just words we use to ascribe to things.
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C
But that's, that's bothersome because like when we're talking about creatures, certain creatures can mate and other creatures can't.
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B
Yep. So there's biological realities for sure that then this is a problem for nominal.
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C
Doesn't that bring a category? I can look at an oak tree and oak trees will survive in certain places. Like yes, I'm Describing a trait. But I can't take an oak tree and plant it in the North Pole and be like, good luck, bud. Like, it's. I cannot approach everything with mystery like that.
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B
I think William of Ockham would say when, like, two dogs mate and they produce puppies, that's happened. That is what has happened to these individual creatures so far. But it isn't. They are not part of some universal.
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C
Category, but enable to mate, like, to enable them to make puppies, they kind of have to be in a category.
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B
So this is a pro. So, like, the fact that the world does seem to follow laws. There are laws of nature seems to be a point against nominalism that, like, certain structures of chemicals will do the same thing every time, and therefore they are following a form in a law. William of Ockham would say they have done the same thing every time so far.
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C
So am I just supposed to live like anything could happen at any moment and not depend on anything? So I think that's what he wants.
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B
I don't know if that's what he wants. It's what he does. What it's more like what he's trying to avoid. He's trying to avoid sort of like that. What we just sort of talked about, that as soon as you begin to categorize something, you can. Begin to sort of put it. You can limit its individual natures to be in its categories. So like, is AJ More than just the form of man, is he. There's all like.
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C
But he's already expressing categories, like individual natures. He's using words like.
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B
He wouldn't say that there's human nature. Human beings don't have natures. So just individual things.
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C
This is my frustration with him, is like, then how am I supposed to interact with the world? Because the way that we know, one of the ways that our brains function is to categorize. And yes, I think he's right about that. We see similarities, we categorize, but those things do follow the category. So am I supposed to, like, am I just supposed to live in constant chaos or.
- [25:10]
A
You're, like, open to the individual nature of this new thing. Right.
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C
But I think it feels like he's trying to avoid the trees, but drives into a pit where.
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B
Yeah.
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C
Where like. Yeah, I can recognize that. That you, Graham, you have infinite complexity. I've been your friend for a very long time, and I still don't think I know everything about you. I know what you've done so far. I know that you may be in unpredictable in the future. Something could happen. I know this. You're still a man. And like, I can still recognize qualities about you that are probably unchanging.
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B
That's just a word you use to categorize me. How dare you? Thanks.
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C
But I know what you mean. I have to be able to say.
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B
That you are talking to a fan of Aristotle, my friend. I'm not saying I believe William of Akam, but I think William of Ockham, he is attempting to counteract a real problem that exists in schematizing the world.
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C
I'm with you.
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B
Yes, but then he creates his own problems we haven't talked about.
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C
Yeah, we'll get to this.
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A
And I guess that's why I think, A.J. you would probably also have issues with these universals. And what does it mean for them to exist and for you to participate.
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C
Yeah, I think those are a little bit silly. I. I land in the place that, yes, we, we recognize patterns. Yes, those patterns actually exist and are a helpful way to help to like, understand the world. We are pattern recognition recognition machines. But we can recognize that triangles do hold weight better than squares. And then they will continue to do that.
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B
Yes.
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C
Now, so that's real and that's a real thing.
- [26:33]
B
So there's the problem of object, of objectivity. So William, this is where sort of modern nominalism or like post God nominalism diverges from William. So William of. So the, the. One of the. The main objections is that there is no objective reality behind our words. All we have is just the words that we use to describe things. And it is just sort of like, everything is just a word game. So this is the problem that like modern nominalism comes into. William of Ockham gets around this by saying that everything ex. That all the individual things exists emanating from God's will. So William of Ockham also doesn't want to limit God to the universals. So he. So, for example, instead of saying like, can God make a man that does not have the form of man that does not. Like, this is a problem that the realists get into. We say like, can a free all powerful God make a human being that does not correspond to the form of human being? The Aristotelian and medieval and medieval Aristotelian Christians would say, like, no, God is bound by these sort of laws. William Vacancy would say that we cannot bind God by his laws. Everything exists through God's will. And God's will is that he makes men similar to one another. But if he wanted to, he could make a man that was not similar and we would. And we could call that person man, when in reality we, we were putting, we were schematizing that person that did not correspond to the individual nature of that person. Now we don't need to get into the, the problems that this has into, like, the nature of Christ. And like, is Christ a diviner? Is Christ man? They like, fought epic, like, comment wars over this in the comments of, of the Scholastics, and we just don't need to get into that. But he sort of throws this out. He sort of lobs this bomb into the Aristotelian Thomistic view of the Middle Ages that things correspond to their forms and their formal causes by saying, no, it's just God's will. Like, and so AJ when you said, well, what is our interface with talking to one another? It ends up being a very serious faith in the will of God. So, like, we understand the world because we have faith in God and God's will is understandable, but it is all individual things existing. It is not. They are not schematized into categories.
- [29:10]
C
So, so my question is, how, how in the world does he access reality?
- [29:15]
B
Well, how in the world do we access reality?
- [29:18]
C
I'm. So he can't say things like things, right? Even that is a category. Yes, even the category of individual is a category. Like, how does, how does he talk about anything that exists or access anything that exists? And then how does he talk about God's will? This is one of my problems. Like, he is seemingly set a giant block between himself and knowledge.
- [29:38]
B
Language is an abstraction that we use to try to understand the things that exist. But the. Every individual thing exists in its own. In its own thing, in its ownness, and is in relationship with everything else.
- [29:56]
C
But again, he's asserting a grand category there.
- [29:59]
B
The great. Well, in that sense, everything is, is the will of God.
- [30:02]
C
But how does he arrive there if he can't access reality and make generalizations about things?
- [30:06]
B
You don't need. The thing is, you make generalizations about things, just don't think those generalizations are really exist.
- [30:12]
C
But that's my point. Is he, he, like our generalizations, cannot access reality. So how is he making any declaration about anything, even the will of God? Like, I am with. I am with him in that, like, accessing reality takes faith. We have to have faith that what our eyeballs are seeing and telling us is true. I have to have faith that what my, like, my eyeballs, my ears are telling me that Graham is here next to me and so is Thomas, that they're not lying to Me, at some point, faith is involved in the process of knowledge. But he is seemingly set an even larger block between just trusting my senses into. I cannot express true things in words about reality, then how can I.
- [30:53]
B
You cannot express true things about. You cannot express universal things. You can talk about the individual, so you can talk about Thomas, and you can talk about the things that you observe and sensually perceive. About Thomas. That got a little weird.
- [31:09]
C
But I can't say he's red because that's a category that I'm putting upon him.
- [31:15]
B
You can't say that his color is similar to other, to other things.
- [31:19]
C
Yes, but, but, but similar is another category.
- [31:22]
B
Like he is not.
- [31:23]
C
Everything breaks down.
- [31:24]
B
He is not participating in some sort of universal of redness. He has his own individual thing about him. He's got his, like Thomas color.
- [31:30]
C
But even, but my point is even individuality, even thingness are categories. Those are universal things. To say that they are individual, they are alone is maybe not even to correctly, like, come up against his connection with other things. What do I mean by individual? This is a universal claim.
- [31:50]
B
So then the only universal category is just God's will.
- [31:54]
C
But my point is, if he cannot access any claim about reality, how does he get to saying God or God's will? Well, they're, they're just through the revelation.
- [32:06]
B
Through revelation.
- [32:07]
C
But those are words that don't connect to reality. Like he, this is my point. He seems like he's burning the porch.
- [32:12]
B
He's sitting there. Is that the words do not so that. That there is not an objective reality behind the words. All we have is just the sense perceptions and then the patterns that we perceive in those sense perceptions. And then we schematize those sense perceptions. And all of us kind of are like, hey, that's super helpful. So basically, like he says, our language is just a really helpful thing. In fact, he says it's a gift from God. Is that language is this gift from God that he gives us in order to make sense of the world. But it is not in itself the reality itself. The reality is the individual thing in front of you, not the systems that we've produced to understand that thing. So in other words, you. If we did not have human language and we could not schematize the experiences, we could still comprehend the thing in front of us and just behold it. So it's like ratio and intellectus. So you could, you could perceive something without having to categorize Thomas. You could just accept Thomas for what he is in this moment right now and just take In. Just drink him in. And I do every time. And then without having to formalize Thomas in relationship to everything else, because in reality, Thomas is in relationship to everything else. But he's. But to say that he participates in a category of things, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species, is just. That's just a helpful overlay that we of human beings do. But it's not real.
- [33:43]
C
I'm clearly very frustrated.
- [33:45]
B
It's hard.
- [33:46]
C
Well, it's not. It's not that I don't feel like I'm misunderstanding it. I feel like.
- [33:49]
A
No, you don't.
- [33:50]
B
I know. You know, I don't think you are misunderstanding.
- [33:51]
C
I don't think I am. I'm. I am cranky because he still seems to be applying universals. And then if he. But he has to essentially say language is meaningless, which means that what he's writing is meaningless.
- [34:03]
A
All the meaning is in the language, right? Yeah.
- [34:06]
B
It's not that language is meaningless, is that everything is words. And this is. This ends up being the power game problem of nominalism, which is it just ends up being who controls the language, controls reality.
- [34:20]
C
Well, that. And I don't think he's being true to nature either. Like, if I didn't have words and I saw a snake of certain colors, I would still feel fear.
- [34:29]
B
Yes.
- [34:29]
C
There is still a category happening. I would look at. Look at it, and even though I'm not putting words to it, I would be saying, that is dangerous. It is something I need to avoid. There would be an emotional response because there's a category for things with bright colors that bite things.
- [34:41]
A
But can I try? Because I think the difference is just when you see that snake, is there some universal snakeness that it participates in that you're scared of?
- [34:50]
B
Or are you scared of that individual snakes?
- [34:53]
A
And you've seen a dozen snakes before. You've probably seen hundreds. I don't know, like. And because of those hundreds of snakes, you have an idea of danger. You've given a name to it. Language. And you're scared of that snake.
- [35:04]
C
Which is. Which is fun. Like, I am all about. Yes, we do categorize things. But it seems like what he wants to do is say that those aren't real, when really they're just helpful.
- [35:13]
A
I think it's the issue of, like, what is real in this sense, because it's like both will speak of categories, but is it. There are universal things that exist outside of Earth, outside of, like, the world, or is it just you have experience and you've developed a name for this thing, danger, snake, whatever. They both speak of categories, but it's like, what is that category? Is it a real thing?
- [35:33]
B
That's a very helpful distinction.
- [35:34]
C
Okay. And I'm fine with saying that those category is like, it's not a real metaphysical, actual reality. It's just a language thing.
- [35:40]
B
It's just a language game.
- [35:41]
C
Yeah.
- [35:41]
B
So this is, of course, the problem now. Once you begin to. Now to divorce William of Ockham from. He needs to couch everything in sort of the will of God, which kind of gives some. Some guardrails to things. But when that is kind of dispensed with. So, for example, during the time the. The structure and form of government of a like monarchy was thought to be the only way you could organize society was because that was the natural, like, form of government. The form of government was that you had a king, because God was king and the king was king and his kid was a king, and he. It was ordained by nature. And then William of Akin comes in and says, that's just the name we give to this structural thing. And then people are like, holy crap, we could do whatever we want. And in fact, you go and look at history and we've had democracies, and we've had all sorts of different kinds of things we don't have to have. So we don't have to have the structures imposed on us that we think they are. This is the thing that William of Ockham is trying to fight against, and that is human beings. When we began to schematize the world, we abstract the world around us and we can. There's other two ways we can go wrong. We either can just get the schemas wrong, and we end up creating sort of horrors by saying, like, some people are slaves and some people aren't, and we have this sort of like, horrific thing that doesn't correspond with human dignity. Or there's even something destructive of the limiting of things by putting them into categories.
- [37:14]
C
I'm fully with you there. So to reduce something into a single category is to like, even not even.
- [37:18]
B
A single category, even if you reduce something into, like participating in 12 categories, even just categorizing something into that and saying you operate out of a mechanized system of behaviors that are. That are correspondent to these categories. You begin, that's actually not a fully expressive. That's not. Doesn't really fully express reality because you can have, you know, people that sort of buck the trend of. Of whatever categories is Right. So in other words, I was trying to think of like, okay, if we. Here's a thought experiment. What would aggressive versions of these, of these philosophies look like? An aggressive, realist version ends up looking like a. A formalizing grid, a mechanizing factor that gets put over all of reality. And, and human beings, we can tend into, we can trend into this direction that we begin to think about things in terms of categories and mechanized control. And we can do this because we can actually do pretty amazing manipulations of reality for whatever we want, right? We, when we understand chemistry, we can use chemicals to do other things that can create all sorts of products and whatnot.
- [38:38]
C
Fireworks are cool.
- [38:39]
B
Fireworks are cool things that benefit us, right? So. But when you start doing that to visions of the human person, or if you begin to become wed to the schema over the reality, if you love your schema more than you actually love the thing that you are schematizing, you can now do violence to the thing. You can just be wrong. You can now actually begin to force the. Force the individual thing to fit into the schema so that your system continues. And this was a problem with the Middle Ages. Once they got new data that kind of didn't fit into their schematic view of the universe, the thing kind of fell apart, right? There's that. There's that old little. Actually, I don't know if Nassim Taleb invented this or if he's talking about it, but it was this idea of there was this little. A little Greek man who ran a bed and breakfast, and his beds were too short, and everybody who stayed the bed and breakfast couldn't fit into the beds, and they had a miserable night. And they were like, this sucks. Staying at this bed and breakfast is terrible. And so what this man did in order to. In order to fix this problem was every person who stayed at his inn, he would tie them down and chop their legs off and fit them into the bed, right? The parable being like, you love your system more than you love reality, so you force reality to fit into your system. This is a problem that happens in an aggressive Platonic and Aristotelian view of nature, sure, is that you superimpose the system. The schema, you, the map is now the territory. And you kind of ignore the territory. And you, and you, you do the map.
- [40:18]
C
That's why you end up with the weird, sexy lotteries in Plato's Republic, for sure. Because some people are meant to rule and some people are meant for slaves. And you can't have them breeding with each other because that would be A disaster.
- [40:27]
B
So you can get into this absurd machine focus or mechanized kinds of thinking. And William of Ockham is probably trying to avoid these kinds of problems with, with this way of thinking. So that's the aggressive sort of realistic thing. Now the aggressive. If you were an aggressive nominalist, everything just falls down into either a triumph of feeling or a triumph of my own individual sense making. You fall into a solipsism problem. You fall into a problem of I just need to be the best describer of things with words. And once I control language, I control perception. And if I control perception, then that's the control that I have. So everything is just now a propaganda game. Instead of everything having this sort of like almost like fascist grid control over reality, you now have kind of this like soft language control over perception. And so the nominalist, the, the hardcore anomalist falls into kind of this like emotionalism. I feel, I perceive, I think it is a self creation that is emanating from my perception of the world. Well, to me I feel like this tree is in fact, blah, blah, blah. And if you disagree with that, we now have to mediate the reality of our sense perceptions and we can either live and let live, or I can use force to try to get you to agree with my perception of reality.
- [41:55]
C
Because neither of us is really correct.
- [41:57]
B
Correct. In fact. In other words, I don't, I don't end up caring about proof if I'm a hardcore nominalist. I now just care about word manipulation or I now just care about like, I don't want, I don't want to convince you, I want you, I want you to comply.
- [42:11]
C
Well, it seems like the same problem you get with moral relativism.
- [42:13]
B
Yeah. Which is like this is. Yes. And this is exactly what it develops.
- [42:16]
C
Why, why even have a conversation? Because our words aren't the reality anyway. So we're just sort of expressing our own experience about a thing that isn't even really all of those things anyway.
- [42:26]
B
Yes.
- [42:27]
C
And so like words don't mean anything. They're not connected to reality.
- [42:31]
B
So, so the, and so if you. Yeah, the, the problem that nominalism slips into is just everybody ends up being in their own kind of language prisons about the world. Maybe, okay, maybe nominalism can work insofar as we all agree in the authority of God's will, but it, if we don't, it now falls apart and it's just like, it's just your opinion, man. And like, and then, and then like.
- [42:59]
C
I, I even had this happen one time when I was talking about moral relativism. I was like, so why are we even having a conversation if the goal isn't to find out what's actually right? And he said, just to pass the time.
- [43:08]
B
Yeah. And I was like, just to pass the time into oblivion.
- [43:11]
C
I'm not. I'm not enjoying this. Like, I'll see you later. I'd rather not.
- [43:14]
B
And so then this ends up now. Okay, so those are the sort of the. Yeah. William of Ockham sort of presents these things to sort of counteract maybe the rigid, dogmatic, and maybe sort of some of the dead ends that come. Or maybe he. He envision. Maybe he sees coming the problem of systematizing the world and the destruction that that can do over plants, animals, man, souls, people, societies. But on the other hand, nominalism kind of retreats back into, like. At best, we have to be humble and just be like, maybe. I don't really know. So far, it's kind of worked this way. But things can change. The world's mysterious, or we kind of fall into some sort of soft. Like, it's all just about, like, trying to comprehend the individual thing in front of you. And like, the. The thing in front of you contains within itself not just its individual thing, but it's, like, relationship with the entire cosmos. And, like, we can see heaven in the grain of sand. Like, that kind of. Of that kind of conception. Now, what I wanted to posit from this is that I think both things are happening in the human mind at the same time. And so I was. Are you. For either of you familiar with Ian McGilchrist or his book the Master and His Emissary Thomas? You haven't heard about this?
- [44:38]
C
Nope.
- [44:39]
B
So Ian McGilchrist is a. I don't even know what he was. He was a. Like a gp. He was like. He was like a doctor. But he started writing books about, like. About the human brain. Now, unfortunately for poor Mr. McGilchrist, his book became popular, and then people turned it into, like, wacky pop psychology. And he's like, oh, this is wrong. But essentially what he was saying is that what we know from human perception in our brains is that we have two halves of our brains, and they are doing. They are perceiving. They. They have two different functions of how they interact in the world. We have the left side of the brain, which is the side of the brain that has to do with, like, specific tasks and mental focus when we want to focus on something. So if I said, AJ I want you to focus on whittling this stick into a figurine and if that thing has captured your attention and you're focusing on it, the left side of your brain is focusing on that specific task. But your brain does not shut out the rest of the world around it. It is still breathing, it is still hearing, it is still making sense of the world. It is still aware of all of the rest of the world around us. And that is the right side of your brain. The right side of your brain is the side of your brain that is involved with sort of the general perception of everything around you. And the left side of your brain is focused on the specific task that you've told it to do. And both of these things are working at the same time. If so we could think of a thought experiment. If there was somebody who completely lost control of the right side of their brain, they would just be like an AI robot that you said make as many paperclips as you can. And they made as many. So many paperclips they destroyed the world. Right. Like they're just hyper focused on this one task. But then we could also think of somebody that had no left brain functions and was just totally right brained and all they would be is just like a passive perceiver of all the phenomena around them without the ability or without the desire even to sort of like schematize and make sense of things around you. And I think that what the, the, the, the, the, the Thomas or the Aristotelians and what the, the the nominalists and Occam are doing is they are talking about both of these two different things that human beings do. We formalize and we focus and we apprehend through categorizing things our left brain. But we also have the, the sense that, not that that is not the completeness of the picture and there is always going to be other things around it. And in fact it is pernicious and damaging to a human person to not have the comprehending side of our, of our faculties wherein we are where things can't completely be explained by a schema. And these things kind of need to be in balance and be intention. Now McGilchris goes off and says that there are different periods of human history where human societies have kept these things in balance in different times when they've gone out of balance. And he tends to think we're living in a left brain world and we've forgotten the right brain. And I don't know. Sure, that's up to people. Go read. He's got a new book where he talks about this. It's 1400 pages and where he talks about this. He's a really interesting guy, but he does kind of like lean towards some like, Zen woo woo stuff. He's, he's one of those Brits that like, you know, sort of lends itself over to sort of like he's. Yeah, the sort of, like that, that kind of, that Zen stuff. And I don't, I don't really, I can't, I can't truck with that. But, but I think he's kind of right in saying. Or maybe that's a helpful framework in saying that, like there is something about the human experience where we can do wonderful things with schemas and formal, formal structures, but we probably get ourselves into trouble if we completely block ourselves off to the individuality of things. Right. Like, we can't perfectly control reality in front of us there. That tree is an oak tree and it is going to do oak tree things. But it also has, it's also that it is that oak tree and it also has its own emergent qualities that are unique to that specific oak tree that we can probably not even predict. Maybe, maybe we. And then, then, then the left brains come in and say, oh, we can project with the, with the best computer that we can get. And then we can finally have power over that oak tree. And then, you know, maybe that's a problem. The reason why he calls the book the Master and his Emissary is because he's. McGilchrist says that the Master is the right brain, the one that just sort of comprehends the world not passively, but with humility. And the emissary is the one that the right brain sends out into the world to have interface with it. But he says every culture on Earth, or at least this is his claim, every culture on Earth has some kind of folk story where the emissary tries to take over the power from the master. So think of the magician's apprentice. The magician's apprentice wants to use the power of the magician to control everything, and it falls apart. So the Disney movie, you know, the magician's apprentice makes too many magical brooms that to fill the bucket of water and he floods the castle. And now the, the, the master has to come back and like, bring balance to everything. So there's some. So William of Occam, we need to take him at his word. Is that what he's trying to do is he is trying to safeguard us from going too far down into the schematizing of the world? But A.J. you're right in saying that he does create logical problems, or he may put. He may now put us on a different wrong path, which is we have now severed all ties with. We now no longer have ways to meaningfully communicate with each other. And if we really take nihilism seriously, this can turn into just language power games and word propaganda.
- [51:00]
C
It sounds like, as you were talking, right brain, left brain, that sort of stuff. It seems to me that it's.
- [51:06]
B
Take that for what it's worth. Like, I don't know if I fully. I thought it was maybe a helpful thing.
- [51:11]
C
I was just thinking how all of this kind of relates to dialectic and mythos.
- [51:14]
B
Yes, right.
- [51:15]
C
So I think a more. Maybe a more healthy way to approach the reality of words is that we have dialectic and it does help us understand the world and we can say, what is justice?
- [51:23]
B
All right, let's talk about its categories. Let's talk about its form. Exactly. Talk about its structure.
- [51:27]
C
We can, we can talk about oak trees. Like, what do they typically do? Where do they usually live? How do they usually function? And those can say real things about the real world. But there are limits to words and that each of those trees does have its own individual essence and can do things that are. May be unpredictable.
- [51:41]
B
And there is a comprehending of an oak tree by living and understanding an individual oak tree itself and seeing it for a long period of time. You don't necessarily need to formalize it. You need to be in relationship with it. And this is where it starts to sound woo, woo.
- [51:56]
C
And recognizing that there are. I mean, like, even if we dive into science, there are things about that oak tree we don't understand. Like, if we get down to the atomic level, we don't know. Most of the stuff that happens down there we don't understand. Like, it could be entangled with atoms that are across the universe. We have no idea. And so there are. There's like a mythos to that tree. Even C.S. lewis would say, just because you've explained what the sun is, you still haven't convinced me that it's not a God. Yeah, right. So you could say that it's a big furnace full of helium. Herb, is it helium?
- [52:26]
B
Hydrogen. Hydrogen.
- [52:27]
C
Hydrogen. And it, like, this is how it all functions. This is what it does. And he's like, yes, but that could be what a God is, is a giant burning ball of hydrogen. And you haven't changed my mind. And so maybe the dialectic is helpful. But knowing that there are limits on words and then engaging with the mythos.
- [52:41]
B
Of a thing in the stories we have like the wizard in the tower that wants to apprehend everything, but he lives in a, like in a, in a tower. He just lives in like a controlled environment, abstracted from the world. But he says I have ultimate power over everything because I understand the form of everything. You need to have some sort of counterbalance to the tower wizard. You need to have, I don't know, is it the Tom Bombadil, right? You need to have the adventurer. You need to have the adventurer. You need to have the person that like exists and understands the individual thing.
- [53:12]
C
It's the elves really, or they probably is. It's nymphs or elves.
- [53:15]
B
And so there. This needs to be the two sides of the human person. I think we need, we. We can trend too much in a formalizing direction and we can actually end up destroying the thing by dissecting it. But we can also completely have everything sort of slip through our fingers and turn into just sort of like a mush of emotion. And everything is just an emanating of my feels. And I need to now convince you, either in a charming way or in an authoritarian way, to get on board with how I perceive reality. Now the reason I sort of brought this up is because I think the Internet tends to draw out more of our nominalistic tendencies. Because when we live in a disembodied kind of existence, so much of our perception of what is real online is just an emanation of our perception and feeling. And when we're not all not perceiving the same thing, it just ends up being this like power game of persuasion. Maybe that's an in between episode conversation, but ultimately there needs to be sort of the balance between these two things. But, but yes, the, the over. The. The over aggressive realist tends towards more like sort of boot on neck control, like a fascist control over nature. But on the other hand, the over the. The. The aggressive nominalist ends up being a propagandist persuasion game. So that tends to be more of the like the communist. Right? Like the. We need to control your mind, not we need to control your body. We need to like force you into compliance. We need to force you into belief. So there can be pernicious things that come out of anomalous view of the world, which is if I can control the way you think about reality, I now can control you. I don't need to, I don't need to exert a schema over you. I just need to change the way you think about things. So 1984 versus exactly 1984 versus brave new world is. Is kind of the. These two things.
- [55:29]
C
Well, both of those do a whole lot of mind control.
- [55:32]
B
Yeah, I guess so. But one. I mean. So there's one is more like the direct control through force and one is more the indirect control through perception. Yeah, yeah. So this. Anyway, so. But these things. But if. If we want to take my theory, my content, my hypothesis that human beings need to be open up to both of these things. We need to schematize the world and formalize the world. And like, you know me, I love me my Aristotle, because that brings a unity to the human experience. That's important, but we also can't be so locked into it that we don't leave ourselves open that the individual thing even transcends the schemas and the gnomen, the nomina that we put on it. Does that make sense? Yeah.
- [56:21]
C
Anyway, so, like, I hate to be one of those guys that's like, you know, any man warmly involved with any theory loves to apply it to everything. But that whole, like, dialectic mythos, I think, really works here, where we try to understand a thing. We can talk about it, we can talk about its categories, but we have to know that the limits on our knowledge and the limits on our words and recognize the mystical qualities of those.
- [56:40]
B
Things there is like, yeah, if we wanted to learn justice, we can talk about formal justice by talking about its structures and different kinds of laws. But then you can also see a story of injustice where justice is brought at the end. And you can be like, that was an example of justice, that you've had an experience with an individual justice. And maybe even from that individual justice, we can't formalize it into a schema, but we have a recognition of that and we can see its similarities and other examples of Justin and just. And. And anyway, so anyway, that's William of Akaman nominalism. I posit that much of our modern lives flits back and forth between the two different ways, and it's not just these little scholastic fights, but that we. We. Yeah, we. We either formalize and schematize or we can slip into just sort of nominalist triumph of feeling. And these are both sort of maybe skill and cryptoses we need to navigate between.
- [57:44]
A
I like that.
- [57:45]
B
Yeah. All right.
- [57:46]
A
This has been classical stuff. You should know. You can find us online@classicalstuff.net you can find us on patreon patreon.com classicalstuff if you want to send us an email, send it to the guys@classicalstuff.net and thank you all for listening, and we'll talk to you again soon. Bye Bye, Sam.