HoP 452 - Better Than Nothing - Metaphysics in the Second Scholastic
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I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Better Than Nothing, Metaphysics in the Second Scholastic. What does a metaphysician have in common with a British police inspector? When they show up to work, both demand to know, what's all this then? Metaphysics is, after all, the study of quite literally everything, from aardvarks to xylophones.

It's tempting to say that it is the study of everything that exists, but even this might be too narrow. Philosophers are often very interested in things that do not exist, especially things that might exist but don't. If it is true that my non-existent sister is a female human, then it is the metaphysician who could tell us why this is true. In fact, if it isn't true, it would be up to the metaphysician to explain that also.

Such speculations might seem idle, but as we just saw last time with the case of Molina and his effort to accommodate human freedom and moral responsibility through the theory of middle knowledge, unrealized possibilities turn out to be very significant for those of us who do wind up existing. And mere possibilities aren't the only things that might interest the metaphysician, despite their failure to exist. It would be worth thinking about impossible things too, like round squares or giraffes that can fly.

Then there is that category of the non-existent that we might call absence or privation. If we are at the zoo and eagerly approach the giraffe enclosure only to find it empty, it's the lack of a giraffe that would explain our crushing disappointment. One philosopher who did not confine his efforts to the really existent was Francisco Suarez. His Metaphysical Disputations, a masterpiece of late scholasticism, was published at the close of the 16th century in 1597.

It spans across 54 individual disputations, each of which explores a metaphysical topic at considerable length and with exquisite subtlety. Following Aristotle, Suarez assumes that metaphysics is the study of being, but he also takes up things that don't really have being, creations of the mind that are conceived only in relation to genuine being. For example, once you have the notion of a giraffe, which is, happily, a real being, you can combine it with the concept of flying, or consider the absence of a giraffe.

but their results will not be anything that exists in reality. Thus, Suarez calls them "beings of reason" . In excluding these from the official scope of metaphysics and by discussing them nonetheless, in order to clarify their relationship to genuine being, Suarez is following Pedro da Fonseca. Fonseca was a major influence on his metaphysics and supplied him with material he worked into the Disputations.

Like Fonseca, Suarez thought that there is a general concept of being that covers everything that exists, including God. But this is a vague, or in technical scholastic terminology, confused notion. Suarez makes being an analogical concept that can be specified into several different kinds. God is infinite, primary being, everything else is limited, and has being in a lesser sense.

This obviously should remind us of Thomas Aquinas' theory of analogy and its defense by later Thomists like Cajetan. But Suarez is actually critical of the Thomists, whom he considers to emphasize too much the gulf between divine and created being. We need to hold on to the idea that there is indeed a single idea of being that applies to both, and this is simply the idea of somethings existing. Like Molina, Suarez thinks that God knows plenty about beings even before he makes any of them exist.

Of course, he grasps that they are apt to exist, in other words, that they could possibly exist. Otherwise, he wouldn't know that he could create them. But beyond this, he also knows, for example, that giraffes are animals, or that squares cannot be round. To use Aristotelian jargon again, God eternally, and antecedently to creation, knows all the essential truths.

One way to understand this is that God knows what terms mean before there is anything to which the terms apply. He knows what a giraffe is, and thereby knows that giraffes can't fly, but can lope gracefully across the savannah. Another way to understand it will remind us more of Molina. God understands that if he were to create giraffes, they would be creatures that can lope gracefully, but not fly. This is what Molina called natural knowledge in God.

None of this is up to God, in the sense that it would be an option for God to create flying giraffes. The ability to fly is simply incompatible with the essence of giraffe, so flying giraffes are just as impossible as round squares, and God cannot make them exist. But the essences do depend on him in some sense. Suarez says that they "flow from the very being of God."

It may seem strange that we, with our little minds, can conjure up flying giraffes whereas God could not, but this is precisely the difference between real beings and beings of reason. A being of reason is simply a mental construct, and there are more relaxed rules about what can be conceived than about what can be real. Suarez calls them "shadows of beings" because they depend on real beings the way a shadow depends on the body that throws the shadow.

When you take a real being and combine it with another incompatible real being, you get a being of reason that is impossible, like a flying giraffe. When you take a real being and negate it, you get an absence or privation, like the lack of the giraffe that you were hoping to find at the zoo. These beings of reason are not even apt to exist like possible entities are, so it's mighty puzzling that we can make true statements about them.

One might for instance rightly distinguish between the lack of a giraffe and the lack of a rhinoceros, as one does implicitly when saying "the fact that there was no rhinoceros didn't bother me nearly as much as the fact that there was no giraffe." Or, one can distinguish impossible things. A flying giraffe is not, say, a flying ox. Believe it or not, the flying ox is an example that Suarez uses himself.

Beings of reason even seem to have causal powers, as when the lack of the giraffe causes disappointment, or when a person's blindness leads to the sharpening of their other senses. How can this be? The answer is that we often treat beings of reason as if they were real in order to say things about them. Thus, one way that Suarez defines the being of reason is that it is something that is thought as being but has no entity in itself.

If I may trouble you with one more bit of technical terminology, Suarez and the other scholastics say that beings of reason have merely objective reality. This is pretty confusing for us nowadays because we tend to use objective to mean something that is real outside the mind, as when we say giraffes are objectively beautiful even if some people think they aren't.

The scholastics mean just the reverse, something is objective if it is only an object of the mind, so that Suárez also defines the being of reason as something that exists objectively in this sense. This way of thinking about the beings of reason was unconvincing to a somewhat lighter thinker from Salamanca, Pedro Otaro de Mendoza. He worked in the 17th century and wrote a very popular textbook on metaphysics that drew on Suárez but also criticized him on some points, including this one.

Hurtado was reluctant to posit a whole realm of mental or objective being just because we sometimes talk about absences or impossibilities. So he said that they were merely cases of the mind making a mistake, perhaps a deliberate one. You can think up a flying giraffe or talk about round squares if you want, but that is of no more metaphysical weight than saying that 2+2=5. I just mentioned though that beings of reason seem to be able to influence the world.

Absences and imaginary things, including fictional beings, affect real being all the time. In addition to the examples I've already mentioned, consider that another impossible flying animal, a large-eared elephant named Dumbo, has made a lot of money for Disney over the years. The fact that beings of reason are "causes" might push us towards Suarez's theory that they have objective being if we assume that every cause is at least something, even if it is not something that exists in reality.

Hurtado would have to say something more complicated here, for example that it is the making of certain mistakes that has causal influence, rather than the concepts that result from the mistakes, but is a good illustration of why Suárez felt the need to include beings of reason in his metaphysics, even if he didn't recognize that they are genuine beings. This is especially because causation is another major topic in his thought, a topic on which he has sometimes been said to anticipate developments in 17th century philosophy.

Which is sort of true, but only sort of, much as flying giraffes are sort of beings, but only sort of. The advance sometimes credited to Suarez is that he started the work of eliminating the various kinds of cause recognized in Aristotelian philosophy until only the efficient cause was left.

This is what we'll find in Descartes, to mention only one prominent case, and it is pretty much how we talk about causes today in science and in everyday language. One thing hitting another and pushing it over, or a fire heating up a rock, or a giraffe tearing a luscious leaf off a tree before the flying ox can get to it, now that's causation. Aristotle and his followers, though, acknowledge three other kinds of cause, namely form, matter, and final causes, which are goals or purposes towards which motions or actions strive.

Because calling these "causes" sounds rather strange to the modern ear, it is sometimes suggested that we should think of Aristotle's four kinds as types of explanation rather than cause. After all, the matter or form of something does explain a lot about it. A bronze statue of a giraffe, raised in tribute to its unparalleled elegance, is heavy because it is made of bronze, and beautiful because of its giraffe shape.

As for final causes, it is the prospect of seeing giraffes that explains why I go to the zoo. Seeing the giraffes is the purpose of my going. We might then group these three kinds of explanation together and say that, while they do help us understand features of the world around us, they are not really causes in the way that efficient causes are.

Now Suarez does say that it is the efficient cause that is most properly a cause, that matter and form are causes only by analogy, and even that final causes or purposes are causes only in a metaphorical sense. Yet he also insists that all four kinds do really count as causes, because all of them satisfy the definition he gives for cause in general. This definition is a bit of a mouthful, it is "a principle that, in its own right, bestows being upon something else."

Of course, each part of the definition is carefully chosen. By saying "in its own right", he excludes merely accidental relationships, and the fact that the effect has to be something else other than the cause rules out self-causation. But the most eye-catching part of the definition is the idea of "bestowing", in Latin, "influence". This conveys that being flows from the cause to the effect.

You can see why this is best represented by efficient causes, as in the case where the heat of fire flows into the surrounding air, or into a nearby rock. The causal influence is guaranteed to occur so long as the fire is close enough to something that can be heated up, and nothing prevents, like a heat shield wrapped around the rock.

Actually, there is one further requirement, which is that God has to allow the fire to burn the rock. Suarez would say that God must concur with the fire or any other created cause so that he allows all these causes to produce their effects. But of course God is also a cause, not just an all-powerful referee, jogging along with the world and allowing play to continue without blowing his whistle. He is the creator of all things as their efficient cause, and being flows forth from him into the world.

This language of "flowing" had been used by other scholastics, for instance Domingo de Soto, but Suarez treats causation here more explicitly as metaphysical. The cause is a source of being and not just motion or form, as de Soto and others said when talking about causation in the context of natural philosophy. Even if the efficient cause is our best example of a cause, forms and matter do count too. This is because they are in a relationship of mutual dependence, with each granting a kind of being to the other.

The form of the giraffe is its soul, and the giraffe's body is its matter, and the soul keeps the body alive even as the body is that in which the soul resides. They are, says Suarez, both incomplete substances that come together to form the complete substance that is the giraffe. Here we see Suarez doing something a giraffe might excel at: he is bending over backwards, to preserve a piece of Aristotelian and Scholastic doctrine. Fairly soon, philosophers of the Enlightenment are going to be dispensing with the substantial form.

As one of our former interview guests, Helen Hattab, has written, once severed from the machinery of scholastic logic and metaphysics, the substantial form hung only by the slender thread of fit between observation and theory. But, like Jean Fresnel, the French thinker who argued that forms are causes that lie hidden within things, Suarez defends them with great determination, using fairly clever examples. He asks us to consider how water will tend to return to a moderate temperature after it is heated up or chilled.

This shows that it has a form that is responsible for restoring it to its natural state between hot and cold. Or, think of milk, which has several properties that always come together, like white color and sweet taste. These features must derive from a unitary form that belongs to milk in its own right. Of the four kinds of cause, it is the final cause that is most puzzling.

For one thing, a final cause doesn't need to do anything in order to exert its causal influence. The leaf can just dangle quietly on the tree and that causes the giraffe to reach up and tear it off the branch. More perplexing, final causes don't even need to exist. Think again of the case where I go to the zoo to see the giraffes, only to find that they aren't there. Perhaps they flew away. In this scenario, I thought that the goal I was striving towards was present, but it wasn't.

And something similar happens all the time without involving such disappointment. The sculptor who sets out to make a bronze giraffe has as their final cause a statue which does not yet exist. This is why Suarez calls final causes metaphorical. They cause without exercising power, either because they do exist but remain inert like the leaf on the tree, or because they do not exist and thus can't do anything.

Again, the later scholastic Cortado will depart from Suarez on this point, saying that we can hardly credit something with being a cause if it doesn't even exist. But Suarez insists otherwise. It is precisely when something is conceived in thought, having objective reality, in that special sense of being an object of the mind, that it can be made a goal for deliberate action. It's the fact that a bronze giraffe is in the mind, and not a bronze elephant, that explains the precise actions undertaken by our sculptor.

That's a nice analysis, but could threaten to undermine the traditional Aristotelian idea that final causation can cause things to happen, even without any conscious agent pursuing an end they have in mind, as when stones fall down, striving as it were to reach the center of the universe, which is the ultimate goal of the element of earth.

Here we might think that Suarez is, after all, like a sculptor, chipping away at the Aristotelian causal theory. He is part of a general trend in this period where Bischolastic thinkers tend to identify final causes especially, if not exclusively, with the goals envisioned and pursued by animals, and above all, humans. I was just saying that these goals cause animals and humans to pursue them despite just sitting there or being inert, but there's more to it than that.

Giraffes don't try to eat just anything, and not just any animal will entice me into a trip to the zoo. It is because these things are, or at least seem, good that they elicit deliberate actions. And the same goes for only mentally existing goals. The sculptor who has decided to make that bronze statue is putting the effort into producing it, because it seems like a good thing to sculpt. Final causes can operate without being strictly speaking operative by being good in a wide variety of ways.

Food attracts giraffes by being tasty, and giraffes attract each other by seeming like good mates. As for humans, they are motivated to pursue goals that no animal would desire, from artistic achievement to moral excellence and political stability. Here again, Suarez and his fellow scholastics are true to the Aristotelian tradition.

Unlike Enlightenment thinkers like Hobbes, and even unlike some contract theorists who emerged as part of the fallout from the Reformation, the political thought of the second scholastic tends to assume that political arrangements are natural, and that humans have a natural tendency to establish good states. States that are good because they serve the common good of all. Indeed, they built upon foundations laid by earlier philosophers, including Aquinas, to expand and reconsider the concept of the natural law.

These are the issues we'll be covering in the next couple of episodes, so make it your goal to find out more by joining me for that, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.