Freedom vs. Freedom, Part 5: Beyond Freedom

Struggling towards a future

As the title suggests, this is part 5 of a series. You probably want to read the preceding parts before proceeding. A link to part 4 is below:

Freedom vs. Freedom, Part 4: Implications

Over those last 4 posts, I introduced the ideas of voluntarism and nominalism, argued that they had enormous roles in shaping our modern ways of living and thinking, and then spoke about the ways in which I think this influence has been a problem: voluntarist and nominalist thought has set us up, in so many ways, to fail.

If you’re read through all this, and even if you agree with my assessment, you might still wonder: what are we supposed to do about this realization that the foundations of our society and psychology are so compromised? This is certainly the essential question. Here, concluding in part 5, I will not pretend to answer this question—it is one that outstrips my expertise and, anyway, will require a community, not an individual, effort. Instead, I want to provide what I think are some necessary starting conditions that I think will be essential to that work: first, I want to set what I think are necessarily limitations to a project of redefining our sense of reality, human and otherwise. Second, I want to suggest certain necessary components of any such (re)new(ed) vision.

What the Future Ain’t

I have already repeatedly peppered my criticisms of voluntarism, nominalism, and modernity with the caveat that my goal is not to simply dismiss modernity as a whole. There is (as I am sure you aware, gentle reader) a whole online industry of reactionary and traditionalist hot takes in which (mostly young white guys) complain about modernity and suggest that the solution is to roll back the clock, to return to some kind of medieval Roman Catholicism, or to a Spartan militaristic hierarchy, or even right back to the barely urban Bronze Age.

Let me be clear and explicit: I have no interest in any of this, even as I will suggest that we recover certain ideas and orientations from our past which I think we have lost. Modernity, despite its drawbacks, has clearly brought a huge range of benefits. My hope is that we can critique the present, appreciate the past, and rebuild our view of the world. But in all of this, my goal would certainly be to retain much of modernity; as I put it last week, though I do want to throw out the bathwater, I want to keep the baby nice and safe.

The “baby” here is any number of real and significant achievements of modern life, such as indoor plumbing, lifesaving vaccines, women’s equality, full rights for same-sex attracted folks, etc. (Plenty more items can be added to this list, of course.) Whatever future we are trying to build, I’m only interested in a future that includes this stuff. Full stop.

The question is: how do we disentangle all this good stuff from all the bad stuff I mentioned last time? Some might want to rephrase this question and make it more pressing: can we disentangle the good from the bad? I don’t have an answer to that question, but I am committed to both acting as if we do, and thereby finding out if it’s possible by trying to make it so.

So I hope I’ve made my point clear here: though I will spend the rest of this piece suggesting that we need to recover some lost wisdom, my hope is that we can marry this ancient thought to all that’s best about the present.

Back to the Future

I’ve spent the last four weeks moaning on and on about voluntarism and nominalism, and a big part of what I was moaning about was the need for modern/Enlightenment/post-Enlightenment culture to accept the fact that modernity owes its existence to the very medieval culture that it defines itself in opposition against: I insisted that every culture has a history, and that we can learn a lot about a given culture by doing some “genealogy” on it: how did we get here? What led to these ideas, instead of others? What assumptions are hiding in the practices and values of this culture?

I’ve spent all this time moaning about voluntarism and nominalism, and so, gentle reader, you might be expecting me to now say, at the end of this, that the solution is to embrace what came immediately before the voluntarist/nominalist revolution. Certainly, this is the approach taken by many modern critics of modernity: what we need, they will say, is to return to the Platonic-Aristotelean thought of high scholasticism, e.g. folks like Anselm of Canterbury and Thomas Aquinas—those (form) realists that we mentioned back in part 2, who argued that reality was actually a set of universals rather than a heap of individuals.

But, actually, no: I am not here to carry water for scholasticism. First off, we must apply our “genealogical” method to any culture we come across. If we can question modernity, and ask where its presumptions come from, we can ask that same question of whatever indeed came before it. And if it’s true that voluntarism/nominalism set the stage for modernity, then we must also admit that scholasticism set the stage for voluntarism/nominalism—even if we see these two schools of thought as largely in opposition.

Of course, we can do this same genealogical tracing back as far as we want, and essentially fall into the folly of infinite regress: at a certain point, we can say that everything was caused by the Big Bang, and leave it at that.¹ If we aren’t happy with modern life, blame the Big Bang! While this is true, as far as it goes, it obviously lacks any analytic relevance. Whatever happens, happens (in part) because of the Big Bang. So we can’t only blame it for the bad stuff, but also have to give it credit for the good. And how do we explain why one approach to life might be better than another? They’re both caused by the Big Bang, after all.

So, genealogy alone will not suffice for our purposes here. And indeed, our critique of modernity was not just based, or even primarily based, on pointing out that its metaphysical foundations are flawed. Though I did start this series of articles on those issues, last week in part 4 I made it clear that the whole point of questioning modernity only arises because we find ourselves dissatisfied with it. It is because of all the problems of modern life—a sense of meaninglessness, technological destruction of our world, increasing social dislocation, raging anxiety and depression, etc.—that we thought to question its foundations in nominalism and voluntarism. If modern life was all hunky dory, we would never have asked “how did we get here?” We would have been happy to have arrived here, and left it at that.

Even so, I do want to argue that the Platonic-Aristotelean synthesis of western medieval scholasticism, as the condition of possibility for voluntarism and nominalism, is (a big) part of the problem, and suggest that what came before that is much preferable, on metaphysical and theological grounds.

Now, I am trying to conclude this series here, and I’m already 1200 words into this post. So I will not be attempting to offer even a summary description of scholastic realist thought. I have already pointed to the most basic elements of it in previous posts, so if you don’t have a sense of what I am talking about, parts 1 and 2 may be of use to you.

What I want to insist here (and this whole topic of course demands much further discussion) is that some kind of neo-scholasticism, an effort to simply re-embrace the position of, say, Aquinas, will not solve the problem of modernity, because it already contains the seeds of modernity. There are many ways to approach validating this argument, but, as usual, I want to focus on the metaphysics and theology.

Between the One and the Many

One of the problems with nominalism that we touched on before was that it cannot account for the unity and interactions of things: nominalism posits a set of discrete entities as the only reals. So I am real, and you are real, and Harrison Ford is real, but there is no shared universal essence of humanity. So far, so good.

But we also know that individual entities can both interact with each other and can indeed also be transformed into new kinds of things: you can be angry at me for my dismissal of nominalism and can punch me in the stomach as just retribution. Likewise, when we die, our bodies decompose, and the chemical building blocks that disaggregate from a corpse can then be formed into new things. How does nominalism handle this?

The answer, as science developed and a better and better understanding of these processes became available, was just to redefine which entities count as real individuals. If the early nominalists thought of human individuals as real specific things (basically following Aristotle’s conception of what a substance is), later materialists would simply define substance down: human beings are not real individuals, we are composites made up of real individuals.

Of course, science started to have a bit of a Russian Nesting Doll problem: in the 19th century, chemists developed the periodic table of elements, which listed a series of about 100 (the number slowly went up over time) atomic substances. As the names “element” and “atom” suggest, these were thought to be the foundational realities, the little particular stuffs out of which all other things were made.

Unfortunately, physicists quickly discovered that these so-called elemental atoms themselves had parts. Whoops. OK, so now we have protons, neutrons, and electrons. But in many ways, this was great, because now we have fewer fundamental building blocks: a much simpler ontology.

Of course, more of these sub-atomic particles were discovered (like photons), but still, it seemed that this might still give us the basic level of reality: a nice tidy materialism. Now, things did get complicated when it turned out that protons and neutrons were actually composed of yet-smaller things called quarks, and a host of other of these sub-sub-atomic particles were also discovered (like muons, bosons, etc.)

But, again, OK: we had to add a new layer under the layer we previously thought was foundational. But this in and of itself is no problem: surely, scientists thought, we are getting closer to the set of things which simply are.

However, physics quickly discovered a much more difficult problem: it turns out that these different particles can transform into each other (as well as into existence that is not itself strictly particular, such as heat generated in an atomic explosion. Einstein’s famous E=mc² explains this possibility: matter can be transformed into pure energy). So, for example, if a photon hits the electron “cloud” around a given atom in a certain way, the photon can actually become an electron.²

While this process certainly maintains the principle of the conservation of mass and energy, it meant that neither of these particles was actually fundamental, finally real. There could be, theoretically, a cosmos with a bunch of photons but no electrons—and vice versa. If the cosmos could exist without something existing at all, how could that thing be fundamental in any meaningful metaphysical or ontological sense? More to the point, there was clearly some kind of rule of interaction which was dictating whether a given amount of matter/energy-stuff took one form or another. And this rule was obviously more fundamental than any of the matter/energy-stuff which it regulated and defined. But, worryingly for materialism, a rule is not made of matter.

And indeed, in the 20th century, quantum mechanics delivered something like a more-or-less unified rule that determines the particular nature of any given particle: the weak force, the strong force, and the electromagnetic force, taken together as a single complex ruleset, explains the kind of matter (and material interactions) we see in the world. One might call this combined ruleset “the fundamental force function”.³

Now, this one mathematical ruleset did not strictly speaking explain everything. Gravity, famously, has not been so easy to integrate into this fundamental force function. Likewise, the theories of relativity (special and general) do not seem to derive easily from it.⁴ And, while the fundamental forces explain the behavior of a given amount of energy/matter-stuff, it does not explain how much of this stuff will exist in the cosmos. Even so, this fundamental force function offers extraordinary explanatory power: given a certain amount of matter/energy-stuff in a given location, these forces can tell us, with a high degree of precision, how that stuff will behave.

But, as I already hinted above, we have arrived at a rather strange position: notice that none of the things that seem to be real at the very “bottom” of reality here are material. The forces are best understood as mathematical formulas or functions, the theories of relatively as well. While we do have a basic sort of matter/energy-stuff, this stuff is only “matter” under certain circumstances, and, importantly, it gets all of its determining features from the fundamental force function (plus gravity, kind of).

What’s odd—and interesting—is that this basic framework actually looks formally similar to the basic picture of Platonic and/or Aristotelean metaphysics. While these two thinkers rather famously disagreed on a number of points, their basic ontological framework shared a lot in common: they understood individual things as a marriage of form and matter, where the latter was a featureless pure potency (that is to say, we cannot confuse the Platonic/Aristotelean view of matter with the later understand of atomic matter). It was the form, according to both Plato and Aristotle, that imparted all the features to a specific entity: a given amount of this “matter” could be a cat, or a dog, or a rock, or a bottle of water. What determined that identity was the form, not the matter itself.

Although obviously modern physics does not posit that cats are caused by some eternal form of the Cat, it’s worth noting that the basic ontology offered by modern physics fundamentally agrees with Plato and Aristotle in that it is pure form that determines the specific features of things: “matter” (the energy/matter stuff of modern physics) is a pure potency which is formed by the force function (plus some other, also non-material, formal realities). If the force function had different mathematical elements, reality would look completely different.

One attempt to derail this reduction to form would be to argue that the fundamental forces don’t constitute material entities, but only describe what they do. But such a maneuver could only succeed by positing a matter which had some kind of deeper reality unto itself which was beyond and before its scientific description. Some defenders of certain kinds of panpsychism might indeed want to entertain such a view, but it would amount to redefining the meaning of “materialism” so much that it would just be applying that term to a fundamentally new metaphysics. If such a metaphysics is true, surely it’d be better to come up with a new name that better describes it.

What we get, then, in the 20th century is an anti-materialist materialism: the quest for a fundamental materialist ontology actually yielded a new mode of what amounts to a new mode of hylomorphism (though admittedly of a very particular, and non-Aristotelean, form).

Now, there are obviously important implications of this realization for any effort to defend materialism in the 21st century: it turns out not only that materialism cannot explain the only reality we can’t possibly doubt (phenomenality) but that materialist science has discovered that its own basis is non-materialist. (Of course, it should be stressed here that this in no way impugns the truth of scientific claims as explanations for physical phenomena—science remains the best way to make predictions about what kinds of physical events will occur in the future. The trouble here is with the metaphysics that science has traditionally based itself on, not the scientific method itself. And the good news is that science could adopt new metaphysics without damaging that method whatsoever. In many ways, this was the goal of both C.S Peirce and Edmund Husserl.)

Get Schooled

Now, we will have to save this interesting (and critical) topic for another day, because we were supposed to be discussing scholasticism, and I just spent 1,000 words giving a very rough summary of the metaphysics behind modern physics. But this was no idle digression: remember that medieval scholasticism was basically the marriage of Platonic and Aristotelean thought, combined with western Christian theology. Scholasticism was hylomorphic in its ontology (especially in the work of the more committed Aristotelians like Aquinas). We just saw above that, oddly, nominalist metaphysics has resulted in a science which fundamentally rejects nominalist metaphysics: at the bottom of reality, there is basically the one fundamental force “function” (plus some other formal stuff, like gravity and the theories of relativity, as well as a purely potent energy/matter-stuff), and everything else derives its existence from this one (formal) reality. Individual things are just expressions of one more fundamental truth.

Here is where the neo-scholastic might feel their day has (finally) arrived: does this mean that, actually, modern science proves the validity of Thomas’s metaphysics? Is Aquinas actually the science giga-Chad? Well, no. Modern science famously began its ascent precisely by rejecting Aristotelean metaphysics, and the similarities between modern science and hylomorphism should not be pressed too far.

And this brings us to the central issue of medieval scholasticism: its hylomorphic metaphysics assumed a great variety of different forms were real: not only the form of the Cat and the form of the Dog, but even more importantly, the form of the Good and the form of the Beautiful, etc. Whereas modern physics gives us (basically) one form to rule them all, scholastic hylomorphism gives us a vast array of eternal forms, each of which seems to be truly, independently, and finally real. Whereas modern science argues that cats and dogs both reduce to the fundamental force function, Plato and Aquinas thought that cats reduced to the form of the Cat and dogs to the form of the Dog. Here is where we need to pause and note two things.

First, the careful reader might notice that in this very diversity of forms, the seeds have been planted for the rise of nominalist metaphysics: if we believe there are a huge array of different eternal forms, each separate and independent, then the shift to the idea that actually there are just a huge array of different temporal, physical individuals is easier to make than if we perceived reality as fundamentally one unity. In other words, the critical issue here has to do with oneness and multiplicity: once we allow for a set of plural, truly real entities, we begin to slip into the nominalist error. And, of course, interestingly, modern physics here seems to speak up for the idea of oneness, as our discussion of the fundamental force function above suggests. And as I will argue below, there is a metaphysics of oneness in the western tradition that I think we need to recover (a metaphysic of oneness that can take us beyond any mathematical formula, which itself must ultimately be contingent).

But, again, here is where the neo-scholastic might interject: surely scholastic thought agreed with the oneness of all things? Medieval scholastics were, after all, Christians, who believed that God was the sole creator and sustainer of all things. Doesn’t this provide the metaphysical oneness that our discussion above calls for?

I don’t think so. And this is the great tragedy, the great catastrophe, at the heart of scholasticism. It seems to me that at some point around 1000 CE, many western theologian-philosophers⁵ came to view God as a form among forms, even if the supreme form, and even if they never explicitly stated this.⁶ This is, I think, most evident in the work of Anselm of Canterbury, who I think is the great canary in the coal mine for the stumbling of western Christian thought.

Not only did Anselm discuss God as a being (as in his infamous ontological argument) which could be compared to other beings (“more perfect than any other being”), his discussion of the Atonement and the Cross in Cur Deus Homo argued that God had to manage the conflict of two different goals in the divine life: justice and mercy. According to Anselm, God had to be both perfectly just but also deigned to be merciful, and yet human sin seemed to make being both at once impossible. The Incarnation and Cross were, essentially, a kind of metaphysical loophole that God devised the square the circle.

Now, there are myriad moral and theological problems with this view of the Atonement, but I don’t want to get sidetracked here.⁷ The thing to focus on for our discussion now is the way in which Anselm assumes that God is some kind of rational entity who has to solve a problem (caused by God’s own act of creation!) because God is beholden to forms that are, it seems, independent of God. Now, of course, Anselm didn’t present it this way, and I am sure his defenders today would argue against this reading. But—and this is a crucial point—theologians are responsible for the logical implications of their work, even if they didn’t intend (or even understand!) them.⁸ I certainly think that Anselm has reverted to a view of the forms that some earlier, pre-Christian Platonists and Aristotelians might have endorsed: one in which a diversity of forms have their own eternal and absolute reality, rather than understanding all reality as contingently dependent on God.

Now, not all scholastics were as guilty of this slipshod philosophical reasoning as Anselm was. Aquinas was certainly far more careful and systematic, and in his best moments, did indeed try to recover a philosophical theology of oneness. But, despite the great esteem his work has had over the centuries, this strain in his thought has generally been sidelined by most of his appreciators. The trajectory, from 1000-1400 CE was, in my estimation, towards an ever-more complex scholastic metaphysics of form realism where multiplicity, not unity, was stressed. “God” too often became the name for one of the forms, rather than the formless reality beyond all forms. But more about that in a bit.

If I am right about this (and of course plenty of people would contest that bitterly), then we see how nominalism’s errors are already present, at least potentially, in scholasticism, and, I hope, we also start to get a better sense of what the solution to all this might look like. If the basic error of western metaphysics for the last millennium was to privilege multiplicity over oneness, and if even contemporary physics points us away from this position, then surely a metaphysics of radical oneness is what is required?

Returning to the One

Now, once we start talking about “metaphysical oneness”, many people (assuming they remain awake!) will immediately think of “Eastern” metaphysics, spirituality, and philosophy: non-dualism, after all is, all the rage among many spiritual-but-not-religious seekers these days. And as I have discussed before on this substack, I certainly think we can learn a lot from Eastern (e.g. Buddhist, Hindu, Daoist, etc.) thought, especially the philosophies of Vedanta.

But, gentle reader, this whole 5-part series has basically been my (extremely!) long-winded way of reminding us that we don’t have to exclusively look East for non-dualist metaphysics. Indeed, what came before scholasticism in western thought was, for a few centuries, mostly a Western form of non-dualism: Christian Neoplatonism.

We are now more than 4,000 words into this mess, so I will not diverge here to give any kind of in-depth description of Neoplatonism.⁹ But, at its most basic, Neoplatonism arose, first in the work of Plotinus, as an effort to draw together the thought both of Plato and the so-called “Middle Platonists” into a more cohesive and comprehensive metaphysics (and spirituality). Crucially, Plotinus argued that the only real was “the One”, a reality beyond form or matter which caused and sustained all existence. For Plotinus, all the various forms were themselves derived from and dependent on the One. Plotinus’s position on the One was deeply apophatic: since the mind can only grasp forms and the One is beyond and before all forms, the mind cannot really think the One—though, the One can perhaps be experienced.

It was not difficult for Christian theologians to draw on this mode of thought in developing some of the most robust early systematic Christian theology. Augustine was famously influenced by Neoplatonism (though, not enough, if you ask me!), and Gregory of Nyssa certainly drew on it as well. Crucially, arguably two of the most important works of early medieval Christian philosophy—Pseudo-Dionysius’s works (such as The Divine Names and The Mystical Theology) as well as John Scotus Eriugena’s Periphyseon were built on the metaphysics of a Christianized Neoplatonism.

These works provided a Christian philosophical theology that was built, in other words, on the metaphysics of oneness. If nominalism (and voluntarism) are built on the idea of irreducible multiplicity, and if scholasticism sowed the seeds of that metaphysics, then in Neoplatonism, we have another option.

My contention, then, is that western philosophers and theologians ought to be studying and drawing on Neoplatonist thought in order to provide a way forward from our present modern crises. As mentioned (way) above, I am not suggesting that we simply try to recreate the social and ecclesial conditions of 9th-century western Europe(!) But I do think we can learn from Eriugena, Pseudo-Dionysius, and others. In fact, if we care at all about good philosophy, true spirituality, and the health of human individuals and societies, I think we must work to recover what is best about that tradition. And, in short, that’s what I am trying to do with this substack.

The good news is that, obviously, plenty of smarter and better-qualified people have been pushing this line of thought for decades (and longer). David Bentley Hart and David Armstrong are two names that come immediately to mind (Armstrong does tend to emphasize Vedantin thought more than Neoplatonist, in my experience). And there is a growing movement calling for a “theology of participation” in various quarters. Stephen R.L. Clark, for example, is an academic deeply involved in this.¹⁰

Now, this whole post has focused on the metaphysics of nominalism; many of you will have noticed that I did not address voluntarism here, despite the fact that this series’s title is about “Freedom”. But I think we can easily connect the dots: voluntarism as a doctrine of either God or human beings only makes sense if we accept the metaphysics of nominalism. If, instead, we come to recognize that all multiplicity ultimately derives from a fundamental oneness, then, as already suggested in previous parts of this series, the question of freedom is radically re-contextualized: instead of seeing freedom as my ability to assert my will over other beings, genuine freedom becomes seen as the ability to recognize the truth of my already being in relationship with all other beings, and already owing my existence to the One beyond Being. Such a view of freedom leads naturally, I think, to an ethics of self-discipline rather than self-indulgence, selflessness instead of selfishness, and a focus on drawing closer to the One rather than elbowing for as much space as an individual. One could even argue for a mode of virtue ethics here, hinted at in earlier posts in this series: to be free means to move towards one’s actual telos, in return to the One, and not in arbitrarily-made choices. In these ways and more, I think, a renewed metaphysics of oneness can combat some of the most egregious agonies of modern life.

My hope, gentle reader, is that this sketch of both the problem with modern thought, and at least some hints as to a path forward from it, has been of value to you. I certainly thank you for reading this far! Next week we will turn to other topics. There need not be, I think you’ll agree, a part 6!

1. Turtles all the way down!

2. I am obviously simplifying this process a lot.

3. It should go without saying that I am not trained in physics. This is a very basic, summary, laymen’s take on the issues. I think it is accurate, but obviously not precise. As far as my (very limited) research has suggested, the phrase “fundamental force function” is not used in physics, but it allows me to gather up a number of terms and refer to them all at once, which is of great value in a broad and general discussion of the topic.

4. At least, as far as I know! It’s possible recent research has made progress here. This is, as mentioned above, beyond my expertise. I will be endeavoring to keep this section on physics as basic and uncontroversial as possible.

5. At this point in history, theologians and philosophers were basically the exact same people.

6. I should note that my academic work was not on medieval scholasticism, and I certainly haven’t read every scholastic thinker exhaustively. But I have read Anselm!

7. I did write a term paper on this subject back at UVA; if you are especially curious, I’d be happy to share it with you. Just leave a comment below to that effect.

8. There is more to say about this, but over the years I have noticed that many theologians are happy to draw on philosophical systems and insights but without accepting all the corollaries and ramifications of that system. They seem to cherry-pick what they like and assume that anything they don’ explicitly state in their work need not be worried about. But this is a shoddy way to do metaphysics.

9. The interested reader may want to consult Deirdre Carabine’s excellent The Unknown God.

10. Though I must admit I have not yet read any of his work. The pile of books to be read is big, and its only grows bigger…