Without the Story of a Tree, There is No Tree
[The following is a small excerpt from a paper I wrote describing John Milbank's theology a little while back. The citation abbreviation TST refers to Milbank's Theology and Social Theory, while RO refers to Radical Orthodoxy]
Why does this inability to speak of
things otherwise than analogically then lead to nihilism? Because with univocity the only way to speak
of anything is to speak of a particular object.
But upon further analysis each object has many aspects, and the many
aspects could only be related to one thing analogically. This means the “univocal” gaze actually
pierces through all things to find them vanishing, leaving nothing. It cannot understand appearances, relations,
or correlations between things as anything else than mere subjective opinion,
which means then that the presence of any
objects are mere appearance (much
like in Kant) so that things in themselves, in univocal accounts (which
secularism is based on) ultimately keep reducing down (and are completely reducible to) more and more basic individual components (a person to body; body to organs; organs to cells; cells to chemicals; chemicals to molecules; molecules to atoms; and on and on). This ultimately means that each higher level is ultimately not meaningful except as it is reduced to the lower. In which case all meaning and value, appearance and significance, love and song, are never more than flux in the void. Things are only understandable through the
analogy of their aspects, which means “this hermeneutic ontology remains truer,
one might argue, to the irreducibly murky character of the boundary between the
finite and infinite by not allowing that the finite is comprehensible simply on
its own terms.”[2] To understand something would be to
understand its infinite aspects and relations, and so it must correspond with
God’s own infinity, which allows the possibility
of such knowledge. “Worship of God and
celebration of corporeal sensuality and beauty absolutely require eachother,”[3]
because “Only transcendence, which
suspends things…suspends them also in the sense of upholding their relative
worth—over against the void.”[4]
So Milbank can say “RO recognizes that materialism and spiritualism are false alternatives, since if there is only finite matter there is not even that, and that for phenomena really to be there they must be more than there is…this is to say that all there is only is because it is more than it is.”[5] “Nihilism” in this instance, for RO, does not necessarily mean amorality, it means the inability to justify morality, to justify the way we see and exist in the world. In this way, when Milbank writes “narration and analogical relationships among things are more fundamental than either explanation or understanding,” he is, in his own way, hinting at his own “proof” for God—yet one only made in faith. For only if we believe in Christ, and that God exists, will our own supposed perceptions and understanding of the world (in its analogical relationships!) be vindicating as something other than pure delusion.
Again,
all well and good. But again, so
what? What does it mean to concede this
genealogy [of the switch from analogy to univocity]? What effect does it have? The effect is, ultimately, nihilism (again
this is similar to claims made by, e.g. Schaefer, when talks about the “line of
despair,” though Schaefer identifies some different culprits). We should note, of course, that both sets of
linguistics and ontologies are talking about the same world. But they organize the world differently. In fact, this is a key aspect of Milbank’s
argument and his metanarrative realism, or what he calls “linguistic
idealism.” Somewhat similar to Bishop
Berkley in the 18th century, Milbank argues there are no abiding
substances in the world, only surfaces, and these surfaces or “presentations of
the world,” can be understood as abiding structures only by linguistic representation: “without the story of a tree
[for example] there is no abiding tree.” (TST
358). Let us move into a few more
concrete examples to see what is at stake, and why Milbank argues univocity,
voluntarism, and nominalism lead towards stories that are nihilistic.
The story that univocity tells us,
is that things can no longer be understood as embedded in wider analogical
meanings, they can only be analyzed as individual things. Any organizing structure greater than the
individual things (“tree” in general, as opposed to particular trees, for
example) must merely be the product either
of a subjective decision unrelated to how reality actually is, even if
heuristically useful, or it speaks of
a general law so that the individual thing being examined is no longer the
object, which is absent, but the law it exemplifies. Yet how do we, for instance, identify a
particular thing? What seems, for
example, to be the commonsense appearance to us of an apple, or a tree, is
actually very complicated to identify, though this is hardly ever reflected
upon. Analytical philosophy and
Anglo-American postmodern linguistics like Kripke, Wittgenstein, Frege,
Russell, et al, have attempted to devise various ways (all assuming univocity
of being) in which to speak of the appearance of an individual thing. But Milbank argues they all fail. Lets look at one example why. “If there only exist individuals, the notions
of qualities attaching to individuals, and the…accompanying idea that we only
perceive individuals in terms of these qualities, seems problematic.” Milbank continues “Frege and Russell, for
example, attempted to reduce every ‘is’ of predication to the ‘is’ of pure
identity (as they must on the univocal account): ‘x is y’ as in ‘this apple is
red,’ is then only comprehensible as x = y where ‘equals’ spells identity.” This is so because if there “are” only
individual things (nominalism) then the thing must be convertible with its
qualities. But Milbank sees a huge
problem with this that demands analogy.
Here it behooves us to quote Milbank at length:
One cannot reduce all the qualitative aspects under
which individual things appear to us simply to the things themselves in their
bare extensional existence. The tree
comes to us sighing, creaking, resistant, concealing, growing, and so
forth. If we tried to identify all these
things we would soon produce nonsense.
And why? Because the referent, the tree, is only available to us under an infinite multitude of senses or
aspects, which in attending to we also intend
[that is, the tree is the thing we decide to see, which could be any level of
its multiple aspects or qualities]. For
this reason, the collapse of the attempt to reduce quality to equality with
individual substance entails also the problematization of individual substance
as such [and thus calls into question univocity’s ability to identify a particular thing to analyze it]. Phenomenology must thus realize that
individual substance proves intrinsically multiple and self-concealing (like
the back of the tree that always remains however many times we run round it). Instead of it being the case that there are
only atomic things, it turns out (as George Berkeley already taught) there are only multiple qualities (in fact
multiple shared essences) since the tree has no monopoly on sighing. Just how it is true that we perceive through
all this annual flurry but one tree,
is the really mysterious thing: what else can one say but that the mind
constructs a kind of analogous holding together than enables it intentionally
to reach the real tree? Once nominalism
self deconstructs, it seems that analogy
lies not only between things but within things as before them, so allowing them
to be. Another way of putting this
would be to say that there can be no access to ontology without a complex
phenomenological detour. The tree
exists, so to speak, only as narrated in its aspects. The problem of aspects (as first opened up by
Husserl, but also by oth Heidegger and Wittgenstein) seems therefore to ruin
individual substance and to disclose the analogical
infinity of the particular thing in a way that even the older realism had
not…this means [following Pierce] that a counter-nominalism indicates that if a
universal as real is still a sign, then indeed it is only partial and so aspectual and must always be interpreted
by a position which abducts to an absent indicated thing [in other words in
speaking about any given individual we have to realize we never invoke the
thing itself since there is no such thing.
All things are aspects of a thing analogically related together and so
seen as one].[1]
So Milbank can say “RO recognizes that materialism and spiritualism are false alternatives, since if there is only finite matter there is not even that, and that for phenomena really to be there they must be more than there is…this is to say that all there is only is because it is more than it is.”[5] “Nihilism” in this instance, for RO, does not necessarily mean amorality, it means the inability to justify morality, to justify the way we see and exist in the world. In this way, when Milbank writes “narration and analogical relationships among things are more fundamental than either explanation or understanding,” he is, in his own way, hinting at his own “proof” for God—yet one only made in faith. For only if we believe in Christ, and that God exists, will our own supposed perceptions and understanding of the world (in its analogical relationships!) be vindicating as something other than pure delusion.
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