No True Scotsman (Part Four): The Place of Duns Scotus in Contemporary Philosophy

III.b. Scotus and Philosophy

In a quote by Agamben above, Heidegger’s thesis that the primacy of the will rules over the course of Western metaphysics is also apt, for Heidegger himself participates in perpetuating a form of the “Scotus Story.”  As S.J. McGrath writes, “the influence of Scotus on Heidegger, while long a subject of general speculation, has not yet received a careful study.”[1]  In part this has been forgotten due to neglect of Heidegger’s Habilitationsschrift written on Scotus (and this in part to taking Heidegger at his own word that it was a “youthful work lacking direction” but which in fact is shot through with themes that will come later in his work).[2]  “Heidegger as no sympathy for the Thomist analogia entis,” says McGrath, “his decisive departure from Scotus, the rejection of an infinite mode of being, does not break with the Scotist project of maintaining a univocal notion of being.”[3]  

In fact, Heidegger’s Habilitationsschrift on Scotus was an “act of defiance,”[4] as Heidegger used him to rebel against the neo-Thomism that he was schooled in.  Heidegger’s particular portrait of Scotus was used as a wedge against the neo-Thomists (“the same monster against which Bernard Lonergan and Karl Rahner raged”[5]).  But the wedge swelled from there, cracking not just the stone edifice of neo-Thomism into which it was placed, but now with the charge of “onto-theology” Heidegger’s ontology was “intended to break with every medieval ontology”[6] and eventually the West as a whole.

This historical context is important for several reasons.  The first is that the Scotist and Lutheran[7] heritage of Heidegger’s work leads to the specific nature of the characterization of the charge of “onto-theology”: namely that it is the philosophical version of Luther’s cry against scholasticism, or in Heidegger’s terms the God of onto-theology enters discourse “only insofar as philosophy, of its own accord, and by its own nature, requires and determines how the deity enters into it.”[8]  But this is redoubled again, in a sense, as the Lutheran edge cuts even sharper against some of the absurdities of the neo-Thomism of Heidegger’s own day.  As such, one can see why the pivot of Duns Scotus might be so important to someone like Milbank, who can claim that the “onto-theological” charge is something that does not (like Heidegger claims) affect the course of Western tradition as a whole, but merely a very distinct and temporally parochial subset of it. 

One does not need Scotus as such to do this.  Those like Merold Westphal have argued that Heidegger’s critique is not against theistic discourse per se, so much as it is a critique of using God as a prop or tool to achieve understanding of the world through theoretical reason.[9]  And this without the whole apparatus of the “Scotus Story.”  Nonetheless using the “Scotus pivot” is an attempt by Milbank (whatever we might think of its accuracy) to make a precise tool to dislodge the tradition that cumulatively began a transition that led up into the onto-theological nature of modern thought.  As such a return to Aquinas against Scotus is seen as a viable path of critique for Milbank, and Radical Orthodoxy.

Such a move would not be limited to countering Heidegger.  In addition, Gilles Deleuze is another major philosopher for whom the Scotus Story is significant:

            Deleuze’s appropriation of the medieval concept of      univocity is the most obvious

and important example of this unorthodox use of the Christian theological tradition.The doctrine of the ‘univocity of Being’ was an ontological theory developed in the thirteenth century by Duns Scotus, following Henry of Ghent, in his magnum opus entitled Opus Oxoniense ,which Deleuze calls ‘the greatest book of pure ontology’. In the Middle Ages, univocity was a heterodox position, constantly at the borders of heresy, and had limited currency outside the Scotistic school (the English word ‘dunce’ is derived from the term of approbation used to describe the followers of Duns Scotus). The concept has a rather curious history in Deleuze’s own work. The term was not even mentioned before 1968, when univocity suddenly became an important theme in almost all of Deleuze’s writings. It first appears in Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza , where it forms the ‘keystone’ of Deleuze’s interpretation of Spinoza (even more than the title concept of ‘expression’).  It then assumes an even more prominent role in Difference and Repetition  and in The Logic of Sense, where Deleuze not only identifies an entire tradition of univocity in the history of philosophy, running from Duns Scotus (against Thomism) through Spinoza (against Cartesianism) to Nietzsche (against Hegelianism), but also presents his own ontology as a univocal ontology, thereby, as it were, identifying himself as the most recent inheritor of that tradition.[10]

As Smith continues, however: “despite Deleuze’s provocative claim, there is no ‘tradition’ of univocity in the history of philosophy, apart from the one he creates: there is hardly a secondary literature on the concept outside of Scotistic studies.”[11]

For Jean-Luc Marion, the “Scotus Story” (again, this is a broad term) in relation to “onto-theology” shows up in an interesting manner.  With an in-depth analysis of Descartes’ theology Marion argues that it is actually a combination of three different strands of incompatible theological argumentation: the idea of God as infinite in Scotus, the idea of God as perfect from Ockham, and the idea of God as “self-caused” (causa sui) which is more obscure in origin and may in fact be the invention of Descartes himself as the tradition would have balked at a anything—even God—causing itself (though Marion believes Descartes may have altered the idea from Suarez).  “Descartes employs several determinations that we can no longer confuse once we have identified (even cursorily) the historical origins of the theological debates in which these determinations have gained their irreducible singularity.”[12] 

According to Marion, Descartes in essence boldly combined the disagreements of Scotus and Ockham, and internalized them into his own doctrine of God.  But this instability leads to an oscillation that tries to prioritize the logic of one (infinity) or the other (perfection).  As a fallout to this, Marion argues Descartes’ successors will pick up on one or another emphasis within his doctrine of God and run with it, essentially unraveling Descartes’ unstable synthesis and exploding the concept of God from within.[13]

With a slightly different take—though still utilizing the Scotus Story by way of Descartes and the general notion of “onto-theology”—Michael Allen Gillespie in his book Nihilism Before Nietzsche notes how Descartes’ work is done fundamentally in the shadow of the voluntarism and nominalism of Ockham.[14]  The “I think, therefore I am,” argues Gillespie can neither be a syllogism (because it would need to import hidden premises to function, and so not be basic) nor is it an intuition.  Rather, as Gillespie’s argument proceeds, it is a fundamental act of will in which the doubter asserts the will to exist in a similar manner to Ockham’s voluntarist God.[15]  In fact part of his analysis explicitly agrees with Marion regarding the instability in Descartes’ God, which tends towards resolution by prioritizing the infinite will.[16]

As the “Scotus Story” (of sorts) continues for Gillespie, he traces how this concept of will found its way into German Idealism through Fichte, passed on into Romanticism and Russian Nihilism, and most peculiarly on to Nietzsche himself:

The postmodern element in Nietzsche’s thought, however, is in many respects unknowingly premodern, drawing upon the nominalist notion of will.  Dionysius in this sense is not a new God who rises up to replace the old God who has died, but that old God, who appears under a new mask.[17]

Continuing this basic idea, Gillespie expands upon it in The Theological Origins of Modernity by noting more broadly not just how the notion of absolute will was formed, but in regards to how voluntarism and nominalism changed the metaphysical and cosmological landscape more generally:

The nominalist revolution was an ontological revolution that called being itself into question … It …gave rise to a new ontology, a new logic, and a new conception of man, God, and nature.  All succeeding European thought has been shaped by this transformation.  While nominalism undermined scholasticism, it was unable to provide broadly acceptable alternative to the comprehensive view of the world it had destroyed.  Some retreat from radical nominalism was thus probably inevitable.  On the basic ontological point, there was no turning back—all, or almost all succeeding forms of thought accepted the ontological individualism that nominalism had so forcefully asserted.  With respect to the other elements of metaphysics, however, there was considerable variation, although these variations themselves were constrained by the structure of metaphysics itself [emphasis added].  In fact … succeeding thinkers focused not on the fundamental ontological question [of the difference of God from creatures] but on the ontic question of the priority or primacy of particular realms of being within metaphysica specialis.  The deepest disagreements in the period between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries were thus not ontological, but ontic, disagreements not about the nature of being but about which of the three realms of being—the human, the divine, or the natural—had priority.  To put it simply, post-scholastic thinkers disagreed not about being itself, but about the hierarchy among the realms of being … Modernity, as we more narrowly understand it, was the consequence of the attempt to resolve this conflict by asserting the ontic priority not of man or God but of nature.[18]

In essence Gillespie argues that the dialectic of determinism and free will are themselves determined theologically as “modernity came into being as the result of a series of attempts to find a way out of the crises engendered by the nominalist revolution.”[19]  Indeed, although the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution are often represented as the separation of theology or religion from the rest of life, as a matter of fact “while modern metaphysics began by turning away from both the human and the divine toward the nature, it was able to do so only by reinterpreting the human and the divine naturalistically … In incorporating them in this manner, however, the earlier conflict between the human and the divine was not resolved but concealed within the new metaphysical outlook [of naturalism].”[20]  As such, in a sense Gillespie agrees with much of the analysis that occurred in the last section on “Scotus and Sociology”:

Viewed from this perspective [of nominalism and voluntarism’s influence] the process of secularization or disenchantment that has come to be seen as identical with modernity was in fact something different than it seemed, not the crushing victory of reason over infamy, to use Voltaire’s famous term, not the long drawn out death of God that Nietzsche proclaimed, and not the evermore distant withdrawal of the deus absconditus Heidegger points to, but the gradual transference of divine attributes to human beings (an infinite human will), the natural world (universal mechanical causality), social forces (the general will, the hidden hand), and history (the idea of progress, dialectical development, the cunning of reason).[21]

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[1] S.J. McGrath, The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy: Phenomenology for the God-Forsaken (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2006), 88.

[2] Ibid., 89.

[3] Ibid., 91.

[4] Ibid., 15.

[5] Ibid., 14.

[6] Ibid., 16.

[7] Ibid., 151-185.

[8] Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 56.

[9] Merold Westphal, Overcoming Onto-Theology: Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), esp. 1-47; 256-285. Cf. 257: “If one were to gather an understanding of Heidegger’s critique of onto-theology secondhand one might easily think that it is directed primarily at Augustine and Aquinas, Luther and Calvin, Pascal and Kierkegaard—against anyone who affirms a personal creator and redeemer.  It is not always sufficiently noted that [Heidegger’s] paradigms are Aristotle and Hegel and that the target of his analysis of ‘the onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics’ is a tradition that stretches from Anaximander to Nietzsche, which isn’t quite the same as the tradition that stretches from Augustine to Kierkegaard.”

[10] Daniel W. Smith, “The Doctrine of Univocity: Deleuze’s Ontology of Immanence,” in Mary Bryden, ed., Deleuze and Religion, (London: Routledge, 2000), 168.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Jean-Luc Marion, “The Essential Incoherence of Descartes’ Definition of Divinity,” in Amelie Rorty, ed., Essays on Descartes’ Meditations (Berkley: University of California, 1986), 328-329.

[13] For Philip Clayton, The Problem of God in Modern Thought  (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 2000) as well the story of Modern philosophical theology “is a story of how two major strands of pre-modern thought about the divine—the divine as infinite, and the divine as perfect—became entwined, defined the agenda for modern thought in a form known as ‘onto-theology’ and then separated again, perhaps permanently” (xi).  This separation occurs, in Clayton’s analysis, because of a fundamental incoherence: “the two concepts [infinity and perfection] evidence radically different logics” (117).

[14] Michael Allen Gillespie, Nihilism Before Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 1-33.

[15] Ibid., 45.

[16] Ibid., 58.

[17] Ibid., 253.

[18] Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2009), 16-17.

[19] Ibid., 261.

[20] Ibid., 262.

[21] Ibid., 273.