UNIVERSALS, QUESTION OF. — A celebrated controversy, and at certain moments a highly clamorous one, concerning a problem which, because it was formulated in terms that were not always clear, gradually appeared susceptible to opposing solutions.
The first logic of the Greeks was mathematics, which was so called because it appeared to be the “discipline” par excellence, insofar as, by means of number and geometrical figures, it makes it possible to reduce the multiplicity of experience to unity, what always seemed varied and different to the dominion of an immutable law, what was sense-impression to science. And the concepts of mathematics were ordered by genera and species in a compact system that permitted the most rigorous deduction; this deduction was transferred into physical reality together with number, considered the essence of things. To defeat the sensationalism and consequent relativism of the Sophists, Socrates inaugurated the search for the universal concept in the treatment of moral problems (Aristotle, Met., I, c. 6, 987 b 1-4). Plato transferred the method of this search to nature in general, universalizing qualities on the model of numbers and geometrical figures, which are abstract quantitative schemes, without noting that physical qualities, once schematized, become unreal abstractions, such as animality, horseness, etc. Platonic ideas are, for the most part, abstractions of empirical qualities, which usurp the fixity (necessity, eternity, universality) of numbers and figures. And just as the Pythagoreans had made number the “essence” of things, so for Plato the ideas are the eternal and universal essence of the mutable and contingent things that appear in space and time. Set above space and time, they exist in and of themselves, beyond the heavens, which are the limit of all mutability, and therefore possess a hyperuranian nature, articulating themselves into a system of dialectical relations around the idea of the Good, from which they radiate. Aristotle did not deny the Platonic ideas, but criticized their separation from the sensible world, showing that the separated idea can be neither the essence nor the cause of things, nor the principle of their knowability; and he undertook to reunite what Plato had separated, reducing the idea to an act that determines and organizes matter, as an intelligible principle of unity and distinction and as a form inherent in things themselves (εἶδος ἑνών: Met., VII, c. 11, 1037ᵃ, 29).
Plato, as is well known, had long endeavored to resolve the problem of the relation to be established between the separated idea and the things of the sensible world and, after having considered a relation of μίμησις and μέθεξις, had settled upon the relation of κανονία, envisaging the possibility that one and the same essence, in itself one and separate, could be communicated, not in parts but whole and entire, to particular things, without losing its unity, so that it could be called “one over many” and “one in many” (cf. Parmen., chaps. 5-6, 131ᵃ-133ᵃ). Aristotle too had adopted this manner of participation. Yet the form inherent in things acquires, through contact with matter, an individual mode of being, and loses Platonic universality. In order to preserve this universality, without which there can be no science, Aristotle devised the doctrine of abstraction and of the agent intellect. In particular things, the universal is only in potency; but freed from contact with matter, it is universal in act, thanks to the action of the agent intellect, which abstracts it from particulars. Hence he was able to affirm that “the universal animal either is nothing, or is posterior” to particular animals (De anima, I, c. 1, 402ᵇ, 5-8).
The Neoplatonists too adopted this thesis of the presence (παρουσία) of the universal in the particular. Plotinus brought Plato’s separated ideas together in the νόος and constituted that νόημος νόητος in which the “ideal reasons” of all things are gathered, arranged dialectically by genera, species, and specific differences; but the world-soul impresses these “ideal reasons” upon matter and makes them the very essence of things in the Aristotelian manner. In this way the universal is separate in the νόος, and is present and inherent in particular things, into which, moreover, the Neoplatonists project the dialectical hierarchy of genera and species, making them corresponding diverse stratifications of physical reality, so that the same “animality” is in all animals, the same “horseness” in all horses, etc.
Porphyry, who in the Isagage ad Categorias or De quinque vocibus had outlined the tree of these hierarchically ordered concepts, had also touched upon the question of whether genera and species are subsistent realities or concepts of our mind. Although he offered no solution to it, the very fact that he had posed it stimulated the search for one. The first to put forward a solution was Boethius. At the beginning of his commentary on Porphyry’s treatise, which he had translated, he summarized the Aristotelian solution: that genera and species subsist only in individuals, but that nevertheless, through the power of abstraction of the human mind, they are “intelliguntur praeter sensibilia.” And again: “Sunt quidem in singularibus, cogitantur vero universalia; nihilque aliud species esse putanda est, nisi cogitatio collecta ex individuorum dissimilium numero substantiali similitudine.” But in explaining this doctrine, he reports that Plato “genera et species ceteraque non modo intelligi universalia, verum etiam esse atque praeter corpora subsistere putat.”
The reading of Porphyry’s little book and Boethius’s commentary on the Categories provided the occasion for disputes in the medieval schools of dialectic. But it must not be forgotten that the Platonic ideas, already gathered by Plotinus in the νόος, the first emanation of the One, had been transferred by St. Augustine into the divine mind and constituted the “ideal” or “primordial reasons” of created beings. Neoplatonic thought, moreover, had acted powerfully not only upon St. Augustine but also upon the writings of the pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Scoto Eriugena (v.), Remigius of Auxerre, and Gerbert of Aurillac (Pope Sylvester II) were certainly indebted to the doctrines of Augustine and of the pseudo-Dionysius; they attributed to universals not only a real existence as ideas in the divine mind, but also an existence as stratifications of reality upon which all the degrees of logical abstraction are projected. As for the reality of ideas in the divine mind (ideas ante rem), all Christian thinkers were in agreement. The point on which they disagreed concerned the existence of universals in re. Realism was the name given to the tendency that regarded genera and species as corresponding stratifications of physical reality, such that one and the same nature, for example that of animal, differentiated itself in its species, and one identical specific nature, for example that of horse, differentiated itself in individual horses. And since it was customary in the Middle Ages to transfer dialectic into theology, in whose service it was placed, Odo of Tournai held that the individual is not a substance, but a “proprietas” of the substance “man,” and maintained that only in this way could one explain how Adam’s sin, by infecting human nature, numerically identical in all human beings, was transmitted to all his descendants (Pl. 160, 1079 and 1090). But the foremost representative of CHAMPLEVE (v.), at least until Abelard compelled him to modify his realistic doctrine substantially. Anselmian realism, on the other hand, remains within the limits of Platonic-Augustinian realism, although Anselm, polemicizing against Roscellinus, let slip a phrase of strongly realistic flavor (De fide trin., chap. 2), which has caused historians to wrinkle their noses. Neoplatonic and Eriugenian realism continued instead in the school of Chartres, with Bernard and Thierry of Chartres and Clarembald of Arras (12th cent.); with Amalric of Bena and David of Dinant it flowed directly into pantheism.
A Neoplatonic realist current was likewise found among the Arabs in the book On the Five Substances by the pseudo-Empedocles, in the so-called Theologia Aristotelica, and in the Liber de causis; among the Jews, in the Fons vitae of Avicobon or Ibn Gèbhiròl (11th century).
Opposed to nominalism (v.) of Erico or Enrico d’Auxerre, Raimberto da Lilla, Roscellino (v.), whom s. Anselmo accused of falling into tritheism. These “heretics of dialectic,” Anselm said of the nominalists, “non nisi flatum vocis putant esse universales substantias”; so that, being unable to understand “quomodo plures homines in specie sint unus homo” (this is precisely the excessive phrase that the abbot of Bec let slip), they could not even understand “quomodo plures personae, quarum singula quaeque est perfectus Deus, sint unus Deus.”
But with the return of Aristotle, these extreme positions were to be abandoned. Among the Arabs, the renewer of Aristotelian doctrine concerning universals was Averroes (12th century). For this celebrated commentator, “universalia... sunt collecta ex particularibus in intellectu, qui accipit inter ea similitudinem et facit unam intentionem” (Metaph., XII, comm. 4); so that “intellectus est, qui facit in rebus universalitatem” (De anima, I, comm. 8). In particular things there is only similitude as something real; only through a process of abstraction is this fixed in a universal concept.
During the 12th century, Aristotle’s Metaphysics and De anima also began to spread in the Latin West, so that the theory expounded by Boethius concerning universals could be better understood. Abelard had already proposed a solution to the problem different from that of Roscellino and Guglielmo di Champeaux. In place of the voces of the nominalists, he substituted sermones, since the former are mere flatus, whereas the latter imply a logical function. Other intermediate solutions had also been proposed. But it was knowledge of the Metaphysics and De anima, as well as of the Averroistic commentary, that restored Aristotelian doctrine concerning universals to first place. S. Tommaso, who in the 13th century was the most steadfast proponent of this doctrine, agrees with Averroes on this point.
The metaphysical presupposition of this doctrine, characterized as “moderate realism,” is the following: the universal, known through an act of thought, has a foundation in physical reality, insofar as form constitutes the ὅσια κατὰ τὸν λόγον of things (Aristotle, De anima, II, c. 1, 412ᵃ, 5 ff., 412ᵇ 10 ff.) and is, in itself, universal like the Platonic idea.
This Aristotelian-Averroistic-Thomistic theory was the one that prevailed in scholasticism from the 13th century onward.
Nevertheless, traces of Neoplatonism are not difficult to find, for example, in the Summa philosophiae, attributed to Roberto Grossatesta and published by L. Baur in Beitr. Gesch. Philos. Mitt., IX, Münster in V. 1912, where it is maintained (pp. 351–52) that genera and species “veras aliquas naturae dicunt et non solus intentiones logicalis.” Connected with this theory is that of the plurality of forms in natural beings, which maintains that the generic form is really distinct from the specific form, and the latter from the “species specialissima” (Giov. di Jundun, De anima, I, qq. 8–9; Phys., VII, q. 8; Mataphys., II, q. 11); from this thesis derive the famous “realitates” or “formalitatea” Duns Scoto (v.) and his school, which differ from one another “a parte rei.”
A pronounced realist tendency is also evident in Giovanni Buridano, followed by Giovanni Wiclaf and by Paolo Veneto, who brought it from Oxford to Padua, where it was defended by Nicoletto Vernia in connection with the question “utrum dentur universalia realia” and vigorously opposed by Pietro Pomponazzi. Alessandro Achillini, author of a short treatise De universalibus (Bologna 1501), remained in the Aristotelian-Averroist position.
The Aristotelian thesis, as we have seen, contains a twofold element: one subjective and gnoseological, the universalizing activity of the intellect; the other objective and metaphysical, the form existing in things. Modern philosophy increasingly tended to develop the first element and eliminate the second. Guglielmo di Occam (v.) is the leader of the so-called nominales of the 14th century. Once the precedence and preeminence of intuitive knowledge over abstractive knowledge had been affirmed, the universal remained merely a function of the latter, which never reaches reality in its concreteness but serves only to unify and order experience by means of termini, fictiones e intentiones in anima. Having expelled “substantial forms” and hidden “essences” from the world of nature, Galilean and Cartesian physics reduced all phenomena to forms of mechanical motion: the universal is only the law expressed in mathematical formulas. And it is precisely in mathematics that the universal seemed destined to remain confined, while empiricism and sensationalism proceeded to dissolve the physical world, denying the reality of bodies, which Cartesio had reduced to simple extended masses endowed with motion. Nevertheless, Cartesio recognized universal and necessary value in innate ideas, which have their foundation in the ideas of the divine mind; this Augustinian thesis, reworked by Malebranche, would be developed in ontologism. In the Spinozian system there is an “ordo et connexio idearum” that coincides with the “ordo et connexio rerum” (Eth., II, 19); a thesis essentially also accepted by Berkeley, for whom our perceptions ultimately originate in the ideas of the divine mind irradiated upon created spirits, and are their symbol. A decisive denial of the universal and necessary value of ideas and principles of reason is found instead in Hume and later in positivism.
In an attempt to overcome the empiricist-rationalist antinomy, Kant made universals the a priori forms of cognition within which the subject orders experience: thus all our knowledge, as regards its content, derives from contingent and changing experience; and all knowledge, as regards the a priori and universal form that illuminates and conditions experience itself, is logically prior to II. Genuine knowledge is only the a priori synthesis. Having thus emphasized the universalizing function of the knowing subject, post-Kantian idealism transferred this function to the absolute ego, which for Hegel is the Idea; although it develops, it preserves its transcendent absoluteness and resolves all reality within itself.
In the reaction against Hegelian idealism, positivism found itself greatly embarrassed in justifying the universal value of science. A. Comte held that mathematics, placed at the summit of knowledge, could suffice for this purpose. But empiriocriticism, contingentism, intuitionism, and pragmatism attacked the universal even in the stronghold that had seemed impregnable, namely mathematics, stripping this science of all theoretical value and leaving it with a purely utilitarian and economical abstractive function.
This thesis, because of the elements of truth it contains, was also accepted in the Crocean system of the philosophy of spirit, which relegates the natural sciences and mathematics among the pseudo-concepts, reserving the function of universalizing reality in the living unity of thought solely to the universal and concrete theoretical judgment.