Types of metaphysical theory

Platonism

The essence of Platonism lies in a distinction between two worlds—the familiar world of everyday life, which is the object of the senses, and an unseen world of true realities, which can be the object of the intellect. Ordinary people recognize the existence of the former and ignore that of the latter; they fail to appreciate the extent to which their beliefs both about fact and about values are arbitrarily assumed and involve internal contradictions. The philosopher is in a position to show them how insubstantial is the foundation on which they take their stand. The philosopher can demonstrate how little thought there is in popular conceptions of good and evil and can show that the very concept of sense knowledge involves difficulties, because knowledge presupposes a stable object and the objects of sense are constantly changing.

The claim, however, is that philosophers can do more than this. Because of the presence in them of something like a divine spark, they can, after suitable preparation, fix their intellectual gaze on the realities of the unseen world and, in the light of them, know both what is true and how to behave. They will not attain this result easily—to get to it will involve not only immense intellectual effort, including the repeated challenging of assumptions, but also turning their backs on everything in life that is merely sensual or animal. Yet, despite this, the end is attainable in principle, and those who arrive at it will exercise the most important part of themselves in the best way that is open to them.

That this type of view has an immediate appeal to persons of a certain kind goes without saying. There is ample evidence in poetry and elsewhere of the frequently experienced sense of the unreality of familiar things and the presence behind them of another order altogether. Platonism may be said to build on “intuitions” of this kind; as a metaphysics, its job is to give them intellectual expression, to transfer them from the level of sentiment to that of theory. It is important, however, to notice that Platonism is not just the intellectualizing of a mood. It is an attempt to solve specific problems in a specific way. In Plato’s own case, the problems were set by loss of confidence in traditional morality and the emergence of the doctrine that “man is the measure of all things.”

Plato thought he could counter this doctrine by appeal to another contemporary fact, the rise of science as shown in the development of mathematical knowledge. Mathematics, as he saw it, offered certain truth, although not about the familiar world. The triangle whose properties were investigated by the geometrician was not any particular triangle but the prototype that all particular triangles presuppose. The Triangle and the Circle belonged not to the world of the senses but to the world of the intelligence; they were forms. If this could be said of the objects of mathematical discourse, the same should also be true of the objects of morality. True Justice and true Goodness were not to be found in popular opinions or human institutions but should be seen as unchanging forms, eternally existing in a world apart.

Modern philosophers have found much to criticize in this system: some have objected that forms are not so much existents as abstractions, while others have found the argument from science to morality quite inconclusive because of what they allege to be an absolute dichotomy between fact and value. It may be that nobody today can subscribe to Platonism in precisely the form given it by Plato himself. The general idea, however, has certainly not lost its hold, nor have the moral perplexities to which Plato hoped to find an answer been dissipated by further thought.

Aristotelianism

For many people, Plato is the archetypal other-worldly philosopher and Aristotle the archetypal this-worldly philosopher. Plato found reality to lie in things wholly remote from sense, while Aristotle took form to be typically embodied in matter and considered it his job as a philosopher to make sense of the here and now. The contrast is to some extent overdrawn, for Aristotle, too, believed in pure form (God and the astral intelligences—the intelligent movers of the planets—were supposed to satisfy this description), and Plato was sufficiently concerned with the here and now to want radical change in human society. It remains true, nevertheless, that Aristotelianism is in essentials a species of immanent metaphysics—a theory that instructs people on how to take the world they know rather than a theory that gives them news of an altogether different world.

The key concepts in Aristotelianism are substance, form and matter, potentiality and actuality, and cause (see Aristotle: Physics and metaphysics). Whatever happens involves some substance or substances; unless there were substances, in the sense of concrete existents, nothing whatsoever could be real. Substances, however, are not, as the name might suggest, mere parcels of matter; they are intelligible structures, or forms, embodied in matter. That a thing is of a certain kind means that it has a certain form or structure. But the structure as conceived in Aristotelianism is not merely static. Every substance, in this view, not only has a form but is, as it were, striving to attain its natural form; it is seeking to be in actuality what it is potentially, which is in effect to be a proper specimen of its kind. Because this is so, explanation in this system must be given in teleological rather than mechanical terms. For Aristotle, form is the determining element in the universe, but it operates by drawing things on, so that they become what they have it in themselves to be rather than by acting as a constant efficient cause (i.e., the agent that initiates the process of change). The notion of an efficient cause has a role in Aristotelianism. As Aristotle put it, it takes a human being, a developed specimen of the kind, to beget a human being. It is, however, a subordinate role and yields pride of place to a different idea—namely, form considered as purpose.

For reasons connected with his astronomy, Aristotle postulated a God. His God, however, had nothing to do with the universe; it was not his creation, and he was, of necessity, indifferent to its vicissitudes (God could not otherwise have been an unmoved mover). It is a mistake to imagine that everything in the Aristotelian universe is trying to fulfill a purpose that God has ordained for it. On the contrary, the teleology of which use is here made is unconscious; although things all tend to an end, they do not in general consciously seek that end. They are like organs in a living body that fulfill a function and yet seemingly have not been put there for that purpose.

As this last remark will suggest, an important source of Aristotelian thought is reflection on natural growth and decay. Aristotle, who was the son of a doctor, was himself a pioneer in natural history, and it is not surprising that he thought in biological terms. What is surprising, and gives his system a continuing interest, is the extent to which he succeeded in applying ideas in fields that are remote from their origin. He was without doubt more successful in some fields than in others—in dealing with the phenomena of social life, for instance, as opposed to those of physical reality. His results overall, however, were impressive enough for his system not only to dominate Western thought for many centuries but to constitute a challenge even today. People still, in many respects, think like Aristotle, and, as long as that is so, Aristotelianism will remain a live metaphysical option.

Thomism

The advent of Christianity had important effects in philosophy as in other aspects of human life. Initially, Christians were opposed to philosophical claims of any kind; they saw philosophy as an essentially pagan phenomenon and refused to allow the propriety of subjecting Christian dogma to philosophical scrutiny. Christian truth rested on revelation and did not need any certificate of authenticity from mere reason. Later, however, attempts were made to produce a specifically Christian metaphysics, to think out a view of the universe and of humans’ place in it that did justice to the Christian revelation and nevertheless rested on arguments that might be expected to convince Christians and non-Christians alike. St. Thomas Aquinas was only one of a number of important thinkers in medieval times who produced Christian philosophies; others—such as the philosophers John Duns Scotus in the late 13th century and William of Ockham in the first half of the 14th century—took significantly different views. In selecting the system of Aquinas for summary here, the factor that has weighed most has been its influence, particularly in postmedieval times. Aquinas was not the only medieval philosopher of distinction, but Thomism is alive as other medieval systems are not.

The central claim of Thomism is that reflection on everyday things and the everyday world reveals it as pointing beyond itself to God as its sustaining cause. Ordinary existents, such as human beings, are in the process of constant change. The change, however, is not normally the result of their own efforts, and, even when it is, it does not depend on them exclusively. No object in the familiar world can fully account for its own esse (i.e., its own act of existing), nor is it wholly self-sufficient; all are affected from without, or at least operate in an environment that is not of their own making. To say this is to say that they are one and all finite. Although finite things can be, and commonly are, stimulated to activity or kept in activity by other finite things, it does not follow that there might be finite things and nothing else. On the contrary, the finite necessarily points beyond itself to the infinite. The system of limited beings, each dependent for its activity on something else of the same kind, demands for its completion the existence of an unlimited being, one that is the source of change in other things but is not subject to change itself. Such a being would be not a cause like any other but a first or ultimate cause; it would be the unconditioned condition of the existence of all other things. Aquinas believed that human reason can produce definitive proofs of the existence of an infinite or perfect being, and he had no hesitation in identifying that being with the Christian God. Because, however, the movement of his thought was from finite to infinite, he claimed to possess only so much philosophical knowledge of the Creator as could be arrived at from study of his creation. Positive knowledge of the divine nature was not available; apart from revelation, one could only say what God is not, or conceive of his attributes by the imperfect method of analogy.

Aquinas worked out his ideas at a time when the philosophy of Aristotle was again becoming familiar in western Europe after a period of being largely forgotten, and many of his detailed theories show Aristotelian influence. He assumed the general truth of the Aristotelian picture of the natural world and the general correctness of Aristotle’s way of interpreting natural phenomena. He also took over many of Aristotle’s ideas in the fields of ethics and politics. He gave the latter, however, a distinctively different twist by making the final end of human beings not philosophical contemplation or the exercise of virtue in the political sphere but the attainment of the beatific vision of God; it was Christian rather than Greek ideas that finally shaped his view of the “summum bonum” (greatest good). Similarly, his celebrated proofs of God’s existence (the Five Ways) proceeded against a background that is obviously Aristotelian but that need not be presupposed for their central thought to have validity. Thomism can certainly be seen, and historically must be seen, as the system of Aristotle adapted to Christian purposes. It is important, however, to stress that the adaptation resulted in something new, a distinctive way of looking at the world that still has its adherents and still commands the respect of philosophers.