Which is the bigger threat: Nominalism or Realism?
I recently read Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism by Paul Forster because I was curious as to why some philosophers have denounced nominalism as a threat to civilization. A quote will help indicate Peirces position.
Nominalism rejects the existence of universals and abstract entities and other artificial creations, or any combination of the above. Personally I see it as uncontroversial to hold the position, and consider myself a nominalist. But as the Pierce quote indicates, it has dire implications for the realist and all he values.
Modern political critics of liberalism and individualism have raised similar concerns. Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin and his French collaborator, Alain de Benoist, go so far as to lay the blame for liberalism and individualism at the feet of William of Ockham. For Benoist, it all leads to a false anthropology that the human being is not fundamentally social. For Dugin, it leads to the end of humanity, as all other identities shatter into individualistic atoms. Categories like gender and homo sapiens fall apart, and perhaps we become cyborgs. All of this threatens their ethno-national political visions.
But their fears are begging the question. They presuppose a realist world in which all that can be loved, or admired, or understood is already extant. What shatters, then, but their own figments? Might the threat of realism manifest at this point?
From a nominalist perspective, the realist project presents a different individualism, an extreme egoism, where figment is all that can be loved, or admired, or understood. The world out there, of particulars, and others, unanchored as they are from every realist mind, are not worthy of value. I suppose they do not have the blessing of the realist mind, because he cannot stir into them his abstractions, categories, and universals.
So which is it? Are the particulars not as worthy of being loved, admired, or understood as the abstractions and universals the realist holds dear?
I'm hoping someone can point me in the direction of those who see realism as a threat, and we can continue this ancient battle on an even footing.
Nominalism and all its ways are devices of the Devil if devil there be. And in particular it is the disease which almost drove poor John Mill mad,the dreary outlook upon a world in which all that can be loved, or admired, or understood is figment.
Charles Sanders Peirce, "Semiotic and significs : the correspondence between Charles S. Peirce and Lady Victoria Welby"
Nominalism rejects the existence of universals and abstract entities and other artificial creations, or any combination of the above. Personally I see it as uncontroversial to hold the position, and consider myself a nominalist. But as the Pierce quote indicates, it has dire implications for the realist and all he values.
Modern political critics of liberalism and individualism have raised similar concerns. Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin and his French collaborator, Alain de Benoist, go so far as to lay the blame for liberalism and individualism at the feet of William of Ockham. For Benoist, it all leads to a false anthropology that the human being is not fundamentally social. For Dugin, it leads to the end of humanity, as all other identities shatter into individualistic atoms. Categories like gender and homo sapiens fall apart, and perhaps we become cyborgs. All of this threatens their ethno-national political visions.
But their fears are begging the question. They presuppose a realist world in which all that can be loved, or admired, or understood is already extant. What shatters, then, but their own figments? Might the threat of realism manifest at this point?
From a nominalist perspective, the realist project presents a different individualism, an extreme egoism, where figment is all that can be loved, or admired, or understood. The world out there, of particulars, and others, unanchored as they are from every realist mind, are not worthy of value. I suppose they do not have the blessing of the realist mind, because he cannot stir into them his abstractions, categories, and universals.
So which is it? Are the particulars not as worthy of being loved, admired, or understood as the abstractions and universals the realist holds dear?
I'm hoping someone can point me in the direction of those who see realism as a threat, and we can continue this ancient battle on an even footing.
Comments (48)
I'm not sure if this makes much sense as a critique. A lot of realism is extremely person centered and sees a strong telos at work in history (the history of particulars). Valuing particulars is not really what is at stake.
Actually, I think some realists attack nominalists precisely for destroying particulars and turning them into a formless "will soup." Note that personalism and phenomenology seems to be biggest in traditional Christian philosophy, which tends to be unrelentingly realist.
While there are strong similarities between anti-nominalist critiques from a variety of Eastern and Western sources, I think nominalist critiques of realism will be more diverse because nominalism tends towards greater plurality (for better or worse). There are simply skeptical critiques ("you cannot know that because you cannot know the noumenal,") and there are critiques rooted in a view of freedom primarily has power/potency ("your ideas are keeping you from realizing maximal freedom"). The critique of an eliminitive materialist is going to be different from that or a Nietzschean, which will be different from that of a skeptical liberal, etc.
Ockham is singled out by lots of people, it's a bit of a trope. But it's really the voluntarism that's more important. Arguably, the nominalism is just a means to his voluntarism.
But it's not like all realism comes from the angel of intellectualism. Some seek to find a unity of intellect and will above all distinctions (more common in the East because the "nous" and "heart" do not map neatly to intellect/will e.g. Palamas, but even for Aquinas the distinction of will and intellect in God is purely conceptual, not real, while in Eckhart there is the "darkness above the light" beyond all distinctions as "Unground"). Yet these will tend towards volanturism being "more wrong, particularly as respects man. Or, in the Philokalic tradition, we might even say that volanturism is the state of the sick soul, the presence of the diabolical, linear reason.
I don't think these critiques are totally off-base, although Ockham and Scotus might be bad targets. The later anthropology that comes to dominate modern thought in thinkers like Hume, and its conception of reason in particular, is very close to the description of the mind in the condition of sin/under demonic influence in writers like Evagrius. So they are diametrically opposed in a fairly strong sense. But I think people tend to confuse "moral opprobrium" with a more "philosophical opprobrium" here.
Then why in your opinion would Pierce describe nominalism as the dreary outlook upon a world in which all that can be loved, or admired, or understood is figment, when the figments in question are universals and abstractions? What is it about the world that changes for the realist without universals and abstractions and forms?
Ideas are often considered abstract objects.
People sometimes lay the blame for the state of the world at the feet of some philosopher and his philosophy, as I tried to show. Though I think this is erroneous, metaphysics ought to inform ones politics, ethics, and so on. If nominalism or realism informs the way one treats others and the world, which is the greater threat to others and the world?
The realism you're referencing is really a type of idealism, right? It holds that platonic objects exist in some sense. Peirce is saying that a universe without ideas is a dead universe where nothing matters. It's a universe that can't break your heart because it's just swirling dust.
The reason Peirce is wrong to say that nominalism is a threat has to do with the way the psyche works. Morality is inextricably tied to the forces that give rise to identity. With everyone you meet, you're consciously or subconsciously assessing who they are relative to you, and they provide the stimulus from which you gather up who you are, what you want, what you need. This activity develops out of innate capabilities, so most people don't have any choice but to be practical idealists, no matter what their philosophies may be.
I think the exception to this is psychopaths. Though they tend to be highly intelligent, they can't make sense of what everyone else refers to as an "inner world." They can't explain their actions, as if they don't have enough of a sense of self to conceive of motive. Everyone else may see motives in their actions, for instance the crazy guy who buries women's heads in his backyard, each one facing his bedroom, appears to want women to see him in bed. But he can't answer the question: why did you do that? He lives in an entirely nominalist world. But there's no point in worrying about his philosophy, because it's being driven by underlying hardware problems. The only hope for him is death.
But what's the threat of realism? There is a world out there, and we try to make sense of it. That someone believes in universals is not a threat against realism. It only implies that we understand things better through universals than particulars.
The only danger from realism I can think of that is any way a "problem" would be a denial of a mind-independent world. If that's true, then we are all idealists' way beyond anything Berkely could have imagined.
But even were that to be true, what's the problem?
Oddly enough Berkeley is considered a nominalist.
For nominalism abstract terms and generalities are useful fictions, namely, names (hence the word nominalism). In that respect they serve a useful purpose.
But if someone kills another for some the sake of some name like country or God, then we have an instance of destroying what is boundlessly more valuable for the sake of an idea or figment. This, I fear, is the threat of realism.
Kills another [I]what[/I] exactly? :wink:
'Gillespie turns the conventional reading of the Enlightenment (as reason overcoming religion) on its head by explaining how the humanism of Petrarch, the free-will debate between Luther and Erasmus, the scientific forays of Francis Bacon, the epistemological debate between Descarte and Hobbes, were all motivated by an underlying wrestling with the questions posed by nominalism, which, according to Gillespie, dismantled the rational God and Cosmos of medieval scholasticism and introduced (by way of the Franciscans) a fideistic God-of-pure-will, born out of a concern that anything less than this would jeopardize His divine omnipotence. Subsequent intellectual history is, in Gillespie's reading, a grappling with the question of free will and determinism. Protestantism becomes fideistic ('salvation by faith alone'), and denies free will in order to preserve God's absolute power (illustrated by Calvin's doctrine of predestination). However, this in turn culminated in an ambivalence about salvation: if God simply wills whom to save, human action can have no real merit. Gillespie's chapter on the debate between Erasmus-Luther was among the most interesting in bringing this out' ~ from a review.
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Compare with:
[quote=Ideas have Consequences, Richard Weaver]Like Macbeth, Western man made an evil decision, which has become the efficient and final cause of other evil decisions. Have we forgotten our encounter with the witches on the heath? It occurred in the late fourteenth century, and what the witches said to the protagonist of this drama was that man could realize himself more fully if he would only abandon his belief in the existence of transcendentals. The powers of darkness were working subtly, as always, and they couched this proposition in the seemingly innocent form of an attack upon universals. The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence.[/quote]
(That book, by the way, is on a similar theme to Gillespie's. Weaver was a professor of English at Chicago, and published his book in the 1950s, since when it has become a staple of American intellectual conservatism (which is unfortunate in my view.))
My interpretation of this issue, and why it is important, is that this is how scientific materialism comes to be such a dominant force in modern western culture. Why? Because in the absence of universals, the nature of being can only be understood in terms of particulars, and universal concepts reduced to the psychological or social.
Quoting NOS4A2
As indeed he was, and it is one of the major shortcomings of his otherwise ingenious philosophy. His circumlocutions on 'general ideas' are the weakest point of his writing - something which C S Peirce also commented on.
Interesting OP, but I don't follow this sentence at all. Peirce is not saying that figment is all that can be loved...? (Edit: So is it the idea that realists are interested in abstractions apart from particulars? That seems a strange construal.)
Do you have a response from a bona fide nominalist, such as Peirce was critiquing? I'm not convinced that such nominalists would agree with you, and it would be interesting to see their response.
It mostly seems like Peirce's critique is not being understood. On your view what does the nominalist say can, or should, be loved?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Nice. :clap:
Critics of nominalism like Dugin and Benoist do often connect it to the unraveling of traditional identities, but as you point out, that assumes the legitimacy of those categories in the first place. From a nominalist view, those identities are constructed and contingent, not essential truths. So if realism can support oppressive structures by making them seem eternal or natural, then yes, it has its own dangers.
For a strong case against realism, Richard Rorty comes to mind, he didnt see truth as correspondence to universals but as what works in conversation. His pragmatism was deeply nominalist. You might also check out Nelson Goodman, especially in Ways of Worldmaking, where he questions whether there even is a singular world apart from the symbols we use to carve it up
Are there any? Or is truth always a mental construct?
For example, we could take Richard Joyce's moral fictionalism as an example:
Quoting Fictionalism | SEP
It seems that Joyce would agree with Peirce that all that can be loved is a figment, and yet would say that we should love the figment all the same. Note how closely this resembles the position atheists in the What is Faith thread are opposing,* namely the position that emotional or wishful reasons are sufficient for justifying intellectual assent. Joyce is literally advising that we engage in pretend and make-believe for pragmatic reasons, and this is an example of a moral nominalism.
I'm not sure the moral angle is the best angle for evaluating Peirce's quote, but that's where the thread has inevitably gone.
I would agree that caricatures of realism are false. And of course caricatures of nominalism are also false. But realism really shines when we move beyond caricatures and examine the actual positions of nominalists like Joyce.
* Despite the fact that no one in that thread has proposed such a position.
Thanks for all the writing, it was a good and interesting read.
Thank you, thats a good analysis.
According to Pierce, Locke, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Mill, and Leibniz were all nominalist as well. Despite all these proponents I cannot see it being a dominant view, or having shaped any future, simply because regular folk or those in power appeal to more realist sentiment.
Im wondering if that is the case. Why else would a nominalist outlook lead him to view it as a dreary outlook? Or the most blinding of all systems? Further, he say it as fundamental to the modern mind.
Another human being.
Umm... so this is behind your reasoning in that a metaphysical stance, nominalism or realism, can be a threat?
If nominalism rejects universals and the abstract and thinks these are just mental constructs, then to the above example it doesn't at all matter. The metaphysical question is hardly relevant: if "country" or "God" are either "abstract entities" or if they are "mental constructs" doesn't matter at all to the actions of someone taking a life of another person.
If you start with nominalism, then issue "good" or "bad", "legal" or "illegal" or things like "justified defense" are also simply mental constructs, but apparently very important ones for our society to function. It doesn't somehow lower or give more credibility to the action, if ones metaphysical view is nominalism or realism.
The stance of there existing universals and abstract entities doesn't create anything more to the issue. Metaphysics doesn't answer moral or social questions.
Yet we can talk about particular ideas. It always seems to me that the best answers lie somewhere in the middle of two extremes - realism and nominalism, rationalism and empiricism, direct and indirect realism, political left and right, etc.
It seems to me that both can be true depending on what goal one has at the moment. What we focus on (the particulars or the universal) at any moment is dependent upon what goal we are trying to accomplish.
Universals are particulars of larger categories of universals.
Are similarity and difference particulars or universals?
What makes something a "human being?" "Usefulness?" The judgements of some "language community?" Real life caricatures like H.P. Lovecraft seemed to doubt that the "gibbering French-Canadians," the residue of the Acadians, the Portuguese, the Welsh, etc. were truly possessed of the same humanity embodied by "good New England stock." More to the point, I have seen people here and elsewhere argue that, not only should elective abortion be legal, and not only is it completely unproblematic, but that this is in part because, prior to passage through the birth canal, the entity in question "is not human."
Humanity, it seems, can be defined many ways. It can even be defined in such a way that no dignity attaches to the term, such that we shouldn't be any more concerned about killing inconvenient humans than we would inconvenient rodents. So, in virtue of [I]what[/I] is the sort of definition you're looking for, one that says 'killing men is wrong,' more accurate vis-á-vis our term "man?"
If Lovecraft was wrong, what was he wrong about? He can hardly have been wrong about his own concept of "man."
Simply that he looks like other human beings. Weve come across enough individual human beings, including ourselves, to develop a general idea of what one is and what one is not. One thing is for certain, we are not developing these general ideas by looking at forms and essences.
The notion that one attaches and removes dignity to terms and definitions in order to dignify a human being is precisely the threat that Im talking about. When one dehumanizes, like calling people rats for example, nothing at all changes in any individual human being outside the realist skull, but his treatment of them certainly does.
Lovecrafts mistake was to develop stereotypes from the cognitive process sociologists call social categorization and to apply them to flesh-and-blood individuals he has never yet met and could know nothing about.
Sure it does. Ones metaphysics ought to inform how he approaches the other branches of philosophy, including politics and ethics. If one believes the word society is just a general name hes not going to spend a serious amount of time trying to change it.
If something "looks like a human being" we should treat it with dignity because...?
"Nominalism is true because realism is certainly false." Good one.
Surely if that's the threat then people's treatment of each other must have improved markedly after 1500, when nominalism became ascendent. More nominalist Protestant nations like the US must have treated minorities better, and the Soviet Union and communist China must have been particular exemplars of upright behavior. In terms of the volanturism that tends to accompany nominalism, I am aware of a society called "the Third Reich" that vastly prioritized the will, which should have resolved the problems of intellectualism in ethics. Let me just flip to my history book to confirm this...
No, the fact that something looks like a human being makes something a "human being". It means that everything we know about human beings is derived from the senses and experience.
Good one. I never said that so the quotes are a little unnecessary.
It's more like "realism is false because no one can find universal or abstract object". One of the common objections from nominalism against realism is that forms and universals and abstract objects cannot be found.
There has never been a nominalist, or rather, individualist country. America is close, I suppose, and has advanced beyond its collectivist ways in the treatments of groups and their memberships, but it still has a long way to go.
I disagree.
Politics and ethics as other moral issues are very important irrelevant of them being either our mental constructs or them being something independent of us. What we do, the actions, are important. The reasons why we do something only explain our actions, but the actions themselves are the important issue here.
Quoting NOS4A2
Now I don't follow your logic at all. Society is a word and we give words / names for complex things like society.
Quoting NOS4A2
Nominalism and individualism aren't synonyms. And here individualism or collectivism aren't metaphysical questions.
Actions are important. But do you not act according to any principle?
Society is not a thing, though, complex or otherwise. It's just a name for a concept.
One informs the other. Again, if one doesn't believe in groups he's not going to advocate for this or that group's interests, or at least he ought not to.
Well, a country is quite a complex idea. It's not something that is easily pointed to in the way a rock or a river can be pointed to.
Likewise energy is a number. It's a physical construct. It's not a thing.
Something is a human being because it looks like what? As you said:
[Quote]It means that everything we know about human beings is derived from the senses and experience.[/quote]
How does one collocation of sense data "look like a human being?" in any definitive sense? It seems we are just attaching names to regularities in sense data, right? By what criteria do we attach such names? Supposing I'm a racist and I do not find it "useful" to attach the name "human" to Asians, why am I wrong about what a human being is? It's just an ensemble of sense data after all.
And what about any particular ensemble of sense data makes it worthy of dignity?
I rephrased it as I did because what you're saying is straightforwardly question begging. The realist claims we see humanity every time we see a man. To expect to "see" (sense) a universal as one would a particular isn't a critique of realism, it's just failing to understand it.
From my brief exposure to the concept of Nominalism, I get the impression that it is often used as a slur. For example, "Liberal" is generally non-threatening, while "Radical" implies a destructive intent. But Trump tweets tend to equate the terms. Likewise, "Abstractionism" merely distinguishes mental representations from the objective referent, while "Nominalism" is interpreted as denial of Truth, Beauty & Goodness. In the first sense, I may be a Nominalist, but in the second sense, I am definitely not a denier of Universal concepts. So, what was Pierce going-on about? :smile:
Principles are indeed important. But are principles mental constructs of our mind or something else? That's the metaphysical question, yet it doesn't matter to the importance of principles themselves.
Think about that you love some person, be it your parent or child or a loved one. Surely there is that subjective part of you loving somebody. Is that then different if you believe in metaphysical question in nominalism or realism? In my opinion it doesn't matter.
Quoting NOS4A2
And a concept is an abstract idea, so you are going in circles. Yet people do live in more or less organized communities that we call societies. And there's many words or names for this.
There have been countries dominated by nominalist ideology though. They can be individualistic or collectivist. That's the whole idea. There is no such thing as human nature. Thus, the state can engineer man into whatever it needs man to be. If this means making man into an ant-like collectivist, why is this wrong? If man lacks a nature, it can hardly be because it goes against his nature, or his "natural individuality."
In what sense is the "individual" the right unit for society. Again, what even constitutes an "individual?" "Individual" is just a name applied to sense data. Yet human infants die on their own. Individual men do not tend to last long in the wild on their own either. Therefore, the proper unit of individuality for "man" is arguably the tribe. "Children," "women," and "men," are merely parts of this "natural" whole. They are accidents, not substance. The substance is the society. (Or at least, this view is just as good of a way to view things as any other, at least from a metaphysical perspective.)
That's the reasoning for collectivist nominalists. If you say, "no, 'man' refers to discrete individuals," I will just ask, "why must this be so?" This would seem to assume some sort of essence that is filled out by unique particulars, the very thing we have already denied. I will just maintain that the more useful measure of the individual is the society, and that you are referring to mere parts, just as a "hand" or "eye" is not a proper whole, neither is this "human being" of which you speak (these are merely cells in the proper organism of state/party).
It looks like those other human beings we've come across our whole lives. Could I be wrong? Sure, it could be an android, but that can only be discovered with further examination and experience.
I don't believe in sense data and am a direct realist, so I would be attaching names to things out there, not in my head. If I were beside you I'd point to myself, or you, or anyone else nearby and say "we are human beings". You would be wrong to not attach the name "human" to Asians because we can look at any particular asian person, notice the similar features, and see that they are indeed human beings. So advanced are we at doing this that we could examine their DNA if need be.
In my opinion, the fact that one exists makes him worthy of dignity. He's particular, unique, is in possession of his own position in time and space. However, he gains or loses dignity according to his acts and how he treats others. That's how I approach it at any rate.
Fair enough, then help me understand. You're looking at a particular man, correct? What else are you seeing?
It does matter, in my opinion, because I know Im not loving the concept of someone, or my own feelings, but the person. So one intuitively has its own value.
I dont begrudge anyone using general terms. We all use them. Its when you start sacrificing those individuals for the sake of those terms, breaking a few eggs to make an omelette, for example.
It seems palatable to me.
But there are many positions in regards to nominalism. Its an ancient argument. Hobbes was a bonafide nominalist, or Hume, or Locke for example, so I just assumed we had an idea of what nominalism is.
Okay, but do you see how Joyce would in no way disagree with Peirce that, "all that can be loved, or admired [...] is figment"? He would not say that Peirce is engaged in question-begging or anything like that. Peirce cannot be dismissed so effortlessly. Joyce would say, "Yes, that's true, and therefore we must resort to make-believe." Peirce would probably say that the idea that nothing is lovable apart from make-believe is "dreary," and again, this claim is not so easily dismissed.
Are you saying I should approach the issue like Joyce?
Im not so interested in how Joyce would approach the issue. What I am interested in is how Pierce approaches the issue. Pierce is dismissive of nominalism and treats those who agree with it as tools of the devil, men who espouse a demonic doctrine.
I am saying that bona fide nominalists, such as Joyce, would not seem to merely dismiss Peirce's observation as question-begging. I think it would be hard to find a bona fide nominalist who does that. Joyce is one example of someone who would agree that what is lovable is figment.
Have you finished Olesky's book? I have not made it all the way through, but I think his exact objections are covered in depth (that's at least what the introduction and chapter summaries suggest, I only got through the discussion on Scotus and Ockham).
Lots of thinkers have called nominalism "diabolical" or demonic though. There is a history here. It's not just that they think they are "bad ideas." Something akin to nominalism shows up at the very outset of Western philosophy, but never gets much traction. By late antiquity, it is all but gone.
A lot of philosophy in this later period (late-antiquity to the late medieval period) is focused on self-cultivation, ethics, excellence, and "being like God." "Being like God" was the explicit goal of late-antique philosophical and monastic education in many surviving guides (even the biographies of Pagan sages paint them as "saints"). Here, reason plays an essential role in self-determination, freedom, the transcending of human finitude, and ultimately "being more like God." Reason itself also has a strong erotic and transformative element. This is a theme in Pagan, Christian, Islamic, and even Jewish thought to varying degrees.
Hume's formulation that "reason is, and ought only be, a slave of the passions," and his general outlook on reason (wholly discursive and non-erotic), hedonism, and nominalism/knowledge, very closely parallels what the old sages describe as the paradigmatic state of spiritual sickness (e.g. "slavery in sin"). The Philokalia, for instance, describes this sort of perception/experience of being in terms of "what can I use this for to meet my desires" (i.e., the Baconian view of nature) as the "demonic" mode of experience. That is, they consider something like utilitarianism (Mill mentions Bentham), and decide that this is how one thinks in the grips of demonic fantasy (for a whole host of complex reasons). The state of Hume's ideal, which is for him insulated from dangerous "fanaticism" and "enthusiasm," is in some ways pretty much a description of the state of the damned in Dante's Hell.
Nominalism also tends towards the "diabolical" in the term's original sense (where it is opposed to the "symbolical"). It will tend to focus on multiplicity and division. But the "slide towards multiplicity/potency/matter" is the very definition of evil in classical thought. Evil is privation, and matter is, ultimately, privation on its own.
The "pragmatic" (and so generally volanturist) recommendations of a number of nominalist thinkers line up pretty well with what Pagan and Christian thinkers thought was the state of a soul "enslaved by the passions and appetites," with a corrupt and malfunctioning nous. It's an orientation towards a hunger that turns out to be a sort of self-consuming, self-negating nothingness (the Satanocentrism of Dante's material cosmos, or perhaps R. Scott Bakker's image of Hell as inchoate sheer appetite, and the [I]consumption[/I] of the other, and thus total frustration of Eros-as-unionor Byung-Chul Han's "Inferno of the Same" recommend themselves as images here).
The idea is not that only nominalists, or specifically nominalists are uniquely "evil." A realist might easily allow that it is better to be led by a virtuous nominalist liberal than by a vice-addled realist. A liberal nominalist society might be organized more virtuously than a corrupt realist one (e.g. the Papacy of Dante's time).
The point is more about how nominalism will make it impossible to identify virtue as virtue and vice as vice in the long run. Indeed, that is, I would imagine, a big motivation for the polemics, the idea that broad currents in modern thought slowly make vice into a virtue. I think there is a strong case for this re pleonexia (acquisitiveness) in capitalism.
And I think this is how you get forceful takes like Weaver's:
By contrast, the modern tends to approach philosophy more like Hume on average than a Plotinus or an Origen. At the end of the day, you kick back from it and play billiards. It's not that serious. Daoism appeals more to some people, nominalist pragmatism to others, realism to still others, etc. It is, in some sense, a matter of taste.
So, when some raving realist says: "don't drink that, it's poison!" the response is likely to be: "well that's quite rude to call it poison. I quite like it." But of course the response here assumes that "poison" is uttered as a matter of taste. The realist thinks they have good reason to think it is really poison. It's a fundamental disconnect. This is why nominalist rebuttals will tend to be less organized.
This is all speaking in very broad terms of course. I am just speaking to the broad pitch of the rhetoric and where it seems to have its history. Nominalism, volanturism, and the elevation of potency over actuality are anathema to broad swaths of the history of Western thought, but the elevation of desire also puts it in conflict with a lot of Eastern thought (which is why the latter has become a popular alternative).
Those who hope for salvation in an Ideal ghost-populated harp-strumming Heaven, might view worldly Realism*1 as a threat to their faith. And secular philosophers, who imagine that Plato's realm of Ideals & Forms is a remote-but-actual parallel word, might view Nominalism*2 as a threat to their worldview. Personally, I don't fit either of those categorical -isms, so I don't feel jeopardized by either belief system.
Someone in this thread mentioned Practical Idealism*3, so I Googled it. For me that BothAnd attitude seems to combine the best of both Pragmatic and Idealistic philosophies. That way, you are safe from faith threats from any direction. :smile:
PS___ I don't know anything about Pierce's Objective Idealism*5, but it also seems to cover both bases. Hence, may offend both Nominalists and Idealists.
*1. Realism and nominalism are opposing philosophical positions primarily concerned with the problem of universals. Realists believe that universals (abstract concepts like "redness" or "justice") are real and exist independently of our minds, while nominalists argue that universals are merely names or concepts created by the mind to classify particulars (individual objects)
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=realism+vs+nominalism
Note --- Universals are presumed to exist in a universal Mind (God). They exist in human minds only as Names referring to a General Concept. In this context though, Realists are faithful Idealists. This name-game makes my head spin.
*2. Idealism and nominalism are contrasting philosophical perspectives that offer different explanations for the nature of reality. Idealism proposes that reality is fundamentally mental, while nominalism asserts that only individuals and particulars exist, with universals being mere names or concepts.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=idealism+vs+nominalism
Note --- The universe does not seem to be "fundamentally mental", since minds only emerged after billions of years of physical development. And yet, the original Cause of the Cosmos must have included the Potential for eventual mental noumena. But Potential is not-yet Real. So is it Ideal, or something else?
*3. Practical idealism is a philosophy that emphasizes the importance of both having high ideals and being pragmatic in pursuing them.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=practical+idealism
Note --- Pragmatism/Realism and Rational Idealism are not necessarily in opposition, unless you choose to view them that way. They can be philosophically reconciled from a Holistic perspective. See *4
*4. Both/And Principle :
My coinage for the holistic principle of Complementarity, as illustrated in the Yin/Yang symbol. Opposing or contrasting concepts are always part of a greater whole. Conflicts between parts can be reconciled or harmonized by putting them into the context of a whole system.
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page10.html
Note --- The "Greater Whole" is the organic Cosmos, including both Matter & Mind. Some philosophers idealize the Cosmos as an omnipotential unknowable transcendent deity, as in PanEnDeism
*5. Charles Peirce The philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce defined his own version of objective idealism as follows: The one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective idealism, that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective_idealism
Note --- That sounds like a pragmatic/semiotic version of PanEnDeism. Physical laws embodied in matter take the place of commandments engraved on stone.
Good read, Count, thank you for that.
Im reading Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism by Paul Forster, but I imagine the themes are exactly the same, how Peirce saw the threat of a new paradigm and wished to provide a realist alternative for philosophy and science. Ill try to find a copy of Oleskys book.
Im still unsure whether nominalism was in fact any sort of paradigm. I also believe its a sort of fallacy to see the impact of the musings of philosophers in the general culture without knowing the extent to which those philosophers are actually read.
[i]...What though the field be lost?
All is not lostthe unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield:
And what is else not to be overcome?
That glory never shall his wrath or might
Extort from me. To bow and sue for grace
With suppliant knee, and deify his power...[/i]
[i]A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less than he
Whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure; and, in my choice,
To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.[/i]
Of course, many moderns have taken Milton's Satan as a sort of hero (surely, he has all the best lines), but the devout Milton is, although he wants to make Satan enticing, ascribing this sort of thinking to the Devil at the end of the day.