Philosophy of the 14th century: Duns Scotus (2)

Duns Scotus also seems to abandon the principle of universal analogy which, for Bonaventure and even for Saint Thomas, was the great driving force of continuity. By declaring that Being has a univocal and not equivocal meaning with regard to God and creatures (that is to say that it means the same thing), he removes any basis for the relationship of analogy which allows us to move from one term (the creature), being in the derived sense, to another, God who is being in a nobler sense; because the creature and God relate in the same way to the notion of being, which thus gives no means of distinguishing them in bringing them closer together.

This discontinuism is first marked by the theory of matter: it is hostile to both Augustinism and Thomism; to Augustinism because Duns Scotus denies the existence of a seminal reason within matter, to Thomism because it denies the Peripatetic principle according to which no power allows matter to exist without form; in a word, he denies what is common to two theories that are otherwise so opposed, namely the link between matter and form which means that, in the first, matter contains an internal principle which makes it aspire to form. and that, in the second, matter only has existence relative to the form which actualizes it. (1) Duns Scotus thinks (like Henry of Ghent) that matter, since it has a distinct idea, is something actual in itself; it is not stopped by this objection of Aristotle that, if this is so, the compound of matter and form is made of two beings in act which add each other and that it no longer has unity.

Inspired by Avicenna, the theory of substance “indifference” from itself to the universal and the individual is neither Thomistic nor Augustinian. We know that, the table of genera and species being traced down to the lower or more specialized species, peripateticism refused to find anything intelligible in the individuals where the specific form was distributed, attributing this division purely numerical to the matter, to the addition of accidents to the specific form. We also remember that Augustinism, seeing in the individual soul the subject of supernatural destiny, conferring on the soul a knowledge of itself by itself which makes it, although singular, intelligible to herself, repudiated, in the name of faith, the theory of individuation through matter. And there remains, in the Franciscan Duns Scotus, something of this Augustinian spirit: to admit the Thomist thesis, to believe that the nature or specific form remains the same in all individuals of the same species, is to return to “cursed Averroes” (2); it is to believe that human nature, itself undivided, is divided only by quantity like homogeneous water distributed into different vessels. But the doctrine of Duns Scotus aims at a much more general result: he wants to give to the individual as such an intelligibility analogous to that which peripateticism gives to the species, that is to say a determination by positive and essential characters and no longer by negative and accidental characters; Socratity is something positive, even before the existence of Socrates in the matter, and it persists, whatever the changes of quantity and accidents, in the real Socrates. It is the unity of the individual, a unity admitted by all which, for Duns Scotus, requires a determined entity which is the haecceity: the specific form (equinity) does not include this entity, the matter to which it is linked (the body structure common to all horse bodies) neither; we must therefore seek it outside of form, matter and consequently their compound, in an ultimate reality. But we must be careful that the passage from species to individuals does not take place like that from genus to species (3): in the passage from genus to species, the genus is to the difference as a potential being is to a form which determines it, and this is why gender and difference unite in a single reality. The special species, on the contrary, is entirely defined: it does not require, to complete itself, individuality; it follows that in one and the same individual being (this horse) “the singular entity (haecceity: of this horse) and the specific entity remain formally distinct realities”. This means that individuality is simply added to the species, without there being any intelligible link of continuity from one to the other. An important trait which manifests itself in Duns Scotus’s criticism of angelic knowledge according to Saint Thomas; the latter thinks, according to the Neoplatonic tradition, that the angels know singular things not like us, but because they possess an intellect, superior to ours, where the knowledge of singulars is contained in that of universals: continuity to everything never impossible for Duns Scotus.