Neville’s Ontological Ultimate: A Bridge Too Far

George Santayana begins Scepticism and Animal Faith with these words: “A philosopher is compelled to follow the maxim of epic poets and to plunge in medias res. The origin of things, if things have an origin, cannot be revealed to me, if revealed at all, until I have travelled very far from it, and many revolutions of the sun must precede my first dawn.”¹ Santayana has Homer in mind, who begins the Iliad in medias res: “Rage-Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles / . . . / Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed, / Agamemnon, lord of men and brilliant Achilles.”²

There we are on page one, already ten years into the siege of Troy, Achilles all in a huff because the king has commandeered his girl friend, the success of the whole military campaign suddenly at risk. It will be many verses later before we learn the back story: Menelaus’s marriage to Helen, her abduction by Paris, the sacrifice of Iphigenia, and the deployment of the Achaean army on the beach beneath the Trojan walls.

Heeding Santayana’s application of Homer’s maxim to philosophic discourse, I will begin my discussion of Bob Neville’s Ultimates far from any of them, and only after many revolutions of the second hand will I finally come to ultimates, if at all. I will start where metaphysics must always start, with what is most familiar to me. With human beings like myself, my wife and children, friends, neighbors, and colleagues like yourselves. With trees and flowers, mountains and streams, grocery stores, street signs, and right-wing radio talk shows. And after a bit, with an eye on similarities, I will have no difficulty agreeing with Neville that we can make an abstractive generalization and say that these are all things. Organic or inorganic, momentary or enduring, tiny or immense, red white or blue, all of them things.

And the first thing Neville says about things is that they are complex. Which is to say that they are composed of components: of parts, attributes, functions, features. It’s not that a thing has components, but that it is those components unified. Achilles is an organic thing, a person who, let us assume, really existed. He is made of flesh and bone, eyes and ears, arms and legs, spleen and liver, heart and mind. Made of memories and dreams, feelings and the ability to express them emotionally, ideas and the capacity to express them semiotically, beliefs and the power to translate them into deeds—silly deeds like his huff over losing Briseis, and important ones like his love for Patroclus and his defeat of Hector. We also have components, you and I, just like Achilles does, some of them similar, some different. Like Achilles, I have hairy arms, strong feelings, and the capacity for speech, but I’d be no match for Hector, nor of interest to Patroclus.

We have to travel a little further from the familiar in order to nod approvingly when Neville sorts the components of any thing into two kinds: conditional components and essential components. A conditional component is relational, a feature of a thing that “derives from some other thing or things”—all the causes and influences upon which a thing is in some way dependent.³ Achilles was born because Peleus was allowed by the gods to lie with the water-nymph Thetis. He was made nearly invulnerable when Thetis dipped him in the river Styx, except unfortunately she missed his heel. He spent a decade at Troy because of Paris’s infatuation with Helen. And he died there far too young because of Paris’s marksmanship. The contingency of these features is obvious, for they depend on things over which we have only partial control and that are themselves contingent. If it had not been prophesied that Thetis’s son would be stronger than his father, Zeus might have been the one who lay with her, and no mortal offspring would have resulted. If a swirl of sand had been kicked up at just the right moment, Paris’s arrow...