The texture of being: essays in first philosophy

2. Analysis by Principles and Analysis by Elements

Chapter 2 ANALYSIS BY PRINCIPLES AND ANALYSIS BY ELEMENTS In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries widespread distrust of analysis by principles contributed to the acceptance of analysis by elements. More precisely, the challenge to the validity and significance of analysis by ontological1 principles resulted in the rise of analysis by quantitative elements. The latter was not unknown hitherto, of course, but under new conditions of thought and life it assumed new forms and unprecedented power, leading in modern physics to the search for basic particles and in chemistry to the search for simple elements. The pervasive collapse of ontological analysis took place largely outside of the universities and north of the Alps and Pyrenees.2 What was distinctive about the change was that analysis by quantitative elements broke loose from the subordinate role it had played within an ontological context. Moreover, it came to be associated with a quite general redefinition of the interests 21 Reprinted from Graceful Reason: Essays in Ancient and Mediaeval Philosophy Presented to Joseph Owens, CSSR, ed. Lloyd P. Gerson. Papers in Mediaeval Studies 4 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1983), 315–30. © Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1983. 1. In the discussion that followed upon my first professional paper (“Natural Wisdom in the Manuals,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 30 (1956): 160– 81) I was asked by Fr. Owens (rhetorically, I suspect) whether the term “ontological” ought to be used nowadays by someone in the Aristotelian or Thomistic metaphysical tradition. I replied that it ought not to be used, and I think that my answer then was prudent, given the context in Catholic intellectual circles. The meaning associated with Leibniz and Wolff, viz., that ontology was the study of ens possible, was being communicated indirectly through some of the scholastic manuals then in wide use. Moreover, the Heideggerian stress on ecstatic possibility (existentialia) was beginning to command quite general attention in North America. Since then, however, the preferred term “metaphysical” has also fallen upon ambiguity in the uses to which positivists and some linguistic analysts have put it; so that it seems to me to be desirable to retrieve a neutral meaning of the term ontological , viz., “analysis in terms of being,” and to develop the further and more determinate meaning in the exposition itself. 2. The quite different situation that prevailed in Italy has often been remarked upon: for there the universities played a more important part in the change of thought. In Spain, of course, the older ontological analysis remained somewhat more secure. and limits of knowledge underway in European culture, and even came to be its definitive factor. This did not mean, however, that ontological analysis was entirely eliminated; nor could it be. Fragments survived for a while and the language persisted long after its previous meaning had departed. There was still talk about matter and form, of essence and existence , of cause and end, but the whole status of ontological analysis itself was displaced into a kind of intellectual limbo. The underpinnings of scientific discourse were taken to be either obviously given (and so not in need of further clarification), or posited hypothetically (in the service of analysis undertaken with laudable motives), or matters of deeply rooted human belief (and so both inevitable and ineradicable). In any event, it was widely accepted that conceptions which lay beyond the reach of quantitative analysis neither needed nor could admit of rational articulation: nor could they receive rational justification. A curtain of primitive positivism descended upon a region of intellectual life that had hitherto been appreciated as the domain of first philosophy and of philosophical wisdom. This redirection of philosophical effort—indeed, its reversal—is patent in the writings of the most influential early modern philosophers whose thoughts set down the framework surrounding the intellectual labors of the scientists. At the beginning of the seventeenth century Francis Bacon expressed a quite general hope for “the new philosophy or active science”: I have made a beginning of the work—a beginning, as I hope, not unimportant:— the fortune of the human race will give the issue;—such an issue, it may be, as in the present condition of things and men’s minds cannot easily be conceived or imagined. For the matter in hand is no mere felicity of speculation, but the real business and fortunes of the human race, and all power of operation.3 His sometimes express contempt for Plato and Aristotle, his excoriation of the schoolmen as spinners of...