 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode ... All or Nothing – The Problem of Universals Irving Thaldberg, the producer of the Marx Brothers movies, had a brilliant knack for show business but also a nasty habit of making people wait for him. The Marx Brothers were familiar with this habit. Once he made them wait outside his office for so long that they smoked cigars, blew the smoke under the crack beneath his door, and yelled fire. Another time, Thaldberg interrupted a meeting with them and left them waiting in his office, and the Marx Brothers decided they'd had enough. When the producer finally returned to the meeting, he found them gathered stark naked in front of his office's fireplace, which they were using to roast potatoes. Thaldberg laughed, had a potato, and never made them wait again. This anecdote confirms something already abundantly clear from their movies. The Marx Brothers shared an anarchic and irreverent sense of humor. And of course, that wasn't the only thing they had in common. They were really brothers and thus shared the same parents, they had grown up together in the Bronx, they all liked a roasted potato, and they all hated being made to wait. In addition, there is the obvious fact that the Marx Brothers were all humans. That may be obvious, but philosophically speaking it is surprisingly hard to explain. In addition to the specific features that distinguish each person—Chico's piano playing ability, for instance, or Groucho's quick wit—all humans share in the feature of humanity, and we are all animals, a feature we have the honor of sharing with giraffes, among other creatures. Philosophers call such shared features universals because they belong to all the members of a class. For instance, humanity belongs universally to all humans. But what exactly is this shared humanity? On the one hand, it seems to have an important role in the world and in our understanding of things. When we know, for instance, that all humans are rational, it seems that we are understanding something not just about you, me, Groucho, or Zeppo, but about humanity itself. What we are understanding is that the possession of humanity implies rationality. On the other hand, the idea of a universal thing that actually exists out in the world is rather an odd one. In our everyday experience, we never encounter abstract humanity or animality. Rather, we encounter concrete particular humans and animals, whom we can distinguish from the other members of their class by their special characteristics. We tell Groucho apart from another animal, like Hiawatha, by noting that he is a human, whereas she is a giraffe. And we tell him apart from Chico, by noticing that he cannot play piano, but can come up with witty remarks like, why don't you leave in a huff? If that's too soon, you can leave in a minute in a huff. The difficulty of accounting for the shared features of things is called the problem of universals. Perhaps the most famous attempt to answer the problem is also the earliest attempt, Plato's theory of forms. This theory was apparently intended to explain common characteristics, like humanity or largeness, by postulating a single overarching form, or paradigm, humanity itself, or largeness itself. As far back as the medieval period, readers have understood Plato's forms as universals, though this may not be quite right. Aristotle points out that, although a platonic form plays the role of a universal by accounting for shared membership in a kind of thing, it also seems to be just another kind of particular, albeit a perfect unchanging and paradigmatic particular. In fact, it was Aristotle himself who really started talk of universals in philosophy, but he left it rather unclear what sort of metaphysical status we should assign to a universal like humanity or animality. For this reason, ancient commentators on Aristotle already engaged in detailed discussions of the problem of universals, discussions that were passed on to the medievals thanks to the translations and commentaries of Boethius. For Boethius and his medieval heirs, the starting point for discussion of this problem was the beginning of Porphyry's widely read introduction to Aristotelian logic. In a few sentences that rank as one of the most enticing, but unsatisfying passages in the history of philosophy, Porphyry sketches out the questions that would need to be answered in order to solve the problem of universals. We would first need to decide whether they are real or not, if they are real, whether they are bodily or incorporeal, and if they are incorporeal, whether they exist in bodies or separately. That last question was of particular importance for Porphyry and other ancient commentators who wanted to reconcile the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, since it seemed plausible to say that Plato's forms were indeed separate universals, whereas Aristotle recognized the reality of universals but understood them to be imminent within bodies. The exegetical problem of harmonizing Plato and Aristotle was one reason the ancient commentators, like Porphyry and Boethius, were so interested in the problem of universals, but it wasn't the only reason. If you think about it, many of the things we say every day involve universals. Even when I talk about a particular thing, like a specific person, I'll often be saying that some universal feature applies to that particular. Suppose I say, for instance, that Groucho is chomping on a cigar, or that Hiawatha is loping across a savanna. Groucho and Hiawatha are particulars, but many people may be chomping on cigars, and many giraffes loping across a savanna. So chomping on a cigar, or loping across a savanna, are universals. They can be and are realized in many particular instances. Then there are sentences where no particulars appear at all, as when we say, cigar smoking is unhealthy, or giraffe is a type of animal. This explains why philosophers still worry about the problem of universals today. Until we sort out the status of universals, we cannot really say how our language gets hold of the result. None of this escaped the ancient commentators and their medieval readers, but they had further reasons of their own to take the problem seriously. Unlike most philosophers nowadays, they followed Aristotle's lead in believing that knowledge in the strict and proper sense, the kind of knowledge involved in scientific understanding, is universal in scope. So for them, answering Porphyry's questions was an urgent task in the study of knowledge or epistemology, as well as in the philosophy of language. Given the strictly introductory purposes of his little treatise on logic, Porphyry took the liberty of leaving his own questions unanswered. So, the passage offered a wonderful opportunity for later philosophers. By commenting on it, they could offer their own account of universals without having to worry about contending with Porphyry's own theory. This led to a certain way of posing the problem that would puzzle contemporary philosophers. Because Porphyry was introducing Aristotelian logic, the kind of universals he was interested in were the species and genera of substances. In other words, his questions were framed in terms of asking whether such items as humanity and animality are real, are incorporeal, and are separate. Though one could extend the question to non-substantial cases like cigar chomping and loping across a savannah, later thinkers taking up Porphyry's questions usually didn't do this. They simply focused on sorting out the status of substantial species and genera. Since the medieval's encountered Porphyry through Boethius, they had to take account of what he had said on the issue. They had plenty to work with, because Boethius was so interested in Porphyry's introduction that he commented on it twice. In the first commentary, he made a convincing point concerning Porphyry's list of questions, namely that his posing all three questions already implied his answer to the first two. If you answer the first question by saying that universals are not real, you don't need to go on to ask whether they are bodily or incorporeal. And if you answer this second question by saying that they are bodily, you don't need to ask whether they are separate from bodies or in them. Thus, Boethius assumed that for Porphyry, universals are indeed both real and incorporeal. In his second commentary, he explained why and how this is so. Universals must be real, since otherwise there would be nothing for us to know when we understand the general features of things. We encounter such features in particulars and then abstract or isolate them through a mental process, something Boethius compares to isolating the line that forms the edge of a body. The feature we are noticing is alike in all the members of a species. Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and Zeppo are all similar in being humans. But it is only at the level of mental understanding that we isolate humanity as something in its own right. While this goes well beyond the intriguing list of questions posed by Porphyry, Boethius says less than one might want about the humanity that is in Groucho and also in Harpo. Is that humanity one and the same thing? Or is it that we have Groucho's humanity, which is one thing, and Harpo's humanity, which is something else, but these two humanities are similar to one another? If we take the first alternative, we are committed to something that really exists out in the world and is universal. If we take the second alternative, then true universality occurs only in the mind of someone who abstracts and isolates humanity as a general concept. An analogy might help here. The first option would be like you're watching the Marx Brothers movie Duck Soup on television while I am watching it in a cinema. One and the same movie is being viewed in two places at the same time. The second option would be like two actual bowls of duck soup made according to the same recipe. They taste exactly alike but were made from different sets of ingredients and are two distinct meals. Vegetarians may want to vary the example slightly using the Marx Brothers movie Animal Crackers. In the 12th century, philosophers working in France split over the correct understanding of universals more or less along the lines I've just indicated. Some thinkers, whom we can call realists, believed that humanity is something real that exists in the world. It is present or instantiated every time that a human exists. Others found this impossible to accept and insisted that everything that really exists is something particular. Historians usually refer to this camp as the nominalists. The usual tutorial here is that nominalism was pioneered by the great Peter Abelard, following ideas first put forward by his teacher Rosselin. And that the anti-realist position is called nominalist because Abelard and his allies held that a universal is nothing but a word or a name, in Latin nomen. In fact things are considerably more complicated. Let's start by considering the contribution made by Rosselin to this debate. He is often portrayed as a forerunner of Abelard's nominalism, not least by the famous Anselm of Canterbury, who mocked Rosselin for saying that universals are nothing but puffs of air. But modern scholars have doubted whether Rosselin really meant to stake out a metaphysical position about universals at all. He did, however, pave the way for Abelard by insisting on a strong contrast between language and its features on the one hand, and the reality expressed by language on the other hand. A nice example of this is tense. Consider the difference between saying Groucho smoked a cigar and saying Groucho is smoking a cigar, or Groucho will smoke a cigar. Rosselin, Abelard, and other so-called nominalists were inclined to think that different sentences with verbs and different tenses could all refer to one and the same event. It's just that Groucho smoking the cigar is future, present, or past from the point of view of the speaker. In this and other cases, it is dangerous to assume a diversity of things on the basis of the diverse linguistic expressions used to refer to those things. There's a further difficulty here in that words are themselves things. For instance, if I utter the name Groucho, that sound I am making is a thing, just like Groucho himself is a thing. Abelard would later eliminate any possible confusion on this score by distinguishing between the utterance in itself, which he called a vox, and the utterance insofar as it is meaningful, which he called a sermo. The utterance is indeed a thing, but it is not insofar as it is a thing that it has meaning, but insofar as it is a sermo, or signifying utterance. Along with other like-minded writers at the dawn of the 12th century, most of whom are anonymous, Rosselin was putting forward his ideas about language in the context of grammar, the first of the liberal arts. The main authority for grammar was the late ancient author Priscian, and his work was made the subject of several commentaries at about this time. Priscian informed his readers that a name or noun must always signify a substance by ascribing some quality to that substance. Here we get a bit closer to the problem of universals. To what does a general noun like human refer? A universal substance, or only particular human substances like Groucho and Harpo? We find grammatical commentaries close to Rosselin's approach saying that words have always been introduced to signify substance. Only afterwards do they come to signify other similar things. For example, someone, somewhere, would have first used the word human and meant by it one particular human. Perhaps it was Adam referring with surprise and delight to Eve, who had just been produced from one of his ribs. Thereafter, as a matter of convention, this same word, human, was applied to anything else that seemed to be similar to the first thing that bore the name of human. This does seem to head in the direction of Abelard's later nominalist view. It would seem, though, that Abelard first explicitly formulated nominalism only as a critical response to those who started espousing realism about universals. His target was a man named William of Champo, master of the school at Notre Dame and a rival of Abelard. The two first encountered one another in Paris right around the 1100s and later led competing schools. In an autobiographical work, Abelard tells us himself how he refuted William's realist understanding of universals. In response, William reformulated his theory only to be crushed again by the superior intellect of Abelard. But we don't have to take Abelard's word for this. We can judge for ourselves who had the better of the debate because Abelard's commentary on Porphyry explains William's original and revised positions, alongside the objections that apparently forced William to change his view and then retreat from the debate altogether. William's original way of understanding universals as real things went as follows. If we consider humanity just by itself, we see that it is universal in nature. It is one and the same for and in all humans. However, in various particulars, humanity is joined to various or characteristics which William called forms. Thus in Chico Marx, humanity is connected to piano playing ability and a preposterous Italian accent, whereas in Harpo Marx, it is joined to harp playing ability and a tendency to sprint after any attractive female who was foolish enough to wander past. Without these other forms, humanity would remain single and universal, but it becomes particularized and multiple thanks to its association with such accidental features. There is a family resemblance between this proposal by William of Champot and the hyper-realism of the earlier Eriugena and his followers. They believe that every substance is an expression of a single archetypal substance, much as ultimately, all things are an expression of the transcendent reality that is God. William's theory was not so Platonist in that it did not assert the existence of some paradigmatic humanity separate from all individual humans. In a way, this was its chief flaw. If humanity in itself is not separate from humans, and if it is one and the same in all humans, then all humans turn out to be numerically identical with each other insofar as they are humans. In other words, Groucho, Chico, and Harpo are all actually one human being. This, at least, is the objection pressed against William by Abelard. To point to the accidental features of things, as William did, is no help, for such accidental features depend on the individual substances to which they belong. Conceptually speaking, Harpo must first exist as a human substance and only then have such additional features as harp playing and skirt chasing. But insofar as he is just a human substance, Harpo will be the same substance as Chico and Groucho. A further problem is that if one and the same substance, namely universal humanity, is the substance of both Harpo and Groucho, then it will have contrary properties. Humanity will be both mute and wisecracking, both harp playing and non-harp playing. Even the Marx Brothers movies never involved anything quite that absurd. Despite his name, William of Champo did not respond to this attack by washing his hair of the whole matter. Instead, he proposed a revised account. This time, the idea was to say that it is in virtue of their agreement in humanity that particular humans have a shared nature. Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and, yes, even Zeppo, are all different, but there is some one thing in which they agree. Or, as William of Champo preferred to put it, they do not differ in respect of humanity. Abelard easily dismisses William's tricky negative formulation. Two humans do not disagree in respect of being a stone either, since they are both equally not a stone. To the more basic idea that the Marx Brothers, and all the rest of us, are humans in virtue of some real thing that is humanity, Abelard replies that human is just what each person is in himself or herself. So this had better be distinct in each person, otherwise, just as with the first attempt to defend realism, Harpo and Groucho will wind up being identical insofar as they are humans. The problem, as Abelard sees it, is that William and the other realists are desperate to hold on to this notion that humanity is a thing. But in fact, humans are alike not in virtue of some real object in the world, namely their humanity. Rather, they are simply alike in all being humans. And being a human is not a thing. It is, rather, what Abelard calls a status, again, coining a new technical term in order to clarify the situation as he sees it. A thing's status is simply some way that it is, and ways of being are not themselves things. The realists might complain that a status must indeed be a thing. My being a human is something about which we can have knowledge and something that explains features of the world. For instance, my being a human explains my being rational and alive, so how could it be nothing at all? Abelard responds with an example. Suppose a slave of ancient Rome is beaten because he refuses to go to the forum. His refusing to go is a status, and it explains something, namely, why he was beaten. But we are surely not tempted to say that his refusing to go to the forum is actually a thing in its own right. Rather, the man who refuses and is beaten for it is a thing. His refusing to go is just a status, one that he lives to regret. This leaves the way clear for Abelard to give his own positive account of the universal, which is that it is nothing more nor less than a word. Universality is like the tense of a verb. It is an unavoidable aspect of our language, but it does not correspond to anything out in the world. Rather, we produce universality through a mental process of extracting some shared feature of things. In my mind, I take the four Marx brothers, and for that matter all the other humans I have ever encountered, and I remove from them the accidental features that vary from one person to another. What I am left with is a common idea that applies to all equally. Abelard compares this to the way painters represent the idea of a lion by depicting a single generic lion, as opposed to painting some particular lion, like the one that was killed by Hercules. It is this conceptual operation, rather than the existence of any universal thing, that allows us to use words universally. When I say the Marx brothers were all human, I am simply ignoring their particular features and focusing on a commonality I have noticed about them. And, what I am saying is true, because they do each have the status of being a human, which is not something universal. In fact, being a human is no thing at all. With this deft series of arguments, terminological devices, and clarifications, Abelard has set out the first explicit and sophisticated version of nominalism. It will not be the last. As we shall see, debates over the problem of universals would be confronted by later medieval thinkers, some of whom will show in greater detail how nominalism might answer possible objections. But we've only begun to consider the astoundingly innovative and brilliant philosophy of Abelard, which involves new proposals in philosophy of language, metaphysics, theology, and ethics. Which is to say nothing of the events with which his name is above all associated, his love affair with Heloise, and its tragic ending. I am a big fan of the Marx brothers, so you probably don't want to take the risk of making me wait. You'd better join me as soon as you can for the next episode on the story of Heloise and Peter Abelard, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.