Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 234 - Your Attention Please - Peter Olivi.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Your Attention Please, Peter Olivey. Here's a riddle, which I only just made up. What do you sometimes not pay when you want to, and at other times pay, without trying? The answer is attention. Attempting to focus on something, and failing to do so, is the most familiar of experiences. You might be listening to a favourite podcast, or reading a reasonably priced and handsomely packaged book based on that podcast, and finding that your mind wanders. It happens to me all the time. I might be reading up on, say, 13th century Franciscan philosophy, and realize that my eyes have been drifting across the same page for several minutes without my actually taking in any meaning. At other moments, we are also able to pay attention to things without any effort. We are often aware of things, yet not consciously aware of them. Suppose that you're at a crowded party, focusing on a conversation with one person, and then halfway across the room someone else says your name. Your ears will prick up and you'll notice you've been mentioned. You have been monitoring the hubbub of voices in the room without even realizing it. Given how common these experiences are, you'd think they would have attracted the interest of philosophers from the very beginning, but that isn't really the case. There were some discussions of awareness and attention in late antiquity, notably in Augustine and in Plotinus, who even gave the example of failing to concentrate when you're reading. But the first philosopher to put attention at the center of his, well, attention, was Peter Olivier. Born in southern France in the late 1240s, Olivier entered the Franciscan order at the tender age of 12. He studied at Paris and had the opportunity to learn from Bonaventure, who was by then Minister-General of the order. Olivier seems to have expected that he would become a master at the university, but this ambition was thwarted after a heated rivalry between Olivier and another young Franciscan named Arnold Gayard. Probably thanks to their mutual recriminations, neither was allowed to pursue the higher studies at Paris needed to become master of theology. It wouldn't be the last dispute of Olivier's career. He was a provocative and challenging figure known above all for his insistence that voluntary poverty was central to the mission of the Franciscan order. Other enthusiasts for this ascetic approach rallied around Olivier, seeing him as a great spiritual leader even as others within and outside the order saw him as a troublesome radical. Olivier's orthodoxy was questioned, but he ultimately managed to persuade the order that his teachings were acceptable. In 1287, he was even appointed as the lecturer to the Franciscans in Florence. He died 11 years later in his native France. Olivier would probably be surprised to find himself praised as an innovative philosophical mind or to be highlighted in this podcast at all. His vocation was that of a theologian, and his writings are dedicated to commentary on the Bible and to defense of his strict interpretation of the Franciscan way. His explicit remarks about the philosophers are largely dismissive, though one should bear in mind that by philosophers he means those who follow Aristotle. In one frequently quoted passage, Olivier's penchant for sarcasm is on full display as he responds to an argument of Aristotle's by saying, Aristotle argues for his claim without sufficient reason, indeed with almost no reason at all, but without reason he is believed as the god of this age. Olivier sneers at those contemporaries who are willing to follow Aristotle's authority wherever it leads, rather than engaging in the philosophical reflection needed to improve on Aristotelian doctrine. And improvement was needed, in Olivier's view. We are, after all, talking about a pagan idolater who defended such abominable teachings as the eternity of the world. Olivier's very lack of allegiance to the Aristotelian tradition freed him to make new philosophical proposals, which can be almost startling in their anticipation of themes from the early modern period. Of course, Olivier isn't the first theologian we've seen stray into philosophical territory. Nor is he the first to do so in the context of commenting on that mainstay of 13th century scholasticism, the sentences of Peter Lombard. It's above all here that he sets forth some of his most original ideas, in the form of a critique aimed at Aristotelian views on the human soul. Here, he's carrying on a discussion that began in earlier 13th century writings concerning Aristotle's definition of soul as the form of the body. In addition to the obvious difficulty that this could imply the soul's dependence on the body, so that it could not be immortal, there was a puzzle about whether we can really understand humans to have only one form. Olivier's contemporary Thomas Aquinas insisted that this is exactly what we should think. For Aquinas, the person is a single substance whose unity is provided by one and only one form, which is the person's soul. Olivier rejects this idea. Actually, that's putting it mildly. What he really says is that Aquinas' view is a brutal error which is contrary to reason and dangerous to the faith. It may be true that some powers of the soul are tied to the body in the way Aristotle suggests. The soul gives us powers of digestion, reproduction, sensation, and movement, and Olivier admits that the use of such powers requires the body. But the rational soul cannot be a bodily form. This higher soul has powers that are manifestly non-corporeal, in particular the faculties of thought and free choice. So how could it have such an intimate relationship with the body? In order to explain how we humans can have such radically different powers, ranging from the lowly capacity for nutrition to the exalted exercise of freedom and intellect of thought, we should simply give up on the idea that each of us has one and only one form. Instead, we possess a plurality of forms, which give us a variety of powers, or faculties. And in its entirety, the human soul is simply an aggregate or collection of these different powers which are the parts of a greater whole. This conclusion frees Olivier from any concern that the soul may be unable to survive without the body, or that its relation to the body would render it unable to exercise a power of choice, exempt from the necessity that attaches to physical things. The rational soul is a stranger to corporeal things, something Olivier at one point memorably captures by proposing that the soul's being in a body would be like wine being contained in a chamber pot. But, as Aquinas would be quick to point out, Olivier's pluralist theory has a big disadvantage too. It threatens to undermine the unity of the soul, and thus of the human person. Olivier seems to be suggesting that the person is not one, but at least two substances, an immaterial, rational soul hovering above an embodied being that is made up of another form and bodily matter. But in fact, this isn't how he sees things. Instead, the soul is already a substance in its own right, with no dependence on the body at all. It does have matter, but the soul's matter is incorporeal or spiritual, an idea taken from Ibn Gabirol and already used by Philip the Chancellor and Olivier's fellow Franciscans Roger Bacon and Bonaventure. This spiritual matter unifies the multiple powers and forms that make up a single soul. The physical body too is included in the unified person. The lower soul is responsible for sensation and other tasks realized through the body, so we should admit that it is unified with the body it is using. The higher rational soul lacks this sort of connection to the body, but it is unified to the lower soul because they share the same spiritual matter. Thus, even though the rational soul has no direct relationship to, never mind dependence on, the body, it forms a unity with the body indirectly or transitively. It is unified to the lower soul and the lower soul is in turn unified to the body. All of this is, I think, profoundly unaerostitilian, which of course would bother Olivier not one little bit. In Aristotle's writings on the soul, we are told that it is the human person who performs the various psychological functions through the soul. Your soul is not a separate thing in its own right, never mind a separate thing whose most important part is only indirectly related to your body. By contrast, Olivier insists that the soul itself is the subject of our most important psychological activities. This is evident from his treatment of free will. Here, we're going to get a first taste of a central dispute in later medieval philosophy. This dispute is usually framed as a clash between two ways of explaining free actions, which modern day scholars call intellectualist and voluntarist. The basic idea of the intellectualist is that human choice is prompted by some belief or understanding of the best thing to do. The voluntarist, by contrast, wants to say that a free choice consists in a sheer act of the will. Our choices may somehow be influenced by our beliefs, but ultimately, the explanatory buck stops with the faculty of will, not the faculty of reason. To some extent, this sharp contrast is like a Swedish communist's favorite dish, a red herring. The so-called voluntarists typically provide a role for reason in human choices, while the so-called rationalists do acknowledge the need for a faculty of will. Still, there is at the very least a strong difference in emphasis between an author like Olivier who looks forward to the voluntarists of the 14th century and Thomas Aquinas. He is usually seen as an intellectualist, not least by Olivier himself, who is no more impressed by Aquinas' views on freedom than by his rivals' views on the unity of soul. For now, it would be enough to explain Olivier's complaints without asking whether he really represents Aquinas' ideas fairly. As Olivier understands it, the intellectualist explanation of choice would have the will being moved passively by reason. Suppose I believe that my listeners will be entertained by the frequent use of puns, and come up with a wince-inducing wordplay, perhaps something about herring. Having formed the admittedly rather dubious belief that it would be a fantastic idea to include this pun in my next episode, I'd choose to do so and write it into the script. The intellectualist thinks my will is just carrying out the determination of my reason, like an executive branch of government whose sole task is to implement rulings laid down by a legislative branch. But this must be wrong, says Olivier. In fact, with characteristic asperity, he calls it insane. The whole point of the will is that it initiates choice. It's therefore the will that makes the decision, and the most that reason can do is to give it advice. The will is not passive, with respect to beliefs or reason, but active. It moves itself, rather than being moved by another part of the soul. As I say, there's a connection here to Olivier's ideas about the higher soul. One of his main purposes in isolating the higher, thinking and willing soul from the body is that bodies are incapable of this kind of self-initiating activity which is not moved by anything else. A stone can't just get up and roll on its own, it needs some other cause to set it in motion. By contrast, humans, including the Rolling Stones, are self-movers. They can spontaneously decide to do things, like writing music or going on tour. Even after a career that single-handedly guaranteed the profitability of the British market in controlled substances, this remains true even of Keith Richards. So how much more must it be true for the rest of us? So when Mick Jagger sang Start Me Up, he needed to look no further than his own self-startings. And according to Olivier, if we are searching for the source of this spontaneous action, we should look to the will's irreducible capacity for choice, not to the reason's ability to perceive things as choice-worthy. Olivier's emphasis on the soul's active nature finds its most unusual and philosophically fruitful expression in another area of his psychology, his account of perception. Again, the best way to appreciate his view is to start with the position he's attacking. It's one we're familiar with since we've seen it put forward by Roger Bacon. According to him, perception occurs when a so-called species reaches the perceiver from an object. This could be a sound, a smell, or something more sophisticated, like the hostility of a dangerous animal. But philosophers talking about perception usually focus on the case of vision, so let's do the same. In honor of the hero of this episode, imagine you're seeing a green olive. Bacon's explanation of how the visual experience occurs is that a green object like an olive will affect the air surrounding it by imparting the species of green to it. This species is then passed on or multiplied through one part of the air after another. When the effect gets to the air touching your eye, this species is received in your eye and this enables you to see green. A pretty plausible theory, you might say, and in fact one that is in broad terms true. But Peter Olivey thinks it suffers from two fatal weaknesses. The first is that the species in the eye would be a physical cause, whereas it is your immaterial soul that is registering the presence of a green object. Whatever it means for the so-called species of green to turn up in your eye, the presence of the species in the eye cannot be identical with, or even give rise to, a perception in your soul. This is because while immaterial things can influence physical things, as when your soul commands your arm to reach out to take an olive out of a bowl, the reverse is not the case. Bodies cannot affect anything incorporeal. So that's the first problem with the species theory, one that would of course only impress someone who shares Olivey's assumption that bodily states cannot affect an immaterial The second problem, however, involves fewer metaphysical presuppositions. In fact, it is a brilliant, if not necessarily unanswerable, objection which will have echoes in early modern philosophy in debates over the empirical basis of knowledge. Olivey observes that, according to the species theory, what you would be aware of when you see a green olive is not actually the olive. It is the species of green in your eye. This might explain why you see green, but it can't explain why you see the green olive. At best, what you would be accessing is a representation of the green olive. But this, Olivey insists, is just false. Unless you're looking at a picture of something, or its image in a mirror, you don't see only a representation or species of the thing you see, you see the thing itself. What Olivey is proposing here is an early version of what is nowadays called direct realism, a theory of perception that avoids invoking representations of the objects of perception in favor of the claim that we perceive things without any intermediary. Of course, merely denying representationalism isn't a positive explanation of how perception does work. Olivey does offer such an explanation, but not one that is particularly explanatory. It again ties in with his claims about the rational soul, and especially the will. On that topic, Olivey wanted to insist on the active, self-initiating nature of the soul, and the same is true here. What really bothers him about the species theory is that it makes us passive as perceivers, much as the intellectualist theory of choice made the will passive. Against this, Olivey insists that perception is no more passive than the will. To perceive an Olive, I must actively do something. I must attend, or pay attention to the Olive. In fact, Olivey even uses the Latin word atencio to describe the phenomenon. He also uses the evocative language of imbibing, or drinking in, what is perceived. Less metaphorically, but still somewhat mysteriously, he speaks of the soul's aspectus, a kind of orientation or direction of focus that we bring to bear on things when we attend to them. Olivey gives an illustration of his point, that is not unlike the one I gave at the beginning of this episode, about your mind wandering when you try to read. He asks us to consider someone sleeping with his eyes open. If there is some light in the room, the eyes should be physically affected by their surroundings, just as they are when the person is awake. So, the person should see if seeing is a purely passive process, as the species theory demands. But in fact, sleeping people don't see anything, because their souls are at rest and not attending to the things around them. I should note that Olivey doesn't rule out that the eyes are somehow affected by their surroundings. He admits that they are, as is clear from Roger Bacon's point that we continue to see after-images of bright lights after we stop looking at them. Olivey's claim is rather that the physical effects in the eyes or other sense organs do not cause sensation. The soul perceives simply by attending to the things to which it has access. And there's another possible misunderstanding we should avoid. Olivey obviously is not claiming that we have to be giving something our full, conscious attention in order to perceive it. If you're reading about philosophy, and a bowl of olives is in your field of vision beyond the book, you may be seeing the bowl without, as we might say, really paying attention to it. But all this shows, according to Olivey, is that the soul's active attention comes in degrees. It can be entirely absent, as in the sleeping case, or it can consist in the kind of basic background awareness of our surroundings that we have as we go about our daily lives. I think he would have loved the case where you overhear your name at a party, since it suggests that our souls are actively monitoring things all the time, always ready to give particularly close attention to something that suddenly comes to seem salient and interesting. Who has the better of the debate between Olivey and the representationist? That's a complicated question, and in fact philosophers of perception today still argue over a version of the same question. The biggest challenge for Olivey and other direct realists is probably the difficulty of accounting for perceptual error, as when you take a green olive to be a black olive because you are seeing it through a fog of cigarette smoke, something that would have been a routine occurrence in many restaurants until just a few years ago. For a representationalist, this is no problem. It's just a case where something is represented but without total accuracy. For a direct realist like Olivey, it's harder to explain, since he wants to insist that you are seeing the olive itself with no filtering representation that could distort the experience. He could however appeal to the fact that even as we directly see the olive, we are also directly seeing the intervening space between the eye and the olive, which in this case is full of smoke. So our overall experience combines these two perceptions. Meanwhile, his theory seems more plausible when we consider normal perceptions that represent things as they really are. It certainly doesn't seem to us that we perceive things through a screen of representative images. I would add that in the context of medieval philosophy, Olivey's position carries particular force. His contemporaries would have agreed with his assumptions about the immateriality of the soul. They would all have admitted that immaterial things like souls, and for that matter God, are able somehow to relate to and even act upon the physical world. If my immaterial soul can make my arm move, why can't my soul also reach out to something that is across the room in order to see it? But there's a danger for Olivey here too. Once we start thinking along these lines, we see that the real mystery is why an immaterial soul should be restricted to perceiving only the things that are related to its body in appropriate ways. Why can't I see behind my head if it is my soul's attention that makes the difference and not the way the objects in front of me are affecting my eyes? Olivey's perception would seem to be that our bodies do restrict the scope of our awareness in this life. Remember that the power of sensation is in the lower soul, and thus tied to the body. In the afterlife, we will not be so restricted, but have a more general and unimpeded apprehension of things. Olivey's ideas about the soul, and especially about perception, have won him admiration from modern-day historians of philosophy. But the just plain historians know him above all for a different reason. His central role in one of the central religious debates in the late 13th century. It was a contest with ethical and political, as well as theological, dimensions. Olivey became the standard-bearer for one side in that contest, fiercely defending an ideal of deliberate poverty, which for him constituted the core of the Franciscan way of life. He set this ideal within an apocalyptic view of history, according to which the Franciscans had arisen just in time to prepare humanity for its final days. Assuming he wasn't right about this apart from his calculations being off by about 700 years, I'll be back in a couple of weeks to tackle this topic of deliberate poverty. First though, I'll be looking in more detail at the non-rational powers of soul that have occupied our attention in this episode, and in particular at the non-human creatures who share these same powers, animals. My guest will be Johanna Toivonen, one of the scholars who has done most in recent years to draw attention to Olivey, and who has thought quite a bit about the attitudes that Olivey and medieval thinkers adopted towards animals. So gather your house pets around your podcast listening device, and join us for the next episode of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.