THE INDIVIDUAL IN A WORLD OF UNIVERSALS

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The Swiss philosopher Karl Jaspers suggested many years ago in The Origin and Goal of History that humankind went through an "axial period" from 800 BCE to 200 BCE during which time human beings began to free themselves from a tribal mentality, in which the interests of the individual were routinely subordinated to the survival needs of the group, to a new sense of individual self-awareness and personal liberty. Among those "axial" thinkers were Socrates and his disciple/scribe Plato. Certainly the analogy of the cave in Book VII of Plato's Republic has had an enduring influence (for better or for worse) on the subsequent history of Western philosophy. The dualism between appearance and reality—that is, shadows on the wall of the cave representing ever-changing sense experience versus the universal forms of things seen in the light of the sun (human reason)—has been both enthusiastically embraced and strongly resisted over the intervening centuries. Idealists and materialists have argued ever since about what's really real and the ultimate source of human knowledge. Scientists, for example, have tended to be implicit materialists because of their insistence on empirical verification of abstract theories. Humanists, on the contrary, in their ongoing search for meaning and value in human life, have tended to be outspoken idealists.

In this chapter I indicate the historical roots of this contemporary clash of cultures within the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle in the ancient world and in the heated debates among medieval thinkers about the status of universals. Plato was understandably fascinated by the newly discovered power of the human mind to penetrate beyond appearances to the form or essence of the thing in question and then to use that elusive definition to put order and coherence into one's personal and community life. Aristotle, being by temperament more empirically oriented, converted the Forms that for Plato existed apart from material reality into substantial forms, the inner principle of existence and activity for individual things. But the substantial form still invariably represented what the individual thing had in common with other similarly constituted things and not how it was genuinely different from those other things. For example, if one seeks to determine what makes human beings different from one another, the alleged substantial form (humanity) is of little value. All the distinguishing physical characteristics of a given individual (e.g., being tall or short, fat or thin, with black, brown, white, or yellow skin) are in Aristotelian terms "accidents," contingent properties that apply to many other human beings. The particular "thisness" of that individual, that which makes him or her as an individual different from other human beings, somehow remains beyond rational comprehension. Hence, even though he was much more aware of the importance of individual things than Plato, Aristotle too lived in a mental world dominated by the search for universals in the world around him.

Still another reason that Aristotle was preoccupied with the issue of universals, of course, was his interest in explaining the reality of change in the world of nature in terms of universal causal principles. W. T. Jones comments as follows:

Aristotle believed that in order to understand any individual thing we must know four aspects of it, each of which operates to determine its nature. We must know (1) the material out of which it is composed (the material cause); (2) the motion or action that began it (efficient cause); (3) the function or purpose for which it exists (the final cause); and (4) the form it actualizes and by which it fulfils its purpose (the formal cause).

While Aristotle certainly wanted to explain the reality of individual things in terms of these causal principles, he found himself once again dealing with the individual existent in very general terms. Admittedly, to see something in terms of its relation to everything around it is a great help in understanding what it is in itself or in its particularity. But its individual "thisness" still remains elusive to full rational comprehension, given its explanation in terms of causal principles applicable to everything else that comes to be and ceases to be.

Why is this the case? Does it represent an inevitable limitation in human knowledge, or is something else at work here? Here I introduce a key component in my overall thesis for this book, namely, the distinction between objects of thought and subjects of experience. Objects of thought are invariably universal in scope since they abstract from the full reality of an individual existent and focus on some attribute or property that the individual shares in common with others of the same class. You and I as objects of thought for one another are both human beings; being human is what we have in common on the level of abstract thought. But as individual subjects of experience, you and I are quite different; we each have our individual approach to being human as manifest in our words and actions. Moreover, I cannot fully understand you in your particularity without becoming you and thereby losing my own personal identity. The same, of course, is true for you in your efforts to understand and deal with me.

By "subject of experience," of course, I do not mean a grammatical subject of predication in a sentence but an existential subject that is both active and passive in its relations with the world around it. That is, it is first receptive to its environment and then has an impact upon that environment by reason of its response to that initial stimulus. Unlike an object of thought, therefore, which has a determinate reality in the mind of the observer, an existential subject or subject of experience is indeterminate since it never stays precisely the same from moment to moment. Its identity keeps changing as it receives new environmental influences and responds to them in ever new ways. Each time that it responds, of course, it becomes for the moment determinate and can be an object of perception or reflection for other subjects and even for itself if it possesses self-awareness. But proper to the notion of subject of experience is potentiality, the power to be other than what it is right now. By way of contrast, proper to the notion of object of thought is de facto actuality, determinate reality lacking in potentiality or the power to change.

But is this not an unnecessary dichotomy? Is not everything in this world necessarily both subject and object? Agreed, but which of the two enjoys ontological priority over the other? Depending upon one's choice here, a radically different...