DUNS THE DUNCE

It is a sad memory for another Irishman on our list, John Duns Scotus (1266-1308), whose name Duns was turned into the unflattering epithet “dunce” after King Henry the Eighth’s repudiation of the Pope and of all Catholicism with that.

Duns Scotus was a Franciscan friar, one of the three great Franciscan philosophers, counting Roger Bacon and William Occam (you will find him in my next entry, to be posted tomorrow), besides him. By contrast, Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas were Dominicans. There existed a certain enmity between these two orders: the Dominicans were considered more orthodox, while the Franciscans, refusing to accept their authority, were seen as straying off the conventional course. This does not mean that the Franciscans were perched on the verge of heresy. Curiously enough, their bitter rivalry with the Dominicans caused Pope Sixtus IV, in the fifteenth century, to write a constitution threatening both sides with excommunication should they keep accusing each other of heresy. The case in point was the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, originally formulated in the eleventh century, but immediately rejected by Church authorities, including Doctor Angelicus-- St. Thomas himself. This doctrine was, however, brought back to prominence by none other than Duns Scotus, and by virtue of his sharply refined argument was established as an optional Church practice. (It was going to become an official dogma of the Church only in 1854, precisely because of the stated Dominican opposition to it.)

From all said above, it is clear that Duns Scotus was poising himself against the authority of Aquinas. This was possible by appealing to the authority of Augustine, which Duns was doing very skillfully. Thus, in his philosophy, the effective ratio of Plato versus Aristotle in the philosophical concoction of the Middle Ages Christian theology was pushed back from Thomistic Aristotle back to Augustinian Plato.

But this was not all that happened as a result of Duns’ efforts. Without actually trying to dislodge Aquinas from his lofty position within the Catholic Church, Duns discovered numerous chinks in his armor, and set on to correct those mistakes. His grudge was against giving too much credit to reason and philosophy, thus leaving too little room for revelation and supernatural illumination. It may be true that Thomas Aquinas is vulnerable because of such obvious mistakes (after all, every philosopher presenting a theory of his own is necessarily guilty of multiple errors, which, after all said and done, completely undermine his construction and turn his theory into a pathetic pile of junk), but at least what he was trying to do was to reconcile these two apparent opposites: reason and revelation; philosophy and theology standing behind them. By his too thorough an effort to push philosophy out of theology, Duns Scotus antagonized philosophy at a time when it had too little clout in its standing against the Church. With the advent of the Renaissance, however, the tables were turned, and a triumphant philosophy pushed back and trivialized theology among all educated minds. Was it worth it, then, we may ask, to repair small parts, while losing the big whole?

The name of Duns, now spelled as dunce, became a nickname for a mentally challenged person, because of Duns Scotus’s alleged obscurity and obtuseness. On the other hand, he is known as Doctor Subtilis among the Catholics for his sharp thorough mind and a genius for the subtleties of extremely difficult, specialized philosophical subject matter. In many ways he epitomizes scholasticism at its peak. But among those truly obscure, abstruse subjects, which have made him, and Catholic Scholasticism as a whole, the butt of many irreverent jokes, there is at least one subject, which is at the same time lively, instructive, and useful in the modern philosophical discourse. It is the “principle of individuation,” that is what determines non-identity of things, and in addressing this question Duns Scotus particularly excelled. Here is how Bertrand Russell describes his contribution:

“Duns Scotus held that, since there is no difference between being and essence, the principle of individuation must be form, not matter. This principle was one of the important problems of the scholastic philosophy. In various forms it has remained a problem to the present day. We may state the problems as follows.

“Among the properties of individual things, some are essential, others accidental. The question now arises: given two individual things belonging to the same species, do they always differ in essence, or is it possible for the essence to be exactly the same in both? Saint Thomas holds the latter view on material substances, the former on the immaterial ones. Duns Scotus holds that there are always differences of essence between two different individual things. The view of St. Thomas depends on the theory that pure matter consists of undifferentiated parts, which are distinguished solely by difference of position in space. Duns Scotus holds that if things are distinct, they must be distinguished by some qualitative difference. This view is nearer to Platonism than that of St. Thomas.”

Russell says further that in modernizing this problem, as we get rid of the concept of substance altogether, Scotus is more up to par than Aquinas, although the serious difficulty in connection with space and time is still unresolved. In my view, it is possible to overcomplicate the philosophical problem of individuation, to bring it even to the point of absurdity, like Zeno Eleaticus has done with his logical puzzles, but in view of the recent cloning experiments becoming a trend-setting development, the principle of individuation ought to be posited in ethical terms, rather than in any other non-ethical philosophical terms, and only the position of Duns Scotus, which unequivocally separates even seemingly identical entities, can sustain the principle of individuation through the cloning controversy. It is essential to see two clones, or two identical twins as distinct not only mentally or immaterially, as St. Thomas would allow it, but as physically distinct as well, where only a categorical qualitative physical distinction will do, thus awarding the whole argument to Duns Scotus.