Ockham
Ockham comes to the question determined to remove even esse objectivum from these possible creatures.118 Ockham criticised the traditional identification of the ideas with the divine essence. This criticism was fuelled by his overall concern to eradicate all metaphysical community and so enforce his ontology of indistinction, with its impervious singularity. It was this move that facilitated Ockham's particular conception of omnipotence, but it can be correctly expressed in the reverse: it was Ockham's novel version of omnipotence which gave rise to this ontology.119
The 'Venerable Inceptor' argues that the attempt to identify the ideas with the divine essence is incoherent.120 His analysis employs the usual Ockhamian methodological presuppositions: principle of annihilation and numerical identity, enforced by the principle of non-contradiction. If the ideas are the divine essence they must either be that essence exactly or they can be relations of imitability. If they are the divine essence in a real and precise sense, then there can only be one idea as there is only one essence. If they are relations of divine imitability, which would allow for a plurality, they must be real relations. But the problem with this is that the Trinity is the only real relation in the divine essence. So they can be relations only of reason. If they are relationes rationis then they cannot be identical with an ens reale such as the divine essence.121 A combination of real relation and a conceptual relation of imitability would fail because a composite cannot be identified with its parts.
For Ockham the ideas are exemplars or patterns that are known in the production of something. The word 'idea' is a connotative term. Consequently, it has only a nominal definition: principally signifying one thing directly (in recto) and signifying another obliquely (in oblique). It is this secondary signification that generates the illusion of a positive entity. This illusion is quickly dispelled when the term's primary signification is recalled, revealing its nominal quiddity (quid nominas). In this sense the word idea will only really signify a creature that is producible by God. The 'idea' is the thought of this creature which the divine intellect knows. This 'idea' functions as a pattern which is the exemplar of that creature. But this pattern is, in the Divine intellect, nothing other than the creature itself. We must remember that there can be no appeal to metaphysical concepts such as existence in the Thomist sense. The ideas are not means by which God knows something and the ideas are not likenesses of the creatures. Instead the ideas are the creatures themselves.122 The word idea is employed to signify God's intelligent thought of them as creatable and so as other than himself. As God thinks of the creature that is creatable he thinks of that creature. So we understand an idea as God's knowledge of what is creatable by him, and that these ideas are in themselves nothing; they are nothing but themselves.123
The word idea directly signifies the creature and in a secondary sense signifies the realisation of that possible creature by God, and his knowledge of it. God knows through these ideas only in the sense that they terminate the act of knowing. That is, without them nothing would be thought. But this is simply a tautology: for something to be thought something must be thought and that which is thought is that which is thought. The full connotative nature of the word becomes apparent as the primary signification continually draws us back to the creature itself. In Ockham's world there could only be God or the individual creature, there can be no tertium quid. Thus when God creates the creature all he has thought of in that creation has been the creature. So the idea is only other from the creature as God's knowledge of what is possible for him to create. There is a distinct lack of any metaphysical community, for the creature does not a la Aquinas participate in God's act of to-be, nor is there a participation in any real universal community of essences.
What a creature is is itself. This is why we have the employment of a factual understanding of what 'is', because a fact is the conceptual tool needed to speak of what 'is' without relying upon other metaphysical concepts. Factuality allows a simple univocal mantra, as one only repeats the fact, so to speak. In this sense, an idea of a creature (that is only itself and as known by God) is nothing. The difference between the realised and an unrealised fact is only the fact.124 The fact of its-self makes all the difference; but this difference, in being the individual fact, is no difference at all. What is meant by this is that the fact, as a possible creature, is its own possibility, and so when it is freely actualised by God it remains the same, and change is external to its own possibility. The only alteration is an act of God's will. This means that the something remains the a priori nothing it always was, even before or without God. This will be explained and elaborated on below. What we must accept at this stage is that for Ockham the ideas are nothing but the creatures themselves. Consequently, before the creatures are, the idea of them is at this point nothing. As McGrade points out, 'pure nothing plays as significant a role in Ockham's ontology as does the void for Democritus'.125
One consequence of Ockham's penchant for terminist logic is that there are three ways in which the word nothing can be employed: (a) syncategorematically, as a negative universal sign; (b) categorematically, in so far as it does not signify anything which actually exists; (c) lastly, as it depicts that for which existence is impossible.126 Chimeras fall under the third use. When Ockham calls a creature a purum nihil it is meant in a categorematic sense. This indicates that, although a creature did not exist from all eternity, it could have existed from all eternity, and so it does exist as the nothing which the idea of its-self actually is. As Maurer points out, Ockham did not actually say that a divine idea is a nothing, 'but he implies this by a statement that a creature known from all eternity by the divine mind as something creatable is unum nihil, for a divine idea is precisely something creatable to which God can give real existence'.127 As we know, Henry of Ghent and Duns Scotus both tried to render ideas nothing, but it was Ockham who managed to empty nothingness of all somethingness.128 The nothingness of the divine idea is nothing but a pure and absolute possibility. The internal intelligibility of this possibility came from that very possibility alone. Ockham could utilise this notion to replace the need for an order of essences or even of being. As Maurer says, 'Ockham had to take the divine ideas more seriously than Scotus, because for Ockham the divine essence is not the exemplar of creatures.'129 The implications of this are enormous and will be discussed below. The ideas are now only the creatures themselves, which are not anchored in the divine essence, but reside outside this essence as a possibility unto themselves, and yet, in being so, they are nothing. But the danger here is that if the negative implication of nothingness is weakened (if that can occur) then these ideas will possibly displace God, in that they will, in a Platonic sense, condition God's intelligibility and in the end his possibility.130 At this stage it seems correct to invoke Anton Pegis' invective that Ockham represents 'Platonism minus the ideas'.131 We will discover that this absence becomes more determinate than any Platonic idea ever did. Below we move from a discussion about divine ideas to one about Scotus' formalism, doing so in an effort to draw out some of the implications touched upon above. Following this we return to Ockham in an analysis concerning modal logic.
Possibly: Nothing
Duns Scotus initiated a new understanding of reality in terms of formality; a formality to become enshrined in the Scotist univocity of being.132 Following Avicenna, Scotus argued that the first object of the intellect is ens qua ens. In making this move, existence was to become essentialised, as the difference between existence and essence came to be understood only as a formal distinction.133 (Although it may be fairer to say that this is a pregnant implication in Scotus, which is later developed by Scotists.) Existence was itself an intrinsic mode of essence, becoming rather more conceptual than existential; being became what was thinkable.134 This univocity of being could only be permitted if intrinsic modes of being could allow for internal differentiation without the mere addition of external difference - which would offend the status of being as the supreme transcendental. Thus according to modal distinctions, the difference appropriate to God and creature arises from the intensive degrees which an essence could attain. So God's being was qualified by the intrinsic mode of infinity - in which univocal being was 'virtually' included. This meant that God was rendered distinct without employing specific differentiae which would improperly suggest that being was a genus common to God and creatures. The concept of being which both God and creatures fall under is not, therefore, proper to God; it becomes so only under intrinsic qualification. Thus 'God is being' is a logical statement that nonetheless has some ontological purchase in that being is a formal reality in God: God as infinite being is lawfully a fully determinate metaphysical statement.
Scotus radically redefines the existent object and the balance between the universal and the singular. For him the object is composed of two aspects that exhibit a plurality of forms within every actuality - singularity of substantial form being denied (the common Franciscan view). An object consists of a common nature and a contracting difference, also known as an haecceity, that makes it singular.135 The two aspects are formally distinct.136 They can be conceived apart and are thus distinguishable. The phantasm presents to sensitive cognition the object's singularity: 'The phantasm represents with its entire function the object as something singular to the imagination.'137 As this phantasm is sensory it can never bring about the reception of a thing's form, which is its universal aspect. Cognition of the thing's universality is achieved by the production of the intelligible species. The phantasm is sensory, so it cannot communicate to the intellectual faculty, while the intelligible species is a product of the agent intellect.
It is this formal element that prefigures modernity. As Alliez says, 'it is in his formalism that Duns Scotus would already singularly escape every form of the via antiqua'.138 Scotus conceived the object in terms of multiple forms. Every object was composed of parts that had themselves a partial being, one which in terms ofpotentia absoluta was easily separated by the mind from its 'host' unity. These partial beings are formally distinct from the object, so the object becomes disembodied as it is forced to inhabit a world determined by the possible. As Alliez says, 'in the Scotist world everything that is conceivable apart possesses an objective reality, and in this respect has in God a distinct idea orientated toward a possible production'.139 Each object loses its ontological unity, a unity only partially regained by practical representation. Linked with the formal distinction is the univocity of being, which asserts that the primary object of cognition is 'being' as ontologically drained, since indeterminate and neutral. Because each reality is mediated by a logical sameness of being, knowledge of being starts to usurp the primacy of theology. And since univocity thereby operates already as the possibility for all knowing, the measure of knowing begins to be a clear and distinct grasp of logically distinguishable items. In this way the primacy of adequation involving a real relation between knower and known starts to fade. Cognition is no longer necessarily about actual objects, but by way of the potentia absoluta is possible in principle without one (Scotus hints at this, and Ockham develops it much further). This means that veridicality will stem from successful representation, which can be mimicked by illusion, since a species is now thought of more as a mimesis of the known object. What is cognised becomes now literally the object of cognition, viz., the object is terminated by the act of cognition rather than an intentional ecstasis. Alliez argues that this re-conception of the object of cognition is itself 'the birth of the object'.140 And it is an object that 'negotiates its own modernity'.141 Because it arrives within the act of cognition any fundamental notion of adequation is implicitly scuppered by the Scotist formalism. For how can one locate actuality if actuality itself is now defined in terms of 'real-possibles'? This is to some degree a precursor to the Cartesian reversal from 'ab esse ad nosse valet consequentia' to 'a nosse ad esse valet consequentia'. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins described Scotus as the 'unraveller' and it seems, in a rather pejorative sense, that this is true.
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