Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Divine Simplicity

Dominik Kowalski has a question for me about footnote 3 in Peter van Inwagen's "God's Being and Ours" in Miroslav Szatkowski, ed., Ontology of Theistic Beliefs, de Gruyter, 2018, pp. 213-223. (Van Inwagen's essay is right after my "Does God Exist Because He Ought to Exist?, pp. 203-212. I managed to upstage van Inwagen, but only alphabetically.) Here is footnote 3:

Catholic philosophers have often said not that God’s existence is a consequence of his nature but that his existence and his nature are identical. This doctrine is one of the many implications of the more general “doctrine of Divine Simplicity”, according to which phrases like ‘God’s power’, ‘God’s wisdom’, ‘God’s love’, ‘God’s nature’ and ‘God’s existence’ all denote one and the same thing, namely the Divine Substance – that is, God, God himself, God full stop. The doctrine of Divine Simplicity, however, presupposes an Aristotelian ontology of substance and attribute (for present purposes, “Aristotelianism”). From the point of view of a Platonist like myself, the doctrine of Divine Simplicity is wrong simply because it presupposes Aristotelianism, and Aristotelianism is false.
Here is Dominik's question:
Where does that idea come from? [The idea that DDS presupposes an Aristotelian ontology.] Seriously, I don't understand. It might be disputable whether we can reconcile Plotinus' understanding of the way the One exists with a Thomistic view about God, but divine simplicity is a core pillar of (Neo-)Platonist arguments, e.g. the argument from composition. As said, perhaps the identification of God with existence is a newer concept due to development by philosophers in the Aristotelian tradition, but prima facie I think formulating the dispute the way van Inwagen does, muddies the water. Divine Simplicity mustn't be identified with an explicitly Thomistic formulation, this just undersells the disputes the doctrine has historically surrounded [undersells the disputes that have historically surrounded the doctrine].
1) Kowalski is right  that the ontological simplicity of the Absolute is at the core of Platonism and Ne0-Platonism. The Good of Plato, the One of Plotinus, and the God of Aquinas are all ontologically simple.  The theology of Aquinas quite obviously incorporates this neo-Platonic element, along with other elements, some of which do not comport well with the neo-Platonic element.  No Absolute worth its salt can fail to be simple, and the God of Aquinas is the Absolute in his system. For Aquinas, Deus est ipsum esse subsistens. Literally translated, God is self-subsisting To Be.  Intellectual honesty demands that we admit that this God concept teeters on the brink of unintelligibility.  But it is defensible as a Grenzbegriff, a boundary or limit  concept. See The Concept GOD as Limit Concept.
 
God is not a being among beings, but Being itself.  In this respect God is like the One of Plotinus. There is no Many in which the One is a member.  The ONE is not one of many. Similarly, in Aquinas there is no totality of beings in which God is a member.  God is not one being among many. He is utterly transcendent like the One of Plotinus and the Good of Plato. And yet, God is not other than every being, every ens, for he himself is. If God were other than every being, then he would be other than himself, which is impossible. This distinguishes the God of Aquinas from Heidegger's Being. For Heidegger, das Sein ist kein Seiendes, Being is other than every being, everything that is. For Aquinas, Gott oder das Sein ist selbst seiend, God or Being is himself being. Or, as I say in my existence book, The Paradigm Existent, the Unifier, is not a being (which would imply that it is a being among beings), but the being, the one and only being (ens) that is identical to its Being (esse) .  That is indeed one of the entailments of DDS: there is no real distinction in God as between God and Being and between God and his Being.
 
2) As for Peter van Inwagen, he, like so many hard-core analytic types, uses 'Platonism' and related expressions in a loose and historically uninformed way.  He calls himself a Platonist but he certainly does not accept 'into his ontology' — as these types say — Platonic Forms or Ideas (eide), Platonic participation (methexis) of phenomenal particulars in Forms, and the rest of the conceptual machinery which naturally within Plato's system implies levels/grades of Being and modes of Being which Dominik, as a German speaker, can understand as Seinsweisen or Seinsmodi. In the essay in question, van Inwagen comes out unequivocally against modes of Being.  (I employ the majuscule 'B' in 'Being' so as to mark the crucial distinction between Being and beings, esse et ens/entia, das Sein und das Seiende. Observing that distinction is initium sapientiae in ontology.)
 
Van Inwagen's main man is Willard van Orman Quine who contributed to the misuse of the good old word 'abstract' with his talk of 'abstract objects.' So-called abstract objects are not products of abstraction.  Van Inwagen buys into this lapse from traditional usage along with his colleague Alvin Plantinga. Accordingly, there are properties, but they are 'abstract objects' which exist just as robustly (or just as anemically) as 'concrete objects.' So-called abstract objects are, besides being outside of space and time, causally inert.  So it is no surprise that Plantinga and van Inwagen reject the DDS claim that God is identical to each of his omni-attributes or essential properties.  To their way of thinking, that identity claim makes of God a causally inert abstract object, which of course God, as causa prima, cannot be.
 
3) When van Inwagen says that DDS presupposes an Aristotelian ontology of substance and attribute, what he says is true inasmuch as said ontology is a constituent ontology (C-ontology). This is what he, as a self-styled 'Platonist' objects to. I explain C-ontology in my Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on DDS.  See section 3. Here is part of what I say in that section:
Since a Plantinga-type approach to ontology rules out DDS from the outset, no sophisticated adherent of the doctrine will adopt such an approach. The DDS defender will embrace an ontology that accommodates an ontologically simple being. Indeed, as Nicholas Wolterstorff (1991) notes, classical proponents of DDS such as Aquinas had a radically different ontological style, one that allowed for the coherent conceivability of DDS. They did not think of individuals as related to their properties as to abstracta external to them, but as having properties as ontological constituents. They, and some atheist contemporaries as well, think in terms of a “constituent ontology” as opposed to what Wolterstorff calls a “relation ontology” or what might be called a “nonconstituent ontology”. Bundle theories are contemporary examples of constituent ontology. If properties are assayed as tropes and a concrete particular as a bundle of tropes, then these tropes or abstract particulars are parts of concrete particulars when suitably bundled. Properties so assayed are brought from Plato’s heaven to earth. The togetherness or compresence of tropes in a trope bundle is not formal identity but a kind of contingent sameness. Thus a redness trope and a sweetness trope in an apple are not identical but contingently compresent as parts of the same whole. A model such as this allows for an extrapolation to a necessary compresence of the divine attributes in the case of God. Aquinas, the greatest of the medieval proponents of DDS, is of course an Aristotelian, not a trope theorist. But he too is a constituent ontologist. Form and matter, act and potency, and essence and existence are constituents of primary substances. Essence and existence in sublunary substances such as Socrates are really distinct but inseparably together. Their unity is contingent. This model permits an extrapolation to the case of a being in which essence and existence are necessarily together or compresent. Constituent ontology, as murky as it must remain on a sketch such as this, at least provides a framework in which DDS is somewhat intelligible as opposed to a Plantinga-style framework on which DDS remains wholly unintelligible. The arguments for DDS amount to arguments against the nonconstituent ontological framework.
Combox open. I invite Dominik to tell me whether I have answered his question to his satisfaction.

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11 responses to “Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Divine Simplicity”

  1. Dominik Kowalski Avatar
    Dominik Kowalski

    Hello Bill, thank you for answering my question. As someone who is very influenced by the likes of Lloyd Gerson I’m appalled by the way contemporary Platonism is classified. I fear that due to the rise of Aristotelianism, and by extension thereby Platonism, in contemporary philosophy, much time will be wasted on the simple definition of words.
    I have no follow-up question, only much to think about.

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  2. BV Avatar
    BV

    Dominik,
    Did you find what I said clear?
    Which works of Gerson have you read, and which would you recommend?
    Does Gerson in any of his works comment on either of the two books on Plato by J. N. Findlay? I am a student of the latter.
    Does Gerson comment specifically in any of his works on the use of ‘platonism’ in contemporary analytic philosophy?

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  3. Richard Norris Avatar
    Richard Norris

    Bill,
    Given the Doctrine of Divine Simplicity that we find in Aristotelianism, it seems it runs into a problem when one looks at the Principle of the Indiscerniblility of Identicals. If essence and essence are identical in God, and God contains no potentials, then God as the first thing would have no way of conceiving a difference between them. If God has no way of differentiating between them, since it would violate P.I.I. and He cannot violate logical principles, then the Aristotelian DDS would seem to leave God impotent. Am I missing something?

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  4. BV Avatar
    BV

    Richard,
    Well, that’s interesting. You seem to be arguing as follows:
    1.In God, essence = existence. So:
    2. God cannot discern a difference between his essence and his existence. So:
    3. God violates Indisc. Id.
    Is that your argument? If yes, it’s a non sequitur. How did you get from (2) to (3)?

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  5. Richard Norris Avatar
    Richard Norris

    I would instead say this:
    1. In God, essence = existence. So:
    2. God cannot discern a difference between His essence and His existence. So:
    3. God cannot individuate existence and essence, as they have no potential to be distinguished from one another.

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  6. Dominik Kowalski Avatar
    Dominik Kowalski

    Bill, I will reply via mail as soon as possible.
    As for Richards argument, I don’t see where God’s impotence is supposed to come from. Of course, his whatness and thatness are indistinguishable in himself, but why should it follow that he thereby were incapable of knowing it to be different in the objects dependent upon him? In fact if existence is truly the fullest property, containing every other property actualizable in possible individuals, wouldn’t knowledge of himself give God knowledge of the difference between essence and existence in every being that is not himself?
    I actually don’t like arguing in this territory since existence is a barely visible limit case, but I don’t quite understand what exactly the problem is.

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  7. BV Avatar
    BV

    Dominik and Richard,
    Richard’s second comment suggests to me the following question: if God is simple, how can he be aware of himself? If God is aware of himself, then there is in God subject-object duality. God as subject is aware of himself as object. So if God is self-aware, then he is not simple. On the other hand, if God is not self-aware, then he is not omniscient, for then he does not know himself.

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  8. Dominik Kowalski Avatar
    Dominik Kowalski

    Very interesting, thank you. I don’t mean to suggest that there’s an answer to the question I’m aware of, but you yourself meditated upon similar topics numerous times. In the ultimate, the object-subject distinction (among many others) must vanish on pain of an unaccounted for complexity. We have an aporia here, though I prefer the DDS solution due to explanatory power, even though it entails apophatic theology.
    The minimal complexity Plotinus accused Aristotle of in conceiving of pure actuality as Thinking thinking about thinking led him to remove mental activity from the One and positing every such acts in the demiurge. However nonetheless, as you conclude in your book, the ultimate must at least be minimally mind-like. And even though it’s the demiurge that is the Intellect, it’s emanated by the One, which suggests that it has to have some kind of mental nature. This however will eventually only be understood if we understand the ultimate in itself.
    In conclusion I don’t think there’s an answer to Richard that will show the argument to be a non-issue. However the idea that the lack of subject-object distinction were problematic would only be given if God’s mind were in some way comparable to ours. He’s no individual though, but a nature. And I don’t see a reason to assume why the distinction is a logical or metaphysical necessity

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  9. BV Avatar
    BV

    Dominik,
    You definitely have a head for metaphysics. Du bist ein Luftmensch. Ich auch!
    >>The minimal complexity Plotinus accused Aristotle of in conceiving of pure actuality as Thinking thinking about thinking led him to remove mental activity from the One and positing every such acts in the demiurge.<< Where does Plotinus say this in the Enneads? I would like to write a separate post on this. >>He’s no individual though, but a nature. And I don’t see a reason to assume why the distinction is a logical or metaphysical necessity.<< Well, God is not an individual among individuals, but he is an individual, or rather THE individual, the absolute individual who is also identically a nature, the divine nature. Of course, this is unintelligible to the discursive intellect except as a limit which the discursive intellect approaches but never reaches -- like an asymptote in mathematics. I suppose you could say that God's self-awareness is non-dual. It is awareness of itself which is (identically) itself. But this too is unintelligible to the discursive intellect except as a limit toward which we grope. On a doctrine of analogy, God's mind would have to be in some ways comparable to ours, nicht wahr? Have you read Erich Pryzswara's ANALOGIA ENTIS? Not very helpful!

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  10. Richard Norris Avatar
    Richard Norris

    Bill and Dominik,
    As per your comment just after my last, Dominik: We must have a general distinction before we get to specific distinctions re: this or that contingent creature. Those creatures cannot supply their own sense of the distinction, since their existence is dependent upon it being made first. If it is knowledge of God as Himself that supplies the distinction, then it seems to simply beg the question for God to supply this distinction since it is not in Him.
    It should also be clear that God relating to Himself is something that He cannot do, as God’s activity is exhausted by terms like omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence, and these terms deal only with contingency as they are defined. So I don’t know if we’ve reached an aporia so much as we have reached logical contradiction.

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  11. Dominik Kowalski Avatar
    Dominik Kowalski

    Bill,
    I will answer the rest of your comments via mail, I have to check whether the points about Plotinus have been made by Lloyd Gerson or Etienne Gilson.
    The point about limit cases is essential to this debate. I agree with the points you made. I’m not familiar with the book.
    Richard,
    logical contradiction is a strong term and definitely not something that can be established by your points. The details about the omni-attributes, although it’s understandable what they’re conveying, aren’t clear at all. Just consider the debate about knowledge of contingencies in God, what can be intrinsic, what extrinsic and what not. Or the manifold different definitions about omnipotence.
    Note just for the sake of it, that strictly speaking we don’t admit of the distinction between God, God’s acts and God’s knowledge of himself, adherents to DDS conclude that this distinctionless result is necessary in every ultimate being, just so you know where we’re actually standing. I’d therefore model what the omni-attributes amount to, to make it compatible with the afromentioned conclusion, not the other way around.
    To answer your points I’d simply construct the story that God by knowing himself as Existence knowledge all the ways in which existence can be limited in particulars (though not that he knows the non-existent partuculars). He knows by them being created that they are not him, thus the limits of the beings, their nature, and their actual dependence upon him, their existence, seem to be things that God can know must be distinct in everything that isn’t him. I don’t see how this would be problematic if he knows of no such distinction in himself. In fact his knowledge of such distinction by introspection seems to entail his own dependence upon something he owes his existence to.

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