Abstract
This is a study of D. H. Th. Vollenhoven’s type-focused historiography of philosophy and its development with respect to pre-Socratic philosophy. It uses the work of Pierre Hadot on philosophical askesis, the work of Martha Nussbaum on therapeutic argument, and recent work on the transformative character of Aquinas’s Summa contra Gentiles and Summa theologiae to question some of the central assumptions of Vollenhoven’s methodology. In the process, Vollenhoven’s practice is compared to and contrasted with the historiographical practice of Aristotle in his Metaphysics. What emerges is a way to acknowledge the continued worth of type-focused reading and the religious intuitions that gave rise to it, but on the basis of different methodological assumptions and to different historiographical effects.
1 Introduction
The essay that follows is an attempt to examine and evaluate the type-focused historiography of philosophy developed by D. H. Th. Vollenhoven, cofounder, with Herman Dooyeweerd, of the Reformational tradition in philosophy.1 It begins its work where Vollenhoven came to center his (Vollenhoven 1950): the range of philosophies developed in the emergent, pre-Socratic period in the history of Western philosophy. It extends itself subsequently to the rest of Mediterranean antiquity and into the High Scholastic era of the European Middle Ages. It uses the work of Pierre Hadot on ancient philosophical askesis, the work of Martha Nussbaum on therapeutic argument, and growing scholarly interest in the spiritually transformative character of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa contra Gentiles and Summa theologiae to question some of the central assumptions of Vollenhoven’s methodology. In the process, it both compares Vollenhoven’s historiographical practice to and contrasts it with Aristotle’s practice in, above all, his Metaphysics. What results is a way to acknowledge the continued worth of type-focused reading and the religious intuitions that gave rise to it, but on the basis of different historiographical assumptions and to different historiographical effects.
2 Vollenhoven and Pre-Socratic Thought
In 1961, Vollenhoven attempted to give an account of the emergence of his characteristic manner and method of approaching the history of philosophy (Vollenhoven 1961). It was a wise move. From the gestation of his planned multivolume Geschiedenis der wijsbegeerte in the 1930s and 1940s, historical research and writing had come to play an ever greater role in his philosophical scholarship (Tol 1993). His manner and method of approach were strikingly idiosyncratic if recognizably related to European scholarly concern in his day (cf. Bril 1986). Were that manner and method of approach to continue to be appropriated in the future, he could do worse than to advocate for it by telling the story of its emergence as concrete response to a recognizable need.
Throughout his teaching career, Vollenhoven’s historical work covered the width and breadth of Western philosophy, from Musaeus to Maritain, as it were. But in 1961, he felt it important to account for his signal concentration upon the very first or pre-Socratic chapter of that history. He justified his investment of so much time and energy in this pioneer group of philosophers by pointing to the role of past thought in later thinking: “I was moved by the simple conviction that in any historical process, what precedes will not completely determine what comes afterwards, but it will nevertheless [condition the future development] in large measure” (Vollenhoven 1961, 10).2
It seems the analyses of Geschiedenis I strike some readers as overly schematic and formalistic, and hence abstracted from the historicity or even humanity of these early philosophers. . . . I have always had a different impression. It has always seemed to me that Vollenhoven, the necromancer of philosophy, had actually looked the dark Ephesian, Heraclitus, for example, in his ghostly face and had known him for the contradictory monist he really was. Like some Dante returning to the land of the living after a visit to the Inferno that is Diels-Kranz, Vollenhoven lived to tell of the real character of the ancient . . . people he had met.
rowe 2007, 219
For the historian of pre-Socratic thought, the problem is simple. Her matter for analysis exists in mere fragments, bits of discourse preserved because they expressed some thought or other in an exemplary way. As a result, pre-Socratic philosophers tend to be represented in the historical record by only their wittiest aphorisms, their most charming turns of phrase, their most electric proposals or most puzzling riddles. Treatises, poems, mythographic narratives—that is, any example of a literary whole—have more often than not gone missing, though often alluded to reverently or polemically by later philosophers, orators, or historians. As a result, the philosophical historian of such thought fragments must make a very pregnant assumption if she is to take these bits and pieces with philosophical seriousness. She must assume that their survival is “providential” in the sense that they preserve something like the very kernel of the philosophers’ systematic sense of the world. She must assume, that is, that each fragment is a synecdoche in that most radical way whereby each part is, at one and the same time, the central gist of which it is a part.
Aristotle can be thought of as the very first historian of pre-Socratic thought to have treated the fragments in this way. Of course, often he was party to more of pre-Socratic writing and teaching than graces our research shelves today. But, just as often, one suspects him of being restricted in his acquaintance too. One suspects that he knew some of his pre-Socratic interlocutors only by pithy reports or in versions that others had heard tell of. In Aristotle’s case, his way of working with what he had heard or read as if it were a synecdoche is legitimated by his understanding of thought and its history. As the first book of his Metaphysics implies, he treated the history of thought as if it were a recapitulation in the human community of the process an individual person undergoes when engaged by something in the world that causes him to wonder and to ask the fateful question—“What is this?” Such treatment accords with Aristotle’s understanding of human nous, for he understands the nous poeticos of every human individual by which humans come to conceive and so understand the intelligible core of their experience of the world as numerically one with the nous poeticos of every other human individual (De anima 430a10–25).
For Aristotle, the results of these first halting efforts are not the deepest and most intelligible understandings of the things or events subjected to enquiry. Nevertheless, they are inexorable features of our coming-to-know, good and proper as far as they go as the human community corporately present in its wisdom lovers moves from surface appearance to the deep intelligible structure and purpose of things. The materialism of the Ionian physicoi (Metaphysics 983b6–984b7), the erotic kinesiology of Empedocles (Metaphysics 985a11–985a2), the form-giving numbers of the Pythagoreans (Metaphysics 985b23–986b2 and 989b30–990a31)—each reflects something true to the world, as far as it goes. None of them arrived at the deepest and fullest knowledge available to us, at least potentially. Of course, in Aristotle’s telling, they were all seeking to know in the fullest way in that each sought to know things by their causes. And, moreover, they each claimed to have done so in and through their philosophical method and the claims it generated. In this they were mistaken, of that Aristotle was convinced, but each mistake was necessary, for it represented one possible outcome of the perennial process of coming to know a world of bodies-in-motion (Metaphysics 982b10–20). Each mistake erased one false conclusion from the universal human checklist. More importantly, each mistake would eventually spur thinkers to consider again what they had thought they knew, leading to deepened understanding by virtue of what is learned in the effort to account for the error made. The progress of human thought was, then, in Aristotle’s view, dependent upon the errors as well as the grasp of adequate truths. For possible construals had to be generated and tried out; they were building blocks to be used in the slow communal edification of the structure of knowledge, lasting monument to the undivertable human drive toward or love of wisdom through knowledge.
For everywhere Vollenhoven sought the “type,” the pattern that organizes the many things claimed or uttered by a philosopher. . . . My point is that where no such pattern had been passed down in a clear way through the doxographical tradition or, better, through the thinkers’ own literary forms, which was the case with the pre-Socratics themselves, the effect of Vollenhoven’s typological (“problem-historical”) analyses was always to bring the dead to life.
The name of one or another pre-Socratic thinker stands for one or another ontological possibility opened up to philosophical thought and intuition. One could say that pre-Socratic philosophers are reduced to their fundamental ontological insights, to the metaphysical system implicit within their surviving fragments. It is this orientation that inspired the notion of an implicit doctrine of “providence” at play, justifying the assumptions underlying the philosophical community’s long struggle to understand and engage pre-Socratic thought. Each group of surviving fragments is thought to contain and hence express an ontologically founded system4 used to give meaning to our experience and so bear witness to the mystery of existence.
Where entire texts of a philosopher existed as with Plato, however, the philosopher could represent for himself the tone and attitude of his philosophical conception. And in these cases the impression Vollenhoven’s strategy leaves on many is that of a deadening (or mummifying) rather than vivifying of these . . . philosophical works.
So, Vollenhoven read pre-Socratic texts in search of the “type,” by which he meant “the pattern that organizes the many things claimed or uttered by a philosopher.” In other words, he presupposed the existence of a conceptual gist or pith that is implicit in the text or some significant part of a text. The formative effect of this gist or pith is to constitute the meaning of the text or part as expressive of a coherent universe. This conceptual “type” is treated in turn as if it marked out a system in nuce, as if pre-Socratic philosophers were thinkers determined to “deduce” the universe we inhabit from its absolutely first clear and distinct notions—in a word, ancient proponents of the philosopher-as-system-builder, as if Descartes or Leibniz avant le fait.
3 Systematicity and System in Ancient Thought
The question is whether this is a helpful way of reading pre-Socratic thought or, indeed, ancient philosophical thought of any kind. Is there not a valuable distinction to be maintained between aiming at systematic philosophical thinking and aiming to produce self-coherent philosophical systems? To use continuous representations structured by inferential norms in order to think through and account for a thing, event, or process encountered in the world is to work systematically, but that is not yet to intend to build a system enclosing all within a single inferentially consistent conceptual representation. Parmenides provides us with an example. It is clear that Parmenides’s understanding of the sameness at play between thinking and being pushes one to attend to realities that can be represented inferentially without remainder, his “way of being” (Vollenhoven 1965). Nevertheless, one also sees in Parmenides’s juxtaposition of the “way of being” and the “way of appearance” that he is after something deeper and prior to any conceptual representation, namely, a fundamental ground of trust to assume as life orientation. His shared ground between thinking and the world we think about was in service of knowing how to live in accord with our proper place in the world (in obedience to Dike or Justice, in whose praise Parmenides wrote his poem).
Ancient thinkers, who were engaged in philosophical thought and writing, were more or less systematic in their conceptual work without thereby achieving or even striving toward a comprehensive thought system. Indeed, the point is well illustrated by the work of Pierre Hadot on ancient philosophical askesis, on the one hand, and by Martha Nussbaum’s work on the therapeutic traditions of Hellenistic ethics, on the other.5
Each school, then, represents a form of life defined by an ideal of wisdom. The result is that each one has its corresponding fundamental inner attitude . . . and its own manner of speaking. . . . But above all every school practices exercises designed to ensure spiritual progress toward the ideal state of wisdom, exercises of reason that will be, for the soul, analogous to the athlete’s training or to the application of a medical cure.
hadot 1995a, 59
This sense of philosophy as an art of right living is crucial to understanding the textuality of ancient thought. Ancient texts remain closely tied to the pedagogies used to inculcate a philosophical life pattern. And that means that their patterns ever betray their roots in oral transmission. They do so via the structural importance accorded to the sound of words. That is, ancient philosophical texts very often proceed “by the associations of ideas, without systematic rigor . . . [retaining] the starts and stops, the hesitations, and the repetitions of spoken discourse” (Hadot 1995a, 62).
In addition, the texts betray the dialogical conventions of school pedagogy. They proceed in terms of standardized questions and answers that frame the way in which theoretical positions come to be developed and challenged. These conventions work against system building, for the questions used will not necessarily line up perfectly.6 As a result, the texts so constructed will “not necessarily be coherent on all points because the details of the argument in each work will be a function of the question asked” (Hadot 1995a, 63). The logical gaps induced by the pedagogical use of stereotypical questions to frame argument is intensified, especially among Platonists and Aristotelians by their habit of formulating responses in the form of grammatical commentary upon the texts of Plato and Aristotle. In short, while there is plenty of argumentation and a great deal of systematic rigor to be encountered in ancient philosophical texts, that argumentation and systematic rigor is not motivated by a primary care to develop and disseminate a single self-coherent system. Nor should this be surprising. As Hadot puts the matter: “Above all, the [ancient philosophical] work, even if it is apparently theoretical and systematic, is written not so much to inform the reader of a doctrinal content but to form him, to make him traverse a certain itinerary in the course of which he will make spiritual progress” (ibid., 64).
John M. Cooper (2012) has criticized Hadot’s notion of philosophical askesis and what Cooper sees as its underappreciation of the centrality of argument in ancient thought. It is not that he rejects the presence of philosophical askesis within important schools of ancient philosophy. Rather, he reads Hadot’s understanding of such askesis to relativize the centrality of argument in the practice of the philosophical life it was intended to support. Aristotle seems to illustrate well Cooper’s point. To be sure, Aristotle recognizes the validity of practical wisdom (phronesis) as aimed at an art of right living, but he also distinguishes speculative or contemplative wisdom (Sophia) from practical philosophy. Contemplative wisdom is an end in itself and not a means to and motivator toward something else. Moreover, contemplative wisdom is viewed as the higher endeavor, which means it is prior and more universal in its intelligible implications. In such a perspective, can Hadot’s ascetic philosophy-as-a-way-of-life ever do justice to Aristotle?
In the Nicomachean Ethics 1138b18–1145b11, practical wisdom marks the human horizon and what it means to live well within that horizon. Theoretical, speculative, or contemplative wisdom, on the other hand, marks a divine horizon that touches our lives and lifts some of us beyond our human selves, so to speak. As the divine is a form of existence higher than mortal existence and the human horizon is intrinsically mortal, the divine horizon that intersects with and ennobles human living is greater than the human living it ennobles. The transcendent ennoblement made available via theorein is in an important sense to be understood as an excellence in addition to those excellences that mark out human flourishing qua human. It is to be desired as end not means, but, in its transcendence, it encompasses not only the divine horizon but the human as well. End and means come together in the end. Sophia in being perfectly itself perfects phronesis or can be said to be true phronesis at one and the same time. As argument is central to theorein, it is central to Sophia. But the distinction between human practical wisdom and Sophia collapses in the end. For the philosopher who truly loves Sophia lives in such a way that that love suffuses the philosopher’s living qua philosopher, to be sure, but also qua human being, a material substance at its core. Argument as central speculative act is the heart of a speculative askesis constitutive of the philosopher’s right living, ever open to divine ennoblement, but it simultaneously stands at the core of and lifts up or exalts the philosopher’s materially human living within its psychosocially somatic and political horizon.
Cooper, then, has misread the logic- and argument-relativizing effect of Hadot’s understanding of philosophy as an art of right living. This can be confirmed by Hadot’s repeated insistence that there was an impulse toward systematicity deeply at work in the philosophies of antiquity (e.g., Hadot 1995a, 65). Hadot recognized the tension ancient philosophers posited between ordinary and conventional life forms, on the one hand, and the philosophical life, on the other. Philosophical life, in view of that tension, is well thought of as a fundamentally cognitive therapy of the soul. Its argumentation, the texts that argumentation generated, even the impulse toward systematicity were molded to therapeutic purposes.
Martha Nussbaum has described the use of argument in therapeutic philosophies of the ancient world. Such arguments reveal again a systematic thinking that is pointed at something other than the construction and further development of a system. She points out, for example, that “medical arguments” are “directed at the health of the individual as such, not at communities or at the individual as member of a community” (Nussbaum 1994, 46). Moreover, “the standard virtues of argument—such as consistency, definitional clarity, avoidance of ambiguity—have, in medical argument, a purely instrumental value” (ibid.). The upshot of all our rehearsal is this: the very common assumption of philosophers like Vollenhoven who seek to engage the pre-Socratics philosophically, namely, that surviving fragments manage to preserve the very gist or pith of a given philosopher’s thought such that one can, by patient analysis, recreate the metaphysical system implicit within them, seems contestable at the very least. It seems in fact to misunderstand the very purpose and character of philosophy as it was appropriated and practiced in the ancient world.
4 Systematicity and System in Medieval Thought
The same holds true for medieval philosophical thought. Pierre Hadot, however, would not agree, for he was convinced that it was Scholastic thought in its theological appropriation of ancient philosophy that turned philosophy into a school subject speculative in its methods, a systematizing knowledge for its own sake (Hadot 1995b, 378–379). His account of what might be termed “the taking of philosophy to school” is fascinating, to be sure. He points to the spiritual assumptions embedded in ancient philosophy and in Latin Christian theology as they had evolved into the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. They were constitutively competitors, transformative disciplines designed to remake the student from top to bottom in conformity with a clearer and more expansive vision of the world and its meaning. How was the Christian theologian to appropriate and benefit from the conceptual clarity and discipline available within ancient philosophy and its Arab and Jewish commentaries entering the Latin cultural sphere in precisely these years? In Hadot’s telling, the answer arrived at was to treat the whole of ancient philosophy as an organon to theology, that is, to Christian wisdom, in the way that the arts faculties of the Latin world’s nascent universities viewed the artes liberales as constitutive of basic or primary education—as a collection of authoritative texts and bodies of knowledge to be “ingested” and commented and that together provide the student with the necessary foundation for the unifying and spiritually transformative higher discipline that follows.
It is clear that there was a cultural debate in the thirteenth century especially between the arts masters, who viewed their discipline as philosophy and understood it in the ancient transformative sense, and the masters of the sacred page or of sacred teaching, who laid claim to the selfsame transformative calling (LeGoff 1957 and de Libera 1991). The debate bears witness to the endurance of the ancient sense of philosophy and its purport into the twelfth and thirteenth century as well as to the theological unease that enduring ethos occasioned. There was pressure exerted by theologians and their allies within the Latin prelacy to domesticate philosophy in one way or another. But the spiritually transformative intentions of theology meant precisely the preservation of a transformative understanding of philosophy, even among the theological antagonists of university arts masters in the second half of the thirteenth century. For among these theologians, theology related to all the other disciplines as their proximate final cause, and final causes were thought to be first in the order of causation, that in virtue of which the other causes existed.7 Theology’s spirit-transformative intentions, then, imbued the whole of the encyclopedia of the sciences.
So, pace Hadot, philosophy remained a spirit-and-life-transforming discipline in its intent, systematic without being focused upon system building. We can see this if we take two of the most stunningly self-coherent and systematic texts of the Middle Ages, the Summa theologiae and Summa contra Gentiles of Thomas Aquinas, as our example. For here too we see that a commitment to systematic elaboration is not the same as a commitment to system building. The Summae, for all their systematic virtuosity, were intended as transformative texts—that is, they were intended to work on their readers in such a way as to further the reader’s spiritual progress. At any rate, this is a view of the two Summae that has become ever more widespread in the wake of Leonard Boyle’s historical explorations in the 1970s and 1980s and Jean-Pierre Torrell’s masterful opus and its publication in the mid-1990s (Boyle 2000; Torrell 1993, 1996).8
What makes the notion of narrative legitimate, indeed inescapable, is not a diminished appreciation or deconstruction of the metaphysics of the Contra Gentiles, but a proper understanding of it. Thomas’s peculiar appropriation of the neo-Platonic motif of the exitus-reditus highlights the contingency of creation, in its origin and its endurance. . . . As an unfolding of divine providence, creation is a sort of narration . . . a setting forth, an exposition, a telling or relating.
hibbs 1995, 7
Indeed, Hibbs is convinced that “progress in reading of the text . . . is possible only on the condition of the docility to its pedagogy. . . . [Without] the active participation of the reader ‘all that is before us is indeed nothing but the book’” (ibid., 4).
Gilles Mongeau, sj, describes the Summa theologiae in similar terms: “Thus, the text of the Summa theologiae is not only materially a spiritual theology (as shown by Torrell). It is also a spiritual theology in its form, as a spiritual pedagogy, or a series of ‘spiritual exercises’ designed to engage the student and lead him or her to an encounter with divine truth” (Mongeau 2004, 94). Here too, then, the text, for all its logical divisio, unproblematically includes materials that break the placid validity the text’s divisio would seem to set up (Vaughan 2009). Systematic thought is exposed as the instrument of other concerns and intentions.
Hadot’s and Nussbaum’s work on the philosophy of antiquity as well as recent work on Thomas Aquinas’s two Summae call into question both the methods and founding assumptions of philosopher-historians who engage the philosophy of the pre-Socratics when those methods and assumptions are applied to philosophers and philosophical texts in other eras of the history of philosophy.
5 Vollenhoven’s Typological Reading of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy
William Rowe has suggested that Vollenhoven’s historiographical work on the history of philosophy became ever more about the refinement of the types themselves rather than about understanding the philosophers whose philosophical texts were purportedly illumined by the types. Indeed, he goes further. He wonders whether “the object of investigation, indeed the intelligible unit of meaning for Vollenhoven, was the totality of philosophical history” (Rowe 2007, 222). By implication, “the constant refinement of types is in effect Vollenhoven’s sustained attempt to do unto this history what he has been faulted for doing with Aristotle and what he succeeded in doing so brilliantly . . . with the pre-Socratics. That is, he attempted to bring the dry bones of this fragmented history back to life” (ibid.). We should remember the young Vollenhoven’s sense of the fragmented character of scholarly understanding of the history of philosophy reducing our understanding to so many bits and pieces, which drove him toward a view of philosophy’s history as a whole (Vollenhoven 1961, 2–3). From such a perspective, one can see why Vollenhoven might conflate a philosopher with the ontological possibility his philosophical texts uncovered or developed. Rowe took as his example Vollenhoven’s work on Aristotle. “The very idea that Vollenhoven ever wrote about ‘Aristotle’ is a sort of optical illusion. He was writing, through a writing about Aristotle, about the history of philosophy as a whole, which he labored ceaselessly to conceive” (Rowe 2007, 222).
What emerges is a picture of Vollenhoven’s historiographical writing that, again, associates his work with the historiographical practice of Aristotle in the first and second book of the Metaphysics. The point is to understand the totality of the history of philosophy as if it were itself a systematic whole, a whole to be laid out by acts of analytic divisio and synthetic compositio. Individual philosophers implicitly stand for or rather realize one or another moment of the corporate human struggle to conceive the cosmos as an ordered whole. Each philosopher either discovers and articulates for the first time some ontological possibility or other, or develops that possibility further and in the context of ever new cultural dynamics that emerge in the passage of time. In such a viewpoint, every philosopher is, on some level, a historical (not logical) necessity, i.e., a fitting participant in the whole, for one learns quite as much from philosophical failures at adequate conceptualization as one learns from adequate conceptions provisionally conceived. This is a crucial point, for Vollenhoven’s history is a tale of error in dizzying variety. And this could not but be, for, unlike Aristotle, Vollenhoven was convinced that ancient philosophers worked under an invincible impediment. He spoke of this impediment as the incompleteness of Greek philosophy.
In his view, a complete philosophical account of our world would have to involve what he identified as God, the law posited by God, and the cosmos subject to that law. Moreover, it would have to see law and cosmos as correlative, that is, as transcendental conditions and what they condition. In addition, it would have to acknowledge the threefold character of law: as structural order conditioning all creaturely existence, as love command simultaneously addressed to and enabling the life response of the human heart, and as positive law by which human beings are led to apply the love command “within the structurally determined, and temporally and spatially limited community for which . . . [they] bear responsibility” (Vollenhoven 1961, 11–12, my translation). The result for Greek philosophy was devastating. “It lacked the view of the whole in which to see law and cosmos. Consequently, structural lawfulness is identified with law in Greek philosophy. The love command remained unknown, and positive law, though known, to be sure, could not be viewed as the bridge between the love command and a specific situation in need of proper ordering” (ibid., 12, my translation).
The medieval situation was, in Vollenhoven’s telling, somewhat different. There was within the Christian cultures of the medieval world access to what he termed Word revelation and the expanded philosophical account that it made available. Nevertheless, here too thinkers operated under an impediment. Vollenhoven saw this impediment arise first and foremost via what he termed the eisegesis-exegesis method of approaching Word revelation. This method arose, as it were, spontaneously among early Christianity’s many adult converts. Many of them had been formed when children by a Greco-Roman paideia and the philosophical ideas that were embedded within it. Upon conversion they began to read the Christian Scriptures, but they did so using the tools they had received in the context of their schooling. Words encountered in Scripture were assigned the meanings and conceptual implications they had had within Greco-Roman schools of one kind or another. The Scriptures were then understood accordingly. The spiritually acute or penetrating effects of Word revelation were eroded in Vollenhoven’s view; in this wearing away, a wide variety of syntheses of Greek and biblical ideas about the world were formed and reformed to the detriment of the biblical ideas (Vollenhoven 2005b, 65; 2005a, 61). In time, basic thought orientations emerged to frame this synthesis. Vollenhoven identified two that emerged already in the patristic period: the use of paradox to acknowledge the tension between Greek and biblical conceptions while affirming both, and the nature-grace schema that came to dominate Christian synthetic thought from the thirteenth century (Vollenhoven 2005b, 69; 2005a, 65).
6 Spontaneity and Synthesis in Vollenhoven’s Historiography of Medieval Philosophy
As already said, according to Vollenhoven, in the patristic and early medieval centuries, synthesis occurred spontaneously. Gradually the range of conceptions that had emerged in Greco-Roman antiquity would come to know their Christian analogues. Subsequently, synthetic conceptions and the scriptural understanding they gave rise to bore a more complex relationship both to Word revelation and to Greco-Roman philosophical conceptions. Patristic and early medieval syntheses mediated the later “Scholastic” interaction with both in ways that gave rise to a second era of synthesis thought, one far less organic and far more self-conscious and studied in its construction. In Vollenhoven’s telling, a third era of synthesis emerged in the last century of the Middle Ages when the extreme technicality of second synthesis thought and exegesis produced disgust and a patristic revival. Scholastic conceptions and habits, however, remained part of the toolkit despite this turn to the Fathers. Far greater attention was paid to the texts of the patristic period with their organic and spontaneous readings of the Scriptures and the world, but the results lacked the same organic spontaneity; the studied reappropriation of what was originally spontaneous could not itself be anything but the result of artifice and self-aware cultivation.
In short, three “generations” of synthesis, their roots in the eisegesis-exegesis interaction with Word revelation and its two subsequent thematizations (paradox and nature-grace), frame Vollenhoven’s reading of medieval philosophy. The emergence of Christian analogues of the ancient types within that frame opened up the possibility for an extension within the story of the three eras of the sort of type analysis that was the hallmark of his reading of pre-Socratic thought and that he had already extended to the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman chapters of the history of ancient philosophy (Vollenhoven 2005b, 65–75; 2005a, 61–71).
What strikes one about Vollenhoven’s conception of the story of medieval Christian, Jewish, and Arabic syntheses is that they emerged spontaneously (spontaan). In his view, the thought that arose is marked by its very spontaneity (spontaneïteit). Aristotle had brought up spontaneity in the context of ethics—in particular, his distinction between voluntary and involuntary action. For Aristotle, actions are involuntary, first, when the efficient cause is external or, second, when the act occurs in ignorance, i.e., without intellectual understanding. In the second case, spontaneity is predicated of actions that arise from internal agency on the basis of an awareness of the particular circumstances of the act and a sense of the right time. This is a matter of intentionality and experience rather than intellectual understanding. The resultant act is freely enacted but in ignorance, as if the actor were a higher animal or a child (Nicomachean Ethics 1110a–b).
In the Hellenistic period and within its most consistently therapeutic philosophies, the spontaneity of animals and children became a guide to how to reconnect with phusis. That is, within the Hellenistic and Roman periods, philosophical therapists regularly accounted for social ill in terms of the corruption of our communal identity, arrangements, and formation. Human existence must be seen as alienated from human nature and hence from knowledge of the lineaments of human individual and communal flourishing. The challenge was to move in thought past the alienation and reconnect with human nature. The spontaneity of children and animals became vehicles of that effort, for they were not or not yet socialized to alienated existence (e.g., Epicureans in Nussbaum [1994], Augustine in Stock [1991]).
Aristotle’s notion of spontaneity and its therapeutic use would come to be developed in the early modern period by Leibniz and Baumgarten, whence it was appropriated by Kant and identified as a primary transcendental condition of human freedom (Sgarbi 2009). As a result, spontaneity became a central key in post-Kantian thought, including, of course, philosophical approaches to the history of philosophy (Asprem 2014). Among historians of philosophy influenced by this Kantian understanding and its historiographical implication, Problemgeschichte, spontaneity arises as an historiographical key for those in search of the “origins” of theoretical thought, its characteristic conceptions, and its criticizable states of affairs. Spontaneous emergence and the sought-for origin are considered to be inextricable. One sees fine examples in the role Emmanuelle Damblon (2013) assigns to “spontaneous rhetoric” in her account of the emergence of “formal rationality” and in Mario Wimmer’s (2017) account of the relationship between Cassirer’s historical work and his philosophy of symbolic form.
In ancient and medieval thought, spontaneity appears in Aristotelian ways modified by the Hellenistic and subsequent Christian therapeutics. That is, spontaneity functions as an indicator of “what-comes-naturally,” pointing to what it means to live secundum naturam. Such living is accorded normative weight. Vollenhoven, by contrast, would have had to work very hard to find a sense of the normativity of “the natural” and of “nature” that he could have used to justify the historiographical charge he gave to spontaneity. Moreover, despite his debt to the post-Kantian historiographical commitment to Problemgeschichte, he would have balked equally at understanding spontaneity as the transcendental ground of autonomous human freedom. Nevertheless, in his accounting for the character of Christian synthesis thought, he used the term in a way that mimics features of the normative weight of the ancient and medieval, and the post-Kantian, principle. In his case, however, the role of spontaneity came from another philosophical direction, the privilege of “nonscholarly” ways of interacting with and understanding the world (relatively spontaneous) with respect to “scholarly” ways (relatively studied) (Vollenhoven 2010, paragraphs 9–12, 148, and 197).
The point is this: Vollenhoven used spontaneity as if it were an excellence, even though the result from his point of view was not, namely, an unstable synthesis of biblical and Hellenistic conceptions either in spite of or in denial of the spiritual tensions at play between them. Moreover, he clearly held the schooled character of second-era synthesis against it, as if to be so self-aware in one’s philosophical construction and still opt to paper over the tensions between biblical and Hellenist conceptions of the world was far less forgivable. Even the return to patristic thought of the third era, though it was a return to spontaneous models, yet contrasted with its models by virtue of its lack of spontaneity (Vollenhoven 2005b, 65–66; 2005a, 62).
The implication of this talk of spontaneous synthesis was to acknowledge that synthesis thought is intrinsic to the story of philosophy as it emerged and developed. How could it have been otherwise? How could eisegesis-exegesis have been avoided? We can imagine our way in hindsight to a sense of regret. We can sigh, as Vollenhoven does, as if there had been a choice. But how could this have been? For synthesis arose spontaneously. It fit the overall story. The results had negative consequences mixed in with what it enabled for and in the community of the faithful. But there you have it: thought in Vollenhoven is a traditioned activity, a cultural form. As such, it exists not only in a structured way but genetically, that is, in process. As a result, to cite again Vollenhoven’s (1961) own description: “What precedes will not completely determine what comes afterwards, but it will nevertheless [condition the future development] in large measure.”
7 Antisynthetic Thought and the Narrative of Medieval Philosophy
Antisynthetic thought such as Vollenhoven’s must be seen to be connected to synthesis thought by a thousand ties. Antisynthetic thought names its orientation toward synthesis, not its concrete results. For all thought subsequent to the ancient and synthetic thought eras will display connections to the conceptions developed in those very same eras. Synthesis is what Christian philosophers cannot but practice as a matter of concrete production, but the antisynthetic thinker will go on to add that no Christian philosopher should ever want to.9 The antisynthetic thinker, then, generates philosophical conceptions with the knowledge that those conceptions may well display connections to the history of philosophy that she will be uncomfortable with once they are brought to the surface. This will keep her from hypostasizing her results as Christian philosophy once and for all. Her own vulnerability will also, if she is wise, keep her from judging harshly the work of her fellow Christian philosophers, past and present. All our results belong to the story of Christian philosophical thought, for errors are necessary to the story and so belong quite as much as do adequate conceptualizations. One might think of this framework for Christian philosophical thinking as an ethos of metanoia, and of the philosophy that results from that ethos as part and parcel of the Christian practice of (scholarly) conversion.
By the beginning of the twenty-first century the historian of philosophy faces a crazy-quilt tradition of immense and growing complexity. On any problem to hand, one confronts multiple braidings, if you will, of distinguishable strands of conviction as they come to expression in a vast string ball of texts and layers within texts, coming to us from different eras. The historian of philosophy’s work adjusts accordingly. Historical analysis comes to resemble the preparatory work of the weaver or knitter. The Vollenhovian historian patiently unravels the tangled mess of the inherited conceptual skein until she is able to identify and account for the various patterns of conviction that have gotten twined together over the course of the ages with respect to the problem at hand.
sweetman 2001, 13
There is a necessity to each of the types that Vollenhoven succeeds in identifying in the passage of the tradition of philosophy through time. It is a narrative-conceptual necessity, to be sure, not a logical necessity (cf. Turner 2011 and Sweetman 2012).10 As Rowe suggested, Vollenhoven seemed to be trying to conceive the story of our human struggle to know philosophically as a whole, as had Aristotle, so many centuries before. Aristotle could legitimate his attempt on his own terms, for in his view, what is, what truly is, has always been from without any conceivable beginning. Vollenhoven’s systematics would hardly allow for a similar legitimation. Nevertheless, one recalls the assumption of “providence” underlying the methodological approach of historians of pre-Socratic thought. Vollenhoven, though working out of an ontology very different from Aristotle’s, also strove to view the history of philosophy as a whole. One can wonder whether Vollenhoven did so not because of the eternity of intelligible being such that the whole is virtually present from before any conceivable beginning, but rather because he worked with the concept of pre-Socratic philosophy’s “providence” as if it were a “predestination.” Such a position would surely overdetermine Vollenhoven’s point about the influence of past thought on present and future thought. Predestination would seem to mean that past thought fully determines present and future thought. In doing so, it would reduce the experience of time to one of expectation in which meaning is fully given “in the beginning.” But we also experience surprise and the new. They are not a matter of expectation but rather of anticipation. They come to us from the future, we might say, in ways that transform meanings of our existence that come to us from the past. They are phenomena of the eschaton, we might say, which escape our most capaciously calculative awareness (Ansell 2015, 210–261).
From the start we have called into question a central assumption of Vollenhoven’s reading of the history of philosophy, namely, the assumption that all philosophers are in principle system builders whose systems are identified by typical conceptions manifest within their writing. I have cited evidence that I think underscores the point vis-à-vis both ancient and medieval thought. But that brings us to the question implicit in the very title of this paper. How is one to read ancient and medieval philosophy in the light of Vollenhoven’s long historical labors? We close with but two deceptively brief suggestions.
First, the story of the three “generations” of synthesis thought is an initial way into the sweep of medieval thought when that thought is viewed in terms of the intersection of Christian faith, Greco-Roman science and wisdom, and the world medieval Christians were attempting to understand. This story provides a context for any type-based readings of medieval thought that might prove helpful in opening up the play of meaning of individual texts or opera.
In the telling of such a story, one might rather emphasize the inevitability and instability of synthetic conceptions, given, among other factors, the religious heterogeneity of the cultures productive of philosophical matter. The historian of thought would do well to look for Christian recognition of such synthesis, however subliminal, and resistance to it. In such a perspective, one arrives at a more balanced account of the dynamic and trajectory of medieval Christian thought, leaving behind the ever-repeated dirge mourning the spiritual blindness ever and again at work among admittedly brilliant thinkers of undeniably disciplined Christian faith. To give an obvious example, the response to the Aristotelian corpus among churchmen and the more “Augustinian” theologians from the second half of the thirteenth century on can be seen as including a consistent spiritual judgment that Aristotle’s universe is incompatible in significant respects with elements of a Christian understanding of the world. Subsequent experimentations, from Scotus’s metaphysical edifice to Ockham’s massive simplifications to the slow epistemologization of the thinking subject in the thought of people like Nicholas of Autrécourt, represent so many attempts to modify the theoretical frame in which the world is thought in ways that purport to make the resulting accounts more consistent with central convictions of the Christian religion (cf. Perler 2006 and Sweetman 2010). In such a narrative, medieval Christian thought can be understood as a long slow struggle to think the world with Christian integrity in the medieval times and places in which Christian theorists found themselves, a struggle in which spiritual synthesis is what ever resulted and was never intended and so was ever repented of. While such an orientation does give to the history of Christian philosophy a tragic aura (Sweetman 1996), one might better adopt Tolkien’s sense of eucatastrophe, by which the result of tragedy is not the disaster we should expect but rather something surprising, indeed, graced emergent within catastrophe (Tolkien 1947).
Second, the distinction between systematic thinking and system building, which is essential when reading ancient and medieval philosophical thought, reframes Vollenhoven’s type-focused analyses of philosophical argument and conceptualization. For if a central point of ancient and medieval thinkers is the reader’s spiritual transformation, then the type of thought appropriated in order to do that transformative work must be understood in different terms than Vollenhoven himself was aware of. The transformative end glosses the conceptual means. In other words, if types do not name metaphysical conceptions just for their own sakes but with a view to furthering spiritual transformation, then the meaning of the type and the eventual judgment of its hermeneutical value change rather dramatically. Types become tied to philosophical intuition that is itself context dependent. This is not to say that there is no structure to the world that awaits appropriate naming and accounting for. Rather, it is to say that the way in which that naming and accounting for was carried on must be respected if it is to be understood aright, and that respect becomes hard to come by if every philosopher is assumed to be a system builder in every philosophical work.
We end with a medieval example: the “philosophical individualism” of William of Ockham and how it might be read anew in line with the perspective laid out in this essay.
Ockham was schooled to an Aristotelian way of thinking about the world that Vollenhoven would have typed as a partial universalism in that Aristotle ascribed the greater scientific weight to the groupings we recognize as given in experience. The individuals that belong to such groupings were, by contrast, accorded lesser weight. Their being was less expansive; they tended to slip below our conceptual gaze. Their existence could only be understood as the means by which the groupings to which they belonged could be present for all times in a particularized world of mortal bodies-in-motion. Both individuals and groupings were to be thought real, and Aristotle was convinced, indeed, that, as to actual existence, individuals were primary. Nevertheless, as to our theoretical or scientific understanding and the divine touch it made possible, individuals existed in relation to the groupings and not the other way around.
Ockham found this Aristotelian way of thinking, or rather, as he insisted, this way of interpreting Aristotle, problematic. The privilege it accorded universal concepts in our understanding of and hence the being of the world as it is (since we are made to understand the world we inhabit) assumed that the creation had about it a level of necessity that was, to his mind, only appropriate to God. In other words, this way of thinking ascribed the prerogatives of divinity to creatures. At the same time, it refused to recognize the due that creatures have coming to them. For in his view, each creature was a unique and irreplaceable work of God, absolute with respect to other creatures and hence an irreducible mystery. The full meaning of each creature was hidden from view, nestled, so to speak, in the bosom of God, an idea stored in the treasure house of the divine Word and yet on display, so to speak, in its concrete existence, here and now.
In thinking these things, Ockham could be said to have philosophized in the spirit of St. Francis of Assisi, who named each creature, be they persons or elements, brother and sister. In Vollenhovian terms, William of Ockham could be said to have understood his Franciscan convictions to lead to “philosophical individualism,” that is, the founding intuition that the individuality, or, better, singularity, of concrete existents was a perfection in both reality and science and not a privation; it could be trusted. This decision lay at the origin of any philosophizing he did; the decision forged criteria by which he judged any and every other philosophy. He was willing to take radical risks to protect this founding conviction, up to and including a reconceiving of the discipline of logic (Panaccio 1984), not to mention theological understanding of the church (Carter 1987). Any extramental reality granted to groupings or universal natures ceded priority to those natures in the order of being. Primary substances become secondary substances and vice versa. Such natures threatened the absolute mystery of creatures with respect to other creatures by subsuming their existence under an accessible, mediating form. Real universals inexorably led to an improper divinization of one aspect of creaturely being.
In this schematic, Ockham’s individualism works from a radicalized sense of the contingency of creatures. In this he seems to be working under the influence of ibn Sina (Avicenna) (cf. Gilson 1949). It also points us beyond his philosophizing to the God of St. Francis, whose ample bosom hides the absolute secret of every creative work. But at this point critical questions intervene for any philosophical theologian. Can Ockham’s philosophical individualism do justice to the privileged role of kinds in our scientific knowing? Can it do justice to our ordinary experience of sameness as one quality connecting separate things? On a more obviously theological plane, is his philosophical individualism compatible with the Pauline notions of First and Second Adam and hence the corporate effects of original sin and Christ’s saving work?
Let this Scholastic sic et non without magisterial determination serve to illustrate something of the changed character of how one works with type analysis in my proposal. It illustrates that there remains plenty of room for critical analysis, but the type only names what must be understood within an ancient or medieval philosopher’s text; it does not provide the understanding itself, and that is because it cannot be counted on to represent a system in nuce. Rather, it represents theoretical conception tied to theoretical encounter with the world and formed to certain transformative intellectual tasks in the lives of its recipients. Its effectiveness in engaging the world encountered while inviting its recipients toward their spiritual transformation will be what bespeaks its truth rather than its effective engagement of the world encountered alone. While the texture and spirit of such a reading seem far from the texture and spirit of Vollenhoven’s own work in the history of philosophy in some ways, he too acknowledged the spiritually transformative work of philosophy in his sensitivity to the religious dynamic animating the types he identified. It is, then, a proposal appropriating in its way central historiographical intuitions that Vollenhoven generated and so a proposal of reading ancient and medieval philosophy after Vollenhoven. It may offer a fresh sense of what his legacy might mean to the generations that have appeared and shall yet appear to take on the call to work philosophically in and through their reading of philosophy’s history.
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My thanks go to one of my peer reviewers for suggesting this improved translation of the passage in question.
One can well imagine Aristotle too saying, as Étienne Gilson insisted, that metaphysicians were not wrong (though often confused and unclear) in what they posited of being, but rather in what they did not. Cf. Gilson (1993, 52).
Of course, in the philosophical era inaugurated by Descartes and more particularly by Kant, systems are elaborated that are epistemologically founded, and for yet others, most notably Emmanuel Levinas, philosophical thought is or ought to be ethically founded.
See Hadot (1995a) and Hadot (1995b, 2002) for philosophical askesis or exercitia spiritualia. See Nussbaum (1994) for philosophy as a therapy of the soul via its logos.
For a medieval witness to this point, see Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, prologue.
Among the many studies either parallel to or inspired by Torrell’s work, see especially Johnson (1999), Rogers (1995), Laporte (2003), George (1993), Narcisse (1997), Hibbs (1995), Ofilada Mina (2000), Emery (1995), Burrell (1974), Levering (2004), Mongeau (2004), Bauerschmidt (2013), and Mongeau (2015).
This is one of the several often-repeated Vollenhovian “wisdom sayings” of H. Evan Runner, early North American student of Vollenhoven.
For the distinction, see the discussion of the Middle English word behovely in Turner (2011) and especially Sweetman (2012, 136).
