Mysterium Fasces Episode 52 — Nominalism
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 18 minutes
Words per Minute
149.1896
Summary
Dr. Matthew R. Raphael Johnson joins Dr. Florian Geyer to discuss Nominalism and its role in the modern world, and why it is so important for political control. Dr. Johnson also discusses why the concept of "absenteeism" is so central to modern thought, and what it means to be a philosopher.
Transcript
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It's a pleasure, dear listeners, to be joining you once again for our second recording of
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Joining me on the program today, I have Dr. Matthew Raphael Johnson.
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I'm very sorry about the technical difficulties that resulted in our lost recording.
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Well, you know, you think of rock bands who've been playing the same song for 40 years every night.
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But I think that all of our listeners will be very excited to hear us give this subject another treatment.
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So we covered such a huge breadth of material on the last recording.
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I suppose in many senses it's still fairly fresh in our mind.
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And to go right to the heart of the matter, we began our last episode by discussing the basic question as to why questions of epistemological nominalism are important for political control.
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And why nominalism as a concept is so central to your critique of kind of the modern and enlightened and rationalist age, and even before that, the Western milieu which it came out of.
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So why don't we begin there, and why don't we answer the question, why is epistemological nominalism important for political control, and what is nominalism?
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Well, I'm glad you put it that way, because, you know, no one was talking about this 20 years ago when I started talking about it.
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And now it's, you know, everyone who's read, you know, Aristotle in college is talking about how nominalism is the chasm separating the medieval from the modern.
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And, you know, it's something that, I mean, I knew of no one at the time making that claim.
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And it's yet one more trend I began and will, you know, never get a citation for.
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Well, let's start off with the definition of the term.
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You know, they don't really have a lot to do all day long.
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So, you know, they – big state university, they teach a class now and again.
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And so they make ever finer and finer distinctions, distinctions with that much of a difference.
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Nomalism is and always has been the notion that universal meaning doesn't exist outside of our minds,
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that we are purposeless, that there can be no truth, at least no abiding truth,
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that we are isolated individuals, that everything we do with each other is accidental,
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even the family, because that becomes dangerously close to a universal.
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Numbers really trip up the anomalous mentality,
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which, of course, Plato had spoken about 2,500 years ago.
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But before I – you know, this was – the main guy in the modern era,
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there were a few pre-Socratics who talked about it.
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developed the notion, you know, really breaking with the Thomas,
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and it's not an accident that he wasn't a Dominican,
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Now, I use words like essence or form or archetype.
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These are the abiding realities that exist in God's mind as he created the world,
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and he did it through logos that contains all the forms of Plato.
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Even William of Ockham says, although I don't know why he bothers to mention this,
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but one of the real cardinal errors that make William such a perverse figure
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is, first of all, we have no idea, you know, why he makes that claim or how he knows this,
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except maybe he's just trying to save the theory.
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But he posits a huge, huge, huge separation between God and man.
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There are no – any mention of an eternal standard goes out the window.
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We talk about something like original sin, for example,
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and this I got from Charles Cullum many years ago.
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Charles Cullum made the argument that you can't talk about original sin
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You can't be a Christian anomalous at least for that reason
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because what was it that was damaged such that it gets passed on?
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without making reference to a divine nature and a human nature
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And Greece had one of the greatest vocabularies for metaphysics.
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And it's not an accident that God chose that group of people.
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And I think the language has a lot to do with it
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is deep in the mentality of the post-Platonic world.
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And Plato, of course, was the one who brought it to the height
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and then Plotinus afterwards may even have improved on it,
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You get this notion that, so let's, for example, John Locke,
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It's a flux of nothing because his theory of property says that something becomes yours
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when you mix your labor with something out in that flux,
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So what is that stuff before you mix your labor with it?
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The only thing that has value or meaning are those things that we create,
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And that's this dead, mindless world that modernists have created.
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Most people don't understand why it's essential,
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but epistemology is assumed in every sentence we utter.
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You know, the assumption for most Americans, whether they know it or not,
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is that the isolated individual is the only thing that exists.
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And even for us, it's really hard to break out of that.
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But studying the fathers, and especially things like Chalcedon,
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you cannot possibly be anomalous and be a Christian.
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Because something like Chalcedon makes absolutely no sense.
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unless you accept the idea of universals and real forms,
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to kind of extrapolate a little bit for our listeners,
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is that the most potent tool for engaging in political control
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Like Stanford Research Institute released a very famous paper called,
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it was essential to control man's own self-image
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How he viewed himself in relationship to the rest of the universe.
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And so inserting the nominalist ideas of individualism
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and of the lack of symbolic and semiotic reality,
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And so the example that I used last time as the total opposite,
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and certainly most appropriately for the Orthodox Church,
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where in the traditional Orthodox understanding,
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the logoi, which penetrate the reality around us,
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a metaphysical reality that it represents behind it.