Chapter 1 - Introduction

Chapter 1: An Introduction To The Problem Of Universals

The trivial events of everyday life add up and sometimes transcend the mundane. We each try to get to the core of the matter that concerns us and hope to control or understand better our inner and outer worlds. We need to know: everyone has tried to better understand some person, issue, or subject. However, there always is another enigma yet to be comprehended. Forever there seems to be another level of reality hidden underneath the obvious - we see and experience this fact - and yet there are mysteries that are endlessly impenetrable. In philosophy one can learn about the nature of knowledge, its acquisition, and about what can be known. One learns about what remains a mystery. Hard questions about reality and softer questions about dreams and hopes are all brought together and answered under philosophy's care.

As one experiences life, constants and unvarying axioms appear amidst the apparent paradoxes. Reversals of doctrines and ever new discoveries add to the accumulated wisdom. What is to be found and what is reliable? What are the modern illusions we accept and what is verity? From these types of questions one is invariably led in philosophy to the consideration of universals, a recurring theme in the vast, almost inchoate world of philosophy. Universals are the what we use in any definition any method we employ to know or to understand is dependent upon the use of at least one universal. When one enters into the debate concerning universals, one finds Heisenburg's Uncertainty Principle (as if a principle of physics can be applied to the realm of things that can be considered) applying to philosophy. As soon as one notices phenomena, uncertainties remain because of the act of observation. Even with these difficulties, certainties are established and verified. What I wish to do here is to share some of my observations concerning these essential issues, hopefully submitting some useful insights to reward the reader.

This paper is about the problem of universals. In the West it was first noted long ago in the Peripatetic School.¹ In this paper the dilemma is put into a historical context with an emphasis on its first formal expressions in the Medieval era. The paper is organized into sections; the first is separated into three chapters and is a historical background with a review of several famous proposed solutions; the second section is a response to these solutions; and finally the last section is an analysis of some resultant individual philosophies and/or basic trends that survive into our era. An internally consistent theory shall then be presented - the thesis proper - supplying an alternate solution to the question concerning the ontological status of universals. Universals will be asserted to exist, from the human perspective, in a trichotomous hypostasis of "symbol, idea(l), and object". It will be asserted that from the vantage point of speculative philosophy, that there is the genuine possibility that universals are the Ultimate which contains the One-Many paradox inherited from antiquity. This paradox defies logic and is inherited and transmitted in our consciousness and world view. It is received and lives in the Space Age.

The presupposition of this thesis is that the problem of universals can be understood and solved in light of the original medieval context from which it comes. The emphasis of analysis here shall be upon the studies and works of medieval philosophers. Contemporary insights will be also included. Whereas this paper is philosophical, it will not be primarily logical. This is not to mean that logic is denied or abandoned in the name of some greater axiom or doctrine. Rather, the reader must acknowledge the responsibility of conceiving and supplying the propositions necessary for this enthymeme.²The subject matter has a tendency to lead endlessly to other pertinent issues. If one does not tread carefully on the path these thoughts travel, one could go astray as one can in an endless labyrinth similar to the maze gardens popular once in Victorian England.
The Nobel laureate, Jorge L. Borges, created a story in which an old Chinese sage named Ts'ui Pên constructed an infinite "Garden Of Forking Paths." I warn the reader to beware and avoid this needless infinite regress while "tending" to problem of universals (the "Garden"). Borges has one character, Dr. Stephen Albert describe this "garden":

"The Garden of Forking Paths" is a picture, incomplete yet not false, of the universe as Ts'ui Pên; conceived it to be. Differing from Newton and Schopenhauer, he did not think of time as absolute and uniform. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times. This web of time - the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect, or ignore each other through the centuries - embraces every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and yet in others both of us exist. In this one, in which chance has favored me you have come to my gate. In another, I say these words, but am an error, a phantom.³

To avoid deceptive doctrines, to find the way through the "Garden" successfully, this paper searches for at least one new and valid perspective in which the problem of universals is justifiably fathomed.
One aspect of the thesis contained herein has a noteworthy feature: its etiology is as much understood in the proponents of universals as from their opponents. An investigation of the bases of opposing schools of thought supplies an opportunity for positing a new hypostasis. This hypostasis, or new theory of universals, results from the contradictions, struggles, and pathos that have carried this issue to us. The court order hemlock drink for Socrates, the executioner of Boethius, the pen-stabbing students of Eriugena, the mutilation of Abelard, are all events that colored the past as this issue came to the present. These grim moments along with innumerable other causes join with the persistent intellectual activity that survive through the centuries. Together they bring the problem of universals to this moment in time. To treat the problem of universals with the respect it deserves, a historical context should be supplied, if only for heuristic purposes.