I.

            Almost all contemporary explications of the realist / nominalist controversy are thoroughly corrupted by the modern subjectivist / objectivist dichotomy. While the realist / nominalist controversy is the groundbreaking moment that leads to the modern categorical experiences of ‘subject’ and ‘object’, these experiences are specifically modern and should not be projected back into the intellectual conditions of the Middle Ages. Granted that this controversy is the originating moment for the modern perception of ‘concept’ as well, we are still far from concept as it comes into common usage in modern or post-Renaissance philosophy.

            In addition, a persistently religious reinterpretation of the controversy, in terms of established dogma, has produced a third or fourth stream of misrepresentations, to further confuse our view of the topic.

            But the first issue is to recognize that the controversy is essentially religious or ‘theological’.

            The concern as to whether ‘the real’ resides in ‘subjectivity’ or ‘objectivity’ is first arising precisely at this point. This eventually produces our categorical sense of the ‘ego’ as well as our modern experience of ‘scientific objectivity’. But precisely because they emerge from this controversy, we have to understand that they are not extant at this inception.

            The concern of the Middle Ages is the question of the ‘God nature’ of the world. Specifically, we are dealing with the Biblical injunctions concerning ‘the word’. When we go back to Plotinus – the actuating source, outside Jesus’ references to ‘three’ (some non-canonical), for the doctrine of ‘trinity’ – we find that ‘the word’ is the linking principle of the ‘three hypostases’ in Plotinus’ doctrine of origination. That is, this is the ‘logos’ which in the Greek Gospel of John constitutes the parallelism for ‘the beginning’ at the head of the Old Testament.

            While we now generally treat the Word as an abstractive name for Jesus, and hence sacrosanct, or beyond philosophy, the Medieval philosophers treated it as the simple reality of the word itself: the word is the word, the value linking principle by which we recognize the nature of things, the ground of perception itself.

            But to call it ‘the value linking principle’ is, in itself, a consequence of the realist / nominalist controversy. The controversy begins in the question of whether value itself is immediate in the word.

            It is this teleological focus on the word which is the beginning of the controversy, and accounts for the vehemence and virulence that ultimately surrounds the contest.

            ‘Value’ rarely surfaces as a term in contemporary philosophical discourse, and then usually only in pejorative phrases – such backhanded references as ‘value judgment’. But, if God has chosen to appear in the world, as the Medieval thinkers took for granted, then the paramount question becomes how or whether that immediate ground of value persists in our world of everyday life, apart from specifically religious observance.

            The Latin use of ‘verbum’ in the Vulgate becomes an immediate philosophical reference – insisting that the word of daily usage somehow now carries the value imbued in the world by the Creator and rectified by the Messiah. Perhaps we can assign trinity itself to the word, particularly if we can find our way back to Plotinus (not necessarily an easy task in the scholarly context of the Early Middle Ages), but the experience of the word, for the philosophical mind – apart from any specifying history – might suggest a similar train of thought.

            The word brings value to focus. Undoubtedly the Medieval thinker is possessed of the tacit human experiences of self and world, but these have not been established as categorical values apart from the experience of value itself. Therefore, they remain largely outside the sphere of consideration. The value experience of the word antedates both. And since that value experience, in this context, is only encountered in terms of language, it is possible to assume that value itself is located in ‘the word’.

            It is this premise which stands at the head of the realism / nominalism conflict.

            The ‘realism’ of the controversy, of course, is almost explicitly the inverse of our use of the term. At the beginning of the contest, ‘realism’ means that the word itself is the reality of value – that value can only be found in the ‘reality’ presented, immediately, by the word.

            Since, even today, with our wonderfully precise sense of ‘self’ and ‘object’, value is still the prior condition, this is not as odd an assumption as it might first appear.

            If we deal with the word as ‘merely’ the ‘bearer’ of value – as we do now – we are instantly mired in the dispersive questions of relativism. If the word is not value, where does value reside? Obviously, we cannot ‘locate’ it except in terms of our experience. Hence, solipsism. But we now have the experience of objectivity. Therefore value must reside in some feature of the world. If we cannot make ‘matter’ stand up and walk on its own feet as the nature of value, however, we wind up reassigning value to concept or word. The circularity is endless.

            We could say that this circularity and the endless hunger for ‘the real’ are the basis of the contemporary intellectual disease, a disease which more and more looks like modern intellect itself.

            The ‘postmodern’ rejection of ‘the real’ does not further either question or issue, since it not only rejects the actuality of intellect, but of experience as well.

            But we are still possessed of the experience of value; that is to say, we still have experience itself.

            Perhaps the real problem is that we are unwilling to begin – as the Medieval philosophers did – from value itself.

            II.

            The controversy begins from one of those peculiarly specific moments of philosophy. In Boethius’ translation of Porphyry’s Isagoge, we find a brief statement of the questions that inspired the subsequent arguments.

            Thus far I have only found the core Latin text on the internet, in a form obviously garbled by the typist. I have corrected typographical mistakes as subsequently corrected in the contextual essay, but since I have less than a modicum of Latin, there may be further errors. But I quote it for the primary terms.

            Mox de generibus et speciebus illud quidem sive subsistant sive in nudis intellectibus posita sint, sive subsistentia corporalia sint an incorporalia, et utrum separata a sensibilibus an in sensibilibus posita er circa haec subsistentia, decere recusabo.

            The Isogoge, of course, is Porphyry’s introduction to the Aristotelian categories. Porphyry is the student and editor of Plotinus, whose hypostatic definition of ‘nous’ or ‘consciousness’ we have already cited as the basis for the doctrine of trinity.

            Since the given translation is profoundly infected with contemporary ethnocentrism, I will give a paraphrase, hopefully not adding further corruptions. While a single statement, like the contextual translation, I will render it as separable questions.

            Are genera and species, in themselves, ‘subsistent’ or purely intellectual?

            If ‘subsistent’, are they corporal or incorporeal?

            And, given this ‘subsistence’, do they exist within sensible things or outside the sensible?

            Granted we are dealing with the foundation of the Aristotelian categories, since ‘genera’ and ‘species’ establish the abstractive conditions by which the abstraction of descriptive categories for objects becomes possible. But this is the first introduction of this core theme of the Aristotelian corpus into Early Medieval thought. The corpus itself will only appear much later. We have to remember that the seeds of philosophy at this point are grounded in a theology which is essentially neo-Platonic.

            In other words, the nature of the essentially Aristotelian question might suggest a more or less complete structural sense of abstraction, whereas, in fact, the moment is the opening moment for the philosophical recognition of abstraction within the frame of the Early Medieval mindset.

            However, the issue here is not abstraction, but value. The introduction of the terms ‘genera’ and ‘species’ is only suggestive of the necessity for abstraction – a residual or tacit suggestion from the past – not, for the Early Medieval reader, the representation of a more or less comprehensive understanding of abstraction. Precisely the question of abstraction is being raised for the first time.

            In this context, the set of questions comes to focus on the issue of value and its grounding and point of access, given the tacit understanding that the awakening to abstraction necessarily raises these issues vis-à-vis value.

            For our eyes, the quote presupposes Aristotle. For Boethius and his contemporaries, the quote introduces Aristotle, and introduces the question of formal abstraction into their previously relatively closed understanding of value and its sources in the given theological presuppositions which grounded their worldview. 

            The quote itself adds its provocation, since Porphyry concludes by ‘refusing to say’ what the answers might be.

            III.

            My standard Latin dictionary equates ‘subsisto’ with the Greek ‘hypostasis’. Only in late modern and contemporary philosophy could we call it ‘objectivity’. Perhaps ‘substance’, in some form, might be a valid translation, since ‘substance’ has a history in western philosophy that probably suggests the values inherent in ‘subsisto’. But this original use of ‘subsistence’ is precisely the source moment for ‘substance’ as a western philosophical term, and its subsequent development therefore implies a great deal more than is inherent in ‘subsisto’.

            ‘Hypostasis’, of course, denotes the ‘ground of the unmoving’, a core term in classic Greek philosophy, with its evolving concern for the ‘self-moving’. As such, we could probably begin to equate it with Aristotle’s primitive notion of ‘inertia’. But primitive his notion is. We get a better representation of hypostasis, perhaps, in the hypostases of Plotinus, where it is certainly not an antagonistic term – not defined by negation.

            But the term that interests me most, at least for the present study, is Boethius’ ‘intellectus’. My OED refers all modern English forms of this radical family to ‘intelligent’, which it assigns to ‘inter’ plus ‘legere’, saying that all meanings in the array are based on ‘linking together’. But this strikes me as a modern speculative interpretation based on our own views of perception and idea. To me, it smacks of the derivations of that other notably problematic word, ‘religion’.

            Since we are dealing ultimately with Aristotle, we are not far from Aristotle’s definitive word for the actuality of the world, namely, ‘entelechy’. And since I am suggesting that the Medieval and pre-Medieval focus was largely on value itself, it would be natural that pre-modern philosophy in the west would focus on the Greek ‘telos’, because it is precisely the spontaneity or ‘finality’ of value that would make its first appearance at the outset of the question of abstraction, that is, the question of the functional nature of value.

            A short walk would take me to an open stacks research library where I could probably find Porphyry’s Greek and perhaps even Boethius’ Latin. But sitting here watching the snow fall on the already deep piles, my inclination is to refer to my own knowledge. In my book, the OED is suspect on the basis of its common refusal to consider theological terms, no matter how extensive their usage in the language. And I have the sense that the same impetus might bias their speculative turns. ‘Teleology’, of course, has become a relatively intellectual verbal vector for religion, just as secularism has its array of loaded intellectual terms.

            And I am consistently convinced that lexicographers in all languages nowadays underestimate the potency of cognates and semi-cognates. Both by nature and developmentally, language is a field, not just an array of linear threads. But the lexical tracing of radicals is, by nature, a business of discrete threads.

            Whether ‘intellego’ and ‘enteles’ share a common radical, I would assume that they share a semi-cognate force in the situation, given that Boethius is translating from the Greek, and therefore obviously has a strong affinity for the basic terms of Greek philosophical language.

            He is also, by our terms, a relatively strong religionist.

            What I am suggesting, then, is that the ‘purity of intellect’ that he cites by translation, while ‘subjective’ by our terms, in his world would imply subjectivity only insofar as it tends to isolate the word as the human response to value. But the force would still reside in the word as the integral nature of the value. I am suggesting that for Boethius, Porphyry’s question involves the first imputation of a formally philosophical rather than a theologically lapsarian ambivalence in value as the word. The question involves the theological issue of the teleological force of value as the word, but raises a first philosophical impetus, precisely because the teleological force is neither specifically subjective or objective. Neither thing nor awareness is the teleological force which is the value

            Naturally, from our perspective, we are still inclined to view this distinction in subjective / objective terms. But if one is beginning from the value itself, in the presumption that word and teleological value are synonymous, the issue is essentially trinitarian, and not dualistic, but trinitarian in purely philosophical rather than theological terms. And since, precisely, subjective and objective remain relatively tacit in the teleological force of ‘pure intellect’ and the ‘subsistent’ nature of the tangible value – that is, since both remain philosophically bound up in the value itself – the consequent philosophical process is still entirely in seed.

            IV.

            The question is actually complex.

            We have the parallax between the concerns of Porphyry and Aristotle, on the one hand, and those of Boethius, on the other.

            At this point we are largely ignoring both Aristotle’s and Porphyry’s concerns, namely, the questions of the appropriateness and legitimacy of the categories.

            But the Aristotelian basis for abstraction, establishing abstraction as an intellectual possibility, points outside its frame, thus provoking the question that arises for Boethius and his contemporaries as soon as the question is asked, namely: What is the nature of ‘the real’?

            It is this dislocation of frames that allows for the question to be asked.

            We have, in fact, a three-way parallax of concerns.

            Aristotle took his analysis and categories more or less for granted.

            Porphyry introduces his questions because he believes that the penultimate neo-Platonism of Plotinus, as the putative synthesis of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophies, both raises and answers his stated questions, although he ‘recuses’ himself from answering them in the present passage.

            Boethius is the naïf at the outset of western philosophy. As both a serious religionist and philosopher, he is concerned with ‘value’ as defined by the post-trinitarian focus on ‘the word’, the ‘common’ word not only as the given value medium, but also as the intimate expression of the world renovation implicit in Christianity.

            Jesus has ‘rectified’ the world. Therefore the value of the world once again holds the possibility of the pre-lapsarian expression of the godhead.

            There is, of course, a natural evolution that leads from Aristotle’s analytical groundwork in his attempt to find the ‘prime mover’ or ‘self-moving’ to the analysis of ‘the real’ as initiated by this passage in Boethius’ work. But unless we follow the actual and radical changes of frame, we cannot understand the process in its own context, and will thus misinterpret both cause and result.