Universals

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A universal is whatever it is that many particular things share when the same word applies to all of them. Two apples are each red; the question is what, if anything, the word red picks out beyond the apples themselves — a single real property in which both partake, or merely a name the mind gives to a resemblance it has noticed. This is the problem of universals, and it is among the oldest running disputes in Western philosophy.

The difficulty is easy to state and hard to dismiss. It is the One-over-Many: how can one and the same property be wholly present in many things at once, spread across the world without being divided by it? Redness, if it is real, would have to be entire in this apple and entire in that one, in two places at the same time — which no ordinary thing can manage. The puzzle has two faces. One is linguistic: a single predicate, red, is true of indefinitely many subjects, and one wants to know what in those subjects answers to the word. The other is ontological: whether there is anything in reality to answer to it at all, or whether the unity belongs only to the word and the work it does.

Plato gave the strongest early answer. In dialogues such as the Phaedo and the Republic he argued that the general terms of speech name Forms: perfect, changeless realities, existing apart from the particular things that imitate them, of which sensible objects are imperfect copies. Beauty itself is more real than any beautiful thing, and a beautiful thing is beautiful only by partaking in it. Such Forms exist before the thing — ante rem, outside space and time — and this is realism in its boldest, transcendent form. Plato did not let the doctrine rest easy. In the Parmenides he set out some of the sharpest objections to it himself, the keenest of which later philosophy named the Third Man Argument: if every group of large things owes its largeness to a Form of Largeness, and that Form is itself large, then the Form together with the large things makes a new group requiring a further Form, and so without end. On the standard modern reconstruction the regress follows from three assumptions held together — that what is shared needs one Form, that the Form has the property it confers, and that the Form is not one of its own participants — and it cuts against transcendent Forms specifically. Aristotle, his pupil, kept universals real but pulled them down into things: the form of a substance is in the substance, not in a separate world. The universal there exists in the thing — in re — wholly present in each instance, abstracted by the intellect rather than glimpsed in a higher heaven. This more guarded view is often called moderate realism, and it is generally taken to slip the regress that snares its Platonic rival.

The debate hardened into named positions, most influentially in the medieval schools, which received the question already posed for them. Porphyry, in the Isagoge, had asked whether genera and species subsist in reality or exist in thought alone, whether they are bodily or bodiless, and whether they stand apart from sensible things or within them — then declined to answer. Boethius carried those questions into the Latin West and offered a careful settlement: no universal could be at once wholly common to many and present in them all, so the mind grasps universals by abstraction from real likenesses, while the Forms themselves are kept safe as ideas in the divine mind. Where Boethius steadied the question, the eleventh and twelfth centuries reopened it. Roscelin pressed the hard line that a universal is a mere word, a vox; his pupil Peter Abelard rejected both that bare-word view and full-blown realism, locating what a general name signifies not in a thing but in a status — a shared condition, itself no thing yet grounded in genuine likenesses, in virtue of which the name is naturally predicable of many. Realists held that universals exist independently of the mind, as genuine constituents of reality. Conceptualists held that they exist, but only in the mind, as concepts the intellect forms — though this middle path must always explain why a concept applies to just these things and not others, on pain of collapsing back toward a real shared feature or down toward bare resemblance. Nominalists held that nothing general exists at all: only individuals are real, and a universal is no more than a name. The position found its sharpest architect in William of Ockham, for whom only single substances and qualities exist outside the mind, and a universal is only a sign in language or thought that happens to be predicable of many. His razor — the counsel not to multiply entities beyond necessity — was the blade that cut real universals away, and his via moderna set the lean ontology against the older realism of the schools. How one decided was held to carry weight far beyond logic: whether the Church is one real thing or a collection of believers, whether sin is a shared nature or a tally of separate acts.

The argument did not end with the schoolmen, and its modern forms are mostly refinements of nominalism. Some hold that to call a thing red needs no further entity at all, the predicate doing its work unaided. Some ground sameness in resemblance, things counting as red by resembling one another or a chosen exemplar. Some identify a property with the class of its instances. The most discussed alternative grants that there are qualitative natures but denies they are shared: each red thing carries its own particular redness, a trope, and objects are bundles of such property-instances, two reds being exact likenesses rather than one repeated item. Against all these stands the realist who keeps universals in things; a contemporary tendency treats that immanent realism and the trope view as the two strongest survivors.

For the Platonic and later Neoplatonic traditions the question was never merely logical. If the Forms are real, the order they compose has to be located, and the answer that shaped much of later thought placed them in a divine mind: the Forms became the thoughts of God, the contents of Intellect, through which the sensible world is patterned. The Forms belong to that Intellect, which itself proceeds from a source beyond it and beyond all multiplicity; they are not the first principle but its first articulation. That move let Christian, Islamic, and Jewish thinkers absorb a pagan metaphysics, and the encyclopedia follows the esoteric currents one step further, where the same frame is taken to make earthly things signatures of higher realities — the correspondence on which much of astrology and natural magic was argued to rest.

The dispute persists because every general claim presupposes some answer to it. It surfaces wherever one asks whether there are real properties and relations or only the things that bear them, whether the kinds nature falls into are joints in the world or conveniences of thought, and whether the objects of mathematics are abstract realities or useful fictions. To ask what a shared word names is to ask how far the order the mind finds in the world is discovered and how far imposed — a question the philosophy of language and mathematics still works at under other terms.

→ In the library: Plato — Parmenides (Jowett, 1892) · Plotinus — Enneads V.9 (MacKenna, 1926)

→ Related: Metaphysics · Substance · The One · Neoplatonism · Gnosis