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.

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. Plato did not let the doctrine rest easy; in the Parmenides he set out some of the sharpest objections to it himself. 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 debate hardened into named positions, most influentially in the medieval schools. 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. Nominalists held that nothing general exists at all: only individuals are real, and a universal is no more than a name — at the limit, in William of Ockham, only a sign in language or thought that happens to be predicable of many. 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.

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. That move let Christian, Islamic, and Jewish thinkers absorb a pagan metaphysics, and it gave esoteric currents a frame in which earthly things are signatures of higher realities — the correspondence on which much of astrology and natural magic was argued to rest.

The dispute never resolved, which is part of why it endured. 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: The One · Nous · Neoplatonism · Anselm Of Canterbury · Emanation