Pickstock Chooses Radical Orthodoxy

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Jan 10, 2000 | by James P. Lucier

Insight: So what happened after Aquinas? Why did almost all Western thinking go off in a completely different direction?

CP: It's hard to know exactly why it happened. Recent historians have started to argue that it was precisely at this rime, the late Middle Ages, that new currents were happening, the transition from merchant to finance capital. I think money is the key. Money had acquired a new meaning. We now no longer saw money as rooted in the gold standard. It had become more abstract and could fluctuate. I think also the rise of the nation-state was incipient at this stage, and there was a new concept of the universe. It is hard to know whether a particular philosopher could harm our thinking, but if there is one such it may be Duns Scotus [1266-1308], who really eclipsed Aquinas in his own day and for centuries eclipsed him.

Insight: But Scotus introduced the idea of "nominalism," that ideas and reality might not be the same thing. What caused the change?

CP: It may just have been the gradual beginnings of capitalism, obviously in a very different form than we have today. Duns Scotus gave the most articulate theoretical expression to what was happening, I think, because his philosophy became so current and so widely read. In the tradition before, the beauty of the universe manifested the supreme value, if you like; but what happened with Duns Scotus and his cohorts, and in general, was what was happening with the changes in money and the beginning of bills of exchange.

Insight: Some people might say that this is just the dawn of the modern age, this is how we make progress.

CP: That depends on how you define progress. If you no longer trust actuality and think that you can't trust the beauty of things, and you become suspicious that any moment things might become otherwise, or fluctuate, or transmogrify as indeed Duns Scotus thought in error -- what kind of progress is that if you have constantly to remain on your guard?

What's so fascinating is that at this point, civil society becomes so supremely legalistic, because there's this new ontology of distrust. The only way you can achieve order in society is by reaction to this distrust by imposing new laws, instead of the earlier model of actually trusting appearances.

Insight: In other words, by using exterior force, the power of the state, instead of the internal power of virtue.

CP: That's exactly right. You have people hanging on to things much more, because they now cling to laws and to things that appear permanent. It's quite interesting that you mentioned at the beginning that the history of Western thought seems to be first a trust in the invisible and then a trust in the visible.

Insight: What role did the 17th-century French philosopher Rene Descartes have in this change?

CP: I think Descartes had an important role. I think in some ways the ground was already laid -- but one can trace, particularly in the rise of nominalism from Duns Scotus through William of Ockham, many of the seeds that Descartes then made more explicit. Of course, Descartes took all of these things a great deal further.