This is where nominalism saves the day. If categories are just plastic conveniences that we will into existence then we are emancipated from the tyranny of the discourse of traditional rationality. We get to pick and choose our personal instance of liberalism based on pure acts of will. There are no crisp categories, only shades of grey, and we get to choose where we stand among them. Stodgy traditionalists don’t get to define us with their silly adherence to the long-discredited notion of independently existent universals; we define ourselves as we want to, as individuals, and you can’t tell me what my liberalism means — I define it for myself.

A requirement not to discriminate in general is ultimately a requirement not to think, since thinking inherently discriminates. Liberalism asserts its own death. One can only wish it would get down to business, take itself seriously, and get on with the job.

“Liberalism asserts its own death. One can only wish it would get down to business, take itself seriously, and get on with the job.”

Great comment. It reminds me of something that one of the Islamist leaders said last fall, that the Muslims’ advantage over Americans in any military confrontation was that the Muslims believed in death, the Americans believed in life. In reply to which, a correspondent wrote to me: “This is a win-win situation!”

Also, I think I’m beginning to understand what Matt means by nominalism, but I would still appreciate a comprehensible definition of it with examples. Also, is it the original, medieval definition of nominalism that he is using, or an updated definition?

As with just about everything of importance, I’ve come to my personal understanding of nominalism mostly by committing the sin myself and having it kicked out from under me by my betters. I suppose it is likely that this results in a different sheen on a topic from the one normally imparted by actual scholarship, although hopefully there is still substantive accuracy; and in my own defense I have attempted after-the-fact to use more scholarly methods to flesh out my initial understanding.

I understand nominalism to be the denial that universals (or categories) have an independent existence. Categories are merely names that we assign to similar things, as a way of conveniently thinking or communicating about commonalities. All statements that pretend to be categorical are really just analogies or degrees of similarity; for example something can be said to be “bad”, but to say it is “categorically bad” is just to say that it is “really bad”. So a venial sin, rather than being something that is categorically bad but not of mortal consequence, becomes an act that just has a wee bit of badness in it.

There are a number of important abservations about, and consequences of having, nominalist commitments.

One is that like liberalism, nominalism is itself fundamentally self-contradictory: it asserts categorically that categorical assertions are invalid. So just as no liberal can possibly take his own liberal commitments completely seriously, no nominalist can possibly take his nominalist commitments completely seriously. When confronted with its actual consequences he dismisses this as “silly” or a “straw man”; in Mr. Auster’s parlance above he makes unprincipled exceptions to his own intellectual commitments.

Another is that nominalism takes the authority of truth and transfers it to the human will. If categories are just analogies that we create for our own convenience, they are our servants and we are their masters. We get to make up what our ideology is and implies in plenary acts of will; nobody else can tell us what we are. This is in stark contrast to treating categories (like “nominalist” and “liberal”) as independent things to which we do or do not pledge our alliegence. Nominalism persists despite the clear evidence of history which shows that ideologues from Mohammed to Jefferson to Marx themselves had no notion of precisely what it was, comprehensively, to which they were pledging their alliegence. Alliegence to the Reich is not comprehensive possession of it, clearly, but somehow the nominalist commitment remains: I decide to which categories I belong (the nominalist view), as opposed to I conform my will and alliegence to what is true.

Immanuel Kant was the last modern, to my knowledge, to attempt a serious counterrevolution against nominalism. I think that great thinker’s basic mistake was in looking for a comprehensive account of things that did not entail deference to tradition, testimony, revelation, etc; but he did try to save categoricity as such, if in a limited form. He ends up making irrational claims about things-in-themselves (‘noumena’) to the effect that we can’t know anything about them but that they nonetheless have implications on our philosophy (trying to parse that is futile — the point is that it does not parse). David Hume famously debunked, given modern premeses, the last holdout category against nominalist critique: “cause and effect”. To Hume cause-and-effect was just an after-the-fact observation of temporal succession that made it easier to talk about things, but cause-and-effect revealed no actual truth about any actual independently existent connection between events. He was also famously athiestic when he died, although I can say with certainty that he is not now. Once you throw in Wittgenstein’s “its only-about-what-we-can-SAYism” you immediately drop into postmodernism, it seems to me.

Now it is true that both nominalism and liberalism ultimately boil down to a positive assertion of the nonexistence of truth. It is true that they boil down to a positive alliegence with the Lie. That is not what someone wills himself to be doing when he pledges his allegence to the Lie; but that doesn’t change the fact of the Lie nor of his actual alliegence to it. It also explains the “but I’m a moderate not an extremist” effect: a slipshod and half-commited soldier of the Reich is still a soldier of the Reich. I was just following orders, and all that.

Has this been helpful?

Another nominalism-relevant observation on Mr. Auster’s original article is that the distinction between what we each ARE and what we each DO may not be as easy to maintain as is normally assumed; and even if it is maintained in some reasonably rigorous fashion, the line so drawn bears no resemblence whatsoever to the discrimination battle line between liberals and “conservatives”. Even attempting to define a distinction between ARE and DO is already to set onesself against the nominalist commitments inherent in being a modern. If _I_ get to define what _I AM_ then I can’t be discriminated against for any reason; including, presumably, the propensity to kill you that is inherent in my self-definition. If you find this a “straw man” then take a look at airport security screening.

Many thanks to Matt, that’s been very helpful. He has described nominalism in a way that takes it out of a hard-to-understand medieval context and shown that it is not something entirely distinct from liberalism but a certain aspect of liberalism—and in some ways almost identical to liberalism. It helps clarify my own analysis of liberalism and the liberal denial of the transcendent. For example, here’s part of a definition I give of transcendence in a forthcoming article of mine:

“Transcendence could be defined simply as the quality of any whole which is larger than the sum of its parts, and which therefore cannot be an object of direct experience. An example of transcendence that should be understandable to most Americans is the idea of ‘man,’ as in ‘all men are created equal … endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.’ While we can see individual human beings everywhere, we cannot see ‘man’ anywhere, even though ‘man’ is the essential nature of what we are, and, according to the Declaration, the very source of our rights as individuals…. When people lose … a transcendent idea of human nature, they cease to be offended by crimes against actual human beings.”

In terms of Matt’s discussion of nominalism, man (the “whole” in relation to which individual men are the parts, and which modern liberalism denies) is the universal or the category the objective reality of which nominalism denies. Nominalism, or modern liberalism, says there are just lots of human beings with their desires and preferences and needs and rights; there is no such category as man or human nature on which the rights are based. Or, as Matt said, the idea of man is just a “way of communicating about commonalities.”

By the way, this seems similar to what Fr. Seraphim Rose says about liberalism, that it denies the essence of truth while keeping its external form. It seems to me that an example of such a vestigial form of truth is to define a category as a “way of communicating about commonalities.”

I also like what Matt says about seeing categories as things we keep around for our convenience. For example, liberal Jews are fond of saying that what they like about Judaism is that it has no defining doctrine and allows them to define Judaism as they like. As Alan Dershowitz said of Judaism in his book Chutzpah:

“I do … precisely what orthodox religions say you can’t do: I pick and choose—hopefully on some principled basis—among the religious practices and select those with which I wish to comply. It’s MY religion, after all, and I don’t see why I can’t be the final arbiter when it comes to its content.”

By the same token, said Dershowitz, he can define America as he likes.

So, once again, thanks. Nominalism has now become a more “relevant” concept to me.

But if nominalism is all those things that we’ve discussed, how could medieval Christendom have tolerated it for an instant? How could the people of that time have seen nominalism as anything but a radical denial of the possibility of Christian truth?

From what I can remember the scholastics were actually arguing against extreme realism (all there are are universals), not for nominalism.
Here’s a link to clarify things:
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11090c.htm

It seems the nominalists didn’t deny Christian truth but said it’s a matter of faith alone, not of reason. Here’s the [1917] Catholic Encyclopedia on William of Ockham:

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15636a.htm

Apparently William got into trouble more because of his political activities as an ally of Lewis of Bavaria and Marsiglio of Padua than because of his philosophical speculations. Marsiglio, by the way, does sound like a proto-liberal:

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09719c.htm

I think it is correct to see nominalism as an early stage in the distancing of theology from philosophy, leading to the separation of faith from reason, and from thence to the separation of church from state. At each stage the human will is further separated from the inherently theological conscience of truth that demands our obedience with its proximity. I find it particularly amusing to watch the worship of “reason alone” — the necessary yang to the yin of “faith alone” — refute itself in the form of postmodernism.

The notion that Thomism ever implied a radical separation of philosophy from theology has been soundly thrashed by the radical orthodoxy movement, and in particular _Truth in Acquinas_ by Pickstock and Milbank. But of course I have no doubt that any number of people have attempted to possess the concept “nominalism” and make it mean whatever they personally willed it to mean; what else should we expect?

Ip address traces are easily reported then banned by movable type.