From: msmorris@watsci.waterloo.edu (Mike Morris)
Subject: Re: Wordstruck
Organization: University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario
Date: Sun, 23 Aug 1992 21:22:34 GMT


                                   Sunday, the 23rd of August, 1992

I had said something to the effect that:
   Here I figured Francis was going to argue that the English
   have sucked liberty and all enlightenment from their mothers' milk.

And Francis argued:
   Alas, it is not an arguable thing, but just a simple truth.

Then I carried on to the end of Robert MacNeil's _Wordstruck_ and found
the selfsame simple truth expressed therein:
   That tolerance for change represents not only the dynamism
   of the English-speaking peoples since the Elizabethans, but
   their deeply-rooted ideas of freedom as well. This was the
   idea of the Danish scholar Otto Jespersen, one of the great
   authorities on English. Writing in 1905, Jespersen said in
   his _Growth and Structure of the English Language_:
         The French language is like the stiff French garden
         of Louis XIV, while the English is like an English park,
         which is laid out seemingly without any definite plan,
         and in which you are allowed to walk everywhere according
         to your own fancy without having to fear a stern keeper
         enforcing rigorous regulations. The English language
         would not have been what it is if the English had not
         been for centuries great respecters of the liberties of
         each individual and if everybody had not been free to strike
         out new paths for himself.
   I like that idea and do not think it just coincidence. Consider
   that the same cultural soil, the Celtic-Roman-Saxon-Danish-Norman
   amalgam, which produced the English language also nourished the
   great principles of freedom and rights of man in the modern world.
   The first shoots sprang up in England and they greww stronger in
   America. Churchill called them ``the joint inheritance of the
   English-speaking world''. At the very core of those principles
   are popular consent and resistance to arbitrary authority; both
   are fundamental characteristics of our language. The English-speaking
   peoples have defeated all efforts to build fences around their 
   language, to defer to an academy on what was permissible English
   and what was not. They'll decide for themselves, thanks just the same.
   [p. 219]

You see? Each and every Bushism of the Week a blow for Liberty!

I did find ``Rosa Mystica'' most diverting, yes. I pulled my Hopkins
off the shelf and read it and even rebuked myself for not having sat
down with any of these poems before.  But, Mark says I have to read
Yeats first, so give me time.

Speaking of another book I haven't read, I've gotten a chapter or so into
_Il nome della rosa_, but any more will have to wait a gumption renewal
for my reading Italian. Nevertheless, I've been wondering about something
with this book for some time. This may be well known and much-discussed,
so I'll apologize in advance if such is the case, but I'm wondering
if Brother William is not modelled greatly on William of Ockham? Let me
quote the biographical sketch by Will Durant, _The Reformation_ (Volume VI
of ``The Story of Civilization''):
    William of Ockham was much harder [than William Durand], but did
    not wait till death to burn; his whole life was one of hot
    controversy, cooled only by occasional imprisonment, and the
    compulsion of the times to phrase his heat in Scholastic form.
    He admitted in philosophy no authority but experience and reason.
    He took his theorems passionately, and set half of Europe by the
    ears in defending his views. His life, adventures, and aims
    prefigure Voltaire's, and perhaps his effect was as great.
       We cannot say precisely where or when he was born; probably
    at Ockham in Surrey, toward the end of the thirteenth century.
    While yet young he entered the Franciscan order, and about the age
    of twelve he was sent to Oxford as a bright lad who would surely
    be a shining light in the Church. At Oxford, and perhaps at Paris,
    he felt the influence of another subtle Franciscan, Duns Scotus;
    for though he opposed the ``realism'' of Scotus, he carried his
    predecessor's rationalist critique of philosophy and theology many
    steps further to a skepticism that would dissolve alike religious
    dogmas and scientific laws. He taught for six years at Oxford, and
    may have taught at Paris. Apparently before 1324---while still a
    tyro in his twenties---he wrote commentaries on Aristotle and
    Peter Lombard, and his most influential book, _Summa totius logicae_---
    a summary of all logic.
       It seems at first sampling to be a dreary desert of logic-chopping
    and technical terminology, a lifeless procession of definitions,
    divisions, subdivisions, distinctions, classifications, and subtleties.
    Ockham knew all about ``semantics''; he deplored the inaccuracy of
    the terms used in philosophy, and spent half his time trying to
    make them more precise. He resented the Gothic edifice of abstractions---
    one mounted upon the other like arches in superimposed tiers---that
    medieval thought had raised. We cannot find in his extant works
    precisely the famous formula that tradition called ``Ockham's razor'':
    _entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem_---entities are
    not to be multiplied beyond need. But he expressed the principle
    in other terms again and again: _pluritas non est ponenda sine
    necessitate_---a plurality (of entities or causes or factors) is
    not to be posited (or assumed) without necessity; and _frustra
    fit per plura quod potest fieri per pauciora_---it is vain to seek
    to accomplish or explain by assuming several entities or causes
    what can be explained by fewer. The principle was not new; Aquinas
    had accepted it, Scotus had used it. But in Ockham's hands it became
    a deadly weapon, cutting away a hundred occult fancies and grandiose
    abstractions.
       Applying the principle to epistemology, Ockham judged it
    needless to assume, as the source and material of knowledge,
    anything more than sensations. From these arise memory (sensation
    revived), perception (sensation interpreted through memory),
    imagination (memories combined), anticipation (memory projected),
    thought (memories compared), and experience (memories interpreted
    through thought). ``Nothing can be an object of the interior sense''
    (thought) ``without having been an object of the exterior sense''
    (sensation); here is Locke's empiricism 300 years before Locke. All
    that we ever perceive outside ourselves is individual entities---specific
    persons, places, things, actions, shapes, colors, tastes, odors,
    pressures, temperatures, sounds; and the words by which we denote
    these are ``words of first intention'' or primary intent, directly
    referring to what we interpret as external realities. By noting and
    abstracting the common features of similar entities so perceived,
    we may arrive at general or abstract ideas---man, virtue, height,
    sweetness, heat , music, eloquence; and the words by which we denote
    such abstractions are ``words of second intention'', referring
    to conceptions derived from perceptions. These ``universals''
    are never experienced in sensation; they are _termini, signa,
    nomina_---terms, signs, names---for generalizations extremely useful
    (and dangerous) in thought or reason, in science, philosophy,
    and theology; they are not objects existing outside the mind.
    ``Everything outside the mind is singular, numerically one.''
    Reason is magnificent, but its conclusions have meaning only in
    so far as they refer to experience---i.e., to the perception of
    individual entities, or the performance of individual acts;
    otherwise its conclusions are vain and perhaps deceptive abstractions.
    How much nonsense is talked or written by mistaking ideas for
    things, abstractions for realities! Abstract thought fulfills its
    function only when it leads to specific statements about specific
    things.
       From this ``nominalism'' Ockham moved with devastating
    recklessness into every field of philosophy and theology. Both
    metaphysics and science, he announced, are precarious generalizations,
    since our experience is only of individual entities in a narrowly
    restricted area and time; it is mere arrogance on our part to
    assume the universal and eternal validity of the general propositions
    and ``natural laws'' that we derive from this tiny sector of reality.
    Our knowledge is molded and limited by our means and ways of
    perceiving things (this is Kant before Kant); it is locked up
    in the prison of our minds, and it must not pretend to be the objective
    or ultimate truth about anything.
       As for the soul, it too is an abstraction. It never appears in our
    sensations or perceptions, external or internal; all that we percieve
    is will, the ego asserting itself in every action and thought. Reason
    itself and all the glory of intellect are tools of the will; the
    intellect is merely the will thinking, seeking its ends by thought.
    (This is Schopenhauer.)
       God Himself seems to fall before this razor philosophy. Ockham
    (like Kant) found no conclusive force in any arguments used to
    prove the existence of deity. He relected Aristotle's notion that the
    chain of motions or causes compels us to assume a Prime Mover or
    First Cause; an ``infinite regress'' of motions or causes is no more
    inconceivable than the unmoved Mover or uncause Cause of Aristotle's
    theology. Since nothing can be known save through direct perception,
    we can never have any clear knowledge that God exists---_non
    potest sciri evidenter quod Deus est_. That God is omnipotent
    or infinite, omniscient or benevolent or personal, cannot be shown
    by reason; much less can reason prove that there are three persons
    in one God, or that God became man to atone for Adam and Eve's
    disobedience, or that the Son of God is present in the consecrated
    Host. Nor is monotheism more rational than polytheism; there may
    be more worlds than one, and more gods to govern them.
       What then remained of the majestic edifice of Christian faith,
    its lovely myths and songs and art, its God-given morality, its
    fortifying hope? Ockham recoiled before the ruin of theology by
    reason, and in a desperate effort to save a social order based on
    a moral code based on religious belief, he proposed at last to sacrifice
    reason on the altar of faith. Though it cannot be proved, it is
    probable that God exists, and that He has endowed each of us with an
    immortal soul. We must distinguish (as Averroes and Duns Scotus had
    advised) between theological truth and philosophical truth, and humbly
    accept in faith what proud reason doubts.
       It was too much to expect that this caudal appendage in honor
    of ``practical reason'' would be accepted by the Church as atoning
    for Ockham's critique of pure reason. Pope John XXII ordered an
    ecclesiastical inquiry into the ``abominable heresies'' of the
    young friar, and summoned him to appear at the papal court in
    Avignon. Ockham came, for we find him, in 1328, in a papal prison
    there, with two other Franciscans. The three escaped, and fled to
    Aiguesmortes; they embarked in a small boat, and were picked up
    by a galley that took them to Louis of Bavaria at Pisa. The Pope
    excommunicated them, and the Emperor protected them. William
    accompanied Louis to Munich, joined Marsilius of Padua there,
    lived in an anti-papal Franciscan monastery, and issued from it a
    torrent of books and pamphlets against the power and heresies of
    the popes in general, and of John XXII in particular.
       As he had in his metaphysics outdone the skepticism of Scotus,
    so now in his practical theory Ockham carried to daring conclusions
    the anticlericalism of Marsilius of Padua. He applied his ``razor''
    to the dogmas and rites that the Church had added to early Christianity,
    and demanded a return to the simpler creed and worship of the New
    Testament. In a pugnacious _Centiloquium theologicum_ he brought before
    the tribunal of his reason a hundred dogmas of the Church, and argued
    that many of them led logically to intolerable absurdities. If,
    for example., Mary is the Mother of God, and God is father of us all,
    Mary is the mother of her father. Ockham questioned the Apostolic
    Succession of the popes, and their infallibility; on the contrary,
    he urged, many of them had been heretics, and some had been criminals.
    He advocated a lenient treatment of heresy, proposing that all
    expression of opinion be left free except for the dissemination of
    conscious falsehood. What Christianity needed, he thought, was a
    return from the Church to Christ, from wealth and power to simplicity
    of life and humility of rule. The Church should be defined not
    as the clergy alone but as the whole Christian community. This
    entire fellowship, including the women, should choose representatives,
    including women, to a general council, and this council should
    choose and govern the pope. Church and state should be under one head.
       The state itself should be subject to the will of the people,
    for in them is vested all final sovereignty on the earth. They delegate
    their right of legislation and administration to a king or emperor
    on the understanding that he will enact laws for the welfare of all.
    If the common good requires it, private property may be abolished.
    If the ruler commits a great crime, or is guilty of negligence
    so extreme that it threatens the survival of the state, the people
    may justly depose him.
       We know little of Ockham's fate. The beer of Munich could not
    consloe him for the lost wine of Paris. He compared himself to
    John the Evangelist on Patmos, but he dared not leave the protective
    orbit of the Emperor. According to a Franciscan chronicler the
    rebel in his final years signed a recantation of his heresies.
    Perhaps the reconciliation of Louis with the Church made this advisable;
    and William may have come to feel that to question the truth of a
    religion's dogmasis jejune. He died of the Black Death in 1349 or
    1350, still in the prime of life.
       Long before his death he was recognized as the most forceful
    thinker of his age, and the universities shook with disputes over 
    his philosophy. Many theologians accepted his view that the basic
    tenets of the Christian religion could not be proved by reason;
    and the distinction between philosophical truth and religious truth
    was as widely spread in the fourteenth century as is today the
    tacit truce between scientific inquiry and religious ministrations.
    At Oxford a school of Ockhamists took form, called itself the
    _via moderna_ (as Abelard had called his conceptualism 300 years
    before), and smiled at the metaphysical realism of Scotus and Aquinas.
    The modernists were especially victorious in the universities of
    Central Europe; Huss at Prague and Luther at Erfurt were taught
    nominalism, and may have been conditioned by it for their revolt.
    At Paris the university authorities forbade (1339-1340) the teaching
    of Ockham's views, but many of the students, and some masters,
    acclaimed him as the standard-bearer of free thought, and more than
    once the opposed factions, as in our times, fought with words and
    fists in the cafes or the streets. It was probably in reaction
    against Ockhamism that Thomas a Kempis condemned philosophy in
    _The Imitation of Christ_.
       Ockham played a part, if only as a voice, in the uprising
    of the nationalist state against the universalist Church. His
    propaganda for ecclesiastical poverty influenced Wyclif, and his
    assaults upon the papacy, as well as his constant appeal from the Church
    to the Bible and early Christianity, prepared for Luther, who ranked
    Ockham as the ``chiefest and most ingenious of Scholastic doctors''.
    His voluntarism and individualism expressed in advance the heady
    spirit of the Renaissance. His skepticism passed down to Ramus and
    Montaigne, perhaps to Erasmus; his subjectivist limitation of
    knowledge to ideas foreshadowed Berkeley; his attempt to rescue faith
    through ``practical reason'' anticipated Kant. Though philosophically
    an idealist, his emphasis on sensation as the sole source of knowledge
    gave him a place in the procession of empirical English philosophy
    from Roger and Francis Bacon through Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Mill, and
    Spencer to Bertrand Russell. His occasional sallies into physical
    science---his perception of a law of inertia, his doctrine of action
    a distance---stimulated thinkers from Jean Buridan to Isaac Newton.
    The general effect of his work, like that of Dund Scotus, was to
    undermine the basic assumption of Scholasticism---that medieval
    Christian dogma could be proved by reason. Scholasticism maintained
    till the seventeenth century a pallid post-mortem existence, but it
    never recovered from these blows. [pp. 246-251]

Even here, and despite Ockham's having attended a rather lesser-renowned
English university, we smell English freedom.

How many of these details fit William of Baskerville I wonder?
I catch many resonances with what little I know of the book
(from the movie, from discussions, and from peering over my
wife's shoulder when she read it).

             Mike Morris
      (msmorris@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)