The Analytic Cri de Coeur: "Death to All Thomists!"

THE POLISH PHILOSOPHER Józef Maria Bocheński (1902-1995) is selected by Steven A. Long in his book Natura Pura as an example or type of what happens when one joins analytic method, particularly its extreme logicism,* to Thomistic realism. Bocheński's interest in analytical methods began even before the "linguistic turn" which so deeply affected it.** Bocheński's struggle with logicism and his Thomism represents for Long an illustration of "a Catholic mind wrestling with one of the most formidable of the material influences of the analytic movement, namely that of logicism." Long, 122. What ultimately happened is that the logicism sort of overwhelmed his traditional philosophic thought, reducing his philosophy to meta-philosophy, prophesizing in a sort of "emblematic significance" how analytic philosophy negatively affects ontology and metaphysics. What is it that caused this professed Dominican to turn from his philosophical roots in Catholicism and Thomism and to consider Christian philosophy among the superstitions of the world and salute his philosophical confreres with the salutation, "Death to all Thomists!" is something we need to know if for no other reason than to avoid it.***

Józef Maria Bocheński (1902-1995)
"Quomodo cecidisti de caelo lucifer qui mane
oriebaris corruisti in terram qui vulnerabas gentes."

Bocheński tried to link both ontology and logic in his book Logic and Ontology, and offered a formulation of ontology and logic that, "if it had been correct, would certainly have made analytic philosophy the natural heir to scholasticism." Long, 122 (citing to Bocheński's "Logic and Ontology"). There was, however, in Long's view, something deeply flawed in the Bocheńskian effort. It was the reduction of philosophical method to a logical meta-philosophy, which resulted in the negation of philosophical method, thus undermining the entire philosophical enterprise.

Bocheński viewed ontology as a sort of rumen and reticulum, a depository of cud, which is later burped out and chewed again by logic. "Logic is the systematic, formal, axiomatic elaboration of this material predigested by ontology." (quoted in Long, 123). There is here given a preeminence to logic which does not belong to it. Logic, as Long observes, is derived from ontology, and ultimately from reality. Ontology, and working backwards, reality, does not derive from logic. "[I]t is more correct to point out that the logical first principles derive from ontology. In other words, logic receives its first principles metaphysics, and metaphysics and ontology unfold these first principles in relation to being as such in all its causal reticulations, whereas logic unfolds them with respect to rational entailment as such and more generically in abstraction from actual existence." Long, 123. That is to say, logic is derived from reality and then works on the abstraction of reality which give rise to concepts. Logic does not work on the real. Logic is not some sort of "super ontology." As Long explains:

It is not the case that ontology is merely "prolegomenon to logic" with the latter [logic] serving as a "super ontology" of real and ideal entities, and ontology merely a rough initial approach to the real. Sed contra, the very distinction of real and logical is a real, i.e., a metaphysical distinction. It is only secondarily a logical distinction. . . . [B]ecause everything is inetelligible in proportion to its actuality, such that the object of knowledge is either the real, or that which is possibly real, or that which stands in some conceptual or ideal relation to these (e.g., genus, species), logic necessarily receives its first principles from metaphysics. Hence, the principles of metaphysics and ontology are the most formal principles, because act is most formal in being, and it will belong to the metaphysician to judge the logical principles to being.

Long, 123. Logic does not precede reality. Reality precedes logic. And metaphysics or ontology is the mediatrix between reality and concept, and is further the midwife to logic. Logic is thus doubly grounded (or at least should be doubly grounded) in reality: first through its derivation from reality and secondly through the concepts with which it works. To suggest that logic is what allows to determine the real is to get this, as one may colloquially say, bassackwards.

[T]he difficulty is that Bocheński's argument is not true. Logic is not ontology, but rather it receives its first principles from metaphysics, and the whole subordinate realm occupied by logic is only intelligible owing to its ordering and relation toward the real. It is for this reason, as St. Thomas and Aristotle both teach, that it belongs to the metaphysician to judge of the relation of the logical principles and categories to being.

Long, 124.

Logic was given some sort of super-preeminence in Bocheński's thought, a sort of "divine spark" within us that is absolutely unmoored from reality and, indeed, is the butler that ushers us into reality. Bocheński is supposed to have said "Outside logic there is only nonsense." Long, 126. **** This is manifest absurdity. And it is philosophically all wrong. The intellectual grasp of being does not come from logic. The intellectual grasp of logic comes from being. Logic is not "a sort of super-transcendental object indifferent to being and nonbeing." Long, 124. No, rather "nothing is intelligible save owing to its relation to being (including logic)." Long, 124.

The seed of corruption thus sown, Bocheński's development was not an evolution, not progress, but a sort of devolution, a regress. Thus Bocheński reduced philosophy to meta-philosophy and began to visualize "Christian philosophy" as a non-scientific "worldview," and not anything rigorously "scientific." Long, 125. This is what Long calls "the hangover from the revolutionary phase of the analytic movement, and the half-life of its effects."

Bocheński . . . in his development, more and more tended to view anything outside logic as mere ideology, and to fall into a thoroughgoing logicism so extreme as to forget that the prime principles of logic are ontological prior to, and as a condition for, their being logical principles. With this error, it was a short step simply to fall into detailed logical considerations more and more remote from foundational ontological and metaphysical analysis.

Long, 126.

It therefore seems that Bocheński's project was doomed to collapse the Thomist philosophy with which he sought to append the analytic method.***** It was as if he expected the cancer cells of analytic method to make the corpus of Thomistic philosophy whole. And what happened to Bocheński is emblematic of those who followed in his footsteps or sought, in their own manner, reconcile analytic method with traditional philosophy.

Bochenski wished to defend Thomistic philosophic theology and metaphysics, and this indeed did function for him as a sort of background velleity [wish]--but ever more remotely, and as less and less formally dispositive with respect to actual philosophic activity. This is more or less the course that Catholic engagement with analytic thought (with certain exceptions, it is true) followed until comparatively recently: a minor key acknowledgement of metaphysics and natural philosophy that over time is progressively overlain and supplanted by logical analysis operating upon an evidentiary basis drained of its ontological content.

Long, 129.

What happened to Bocheński who at one time was well-grounded in Thomistic philosophy is even more catastrophic to one who is less well-founded on any realistic philosophy. Exposure to analytic thought is mind-numbing, heart-chilling, wonder-killing, and love stifling. While Thomism and analytic thought need to engage, the Thomist that dares to enter where angels fear to tread needs to remember that ontology precedes logic, and that the no man's land between the boundaries of Thomism and analytic thought where the dialogue occurs does not define Thomism.

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*Logicism may be defined as the thought that mathematics and, by extension, philosophy is reducible to logic. Thus the treatment of philosophical issues proceeds in a manner that treats it as the subject of formal, logical, and conceptual analysis, one even prescinded from reality. According to Long, logicism "is not philosophy," but rather, a "widespread meta-philosophy sociologically rooted in the residue of the earlier revolutionary analytic movements regard to which it constitutes a sort of post-factual epiphenomenon." It is a ripple of thought after the rock of analytical method has been thrown in the pool of the philosophy of realism.
**The "linguistic turn" is a reference to the development in Western philosophy where philosophy focused primarily on the relationship between philosophy and language. (The reference hales back to the so-called "epistemological turn" which refers to Descartes' revolution in philosophy regarding how humans know things and upon what human thought is ultimately based.) Though not the originator of the term (it may have come from the Austrian philosopher Gustave Bergman), the term itself was popularized by the American philosopher Richard Rorty in his 1967 anthology of essays which he edited and entitled The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method. Very broadly, philosophy affected by the "linguistic turn" focused on language as constitutive of reality, a position which seems to be counterintuitive and certainly contradictory to traditional Western philosophy where words function as labels attached to concepts, concepts where are abstracted from perception of the real world. Traditionally, the word "apple," for example, corresponded to the concept of "apple" in the human mind, which in turn corresponded to "apples" in the real world. Kant's critique placed doubt between the "apple" in the world (the thing in itself) and the conceptual "apple" in the mind, arguing that we did not really know the "apple" out there, we only knew the "apple" in our mind. The "linguistic turn" went further and addressed the link between the concept of "apple" in the mind and the word "apple," argued that the word "apple," which is really a matter of convention, itself affected in some manner the concept of "apple" in the mind, and hence was determinative of, or at least significant factor in, of our perception of reality. If "apple" had been defined more broadly by convention (say to include "pears") our perception of reality would be significantly affected since we would not recognize differences between what we conventionally call "apples" and "pears" without the convention. At the extremes, some take the position that anything not given a name in language is by definition inconceivable (having no name and therefore no meaning to us). Without a name, therefore, we have no concept, and the unnamed cannot be conceptualized in the mind, and therefore cannot be said to be part of human reality. To be part of human reality, the concept has to be articulated by language, and, so ultimately, all is determined by language. This view is obviously opposed by philosophical realism, which is the essential kernel of Thomism and Aristotelianism.
***On the "Death to all Thomists!" matter, the story as recounted by Professor David Solomon, Director of the Notre Dame Center of Ethics and Cutlure, is told in Long, 257, n. 20. The observations of Bocheński on Christian philosophy are from Jan Wolenski as quoted in Long, 128.
****Long quotes from Professor Jan Wolenski's views.
*****The effect on the rich and central concept of analogical thinking in Thomism was particularly harmed by Bocheńsk's efforts to create a "logical formalization of the doctrine of analogy along the lines of a mathematical isomorphic function." Long, 130. To cram analogical thinking using univocal mathematical concepts is to corrupt analogical thinking. In mathematics, a variable, say A, is always univocally A. In analogical thinking, a variable, say "light," is not univocally "light." The "light" to the eye is different than the "light" of reason in man's mind is different than the lumen propheticum, the "light of the prophets," is different than the lumen gloriae, the light of glory," is different than the "Light from Light," the Lumen de Lumine, we call Christ. The term "light" is used neither univocally or equivocally in all these instances; the term "light" in every case encompasses differences and likeness with the other cases; the term "light" is therefore used analogically. Light is not a univocal concept like saying A=A; rather, it is something like saying a=A or even ا=a=א=α ('alif=a=aleph=alpha); nay, it is actually a kind of thinking which goes beyond even that. The relationship is not one of equality, but one of "analogical likeness or 'fusing together' . . . of essentially differing rationes in a proportional unity." Long, 132. In short, the analogia entis cannot be bottled up in a mathematical jar.

Analytic Method and and Philosophy of Nature

POOR NATURE, ONCE RECOVERED from the neglect of theology, she must also be rescued from the assault of philosophy. Modernity has been singularly unkind to the concept of nature, and the recovery of the concept requires that both theology and philosophy undergo some sort of "sensitivity training." Having addressed the theological insult to the concept of nature in his earlier chapters, in Chapter 3 of this book Natura Pura, Steven A. Long reflects upon the philosophical problem once theology is made to see that nature, pure nature, is an important concept with "ontological dynamism, density, and relative autonomy vis-à-vis the revelata." Long, 111. It is as if once we have convinced a mother that her son is grown up, we have to turn to the father and begin to persuade him the same thing. The problem with releasing the concept of pure nature from the theological snubbing she received by la nouvelle théologie is that the philosophical world at large--a world in which analytical philosophy and the analytic method is at large*--is not ready to receive her. She will be misunderstood, and her beauty and poise unappreciated, in a world governed by the method of analytic philosophy. To introduce the concept of nature into a room full of analytic philosophers may be akin to introducing a débutante into a hall full of half-blind forensic pathologists. Nature will not be viewed as a débutante to be courted, greeted, toasted, danced with, and engaged in conversation--the old traditions are dead--but she will be greeted as an analysandum or definiendum. The analytic philsophers will never notice our débutante's décolletage, much less know her soul, as they will be focusing on the quicks of her fingers with their weak eyes aided by microscopes. The fact is that analytic philosophy is incapable of greeting nature because it lacks a "methodic narrative," an "essential method in philosophy of nature and metaphysics" of being. Long, 116. "[A]nalytic practioners as such do not accept as essential to analytic thought any normative commitment" to any substantive doctrine of nature or metaphysics nor "to any method in philosophy of nature and metaphysics." Long, 116. Both substance and method are lacking. Certainly, analytic philosophy alone is incapable of handling nature. The question then is whether the analytic method, coupled with Thomism, is what is modernly needed to handle the notion of nature? Is there such a thing as "analytical Thomism," and does it have any value over classical Thomism? Or are we merely taking our myopic and hyperopic pathologists and dressing them with some ill-fitting, old-fashioned livery?

In Long's view, an "analytic Thomism" is not a match made in heaven, but a sort of philosophical chimera. The analytical world might be identified through the following list of "sociological desiderata and meta-philosophy," since it really does not espouse any sort of methodically-unified doctrinal system:

• a focus on logic and a penchant for logical symbolism in argument as "method;"**
• a concern about how arguments should be displayed;***
• a concern for analysis of language;
• an inherited gap with respect to any principles of being and nature and a lack of any methodic approach required to apprehend or work with such concepts;
• a tendency toward Humean skepticism and conventionalism;
• an inherited bias without current justification against philosophies and philosophers that were originally deprecated by the original revolutionary analytic doctrines, even though these latter doctrines have been subsequently shown to be erroneous or flawed;****

Given the above, Long has doubts about what contributions, if any, analytic thought can make to classical Thomism in the area of nature or being. It may be more a a detriment to try to blend Thomism and analytic method, weaking Thomism's rigor, sort of like trying to make paint thicker by adding solvent. It is even worse to suggest that analytical method alone should be used as a replacement for Thomism as the underpinning of a modern philosophy of nature.

Einstein at Bern Patent Office

Several observations may be made:

• To suggest that a modern understanding of nature requires the analytical method be used seems to beg the question of whether a secular, non-speculative, non-metaphysical philosophy prevalent in the secularized institutions is one that can comprehend a theonomic notion of nature. It seems rather unlikely.
• Analytical method is not necessarily attachable to a philosophy such as Thomism merely because it uses logic. Logic is preliminary to all philosophies and sciences, including Thomism. Logic is not equivalent to analytic method or vice versa.
• The suggestion that analytic method is superior to other philosophies is, "after
  the failed cognitive revolutions," virtually a matter of ipse dixit, "as though a simple assertion should suffice to privilege one's philosophy of logic from criticism." Long, 120.
• There may be too much emphasis given to trying to fit a Catholic philosophy into analytical method, so that such becomes the goal, and this at the expense of a principled and rigorous
  analysis of speculative truth for the sake of that truth.
• Because of "typical but not universal deprivations within analytic method," it could result in the loss of apprehension of Thomas Aquinas's teachings
• Because analytic method is non-systematic, but is "chiefly a
  sociological multiple of speculative privations, logical rigor, and logicist and skeptical errors," whatever limited benefits it may provide through its narrow speculative insights may affect negatively the systematic and speculative strength in a philosophy such as Thomism.

The positive philosophical theories of scientism and logicism upon which analytic thought relied appear to have collapsed, leaving nothing behind but the analytic method, which may be better classified as something not equivalent to philosophy, but perhaps a partial meta-philosophy. Once we get into the philosophical real--where Thomism may be found--we leave meta-philosophy behind.

The analytic tradition has no essential principles of metaphysics upon which it is founded and which govern its function. The analytic tradition never goes beyond logic, beyond definition, to grasp a method beyond logic and definition, a method which is designed to take intellectual possession as it were of reality so as to make it intelligible and rationally defensible. Without such a method beyond logic and definition, we do not have a philosophy strictly so-called.

The sum of the matter is simply this: the realm of analytic thought today is merely the amalgam of considerations developed by persons who have a predictable exposure to certain logical and linguistic disciplines, but no reliable exposure or formation with regard to method in philosophy of nature and metaphysics . . . . There is no analytic philosophy. This patent fact is a reason for looking skeptically on the claims of analytic practitioners to maintain a monopoly of position and influence . . . . It suggest no reason whatsoever why any but adventitious contributions might be expected to the development of the realist tradition from analytic sources.

Long, 121.

The contributions it makes: fine. But it ought to be seen for what it is, something that occurs in spite of the lack of philosophical method, and not because of it.

An Einstein can come from the patent office, but it does not follow that the patent office as such thus becomes the Source of Einsteinian Genius or of Einsteinian accomplishment, but less the repository of method in hypothetico-deductive physics. The same may be said equally of redoubtable minds formed in analytic thought who subsequently take on the task of genuine engagement with philosophy of nature and metaphysics.

Long, 121.

In the matter of nature, let us make sure we are listening to an Einstein who thinks himself a clerk, and not a clerk who thinks himself an Einstein.


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*Analytic philosophy is a philosophical school without any unitary doctrine prevalent especially in the English-speaking countries, the central methodology of which is the analysis of concepts or language. Its emphasis is on method, and so Long describes the "analytic concept" as a "adjective on pilgrimage to find out what if anything it may modify." Long, 112. It arose in the 20th century as a reaction to the idealism of Hegelian philosophy which was prevalent in the late 19th and early 20th century. It shuns systems, and in fact seems, through its method, inimical to them. Leading practitioners have included Bertrand Russell, George Edward Moore, A. J. Ayer, Rudolf Carnap, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Analytic philosophy tends to focus on detail using logical and language analysis to clarify philosophical issues somewhat perhaps like a pathologist would use a microscope to look at a biopsy sample. Its method is an application of "a certain understanding of logic," a "concern for language," and a "concern about how arguments should be expressed." Long, 113. Long observes that "logic is a propaedeutic to method rather than a method," that "language is to be judged by its effects," and that the way an argument is expressed is "secondary to what the argument is." The analytic method ultimately has no "intrinsically philosophic method or formation to offer," but a panoply of "ad hoc discussions." Long, 113. It has no "normative metaphysical or ontological evidence and principles," no "normative methodic account," by which it may be distinguished substantively from any other philosophical system. Long characterizes it as a stumbling from error to error, an "intriguing compendia of error," which displaced prior systems of philosophy, "more or less forced all the other stars from the heavens," and which, "although in search of a new revolution, is to this day marked by the deprivation of method in philosophy of nature and metaphysics." Long, 113. Without ontology, without metaphysics, without natural theology, it seems like analytic philosophy is hardly "poised to aid in developing these philosophical disciplines, howsoever true it is that discourse with particular minds formed in the analytic tradition may prove fruitful." Long, 114. In fact, by self-definition, analytic philosophers require no commitment to any system or any philosophical method outside of "a mere commitment to logic," which is the same thing as saying that "analytic thought is not a philosophy," strictly speaking. Long, 117.

Today the term "analytic" is free of any philosophic substance at all, a Banquo's ghost as it were, roaming the halls of academe, seeking living philosophic works to haunt and adjectivally modify. . . . Analytic "method" thus is not method at all, but turns out to be merely a partial meta-philosophy, a part of a part masquerading as the whole. The confusion of meta-philosophic principles with method is a methodic impoverishment.

Long, 117.
**Long observes that "logic" is not properly speaking a "method," since "logic is propadeutic to method in every science rather than itself being a method." Long, 118.
***Long criticizes this overemphasis on the form of argument: "[P]references about how arguments should be displayed are extrinsic to the arguments themselves and rather picayune as grounds for examining or not examining them." Long, 118.
****Though there is a tendency in all human systems to rely on the past and its inertia, and though sometimes the initial presuppositions need to be re-examined, it is particularly a crucial problem with analytic practitioners "because of the sociological predominance of analytic thought on the one hand, and the falsification of the strategically positive philosophic judgments of the early revolutionary analytic doctrines on the other. Where the original grounds of criticism are no longer extant, it is not a sign of integrity of thought to persist uncritically in negations that are no longer justifiable." Long, 119. To the degree they deprecate past systems, e.g., Thomism, the practitioners of the analytic method may be somewhat like those who, based upon the strength of their inherited Ptolemaic biases, failed to see the validity of the Copernican theories.