Where Western Philosophy Resides

Peculiarities of Medieval Philosophy

Critical thinking, often hailed as the hallmark of Western philosophy, is perhaps best understood as the ability to distinguish true judgments from false ones, even when the latter may appear to be true. For instance, the judgments "All men are equal by nature" and "Men are unequal by nature" both seem equally plausible: they are similarly structured and can summon numerous examples and arguments in their favor. Yet the first statement is true, while the second is false, because the former deals with an enduring property of nature, as seen in the equality of all before death, while the latter illegitimately conflates two incompatible concepts—social practice (inequality) and natural life—that cannot coexist within a single judgment.

Since all people arrive at judgments through different experiences, shared judgments are not a mere generalization of experience or its reduction to an average form. Instead, they reflect a relationship in which the critical acceptance of another’s position becomes part of one’s own critical thinking. In this sense, the individual is both the subject of critique, engaging in critical thought, and the object of critique, as they are capable of accepting the premises of another's thought as something that affects them.

Establishing causal relationships between phenomena is the primary task of reason. The distinction between intellect and reason is one of the most significant tenets of Western philosophy. The intellect is the principle of contemplation; it penetrates the essence of phenomena and allows us to comprehend the universal laws of existence. Reason, on the other hand, is the principle of differentiation; it enables us to distinguish particular regularities from universal ones, individual cases from recurrent patterns, and the content of our knowledge from its current form. Thus, intellect can be equated with the perfection of being, while reason pertains to the presence and participation in the things it seeks to understand, their articulation, and their expression.

In medieval philosophy, God as the perfect intellect was understood both as the perfection of being and as the perfection of goodness and beauty. For us, these identifications may seem unconvincing: we might say that beauty pertains to taste, goodness to social regulation, and being is so self-evident that it does not depend on individual or social experience. Yet for medieval thought, the intelligible being inherently encompassed the "modes" (ways of realization) of both goodness and beauty. If God punishes the sinner, it is because the mode of goodness includes the punishment of evil.

This explains the central characteristic of medieval philosophy: in it, causes are always greater and higher than their effects. We are accustomed to the idea that small causes lead to great effects—a tiny virus causes serious illness, and simple life forms evolve into more complex ones. In medieval thought, however, it was different: God, as the fullness of being, is the cause of particular things and phenomena. The cause is not merely a pretext; it is the foundation of existence. Even if this foundation resides in the heavens, it must be firmer than the things founded upon it.

The understanding of truth in the era of the rise of universities was also different. For us, truth is a correct statement or a set of correct statements. The idea that truth is alive, active, and transformative is difficult for us to conceive—unless we formulate a norm based on truth, according to which we will transform the world around us. But medieval truth is the fullness of existence. God does not simply "exist" as such; He "exists" in the fullness of His being, and this existence is truth. Therefore, truth is never fully knowable, yet God is knowable and is known as truth, and this knowledge brings happiness to the knower. In Western theology, truth was in some ways akin to Aristotle's concept of "entelechy"—the final form of a thing's existence, while in Byzantine theology, it was eventually brought closer to another Aristotelian concept—"energy," the perpetual activity of God, distinct from His essence yet knowable as uncreated, as it is the truth, not mere content, that is known.

The word "essence" also requires clarification. We often equate essence with content or with genus membership. For example, we say that the essence of an orange is that it is a fruit. Similarly, we often equate meaning with use, as when we say that the meaning of a car is that we can drive it. However, for medieval philosophy, essence precedes the division of things into genera and species; this division establishes meaning, but not essence. A medieval theologian or philosopher would say that the essence of an orange is that it was created by God, while its meaning lies in the fact that it exists not as a singular entity, but as a species.

Western medieval philosophers, such as Thomas Aquinas, strictly distinguished between "essence" and "existence." The former answers the question "What?" while the latter answers "How?" For example, the essence of man is to be a rational being, while the existence of man is the actualization of his reason, his ability to understand and comprehend things. Knowing essence helps us differentiate one thing from another, whereas knowing existence allows us to understand how that thing can act among others and, in general, be among them.

For an individual thing, there is a word that denotes independent existence: "substance" in Latin, "hypostasis" in Greek, literally meaning "standing firm." One essence can belong to several independent existences: for instance, there are many people, but each one is a human. The essence of God is singular, but the Father, Son, and Spirit exist independently, though unlike humans, each possessing their unique properties, the persons of the Trinity direct their properties toward one another: the Father begets the Son, and the Son is begotten of the Father. Sometimes the word "person" was used synonymously, meaning the legal concept of a person capable of acting independently, with full legal rights, for the fulfillment of which one must be recognized as a distinct "person."

But how are we to understand that man, for example, consists of body and soul? The soul encompasses intellect, reason, feelings, and will, while the body grows, changes, and dies. The answer is simple: they are not only "linked" together, such that only death can separate them, but they are in relation to one another, and the key issue is not how they are, but how they relate to each other. The soul gives form to the body, and when the soul departs, the body loses its form and decays. The body, in turn, is the soul's aid; the soul senses through the body, uses the body, and the body allows the soul to live among things and exist fully.

Thus, if soul and body are in a certain relation, the relations between things not so connected are determined by their belonging to specific conceptual categories, their intellectual content, and their capacity to be subject to categorical judgment: this is created, this is distinct, and this happens. This idea of the existence of not only categories as a logical tool for ordering but also categorical judgments (predicables), linking things as capable of being in relation, was lost in modern philosophy. As a result, various substitutes had to be introduced: the universal laws of nature, as Newton did; the direct will of God, as in Berkeley and Malebranche; the sufficient reason for existence, as in Leibniz; or the "transcendental synthesis of apperception" (the perception of all things as connected, capable of being connected in our understanding), as in Kant.

Such a shift in philosophy also manifested in science, when experimentation became the primary means to confer universal validity to judgments, demonstrating that they truly function in reality. Similarly, in art, creative individuality began to be valued over merely solving problems within an established canon. The very style of philosophical work changed: in modern philosophy, the commentary, as a continual clarification of one’s position, faded away. Instead, any philosophical position had to stand on its own foundations and be articulated in a vivid and persuasive presentation. If a modern philosopher, such as Hegel, added notes, it was more a result of personal inclination to reproduce the intellectual habits of previous eras rather than a professional requirement for the philosopher.

At first glance, the transition from medieval to modern philosophy seems to bring little change: in earlier thought, it was normative to distinguish between intelligible and sensory things, and Kant likewise distinguishes between the intellectual (noumenon) and the sensory (phenomenon). Even in our everyday speech, we never confuse mental constructions with the course of events in the surrounding world. However, for medieval thought, the intellectual realm was the highest reality, those things which were dear to the mind, beloved by it, and which awakened love. Even ethically evil things, such as fallen angels or passions, could only be evaluated by love, which recognized their ugliness.

For Kant, however, anything could be intelligible, as long as it became an object not only of use but also of contemplation, recognized in its essence as a thing. He calls this "the thing-in-itself," or more precisely, “the thing as it is by itself,” “the thing as it truly is.” In his view, celestial things hold no inherent value above earthly things. Where medieval thought spoke of ascending toward higher essences, modern thought addresses the very conditions by which we can come to know any essences at all. After Kant, philosophers could still debate whether art or precise formulation granted access to reality as such, or whether we only have access to the rational data available to us, but it was no longer possible to claim that the highest reality was so valuable that it naturally attracted and elevated us. Such a claim could only be made if we first fully understood the possibilities and limits of our knowledge.

Truth in modern philosophy is understood differently: not as the joint possession of reality and the mind, but as a relation to things or a judgment that remains unrefuted when this relation or judgment is developed further in subsequent examples. Truth in old philosophy resided in contemplation, while in modern philosophy, it lies in the non-contradiction of the very conditions of contemplation.

Let us clarify at once that the word "contemplation" in philosophy never means mere curiosity or idle observation. On the contrary, contemplation is an intense intellectual experience, allowing one to perceive actions and the conditions of these actions. In old philosophy, contemplation primarily concerned action occurring in the realm of various things, what might yet happen to them. In contrast, in modern philosophy, contemplation investigates the very possibilities of things becoming objects of contemplation.

Medieval philosophy is sometimes called the handmaid of theology, a notion true in only one sense: theology, or theology proper, was not understood as the formulation of established church doctrine but as the opportunity, through reason, to contemplate those things that were philosophical problems but direct experiences for theology, such as divine grace. In this sense, philosophy engaged in contemplation, while theology transitioned from contemplation to the very object of contemplation.

The word "theology" appeared in the time of Plato, meaning a rational teaching about the gods, in contrast to mythology, which consisted of contradictory stories varying from one region to another and therefore incapable of consistent systematization. Both pagan and Christian theology were considered exact sciences, like mathematics, working from axioms (dogmas) and constructing theorems (theological arguments) based on them.

Pagan theology was primarily cataphatic, deriving the order of gods from their properties. Christianity, like other monotheistic theologies, could not be satisfied with only cataphatic assertions—positive statements about God's attributes. This would imply that God could be reduced to specific properties, each belonging to the created world, and therefore, could not convey the omnipotence of the Creator. Thus, apophatic theology emerged, tasked with stating what God cannot be. When we say "God is eternal," we are engaging in cataphatic theology, attributing to God a property we ourselves comprehend and classify. Yet, to speak of God with proper reverence, we must understand that we are working with signs, and the sign "eternity" helps us grasp God as both the omnipotent creator and eternally existent. However, when we say, "God is beyond all eternity and time," we enter into apophatic theology, which denies all established signs and seeks to comprehend God through symbols and images that themselves are negated. Eternity and time become two sides of one poetic image, but both must be discarded to directly contemplate God.

Consider the justification for cataphatic and apophatic theology given by the Neoplatonic Christian philosopher, a follower of Proclus who claimed to be a disciple of the Apostle Paul, Dionysius the Areopagite: "Let us pray that we may sing a hymn to Him who is beyond being, erasing all being: just as those who create a talented statue subtract everything superfluous as an obstacle to the pure contemplation of the hidden. Only with such subtraction does hidden beauty begin to reveal itself. I believe such negations should be sung over affirmations. When we affirm, we start from the primary and, through the middle, reach the final, the lowest. But when we negate, we proceed from the lowest to the primary principles, to comprehend that unknowing hidden within all being behind what is known to all, and thereby apprehend the darkness beyond all being, which is hidden from us by the light that rests upon every thing of being. (…) Why, you ask, do we begin with affirmations about God from the primary, but with negations about God from the very last? Because a positive statement convincingly begins with that which is closest to the exceeding height of any possible affirmation. Yet, the denial of something in the exceeding height of any negation is most convincingly begun from the denial of what is most remote. Is not God, in a more majestic sense, life and goodness, rather than air and stone? And is it not better to begin by denying that God becomes intoxicated or angered, rather than denying that He speaks or thinks?"

The Greek word "heresy" and the Latin "sect" in antiquity referred to a philosophical school or a community of followers, and primarily, to people leading a similar way of life. The affirmation of Christian orthodoxy against "heresies" was chiefly concerned with this latter meaning: compared to the demands of orthodoxy, these ways of life, however virtuous, seemed narrow and limited, as if they had no future. Of course, there is no room in a philosophical work to discuss church politics. But when Thomas Aquinas condemned the teaching of Averroes (Ibn Rushd) as heresy, despite Averroes never being part of Christianity, it was understood as the substitution of the universal with the particular. For Thomas, the doctrine of "two truths," that the logic of theology differs from the logic of the natural sciences, meant that any knowledge was confined to the particularity of its claims.

Philosophy has largely shaped the literary culture of the West. In antiquity, reproducing books was not difficult: all it took was seating one hundred literate slaves together, and by dictation, they would write out one hundred copies. In the Middle Ages, a book was written for use in a monastery, a secular corporation centered around its church building, or later, a university corporation. Back then, each book was unique, much like any monastic or ecclesiastical property. There was no need for multiple copies of such a book, but what was needed were philosophical traditions of thoughtful reading, discussion, and commentary.

The first crisis in this system came during the Renaissance. The new culture of travel demanded pocket-sized books, and now a library could be carried along with you. This meant that a book was no longer an inalienable possession of a corporation, bound to the traditions of its existence; it became an item for individual use. In response to these nimble Italians came the Germans, who invented the printing press: though the first printed books differed little in size or design from manuscripts, the very act of reproducing books meant that a book could appear anywhere. The creation of a book was no longer a craft, but an intellectual endeavor—an improvisation, rather than the inheritance of established reading traditions. Here we already see a hallmark of new philosophy: thinking is understood not only as a system of contemplation but also as a system of active improvisations.

The first sign of the emergence of new philosophy was the expansion of the circle of authoritative books. For Renaissance figures like Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, Plato or ancient Egyptian wisdom held no less authority than the Bible. A concept arose, known as "primal theology"—simple assertions about God that united all religions and became humanity’s first universal wisdom. The teaching of primal theology allowed for the reconciliation of contradictions between authoritative texts by claiming that every book was valuable as an independent interpretation of this primal theology, and the Bible’s superiority lay in its dual role as both a subject and an instrument of interpretation.

The Renaissance viewed ancient literary heritage in much the same way: it was important both as a tool for assessing the turbulence of contemporary politics and as a subject around which other subjects could be structured, in the ambitious project to render the present age magnificent. Just as with the idea of primal theology, so too with the idea of restoring classical literature, the previous medieval correspondence of all things—where any object could be seen as a sign of historical events with roots in biblical naming—was replaced by an insurmountable distinction between the authentic and the inauthentic. The authentic was the ancient, for it experienced its own existence as essential, whereas conjectures, guesses, and comparisons often obscured the truth more than they illuminated it.

In old medieval philosophy, language was understood only as a physiological ability, differing among nations much like bodily posture or culinary habits. After all, all things in the world pointed to one another as parts of a biblical world that had found itself directly here, and in this sense, they created a language for understanding the Bible, and through the Bible, for understanding the events around them. But with the arrival of modernity, language emerged as a capability to produce meaning directly in the here and now, using available materials without invoking all the accumulated things of previous centuries.

The word "modernity" (modernitas and its derivatives in various European languages) first appeared simply to designate the authors of that time in opposition to the ancients. But, put simply, modernity is the era when a fact has its own structure, independent of its position in biblical history or world history. Modernity requires the acceptance of facts as they are, not merely as signs of something recurring or something that has predictably come to pass. This includes accepting facts as entirely unique and unexpected. Even if adherents of "primal theology" interpreted ancient texts symbolically, they still imitated these texts as perfect, reproducing them, imitating them, just as they imitated ancient theologians and ancient orators alike. It is for this reason that Renaissance mysticism loved poetry: poetry in the Middle Ages was traditionally interpreted allegorically, but now allegory could be turned into proof of the kinship between poetic texts and theological ones, using both for the perfect interpretation of individual facts.

Of course, the philosophers of the time fully understood that every text is created at a specific time and place. But this time and place served merely as a frame for the fact, which needed to be interpreted in all its persuasiveness so that modern history, too, might become convincing. This project was quite effective while all the arts were united in a kind of grand spectacle. Yet for Leonardo da Vinci, the languages of different arts were already becoming untranslatable. In his "Debate Between the Poet, the Painter, and the Sculptor," none of the participants could say everything at once: the painter could depict a thing in its entirety, but not in motion, while the poet could show a thing in motion, but his description moved from one detail to the next, never capturing the whole. Painting’s advantage lay in its ability to present many things simultaneously, and from this came the path to Descartes’ philosophy, which understood knowledge as the instant grasping of clarity, akin to the most persuasive image of things, corresponding to the discovery of linear (geometric, atmospheric) perspective in painting and warfare. Perspective allowed not so much for observing phenomena within a preexisting experience but for modeling, including unfamiliar experiences, based on known or presumed properties of things. What happens next is the subject of the following chapters of our book.