Anticipations of the Ontological Proof
Charles Hartshorne
In a remarkable article, Prescott Johnson (see Bibliography) seems to succeed in showing that Plato’s dialectic (in The Republic) as means to knowledge of the Good amounts to an ontological argument for the necessary existence of the Good. The lesser ideas are incapable of expressing the principle of order among themselves; in conceiving this order we are conceiving a supreme idea which therefore cannot be lacking in content for our thought. This is—says Johnson—the a posteriori element in Plato’s reasoning. In effect, it is his refutation of positivism. The supreme reality is not inconceivable. (I would here depart somewhat from Johnson by remarking that the conceivability of something is a necessary, not a merely contingent or factual, truth and that it cannot, properly speaking, be known a posteriori. But I shall not attempt to relate this consideration to Plato’s procedure.) The supreme reality is not to be treated as a mere hypothesis. Knowledge of it “requires no assumption,” and “makes no use of images, relying on ideas only.” In short this knowledge is strictly a priori. And no merely contingent existence could be thus known.
(Nor, I add, would it make sense to say of a contingent reality that it was “superior to existence,” as Plato says of the Good. Only a reality existing in an underived and necessary fashion could be to all things as the sun is to life on the earth.)
Johnson correctly defends Plato’s procedure against the Kantian criticism that the merely possible and the existent cannot differ qualitatively. In regard to the supreme conception, the merely possible is indistinguishable from the impossible. We have not to compare two states of the Good, one as nonexistent and the other as existent; for this is to treat the “beginning” or “principle” of all meaning, value, and reality as a mere possibility which might or might not be actualized. But if it can be so treated it is not the absolute principle at all, and the knowledge of it must be precisely the hypothetical knowledge which Plato contrasts with the highest knowledge.
Johnson does not discuss the relation of the Good to God. This is a difficult topic in Platonic scholarship. Perhaps one is fairly safe in saying that there are grave difficulties in either denying or asserting the identity of the Good with God. Moreover, when in the Timaeus deity is plainly under discussion, we again have ambiguity, for there we seem to confront two Gods, the ‘eternal God and the God that was to be’, or the Demiurge and the World Soul. I wish merely to suggest that Plato is wavering between classical and neoclassical theism, or between the view that deity is pure absoluteness or necessary existence and the view that deity is indeed absoluteness necessarily actualized somehow, but with the particular concrete how or actuality contingent and relative. What in Plato was an unresolved ambiguity, a wise restraint in the claim to settle basic issues, in his followers tended to become a premature and unwise resolution of the ambiguity. This unwise resolution, which oversimplifies the religious idea and gives it a fatal one-sidedness, has exacted severe penalties all through the history of thought. One of the penalties has been the failure to clarify the Anselmian problem in a permanently satisfactory manner.
It was a rather close anticipation of Anselm when Aristotle declared, “To be possible and to exist do not differ in eternal things.”1 But Aristotle came even closer:
For what is ‘of necessity’ coincides with what is ‘always’ since that which ‘must be’ cannot possibly ‘not-be’. Hence a thing is eternal if its ‘being’ is necessary: and if it is eternal, its being is necessary.2
No eternal thing exists potentially. The reason is this. Every potency is at one and the same time a potency of the opposite; for, while that which is not capable of being present in a subject cannot be present, everything that is capable of being may possibly not be actual . . . And that which may possibly not be is perishable, either in the full sense or in the precise sense in which it is said that it possibly may not be . . . Nothing, then, which is in the full sense imperishable is in the full sense [‘in respect of substance’] potentially existent (though there is nothing to prevent its being so in some respect, e.g., potentially of a certain quality or in a certain place); all imperishable things, then, exist actually.3
Some things owe their necessity to something other than themselves; others do not, but are themselves the source of necessity in other things. Therefore the necessary in the primary and strict sense is the simple; for this does not admit of more states than one, so that it cannot even be in one state and also in another; for . . . it would already be in more than one [if it were in all respects necessary]. If, then, there are any things that are eternal and immovable, nothing compulsory or against their nature attaches to them.4
Nothing is by accident perishable. For what is accidental is capable of not being present, but perishableness is one of the attributes that belong of necessity to the things to which they belong; or else one and the same thing may be perishable and imperishable, if perishableness is capable of not belonging to it. Perishableness then must either be the essence or be present in the essence of each perishable thing. The same account holds for imperishableness also; for both are attributes which are present of necessity.5
Certainly Anselm did reason partly as follows: To exist eternally is better than to exist with a temporal beginning or ending; hence God cannot be conceived in the latter fashion; but only that which could not not exist is intrinsically, or for an intelligible reason, without beginning or ending, secure in its eternity. As a Socinian theologian later put it, “that is eternal which cannot not exist.” There is no other criterion for eternal existence, since one cannot wait forever to observe that a thing always goes on existing. Not even God Himself could know it in that way.
Actually Aristotle is superior to Anselm in some respects in this matter (save only that he did not turn his insight into a proof). For one thing, he makes a clear, and virtually neoclassical, distinction between eternity or necessity of mere existence (‘in respect to substance’), and eternity or necessity with respect to all properties whatever. The former, he says, does not entail the latter. Precisely, and the neglect or underestimation of the former was the great error of classical theism, an error into which Aristotle himself fell, as is indicated in the next to last of the above quotations. The blunder was natural enough. There are: (a) things contingent or ephemeral both substantially, or as the individuals which they are, and also in the qualities not essential to their individual identity; (b) things (a thing?) existing eternally, necessarily, as the individuals which they are, but not eternal or necessary in all their properties or states; (c) as the extreme or pure case of necessity, things or a thing which could neither fail to exist nor ever in any way be other than it is. The superiority of (b) to (a) seemed clear to Aristotle (as it does to me); he apparently inferred that, by the same principle, (c) must be superior to (b). However, it is not the same principle at all. That it is better to be both contingent and necessary than to be contingent alone does not entail that it is best of all to be necessary alone. It is better for a saw to be both sharp and not sharp, the one in the blade, the other in the handle, than to be not sharp all over; but it is by no means best of all that it be sharp all over and have no handle. To lack necessity even of existence and be therefore wholly contingent is indeed a defect; but this is entirely compatible with its being also a defect to lack all contingent qualities and be wholly necessary. For, if the necessary as such is, as has been shown in this book, extremely abstract, a mere universal common factor, then to be purely necessary is to be purely abstract, totally lacking in concreteness, that is, richness of definite detail and variety.
True, Aristotle seems also to have reasoned: since ‘actuality is prior to potency’, the supremacy and ultimate priority must belong to a purely actual being devoid of potentiality for further actualization. But we saw in Part One, Secs. 4, 5, that this assumes an irrelevance of quantity to quality and also of incompossible values to the supreme value, which are anything but noncontroversial. I pass over Aristotle’s suggestion that the supreme reality must be immune to influence by others, a typical piece of Neoplatonic scorn (is not Aristotle the first Neoplatonist?) for passivity, responsiveness, sensitivity to what passes in others.
In the above quotations the Stagirite not only makes an important distinction between two ways of conceiving necessary existence, but he also (1) gives reasons for identifying modal status with temporally limited and temporally unlimited ways of existing, the contingent having being at most for some time, the necessary always, and (2) with lucid, subtle reasoning shows that such temporal-modal status is itself in all cases necessary, so that the contingent and perishable could not have been necessary or imperishable, and the necessary and imperishable could not have been perishable. This is a form of the modal reduction principle; modal status, including that of nonnecessity, is itself always necessary. And here, two thousand years in advance, is the answer to Kant’s charge that the ontological argument must assume that existence is, in general, a predicate, whereas in general it is not. Rather, either contingency (perishableness) or its negative, necessity, (imperishableness) is inherent in any predicate whatsoever: modal status is always a deducible predicate. Kant’s cultural lag on this point is two millennia. Surely Aristotle would have known what Anselm was talking about at least better than even the greatest of Gaunilo’s countless disciples.
Since neglect of the temporal aspect of modality, or the modal aspect of temporality, is a major defect of the European tradition, it is an interesting question, which I hope to pursue elsewhere, why Aristotle failed so signally to communicate his insights at this point.
Of the long and shameful story of the underestimation of Jews by Christians (in our day by communists as well), one of the least shameful but still interesting chapters is the underestimation of Philo. It is easy to say that Wolfson has exaggerated Philo’s importance; it is harder to find in medieval scholasticism a single statement about God—apart from the Incarnation and some points about the Trinity—which cannot be matched in Philo’s own words. Practically the entire religious metaphysics of fourteen centuries (including both best and worst features) is definitely Philonian. That the divine existence is necessary is repeatedly stated, as follows:
“The virtues of God are founded in truth, existing according to his essence: since God alone exists in essence, on account of which fact, he speaks of necessity about himself, saying, ‘I am that I am’.6
“ . . . the God who exists in essence, and who is duly thought of in respect of his existence . . .”7
“ . . . God who exists only in essence . . .”8
“ . . . He is full of himself, and He is sufficient for himself . . .”9
Here we have the idea of existence as an identity, therefore necessary. Recognition of existence in this superior form of sheer self-existence is not indeed new with Philo, for—besides being in Aristotle—it seems to be as old as monotheism itself, since Ikhnaton expressed it nicely, “Thou of thyself art length of life, men live through thee.” (And not of course men alone, as the grand old hymns make clear enough.) Thus the idea that God’s existence could be just another case of existence in general has always been a failure to comprehend theism. It is three millennia out of date.
The unsurpassability or perfection of God is indicated by Philo as follows:
It is impious to conceive that anything can be better than the cause of all things, since there is nothing equal to him, nothing that is even a little inferior to him; but everything which exists in the world is found to be in its whole genus inferior to God.10
. . . the living God . . . is superior to the good, and more simple than the one, and more ancient than the unity . . .11
His nature is entirely perfect, or rather God is himself the perfection, and completion, and boundary for happiness.12
I submit that these passages are at least as close to the Proslogium as anything in Augustine, who is usually cited in this connection. And they are about four centuries earlier! True, Philo apparently did not see that he had in such considerations the basis for a proof for the divine existence, but then neither did anyone else before Anselm. Augustine’s proof from the superiority of reason to all but Truth, and the identity of God with Truth, is a version of what I call the epistemic or logical proof, not of the ‘ontologica1’, which must (if the label is to be of any use) be from the idea of God itself as intrinsically connoting necessity. Nor are proofs, such as Aristotle’s, from ‘degrees of perfection’ to perfection itself ontological. To use the term so widely makes virtually any proof ontological. The essential idea is not of kinds of things, one kind implying another, but of ways of existing, and of one way as self-realizing and self-certifying, and as such alone appropriate to the all-worshipful being, hence either assertible or deniable on grounds of meaning alone.
A third (vague) anticipation, though not in our Western tradition, is found in the Taoist principle that the supreme reality (the Tao) is like water, completely without exclusive form of its own, but able to assume the form of any vessel. This makes deity a correlate of being as such, rather than one form of being instead of another. Such absolute nonexclusive flexibility or absence of competitiveness is, I have argued (in this book and elsewhere), identical with noncontingency. The principle is also suggested in the analogy employed by the ancient monists of India that space can take the forms of all the objects in space, and hence is not itself limited by any of these forms. The important thing is to see that the perfection of cognitive capacity, infallibility, is even more clearly without exclusive form, since by definition it must be able to express any form whatsoever (in knowing it). Anselm failed to achieve clarity at this point, and his Greek cast of mind made this inevitable. He was typically Western in exalting ‘masculine’ mastery, power, stability, control, being, absoluteness, while depreciating the feminine, yielding, passive, fluid—that is, becoming and relativity.
Taoism and Buddhism are closer to the truth here. But Jesus was perhaps closer still. God’s sensitivity registers the fall of the sparrow. This occurrence is a modification of his sympathetic awareness. The absolute responsiveness of universal love is purely noncompetitive, hence in its bare existence wholly noncontingent.
All genuine thought about deity must, indeed, be close to the ontological proof. For it is blasphemous to think of God as merely an additional fact, however great, merely one side of a significant alternative, rather than as the soul of factuality itself and the very basis of all alternativeness, the potential registrant of whatever value or importance either side of any disjunction can have, hence not subject to intelligible denial.
Ikhnaton (in spite of associating deity peculiarly with sun and sunlight) clearly thought of God as the strictly universal principle of meaning and value, measuring by His love all the forms of existence. He was the God of absolutely all creatures, not just of some. It is only a clarification of this to see that possibility itself must be expressive of the divine, and hence that the ‘possibility of there being no divinity’ formulates an absurdity.
The very notion of creator, introduced into philosophy in the Timaeus, implies the principle of modal equivalence just referred to. For if the reality of the Demiurge actualized a possibility capable of being unactualized then He must be Himself as much in need of a creator as anything else. Thus the Platonic, which is the oldest, formal proof for God breaks down if Anselm’s discovery is a mere sophistry.
And yet no one formulated his Proof or anything much like it before he did. Esser, in his monograph on alleged anticipations of the Proof (see Bibliography), considers a number of pre-Anselmian proofs and rightly dismisses them as not proofs from the mere idea of God. Esser ignores Philo and the most relevant passages in Plato and Aristotle; but I incline to agree with him that before Anselm there was no Ontological Proof.
Anselm’s formula for deity is perhaps less novel. Collingwood mentions some precedents in Boëthius, and he should have mentioned Philo and Augustine. (See Sec. 15,p. 250.) Nevertheless, here, too, Anselm remains distinctive. He alone puts sufficient emphasis upon the difference between greatest, or unsurpassed, in fact and not conceivably surpassable.
No one before Anselm gave so neat a formula for the divine excellence. Correctly interpreted, as to be sure he did not interpret it, it remains without a flaw, precisely as he stated it. I hold that this definition, and the deduction of noncontingency therefrom, constitutes the greatest single step forward in constructive metaphysics taken after Philo and prior to Leibniz. It is also the least understood, the most carelessly treated, by scholars.
A Strange Story
The history of discussions concerning the ontological argument might have been that of a collective inquiry into the validity of the reasoning of Prosl. II-IV, with reasonable account taken of later passages. This inquiry might also, after a few centuries perhaps, have led to the discovery of the abstract-concrete paradox as inherent, not in the Argument as such, but in classical theism, yet made more apparent by the Argument. All this might conceivably have happened.
What we find in fact is rather different: a story of prolonged debate largely, often exclusively, over the thinking of the fictitious Anselm of the Gaunilo tradition, that conveniently naive fellow who made his whole point in Prosl. II and added nothing relevant thereafter, in contrast to the historically demonstrable, keen-witted philosopher whose main point first appeared in Prosl. III, and was considerably amplified and carefully defended in still later discussions. And the last thing anyone saw clearly was the abstract-concrete paradox, the heart of the whole problem; the problem, however, not alone of the Proof, but of theism itself.
Such is the tale—‘stranger than fiction,’ though in a sense about a fiction—which we shall now tell, partly in the words of some of the chief participants. The story has at least a happy ending, for it seems to show that the long-stretched-out farce is nearing its probable denouement, and that the unconscious falsehoods about the magnificent doctor can scarcely retain their innocence, which has been their strength, much longer.
Notes
1. Physics, III, 4. 203b, 30. I owe this reference and the literal translation to my colleague A. P. Brogan. Oxford translation, “In the case of eternal things, what may be must be.”
2. De Generatione, II, 12, 338a, 1-4.
3. Metaphysics, IX, 8. 1050b. 8-18. Trans. W. D. Ross.
4. Op. cit., V, 5, l015b, 9-16.
5. Ibid., X, 10, 1059a, 0-7.
6 Works of Philo Judaeus, trans. C. D. Yonge (London, 1890), I, 282.
7 Op. cit., IV, 283.
8 Ibid., II, 28-29.
9 Ibid., p.243.
10. Ibid., I, 196f.11. Ibid., p. 229.
12. Ibid., IV, 1-2.
Source:
Charles Hartshorne, Anselm’s Discovery, pp. 139-150.
HyC