THE TWO APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE:

Philosophical and Historical Reflections on the Point of Departure of Jean Poinsot's Semiotic

John N. Deely

St. Mary's College

Notre Dame, Indiana

" We publish our position without yielding to contention or jealous rivalry, but giving ourselves to the pursuit of truth, which concerns doctrine and not persons."

" To the Reader " of the Cursus Philosophicus of Jean Poinsot. Alcalá, Spain, 1631.

" RELATIONS DO NOT exist as such; they do not constitute a mode of being; when two entities are related--whether they are related as knower and known, as father and son, as double and half, or any other way--the relation exists entitatively as an accident in each of the relata. It does not exist as something in between them, not inhering in either of them. There is, in short no inter-subjective mode of being; for everything that exists exists either as a subject (i. e., a substance) or in a subject (i. e., an accident) ."¹

This proposition, or set of propositions, proved to be, in the light of my five years (1969-1974) as Senior Fellow responsible for the direction and development of language research at the Institute for Philosophical Research in Chicago, the dialectically and philosophically crucial one for understanding (and systematically grasping the remedy for) the inveterate subjectivism and penchant toward solipsism that has beset philosophy

¹ Mortimer J. Adler, " Sense Cognition: Aristotle vs. Aquinas," The New Scholasticism, XLII (Autumn, 1968), p. 582, in reply to John N. Deely, "The Immateriality of the International as Such," in No. 2 of the same volume and journal; Adler's emphases.

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throughout its career in the national languages of modern times. For, in the course of my investigations into the philosophical literature concerning language, it came to light that in 1632, during the lifetime of Hobbes, Descartes, and Suarez, Jean Poinsot, the last philosopher, practically speaking, to hold the contrary of the above proposition up until Hegel,² was also able to demonstrate that what is at stake in this straightforward proposition is the possible convertibility of being and truth within the order of human understanding, and the successful culmination--through the systematic application to discourse of the contrast between the relative secundum dici and secundum esse--of the old medieval controversies over the "transcendental " properties of being, i. e., the properties whereby the order of the knowable includes indifferently objective elements of being and non-being so far as it falls under perception and conception.

We are confronted here with a situation that is, as Jacques Maritain well remarked, " puzzling to realize."³

Even the most advanced professors and students of philosophy today are unlikely to have encountered the name of Jean Poinsot in the course of their researches and studies.⁴ The distinction

² That is to say, the last proponent at the dawn of the national language phase of Western philosophy of the view that relations as such constitute precisely an intersubjective mode of being, existing according to what is proper to it neither as a subject nor in a subject, but as a suprasubjective means of union between (tertium quid) a subject and some thing that subject is not.

³ " It is puzzling to realize that the treasures contained in their writings "--i. e., the writings of the commentators and defenders of St. Thomas, particularly, perhaps, in Iberia, between the 13th and the 17th centuries--"have remained, for so many generations, unknown except to a very few. . . ." Jacques Maritain, letter to Yves Simon, printed as the "Preface" to The Material Logic of John of St. Thomas [i. e., Jean Poinsot] trans. by Yves R. Simon, John J. Glanville, and G. Donald Hollenhorst (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), p. v. See the " Thomistic Afterword " at the end of this present article.

⁴ Nonetheless, Poinsot, an Iberian thinker who wrote under the name " John of St. Thomas," was a figure of exceptional prominence in his day. The principal historical materials relating to Poinsot's person and life have been gathered together and analyzed in the "Praefatio Editorum" to Joannis a Sancto Thoma, Cursus Theologicus, edited by the Benedictine Monks of Solesmes, France (Paris: Desclée, 1931), Vol. I.

between what is relative secundum dici and what is relative secundum esse is hardly more familiar. Consequently, we have to do here with a philosopher and a doctrine that are, for all practical purposes, universally unknown today, and that yet rival and surpass the importance of Immanuel Kant for understanding the present philosophical situation and interpreting its historical essentials. For in revealing how and why the ancient doctrine of the relative is essentially at issue in the celebrated controversies over the objects of apprehension (and particularly in the denial of universality), while achieving for the first time a clarity in principle at the foundation and base of the ancient doctrine, Poinsot's work, for those who learn how to read it, brings into an extremely clear prepositional focus the essential features of the doctrinal mélange that spreads outward and across the centuries after 1300 from the circle of William of Ockham in what concerns the theory of knowledge and truth, providing--again for the first time--an entirely unambiguous ontological grounding for the notion of " realism." By the same stroke, Poinsot's Treatise on Signs provides the Ariadne's thread which enables us to trace in this same area the effective influences which made their way, in the period from 1600 to 1800, across the line separating the Latin phase of Western philosophizing from the national language phase of the modern period up to the present time.

I. WIEDERHOLUNG: THE TEXT AND DOCTRINAL FOUNDATIONS OF POINSOT'S TREATISE ON SIGNS.

What I refer to as Poinsot's Treatise on Signs appears embedded within a much larger Cursus Phïlosophicus entirely by the same author published in Spain in five serial volumes between the years 1631 and 1635.⁵ Within the entirety of the

⁵ The latest complete edition of this work was done in three volumes with extensive indices by B. Reiser under the title, Cursus Philosophicus Thomisticus (Turin: Marietti, 1930-1934). H.-D. Simonin, in a "Review" in the Bulletin Thomiste, III (1930-1933), p. 148, has said of Reiser's work: "Telle qu'elle se présente l'édition de Dom R. est désormais l'édition classique de Jean de St.-Thomas." See following note.

Cursus Philosophicus, however, Poinsot makes it clear that the Treatise on Signs occupies a virtually independent and entirely privileged position. This appears from a sufficiently careful analysis of the structure of the Cursus as a whole, illumined by Poinsot's remarks concerning his treatment of signs within that whole.

Ars Logica is the collective name for the first two of the five parts of Poinsot's Cursus Philosophicus. It is from the Ars Logica that the whole of the Treatise on Signs (tractatus de signis) derives.⁶ The Prima Pars Artis Logicae, published in 1631 at Alcalá, Spain, consists of an introductory logic text for beginners--called Summulae books, according to the custom of the times--followed by a series of eight " Quaestiones Disputandae " or exercises designed to illustrate some difficulties incident to the Summulae books.

The Secunda Pars Artis Logicae was published at Alcalá in 1632, and is of an altogether different character, dealing primarily with questions raised by the imperfect interrelations of truth and logical form. Whereas Part I was intended for beginning students, Part II is intended for advanced students, and indeed for the author's peers. More philosophical than logical, by modern standards, the task of Part II is "to explain--leisurely, patiently, thoroughly, and with unique skill in the selection and multiplication of standpoints--a restricted number of wonderful questions." ⁷ The readers of this Part,

⁶ In Part II of the Ars Logica, Questions 21-23 are the questions expressly devoted to the subject of signs, and it is to these three questions that Poinsot, in a special " Preface " added to the 1640 Madrid edition of Part II of the Ars Logica, expressly assigns the title, " tractatus de signis." This Preface may be found reprinted in the Reiser edition of the Ars Logica (Turin, Italy: Marietti, 1930), p. 249. All page references to Poinsot's work in subsequent notes will, without exception, be from this 1930 Reiser edition of the Ars Logica, and will include column and line references along with the page numbers.

⁷ Yves R. Simon, " Foreword " to The Material Logic of John of St. Thomas, translated by Yves R. Simon, John J. Glanville, and G. Donald Hollenhorst (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), p. xx. This volume is an English translation covering three-fifths or so of Part II of the Ars Logica, without envisioning the unique and controlling status of the theory of signs either within the Ars Logica or in relation to the Cursus Philosophicus as a whole.

in Poinsot's milieu, could all be assumed familiar with the Organon (the logical works) of Aristotle and with the major Latin writings related thereto; and it must be said that, taken as a whole, the series of 27 questions comprising Part II of the Ars Logica acquires continuity and completeness only when set explicitly in relation to the Latin translations of Aristotle's texts together with the major Latin discussions sparked by those texts all the way back to Boethius in the 6th century. This makes for enormous difficulty in reading Poinsot, because it means that 1100 years of Latin discussions of logical and philosophical questions are resumed and at issue at each point of Poinsot's work.⁸ In the particular case of the discussion of signs, fortunately, this difficulty is minimized, owing to the originality of Poinsot's standpoint, and to his conscious intention in giving it expression.

At the very beginning of the Ars Logica, in a " Word to the Reader," Poinsot draws particular attention to the originality in his handling of signs:

We have taken care to cut out [of the introductory text] an immense forest of intractable questions and a thorny thicket of sophisms. . . . The metaphysical and other difficulties from the books On the Soul which break out in the very beginning of the Summulae books from the ardor of disputants, we have removed to their proper place, and we have set forth the tractate on signs and awarenesses in Logic in relation to the Perihermenias books.⁹

 ⁸ With characteristic dead-pan, Henry Veatch, in his book, Intentional Logic (New Haven: Yale, 1952), p. ix, says of the Ars Logica: "For all its wealth, it must be admitted that this book was written in the seventeenth century, in Latin, and with what might loosely be called a thoroughly Scholastic orientation. In consequence, the basic issues and problems of logic as they appeared to John of St. Thomas are scarcely such as they would appear to be in this day and age, after Principia Mathematica and the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus."

⁹ Joannis a Sancto Thoma [i. e., Jean Poinsot], Ars Logica, new edition by B. Reiser (Turin: Marietti, 1930), p. 1: "Ut brevitatem [S. Thomae] imitaremur, immensam inextricabilium quaestionum silvam et spinosa sophismatum dumeta excidere curavimus, quae audientium mentibus onerosae et pungentes utilitatis nihil, dispendii non parum afferebant. Ad haec metaphysicas difficultates pluresque alias ex libris de Anima, quae disputantium ardore in ipsa Summularum cunabula irruperant, suo loco amandavimus et tractatum de signis et notitiis in Logica super librum Perihermenias expedimus."

Why does Poinsot regard the discussion of Aristotle's Perihermenias books as the proper context for considering the nature and function of signs? Not because of the actual content of the traditional books so named, he will explain (in his " Remarks Concerning the Books Perihermenias "), but because of the name itself, perihermenias, which means, in Latin, " concerning interpretation " (de interpretatione).

In writing his books on this subject, Aristotle (and subsequently his commentators) restricted the consideration of interpretation to the logical elements of discourse, with the result that the subject of interpretation has been (as of Poinsot's time) neither fundamentally nor adequately treated. For interpretation, being an activity coextensive with human awareness in its entirety, is far more universal than logical analysis, and indeed, being based on signs, it includes the logicians' instruments along with the many other instruments by which sense is made out of the world. Thus, if the theory of interpretation is to become transparent to itself and grounded in principle, Poinsot is saying, it must not restrict itself to logical elements as such (as in the older Aristotelian tradition) but must extend itself to include a consideration of signs taken in their entire amplitude. It is the recognition of this fact that leads Poinsot to say that, in setting his discussion of signs in relation to the Perihermenias books, he has at the same time found the proper place for inserting a Treatise on Signs into the philosophical tradition of the Latin West. Hence the distinctive cast of Poinsot's Treatise: it introduces a revolutionary viewpoint, but it does so in a conservative way. Nothing of the old tradition is lost, but it is yet made to surpass itself in the direction of its foundations.

A. The Task of Discriminating the Ground of the Terminology and Structure of the Treatise on Signs.

The order of development followed over the three questions-- or " Books," as I will refer to them--of the Treatise on Signs seems straightforward enough: " Concerning the rationale

proper to signs," Poinsot writes (642a38-b2), " there are two principal points of controversy. The first concerns the nature and definition of signs; the second concerns the division of signs, and each divided member in particular." Thus, the first "book" of the Treatise (Question 21 of Part II of the Ars Logica) deals with the ontological status or nature of signs, the second " book " (Question 22) deals with the various kinds of signs, and the third " book " (Question 23) extends the discussion of the division of signs into certain details of controversies prominent in Poinsot's time on which the theory of signs has a direct bearing.

Yet the reader who seeks to master the terms of this "straightforward " development is soon brought up short by the theoretical demands the Treatise places on the Ars Logica as a whole in order to become fully intelligible in its own right-- demands brought quickly into focus by Poinsot's preliminary remark that " this inquiry into the nature and definable character of signs depends principally on an understanding of mind-dependent being and of the category of relation," ¹⁰ coupled with his setting of the problematic for the Treatise as a whole in terms of the contrast between what is relative secundum esse and what is relative secundum dici.¹¹· With these clues alone to guide him, Poinsot leaves to his reader (and this no doubt largely explains why the Treatise so long lay hidden within the general oblivion that befell Aristotelian writings after the 17th century) the most difficult task of conceptually locating the ground and architectural conception of the Treatise as an independent whole. To accomplish this task is the aim of this first part of this article and will serve to doctrinally situate Poinsot's work. After that, we will be in a hermeneutic position to essay an historical situation of the work.

¹⁰ Poinsot, " Super Libros Perihermenias," in the Ars Logica, 642a23-29: ". . . quaestiones istae de signis . . . in hoc loco genuine introducuntur, post notitiam habitam de ente rationis et praedicamento relationis, a quibus principaliter dependet inquisitio ista de natura et quidditate signorum."

¹¹ Treatise on Signs, Book I, Question l (i. e., Ars Logica, Part II, Question 21, Article 1: see following note), 646b16-45 (partially cited in note 21 below).

B. The Textual Requirements of the Treatise on Signs as an Independent Whole.

Of the 27 " questions " comprising Part II of the Ars Logica, one Article of Question 1 and the whole of Question 2 is devoted to the topic of mind-dependent being, while the whole of Question 17 is devoted to discussing the topic of relation. A careful reading of these sections within an eye to the discussion of signs reveals that the first, second, and fourth Articles of Question 2, and the first three Articles of Question 17, provide all the terms and distinctions indispensable for following the discussion of signs in Questions 21-23 (i.e., the three " Books " of the Treatise). When I have occasion to refer to the Articles from Question 17,1 will refer to them as "Appendix A," followed by page and line numbers in Reiser's edition of the Ars Logica. Articles from Question 2 I will refer to as "Appendix B." The inclusion of these two Appendices meets all the textual requirements that the larger project of the Ars Logica imposes as a matter of strict necessity on the reader of Poinsot's Treatise on Signs.¹² From a purely conceptual standpoint these two Appendices suffice to constitute the Treatise as an independent whole vis-à-vis the Ars Logica and Cursus Philosophicus.

However, the careful reader is soon led to realize (e. g., by 287a27-3, 290a30-34, 291b1-40) that what Poinsot calls the " aliquid peculiare relationis "--the ontological peculiarity of relation in the order of existence, let us say (580a32-582b16) -- is the guiding insight for Poinsot's discussion of mind-dependent

¹² Questions 21-23, i. e., the main parts of the tractate, I will refer to, as was said in the text above, as " Books I-III," and I will refer to the Articles subdividing them as " Questions " rather than Articles, though "Article " will be retained as the name of the main sub-divisions of the material in the "Appendices." This system of reference conforms to the translation of the Treatise on Signs now being completed by myself in consultation with Ralph A. Powell for publication as an independent whole. Pending the appearance of this work, if the reader will keep in mind that all page, column, and line references to the Treatise conform, as indicated in notes 6 and 11 above, to the text of the 1930 Reiser edition of the Ars Logica, there should be no cause for confusion on the part of those pursuing any references herein given.

being and relation alike and is therefore the most fundamental notion to be grasped in embarking on his theory of signs. Thus, while the Articles from both Question 2 and Question 17 are essential to the reader of the Treatise on Signs, priority goes to the Articles drawn from Question 17. It is necessary above all to have a sure grasp of the traditional materials at Poinsot's disposal in terms of which these Articles were framed. Without a knowledge of these basic texts and controversies, the starting point of Poinsot's Treatise--namely, the assignation of sign to the class of things, ontologically relative in their opposition to transcendentally relatives--is bound to seem recondite and artificial, if not arbitrary. With a knowledge of the traditional materials involved, however, the naturalness and simplicity-- indeed, the necessary element--of Poinsot's point de départ shows all the traces of philosophical genius of the purest type at work. Let us try to see, if we can, what is at stake in Poinsot's beginning where he does.

C. The Discussion of the Relative in Ancient Greece from the Perspective of the Cursus Philosophicus.

It was in Aristotle's attempt to work out a categorial scheme for the order of mind-independent being that the notion of the relative, in the sense that proves decisive for understanding (from the standpoint of Poinsot's Treatise) the fate of Western philosophy at the dawn of modern times, first began to come into focus. Accordingly, we begin our account with that attempt.

According to the view of Aristotelian physics the natural world is comprised of " a many, each of which is itself one,"¹³ and subject to change in time. The " ones " or fundamental natural units in this scheme Aristotle called substance, and the various ways in which the being of a substance could be affected without losing its basic self-identity Aristotle called accidents,

¹³ Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book III, Chapter 4, 100 1b5-6: " all things are either one or many, and of the many each is one " : a[panta deV taV o[nta h] e}n h] pollav, w|n e}n e{kaston .

of which he himself enumerated nine. Substance and the nine accidents make up the traditional list of Aristotelian categories. Though the number of categories that ought to be listed was sometimes argued over among the important figures in the Latin West, by the time of the high Middle Ages, there was general agreement among them as to the purpose for which the Aristotelian categorial scheme had been devised, a consensus well expressed by Poinsot in the following passage:

The distinction of the categories was introduced for this, that the orders and classes of diverse natures might be set forth, to which all the things which participate some nature might be reduced; and on this basis the first thing that must be excluded from every category is mind-dependent being, because being which depends for its being on being cognized (mind-dependent being) has not a nature nor a true entity, but a constructed one, and therefore must be relegated not to a true category, but to a constructed one. Whence St. Thomas says (in q. 7, art. 9 of his Disputed Questions on Power) that only a thing independent of the soul pertains to the categories.¹⁴

Substance and its accidents thus were understood by our author in the traditional sense as constituting the categories of mind-independent ways of being. Aristotle was of the opinion that a category of " the relative " ought to be included in the list of categorial accidents, and his first suggestion for the definition of this category was as follows:

Those things are called relative which, being either said to be something else or related to something else, are explained by reference to that other thing.¹⁵

¹⁴ Ars Logica (Reiser ed.), Part II, Q. XIV, Art. 1, "Quid sit praedicamentum et quid requiratur ut aliquid sit in praedicamento," 500b36-501a2: " Et quia praedicamentorum distinctio ad hoc introducta est, ut diversarurn naturarum ordines et classes proponerentur, ad quae omnia, quae naturam aliquam participant, reducerentur, ideo imprimis secludendum est ab omni praedicamento ens rationis, quia non habet naturam neque entitatem veram, sed fictam, ideoque neque ad praedicamentum verum, sed fictum reici debet. Unde D. Thomas q. 7. de Potentia art. 9. tantum res extra animam dicit pertinere ad praedicamenta."

¹⁵ Aristotle, Categories, ch. 7, 6a36-39: Prov" ti deV taV toiau'ta levgetai, o{sa aujtaV a]per ejstiVn eJtevrwn ei\nai levgetai, h} oJpwsou'n a[llw" proV" e{teron, oi|on toV mei'zon tou'q j o{per ejstiVn eJtevrou levgetai. I have cited the translation by E. M. Edghill in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. by Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), p. 17. Cf. the translation by J. L. Ackrill, Aristotle's Categories and De Interpretatione (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963), p. 17: " We call relatives all such things as are said to be just what they are, of or than other things, or in some other way in relation to something else."

Although this definition of the category of relation seemed sound to Aristotle,¹⁶ he conceded that it presented some difficulty from the point of view of constituting a distinct category within the substance-accident scheme:

Indeed, if our definition of that which is relative was complete, it is very difficult, if not impossible to prove that no substance is relative. If, however, our definition was not complete, if those things only are properly called relative in the case of which relation to an external object is a necessary condition of existence, perhaps some explanation of the dilemma may be found.

The former definition does indeed apply to all relatives, but the fact that a thing is explained with reference to something else does not make it essentially relative.¹⁷

¹⁶ For example, he explicitly re-affirms it at ibid., 6b6-9: prov" ti ou\n ejstiVn o{sa aujtaV a{per ejstiVn eJtevrwn ei\nai levgetai, h] oJpwsou'n a[llw" prov" e{teron, oi\on o[ro" mevga levgetai proV" e{teron.

¹⁷ Categories, ch. 7, 8a28-34: eij meVn ou\n iJkanw'" oJ tw'n prov" ti oJrismoV" ajpodevdotai, h} tw'/n pavnu calepw'/n h} tw'/n  ajdunavtwn ejstiV toV dei'xai wJ" oujsiva tw'/n prov" ti levgetai. eij deV mhV iJkanw'/", ajll j e[sti taV prov" ti oi|" toV ei\nai taujtoVn ejsti tw'/ prov" tiv pw" e[cein, i[sw" a]n rJhqeivh. ti proV" aujtav. oJ deV provtero" parakolouqei' meVn pa'si toi'" prov" ti, ouj mhVn taujtovn gev ejsti tw'/ prov" ti aujjtoi'" ei\nai toV aujtaV a{per ejstiVn eJtevron levgetai. Edghill trans., loc cit. (in note 15 above), p. 22. Whatever else is to be said of this translation, in this passage and in the next one I shall quote, Edghill's rendering at least conveys in English the Greek-Latin parallel between levgetai and dicuntur (" Dans le texte grec comme dans la version latine," notes Krempel [La doctrine de la relation chez saint Thomas, p. 398], "l'ancienne définition est dominée par un double levgetai, dicuntur; la nouvelle, par eijnai, esse.") This contrast, everywhere discussed in the Latin West for over a thousand years, is much obscured, for example, in Ackrill's rendering (reference in note 15 above), pp. 22-23: " Now if the definition of relatives which was given above was adequate, it is either exceedingly difficult or impossible to reach the solution that no substance is spoken of as a relative. But if it was not adequate, and if those things are relatives for which being is the same as being somehow related to something, then perhaps some answer may be found. The previous definition does, indeed, apply to all relatives, yet this--their being called what they are, of other things--is not what their being relatives is."

What seems to take place in Ackrill's rendering is a repetition of the now long-forgotten (in the modern languages) attenuation of the Aristotelian conception of the categories introduced into the sixth century Latin West by Boethius under the Platonic construing of the categorial scheme at work in Alexander of Aphrodisias, Plotinus, and Porphyry, according to the description of Krempel: " C'est ce qui amenait déjà Alexandre d'Aphrodise (200 avant J. C., à Athènes), et plus tard Plotin, à opposer trop brutalement levgetai et ei\nai. Pour Aristote, levgetai n'est jamais un simple: on dit. Si, par principe, il commence par le mot, il finit par la chose. Les predicaments sont pour lui l'écho de la réalité. Boèce semble avoir perdu ce fait de vue quand, sous l'influence de ses prédécesseurs il accentuait outre mesure dicuntur et esse." This description by Krempel would seem to be confirmed by Gilson's evaluation of Boethius's rendering of Aristotle (La philosophie au moyen age, 2nd ed., p. 141) : " La logique de Boèce est un commentaire de celle d'Aristote, où perce fréquemment le désir de l'interpréter selon la philosophie de Platon. Ce fait s'explique parce que Boèce suit de près un commentaire de Porphyre (J. Bidez), et il explique à son tour les pullulements des opinions contraires qui s'affronteront au XII^e siècle sur l'objet de la doctrine d'Aristote, car tous les professeurs commenteront le texte de Boèce, mais alors que les uns en retiendront ce qu'il avait gardé d'Aristote, les autres s'y attacheront au contraire à ce que son auteur y avait introduit de Platon."

In any event, there is no question in Poinsot that the secundum dici involves, in principle, being according to its own exigencies for understanding and not merely a question of being spoken of in an entirely contingent or dialectical fashion. It is precisely because the categories are " l'écho de la réalité " that Poinsot's contrast between dici and esse establishes in principle the ground of the categorial interconnections. Cf. Sein und Zeit, p. 3, n. 1.

This distinction between what must be explained by reference to something else without having itself to be a relation, and what is essentially a reference to something other than that on which it is founded or based, is the first recorded glimpse of what was to become the Latin distinction within the order of relation between what is relative secundum dici and what is relative secundum esse. Relativity in the first sense characterizes not only what falls under the category of relation in Aristotle's scheme but what falls under the " absolute " categories of substance, quantity, and quality as well (categories called " absolute " from the fact that they are defined in terms of themselves without including an essential relation to something else). Outside the mind a substance and its accidents other than relations--a subject of existence in its subjective determinations, let us say--constitute the order of " absolute " and mind-independent being. Absolute beings in this sense, the constitutent structures of ontological subjectivity

though they can be defined without reference to anything else, cannot be accounted for except by reference to something else, namely, their principles and causes; and in this sense they are relative according to the way their being must be expressed in discourse, even though they are not relative according to the way they essentially have being. At the risk of getting a bit ahead of ourselves, we may note at once that such relativity, besetting as it does each of the absolute categories, is called by Poinsot transcendental,¹⁸ in line with the medieval custom of calling properties of being which are not restricted to any one category " transcendental," i. e., transcending the categorial divisions of the substance-accident scheme.¹⁹

Opposed to what is relative only according to the way its being must be expressed in discourse (secundum dici), or to the transcendental notion of relation, there is the second kind of relativity, the relativity which besets a thing according to the way it exercises existence and is essentially a reference toward another. Beings relative in this sense are the constitutent structures of ontological intersubjectivity and can neither be defined nor accounted for save in terms of what they themselves are not, namely, subjects or subjective determinations of being.

The question concerning the relative raised by Aristotle in seeking to clarify the divisions of his categorial scheme thus became, in the Latin West, the question of whether there ought to be admitted among the categories of mind-independent ways of being a category of external relation between subjects (hence categorial relation) ; or ought it to be said rather that relation in a pure form, i. e., as essentially toward another according

¹⁸ Ars Logica (Reiser ed.), 590a48-591a5: Relationes " transcendentales non sunt aliquid distinctum a re absoluta, sed vere sunt absolutae entitates; neque enim habent speciale praedicamentum, sed per omnia vagantur et sic ex sua transcendentia habent imbibi in ipsa re absoluta, non distingui."

¹⁹ E. g., Poinsot notes (Ars Logica, 594a43-b6) that St. Thomas " docet in 1. dist. 2, q. 1. art. 5. ad 2., quod res est de transcendentalibus et ideo se habet communiter ad absoluta et relativa. Ibi enim sumit rem transcendentaliter, prout est communis ad entitatem et modum." (See also note 38 below.)

to the way it has being, exists only thanks to the powers of perception and understanding?

D. The Notion of Relation as an Ontological Rationale Fully Considered.

To disengage as such the full notion of ontological relation (" relatio secundum esse ") in its properly philosophical import, it seems, was the unique privilege of Poinsot among all the Latin scholastics who, for more than 1100 years, debated the question of the relative raised by the Aristotelian texts. (Before him, however, St. Thomas had shown the surpassing theological import of the material elements comprising the notion by using them to reconcile the trinity of persons demanded by Christian faith with the unity of God insisted on by Islam and by the requirements of metaphysical wisdom; and, as we shall see more clearly in Part II of this article, the medieval discussion of the "transcendental" properties of being adumbrated the fullness of the notion of ontological relation as it is realized in Poinsot's Treatise.)

According to the tradition of Latin Aristotelianism represented by Poinsot there are relations given in a pure form, i.e., according to the way they have being, independently of our cognition as well as dependently upon it. Relation according to the way relation has being is both a category of mind-independent being in the strictest Aristotelian sense of category, with its instances called categorial relations (" relationes praedicamentales seu reales ") and something that is found existing sometimes entirely dependently upon the mind ("relationes rationis "). " The relative " includes not only transcendental relations (which are mind-independent, but not as relations) and mental or mind-dependent relations (which are truly relations but as such are in no way independent of mind) but also categorial relations which are mind-independent in their very existence truly as relations.

Like each of the other categories relation is a rationale of being, an " ontological " rationale, i. e., a rationale expressive

of the possibilities of existence. But unlike the other categories, relation as an ontological rationale embraces in its positive content both the mind-dependent and the mind-independent orders of being; and so relation may be most properly called " ontological " when it is understood that the positive content in question is indifferent to realization according to its proper being in the opposed orders of what is mind-independent and what is mind-dependent. Not that mental relations can be said to belong to the category of relation--which would be a contradiction in terms--but that mental relations are relative according to the way they have being, just as are categorial relations:

Any unreal object whatever conceived as being a subject or subjective modification of being is the mind-dependent being which is called negation; yet it will not be a mind-dependent substance, because substance itself is not conceived as a mind-dependent being patterned after some mind-independent being: rather, negations or non-beings are conceived on the pattern of substance and quantity.

But in the case of relatives, not only is there indeed some non-being conceived on the pattern of relation, but also the very relation on the part of the respect towards, while it does not exist in the mind-independent order, it is conceived or formed on the pattern of a mind-independent relation; and so that which Is formed in being, and not only that on whose pattern it is formed, is a relation: and for this reason there are in fact mind-dependent relations, but not mind-dependent substances.²⁰

Thus the notion of the ontologically relative expresses precisely the indifference of relation to its subjective ground or cause of being, or, to put it another way, expresses the full meaning of the intersubjective: indifference to subjective ground. The notion of ontological relation of intersubjectivity in the full sense, thus, depends entirely for its force on a prior

²⁰ Poinsot, Treatise on Signs, Appendix B, 581b47-582a16: " Sed hoc est ens rationis, quod vocatur negatio, non autem erit substantia rationis, cum non ipsa substantia ut ens rationis ad instar alicuius realis concipiatur, sed negationes seu non entia ad instar substantiae et quantitatis. At vero in relativis non solum aliquod non ens concipitur ad instar relationis, sed etiam ipsa relatio ex parte respectas ad, cum non existit in re, concipitur seu formatur ad instar relationis realis, et sic est, quod formatur in esse, et non solum id, ad cuius instar formatur, et ratione huius datur relatio rationis, non substantia rationis."

decision to the effect that there exist independently of the human mind relations which as such are distinct from and supraordinate to the subjective foundations upon which they nevertheless depend for their existence. For if categorial relation (" relatio realis ") in this sense is denied, only transcendental relation (or some murky equivalent) remains common to the two orders of mind-independent and mind-dependent being; and even though mind-dependent being further contains " genuine " relations, it does not contain them in a fully intersubjective way, for it does not contain them as enjoying any indifference to the subject upon which they depend for existence here and now: for this, mental relation must be itself but a mind-dependent instance of something which is also given in its positive content as such independently of the mind.

E. Ontological Relation as It Determines the Problematic in Poinsot's Discussion of Signs.

The observations in sections C and D above suffice to indicate that the fundamental option which Poinsot poses at the very beginning of his Treatise on Signs is in no way arbitrary but is rather the necessary point of departure for any systematic inquiry into the nature of signification (including linguistic signification and reference) that has become transparent to itself and grounded in principle: are signs to be regarded as primarily and essentially relative only according to the way their being must be expressed in cognition and discourse (transcendentally), or according to the way they have the being proper to them as signs (ontologically) and therefore (sometimes) independently of expression?²¹

²¹ " Quaerimus ergo, an ista formalis ratio signi consistat in relatione secundum esse primo et per se, an in relatione secundum dici seu in aliquo absoluto, quod fundet talem relationem.

". . . loquimur hic de relatione secundum esse, non de relatione praedicamentali, quia loquimur de signo in communi, prout includit tam signum naturale quam ad placitum, in quo involvitur etiam signum, quod est aliquid rationis, scilicet signum ad placitum. Et ideo praedicamentale ens esse non potest nec relatio praedicamentalis, licet possit esse relatio secundum esse iuxta doctrinam D. Thomae 1. p. q. 28. art. 1. . . ." (Treatise, on Signs, Book I, Question 1, 646b16-37.)

These two ways exhaust the possibilities of anything's being relative: if something is relative in a given respect, it must be so either transcendentally or ontologically, whether it be mind-independent or mind-dependent. From Aristotle to Charles Morris²² all theorists of signs have defined them as relative--signifying something to someone (aliquid ad aliquid). But only Poinsot, it seems, ever managed to get clear about what in principle is at stake in the fact of a sign's relativity. By contrasting ontological relation to transcendental relation he has posed the question in terms that enable him to bring together in the sign the opposed orders of mind-dependent and mind-independent being, just as they appear to be found together in our direct experience of the world.

From the standpoint of this connection the genius of Poinsot's Treatise is to see in the distinction between what is relative secundum dici and what is relative secundum esse the resources for explaining the ontological status of signs according to their characteristically peculiar indifference to the presence and absence, the being or non-being, of what they signify. The semi-autonomy discourse displays in the face of reality and the truth about things is explicable provided only that (but only provided that) we resolve the pertinence of signs to the order of relation in favor of relation according to the way it has being. Since both physical (or mind-independent: " categorial ") and mental (or mind-dependent: cognition-dependent) relations are truly relations according to the way they have being, identifying signs as ontological relations makes room for the obvious fact of stipulated signs (" signa ad placita "), without even seeming to foreclose the possibility of signs whose relation to what they signify is given independently of mind.²³ On the

²² Thus, for example, William Alston, in Philosophy of Language, (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964), p. 51, writes: "Peirce's definition may be taken as typical. sign is something that stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity ' [Collected Papers, 2.228]."

²³ Treatise on Signs, Book I, Question 1, 647b15-22: "Addimus in conclusione [signa] consistere in relatione secundum esse. . . . Et ita utimur vocabulo communi utrique relatione, et non solum agimus de relatione reali vel rationis determinate."

contrary, the discovery that signs without exception are constituted formally by ontological relations opens the way to rooting the theory of signs in mind-independent nature by the fact that, first, .some signs are as such physically related to what they signify (namely, when what they signify itself exists physically), and, second, initially stipulated or mind-dependent signs can become through custom assimilated to the world of what is natural (for a given community) and possessed in their turn of a relatively mind-independent significance.²⁴

F. Doctrinal Résumé.

The distinction between what is relative secundum esse and what is so only secundum dici is the first and most fundamental analytical couplet of Poinsot's Treatise on Signs. All the terminology playing an architectural role in Poinsot's Treatise is governed by the fundamental discovery in the order of the relative of an ontological rationale which at once divides the inter subjective from the subjective (the distinction of ontological from transcendental relation, secundum esse from secundum dici) and unites within the intersubjective the opposed orders of being existing now independently of and now dependently upon human (or animal) awareness; for it is this discovery that enables Poinsot to explain how signs enable us to transcend the sensory here and now by reason of their indifference to the mind-independent existence or non-existence of what they signify, itself a consequence of the functional equivalence in cognition of " real " or mind-independent and " unreal " or mind-dependent relations, which springs from the indifference of relation in its proper rationale to the subjective cause or ground whence it exercises existence. Understanding the Treatise is, accordingly, principally a matter of mastering the complex of detail in the working out of this extended and slippery contrast as it is verified in differing ways through application to the variety of signs considered from various points of view.

²⁴ See the Treatise on Signs, Book I, Question 2, and Book II, Questions 5 and 6.

Thus, precisely because the relative secundum esse unites under one ontological rationale the distinct orders of mind-independent and mind-dependent being (and so includes implicitly the second fundamental analytical couplet of the Treatise, the distinction between ens reale and ens rationis) ,the systematic contrast of these two terms determines the conceptual architecture of the Treatise on Signs as a whole: 1100 years of Latin philosophizing are summarized and rendered aufgehoben in this application.²⁵ Nor does it seem too much to say that Poinsot's Treatise is the first successful attempt in any language to construe in a systematic way the intricate network of contrasts that oppose these notions and give them unrestricted scope. For, between them, they divide the order of subjectivity taken in all its possible determinations (transcendental relation) from the order of intersubjectivity and public life (ontological relation) where truth and history are given

²⁵ A. Krempel traces the origin of these two expressions in the Latin West all the way back to Boethius's 6th century translation of and commentaries upon Aristotle's Categories. From that time until the 17th century Krempel finds, " le couple au nom si étrange préoccupait tous les scolastiques " : La doctrine de la relation chez St. Thomas (Paris: J. Vrin, 1952), Chapitre XVIII, " Le relativum secundum dici et le relativum secundum esse," p. 394. This chapter in particular paradigmatically illustrates the strange character of Krempel's massive and remarkable volume as a whole: a most careful and exhaustive compilation of texts on the subject of relation drawn from the entire period of Latin scholasticism, combined with a flatly unsuccessful attempt to interpret the import of the compilation philosophically. Nowhere is the philosophical barrenness of this impeccable (and invaluable) scholarly study more clearly in evidence than in Krempel's conclusion concerning the secundum esse-secundum dici couplet. " Impossible," he writes (p. 394), " de trouver une traduction satisfaisante pour les deux terms." It is hardly to be wondered at, in light of this failure, that Krempel, when he comes to interpret Poinsot (p. 412), finds (or thinks he finds, for a whole nest of misconstructions in his work come together on this point) that " à ce moment la tradition est rompue." What has actually transpired is something quite different and of another order: at this moment the latent possibilities of the tradition in the distinction in question are freed of long-standing confusions and rendered actual in their proper scope. It is not a matter of something rompue, but of something aufgehoben. And it must be said, to Krempel's credit, that, in whatever respects his interpretation falls short, it was conceived in the effort to elaborate discursively a profoundly true intuition of the scope of the difficulty: " s'il y a des cas où l'on doit remonter à l'origine et à l'original, c'est bien ici." (Krempel, p. 397.)

among men. Successful communication, whenever it occurs, and whether it transpires between men and animals without human understanding, or between men or animals and the physical world: wherever there is a " communing " between things, it occurs because and only because a pure relation-- relation according to the way relation has being--has arisen and serves as the medium of the communion. Unlike the subjects brought into union by such a relationship, the relationship as such is an intersubjective reality: regardless of its subjective cause--mind or nature--its positive content remains unchanged. It extends the boundaries of existence over and beyond the boundaries of the subjective here and now, mediating (in the case of real existents) a trans-subjective contact and union between otherwise isolated members of the material world. And because of the ontological indifference relation enjoys towards its subjective ground, this extension beyond subjectivity takes place sometimes (the case of signa naturalia) along lines drawn by nature, sometimes (the case of signa ex consuetudine) along lines drawn by the customs of a community, and sometimes (the case of signa ad placita) along lines creatively drawn by the free exercise of genius (or perhaps the influx of a spiritual intuition, or even a divine inspiration) --a pattern which may in its turn become naturalized by customs to contribute to the historical achievement of humanity expressed in a privileged line of transmission, a traditio in the highest sense.²⁶

²⁶ These remarks suffice to indicate the dependence upon the terms of the secundum esse-secundum dici contrast of Poinsot's division of signs drawn from the standpoint of the causes habilitating them to what they signify into natural, customary, and stipulated. Poinsot has a second and more celebrated division of signs, drawn this time from the standpoint of how a given sign functions in cognition and discourse, according as it is itself first of all an object of conscious awareness (an objectified sign, let us say), or as it is not itself first of all an object of conscious awareness (an unobjectified sign). Signs of the former sort he calls instrumental signs, signs of the latter sort (concepts, but as including memories and imaginations) he calls formal signs. Because of the interest this division has occasionally sparked here and there in contemporary discussions (e.g., see the references in notes 93 and 94 below), and because of the reliance upon it of even the provisional and primitive Institute schema for the treatment of the subject of language (e. g., cf. M. J. Adler, The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes [New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1967], p. 320 n. 8, p. 327 n. 10, p. 331 n. 11), it may be useful to note that this distinction too depends for its being rightly understood on the secundum esse-secundum dici contrast, in the following manner.

The distinction between the subjective means of objectification intrinsic to a cognizing power as signs that need not themselves be cognized in order to function in awareness (formal signs), and the objective means of communication extrinsic to a cognitive power as signs that must be themselves cognized in order to function in awareness (instrumental signs), is a distinction based in its proper intelligibility on the fact that, since the ontological relation constitutive of signifying respects the signified object directly and a cognitive power only indirectly, the direct relation of sign to cognitive power can be merely transcendental and thereby can be entirely intrinsic to the cognitive power and the subjectivity of the knower, without the signifying as such (the formal rationale whereby the sign functions to present another than itself) being in any way affected. It is due to this fact that a concept, a " quality " and " inhering accident," as such bound up with the subjectivity and individuality of the knower hic et nunc, can yet serve as such to found an ontological relation to an object outside of the subject, by which relation the external object is made present in cognition even though the foundation of that relation itself remains unobjectified in that same cognition and intrinsic to it. "A sign is formal or instrumental," i.e., intrinsic or extrinsic, unconscious or conscious for its immediate user, Poinsot says simply, " by reason of the fundament of the sign-relation itself but not on the part of the relation " (684b11-14). On the part of the relation itself the sign is simply ontological; and so it is that Poinsot is able to reconcile in the being proper to signs (whereby they "draw the order of the cognizable to the order of the relative") the subjectivity of our means of knowing with the intersubjective character of our objects of knowledge, by showing that these subjective means do not interpose themselves between conscious awareness and being, provided we understand " being " as it includes mind-dependent as well as mind-independent patterns of actuality (praedicamenta vera et ficta) and provided we understand that both the signs that need not themselves be cognized and cannot be observed under any circumstances except in their effects on the sensible patterns in perception (formal signs) and the signs that are objects first of all (instrumental signs) can function as natural signs even when what they signify is itself unreal, by virtue of their transcendental character as foundations in a subject for the rationale of the relative indifferent in its positive content to the source of its exercise (that is, the rationale of the ontological, not of the transcendental, relative.)

II. THE HISTORICAL SITUATION OF POINSOT'S TREATISE ON SIGNS.

In the English-speaking world no name is more closely associated with the theory of signs than the name of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) ,²⁷ Now Peirce was one of the most learned

²⁷ " Like Aristotle," writes T. A. Goudge, The Thought of C. S. Peirce (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1950), p. 137, Peirce "saw that symbols are the medium through which the rationality in the universe must be expressed and communicated." The facts making this so " prior to Peirce's day," Goudge allows, " had never been systematically investigated," and Peirce " was thus forced to become the founder of a new discipline."

Charles Morris, in his book, Signs, Language, and Behavior (New York: George Braziller, 1955), p. 287, states flatly that " Peirce was the heir of the whole historical philosophical analysis of signs."

" Many thinkers--most notably C. S. Peirce--have supposed," writes William P. Alston in the article, " Sign and Symbol," for Edwards' Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Free Press, 1967), Vol. 7, p. 438, that all the different kinds of signs " are species of a single genus, for which the term ' sign ' can be employed."

Writing in the same volume of the Encyclopedia on " Semantics, History of," p. 395, Norman Kretzman asserts that Peirce " went much further than anyone before him had tried to go toward the development of a completely general theory of signs."

philosophers of recent times, whose background was by no means confined to the national language phase of Western philosophy, as he himself tells us:

From Kant, I was led to an admiring study of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, and to that of Aristotle's Organon, Metaphysics, and psychological treatises, and somewhat later derived the greatest advantage from a deeply pondering perusal of some of the works of medieval thinkers, St. Augustine, Abelard, and John of Salisbury, with related fragments from St. Thomas Aquinas, most especially from John of Duns (Duns being the name of a then not important place in East Lothian), and from William of Ockham.²⁸

Few remarks could be better used to illustrate the oblivion into which Poinsot's 17th century work on signs fell, therefore, than Peirce's description of the situation in which he found himself in the opening decade of the 20th century as regards his attempt to work out a general doctrine of signs:

I am, as far as I know, a pioneer, or rather, a backwoodsman, in the work of clearing and opening up what I call semiotic, that is, the doctrine of the essential nature and fundamental varieties of

²⁸ Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931-1938; Vols. I-VI edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, Vols. VII-VIII edited by Arthur W. Burks), Vol. I, paragraph 560, i.e., 1.560 according to the standardized practice of giving the volume and paragraph numbers separated by a decimal when citing Peirce's Collected Papers.

possible semiosis for signifying]; and I find the field too vast, the labor too great, for a firstcomer.²⁹

It is unfortunate in some ways at least that Peirce (to say nothing of the students of Semiotic who came after him: Cf. Note 27 above) did not know that his was anything but the first attempt to overcome the " beastlike superficiality and lack of generalizing thought [that] spreads like a pall over the writings of the scholastic master of logic "³⁰ in the early Latin phase of the modern period.³¹ Poinsot's historical situation in this regard, as we shall see, gives the philosophical view expressed in the Treatise on Signs a unique importance for interpreting the history of philosophy both prior to and after the crucial 17th century--and including the Peircean effort to re-establish a systematic view of signifying.

What seems to me called for first of all is a clarification, in

²⁹ Ibid., 5.488.

³⁰ Ibid., 1.561. One is reminded of Gilson's query: "If Ockham was an Aristotelian, and St. Thomas Aquinas an Aristotelian, and perhaps even Aristotle an Aristotelian, this at least remains to be explained: how is it that Ockham's ultimate conclusions are so completely destructive of those of Aristotle as well as those of St. Thomas Aquinas? " (The Unity of Philosophical Experience [New York: Scribner's, 1937], p. 64.)

³¹ Despite his wide-ranging forays into Latin scholasticism and the attraction he found in Scotist thought (see his Collected Papers, 1.560)--which may help to explain the fantastic complexity of Peirce's scheme of divisions of signs as compared with Poinsot's--Peirce seems to remain wholly a son of the modern tradition in his basic creative inspirations. In his essential definition of the sign Peirce does not seem to envisage the systematic difference Poinsot demonstrates between representation and signification but speaks of signs as if they were " representamens " simply (e. g., see 2.228), with the result that his notion of the " interpretant," unlike Poinsot's formal sign, readily lends itself to the construction it receives in the work of Morris and Osgood, where it is explained (in Poinsot's terms) as something only transcendentally relative. In his approach to the subject of signs through categories he remained entirely within the Kantian conception of categories as dependent on formal logic (see Collected Papers, 1.561). Finally, where Poinsot sees logic as subordinate to the theory of signs as one level and type of interpretation among others, Peirce simply extends logic " to embrace all the necessary principles of semiotic " (Collected Papers, 4.9), in this perhaps showing a Hegelian tendency to equate interpretation tout court with a sufficiently sophisticated logical construction.

terms of the development of philosophy between Poinsot and the present, of the fundamental option which Poinsot poses at the very beginning of his Treatise, the need for a choice between regarding signs as primarily and essentially relative only according to the way their being must be cognized or expressed (transcendentally), or according to the way they have the being proper to them as signs (ontologically) and therefore (sometimes) independently of expression.

Yet this choice itself depends for its recognition and possibility, as Poinsot shows and as we have seen, on a prior decision concerning the nature and reality of the relative as it belongs to the order of mind-independent being. In this, Poinsot advances the issue a step beyond his later contemporary, John Locke, who, having set himself " to examine the extent and certainty of our knowledge," soon enough " found it had so near a connexion with words that, unless their force and manner of signification were well observed, there could be very little said clearly and pertinently concerning knowledge." ³² Thus Locke had already uncovered for modern thought the decisive connection between signs and knowledge, and no insight was to exercise greater influence over the immediate development of philosophical thought in both England and Europe; but it was the privilege of Poinsot to see in exactly what way the connection between knowledge and being is also decisively at stake in the explanation of signifying, though this insight of Poinsot's is traceable after Locke mostly by its absence.

We begin our attempt to historically situate the philosophical substance of Poinsot's Treatise, therefore, with a sketch of the history in the Latin West of the discussion of whether there are pure relations in the world, existing as such dependently upon but supraordinate to and really distinct from their foundations in material subjects. It was in the discussion of this question, according to the terms of Poinsot's theory, that the way was

³² John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book , Chapter 9, par. 21. (Vol. II of the 1894 Fraser/Oxford Press edition, p. 118.)

prepared at the dawn of modern times for the split between being and intelligibility that received its classic systematic formulation in Kant and which has perpetuated itself down to our times as the characteristic heritage of philosophy after Locke and Descartes but which is already implicit in any view of signs (and therefore of concepts) as primarily relative in a transcendental rather than in an ontological way. It is this split for which Poinsot's theory of the sign is the unique remedy. What is at stake in the contrast between the relative secundum esse (or ontologically relative) and the relative secundum dici (or transcendentally relative) as Poinsot makes of it the foundation of his Treatise is nothing less than the classical medieval thesis, ens et verum convertuntur. It is a question of being able to explain the apparent intersubjectivity of objects in discourse (whereby they are referrable indifferently to the self and to others) and their partial coincident identity with mind-independent beings, or having to explain all this away.

A. The Discussion of Mind-Independent Relation in the Latin West up to Poinsot.

Richard McKeon and others have well pointed out that an across-the-board influence of Aristotle did not make itself felt in philosophy until after the translations into Latin of the whole range of his writings in the 12th and 13th centuries. Thus, it is to a very late period (1250-1265 particularly) that van Steenbergen applies the name, " Latin Aristotelianism."³³ Yet, as the exhausting textual surveys of Krempel show,³⁴ in what concerns the relative and its possible foundations for the theory of knowledge and truth, " Latin Aristotelianism " comprises the entire period from Boethius's 6th century translation

³³ Fernand van Steenberghen, Aristotle in the West (Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1955), pp. 147-197.

³⁴ See A. Krempel, La doctrine de la relation chez St. Thomas. Exposé historique et systématique (Paris: Vrin, 1952), particularly Chapitre XVIII, " Le relativum secundum dici et le relativum secundum esse." (As we have had occasion to remark in note 25 above, Krempel's " exposé historique " is considerably more satisfactory than his "exposé systématique.")

of and commentaries upon Aristotle's Categories to Poinsot's masterful Ars Logica of the early 17th century. From Boethius on the question of whether there are in nature relations given as such independently of cognition and mind was commonly discussed in the West, and generally, with a few exceptions, this question was resolved in the affirmative. By the close of the 13th century consensus had it that there are relations in the world existing; as such dependently upon but supraordinate to and really distinct from their subjective foundations in things. This consensus was first challenged effectively in the work of William of Ockham (c. 1300-1350), which gave rise to a movement called nominalism--" a term which does not at all serve to define it "³⁵--whose partisans were also known as " terminists " terministae) and " moderns " (moderni) .³⁶ Complex as the movement was, it was united in its denial of the mind-independent reality of relations,³⁷ a denial to which Suarez had attached by Poinsot's day the weight and influence of his Disputationes Metaphysicae. According to this view of " modern " Latin Aristotelianism, in the order of mind-independent being as such, there are only absolute subjects with their individual determinations. Relativity in the proper sense of something essentially relative arises among these subjects only as a result of our perceptions and attempts to explain things. This order of being--the order of being which does

³⁵ " Nous pénétrons ici," writes Gilson (La philosophie au moyen age, 2nd ed., p. 657), " sur un terrain doctrinal mal connu, extrêmement complexe et dont on sait du moins déjà ceci, que le terme de nominalisme ne suffit aucunement à le définir."

³⁶ Ibid., pp. 656-657.

³⁷ " Les noms dont on désignait au XIV^e siècle les partisans des anciennes et ceux de la nouvelle doctrine, supposent que l'on traçait entre eux une ligne de démarcation extrêmement nette," writes Gilson (ibid., p. 656). This is the most fundamental such line suggested by Poinsot's Treatise, and one that, in the context of present considerations, gives an entirely new dimension to Jacques Maritain's contention that "A deep vice besets the philosophers of our day, whether they be neo-Kantians, neo-positivists, idealists, Bergsonians, logisticians, pragmatists, neo-Spinozists, or neo-mystics. It is the ancient error of the nominalists." (The Degrees of Knowledge, trans. from the 4th French ed. under the supervision of Gerald B. Phelan [New York: Scribners, 1959], p. 1.)

not depend for its existence on being cognized: the mind-independent order of being--reveals itself as relative according to the way its being must be expressed in discourse; but apart from the work of perception and discourse, there is nothing of relative being in a way that extends beyond subjectivity. The relative, on this view, is divided, in effect (and always allowing for idiosyncrasies in sophisticated terminologies), between what Poinsot calls transcendental relations, which are not truly relations according to their way of being independently of the mind, and mental relations, which are truly relations but as such are in no way independent of the mind: there is a mode of being which is a relation according to the way it has being, but this mode is given existence only by the mind: it is not an ontological rationale. Relation according to the way it has being belongs exclusively to the order of mind-dependent being.

Thus, by the time of Poinsot's publication in 1632 of his Ars Logica, Part II, the medieval consensus in this matter had given way to a clear opposition within the ranks of the Latin Aristotelians:

Those at one extreme think that relations are not distinguished on the side of mind-independent being from their fundaments, but only by the mind. This position is traditionally ascribed to the Nominalists, against whom we argued in Article 1. Others, however, who admit categorial relations against those Nominalists, follow this opinion concerning a mind-independent distinction from the fundament. Thus Suarez in his Disputationes Metaphysicae, disp. 47, sec. 2. And others at the opposite extreme distinguish all categorial relations from their fundaments mind-independently, which the Thomists generally follow, although some distinguish the relation from the fundament as a thing from a thing, others only as a mode.³⁸

³⁸ Poinsot, Ars Logica, Part II, Q. 17, Art. 4, "Utrum Relatio Distinguatur a Parte Rei a Suo Fundamento," 591a6-23: " Circa hanc ergo difficultatem divisi sunt auctores. Quidam in uno extremo existimant relationes non distingui a parte rei a suis fundamentis, sed solum ratione; quod Nominalibus tribui solet, contra quos egimus art. 1. [i.e ., the Treatise on Signs, Appendix B, Article 1], Aliqui tamen, qui contra illos admittunt relationes praedicamentales, sententiam istam sequuntur de distinctione rationis a fundamento. Ita P. Suarez disp. 47. Metaph. sec. 2. Et alii in alio extremo omnes relationes praedicamentales realiter distinguunt a suo fundamento, quod communiter thomistae sequuntur, licet aliqui distinguant relationem a fundamento ut rem a re, alii solum ut modum."

Here Poinsot clearly identifies modal distinction as a type of real distinction. Here then is clear proof of the unreliability of Krempel's entire study of relation so far as it concerns Poinsot; for Krempel writes (La Doctrine de la Relation chez Saint Thomas, p. 270) : " Sous l'influence de saint Albert et surtout de Boèce la plupart des thomistes primitifs, tel Hervé de Nédellec et Nicolas Trivet, rejetèrent la distinction réele entre la relation accidentelle et sou fondement absolu. De même Gilles de Rome, les nominalistes, Suarez, et Jean de saint Thomas." Nor is there a trace of Boethian influence in Poinsot's fundamentally and unquestionably Thomistic conception of the categories.

Outside what Poinsot here calls the " Thomist " line, the position of Ockham and Suarez was universally adopted by the figures who exercised the controlling influence over the transition in the 17th and 18th centuries from Latin philosophizing to philosophical discourse in the new national languages. Whether we look to the work of Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume in England, or to the work of Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, and Kant on the Continent, we find the unanimous adoption of the view of Suarez and Ockham denying the reality in nature of mind-independent relations as such.

B .Poinsot as Watershed of the Philosophical Tradition.

This puts into an entirely new perspective what Randall well calls--despite his own work embodying the results of several· decades of research in the area--" that least known period in the history of Western philosophy, the transition from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries, when modern philosophy is conventionally supposed to have begun."³⁹ The " essential continuity between medieval and modern philosophy " that increasingly impressed Randall "ever since the early studies of Gilson on Descartes "⁴⁰ does not at all obtain at the level of ultimate philosophical understanding of the foundations in the order of the relative for the medieval theory of knowledge and of truth as convertible with being. For Poinsot's theory

³⁹ John Herman Randall, Jr., The Career of Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), Vol. I, " Foreword," pp. vii-viii.

⁴⁰ Ibid., p. viii.

of signs--contemplated and crafted over a period of about 30 years in the very heart of Iberia--precisely extends to the means of knowledge (the instruments whereby objectivity is structured in cognition, let us say) St. Thomas's use of the ontological rationale of the relative to explain truth as a property of being, i. e., the convertibility of ens and verum.⁴¹

This extension is impossible within the confines of the modern tradition. Having only the transcendental rationale of the relative with which to explain the connection of being and truth, in the terms of Poinsot's theory, the modern tradition is without resources for explaining the possibility of even the most limited escape from the basic condition of subjectivity as something closed upon itself.⁴² The ontological relative does allow for intersubjectivity as a rationale of being equiprimordial with subjectivity, and, as realized in the particular case of signs actually manifesting in cognition what they signify, does explain the intersubjective character of discourse and the public character of objects both real and unreal. Discourse is intersubjective and objects of awareness are public, in principle because the means or instruments of discourse and objectification are ontologically relative as signs, not transcendentally relative, and so " do not pertain to the order of the cognizable absolutely, but relatively and ministerially,"⁴³ i. e., in such a way as to

⁴¹ See Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate, Q. 1, art. I. What Maurer says of " Renaissance Scholasticism " (in his Medieval Philosophy, p. 347) --that " with the exception of legal and political theory it contributed little to the advancement of learning," and that " it did not even grasp with exactness and profundity the most personal doctrines of St. Thomas Aquinas "--may well be true of Suarez, but, in light of the above, how can it be said of Poinsot? The answer is that it cannot.

⁴² For, as we saw above, on the view that only transcendental relation is common to the two orders of mind-independent and mind-dependent being, even though mind-dependent being further contains genuine relations, it does not contain them in a fully intersubjective way, for it does not contain them as enjoying an indifference to their subjective ground. For this, mental relation must be itself but a mind-dependent instance of something which is also given in its positive content independently of the mind.

⁴³ Treatise on Signs, Book I, Question 2, 663a28-34: " ratio signi cum non consistit in ratione obiecti absolute, sed substitutionis ad alterum, quod supponitur esse objectum seu signatum, ut representetur potentiae, non pertinet ad genus cognoscibilis absolute, sed relative et ministerialiter."

be able to manifest otherwise than in terms of their objective self alone,⁴⁴ and otherwise than in terms of the physical presence or absence of objects signified. If signs are not ontologically relative, however, they do not pertain to the order of the cognizable in a ministerial capacity first of all, but in an objective capacity. The grounds for Poinsot's distinction, first, between formal and instrumental signs (i. e., between concepts, and objects serving to signify), and second, between instrumental signs which are founded in nature and instrumental signs which are founded in custom or stipulation, are entirely removed. Being transcendentally relative, concepts, even as signs, would be determinative of rather than .specified by and subordinate to their objects; nor would they be mind-independently distinct from the subjective being of the knower as closed upon itself. There could be no formal signs in Poinsot's sense, for being cognized would pertain to the rationale as well as to the exercise of a sign; being formed by the mind and being constituted in objective existence would be everywhere and at all points the same.⁴⁵ There would still be signs founded on custom and stipulation; but no signs founded on nature as something knowable in itself given with and by the objects of experience. Whatever necessity human understanding might think it discerns among objects would perforce be the result either of custom alone, or of custom together with some hidden mechanisms of understanding which determine thought along lines inscribed in and prescribed by an order of the " things-in-themselves," i. e., the order of things which are absolutely other than the objects presented in consciousness by our concepts or discussed with our fellows through signs.⁴⁶

⁴⁴ See the Treatise on Signs, Book I, Question 1, esp. 695b5-696b16; and Jacques Maritain, The Degrees of Knowledge, pp. 119-120. See also note 26 above.

⁴⁵ Just as it became for each one of the British empiricists and Continental rationalists. See, in particular, John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Introduction, par. 8 (Fraser ed., Vol. I, p. 32).

⁴⁶ This line of thought, it seems clear, is what is at stake in Chomsky's well-known study, Cartesian Linguistics (New York: Harper and Row, 1966).

In the choice between signs as ontologically relative or signs as transcendentally relative one chooses between the acceptance or denial of being and truth as convertible; but in choosing to deny the mind-independent reality of relation as distinct from and supraordinate to its fundament, one perforce excludes the very notion of an ontological relative in the sense required to reconcile the medieval doctrine of transcendental truth with the dependence of objects in their cognized being on means of objectification rooted in the subjectivity of the being who knows.

Among those in the modern tradition conscious of the consequences of excluding relation as an ontological rationale realized independently of human understanding few were more conscious than William of Ockham himself. And it seems safe to say that the entire structure of Book III of Poinsot's Treatise was conceived as the philosophical counter to what Gilson called " Ockham's master stroke," ⁴⁷ namely, the perception that the problem of removing entirely the character of relation as an ontological rationale " could not be solved unless a new classification of the various types of knowledge was first substituted for the old one,"⁴⁸ specifically, a classification beginning with our experience of the difference between cognition of things present and absent to sense. " Hence his division of knowledge into abstractive and intuitive, terms that had already been used before him, but to which he gave a new turn and was to use in a new way." ⁴⁹

This last remark I apply to Poinsot as well as Ockham; for Poinsot did not simply restore this division of knowledge to its foundation in Scotus's pre-Ockhamite usage.⁵⁰ Rather, he re-thought

⁴⁷ Etienne Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience (New York: Scribner's, 1937), p. 68.

⁴⁸ Ibid.

⁴⁹ Ibid., pp. 68-69. See also Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (New York: Random House, 1955), pp. 489-491.

⁵⁰ For Poinsot and Scotus alike intuitive knowledge requires physical presence on the part of the object apprehended as such. But, for Scotus, abstractive knowledge prescinds from the existence or non-existence of its object, whereas for Poinsot abstractive awareness prescinds only from physical presence in perception, not necessarily from existence. These remarks may suffice for here, but a detailed comparison of Scotus and Poinsot on these points should eventually be made.

thought (or rather: he projected a re-thinking of) the experience on which it is based, entirely in terms of the systematic implications of the identification of signs as ontologically relative in rationale. It is because concept as signs are ontologically relative that they are able to mediate between the transcendental relations of objects to the order of mind-independent being (on the one side) and to the order of what depends on cognition for its being (on the other side), and to unite in the object the divisions relative to both orders--the order of praedicamenta vera et ficta simul.

Poinsot shows that the foundations for the prior possibility of critical truth as the conformitas intellectus ad rem lie in the ontological peculiarity of the relative as something realizable as such in the order of mind-independent existence.⁵¹ With his two divisions, one of natural signs into formal and instrumental, and one of instrumental signs into natural, stipulated, and customary, both founded on the contrast between the ontologically and the merely transcendentally relative as explaining the presence of non-being in cognition and the mediating role of custom in structuring the apprehensive relations between human understanding and mind-independent being, Poinsot may be said to have provided, for the first time, and at the very end of a tradition founded on an 1100 year old consensus on the reality of relation as an intersubjective union, a metaphysical apparatus for analysis sufficiently refined and delicate (" ens minimum, scilicet, relatio "⁵²) to accommodate transcendental truth to history. At the very time when the

⁵¹ Thus Poinsot's theory at once answers Heidegger's central question in Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (1954) and provides the foundations in ancient ontology required to ground in principle Heideggers's anti-constructivist view that (Sein und Zeit, p. 62) " Im Sichrichten auf . . . und Erfassen geht das Dasein nicht etwa erst aus seiner Innensphäre hinaus, in die es zunächst verkapselt ist, sondern es ist seiner primären Seinsart nach immer schon ' draussen ' bei einem begegnenden Seienden der je schon entdeckten Welt."

⁵² Thomas Aquinas, In I Sent, dist. 26, q. 2 ad 2. Cf. J. Maritain, The Degrees of Knowledge, p. 112.

medieval consensus entirely gave way in modern thought to the nominalist or Ockhamite tradition on the non-reality of relation (as transmitted through the work of Suarez, Hobbes, and Descartes within Poinsot's very lifetime; and as removing the foundation of truth--its formal or categorial foundation--in the order of mind-independent being as such), Poinsot was achieving in the older tradition the first entirely systematic clarification of the ontological foundations in relation for the possibility of truth as a conformity known in the structures of objectivity between thought and things, and of communication as an escape from subjectivity equiprimordial with subjectivity itself. Historically and philosophically, Poinsot's Treatise stands astride the dividing line that separates the early Latin phase of the modern period (Ockham to Suarez) from its national language phase (Descartes and Hobbes to the present). It is this fact that gives the philosophical view expressed in the Treatise on Signs a unique importance and heuristic value for interpreting the history of philosophy posterior as well as prior to the crucial 17th century.

C. The Modern Tradition up to Kant.

Hobbes spoke for the fundamentally new (and Ockhamite) way philosophy was to take in England, we may say, when he wrote in his Philosophia Prima: " De Relatione autem non ita censendum est, tamquam ea esset accidens aliquod diversum ab aliis Relati accidentibus, sed unum ex illis, nempe, illud ipsum secundum quod fit comparatio." ⁵³ The implications of this view in the West for the grounds of knowledge and the understanding of signs were first put to work systematically in the national languages, it seems, with the appearance in 1690 of John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

⁵⁸ Thomas Hobbes, Opera Philosophica, Quae Latine Scnpsit, Omnia (Amsterdam: Joannes Blaev, 1668), Vol. I, Caput 11, par. 6, p. 71: "Concerning relation, however, it must not be thought to exist in such a way as to be diverse from the other accidents of the related thing, but as one of them, namely, that very one according to which a comparison is made." Cf. the Treatise on Signs, Appendix A, Article 1, 573b44-574a7.

 page 889

Here, the consequences of choosing the transcendental alternative to Poinsot's answer concerning the rationale constitutive of signs begin to come into the open, for here for the first time a systematic work appears devoted to exploring the structures of signs and cognition on the supposition that " ideas of modes and relations are originals, and archetypes; are not copies, nor made after the pattern of real existence, to which the mind intends them to be conformable, and exactly to answer."⁵⁴

Now there is no doubt that we experience things as connected with one another in various ways. But if there are no true relations save those our mind makes, on what grounds do we experience these connections? Locke, it must be said, failed to face this question in an entirely consistent way and introduced as a result many inconsistencies into his Essay.

It was left for Hume to remove these inconsistencies, by giving, with his Treatise of Human Nature in 1739, the first of the two possible answers (within the confines of the modern tradition) to why we connect objects in our experience:

Nature, by an absolute and uncontrollable necessity, has determin'd us to judge as well as to breathe and to feel; nor can we any more forbear viewing certain objects in a stronger and fuller light, upon account of their customary connexion with a present impression, than we can hinder ourselves from thinking as long as we are awake, or seeing surrounding bodies, when we turn our eyes towards them in broad snshine.⁵⁵

This certainly improves upon Locke's contention " there is nothing more required " than that relations have reality " only in the minds of men." ⁵⁶

⁵⁴ John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Chap. 31, par. 14 (Fraser ed., Vol. I, p. 512).

⁵⁵ David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. by L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon, 1946), Book I, Part IV, Section 1, p. 183.

⁵⁶ John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Chap. 30, par. 4 (Fraser ed., Vol. II, p. 449-500) : " Mixed modes and relations, having no other reality but what they have in the minds of men, there is nothing more required to this kind of ideas to make them real, but that they be so framed. . . ."

To Poinsot's question: " How does understanding form pure respects if it has only absolute things (i.e., transcendental relations) as the pattern on which to form them?," ⁵⁷ Hume can now answer: if anything further be required, as Locke doubted, the intervention of customs in our perceptions supplies that requirement.

Poinsot has no doubt of the correctness of Hume's contention that custom intervenes to structure the relations we directly perceive in and among objects. In simple awareness, he writes, " we apprehend many things not through proper concepts but through connotative ones."⁵⁸ Indeed, it is on this ground that he explains the incorporation into nature of patterns of non-being through the transformation of free creations into customary institutions by the use men make of them in everyday life.⁵⁹ It is on this ground too that he explains how language in use becomes a Lebensform, wherein stipulation, which belongs to the order of non-being according to its foundation or direct ground in subjectivity, is sensibly transformed into custom, whereby the element of stipulated non-being is indirectly naturalized and made perceptible in the order of instrumental signs.⁶⁰ But, in Poinsot's scheme, the formal recognition in actu exercito of mind-dependent relations as such by human understanding, whereby alone stipulation itself first becomes possible,⁶¹ also provides the resources for critically distinguishing among even customary associations those which are also connections

⁵⁷See the Treatise on Signs, Appendix A, Article 1, 575a25-32: "Quomodo intellectus puros respectus format, si non habet nisi res absolutas seu relationes secundum dici, ad quarum instar eas formet? Erunt ergo mera figmenta relationes ab intellectu formatae, cum non habeant in re puras et veras relationes, ad quarum instar formatus."

⁵⁸ Simplex apprehensio " non semper apprehendit rem, ut est in se, quasi numquam ad instar alterius, cum plura apprehendamus non per proprios conceptus, sed per connotativos." Treatise on Signs, Appendix B, Article 3, 305b39-43.

⁵⁹ See the Treatise on Signs, Book II, Question 6, esp. 721b27-40.

⁶⁰ Cf. Treatise on Signs, Book II, Question 6, 719b15-36 and 722a11-24, with Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. by G. E. M. Anscombe (3rd ed.; New York: Macmillan, 1958), p. 88, pars. 240-242, esp. 241.

⁶¹ Cf. Treatise on Signs, Appendix B, Article 3, 305b19-25; Book I, Question 6, 685b29-32.

realized independently of custom (and so of human understanding) and those which are only connections realized through custom; because, for Poinsot, the discrimination of the mind-dependent element in objective relations presupposes that relation in the ontological sense, i. e., as including mind-independent relations cognized as such before being recognized as such in their contrast to mind-dependent relations, has already been given in the line of being as first known (ens ut primum cognitum). There is room thus in Poinsot's theory for the further difference between customary signs, i. e., signs naturalized in experience, and natural signs simply speaking, i. e., signs connected with what they signify antecedently to and independently of their appearance as associated within human experience.⁶²

Poinsot's theory achieves in this way a connection and commercium between mind-dependent and mind-independent elements of objective structure knowable as such because his theory of signs as relations enables any given sign to " take on something of the entitative order,"⁶³ even though only some signs have this entitative dimension immediately from the fact that cognizability itself is something mind-independent in the order of the relative (ens ut verum fundamentaliter) .^63a

But such discrimination is impossible for Hume, because it contradicts the premise that relations as such have their being entirely from the work of human understanding. Consequently, where Poinsot explains the discrimination between natural and customary elements on the grounds of the ontological rationale proper to relation whereby non-being becomes a functional and structural element in our direct experience of objects, Hume is obliged to explain this discrimination away as a natural illusion.

'Tis natural for men, in their common and careless way of thinking, to imagine they perceive a connection betwixt such objects as they

⁶² See the Treatise on Signs, Book I, Question 6, 719b8-11 and 719b37-720a11.

⁶³ Treatise on Signs, Book I, Question 2, 663a35-36.

^63a Cf. Treatise on Signs, Book I, ch. 2, 657a39-658b29.

have constantly found united together; and because custom has render'd it difficult to separate the ideas, they are apt to fancy such a separation to be in itself impossible and absurd. But philosophers, who abstract from the effects of custom, and compare the ideas of objects, immediately perceive the falsehood of these vulgar sentiments, and discover that there is no known connexion among objects.⁶⁴

Thus, by the middle of the eighteenth century in England, the denial by Hobbes and Locke of the mind-independent character and ontological rationale of relations has led directly to a theory where all objective structures are the free work of the mind, moderated or stayed, so far as can be known, only by custom, the warrant available to man for his seeing things as related in various ways.

The reduction of all connections among objects to custom is disastrous for the theory of the sciences, which, since the time of Aristotle, had thought to uncover necessary connections among things. This reduction was not acceptable to Kant. Agreeing with Locke and Hume that all relations as such are the work of mind, Kant thought to restore true necessity among objective connections by adding to the customary connections admitted by Hume relations which the mind forms by an a-priori necessity of its manner of operations.

Moreover, unlike Locke and Hume who began to treat of human thought and handled the question of relations along the way, Kant's critical reflections are distinguished by beginning, exactly as Poinsot's, with the problem of the relative in being explicitly envisaged as such as the determining ground for any problematic involving concepts.

For this reason, within the modern tradition as it took form in the national languages, Kant, writing nearly 150 years after Poinsot, emerges as the only figure whose work stands to the foundations of the modern tradition in a position entirely comparable to the position Poinsot's work occupies within the older tradition. With Kant, for the first time in the national languages,

⁶⁴ David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part IV, Section 3, p. 223.

page 893

we have an entirely systematic work which not only (as with Locke and Hume) explores the structures of signs and cognition but does so from the first thematically under the guidance of the notion of relation. Just as Poinsot's Treatise is an attempt to think through the affirmation of relation as an ontological rationale as this bears on the order of human understanding and its possible objects, so the enterprise of Kant's Critique is an attempt to think through the denial of relation as an ontological rationale as this bears on the order of human understanding and its possible objects. Gilson considers that Hume's influence on Kant was, in this respect, as direct as could be:

" There are two principles I cannot render consistent," Hume says in the Appendix of his Treatise of Human Nature,⁶⁵ " nor is it in my power to renounce either of them, namely, that all our distinct perceptions are distinct existences, and that the mind never perceives any real connection among distinct existences." We do not know with certainty what, exactly Kant had read of Hume, but there is little doubt that this sentence was the very one that aroused Kant from his dogmatic slumber.⁶⁶

Kant's Critique is a systematic attempt to go to the very foundations of the modern " way of ideas " as only transcendentally relative in founding the structures of objectivity, and to do so in a way revelatory of the nature of truth in connection with objective being. Since the possible conformity of concepts to mind-independent objects given in experience requires relation as an ontological rationale indifferent in its positive content to its subjective ground, from within the modern tradition premised on the denial of such a rationale, the most consistent pursuit would indeed be to "make trial whether we may not have more success in the tasks of metaphysics, if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge." ⁶⁷

⁶⁵ P. 636 of the Selby-Bigge ed.

⁶⁶ Etienne Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers (2nd ed., corrected and enlarged; Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1952), p. 122.

⁶⁷ Kant's Gesammelte Schriften, herausgegeben von der Königlich Preussischen Academie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: Reimer, 1911), Band III, p. 12: "Man versuche es daher einmal, ob wir nicht in den Aussgaben der Metaphysik damit besser fortkommen, dass wir annehmen, die Gegenstände mussten sich nach unserem Erkenntnis richten." Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. by Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1963), " Preface to Second Edition," p. 22.

It is instructive, with the contrast between the ontologically and the transcendentally relative expressly in mind, to re-read the paragraphs in which Kant explains the revolution he wishes to effect in philosophy by bringing its assumptions concerning the relation between objectivity and truth in knowledge, into conformity with the fact that relation is not an ontological rationale; beginning with the passage in which he celebrates his proposal by comparing it to the method of Copernicus:

Failing of satisfactory progress in explaining the movements of the heavenly bodies on the supposition that they all revolved around the spectator, he tried whether he might not have better success if he made the spectator to revolve and the stars to remain at rest.⁶⁸

For Poinsot, this reduces the Copernican hypothesis down to a question of alternate suppositions concerning which was the primarily real and which the primarily unreal relation and well illustrates the functional equivalence of the two types of relation within an objective scheme. Kant continues:

A similar experiment can be tried in metaphysics as regards the intuition of objects. If intuition must conform to the constitution of the objects, I do not see how we could know anything of the latter a priori [i. e., how there could be necessity in certain connections between objects--in certain objective structures, let us say-- not reducible to the merely apparent necessity of customary association alone postulated by Hume]; but if the object (as object of the senses) must conform to the constitution of our faculty of intuition, I have no difficulty in conceiving such a possibility.⁶⁹

 

⁶⁸ Ibid: " nachdem es mit der Erklärung der Himmelsbewegungen nicht gut fort wollte, wenn er annahm, das ganze Sternheer drehe sich um den Zuschauer, versuchte, ob es nicht besser gelingen mochte, wenn er den Zuschauer sich drehen und dagegen die Sterne in Ruhe liess."

⁶⁹ Ibid: " In der Metaphysik kann man nun, was die Anschaung der Gegenstände betrifft, es auf ähnliche Weise versuchen. Wenn die Anschauung sich nach der Beschaffenheit der Gegentände richten müsste, so sehe ich nicht ein, wie man a priori von ihr etwas wissen könne; richtet sich aber der Gegenstand (als Objekt der Sinne) nach der Beschaffenheit unseres Anschauungsvermögens, so kann ich mir diese Möglichkeit ganz wohl vorstellen."

So far still, Poinsot has no quarrel with. Kant. The objects of our senses must indeed conform to the constitution of the sense faculties: objects can affect the eye primarily only as colored, and so on for each sense. Moreover, there is a sense for Poinsot in which an external sense is in a privileged way called a " faculty of intuition," since its operation always requires the here and now presence in physical being of its object.⁷⁰ This is but to say, in Poinsot's terms, that powers and objects are transcendentally related and that, in the case of sensation, a transcendental relation alone suffices to explain the objective union attendant upon the physical influence here and now of a physical object upon a passive sensory organ.⁷¹ But here, possible agreement ends. For as cognition develops out of the passivity of sense through the active formation of concepts by internal sense (imagination, memory, natural instinct of various kinds), the transcendental relation of power to object is superseded in Poinsot's scheme by an ontological relation of

⁷⁰ Treatise on Signs, Book III, 734a37-735a36; Appendix C, 10b22-38.

⁷¹ For Poinsot, sense knowledge, analytically distinguished as such at the foundation and core of perception, differs from all other cognition in this, that of itself it gives rise to no ontological relation of signification over and above the categorial relation in the order of cause to effect and effect to cause resulting from the action of the sensible object on the sense. Hence sensory apprehension, inasmuch as it bears on the proper sensibles directly, enjoys none of the indifference to the being of its object exhibited by imagination, memory, and understanding, though it does involve relations between such so-called " proper " sensibles as color or sound and such so-called " common " sensibles as movement and shape, and so does not have an " atomic " or isolated character, but immediately reveals objects as mind-independently structured within sensation according to size and distance, shape and movement, etc. See esp. Book I, Question 6, of the Treatise on Signs. Whereas for Locke and Hume (as later for Russell) the sense-data were regarded as bare effects within my subjectivity directly known and supposedly caused by unknown things, sense-data for Poinsot are effects indeed, but such effects as presuppose and exhibit the here and now action of the cause as object, and hence effects which, as transcendental relations, are pure means by which (principia quo) their causes are cognized under the aspect of being noisy, colored, shaped, in motion, etc., and present in awareness in themselves here and now. Thus Poinsot's view of sense experience comes much closed to the views of T. H. Greene (1836-1882), except that with Greene even the primitive relations of sense perception (those obtaining at the level of the sensibles proper and common) remain wholly the achievement of mind.

sign (concept as formal sign) to signified (object as made naturally present in cognition as extrinsic specifier) . This reversal and subordination of the internal subjective means of objectification to external specifications initially introduced through the senses is not possible from within the modern tradition, for it can only come about through the intervention of relation as an ontological rationale mediating the connection between concepts and their objects in perception and understanding. Hence Kant makes the decisive determination constitutive of his Copernican revolution when he extends the primacy of transcendental relation over the means of knowing not only into the active process of concept formation but into the actual function concepts perform as means of objectification: if sensory intuitions are to become known, " I cannot rest in these intuitions . . . but must relate them as representations to something as their object, and determine this latter through them." ⁷²

Kant may be said to be the first in the modern tradition concerning the difference between a relation and its subjective foundation to have seen, with a clarity and depth comparable to that found in Poinsot's Treatise, the true requirements of the problem:

Either I must assume that the concepts, by means of which I obtain this determination [of what has been given in intuition], conform to the object [in which case the concept as it functions in cognition is ontologically relative], or else I assume that the objects, or what is the same thing, that the experience in which alone, as given objects, they can be known, conform to the concepts [in which case the concept, even as it functions formally as a pure means of cognition, is only transcendentally relative].⁷³

⁷² Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, " Preface to Second Edition," p. 22, italics added. Kant's Gesammelte Schriften (note 129 [69?] above), p. 12: " Weil ich aber bei diesen Anschauungen, wenn sie Erkentnisse werden sollen, nicht stehen bleiben kann, sondern sie als Vorstellungen auf irgend etwas als Gegenstand beziehen und diesen durch jene bestimmen muss."

⁷³ Ibid.: " So kann ich entweder annehmen, die Begriffe, wodurch ich diese Bestimmung zu Stande bringe, richten sich auch nach dem Gegenstände, . . . oder ich nehme an, die Gegenstände oder, welches einerlei ist, die Erfahrung, in welcher sie allein (als gegebene Gegenstände) erkannt werden, richte sich nach diessen Begriffen."

To the question " whether the formal rationale constitutive of a sign as such consists, primarily and essentially, in an ontological or in a transcendental relation," ⁷⁴ we have only two systematically conceived answers. One, published by a professor at Alcalá, in Iberia, in the year 1632, according to which concepts (being natural signs formal in type) as they function in cognition are ontologically relative and so sustain the convertibility of being with truth: this is Poinsot's Treatise on Signs. The other, published by a professor at Königsberg, Germany, in 1781, according to which concepts even as functioning in actual cognition remain primarily transcendental in their relative being, and so compromise the transcendental character of truth (i. e., the character of truth as mind-independently founded) and its convertibility with being.

Poinsot and Kant are, each in their own way, the culmination of two radically opposed traditions concerning the connection between being and truth. These two traditions overlap in their Latin development for about 300 years (1350-1650), at which point the older tradition that Poinsot represents is effectively terminated for the time, and the initial formation of the modern tradition in the national languages takes place entirely under the influence of the modern and nominalistic position concerning the relative underlying the standpoint of the great Kantian critiques. The doctrine of intuition Poinsot introduces in Book I, Question 6, and develops in terms of formal signs throughout most of Book III, clearly expresses the consequences of construing concepts and the means of knowing generally as signs and ontologically rather than transcendentally relative. As such, these pages serve as well to oppose Poinsot's notions of intuition and experience to those of Kant after him, as to those of Ockham and the nominalists before him in what proved to be indeed the early modern period.

D. The Twilight of Modern Times.

From the viewpoint of its foundations in the being proper to

⁷⁴ Treatise on Signs, Book I, Question 1, 646b16-19. See note 21 above.

relation the modern tradition as found in the national languages is perfectly continuous up to Kant, who, as we have said, brings into systematic play the innermost possibilities of that tradition concerning concepts (the formal signs of understanding) much as Poinsot does for the older tradition. This unity of the formative stage of the modern philosophical mind was clearly perceived by Hegel, who wrote (in 1802) : " Hume's and Locke's reflective way of philosophizing, more thoroughly and systematically worked out on German ground and soil, becomes German philosophy."⁷⁵

Hegel also brings the unity to an end. He becomes the first figure of stature to challenge and deny the all but universal assumption that every relation existing as a relation is the work of the mind.

I do not wish to say a great deal about Hegel here beyond this: first, he certainly seems to recognize, with his " absolute relation," essentially the same notion of the relative termed " transcendental relation " by Poinsot;⁷⁶ second, he certainly recognizes mind-dependent relations; ⁷⁷ and third, he seems also to recognize the equivalent of what Poinsot terms mind-independent or categorial relations.⁷⁸ Thus, at least in a tacit and confused way, there would be operative in Hegel's thought the notion of relation as the ontological rationale whereby Poinsot accounts for the presence of being and non-being alike in the objects of our experience and awareness. The univocity of being and non-being in cognition is a fundamental principle for Poinsot's Treatise. It would not seem entirely unrelated to the

⁷⁵ Hume's and Locke's " Reflexionswesen auf deutschen Grund und Boden weit läufiger und systematischer ausgesponnen wird deutsche . . . Philosophie genannt." G. W. F. Hegel, " Glauben und Wissen oder die Reflexions Philosophie der Subjektivität," Journal der Philosophie, Band II, Stück 2 (1802), as reprinted in Sämtliche Werke (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1964), Vol. I, p. 374.

⁷⁶ " Das Nothwendige ist in sich absolutes Verhältniss. . . ." System der Philosophie. Erster Teil. Die Logik, SW, Vol. 8, p. 337.

⁷⁷ ". . . der Gedanke ist die Sache; einfache Identität des subjectiven und Objektiven." System der Philosophie. Dritter Teil. Die Philosophie des Geistes, SW, Vol. 10, p. 359.

⁷⁸ ". . . das Verhältniss des Kindes im Mutter Leibe, --ein Verhältniss, des weder bloss leiblich noch bloss geistig, sondern psychisch ist, -- ein Verhältniss der Seele." Ibid., p. 158.

famous text at the opening of Hegel's Logic: " Being, the immediate indeterminate, is in fact nothing."⁷⁹

But it does not seem to me that Hegel ever works out in a clear way the reduction of mind--independent and mind-dependent relations to their common ground or their functional interrelation in knowledge. It seems to me that Heidegger's critique in passing of Hegel is probably sound: " when Hegel at last defines ' Being ' as the ' indeterminate immediate ' and makes this definition basic for all the further categorial explications of his ' logic ', he keeps looking in the same direction as ancient ontology"⁸⁰ whereas with signs it is the question of the prior possibility of a categorial scheme of any kind that is posed for settlement in a fundamental way. The first problem is not the derivation of one categorial scheme as superior to some other but to lay bare the possibility of deriving categorial schemes from experience and of distinguishing within experience the mind-dependent and mind-independent elements of objectivity.⁸¹

⁷⁹ " Das Seyn, das unbestimmte das Immittelbare ist in der that Nichts, und nicht mehr noch weniger als Nichts." Wissenschaft der Logik, Erster Teil, Erster Abschnitt, Bestimmtheit, Erster Kapitel, Seyn, par. A, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. 4, p. 88.

⁸⁰ " Und wenn schliesslich Hegel des ' Sein ' bestimmt als das ' unbestimmte Unmittelbare ' und diese Bestimmung allen weiteren kategorialen Explikationen seiner ' Logik ' zugrunde legt, so hält er sich in derselben Blickrichtung wie die antike Ontologie, nur dass er das von Aristoteles schon gestellte Problem der Einheit des Seins gegenüber der Mannigfaltigkeit der sachhaltigen ' Kategorien ' aus der Hand gibt." Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, p. 3, emphasis added in English rendition.

⁸¹ Much of the difficulty and originality of Poinsot's work alike, we may say, derive from his tacit recognition that the first concern of anyone who would seek to explain signs, the universal means of communication, must be to pay heed "to Aristotle's problem of the unity of Being [as that which is first in human understanding] as over against the multiplicity of ' categories ' applicable to things " (Sein und Zeit, p. 3: " das von Aristoteles schon gestellte Problem der Einheit des Seins gegenüber der Mannigfaltigkeit der sachhaltigen ' Kategorien ' aus der Hand gibt "). The experience of signs and of the escape from the subjectivity of the here and now is as fundamental in its own way as is the experience of things in terms of the effects which provide experimental justification for the scheme of the categories, as is clear from the fact that the derivation of the categories from experience is itself a function of the use we make of signs in developed discourse (cf. Treatise on Signs, Appendix A, 577a10-28).

The sign, as the medium of communication, functions by distinguishing connections within experience and so is not only presupposed to any system of categories but is also the instrument of their establishment. The analysis of the sign, therefore, must be precisely fundamental to any categorial ontology--that is to say, it must explain how it is that signs so function as to make possible the eventual assimilation of experience to a categorial scheme of whatever kind.