An Introduction to The Post-Scotist

To be authentically “post” something means, as I understand the prefix, to not only come after something, but transcend that something through that something. The post-structuralists, for instance, critiqued the structuralists but have always lived in the world over which the structuralists ruled; poststructuralist thought must therefore be affirmative as well as negative to be truly post.

The title of this publication, The Post-Scotist, therefore acknowledges a particularly creative debt to one John Duns Scotus. This Franciscan theologian, cut off in the prime of his career, is at times maligned for ushering in the breakdown of the ideology underpinning medieval society. One may very well commend the Subtle Doctor for the same thing: how much, really, would we like to backtrack to medieval society? Scotus did not close the medieval world any more than Pandora’s Box destroyed the world its contents afflicted. Scotus opened up a whole world of thought in continuity with the medieval system as in discontinuity. Whether or not it was for the better, it must be affirmed.

The title then recognizes that something changed in 14th century Europe. But it is likewise a call to action. It is very possible to pine for the metaphysical ideology that precedes Scotus — or rather the one which is imagined to precede him — such being the approach of some theologians, most notably John Milbank. It is my opinion that such searching for stasis is wasting an opportunity. The fecundity of post-Scotism is perhaps best illustrated by the wide range of thinkers that could bear the label.

At the base of America’s homegrown philosophical tradition, Pragmatism, stands Charles Sanders Peirce, a scientist and logician; in addition to setting Pragmatism into motion, he likewise conjured the discipline of semiotics. Both contributions make him one of the United States' most influential philosophers. Notably, the thought of John Duns Scotus provided a major foundation for numerous parts of Peirce’s philosophy:

The works of Duns Scotus have strongly influenced me. If his logic and metaphysics, not slavishly worshipped, but torn away from its medievalism, be adapted to modern culture, under continual wholesome reminders of nominalistic criticisms, I am convinced that it will go far toward supplying the philosophy which is best to harmonize with physical science.

Using “Scotistic realism” as an inspiration, Peirce furnished a strongly realist philosophy towards that harmony. But Peirce’s understanding of realism is the theoretical backbone of almost all of his systematic thought, from his views on logic to his Pragmatism and semiotics. It is not unreasonable to think that, without Scotus, we could not have the Peirce’s Pragmatism, and thereby the Pragmatisms of James, Dewey, Rorty, and so on.

Another post-Scotist, one of perhaps greater note, is Gilles Deleuze. In Difference and Repetition, he writes:

There has only ever been one ontological proposition: Being is univocal. There has only ever been one ontology, that of Duns Scotus, which gave being a single voice. We say Duns Scotus because he was the one who elevated univocal being to the highest point of subtlety, albeit at the price of abstraction. However, from Parmenides to Heidegger it is the same voice which is taken up, in an echo which itself forms the whole deployment of the univocal.

Scotus is certainly not the greatest influence on Deleuze; that honor would go to Spinoza, with Nietzsche and Bergson close behind. But in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze traces his greatest attachments to univocity through Spinoza and Nietzsche, but only by first beginning with Scotus. His concept of univocity is certainly distant from the concerns of Scotus, but that is not the point. I am claiming that Deleuze, after all, is a post-Scotist. Deleuze perfectly embodies this spirit in his creative use of Scotism.

Finally, we may see Scotus’s power outside of philosophy in the life and work of Gerard Manley Hopkins. One could begin and end such a discussion with Hopkins’s poem “Duns Scotus’s Oxford:”

Towery city and branchy between towers;

Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmèd, lark charmèd, rook racked, river-rounded;

The dapple-eared lily below thee; that country and town did

Once encounter in, here coped & poisèd powers;

Thou hast a base and brickish skirt there, sours

That neighbour-nature thy grey beauty is grounded

Best in; graceless growth, thou hast confounded

Rural, rural keeping — folk, flocks, and flowers.

Yet ah! this air I gather and I release

He lived on; these weeds and waters, these walls are what

He haunted who of all men most sways my spirits to peace;

Of realty the rarest-veinèd unraveller; a not

Rivalled insight, be rival Italy or Greece;

Who fired France for Mary without spot.

“He” here referring, of course, to Scotus, who, as Hopkins notes in the end, famously defended the Immaculate Conception of Mary, which centuries later would be defined as dogma by the Catholic Church. Hopkins takes from Scotus various things, though the most notable borrowing is Hopkins’s concept of inscape, which we might gloss as the individuality of a thing, which, whether it is a straight or modified borrowing, is an adaptation of Scotus’s notion of haecceitas, or “thisness.” It was love at first sight; Hopkins tells us:

At this time I had first begun to get hold of the copy of Scotus on the Sentences in the Baddely library and was flush with a new stroke of enthusiasm. It may come to nothing or it may be a mercy from God. But just then when I took in any inscape of the sky or sea I thought of Scotus.

So I have chosen the title of this publication to be The Post-Scotist: a recognition of a condition of our times, a call to live and think in it fully, and a mark of a tradition of intellectual kindred known by its creative developments of even incompossible ideas. It is here that it must be said, then, that The Post-Scotist is not a blog about Scotus and Scotism. In all likelihood, you will read here more about the aforementioned Peirce or Deleuze than you will Scotus. More than any of that, you will be reading a good deal about my thoughts. Hence the “post;” the point is to be thinking on the frontier in the world which Scotus opened, whether he is directly involved or not. But even the unrelated thoughts here emerge from a mind kin to him.

All this said and out of the way, it is my pleasure to introduce to you The Post-Scotist.