Uninstantiability

1 Holmes challenge to Ratzinger concerning relation

In a very worthwhile and interesting blog entitled “A Year with Ratzinger,” Professor Jeremy Holmes, in the section “Ratzinger and Aristotle II,” comments on this: “That the Christian experience should explode the distinction between substance and accident is impossible on three counts,” first and foremost of which is this: “the distinction itself, as Aristotle puts it, is an absolute dichotomy: ^[1] that which exists in another [esse in alio] is accident while that which does not exist in another [esse in se] is substance. ‘Is’ versus ‘is not’ is hard to explode” (Holmes 2010).

Yet, Holmes admits, “there is something strange about relation,” already in the discussion of Aristotle; ^[2] but only Aquinas “brings clarity to the issue: relation is strange because it adds no being to a thing.” So “When Ratzinger says that Christians have found that relation ‘stands beside the substance as an equally primordial form of being,’ he says the exact opposite of the truth.”

The problem, as Holmes sees it, is that Ratzinger “has misunderstood Aristotle and the Aristotelians in a fundamental way: when they say ‘substance’, he thinks they mean something inert that stands under accidents the way a pin cushion stands under the pins pushed into it. ^[3] He would rather that God, that Being, be something dynamic and active, something that strains forward to a goal, something that loves and burns. And what he wants, I think, is in fact what good Thomists mean by substance.

“Substance is not something inert. Natural substances bubble with activity, flow from origins, and yearn towards goals. In fact, the very being of a man is the kind of being that must be from the first principle of being, and it is the kind of being that must strain forward to reach the end of all things. By my being itself, and not by something added over and above my being, I relate to God as his creature and move toward God as my end.” (Holmes 2010)

2 What (according to Holmes) good Thomists mean

Holmes then tells us that, if we but understand what “good Thomists mean” by substance, we will see how “Ratzinger is right” despite his having “learned of Aristotle only through dry, stale manuals.” And he bases this quirky claim on his understanding of the “beautiful and intellectually exhilarating account of how relation works out in the Trinity.” According to Holmes, “of all the categories besides substance, Aquinas says, relation is the only one that we could speak of in the Trinity precisely because it is the only one that does not add some extra being and so would not compromise the simplicity of God” (Holmes 2010).

3 What Thomas means

There is a problem here. For if relation “adds no being to a thing,” then it is not a category in either Aristotle’s or Aquinas’s sense. ^[4] In other words, if we understand what Thomas means by relation, we see at once that Holmes’ account of relation belongs, knowingly or unknowingly, not to Thomas at all, but to William of Ockham. It was not at all the view of Thomas that relation “adds no being” to a related thing. Were that true, relation would not be a category of being irreducible to the other categories, as both Aristotle and Aquinas insisted it was. Listen to Thomas: ^[5]

“Being toward” differs from “being in” as a mode of awareness-independent being in this, that all modalities of “being in” require from their positive and defining character to belong exclusively to the subjective dimension of the awareness-independent order, as quantity, for example, posits an awareness-independent feature of subjectivity, and so on for all the other modes of “being in,” whether being in itself (substance as the subject of existence) or being in another (inherent accidents as the subjective characteristics of existing subjects).

(Thomas Aquinas i.1256/1266: 489)

What Thomas says is not that relation “adds no being,” but rather that relation adds a suprasubjective mode to the subjective being of substance with its inherent accidents, although dependently upon the subjective aspects or modes, the accidents. Whence, among the modes of awareness-independent finite being, by contrast with substance, relation is the minimal realization of awareness-independent being, ^[6] the weakest form of awareness-independent being, ^[7] which yet relation in God is a form of being far higher than anything to be found in creatures, including substances. ^[8]

And the reason that Trinity of Persons consisting of relations does not compromise the simple unity of the Godhead is not at all that there is no difference in being among the Three Persons, but rather because relational difference is the only form of being wherein opposition does not entail privation and hence does not require a contrast between perfect and imperfect; relation introduces no privation into the unity of God, but adds only the being of the divine Persons in the one God. ^[9]

4 What is “strange” about relation

If Holmes reckoning were correct, the only “good Thomists” would be those who adopt the view of relation espoused most successfully by William of Ockham. ^[10] Holmes’ reading of Ratzinger as buttressed by his interpretation of Aquinas on relation serves rather to underscore the point I stated as a necessary “new first step” for understanding either the notion of το ὀν in Aristotle or ens reale in Aquinas:

in order to get the point of postmodernity as a new epoch in philosophy’s history as a whole, the single most important first step Aristotelians or anyone else talking about “reality” has to take is to abandon the approach to the question of hardcore reality which begins by distinguishing between … substance [as “being in itself”] and accidents [as “being in another”]. For history in every previous age – ancient Greek philosophy, the Latin interval, modern times – amply demonstrates that most thinkers who have taken this starting point never reach an understanding of the positive uniqueness of relation, let alone its further singularity.

(Deely 2010: 66)

Let us start with the notion perhaps most poorly understood in the circles of late modern Thomism, Aquinas’ notion of ens primum cognitum. Commonly assumed to be our distinctively human awareness of ens reale, it is rather for St. Thomas the formal object of intellect which distinguishes the awareness of understanding from animal estimation, just as the differentiation of light that we call “color” is the formal object which enables us to distinguish sight as a specific cognitive power. And just as the categories are subdivisions of ens reale, so ens reale is a subdivision of ens primum cognitum, specifically, that subdivision which we become aware of only in contrast with ens rationis, the first meaning of “nonbeing” in Aquinas.

Exactly here do we encounter what is singular about relation as a mode of being: it is the only mode of being which can be verified in its positive essence both in the order of ens reale and in the order of ens rationis.

By contrast [with all modes of “being in”], ^[11] “being toward” from its positive nature as a type of being does not require that it posit something realizable only awareness-independently; whence are found some instances of “being toward” which, as relations, are nothing in the awareness-independent realm but obtain in awareness only – an occurrence impossible for any mode of “being in,” for subjectivity.

This point bears spelling out.

5 How relation alone as verified in both ens rationis and ens reale enables truth and falsity

Aquinas follows Aristotle in subdividing ens reale into the ten categories. But the number ten represented simply the maximum number of categories that Aristotle had identified, in contrast to the minimum necessary to accommodate the varieties of being as it exists independently of finite mind. If we pose for ourselves the question of how many of the traditional list of ten categories are irreducible, the answer is six (Deely 2001: “The Categories of Aristotle,” 73–78): substance, or “being in itself”; then four modes of “being in another”: quantity, quality, action, passion; and one mode of “being toward another,” relation, which as a mode depends directly upon “being in another,” – just as the four modes of “being in another” (inherent accidents) directly depend upon “being in itself” (substance) – but relation (being toward another) only indirectly depends upon “being in itself.” What is to be noted here is that both substance and the subjective accidents are instances of “being in,” but relation is by contrast the only instance of “being toward,” albeit founded upon “being in.” With that point made, we see within the order of being as it exists independently of finite mind a first feature of the singularity of relation: it depends upon substance only indirectly, through its direct dependence upon the “accidental” modes of “being in.”

Just as Aquinas identifies ens primum cognitum as an awareness of the world that enables us to inquire into the structure of what (ever) we are aware of, and hence accompanies our awareness of every particular object (just as the differentiation of light called color accompanies without exception everything that we see), the first division (or “subdivision”) of ens primum cognitum is ens (i.e., “ens reale”) and nonens (i.e., “ens rationis”). And just as ens is then subdivided into ten categories (reducible to six, if we eliminate combinations, as noted), so nonens, or ens rationis, according to Aquinas, is exclusively and exhaustively subdivided into two modes (or “categories,” if you like, but now constructed categories of the ways in which being can exist objectively dependently upon finite mind), namely, negation and relation.

But what does “relation” here mean? Well, in one way it means exactly what “relation” as a category of ens reale means: a “being toward another.” But whereas a “being toward another” under ens reale is a relation that exists regardless of whether any finite mind is aware of it or not, “being toward another” under ens rationis is a relation that does not obtain outside the order of objectivity, i.e., except by reason of having been formed by a finite mind. Yet notice this: “being toward another” is the essence of relation in both cases, i.e., whether the relation in question be an instance of ens reale or of ens rationis.

But now notice something else, which neither Holmes nor the average “good Thomist” of today seems to have noticed. What means “negation” in contrast to “relation,” as exclusively and exhaustively dividing being which exists objectively only thanks to the awareness of finite mind?

Every ens rationis is an object of awareness formed by finite mind at levels requiring concepts in order to interpret the basic animal awareness which does not itself directly involve concepts, namely, sensation, sentire. Since, according to Aquinas, sentire is the whole and sole result of an actio sensibilis in sensu (the action of a material object upon an animal body proportioned to become aware its surroundings as involved in the particular interaction), ens rationis is the result of concept-formation based on the model of objectivity that sensation provides, and this model has only two “sides”: subjectivity or inesse, and intersubjectivity or the adesse of a relatio realis.

So, when the animal mind undertakes to interpret what it has been given in sensation, it has only two models upon which to base its interpretive formations or “concepts,” namely, subjectivity or intersubjectivity. When it forms its awareness-dependent object on the basis of subjectivity, it forms a concept which presents an object which IS NOT what the pattern upon which it is formed IS, namely, an individual with certain (subjective) characteristics – say, Sherlock Holmes. But when it forms its awareness-dependent object on the basis of INTERSUBJECTIVITY, that object IS what its model IS, namely, a relation – say, the grandfather (or father) of Sherlock Holmes.

But notice this generally unnoticed point, not explicitated even by Aquinas: in BOTH cases, i.e., whether the ens rationis is not what its pattern is (the case of “negation”) or is what its pattern is (the case of so-called “awareness-dependent relation”), the ens rationis CONSISTS IN a “being toward another” (an esse ad). In short, whether the ens rationis be a “relation” or a “negation” does not name what is essential to EVERY ens rationis. What is essential to EVERY ens rationis is that it consists in a “being patterned after” what it itself is not, namely, an ens reale. In other words, in every case, without exception, whether called a relation or called a “negation” with reference to its experientially formative pattern, an ens rationis IS A RELATION, because it IS a “being patterned after” what it itself is not, namely, ens reale. There is no way to CONSIST IN “being patterned after” and NOT to be a “BEING TOWARD” – esse ad. Whether what you are “toward” is what you yourself are (“relatio rationis”) or what you yourself are not (“negatio rationis”), in EITHER CASE you are ESSE AD.

To make a long story short, ens rationis and relatio rationis are synonyms, subdivisible as “negation” when the relatio rationis is formed after the pattern of the experience of subjectivity, or “relation” when the relatio rationis is formed after the pattern of the experience of intersubjectivity. Every awareness-dependent being has the positive essence which defines relation, that is, a “being toward.”

Take careful note of the fact the “experience” in question wherein entia rationis are formed is not a matter of consciousness, still less “reflective awareness,” as much as it is of what Maritain has characterized as “preconsciousness” (Maritain 1953); for brute as well as rational animals form these relationesseu entia rationis. ^[12] Hence so-called “entia rationis” are not necessarily “rationis,” for they are formed preconsciously and used in perception by the internal sense powers of memory, imagination, and estimation generically common to all animals which move about in the physical environment. Ponder the words of the only one from the late modern Neothomist generations who caught a glimpse of the importance for Thomism of Poinsot’s work on signs:

For the first stirring of the idea [of the understanding, species expressa intellecta] as distinct from images [ideas in the sense of perceptual, species expressae sensatae], the intervention of a sensible sign is necessary. Normally in the development of a child it is necessary that the idea be ‘enacted’ by the senses and lived through before it is born as an idea; it is necessary that the relationship of signification should first be actively exercised in a gesture, a cry, in a sensory sign bound up with the desire that is to be expressed. Knowing this relationship of signification will come later, and this will be to have the idea [or understanding], even if it is merely implicit, of that which is signified. Animals and children make use of this signification; they do not perceive it. When the child begins to perceive it (then the child exploits it, toys with it, even in the absence of the real need to which it corresponds) – at that moment the idea has emerged.

(Maritain 1986 [1957]: 88)

The primum cognitum intellectus has taken hold.

For only intellect, in its difference from the estimative calculations of the so-called brutes, is able to recognize and formally distinguish relations from the objects and things related. Only when recognized in their own right as distinct from objects related, and when seen to be dependent for being upon awareness (which is not always) – both of which recognitions are possible only for a cognitive power which is not directly dependent wholly upon the secondary matter of perceptible objects – does the human animal recognize the presence within experience of objectivities which have no being apart from the experience, whence such objective features came to be called entia rationis – a labeling which proves historically to have done more harm than good, for it has blinded most thinkers to the fact that animals without reason necessarily form and use “beings of reason” in order to render the physical environment species-specifically meaningful for them as a world of objects to be sought, avoided, or safely ignored.

6 The singularity of relation as regards perception

The being of relation as suprasubjective is what makes possible the difference between objects and things. A thing in the order of ens reale is what it is regardless of any relation to finite mind, but an object is not an object unless it stands as the terminus of a relation to finite mind. Now in the case of relationes reales, the relation is both founded in and terminated at a thing. But it is not the being of the thing as thing that makes it a terminus: it is the relation itself that makes both a fundament be a fundament and a terminus be a terminus. This little noticed point can nonetheless easily be established. A and B can be really related on the basis of some characteristic or another only as long as both exist. But when one ceases, nothing is changed in the other, except that it no longer provides actually either a fundament or a terminus! So we see that the being of fundament and the being of terminus within any relation depend for their status qua fundament or terminus on the relation itself.

When considering so-called “real relations,” i.e., relations as verified in the category of relation, this fact has no obvious importance. But when we come to further consider the case of psychological states, both cognitive and cathectic, it is not so easy to understand how the point continues to be overlooked. For psychological states, famously, after Brentano, cannot be without being “of” or “about” something, a fact which has become the basis for analysis of the so-called “intentionality” of consciousness. Psychological states always involve their subject with objective being, regardless of the awareness-independent status of the objective being in question.

Here the singularity of relation becomes key to resolving the modern dilemma called the “problemapontis,” the problem of finding a bridge between the subjectivity of our ideas as psychological states and the objectivity of what our ideas make present to us in awareness. Missing in the modern approach is the realization that objects are always self-representations suprasubjectively terminating relations founded upon ideas as other-representations. The “bridge” in every case is a relation in its positive being as a suprasubjective mode, regardless of the subjective status of its terminus.

In other words, the difference between an awareness-dependent and an awareness-independent relation does not at all lie in the being of the relation as a relation, but wholly and solely in the circumstances under which the relation exists here and now. Thus, as Poinsot will say, relation itself transcends the distinction between ens reale and ens rationis, even though any given relation here and now will perforce be either a relatio realis or a relatio rationis. Or, to put it another way, one and the same relation under one set of circumstances will be a relatio realis and under another set of circumstances a relatio rationis, in both cases with the relation itself as a suprasubjective mode terminating at some object unchanged as objective terminus even if changed as thing. All that has changed is that in the former case the objective terminus had a further subjective dimension, while in the latter case the terminus is purely objective. The object qua object is a terminus of a relation. Whether that terminus is also a thing does not matter to the relation qua relation, for it remains one and the same relation in either case, a suprasubjective mode of being linking the knowing subjective self to an objective other. The being of relation, in other words, in its singularity, is precisely what provides the answer to Heidegger’s question concerning “the essence of truth,” to wit, what is the basis of the prior possibility of a correspondence of thought with thing? The basis of that “prior possibility” is precisely the singularity of relation as realizable alike in the order of ens reale and ens rationis.

Perception, however, is necessarily involved with matter in the sense of things that can be seen and touched, what Scholastics generally (including Thomists) call rather “secondary matter” (though Aquinas himself speaks rather of “signate matter”, materia signata), or prime matter quantified interactively, in contrast to prime matter itself which can neither be seen nor touched but only understood. Objects are called “material objects” precisely because their signate or secondary matter allows them to be sensed (more commonly than because of their insensible prime matter). Animal perception deals precisely with the secondary matter of object, first by becoming aware of it in sensation and then further by interpreting what is sensed, correctly or incorrectly, as something good for the animal (+), bad for the animal (–), or indifferent for the animal (0).

Here again do we encounter a further feature of relation’s singularity: in the order of material being relation is the only category of reality which has no direct aspect of secondary matter. Relations as relations can be neither seen nor touched, but only understood. Having no secondary matter of their own, relations cannot be directly instantiated. This uninstantiability of relations as relations has an important consequence: distance makes no difference to the being of relations. “Far or near,” as Poinsot puts it, “a son is in the same way the son of a father.” ^[13] This was a crucial point that eluded Descartes. Having never confronted analytically the singularity of relation as a suprasubjective mode of being, Descartes did not hesitate to reduce objects to ideas. But objects are not ideas, objects as objects are rather termini of relations as adding to subjectivity a suprasubjective mode, while ideas as ideas are subjective qualities serving to found and to provenate the suprasubjective relations which terminate at objects of awareness, both cognitive and cathectic. The question of the “reality” of the objects concerns whether they participate directly in the order of ens reale by themselves involving a subjective dimension or not. In either case, i.e., possessing a subjective dimension of their own or no, objects are not reducible to the ideas as provenating the relations without which the objects would not be as cognized in the first place.

The distinction within a relation between its fundament and its terminus is a matter of principle: the two are always formally distinct, even when they materially coincide. This, together with the fact that distance makes no difference to the being of relation as relation, explains why objects are always public in principle, even when they are wholly fictitious: because relations as such in terminating at objects are always suprasubjective modes of being. And any two thinkers, say, can consider the same object. What has no secondary matter has no proper location in space, except by way of the secondary matter of the things objectified which it suprasubjectively links.

Now the internal sense powers of animals are limited to the representation of material objects, i.e., things as susceptible of being seen and touched. They can represent these objects in various and multiple relations, but what they cannot do is represent the relations themselves in their difference from the objects related. Animal perception begins with sense and returns to the sensible. What cannot be sensibly instantiated cannot by the animal be directly known.

7 The bearing of relation on the distinction of intellect from sense

Writing in 1982, I had occasion to remark that one little-realized way of grounding the putative distinction between understanding and perception (intellect and sense) is precisely in terms of relation (Deely 1982: 117): perception reveals objects as they are only relative to the dispositions, needs, and desires of the organism perceiving, whereas understanding reveals in these same objects the further dimension of existence in their own right independent of relations to the knower. But in order to do this – to see objects in the light of “things,” which are what they are regardless of our cathexis toward them – the intellect has to add to the objective world of animal perception a relation of self-identity under which alone can an experienced object be viewed as having an existence or being independent of its relations to me as +, –, 0.

This addition in turn requires a cognitive power that is able to objectify what cannot be directly instantiated within sense-perception, for only when objects per se sensible are seen under the relatio rationis of self-identity is the exclusive relation network of animal interest in the object opened to the further inquiry into objects as things. Thus entia rationis, consisting throughout and exclusively of esse ad, play a crucial role not only in the life of all animals which move about in the environment but further in enabling the human animal, as St Thomas puts it, to transform or render what is per se sensible into something that is also intelligible. The action of the intellect (“intellectus agens” [Deely 2007]) required to make sensible things intelligible is precisely the addition to the animal Umwelt (“objective world”) of the ens rationis of self-identity.

This way of interpreting the difference between “sense” and “intellect,” it seems to me, is quite necessary to overcome Hume’s objection that human understanding differs in nowise but degree from the understanding manifested in the behavior of other animals:

Next to the ridicule of denying an evident truth, is that of taking much pains to defend it; and no truth appears to me more evident, than that beasts are endowed with thought and reason as well as men. The arguments are in this case so obvious, that they never escape the most stupid and ignorant.

We are conscious that we ourselves, in adapting means to ends, are guided by reason and design, and that it is not ignorantly nor casually we perform those actions which tend to self-preservation, to obtaining pleasure, and avoiding pain. When, therefore, we see other creatures, in millions of instances, perform like actions, and direct them to like ends, all our principles of reason and probability carry us with an invincible force to believe the existence of a like cause. It is needless, in my opinion, to illustrate this argument by the enumeration of particulars. The smallest attention will supply us with more than are requisite. The resemblance betwixt the actions of animals and those of men is so entire, in this respect, that the very first action of the first animal we shall please to pitch on, will afford us an incontestable argument for the present doctrine.

(Hume 1739–1740: Book I, Chapter 3, Section 16)

Missing in Hume’s otherwise powerful argument is the doctrine of formal object at the basis of Aquinas’ argument for differentiating cognitive powers. Unless there is something that is directly and essentially attained by a power by reason of which whatever else the power attains is attained, there is no basis for asserting that power in the first place. For Aquinas, that which is directly and exclusively attained by intellect he calls ens primum cognitum, and most Neothomists with little further thought assume that “of course” Thomas means ens reale. But he does not.

They then tend further to assume that just as ens reale means the modern “external world” restored now as knowable (“realism”), so ens rationis means basically the modern notion of psychological subjectivity, not realizing at all that for St Thomas the two, ens reale and ens rationis (even though phantasiari [or percipere] and intelligere are alike preceded prescissively by sentire), are equally objective within human awareness, a situation impossible to account for without bringing relation as a suprasubjective mode of being to the front and center of the analysis of knowing.

It is because concepts as qualitative states of psychological subjectivity serve as but fundaments provenating relations interpretive of objects having in turn their foundation in the physical interactions of animal bodies with their physical surroundings as terminating those specifications introduced into the powers of sensation to become aware of this rather than that: this is the reason that the modern problema pontis and the modern idealism resulting from it are (or can be) overcome by the development of aspects of Thomas’s writings. But this “problem of the bridge” cannot be resolved without bringing into foreground account relation as a suprasubjective mode only indirectly involved with secondary matter and explicative of the difference between objects and things in such a way that we can see why objects are always public in principle even when they don’t, no longer, or never did exist in the order independent of animal or human awareness. Finally we see how relation by its distinctive being as esse ad (in contrast no less to esse in alio than to esse in se) transcends alike the circumstances determining when ens reale is at play in the objective order, and the divide between inner and outer respecting the psychology of the knower.

Ens primum cognitum in Aquinas includes something of ens reale, necessarily, by reason of the origin of animal awareness in external sense. But it also includes necessarily and irreducibly something of ens rationis, by reason of the awareness-dependent relations animals necessarily introduce into their sense experience in order to be able to orientate themselves in the physical surroundings and render those surroundings meaningful in the species-specific ways required by the animal’s bodily type. Ens primum cognitum is the explanation Aquinas gives as to why human animals alone possess an awareness of the world that enables them to inquire into the structure of what (ever) we are aware of, and not just into the sense-perceptible aspects of objects as they bear on the +, –, 0 interests of the animal as animal.

Because relations alone among all the modes of being transcend the ens reale/ens rationis divide, relations alone explain why objects need not be in order to be known and influential in social life and organization. Because relations alone transcend all divisions of subjectivity, relations alone explain why the human animal is, in Heidegger’s expression, from the first a “being-in-the-world.” And because human animals alone on our planet have a cognitive power that is not directly dependent upon the dimension of signate matter in what sensation and sense-perception enable us to become aware of, human animals alone are able to render their surroundings intelligible and proceed to investigate the “things in themselves” which Husserl longed to uncover, but by a method lacking the means of distinguishing sensation prescissively taken as such (i.e., as logically prior to, even when temporally concomitant with, concept-formation in animal interactions) from perception and intellection as alike dependent upon concept formation in order to know.

8 From “ens primum cognitum” to species-specifically human animal experience

Within the interweave or mix in experience of awareness-dependent and awareness-independent relations, only those organisms possessing the capacity to understand in its distinction from the capacities to sense and perceive will ever be able even on occasion to discriminate formally between real and unreal elements in semiosis, that is, in the process of communication through signs that we call “experience.” Stipulation, as a distinctive semiotic process, presupposes exactly this ability; and it is only in relation to stipulative decisions and their consequences that language can be said to be “conventional.” But stipulations, when successful, pass into customs, and customs into nature. Thus, sign-systems arise out of nature in anthropoid experience, become partially “conventionalized” in the sphere of human understanding, and pass back again through customs into continuity with the natural world as it is experienced perceptually by human and non-human animals alike (Deely 1978: 7).

“Language,” in the sense that is species-specific to homo sapiens, is nothing else than the “unreal” component of sign-action predicated on the singularity of relation and its imperceptibility to sense segregated and seized upon in its unique potential by the understanding in its difference from perception and sense. As a result of the intervention of language in this species-specifically human sense of linguistic communication, those organisms capable of seizing upon the difference between the awareness-independent and the awareness-dependent elements of experience soon find themselves in an entirely different world.

In pre-linguistic experience, as in experience generically animal, relations are not distinguished from the objects related. With language, it becomes possible to separate the two. The consequences of this simple feat are enormous, and without end – literally, for it is this that makes human experience an “open-ended” affair as a matter of principle (See Table III in Deely 1982: 119; reproduced also in Deely 2009b: 197).

9 Attempt at a summary overview

The “sensory core” we have distinguished within perception (Deely 1982: 114; reproduced in Deely 2009b: 123) consists of the impressions produced in the organs of sense by the action here and now of the surrounding environment on the organisms. Never given as such in our experience, which is always of perceptual wholes, pure sensations are known only derivatively and by an analysis which proceeds from the realization that unless there were such first elements or data at the base and core of perception, we would find that all knowing in every respect entails an infinite regress, and so could have no point of origin. ^[14]

Now sensations are always given with and by perceptions, that is to say, within an elaborate and detailed network of objectivity that is the work of memory, imagination and estimation as well as of the so-called external senses. Moreover, the perceptual field is not only determined by the individual experiences of an organism, but, even more profoundly, by the anthropoid history of the higher organisms (which alone concern us at present) as it has been built into their genetic constitution over the centuries by the complex processes of “natural” or evolutionary selection. Thus, a given organism has a “natural” perception of certain objects as friendly or hostile, alluring or repulsive, prey or predator, etc., and these naturally given determinations of perception – sometimes called “instinct” – precisely consist in the catching of a given element of experience within a net of “unreal” or awareness-dependent relations interwoven or mixed with awareness-independent relations whereby the perceiver apprehends its objects not principally according to what they are “in themselves,” as it were, but rather according to what they are so far as the perceiving organism is involved. The same remarks apply to awareness-dependent relations attached to objects not by the a-prioris of organic constitution (the organism’s genetic and selective history), but by the simple learnings about things built up through experiences the organism undergoes.

Now outside the human species, and indeed often enough inside the human species, this difference between relations obtaining among objects so far as the actions or behavior of the individual organism is concerned and relations obtaining among objects prior to or independent of the self-interests of the perceiver in the perceived – this is never thematized, never disengaged as such as an explicit component of a categorial scheme. Yet, prior to such a thematization, in all our direct experiences of objects, the objects are given in an apparently unified way which in fact conceals the profound differences between an object as a thing in its own right and an object as an element of experience being accounted for by the perceiver in terms entirely born of its own needs and desires.

Thus, all objects of direct experience, from an independent viewpoint, are known to be at best an imperfectly discriminated amalgam of what is, in terms of awareness-independent being, being and non-being, i.e., awareness-independent and cognition-dependent interwoven networks of objectified relations.

The discrimination of relation as such, as a mode of being distinct from and superordinate to related subjects, seems to take place only upon a comparative analysis – not always self-conscious and transparent to itself, to say the least – which is also able, in principle at least, to further distinguish among relations so discriminated between those whose terminations or “objects” are mainly or entirely the work of the perceiving organisms (whether idiosyncratically, by custom, or by social institution) and those which obtain physically as well as through our experience. This relative discrimination of awareness-dependent elements in the objective structures of experience and (in further refinements) beyond the experimentally given – never wholly secure, to be sure, because never exhaustive (caught as we are in time which throws up new structures in direct apperception faster than we can reflexively disengage their pure elements) – is what underlies the possibility of a system of signs containing irreducibly stipulated components demonstrably understood as such by the controlled flexibility human beings display in imaginative discourse and, perhaps especially, fairy tales.

This peculiar capacity for thematizing and critically reassessing under various circumstances the line between reality and unreality, exhibited in the partially controllable indifference of our discourse to what is and what is not the case, is found nowhere else in the animal kingdom. It is an activity unique to and in some ways definitive of human understanding.

10 Uninstantiability and reality as socially constructed

In their version of a “race to the top,” the Neothomists gave little or no thought to the problem of how socially constructed reality comes about, and is as “real,” if not more real, in everyday human life than are the stars and planets of το ὀν fame in the days of Aristotle and Aquinas. Socially constructed realities are hardly unique to human animals; the recognition of them as such, however, is.

Consider the being of a Harvard graduate student as such, or the boundary as such between Texas and Oklahoma. Both are socially constructed realities. Both are uninstantiable in the way that relations as such are wanting for secondary matter. Cut up the President of the United States as you will, you may find a tumor, but you will not find his presidency.

The ability distinctive of intellect to recognize objects devoid of secondary matter is one and the same with the intellect’s ability, consciously, preconsciously, or unconsciously, to deal with relations in their difference from related objects and things. It makes lying possible, yes, but it is also what through the intellectus agens makes for the intelligibility of experienced objects, and the difference between objects and things. Without this ability, Hume’s criticism of those who think so-called “reason” differs in kind from animal estimation would be unanswerable.

11 In conclusion (for now)

Can you have a statue of an angel – or, for that matter, of God? How you answer those two questions, especially the first one, will show not only how much you know about the history of angelology, but also how well you have understood the meaning of uninstantiability – and, for that matter, the text of our opening epigram from Aquinas.