20th WCP: Xavier Zubiri's Critique of Classical Philosophy
Comparative Philosophy
Xavier Zubiri's Critique of Classical Philosophy
Thomas B. Fowler
Xavier Zubiri Foundation of North America
ABSTRACT: The contemporary Spanish philosopher Xavier Zubiri
(1893-1983) developed his philosophy in constant dialogue with
the past. Zubiri believed that there are fundamental flaws with
classical philosophy that require a fresh approach. His critique
of classical philosophy falls into three areas: conceptual,
factual, and scope. The first is treated in this paper with
respect to five subjects. Zubiri believed that the structure of
human intellection is incorrect in classical philosophy. This
error contributes in large part to two key errors which he
termed "entification of reality" and
"logification of intellection." Closely related are
errors concerning essence and the relationship of truth and
reality.
Introduction
'Classical philosophy' may be loosely
defined as the set of beliefs, assumptions, and analyses of
experience, together with the intellectual edifice erected upon
them, worked out by Ancient Greek philosophers, especially
Aristotle, and further developed by Medieval and post-Medieval
thinkers, foremost among them Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, and
Francisco Suarez. The tradition has continued to our own day, in the
persons of Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson, among others.
Extending over a period of 2500 years, classical philosophy has
undergone many changes; but some basic underlying ideas and ways of
viewing the world have remained remarkably constant. It is these
which are the subject of the present study.
In the course of developing his own philosophy,
Xavier Zubiri (1898-1983) has thoroughly and incisively analyzed
much of classical philosophy. Zubiri ultimately parts company with
Aristotle and classical philosophy because he believes that despite
its successes and insights, it suffers from fundamental errors with
respect to both point of departure and the answers given to certain
critical questions. In many cases, these errors have been set into
high relief by developments in modern science; in others, they have
been made visible by the critique of philosophers not in the
classical tradition.
Zubiri's analysis of the errors of classical
philosophy may be grouped into three broad areas:
Conceptual:
(1) Structure of human intellection.
(2) Confusion of reality and being, the
"Entification of reality".
(3) Subsuming of intellection under logos,
the "Logification of intellection".
(4) Nature and function of definition.
(5) The notion of truth.
Factual:
(1) Inconsistency with modern science.
(2) Disagreement with empirical facts.
(3) Failure to reach legitimate goals.
(4) Foundations and nature of mathematics.
Scope:
(1) The division of philosophy.
(2) Ability of unaided mind to penetrate secrets of
nature.
(3) Structural complexity of reality.
(4) Hierarchical nature of reality.
(5) The canon of reality.
The first category is the subject of this
paper.
Principle Conceptual Errors of Classical
Philosophy
(1) Structure of human intellection
For Zubiri, perception of reality begins with the
sensing process; but in contrast to Hume and classical philosophy,
Zubiri does not believe that there is duality of sensing and
apprehension. What we have, rather, is a fully integrated process
that immerses us in reality:
As impression is what formally constitutes sensing,
and reality is what formally constitutes intellective knowing, it
follows that saying that the moment of reality is "in" the
impression is the same as saying that intellection is structurally
"in" the sensing; i.e., the impression of reality is
intellective sensing. For this reason, when we apprehend
heat, for example, we are apprehending it as real heat. An animal
apprehends heat only as a thermic response sign; this is pure
sensing. In contrast, man senses heat as something "in its own
right", as something de suyo: the heat is real heat.
(1)
Direct apprehension of reality through sensible
impression is a process which is intrinsic to our somatic structures
as human beings. It is, indeed, the most important characteristic of
our apprehension, and the foundation of all subsequent knowledge,
including all rational knowledge. This impressive apprehension of
reality is an act of what Zubiri terms the sentient intelligence
(as opposed to earlier conceptions of it, which he refers to as
sensible intelligence):
By virtue of its formal nature, intellection is
apprehension of reality in and by itself. This intellection...is in
a radical sense an apprehension of the real which has its own
characteristics...Intellection is formally direct
apprehension of the real—not via representations nor images.
It is an immediate apprehension of the real, not founded in
inferences, reasoning processes, or anything of that nature. It is a
unitary apprehension. The unity of these three moments is
what makes what is apprehended to be apprehended in and by
itself.(2)
This fully integrated nature of the sensing and
intellection aspects of perception implies that the Scholastic maxim
nihil est in intellectus quod prius non fuerit in sensu
nisi ipse intellectus is radically false. (3)
(2) Confusion of reality and being; the
"entification of reality"
Zubiri criticizes all earlier philosophy (not just
classical philosophy) for sloppy thinking in regard to being and
reality. For him, reality is sensed, and it is de
suyo. Reality is formality, not being; but it is possible to
articulate the relations between the two. Being is sensed in an
oblique manner when reality is sensed. Zubiri comments,
Classical philosophy has addressed the problem of
being from the standpoint of what I have termed the
'conceptualizing intelligence'. To know intellectively
would be to "understand"; and understanding would be
intellectively knowing that something "is". That was the
thesis of Parmenides and Plato, and it has stamped European
philosophy with its peculiar character. But the conceptualizing
intelligence is constitutively founded upon the sentient
intelligence.... (4)
This approach leads inexorably to a certain view of
reality and being:
...for this theory, what is intellectively
known consists in "being". Whence it follows that reality
is but a mode of being—to be sure, the fundamental mode, but
nonetheless only a mode: the esse reale. That is to say, the
real is formally ens; reality would thus be entity. This is
what I call the entification of reality. (5)
Zubiri clarifies his position vis à
vis classical philosophy by pointing out that in classical
philosophy, substantial being was identified with reality, the
esse real. This Zubiri terms the 'entification of
reality'.
It is what I have termed the entification of
reality: things are not entities unless they have being. Now, to
be is always but an ulterior act of the real. Whatsoever a being may
be, it is always and only being "of" the real. Ulteriority
is the precise meaning of this "of". Therefore, reality
and entity are not formally identical. Prior to being entities, and
precisely in order to be able to be so, things begin by being
real. The ground of being is reality. (6)
This confusion results in the failure of classical
philosophy to fully come to grips with being and reality. Zubiri
argues that Aristotle's notion of ens (to
Ôn) never went beyond the stage of a not-so-clear
analogy of eighteen meanings. Given this situation, the Medieval
philosophers thought that no unitary concept of ens was
possible. They identified reality and existence, and then understood
existence to be an act of an existing thing (St. Thomas) or a
mode of the thing (Scotus). Zubiri argues:
But this is not so from the standpoint of a
sentient intelligence; because as we have already seen, reality is
not existence, but rather being de suyo. That is to say, it
does not have to do with either a de facto act of existing,
nor an aptitude for existing, but rather something prior to any act
and any aptitude, viz. the de suyo. The real is de
suyo existent, de suyo apt for existing. Reality is
formality, and existence concerns only the content of the real. And
thus the real is not ens, but is the de suyo as such.
Only by being real does the real have an ulterior actuality in the
world. This actuality is being, and the real in this actuality is
ens. ...Reality is not formally entity. (7)
Thus for Zubiri, the idea of ens is wrong at
the deepest level, that of the conceptualizing intelligence.
Something real is ens only as actuality in a world. Where
does that leave the history of philosophy?
The old thesis of Parmenides canonized the
opposition between intellective knowing and sensing which has been
sustained throughout all of Western philosophy. Nonetheless, this
opposition, as we have seen, does not exist. To know intellectively
is to apprehend the real, and this apprehension is sentient. Being
is nothing but the oblique moment of what is apprehended in an
impression of reality. From the standpoint of a conceptualizing
intelligence, what is known intellectively modo recto is
"being"; whence it follows that what is oblique would be
the apprehension of the real. It would be what we could call the
obliqueness of the real. And as I see it, that constitutes
the radical flaw of European philosophy on this
point... (8)
Finally, this thing-centered approach leads to
notion of being according to the categories, into which many things
don't fit: energy, entropy, forces of nature.
(3) Logification of intellection
Moreover, the being of the affirmed was identified
with the being of predication, with the copulative 'is'.
This, which he believes to be wrong as well, he terms the
'logification of intellection':
Basing themselves on Parmenides, both Plato and
Aristotle subsumed intellection under logos; that is what...I
called the logification of intellection....for this theory,
what is intellectively known consists in "being". Whence
it follows that reality is but a mode of being—to be sure, the
fundamental mode, but nonetheless only a mode: the esse real.
That is to say, the real is formally ens; reality would thus
be entity. This is what I call the entification of reality.
Logification of intellection and entification of the real thus
converge intrinsically: the "is" of intellection would
consists in an affirmative "is", and the "is"
known intellectively would be of entitative character. This
convergence has in large measure etched the path of European
philosophy. (9)
From Zubiri's standpoint, however, the
situation is entirely different:
...the problem does not exhibit the same character
from the standpoint of a sentient intelligence. The logos is
founded on sentient apprehension of the real; i.e., on the sentient
intellection. Therefore, instead of "logifying"
intellection, what must be done is, as I said, to
"intelligize" the logos; i.e., make the logos an ulterior
mode of the primordial apprehension of the real. The formal
terminus of intellective knowing is not the "is",
but "reality". And thus it follows that reality is not a
mode of being; indeed, being is something ulterior to reality
itself. In virtue of this ... there is no esse real, but
rather realitas in essendo. (10)
This logification has led to quite erroneous ideas
about reason. According to Zubiri, they are three: reason as organ
of evidence about being, of speculative dialectic, and of total
organization of experience. He remarks:
These conceptions are unacceptable at their root,
because intellective knowing is not judging but sentiently
actualizing the real. Whence it is that reason does not rest upon
itself, but is always just a mode of intellection. Reasoning,
speculating, and organizing are three ways—among the many
possible—of intellectively progressing in depth toward the
beyond. And this progression is by its own formal nature founded
upon a previous intellection, a sentient intellection. (11)
For Zubiri, in other words, the classical paradigm
of rational knowledge as the ultimate basis for all knowledge, and
accordingly that which must ground our knowledge, is completely
wrong.
(4) Nature and function of definition
Essence is indeed one of the most profound subjects
of human thought, and has exercised many of the greatest minds from
antiquity to the present day. The central place of essence in human
speculation inevitably means that in an age of science, its nature
and relationship to the scientifically revealed world will become
critically important. Do scientific discoveries about the nature of
things bear on essence?
Zubiri greatly broadened and deepened our
understanding of essence, both in the logical as well as the
physical sense. He reviews old concepts of essence, and rejects them
all as insufficient, before proposing his own, founded upon the
notion of system:
... the basic, constitutive system of all the notes
which are necessary and sufficient for a substantive reality to be
what it is, is precisely what I have called essence. It is
the primary, coherential, unity. (12)
For Zubiri, it is the interrelationship of the
notes making up essence which is important; each constitutive note
is present by virtue of its place in constituting the whole. The
notes are mutually dependent, and often lose their individual
identity in the constituted system. (13)Every reality is thus a
systematic unity. (14)This general discussion is in agreement with the
modern scientific concept of things as dynamic systems, in which the
interrelationship of the components makes the thing what it is, with
its own behavior, different than that of its constituents and often
obscuring them.
In light of Zubiri's discussion, it is apparent
that classical concepts of essence are not congruent with science
because they are what I term "flat", i.e., they assume
that there is an absolute character of everything that can be
captured by some act of the mind, usually unaided, on the basis of
which we then "know" the thing. The primary example, of
course, is the classical definition in terms of genus and species,
with the example, "man is a rational animal", though Hegel
and Husserl immediately come to mind as well. Zubiri correctly
points out that all such concepts of essence are inadequate because
they do not capture its key physical property, that of structure,
the de suyo, from which emerge all of its properties or
notes, including its dynamics, the dar de sí. This is
more along the lines of Aristotle's tÕ t...
Ïn enai, but without the logical connotations which it
ultimately assumed. Clearly, behavior such as we now understand,
from biological evolution to chaos, is of an entirely different
order than that envisioned by the creators of the old concepts of
essence; and it involves layers of structure which point to a far
richer and more complex reality than those concepts are capable of
expressing. Indeed, it is unclear that essences can be adequately
expressed at all in normal language.
The probing activity of science, through sketching
of possibilities and use of experiment, may be the principal route
to knowledge of essences, even though essence appears logically in
primordial apprehension. Zubiri's concept of essence is thus
much more profound, but also much more difficult to achieve, than
earlier conceptions of it. He notes,
... essence is not to be sought in the metaphysical
analysis of the predicates which are attributed to the thing, but
rather, on the contrary, in the analysis of its real structures, of
its notes, and of the function which these fulfill in the
constitutional system of its individual substantivity.... It is the
essence as "physical" moment of the real
thing. (15)
(5) The notion of truth and its relationship to
reality
The classical notion of truth is or involves some
agreement between thought and things—Zubiri terms it
'dual truth'. Zubiri does not wish to reject this
notion, only to reject it as the fundamental meaning of
'truth'. The major problem with the classical idea is
that it does not provide a reliable path for us to go beyond our
perceptions; there is, so to speak, and unbridgeable gap between the
world of sense perception and that of real things. But for Zubiri,
this problem is a pseudo-problem because it is based on an incorrect
analysis of our fundamental act of perception and on a derivative
notion of truth. The correct analysis of perception is that of
Zubiri's sentient intellection, according to which we do
directly perceive reality in primordial apprehension; this is
real truth and not subject to error; error can only arise
when we seek to go beyond primordial apprehension via rational
processes. Zubiri notes,
...the real is "in" the
intellection, and this "in" is ratification. In sentient
intellection truth is found in that primary form which is the
impression of reality. The truth of this impressive actuality of the
real in and by itself is precisely real truth.... Classical
philosophy has gone astray on this matter and always thought that
truth is constituted in the reference to a real thing with respect
to what is conceived or asserted about that thing. It is because of
this that I believe that the classical idea of truth is always what
I term dual truth. But in real truth we do not leave the real
thing at all; the intelligence of this truth is not conceptualized
but sentient. And in this intellection nothing is primarily
conceived or judged; rather, there is simply the real actualized as
real and therefore ratified in its reality. Real truth is
ratification, and therefore is simple truth. (16)
Truth is often conceived as agreement of thought
with things. This may be the case in some areas, such as the
judicial system; but it is inadequate in general. For example, we
wish to speak of the truth of art or literature. Moreover, once one
agrees that language is limited in what it can express, unless one
generalizes the notion of truth, it too becomes extremely limited.
Zubiri comments:
Primary and radical truth is not the conformity of
thought with things, i.e., truth is not primarily a property of
thought, but a property of reality itself, that characteristic
according to which reality itself is actualized in the intelligence.
This is what I have called real truth. This truth has, as we
indicated, three dimensions: patency of reality, firmness of
reality, effectivity of reality. Patency, firmness, and effectivity
are the three dimensions of the intellective actualization of
reality. (17)
With respect to error, Zubiri observes that
the mere actuality of what is apprehended
"in" the apprehension itself is not dual; it is a series
of notes which pertain to what is apprehended "of its
own", i.e., de suyo. Hence, error consists in
identifying the real which is apprehended with the real beyond or
outside of the apprehension; in no way does it consist in what is
apprehended being unreal "in" the apprehension and yet
being taken as real. In an apprehension the apprehended content is
real in and by itself; when ratified as such it constitutes real
truth. There is no possibility of error. (18)
With this background, it is natural that in Zubiri
truth will have a different meaning than in classical (or any other)
philosophy. The priority of reality is paramount; for Zubiri, truth
is intellective actualization of the real qua intellective,
in the sense that a thing is really that in accordance with which it
has been actualized.
Notes
(1) Xavier Zubiri, Inteligencia y
realidad, (First volume of trilogy, Inteligencia
sentiente), Madrid: Alianza Editorial/Sociedad de
Estudios y Publicaciones, 1980, p. 82-83. (Hereafter, IRE; unless
otherwise indicated, all translations of Zubiri are by the author).
(2) IRE, p. 257.
(3) IRE, p. 104.
(4) IRE, p. 224.
(5) IRE, p. 224-225.
(6) Xavier Zubiri, El Hombre Y Dios,
Madrid: Alianza Editorial/Sociedad de Estudios y Publicaciones,
1984, p. 131. (Hereafter, HD; translation by Mr. Joaquin
Redondo.
(7) IRE p. 226.
(8) IRE, p. 227-228.
(9) IRE, p. 151
(10) IRE, p. 151
(11) IRE, p. 523
(12) Xavier Zubiri, Estructura Dinámica
de la Realidad, Madrid: Alianza Editorial/Sociedad de Estudios y
Publicaciones, 1989, p. 35. (Hereafter, ED).
(13) Xavier Zubiri, Sobre la Esencia,
Madrid: Alianza Editorial/Sociedad de Estudios y Publicaciones,
1985, p. 144. (translation of A.R. Caponigri; Hereafter, SE). p.
144.
(14) SE, p. 266.
(15) SE, p. 177.
(16) IRE, p. 234-235.
(17) HD, p. 214.
(18) IRE, p. 236.
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