In the 1600’s, philosophy, and so Europe, came to look different. Just what brought the transformation about remains controversial; indeed, it even remains undecided whether the new epoch of philosophy was its third (following on Ancient and Medieval, as most people think, bobbing in the wake of Hegel, who was famously enamored of triads) or the second (as I think, rating the persistent dance of the Metaphysical Barn more important than the transition from the Greeks to the Christians).
My amalgamation of the medieval to the ancient is rooted in the fact that the medieval world, like the ancient, was ousiodically structured: it consisted of kingdoms, armies, fiefdoms, villages, parishes, dioceses, households, and the like, each resting within its boundaries and each organized and controlled from the top by a unified agent—indeed often, in theory anyway, by a single person. The whole arrangement looked to ancient Rome for its inspiration, as Rome had looked to Athens.
But now, in the 17th Century, it teetered.
For Aristotle, whose metaphysics dominated European social structures even during the long eclipse of his writings, the status of ousia as a model for all social institutions was justified by its being the basic structuring principle of the natural world:
In all things which are composed out of several other things, and which come to be some single common thing, whether continuous or discrete, in all of them there turns out to be a distinction between that which rules, and that which is ruled; and this holds for all ensouled things by virtue of the whole of nature…(Politics I.4).
All very fine—until the rise of science evicted ousia from the natural world. Galileo, who died in 1642, recognized that atomism was more compatible with modern mechanics than Aristotelian essentialism: a stone falling to earth is not striving to realize its heavy essence, but is merely being acted upon by gravity. Similarly, Newton discovered, for the earth itself.
If nature was not ousiodic , how could it underwrite ousia in the human world? Aristotle’s strategy collapsed, and modernity was born.
Some, such as Heidegger, have maintained that modern philosophy came about through a hubristic elevation of the human mind to a position akin to the one formerly occupied by God. Others suggest that the social and religious turmoil instigated by Martin Luther in 1453 eventually made philosophical certainty imperative, and that the surrounding confusion required that such certainty be sought in the individual mind—a hope realized when Descartes came across the cogito, the absolute certainty that I have of my own thought. These claims are all very well—in history, the more explanations we have the better, as long as they are consonant with the known facts—but left to themselves, I think they underplay two things.
First, the elevation of mind went along with a reevaluation of matter, which lost form; unformed yet somehow clumped matter, i.e. bodies, became basic to nature. Heidegger was half right, then: the elevation of the human mind he advocates for was in fact paired with the scientific eviction of form from nature.
Second, this double development provoked the new problem I mentioned above, a problem too basic to too many things to be seen clearly: if ousiodic structure could no longer be found in nature, what entitled it to play its traditional role in structuring the human world? How could Europeans continue to have their traditional kinds of families, states, churches, and so on in a world which had literally been de-formed by modern science?
Two general strategies emerged. Some philosophers concluded that since a natural justification for ousia was impossible, a supernatural one was required. Daniel Garber indicates how it worked:
Descartes rejects the tiny souls [essences] of the schools only to replace them with one great soul, God, an incorporeal substance who, to our limited understanding, manipulates the bodies of the inanimate world as we manipulate ours (Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics p. 116).
Descartes thus divinizes ousia in a monotheistic way and relocates it to the level of the entire universe. The strategy will survive him: Spinoza will absolutize it, and Leibniz will loosen it.
The other move was to abandon the entire project of formulating an overall justification for ousia, while salvaging various individual cases of it. Here we get Hobbes’ account of Leviathan, the modern state; Locke’s of the individual property owner; and Hume’s of the individual mind. All retain ousiodic structure, but only on one level of what had been the cosmos. The other levels are de-formed into mere matter, to be manipulated at will.
So the homo economicus of Locke steps forward in contrast to the homo politicus of Hobbes, and both confront the Humean individual, who overturns the entre ancient morality of reason: “reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them” (Treatise p. 415). Ousiodic structure is still here, guiding Hume’s metaphor of master and slave, but it has been turned on its head.
These two opposing strategies—the divinization of ousiodic structure on the one hand, and its piecemeal abandonment on the other—were born together, out of the need to justify ousia as the structuring principle of the (European) human world after it had lost its status in nature and could no longer do the job in the old way. Their common birth, which was the birth of modernity, meant that the new, modern world was inherently conflictual.
It has remained so: Hobbesian homo politicus and Lockean homo economicus, for example, continued their confrontation all the way into the Cold War. This abiding conflict should not conceal the common concern of the parties to it with ousia, or the even deeper question which that concern raises: are modern theories of the state, the economy, and morality any less fantastic than the ancient theories of nature they supposedly replace?