Chapter 10 Chapter 9 The World of Universals

At the end of the last chapter, we have seen that entities such as "relations" seem to exist, but they do so in a different way from physical objects, and from mind and sense-data.In this chapter we must consider what the nature of this being is, and also what kind of objects have this kind of being.Let's start with the latter question first. We are dealing with a very old question, because it was Plato who brought it into philosophy.Plato's "Theory of Ideas" is an attempt to answer this question, which is, in my opinion, the most successful attempt so far.What follows is, for the most part, Plato's theory.It's just that some necessary corrections have been made due to the progress of the times.

For Plato, the way this problem arises is roughly like this.Let's consider a concept like "fairness."If we think about what is just, we naturally think in terms of this, that, or other just act, in order to discover what they have in common.They must in some sense have a common quality which exists in all just things and which is absent in others, and this common quality (by which just actions are just) ) is justice itself, the pure essence, which mixes with some facts in daily life to produce countless just actions.Any other word, say "white," would equally apply to the common fact.The reason why this word can be applied to many specific things is that these things have a common quality or essence, and this pure essence is what Plato called "idea" or "form". (It must not be thought that what Plato called "ideas" existed in the mind, although they could be understood by the mind.) The "idea" of justice is not equal to anything just: it is something that does not belong to particular things. , but shared by particular things.Since it is not particular, it cannot exist by itself in the world of sense.And it is not so capricious as the things of sense; it is itself eternal and immortal.

Plato thus arrives at a supersensible world that is more real than the ordinary world of senses, that is, the unchanging world of ideas, which alone offers a faint reflection of all the realities that belong to it in the world of senses.For Plato, the truly real world is the world of ideas.For whatever we want to say about things in the world of sense, we can only say that they share this or that idea which constitutes their characteristic.So it's easy to slip into mysticism.We may expect to see the Ideas as objects of the senses in a mystical revelation; we may also imagine the Ideas to exist in the heavens.These mystical developments are quite natural, but the basis of the doctrine is logical.It is precisely because it is fundamentally logical that we must take it into account.

Over time, the term "idea" has acquired so many irrelevant associations that it is easy to cause misunderstanding when it is applied to Plato's "idea".Therefore, we use the word "universal" instead of "idea" to express Plato's opinion.The essence of what Plato speaks of is that it is opposed to the particular given in sensation.Whatever is given in the senses, or is of the same nature as that given in the senses, we say to be a particular; What things share, and which have those qualities which, we have seen above, distinguish justice from just actions, and white from white things.

When we study ordinary words, we find that, in general, special names represent particulars, while other nouns, adjectives, prepositions, and verbs represent universals.Pronouns stand for particulars, but their meaning is ambiguous: only from the context or from the linguistic environment do we know which particulars they represent. The word "now" signifies a particular, that is, the present moment; but like a pronoun it is also an ambiguous particular, since the "now" is forever changing. Therefore, it can be seen that a sentence must have at least one word expressing a universal.A statement like "I like this" is the closest thing to the above statement.But here too, the word "like" signifies a universal, because I can also like other things, and other people can also like something.Thus, all truths involve universals, and all knowledge of truths involves knowledge of universals.

Since almost all the words in the dictionary represent universals, this is very strange: why does no one understand the existence of entities like universals except people who study philosophy?We naturally don't think much of words in sentences that do not represent particulars; if we have to think of a word that represents a universal, we naturally think of it as representing a particular that appears as a universal.For example, when we hear that "Charles I's head was cut off", we will very naturally only think of Charles I, Charles I's head and the act of beheading his head, these are particulars; Does not ponder what the word "head" or "cut" means, both of which are universals.We feel that these words are incomplete and not specific.As if they needed a scope to work.We cannot avoid, therefore, completely ignoring such universal words until we are compelled to pay attention to them in the study of philosophy.

In general we may say that, even among philosophers, only those universals called adjectives or nouns are often recognized, and those called verbs and prepositions are often neglected.Philosophy has been greatly influenced by this omission; and it is not too much to say that, since Spinoza, the greater part of metaphysics has been determined by it.The situation is roughly like this: Generally speaking, adjectives and nouns express the quality or nature of a single thing, while prepositions and verbs tend to express the relationship between two or more things.Thus, the neglect of prepositions and verbs creates the belief that prepositions can be seen as attributing properties of a single thing, rather than expressing a relation of two or more things.Therefore, it was thought in the past that, in the final analysis, there can be no such entity as a relationship between things.Therefore, whether there is only one thing or many things in the universe, it is impossible for them to interact with each other in any way, because any kind of interaction will be a kind of relationship, and relationship cannot exist.

The first of these views, pioneered by Spinoza and still held today by Mr. Bradley and many other philosophers, is called monism.The second view, pioneered by Leibniz (and not very popular today), is called monadism, because every isolated thing is called a monad.Interesting as these two opposing philosophies are, it seems to me that they both pay too much attention to a certain class of universals, that is, to universals expressed by adjectives and nouns, and not to due attention. The universals expressed by verbs and prepositions. As a matter of fact, if one were tempted to deny altogether that there are such things as universals, we would find that we cannot strictly prove that there are entities such as properties, that is to say, that adjectives and nouns exist. The universals of representation exist; but we can prove that relations necessarily exist, that is, of the universals generally represented by verbs and prepositions.Let us take Gongxiangbai as an example to illustrate.If we believe that there is such a universal as "white", we say that things are white because they have the property of being white.However, this view was strongly denied by Berkeley and Hume, and later empiricists followed in their footsteps in this respect.Their denial of this view takes the form of denying the existence of "abstract ideas."They say that when we want to think about whiteness, we form in our minds a particular, an image of something white, and we speculate on this particular, taking care not to deduce anything that is true about it. And not the same true thing in other white things.If this is taken as an illustration of our actual thought process, there is no question that this is roughly true.In geometry, for example, when we wish to prove something that all triangles have, we draw a particular triangle and speculate, taking care not to exploit properties that it does not share with any other triangle.The beginner, in order to avoid mistakes, often finds it helpful to draw several triangles, as different as possible from each other, in order to be sure that his reasoning applies equally to all triangles.Difficulties arise, however, as soon as we ask ourselves how we can know whether a thing is white, or a triangle.If we wish to avoid universal whites and triangles, we must choose a particular piece of white or a particular triangle, and say that anything is white as long as it is exactly like the particular we have chosen, Or just a triangle.But the similarity required at this time must also be a universal.Since there are many white things, this resemblance must hold between many pairs of white things; and this is a characteristic of a universal.It is useless to say that each pair has a different resemblance; for, then, we would have to say that the resemblances are all resemblances to each other, and so in the end we would have to admit that the resemblance is a universal.So the similarity relation must be a real universal.Now that this universal has to be recognized, we feel that it is not worthwhile to create some difficult and unreasonable doctrines to avoid recognizing such universals as "white" and "triangle".

The reason why Berkeley and Hume fail to perceive this objection to their denial of "abstract ideas" is that they, like their opponents, think only of properties, completely ignoring that relations are also universals.The rationalists, therefore, seem to be right again against the empiricists on the other point, though what they deduce, so to speak, may be, by ignoring or denying the existence of relations, more mistake. Now that it is clear that there must be such entities as universals, the next point to prove is that their existence is not merely mental.This means that, whatever their existence may be, their existence does not depend upon being thought, nor upon being perceived by the mind in any way.We have touched on this problem at the end of the last chapter, but now we need to study more fully which kind of existence the universal belongs to.

Let us consider the proposition 'Edinburgh is north of London'.There is a relation here between two places, and the existence of this relation does not depend on our knowledge of it; this is most obvious.When we know that Edinburgh is north of London, we know one thing about Edinburgh and London: our knowledge of the proposition does not make the proposition true, on the contrary, we only learn of an We know for a fact that it has been there before.Even if no one knew north and south, even if there were no minds in the universe, the piece of land occupied by Edinburgh must be north of the piece of land occupied by London.Of course, there are many philosophers who could deny this on the grounds of Berkeley or Kant.But we have considered these reasons and consider them all to be invalid.So we can now assume that it is true that there is nothing spiritual presupposed in the fact that Edinburgh is north of London.But this fact involves the relation "north of" which is a universal; if the relation "north of" (which is an integral part of the fact) does If something spiritual is involved, then it cannot be that the whole fact is also something spiritual.We must therefore admit that relationship, like the items it involves, does not depend on our thinking, but belongs to that independent world which thought can understand but cannot create.

This conclusion, however, encounters the difficulty again: the relation "north of ..." does not seem to exist in the sense that Edinburgh and London exist.If we ask: "Where and when does this relationship exist?" the answer should be "Nowhere and anytime."There is no place, and no time, where we can find the relationship "north of".It exists no more in Edinburgh than in London, for it connects the two places, and resides impartially between them.Nor can we say that it existed at a particular time.Everything that can be apprehended by the senses or by introspection exists at a particular time.Therefore, the relationship "north of ..." is fundamentally different from the above-mentioned class of things, it is neither in space nor in time, it is neither material nor spiritual; thing. It is mainly because of this singular existence that universals have that many people regard universals as belonging to the spirit.We can think of a universal, and then our act of thinking is like any other mental act, and its existence is in the ordinary sense.Suppose, for example, that we now think about "whiteness," then, in one sense, "whiteness" can be said to be "in our minds."Here again we encounter the ambiguous problem mentioned in the discussion of Berkeley in Chapter 4.Strictly speaking, what is in our mind is not "whiteness", but the act of thinking about whiteness.We have also noticed that there is also entanglement and ambiguity in the word "idea", which is also the cause of confusion here."White" is an "idea" in one sense of the word, that is, in so far as it refers to the object of an act of thinking.Therefore, if we do not pay attention to guard against the ambiguity mentioned above, we may regard "whiteness" as a "concept" in another sense, that is, as a matter of thinking. Behavior; thus, we will think of "white" as spiritual.But in thinking this way, we deprive it of its essential quality of universality.One man's act of thinking is not necessarily the same as that of others; nor is a man's act of thinking at one time the same as his act of thinking at another time.Therefore, if "whiteness" is a thought opposed to an object, two different people cannot think about it, nor can the same person think about it twice.What the various thoughts of "whiteness" have in common is their object, and this object is not the same as all these thoughts.Universals are therefore not thoughts, although they are known only as objects of thought. We shall find it easy to assert that things exist only when they are in time, that is, only when we can point to the time of their existence (which does not exclude the possibility of things being eternal).Thus, thoughts and feelings, minds and physical objects, exist.But universals do not exist in this sense; we say that they are eternal, or that they have a reality, where "reality" is timeless, as opposed to "existence."Therefore, the world of universals can also be said to be the real world.The real world is immutable, strict, and exact, and it is pleasing to mathematicians, logicians, metaphysical system builders, and all those who love perfection more than life.The world of existence is fleeting, indistinct, without definite boundaries, without any apparent plan or arrangement; but it embraces all thoughts and feelings, all sense-data, and all material objects: all kinds, beneficial and Things that are harmful and can affect the value of life.According to our dispositions, we now prefer to meditate on both worlds.The world we would rather not choose is probably a faint shadow of the one we prefer, and hardly worthy of being real in any sense.But in fact, both worlds demand our attention equally, both are real, and both are equally important to the metaphysician.True, once we have distinguished the two worlds, we must consider their relationship. But first we should consider our knowledge of universals.We shall consider it in the next chapter, and it seems to us that this solves the problem of a priori knowledge; having solved this problem, we proceed to the study of universals.