As citizens of human culture, we swim in an ocean of ideologies. Some of these, like the oft-debated topics of populism or socialism we are quite conscious of. Some of them much less. Yet like the air quality in a room silently affects our health, surrounding ideological currents have a tremendous influence on the way we think and act, and make up part of who we are – regardless of how aware we are of them.

Sometimes, however, it’s not enough to be merely aware of ideologies we “breathe”. It’s also important to understand them in their historical context. Only then do we become truly aware of their significance and character in contrast to other ideologies. It’s hard, for example, to understand the profundity of individualism without understanding the millennia of group-oriented thinking which preceded it. 

For this reason it’s important to know how the ideas which tend to dominate our thinking today had their origins. I want to shortly discuss one strand of thought which arose in the middle ages and has come to virtually dominate modern discourse. It’s called „nominalism“.

What is Nominalism?

Like such ideas as „populism“ or „marxism“, nominalism is sometimes difficult to explain with mere words. But once you understand it, you begin to see it everywhere. You may even recognise that, just like the idea that „everyone has the right to express themselves“, you’ve come to accept it long before you ever really thought about that. 

Nominalism teaches that there is no inherent nature to things, but rather that they receive their identity and essence from the outside, by human thought, culture, or the systems in which they exist. 

Cases where this is obviously true involve, for example, spoons or tables. The purpose of a spoon is imposed upon it from the outside, making its purpose extrinsic, or outside of itself. It finds itself as part of a system its internal nature knows nothing about – even if it is suited well towards the purpose it is used for. 

One can’t possibly say that the purpose of a spoon is to aid humans in eating food. That’s only some human’s purpose for spoons. You can also use it for digging dirt or decoration without breaking any kind of invisible rule about its purpose. The same applies to tables. You can use a table for eating at or even for burning to keep your family warm – but apart from human societies and cultures, tables have no such thing as an objective purpose of being eaten upon. 

Intrinsic Purpose and Essence

More difficult to judge are cases of biological life. But before we get there, we need to make the very important distinction between two kinds of purpose. What we’ve been discussing is purpose in the extrinsic sense. In other words, purpose as assigned from the outside. I can use a pencil for the purpose of any number of things, including writing. But in the end, no matter if I use the pencil for writing, to poke holes in my homework, or to prop open a window, its purpose is outside of it, or extrinsic. The nature of a pencil has no inkling of what I am using it for.  

Yet there is another kind of purpose, namely intrinsic purpose. This purpose is not the kind of purpose that we assign to things, but the natural ends towards which a thing is aimed. For example, an acorn naturally strives to become an oak tree, even if it doesn’t succeed. This doesn’t require me to use it for that purpose; it just is what an acorn naturally does. 

According to the concept of intrinsic purpose, we can understand an acorn to have the purpose of becoming an oak tree. That is, not because any human or even because God has decided to impose this purpose upon it, but because it is simply what its nature is aimed at. The same is true for elephants, say, and reproduction. Elephants don’t reproduce because God or humans told them to, or because that’s how culture has conditioned them, but because that is what they from their internal nature are geared towards. While this is a rather common-sense perspective, its first precise articulations came from the Greek Philosophers Plato and Aristotle.  

In the middle ages, St. Thomas Aquinas heavily contributed to reviving Aristotelianism to European theological and philosophical thought. The major trend of Christian thought up until this point was Neo-platonist. That is, there were such things as internal natures and creatures had them, but these essences existed abstractly in the heavens, so to speak, in the mind of God as pure and perfect forms. A cat was a cat because it participates in the form of cat-ness which exists in the mind of God. Plato described human life as a constant experience of illusion from which only contemplation of the true heavenly forms could provide escape and true enlightenment. 

Aristotle disagreed. He believed that cats, humans, and elephants had essences, but that the essences didn’t exist in a celestial sphere or even in the mind of God, but in the creatures themselves. Essences weren’t – and this is important – supernatural entities. They were, according to Aristotle, abstract entities which constitute the identity of things and creatures. 

When Aquinas re-introduced Aristotle into European thought in the 13th century, a shift happened in which an interest in the local, the thing-in-itself, and nature arose. Commonplace things were not merely shadows or delusions, they had true essence. Creatures had a proper aimed purpose according to which their nature reached its perfections. That included humans. The ultimate good of humans was built into and an inherent expression of their very essence. This led to a healthy focus on respecting the natures of things as intrinsically expressing their ultimate good. The proper end of a tree is to produce seeds, leaves, roots, and etc.. It doesn’t always reach these goals – perhaps it is spoiled or abused and ends up dying. But that doesn’t change that its nature strives towards this.  

Ockham and Nominalism

Shortly after the time of Aquinas,  William of Ockham, a medieval Philosopher, disagreed. Ockham did not accept the idea that there was an internal essence which constituted the ultimate good of humans intrinsic to their nature. (1)

Why? Because this would limit God’s freedom. If mankind had its own inherent good (much like it is the inherent good of a sunflower to grow and bloom), this limited God from being able to say otherwise. God was therefore limited and unfree. His sovereignty was under attack by aristotelian essences. Ockham, rejected the idea of intrinsic purpose or essence and opted for an external understanding of purpose. The ultimate good of humans is precisely what God says it is because He declares it so and nothing else. He went on to apply this to any kind of intrinsic nature, whether natural or accidental. In Ockham’s view, the labels we apply to things like “human”, “tree”, “animal”, etc. were just labels and abstractions of the human mind. Nothing more. 

Nominalism and the natureless world

Ockham was influential in medieval philosophy and his thought attracted a following in future philosophers which has gone on to deeply affect the modern world.  Although the concept of intrinsic essences has remained a cornerstone of various institutions and faith confessions like the Catholic church, the modern world has, through a long process of transformation, largely abandoned the idea.

Francis Bacon, for example, living in the late renaissance period (16th-17th century) and widely known as the father of the scientific method, went on to further the claims of nominalism. He claimed that the natural world has no inherent natures or essences, and that the only kind of things that could be known about it were statements about how entities responded to empirical experiments and various discovered properties. He then purported a picture of the universe which functioned consistently not by the internal structure of the world, but by laws which enforced its behavior from the outside. If humans gain knowledge of these laws, they would be able to learn more and use nature for their own ends.  

David Hume, a Scottish philosopher in the 18th century, even went on to deny the rational basis for understanding causality. Why? Because, according to his nominalist understanding of reality, there is no such thing as internal nature or intrinsic purpose to the world and its objects which would allow us to think that they necessarily produce consistent effects. Rather, objects act according to laws enforced upon them from the outside. Their properties might influence this, but they do not determine it. We can’t therefore say that event A truly caused event B, because event A is ultimately not necessarily something that has an internal nature such that it would always cause such a thing as B.  Throwing a rock into a pond might just as well have caused an explosion and raging fire as small ripples and „plop“ noise. 

Now, this might sound quite absurd. Of course Hume didn’t really expect throwing a rock into a pond to cause a fire. The point is deeper: effects don’t necessarily follow from their causes – it’s just the way the world works because of scientific laws of the universe. Where previous  philosophers such as Ockham and Isaac Newton had understood God to be the one who enforced the behavior of the universe, Hume, a skeptic, saw these laws as merely the way the universe worked. To this day there is no real scientific consensus on why or how the „laws of the universe“ work.  

Nominalism and the natureless humanity

These shifts were by no means restricted to natural science. The English philosopher John Locke argued before Hume that the human mind was a “tabula rasa” or blank slate– humans had no innate ideas. Rather our consciousness needed to acquire (or have imposed) its shape from the outside – which in principle implied that human consciousness could be anything it was shaped to be. 

Friedrich Nietzsche then developed the concept of the “Übermensch”, the man who overcomes the vagaries of nature and imposes his own identity, morality, and purpose onto life. This idea was advanced even further in the postmodern era. Here one could find multiple voices like the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre claiming that „Existence precedes essence“, meaning that there is no inherent structure and shape to reality; only that which we humans give it. Our task in life is to create ourselves according to our own sensibilities. The objective authority of any kind of inherent nature of humanity is rejected in lieu of the human responsibility to “create and define oneself and one’s principles” .

There has been, then, a significant and growing shift in western society from an intrinsic understanding of purpose and nature to an extrinsic. Whereas God’s presence was previously seen in an ordered nature seeking to fulfill His will of its own accord, society now saw itself in a law-governed and mechanical universe which merely responds in certain ways to stimuli.

We no longer looked to things in themselves to determine their own identity, purpose, nature, and perfection. Instead we, the external agents, assign our own purposes to ourselves and impute a purpose upon our own lives and a structure to our own. 

Through this lens, many of the movements of the last century may suddenly make more sense. Attempts to „re-make“ human nature according to our own ideology have redounded – aided by advancements in technology which have freed us from the necessity of holding traditional social roles for survival. 

Though many of these movements have run up against the brick wall of human nature (which hasn’t disappeared even if our understanding of it has) and continue to do so, the project still has not run out of steam.  Nevertheless the cracks in the facade of such movements such as radical transgenderism, liberal feminism, and radical individualism are beginning to show. These reveal themselves primarily in the reality-estranged and contradictory conclusions they come to about humanity as well as the disillusionment many have begun to feel about them. 

This is only to be expected when one attempts to force a foreign framework of thought onto the human frame, assuming it is a purely „blank slate“ and doesn’t have a specific nature and an ultimate good which might contradict it. It might work for a while, but it ultimately begins to fall apart. 

The problem with nominalism and its accompanying mechanistic theory of the universe is that it has multiple fatal objections and fails further to answer critical questions – like, „can there be individual things?“ or „is change possible?“

It also fails to account for our very strong intuitions that many things in our universe truly do have an ultimate good and that regardless of how culture has represented them or what we think about them, there are some things which are truly good for them and some things which are truly bad for them. The climate movement, for example, is predicated upon the idea that indeed there is such a thing as abusing the earth, and that the „good“ or „perfection“ of nature involves not inundating it with Co2 gasses.  

Is it not also possible that as humans we have a very specific nature, which flourishes or wilts according to certain ways of living? 

In my opinion, nominalism has some good insights about the universalising nature of language; it also can offer some deconstructive contributions to society which help us recognise where merely human constructs lie. But I think it goes too far and becomes a kind of smog around us which obscures the real world which fails to recognise the true natures of things. 

A caricature of freedom

One important thing to notice, however, is instanced in Ockham’s rejections of internal purpose and also in many movements throughout history. Namely, that a skewed or glorified understanding of freedom can distort one’s philosophical perception of the world and result in serious estrangement from reality. God is no less free by being bound to the nature of his own intentional creation than I am unfree because I have chosen to do x and therefore by definition cannot simultaneously do not-x. Reality itself places restrictions on us which we cannot escape. 

We live in a society so heavily influenced by the idea of utter and radical freedom that the very idea of truth has become hateful to us because it binds us to an unchanging and unyielding reality. In being bound to reality, we are not „free“ to believe whatever we want and shape our lives however we prefer. Yet if our conception of freedom requires us to disengage from reality, perhaps we need to question our concept of freedom. 

Indeed we must recognise that to „be“ anything means necessarily to not be its negation. Any society or individual which places utter freedom as its highest good must ultimately destroy itself.  For by definition purpose, identity, belief, or moral principles of any kind necessarily decrease one’s freedom –  even if these are the very thing that brings us life. 

1. Ockham’s rejection of essences was based on other reasons, such as reflections upon the nature of cognitive and connotative reference being sufficient to explain universals, and eliminating the need for positing anything metaphysical to explain universal natures.