Aquinas and OOO

Paul Bains comments as follows at Larval Subjects:

“At the risk of being considered a party pooper I would say that ‘harman’s thesis’ can clearly be seen in Aquinas. We do not know substances but only their accidents, and substance are not congeries of accidents. ‘substantial forms are in their own being unknown to us’ (Summa theologiae 1.77.1 ad7).” (Comment #8)

I don’t consider Bains a party pooper here at all. I’ve always appreciated his remarks on links between OOO and medieval philosophy.

However, Bains is also missing the point of my major thesis. The central claim of my philosophy is not that “we do not know” substances (even Aristotle sometimes approaches that claim), but that substances also do not fully interact with each other, and that those two facts are on the exact same ontological footing.

If Bains wants to up the ante and say that the Scholastics knew that as well, he will run up against the barrier that we don’t find occasionalism in Medieval Europe. Aquinas does say that God sustains everything, just as (to use the classic analogy for Aquinas) the electricity in a house enables the functioning of all the electrical appliances in the house. But that doesn’t mean that Aquinas goes one step further and say that the electrical appliances can’t affect each other directly, which is what occasionalism means.

I suppose Bains could then claim that I’m just repeating what some of the medieval Arabs already said, but then he would have to confront the fact that they always invoked God as the universal causal mediator, which I am on record as calling a dodge of the issue: for there is no reason other than piety to give one specific entity direct causal powers that are forbidden to all other entities.

What’s “new” about my version of OOO (and I use the scare quotes only because Bains keeps assaulting that word in particular) is that objects cannot make direct contact and need mediators for all their interactions. Latour is the first I know of in the history of philosophy to insist on this point (even Whitehead has recourse to God again). For my critique of why Latour’s model does not yet quite work, see the passages I wrote on Joliot in Prince of Networks.

But if object-oriented philosophy can be made more palatable to some people by saying that Aquinas already proved it right, then that will be nicely convenient, even if it is historically false.