Dominik Kowalski has a question for me about footnote 3 in Peter van Inwagen's "God's Being and Ours" in Miroslav Szatkowski, ed., Ontology of Theistic Beliefs, de Gruyter, 2018, pp. 213-223. (Van Inwagen's essay is right after my "Does God Exist Because He Ought to Exist?, pp. 203-212. I managed to upstage van Inwagen, but only alphabetically.) Here is footnote 3:
Catholic philosophers have often said not that God’s existence is a consequence of his nature but that his existence and his nature are identical. This doctrine is one of the many implications of the more general “doctrine of Divine Simplicity”, according to which phrases like ‘God’s power’, ‘God’s wisdom’, ‘God’s love’, ‘God’s nature’ and ‘God’s existence’ all denote one and the same thing, namely the Divine Substance – that is, God, God himself, God full stop. The doctrine of Divine Simplicity, however, presupposes an Aristotelian ontology of substance and attribute (for present purposes, “Aristotelianism”). From the point of view of a Platonist like myself, the doctrine of Divine Simplicity is wrong simply because it presupposes Aristotelianism, and Aristotelianism is false.
Here is Dominik's question:
Where does that idea come from? [The idea that DDS presupposes an Aristotelian ontology.] Seriously, I don't understand. It might be disputable whether we can reconcile Plotinus' understanding of the way the One exists with a Thomistic view about God, but divine simplicity is a core pillar of (Neo-)Platonist arguments, e.g. the argument from composition. As said, perhaps the identification of God with existence is a newer concept due to development by philosophers in the Aristotelian tradition, but prima facie I think formulating the dispute the way van Inwagen does, muddies the water. Divine Simplicity mustn't be identified with an explicitly Thomistic formulation, this just undersells the disputes the doctrine has historically surrounded [undersells the disputes that have historically surrounded the doctrine].
1) Kowalski is right that the ontological simplicity of the Absolute is at the core of Platonism and Ne0-Platonism. The Good of Plato, the One of Plotinus, and the God of Aquinas are all ontologically simple. The theology of Aquinas quite obviously incorporates this neo-Platonic element, along with other elements, some of which do not comport well with the neo-Platonic element. No Absolute worth its salt can fail to be simple, and the God of Aquinas is the Absolute in his system. For Aquinas, Deus est ipsum esse subsistens. Literally translated, God is self-subsisting To Be. Intellectual honesty demands that we admit that this God concept teeters on the brink of unintelligibility. But it is defensible as a Grenzbegriff, a boundary or limit concept. See The Concept GOD as Limit Concept.
God is not a being among beings, but Being itself. In this respect God is like the One of Plotinus. There is no Many in which the One is a member. The ONE is not one of many. Similarly, in Aquinas there is no totality of beings in which God is a member. God is not one being among many. He is utterly transcendent like the One of Plotinus and the Good of Plato. And yet, God is not other than every being, every ens, for he himself is. If God were other than every being, then he would be other than himself, which is impossible. This distinguishes the God of Aquinas from Heidegger's Being. For Heidegger, das Sein ist kein Seiendes, Being is other than every being, everything that is. For Aquinas, Gott oder das Sein ist selbst seiend, God or Being is himself being. Or, as I say in my existence book, The Paradigm Existent, the Unifier, is not a being (which would imply that it is a being among beings), but the being, the one and only being (ens) that is identical to its Being (esse) . That is indeed one of the entailments of DDS: there is no real distinction in God as between God and Being and between God and his Being.
2) As for Peter van Inwagen, he, like so many hard-core analytic types, uses 'Platonism' and related expressions in a loose and historically uninformed way. He calls himself a Platonist but he certainly does not accept 'into his ontology' -- as these types say -- Platonic Forms or Ideas (eide), Platonic participation (methexis) of phenomenal particulars in Forms, and the rest of the conceptual machinery which naturally within Plato's system implies levels/grades of Being and modes of Being which Dominik, as a German speaker, can understand as Seinsweisen or Seinsmodi. In the essay in question, van Inwagen comes out unequivocally against modes of Being. (I employ the majuscule 'B' in 'Being' so as to mark the crucial distinction between Being and beings, esse et ens/entia, das Sein und das Seiende. Observing that distinction is initium sapientiae in ontology.)
Van Inwagen's main man is Willard van Orman Quine who contributed to the misuse of the good old word 'abstract' with his talk of 'abstract objects.' So-called abstract objects are not products of abstraction. Van Inwagen buys into this lapse from traditional usage along with his colleague Alvin Plantinga. Accordingly, there are properties, but they are 'abstract objects' which exist just as robustly (or just as anemically) as 'concrete objects.' So-called abstract objects are, besides being outside of space and time, causally inert. So it is no surprise that Plantinga and van Inwagen reject the DDS claim that God is identical to each of his omni-attributes or essential properties. To their way of thinking, that identity claim makes of God a causally inert abstract object, which of course God, as causa prima, cannot be.
3) When van Inwagen says that DDS presupposes an Aristotelian ontology of substance and attribute, what he says is true inasmuch as said ontology is a constituent ontology (C-ontology). This is what he, as a self-styled 'Platonist' objects to. I explain C-ontology in my Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on DDS. See section 3. Here is part of what I say in that section:
Since a Plantinga-type approach to ontology rules out DDS from the outset, no sophisticated adherent of the doctrine will adopt such an approach. The DDS defender will embrace an ontology that accommodates an ontologically simple being. Indeed, as Nicholas Wolterstorff (1991) notes, classical proponents of DDS such as Aquinas had a radically different ontological style, one that allowed for the coherent conceivability of DDS. They did not think of individuals as related to their properties as to abstracta external to them, but as having properties as ontological constituents. They, and some atheist contemporaries as well, think in terms of a “constituent ontology” as opposed to what Wolterstorff calls a “relation ontology” or what might be called a “nonconstituent ontology”. Bundle theories are contemporary examples of constituent ontology. If properties are assayed as tropes and a concrete particular as a bundle of tropes, then these tropes or abstract particulars are parts of concrete particulars when suitably bundled. Properties so assayed are brought from Plato’s heaven to earth. The togetherness or compresence of tropes in a trope bundle is not formal identity but a kind of contingent sameness. Thus a redness trope and a sweetness trope in an apple are not identical but contingently compresent as parts of the same whole. A model such as this allows for an extrapolation to a necessary compresence of the divine attributes in the case of God. Aquinas, the greatest of the medieval proponents of DDS, is of course an Aristotelian, not a trope theorist. But he too is a constituent ontologist. Form and matter, act and potency, and essence and existence are constituents of primary substances. Essence and existence in sublunary substances such as Socrates are really distinct but inseparably together. Their unity is contingent. This model permits an extrapolation to the case of a being in which essence and existence are necessarily together or compresent. Constituent ontology, as murky as it must remain on a sketch such as this, at least provides a framework in which DDS is somewhat intelligible as opposed to a Plantinga-style framework on which DDS remains wholly unintelligible. The arguments for DDS amount to arguments against the nonconstituent ontological framework.
Combox open. I invite Dominik to tell me whether I have answered his question to his satisfaction.
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