Nominalism

Is everything Ockham’s fault? In the introduction to his postwar cri de cœur, Ideas Have Consequences, Richard Weaver seems to say as much. He traces today’s nihilistic denial of universals back to William of Ockham, “who propounded the fateful doctrine of nominalism.” But we need to be cautious in how we read Weaver. I don’t think he intended to formulate a perverse negative Hegelianism, a view that treats history as the fateful outworking of bad philosophies. His brief sketch of the history of ideas at the outset of Ideas Have Consequences is meant to develop a concept for readers to use, rather than to provide a historical explanation. His claim, developed across the pages of the book, is that our present outlook, the “metaphysical dream” of our time, is functionally nominalist.

Crudely put, nominalism holds that universal truths do not exist. They are conventions—names we coin, mental constructs, as it were. Weaver is certainly correct about our dominant metaphysical dream. When someone speaks of the “social construction of reality,” he is advancing a nominalist view. This way of talking is not restricted to the professoriate. Our society is functionally nominalist. Sure, some of us wince when people say that sex (a term that decades ago was replaced by “gender”) is “socially constructed,” and that therefore “men can give birth.” But even those who object rarely have an articulate basis for dissent. That’s because much of modern culture presumes the denial of universals. They are seen as dangerous threats to freedom and progress.

As I recently noted in these pages (“Idealistic Nihilism,” February 2024), Richard Rorty nicely illustrates the political reasons for today’s denial of universals. He claimed that old concepts such as essence, substance, and accident had been replaced by the modern scientific account that has no room for such notions. We may fix names such as “human being” to the ever-changing trajectory of DNA or speak of “natural right.” But these ascriptions are “nominal,” arbitrary conventions of language meant to pick out this or that moment in the continual flux of things. Rorty’s view does not teach that nothing exists. Rather, it holds that nothing is permanent; nothing anchors reality and provides constant, unchanging truths to which we must conform if we are to be wise and happy.

Rorty welcomed nihilism. (To my mind, this term is more apt than “nominalism,” which in Ockham’s formulation is most decidedly not nihilistic, since it was conceived to accentuate God’s omnipotence and sovereignty—for Ockham and his Franciscan followers, obviously something quite real.) Rorty celebrated the condition in which we are unburdened of truth, free to seek whatever future we want. Everything can be made and remade. Again, transgender ideology epitomizes this promise.

The gravamen of Ideas Have Consequences is that nihilism’s promise of empowerment is a false one. Yes, nihilism frees us from universal truths. But thus liberated, we are without resources either to think or to act with purpose and conviction. Freed from the obligation to act for the sake of truth, we have no resources by which to resist advertising, social pressure, ideology, and other homogenizing and dehumanizing forces of modernity. Put simply, without a metaphysical dream of universals, we are naked before the world. Thus unmanned, like nature herself in our technological mania for mastery, we are vulnerable to power’s designs; we become socially constructed. What are the countless embryos in storage at IVF clinics if not socially constructed, treated as mere things available for use by the powerful?

Weaver writes, “Man is constantly being assured today that he has more power than ever before in history, but his daily experience is one of powerlessness.” Substitute “freedom” for “power” and the insight becomes poignant. We live in a society that promises liberation yet delivers many iron cages of bondage. Philip Howard and Matthew Crawford limn a contemporary form of the bondage, our encasement in a legal and cultural regime that does not trust us to act wisely and responsibly. Let the experts decide!

Having graduated from college forty years ago, I can report that today’s students receive far more assurances than I did that they have freedom, more freedom than ever before in history. They are told that they are not to be bound by archaic notions such as patriotic duty, and certainly not by anything as untenable as divine commandments. They’re free to have sex with boys or girls, or perhaps both at the same time. They’re free to choose their pronouns! These freedoms and others are not just offered. They are guaranteed, even to the point of punishment for those who create a “hostile environment” by dissenting.

Yet in 2024 these same young people are more anxious and constrained than were my classmates many decades ago. To a degree unimaginable to my younger self, those coming of age today are career-fixated, status-fixated, and appearance-fixated—all conditions of bondage to society’s rules. And when not conformists in this respect, they are moral conformists, caught up in various moral panics, from “white privilege” to “climate catastrophe.” When so many Ivy League undergraduates are on medication to address psychological disorders and distress, one can hardly speak of our time as one of great and expansive freedom.

Are Ockham and nominalism the root of all evil? I am hostile to the Lord of the Explanations, the one explanation to rule them all. Human freedom plays a role. We are not passive victims of bad ideas; by and large, we embrace and endorse them. I think Weaver would agree. As he observes throughout Ideas, a denial of universals reduces us to the unhappy condition of endless public contest for power. That denial does not liberate us. It enslaves us to the fickle flux of our desires. Weaver worried that this reduction to savagery and instinct foretold the end of Western civilization. He was right to worry.