Lorenzo Valla: the refutation of metaphysics on the basis of rhetorical-linguistic criteria.
From Panagiotis Kondylis' Modern-era Criticism of Metaphysics, I., 2., c).
The central importance of the complex of ideas discussed so far for metaphysical criticism in the 15th and 16th centuries can be seen in Valla's argumentation, in which the anti-intellectual attitude (primacy of the will and the vita activa) goes hand in hand with a linguistic critique of fundamental Scholastic-Aristotelian concepts. Whoever places the intellect above the will is in error, writes Valla, and as proof of this he cites the sinful deeds that would be impossible if the intellect had a constant grip on the will. Both virtue and sin emerge from the will, while the intellect in itself can be neither good nor bad. Therefore, the assumption of the primacy of the speculative life, which presupposes an active mastery of the other faculties by the intellect, must also appear untenable. Intellectualist philosophy is the result of alienation from practical life as the crystallisation of a will. Although Valla, like other humanists, distinguishes the "real" Aristotle from his scholastic-Aristotelian interpretation for understandable polemical reasons, he nevertheless accuses him, whenever he directly opposes him, not least of the abstract-intellectualist character of his philosophy, which he claims is due to Aristotle's personal inexperience in political or military action. The Aristotelian and general philosophical assertion that pure theory turns man into a god, for Valla is mere self-praise on the part of the philosophers. Augustine's contempt for philosophical constructs is echoed here once again. Like many other humanists before him, Valla expresses his sympathy for the unadulterated theology of the Church Fathers — Cyprian, Ambrose and Augustine, among others, are mentioned — and emphatically disapproves of the Thomistic coupling of theology and metaphysics. By referring to Paul's statements against philosophy (e.g., Col. 2:8), he regards this coupling as an artificial and illegitimate innovation, which was rejected by the older theologians both for pragmatic reasons (rational metaphysics cannot grasp divine things anyway) and for linguistic reasons, since the terms of the Greek language cannot be translated into Latin; precisely because the old theologians were proficient in Greek, they never dared to commit the linguistic monstrosities of the newer ones and avoided terms such as ens, entitas or quidditas.
These views had already been held in more or less similar form by other humanists, but Valla's linguistic analysis of metaphysical terminology was nevertheless original and groundbreaking in many respects. Such an analysis could, of course, only take place on the basis of the rehabilitation of rhetoric described above. The practical-utilitarian attitude associated with this rehabilitation inspires Valla's praise of the common, generally understandable and socially useful language as opposed to the abstract, artificial and socially hardly usable language of philosophy, namely dialectics and logic. Philosophy and dialectics, Valla believes, should not deviate from the common use of language. Although he admits that dialectic is primarily scientia sermonicans and logic scientia rationalis, i.e. that the former is closer to everyday language (sermo) than the latter, which establishes the strict rules of scientific argumentation, he nevertheless wants to link the two as closely as possible, because he regards both equally as forms of human communication by means of language. He thus falls back on the origin of "logic" from λόγος, whereby he understands λόγος not as the ratio or the formally flawless process of reasoning, but as sermo, the living language; for him, logic, just like dia-lectics, is a dia-logue in which at least two persons participate and which must therefore be defined as duorum sermo, while an expression such as duorum ratio would make no sense. In contrast to the nominalists' adherence to the Aristotelian divisions, Valla thus strives for the unity of logic and rhetoric, whereby the former should cease to be the exclusive organ of critical thought; the critical work of thinking should rather be done by allowing the natural mechanisms of language to unfold uninhibitedly — which in turn implies that the natural use of language must eo ipso take care of any metaphysics (see below). In Valla's view, dialectic becomes an easy and simple matter when it reconnects with the authoritative historical and social dimension of sermo, when it approaches grammar and the art of persuasion anew. Dialectic and rhetoric have important things in common: both aim to refute opposing positions and both use syllogisms and arguments, albeit in different forms. The scholastic abstractions have disturbed the natural relationship between verbum and res, and the return to res is now to be achieved precisely through the linguistic and pragmatic analysis of the verbum, which dissolves any false generalisation and mystification into thin air. Analysing words is tantamount to discovering things. It is only seemingly paradoxical that a return to things is called for here, while the analysis moves exclusively in the field of language and the question of being is not asked at all. For from Valla's point of view, res (and that means: living reality in its immediate human expression) coincides with language, if only it is cleansed of scholastic distortions and additions; and since these arose not least in the attempt to build a metaphysics, the return to the clarity and naturalness of language must automatically mean the return to things by turning away from metaphysics. If language is understood and used correctly, it refers by its very nature to a reality that has very little to do with the being of metaphysics; metaphysics can therefore only arise from a misuse of language.
We now understand why Valla so emphatically makes the precision of thought dependent on the sensitive care and correct use of language; the errors of even the greatest thinkers can be attributed to the neglect of language. The most elementary criterion of the correct use of language is, however, the observance of grammatical rules — and Valla accuses the metaphysicians of having formed their basic concepts by violating grammatical rules by deriving entitas from ens, quidditas from quid and identitas from idem. However, only the word res, which can encompass every form of realitas, possesses genuine ontological weight and true grammatical and logical generality. Therefore, all transcendentalia can be subsumed under "res", become its attributes and thereby shed their fictitious ontological reference. The terms ens, aliquid, unum, verum, bonum thus prove to be special determinations of "res" and can be paraphrased as follows: ens = res quae est, aliquid = aliqua res, unum = una res, verum = vera res, bonum = bona res. Every participle and every adjective is transformed into the corresponding verb and the corresponding relative pronoun; the expression bona res is therefore only a paraphrase of res quae bona est, which in turn results from the analysis of bonum, just as the sentence homo qui legit is the analytical form of homo legens. Valla is particularly vehemently opposed to the abstract nouns on -itas that are popular with the scholastics, which, as he shows, also come from adjectives and can be paraphrased in the manner described. In the transformation of adjectives into nouns, he senses the danger of an abstract hypostatisation of things that actually belong to the realm of human action (thus bonum means: bona res, and this in turn: bene facere). Substantivisation is not an objectification, but rather a concealment of the living human and practical root of a word behind an imposing abstraction.
Valla also offers linguistic analysis when he is concerned with breaking the backbone of scholastic-Aristotelian metaphysics, i.e. the system of categories. The first and fundamental metaphysical category was rendered by Boethius in Latin by the word substantia, which in reality means something other than the untranslatable participle ὄν; a disorientation of the entire Latin-language philosophical literature was the result. This circumstance, combined with the vagueness of the Aristotelian term οὐσία — which sometimes means the τί ἦν εἶναι, sometimes a general or a genus (genre), sometimes the form or the matter, sometimes the composite of both — produced the incurable conceptual ambiguity of the Peripatetics and gave rise to the misleading synonymy of substantia and essentia. Valla proposes to use substantia synonymously with res, in the sense of the common permanent bearer of several attributes, as the etymology of the word also suggests; essentia, for its part, should express matter in its opposition to form. The substantia thus becomes the inseparable unity of essentia and qualitas, which in turn represents a function of forma as the genetic cause of the specific quality of a thing. Valla ascribes several meanings to the concept of qualitas, thus making it possible to replace the system of the ten Aristotelian categories with three comprehensive genera (summa genera), i.e. substantia, qualitas and actio, while at the same time using the concept of actio. The remaining seven Aristotelian categories or accidentals are subsumed under the latter two, partly with linguistic and partly with pragmatic arguments.
By linking substantia to forma as a concrete qualitas and summarising the nine accidentals in two, Valla drastically simplifies the metaphysical terminology common at the time and at the same time undertakes an indirect but far-reaching modification of the content of scholastic Aristotelian metaphysics. Firstly, he makes an abstract understanding of substance and thus the establishment of a hierarchy of merely intelligible substances impossible; and furthermore, he eliminates the scholastic ontological distinction between formae substantiales and formae accidentales, which not only considerably complicated the logical structuring of metaphysics, but also underpinned its theologically inspired teleology. Valla's rejection of the Aristotelian juxtaposition of potentia and actus had similar consequences. We will be able to better appreciate the significance of this rejection if we remember that the aforementioned juxtaposition established the transcendence of God as actus purus vis-à-vis the contingentia of nature; for material and changeable nature must forever remain imperfect and incomplete, i.e. a sum of possibilities to be fulfilled and, to varying degrees, under the sign of privatio. In the same sense, the juxtaposition of actus and potentia was related to the central scholastic distinctions between existence and essence, matter and form, etc. The inseparable unity of substance and quality, as advocated by Valla, had already rendered the Aristotelian doctrine of privatio obsolete; this same position is now corroborated by the refutation of the doctrine of the potential, which Valla undertakes with reference to the normal use of language. How could anyone claim, he asks, that a box is potentially contained in a piece of wood? What should this "potential" refer to if it can be attributed neither to the wood nor to the craftsman who makes the box but does not create it out of nothing? The wood can take on several forms without there being a necessary connection between actual form and potential form. Therefore, everyday language is much more precise when it says that a box can be made from the wood, and not that the wood is a potential box; the Latin language expresses this with the ending -itas. Valla thus calls for the adaptation of our theoretical conceptions to the natural sense as it is crystallised in common usage.
If the transition from potentia to actus is abolished, all that remains for Valla is the transition from the concrete actiones to the concrete qualities, which generates and at the same time constitutes the eternal movement in the world. The fixed metaphysical hierarchy is now replaced by the horizontal coexistence of things, qualities and acts. Human language refers to these ontological realities in different ways, and if it does not do so, then confusions and aberrations arise that endlessly reproduce and multiply. The abolition of the Aristotelian juxtaposition of actus and potentia thus ultimately means that there is not on the one hand a complete and exemplary world that can be grasped in the form of a logical-metaphysical construction, while on the other hand there is an unfinished world in need of completion, which must be completed with the help of some kind of teleology. The world is as it is, it is in eternal motion and flourishes in eternal plenitude. In fact, Valla tends to see the world as an organic, living unity, as is also shown by his criticism of Aristotelian anthropology and zoology. But other aspects of his thinking also point to new orientations and values. These are above all the turn from ontology to epistemology, which, as already mentioned, paves the way for the new primacy of certitudo modi procedendi over certitudo obiecti. Valla repeatedly emphasises the decisive role of the subject in the development of knowledge, for example when he writes that truth and error are equally functions of our thinking and that we cannot accept the subjective origin of the latter without at the same time having to admit the subjective origin of the former. Valla also regards as subjective those qualities which, as he believes, we only regard as objective because we name an object in place of the sense in question, e.g. we speak of a soft or white thing and not of the corresponding tactile or visual sensation.
Just as the artificial terminology of metaphysics is contrasted with normal everyday language, Valla also contrasts the artificial thinking of Aristotelian syllogistics with the unconstrained course of natural human thought. The complicated syllogistic rules are superfluous if even children have the spontaneous ability to form correct syllogisms. Of course, the great model of natural thought remains rhetoric, and Valla's criticism of Aristotelian syllogism is fuelled by the desire to embed the mechanisms of logic anew in language as a practical means of social communication. From this point of view, syllogism is only a kind of speech (oratio), which is generally defined as a harmonious composition of words whose meaning has been determined by their author. Valla admits the qualitative difference between the syllogism and rhetorical argumentation, since the aim of the former is the demonstration on the basis not of probable but of necessary arguments, which must be presented in the form of the upper, lower and subsequent propositions. However, he does not accept that truth results from the formal correctness of the syllogism, since he regards it as a function of the correct use and placement of all components of language within the upper and lower propositions. In order to safeguard the linguistic and substantive validity of the introductory sentences of the syllogism, however, recourse to the means of proof of rhetoric is necessary. The formal independence of the syllogism is preserved (even if Valla drastically reduces the number of Aristotelian syllogistic forms), but at the same time its components are selected and tested on the basis of rhetorical criteria. In the same sense, Valla contrasts the logical conception of induction with a rhetorical one. He rejects the traditional definition of inductio as a progression from the individual things to the general with the argument that the transition from those to the general is impossible, since the general cannot be composed by a mere summation of individual things. The inductio can therefore only be of use in a consultative sense and is therefore close to the rhetorical exempla. In discussing the positions of the humanist rhetoricians of the 16th century, we will see that this renewal of Aristotelian logic through the conceptuality and methodology of rhetoric not only deprived traditional ontology of its logical supports, but also contributed significantly to the development of the modern concept of scientific method.