A thing that cannot act does not actually subsist. It might exist concretely, certes, but it cannot subsist. Hammers, e.g., exist, to be sure; but not actually, because of course they cannot act. So, your hammer is not really a thing, but rather only notionally, heuristically, and conventionally a thing. It has no integrity of its own. All its integrity qua tool derives from its usages by beings that do actually subsist: men, i.e. Your hammer exists, as a fit denotandum of your “hammer.” But only as such, and not as an actor – a substance – in its own right.
Excursus: the nominalist sport starts from this. It supposes that all denotations specify a mere heuristic. There is no way to entertain the nominalist proposal, than to presuppose it. From the presupposition of the nominalist proposal, the conviction of its conclusion then follows.
I say this with all due respect to and affection for several hammers I have known and loved. Also chainsaws. And oars. Also knots.
Excursus: I grant with all users of tools that it can often seem as though our tools have minds of their own. Especially computers and cars. And chisels, forsooth; and, o my gosh, planes! Planes have minds like cats, I swear!
There is something in that to be reckoned with, methinks. But not in this post. I’ll get to it later.
Let me say just this for now: if a house can be haunted, or a graveyard, a crossroads, or a battlefield – as seems manifestly to be the case – then why not a car or a computer, or a recalcitrant plane?
But, NB: from the fact that this or that precinct can be haunted, it would not follow that the precinct was itself a substantial entity.
Say that a kitchen is haunted. Is the kitchen really a coherent substantial thing? No; obviously not. It is, rather, merely a causal locus: a place where events can happen, that involve it, and organize it so as to render such events more likely in the future.
A thing that can go only one way, given its causal inputs, cannot act. It can’t *do* anything. It can only respond to other things that *can* do things. The hammer can’t get up on its own and hit a nail.
The carpenter can. He can hit the nail with his forehead, should he so choose, leaving the hammer out of the causal chain altogether.
OK, we’ve defined actuality and substantiality. Substantial beings can act, and so become actual, so that, i.e., they can then exert causal effects on things in their futures.
Notice now that, given the foregoing, the only really real things are those that were at their inception free to act in one way or another, so as to become substances.
Here now is the thing: at one fell swoop, this (relatively paltry and obvious) distinction slays all determinist notions. On its terms, a thing that in virtue of its antecedents cannot be otherwise than it is turns out to be inactual (however concrete, like the hammer, it might be); which is to say, irreal; a mere heuristic, which (as with the hammer or the nail) we employ to economize in our significations to each other.
Determinism then entails the demolition of actuality. It entails the demolition of our – of all – substantial being. Many strict and honest determinists agree … despite that, on their convictions, their agreement is not theirs, and nor in the end is it an agreement, but rather is it (if it is even an it to begin with) just something that happens for no reason.
We find that there is actuality. We are.
This is the great scandal, and indeed downfall, of Modernity.
We are, and we do. There can be no apprehension of our experience – of our experience per se – more basic or less eluctable than this. So, freedom must be real, and must be essential to substantial being per se.
On determinism, there can be no act of discernment whether determinism is true. On determinism, then, determinism cannot be determined to be true.
Only on freedom can the truth of determinism be discerned; for, only on freedom can anything at all – such as discernment – happen.
Only if freedom is basic can anything be determined to be true.
That’s it in a nutshell: determinism as such presupposes indeterminacy.
The Orthosphere 
Kristor, I really enjoy your Philosophical Skeleton Keys series. Thank you for the time and effort I imagine these sorts of posts entail.
Thanks Wood. It is good to hear that someone out there is enjoying them.
What would your answer be to the hypothetical hardcore Calvinist (or other hard theological determinists) then?
>just something that happens for no reason
It happens because God willed it to happen.
>there can be no act of discernment whether determinism is true
God did the act, “I” did not.
This chain of reasoning works against materialists, because materialism is incoherent, but no further it seems.
Well, hardcore naïve determinists of any sort – Calvinist, materialist, Catholic – are by their premises (which implicitly take our cosmos and its causal order to be basic, and thus its terms the basic terms of analysis, so that they are therefore at bottom naturalist) forced to a conclusion that no creature ever acts, or therefore actually exists. To reject creaturely freedom then is to reject creaturely actuality, and is then to reject creation per se. It is a move that ends in acosmism..
If creaturely motions are wholly determined before they happen in the order of time, then they just don’t happen qua acts. They are not then acts, properly speaking. They are then rather just, and no more than, entirely sequelae of their predecessors, like the motions of the hammer in the hands of the builder.
The thing is, there is no reason to suppose that anything is determined before it happens in the order of time. Time is entirely a derivate of motions; of causal effects. Time then is not ontologically basic. Time is then itself a sequela.
Time being a derivate of motions, then motions are more basic than time.
But then, motions are specified only ex post, and at least, in relation to each other, and thus in terms of time (and of space – of space-time). If space-time and its creaturely causal constituents – the spatiotemporal order – are not basic, what is??
Eternity.
In eternity, there is no before or after, no sequence or distance (NB: that there is no sequence or distance in eternity does not entail that there is in eternity no causation; it’s just that in eternity, all causation reduces to implication, and to cognition thereof (the implication is in the Father; the cognition thereof is in the Son; the action thereof is in the Spirit)). In eternity, everything that happens, happens all at once. Thus the Eternal God knows (and wills) that you go to the store for some peanuts tomorrow not before you go to the store, but as you go; for, there is in the life of the Eternal One no before or after.
That God does not know or will what you do before you do it – there being in eternity and thus in his life (and, so, in reality as perfectly understood) no such thing as before or after – means that you are free. The omniscience of God entails that, whatever you freely do God wills that you freely do; for, had he not willed your freedom to do whatever you freely do, you could not do it. But in the logic of eternity, he cannot will what you do before you do it. So, he cannot determine what you do before you do it.
So, yes, everything that happens does so in virtue of Grace; including our free acts. God wills that we do – and that we will to do – all that we do, as we do it. Still, *we* do what we do. We choose. Thus the logic of morality, sin, redemption, sacrifice, atonement, salvation, damnation, and so forth are preserved.
Eternity is inconsistent with before and after in a temporal sense, but not with a chain of causation. God is logically prior to creation, and knows what will happen in it by virtue of His own power, not in response to the events.
“Woe to thee, Corozain, woe to thee, Bethsaida: for if in Tyre and Sidon had been wrought the miracles that have been wrought in you, they had long ago done penance in sackcloth and ashes.” – Matthew 11:21
Christ knew how the Tyrians would choose to respond to His hypothetical miracles “before” they did so (since He never performed such miracles for them and they therefore never made such a choice). Thus human free will must be compatible with our actions being “predictable” from God’s vantage point. We are not so free that our choices come “from nowhere”.
Yes. God eternally knows what we freely do. He knows now, and knew before there was Earth, that I will go to the store tomorrow; he knows tomorrow that I am going to the store; and he knows the day after tomorrow that I went to the store the day before.
His knowledge of what we do does not force us to do it, although it does condition what we do.
I would however quibble with the notion that God predicts. Rather, he dicts. By his Word are the heavens made; ditto for my trip to the store. God dicts in eternity, and the created order then transpires in times and spaces.
“Transpire” is used here advisedly: the created order is the transpiration of the Holy Spirit.
This in re the Christian Neo-Platonism of Saint Dionysius the Areopagite. Everything that happens is in virtue of and by way of gratuitous Providential gifts, *including the freedom and the free acts of actualities.*
Absolutely right. No thing can come from out of nothing; indeed, it is not possible to obtain even nothing from nothing.
So, nothing is an impossible state of affairs.
In that there is an argument for the existence of God.
I understand the idea that a hammer is not a substance, but I don’t understand saying it doesn’t actually exist. Wouldn’t this same reasoning apply to all inanimate things, so that things like rocks, water, stars, and so forth, don’t actually exist and do not subsist?
What is the other option? To say that they only potentially exist?
And to say that something acts: doesn’t all that mean is just that it has active powers that actually affect and influence other things? So, for example, a star acts by radiating heat and attracting other bodies via its mass, among other things. A hammer, if nothing else, acts on other bodies by virtue of its mass. It therefore has actual being, if not substantial being.
Thanks, Ian, these are great questions. I much appreciate your engagement with the arguments I have here offered. Indeed, I am humbled.
The nub of your worries seems to be over the threshold that divides subsistent beings, such as we, from other sorts of concrete objects, such as hammers. The question has bedeviled philosophers for centuries.
Hammers do indeed exert gravitational effects. The question though is whether they do so in their own right, or as a mere function of the gravitational effects of their atomic constituents. Are the gravitational effects in question due to the hammer, or to its constituents? The parsimonious response is to attribute the gravitational effects of the hammer to the constituents thereof. The hammer adds nothing to the effects of its constituents.
The human does thus add. The acts of the constituents of a given human add up to the acts of a dead body, and no more.
The physicalists who suppose that the acts of a living human reduce entirely to those of its atomic constituents suppose that our living bodies are the bodies of dead robots; fancy hammers and tongs. They suppose that we, and they, are in fact dead..
We are not dead. Ergo, etc.
So we see that the criterion we seek is that of whether or not an object has a life that it suffers, to which it responds intelligibly, and that cannot be reduced without remainder to the acts of its particular constituents.
In respect to this criterion, hammers are little different than heaps. We name heaps and hammers, but we do not suppose that they are beings in their own right, apart from the usages we have of them.
I hope that clarifies things a bit. Let me know, if not.
Oh, one more thing: stars might be subsistent entities. Also galaxies, ecologies, watersheds, nations, economies … the world is more complicated than the improper materialist reduction of the last few centuries has taught us to think. Bottom line: animism is not simply puerile bunkum.
Thanks, Kristor.
I agree that hammers do not act “in their own right”, but rather as a function of their constituents, whether that be the atomic constituents or the wood and steel that comprise it. That’s because a hammer is an artifact, while its parts or constituents (at some level) are substances.
I think what I’m hung up on is the claim that a hammer doesn’t actually exist. This same reasoning would apply to any artifact then: houses don’t actually exist, the Mona Lisa does not actually exist, etc.
What would make more sense to me is to say that such artifacts do actually exist, but that their actuality is derived from and reducible to that of their substantive components.
Although maybe even that is not their whole story: because artifacts also have a principle of unity that is not reducible to their parts, though this principle of unity is imposed from the outside rather than intrinsic. Houses and hammers and paintings have functions qua houses and hammers and paintings that mere heaps qua heaps do not. Such functions owe their existence to the organizing form or structure imposed on the artifact: a hammer would not function were the head not connected to the handle, a house would not function were its constituent materials not arranged in such and such a way, etc.
I guess what you are saying is that what subsists are the constituent substances of an artifact, rather than the artifact per se? I might be able to agree with that much, though it still seems to me that for an artifact, there is something over and above its constituents, namely its (externally imposed) form, and it is this that distinguishes them from mere heaps and what makes the former intelligible as unitary things.
Good stuff, Ian, thanks.
When I say that hammers don’t actually exist, all I mean is that they don’t act. They concretely exist, to be sure, but not as subsistent entities. We concretely exist, too, and our concrete existence is of the actual sort. The concrete existence of hammers is of the conventional, heuristic sort. The functions of our artifacts derive from us because their motions derive from us. An alien species that had no use for or concept of artifacts would understand hammers in the same way we do heaps.
I am indeed saying that what subsists in a hammer are its constituent atoms, and perhaps molecules.