Univocity of being is the idea that words describing the properties of
God
In monotheistic thought, God is usually viewed as the supreme being, creator, and principal object of faith. Swinburne, R.G. "God" in Honderich, Ted. (ed)''The Oxford Companion to Philosophy'', Oxford University Press, 1995. God is typically ...
mean the same thing as when they apply to people or things. It is associated with the doctrines of the
Scholastic theologian
John Duns Scotus
John Duns Scotus ( – 8 November 1308), commonly called Duns Scotus ( ; ; "Duns the Scot"), was a Scottish Catholic priest and Franciscan friar, university professor, philosopher, and theologian. He is one of the four most important ...
.
Scotus
In medieval disputes over the
nature of God, many theologians and philosophers (such as
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas, OP (; it, Tommaso d'Aquino, lit=Thomas of Aquino; 1225 – 7 March 1274) was an Italian Dominican friar and priest who was an influential philosopher, theologian and jurist in the tradition of scholasticism; he is known wit ...
) held that when one says that "God is good" and that "man is good", man's goodness is only analogous to, i.e. similar to but distinct from, God's goodness.
John Duns Scotus
John Duns Scotus ( – 8 November 1308), commonly called Duns Scotus ( ; ; "Duns the Scot"), was a Scottish Catholic priest and Franciscan friar, university professor, philosopher, and theologian. He is one of the four most important ...
, while not denying the analogy of being à la St. Thomas, nonetheless holds to a univocal ''concept'' of being. It is important to note that Scotus does not believe in a "univocity of being", but rather to a common concept of being that is proper to both God and man, though in two radically distinct modes: infinite in God, finite in man.
The claim here is that we understand God because we can share in His being, and by extension, the transcendental attributes of being, namely, goodness, truth, and unity. So far as Scotus is concerned, we need to be able to understand what ‘being’ is as a concept in order to demonstrate the existence of God, lest we compare what we know - creation - to what we do not - God. Thomas Williams has defended a version of this argument.
Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze borrowed the doctrine of ''
ontological
In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being, as well as related concepts such as existence, becoming, and reality.
Ontology addresses questions like how entities are grouped into categories and which of these entities exi ...
univocity'' from Scotus. He claimed that being is univocal, i.e., that all of its senses are affirmed in one voice. Deleuze adapts the doctrine of univocity to claim that being is, univocally, difference. "With univocity, however, it is not the differences which are and must be: it is being which is Difference, in the sense that it is said of difference. Moreover, it is not we who are univocal in a Being which is not; it is we and our individuality which remains equivocal in and for a univocal Being."
Deleuze at once echoes and inverts
Spinoza
Baruch (de) Spinoza (born Bento de Espinosa; later as an author and a correspondent ''Benedictus de Spinoza'', anglicized to ''Benedict de Spinoza''; 24 November 1632 – 21 February 1677) was a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese-Jewish origin, ...
, who maintained that everything that exists is a modification of the one
substance,
God
In monotheistic thought, God is usually viewed as the supreme being, creator, and principal object of faith. Swinburne, R.G. "God" in Honderich, Ted. (ed)''The Oxford Companion to Philosophy'', Oxford University Press, 1995. God is typically ...
or
Nature
Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. Although humans are ...
. He claims that it is the organizing principle of Spinoza's philosophy, despite the absence of the term from any of Spinoza's works. For Deleuze, there is no one substance, only an always-differentiating
process
A process is a series or set of activities that interact to produce a result; it may occur once-only or be recurrent or periodic.
Things called a process include:
Business and management
*Business process, activities that produce a specific se ...
, an origami cosmos, always folding, unfolding, refolding. Deleuze and
Guattari summarize this ontology in the paradoxical formula "
pluralism =
monism
Monism attributes oneness or singleness (Greek: μόνος) to a concept e.g., existence. Various kinds of monism can be distinguished:
* Priority monism states that all existing things go back to a source that is distinct from them; e.g., i ...
".
[Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, '' A Thousand Plateaus'', 1987, p. 20.]
See also
* ''
Unus mundus''
*
Fundamental ontology
In ''Being and Time'', the philosopher Martin Heidegger made the distinction between ontical and ontological, or between beings and "being" as such. He labeled this the "Ontological Difference." It is from this distinction that he developed the con ...
*
Henology
Henology () refers to the philosophical account or discourse on The One that appears most notably in the philosophy of Plotinus. Reiner Schürmann describes it as a "metaphysics of radical transcendence" that extends beyond being and intellec ...
*
Law of noncontradiction
In logic, the law of non-contradiction (LNC) (also known as the law of contradiction, principle of non-contradiction (PNC), or the principle of contradiction) states that contradictory propositions cannot both be true in the same sense at the sa ...
References
{{Deleuze-Guattari
Medieval philosophy
Religious philosophical concepts
Scotism
Conceptions of God
Further reading
* Horan, Daniel P. OFM, "Postmodernity and Univocity - A Critical Account of Radical Orthodoxy and John Duns Scotus" Fortress Press, 2014.