The Great Medium Debate:

The Analogical vs Univocal Mind

The great philosophical debate on Medium today is between two authors with Biblical names, Matthew and Benjamin Cain on humanism vs theism. It’s kinda like the clash among jurists between “originalists” and “contextualists” in applying the law. This indicates to me a more fundamental struggle between the univocal and analogical mind in American society.

George Murray was three years ahead of me at our Jesuit School of Theology. He loved and promoted progressive jazz and argued that those who do not understand it “have a univocal concept of being.”

You have to understand that the predominant philosophy in our school at the time (the 60s) was NeoThomism. For Aristotelian Saint Thomas Aquinas, Platonists have a “univocal concept of being.” The “Real” means the same thing at all places and all times for all things and comes by attaining true and absolute Ideas through intuition and/or divine revelation.

But St. Thomas, following his Aristotelian Islamic masters, affirmed that the concept of being was “analogous.” That includes Being as God which could only be known (or proven) by analogy.

We might say today that we understand realities through analogy, e.g. figures of speech. This means that knowledge starts with sense experience and is collected in categories through concepts that we infer through analogy or literally “cross words.” We learn through similarity, metaphor, relationship and applying words and images so they best fit the situation. We might argue that it was this insight in the waning Dark Ages that gave rise to the Enlightenment and modern empirical science — which many univocal thinkers today still oppose with their revealed absolute truths.

I wouldn’t go so far as to assert that all who don’t like jazz have univocal minds. Jazz is a very culturally shaped medium. Nor do I think that all jazz lovers have analogical minds. Certainly not “smooth jazz” elevator music lovers!

But I still love Murray’s distinction. Jazz experiments. Jazz weaves diverse themes and tempos, discovers harmony in discord, and builds on improvisation. Jazz is never the same. It seems to me that Murray was on to something when he divided the world between univocalists and analogicians.

And I think the distinction has relevance to not only taste in music, but also to religion, economy, politics, morality, and human life itself. I argue that the big divisiveness in our culture today is not between civilizations, e.g. eastern vs western, or religions e.g. Christian vs pagan, or political parties, e.g. liberal vs conservative, or psychological types, e.g introvert vs extrovert, or economies e.g. socialist vs capitalist, or even classes e.g. haves vs have-nots. Rather I suggest that there is an underlying struggle between the univocal and the analogic mind in all of these and in all of us.

The analogic mind acknowledges that the images that it uses to deal with the world and other persons are indeed images, fashioned by humans, developed through historical usage, and used to project and shape the human future. It is the complex of these images in a certain time and place that make up a specific culture. These images and concepts can be set in stone as well as in pictures and words but never in eternity though the naïve or infant mind seems to think so simply because it has not come across others.

The analogic mind is characterized by a profound sense of humor. The sense of humor I am talking about is not just the ability to make jokes but a sense of irony or impermanence in all our beliefs. The analogic mind laughs with (and at) the gods at all of our human conceits and foibles. The analogic mind does not take itself or the world or the gods very seriously which is not to say without passion or importance or commitment.

The analogic mind contrasts with Eric Hoffer’s true believer in his book by that name on the origins of authoritarianism and autocracy. The autocratic mind identifies its faith with its beliefs. That mind is not a search for truth. It is a proclamation of knowing Truth of all truths. Especially those that are held most vehemently. This is why the univocal mind is not a good subject for religious or even political conversion.

The analogical mind has made peace with uncertainty and actually revels in the ambiguity of finding itself in a continual point of tension. A tension between inner life and outer action, between tradition and innovation, between individuality and communality, between privacy and publicity, between corporeality and spirituality, and a whole lot more. Human existence is that tension between our embodied consciousness and the world.

The analogic mind is a relational thinker and doer. While avoiding absolute ways of speaking or living, it can also express and commit itself to principles and purpose but at the same time keep doubting its own ways of expressing them. It can be argumentative, opinionated, passionate, and loyal but never unmovable. It finds causes and answers, but never ultimate ones. The analogic mind has the ability to see itself and its positions from many other viewpoints. It also recognizes that even in accepting diverse viewpoints that there is no viewpoint without a blindspot. Scotoma is just part of the human condition from which we cannot extricate ourselves even in our fantasy of fleeing flesh to join the Great Spirit.

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5

When my soulmate and I saw the film No County for Old Men (from the Cormick McCarthy novel), we were mind-swiped. It is the story of a man who while out hunting in the vast desert plains of Texas comes across the results of a drug deal gone wrong. He finds many men shot dead and a truck full of bags of dope. One man is alive but dying and asking for “agua” which he has none to give. He also finds a man dead under a tree with a case full of money, which he takes home with him. Then follows the hunt for him by a sociopathic killer who seems totally at home in the country and by a tired aging sheriff for whom the country has accelerated way past him.

When the film abruptly ended, we just sat there gasping. When we were able, we talked. We saw illustrated in the film an allegory of our time, our nation, and our choices. The film haunted our dreams that night and we discussed it more the next day. I had read Blood Meridian by McCarthy and we both read The Road so we knew that this artist was continuing his very ambiguous portrayal of an America past and present between violence and redemption. For a further sense of the film I went to the net and read reviews and comments by critical moviegoers. Many said that the film was too violent or boring, and they were unhappy with an ending without resolution.

I thought they were univocal minds encountering an analogical masterpiece. De gustibus non est disputandum.

I see Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh as extreme illustrations of the univocal mind. Their jokes are not funny to me because they are all disparaging and without understanding of their own foibles. They are strident in their attacks on people with whom they do not agree or who challenge their cherished principles and beliefs.

It is not because they are conservative. John Kekes is a powerful conservative with an analogical mind. So was Russell Kirk and William Buckley. I enjoy engaging with them as I do with George Will and David Brooks.

On the so called “liberal” side, I hear commentators on Pacifica Radio who take themselves and their ideas too seriously. Christopher Hitchens was just a little too fervent in his atheism. Richard Rorty on the other hand is epitome of the analogical mind in the progressive persuasion and was sometimes attacked by true believers of the left.

William Kristol is a brilliant neo-conservative, much more affable and easy to listen to than the Coulters and Savages but similarly un-nuanced as was Dick Cheney and his appointer. Whereas Francis Fukuyama I think is an analogical mind. Although formerly esconced in the neo-conservative camp, he is highly nuanced, self-critical, not at all absolute in his pronouncements. I have learned much from him.

I suppose that Donald Trump might have an analogical mind (if he still has one at all) with a terrific ability to use and con true-believing univocalists. Then again I suspect he believes his own Bullshit.

The inspirers of most of the great religions were analogical minds; and maybe that is the “great transformation” of which Karen Armstrong is speaking in her book by that title. Lao Tsu, Jesus of Nazareth, Socrates, the Yahwist, Buddha Gautama, Paul of Tarsus, Rabbi Gamaliel, I imagine with analogical minds that challenged the univocity and idolatry of the established order. Their teachings and lives were then distorted by the univocal minds of “the Fathers” or theologians of the religions that codified them. Not all religions are theistic. But those that are, especially the monotheistic ones tend to be univocalist.

So, what makes a mind analogical or univocal? I leave it to neuropsychologists and evolutionary anthropologists to identify the genetic or cultural reasons.

Maybe it’s education? But I think back on my early training in philosophy and theology where I found so many professors of Aristotelian Thomism who, while teaching the epistemology of analogy over intuition, were total univocalists. They taught Thomism because Rome commanded it; but they were loathe to adopt any of the insights of the great British empiricists, German idealists, or French existentialists that were then challenging thinkers and pushing beyond fixed ideas and the very correspondence theory of truth itself. According to these old professors, there was one Reality and one Truth and St. Thomas and Rome had it. A univocal mind does not play with ideas.

Is one approach more successful? But then I realize that univocal and analogical minds have much different gauges of success. Univocal success is usually evaluated in terms of eternal reward, influence on others, security and stability, and righteousness. While analogical success consists in the thrill of adventure, the tension of ambiguity, scientific experimentation, spiritual capital, and relational action.

Maybe the difference is just a matter of Jungian personality preference such as measured by the Meyers-Briggs test — SPs vs. NTs. This would more charitably imply we all range in degrees between a univocal and an analogical approach to reality at particular times and positions. That explanation of course appeals more to wishy-washy analogical minds.

So back to the great conflict between biblically named Matthew and Benjamin, both of whom I am following on Medium. Intellectually and emotionally, I am with Benjamin, a humanist and not a theist. But I do see the uses (and abuses) of religion even the theist kind. I just urge us all to avoid idolatry and iconoclasm in our beliefs and see the humor in all our philosophical and theological, scientific and political pronouncements.

At parties and in lecture halls, I do prefer the analogical mind. And I tend to engage with others of that mind no matter to what philosophical tradition, political party, religious persuasion, economic class, racial type, age or geography they belong. I don’t really like univocal minds. They are too pious and preachy and righteous for me. And I don’t like myself when I am being that way. Deliver me from the strident reactionaries and dour radicals of the world.

And I hope that our next leaders like jazz and even appreciate hip-hop and experimental art — as long as they don’t take themselves too seriously.