William Okham: The Curse of Nominalism

Today let's talk about philosophy and more specifically about nominalism.

Many people who consider themselves intelligent occasionally repeat the phrase "let us not  double essences" and look around triumphantly, expecting others to appreciate their “intelligence”. It looks really stupid, and the very content of this statement, which belongs to the founder of nominalism, the medieval philosopher William Occam, is simply criminal. It is crude and filthy blasphemy, a kind of metaphysical profanity -- false and insulting. And it is often repeated quite thoughtlessly. Such practice must be stopped.

The call to "not double essences" is the slogan of radical and crude materialism. For Occam and his followers, in the reality there are only separate material things, only a quantitative multitude. This multitude is perceived by the senses and is subject to measurement. And everything else - the spirit, the soul, the universal ideas - simply do not exist. They are just shadows and projections of the human mind.

This is Occam's famous razor - it cuts the spiritual vertical of being. It is an instrument of castration, the tool of the maniac killer.
While Occam himself still recognizes God as the creator of this material multitude, His role is not much different from the Big Bang of modern physics. Such a "God" is only the cause of material existence. And following the logic of "don't double essences" such a "God" will gradually disappear from modern Western European science. God disappears precisely because "there is no need to double essences," the materialists will develop Occam's idea until logical end. The material multitude itself is enough. And everything else is just a pure game of the intellect, desperately trying to cope with the multitude that surrounds it. And the bearer of the intellect is also only a material individual, another atom added to an infinite number of particles. Not parts, for only a whole can have a part, but particles, that is, parts that do not have a whole, being parts of something that does not exist.

"Don't double essences" means that there is no soul, no spirit, no ideas, and, after all, no God. There is the earth, but there is no heaven. And “kingdom, which is not of this world”, also does not exist in this case. Neither the King Himself – Lord Jesus Christ. There is only "this world," which is concrete, tangible, measurable, comprehensible. But there is no other. Nothing transcendent…
We do not think about it, but during the last centuries we have been living in William Occam's world. We have such science, such education, such culture, such society, such philosophy, such politics. Everything is one-dimensional, this-worldly. And any reference to the Other, to that which is not of this world, evokes only a contemptuous smirk. It is “not modern”; it is “medieval obscurantism”.

For those who lived in pre-modern times “did not yet understand the need “not to double essences”, so they did.
Step by step, nominalism destroyed these “unnecessary essences” - religions, empires, hierarchies, estates - all the things which sought to elevate man, culture, society to the heavens.  After all, heaven was abolished.

Then national states were taken over: they only double up civil society. So let us abolish them! Afterwards comes gender politics - why divide people into male and female, let every individual (a particle without a whole) choose his or her own sex optionally. "let us not  double essences"...

And finally, the collective concept of man - after all, presumes double essence. So where is this man – man as essence? Nowhere. It is merely word, flatus vocis.

There is only the individual. And he (it?) can choose by him(it)self what to be – human or not.

Hence, following initial Occam's invitation we arrive to the posthumanism. Each individual chooses for himself what he wants to be: a man, a beast, a cyborg, a machine, or a mold.

The whole history of the philosophical degeneration of Western civilization is embedded in this cursed formula "don't double essences”. As long as we follow it, we are doomed.

So what is the conclusion? It's simple. Immediately we have to return to doubling essences. There are time and eternity, there are the world and God, there are idea and object, there are reality and dream, there are man and woman, there is this world and there is another world.  As soon as we stop doubling, everything collapses. Hence the fatal, unstoppable decline of civilization.

Let us double. – Let us do it hard, uncompromising, platonic, desperate, medieval. Double and double ruthlessly.

It is the only way to salvation.