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Two astute critics of modern Western thought, Richard Weaver (Ideas Have Consequences) and Rene Guenon (The Crisis of the Modern World; The Reign of Quantity & The Signs of the Times), though approaching the subject from very different backgrounds, nonetheless agreed in describing the intellectual revolution of the fourteenth century, with its mounting distrust of metaphysical intuition, as the origin of the present cultural and intellectual crisis of the West.
Both men contended that Ockham's nominalism, according to which the "universals" are simply creations of the human mind and not knowable realities (RES), served to sire our modern intellectual world, dominated by its quantitative quest of objectivity (das Ding an sich) and founded on the pervasive presupposition that certitude is available only by empirical verification and/or the laws of logic. The nominalists' denial of the mind's capacity to grasp anything other than matter and logic, to know anything real above itself, Guenon and Weaver argued, led to the forfeiture of metaphysics and the manifold other cultural and spiritual dissolutions attendant upon that loss.
Relative to that dethronement of realist philosophies by fourteenth-century nominalism, three further considerations may be proposed.
First, it is arguable that classical realism was probably on the way out already, well in advance of Ockham's speculations. Medieval scholasticism's reduction of metaphysics to an academic discipline, a classroom subject pursued very much as any other classroom subject, had already been something of a step at variance with tradition. Prior to the rise of the Schoolmen, the metaphysical quest had normally been understood as a matter of one's conversion and personal relationship to God, involving strenuous moral effort (dharma, askesis), the sustained purification of the heart and mind (apatheia, puritas cordis), the disciplined pursuit of virtue, and all the struggle preparatory to serene, loving, unselfish contemplation (veda, visio). In that earlier tradition, now better preserved in the non-Christian East, metaphysics had not been understood as philosophical theory but as a purified theoria, a vision of Reality. The real and more substantial world was that of the spirit.
Judged by such standards, it would not be unfair to say that medieval scholastic philosophy, even prior to Ockham, was engaged less in the pursuit of metaphysics than in the study of certain theories about metaphysics. Thus, from serving as a useful tool in the quest of truth, dialectics had passed to being a self-contained, self-fulfilling discipline. Already the speculative and analytical had largely replaced the contemplative and experiential, and even as this substitution was taking place, some clear-sighted observers, such as Bernard of Clairvaux, thought it obvious that the scholastic endeavor represented a very wide divergence from tradition.
Second, it may be further argued that even the meaning of metaphysics has now, in our own time, likewise perished. With few exceptions, such as the Neo-Thomism of men like Maritain and Adler, the twentieth-century Western philosopher stands several steps removed from the ancient understanding of metaphysics, so that on the whole he does not realize exactly what, several centuries ago, he truly did lose. Long accustomed now to viewing the pursuit of knowledge solely in terms either of logical abstraction or empirical objectivity or some combination of both, most Western philosophers seem no longer familiar even with the essential nature of metaphysical thought.
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