Workshop: Metaphysics 2015
These
notes are my preface and accompaniment to the text that was offered by the
Commission. I consider that normative and my notes accessory and hopeful
helpful.
Me:
The ultimate reason for the Greeks, at the time of the Babylonian Captivity, to
seek Being as ultimate reality is the fact that they experienced this in the
remainder of believing Jews in Bagdad, and also in themselves as culturally
mixed with the Jews. Within the experience of Abrahamic faith as self-transcending
obedience [leaving Ur for Egypt, returning on command, attempting the sacrifice
of Isaac (Abraham’s very self)], the very meaning of faith is self-gift to
death – which is the transformation of the person ontologically. Consider
Benedict XVI’s remark:
“Furthermore, the Word of
God is the foundation of everything, it is the true reality. And to be
realistic, we must rely upon this reality. We must change our idea that matter,
solid things, things we can touch, are the more solid, the more certain
reality. At the end of the Sermon on the Mount the Lord speaks to us about the
two possible foundations for building the house of one's life: sand and rock.
The one who builds on sand builds only on visible and tangible things, on
success, on career, on money. Apparently these are the true realities. But all
this one day will pass away. We can see this now with the fall of large banks:
this money disappears, it is nothing. And thus all things, which seem to be the
true realities we can count on, are only realities of a secondary order.
The one who builds his life on these realities, on matter, on success, on
appearances, builds upon sand. Only the Word of God is the foundation of all
reality, it is as stable as the heavens and more than the heavens, it is
reality. Therefore, we must change our concept of realism. The realist is the
one who recognizes the Word of God, in this apparently weak reality, as the
foundation of all things. Realist is the one who builds his life on this
foundation, which is permanent. Thus the first verses of the Psalm invite us to
discover what reality is and how to find the foundation of our life, how to
build life.”\
This has ontological
ramifications which becomes a metaphysic of person as the meaning of Being.
JohnPaul II called for this in #84 of “Fides et Ratio:” “In a special way, the person constitutes a privileged locus for the
encounter with being [actu essendi], and with metaphysical enquiry.” Therefore,
without the experience of the self becoming alter
Christus in the act of faith, one does not experience the full force of
being.
Man saw and dealt with God face to face as
image and likeness. He sinned and lost the likeness to God as obediential act
of self-gift without losing the imaging. He forgot the Light of the
Divine Face. Man continued to be called to likeness by self-giving. Faith is
this act of self-gift which restores light. It is the “remembering”
or an-amnesis as the Greek Fathers of
the Church called it. Metaphysics is the rational account of this experiential
entering into a likeness to
God which initiated in the Sixth Century B.C., the time of the Jewish Exile in
Babylon.
The Historical Beginning of Metaphysics
as the Experience of the Absolute: Explanation:
Greek reason came in contact with the faith of Abraham (the Absolute of
“Yahweh: “I AM WHO AM” and moved from naming “gods” immanent to the empirical
cosmos to a search for the transcendent absolute.
The Importance of Faith for the Development of
Metaphysics: Sokolowski
Overview: The capacity
of the mind to know depended on the relation to the Creator. In obedience, Adam
achieved person hood by obedient work and naming the animals. That done, he
experienced the excellence of personhood – “alone” – in a creation of “things”
God declared this “not good” and recreated Adam into is and isha, male and
female. They knew God, themselves and the world. They lived in a state of
self-gift.
They sinned. Robert
Barron: “(T)he fall had implications at all levels of a person’s being.
Original sin affected not only the will but the body, the passions, the
imagination, and the mind as well. Because of sin each of the powers within a
person has become corrupt, and more to the point, they have fallen into
disharmony with one another…. (T)he fallen mind, the mind in the shadows, has a
tendency toward inattentiveness, stupidity, unreasonability, and
irresponsibility; it is curvatus in se,
self-absorbed, fearful, pusillanimous. The central paradox is this: only those
who have been touched by the Christ-mind, the intellect in love, realize the
limitation of the minds they have.”
To the point: Simon was able to affirm from within
himself: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Mt. 16, 16) only
because he had prayed with Christ (Lk. 9, 18). Since Christ is total relation
to the Father, His very Person is self gift, and as such is prayer. And since
like is known by like, Simon experienced being
“another Christ. He knew Christ ab intus (from within his own self).
Hence, Jesus changes his name from Simon to Petros (rock) as Christ Himself is
“cornerstone” (Act 4, 11). This is the foundational explanation of what took
place in 6 c. B.C. And so, living faith enables the awakening of reason from
sin to the sighting of Being. Hence, the true metaphysic works within the lived
context of faith.
Thumbnail Sketch of the emergence of the mind to reality:
the work of Fr. Robert Sokolowski in his book: “T he God of Faith and Reason”
UNDP (1982).
1.
The Greek mind was searching for cause, working
with sense perception and abstract thought. They arrive at asserting the
existence of the gods but always within the sensible, empirical
horizon. The issue of creation is not raised. “In Greek and Roman religions,
and in Greek and roman philosophies, god or the gods are appreciated as the
most powerful, more independent and self-sufficient. Most unchanging beings in
the world, but they are accepted within the context of being. Although god or
the gods are conceived as the steadiest and most complete beings, the
possibility that they could be even though everything that is not divine were
not, is not a possibility that occurs to anyone. The being of pagan gods is to
be a part, thought the most important part, of what is; no matter how
independent they are, the pagan gods must be with things that are not divine.
It is clear that the Olympian gods are
understood as particular beings in the world.
They are the expression of necessities that men encounter in the world,
necessities that men must respect. Zeus, Poseidon, Ares and Aphrodite, the
Muses, and Apollo are agents that rule over their particular domains, and they
are the causes, the ones responsible, for what happens. Some of the gods rule
over and in natural phenomena; others, the gods of the city, are involved in
political events; still others are related to families. As far as human beings
are concerned, the gods represent necessities that most be accepted and against
which a man can pretend to act only at his peril…
The
necessities became simply the way things were born to be; they became that
which is ‘by nature’ as opposed to that which is because of human making or
because of human choice. And the divine withdrew to those forms of being that
were taken to be the independent, ruling substances in the world. The divine
was part, the best and governing part, of nature, but its direct involvement
with human affairs was no longer acknowledge hnor was it feared.
In
talking about the highest, celestial substances, for example, Aristotle says
that the ancient myths told us ‘that these are gods and that the divine
encloses the whole of nature.’ He then says that many human features were added
to the gods in order to pacify and guide the multitude, and he clearly rejects
such accretions. However, he says that the first point, ‘that they thought the
first substances to be gods,; ought to be taken as an ‘inspired (theos)
statement’… That is, Aristotle finds in the myths something to be
repeated and maintained, provided the divine is withdrawn from the lower
substances we find in the world and placed in the highest and first substances
that govern the world. This divine part of the world serves as the cause of
motion and development in other things; by a kind of final causation it draws
other beings to imitate, in their own appropriate ways, its permanence and
independence… No matter how Aristotle’s god is to be described, as the prime
mover or as the self-thinking thought, he is part of the world, and it is obviously necessary
that there be other things besides him, whether he is aware of them or not…
Aristotle thus considers the divine to be the best part – but still only a part
– of the cosmos; he sees human being as independent of the mythical gods, but
still subordinated to necessities in many ways…
Plato’s appreciation of being, the
divine, and the human, is not, in its fundamentals, very much different from
what we have found in Aristotle… There is
the same acknowledgment of human agency, the same withdrawal of the gods form
immediate control over nature and human affairs, and the same recognition of
the divine as the best that there is, the motive and the object of the exercise
of reason…. Even the One or the Good is taken as ‘part’ of what is; it is the
One only being a one over and for many, never alone by itself… the divine, even
in its most ultimate for m, is never conceived as capable of being without the
world. It is divine by being differentiated from what is not divine and by
having an influence on what is not divine. The One of Plato is on the margin
of, and in touch with, the many; it lets the many and the variegated be what
they are. Even the One written about by Plotinus, which is placed s till
further ‘beyond’ being than it is in Plato’s writings… cannot ‘be’ without
there also being its reflections and its emanations in the other hypostases
(the Mind and the Soul) and in the things of the world.
Sokolowski’s
thesis: “It is natural for human reason to find itself within the context
of the world, to come up against the world and its necessities as simply there,
as the extreme margin of what can be thought. To think or to believe beyond the
setting of the world and its necessities should be recognized for the unusual
movement that it is:” Judeo-Christian Creation.
Judeo-Christian
Revelation of Creation as Enabling the Mind to Make the Distinction Between God
and the World.
Perhaps this is best understood by
saying that if God created the world, His Being is not more after the creation;
and If the world were not created, God would not be less – so different are
their ways of being. The “Being” of God is not like the “being” of the world.
The revelation of Creation allows the
mind to perceive Being beyond the context of the world, and this because it is
able to perceive the sensible world as not having to be . This is a new
distinction for the mind: “the distinction between the world understood as
possibly not having existed and God understood as possibly being all that there
is, with no diminution of goodness or greatness. It is not the case that God
and the world are each separately understood in this new way, and only
subsequently related to each other. The reality of God and the world is not a
zero sum where the lessening of one is the increase of the other.
Chesterton suggests that the best way
to imagine this truth of the existential
quality of the sensible world, is to stand on your head and see all
things falling off. In a word, the real entry into Christian metaphysics
is to put the ordinary world of sense perception into existential crisis. It
need not be.
The key to the experience of transcendence is the
experience of the subject in act of Abrahamic faith as revealed in Jesus
Christ. And there the experience of the transcendent and absolute is achieved,
and now, in the Magisterium, is found to be in the believing person: “In a special way, the person[going
beyond self in the act of faith]
constitutes a privileged locus for the encounter with being, and hence with
metaphysical enquiry.”
The Axial Age (6 c. B.C.): Benedict’s Regensburg: “The mysterious name of God, revealed from
the burning bush, a name which separates this God from all other divinities
with their many names and declares simply that he is, already presents a
challenge to the notion of myth, to which Socrates' attempt to vanquish and
transcend myth stands in close analogy. Within the Old Testament, the process
which started at the burning bush came to new maturity at the time of the
Exile, when the God of Israel, an Israel now deprived of its land and worship,
was proclaimed as the God of heaven and earth and described in a simple formula
which echoes the words uttered at the burning bush: "I am."
This new understanding of God is accompanied by a kind of enlightenment, which
finds stark expression in the mockery of gods who are merely the work of human
hands (cf. Psalm 115). Thus, despite the bitter conflict with those Hellenistic
rulers who sought to accommodate it forcibly to the customs and idolatrous cult
of the Greeks, biblical faith, in the Hellenistic period, encountered the
best of Greek thought at a deep level, resulting in a mutual enrichment evident
especially in the later wisdom literature.
Today we know that the Greek translation of the Old Testament produced at
Alexandria -- the Septuagint -- is more than a simple (and in that sense
perhaps less than satisfactory) translation of the Hebrew text: It is an
independent textual witness and a distinct and important step in the history of
Revelation, one which brought about this encounter in a way that was decisive for
the birth and spread of Christianity. A profound encounter of faith and reason
is taking place here, an encounter between genuine enlightenment and religion.
From the very heart of Christian faith and, at the same time, the heart of
Greek thought now joined to faith, Manuel II was able to say: Not to act
"with logos" is contrary to God's nature.”
Benedict XVI’s
point at Regensburg (2006), his undelivered address to the Roman University “La
Sapienza,” his Address to European Professors, June 24, 2007 and his
address to The Sixth European Symposium of University
Professors (June 7, 2008) are all directed to the same point: “Broaden Reason.”
Reason has been narrowed by reducing the world to “facts.” The broad world is
the self, believing. It is the ontological experience of self-transcendence in
the act of Christian faith. The mind “sees” the being of the believer as illuminated in the very act of belief that
is a moral, ontological act of the “I.” Reason is “broadened” by this new
exposure to Being in a way unmediated by sensible perception or conceptual
symbolizing. Access to Being broadens reason. It is a new access to a reality
that transcends cosmic perception. In the Regensburg address, Benedict made
reference to this moment of tansfertilization between Abrahamic faith and Greek
pagan culture in which the lights went on:
“Within the Old Testament, the process which started
at the burning bush came to new maturity at the time of the Exile, when the God
of Israel, an Israel now deprived of its land and worship, was proclaimed as
the God of heaven and earth and described in a simple formula which echoes the
words uttered at the burning bush: "I am."
“This new understanding
of God is accompanied by a kind of enlightenment, which finds stark expression
in the mockery of gods who are merely the work of human hands (cf. Psalm 115).
Thus, despite the bitter conflict with those Hellenistic rulers who sought to
accommodate it forcibly to the customs and idolatrous cult of the Greeks,
biblical faith, in the Hellenistic period, encountered the best of Greek
thought at a deep level, resulting in a mutual enrichment evident especially in
the later wisdom literature.”
Benedict XVI’s point at Regensburg,
his undelivered address to the Roman University “La Sapienza,”
his Address to European Professors, June 24,
2007 and his address to T
he Sixth European Symposium
of University Professors (June 7, 2008) are all
directed to the same point: “Broaden Reason.” This broadening is achieved by the ontological
experience of self-transcendence in the act of Christian faith. The mind “sees”
the being of the believer as
illuminated in the very act of belief that is a moral, ontological act of the
“I.” Reason is “broadened” by this new exposure to Being in a way unmediated by
sensible perception or conceptual symbolizing. Access to Being broadens reason.
It is a new access to a reality that transcends cosmic perception. In the Regensburg
address, Benedict made reference to this moment of tansfertilization between
Abrahamic faith and Greek pagan culture in which the lights went on: “Within the Old Testament, the
process which started at the burning bush came to new maturity at the time of
the Exile, when the God of Israel, an Israel now deprived of its land and
worship, was proclaimed as the God of heaven and earth and described in a
simple formula which echoes the words uttered at the burning bush: "I
am."
“This new understanding of God is accompanied by a kind of enlightenment, which
finds stark expression in the mockery of gods who are merely the work of human
hands (cf. Psalm 115). Thus, despite the bitter conflict with those Hellenistic
rulers who sought to accommodate it forcibly to the customs and idolatrous cult
of the Greeks, biblical faith, in the Hellenistic period, encountered the best
of Greek thought at a deep level, resulting in a mutual enrichment evident
especially in the later wisdom literature.
Reductive Knowing
Consider
Pope Francis in #106 of “Laudato Si:” 106. The basic problem goes even deeper: it is the way that
humanity has taken up technology and its development according to an undifferentiated and
one-dimensional paradigm. This paradigm exalts the concept of a subject
who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains
control over an external object. This subject makes every effort to establish
the scientific and experimental method, which in itself is already a technique
of possession, mastery and transformation. It is as if the subject were to find
itself in the presence of something formless, completely open to manipulation.
Men and women have constantly intervened in nature, but for a long time this
meant being in tune with and respecting the possibilities offered by the things
themselves. It was a matter of receiving what nature itself allowed, as if from
its own hand. Now, by contrast, we are the ones to lay our hands on things,
attempting to extract everything possible from them while frequently ignoring
or forgetting the reality in front of us. Human beings and material objects no
longer extend a friendly hand to one another; the relationship has become
confrontational. This has made it easy to accept the idea of infinite or unlimited
growth, which proves so attractive to economists, financiers and experts in
technology. It is based on the lie that there is an infinite supply of the
earth’s goods, and this leads to the planet being squeezed dry beyond every
limit. It is the false notion that “an infinite quantity of energy and
resources are available, that it is possible to renew them quickly, and that
the negative effects of the exploitation of the natural order can be easily
absorbed”.[86]
107. It can be said that many problems of
today’s world stem from the tendency, at times unconscious, to make the method
and aims of science and technology an epistemological paradigm which shapes the
lives of individuals and the workings of society. The effects of imposing this
model on reality as a whole, human and social, are seen in the deterioration of
the environment, but this is just one sign of a reductionism which affects
every aspect of human and social life.”
The moment we were living through
as a financial debacle (2008), and now societal as the legitimization of same
sex union (“gay marriage”) is really a crisis of the meaning of man as person.
It begs for a comparison with the meaning of 6
th c. axiality. From a
positive perspective, the turn to the subject as ontological reality
and not mere consciousness is its full import. Could it not be, at the start of
this new millennium, that we are entering a new consciousness of reality and
truth that is the human person whose practical mandate is the gift of self – in
the image of the god-man? An age of conceptual reductionism is being exploded
by an age of experiential enlightenment which cannot tolerate theburden and
boredom of a meaningless infinity of data bases of facts. The human person is
emerging not as an evolving animal but as “another Christ” who is an autonomous
and self-determining “I” in search of the Absolute.
Bad
Reason ( No Metaphysics) Damaged Faith
(Protestant Reformation)
Luis Bouyer’s
Assessment of how the Defective Metaphysic of Nominalism Vitiated the Protestant Protestant Reformation:
The principal source of the error of Protestantism
was the use of philosophic nominalism (developed within Catholicism) where the
metaphysics of being had been lost.
Bouyer assessed
that it is evident in two signature sentences of Luther: 1) Grace alone saves us; 2) it changes nothing in us. "Grace" has been objectified
and reified into a "thing,” while it envelops us as a "cloak."
We are saved, but nothing has changed in us. We continue in our sin. God
becomes objectified to us, and we to each other. We are alone together as
individuals. The relationship is not constitutive but accidental. Grace,
as “thing” is extrinsic to us and covers
us as a cloak.
The operative concept offered by
Louis Bouyer to explain the isolated extrinsicism of
God and creature as presented by the thought of Luther and Calvin is not to be
found in scripture nor in the principles of "Grace alone saves us,"
or "it changes nothing in us" is philosophic
nominalism. I quote:
"What, then, is the source of the element in Protestant theology of
a God forbidden to communicate himself to his creature, of man unable, even by
the divine omnipotence, to be torn from his own solitude, from the autonomy of
his so arrogant humility, of a world and a God inexorably condemned to the most
utter 'extrinsicism?'
To the historian, the reply is obvious. The Reformers no more invented this
strange and despairing universe than they found it in Scripture. It is simply
the universe of the philosophy they had been brought up in, scholasticism in
its decadence. If the Reformers unintentionally became heretics, the fault does
not consist in the radical nature of their reform but in its hesitation, its
timidity, its imperfect vision. The structure they raised on their own
principles is unacceptable only because they used uncritically material drawn
from that decaying Catholicism they desired to elude but whose prisoners they
remained to a degree they never suspected. No phrase reveals so clearly the
hidden evil that was to spoil the fruit of the Reformation than Luther’s saying
that Occam was the only scholastic who was any good. The truth is that Luther,
brought up on his system, was never able to think outside the framework it
imposed, while this, it is only too evident, makes the mystery that lies at the
root of Christian teaching either inconceivable, or absurd.
"What, in fact, is the essential characteristic of Occam's thought,
and of nominalism in general, but a radical empiricism, reducing
all being to what is perceived, which empties out, with the idea of substance,
all possibility of real relations between beings, as well as the stable
subsistence of any of them, and ends by denying to the real any intelligibility,
conceiving God himself only as a Protean figure impossible to apprehend?"
Lesson 3: Socrates and
the essences of things: The point here is the
appeal to personal experience (phenomenology): Wojtyla wrote in the opening paragraph of the “The Acting Person
(p. 3):” “Man’s experience of anything
outside of himself is always associated with the experience of himself, and he
never experiences anything external without having at the same time the
experience of himself.” The Socratic method is conceptualizing
[objectifying] the consciousness that comes from the experience of the acting
person. And it is here where the universal and the absolute are encountered
John Henry Newman
corroborates t he view of empiricists like Locke and Hume on causality, i.e. it
cannot be perceived by the external senses. He will say that indeed, causality
is not perceived through the external senses but in the experience of the self
exercising self as agent. There and only there. From that internal experience
of the “I” as agent as master of itself – which is the proper locus of freedom
– causality is extrapolated to the relations and associations that are
perceived through sensation.
“The assent which we give to the
proposition, as a first principle, that nothing happens without a cause, is
derived, in the first instance, from what we know of ourselves; and we argue
analogically from what is within us to what is external to us. One of the first
experiences of an infant is that to his willing and doing; and, as time goes
on, one of the first temptations of the boy is to bring home to himself the
fact of his sovereign arbitrary power, though it be at the price of
waywardness, mischievousness, and disobedience. And when his parents, as
antagonists of this willfulness, begin to restrain him, and to bring his minds
and conduct into shape, then he has a second series of experiences of
cause and effect, and that upon a
principle or rule. Thus the notion of causation is one of the first lessons
which he learns from experience, that experience limiting it to agents
possessed of intelligence and will. It is the notion of power combined with a
purpose and an end. Physical phenomena, as such, are without sense; and
experience teaches us nothing about physical phenomena as causes.
We can say in summary that the turn to the
subject has undermined our naiveté with regard to what is actually “taken in”
by the external senses. Modern philosophy has been honest and correct in its
evaluation of the content of sensation. We do not sense “substances” nor
sensible qualities such as color, smell or sound. Pain is not in the tooth, nor
red in the dress. Nor do we sense moral values that are absolutes in the
objective world of sensation where the real is always individual, particulate
and contingent. True there is no knowledge at all without external sensation, but
it is not only the experience of sensing that gives us the full horizon of
knowing, but the experience of ourselves experiencing things through sensation.
The experiences itself as subject in the act of experiencing the external world
as object. The received classical realism has insisted this in its nihil in
intellectu nisi per sensum. The same obtains in the moral absolutes. They are
not found in the contingent, empirical sensory world as absolutes. They are
experienced as the being of the “I” as image of the Creator tending
ontologically to union. That ontological tendency within us is the ontological
hard-wiring of the created image that, when reflected as consciousness, becomes
“conscience” that resonates with some forms of action and shuns others. Conscience,
then, is not a store of retrieval a priori principles that we recall and from
which we deduce moral probity in the concrete existential. It is an
ontologically grounded innate sense.
2) Aristotle’s Great
Work of an Objective Metaphysics of the “Form” as Presented by Etienne Gilson
as a Separate Handout. It is extended to all reality as the objective ontological
principle of “substance,” that will develop into Wojtyla’s subject, “I.”
T he Great
Metaphysical Achievement For the 3d Millennium (and beyond): The Ontological “I:” The Metaphysics of St.
Thomas and Wojtyla’s Phenomenology (below) Completing It.
(Wo jtyla’s) “Subjectivity and the Irreducible in the Human Being”
1.
THE STATE OF
THE QUESTION
(All emphasis by
underling with some bold is mine)
The problem of the subjectivity of the human being seems
today to be the focal point of a variety of concerns. It would be
difficult to explain in just a few words exactly why and how this situation
has arisen. No doubt it owes its emergence to numerous causes, not all
of which should be sought in the realm of philosophy or science.
Nevertheless, philosophy—especially philosophical anthropology and
ethics—is a privileged place when it comes to clarifying and
objectifying this problem. And this is precisely where the heart of the issue lies. Today more than ever before we feel the need—and also see a greater possibility—of objectifying
the problem of the subjectivity of the human being.
In this regard, contemporary thought seems to have more or
less set aside the old antinomies that arose primarily in the area
of the theory of knowledge (epistemology) and that formed an as though
inviolable line of demarcation between the basic orientations in
philosophy. The antinomy of subjectivism vs. objectivism, along with the
underlying antinomy of idealism vs. realism, created conditions that discouraged
dealing with human subjectivity—for fear that this would lead
inevitably to subjectivism. These fears, which existed among thinkers who
subscribed to realism and epistemological objectivism, were in some
sense warranted by
the subjectivistic and idealistic character—or at least overtones—ofanalyses conducted within the
realm of "pure consciousness." This only served to strengthen the line of
demarcation in philosophy and the opposition between the "objective"
view of the human being, which was also an ontological view (the human being as a being), and the "subjective" view, which seemed
inevitably to sever the human being from this reality.
Today
we are seeing a breakdown of that line of demarcation—and for some of the same reasons that gave rise to it in the
first place. By "some of the same
reasons" I mean that this is also happening as a result of phenomenological analyses conducted in the realm of
"pure consciousness" using
Husserl's epoché: bracketing
the existence, or reality, of the conscious
subject. I am convinced that the line
of demarcation between the subjectivistic (idealistic) and objectivistic (realistic) views in anthropology and ethics
must break down and is in fact breaking down on the basis of the experience of the human being. This experience automatically
frees us from pure consciousness as the subject conceived and assumed a
priori and leads us to the full concrete existence of the human being,
to the reality of the conscious subject. With all the phenomenological analyses in the realm of that assumed subject
(pure consciousness) now at our
disposal, we can no longer go on treating the human being exclusively as an objective being, but we must also
somehow treat the human being as a subject in the
dimension in which the specifically human subjectivity of the human being is
determined by consciousness.
And that
dimension would seem to be none other than personal subjectivity.
2. THE HISTORY
OF THE QUESTION
This matter
requires a fuller examination, in the course of which we must consider the
question of the irreducible in the human being—the question of that
which is original and essentially human, that which accounts for the human being's complete
uniqueness in the world.
Traditional
Aristotelian anthropology was based, as we know, on the definition o anthropos zoon noetikon, homo est animal rationale. This definition
fulfills Aristotle's requirements for defining the species (human being) through its proximate genus (living being)
and the feature that distinguishes the
given species in that genus (endowed with reason). At the same time, however, the definition is
constructed in such a way that it excludes—when taken simply and
directly—the possibility of accentuating the
irreducible in the human being. It implies—at least at first glance—a belief in the reducibility of the human
being to the world. The reason for
maintaining such reducibility has always been the need to understand the human being. This type of
understanding could be defined as cosmological.
The usefulness
of the Aristotelian definition is unquestionable. It became the
dominant view in metaphysical anthropology and spawned a variety of
particular sciences, which likewise understood the human being as an animal with the distinguishing feature of reason. The whole
scientific tradition concerning the
composition of human nature, the spiritual-material compositum humanum—a tradition
that came down from the Greeks through
the Scholastics to Descartes—moved within the framework of this definition and, consequently, within the
context of the belief that the
essentially human is basically reducible to the world. It cannot be denied that vast regions of experience and
scientific knowledge based on that experience reflect this belief and
work to confirm it.
On the other hand, a belief in the primordial uniqueness of the human being, and thus in the basic irreducibility of the human being to the natural world, seems just as old as the need for reduction expressed in Aristotle's
definition. This belief stands at the basis of understanding the human being as
a person, which has an equally
long tenure in the history of philosophy; it also accounts today for the growing
emphasis on the person as a subject and for the numerous efforts aimed at
interpreting the
personal
subjectivity of the human being.1
In the
philosophical and scientific tradition that grew out of the definition homo est animal rationale, the human
being was mainly an object, one of the
objects in the world to which the human being visibly and physically
belongs. Objectivity in this sense was connected with the general
assumption of the reducibility of the human being. Subjectivity, on the other
hand, is, as it were, a term proclaiming that the human being's proper essence
cannot be totally reduced to and explained by the proximate genus and
specific difference. Subjectivity is,
then, a kind of synonym for the irreducible in the human
being. If there is an opposition here, it is not between
objectivism and subjectivism, but only between two philosophical
(as well as everyday and practical) methods of treating the human being: as
an object and as a subject. At the same time, we must not forget
that the subjectivity of the human person is also something objective.2
I should also emphasize that the method of treating the
human being as
an object does not result directly from the Aristotelian definition itself,nor does it belong to the metaphysical conception
of the human being in the Aristotelian tradition. As we know, the objectivity
of the conception of the human being
as a being itself required the
postulate that the human being is 1)
a separate suppositum (a subject
of existence and action) and 2) a
person (persona). Still, the
traditional view of the human being as a
person, which understood the person in terms of the Boethian definition as rationalisnaturaeindividuasubstantia, expressed
the individuality of the human being
as a substantial being with a rational (spiritual) nature, rather than the uniqueness of the subjectivity
essential to the human being as a
person. Thus the Boethian definition mainly marked out the "metaphysical terrain"—the dimension of being—in
which personal human subjectivity is
realized, creating, in a sense, a condition for "building
upon" this terrain on the basis of experience.
3. LIVED EXPERIENCE AS AN ELEMENT
IN
INTERPRETATION
The category to which we must go in order to do this
"building" seems to be that of lived experience. This is a
category foreign to Aristotle's metaphysics. The Aristotelian categories that may appear relatively
closest to lived experience—those of agereand pati—cannot
be identified with it. These categories serve to describe the dynamism of a
being, and they also do a good job of differentiating what merely happens in the human being from what
the human being does.3But
when the dynamic reality of the human being is interpreted in Aristotelian
categories, there is in each
case (including in the case of agereand
pati)an aspect not directly apprehended by such a metaphysical interpretation
or reduction, namely, the aspect of lived experience as the irreducible,
as the element that defies reduction. From the point of view of the meta-physical
structure of being and acting, and
thus also from the point of view of the dynamism of the human being understood meta-physically, the
apprehension of this element may seem
unnecessary. Even without it, we obtain an adequate understanding of the human being and of the fact that
the human being acts and that things happen in the human being. Such an understanding formed the basis of the entire edifice of anthropology and
ethics for many centuries.
But
as the need increases to understand the human being as a unique and
unrepeatable person, especially in terms of the whole dynamism of action and inner
happenings proper to the human being—in other words, as the need increases to
understand the personal subjectivity of the human being—the category of lived experience takes on greater significance,
and, in fact, key significance. For
then the issue is not just the metaphysical objectification of the human being as an acting subject, as the agent of
acts, but the revelation of the person as a subject experiencing its acts and
inner happenings, and with them its own subjectivity(for example,
replicating the sentiments of Jesus Christ). From the moment the need
to interpret the acting human being(I'homeagissant) is expressed, the category of lived experiencemust have a
place in anthropology and ethics—and even somehow be at the center of their
respective interpretations.4
One
might immediately ask whether, by giving lived experience such a key function
in the interpretation of the human being as a personal subject, we
are not inevitably condemned to subjectivism. Without going into a
detailed response, I would simply say that, so long as in this interpretation
we maintain a firm enough connection with the integral experience
of the human being, not only are we not doomed to subjectivism, but
we will also safeguard the authentic personal subjectivity of the human being in the realistic
interpretation of human existence.
4. THE NECESSITY OF PAUSING AT THE IRREDUCIBLE
In order to interpret the human being in the context of
lived experience, the aspect of consciousnessmust
be introduced into the analysis of human existence. The human being is then given to
us not merely as a being defined according
to species [this would be an
abstraction], but as a concrete self, a self-experiencing subject.
Our own subjective being and the
existence proper to it (that of a suppositum)
appear to us in experience precisely as a self-experiencing
subject. If we pause here, this being
discloses the structures that determine it as a concrete self [they will be
self-mastery, self-governance, self-gift]. The disclosure of these
structures constituting the human self need in no way signify a break with
reduction and the species-definition of the human being—rather, it signifies the kind of methodological operation that may be
described as pausing at the irreducible. We should pause in the process of
reduction, which leads us in
the direction of understanding the human being in the world (a cosmological type of understanding),
in order to understand the human being inwardly [we are in search in search of
the meaning of “sense of divine filiation” that will be a consciousness
of the action of being “another Christ”]. This latter type of understanding may
be called personalistic. The personalistic type of understanding the human being
is not the antinomy of the cosmological type but its complement
(my underline). As I mentioned earlier, the definition of the person formulated by Boethius only marks out the
"metaphysical terrain" for interpreting the personal
subjectivity of the human being.
The experience
of the human being cannot be derived by way of cosmological
reduction; we must pause at the irreducible, at that which is unique and
unrepeatable in each human being, by virtue of which he or she is not just
a particular human being—an individual
of a certain species—but a
personal subject [To be a subject is to be the protagonist of action – Helen
Keller]. Only then do we get a true and complete picture of the
human being. We cannot complete this picture through reduction
alone; we also cannot remain within the framework of the irreducible alone
(for then we would be unable to get beyond the pure self). The one
must be cognitively supplemented with the other. Nevertheless, given
the variety of circumstances of the real existence of human beings, we
must always leave the greater space in this cognitive effort for the
irreducible; we must, as it were, give the irreducible the upper hand
when thinking about the human being, both in theory and in practice (my
underline). For the irreducible also refers to everything in the human
being that is invisible and wholly internal and whereby each human
being, myself included, is an "eyewitness" of his or her own
self—of his or her own humanity
and person.
My lived experience discloses not only my actions but also my inner happenings in their profoundest
dependence on my own self. It also discloses my whole personal structure of self-determination, in which I discover myself
as that through which I possess myself and govern myself—or, at
any rate, should possess myself
and govern myself. The dynamic structure of self-determination reveals to me that
I am given to myself and assigned to myself. This is precisely how I appear to
myself in my acts and in my inner decisions of conscience: as
permanently assigned to myself, as having continually to affirm and
monitor myself, and thus, in a sense, as having continually to
"achieve" this dynamic structure of my self, a structure that is given to me as
self-possession and self-governance. At the same time, this is a completely
internal and totally immanent structure. It is a real endowment of the personal
subject; in a sense, it is this
subject. In my lived experience of
self-possession and self-governance, I experience that I am a person
and that I am a subject.
These
structures of self-possession and self-governance, which are essential to
every personal self and shape the personal subjectivity of every human being,
are experienced by each of us in the lived experience of moral
value—good and evil. And perhaps this reality is often revealed to us more
intensely when it is threatened by evil than when—at least for the
moment—nothing threatens it. In any case, experience teaches that the morale is very deeply rooted in the humanum, or, more precisely, in what should be defined as the personals. Morality defines the
personalisticdimension of the human being in
a fundamental way; it is subjectified in this dimension and can also be properly understood only in it. At the same time, however, the morale is a basic expression of the transcendence proper to the personal self. Our decisions of
conscience at each step reveal us as
persons who fulfill ourselves by going beyond ourselves toward values accepted in truth and realized, therefore,
with a deep sense of responsibility.
5. A CHALLENGING
PERSPECTIVE
This topic has been the subject of many penetrating
analyses, some already completed and others ongoing. While not
continuing those analyses here, I wish only to state that, when it comes to
understanding the human being, the whole rich and complex reality of
lived experience is not so much an element or aspect as a dimension in its own
right. And this
is the dimension at which we must necessarily pause if the subjective structure—including the subjective personal
structure—of the human being is to be fully delineated.
What does it mean to pause cognitively at lived experience? This "pausing"
should be understood in relation to
the irreducible. The traditions of philosophical anthropology would have
us believe that we can, so to speak, pass right over this dimension, that we can
cognitively omit it by means of an abstraction that provides us with a species
definition of the human being as a being, or, in other words, with a
cosmological type of reduction (homo =
animal rationale). One might ask, however, whether in so defining
the essence of the human being we do not in a sense leave out what is most
human, since the humanum expresses
and realizes itself as the personalis.
If so, then the irreducible would suggest that we cannot come to know
and understand the human being in a reductive way alone. This is also
what the contemporary philosophy of the subject seems to be telling the traditional
philosophy of the object.
But that is not all. The irreducible signifies that which
is essentially incapable of reduction, that which cannot be reduced but
can only be disclosed or revealed. Lived experience essentially
defies reduction. This does not mean, however, that it eludes our
knowledge; it only means that we must arrive at the knowledge
of it differently, namely, by a
method or means of analysis that
merely reveals and discloses its essence. The method of phenomenological analysis allows us to pause at
lived experience
as the irreducible. This method is not just a descriptive catalogingof individual phenomena (in the Kantian sense,
i.e., phenomena as sense-perceptible
contents). When we pause at the lived experience of the irreducible, we attempt to permeate cognitively the
whole essence of this experience. We thus apprehend both the essentially
subjective structure of lived
experience and its structural relation to the subjectivity of the human being. Phenomenological analysis thus
contributes to trans-phenomenal
understanding; it also contributes to a disclosure of the richness proper to human existence in the whole complex
compositumhumanum.
Such a disclosure—the deepest possible disclosure—would
seem to be an indispensable means for coming to know the human being
as a personal subject. At the same time, this personal human
subjectivity is a determinate reality: it
is a reality when we strive to understand it within the objective totality that goes by the name human being. The same applies to the whole character of this method of understanding.
After all, lived experience is also—and above all—a reality. A legitimate
method of disclosing this reality can only enrich and deepen the whole
realism of the conception of the human being. The personal profile of
the human being then enters the sphere of cognitive vision, and the
composition of human nature, far from being blurred, is even more distinctly
accentuated. The thinker seeking the ultimate philosophical truth about
the human being no longer moves in a "purely metaphysical terrain,"
but finds elements in abundance testifying to both the materiality and the
spirituality of the human being, elements that bring both of these aspects
into sharper relief. These elements then form the building blocks for further
philosophical construction.
But
certain questions always remain: Are these two types of understanding the
human being—the cosmological and the personalitic—ultimately mutually exclusive? Where, if at all, do reduction and the
disclosure of the irreducible in the
human being converge? How is the philosophy of the subject to disclose the objectivity of the human being
in the personal subjectivity of this being? These seem to be the
questions that today determine the perspective for thinking
about the human being, the perspective for contemporary anthropology and ethics. They are essential and burning questions. Anthropology and ethics must be pursued
today within this challenging but promising perspective.
NOTES
1.
One such effort is my book Osobaiczyn [Person and
Action] (Krakow: Polskie Tow. Teologiczne, 1969; rev. ed. 1985). [English
edition: The Acting Person, trans. AndrzejPotocki, ed.
Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (Boston: Reidel, 1979).] Another even more relevant work in this regard is my essay "The
Person: Subject and Community" 219-261 below.
2.
See the section entitled "Subjectivity and
Subjectivism" in The Acting Person 56-59.
3.
My
work The Acting Person is in large measure constructed upon this basis.
4. One can observe this by comparing my book The Acting Person with Mieczyslaw A. Krapiec's book I—Man: An Outline of Philosophical
Anthropology, trans. Marie Lescoe, Andrew Woznicki, Theresa Sandok et
al. (New Britain: Mariel,
1983).
Karol
WoJtyla, "Podmiotowosci I 'to, co nieredukowalne' w eflowieku," Ethos 1.2-3 (1988): 21-28. A paper sent to an international conferencein Paris (13-14
June 1975).
* * * * * * * *
Notice
here how the explanation of morality is very different from Aristotelian/thomist-scholastic
logic that we have looked at up to Wojtyla’s “Subjectivity and the
Irreducible…” that is, instead of an abstraction of man as “rational nature” or
“substance,” man is “I.” But that “I” is fully intelligible as image of the divine
Persons who are one God each as gift to the Other. The human “I” has an
internal dynamism of becoming who he/she is by transcending himself/herself.
That is, the truth of the human person is “self-gift.” And none understand that
better than the woman who engendered the God-man by her fiat (self-gift). So,
the simple moral criterion is going out of selft: when gift, one is becoming another
Christ; when turning to self, one sins. The act of freedom is the act of
determing oneself.
Wojtyla: Person and CommunityLang
(1993)188-195.
“The Personal Structure of Self-Determination,”
(…)
In phenomenological experience, I appear as someone who
possesses myselfand who is simultaneously
possessed by myself. I also appear as someone who governs myself and who
is simultaneously governed by myself. Both the one and the other are revealed
by self-determination; they are implied by
self-determination and also enrich its content. Through self-possession and self-governance, the personal structure of
self-determination comes to light in its whole proper fullness.
In
determining myself—and this takes place through an act of will—I become aware
and also testify to others that I possess myself and govern myself. In this way, my acts give me a unique
insight into myself as a person. By virtue of self-determination, I
experience in the relatively most immediate
way that I am a person. Of course, the path from this experience to an understanding that would qualify as a
complete theory of the person must lead through metaphysical analysis.
Still, experience is the indispensable beginning of this path, and the lived
experience of self-determination seems to be the nucleus of this beginning. In
any case, if a full affirmation of the personal value of human acts requires a
theory of the person as its basis, the
construction of this theory seems impossible without an analytic insight into the dynamic reality of action, and above
all into the structure of the self-determination essential for action, a
structure that from the very beginning presents itself in some sense as a personal
structure (my emphasis).
IV
In Vatican II's
Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et
Spes, we read that "the
human being, who is the only creature on earth that God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself or herself
except through a disinterested gift of
himself or herself" (24). The document of the last Council seems in
these words to sum up the age-old traditions and inquiries of Christian
anthropology, for which divine revelation became a liberating light. The
anthropology of St. Thomas Aquinas is deeply rooted in these traditions, while
also being open to all the achievements of human thought that in various ways supplement the Thomistic view of the
person and confirm its realistic
character. The words of Vatican II cited above seem chiefly to
accentuate the axiological aspect, speaking of the person as a being of special
intrinsic worth, who is, therefore, specially qualified to make a gift of
self. Beneath this axiological aspect, however, we can easily discern a deeper,
ontological aspect. The ontology of the person suggested by this text
seems again to coincide closely with the experience discussed above. In
other words, if we wish to accentuate fully the truth concerning the human
person brought out by Gaudium et Spes, we must once again look
to the personal structure of self-determination.
As I said
earlier, in the experience of self-determination the human person stands
revealed before us as a distinctive structure of self-possession and
self-governance. Neither the one nor the other, however, implies being closed
in on oneself. On the contrary, both self-possession and self-governance
imply a special disposition to make a "gift of oneself," and this a
"disinterested" gift. Only if one possesses oneself can one give oneself and
do this in a disinterested way. And only if one governs oneself can one make
a gift of oneself, and this again a disinterested gift. The problematic
of disinterestedness certainly deserves a separate analysis, which it is
not my intention to present here. An understanding of the person in
categories of gift, which the teaching of Vatican II reemphasizes, seems to
reach even more deeply into those dimensions brought to light by the
foregoing analysis. Such an understanding seems to disclose even more fully the personal structure
of self-determination.
Only if one can determine oneself—as I attempted to show
earlier—can one also become a gift for others. The Council's statement that
"the human being... cannot fully find himself or herself except
through a disinterested gift of himself or herself' allows us to conclude that it
is precisely when one becomes a gift for others that one most fully becomes
oneself. This "law of the gift," if it may be so designated,
is inscribed deep within the dynamic structure of the person. The text of Vatican II
certainly draws its inspiration from revelation, in the light of which it
paints this portrait of the human being as a person. One could say that this
is a portrait in which the person is depicted as a being willed by God
"for itself' and, at the same time, as a being turned "toward"
others. This relational portrait of the person, however, necessarily presupposes the
immanent (and indirectly "substantial") portrait that unfolds
before us from an analysis of the
personal structure of self-determination.
R. Connor
The syllabus is structured with two goals
in mind:
i.
The course should acquaint the students with the
philosophical concepts mentioned in the syllabus.
ii.
The treatment of these topics should help the students
understand the errors in today’s culture that stem from mistaken philosophical
concepts (reductionism/relativism) in general, and from mistaken metaphysical
concepts in particular. They should
understand how a correct metaphysical approach provides an answer to these
mistaken notions.
iii. I add at the beginning the act of
Judeo-Christian faith as a lived self-transcendence. Without it, Metaphysics as
we have come to understand it originating from the Greeks would not have taken
place.
a.
While there are many such
notions, three we have chosen to focus on are:
i.
Importance of metaphysics
for theology. I add: a) Louis Bouyer’s appraisal that the Protestant
Reformation was vitiated not by its theology or intention, but by the Nominalism
in which it was formulated; b) now, at this moment, Vatican II cannot be
understood and become culture without the development of the “I” ontologically
as in the Magisterium of the post-Council. By way of example, it is impossible
to give a coherent account of Humanae Vitae and the identity of
love and life without a metaphysical account of Gaudium et Spes #24: “man,
the only earthly being God has willed for itself, finds himself by the sincere
gift of himself.” Also, without a
metaphysic of intrinsic and constitutive relationality, the sacrament of
matrimony cannot be explained in terms of the complementarity of self-gift, and
therefore invalid in the case of homosexuals. That lacking, the default
refutation of “gay marriage” takes the form of consequentialism (as no kids, it
doesn’t last, etc.). This is the challenge of the moment. We need a metaphysic
of constitutive relationality. Deeper yet, we need the theo-ontologic offered
by Robert Barron where Jesus Christ is the meaning of Being, and it is
only within the Christology of Chalcedon (451) and Constantinople III (680-681)
of the relation of the divine and human natures of the divine Person that the
metaphysic of St. Thomas takes on its full force and relevance for the future.
See the Appendex at the end: Karol Wojtyla’s “Subjectivity and the Irreducible
in the Human Person” for the achievement of the human person as ontological
“I.”
ii.
Understanding of the faith requires clear
concepts; many of these concepts are metaphysical in nature. Two specific examples to be covered are
Transubstantiation and the Incarnation.
iii.
Importance of metaphysics
for ethics/natural law – the importance of stable natures to a coherent ethics.
Instead of “nature” read “person.”
iv.
Scientism is a reductionist
materialism which is current among the many “new atheists”. Their ideas purport to show how science
proves that God does not exist. Students
should understand the non-scientific presuppositions of scientism and be
acquainted with the metaphysical problems involved with the many forms of
reductionism prevalent in modern society.
Benedict XVI: Regensburg Lecture
(2006):
