Autor: Schindler, David C., Jun

Buch: The Catholicity of Reason

Titel: The Catholicity of Reason

Stichwort: Nichtwissen - Anmaßung 1; Sokrates (Paradox: Nichtwissen inkludiert Wissen um ein "Was" u. "Alles"; Beispiel: Gerechtigkeit); zwei Aspekte einer Sache: sokratisches Nichtwissen - Lernen als Erinnerung (Plato)

Kurzinhalt: ... our argument is... that the only way to avoid a closed system is vigilantly to insist on "totality." ... it is not enough to say indeterminately that one does not know, but one needs to have insight precisely into what one does not know ... justice

Textausschnitt: Ignorance and Presumption

22a Insisting on the catholicity of reason might seem out of tune with the ethos of the postmodern age, which has reacted for many good reasons against the presumptuousness of reason that characterizes certain dominant strands of the Enlightenment precisely by cultivating an apparently more self-aware "weak thinking" (pensiero debole: Vattimo). The emphasis on wholeness evokes the "totality" that Levinas associated with the oppressiveness of what we might call the "heterophobia" of closed systems, to which he opposed the "idea" of the infinite that can alone give a certain priority to the Other.1 One of the first and most decisive forms of this self-restriction of reason is no doubt Kant's determination to set limits to reason "in order to make room for faith."2 Such a determination seems eminently reasonable: the remedy for presumption is modesty, and modesty would seem to be best ensured by restricting reason's scope, which would cause it to respect what lies beyond it as genuinely "beyond." But our argument is that setting limits to reason in this way in fact makes modesty impossible, and that the only way to avoid a closed system is vigilantly to insist on "totality." The problem with Hegel, for example, who is typically presented as the very peak of Western rational presumption, is not that he claimed too much for reason, but too little: his system closed in on itself the moment he allowed reason to lose sight of the whole. We will elaborate this argument by reflecting, in a somewhat speculative way, on the nature of Socratic ignorance. (Fs)

22b The most obvious way to interpret Socrates' well-known refrain, "I know that I don't know," is as a confession of radical skepticism: the fact that there is no determinate object to the verb in the relative clause apparently implies universality; what Socrates claims not to know is literally without bounds, which is to say that Socrates is affirming that he knows in fact nothing, not one thing, at all. But of course the claim itself refutes this inference, since it claims at least one thing that Socrates does know, even if this one thing is only that the claim to knowledge extends no further. This reading would seem to be the most radical self-limitation of reason that is logically possible, insofar as it admits under reason's certain grasp only the most minimal content that is required to avoid self-contradiction. So our first question is: How minimal in fact is this content? (Fs)

23a To determine this, we must ask first, What is implied by saying specifically that one knows that one doesn't know, as opposed to saying, with some uncertainty, I think or suppose or believe that I don't know? The question immediately presents a paradox, which in fact turns out to be unavoidable. As Socrates makes clear in a different context,3 to be sure that one does not know, one actually needs to know a great deal: it is not enough to say indeterminately that one does not know, but one needs to have insight precisely into what one does not know. Let us take the classic example of justice. How would I determine whether or not I know what justice is? To begin, I would have to fish around in my soul, as it were, to locate whatever impressions or opinions I might have about justice. Already here, though, before I take this first step, I need to have some idea of what my opinion might be, an idea that guides my search. As Socrates points out in the Meno,4 the search, obviously, cannot be "random": there is a difference between the act of formulating my opinion about justice and simply uttering whatever words happen to be in my head at the moment, even if the resultant content turns out to be indistinguishable. But the next moment is the decisive one: in order to determine whether the opinion, once formulated, is true, I of course need to know what justice in truth is. By the same token, to see that my opinion falls short of the reality, I need to see through the opinion to the reality itself. And note, there is a difference between having some vague sense that one's notion falls short and being able to say, with complete certainty, indeed, with what Socrates calls "knowledge," that it falls short. If even the former case requires some grasp of the reality, the latter requires a sure insight into its truth. There might seem to be a tension, if not a contradiction, between Socratic ignorance and the Platonic idea of learning as recollection, which implies that the soul is already in possession of the truth, and one might be tempted to resolve this tension by separating the skeptic Socrates from the dogmatist Plato, but in fact these two ideas are simply two different ways of articulating the very same point. We said above that knowing that one doesn't know requires knowing a great deal. In fact, the universality of the claims requires that one know everything, that one have a solid insight into the whole. Socratic ignorance represents no minimalist epistemology; rather, it is a claim "than which nothing greater can be thought," as we will see in a moment. (Fs)

Autor: Schindler, David C., Jun

Buch: The Catholicity of Reason

Titel: The Catholicity of Reason

Stichwort: Nichtwissen - Anmaßung 2; Variation sokr. Nichtwissens (Ich denke [meine], dass ich nichts weiß) -> Absolutierung d. eigenen Ich; Isolation eines Teils vom Ganzen -> Absolutierung d. Teils

Kurzinhalt: ... which is to say that one keeps oneself away from the world and in one's own head — which is to say, further, that one absolutizes one's own ego over and against God, reality, others, whatever it may be, all of which is equally irrelevant to that ego.

Textausschnitt: 24a Before we turn to that issue, let us first ask whether, in light of the comprehensive content that turns out to lie, admittedly somewhat hidden, in Socrates' knowing that he does not know, the more typical claim of ignorance is more modest than the Socratic variety. In other words, is it less presumptuous simply to say I think that I don't know, but I could be wrong? Or perhaps to admit that I know some things, in a delimited area, but to make no claim one way or the other about anything that lies outside of that area? What connects these statements is the assumption that a suspension of judgment is a gesture of modesty, though that suspension has a different scope in the two cases. In the first, the scope is universal: one expresses a general reluctance to claim truth, "absolute knowledge," in any particular instance. But note: this stance implies that the question of whether or not one's ideas, in one case or another, are true in fact is, for all intents and purposes, irrelevant. The phrase "all intents and purposes" is particularly appropriate here because the stance willy-nilly absolutizes pragmatism. But there is an outrageous presumption in this: if pursuing the question of truth requires one to venture, as it were, beyond one's thinking to reality, dismissing this question means resolving not to venture beyond one's own thinking as one's own, which is to say that one keeps oneself away from the world and in one's own head — which is to say, further, that one absolutizes one's own ego over and against God, reality, others, whatever it may be, all of which is equally irrelevant to that ego. What reason does one have for dismissing the question of truth and suspending one's judgment? While it could turn out in a particular case or another that suspending judgment is prudent, there can in fact be no reason at all for a universal suspension of judgment, insofar as accepting a reason as true requires suspending this suspension. It follows that this suspension is strictly groundless; it is a wholly arbitrary a priori, which claims preemptively that no statement will ever have a claim on one's judgment without obliging oneself to listen to and consider any given statement. It may be that one opinion or another that one happens to hold is in fact true, but the suspension of judgment neutralizes its significance for me qua truth, again for no reason. I thus absolve myself of all responsibility: if I make no claim on truth, then truth never has a claim on me. (Fs) (notabene)

24b The second alternative above, namely, that I claim knowledge about things in a delimited area, but make no judgment one way or the other regarding anything outside the limits, is at least apparently less presumptuous than the first, ironically because it does indeed admit that some of its knowledge is true. The difficulty is in fact twofold. On the one hand, as we observed at the outset of this chapter, one can set limits in the proper place only if one is already beyond those limits, which means that to the extent that self-limitation is strictly a priori, and not the fruit of an encounter with what lies outside of oneself, the limitation is an act of presumption: one is acting as if one knows what one does not in fact know. On the other hand, and perhaps more profoundly, to allow oneself judgment on one side of a boundary and at the same time to suspend judgment on the other side is to claim — again, in an a priori way, which is to say without any sufficient reason — that what lies on the other side does not in any significant sense bear on my understanding of the matter or matters lying on this side. But of course to make this claim without investigation and justification is presumptuous. (Fs) (notabene)

25a It does not in the least do to insist, "But I am limiting my claims only to this particular aspect!" because this begs the very question being raised here. Plato describes the tendency of experts in a particular craft to presume expertise about the whole.1 If we penetrate below the surface, however, we see that this is not a (mere) moral critique about the way some people happen to act. Instead, there is a logical necessity here: to claim expertise about a part is already — and precisely insofar as it is a claim of expertise concerning the part — to presume regarding the meaning of the whole. The ignorant presumption can be very obvious, or it may be subtle. For example, one might isolate economics from politics as a closed system in itself, which is evidently misleading insofar as the "agents" of economic transactions are living members of communities whose choices inevitably reflect in a significant way the nature and structure of those communities. Perhaps less obviously, but with analogous implications, one might also separate politics from philosophical anthropology, anthropology from metaphysics, or metaphysics from theology. The problem will be there whenever one isolates a part from the whole in a way that excludes the relevance of the meaning of the whole to the meaning of the part, which is to say that one fails to approach the part as a part, i.e., as related to what is greater than it, and so one (presumptuously) makes it an absolute in itself. To avoid this presumption, one might first seek to attenuate one's insistence on knowledge within the delimited sphere in light of one's ignorance of the larger whole, which would seem to acknowledge at least in principle the significance of that whole. But in fact this is a retreat into what we showed above to be the greatest possible presumption, namely, the universal suspension of judgment. The only way to avoid the dilemma is in fact to achieve actual knowledge about the whole. (Fs)

Autor: Schindler, David C., Jun

Buch: The Catholicity of Reason

Titel: The Catholicity of Reason

Stichwort: Nichtwissen - Anmaßung 3; wissenschaftlicher Reduktionismus; Isolierung eines Teils vom Ganzen -> stets Aussage über d. Ganze (Beispiel: Dawkins, Bewusstsein - Gehirntätigkeit); Unterschied: Wissenschaft- Szientismus; falsche Bescheidenheit

Kurzinhalt: ... the only way finally to avoid scientific reductionism is to recover within science a more self-conscious sense that one is not studying only a part, but rather the whole, even if it is in a particular respect.

Textausschnitt: 26a To make this argument more concrete, let us consider the general status of scientific reasoning in the present age. Modern science was born precisely as a result of the kind of self-limitation of reason that we have been discussing. Galileo was revolutionary for criticizing what he took to be the presumption of classical philosophy to see into the "essences" of things. He thus proposed, instead, to "bracket out," as it were, the metaphysical question of "what" things are, and to attend only to the mathematically formulizable laws that govern their locomotion, laws that reveal themselves only to controlled experiment. The "conceit" of modern science, as generally understood, is this: we can learn a lot about the world, or at least about how the world works, if we abstract one feature of reality — i.e., quantifiable change — which we rationally master as far as we are able, and we leave the "big questions" concerning meaning, ethical implications, and so forth, to the philosophers and theologians. Now, the precise relationship between science, philosophy, and theology is of course a vast one, and we are not claiming to do it justice here (and, note, we are able thus to limit ourselves because we know it is a vast question!), but we wish only to observe the following: there has been a concern, from the very beginning of this sort of thinking, that this position, in spite of its explicit modesty, tends to encroach upon the "big questions" and in fact to impose certain answers to those questions. What we wish to propose, in the light of the discussion above, is that this encroachment is inevitable because it is "built into" the logic of epistemological modesty. (Fs)

26b Along the lines we have been arguing, to say that one is attending only to the quantifiable aspect of change and that one is setting aside the philosophical question about the essence of a thing, or in other words to isolate this particular part from the whole, entails three claims: first, that the larger question about the nature of a thing does not bear on its movements in a way that might require a grasp of that nature properly to detect;1 second, that this movement is not and indeed cannot be transformed in subtle but significant ways according to the context; and, third, that what is "bracketed out" is extrinsic to what one is studying, in abstraction, so that the whole at issue represents a mere addition of "all the rest" to the part that had been isolated. Note that one cannot isolate the part in this absolute way without making a judgment, willy-nilly, about the nature of the whole of which it is a part — and indeed to do so in spite of one's professed ignorance. The isolation and the presumptuous judgment are one and the same act. Let us take an example, which is admittedly extreme but thereby serves to make the point in big letters. Richard Dawkins "modestly" confesses ignorance regarding the nature of consciousness, and sets this question aside in order to restrict himself to what one could call the mechanics of brain activity.2 In doing so, he presumes from the outset, and so without reason or argumentation, that consciousness qua consciousness has nothing to do with what goes on in the brain. This strictly baseless assumption excludes from the outset the possibility consciousness might be an integral whole that includes the brain in its mechanical dimension even as it transcends it. Instead, because it requires conceiving consciousness as external to the mechanics of brain activity, Dawkins's starting assumption leaves only two alternatives: either consciousness is a product of the mechanics or it is a "ghost in the machine," i.e., some kind of "supernatural" entity one may or may not privately believe in, independently of one's scientific thinking.3 The methodological practice of setting aside the question of the nature of consciousness is willy-nilly a positive claim about the nature of consciousness; because it makes this claim without acknowledging it and accepting responsibility for it, the practice is inherently presumptuous, regardless of the moral character of the scientist or his explicit intentions in adopting the methodology. (Fs)

28a Of course, an adequate treatment of everything implied here would require a much lengthier discussion that would elaborate responses for the many evident objections one could make. But our intention in the present context is simply to recognize a recurring pattern. A common response to what we are describing is to make a distinction between science, the systematic study of empirical facts, and "scientism," which is the confusion of science with philosophy, the assumption that the part one studies under specific conditions gives an adequate understanding of the whole. In other words, science limits itself to the study of matter in motion; scientism says that matter in motion "is all there is." As long as scientists stick to the "how," it is said, and do not presume to answer the question "why," then science poses in principle no threat to philosophy or religion. But we wish to suggest, by contrast, that the only way finally to avoid scientific reductionism is to recover within science a more self-conscious sense that one is not studying only a part, but rather the whole, even if it is in a particular respect. In other words, the problem is not that certain scientists fail to adhere to the modesty that defines the scientific project; the problem lies in the modesty itself. Scientific reasoning will have humility only to the extent that it understands itself (once again) as a philosophy. In more technical language, we might say that reason is always inevitably "of being." Scientific reasoning, to be truly a mode of reasoning, would thus be of being, but in a particular respect: being qua that which changes in a quantifiable manner (or however one might need to specify in the particular context). If it "pretends" to be only the study of quantifiable motion qua quantifiable motion, it in fact identifies being with this particular respect, which is to say that it makes its object an unconditional absolute in itself, and so indifferent to anything outside of itself. The moment reason admits that it is philosophical, which means acknowledges it is a particular way of accounting for the whole, it then opens up from within to dialogue with the other accounts of the whole, because it is now responsible to that whole; it becomes "vulnerable" to the truth of the whole in a way that its self-proclaimed "modesty" precisely protected it from ever being. Ironically, the more one insists on modesty in science, the more "impenetrable" one makes it, i.e., the more one makes it an absolute in itself and so unable to be integrated into a larger whole. To set any absolute limit not only keeps reason from exceeding a boundary, it necessarily also keeps anything else from getting in. (Fs) (notabene)

Autor: Schindler, David C., Jun

Buch: The Catholicity of Reason

Titel: The Catholicity of Reason

Stichwort: Nichtwissen - Anmaßung 4; sokratisches Nichtwissen als Widerspruch?; Vernunft: univokes - ekstatisches Verständnis; Plato: Siebter Brief; Thomas v. Aquin: Begriff: wodurch wir Wissen haben; Wissen als Sein in d. Vernunft - Vernunft außerhalb ihrerselbst

Kurzinhalt: If ... knowledge represents the reality insofar as it exists in my intellect, then the distinction between knowledge and being ... implies simply that reason is ecstatic.

Textausschnitt: 29a But — to return to the general argument — if knowledge is necessary to be able to know that one does not know something, then doesn't the very requirement eliminate the possibility? In other words, would it not follow that to know that I don't know something is no longer to be in ignorance of it? Is Socratic ignorance simply a contradiction? One must respond that the contradiction would be inevitable if we took for granted a univocal sense of reason. But the analogical or ecstatic conception of reason that we have described as its catholic character allows the paradox to stand without contradiction. In this case, there is room within reason itself for the difference between possession and nonpossession. We might say, in fact, that the distance between the two expresses what Plato, more metaphorically, described as a "forgetting" in his notion of learning as recollection: the point in both cases is that an understanding of the matter at issue both is in the soul and is not in the soul in some sense at the very same time. Such a thing is possible, once again, only if reason is "structurally" out beyond itself. This interpretation allows us a different interpretation of the common failure in the Platonic dialogues to come to an adequate definition of an idea from the usual reading. Typically, the failure is taken to demonstrate the "skeptical" moment in Plato's (or more specifically Socrates')1 thought, by which is meant that Socrates recognizes that the goal of knowledge that he presents is in fact impossible. According to this perspective, what Plato is offering, in these early dialogues at least, is not a search for knowledge; instead, he is encouraging his audience to give thought to these things, that is, to exercise reason rather than to satisfy it. But of course a purely instrumental notion of reason, which this interpretation, taken radically, implies, is altogether foreign to Plato, and in any event as we have seen a deep sense of one's failure to know something requires ... knowledge of it. The alternative interpretation that arises from our consideration of the paradoxical character of Socratic ignorance is that one fails to formulate an adequate definition, not because the reality one seeks is ultimately inaccessible, but rather for the opposite reason, namely, that one is "too close" to it. In other words, reason, as always already out beyond itself, enjoys an immediate contact, an intimacy with reality, which eludes definition precisely because definition entails a kind of abstraction that indicates a departure from that intimacy. In the famous Seventh Letter, Plato describes the stages of reason's progress in relation to the being of things, a journey that culminates, significantly, not in knowledge, but beyond it in the being itself of things.2 This is perhaps not as different as it might seem from Aquinas's statement that the concept is not the object of knowledge, but that by which we know. If, to use Plato's terminology, knowledge represents the reality insofar as it exists in my intellect, then the distinction between knowledge and being, insofar as being is not in Plato's description a noumenon outside of reason but where reason ultimately comes to rest, implies simply that reason is ecstatic. If knowledge is being in reason, then the distinction means that reason ultimately lies outside of itself in being. The failure to reach a definition in the dialogues would in this case be the dramatic opening of one's mind to this distinction. The goal, more precisely, is not to eliminate the distinction but instead to pass from ignorance of the distinction — which expresses itself as presumption — to knowledge of the distinction. We can make progress toward knowledge only because in some sense we have always already been at the end; or, as Socrates puts it, all learning is recollection. (Fs)

Autor: Schindler, David C., Jun

Buch: The Catholicity of Reason

Titel: The Catholicity of Reason

Stichwort: Nichtwissen - Anmaßung 5; sokratisches Nichtwissen als umfassendstes Wissen - Hegel: Geist als vollkommener Selbstbezug, Vernunft kann nicht "mehr" sein; falsche "epistemologische" Bescheidenheit; Vernunft als katholische - "mehr" u. beim andern

Kurzinhalt: [Hegel] ... the object must come to reason's terms, but reason is incapable of coming to terms with the object...

Textausschnitt: 30a We are now in a position to see why knowing that one doesn't know is not a skeptical self-limitation of reason a priori, but is rather the most comprehensive — most catholic — conception of reason possible. It might seem at first that one would be claiming more for reason to say that it knows that it knows, to say, in other words, that reason is (or can be) in full possession of the truth. But in fact this collapses reason back into itself. As we mentioned at the beginning of this section, Hegel is no doubt the best example of this apparently extreme claim for reason — better, for example, even than Descartes with his project of a universal mathesis, insofar as Descartes assumed consciousness as a sort of sphere outside the world whereas Hegel affirmed Geist as a kind of self-transcendence inclusive of the world — and he illustrates the problem that arises when reason prematurely limits itself. For Hegel, "an out-and-out Other simply does not exist for spirit,"3 by which he means that, no matter how transcendent its object, reason can grasp that object ultimately without leaving itself. Spirit is perfect self-relation, which can be, as it were, "at home" (bei sich) no matter where it is. But in this conception of reason, Hegel rejects the possibility of reason being "more." In other words, he rejects a priori the possibility of reason being genuinely more than itself, being capable of leaving its home, so to speak, and entering the home of another. Hegel does not claim too much for reason, in this regard, but too little: he limits reason specifically to itself, which means that it can relate to its object as reason only to the extent that the object enters into it; the object must come to reason's terms, but reason is incapable of coming to terms with the object. In a word, Hegel's conception of reason is less than catholic, and it is precisely this failing of the whole, which he himself says is the truth of truth,4 that makes Hegelian reason "totalizing." (Fs) (notabene)

31a With this last point, we have reached our conclusion. A great deal of postmodern thought is driven by a kind of nostalgia for "epistemic humility," which in its best sense means a respect for the deep mystery of things. This nostalgia becomes urgent to the point of desperation as the sense for mystery grows weaker, to the point that the human spirit feels compelled in the end simply to fabricate its own mysteries, to play ever more hysterically with its own fictions.5 The phenomenon gives rise to the suspicion that there is a deep pathology at work here, that the response to the problem is itself a function of the problem, which thus causes it to worsen rather than improve: far from bringing any peace, it only generates a greater need, so that one is prompted to answer with an even more intensified version of the same, and so on. Can one in fact make the claim, without embarrassment, that reason's embrace of a radical modesty in the birth of modern science, for example, ushered in a reverence for the mystery of the natural world and respect for its integrity that the world had never before seen? Our argument has been that there is in fact nothing more presumptuous than reason's "modest" self-limitation. We will flesh out this argument in a variety of directions over the course of this book. What we are proposing here, and what is presupposed by all of the chapters to follow, is that reason is essentially catholic, and that it is only by recognizing this and being faithful to it that we will be able to recover the sense of mystery, the loss of which has been justly mourned in much postmodern thinking. We will recover humility only if we recover at the same time a robust sense of truth, and of the reason that grasps it. To say that reason is catholic is to say, not that it encompasses the whole in itself, but that it grasps the whole only in being called constantly beyond itself to what remains ever greater. Catholicity means that reason is responsible to the whole, and cannot absolve itself of this responsibility through protests of modesty. Only one who is open to the whole as such is vulnerable to the claims of truth. (Fs) (notabene)

Autor: Schindler, David C., Jun

Buch: The Catholicity of Reason

Titel: The Catholicity of Reason

Stichwort: Kausalität 5a; Ikonoklasmus (Claudel), mechanistisches Weltbild, Wahrheit; Imagination: Schnittpunkt zw. Seele und Körper

Kurzinhalt: [Imagination] ... is the place where faith in the incarnate God becomes itself incarnate and therefore truly becomes faith; it is — pace Hegel — where reason becomes concrete, and the bodily life of the senses rises to meet the spirit.

Textausschnitt: PART TWO
Causality

5 The Iconoclasm of the Intellect in Early Modernity

Feeding the Imagination

119a In an essay on the enduring significance of Dante, the poet Paul Claudel wrote of the age that had just passed: "The crisis that reached its peak in the nineteenth century ... was the drama of a starved imagination."1 It may strike us as odd to show such concern over what would seem to be nothing more than a faculty of aesthetic creativity in relation to an age in which man was being radically redefined in abstraction from any supernatural destiny or transcendent horizon of meaning, when an antihuman industrialization grew with the waning of an organic and cultural Christian faith, which left the West vulnerable to the two world wars. But what is at stake in the imagination is in truth far more than a mere aesthetic faculty, conventionally understood. The imagination is, if not the center of the human being, then nevertheless that without which there can be no center, for it marks the point of convergence at which the soul and body meet; it is the place where faith in the incarnate God becomes itself incarnate and therefore truly becomes faith; it is — pace Hegel — where reason becomes concrete, and the bodily life of the senses rises to meet the spirit. It lies more deeply than the sphere of our discrete thoughts and choices because it is the ordered space within which we in fact think and choose. Far more than a mere faculty, the Christian imagination is a way of life, and this is because we might say it represents the point of intersection between Christianity and the world. In this case, a starved imagination represents a crisis indeed. (Fs; tblStw: Imagination?) (notabene)

120a Now, it is no doubt the case that the almost maniacal multiplication of images in the technological explosion of the twentieth century has done nothing to nourish the imagination, but instead has fed it with unwholesome food. But it is not enough simply to issue a call for the reinvigoration of the imagination or for the Christianization of the media. We need instead to address the problem at its roots. We propose that one of the sources of the starved imagination lies in the general impoverishment of the notion of truth, through which all our human experience is mediated and thus formed. In the present context, it is of course not possible to lay out a satisfactory argument regarding the history of the notion of truth, so we will instead offer in this chapter a philosophical reflection on one aspect of the issue, though it may initially seem tangential to the question of the health of the imagination. We intend to reflect on the transformation of the notion of causality in the seventeenth century and what this transformation implies for the significance of sense experience, which represents of course the foundation of the imagination. Our thesis is that a mechanistic conception of the natural world evacuates sense experience of meaning, and therefore that the effort to cultivate the Christian imagination will be vain unless it is accompanied by a recovery of the ontological significance of goodness and beauty and thus by a critique of the popular view of the world inherited from classical physics. This is a task we might call a "reimagining of the natural world." (Fs)

Autor: Schindler, David C., Jun

Buch: The Catholicity of Reason

Titel: The Catholicity of Reason

Stichwort: Kausalität 5b; Körper als Abbild; Platon, Plotinus, Kirchenväter: Körperfeindlichkeit?; Descartes; Worterklärung: Ursache (aitia); Plato, Timaios: Unterschied: was ist, was wird (schön, nicht schön); Ursache als Kommunikation von Form; eikon, Bild

Kurzinhalt: ... to say that the causal agent always makes according to a model means that agency is the communication of form...

Textausschnitt: Body as Image

120b Every fall and spring, in Introduction to Philosophy classes all over the world, René Descartes is presented to young, impressionable imaginations as a more systematically rigorous proponent of "Rationalism," the philosophy that Plato supposedly brought into being. According to Rationalism, sense experience lacks the qualities required to furnish a reliable object for the mind: it is neither necessary nor universal, as rational objects must be. The inference generally drawn is that the senses are deceptive, and thus present at best indifferent stepping stones to reach the true life of reason, and at worst obstacles that actively seduce the mind away from such a life. If the Intro class includes a bit of intellectual history, one learns that the contempt for the body implied in Platonic Rationalism and taken over by Plotinus and his followers made Neoplatonism the philosophy most suited to the early Christian thinkers, who (as Nietzsche sneered)1 added to Plato's primarily epistemological motivation a more directly moral reason to reject the sense world. (Fs)

121a There are indeed texts in abundance from Plato, Plotinus, and the Church Fathers that would seem to confirm this interpretation beyond any doubt, texts that cause contemporary Christian thinkers a good deal of embarrassment. A closer inspection of these texts, however, and a consideration of them in the light of the general view of the world they express, would reveal that the antipathy toward the senses in the ancient world is radically different from that in the modern "world, and that only the former is compatible with a loving embrace of the sense world as marvelously filled "with meaning. A genuine contempt for the senses requires their being emptied of any significance at all, and this, as we will see, follows from the changes in our understanding of nature that occur during "what is known as the Scientific Revolution, of "which Descartes was both a participant and an immediate heir. To see this, we will compare Plato's and Galileo's response to the question, What is the cause of our sense experience? The first aspect of this question that we must attend to here is the notion on which it turns: What, first of all, does it mean to be a cause? (Fs)

121b The Greek word for cause (aitia or aition) is a broad one, i.e., it does not initially have a univocal technical meaning. The Greek word for cause comes from aitios, meaning "blameworthy," "responsible," "to blame," and which in turn is derived from the verb aitiaomai, "to blame," or "to accuse." The verb is the middle voice form of the verbs aiteO and aitizO, meaning "to ask," "to request or petition," or "to call for." The root sense that appears to unite all these verbs is a turning toward one who is responsible or capable of providing. It indicates a kind of dependence. Used in a philosophical context, the term indicates anything that accounts for a thing's being the way it is, that which is responsible for the how and why of a thing.2 In his late dialogue, the Timaeus, Plato begins his account of cause in the cosmos by making two fundamental distinctions. He first distinguishes between that which is and never becomes (being, to on ) and that which becomes and never is (becoming, to gignomenon) (27d-28a). "Everything which becomes," he goes on to say, "must of necessity become owing to some cause; for without a cause it is impossible for anything to attain becoming" (28a). Among those things that come to be by virtue of a cause, Plato next distinguishes between those that are beautiful and those that are not. The former are modeled after that which is, the latter after that which has come to be. If we ask, then, where among these distinctions we would place the cosmos as a whole in which we live, i.e., the world that is manifest to the senses, we would have to say that, "as visible and tangible and having body" (28b), it has come to be, and, as evidently beautiful and well ordered, it has been modeled after what is eternal and perfect. To suggest otherwise, says Plato, is "impious": "It is clear to everyone that [the maker's] gaze was on the eternal; for the cosmos is the fairest of all that has come into existence, and he the best of all the causes" (29a). (Fs)

122a As straightforward as this passage may seem, it is filled with meaning that it would be good to unfold. As we see here, Plato affirms that causality always occurs according to a model, which is another way of saying that what comes to be is not simply a self-contained entity, but a revelation or manifestation of something else: to say that the causal agent always makes according to a model means that agency is the communication of form. Causation is not, in other words, simply the bringing about of a thing or the setting of something in motion, i.e., an essentially formless event or activity, which may or may not subsequently give rise to something with form and therefore something intelligible. If the cause is what accounts for a thing, it is form for Plato that is most fundamentally cause, most fundamentally responsible for the way things are. This simple insight is magnificent: it leads to a particular way of characterizing absolutely everything that exists: "Since these things are so," Plato writes, "it follows by unquestionable necessity that this world is an image of something" (29b). To say that agency is the communication of form means that all of the things that come to be have the character of image — the Greek word is eikOn, whence the English "icon" — or, in other words, that they reflect a meaning of which they are not themselves the source. It is crucial to see that there is no dualism here, as it were, between being and significance, as if things had a sort of opaque reality that subsequently indicated an intelligible content. To posit such a bifurcation would be to deny the meaning of cause as Plato clearly intends it, namely, as the communication of form in the bringing about of a thing. We could say that, for Plato, ontology is semiotics. Being an image is what makes a thing real.3 (Fs)

Autor: Schindler, David C., Jun

Buch: The Catholicity of Reason

Titel: The Catholicity of Reason

Stichwort: Kausalität 5d; Plato, Timaios: paradeigmata - Demiurg; das Gute als höchste Ursache, als selbst-verschwendend; Aristoteles (3 Ursachen) - Platon (3 in 1); tatsächliche Ursache - synaitia; Schönheit als U. (parousia, koinOnia); eikon - Bild, Abbild

Kurzinhalt: ... the sensible beauty we perceive in things is the intelligible form of beauty manifest in space and time; in other words, it is to say that sense experience is the expression of a meaning, that it has intelligible content, which, as intelligible ...

Textausschnitt: 123a But if form accounts for the way things are, it does not yet account for the fact that there is a sensible world in the first place. It is significant that Plato distinguishes in the Timaeus between what he calls the models (paradeigmata), and the agency that "reproduces" them, as it were, in nature — the famous "demiurge," or craftsman. To ask after the ultimate cause of the world is to ask why the agency makes it at all. Plato's response to what Heidegger refers to as the most radical question for metaphysics, Why is there something rather than nothing? is again both simple and endlessly rich: "Let us state the reason why. He [the maker and father of the universe] was good, and one who is good can never become jealous of anything. And so, being free from jealousy, he wanted everything to become as much like himself as was possible" (29e). Plato's statement here accords with his well-known claim in the Republic that the Idea of the Good is the ultimate cause of all being.4 We have in this the first expression of what would become a basic axiom in Neoplatonism, and was embraced by the Fathers and the medieval theologians: it is the very nature of goodness to be self-diffusive.5 Indeed, it is just this character that requires us to see goodness as the ultimate cause: according to the ancient axiom, what is perfect cannot come from what is imperfect, but only the reverse, which means that the ultimate cause of everything cannot be imperfect in any respect. But what is perfection itself cannot act so as to become more perfect, which implies that its causation must be a consequence of the perfection it always already is rather than a means to accomplish that perfection. (Fs) (notabene)

123b Moreover, for the very same reason, what is brought about by goodness must necessarily reflect its cause, since perfect causality cannot be anything but the communication of its own perfection, i.e., its self, to another.6 In this respect the form that is communicated by agency is necessarily a reflection of goodness. And, finally, insofar as this form most basically determines what a thing is, and is itself an imitation of the first cause, the gift of the being of each thing is at the very same time the gift of the ultimate purpose of each: namely, to be what it is by imitating in its particular way the ultimate source of all that is, i.e., by pursuing goodness. In a word, what would eventually be differentiated by Aristotle into three causes, as we will see in the following chapter, appears first in Plato in its unity: the what of things is inseparable from their goodness, their purpose, and indeed their "thereness." For this very reason, goodness represents the paradigm of causality — the goodness at the origin of the cosmos, as we saw, is the "best of all the causes" — and thus all causes in the cosmos are, as causes, a reflection of goodness. Nothing is so causal, for Plato, as goodness and the beauty he takes to be essentially identical with it.7 (Fs)

124a What, then, does this view of causality imply for the status of sense experience? In the Phaedo, Socrates recounts his puzzlement at his encounter with the early philosophers who attempted to account for the way things are through what we would call "mechanistic causes," namely, through the pushing and pulling of material bodies acting upon one another extrinsically. Although he does not deny the reality of such activity, he explains that the name "cause" "does not belong to it."8 In the Timaeus, he refers to what we would call mechanistic causes assynaitia, that is, that which accompanies (syn) the cause, though he adds that the majority of people confuse them with the causes themselves. In the context of the Phaedo, Socrates insists that there is a distinction between that which is a cause in reality (tO onti), and that without which the real cause could not be a cause. The mechanical interaction of bodies is, of course, necessary for things to be the way they are, but it does not account for them, it is not what explains them or reveals what they are.9 What is lacking in the mechanistic explanation (or better: what prevents this account from being an explanation), as Socrates goes on to say, is the goodness that "holds [things] together,"10 because goodness is in fact the causality of all cause. As Dionysius would affirm, many centuries later, every sort of cause whatsoever exists for the sake of, by means of, and in the beautiful and the good.11 We will elaborate Dionysius's notion of cause in chapter seven. (Fs) (notabene)

125a It is at this point that Socrates offers his counterproposal for the operation of cause: what makes things beautiful, for example, is not some physical thing such as color, shape, the arrangement of parts — though of course these may be necessary conditions of beauty — but it is beauty itself that causes it. It is, more specifically, the presence (parousia) or communion (koinOnia) of beauty "itself" in things (100d) that makes them beautiful. The sensible reality of beauty, in other words, is caused by the intelligible form of beauty. Now, it is difficult for us to hear this claim without imagining a "thing" called beauty, which acts on another thing, i.e., exerts a force on it, so as to bring about beauty in it. But this is precisely the sort of activity that, as Socrates has just affirmed, fails to warrant the name "cause," because it in fact fails to account for things. How, then, are we to understand the kind of causality Socrates is offering in its place? (Fs)

125b To say that the presence of beauty is the cause of beautiful things qua beautiful is simply to say that the sensible beauty we perceive in things is the intelligible form of beauty manifest in space and time; in other words, it is to say that sense experience is the expression of a meaning, that it has intelligible content, which, as intelligible, cannot simply be identified with the particularity of its manifestation. If we recall the point made in the Timaeus, namely, that whatever comes to be is the result of the communication of form, we see that what Socrates says about beauty here ought to be extended to all things in the cosmos: physical objects, insofar as they are intelligible, are the expression of meaning, intelligible content, in a spatial and temporal mode. We can go further: there is, in fact, no content whatsoever in our sense experience that is not an expression of intelligible meaning. The word that this observation demands is the word we saw Plato use at the outset, a word that will forever be associated with Plato's philosophy: eikOn, image. The sensible world is image, through and through, which is to say the sensible world is an expression of meaning, i.e., a reflection of goodness. In the divided-line image of Plato's Republic,12 we see this point made with all desired clarity: here, Plato divides a line into unequal segments, the upper two representing different modes of intelligibility, the lower two representing different modes of sensible perception, but it is a continuous line from top to bottom, which is to say that the idea and the sensible reality are not two different things, but a single meaning grasped either intellectually or grasped with the bodily senses.13 The upshot of all this is that there is nothing in what we would call the "physical" world that is not derived from form except its not being itself form, and this is simply a way of saying that the physical world is nothing but meaning made tangible. (Fs)

Autor: Schindler, David C., Jun

Buch: The Catholicity of Reason

Titel: The Catholicity of Reason

Stichwort: Kausalität 5c; Plato, Phaidon (Phaedo): Körperfeindlichkeit?; Seele -> Ding (Gefangenschaft), wenn das Sinnliche nicht mehr Ausdruck d. Geistes ist; Augustinus (Schönheit - Befreiung v. Manichäismus); Dionysius

Kurzinhalt: Phaedo ... he does not say that the body imprisons the soul, but rather that the soul imprisons herself in the body ... The decisive question is whether the body and the soul ... are taken to be opaque things juxtaposed to one another, or whether ...

Textausschnitt: 126a What, then, accounts for Plato's notorious depiction of philosophy as a liberator from the deceitful senses that imprison the soul in a body? (Fs)

The lovers of learning know that when philosophy gets hold of their soul, it is imprisoned in and clinging to the body, and that it is forced to examine other things through it as through a cage and not by itself, and that it wallows in every kind of ignorance. Philosophy sees that the worst feature of this imprisonment is that it is due to desires, so that the prisoner himself is contributing to his own incarceration most of all. As I say, the lovers of learning know that philosophy gets hold of their soul when it is in that state, then gently encourages it and tries to free it by showing them that investigation through the eyes is full of deceit, as is that through the ears and the other senses. Philosophy then persuades the soul to withdraw from the senses insofar as it is not compelled to use them and bids the soul to gather itself together by itself, to trust only itself and whatever reality, existing by itself, the soul by itself understands, and not to consider as true whatever it examines by other means, for this is different in different circumstances and is sensible and visible, whereas what the soul itself sees is intelligible and invisible. The soul of the true philosopher thinks that this deliverance must not be opposed and so keeps away from pleasures and desires and pains as far as he can ... because every pleasure and every pain provides, as it were, another nail to rivet the soul to the body and to weld them together. It makes the soul corporeal, so that it believes that truth is what the body says it is. (Phaedo 82d-83d)1

127a For all the talk of the beautiful cosmos, is not Plato nevertheless a dualist in the end who relegates the material world to a ghostly unreality? Doesn't he make the imagination, eikasia, a trivial power of the soul that needs to be transcended to the purity of reason alone?2 The interpretation we have just laid out, which brings out the significance of sense experience and the supreme beauty of the physical world, is not only able to be harmonized with the passages expressing a kind of hostility toward the senses, but in fact explains them. (Fs)

127b The passage from the Phaedo, which is one of the clearest "anti-body" texts in the Platonic corpus, makes two points that are especially significant given our discussion thus far: first, he does not say that the body imprisons the soul, but rather that the soul imprisons herself in the body,3 which is what constitutes the worst feature of this predicament. Second, what characterizes this imprisonment is the inversion by which the corporeal aspect of experience is taken to be more real than the noncorporeal dimension. To put this point in the language we have been using, it amounts to saying that the expression is given priority over what is expressed. But this inversion would in fact by that very stroke eliminate the body's and thus the senses' expressive character. In other words, to take the natural world in its materiality as a positive thing in itself separate from its subordination to meaning and thus its expressiveness is to destroy it as image, to render it mute. It thus becomes dead "stuff." The world surrenders its meaning, and the soul becomes entangled in the push and pull of pleasure and pain as so many mechanistic and therefore unintelligible, noncausal, forces. Indeed, if the body is no longer "expression," then the soul is no longer that which expresses itself. It thus becomes itself a "thing," alongside the thing called "body," and of course it will necessarily be an impotent sort of thing, for what kind of corporeal force can the soul exert in comparison to bodies? It is because of this unintelligibility that Plato describes this inversion as a state of ignorance — to fail to see the world as significant already in its being is to be ignorant in the perfect sense — and it also makes clear why this is not something the body can qua body impose on the soul: to think that it can is already to assume that the body is a thing in itself over against the soul, which is to say, it is to take the state of ignorance to be the best vantage from which to see the truth of things. To a soul that sees because it knows, by contrast, the world is nothing but epiphany. (Fs) (notabene)

128a The irony now ought to be clear: owing to the paradoxical nature of image, the inversion of the body-soul relationship is deeply problematic, not (only) because it trivializes the soul, but because it subsequently trivializes the body. In other words, the absolutizing of the physical fails to accord the physical its due goodness — i.e., it empties it of the goodness it can possess only as receiving, and thus only in its subordinate station as mediator, as image. But this means that the sometimes vehement condemnations of the body's tendency to claim ascendency over the soul that we find in classical literature, both pagan and Christian, may indeed be a zealous affirmation and protection of the body's significance. The decisive question is whether the body and the soul, and thus the senses and the intellect, are taken to be opaque things juxtaposed to one another, or whether body is presented as image, and thus as an expression of spirit. One cannot insist on the body's significance without at the same time insisting on a hierarchical relationship to spirit. As we have seen, behind this question lies the even more fundamental question of whether causality is understood first and foremost in terms of goodness and beauty. As Hans Urs von Balthasar has taught us, one of the most important considerations when evaluating an intellectual epoch is the status it grants to beauty. Here we find a way in which Christianity deepens, and gives an ultimate foundation for, one of the highest truths in pagan thought. The beauty that Augustine loved late was a beauty that ran through the cosmos, a beauty that called him in sensible things to God.4 We recall that it was precisely Augustine's encounter with Neoplatonic thought — most likely Plotinus and Porphyry in Victorinus's translation — that liberated him from the flesh-condemning Manichees.5 It is not at all accidental that the liberation consisted in the discovery that spirit must be understood in nonmaterial terms, and thus not as a thing opposed to the thing called body. Only thus can the body, and therefore the material world, be expressive in the way Augustine celebrates in the Confessions. Plotinus himself, who may be notorious for passages that seem to demean the body, wrote what is one of the most passionate attacks on Gnosticism in the ancient world.6 Anyone who hates the body, he writes, blasphemes because he shows contempt for its Creator.7 It is, indeed, goodness and beauty that lie directly in the center of what we may for that very reason call Plotinus's "cosmos." But the Christian thinker who adopts and adapts this view most decisively is no doubt Dionysius the Areopagite, for whom God is cause, i.e., creator, precisely as goodness and beauty,8 and thus whose relentless via negativa takes place from beginning to end within a world whose very stones proclaim the Lord precisely in their stoneness.9 Along with Augustine, Dionysius was passed on to the great thinkers of the Middle Ages as the authority on such matters, and these thinkers can therefore be said to be arguably the most decisive formers of the Christian imagination.10 Dionysius will thus be a primary focus for us in chapter seven. (Fs) (notabene)

Autor: Schindler, David C., Jun

Buch: The Catholicity of Reason

Titel: The Catholicity of Reason

Stichwort: Kausalität 5e; K. als Kraft; Platon: parousia; Descartes: "Reformation" d. Philosophie (Dualismus, Zerstörung d. Imagination); Galileo: "Reformation" d. Physik (Definition: K.); zeitlich Abfolge zw. Ursache und Wirkung; Platon: K. als Kommunikation ...

Kurzinhalt: Galileo ... the only thing joining cause and effect, as we saw, is succession in time and space. Physical motion ... (mechanistically understood) by its nature is not something that can be shared; it is atomistic of its essence.... extrinsic ...

Textausschnitt: Cause as Force

129a The light of our discussion so far will set into relief the differences between Cartesian rationalism and the so-called rationalism or spiritualism of the Greek and Christian Neoplatonists. In the first place, Descartes explicitly distinguishes between body and spirit as between two things: the res cogitans and the res extensa,1 In this, he is much closer to the Manichees, or in any event to the materialist philosophers of late antiquity, than to the Platonic or the Augustinian tradition.2 One might object that Descartes is using the term "res" here in a wholly equivocal sense, since the mind is clearly for him in no way a "thing" like matter extended in space, which is precisely why it becomes so difficult for him to explain how they would interact in a living human being. Though it would not be difficult to show how this objection is mistaken, it is in any event beside the point. The crucial thing is this: the body for Descartes is no longer image, which is to say that it is no longe expressive of a meaning which, as meaning, cannot be body in any sense. (Fs)

130a Descartes' relationship to the world of the senses is therefore quite radically different from what we saw in Plato. For Plato, truth is present (parousia) in sense experience, if not qua sense experience, so that transcending the senses means seeing them as images, i.e., "windows" of meaning. Body is meaning-ful, we recall, precisely by not being meaning itself, or, rather, substituting for it. For Descartes, by contrast, everything qualitative (i.e., expressive of meaning) in sense experience must simply be set aside as subjective, for reasons we will investigate in just a moment. What is left is nondescript "stuff," bereft of any nature and reduced to its measurable dimensionality, perceivable by the mind alone.3 It is noteworthy, in relation to our general theme, that this stripping of sensible objects precisely of their sensibilia coincides with the elimination of the imagination as an essential part of the soul.4 We suggested at the outset that the imagination operates as a sort of middle term connecting the body and the soul and for that very reason connecting man and the world. Lacking an imagination, Descartes reduces the real to a pure mathematical abstraction, which neither he nor anyone else will ever encounter. Arguably, Descartes finally resolves the haunting problem of knowing whether the world exists in the Meditations simply by eliminating the world. (Fs) (notabene)

130b Now, these observations regarding Descartes echo criticisms that have been made of his philosophy for centuries. But we wish to suggest that this destruction of the imagination in Descartes is not the introduction of the problem, but rather itself an expression of a deeper transformation that was to have a far more pervasive impact on Western civilization than even Cartesian dualism, and that is the Scientific Revolution. Descartes' "reformation" of philosophy, through the introduction of a method that would allow indifferently anyone to make progress in the understanding that was previously reserved for the few,5 is itself a repetition of Galileo's reformation of physics through the introduction of a technique that allows experiment to take the place of insight:

Profound considerations of this sort belong to a higher science than ours. We must be satisfied to belong to that class of less worthy workmen who procure from the quarry the marble out of which, later, the gifted sculptor produces those masterpieces which lay hidden in this rough and shapeless exterior.6

131a Our thesis has been that an appreciation of the meaningfulness of the senses rests on the primacy of goodness and beauty in the order of causality and therefore of understanding. It is no doubt true that the roots of this loss of primacy lie quite deep — one might point to goodness's loss of explanatory power in the new political philosophy of Machiavelli,7 to the ascendancy of power over goodness in the nominalist theology of divine attributes, or even to the medieval appropriation of an Aristotelianism that separated goodness and truth because it had little place for beauty8 — but, however that may be, Galileo's work gives the reformation of causality decisive and culture-changing expression. (Fs)

131b The heart of the matter lies in Galileo's reinterpretation of causality in strictly dynamic terms. According to Galileo, "that and no other is in the proper sense to be called cause, at whose presence the effect always follows, and at whose removal the effect disappears."9 The difference between cause as defined here and in the classical view is striking. Cause for Galileo is not what accounts for an effect, but what produces an effect, and indeed does so wholly through direct, material contact. Moreover, the only relationship that holds in an essential way between cause and effect is temporal succession. It would require another generation or so before it was discovered, by David Hume, that such a relationship is not in fact intelligible in the strict sense, as we shall see in the next chapter. But Galileo already himself recognizes that this view of causality — which to be sure unlocks the door to a new character of the material world, namely, one that, in its predictability, allows a kind of mastery never before possible — comes at the price of renouncing insight into the essence of things. As he says, for example, while we might inquire into the "essence" of the thing, it is

not as if we really understood any more, what principle or virtue that is, which moveth a stone downwards, than we know who moveth it upwards, when it is separated from the projicient, or who moveth the moon round, except only the name, which more particularly and properly we have assigned to all motion of descent, namely gravity.10 (Fs) (notabene)

132a An "effect" is not an image; it does not reveal the nature of its cause. To produce the effect, the cause must be of the same order as the effect, and thus has to be equally material. Cause and effect fall on the same horizontal line, which means, as we saw, that there can be no manifestation of meaning: revelation necessarily implies a hierarchy, insofar as what reveals must be in some fundamental sense subordinate to what it reveals. Investigating effects, therefore, does not teach us anything about the causes, no matter how precise and thorough our knowledge of the effects may be. Thus, as Galileo explains, the word "gravity" is a mere name. We do not know what it is. We are left, instead, with the task of calculating the quantity of the motion it produces through controlled observation of its effects. (Fs) (notabene)

132b For Plato, goodness is the paradigm of causality because it represents self-communication, and, since all other causality reflects to some degree this ultimate causality, what principally characterizes cause, as we saw, is the communication of form. For Galileo, by contrast, we might want to say that force is communicated from cause to effect, as revealed in the motion produced in the effect. But in the strictest terms, we would have to deny that anything is communicated. Communication implies that something is shared, that there is something that therefore unifies the communicants. According to the mechanistic view of causality we find in Galileo, however, nothing is "shared": the only thing joining cause and effect, as we saw, is succession in time and space. Physical motion (mechanistically understood) by its nature is not something that can be shared; it is atomistic of its essence. One thing can set another in motion, but the connection between them is extrinsic; it is the nature of force to operate from the outside — as opposed to, say, attraction, which operates simultaneously externally and internally. (Fs) (notabene)

Autor: Schindler, David C., Jun

Buch: The Catholicity of Reason

Titel: The Catholicity of Reason

Stichwort: Kausalität 5f; Galileo: Ursache - Wirkung (alle Qualitäten nur Illusion); neue Form von Leibfeindlichkeit; Claudel: Tod d. Imagination;

Kurzinhalt: Sense experience is an effect produced in us by some external cause. But effects are not images that disclose the truth of their cause...

Textausschnitt: 133a We do not have room to pursue the theme here, but we note how the quantification of the study of motion results naturally from this transformation of the notion of cause. In this respect, Heidegger is profoundly right: the advent of empirical science is a result of a more fundamental shift in understanding; praxis is always and without exception rooted in and expressive of theory.11 Whereas, for Aristotle, motion is the actualization of a potential, and in this respect represents the unfolding of a nature, so that we have to describe it in the first instance as relative to that nature and thus in qualitative terms — e.g., Aristotle demonstrates why circular motion is the most perfect and thus expected of the highest things — motion can have no intrinsic significance for Galileo: it is the homogenous monotony best described by number, successive units of the same.12 (Fs) (notabene)

133b It is at this point that we can assess the implications of the reformation of causality for the significance of sense experience. In the popular scientific imagination, Galileo stands with Francis Bacon as the one who rescued science from the groundless and sterile fancies of late scholastic Aristotelianism by bringing it "down to earth," and chastening it to remain more modestly within the bounds of the empirical. Though this judgment is in a certain respect true, the respect in which it is true rests on the radical reversal of the meaning of terms, so that the empirical loses any meaningful connection with sense experience. It is not simply that Galileo's insistence on the empirical did not prevent him from wild and presumptuous speculation about things he could never in fact determine through sense experience13 — a fact that suggests that what "empirical" means in the first and most fundamental sense is a cast of mind, a philosophical disposition, before it designates a real practice — but in point of fact this empirical method requires one to do violence to sense experience in a systematic fashion. In his book, The Two Great Systems, Galileo expresses a boundless admiration for reason's capacity, "in Aristarchus and Copernicus, to commit such a rape on their senses, as in despite thereof to make herself mistress of their credulity."14 Notice: the very image is wholly unnatural. But it offers a revealing point of contrast with what we saw earlier. The violation of the senses that this passage commends is foreign to the Platonic tradition, which would never imagine reason and the senses as two "things" set over against one another: for Plato, if anything, reason must keep vigil over itself, because the deception of the senses always turns out in the end to be reason's self-deception. But in Galileo, reason and sense experience are necessarily opposed in their nature even if they are brought into accord in practice. (Fs)

134a The reason for this opposition follows straightforwardly from the transformation of the understanding of cause. Sense experience is an effect produced in us by some external cause. But effects are not images that disclose the truth of their cause. Rather, they are individual motions that bear no relation to their causes apart from the fact of having been initiated by them. Thus, after discussing the way the sensation of tickling comes about in us through the touch of a feather, Galileo concludes:

Now this tickling is all in us, and not in the feather, and if the animate and sensitive body be removed, it is nothing more than a mere name. Of precisely a similar and not greater existence do I believe these various qualities to be possessed, which are attributed to natural bodies, such as tastes, odours, colours, and others.15

134b Galileo's inference applies to all of what are now called the secondary qualities of sense experience: it is all a subjective illusion, because it communicates nothing intelligible regarding the real. There is nothing in our experience of heat, for example, that reveals the nature of the objective reality of heat. What is real are bodies in motion, which lie as it were behind, but not in, our sense experience. The world of perceived qualities that fills our conscious life, and indeed our imagination, has nothing meaningful to say to us. It has to be mute, because — to speak somewhat anachronistically but no less accurately — it is in itself nothing but the separate motions of particles, the interplay of forces, in the material substance of the brain. Our only relationship to the world, in this case, is contiguity in time and space. There is clearly only a small step — if there is any step at all — between Galileo's mechanism and Descartes' mind-body dualism, which turns out to be an invincible monism of rationalistic intelligence. (Fs)

135a We observed, earlier, the irony that the passionate language used in the ancient texts to "condemn" the flesh may represent in fact nothing less than a safeguard for its significance. The converse irony can be observed here: we often hear that modernity, with its "this-worldly" religion, is the first epoch in the history of the West to come to terms with the body and make peace with the flesh. But our discussion here suggests that what looks superficially like peace and a respect for the world of the senses arises in fact from a contempt that runs so deep it has grown cold to the point of indifference. The life of the senses can be enjoyed in detachment, or, conversely, the senses can be dispassionately exploited — "raped" — ultimately because sense experience does not mean anything in itself. In this case, imagination becomes simply trivial, and so too does the natural world the imagination mediates. The imagination is where the world can have a sort of spiritual home in us, and for that same reason is what allows us to have a home in the world. The destruction of the imagination — let us call it the iconoclasm of the intellect16 — will thus necessarily coincide with an alienation and its attendant anxiety, which drives man to the apparently more certain but literally hope-less scheme of self-redemption through productivity.17 A more detailed investigation would be necessary to develop and justify the observation, but it is worth reflecting on the fact that the reformation of science in Galileo and the reformation of philosophy in Descartes — not to mention the reformation of political philosophy previously in Machiavelli or the subsequent reformation of logic and education in Peter Ramus,18 and arguably even the ecclesial reformation in Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli — all seem to share different versions of the same characteristics: they deny the substantial causal significance of goodness and beauty, i.e., the metaphysical reality of the transcendentals; they excise the whole of the mediating tradition which they subsequently affirm piecemeal on the basis of a new criterion applied immediately by the individual; they develop a technique or method that is meant to produce practical results rather than engender insight and understanding ... and they all eliminate the significance of the imagination. (Fs) (notabene)

136a In sum, the root of what Claudel called the crisis of the late modern world, namely, the starvation of the imagination, is the eclipse of goodness and beauty from the order of cause. If this is true, it follows that the recovery of Christian art, Christian literature, and indeed Christian culture more generally is not sufficient on its own to address this crisis. Or perhaps more adequately the recovery of a genuine Christian culture — the world and Christian imagination — requires a recovery of beauty in its theological, metaphysical, and ultimately even its physical significance. Anything less will no doubt unwittingly trivialize precisely what it seeks to restore. It is not just the Word, but the Word made flesh, who was sent by the Father to dwell among us, the Word made flesh who enjoined us to carry the Good News to the ends of the earth — i.e., to the very extremities of being. It is Christ who said, "Behold, I make all things new," and who thus revealed himself to be, as the scholastics put it, the "perfect image," of the Father, or as we might say, the Truth of the Father's Imagination. (Fs)

Autor: Schindler, David C., Jun

Buch: The Catholicity of Reason

Titel: The Catholicity of Reason

Stichwort: Kausalität 6a; historische Intelligibilität; Temporalisierung des Seins

Kurzinhalt: In other words, acknowledging the genuine reality of history forces a choice between the collapse of intelligibility, on the one hand, or a metaphysics of creation on the other.

Textausschnitt: 6 Historical Intelligibility: On Creation and Causality

136b When David Hume denied the objective basis for the concept of causality in the eighteenth century, a denial that sent forth philosophical waves forceful enough to wake the sleeping giant, Immanuel Kant, it appeared that he was upsetting a tradition as old as philosophy itself. Even more explicitly than his teacher Plato,1 Aristotle affirmed in the fourth century BC that the determination of causes constituted the essence of knowledge, and then proceeded to develop a theory of causality that attempted to account for the variety of ways the mind seeks to explain the real.2 For his part, Hume accepted the essential connection between causality and knowledge, but pointed out that this connection rests in turn on what he claimed to be an as-yet-unexamined assumption, namely, that it is possible to experience causality in such a way that it would provide an empirical foundation for our claim to know. When we expose these roots to the direct light of scrutiny, Hume claimed, they wither. For Hume, this means that what we call knowledge cannot ultimately be distinguished from belief, and so an honest philosopher is in the end forced to become a skeptic. Curiously, Hume's own honesty did not reduce him to forfeiting all speech and simply wagging his finger, like Cratylus, the radical disciple of Heraclitus;3 indeed, Hume wrote a good deal of philosophy, and not only on this topic. His skepticism did not prevent him from developing arguments on behalf of skepticism. (Fs)

136c We will reflect on the reason for Hume's eloquent s kepticism further on; for the moment, we suggest that the difference between Aristotle and Hume on the question of knowledge and causality is not due in the first place to the degree of "optimism" regarding the stability of things in themselves, on the one hand, or regarding the adequacy of the human mind, on the other. Instead, as we will propose in this essay, their differences in these matters stem more fundamentally from a transformation in the meaning of causality, which appears to have taken place over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and which in turn betrays a fundamental shift in the meaning of being.4 In the previous chapter, we considered the displacement of the good by power as the essence of causality; here, we shall investigate a related change, which may be described as a reductive temporalizing of being.5 While this transformation succeeds in giving a new weight to history, we will see that it entails a notion of cause that combines a radical skepticism with a positivistic empiricism. One does not need to be particularly gifted with powers of observation to see that this superficial certainty coincident with a profound anxiety characterizes the temper of our age still. But to respond to the problem that this notion of causality represents, it will not do to eliminate the philosophical significance of history and simply reject the "temporalizing" of being altogether,6 not least of all because the significance of history is one of the fruits of Christianity. Not only is salvation effected in history — in contrast to the teaching of the Neoplatonic tradition, for example — but the being of the world is created in time, and this origin cannot but leave an indelible stamp on its most fundamental meaning. (Fs)

138a The question we intend to address in the present chapter is how the doctrine of creation in principle allows the affirmation of the historical dimension of being without sacrificing intelligibility. In the sections that follow, we will begin by reflecting on the meaning of causality in Hume in contrast to the classical notion of causality represented by Aristotle, in order to show how it undermines intelligibility, and does so even more radically than Hume himself acknowledged. We will then argue for the need to maintain an integrated notion of causality, which will present us in the end with two alternatives: either we affirm, as did Aristotle, the unchanging permanence of forms in the manner of eternal species, or we affirm the supra-temporal and -spatial notion of creation, along with a supra-formal notion of act that it implies, which is compatible with genuine change in the historical order. In other words, acknowledging the genuine reality of history forces a choice between the collapse of intelligibility, on the one hand, or a metaphysics of creation on the other. (Fs)

Autor: Schindler, David C., Jun

Buch: The Catholicity of Reason

Titel: The Catholicity of Reason

Stichwort: Kausalität 6b; ontologische - dynamische K.; Hume: Ursache - Wirkung (3 Elemente); Aristoteles: K. ein analoger Begriff; aitia: keine Verbalform; neues Seinsverständnis - Neuinterpretation d. Usachen; Formalursache; Wirkursache

Kurzinhalt: In Aristotle's sense, a cause is not an event that produces a subsequent event, but is rather anything that accounts for a thing ... They describe the complex and unified ways that things are, and not in the first place how they happen.

Textausschnitt: Ontological and Dynamic Causality

139a In a succinct account of the argument he first presented in the Treatise on Human Nature,1 David Hume claims that the "cause-effect" relation possesses three essential elements: first, contingency in time and place (i.e., cause and effect must be immediately "adjacent" to one another, both temporally and spatially); second, priority in time of the cause to the effect; and, third, the constant conjunction of the two, that is, the unvarying experience that "every object like the cause, produces always some object like the effect."2 For our purposes, the first thing to notice about this description is that it takes for granted the essentially "dynamic" character of causality. In other words, it thinks of the causal relation as an event that takes place in time, and indeed is defined precisely by its temporal succession. It is significant that what Hume presents here as the paradigm of such a relation is the collision of billiard balls. His view of causality reflects a change that occurred perhaps most decisively with Galileo, as we saw in the previous chapter, even if the seeds of this change go back much earlier.3 In this change, a dynamic sense of cause came to take the place of the classical view, which, as we will explain in a moment, could be more properly characterized as an "ontological" sense. The word "dynamic," here, is meant to capture two features of this new interpretation of cause. In the first place, it indicates that this view conceives of cause principally as a kind of motion; secondly, if the content of this relation is motion, that which brings it about, as we saw in the previous chapter, is simply a producer of motion, i.e., it is force.4 In the context of this notion of cause, "explanation" comes to mean the identification of the agent or agents that initiate the event of change, and the circumstance under which it or they thus operate. An explanation is complete if all such agents for a particular change are identified, and it is called "exact" precisely to the extent to which the amount of force can be quantified and thus rendered in the form of mathematical formulae. (Fs) (notabene)

140a It is commonly said that the essential difference between the modern and classical notion of science is that the ancients pursued four causes in their search for understanding, while the moderns cast aside final causes — which Aristotle had taken to be primary — as a hindrance to the progress of the knowledge of nature, and, in doing so, lost the formal cause that always accompanies it. According to this interpretation, modern science limited itself to the material and efficient causes, conceiving of the natural world as constituted by extended matter set in motion by extrinsic forces, in the manner we described a moment ago. While this characterization is evidently not altogether false, it does not get to the heart of the matter. The reason for the change is not simply, as it were, a reduction or limitation of attention to some factors in the explanation of a reality to the exclusion of others. As we intend to show, the redirection of attention is itself due to a change in understanding. (Fs)

140b We contrasted the dynamic view of cause with what we called an "ontological" sense. What does this mean exactly? One of the first challenges a person tends to face in teaching undergraduates Aristotle's notion of causality is the difficulty students have in thinking of the term "cause" as referring to things rather than to events. Indeed, the Greek term that is translated as "cause," namely, aitia, has no verbal form that would mean what we mean by "to cause," namely, "to make something happen." In Aristotle's sense, a cause is not an event that produces a subsequent event, but is rather anything that accounts for a thing — what, how, or why it is. Moreover, it becomes immediately evident in Aristotle's presentation that cause is an essentially analogous term, which is to say that the term covers an essential diversity within unity or unity in diversity: the four causes that Aristotle describes are all the same in the sense that they all serve to account for the reality of a particular thing, but they do so according to orders so basically different as to be irreducible one to the other. As we will elaborate in a moment, the causes are principles that, while absolute in respect to the particular order they designate, nevertheless subsist in interdependence on the others according to a more general determinate, asymmetrical order. They describe the complex and unified ways that things are, and not in the first place how they happen. This is what it means to speak of causality in Aristotle as ontological as opposed to dynamic. (Fs)

141a We are going to argue that the bracketing out of formal and final causes is a natural result of a more fundamental shift, the dis-integration of the causes from one another, the isolation and thus absolutizing of each of the respective principles in itself. This shift coincides exactly, as we will see, with the loss of the primacy of things in favor of a primacy of extrinsic relations, so that formal laws or patterns become the basic residence of intelligibility rather than what Aristotle called the ?????. In order to understand how this shift was not simply an exclusive focus on two causes, but in fact a reinterpretation of all of them on the basis of a new sense of being, it is helpful to see how even the efficient and material causes that the new science affirms underwent a transformation that stripped them of the richness they enjoyed in the earlier conception. (Fs)

141b As Kenneth Schmitz explains it, whereas efficient causality originally indicated an ontological principle, so that it would be defined as the communication of being—in Aquinas's words, "A cause is that from whose being another being follows"5 — it comes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries "to mean an active force or impulse that initiated change by transference of energy to another, resulting in displacement of particles in a new configuration and with an accelerated or decelerated rate of motion among the particles."6 In both cases, the notion of efficient causality indicates a relation between two entities. One of the ways we could describe the difference between these two characterizations of efficient causality, however, is that the newer understanding "exteriorizes" this relation. A communication implies — as we will explain further in relation to formal causality — a sharing, which means that there is some (identically) one "thing" in common uniting the two sharers. What the two are individually includes, then, the reality in which they are united. In the modern conception of efficiency, by contrast, there is no sharing: force is precisely an extrinsic imposition of determination.7 (Fs)

Autor: Schindler, David C., Jun

Buch: The Catholicity of Reason

Titel: The Catholicity of Reason

Stichwort: Kausalität 6c; Materialursache als "Offenheit" u. Potenz in verschiedenen Graden in Bezug auf Form vs. Materialu. als Stoff; Form als "Aktualisierung" vs. F. als "äußere " Kraft (Ordnung als Gefüge durch Gesetze)

Kurzinhalt: ... matter is relatively determinate openness, or receptivity, to order... "Formal" comes to mean separation from any particular content. In this case, it is of course natural, indeed necessary, to conceive of order in terms of law, or extrinsic ...

Textausschnitt: 142a Similarly, the material cause, in the older analysis, did not indicate an individual entity, but a principle, specifically that "out of which" a thing was, a principle that makes sense only in relation to an "into which," so to speak. In other words, matter was understood as potency, which for Aristotle always relates to some actuality, and the potency exhibits different levels of determinacy at different levels of being. Thus, at the higher levels, the material cause would represent a relatively formed substance, a physical body, which possesses in itself a particular nature but which is still capable of being formed (not in a separate temporal moment, but ontologically relative to a higher nature) at a higher level of being. At the lowest level, it is "prime matter," no substance at all in itself but rather the pure capacity to receive determination. Regardless of the level, in this older view material cause always has a relationship to an actuality distinct from it. In other words, it is not intelligible, and does not have its existence, merely in itself, but only as itself in relation to a determining act that is distinct from it. To put it even more simply, matter is relatively determinate openness, or receptivity, to order. This view of matter contrasts sharply with, say, the Cartesian view of "res extensa," which possesses no such openness. It is, rather, opaque "stuff"; it designates inert objects of the forces that push and pull it in one way or another. In this case, we can see that it is still possible to affirm what we did above, namely, that matter is not intelligible in itself, but only in relation to what is distinct from it — in this case, force — and yet now the meaning of this affirmation changes by virtue of the new context: while in the first case matter itself receives meaning insofar as it relates to actuality, and does so because it itself is a potentiality on which actuality depends, in the second case matter remains always outside of meaning, just as meaning remains outside of matter. (Fs) (notabene)

142b But it is not only the efficient and material causes that are carried over into the newer analysis in a transformed state. It is important to see that form and finality are likewise present, though equally changed. Regarding formal cause: in both the older and the newer understanding, form represents a kind of determination or intelligible order. The two differ most directly in the "place" of that determination, though this difference has immediate implications for the nature of that order. In the classical understanding, form determines a being from within; it is an internal principle of order, because it is "that by which a thing has existence" and that which "makes something to be actually."1 Aristotle observed that form is most directly connected to nature precisely because he defined nature as an internal principle of change and rest. Now, the association of form with actuality is crucial. There can be no act without some thing that is actualized, and that thing must possess the specific potentiality for the actuality of a particular form, a potentiality that is distinct from the form that actualizes it. There is a connection between the rejection of the subsistence of forms as such and the interpretation of them as actuality. The meaning of form as act depends on the meaning of matter as potency. Only if we understand them both thus in relation to one another are we able to affirm the determination or intelligibility that form provides as internal to the being in question. Now, because, as we have just seen, the modern view of causality no longer thinks of matter in terms of potency, it is no longer possible within this conception to think of order as anything but extrinsic to things. "Formal" comes to mean separation from any particular content. In this case, it is of course natural, indeed necessary, to conceive of order in terms of law, or extrinsic pattern or structure, which, precisely because it is no longer understood analogically, comes to be expressed in terms of mathematics. It is not accidental that Aristotle, directly after presenting his most elaborate discussion of the nature of causality in Physics II, distinguishes the one who studies the natural world specifically from the mathematician along these lines: while both study form, the latter studies it as separate from natural bodies and thus in abstraction from any relation to motion, motion being in its principal sense the activity that springs from the internal principle that defines things: i.e., their nature.2 (Fs)

Autor: Schindler, David C., Jun

Buch: The Catholicity of Reason

Titel: The Catholicity of Reason

Stichwort: Kausalität 6d; moderne Wissenschaft: Umdeutung d. Finalursache (Spaemann); Zweck d. Wissenschaft: Wissen an sich (Finalität d. Menschen übereinstismmend m F. d. Dinge) - Verbesserung d. Gesellschaft; wissenschftl. Revolution: Transformation aller Ursachen

Kurzinhalt: .. the Scientific Revolution, viewed specifically in relation to the issue of causality, is not that it retains only some of Aristotle's causes and rejects others, but that it retains all of them in some sense even while it radically transforms the ...

Textausschnitt: 143a Now, if one is willing to admit that modern science retains formal causality, even if in an altered form, it would seem difficult to affirm that any trace of final cause remains, not least because those in whom modern science most clearly "came to be" explicitly understood themselves to be rejecting final causality.1 While it is clearly true that one of the things that most defines the revolution in understanding we have been describing is the attempt to abolish teleology from scientific accounts, final causality nevertheless stubbornly refuses to leave. We see this stubbornness in two ways. In the first place, as Robert Spaemann has shown, even analysis carried out strictly in the terms of mechanistic causality nevertheless has to isolate causes and effects, removing them from a literally endless continuum of possibly significant facts. Such an isolation cannot occur without some reference to final causality, since causes stand out as causes only in relation to the relevant effect that they are taken to produce.2 If we eliminated even this minimalistic teleology, we would simply have no understanding whatsoever. Intelligibility of any sort always requires at least some modicum of purpose — which is a plausible way of interpreting Plato's claim that whatever we understand, we invariably understand by reference to the good.3 (Fs)

144a At a more general level, final causality remains in modern science by virtue of the fact that science is a human activity, and there is no human activity that occurs without some reference to purpose, however implicit. Thus, if final causality is removed from the inner constitution of things, it nevertheless has to go somewhere, as it were. The purpose of modern science and therefore the source of its intelligibility according to its founders is the improvement of the human estate. Scientific study and the gathering of data make sense insofar as they serve this larger goal. For Aristotle, by contrast, the purpose of science is the science itself, or in other words, it is good — indeed arguably one of the highest human goods — simply to know. What is crucial to see in relation to our general argument is that, in this case, the final end of human activity perfectly coincides with the final end of things themselves, insofar as absolutizing knowledge means affirming the intrinsic meaning of things, the simple integrity of the way things are. Conversely, there is a necessary connection between depriving things of an internal finality and subordinating them, not to the act of knowledge (because knowledge as such does not subordinate), but to human praxis: if we make the improvement of the human estate the end of science, we displace the intelligibility of things themselves, and the more we reduce the meaning of things to data to be gathered, the more suitable they become to be used as instruments of human praxis. (Fs) (notabene)

144b The point of the foregoing, in short, is to see that the essence of the Scientific Revolution, viewed specifically in relation to the issue of causality, is not that it retains only some of Aristotle's causes and rejects others, but that it retains all of them in some sense even while it radically transforms the meaning of each. What we wish to suggest is that this transformation is not arbitrary, but itself reflects a change in the understanding of being. The next point in our argument, however, is to show that the meaning of each of the causes changes, and indeed has to change, precisely to the extent that each is interpreted in abstraction from the others. More precisely — because there is a sense in which any act of understanding involves some kind of abstraction — the change occurs insofar as the causes are no longer understood as intrinsically dependent on one another, so that one would have to understand the other causes at least implicitly in order to have a proper understanding of each one individually. The transformation at issue can be described as the dis-integration of the causes. In order to see this it is necessary to consider in what sense the causes depend in each case on an implicit reference to the whole for their own integrity. We will then go on to consider, in the fourth section, what sense of being is required for an integrated notion of causality and the "conditions of possibility" for this sense of being. (Fs)

Autor: Schindler, David C., Jun

Buch: The Catholicity of Reason

Titel: The Catholicity of Reason

Stichwort: Kausalität 6e; Verflochtenheit der Ursachen; Wirkursache Kommunikation von Sein) -> Formursache; Materialursache <-> Formursache (Potenz zu Form); Finalursache (Austauschbarkeit d. Dinge ohne inneres Ziel); entelecheia

Kurzinhalt: The general principle in classical thought, omne agens agit sibi simili, holds by virtue of this unity in form, so that there would be no unity were there no form. This means ... cannot be what it is, namely, the communication of being sibi simili ...

Textausschnitt: The Interweave of the Causes

145a Let us briefly consider each of the causes in turn with a view to at least some aspect of their interdependence.1 As we saw above, classically understood, the efficient cause is not a force that sets a mechanistic event in motion, but in the first place is a communication of being: the paradigm of such causality for Aristotle would be the generation of progeny; for Aquinas — as we will explore further in a moment — the only "instance" of efficient causality in the strictest sense, which establishes the meaning for every other analogical instance, is God's act of creation. This act is a communication of being simpliciter. It is worth pointing out that, in contrast to the modern notion of cause which is necessarily a temporal event, this act designates in the first place an ontological relationship; it is not a change that occurs within the world. Now, setting aside the act of creation for a moment, and considering efficient causality in a general sense, the word "communication" implies that something is shared, which as we suggested above means that there is some unity between the cause and the effect. This unity lies in the form: a father and mother "cause" a child by passing on to him the human form, and they have a unity with him because this form is in some respect identically the same. The general principle in classical thought, omne agens agit sibi simili, holds by virtue of this unity in form, so that there would be no unity were there no form. This means, then, that the efficient cause cannot be what it is, namely, the communication of being sibi simili, without reference to form: the formal cause, in other words, belongs to the efficient cause properly understood. As we argued in the previous chapter, if it is separated from the formal cause, the efficient cause cannot communicate anything, but can only transfer energy, which, precisely because it is necessarily extrinsic in this case, takes the form of force. (Fs; tblStw: Kausalität) (notabene)

146a While matter in the modern conception means mere extension in space, and so designates "physicality," we might say, bereft of any inherent qualities apart from measurability, matter in the classical understanding was an essentially relational term. Specifically, as a potency, it always referred in some sense to form or actuality, in two respects. On the one hand, matter is, in itself, aptitude for form, so that, as we explained above, its intelligibility derives in part from the form that actualizes it and thus determines it in a certain way. Matter is openness upwards, we might say. On the other hand, what is potentiality in one respect will always be actuality in another: the body that represents the material cause of a living organism with respect to its animating principle, namely, the form or soul, is itself the form with respect to its own material principles, namely, the flesh, blood, and bones, and so on down the line. In this sense, matter — understood as formed body — will always have a qualitatively determined nature, in one respect, even while it will remain in another respect open to higher determinations. Although this inference was rarely drawn in classical accounts, it follows in fact that the more relatively determinate matter is, the more receptive it is capable of being for a higher form. But this means that, if matter is defined as a potency for form, the higher, more organized instances of matter, which by virtue of their complexity are more capable of receiving higher-order actualities, represent more fully what matter is than the lower instances. Thus, for example, a human body is a better representative of the nature of matter than, say, a stone, which has little intrinsic potency to receive form.2 Thus, in short, we do not speak of matter, simply, as a thing in itself, but always of the material principle of a particular being. The natural being as a whole is in each case the subject, the fundamental reference point, in relation to which we are able to judge what in fact the material cause is. The material cause alone, without any reference to form or nature, would be simply unintelligible. (Fs; tblStw: Kausalität)

147a Next, we may consider the dependence of form on matter. The key to this dependence is that, if form is not the actualization of some potency, as we noted above, it cannot be the intrinsic principle that it in fact is. Instead, it becomes an abstract formality, so to speak, which must remain by definition superficial, since it does not bear any internal relationship to the thing of which it is the form. In other words, it necessarily turns into a purely extrinsic structure, pattern, or law.3 We thus no longer speak of things as formed, in the sense of being "in-formed," but rather we speak of form as the external patterns to which things are con-formed. To speak of form as an internal principle requires, once again, a reference to a real being — or as Aristotle puts it, a "natural body" — of which it is the form, and a real being is such only by virtue of the relation between form and matter: "nature is twofold, and is both form and matter."4 We can explain this essential relation by saying that, in order for form to be internal to a being, it must be received into it, and it can only be thus received if there is an intrinsic potency for that actuality, i.e., if there is a material principle understood as we have just described it. There is thus a relationship of reciprocal dependence between form and matter: matter, as a "potency for," implies the priority of form, and form cannot exist as such except as received by matter. This means that there cannot be a temporal priority of one or the other, so that they are then added together in a subsequent "moment." Instead, they must always already be involved with one another, so to speak. This is why Aristotle presents organic form, which is always already intrinsically related to its matter, as the paradigm, and treats the form of an artifact, which is to some degree simply imposed on matter that is in a certain respect independent of it, as an analogous sense of the term.5 An intrinsic relation to matter is part of the meaning of form in its strict sense. (Fs) (notabene)

148a As for final causality, it represents an explanation of the meaning of things, and not simply an arbitrary imposition, only insofar as teleology is taken to be most fundamentally intrinsic. If there is no intrinsic relationship between a being and the purpose it serves, if, in other words, the purpose is simply extrinsic to a being, then it becomes wholly accidental that it happens to be this particular being that serves the purpose, and not some other. Things become interchangeable with respect to their purpose, and represent nothing more than instruments in its service. The purpose, in this case, does not illuminate the meaning of the being, which is to say it has no strictly theoretical role, but as we saw above dissolves into a kind of positivistic pragmatism that is never truly self-explicating but only ever endlessly self-justifying, and indeed, always in terms other than itself. For teleology to have an essentially theoretical dimension, the end must be internal, which is another way of saying that natural things must be their own end. Aristotle coined the term "entelecheia" to refer to organisms: they possess (echein) their end (telos) in (en) themselves; they are, so to speak, "enpurposed." But this simply means that the first aim of an organism is to be itself, to actualize as fully as possible what it is. It follows, then, that final causality, if it is to be something other than external manipulation, requires a reference to formal causality, the essential "whatness" of a thing or its most basic determinate act, and more specifically to an internal notion of form, which as we saw above, is such only with reference to an internal potency. In the paradigmatic case of the organism, once again, the "reference" is so intrinsic as to be materially identical, to represent one and the same thing under a different aspect.6 Finality as a cause is inconceivable without formal causality. (Fs; tblStw: Kausalität)

Autor: Schindler, David C., Jun

Buch: The Catholicity of Reason

Titel: The Catholicity of Reason

Stichwort: Kausalität 6f; "dynamisches" Verständnis v. K. (Hume): Verlust v. Intelligibilität; Überzeitlichkeit v. Form, Substanz (Billardball) als Voraussetzung f. Wissen

Kurzinhalt: ... the reduction of cause to an event not only precludes the possibility of knowing the necessity or even probability governing the relations between things, but it eliminates the understanding of the things themselves at all, since no "thing" ...

Textausschnitt: The Unraveling of Intelligibility

148b There would be other ways to show the interdependence of the four causes, but the brief account given already establishes the principle that the causes cannot be understood in isolation from one another, so that to separate them is to distort them. Before we raise the issue of what understanding of being is required in order to be able to affirm an integrated notion of causality, we will first consider the implications of this distortion with respect to the intelligibility of things more generally. We have suggested that the modern view of causality did not so much eliminate some of the causes as it did reinterpret them in a dynamic, rather than an ontological, sense. We wish to argue now that this reinterpretation in fact undermines their intelligibility more radically than is typically acknowledged. (Fs)

149a As we saw at the outset, Hume affirmed the dependence of knowledge on causality, which he in turn described as the regular succession of contiguous events in time. Having described things thus, he points out that the mind has no access to any necessary connection between the two, but only to the one event that precedes and the other that follows. This exhaustively "dynamic" notion of causality is, we might say, a paradigmatic expression of the dis-integration we have been describing. Unities are always supra-temporal — which does not mean that they do not exist in time, but only that their existence in time does not account for the whole of their reality. An identity, which is a type of unity, remains numerically the same over the course of a multiplicity of moments, which means that its reality transcends each one of those moments and so cannot be reduced to it. To define causality in strictly temporal terms is not to show that there is no basis for knowledge, but in fact to take the absence of that basis for granted at the outset, which is of course to beg the question. (Fs) (notabene)

149b It is interesting that Hume does not link knowledge to essences or forms, or to intrinsic teleology, all of which imply a unity, but rather to the physical interaction between things, an event. As a merely physio-temporal event, this encounter — if the word is appropriate at all in this context — is wholly extrinsic. Nothing about the interaction reveals the meaning of either of the things involved, or bears significantly on that meaning. Indeed, it is wholly a matter of indifference what the cause and effect are in themselves, but only that they happen to connect at this point in time and space: there is no communication (of form), which means that the effect tells us nothing about the nature of the cause. Now, it follows directly from this that there can be no essential necessity to this relation. If the two things relate to one another in a wholly extrinsic fashion, their interaction will be altogether accidental, or in other words arbitrary in relation to the meaning of things, regardless of the empirical reliability of the law to which they appear to conform. In this case, the regularity of their interaction — should it happen indeed to exhibit some regularity — is simply a matter of probability, a likelihood that always only asymptotically approaches necessity as something extrinsic to itself. Given Hume's definition of causality, he cannot but deny any essential difference between what we call knowledge and the belief based on custom and constantly reinforced by experience. (Fs) (notabene)

150a But Hume did not draw the full implications of his starting assumptions; more needs to be said here. It is not merely the necessity of the connection between cause and effect that gets lost the moment we reductively temporalize the relation and see them therefore as wholly extrinsically connected, but intelligibility itself founders at its root: we are in this case not simply unable to predict things with the absolute certainty that necessity offers, but the very possibility of any sort of understanding is undermined as well. As we mentioned above with reference to Spaemann, even a wholly "positivistic" view of causality derives whatever intelligibility it possesses from an implicit affirmation of teleology. One cannot distinguish a cause from the essentially infinite number of conditions preceding the effect without some minimal reference to final causality: this reality differs from the others in that it acts "for the sake of" this effect; its activity has the purpose of producing such and such an effect. If there is nothing but wholly extrinsic relations, it would make no sense to distinguish a "post hoc, propter hoc" fallacy from a valid analysis of a causal relation, because there would be only "posts" and no "propter." Thus, not only would we lack a basis for attributing any necessity to the connection between cause and effect, but we would in fact have no way of identifying any causes, which means we would also lose the ability to identify something as an effect, insofar as doing so depends on identifying a cause. Along with necessity, there would be no such thing as probability. (Fs) (notabene)

150b At an even more fundamental level, the reduction of cause to an event not only precludes the possibility of knowing the necessity or even probability governing the relations between things, but it eliminates the understanding of the things themselves at all, since no "thing" whatsoever can be a "thing" unless it is an intelligible whole. If there is no form as an internal principle of unity that identifies a thing as what it is and distinguishes it from everything it is not by gathering up the multiplicity of parts and aspects and ordering them around a center, then the mind seeking understanding has, as it were, no place to go in its relation to things. It is interesting to note that, addressing the question of the possibility of knowledge, Hume immediately speaks of the connection between things, and considers whether it is possible to affirm necessity of this connection. But he does not first raise the question of our knowledge of the things themselves that connect. He evidently takes it for granted that we are able to identify the first billard ball, and then the second, even if he rejects the claim that we can identify anything in experience that we could call their causal connection. It is only later that he introduces the issue of substance, and of course denies that we can have knowledge of it, since our experience of things is limited to their accidents: our relation to things is, indeed, just as extrinsic as the colliding billiard balls. For Hume, the mind seeking understanding is drawn outward, away from things and toward their external relationships. (Fs)

151a The implications of this turn however extend further than Hume seems to have realized. He denies substance, and speaks instead of accidents; he denies knowledge, and speaks instead of experiences and impressions that give rise to belief of varying degrees of compelling power. But isn't an accident also an object with its own form, a meaningful whole that is not merely the sum of its parts, and couldn't we say the same for any experience or impression, not to mention the notion of knowledge or belief? The strictures that Hume demands would render unintelligible the very language in which he demands them. (Fs)

Autor: Schindler, David C., Jun

Buch: The Catholicity of Reason

Titel: The Catholicity of Reason

Stichwort: Kausalität 6g; moderne Logik; radikaler Skeptizismus (Hume): Problem d. Intelligibilität; Selbstbeschränkung d. Denkens -> Utilitarismus; Soziologie anstatt pol. Philosophie; Rechtfertigung durch Erfolg; Nihilismus "im Dienste" d. Effizienz

Kurzinhalt: The fragmentation of causality ... undermines intelligibility so radically that intelligibility no longer matters, so radically that intelligibility can be "used," even if it does not in fact have a basis in reality ... as long as its use brings about ...

Textausschnitt: 151b Or apparently, at any rate. It turns out that a strategy remains for salvaging at least a kind of intelligibility in the face of a fundamental skepticism with respect to any intelligibility, whether in the world or in the soul. In a book published in 1969 titled Two Logics,1 Henry Veatch describes the supplanting of Aristotelian categorical logic by the symbolic logic represented by Russell and Whitehead, and claims that much more was going on here than simply the expansion of logic's scope and power: symbolic logic, according to Veatch, is essentially a "relating-logic," which in contrast to the Aristotelian "what-logic," is "unable to say what anything is." Although we unfortunately cannot enter into the details of his interesting argument, it is helpful, in relation to our theme, to note one feature of it. At the heart of this transition to symbolic logic, which we find for example in the analytic philosophy that dominates the Anglo-American academy, lies a radical reconception of the basic instance of human thought, namely, the simple proposition: S is P. Whereas in the traditional view, this presented an articulation of the subject and its accident, whereby the accident reveals something about the nature or the reality of the subject, in the modern view this simple proposition represents a relation between two terms, which relationship is conceived as a logical function. In this case, the predicate is not understood to disclose something about the meaning of the subject, but instead represents simply a property that is posited as belonging in this case to the subject. In other words, it assumes an extrinsic relationship between the two terms, so that either the predicate is already contained in the subject and so is not different from it (analytic statement), or the predicate is separate from the subject and can be connected either formally by the logic of categories (synthetic a priori) or materially by experience (synthetic a posteriori). But this way of conceiving things leaves us, on the one hand, the sphere of necessity that is limited to a logical analysis of "what we mean" by the language we use to describe the world or the necessary relations between concepts, and on the other hand the contingent sphere of empirical facts, which can be recorded and organized according to patterns (i.e., form understood extrinsically as law) but not intellectually penetrated as an essential, intrinsic meaning (form as ontological principle). Intelligibility is therefore "saved" in this case by separating thought altogether from things, allowing it the much more modest goal of coherence and consistency, and subsequently extrinsically reconnecting it to the world only in the apparently equally modest mode of a positivistic empiricism. It is just this that we find in both in Hume and in a more sophisticated form in Kant. What Veatch does not say here, but what our previous discussion allows us to see, is that the root of this development in twentieth-century philosophy is a dis-integration of the notion of cause; a metaphysical problem lies at the basis of the epistemological problem. (Fs; tblStw: Kausalität, Nihilismus) (notabene)

152a The question often arises, with respect to this detachment of thought from the world, which is itself a reflection of the displacement of intelligible form from the center of things, whether it does not harbor within itself outright contradiction, along the lines we indicated above with respect to Hume: even within this apparently modest self-limitation of reason, he necessarily speaks of the nature of concepts, of propositions, of reason, and even of the things whose nature is unknown to us. Indeed, this is clearly self-contradictory. But it is crucial to see why the very separation of thought from the world renders this charge gratuitous, at least in a certain respect. The problem in a nutshell is that this contradiction lies too deep to create a difficulty for self-limiting thought; it lies, we might say, in the very realm that reason restrains itself from entering. The result of this self-restraint is that a new criterion for judgment takes the place of truth, namely, a necessarily utilitarian concept of the good. Although this pragmatism cannot justify itself theoretically, it can always persuade itself to take solace in the fact that the essentially contemplative vision of truth presupposed by the ancient science cannot justify itself practically — at least not according to the terms set by pragmatism: i.e., it does not appear to produce anything of immediately utilitarian benefit. The key is that, along with its being shifted from a "theoretical to a pragmatic register, the criterion for judgment is simultaneously "temporalized," in the sense that an idea justifies itself by pointing to its consequences here and now.2 (Fs) (notabene)

153a What is at stake in the question of the proper measure of truth is nothing short of the basic meaning of the cosmos, the meaning of human nature, and indeed ultimately as we will see in a moment the meaning of the God who created both. The fragmentation of causality not only eliminates necessity, but it undermines intelligibility so radically that intelligibility no longer matters, so radically that intelligibility can be "used," even if it does not in fact have a basis in reality or ultimately mean anything, as long as its use brings about desired results — "desired" meaning here only what the utterly arbitrarily imposed final cause determines it to mean in any given case.3 This is a nihilism far more profound than that expressed by Friedrich Nietzsche, who suffered extreme loneliness as a result of his convictions. It is a nihilism compatible with the various truth claims required for efficient living in the contemporary world. The fragmentation of causality puts reality wholly at the service of human aims, and indeed at the service of aims that have become so bourgeois they are no longer human, but merely "all too human." (Fs) (notabene)

Autor: Schindler, David C., Jun

Buch: The Catholicity of Reason

Titel: The Catholicity of Reason

Stichwort: Kausalität 6h; Aristoteles: Ewigkeit d. Arten - Thomas: Schöpfung; Substanz: absoluter Bezugspunkt für Verständnis d. Ursachen (Beispiel: Frosch unreduzierbar auf Teile); Dilemma: Ganzheit d. S. - Möglichkeit v. Evolution

Kurzinhalt: In a proper substance, none of the four causes, in other words, has its being, so to speak, in itself. Rather, each is a cause of the being in both the objective and subjective sense of the genitive. The substance is the absolute to which the causes ...

Textausschnitt: Substantial Meaning

153b To respond to this nihilism, we must ask what understanding of being is necessary for an integrated notion of causality. As we have seen, each of the causes has its proper meaning only in relation to the others. But this interdependence would seem to create a logical difficulty: if A cannot be A without B, but B cannot be B without A, then it would seem to be impossible to have either, for each would await the other to attain to its own meaning, which entails an infinite regress with no absolute place to start. But if it is true that one could never move sequentially from A to B, or from B to A, insofar as the two are reciprocally dependent, it is possible to have both of them at the same time, or in other words to take as the starting point the reality of a whole in which A and B are reciprocally dependent as constitutive parts. And here we are brought to the sense of being required for an integrated notion of causality: as Aristotle saw, the essential meaning of being is substance; what are absolute are concrete, natural things, the most basic of which are organisms, and the most derivative of which are in some sense elements and in another sense artifacts.1 A substance is a whole, which is simultaneously complex and irreducibly one. A substance cannot be divided, properly speaking, without ceasing to be the substance it was (homogenous elements come closest to this possibility, but for that very reason are the least deserving of the name "substance"). In it, the constitutive principles — efficiency, matter, form, and finality — interweave in a reciprocally dependent and asymmetrical manner, as we described above. They exist together in some respect "all at once." (Fs; tblStw: Kausalität, Substanz) (notabene)

154a Now, the complex unity of substance has a difficult implication, which could scarcely be entertained today, but which follows from Aristotle's view with strict logical necessity: it is impossible, according to this understanding of the interdependence of causes, for new forms to come to be. Aristotle affirmed the eternality of the species, and it should be clear that he could do nothing else. A whole that is in the strictest ontological sense greater than the sum of its parts cannot be "cobbled together" from those parts. Take a frog: an organism of this sort represents the integration of causality to such an extent that the efficient, formal, and final cause are in this case one and the same (it is the frog, the what of the thing, that moves itself, and it does so in order to be a frog in the fullest sense it can). The material cause, though not in any genuine sense identical to form, nevertheless remains intrinsic to it so that there never exists frogness "as such," but only as individual frogs. Because of this integration, it would be impossible to assemble a frog in the manner of Frankenstein's monster, and to the extent that one could approximate such a thing, it would inevitably serve an extrinsic purpose, which means it would not be an "entelechia," as properly befits an organism. In a proper substance, none of the four causes, in other words, has its being, so to speak, in itself. Rather, each is a cause of the being in both the objective and subjective sense of the genitive. The substance is the absolute to which the causes are relative, it is the essential reference point for the understanding of each. Thus, for Aristotle, substance must be eternal, a frog cannot be produced out of something more basic, but can come only from other, already actualized, frogs. If it did come from something more basic, it would be reducible back to that or those most basic things, which would then represent eternal substance themselves. In this case, what appeared to be the reality would not be the genuine reality.2 Strict novelty, in any event, is impossible for Aristotle; even the creation of apparently original artifacts is the expression of forms that have been derived from other more basic forms, and cannot be said to have been generated from nothing. (Fs) (notabene)

155a We thus appear to stand before a dilemma. On the one hand, we have an integrated causality that represents the condition of possibility for all intelligibility, but to affirm this would require us to accept the eternal reality of substances, for any whole greater than the sum of its parts cannot simply be constructed step by step out of its parts. But this is an essentially "static" notion of the cosmos; it denies development, and very clearly denies the possibility of anything like an evolution of species. It would seem to deny, moreover, the possibility of creation, if one thinks of this divine act as an alternative to the eternality of species. There thus appears to be good reason to reject this understanding of being. On the other hand, actually to do so would present an even more obviously problematic implication: it would entail the dis-integration of the causes, and therefore a purely mechanistic conception of the universe and all things in it, coincident with the loss of any foundation for intelligibility, so that, if there is to be meaning at all, it is forced to fix its outer limits at the hermetically sealed borders of self-enclosed reason. What, in this situation, are we to do? (Fs) (notabene)

156a One might anticipate that it was precisely the worldview brought by Christianity that undid the integration of Aristotle's eternal substances, insofar as the doctrine of creation means that all things in the cosmos "come to be," at least in some respect. But this would only be the case in principle if indeed the sense of being entailed in the doctrine of creation were incompatible with the absoluteness of substance. As Thomas Aquinas shows, there is no contradiction in principle between the world's being created and its being eternal. As he indicates in the short treatise On the Eternity of the World, it is a mistake to think that efficient causality can operate only according to temporal succession.3 While it is true that efficient causality implies a "before" and an "after," he explains, these terms need not indicate an order of time (as they essentially do in Hume, and "before" him in Galileo), but can also indicate an order of nature.4 In other words, the causality of creation does not necessarily imply an event in time, but can simply mean absolute metaphysical dependence — even, in principle, of eternal things. In this respect, Aquinas affirms that the Platonic notion that the world is both eternal and wholly dependent on God is not offensive to reason. (Fs)

Autor: Schindler, David C., Jun

Buch: The Catholicity of Reason

Titel: The Catholicity of Reason

Stichwort: Kausalität 6i; Ewigkeit der Welt (Aristoteles) - Thomas; Nicht-Sein nicht zeitlich "früher" als Sein (Ordnung der Zeit d. Natur); Substanz transzendiert Zeit: Th.: Ewigkeit unterschieden von Zeit durch Prinzip der Ganzheit

Kurzinhalt: Composite wholes — whether we call them substances in Aristotle's sense or subsistent beings in Aquinas's — remain absolute in the doctrine of creation, which means that this doctrine entails an integrated notion of causality.

Textausschnitt: 156b There are some who believe that Aquinas means to present this ancient view as a possibility for reason; guided by the Christian faith, however, which affirms the creation in time of all things and so denies the eternity of the world, we ought to reject this possibility in favor of the other reasonable possibility, namely, that all things come to be in time. If this were the case, one would wonder why he would write an entire treatise on behalf of a position he considers false.1 But there is another way to interpret Aquinas regarding this question. If we consider Aquinas's metaphysical exposition of creation in the Summa, we realize that, for Aquinas, this ancient philosophical notion regarding the eternity of the world is and remains in some respect true, even if this truth does not contradict the affirmation that all things have come to be. We are approaching the height of paradox here, but it is reason that is leading us to it. One of the constant themes in Aquinas's exposition of the notion of creation is that the proper terminus of God's creative act is the particular subsistent being, what Aristotle calls the substance: "Creation does not mean the building up of a composite thing from pre-existing principles; but it means that the composite is created so that it is brought into being at the same time with all of its principles."2 The reason for this is that we can attribute being to parts — for example, to form and to matter — only analogously insofar as they contribute to the reality of things. But being belongs in the proper sense "to that which has being — that is, to what subsists in its own being."3 Aquinas in other words affirms Aristotle's notion that it is wholes, composite beings, that are what is most real, and that other aspects of the world have their reality always relative to these wholes. In this respect, a human being would be more real, for example, than the genes that make him up. He is more real than an atom, or indeed even more than a rock or a tree, insofar as a human being has more independence than they. Composite wholes — whether we call them substances in Aristotle's sense or subsistent beings in Aquinas's — remain absolute in the doctrine of creation, which means that this doctrine entails an integrated notion of causality. (Fs; tblStw: Substanz, Zeit)

Fußnote 1 oben: 31. "Further, let us even suppose that the preposition 'out of' imports some affirmative order of non-being to being, as if the proposition that the creature is made out of nothing meant that the creature is made after nothing. Then this expression 'after' certainly implies order, but order is of two kinds: order of time and order of nature. If, therefore, the proper and the particular does not follow from the common and the universal, it will not necessarily follow that, because the creature is made after nothing, non-being is temporally prior to the being of the creature. Rather, it suffices that non-being be prior to being by nature. Now, whatever naturally pertains to something in itself is prior to what that thing only receives from another. A creature does not have being, however, except from another, for, considered in itself, every creature is nothing, and thus, with respect to the creature, non-being is prior to being by nature. Nor does it follow from the creature's always having existed that its being and non-being are ever simultaneous, as if the creature always existed but at some time nothing existed, for the priority is not one of time. Rather, the argument merely requires that the nature of the creature is such that, if the creature were left to itself, it would be nothing." On the Eternity of the World, trans. Robert T. Miller.

157a The question that arises, here, is whether this absoluteness of wholes presents a difficulty for the temporal coming to be of the world that is entailed in the Christian belief in creation in time. On the one hand, Aquinas affirms that substances as such imply the transcendence of time — "time does not measure the substance of things"4 — and for this reason, because demonstration concerns the essence of things (which represents their non-temporal aspect), creation in time cannot be demonstrated. This implies that a "supra-temporal" aspect of being is essential to its intelligibility, which is what we have argued with respect to the notion of causality. Indeed, Aquinas specifically distinguishes eternity from time by the principle of wholeness: eternity is simultaneously whole, while time is not.5 We may infer from this that, insofar as something is whole, and to that extent it represents something essentially greater than and irreducible to its parts, that thing transcends time. It is important to see the implication: it is not simply a part of a substance — for example, the abstract form or the "ideal" reality of the thing — that transcends time, but that each individual substance must transcend time precisely to the extent that the substance represents an irreducible unity. This does not mean the thing does not exist in time, but only that its temporal reality is not the whole of its reality. Again, it is just this transcendence of time that makes it intelligible. But faith does not contradict reasoning; the light of faith does not obscure the light of reason. This means that the new context into which faith introduces the being of the world preserves the intelligibility, and therefore the time-transcending character, of being even as it transforms it. The sharpest question we must ask, then, is how does the origin in time of things not eliminate the supra-temporal integrity of their intelligible reality? (Fs) (notabene)

158a We cannot here explore this question in all the depth that it demands, but we may nonetheless draw principles of a response to it from Aquinas. Precisely because substance necessarily has an "all at once" quality, it cannot as we said come into being incrementally. Moreover, insofar as creation is a divine act, it does not itself take place in time, as a movement or a change, which always implies the succession of moments. Thus, Aquinas affirms that the world is created simultaneously with time: "Things are said to be created in the beginning of time ... because together with time heaven and earth were created."6 Indeed, God does not "take time," as it were, to create, but rather "He must be considered as giving time to His effect as much as and when He willed."7 It is manifestly not the case that, for example, the matter is first created as a potential to receive at a later moment the form that actualizes it. This would leave form and matter extrinsic to each other in a way that would not allow us to make sense of organic beings, the epitome of the real. To the contrary, not only is no matter present prior to God's creation of subsistent beings, but no possibility is present — or rather, if there is a possibility it lies wholly in God's will.8 God does not operate within the limits of the conditions of possibility, but he gives those conditions in giving being. It is in this sense that each real, subsistent being is created "all at once," specifically as a whole. (Fs)

Autor: Schindler, David C., Jun

Buch: The Catholicity of Reason

Titel: The Catholicity of Reason

Stichwort: Kausalität 6j; Schöpfung - Zeit - Substanz - esse; Sein als Aktualität, begrenzt durch Form; S.: vertikale - horizontale Entfaltung; Möglichkeitsbedingung d. S. nicht vorher in der Zeit, sondern Natur; Evolution fordert Schöpfung

Kurzinhalt: if there is a subsistent being at all, its conditions of possibility were not given merely in the temporal moment prior to its actuality, but rather that its possibility is given simultaneously with its actuality, which transcends time by definition.

Textausschnitt: 159a Now, while we might be able to imagine in some distant way that God created the world together with time in the distant past, it does not seem to be the case that individual beings are created "immediately," in the manner described. If they were, we would expect to see beings "pop up" into existence literally "out of nowhere." Is it not the case that the beings that make up the world have come to be gradually insofar as they evidently did not exist at the beginning of the universe — something that not only modern science, but Aquinas too seems to have held?9 If this is the case, it seems to contradict the claim we have repeatedly made that substances have an absolute character that does not allow them to be reduced back to anything less than they. There are two points to make in response to this difficulty: first, the absoluteness of substance precludes a "coming to be" from below, but does not preclude a coming to be, so to speak, from above. But such a "coming to be" requires a kind of actuality that is distinct from, and indeed superior to, the actuality of form. Aquinas presents this kind of actuality in his notion of esse, the existence that God shares with the beings he makes be, or the act by which all forms themselves are actualized.10 Esse, according to Aquinas, is formal with respect to all form because it is the actuality of all (formal) acts.11 In this respect, it is that to which the actuality of real beings can be reduced. It is not a potentiality out of which forms are generated "from below," but is rather an excess, so to speak, of actuality that is limited "from below" by the forms to be actualized.12 Because esse, moreover, is not itself a subsistent being, but is rather a substantial-izing act, the reducibility of form to esse does not eliminate the absoluteness of individual substances. To the contrary, it is precisely what makes them absolute. (Fs) (notabene)

160a The second point to make is a more speculative development: it is true that no substance can exist merely temporally; the sheer multiplicity of time is incompatible with any sort of subsisting being. A fortiori a subsistent being does not come to be merely in time. Once we recognize this we are able to say that, if there is a subsistent being at all, its conditions of possibility were not given merely in the temporal moment prior to its actuality, but rather that its possibility is given simultaneously with its actuality, which transcends time by definition. What this means is that we cannot think of the coming-to-be of substances merely "horizontally," but must rather think of them "vertically" as unfolding in time from above. We will explore this notion more fully in the following chapter. The condition of possibility, in any event, does not precede in time but rather in nature, and the reference point for understanding the process lies not in the first moment, and then each succeeding moment thereafter, but in the form that lies above the temporal process altogether. At the same time, of course, the form reciprocally depends on the temporal process for its coming to be in reality, but this dependence is asymmetrical: the substance's dependence on its history lies so to speak inside the history's dependence on the substance. The passage we cited above expresses this point quite nicely: God gives time to the effect that he creates, which we may read as generously allowing it to develop gradually into what it has always been meant to be. (Fs)

160b The inclusion of the horizontal dimension of being within the vertical dimension allows the possibility of a kind of evolution in the biological sphere, even though it precludes a purely mechanistic account of that evolution. It should be noted that, despite claims to the contrary, evolution cannot in any event be accounted for in wholly mechanistic terms insofar as mechanism excludes the possibility of natural forms and therefore of genuine substances.13 This means, ironically, that not only are creation and evolution not opposed in principle, but in fact evolution requires creation to be intelligible at all as the gradual coming to be of real beings. Chesterton captures this point quite well:

Evolution is a good example of that modern intelligence which, if it destroys anything, destroys itself. Evolution is either an innocent scientific description of how certain earthly things came about; or, if it is anything more than this, it is an attack upon thought itself. If evolution destroys anything, it does not destroy religion but rationalism. If evolution simply means that a positive thing called an ape turned very slowly into a positive thing called a man, then it is stingless for the most orthodox; for a personal God might just as well do things slowly as quickly, especially if, like the Christian God, he were outside time. But if it means anything more, it means that there is no such thing as an ape to change, and no such thing as a man for him to change into. It means that there is no such thing as a thing. At best, there is only one thing, and that is a flux of everything and anything. This is an attack not upon the faith, but upon the mind; you cannot think if there are no things to think about. You cannot think if you are not separate from the subject of thought. Descartes said, "I think; therefore I am." The philosophic evolutionist reverses and negatives the epigram. He says, "I am not; therefore I cannot think."14

161a The reason that there cannot be evolution without creation is because, as we have seen, there can be no intelligibility of any sort without the absoluteness of substance, which the supra-temporal and indeed the supra-formal act of creation alone — if one does not affirm the eternity of species — makes possible. As we have come to see, this acknowledgment of intelligibility requires an inversion of our normal way of thinking that limits physical being to the flux of time, and demands instead that we see time as belonging to things, as unfolding from above in reference to what transcends things. The physical world does indeed exist in time, but not reductively so: all real beings "stick out" ec-statically into the eternity of the God who made them from nothing and "continues" so to make them. The dis-integration of causes is a natural result of the failure to interpret creation thus metaphysically and the subsequent temporalization of being. A recovery of their integration, a restoration of the wholeness of things and thus the basis of any thinking whatsoever, will therefore require a restoration of a proper sense of being as created. (Fs) (notabene)