Autor: Schmitz, Kenneth L.

Buch: The Gift: Creation

Titel: The Gift: Creation

Stichwort: Schöpfung - Geschenk; Welt als gegebene Tatsache -> Erschwernis eines Verständnisses von G.; Gegebenes: 2 Bedeutungen; donum (do) - datum (gleichsam ohne Geber); Tatsache, Faktum (facio)

Kurzinhalt: The characterization of what is there as given is meant to rigorously exclude any reference to a giver; hence the expression: "It is simply given." ... An epistemology that limits itself to data does not permit the knower to go "behind" ... the given ...

Textausschnitt: II
34a Studies in anthropology over the past century have made available to us an understanding of the meaning of the gift in pre-literate societies. That meaning is still significant for us today, because in its deepest and broadest import it still is capable of functioning in modern life. The prevailing attitude, however, is not favorable to the extension of the category of the gift beyond situations limited to interaction between humans. Giving and receiving is taken to be an affair between humans, except where sentiment extends it to our pets. An older wisdom spoke of "the gifts of Mother Earth," of "gifts from the gods," and of "the gift of life." But such locutions are not easily understood today, and they are likely to be sloughed off as poetic imagery and archaic metaphor. To be sure, religious sciptures may sometimes speak this way and find their voice in religious hymns; but what in them is decorous imagery and what is reality? The chief obstacle to a better appreciation of the category of the gift is a widespread current attitude towards the world; it is the attitude that takes the world as a given fact. Now these two words need looking into, for their joint meaning is not obvious, and there is nothing direct or simple about their common usage. They are a way of understanding what is before us, around us, present to us. They are burnt deeply into the outlook of the so-called "advanced" societies. They provide a primary interpretation of what is evident. They combine to form the first name we give to what we encounter. Moreover, in scientific and learned discourse and in everyday speech as well, this initial name proves ultimately decisive and presides over most subsequent understanding of the world, so that our thought seldom breaks free from this first determination of the things that are. (Fs)

35a We say of something that it is "there." But what do we mean when we say that it is "given?" Do we not say more than that it is simply there? Do we not add something? Do we not add a fundamental attitude towards what is there? The nomenclature and the usage express the attitude. Current English1 usage draws a sharp distinction between most uses of "the given" and "the gift"; and not only English: French distinguishes la donnée from le don; and Latin harbours a distinction between datum and donum. The first members of these pairs (given, donnée, datum) usually serve a learned function in the discourse of the natural and positive sciences and in empiricist philosophy, often in the Latin plural form, data. Indeed, much of the usage comes into English from the technical vocabulary of late medieval Latin, though it is nowadays widely used in technology and in more or less educated popular speech as well. The given (data) has two meanings which are distinct and yet compatible with one another. There is first its hypothetical meaning which has arisen in highly conditioned contexts: in logic, where it is used to designate the basis for an argument, hence: "The premisses being given, it follows that...."; in mathematics, where it assigns a non-problematic status to a postulate for the sake of a demonstration, hence: "Granted that...."; and in navigation, where it denotes the basis for the construction of a position from which a course can be devised. The generic meaning of these is that of "granting, positing, conceding" some item, so that further argument or construction can follow upon it as from a basis and starting-point. It designates what Hegel called a "foundation" (Grundlage) rather than a "source" (Grund). The term "given" expresses some agreement, provisional or otherwise, among the parties relevant to the operation or discourse which is to follow upon the concession. In this its concessive or hypothetical sense, it serves as an agreed upon stipulation, expressed by the term: "If we grant that...." (Fs)

36a But there is a second sense: the evidential meaning of the term. Something is said to be given if it is taken to be the direct yet warranted observation of what is actually the case. The connection between the hypothetical and the evidential meanings seems to be the conviction that what is evident is both the case and also what every "right-thinking" observer agrees is the case. So that the term: "Given that...." refers as much to the thinker addressed as to the matter designated. Moreover, what the evidential and the hypothetical sense share is that both are taken as the basis and starting-point for some sort of progression, either in discourse (an argument) or in actuality (a construction or production). The given is taken to be the starting-point for scientific discourse, for technological advance, and for more general forms of progressive action. The given is accepted for the sake of the use that can be made of it as a starting-point. The cast of mind is towards future development and results. (Fs)

37a A combination of pressures in modern scientific discourse has produced what at first seems to be a paradoxical usage. The characterization of what is there as given is meant to rigorously exclude any reference to a giver; hence the expression: "It is simply given." This closure on itself is mirrored in the etymology of the term. Thus, in the Latin from which the usage takes it origin, the term for gift (donum) is a direct extension of the verbal stem (do, give), whereas the term for the given (datum) is formed from the past participle and thereby suggests a finished state, completed within itself. An epistemology that limits itself to data does not permit the knower to go "behind" or "beneath" the given in search of an ontological cause. The only justifiable reason for returning to the given is in order to reconfirm the basis of the progression, to re-examine the argument at its starting-point, to repeat the experiment from the first step onward, or to refine the method of production: in a word, to verify the development and the result. If the initial given is broken down by analysis, a new given appears; but givenness, that is, the characterization of the evidence as given, does not disappear. The "fact of having been given" monitors the progression. Thus, physics starts with corpuscles, and then passes on the molecules, to atoms, to protons and so on; but each new temporary point of rest is itself characterized as a given. Nor is there any talk of a giver. No doubt this usage reflects a combination of factors in modern discourse: the constructivist temper brought about through the mathematical and experimental tendencies in modern science, the exigency for application animating scientific technology, and the positivist temper of philosophers influenced by these factors, such as Hume, Kant and others. The givenness of the given remains inviolate in such discourse, and admits of no giver within its semantic field. In its hypothetical as well as its evidential sense the term enjoys a certain absolution from the conditions of explanation and inference just because it lies prior to them as their starting-point; it stands free from and prior to them just insofar as it is first. This structure of discourse empiricist and phenomenalist has been challenged recently. I do not think that the controversy of sense-data altered very much, however, since its challenge was directed primarily towards the absurdities of interposing sensa between knowers and the world, while it left intact the structure of givenness. No doubt the linguistic turn taken by the so-called ordinary language philosophers drew attention away from data to agents, as when Austin drew attention to performatives and speech acts. But the more long-range critique has been mounted by the work of hermeneutics in the social and humanistic fields; for it restricts the given to the natural sciences and characterizes its own evidence in other ways.2 Nevertheless, even here the turn is not to a giver in the traditional sense. Moreover, the characterization of the evidence as given still determines a wide range of conventional understandings. (Fs)

39a Turning to the semantics of the term "fact," we are familiar with the phrase: "Given the fact that...." which couples the two terms together. Here the term "given" in its combined evidential and hypothetical sense is reinforced by the term "fact" in its evidential sense. "It is a fact that...." is equivalent to "It is actually the case that....," and to "It is a matter of fact that...." This evidential sense is the common current meaning:
Something that has really occurred or is actually the case; something certainly known to be of this character; hence, a particular truth known by actual observation or authentic testimony, as opposed to what is merely inferred, or to a conjecture or fiction; a datum of experience, as distinguished from the conclusions that may be based upon it.3

39b There are nuances in this dictionary account. The term designates a real occurrence ("actually the case"); it is "a datum of experience;" and it is what is "certainly known." This complex meaning of fact has been shaped within the problematic of human cognition, with attention to how realities can be known. It points, therefore, not only to the matter of evidence, to what is there, but also to the human conditions required to certify it. Hence the authority of the phrase: "It is a fact that...." or "It is a known fact that...." Uncontroverted facts are few, however, and the term has been subjected to more and more analysis by theoretically inclined historians, for whom an historical fact is not simply what is there in the evidence, but rather the product of a long process of selection and discrimination that, along with what is there, includes also the interests of the historian, the professional standards of the historical guild, the availability of testimony, the canons of argumentation, the demands of systematic coherence and the spirit of the times. The use of the term "fact" in history is a methodical disciplined use that draws upon an older sense of the term, according to which a fact is not simply what is there, but is rather something that is somehow fashioned or made (from the Latin: facio: do, make). The somewhat archaic "feat" means "a thing done" (from the Old French: fait). In sum, then, the term "fact" has for its foreground, focus and surface what is actually the case, the evidence; but that evidence comes forward from a background of selective attention guided by an implicit understanding of what is significant for a distinctive kind of discourse. To speak of what is there as given fact is to speak within the circle of a discourse that directs attention to the matter insofar as the matter is capable of satisfying certain conditions that are determinded a priori and in accordance with the demands of objective method; that is, the matter must satisfy the set of conditions by which the evidence can be presented in the form of objects standing over against the human knower and in a state of mutual exclusion. This objective sense of the evidence produces the domain in which the given fact is primary. It is important to acknowledge the remarkable results achieved in this way in the natural sciences, and also in some aspects of the human and social sciences. But it needs to be said that such a domain of discourse is not the only domain; and that such a mode of discourse closes out the more primitive semantic atmosphere that arises before us as we reflect upon the gift rather than upon the given. (Fs)

Autor: Schmitz, Kenneth L.

Buch: The Gift: Creation

Titel: The Gift: Creation

Stichwort: Schöpfung - Geschenk; vom einfach Gegebenen zur Selbst-Gabe (Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx); Hegel: Begehren ist wesentlich Selbst-Begehren; Unmöglichkeit eines Geschenkes an sich selbst

Kurzinhalt: The absolute release of the given that characterizes the earlier outlook ("Simply given") has been transferred to the absolute power of the transforming agency ("man alone")... we can't really give anything to ourselves.

Textausschnitt: 41a At the beginning of the nineteenth century a radical shift from the empiricist-phenomenalist epistemology brought with it a drastic revision in the meaning of evidence. Thus, according to Hegel, nothing is simply given; everything is the result of a self-giving carried through from first to last by Absolute Spirit (Geist). In this sense, everything is self-given. The anthropocentric turn taken immediately after Hegel by Feuerbach, Marx and others gave rise to humanisms in which the self at the root of the self-given was humanity itself, either as a totality (mankind) or as a part (a nation, or a class, or especially significant individuals). Liberal belief in progress and socialist faith in revolutionary praxis could both become humanist ideals once it was assumed that the existing social order has been brought about solely by the same sort of agency as modern men possess; so that what has been made by that agency alone is able to be improved upon or destroyed and remade by it alone.1 This is the prinicple of human autonomy that is shared by liberal and revolutionary ideologies alike. Their differences are important, to be sure; for they disagree about the type of man who will be the agent for all of mankind, and they disagree over what means are to be used to accomplish the goal. Nevertheless, in at least one important aspect, they share a trait already present in the earlier sense of the given; for the cast of mind is still emphatically oriented towards the future, towards strictly human possibilities and towards means with which man is fully competent. The absolute release of the given that characterizes the earlier outlook ("Simply given") has been transferred to the absolute power of the transforming agency ("man alone"). This is the root of the justification of the claims made for both liberal progress and revolutionary action. But although these two anthropomorphic forms of self-givenness are the most effective today, Hegel has put the issue of self-givenness with greater power and comprehension; for in addition to the secular sphere which includes human discourse and action along with natural processes, he has claimed to sublate into a single all-embracing process of self-activity the religious sphere of divine action and discourse as well. (Fs)

43a We might ask whether such self-activity ought to be characterized as self-giving? It seems that the terms "self-giving" and "self-given" are somewhat forced. Perhaps that is why many of us react with misgiving when an advertiser urges us "to give yourself the best," by which is meant: "Buy something you don't really need." But after all of the word-magic is over, buying is simply not giving, nor is taking possession receiving. Perhaps the huckster is counting on an old amalgam of greed and the attractiveness of giving and receiving. The magic spell is broken once we realize that we can't really give anything to ourselves. If the gift we receive is wholly at our command and within our power, it is not in any strict sense a gift. In his analysis of desire Hegel insists that the self and not the object desired is the primary term of desire, so that all desire is desire of self, precisely, the self as satisfied.2 And he characterizes self-desire and the activity which strives for self-satisfaction as a struggle to take possession of another. In his general articulation of the process of absolute self-determination he does not characterize it as a "self-giving," but appeals to other categories of action, viz., to positing, self-causation and self-determination. Through these categories he seeks to bring to discourse the movement of reality understood as a process of absolute self-determination, and to express that process as a fully coherent and adequate system of conceptual knowledge.3 Now to talk the language of self-determination is not to talk the language of gift, for to give a gift properly speaking is neither to posit oneself nor to determine oneself in the articulation of a system; it is to embark upon an originative activity that is radically non-systematic. (Fs)

Autor: Schmitz, Kenneth L.

Buch: The Gift: Creation

Titel: The Gift: Creation

Stichwort: Schöpfung - Geschenk; Definition G. (Ungeschuldetheit); G. - Haltung der Annahme; Marcel: Unterschied zw. Passivität und Aufnahmefähigkeit (gratitudo); G. Kommerz (mereo, merx, commercium)

Kurzinhalt: What is a gift? It is a free endowment upon another who receives it freely; so that the first mark of a gift is its gratuity...

Textausschnitt: 44a A reflective understanding of the gift is available to us in the empirical studies carried out over the past century by anthropologists, sociologists and historians of religion.1 But it is also as near to us as our experience of generosity in others and ourselves. I have suggested that the semantic energy of such generosity is quite unlike the relatively unbroken formal necessity to which the empirio-mathematical and systematic sciences aspire on the basis of the given or by way of self-determination. For the term gift is rooted in a domain of significance that is charged with discontinuity and contingency, with risk, vulnerability and surprise. Moreover, the gift points beyond itself to its source, to a more or less definitely apprehended giver. (Fs)

44b What is a gift? It is a free endowment upon another who receives it freely; so that the first mark of a gift is its gratuity. Even the banal conventional acceptance, "Oh! but you shouldn't have; it really wasn't necessary!" expresses this inherent gratuity. There is a quality of absoluteness about a gift in the fullest sense. I have already remarked upon the absoluteness or unconditionality that attaches to the given, viz. its incontrovertibility either by supposition (the hypothetical sense) or in fact (the evidential sense). There is also a kind of absoluteness that is endemic to the process of self-determination according to Hegel (Absolute Spirit) and his successors ("man alone"). The character which the unconditional takes in the gift, however, is just its gratuity. Of course, we ought not to expect to find in the concrete and actual human situation pure interactions of giving and receiving unmixed with other qualities and intentions. The line between a gift and a transaction, a piece of business, is eidetically clear enough, but it is not always clear in life itself, nor should we expect it to be. We know of societies in which a return gift is expected, and whose nature is precisely defined, its value weighed and ranked. Is such a handing over a gift? Or is it an exchange of "presents" undertaken out of social duty, for social advantage, or even as part of a commercial transaction? If something is given out of gratitude, it is caught in the temper of the gift; but if it is in "compensation" for something received or expected, then it falls away from the character of the gift towards that of a transaction. Now a commercial transaction (whether in monetary or other value) is an exchange measured in terms of some standard of merit (mereo, merx, commercium), whereas a gift is in the strict sense unmerited. A gift, then, qua gift does not call for an "adequate return" upon the endowment; such a return is appropriate to investments of a commercial sort. There certainly are mixed donations, most obviously in societies where custom is formalized. We have often given a "gift" because it was expected. There is, of course, nothing wrong in this, and such interpersonal and social interaction makes affairs run more easily; not without danger, however, as shown by the ease with which innocent "gifts" imperceptibly move along a line towards bribery and coercion. Still, external forms of interaction, however empty and shallow they may at times become, remind us of an essential generosity without which life itself dies. In some situations a gift may be expected and be very precisely defined, in an other it may be expected but not so exactly defined, in an other it may not be expected at all, and in still an other it may be unexpected. The two latter unobligatory situations approach most closely the full nature of the gift, whereas the former two might better be called (as I have just suggested) "presents." Although such presents may be all but obligatory, they may still be beneficial, for not all human relationships take the form of giving and receiving. Nevertheless, the more or less obligatory situations do not realize the fullest possibility of the gift. Sometimes the routine manner of accepting presents even with a ritual "surprise" built in testifies to the diminution of that possibility. If presents in such situations do take on the genuine aura of the gift, it will be because the one who presents them has invested them with personal attentiveness beyond what is called for by the formal exchange of presents. Not satisfied with discharging the minimal conditions of the exchange, he or she will have seized its deeper possibility, endowed the presentation with his or her own care, and thereby transformed a mere present into a genuine gift. Such a giver will have made more than a presentation; he will have made a present into a gift. Now, the "extra" beyond the mere present is the gratuity that animates the gift. So far, then, we have recognized the non-obligatory character of the gift. (Fs)

47a Despite the absolute gratuity inherent in the gift as endowment, reciprocity is appropriate to the gift. A gift is meant to be reciprocated. The fundamental reciprocity called for, however, is not the return of another gift. It is rather the completion of the gift being given. Now, for its completion a gift must not only be offered; it must also be received. So that reception is the original reciprocity intended in the very meaning and reality of the gift. Receptivity on the part of the recipient is the primary requisite for the completion of the gift. But the appropriate kind of receptivity is not that of passive inertia. Gabriel Marcel has distinguished between passivity and receptivity.2 The wax undergoes the imprint of the mold and may be said to "receive" it; but such passivity is especially characteristic of physical matter. A truly human mode of receptivity calls for the recipient to rally his human resources in order to make a good reception. For example, when we receive a guest into our home, we are attentive to his needs, so that we might make him "feel at home." Now, it is just such attentive receptivity that is called for by a gift. To accept it absent-mindedly, with indifference or even hostility, would not really be to receive it at all. The gratuity inherent in the gift, moreover, requires that the receptivity be grounded in what Marcel called "availability" (disponibilité), the ontological disposition in which we are ready to accept the unexpected, to make room for it.3 The reception of the gift does not follow from the endowment in the manner of a secure formal inference, but is broken by the radical surprise occasioned by the gratuity at the source of the gift. The primary reciprocation, therefore, is the acknowledgement of that gratuity and the appropriation of the gift as gratuitously given. But, if the gratuity is to be maintained, the reception must be free. In the degree to which the recipient is free in regard to the endowment, in that degree he is able to make an appropriate response. And if he is not free....? Was it not Charles Peguy who prayed to God that the poor might forgive us the bread we give them? The gratuitous character (gratuitus) of the endowment must also animate its reception (gratitudo). Such receptivity is needed to bring the gift to completion. Endowment, then, does not alone realize the gift; gratitude is also called for.4 (Fs)

48a It follows that, in giving and receiving, there is risk for both the giver and the receiver. It may go badly. For the recipient, because the giver may seek to entrap the receiver by his gift, thus abusing the gift. For the donor, because the receiver may repel the advance made by the giver with his gift, thus abusing the generosity. Again, there is risk for the giver: for his gift may be refused, and there is something marred about a gift that is badly received, either accepted gracelessly, or rejected outright. Such a refusal is the original form of non-reciprocity that preys upon and spoils a gift, rendering it not only uncompleted but flawed as well. For when it is refused, a gift, so to speak, bends back upon the giver, leaving him exposed and wounded. In an intimate relationship the refusal is felt as a personal rebuff; in a more public relationship it is likely to become an occasion for uninvited shame. The wound is not only to the dignity of the giver, however, who may be able to tolerate it. More importantly, it may be an offence against the very spirit of generosity itself, cutting off its out-reach. But there is risk to the receiver as well, who is made vulnerable by the initiative of the giver. Risk attaches to reception differently than to endowment. In reception the receiver opens himself up to the intention of the giver and to the significance of the gift. If giving and receiving are stabilized by customary forms in a society, the essential quality of the gift may be lost for both giver and recipient by virtue of the automatism lurking in such forms. But in a less formal society it may also not be easy to give and to receive a gift appropriately. If no relationship exists between the two parties, the gift is meant to establish one; and if a relationship already exists, it may alter that relationship. So that both parties are put at risk in giving and receiving. (Fs)

49a Then, too, there may be an opacity about the gift that creates a certain ambiguity. This is especially true if the gift has its own material value. For a material thing is not transparent; it is opaque, and that opacity may hide as much or more than it reveals of the intentions of the giver. Its independent substance may contain an unforeseen chain of possible consequents. Long after the gift has been given and accepted, it may subsist as a pledge of fidelity or, if dispositions or circumstances alter, as an encumbrance or an embarrassment. Moreover, the material or symbolic value of a gift may distort a relationship, its "weight" unbalancing the relationship or preventing a promising development. And so the risk is rooted not only in the dispositions of the donor and the recipient, but in the opacity of the gift itself. So far, then, we have seen: (1) the gratuity inseparable from the gift as such, (2) the primary reciprocity that brings the gift to completion: gratitude as the free reception of the gift, and (3) the risk inherent in the vulnerability of the parties and the opacity of the gift. (Fs)
50a Just as the original gift may hide the intentions of the giver and hold within it unforeseen consequences, so too a return gift may be opaque. To be sure, it may embody a more or less genuine, even innocent, gratitude, a non-devious show of appreciation, just as the original gift may be a sign of genuine affection. On the other hand, the return may be an attempt to forestall the original gift in order to reject it in its givenness, to cancel out its having been given. The return may intend to reduce the original gift to a mere present, and to "pay off" the "indebtedness" incurred by the reception of the original gift. In this way, the return may be meant to discharge a social obligation and to announce a newly regained freedom from such a debt. And so a return gift may actually embody the outright refusal to accept the original gift, representing the refusal to be obligated, rather than the acceptance of mutual obligations. If not outright refusal, at the very least a gift returned with such intent signifies a grudging acceptance of the original gift. Such an unfree reception expresses the very opposite disposition to gratitude, since to be grateful is to accept something unmerited (gratia, grace) willingly and gladly. On the other hand, many concrete situations remain obscure, even to the parties involved. The ambiguity in an interchange of gifts may remain until some unequivocal act of generosity breaks through and declares the inherently free character of giving and receiving, or until an equally unequivocal act announces by a negative freedom the deliberate refusal to take up the relationship intended by the gift. It is important to remember that there is nothing wrong with the interchange of presents out of mixed motives, for such exchange may well make smooth the pathways of interpersonal, social and even commercial relations. Moreover, not all gifts have to be accepted, anymore than they have to be given. But, if a gift is to reach its maturity, true to type, then it needs to be received with gratitude and not compensated for by a return gift. (Fs)

52a For all that has just been said, nothing is more customary, of course, than the exchange of gifts. We are told that pre-literate men hastened to return another gift in order to re-establish the equilibrium unbalanced by the initial gift;5 and this reaction is not unknown among us today. Once again, a return gift is not by its very nature a refusal or non-acceptance; but it is important to recognize that the gift is not first completed by the return of another gift. For a new gift introduces a fresh act of giving into the relationship. And so it is strictly not a return gift, but a new initiative. To be sure, a return gift is founded upon the reception of the first gift, and so it might be called a gift in return. Indeed, the gratitude with which a genuine gift is properly received itself founds an intentionality that seeks expression. The expression may surface in words and facial expressions, or in gestures or conduct. But it often tends to take tangible form in the offering of a gift in return. What finds expression in such exchange at its best is the mutual affection and respect within which both parties are at once receivers and givers to each other. It is in this way that mutual gifts build community by a cumulative effect. For, as Van der Leeuw has insisted, the do ut des formula associated with religious offerings to the gods is not to be taken as a contractual quid pro quo, but rather in the diffuse creative sense that "I give in order that you might be able to give."6 So that, although the original gift cannot be returned, it can make possible a gift in return. This bond of affection and respect rests upon the original receptivity of giving and receiving. Once again, in the concrete building of community the mutual interchange arises out of a mixture of motives; but the quality of the community is determined in a significant way by the degree to which the exchange participates in the inherent generosity of the gift. (Fs)

Autor: Schmitz, Kenneth L.

Buch: The Gift: Creation

Titel: The Gift: Creation

Stichwort: Schöpfung - Geschenk; ungleiche Wechselseitigkeit zw. Geber und Empfänger; Tradition, Anonymität der meisten Geber; Sartre: Exzess an Existenz; bonum diffusivum sui; Netz einer uneinholbaren Geschenk-Situation (transzendenter Charakter von Geschenk)

Kurzinhalt: If human life is impossible without the web of non-reciprocal, unique but mostly anonymous giving and receiving, then the gift communicates the indispensable generosity of life itself... This transcendental character is inseparable from every ... gift ...

Textausschnitt: 53a When we examine the gift within the concrete milieu of human life, several features are suggestive. First, if we look back over our own lives, and then still farther back through the long career of human existence, we find a disparity between donors and recipients, an inequity and non-equivalence. This non-convertibility is channelled into various traditions: religious, artistic, political, familial, scientific, technical, and others. Now a tradition is a chain of benefactors who pass on or hand over human goods (trado, give over). Such is the concrete human condition that the motives are usually mixed and often obscure, and that the goods are beset with imperfection or worse. Nevertheless, a tradition is a benefaction, and the donors stand in a non-reciprocal relation to the recipients. In regard to most benefactors in this temporal chain, the only way in which the recipients can reciprocate is by receiving the benefits well. Thus, for example, I cannot "repay" Plato or Aristotle or St. Thomas, except by receiving their words thoughtfully, that is, by subjecting them to serious critical attention. It is obvious that time makes any other reciprocity impossible. We remember teachers, too, whom we can never "repay" except by trying to teach others. Reciprocity is called for as in the reception of every gift; but a straightforward reciprocal relation is impossible. We need now to consider the nature of that impossiblity and the reason for it. (Fs)

54a In the atmosphere of freedom that animates the gift as such we have recognized a necessity that is consonant with the gratuity of the gift. It is, of course, a necessity that is radically other than the determinism which opposes indeterminism in physical interaction. This necessity is the original reciprocity that calls for the appropriate reception of the gift in order to bring the gratuitous initiative to completion. We have also recognized the original non-reciprocity that consists of the refusal of the gift. And finally, we have recognized the possibility, even the likelihood, of a founded reciprocity that incarnates itself in offering a gift in return, thereby giving expression and embodiment to the original receptivity in and through a mutual exchange of gifts among co-existent members of a community. The impossibility of reciprocation that we are presently considering is, however, none of these. It is rooted in the disparity between donor and recipient. Moreover, the inequity which founds the impossibility of reciprocating in relation to past benefactors is not simply due to the irreversibility of time. Even when my father was alive, I could not return a father's love to him, except by receiving it as his son and by loving my children with a love not unlike his. And so the non-reciprocality is rooted, not simply in the temporal condition of the giver, but in his ontological status qua donor; and also in the character of the giver (whether a father or an inventor, etc.), in the nature of the gift (whether life or a technique, etc.), and in the actuality and uniqueness of the concrete relationships. The last feature is decisive. A tradition is a chain of actual benefactions. It is not parentage-in-general that gives life, or technical insight that invents a tool; rather, it is this giver and that receiver. The inequity inherent in the gift is rooted in an actual initiative from which the gift issues. Giving and receiving is an existential relation and issues from a unique actuality: this giver, either an individual, a pair or a group. The recipient may become a giver in turn and assume membership in a tradition; but the first giver and the gift remain unique, so that that gift can never simply be "repaid" to the donor or donors in the way that accounts are settled. (Fs)

55a After insisting upon the uniqueness of the giver, be the donor one or many, it seems paradoxical to insist also that most of them remain anonymous to their recipients. But the uniqueness of the giver, that is, that he or they be actually existent individuals or groups, is an ontological condition, required by the actual relationship of endowment that constitutes giving and receiving; whereas the anonymity of most donors to their recipients is an epistemological condition. We recognize a certain diffuseness with respect to those to whom we owe the goods we enjoy. Thousands of unasked for favours have been strewn through my life, and even more have gone unnoticed or unknown by me. I cannot make use of the simplest technique which did not have to be discovered and brought to excellence by nameless craftsmen; so that most of my benefactors remain unknown to me. Some of us can name a few generations of our ancestors, but before long the chain of those who have helped to give us life fades away into obscurity. Such anonymity is constitutive of human life as we know it. The second suggestive feature of the concrete milieu of giving and receiving, then, is the epistemological anonymity of most donors. (Fs)

56a The non-reciprocation by recipients to unique but anonymous donors is inextricable from human life and human society. The third suggestive feature of giving and receiving, then, is precisely the one that offended the young Sartre, viz., what he called the "excess" of existence in contrast to the clean outline of thought.1 An appreciation of the gift, however, welcomes it as unmerited abundance. If human life is impossible without the web of non-reciprocal, unique but mostly anonymous giving and receiving, then the gift communicates the indispensable generosity of life itself. There is, then, in any particular gift, not only its special character, but also a certain transcendental character by which it bears a universal good and releases the generosity without which life is impossible. This transcendental character is inseparable from every genuine gift and is constitutive of man and his world. "It is the nature of the good to spread and communicate itself," wrote St. Thomas, citing the Dionysian refrain: bonum diffusivum sui.2 The transcendental generosity calls for a transcendental receptivity, availability and openness. (Fs) (notabene)

Autor: Schmitz, Kenneth L.

Buch: The Gift: Creation

Titel: The Gift: Creation

Stichwort: Schöpfung - Geschenk; Zusammenfassung: G.; G.: Außen- Innenseite (Band zw. Geber und Empfänger; Gegenwart des Gebers im G.)

Kurzinhalt: In barest outline the simple situation in which a gift is given and received contains three ontological elements, the giver, the gift and the receiver: g sg r... The thing given, then, is not simply a detachable item ... it is he.

Textausschnitt: 57a The foregoing reflection has uncovered the following features of the gift: (1) the gratuity of the gift; (2) the act of endowment by the giver; (3) the original reciprocity: the reception or refusal; (4) the mutual risk to both parties; (5) the additional risk because of the material or symbolic opacity of most gifts; (6) the community built up through the exchange founded upon the original giving and receiving; (7) the non-parity of the parties and the consequent non-reciprocation; (8) the uniqueness and actuality of the relation and the parties; (9) the anonymity of most donors; and (10) the transcendental aspect of the generosity that spreads a sort of diffusive goodness throughout the situation. (Fs) (notabene)
57b In barest outline the simple situation in which a gift is given and received contains three ontological elements, the giver, the gift and the receiver:
g sg r.

57c Something is given (sg) by someone (g) to someone else (r), even while that something (sg) is received by someone (r) from someone else (g). A gift is often thought of merely as something that passes from the ownership of one person into the possession of another. Certainly, we cannot give what is not ours to give. But the pleasure, surprise, and sometimes the solemnity, embarrassment, or uneasiness that attends the reception of a gift points to a deeper flow of energy. We transfer money from one account to another, and furniture from one house to another; but something more moves with a gift. An act of giving initiates a movement that leaves things different than they were. The act is critical in that it divides what has been from what is and will be. It is a crisis (krino, cerno: separate; krisis: decision, issue). It involves giver and receiver in a relationship that has been newly established by the act or in a relationship that has been modified by it. A gift may be more or less meaningful, of course, but its meaning as gift does not derive primarily from its subsistent value, that is, from its independence outside of or apart from the context in which it serves as gift. That is why the widow's mite may be a greater gift than a king's ransom. Inasmuch as it is a gift, it draws the giver as well as the receiver into the relationship. It presents the giver to the receiver. In that presentation the thing acquires an "inside." Now, the "outside" is the independence of the thing given, considered apart from the relationship; and in this exteriority lies it opacity. But the "inside" is the interior bond by which the giver commends himself to the receiver. The lower limit at which something ceases to be a gift is that limit at which all interiority fails, that is, where no giver is present. To an uninvolved spectator a gift might seem to detach itself from one possessor to pass over into the possession of another. But that is to observe only the physics of transference that sometimes accompanies a gift; it is not to grasp the metaphysics of the gift itself. The giver does not hand over something "outside" of himself but under his control; rather, he builds up the thing into a gift by loaning it his own conscious intention as he attends to the receiver. In the act of endowment the giver makes himself present to the receiver; and in this attentive presence he does not only give what is his, he commends himself. In his essay entitled "gifts," Emerson writes:

The only gift is a portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me. Therefore the poet brings his poem; the shepherd, his lamb; the farmer, corn; the miner, a gem; the sailor, coral and shells; the painter, his picture; the girl, a hankerchief of her own sewing. This is right and pleasing, for it restores society in so far to its primary basis, when a man's biography is conveyed in his gift....1
59a In the medieval legend, the juggler brought his performance; and the small child brings her laughter. The thing given, then, is not simply a detachable item, an independent thing in its own right; nor is it to be understood as an external substitute for the giver. It is a token of him, that is, it is not only his: it is he. (Fs)

59b This underscores the risk already mentioned, for if the intended recipient rejects the gift, the giver himself is thereby rejected. The extended hand is a gesture of openness, but it can be brushed aside. In extending a gift, the giver exposes himself, thereby opening up his own being to rejection. If the gift is refused, his openness is betrayed. We have already seen that the recipient is also vulnerable. So, too, our physical posture illustrates this vulnerability and embodies it, for the open arms of a welcoming embrace expose us and stand at the opposite to the closed fist and defensive crouch of someone on his guard. To receive may be to admit more than what is needed and to acquire more than what is possessed. For the receiver the reception is critical because, in receiving the donor himself, he may receive more than he wants. The endowment from which the interiority of the bond issues may be good, ambivalent or worse, so that a gift may be flawed, not only by a refusal or malacceptance on the part of the recipient, but by the intention of the endowment on the part of the donor as well. Once again, it is of such contamination that Peguy speaks when he asks the poor to forgive us the bread we give them. It is not uncommon to feel an obligation attaching to the reception of a gift, and this may be freely taken up in gratitude. Marcel has pointed out that, to the extent to which life is accepted as a gift, it is a call for a pledge of fidelity. The existentialist anti-hero of recent romantic and philosophical literature, on the contrary, protests against the burden of a life which he must bear without having been consulted beforehand. Of course, we often welcome a gift from a tangle of motives, not always without greed, but often with joy at the symbolic presence of the giver who in the gift is brought into a new association with us. Such joy does not, of course, refute the vulnerability or remove the risk; it simply confirms the crisis by its glad surprise. (Fs)

Autor: Schmitz, Kenneth L.

Buch: The Gift: Creation

Titel: The Gift: Creation

Stichwort: Schöpfung - Geschenk; Beispiel: Eltern - Kind (E. als Geben und Empfänger); creatio ex nihilo (absolut unbedingte Ungleichheit zw. Geben und Empfänger)

Kurzinhalt: d: (g - sg - r = d)... D: [ (g - sg - r = D) ]... creation ex nihilo ... the Lord is the donor who institutes the order within which the thing has its value, within which the giver gives, and within which the recipient receives.

Textausschnitt: 61a Suppose now that we modify the simple gift situation by introducing into it a complicating factor. We have already pointed out the inveterate non-parity between donor and recipient; but let us introduce an additional inequality between giver and receiver. Let the receiver be the original donor who makes it possible for the giver to give a gift. The situation becomes that of donor, giver, gift and receiver who is the original donor:
d: (g - sg - r = d).

61b An everyday family example will illustrate the modified situation. The parents of a small child provide it with the very means by which it can give them some little gift. Now, in giving the gift the child actualizes the possibility which its parents have provided. Of course, the child subsumes their endowment and fashions its own characteristic response which can be made only by it, and so it has further determined the possibility through its own initiative and character.1 (Fs)

61c What are we to make of this? Is such a "giving" genuine? It would be quite mistaken, I think, to look upon it as empty sham and mere childish play-acting on the grounds that nothing is actually given to the parents which they did not already have or could easily have; or to see its only value in the formation of habits of generosity for later life. Quite to the contrary, the very "nullity" of the little gift as a value in and of itself renders it transparent, so that perceptive parents can see the true value of the gift to lie in the child's expression of affection. The child gives nothing of value except itself. The gift is the symbolic delivery of itself into the receiving hands of its parents, the "return" of its life to them. Of course, the child may well expect their continuing favour and support, and its motives may be unclear; but in that it is not so unlike an adult. Ontologically, then, the situation reveals these three characteristics: (1) There is inequality in the ontological status and power of the child and its parents; for the parents play a double role, that of setting up the conditions for the child being able to give and that of receiving the gift from it. (2) In many situations the subsistence or independent value of the gift renders it opaque. In this situation the relative "nullity" of the thing given renders the gift transparent, since it has no independent value for the parents. (3) It symbolizes the giver, therefore, making the child present with its love. (Fs)

62a We have been considering a relative inequality so far. Although the parents are the principal causes of the life of the child, they are not its only causes, for the child draws continuing life from other persons and things about it. That is why the child can bring to the parents something they have not given to it, flowers from the field, a water-colour of its own making, or even a smile that reveals its growing personality. But suppose now that we imagine a situation in which there is absolute unconditioned inequality. Here the donor would be the founder of the entire order within which the giver gives and within which the recipient receives. And suppose further that, as in the previous situation, the recipient were the same original donor. Thus,
D: [ (g - sg - r = D) ].

63a The donor institutes the whole order which includes the giver who gives something to the recipient who is the original donor. The donor creates the context within which the giver can give back to the donor something already received from the donor. Now, in this situation nothing can be introduced from outside as from an independent source; the situation is creation ex nihilo. To put it in terms of the Biblical religions, the Lord is the donor who institutes the order within which the thing has its value, within which the giver gives, and within which the recipient receives. "O God, you give that I may give." (Fs)

Autor: Schmitz, Kenneth L.

Buch: The Gift: Creation

Titel: The Gift: Creation

Stichwort: Schöpfung - Geschenk; ex nihilo, Gnade - Aufbegehren dagegen (Comte, Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre: Unglaube als Bedingung für menschl. Wohl; Sünde: Aufbegehren, Verdunkelung d. Verstandes, Untreue

Kurzinhalt: Now what is troublesome about such a situation of absolute inequality is not only his transcendence, but his absoluteness as well ... religion can frame an explanation of its rejection by atheism. (1) Its most immediate interpretation and evaluation ...

Textausschnitt: III
63b What are we to make of this new situation of absolute inequality? It is a situation of which atheistic humanism has made a great deal. If it is understood in terms of the Biblical religions, the traditional believer will undoubtedly concede that God must withhold his full power from creatures lest they perish. "Man cannot see me and live," says the Lord (Ex. 33:19-24); and Jesus says to his disciples: "No one has seen the Father, except he who comes from God." (John 6:46) Indeed, the taboos which function in many religions make a similar point. But the withholding of creative power is itself part of the situation, and so the difficulty remains: In such a structure it seems that the sacred gives what is sacred to the sacred. And if that is the situation, can a human being make any real contribution of his own in such a situation? Can there be any integrity to giving and receiving in such a world? Can religious sacrifice, prayer, offering or the service of God have any significance other than the circle of divinity closing upon itself? And is this what is meant when the Bible says that God created the world in order to manifest his glory? What is human, finite and relative seems overwhelmed by what is sacred, infinite and absolute. The air is as close as an incensed altar. (Fs)

64a As the atheism of the Enlightenment, based upon the alleged self-sufficiency of natural science and mechanism, deepened into the radical atheism of the nineteenth century, based upon the primacy of man, the will to reject such a religious structure expressed itself in a positive demand for unbelief as the condition of human well-being (Comte, Marx, Nietzsche). It was urged, on general grounds and on the basis of criteria external to the religious structure, that religion is really man's concession to his own impotency and that it is merely a fearful and ineffectual hope for security, an illusion in need of therapy, perhaps also a social and political strategy of priestcraft. Within the structure human action would have to be empty, it was alleged, a sham in which a divine self-identity would absorb everything else. (And, indeed, is not the speech of the prophet a heteronomous speech? Does he not utter someone else's word, a strange speech in which what passes between human speaker and human listener is owned by neither? And does not St. Paul boast that he does nothing and that God alone works in him?) Genuine action, including that of giving, seems to require genuine diversity of being, power and will, whereas the structure set out above seems to deny to man his own freedom since it denies to him everything that might be his own work. But even if the structure were not empty, it would be intolerable on its own terms, for even a child can surprise its parents by bringing them something not received from them and which lies outside their power. But within this structure, giving would be both necessary and humiliating. It would be necessary, because the situation of absolute inequality would have to be acknowledged (obligatio, religio); and it would be humiliating, because it would be futile as well as compulsory. The condition of absolute inequality and the divine circularity seem to make any attempt of man to reciprocate to God a vain and empty gesture. Indeed, according to the Christian doctrine of grace the very reception of the original gift is itself first received from God. And indeed, if creation ex nihilo is taken in its radical sense, then not only the endowment but the reception must also be part of the original gift. The case against such a religious situation comes down to this: the radical inequality suffocates man and his possibilities, and the divine circularity empties his giving and all his activity of reality. In denying him creativity, religion becomes man's opium. Unbelief offers itself as the only defence of human autonomy. Indeed, Sartre's characters writhe under the shame of having to receive even from other humans; and Mauriac's Woman of the Pharisees uses her "gifts" to bind everyone to her. How much more would the "gifts" of an absolutely transcendent God bind! (Fs) (notabene)
66a At this point the conception of an absolutely all-powerful God, creator ex nihilo, seems utterly outmoded. Surely progressive man has grown beyond such a primitive notion as he comes of age. Is it not a kindness to put away such an oppressive obstacle to the dignity and freedom that man has already won in any event? It seems only decent, then, to proclaim the death of God. Or, if he is not dead, then at least that he is finite or in process and therefore in mutual interaction with creatures, giving but also receiving from them (W. James, some Whiteheadians). Now what is troublesome about such a situation of absolute inequality is not only his transcendence, but his absoluteness as well. That is why a Hegelian self-developing absolute is not of much help in meeting the atheistic objections. After all, did not Kierkegaard warn us about the danger to the solvency of the individual in an absolute system of the Hegelian sort? (Fs)

66c Of course, traditional Biblical religion can frame an explanation of its rejection by atheism. (1) Its most immediate interpretation and evaluation of the atheistic refusal to accept the religious situation is to understand it as sin, man's turning away from the very conditions of his salvation. (2) Since the refusal is viewed as a failure of knowledge, a darkening of the light, the sin is unbelief. And (3) since it is a breaking of a relationship already given, it is infidelity. On the other hand, in traditional Christianity, the possibility of refusal is seen as the condition for the freedom of accepting the relationship. (Fs)
67a Unbelief sees it differently. We began with a simple situation of giving and receiving and seem to have been caught up into a perverse form of domination. We have extended the category of the gift to a situation of absolute inequality between donor and recipient, and we have done this in order to understand better the meaning of creation ex nihilo; but our strategy seems to have failed, or to have succeeded too well. If man is to communicate with a creator ex nihilo, must he not pay the price of absorption into the circle of the divine creative power? Is not such a God the natural predator of man? Some Christians may throw up their hands and cry out: "But you don't understand the situation! It is not a power-relation at all; it is a love-relation. Our God is a God of Love." But the shift from power to love does not seem, on the face of it as least, to overcome the difficulty. An overwhelming love may be a gentle yoke, yet where in its soft coils is man? To many of our contemporaries there seems no escape but to refuse to respond. Non serviam: I will not give my consent. If God initiates the context and sets the conditions for performance, then man is pressed to play a role that is already determined and not his own. And this evacuation of man seems brought to its extreme by a creation which determines everything about man and the world, even their very possibility. Is it any wonder, then, that Sartre argues more or less as follows: If there were a God worthy of the name, he would have to be all-powerful and free; but then I would not be free; since I will to be free, there is no God?1 Or that Nietzsche writes: If there were gods, how could I endure not to be one; hence there are no gods?2 And a Catholic interpreter even adds, somewhat dramatically perhaps, that Nietzsche here gives expression to a desire for the death of God, a desire rooted in the very condition of being a creature.3 (Fs)

68a The difficulty is neither new nor contrived. Even some Christians find the traditional belief in the absolute transcendent power of God to be an unfortunate bar to the full realization of human freedom and responsibility, dignity and creativity. They also find it to be an impediment to any effective apologia for a contemporary faith. Finally, they find it difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile the appalling evil in the world with the embarrassing claim to God's absolute transcendent power over it. It seems that the "Good News" can survive only if it disengages itself from transcendence, and a fortiori from the most extravagant expression of transcendence, creation ex nihilo. In that survival, however, it is not clear just what survives, since such an immanentized faith will have lost its traditional focus. (Fs)

Autor: Schmitz, Kenneth L.

Buch: The Gift: Creation

Titel: The Gift: Creation

Stichwort: Schöpfung - Geschenk; ex nihilo; Thomas, Gottesbeweise (2 Gegenpositionen -> wirskam dann im späteren Atheismus); Atheist: ex nihilo als Degradierung d. Menschen (doch woher der Maßstab?; Widerspruch: Erniedrigung (Hegel, d. unglückliche Bewusstsein)

Kurzinhalt: ... the atheist interprets the putative humiliation of being-a-creature in terms of a putative integrity that man would have (really can have?) outside that structure...

Textausschnitt: 69a It is noteworthy that St. Thomas selected only two counterpositions to set against his five ways to the existence of God.1 They are: (1) Theoretically, an appeal to God is not needed in order to explain things, since recourse to the principles of nature, on the one hand, and to the freedom of man, on the other, suffices. And (2) practically, if there were an all-powerful God, he could not have tolerated so much evil in his creation, unless he were himself a monster. The subsequent career of atheism has played out both of these objections. The scientific atheism of the Enlightenment professed disbelief on putative cognitive grounds: God was neither knowable nor needed to explain man and the world. To this Voltaire added his scorn for the reputed benevolence of God. The humanistic atheism of Nietzsche and Sartre professed disbelief the better to defend human freedom, dignity and responsibility. Following Feuerbach, Marx raised human praxis to the first principle of social reconstruction and explanation ("man alone"). So that these later humanistic atheisms are those of will and action.2 They are practical more than theoretical in origin and intent. Nevertheless, the decision of the atheistic humanist to eradicate belief in God is based upon his understanding of the situation in which an allegedly all-powerful God stands over against and above man and his world. (Fs)

70a It seems appropriate, then, to attempt to provide a cognitive solution of the issues raised by the atheist's understanding of creation ex nihilo. These issues arise in the face of the radical inequality that is inseparable from absolute giving and receiving. The contemporary atheist puts them in the form of two objections: (1) A creator ex nihilo would make impossible the ontological otherness of man, his self-subsistence and independence; and (2) it would make impossible man's freedom, his effective agency, autonomy and creativity. In a word, in such a situation man would be robbed of his genuine possibilities and his responsibility. (Fs) (notabene)

70b The atheistic humanist alleges that man would suffer a radical humiliation in such a situation. Now humiliation or indignity is a state of degradation. In its ordinary meaning degradation implies a process from a prior, more worthy state; and in its ordinary meaning a state presupposes a subject. Such a state is posterior to and dependent upon its subject; so that the subject itself bears the capacity for a different and better state. The atheistic humanist, however, raises humiliation to transcendental import. He alleges that if there were a creator ex nihilo, then the human condition would be one of abject and total dependence; so that the only worthy response on man's part would be to abolish the very structure itself through the free production of meaning out of himself. (Hence, Marx's "man alone," and the secular atheisms of Nietzsche and Sartre.) Moreover, the atheist refuses to avoid the problem by relativizing the creator, as though it could become a more or less equal party in interaction with man. In any event such a relativism abandons the issues by abandonning the conception of a creator ex nihilo. The atheist, on the other hand, does not ignore the conception; he seeks to deny its validity. He doesn't want compromise; he wants refutation. (Fs)

71a To attribute humiliation to someone is to measure his present condition by reference to some other condition in which he might have been or could yet be. When the atheist says, therefore, that man is humiliated if he is a creature, he measures his being a creature in comparison with another possibility, viz., that of not being a creature. That is, the atheist interprets the putative humiliation of being-a-creature in terms of a putative integrity that man would have (really can have?) outside that structure. Now this is not to find a defect within the creational structure taken in its own terms. It is to state his own conviction in favour of one structure (non-creational) against another (creational); but it is not to put forth an objection against creation. Instead of making an objection against creation on its own grounds he covertly asserts his own position, viz., that man has an intrinsic dignity only insofar as he is not created. This surreptitious (and perhaps unwitting) transference from one structure to the other is the source of the allegation that creation ex nihilo contradicts itself when it affirms both the integrity of the creature and its absolute dependence. This is certainly an important and legitimate issue: How can a creature be absolutely dependent in its being and also have ontological integrity? Is this a contradiction or is it not? That is a fair question. (Fs) (notabene)

72a The atheistic humanist, for his part, holds that the double assertion is contradictory. But he attempts to show this by absolutizing some form of what Marcel called "the techniques of human degradation."3 Now, any attempt to absolutize them does, indeed, end in contradiction. Suppose that the creator is an absolute tyrant. Then, if the one suffering humiliation (the creature) is in fact a mere shadow, a plaything, simply a puppet without integrity, the humiliation rebounds upon the torturer and verges on self-mutilation. Sadism turns into masochism, and the creator-tyrant is discredited. If, on the other hand, the one suffering humiliation has even a minimal subsistence, if he is even a slight self, then a cry of indignant protest against the torturer rises in our throats: You have no right to the absolute disposal of the sufferer! And once again the creator-tyrant is discredited. Up with the banner of atheistic humanism, down with the dehumanizing belief in a creator ex nihilo! It is true that the attempt to absolutize humiliation bears the contradiction by which the creator-tyrant needs the otherness of the sufferer (the creature) in order simultaneously and in the same process both to obliterate the other (rendering it worthless) and yet to sustain the other (in order to visit the degradation upon it). Long before Sartre and atheistic humanism, Hegel had parlayed the drama of this conflict into the provisional stalemate of the "unhappy consciousness,"4 and had pointed out the contradiction inherent in this state of mind. Moreover, the one-sided nature of the resolution proposed by atheistic humanism is manifest in its anthropocentric weight and the arbitrary restrictions it places upon the central conceptions of freedom and power. Then, too, the purported "objections" against creation ex nihilo are really assertions of a point of view, which imports into the creational structure the very conceptions of autonomy and heteronomy, of power and dependence, that are guaranteed to undermine it. (Fs)

Autor: Schmitz, Kenneth L.

Buch: The Gift: Creation

Titel: The Gift: Creation

Stichwort: Schöpfung - Geschenk; ex nihilo; Pluralität d. Sch.; Wechselseitigkeit in einem klassischen System (Gleichgewicht d. Kräfte) - Nicht-Wechselseitigkeit (Geber - Empfänger: Leben, Freiheit, Wissen); Empfangen als Erniedrigung: Widerspruch

Kurzinhalt: Since man is a member of the ultimate dynamic plurality, giving and receiving are so ... radical that they constitute the very condition for being human. To protest against the reception, saying that it is a humiliation, is to protest again ...

Textausschnitt: 73a To determine whether in truth there are genuine objections to creation ex nihilo that show it to be wrong or inadequate in important ways, the meaning of creaturely integrity and creative power need to be examined afresh within the context of creation ex nihilo itself. Only then can we relate it to the whole of our experience and thought. (Fs)

73b It is necessary, first of all, to continue the consideration of the challenge of atheistic humanism, since if it were to carry the day in terms of the creational structure itself, as it claims to do, then creation ex nihilo would be condemned out of its own mouth. And so we ask, within the creational structure itself, whether the absolute dependence of the creature is or could be a condition of essential and radical indignity and humiliation. Now, within the creational context, the creatureliness of the creature, its being-a-creature, is not a received condition which it has; nor, strictly speaking, is being-a-creature even a received condition that it is; rather, the received condition itself is it. The dependence of the creature is absolute because it is dependence upon that very generosity that in its turn is the original condition of the creature's very being. If the creature were humiliated by this, then its very being would be in a totally deprived and absolutely abject state; so that the creature would be nihil, rather than ex nihilo. Now, in touching upon St. Anselm's discussion, I suggested that creation is the original gift, a giving out of absolute privation. It follows that the creatureliness of the creature (the received condition) is not a nullity, but is rather the ingress of the creature into being; so that, on the basis of that ingress, can be seen the absolute nihil that was the creature's meontological predecessor. The creature is ex nihilo, that is, it stands outside of absolute privation by virtue of the creative generosity. This creative generosity is the ground for the absolute inequality between creator and creature, that very inequality that has raised the threat to the creature's integrity. But that same creative generosity is also the ground for the very being of the creature. (Fs)

74a Moreover, since the creative generosity does not extend simply to individuals singly, but in creating them creates their world as well, the creature is in fact a member of the ultimate plurality, the created universe.1 More than that, it is by its very nature and being a member for this plurality. (Fs)
75a It participates in the plurality, and the plurality in and through it. Now, no member of a plurality can be humiliated by the primary condition that makes possible (1) the plurality essential to the member, (2) its membership in the plurality, and (3) its own being as well. That is, not unless humiliation were the first and the last word, and every word between, engulfing the plurality and its members. Nor is it possible to isolate man, this "thinking reed," and arrogate to him the foundations of truth and value, in the manner recommended by atheistic humanism. For his interdependence with non-human as well as human beings is so patent and so indispensable for his own being, worth and thought that it would be nothing short of impossible for him to produce the intelligible and the valuable out of radically anti-intelligible and valueless absurdity. In the context of creation, there can be no plurality, no relation of membership and no members to be humiliated without the original founding endowment. Humiliation and indignity are relative to that original presupposition. They are specific evils that rest upon a transcendental generosity. They are founded upon, derivative from and ontologically posterior to the foundational ingress into being. In creation, the original endowment makes the plurality and its individuals both possible and actual; and that endowment itself cannot be identified with humiliation, since it is the presupposition of any such secondary condition. In a word, there must be something in order that something might be humiliated. The endowment is the presupposition of any such possibility. Subsequent factors would have to be introduced to account for humiliation. (Fs)

76a Of course, it might be suggested that the original creative endowment is just for the sake of having a creature to humiliate. Indeed, this has been suggested by the dark meditation upon divinity in Brownings's Caliban upon Setebos:
Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-first.
Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.

76b An absurd world for the victims, to be sure! I will argue shortly, however, that cruel tyranny could not sustain the creature in its integrity; and the full intent of creation ex nihilo is to maintain the integrity of the creature as well as its absolute dependence. Both atheistic humanism and tyrannical theism travel along the same circle: either God or man, but not both. (Fs)

76c We have been discussing the ontological features of a dynamic plurality because the total effect of the creative activity is not a loose collection of individuals; it is a world of created beings. The created world is the totality of all totalities, the most extensive dynamic plurality of beings and their factors. Within it there is movement, interaction, communication, and, in the broadest and deepest sense, giving and receiving. For these are endemic to any dynamic plurality, and without them it can neither be established nor maintained. Within the world we can distinguish different kinds of plurality: for example, the natural, the organic and the social forms of organization. Each has its proper mode of communication, and can be examined according to its terms. But it is also possible to examine the world as a whole in terms of the mode of communication appropriate to one of its forms of organization: for example, the physical and chemical transference of energy characteristic of the world of inanimate nature is operative in the inner-directed transformation of the environment carried out by organisms, and also in the behavioural interaction between members of animal or human society. Within the limits of such an analysis a certain equivalence of impetus and resistance is observable in the exchange of physical and chemical energy. Then, too, organic life is maintained by a balance of inner and outer forces. And mutual exchange is even essential to human society (commercium). In terms of physics and mechanics, a billiard ball's impetus is met by the resistance of the ball it strikes; in terms of physiology, there is stimulus and response; and in sociology, there are the dynamics of social interaction. Within the limits of such an analysis we can report a sort of equivalence in kind and degree between the impulse and the reception at impact. This is what we mean when we say that, in a closed classical system, an action is countered by an equal and opposite reaction; or when we say that ideally stimulus should equal response. (Fs)

77a Yet, as I have already remarked, there is nonreciprocity as well in each of these forms of organization and communication, that is, in the natural, organic and social. It is possible to regard the second law of thermodynamics as a minimal expression of a certain irreversibility and non-reciprocity in the flow of energy, whereby the free energy available for further transformation decreases with each transformation (entropy), though this law rests upon certain presuppositions about the nature of the physical universe. The ontological difference between giver and receiver, the "distance" opened up by the non-reciprocity that is inseparable from giving and receiving, increases with the increasing complexity of the plurality and its members. Moreover, the non-reciprocity is not one of entropy or decline in possibilities. When parent organisms give life to their young, whatever satisfaction may come to the parents by reciprocation from the young (in the case of the higher animals, for instance, which rear them), it is different in kind, weight and degree from the gift the young receive from their parents. The non-reciprocity is greater, because it is a difference of another order: life itself is given, whereas some satisfaction is received in turn. And so, too, the health restored to me by the physician is not matched by the fee I pay him. The distance can be acknowledged (and this, indeed, is part of the appropriate reception), but it cannot be traversed. The receiver is indelibly marked by having received what cannot be returned. It is true of all such values: power, life, health, freedom and knowledge. None of these fundamental values can be reciprocated, although they can be handed on. Such non-reciprocity is built into the dynamic plurality of existence and life at its deepest and broadest level. It is the indispensable transcendental generosity needed for the establishment and maintenance of a dynamic plurality, the profligacy that is inseparable from it. (Fs)

79a Now the world which results from creation is not a mere loose collection of units which happen to produce the plurality as a resultant sum. Rather, the plurality is the units and their being together.2 Indeed, their being units at all includes their being units of a plurality. Now this mutuality of the units is the indispensable condition for their being members of the plurality, and since their very nature (ratio) is such that they could not be without being members, this mutuality is the indispensable ground of their being as units. Since it is not possible to disengage their membership from their simply being (except by an abstract analysis which deliberately leaves out their membership, and thereby distorts their nature), it follows that the radical generosity required by the dynamic plurality is the original condition for the basic, shared values that are constitutive of the plurality itself and of the units as well. In any communication within the plurality, there is a specific character that is realized insofar as things are themselves units, or groups of units, and there is a transcendental character ingredient in the same communication insofar as things are members of the plurality and participants in its inherent liberality. That is why we have been able to discern in a gift, in addition to its specific values, transcendental values which it embodies and communicates, and which are fundamental conditions for the plurality, the membership and the units. These transcendental values include existence, power and life, but also individuality, relation and otherness. Moreover, these values are not merely minimal conditions for the units or merely external to them. On the contrary, they play an intrinsic role in enriching the unit's membership in the plurality. None of these ultimate values, nor for that matter their corresponding disvalues, neither good nor evil, is something to be transferred from one unit to another as a detachable object. They are values or disvalues, because they are not indifferent conditions; they do not leave the plurality and its units untouched. They are the goods or evils on which the very survival or annihilation of the plurality itself depends, and the very well-being or devaluation of its units. (Fs)

80a The condition for a dynamic plurality of beings to exist is that they receive from others. Since man is a member of the ultimate dynamic plurality, giving and receiving are so pervasive and radical that they constitute the very condition for being human. To protest against the reception, saying that it is a humiliation, is to protest against the very conditions that make human being and human dignity possible; and to protest against the very conditions that make the protest possible. But this is to embrace contradiction and absurdity. Giving and receiving are the radical conditions without which man could not be. They are the foundation of his being, his own ontological good. All other goods are subsequent to that. The original endowment of which creation ex nihilo speaks is the first and indispensable ontological good without which other values and disvalues could not count because they would not be at all. All further considerations are founded upon that original good. In the human order, the specific objects which men hand one another are symbols of a deeper giving and receiving, for they are signs that embody the generosity of their shared being as members of a dynamic plurality. The gift, then, is the medium in and through which giver and recipient affirm their being-in-the-world-together. It is the place of the celebration of their co-presence. (Fs) (notabene)

81 We need to see, however, not only that giving and receiving are indispensable and integral to being human, but also how it is possible to receive everything and yet to maintain an intrinsic dignity and integrity. If the creator's giving and receiving presupposes an absolute inequality, how can man receive with dignity and respond with integrity? We must take our cue from human experience itself. Human beings are involved in a variety of relationships, but there is one mode of relation that is constitutive of consciousness itself, and it promises the possibility of association between unequals that is compatible with the integrity of both parties to the relation. Adapting Aristotle's saying about the soul, St. Thomas frequently remarks that it can in a manner become all things.3 This capacity also led Hegel to find the distinctive character of spirit (Geist) in something like consciousness, saying that only consciousness could tolerate the contradiction of the other, recognize its otherness, pass over into it, and yet retain and recover itself in the process.4 More recently, phenomenologists, existentialists and others have emphasized the intentional character of consciousness (conscience de.... ), in that consciousness is attentive to the other as it is in its otherness. (Fs) (notabene)

82a Objectification has frequently been criticized insofar as it has been understood to be an attitude of the mind whereby it posits its objects as abstract products of its hidden methodological presuppositions, or as something alien standing over against its own subjectivity. But the spirit of objectivity in its best sense is the inherent and distinctive thrust of consciousness towards realizing its own capacity through opening itself out on to the world of beings.5 Now, such an objectivity requires that consciousness be intentionally present to another in terms of the other's own being. Thus, for example, a scholar only comes to know a subject if he lives with it, gets inside of it, so to speak, becomes intimate with its fuller meaning, as the entymologist Fabre lived with his beloved insects. In the relationship, the enquirer's curiosity, his methods and criteria as well as the face which the thing turns toward him, all of this sets the slant of his knowledge. Still, to the degree that he is to succeed in knowing his subject at all, to that extent he must bring a readiness to submit to the appropriate demands of the other. It is as though the subject-matter were to say to him: "This is what you must do, if you would really come to know me." Caught up by the theoretical power of his presuppositions the enquirer may be tempted to shut up the evidence before it is finished speaking to him; indeed, it never finishes. Listen to Fabre as he calls to his insects:

Come here, one and all of you you, the sting-bearers, and you, the wing-cased armour-clads take up my defence and bear witness in my favour. Tell of the intimate terms on which I live with you, of the patience with which I observe you, of the care with which I record your actions. Your evidence is unanimous: .... and whoso cares to question you in his turn will obtain the same replies.6
83a It is a homely example; but, no matter how complex and interwoven with subjectivity and with theoretical preoccupations the enquiry may be, its subject-matter places an unconditional demand upon the enquirer that he respect its integrity, even as he enters into relationship with it. Indeed, if the subject-matter of the enquiry does not retain its integrity or if the enquirer does not respect it, he will inevitably distort it and fail to know it, for he will fail in that degree to be present with it just as it is. For although knowledge must have its subjective moment (self-consciousness), it must also have its objective moment. Now this latter is the requirement that the knower be with the known on the terms of the known. The knower must submit to the discipline of the thing to be known. (Fs)

Autor: Schmitz, Kenneth L.

Buch: The Gift: Creation

Titel: The Gift: Creation

Stichwort: Schöpfung - Geschenk; ex nihilo; Liebe, Güte - amor benevolentiae (3 Aspekte)

Kurzinhalt: Benevolence, therefore, is neither egoism nor altruism. For it is not only a shift of weight or expansion to a second centre, it is also the qualitative transformation of the very nature of self-satisfaction. In benevolence the lover takes his own joy ...

Textausschnitt: 84a There is an aspect of discipline in love, too, and especially in that love that is the capacity to associate with another in a way that respects the integrity of the other. There is a kind of love that is a presence to another in which the lover is concerned to wish the other well: amor benevolentiae. It has three aspects: the risk of generosity, the satisfaction of subjectivity and the discipline of objectivity. Benevolence obviously contains an ingredient of generosity within it, and the ungenerous are incapable of extending it to others. Generosity is that spirit of abandon with which the lover breaks beyond the limits of autonomy and heteronomy, beyond the seemingly safe territory where mine is mine and yours is yours, into an intentional relation wherein the good of the beloved is in the lover's concern without being in his possession. It is as though the lover has adopted a second centre, as though he has redistributed his concern, so that the good of the beloved has equal weight (pondus) with his own. (Fs)

84b But there is an aspect of subjective satisfaction, too. The ingredient of subjectivity appropriate to benevolent love is the satisfaction enjoyed by the lover in his association with the beloved as he gives himself over to the spell of the beloved. It is obvious that the element of subjective satisfaction needs to be restrained, lest it overwhelm the beloved and corrupt the relationship. But neither should the element of satisfaction be wholly suppressed, as is suggested by some of the talk about "being a person for others." It is misleading to obscure the ingredient of self that is essential to any healthy love. For without self-worth, the lover has nothing to offer the beloved, and without self-satisfaction the lover can take no joy in the goodness of the beloved. If the lover recognizes the element of self in his love, he is the less likely to let it intrude surreptitiously into the relationship to the injury of both parties. Benevolence, therefore, is neither egoism nor altruism. For it is not only a shift of weight or expansion to a second centre, it is also the qualitative transformation of the very nature of self-satisfaction. In benevolence the lover takes his own joy in what is good for the other; he enjoys the good that the beloved enjoys; he takes satisfaction in what is genuinely satisfactory for the other. (Fs)

85a Now, it is just here that the discipline of objectivity shows itself in benevolent love. For genuine love is the giving of oneself with respect for the other. It is not an indiscriminate giving without consideration for the capacity and freedom of the recipient. False love is giving with an abandon that is still centered in a hidden way upon a self that has not yet attained an objective respect for the integrity of the other. Genuine love may not reckon the cost to the giver, but it does reckon the cost to the recipient. When such love is properly received, it can be a strength that helps to bring about the genuine possibilities of the beloved, even possibilities that would not exist without the love. False love, on the other hand, realizes the possibilities of the lover by betraying the integrity of the beloved. Genuine love is desire under the inner constraint of the beloved; it is subjective passion disciplining itself creatively in and through the presence of the beloved. In a word, then, there are relationships in which there can be the giving of oneself to another while respecting the integrity of the other. Through them, it is possible to give without usurpation and to receive without humiliation. The tension and the risk that attend all-giving and receiving are still there, for without them there would be no generosity. But the willing discipline of objectivity is there too; and, when all goes well, the transformed satisfaction of subjectivity is present in benevolent love as well. These three are constitutive of this distinctive and highly determinate relationship; so that, through understanding and love, we have access to the transcendental as well as to the specific energies operative in giving and receiving, and even to an obscure hint of love that exceeds any we are capable of. (Fs)

Autor: Schmitz, Kenneth L.

Buch: The Gift: Creation

Titel: The Gift: Creation

Stichwort: Schöpfung - Geschenk; ex nihilo; Generosität - schöpferische Kausalität (identifikation von Macht und Liebe); Analyse d. wahrhaft Menschlichen - Analyse d. Wirklichkeit; metaphysische Interiorität; Böses: Unmöglichkeit ohne Integrität d. Geschöpfs

Kurzinhalt: In terms of creative causality, generosity expresses itself as the power that brings creatures and their world ex nihilo into being.... The interpretation of creative causality through the category of gift ... restores a metaphysical interiority ...

Textausschnitt: 86a The preceding analysis is meant to have shown that an absolute giving is compatible with the integrity and dignity of the creature and with the freedom of human receptivity. It has sought to clarify the conception of creation ex nihilo. If we were to put that conception into play, we would have to show that there is actual creation, and this would require us to mount a proof that would show that the transcendental aspects of giving and receiving can be grounded only in an original giving whose source can only be the actually existing creator, this "most liberal giver." Such a proof lies beyond the intent of the present lecture, which is attempting to analyze and clarify the meaning of gift as the mode appropriate to creative causality. In furthering that clarification we need to outline the way the three aspects of benevolent love function in creative causality: creative generosity, creative subjectivity and creative objectivity. (Fs)

87a Generosity is inseparable from all giving. It is the primal reality at the source of the breaking forth accomplished in giving; for giving is a deed: it is done, something is given. Generosity nourishes the reality of power that is fused with the intentionality of intelligence to form the communication. In terms of creative causality, generosity expresses itself as the power that brings creatures and their world ex nihilo into being. Now, such a creating power is not an extravagant display of physical or trans-physical force, a sort of cosmic super-power, a celestial megaton bomb in reverse. Creative activity is not to be understood in terms of the lowest common denominator among the modes of power. (Fs)

87b Nor is it to be understood in terms of an indeterminate concept of causality. Such a general concept of causality is simply not definitive enough to sustain the unique and unexampled determinacy of creative causation. This may not have been so obvious as long as the medieval notion of causality was rich enough to carry implicitly the sense of the higher modes of causality; as long, for example, as it was generally accepted that intelligence and being are convertible (ens et verum convertuntur), that the exercize of power was at root the activity of intelligence, and that cosmic power was associated with order and wisdom. With the subsequent modern reduction of causal power to that exercized in physical nature alone, however, the general concept of causative power has become increasingly empty and unable to support the requirements of creation ex nihilo. (Fs)

88a In this present essay, the turn to the category of giving is not meant to place an anthropological or "merely subjective" restriction upon causative power; quite to the contrary, it intends the opening out of the category of causality to richer and more definitive forms and potencies. And we are justified in taking this turn on the general grounds that what holds really and truly at the level of human life is as apt for analysis of the ultimate nature of reality as is the methodologically restricted concept of power-as-physical-force operative in the objective consideration of physical nature. The objectification of nature (and by extension, of the human as well) is promoted today with impressive results. It proceeds in the name of external criteria of verification and in accord with the acceptance of the world as a set of given facts (data) to give its account of reality in terms of external relations. Such objective study will and must go on. It is a precious contribution to our understanding, and in the form of scientific technology it alone can provide the means for meeting many of the problems of contemporary existence. But we have seen that it takes the world as a starting point from which to construct experiments, hypotheses and techniques that seek to control the repetible dimensions of things. Its external grasp of evidence does not carry us into the region of ultimacy, so that ultimate questions are then left to religious faith (bereft of the support of rational understanding), or what is at least as likely to the misapplication of a scientific theory to an inappropriate field, or what is worse to vague opinions confirmed by shifting opinion polls. The withdrawal over recent centuries of much of philosophical and scientific intelligence from the interiority of nature is not simply a particular change in philosophical theory; it is the retreat of discourse from an entire intellectual domain. It is not uncommon today to counteract the withdrawal of interiority from nature (objectification) by a process of subjectification that heightens man's own interiority. This is the modern anthropological turn characteristic of recent centuries in European and American culture.1 (Fs) (notabene)

89a The interpretation of creative causality through the category of gift, on the other hand, restores a metaphysical interiority to nature, as well as to the natural in man. By metaphysical interiority I mean that which accounts for the intelligibility without which nature could not enter into scientific and philosophical enquiry; that which accounts for the serviceability by which it can play its role in human technology, meshing with human purpose; that which accounts for its availability to religion in its sacraments and symbols, and in other ways, to literature, art and music; indeed, to what Hegel called the works of spirit. But, first of all, by the metaphysical interiority of nature I mean its own immediate inner ground of integrity, the proper foundation upon which it rests its own "right" to claim respect. Now, this metaphysical interiority cannot be confirmed or even reached by external methods of objectification. It is a rich metaphysical texture grounded in the intimate presence of the creative cause to the things of nature, and to the natural in man. In and through the category of gift we can recover the metaphysical interiority of nature, since the analysis permits us to see the outlines of a causality that is fully determinate, both as to its mode: it is intelligent, voluntary and loving, and as to what is communicated: the most determinate and decisive actuality, the very existence of the world and its creatures. (Fs)

90a Now, this highly determinate causality is characterized by the identification of power with love. Often enough we encounter power in indifferent, uncaring or even hostile form. This is the dark mystery of contending forces that threatens even the conception of benevolent love when it is understood as absolute creative power. It is the scandal not of the mere possibility of evil but of its actual existence. Within the limits of this lecture, and mindful of the lectures given on this topic already in this series, it is only possible to remember that far from being able to "solve" the "problem" of evil all of one's intellectual acuity and spiritual courage is required simply to contain it, even in the order of analysis. But by a paradox that is the ground for hope, it should be recognized that there could be no evil in a universe created by an absolutely benevolent love, if its creatures did not possess their own integrity, and were not bent upon realizing their own possibilities, including for some of them their free possibilities. But so they were made. Indeed, if creatures as we know them lacked their own integrity, it is difficult to see how they could be the product of an absolutely benevolent love. Here we are at the centre of the ontological tension between creator and creature, a tension that the benevolent love could have avoided by not creating at all, but which it sustains rather than removes. What great good is to be realized by this universe, that a benevolent love should create it in the face of the possibility might we even say, the likelihood of great evil? (Fs)

Autor: Schmitz, Kenneth L.

Buch: The Gift: Creation

Titel: The Gift: Creation

Stichwort: Schöpfung - Geschenk; ex nihilo; Möglichkeit d. Bösen; Verhältnis: Schöpfer - Geschöpf: relatio rationis - relatio realis; Opfer: Liebe d. Schöpfers (2. Aspekte)

Kurzinhalt: ... the creator can receive a wound to his being as a lover. In his creative activity he makes an offer of being, and in that offering he exposes himself as a potential victim of malacceptance...

Textausschnitt: 91a It is against this sombre backdrop, then, that we must place the identification of creative power with radical love. There can be no such essential identification of human power with human love. Both remain in some way abstract; this is the tension peculiar to the creature, and of which man is especially aware. To be sure, the human lover does not make an empty gesture of good will when he "gives spiritual support" to his beloved. He rallies his resources and powers, and expends the totality of his energies to sustain the beloved if need be. Nevertheless, a human lover finds his actual power tragically limited, so that he feels an uneasy gap between what he wills for the beloved and what he can actually do for the beloved. This is because human love is the fusion of actual energies with an intention that may remain unfulfilled. The non-coincidence of intent and actuality can be a source of anguish for the human lover. The absolute creative power, on the other hand, can voluntarily withhold itself for the good of the creature and its integrity or freedom. But, just because it is absolute, there can be no necessary distance between intention and fulfillment, no restriction upon creative power, no emptiness in creative intent: power and intent are one and the same. In creation, a "most liberal giving" institutes or establishes ex nihilo creatures and their world. It thereby also constitutes and sustains them. This absolute fusion of power and love, of reality and intent, of effective determination and total concern brings about the existence of creatures whose integrity even the creator freely respects in keeping with the very character of his benevolence. (Fs)

92a Does risk remain for such an absolute giver? The answer must be: yes; for at the centre of creative giving lurks the dark possibility of evil. Just because the creator is a lover and just because creation is the generosity of a thoroughly radical love, just because that love respects the integrity and dignity of the creature, and just because that love wills into existence a beloved who can respond in freedom and therefore, badly or well, how could such a universe be and yet not carry within it the possibility of evil? To be sure, a bad reception of the creator's gift does not inflict upon him a wound to his being in its subsistence; just as, in many instances, a human lover does not lose something of his proper being, the being he possessed before he offered love and was refused. But, as with human lovers, so too with divine, the creator can receive a wound to his being as a lover. In his creative activity he makes an offer of being, and in that offering he exposes himself as a potential victim of malacceptance. Of course, because the creative offer of being is absolutely radical, it would be quite wrong to imagine that, before the offer is actually made, the creature waits in some state of possibility in order to accept or reject the gift. For the recipient of that radical gift only comes into being with it. No creature is consulted before it is created, because there is no creature to consult. We are, indeed, at the beginning. Nor does any creature ask to be created, or hover in the wings, like an actor worrying about his lines and waiting to be called on stage. Still, we are justified in speaking of creation as an offer. For it is freely given being, a sort of ontological credit advanced for subsequent realization in and through the career of the creature. (Fs)

94a Moreover, since the "most liberal giver" does not give out of need, but rather for the good of the recipient, the evil that comes through creaturely malfeasance is the evil that infects the creature and not the creator. The creator is "moved" by the fate of the creature because of his own concern for the creature. The "movement," to speak improperly, is intransitive; that is, it is not brought about by the transitive action of the creature. Indeed, even with human lovers, the plight of the beloved does not affect the lover in the same way as a productive force effects a product. The relation is intransitive in its essential nature. The intransitivity of the relation of knowing and loving does not mean that the knower and the lover are not attentive to what is known and loved. On the contrary, it is only in and through such intransitivity that there can be knowing loving concern. In creative activity there is a unique intransitivity. For, because he is absolute, the creator knows and loves the creature out of his knowledge and love of himself, and not out of any dependence upon the creature. His concern for the creature rises up in him through his own unconditioned self-knowledge and self-love. It is not that the creator is unconcerned with the fate of the creatures he has made; quite to the contrary, his concern flows from his unconditioned generosity. (Fs)

94b We have come again by another route upon the absolute inequality between creatures and their creative donor; and also upon the absolute non-reciprocity between the creative donor and the creaturely recipient. The medieval schoolmen expressed this absolute non-reciprocity by saying that God is related to creatures only by a relation of reason, whereas creatures are related to God by a real relation of causal dependence and participation.2 To this we can add the modern sense of intentionality, which is a kind of intransitivity, and according to which relations of knowing and loving concern are intentional. The relation of God to creatures is intentional, then, not only in the sense that it is not a real reciprocity after the manner of an interaction in which both parties undergo transmutation; but rather because the relation of God to creatures is like a relation of consciousness. Moreover, it is like a relation of consciousness that, out of its own generosity rather than out of any dependence upon creatures, is fully attuned to them in loving concern. The category of gift helps us to understand such knowing and loving concern, and to understand as well the nature of the risk undertaken by the generosity that characterizes radical creative love. (Fs)

95a Because of the absolute, unconditioned and unconditional nature of creative love, it might seem that neither subjective satisfaction nor objective discipline could be associated with it. But in truth we can speak of a divine self-worth that is absolute and of a self-satisfaction that is the unconditional joy of the creator in the good of the beloved, a joy that springs from no need in the creator, but rather out of the admiration and pride of the worker in his workmanship. The Biblical tradition gives religious expression to this joy: for the Lord looked at what he had made and saw that it was good, and so seeing he blessed it. And the Biblical tradition once again gives religious expression to the manifestation of this joy: it is the glory of God the creator shining before his creation. In philosophical terms, the moment of self-satisfaction, already transformed in human benevolent love into a joy for the sake of the other, now in creative self-satisfaction is utterly transformed into a concern that is identical with the genuine good of the creature. So that the glory and the goodness, the subjectivity and the objectivity of creative love is wholly and entirely the integral good of the creature willed by the creator. (Fs)

96a It may be well to emphasize once again, however, that the objectivity in creative love is not a condition imposed upon the creator by the creature, for then the creative love would not be absolute and unconditioned. The objectivity operative in creative love, then, is not, as with human lovers, a conditioned objectivity in which the lover stands in real, although intransitive and intentional relation to the object loved. Rather, the objectivity is the creator's, and it holds insofar as he freely determines to create a creature of a certain sort with integrity and freely determines to respect that integrity. In creating creatures who have freedom, he even determines to respect the capacity to flaw the original gift. The German word, Opfer, catches both meanings, for the creator's love is both an offering and, potentially, a victim. Theories of divine creative ideas (St. Augustine) and of exemplar causality (St. Bonaventure) catch the element of self-possessed objectivity in the creator. They must be completed, of course, with the reminder that by its very nature creative activity does not only bring about types of being, or even a world of being, but individual beings themselves. And we need to remember, too, the risk that arises not out of thought about creation, but only with the actual giving. And with that we come to the drama of creation: the conferring of actual existence ex nihilo. (Fs)

Autor: Schmitz, Kenneth L.

Buch: The Gift: Creation

Titel: The Gift: Creation

Stichwort: Schöpfung - Geschenk; ex nihilo; Thomas: productio entis (vs. Kant: Kopula; u. Hegel: "das reine Nichts"); Hegel: Wirklichkeit (wirklich von "wirken") vc. Thomas: actualitas (actus, agens)

Kurzinhalt: St. Thomas' term "actual" does not have the same meaning as Hegel's term "wirklich," even though the latter term is usually ... rendered by the term "actual." But the inner meaning of Hegel's Wirklichkeit is quite the reverse of the meaning of St. Th...

Textausschnitt: IV
97a Along with others, I have found St. Thomas especially helpful, because he hands on a light for our journey to the centre of the created world. That light is his understanding of being (ens). He tells us that we can speak of prime matter as created, and of forms and accidents as created too, but only indirectly insofar as they come to be in the production of a being (productio entis). Now, by recognizing in his metaphysics the primacy of being, St. Thomas is simply redeeming the initial promise uttered in our first knowing encounter with things.1 For in that encounter what first strikes the mind is that things in some way are, and so we necessarily attribute the name being to everything we apprehend. A Kantian may be expected to object: But is this not the merely apparent necessity by which data must be submitted to the a priori conditions of the human mind? St. Thomas is surprised, instead, with some ingredient in things themselves that draws the mind forth into the judgment: that things are. Not that they seem, but that they are. For the primary inclination of the judgment is ad rem, to the things themselves in their being and because of their being. This is the ontological force of objectivity. That is why, for him, the primary role of the copula in the judgment is not to wed two terms in propositional bliss, but to bond the mind itself to reality through a judgment whose content and shape is determined by the things that are. This is to grasp things in an absolutely decisive manner (per modum actualitatis absolute),2 for it resolves them into the crisis of being (affirmation) or not being (negation). And it does this, not because the mind needs to frame affirmative and negative judgments, nor because of what things seem or appear to be, nor even because of what they are, but simply because they are. (Fs) (notabene)

98a The primacy which the term "being" names, however, is not only that of the first encounter and of the judgment's final resolution.3 The modern development of the conception of totality into that of system (Leibniz, Kant, Fichte and Hegel), while it is not without difficulties because of an excessive stringency, has nonetheless disclosed something that is not incompatible with St. Thomas' understanding of being. For it is by its very character as primary that being proclaims its total hegemony. Being is not only initiation and resolution, but also centre and circumference: ontological omnipresence. It is, to be sure, important to clarify the term "being" here, since a Hegelian might expect it to mean the primitive placeholder with which the Hegelian Logic begins, the pure being (das reine Sein) that is so universal and so indeterminate that it is equivalent to pure nothing (das reine Nichts).4 It is clear that Hegel and St. Thomas differ about the nature of the beginning, and in the way in which they develop the question of origins from their understanding of the beginning. Psychologically speaking, of course, they will both agree that we first experience concrete, complex, differentiated things. But the understanding of the ontological structure of those things will set the cadence of the mind's account of their significance. Both agree that in the beginning there is being. But, for St. Thomas, that being is already what is richest and most complete in things.5 He calls it act: we name things being because they are in act (esse in actu).6 What is onto-logically (not experientially) first for Hegel is what is most primitive; what is metaphysically first for St. Thomas is already what is most complete. This principal difference in the meaning of being counts in the subsequent career of the two philosophies. Hegel's onto-logic begins with a task and a promise: to build up the understanding of the whole reality in terms of a concrete systematic totality. St. Thomas's metaphysics begins with a gift, a certain plenitude. The world of things is received as manifest actuality; and the task of metaphysics is to refer everything the mind encounters: things themselves, their forms, matter, qualities, relations and movements, back to the fullness first manifest in and through the judgment that things are. (Fs) (notabene)

100a Further contrast with Hegel's philosophy is enlightening with regard to two points: the universality of being and the character of actuality. St. Thomas finds in the unrestricted verbal infinitive: to be (esse) the expression of that which is shared universally by each and all being insofar as it is actual.7 Hegel, on the other hand, finds in the unrestricted verbal substantive: Being (Sein) the universality of pure indeterminacy within which all determinations of being can arise.8 For Hegel, determinacy means the reduction of indeterminacy through the inner onto-logical development of the categories of the system. For St. Thomas, determinacy is present from the beginning as actuality in things; and yet it is just this determinacy of the actual that is most universal. (Fs) (notabene)

100b It is obvious that the meanings of determinacy and universality differ in the two philosophies, and their contrast will take us another step towards the centre of creation. For there is something of import in St. Thomas' identification of what is most actual and determinate with what is most common and universal. Because of its natural tendency towards abstraction, the human mind customarily reduces the common to the minimal. Thus, we think of humanity as embodying the generic and specific features of being human while ignoring the particular differences that characterize individuals. Now, the generic is conceived as a minimum because it is the representation of that which is only potential to receiving the specific differences, of that which is determined by the particularities. This build-up from the minimal is achieved either by the external addition of differentiae (in the Porphyreann manner) or by internal self-determination (as in the Hegelian manner). Nothing seems more obvious to thought than that the more universal or general a term is the less definite it can be. Indeed, St. Thomas himself finds in the unrestrictedness of the term its aptness to designate, not just this or that kind of being, but everything that in any way is. The unrestrictedness of the term is not, however, due to an empty and minimal meaning, but, on the contrary, is due to its over-riding fullness and preeminence. In signifying the thing insofar as it is actual (or related in some way to what is actual), the term is and its cognate being expresses what is maximal in the thing, since if it were not, nothing else belonging to the thing would be either, neither what is particular about it, nor specific, nor universal.9 There is, then, a certain paradox in this convergence of what is most common with what is fullest and most radical and most completive in the thing. (Fs) (notabene)

102a The distinctive commonality is coupled with an equally distinctive meaning of actuality. For St. Thomas, "actual" doesn't mean "factual," since the term does not move for him in the semantic field of givenness which we traced out in the early part of this lecture. "To be in act" (esse in actu) is not equivalent to "It is the case that...." For although it may include a similar usage, it means much more. In any event, it means differently. What is more, St. Thomas' term "actual" does not have the same meaning as Hegel's term "wirklich," even though the latter term is usually (and not incorrectly) rendered by the term "actual." But the inner meaning of Hegel's Wirklichkeit is quite the reverse of the meaning of St. Thomas' actualitas in one most important aspect. In the "Logic of Essence" (Wesen), Hegel traces out the increasing determinacy within the system, determinacy that reaches a certain watershed with the category of Wirklichkeit.10 He exhibits the career of a content or formed structure (Sache) which, as its conditions (Bedingungen) come to be fulfilled, emerges into reality (Existenz), eventually becoming "effectual" (wirklich from wirken: to effect). Now this effectuality is the conditioned result of a conditioning process, even though it is the result of self-conditioning. On the other hand, no such result is intended by the Latin actualis.11 The Latin actualitas comes from actus, which in turn comes from agens and agere; so that, in calling a being actual, we name it in virtue of its active principle, its agency. That is why the actual principle of a being is potior, since it is more powerful than anything else that belongs to the ontological make-up of the being. In a word, then, the term actual designates a principle not a principiate, a source not a result. As to its meaning (and without adverting to the distinction that must be made in the order of real causality between the caused actuality of the creature and the causative actuality of the creator), act means neither fact nor result, but principle. (Fs) (notabene)

103a St. Thomas insists that act is prior to potency, and more potent, too.12 In so saying, he knowingly puts his foot upon a path already trodden a goodly way by Aristotle. It is important, however, to point out another path that lies at the beginning of our philosophical and poetic tradition; especially, since it is a path that others have trod and which still has travellers on it today. It begins with the radical ambiguity expressed by the Latin term potior. What is it to be potent? Now, this alternative to the Aristotelian way combines commonality with a certain kind of indeterminacy, so that determinacy will be derivative and secondary. Along the Aristotelian path, on the other hand, the radical ambiguity in the conception of potency is disentangled by the distinction between potency as the capacity to receive actualization or determination and potency as the capability to actualize or determine. This distinction between passive potency and active potency is further resolved into the more fundamental distinction between potency (matter in the order of substance-formation, and substrate in the order of accidental modification) and act (form in the first order, and accident in the second). In accordance with this Aristotelian distinction, the origin of any change must be sought in the actual principle appropriate to the change: in the order of being, act is prior and more potent than potency. Along the alternative way, however, the origin must be sought in the recovery of an original ambivalent unity, so that the differentiated orders of things can be returned, in thought at least, to their undifferentiated source. This source is represented poetically among the Greeks as a fecund Chaos, the mother of all things. It seems to reign in the same mythical atmosphere mentioned at the beginning of this lecture. But it passed over into the philosophical tradition as well, where it became an alternate form of the principle of plenitude; for this primordial fullness was conceived neither as material nor formal, neither physical nor spiritual, neither potential in the Aristotelian sense of passive potency nor actual. (Fs) (notabene)

104a Heidegger's reflection upon the conceptions of genesis, moira, logos, aletheia and physis at the beginning of our Greek tradition attempts to show that the religious poets and the earliest philosophers articulated a fullness out of which a differentiated order came by a process of original self-distinction. At first the regions were taken over by mythical divine presences (as in Hesiod), and later by the elemental principles of the philosophers (the Presocratics). The emergence of order led both thought and being towards greater determinacy. (Fs)

105a But in a tradition which represents the origin as an original plenitude, an unlimited source of being, power and good, determinacy forecloses upon that boundless source; and so the determinate is always derivative. According to Heidegger under the sponsorship of Plato and Aristotle philosophy tended to rest content with an understanding of beings as determinate beings (Seienden). In this view, the distinctions drawn by Aristotle, therefore, cannot be primary ones, because they are built upon the determinate results of the process of the origination of things. It follows, then, that the Aristotelian claim to the primacy of act over potency rests upon an understanding of being that is itself derivative, merely entitative, categorial and ontic. The true task of philosophy is, instead, to "get behind" these determinate beings in order to recover and reawaken the more original process by which things come to be. Reflecting upon the primordiality of things, authentic philosophical thought is meant to recapture the morphology of the mythical process of origins. The Aristotelian path is one that thought had to tread, but it is a cul de sac from which we must retrace our steps to the beginning. (Fs) (notabene)

105b St. Thomas lived too early to heed Heidegger's advice,13 of course, but he knew of the alternative path just the same. Moreover, he retraced the steps taken by Aristotle by writing commentaries on the Philosopher's most philosophical treatises. But this simply confirmed for him the primacy of act over potency, for he agrees with Aristotle that it is prior to and more potent than potency: prior et potior. We are certainly entitled to ask how he knows this. He tells us that just because act is a first principle it cannot be demonstrated. On the other hand, he never suggests that we must have a privileged intuition if we are to become initiates of the Aristotelian way. Nor is act something irrational, as though it had to be posited arbitrarily, felt obscurely or based upon a groundless belief. Indeed, St. Thomas insists that being is by its very nature most intelligible (maxime intelligibilis); all the more, then, is act intellegible, for act is the distinctive character of being. Moreover, the primacy of act over potency is not a mere postulate (positio) to be accepted without full certitude, but is rather a maxim (dignitas) or maximal proposition, firmly and adequately knowable, even if it requires study.14 Because act is a first principle, and because first incomplex principles (prima simplicia) cannot be defined, it does not follow that act cannot be known. For it can be grasped (videri) by the relation (proportio) two things have to each other; as for example, how the builder relates to what is buildable, or someone awake to someone asleep.15 From such particular examples, then, we can come to the knowledge of both act and potency indirectly (proportionaliter). (Fs) (notabene)

106a Not only is the primacy of act relevant to creation ex nihilo, but so too is the nature of the order that properly obtains between potency and act. Their relation is not in itself one of reciprocity. Act alone is absolute; potency is only relative. Act stands to potency somewhat in the way in which Aristotle's primary subjects of predication stand to their predicates; for predicates are referred to them, but they are not predicated of anything else.16 So, too, act alone is in its full and proper sense non-referrable, for there is nothing to refer it to.17 Within a certain order, act stands for that which is most fully determinate in that order; and in the order of being, act stands for that which is absolutely determinate. Capacity or passive potency, on the other hand, can be understood only by reference to another, viz., to the actuality that fulfills it. Precisely as potency, it has no other meaning or reality than such other-directedness.18 The relation of what is potential in the thing to what is actual is one of real dependence, that is, dependence for the actuality it has or may receive (participation). Act, on the other hand, can be referred to potentiality only by a relation of reason, that is, one of our own making.19 We can put act into a relation of equivalence and reciprocity, since both of them are terms equally at our disposal; but the equivalence and reciprocity do not preside in the thing. In the thing there is inequality and non-reciprocity between the actual and the non-actual or potential features of the thing. Act is related to potency in the way in which the knowable is related to the knowledge of it, and God is related to creatures: by relations of reason alone. The very non-reciprocity that we found to hold between giver and receiver does not hold only between creator and creature; it is also reflected in the ontological interior of the creature itself. (Fs) (notabene)

108a The Aristotelian path leads from various kinds of potency to their determining and completive acts. It is form that actuates matter, giving to it the definiteness admired by most Greeks. It is accidental qualification that fulfils the receptive potencies of substances, bringing them to further completion. And so, form and accidental determinants are what is actual in their respective orders. Because of one or two events that had happened, and one or two thoughts that had been thought along the way, St. Thomas continued beyond that formal limit at which Aristotle had found his highest principle of act. And beyond form, in the trans-formal texture of actual existence, St. Thomas found the absolutely determinate principle of existential act: actus essendi, the act of being. (Fs) (notabene)

108b A paean to act as esse sounds in his works. A modern editor has gathered together some of the more striking characterizations in the compass of two pages in an easily available little book.20 It goes without saying, of course, that they should be studied in their larger context. Being (ens) is that which, as it were, has esse,21 for being is imposed upon something from the very act of existing of the thing;22 and so, properly, being signifies something existing in act (aliquid proprie esse in actu).23 St. Thomas indicates ways in which a thing can be said to be in the weaker senses that refer to, but fall short of, actual existence (esse in actu): thus, something can be said to be in the potentiality of the matter, as fire in the kindling; or again, in the mind, as the formula for combustion in the mind of the chemist or the arsonist; or in still another way, in the active power of the agent, as fire in the match (weaker in the sense that, although the fire exists in a more powerful, determinant mode, it doesn't exist in itself at all).24 When we say that something is, "is" means "primarily that which the intellect apprehends as being absolutely actual."25 Esse is the intrinsic and exclusive source of what is actual in a thing. "That which has esse is made actually existent"26 thereby. Any form "is understood to exist actually only in virtue of the fact that it is held to be."27 (Fs) (notabene)

109a And so, along the path that St. Thomas has walked he has found that it is not form that is most actual, but rather that esse is the actuality of every form.28 Indeed, of itself, form is not actual; it can be said to be relatively actual, that is, actual only through its relation to that which is absolutely and in every respect actual. Esse is the actuality of all acts, the perfection of all perfections;29 it is more formal than form, most determinative and completive, innermost and deepest in each thing,30 superior and noblest among all the principles that compose the thing.31 Being most complete, it is the principle of plenitude that is reached in the journey from potency to act. And yet, it is what first falls into the intellect, and what we encounter in everything that we encounter. It is the source of everything that is in the creature, and the source of the generosity with which the creator creates. (Fs) (notabene)

109b If the act of which St. Thomas speaks is mistaken for fact or result, the conception will not be able to carry the weight he has put upon it. Only as the most decisive and completive principle can esse, so to speak, "draw" all else in the being: form, matter, accidents, out of nothing and into composite unity with it. Only in this sublimation of other principles into its own order can their own nature be realized and the being itself made actual. Only in this way can there be an it in the first place. Not that the intrinsic act of the creature does this out of and from itself (a se). Rather, the actuation in the thing at this most absolute level of actuality (per modum actualitatis absolute) comes about through the communication of esse to the creature by the creator. (Fs) (notabene)

110a The philosopher who speaks of act here cannot fail to learn humility, for his dry language can scarcely hint at the drama with which the creature first begins to be and continues to be. On this level, the creature is bounded at the nadir by nothing, and at the apex by eternity. The nadir haunts the creature with its finitude, for (as Hegel has shown so brilliantly)32 its completion lies wholly outside of itself in the perfect infinite. It is not simply limited; it is radically dependent for its very being. In a word, it is, indeed, a creature. Nevertheless, this it that is is not simply negative. For with the finitude, of which as a Christian he was well aware, St. Thomas also recognizes a perseity, the created supposit. For insofar as it is and is an it, what has been communicated is not simply act, but being, a being. (Fs) (notabene)

111a There is no doubt that the nature of the unity that is created is at issue. As Aristotle before him, so too St. Thomas speaks of the communication of act to a being. The creator does not create an indeterminate world, after the manner of Descartes' suggestion regarding the material universe, viz., that God might create only matter and the laws of motion. Nor does the creator create the System, after the manner of a self-determining totality. Rather, the creator creates beings: this being, that, and yet others. Nor are these individuals mere particulars that serve an empiricist or a systematic function. It was this latter charge that was levelled against Hegel by Kierkegaard who sought to preserve the solvency of the individual, even though he restricted his defence to the individuality of the human subject. The solvency of the ontological individual, including the nonhuman, is also uppermost in St. Thomas' understanding of creation. (Fs)

Autor: Schmitz, Kenneth L.

Buch: The Gift: Creation

Titel: The Gift: Creation

Stichwort: Schöpfung - Geschenk; ex nihilo; potior; Ordnung des Seins (Seinsakt) - Entstehung aus Chaos (vom Unbestimmten zum Bestimmten); Thomas: Akt als erstes Prinzip; Heidegger: Kritik (Primat von Akt); Nicht-Reprozität: Akt - Potenz (Geber - Empfänger)

Kurzinhalt: Because act is a first principle, and because first incomplex principles (prima simplicia) cannot be defined, it does not follow that act cannot be known. For it can be grasped (videri) by the relation (proportio) two things have to each other ...

Textausschnitt: 103a St. Thomas insists that act is prior to potency, and more potent, too.12 In so saying, he knowingly puts his foot upon a path already trodden a goodly way by Aristotle. It is important, however, to point out another path that lies at the beginning of our philosophical and poetic tradition; especially, since it is a path that others have trod and which still has travellers on it today. It begins with the radical ambiguity expressed by the Latin term potior. What is it to be potent? Now, this alternative to the Aristotelian way combines commonality with a certain kind of indeterminacy, so that determinacy will be derivative and secondary. Along the Aristotelian path, on the other hand, the radical ambiguity in the conception of potency is disentangled by the distinction between potency as the capacity to receive actualization or determination and potency as the capability to actualize or determine. This distinction between passive potency and active potency is further resolved into the more fundamental distinction between potency (matter in the order of substance-formation, and substrate in the order of accidental modification) and act (form in the first order, and accident in the second). In accordance with this Aristotelian distinction, the origin of any change must be sought in the actual principle appropriate to the change: in the order of being, act is prior and more potent than potency. Along the alternative way, however, the origin must be sought in the recovery of an original ambivalent unity, so that the differentiated orders of things can be returned, in thought at least, to their undifferentiated source. This source is represented poetically among the Greeks as a fecund Chaos, the mother of all things. It seems to reign in the same mythical atmosphere mentioned at the beginning of this lecture. But it passed over into the philosophical tradition as well, where it became an alternate form of the principle of plenitude; for this primordial fullness was conceived neither as material nor formal, neither physical nor spiritual, neither potential in the Aristotelian sense of passive potency nor actual. (Fs) (notabene)

104a Heidegger's reflection upon the conceptions of genesis, moira, logos, aletheia and physis at the beginning of our Greek tradition attempts to show that the religious poets and the earliest philosophers articulated a fullness out of which a differentiated order came by a process of original self-distinction. At first the regions were taken over by mythical divine presences (as in Hesiod), and later by the elemental principles of the philosophers (the Presocratics). The emergence of order led both thought and being towards greater determinacy. (Fs)

105a But in a tradition which represents the origin as an original plenitude, an unlimited source of being, power and good, determinacy forecloses upon that boundless source; and so the determinate is always derivative. According to Heidegger under the sponsorship of Plato and Aristotle philosophy tended to rest content with an understanding of beings as determinate beings (Seienden). In this view, the distinctions drawn by Aristotle, therefore, cannot be primary ones, because they are built upon the determinate results of the process of the origination of things. It follows, then, that the Aristotelian claim to the primacy of act over potency rests upon an understanding of being that is itself derivative, merely entitative, categorial and ontic. The true task of philosophy is, instead, to "get behind" these determinate beings in order to recover and reawaken the more original process by which things come to be. Reflecting upon the primordiality of things, authentic philosophical thought is meant to recapture the morphology of the mythical process of origins. The Aristotelian path is one that thought had to tread, but it is a cul de sac from which we must retrace our steps to the beginning. (Fs) (notabene)

105b St. Thomas lived too early to heed Heidegger's advice,13 of course, but he knew of the alternative path just the same. Moreover, he retraced the steps taken by Aristotle by writing commentaries on the Philosopher's most philosophical treatises. But this simply confirmed for him the primacy of act over potency, for he agrees with Aristotle that it is prior to and more potent than potency: prior et potior. We are certainly entitled to ask how he knows this. He tells us that just because act is a first principle it cannot be demonstrated. On the other hand, he never suggests that we must have a privileged intuition if we are to become initiates of the Aristotelian way. Nor is act something irrational, as though it had to be posited arbitrarily, felt obscurely or based upon a groundless belief. Indeed, St. Thomas insists that being is by its very nature most intelligible (maxime intelligibilis); all the more, then, is act intellegible, for act is the distinctive character of being. Moreover, the primacy of act over potency is not a mere postulate (positio) to be accepted without full certitude, but is rather a maxim (dignitas) or maximal proposition, firmly and adequately knowable, even if it requires study.14 Because act is a first principle, and because first incomplex principles (prima simplicia) cannot be defined, it does not follow that act cannot be known. For it can be grasped (videri) by the relation (proportio) two things have to each other; as for example, how the builder relates to what is buildable, or someone awake to someone asleep.15 From such particular examples, then, we can come to the knowledge of both act and potency indirectly (proportionaliter). (Fs) (notabene)

106a Not only is the primacy of act relevant to creation ex nihilo, but so too is the nature of the order that properly obtains between potency and act. Their relation is not in itself one of reciprocity. Act alone is absolute; potency is only relative. Act stands to potency somewhat in the way in which Aristotle's primary subjects of predication stand to their predicates; for predicates are referred to them, but they are not predicated of anything else.16 So, too, act alone is in its full and proper sense non-referrable, for there is nothing to refer it to.17 Within a certain order, act stands for that which is most fully determinate in that order; and in the order of being, act stands for that which is absolutely determinate. Capacity or passive potency, on the other hand, can be understood only by reference to another, viz., to the actuality that fulfills it. Precisely as potency, it has no other meaning or reality than such other-directedness.18 The relation of what is potential in the thing to what is actual is one of real dependence, that is, dependence for the actuality it has or may receive (participation). Act, on the other hand, can be referred to potentiality only by a relation of reason, that is, one of our own making.19 We can put act into a relation of equivalence and reciprocity, since both of them are terms equally at our disposal; but the equivalence and reciprocity do not preside in the thing. In the thing there is inequality and non-reciprocity between the actual and the non-actual or potential features of the thing. Act is related to potency in the way in which the knowable is related to the knowledge of it, and God is related to creatures: by relations of reason alone. The very non-reciprocity that we found to hold between giver and receiver does not hold only between creator and creature; it is also reflected in the ontological interior of the creature itself. (Fs) (notabene)

Autor: Schmitz, Kenneth L.

Buch: The Gift: Creation

Titel: The Gift: Creation

Stichwort: Schöpfung - Geschenk; ex nihilo; Thomas: actus essendi (esse als Aktualität d. Form); Kommunikation des Aktes an ein Seiendes

Kurzinhalt: Being most complete, it is the principle of plenitude that is reached in the journey from potency to act. And yet, it is what first falls into the intellect ... St. Thomas speaks of the communication of act to a being.

Textausschnitt: 108a The Aristotelian path leads from various kinds of potency to their determining and completive acts. It is form that actuates matter, giving to it the definiteness admired by most Greeks. It is accidental qualification that fulfils the receptive potencies of substances, bringing them to further completion. And so, form and accidental determinants are what is actual in their respective orders. Because of one or two events that had happened, and one or two thoughts that had been thought along the way, St. Thomas continued beyond that formal limit at which Aristotle had found his highest principle of act. And beyond form, in the trans-formal texture of actual existence, St. Thomas found the absolutely determinate principle of existential act: actus essendi, the act of being. (Fs) (notabene)

108b A paean to act as esse sounds in his works. A modern editor has gathered together some of the more striking characterizations in the compass of two pages in an easily available little book.20 It goes without saying, of course, that they should be studied in their larger context. Being (ens) is that which, as it were, has esse,21 for being is imposed upon something from the very act of existing of the thing;22 and so, properly, being signifies something existing in act (aliquid proprie esse in actu).23 St. Thomas indicates ways in which a thing can be said to be in the weaker senses that refer to, but fall short of, actual existence (esse in actu): thus, something can be said to be in the potentiality of the matter, as fire in the kindling; or again, in the mind, as the formula for combustion in the mind of the chemist or the arsonist; or in still another way, in the active power of the agent, as fire in the match (weaker in the sense that, although the fire exists in a more powerful, determinant mode, it doesn't exist in itself at all).24 When we say that something is, "is" means "primarily that which the intellect apprehends as being absolutely actual."25 Esse is the intrinsic and exclusive source of what is actual in a thing. "That which has esse is made actually existent"26 thereby. Any form "is understood to exist actually only in virtue of the fact that it is held to be."27 (Fs) (notabene)

109a And so, along the path that St. Thomas has walked he has found that it is not form that is most actual, but rather that esse is the actuality of every form.28 Indeed, of itself, form is not actual; it can be said to be relatively actual, that is, actual only through its relation to that which is absolutely and in every respect actual. Esse is the actuality of all acts, the perfection of all perfections;29 it is more formal than form, most determinative and completive, innermost and deepest in each thing,30 superior and noblest among all the principles that compose the thing.31 Being most complete, it is the principle of plenitude that is reached in the journey from potency to act. And yet, it is what first falls into the intellect, and what we encounter in everything that we encounter. It is the source of everything that is in the creature, and the source of the generosity with which the creator creates. (Fs) (notabene)

109b If the act of which St. Thomas speaks is mistaken for fact or result, the conception will not be able to carry the weight he has put upon it. Only as the most decisive and completive principle can esse, so to speak, "draw" all else in the being: form, matter, accidents, out of nothing and into composite unity with it. Only in this sublimation of other principles into its own order can their own nature be realized and the being itself made actual. Only in this way can there be an it in the first place. Not that the intrinsic act of the creature does this out of and from itself (a se). Rather, the actuation in the thing at this most absolute level of actuality (per modum actualitatis absolute) comes about through the communication of esse to the creature by the creator. (Fs) (notabene)

110a The philosopher who speaks of act here cannot fail to learn humility, for his dry language can scarcely hint at the drama with which the creature first begins to be and continues to be. On this level, the creature is bounded at the nadir by nothing, and at the apex by eternity. The nadir haunts the creature with its finitude, for (as Hegel has shown so brilliantly)32 its completion lies wholly outside of itself in the perfect infinite. It is not simply limited; it is radically dependent for its very being. In a word, it is, indeed, a creature. Nevertheless, this it that is is not simply negative. For with the finitude, of which as a Christian he was well aware, St. Thomas also recognizes a perseity, the created supposit. For insofar as it is and is an it, what has been communicated is not simply act, but being, a being. (Fs) (notabene)

111a There is no doubt that the nature of the unity that is created is at issue. As Aristotle before him, so too St. Thomas speaks of the communication of act to a being. The creator does not create an indeterminate world, after the manner of Descartes' suggestion regarding the material universe, viz., that God might create only matter and the laws of motion. Nor does the creator create the System, after the manner of a self-determining totality. Rather, the creator creates beings: this being, that, and yet others. Nor are these individuals mere particulars that serve an empiricist or a systematic function. It was this latter charge that was levelled against Hegel by Kierkegaard who sought to preserve the solvency of the individual, even though he restricted his defence to the individuality of the human subject. The solvency of the ontological individual, including the nonhuman, is also uppermost in St. Thomas' understanding of creation. (Fs)

Autor: Schmitz, Kenneth L.

Buch: The Gift: Creation

Titel: The Gift: Creation

Stichwort: Schöpfung - Geschenk; ex nihilo; Welt: weder Individuum, noch System; Sein im Akt der Individuen; Einheit (unum per se) = Einfachheit: Atomismus, Nominalismus, Hume; Akt: Prinzip d. Einfachheit (Substanz); Akt: fundamental, radikal, universal

Kurzinhalt: ... act is and must be simple; but, since it is not isolated and withdrawn from all involvement with otherness, it takes up all that which is not act (praeter esse) into its own power and thereby realizes the potentiality of non-act ---

Textausschnitt: 111b Nevertheless, it seems to me that the conception of the world as totality is not incompatible with this emphasis upon individuals. To be sure, the world is not some thing apart from its creatures: it does not have its own act of being. Still, it does have its own mode of being. The world is not an individual. Nor is it a mere collection, a network of relations resting upon non-worlded and private individuals. Nor is it the System of which they are mere members. Rather, the world is that which is built into its creatures, and they into it. For they are built-up in and for and with regard to the world within which they have their being. The world is a sort of compossibility grounded in the mutual existence of creatures. The creator's regard for creatures' being-in-the-world is not restricted to ordinary categorial relations, but is directed fundamentally to a distinctive kind of transcendental interrelationship. For the mode of the world is that it have its being in the acts of its creatures. (Fs)

112a These actually existent creatures are individual beings. Insofar as they retain their existent individuality, they cannot form an ontological unit in the strict sense. Their own definitive being prevents them from forming more than a set, or a compound, or an association of some sort. Now, an individual, as the name suggests, is that which is actually undivided; and this is what is meant by an ontological unit in the strict sense: unum per se, Aristotle's "this of a certain kind" (tóde ti). The conception is neither obvious nor without controversy. The chief issue is whether or not unity is equivalent to simplicity. Such an alleged equivalence is not unknown in the history of philosophy. Thus, atomism is the metaphysical expression of the equation of unity with simplicity; and in its Greek form it shows its parentage in Parmenides' exclusion of all difference and complexity from the notion of being. Nominalism is a later logical expression of this equation of unity and simplicity; and Humean impressionism a psychological version of it. Now, this equation, or more precisely, this identification of unity with simplicity conceives unity as indivisibility. What is one is not only undivided in fact, it is unable to be divided by its very nature, because there is no duality within it that is susceptible to being differentiated. Hegel has made us aware of a tendency in modern thought to frame a conception of the ego isolated from the world and withdrawn into itself away from all otherness and relatedness. Such an ego is derivative, and its abstract simplicity makes it incapable of generating plurality. He criticizes the philosophy of Plotinus also, because no plurality can be gotten out of a unity that is pure simplicity. (Fs) (notabene)

113a Now, if ontological unity were equivalent to ontological simplicity, then indeed, there could be no ontological composites that are ontological units in the strict sense, such as the substances which Aristotle tells us are composed of matter and form, or the individuals which are composed of substance and accidents, or the beings which St. Thomas tells us are composed of essence and esse.1 At most, such composites would be an obscure sort of compound to be replaced as soon as modern chemistry got under way in the early 19th century. Indeed, the understanding of such composites as compounds of elements capable of independent existence in their own right had become widespread two or more centuries earlier and proved fatal to the acceptance of strict ontological composites. (Fs)

113b But, if each creature is in truth an ontological unit in the strict sense and yet composite, then we need to understand how there can be strict ontological unity (perseity) without simplicity. Or rather, we need to place the simplicity correctly. That is, we need to recognize that, in regard to creatures, simplicity is not characteristic of the ontological unit as a whole; it is characteristic only of one of its principles. For creatures, the simplicity is one of principle, unlike God whose very being is simple. Now that simplicity is characteristic of the very act. Intrinisically and taken in itself, act is simply act. The traditional formula of the schoolmen held that act is not of itself limited; if it is limited, as in creatures, it is limited by another principle, matter or quantity or form. Because act is by its nature unlimited, it can be actually infinite in God, whom St. Thomas characterizes as Pure Act. Since it has no duality of self and other in it, act is simple. And just because it is simple, it can be the source of the unity of the ontological composite. This is the truth that is exaggerated in the demand that every ontological unit be simple; viz., that without simplicity there could be no unity. It is interesting that Kant, in a quite different context and with a quite contrary purpose, nevertheless insists upon the transcendental unity of apperception as the necessary a priori source of unity in all knowledge. The principle of unity is, for him, the principle of synthesis or combination; but taken in itself, the I think is self-identical, carrying no otherness within itself. For it is the simple function by which the synthetic unity of the manifold comes to objective unity.2 And indeed, it is true that unity must be traced back to simplicity. But we must also come to see that not every ontological unit need be simple. (Fs) (notabene)

115a Hegel is right to insist that a simplicity borne in upon itself to the exclusion of all involvement with otherness is a sterile simplicity, incapable of being the source of any duality and composition. But the act of which St. Thomas speaks is by its very nature communicative and diffusive. He tells us that a being is called being by virtue of its act; and that to be one means to be actually undivided. Actually undivided: in other words, (1) act is that in virtue of which something is called being, and (2) that very act is the source of the actual indivision that constitutes the ontological unit. To be sure, act is and must be simple; but, since it is not isolated and withdrawn from all involvement with otherness, it takes up all that which is not act (praeter esse) into its own power and thereby realizes the potentiality of non-act (praeter esse, id quod, essentia), its potentiality to be actualized in the actual composite ontological unit. So that, act in its simplicity is the primary principle of the perseity of the ontological unit, of its integrity and undividedness. (Fs; tblStw: Akt) (notabene)

115b We need to understand how it is that the indivision of an ontological unit in the strict sense can arise; and it is here that the Aristotelian path from potency to act provides direction. Both Aristotle and St. Thomas agree that such an indivision can arise only when that which is apt to receive a determination and thereby be realized in the reception is bonded to and by and with that which is capable of providing the determination.3 Now, this bonding is just that of a capacity and its fulfillment; it is the actuation of a potentiality. It is the relation of a potency to its act, then, that brings being to be as a being. The ontological unit in the strict sense is absolutely one, that is, it is not merely one in this or that respect, but is one without qualification (simpliciter). It is not simple, but it is simply one. Now, St. Thomas tells us that a plurality cannot "become one in an absolute sense," unless there be a relation not of actual entities, independent units but a relation of principles; that is, unless there be an ordering in which all other items of the plurality are related to one principle as the potential to its act.4 Since the unity is that of principles, and not of actual beings, nothing else can intervene between them, no "third thing," no other thing, nothing whatsoever. It is ens et unum per se. And that is why being and unity are convertible, and why there is an ontological preference on the part of each being in favour of its own unity. (Fs; tblStw: Akt) (notabene)

116a Act is always the act of a being, the being of a stone (esse lapidis), for example.5 And that which is not act in the thing (essence) simply is not without the act; lacking the act, it simply and absolutely is not. Act is that by which (quo est) whatever is (quod est) is. The possessive genitive, then, stands for a non-reciprocal relation of potency to act in the absolute order of being. For that which the thing is (stone) is appropriated ("owned") by that esse which, being act, appropriates what the stone is in its capacity but cannot be without that act (esse). The simplicity of esse has loaned to the composite that actual indivision without which it could not be an ontological unit in the strict sense: ens per se. And the act is the thing's own act in that the act is the source of the thing's capacity coming to actual subsistent being: ens per se.6 It must be recognized, of course, as has already been said, that the act proper to the existent creature does not do this simply by itself. Rather, this interior communication, which reflects the giving and receiving that is inseparable from the generosity of being, itself arises out of a larger communication of act. Now, this larger communication of act is creative activity proper; and it is to this that we finally turn. (Fs) (notabene)

117a We have been examining the absolute nature of act, because it is the jewel at the centre of the gift of being that is communicated in and through the creator's activity. Act is absolutely fundamental, since without it nothing else can be. It is most radical, since it is the root without which nothing else in the thing can be. At the same time, it is most common or universal, since its proper effect is not merely some modification or arrangement of already existing things, nor merely the generation of a certain kind of thing; but, rather, creation has as its distinctive effect the very coming into being of any and everything qua being.7 In the accidental modification of things and in the generation of substances, creaturely causes play their secondary and limited role; but "God is universally productive (activus universaliter) of the total being of things (totius esse)."8 Now, as we have already seen, the ontological commonality or universality (as distinct from abstract universality) is inseparable from the fullness of existential act; so that act, taken absolutely as esse at once, most fundamental and radical, most common and total, and most complete in its determinative power is the primal principle of plenitude.9 (Fs) (notabene)

Autor: Schmitz, Kenneth L.

Buch: The Gift: Creation

Titel: The Gift: Creation

Stichwort: Schöpfung - Geschenk; ex nihilo; Sein - Prinzipien v. Kausalität; Wirkursache: omne agens agit inquantum est actu; Exemplarurs.: omne agens agit sibi simile (inquantum est actu); Finalurs.: omne agens agit propter finem; Moderne: Unintelligibilität v. K.

Kurzinhalt: As a result, causality itself became so reduced that it became strictly unintelligible within the reduced horizon of discourse, and eventually lost its explanatory power... causality itself became so reduced that it became strictly unintelligible ...

Textausschnitt: 118a The metaphysical axioms of causality are suffused and transformed by this most determinative plenitude of act, so that they bespeak an absolute energy (energeia). There are three principal axioms. First, the axiom of agency or effectivity: omne agens agit inquantum est actu, every agent acts insofar as it is in act.1 Moreover, what the agent communicates is precisely, act; for an agent is an agent insofar as it makes something to be actual. It follows, therefore, that what is received from an agent must be just this: act. Second, the axiom of similitude: omne agens agit sibi simile, every agent acts so as to produce what is like itself.2 This axiom is often called the principle of formal causality, or more correctly, of exemplar causality. These designations, while correct, are liable to mislead at the metaphysical level of causality. For St. Thomas adds: inquantum est actu.3 That is to say: every agent acts so as to produce what is like itself insofar as it is an agent and in act. Furthermore, it is through the very act, which the recipient has received and which the agent has communicated, that the recipient becomes like the agent. So that the very process of approximation (assimilatio) of recipient to agent is an affair shot through with act. Third, it is less obvious that the axiom of finality also is to be regarded in terms of act: omne agens agit propter finem, every agent acts for the sake of an end.4 If we are to counteract the prevalent modern reduction of finality to human conscious purpose, it is important to notice that the end may be sought for by the agent either in a knowing manner or by virtue of the very nature of the agent. Our present interest in the axiom, however, is to touch only that point at which act bears properly upon this teleological principle. For it does touch upon it; if only in that it speaks of an agent, and therefore of a being insofar as it is both in act and acting. Now, the end for the sake of which the agent takes up its activity determines both whether there is to be action or not, and that this be done rather than that. Natural things are fixed upon pre-determined results, for the most part, and there is little doubt about the outcome, providing that all of the conditions are in place. In those acts over which man has control, the human agent is faced with alternatives. Most generally stated, there is a double facet: (1) whether to do or not to do; and (2) whether to do this rather than that.5 Both of these are factors that preside, so to speak, over actuality and inactuality. For to do or not do is determinant of whether there is to be actual activity and its result or not; and to do this rather than that is determinant of whether one thing is to be actual rather than another. (Fs; tblStw: Kausalität)

120a The three axioms of metaphysical causality have not had an easy time in modern thought. Their widespread rejection or neglect is linked to a redirected interest in motion. The revival of atomism in the late 16th and early 17th centuries (Gassendi, Hobbes' corpuscularism) contributed to the reduction of the various sorts of motion distinguished by Aristotle (generation and corruption, alteration, growth and displacement) into a single kind of motion: the movement of particles, whose causation was that of combination and segregation. The rise of mechanism at the same time reinforced this reduction of motion to the displacement of physical bodies (Hobbes, Descartes, de la Mettrie). The chief opponent to atomism and mechanism in the latter part of the 17th century was Leibniz, who sought also to recover a kind of finality, and who did reinstate a version of the Stoic vis activa. But this same Leibniz in his Monadology and elsewhere undermined the communicative sense of agency entirely, by upgrading a kind of exemplar causality to the exclusion of all real relations of causation between the monads. Windowless, they mirrored the other monads and the Supreme Monad. In the question of origins, of course, the communicative sense of causality is central. It is not strange, however, in an era initiated by a revolution in astronomical theory (the displacement of heavenly bodies) and attended by the mathematization of physics (the displacement of terrestrial bodies), that scientific intelligence should quite generally withdraw from an investigation of reality in terms of act and potency, or from causality in terms of the communication of the act of being (influxus entis). What is important, nevertheless, is that the reduction of motion was accompanied by a rejection of all causality except that which was both observable and sufficient to account for motion as displacement. It was certainly detrimental to the continuation and cultivation of a philosophy of act; but also for the cultivation of scientific intelligence and culture as well. (Fs)

121a The reduction affected the other axioms, too. The metaphysical principle of similitude is embedded in the whole context of causality conceived as the communication of act. Francis Bacon provides a barometer and bellwether of the new intellectual climate and of the withdrawal from the context of metaphysical causality as the communication of act. He strives for a new understanding of nature, but is not yet ready to quite abandon the old. Of the claim that God created the world, he holds that this is a matter of sound religious belief. He concedes, too, that there may well be some faint trace of God's hand in the world, some residue of his creative activity; but he thinks that it is too faint for unaided reason to use it as a sure ladder in mounting a proof for the existence of God. The old maxim that God leaves some sign of himself upon the face of creation is too obscure and doubtful to be a philosopher's aid. David Hume carried the argument even further, of course, holding that any knowledge we might claim of God from nature would be simply an isomorphic likeness of nature itself. A similar and complementary account could be given of the axiom of finality. It, too, fell during the heydey of mechanism, and was either abandoned entirely (Spinoza) or reclaimed for human subjectivity (Kant). It was another line of withdrawl of metaphysical discourse, understood in terms of a philosophy of act, from the study of nature. The fate suffered by the axioms of similitude and finality was concomitant with that suffered by the axiom of effectivity; for the three make up a single conception of agency. As a consequence, the understanding of agency was altered. With the abandonment of the principle of similitude especially, the residual understanding of effectivity or production underwent a radical reduction. It was no longer understood to be the communication of act in the constituting of a being, and came to be understood, rather, as the initiation of a displacement by impulse. As a result, causality itself became so reduced that it became strictly unintelligible within the reduced horizon of discourse, and eventually lost its explanatory power. The formulation of laws replaced it as a mode of explanation. The empirical emphasis upon sense perception was made by Aristotle and St. Thomas in order to arrive at the understanding of reality through the intellectual discovery of the intelligible natures of things. With the denial of formal causality, however, there could be no natures to discover; hence Moliére's travesty. Empiricism has other motives for its stress upon the sensible, for it seeks to describe behaviour. (Fs) (notabene)

Autor: Schmitz, Kenneth L.

Buch: The Gift: Creation

Titel: The Gift: Creation

Stichwort: Schöpfung - Geschenk; ex nihilo; Sein - Kausalität; reduktionistisches - metaphysisches Verständnis von K.; K. als influx entis (Kommunikation); assimilatio ad causam; Partizipation - Kausalität; Akt als Klammer d. 3. Prinzipien von K.

Kurzinhalt: ... the communication of act draws together the three axioms of metaphysical causality: the agent acts insofar as he is in act, the agent acts for the sake of communicating act, and the agent produces its resonance insofar as its effect is in act.

Textausschnitt: 123a In short, then, the lines between agent and patient, between cause and effect, were initially blurred (F. Bacon), then reduced to impulse (Hobbes), then to regularities (Hume), or at the last either broken entirely (Leibniz) or rescued by Kant who placed them as a priori structures in and of the human mind. Much of this has had its positive results, for our theoretical understanding as well as for our practical use. I have not rehearsed these generally known facts in order to sound another belated chorus of doom. On the contrary, at the beginning of our modern age a new possibility of analysis and a new mode of discourse claimed a certain freedom from the metaphysical analysis and the ontological discourse in order to serve other interests and to perform another work. But interests can develop discourse that either rules out or makes all but impossible the horizon needed for the discussion of questions at once deeper and broader than those that have occupied much of our intellectual effort since the early modern times. The sketch, then, will have served its purpose, if it sets in relief still new and untapped possibilities open to a recovery and development of a metaphysical analysis and an ontological discourse that finds in nature as well as in man both interiority and depth. (Fs; tblStw: Kausalität) (notabene)

123b I have been talking of this new possibility by its old name: analysis in terms of a potency and act that has been carried beyond Aristotle by St. Thomas towards the absolute consideration of act. "Whatever is present in a thing from an agent must be act."6 Causality is communication of being as act, the inflowing of being (influxus entis) from the agent and by virtue of the agent. The link that holds the three axioms together is their expression of and relation to act. The role of act is decisive, since it clarifies the nature of the likeness between agent and recipient: an effect need not resemble its cause in some definite way; it need only resemble it in some way. Here again, we have the paradox of the coincidence of the commonality of the likeness and the actuality of the determinacy. In asking, Whether the perfections of all things are in God?, St. Thomas traces the line of similitude (assimilatio) between agent and recipient, cause and effect, giver and receiver.7 Any determinacy (perfectio) present in an effect, he tells us, must be found in its productive cause: this is the axiom of agency. Nevertheless, that co-presence of agent and recipient need not require the same isomorphic formality in both, as when an organism reproduces another of its own kind and likeness. The degree of unlikeness that can be tolerated between agent and recipient may be very great indeed. Thus, the sun reproduces its "likeness" in the greening of plants. The burgeoning plant is not at all like the sun in any strict sense of a figural resemblance; it does not even behave like the sun. Nevertheless, there is a communication between them, as every gardener knows. For if we remove the plant from the sunlight, it whitens and dies. The greening disappears; for if the cause fails, the effect fails. If the cause is there, the "likeness" is there, but it is not primarily a resemblance. It is a being-present, a presencing of the cause to the effect in the moment of causation and throughout it. We have, then, not an analogy of likeness in any ordinary sense of the term; but we do have a life-line that communicates a presence. It thereby establishes an analogy of community, at whose origins there is the non-reciprocal communication of agent to recipient. Receptivity, not reciprocation by interaction, is the first response of this community. This community of co-presence by which the effect is related to its cause discloses the proper nature of that which is communicated in and through ontological causality: the gift that is in the power of every agent to give is act. Agency communicates act. "It is through act that any thing becomes like unto its cause (assimilatio ad causam);" and this act is nothing other than existential act (ipsum esse, being itself).8 This "likening" in regard to being comes about through the participation of the effect in the power that flows from the agent and its agency; for participation is the same relation as causality, looked at from its reception. And so, the communication of act draws together the three axioms of metaphysical causality: the agent acts insofar as he is in act, the agent acts for the sake of communicating act, and the agent produces its resonance insofar as its effect is in act. (Fs)

Autor: Schmitz, Kenneth L.

Buch: The Gift: Creation

Titel: The Gift: Creation

Stichwort: Schöpfung - Geschenk; ex nihilo; agens - recipiens: Ordnung: vorher - nachher; bezügl.: aktive Potenz: Präexistenz d. Geschöpfs im Schöpfer (Beispiel: Michelangelo); K. - Geschenk - Schöpfer; Epiphanie: Akt d. Gebers - empfangener Akt

Kurzinhalt: "In giving esse, God in the same act (simul) produces that which receives it."... creation as the absolute gratuity of the gift undertaken by the creator in endowing the act of being and its conditions.

Textausschnitt: 125a The order of priority and posteriority between agent and recipient is mirrored in the interior communication within the ontological composite unit itself. For within it, existential act communicates the power of actualization which it receives through the creator's communication. In this endowment the principle of act within the creature (quo est) realizes the potentiality of the creature (quod est). Because of the absolute nature of the communication between creator and creature and also, as a result, within the creature itself, there can be no pre-existing matter or substrate. No potentiality or possibility lies out of the reach of such an absolute cause and principle. Outside that reach is nihil, nothing. The creative communication endows act absolutely: to be rather than not. Yet its product is not simply act: it is an ontological composite, a being. In endowing act, the creator also endows the conditions for the reception of act, gives whatever is needed for the reception of its own communication. "In giving esse, God in the same act (simul) produces that which receives it."9 It is not too paradoxical to say that, before the created world had begun to be, it was not possible for it to be. St. Thomas concedes that we can speak of the possibility of the world prior to its being created, and mean by its possibility that it was not contradictory and impossible. After all, God did not create a contradiction. But the real possibility does not lie with the creature. Before it was created, there was no it in any sense; and so, there could be no possibility for it, no potentiality with respect to it. Relations need terms. It is, simply, ex nihilo: it did not exist, it does exist. But St. Thomas continues: If, on the other hand, we speak, not of the passive capacity of the creature, but rather of the active potency of the creative agent, then we can indeed say that the creature pre-existed itself in the power of its creative agent.10 In the creator, a possibility is nothing passive; it is the determination to create by way of some aspect of his riches, for we are born of his riches, not of our need. By an imperfect analogy, it was not in the capacity of the oils to become glorious under Michelangelo's hands; rather, their glory was resident originally in the power of his artistry. Creation, as it were, is as though, not Michelangelo, but an infinitely greater artist produces all: oils, and design, and the actual shining beauty. (Fs; tblStw: Schöpfung) (notabene)

127a I have tried to make available some thoughts that strike me as signs of the still latent power resident in the conception of creation ex nihilo. It is the conception of the great and continuing "metaphysical event." Much depends upon whether it is true or not, since it directs us to take up the universe as the gift of an intelligent and caring creator; it also directs us to take up our own lives responsibly and with the confidence that the interiority and the depth of beings shine with the benison and the risk of an original and final love. I have left many tasks undone, not the least of them is the great question of the existence and nature of the first principle. But such a task should not be taken up lightly. I have tried instead to accomplish two rather more modest tasks as prelude: to clarify the nature of the absoluteness of creation ex nihilo; and to rebuild a sufficiently rich texture of causality as an aid towards understanding better the nature of creative activity. These two themes have come together in the conception of creation as the absolute gratuity of the gift undertaken by the creator in endowing the act of being and its conditions. The non-reciprocity disclosed by the absolute character of act, as well as of the causality that communicates act, is already indicated in the gift. For in giving and receiving we find a moment of absolute gratuity that points towards act in its purity, and a moment of absolute receptivity that points towards nothing. So that giving and receiving, understood as the communication and reception of act, points towards creation ex nihilo, once the inherent absoluteness of radical presence and radical absence has been translated into original act (esse) and original potency (praeter esse) in the creative communication that founds the ontological composite unit, the creature. (Fs)
128a The several aspects of causality are transformed by the privative ex nihilo. It is the badge of the absolute character of creative power in its fullest. In the utter contrast provided by this absolute privation, the aspects of causality, act, form and finality, are themselves disclosed as absolute. The element of power (act) is absolutized, since it needs no pre-existing matter or energy with which to do its work. But the original knowing love is also absolutized, and with it the aspect of finality (the good). In its freedom, this love is bound by no conditions that escape it, or that it does not set for itself. It thereby freely transforms the moment of gratuity in the gift as we know it into its own highest, most intelligent and caring power. For its bounty is uncalled for: this is our absolute privation, and the challenge to receive ourselves well. And its effect is the very being of creatures in the world: this is our esse in actu. Reflection upon creation leads us to the centre of the world. (Fs)

129a We might wish that our philosophical notions were less encumbered by the situation of our being and the experiences of our life. But the conception of creation draws upon deep and sometimes obscure sources. Now, it is characteristic of important and fundamental notions that they arise in the drama of human existence. This is not surprising, however, for they underly issues of great import that test our intelligence and our character: to be or not to be; to be good or evil; to be free or enslaved; to live or die; to know or not know. These conceptions are tempered by sorrow over evil, by grief over the seeming finality of death, but are also lifted by an insistent hope, or a grateful joy. It is characteristic of such important conceptions that they retain their original tensions, even after extensive analysis. They are, in Marcel's sense of the word, ineluctably mysterious.11 Not that we are simply ignorant regarding the conception of creation, for we know a good deal. Yet it continues to draw the mind towards it by the power of a presence that remains hidden even while it reveals something of itself. Now this presence is the nature of truth insofar as it emanates from a mystery. For the question of origins is not to be settled once and for all by verification or demonstration; but it pronounces itself by its power to hold the mind and not to let it go. Again and again, it draws us by a presence within it that is too deep for such dispatch. In creation ex nihilo the very unity of each creature and of the world itself is given. In that giving, an absolute inequality between giver and receiver is itself transcended by the generosity of the communication which intends the freedom and the integrity of the creature. No straightforward reciprocity is possible; only the receptivity on the part of the creature. This receptivity is the continuing opportunity in which the creature finds the integrity already given to it to be realized in its career, and by the human creature in his biography and history. The generosity of the creative giver grounds the absolute character of the act that is given. The glory of the giver shines as an epiphany in the similitude between the Act that gives and the act that is received. The finality of the donation is at once the good of the creature and the goodness of the donor. The question of origins has suggested a path of reflection that carries along towards understanding origination to be the endowment of a being out of nothing in and through the continual knowing and loving communication of absolute act. It is not without risk and not without promise. (E14, 17.11.2014)