Autor: Schindler, David C., Jun

Buch: The Catholicity of Reason

Titel: The Catholicity of Reason

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

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

Textausschnitt: 6 Historical Intelligibility: On Creation and Causality

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

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

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