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)