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)