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)