The Paradoxical Structure of Existence

Frederick D. Wilhelmsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351477697
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

For metaphysicians who have imbibed the sober and inebriating teachings of Thomas Aquinas, existence is an act, the act which makes all things actually to be. As the act of existence makes things to be, essence makes them to be what they are. Essence and the act of existence, in other words, are really distinct yet together they compose each of the things that are.Such an understanding involves a number of paradoxes, and Frederick D. Wilhelmsen's articulation of them reveals his philosophical genius. These paradoxes include the fact that the act of existence does not exist, that it can be thought but not conceived by the mind, and that truths about God can be known while He himself remains absolutely unknown. Wilhelmsen argues the notion that the Christian faith and philosophical reason harmonize while remaining completely distinct from each other.Writing in a captivating style, Wilhelmsen begins with a discussion of the development, strengths, and limitations of the ancient Greek philosophical accounts of being. Following that, he develops such key topics as the problem of existence, St. Thomas Aquinas' understanding of being, critical analyses of Hegel's and Heidegger's doctrines of being, existence as "towards God, " and a metaphysical approach to the human person. The final two chapters develop the sense in which metaphysical thinking is and is not shaped by historical and social factors.

1

The History of Being in Western Civilization: a Résumé

Philosophy, alone among the purely rational disciplines, carries its own history. This is supremely true of metaphysics because the achievement of the Philosophy of Being was the work of a long tradition and not that of a lonely genius. But an understanding of this history not only forces us today to rethink that tradition and thus make it our own, but also relieves us of the burden of repeating the mistakes of the past. As Gilson insisted, only the man ignorant of history is forced to be its dupe. Therefore we propose, in this opening chapter, to sketch the broad lines of a tradition of meditating upon being which reached its culmination, we are convinced, in the metaphysics of existence developed by St. Thomas Aquinas. We advise the reader, however, that the metaphysics of the Common Doctor is less a closed system than an invitation to use his own conclusions as a point of departure for future reasoning about the ultimate natural mystery, existence. We also hope to demonstrate that metaphysics can never be a closed system and that every metaphysical conclusion functions as a premise and a promise for future speculation.

Few scholars today would quibble with the contention that the West was born in that Greece which simultaneously gave birth to metaphysics. Scholars from Voegelin to Heidegger have been fascinated by the birth of the philosophy of being in Parmenides, but the greatest tribute paid him was by Plato, who called Parmenides “a man to be feared.”¹ Parmenides’ discovery of being apparently had no antecedents. It came forth from him altogether apart from those human and cultural influences which usually guide the mind.² Eric Voegelin insists that “the being of Parmenides is not an origin of sensually perceived entities (ta onta), as in Ionian speculation.”³ Being emerges in Parmenides as an overarching principle that escapes objectivity. Nothing imposing itself upon sensibility and in intelligence can be identified as “Is.” “Is” (not the verbal form employed by Parmenides) transcends all objects or “things” in that “Is” is never present to man at all. We can never finger “Is” as though it were something given in experience, one among many objects thrown up before the screen of vision. Nonetheless, of everything that is present to the scope of human understanding there can be said of it—”It is.” The “Is” of Parmenides, hence, is not an object of speculation or of thought, but is rather that ground outside of which there is neither objectivity nor speculation.

Experienced neither as a “thing” nor as a “datum,” the Parmenidean “Is” can only be answered by an exclamation uttered in wonder: Is! Is! Is! When Parmenides writes “that Is is and that Not is cannot be” the “Is” fails to function as a grammatical subject. Parmenides is not really talking about anything at all, but this “non-thing” is that without which there would be nothing to talk about. In experiencing (without in any sense “grasping”: how can we “grasp” a non-object or a non-thing?) the “Is” as the transcendence of all objectivity, as the “beyond nature,” Parmenides gave birth to metaphysics.

Parmenides’ “Is” is not a ground or a cause of nature. It is rather the climate within which the soul of man lives. Everything we think is thought of in terms of “Is,” and should an object “not be” in some sense, then it is simply not thought at all. It drops out of being. But Parmenides was unable to maintain himself for long in a stance of pure rapture before the ultimate principle of all principles. Constrained to think about the “Is,” he commenced to give it predicates, to assert it in this and that way. But in order to think about anything, we have to convert it into an object of thought. We have to “objectify” or “thingify,” thus placing a reality before the intelligence where it can be bombarded with predicates, or meanings. Parmenides thus turned his verbal “Is” into the substantive “Being.” In so doing, he betrayed his original intuition. “Being,” as a substantive, functions as do all other objects, even though this object be considered a trans-object. Functioning as an object, “Is” ceases to be the climate of the mind and the backdrop of the real order; it becomes simply one object among others. It is well known that Parmenides dug his own philosophical grave when he thus surrendered to the human penchant to objectify. “Being” presents itself as “One,” and the multiplicity of the real is jettisoned and consigned to the road taken by those who lack the courage to face the evidence of the intelligence. “Being” is unchangeable (any change would be into either Being or Non-Being) and thus the fluidity and dynamism of the physical world is denied access to the mind. “Being” is without beginning and end, and hence the coming-into-being and the going-out-of-being of the things of this world are declared to be unintelligible. Faithful to the evidence found within the intelligence that insists that everything we know is being, Parmenides reduces the “Way of Being and Non-Being” to the evidence of the sensibility that reports a multitudinous world in constant motion as it dynamically comes into and then falls out of existence in the constant rise and fall of the tides of nature.

Parmenides is rightly looked upon by Western Philosophy as the man who cracked the boundaries of nature and who discovered that principle without which there would be no nature: Being in the sense of Is. He is also to be saluted for having discovered the link between intelligence and being. We cannot think in terms of non- being; and the very faculty of the understanding finds its term in being, not in the sense that “Is” emerges as an object or a presence, but in the sense that everything known is known in terms of being or existing in some fashion or another.⁴

Parmenides sacrificed The Many, the world known to sensation, because he transformed his verbal “Is” into a substantive, “Being,” which, upon analysis, turns out to be One, Unchanging, Uncaused, Beginningless, Endless. The attributes of this Parmenidean Being contradict the world as we experience it sensorially. But sensation had its vengeance in the person of Heraclitus, Parmenides’ twin pioneer in metaphysics in that early dawn of Greek speculation.⁵ Enchanted, almost bewitched, by change and plurality, Heraclitus was constrained to deny any link between being and sensible reality. The world in which we live is constantly moving, a world “on the go.” Changing in quality as well as in quantity, the things that seem to exist finally change in the radical sense of appearing and disappearing on the theatre of existence. Swarming into the spectrum of the human sensorium, they exist only in the sense that they are already hurtled down a road leading to death. Advancing his own analysis, Heraclitus insisted that change was a mark of perfection. Men change more than rocks, and great men change more than little men. Heraclitus discovered, we might say, the dynamic order. In so doing he articulated an early Greek conviction concerning the meaning of nature. Nature is structurally an unfolding which is a flowering into fullness followed by a withering away into the dust of nothingness. Aware that the intelligence unifies and hence presents reality in terms of being, Heraclitus denied that this unifying factor is extramental. Enjoying existence only within the mind, the Unity of All in Being is a lie, and the intelligence of man is the faculty of lying. The intellect understands things in terms of consistency, objectivity, thingness. The mind grasps the real the way in which a man might pin a butterfly to the wall. But reality is thus mummified only within the spectrum of intelligence. “Out there” in reality there is only constant change.

Heraclitus expressed this intuition in terms of fire. Some scholars claim that he reduced reality to fire, but it seems more sophisticated to conclude that “fire” for Heraclitus was simply an apt symbol for change. Fire exists only through consuming itself and has being in the very act in which of itself it fashions a holocaust. Fire is the very act of burning itself into the cinders of nothingness. And fire thus reflects admirably the drama of reality itself. The Real (if such a word be permitted within Heraclitus’ vision) exists only in the act of consuming itself, in changing, growing, waxing, waning.

This divine fire is captured by what Heraclitus called the logos. The logos marries the fire and is thus a kind of spirit consummating itself in its union with the world. And the logos knows that the law of all things is the law of war. Reality is a constant war between opposites which devour one another in eternal battle: man and woman; sleep and wakefulness; rest and movement. All things “are” real in and through their oppositions, which is another way of saying that all things consume themselves and find their reality in this drive towards thanatos. (The anticipation of Freud could never be clearer.) Fire reconciles opposition because it most perfectly unites the opposed. “You cannot step twice in the same river.” “You step into the same river and other and other waters will flow on.”⁶ And then Heraclitus introduces the symbol of animal passion. “When they are born they desire to live and to meet their fate and they leave children who also meet their fate.”⁷ This twin symbolism dominated the mind of Heraclitus: the fire which burns up in the very exercise of its life and the strife or war which forms the heart of all that “is.”

Maritain, in commenting on that latter day Heraclitean, Bergson, insisted that this doctrine cannot be intellected or thought. And both Bergson and Heraclitus would have admitted this accusation candidly: has not Heraclitus told us that the intelligence is a factory of manufacturing lies? Did not Bergson joyfully receive William James’ telegram upon the publication of Bergson’s Creative Evolution: “Congratulations for having destroyed that beast, the intelligence!” For Heraclitus even speech ought to be suppressed because it utters the content of thought. It would be better to say nothing at all. Thus we are told that a disciple of Heraclitus reprimanded his master for saying you could not step twice into the same stream. No, you cannot step into the same stream once! This same disciple, so goes the story, contented himself in his last years with keeping silent and with wagging one finger in a symbolic gesture of the change that constitutes the only reality that is.

The philosophy of Heraclitus was peripheral to the entire sweep of the Greek experience in the sense that Greek thought in general was frightened of change. The Hellenic spirit tended to find perfection in immobility and shuddered before the chaos attendant upon change. Hierarchy, harmony, marmoreal order, peace, unity—these Greek ideals, themselves the heart of Platonism, found little resonance in the restless spirit of Heraclitus, apostle of perpetual war. His insights were never exploited within Greek civilization.

A convention has grown up within the Western philosophical tradition which insists upon viewing Parmenides and Heraclitus as contradictions, as pure opposites within the entire spectrum of philosophical positions. This convention sees Parmenides as the philosopher of Being and Heraclitus as the champion of Becoming. These oppositions certainly exist, and the tradition has been right in emphasizing them. Nonetheless, if we penetrate the deeper meaning of what these men were trying to say rather than what they did say, the opposition between them tends to dissolve. We might begin with the symbol of fire in Heraclitus and attempt to grasp it in terms of his intentions rather than his execution. Fire is not an object; it is not a “consistency.” Consuming itself, fire finds its own destiny and therefore symbolizes the destiny of the flux. But Parmenides’ “Is,” before he turned it into a substantive, is also nothing which a man can taste, touch, smell, or even intellect as an object. The “Is” of Parmenides looks suspiciously like the Fire of Heraclitus. Both grope toward the deepest metaphysical roots of the Real, towards a principle itself irreducible to any given reality or even to all of them understood in unity. Both point to a crackthrough by the Hellenic mind, a thrust beyond objects and nature. Both suggest a gesture towards transcendence.

But this transcendence was lost in the moment of its discovery. We can demonstrate negatively this forgetfulness of being, in Heidegger’s term, by indicating the contradictions that mushroomed into philosophy due to these thinkers’ having badly articulated their own intuitions.⁸ Parmenides insists that we abandon the multiple world of sensation, and Heraclitus preaches the suicide of the intelligence. The contradiction between intelligence and sensation cannot be resolved by reducing “Is” to the substantive “Being” nor by denying to the intelligence its role within the life of man. Pre-Socratic thought teaches us two things, therefore, about the meaning of being and the human response thereto: being in the sense of “Is” or existence is both a condition for reality and for the human intelligence. Things cannot be and they cannot be thought outside of the climate of existence. But existence is reducible neither to reality nor to the mind. In some fashion, not yet articulated in the dawn of Western thought, “to be” did not mean “to be real” or “to be thought”; but, conversely, whatever is real or is thought is so constituted somehow thanks to “Is.”

Although it is impossible to reduce the philosophy of Plato to any schematic map, it is fair nonetheless to suggest that his metaphysics represents an effort to balance the tensions in being discovered by Heraclitus and Parmenides. Plato remained heroically faithful to his intention to be true to both the evidence of the mind and that of sensation. Aware that the human intelligence captures all things under the aspect of their unity in being, Plato was also aware that the senses do reveal a multiple universe, fluid and changeable. The Platonic metaphysics thus tried to balance the unity of being—discovered in the mind— with being’s multiplicity—discovered through sensation. It remains true, however, that Plato’s ultimate solution leaned more in the direction of Parmenides than it did in that of Heraclitus. As already pointed out, Plato philosophized in the shadow “of the great Parmenides,” that old sage who was “to be feared.” Plato’s most profound statement of his own position as well as his own critique of “Platonism” was named The Parmenides.⁹

What is being? Remaining faithful to the multiplicity of the real that swarms through the sensibility, Plato insisted that the Many are unified in that they are being. If I assert, for instance, that a tree is being I mean to say that the tree is that which it is, a tree. Being emerges initially in Plato as a kind of “doubling back” upon itself. Being means “To be the same as itself.” He identified Being and the form of The Same. Platonic being is a self-consistency or reduplication of a presence. Being is thus the seal reality puts upon itself. It follows that Platonic being is that which already is, the ”nunc stans” the achieved, the finished, the done. In grammatical terms being for Plato is that to which we can put a period, reality now present to the human intelligence. Ortega y Gasset described this Platonic understanding of being as “Eleatic” in that it followed the Greek tendency to read reality in terms of presence, be that presence spatial: that is, objects pinned to the human sensibility, or be that presence mental: that is, ideas or concepts intellected and thus understood.

In constituting being as sameness, Plato was able to set up a dialectic or opposition between being and non-being. Non-being is “otherness.” Non-being does not present itself as non-existence because being is not understood in terms of existence.¹⁰ Being, that which is what it is, ceases “to be being” when it changes and becomes “other” than it was. Otherness for Plato is a form of reality which is just as real as is being. Hence a dialectic is possible between being and its opposite. I am the same as myself: this is my being; I am other than everything else, and thus the world surrounding me emerges as my non-being. In turn, I am non-being to that which is my other.

Plato’s defense of the reality of non-being is strikingly clever. When I form the proposition stating, let us say, that “John is not flying,” I am saying something meaningful, or I am not. If “not-flying” is nothing real in John, then it follows that the proposition says nothing at all and cannot be distinguished from saying just nothing whatsoever about John. But the proposition evidently means something; since everyone understands what I am talking about, “not-flying” must be some reality formally in John. That reality is a form of “The Other” or of “Non-Being.”

The phenomenal universe in which we live is actually a mosaic of forms of being and non-being, of sameness and otherness. Change itself was understood by Plato not in terms of the dynamic, but rather as a kind of replacement of one form by another. Note carefully that this “replacement” theory corresponds exactly to reality as it is sensed by the human eye. Change, to the eye, is precisely a kind of replacement of one object by another, of one colored thing by another. This game of musical chairs is all that sight by itself can make out of change or process, but it is a game that fits Plato’s understanding of the meaning of being and non-being.¹¹

Given that being is self-consistency or sameness, it follows that being is encountered in its pure state only within the mind. Ideas or forms o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Introduction
• 1 The History of Being in Western Civilization: a Résumé
• 2 The Problematic of Existence: a Parenthesis on Metaphysical Methodology
• 3 St. Thomas Aquinas and an Introduction to the Metaphysics of Existence
• 4 Reasoning about Existence
• 5 The Domestication of the Nothing
• 6 Existence as a “Towards God”
• 7 The Human Person: Towards a Metaphysics of the Future
• 8 Existence and History
• 9 The Philosopher and the Myth
• Index