Being and Knowing

Reflections of a Thomist

Frederick D. Wilhelmsen

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351314220
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Philosophy
• Categoría: Philosophy History & Theory

Frederick D. Wilhelmsen's Being and Knowing, rooted in the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, rests on two basic assertions: first, metaphysics is the science of being in its first and ultimate act, existence (the act by which all things manifest themselves); second, that existence is known not through observing objects, but in affirming through judgments that these objects are subjects of existence.

The chapters of this book explore these Thomistic doctrines. Some explain St. Thomas Aquinas's philosophy of being. Others probe his epistemology. The complexity and density of Aquinas's theory of judgment (that truth is realized in the judgment of man), emphasized throughout most of the book, point not only to a deeper understanding of the nature of metaphysics, but they open doors to the clarification of philosophical issues germane to contemporary thought.

This work addresses a number of metaphysical philosophical paradoxes. Wilhelmsen's exploration of them demonstrates why he was the preeminent American scholar of the Thomistic tradition. This volume is part of Transaction's series, the Library of Conservative Thought.

III

The Concept of Existence and the Structure of Judgment: A Thomistic Paradox

The precise role of existence as related to judgment has increasingly engaged the attention of Thomistic metaphysicians in recent years.¹ The plethora of articles and books whose attention has been bent to the elucidation of the issue might lead us to suspect that little more can be said on the subject. A warning signal that this suspicion is not well founded is the appearance of several studies that have challenged the thesis that the metaphysics of St. Thomas advances towards its fruition thanks to a disengagement of exigencies discovered in the famous “judgment of separation.”² Even though the thesis has been argued that the interpretations given the Thomistic being (esse) by Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson are by no means equivalent doctrines, the names of these two illustrious philosophers are frequently linked by the opponents of what might well be called a “metaphysics of separation” and what has in fact been referred to as “existential Thomism.”³ The expected reaction against the Existentialism of the post-World War II era has resonated within Thomistic circles as well. The present essay is by no means a contribution to the literature of Thomistic revisionism, pro or con, but is written in the spirit of a man who, in fact a non-revisionist, is convinced that all has not yet been said about the role of existence and judgment, that the role of the judgment of separation, of a properly negative dimension to all metaphysical propositions and conclusions, is sufficiently dense and rich that we can assume confidently, unless proven otherwise, that there is more to the doctrine than meets the eye.

St. Thomas’ teaching that human understanding bifurcates into two terminal operations, expressed by the distinct verba of the mind, is so well known that it suffices here merely to restate the doctrine. Two acts grasp two aspects of being which, thanks to subsequent reasoning, are known to be non-identical or “really distinct.” The synthesizing, composing, or “to-gethering” function of the act of existing, an activity which forms no part of any synthesis but which is the catalyst in which the principles of nature are annealed into unity, is reiterated cognitively and hence intentionally by the intellect in the act of judgment.⁴ Judgment thus is a re-play of the principles of the real. So far as existence is concerned, judgments exercise in a spiritual way the very existential composing which is going on in the real at any one moment of time. The verb “to be” consignifies in the mind the active composing in which being (esse) consists in the real, and it consignifies that composing in the very temporality in which it is discovered to be.⁵ This cognition of the composite as composite is counterpointed by the cognition of the composite as simple, meaning thereby the composite as though it were simple: e.g., “walking man” abstracting from whether or not the man is here and now, in this moment of time, actually walking. Therefore the act of simple understanding cognizes synthesized essences, whereas the act of judging cognizes their here and now being synthesized in existence. Thomistic esse thus plays the double role of positing things in being as their absolute act—no other act can be said to be the act that it is unless it be; and, language here is necessarily awkward—being-their-very-being as well as composing all of the essential principles constituting “thinghood” into unity. The very unity of any essence, according to Saint Thomas, is its being.⁶ Essences, abstracting from existence in either the real or in the mind, are neither one nor many.⁷ Esse is the being of things and their being-composed: the esse of composite creatures is existential synthesizing activity.⁸

But every one of the propositions forming the above paragraph is a conclusion of an act of metaphysical reasoning. Not one of those propositions is understood in some kind of privileged intuition. In this case, a number of truths are known but the content of these truths is not cognized properly in any act of simple understanding, in any “vision.” The verbal copula “is” has been distended into playing the role of subject as well as predicate in a series of judgments which are results produced by syllogistic reasoning on exigencies initially grasped immediately in experience.⁹ As so distended into operating as a subject of predication or as a predicate affirmed or denied of some other subject, being—in the sense of existence—has shifted radically from the initial role that it plays in all human knowing. In the cognition of things as being, grasped intellectually in and through sensation, existence is never affirmed or denied as though it were some object known, some “meaning” or intelligibility thrown up before “the screen of the consciousness.” “Screen,” of course, is a metaphor weighted with our idealist inheritance. What is known directly, according to Thomistic epistemology, is the thing sensed and it is not known as sensed but as it is. Nowhere in non-scientific judgments is existence known as subject or predicate but everything else is known as either existent or non-existent, or as existent or non-existent in this or that way. This scandal for a mind bent on conceptualizing everything when confronted with non-conceptualizable existence is no scandal at all for the non-philosopher in any waking moment of his life: he is constantly affirming and denying and these affirmations and negations all bear on existence, the “factor” cognized in judgment. The author has argued that the “fact” of existence is in no way distinct from the Thomistic esse.¹⁰ When I know that “It is raining” or “My friend’s hair is turning grey,” I am knowing esse, subsequently understood by the metaphysician as absolute act (in the first case) and as synthesizing as well as absolute act (in the second case). In both instances I can switch the words I use and easily speak of “the fact of raining” and “the fact of my friend’s greying hair.”

But the shift from knowing being as fact and knowing existence in the series of propositions that cluster around a philosophy of ens commune or esse commune¹¹ is the entire shift from non-metaphysics to metaphysics. To subject existence to some predicate or to make existence the predicate of some subject, using all the while the verb “to be,” is to wrench the verb “to be” out of its normal usage. The obvious danger here consists in making the subject “existence” exist as a subject of being or in making the predicate “existence” exist as an inhering and determining form. The avoidance of this temptation is the heart of the present study. After all, both are declared, thanks to the copula, “to be.” The judgment, “John is a man” entails that the subject, “John,” exists; but the judgment “Existence is an act”—a commonplace in Thomistic metaphysics—does not mean or intend to mean that the subject, “existence,” exists in its own right as an act—at least not in the way John exists as a man. A comparable case can be found in judgments proper to the Aristotelian philosophy of nature: e.g., “Substantial form is the act of first matter” is not intended to affirm the subsistence of substantial form, its actual being as a thing in itself. But the metaphysical statement about existence is far more radical. Form is not declared not to be form but is declared not to exist, in philosophy of nature; but in Thomistic metaphysics, it is precisely existence which is declared not to exist. Quite evidently there is a distinction between denying that principles in general exist and denying that the principle through which all other principles are in being is itself being or exists. The prior but accidental characteristics of the Thomistic esse, stressed so frequently by Father Joseph Owens, heighten a unique paradox which has no analogue in the order of nature.¹² Creatures are, through an esse which is a quo and not a quod.¹³ Since esse is not a quod, esse is not a subject of anything at all.

The issue touches the very question of the possibility of metaphysics and of man’s capacity to make significant and true propositions about being. A metaphysics of being as existing must, among other things, square itself with Kant’s insistence that metaphysics lacks any object discovered in experience, that metaphysics is a perennial temptation to convert laws into quasi-realities.¹⁴ As interesting as it would be to approach the question in the light of Kant’s rejection of metaphysics, this essay restricts itself to the problem as encountered in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. Within this metaphysics, it shall be argued, the temptation to turn existence into a privileged object in a world of objects is avoided thanks to the techniques proper to the judgment of separation which, in this case, emerges as an instance of the “way of negation,” the via negationis.¹⁵

The incipient metaphysician puzzling over the mystery of being seems at the outset of his investigation to be gored on the horns of a dilemma: either he tries to conceptualize the verbal copula or he tries to convert the copula into the substantive, “being.” It would seem initially that he has no other way to talk about being. Being thus is going to function variably as subject and predicate if the novice philosopher is to be released from the pre-philosophical awe at the dizzying truth that things are, an awe whose only response is the hortatory “Is—Is—Is” which overwhelmed Parmenides. But Parmenides subsequently worked himself free of the grip of his experience in order to reason about its meaning.

The experiment consisting in disengaging the copula from its normal function in predication and expanding it into a conceptual object forces the mind to reduce “Is” to nothing at all. No-thing is “Is.” Conceptualized “Is,” hence, is equivalently nothing. The very vacuity and the indetermination of “Is,” thus conceived, coupled with the realization that experience has never yielded an “Is” that talked, walked or ate, ineluctably necessitates the judgment, “Is is not.” In a word: “Is,” as thought conceptually as an object, simply blanks itself out because “Is” is no subject (in the scholastic sense of the term) at all, and certainly not a subject of itself. As St. Thomas puts it in his In Boethii de Hebdomadibus:

In respect to being (ens), however, esse is considered as in itself something that is common and non-determined which becomes determined in two ways: in one way from the side of the subject which has esse; in another way from the side of the predicate, as when we say of a man, or of any other thing, not that it is in an unqualified way but that it is such and such, e.g. black or white.¹⁶

Being (ipsum esse) considered “in itself” as “something” common and non-determined is always determined concretely in the real either by the subject which has being or by the predicate which determines the being of the subject. But the esse as such cannot quite be said to exist, to be: “Ipsum enim esse nondum est.”¹⁷ The sense of the statement hinges upon the tricky adverb “nondum.” “Dum” usually carries a temporal sense and so too does “nondum”; “not quite” but, possibly, “later on.” The temporal sense can be more forcefully expressed by interjecting a “nihil.” Aquinas could have written, “Ipsum esse nihil dum est” and this would have meant that esse is nothing right now, nothing in the “while” which is the present, but that it will be. Had St. Thomas wished simply to cancel esse after the manner of Hegel he would have written: “ipsum esse nihil est.” But his use of the “nondum,” expanding its force beyond any temporal connotation, suggests a delicate precision in his use of language. That he is altering the original meaning of the sentence found in Boethius to suit his own metaphysics indicates an even more refined delicacy: “‘To Be’ itself does not quite exist.” This does not mean that “to be” will eventually come to exist as a subsisting existence, thus swamping creatures in a pantheism. Neither does this mean that “to be” is simply zero, nothing at all. The issue is clarified by St. Thomas’ comparison of “to be” with “to run.”

“To run” and “to be” signify in the abstract whereas “a being” (ens) and “a run...