A paper published over twenty years ago nowFootnote 1 sought to stress the insolubility of the problem of the existence of just this self which I am, or of the self which you, a definite individual within the finite number of those which ever have existed, are. I concluded that this problem was no different from that of the existence of the world, so that for similar reasons it could only be referred to the incomprehensible freedom of a first infinite cause and creator.
This may have been all right as far as it went, but perhaps the more important part was what I did not see was still to be added. I was indeed surprised to find that one or two people whom I regard as wise had no appreciation of the problem, answering me, for example, in terms of personal history, who one's parents were, say, as if the same mystery did not attach to each of them and, more nearly, as if the whole world could not have gone on without me, those same two people either generating or not generating some other child at the very same time they generated me, ot at any other time. Neither astrology nor genetics can have the last word in the constitution of the self.
Now why is this not obvious to all? Here I come to my answer as to that more important part of the explanation which I mentioned above. Those I consulted were, as I was myself, either philosophical realists or realists in the sense of taking the natural and unreflective attitude. We thought in terms of a world of objects, even if we should choose to state that God (object of thought at least) is not an object and other paradoxical things. Above all, we treated each self as an object, this self that exists, a contingent object. It was indeed the contingency, this lack of sufficient reason, which led straight to the naked will of God.
In theory of course one knew that God has known and loved each one of us from all eternity. We then went on to attribute necessity to all the possible beings known to infinite knowledge, from which he freely and hence contingently selects a finite number for actualisation. Here, one may remark in passing, there is a certain failure to see that this fancied possibility is not other than the infinite divine power itself to create as it wishes. That alone is what is necessary. I am not selected out of some larger set.
So if one does speak of an election something other is meant, namely that one is a part (though God has no parts), an expression, of God, that God is in one and one is in God. He dwells in us and we have our being in him. That is why one exists, not because of a gift to a nothing (this indeed cannot be expressed, there being no recipient prior to the gift) but because one has always been there, in the divine mind. This is the unity of the self and God, just as our appropriation of the world in knowledge is a kind of re‐creation of it, or rather it is a being present at its creation.
In fact if there is otherness in God, as the Trinity as a doctrine of the divine “processions” or proceedings exemplifies, then there will be a proceeding ad extra too, a kind of mirror of the Son's eternal begetting on the Christian scheme, and this has to be a creation out of nothing. This creation is just the one in which God expresses himself, as he does in his images, ourselves. Why do I exist? I exist as with God in idea from all eternity. That is my irremovable stake in actuality.
There is a parallel to this in our thinking about the material universe or nature. Succeeding to the naive or supernaturalist view of the creation in all its specific detail we have the evolutionary explanation, supported by the fossil record, together with analogous cosmological speculation supported by observation and measurement of, for example, an expansion from a central point. But these explanations lead us back to a beginning needing to be explained in the old way, i.e. to be left unexplained, the only conclusion being to a divine fiat, even thought this is at variance with the whole previous way of thinking, a “God of the gaps” indeed, leaving us with two analogous, discontinuous realities.
This is again to stop halfway. If we arrive at this infinite eternal being, the creator, then we know that the centre and origin is there and should try to think this. Then we would see that the otherness that creation embodies (and which we find in creation) must, like everything else, be prefigured in the divine or absolute unity, who therefore must also contain a plurality, at least of relations. It is upon and to one or more of these relations that the external relation of creation must succeed, a creation which, though, is not identified with God, but always remains nothing apart from him. It is as it were his veil, his many veils, or, from our point of view, his “objectification”. Time too appears thus as the veil or image of eternity, obviating realist puzzles about its beginning which ignore the fact that a beginning is an intra‐temporal concept.
What this amounts to is an extension of philosophical or scientific explanation to creation, the becoming of nature as a whole. This is not derived from Christian doctrine but gives, rather, support to it. The realist theology of creation does not so much explain it as argue towards it, though the theory of the divine ideas contains the germ of an explanation. These, however, if relations, express only the quasi‐logical relations of identity within the divine mind. The power of creating, of making the other as such, needs to be led back to a permanent generation of the other within the divine being itself, since it is only in and together with such generation, obviously occurring continually and not once and for all in some fictive divine past, that the external going forth of creation can be accomplished.
We are offered, usually, the picture (this is what it is) of a divine hand guiding the development from above, from outside, so that life should occur, for instance. A more unitary, hence more plausible and eo ipso more satisfying view is that of an inner development of what is already there in germ, going back to the beginning. Time then shows us the world becoming conscious of itself and so, increasingly, conscious that it is conscious, thereafter in innocent regress. The senses develop, in dialectical interchange with the living being's survival needs, a sensitivity to light (apprehended by the creature as a whole or formally) or perhaps the sensation first happens to it and then it uses it. Or does it strive to see before seeing? Sight can anyhow not be divorced from the will to know where danger lies, where the food is, etc.), touch, smell. What was the world before these senses existed, even that of touch, world that so mysteriously corresponds exactly to just these five senses or so? Was it what science now discovers it to be? With the same measurements? Like the waves that could be corpuscular, the randomly uncertain particles, must not the measurements too be, as it were, to our measure? Finally, what is the status of this “before”, viewed outside of human perception or absolutely? We have, after all, accorded a definite age to the world.
Could man have arisen naturally, from within, or must the intellect have come “from outside”, as Aristotle said? The senses would be the base, quaedam cognitio, the vis aestimativa yielding to the vis cogitativa, the latent power to grasp a quod quid est, woman perhaps, or man. Immateriality indeed, abstraction, but then we must ask, are there no immaterial beings in nature, in the realm of objectified spirit? Is being itself material, that being which cannot both be and not be? Yet we have already raised a doubt about its materiality, its mass, its resistance to pressure, before there was any sense of touch. Was it visible before eyes were postulated? Was there light to accompany the degree of heat, quantifiable in terms of energy, which however can equally be taken just phenomenally if anything can?
If it is just the world that knows itself we have a circle. Must not knowledge judge it from outside, freely? Even in the act of postulating a monist system? Or else it seems we must take the world as an absolute, inseparable from the indwelling God.
We might say, the intellect comes not from outside; it comes from inside, but it comes from it as a whole, since this is what defines intellect, viz. that it grasps and names the universal (kat holon). This is why man, each human being, was spoken of as a microcosmos, a (the) world in miniature. Thus Hegel speaks of “an individually determined world soul”.
The world grew gradually conscious of itself but in virtue of the logos indwelling from the beginning. “What is the world without the reason?”, Gottlob Frege rhetorically asked, his question leaving open which arose within which. This logos, source of all, has to be infinite, since there is nothing that could limit it. It is clear that man has a special relation to it, of a reflected universality able in principle to interiorise or “think” all things. Any further evolution will retain this, just as life or sensitiveness is never gone beyond.
Here we have an alternative to the jarring picture of a special creation and infusion of each soul. It is just this universalising power which, as ad opposita, includes the freedom in virtue of which each new human being is a new beginning, whether or not generated by parents. This is to say, his soul and therefore his self is his own. Hence the hypotheses of his coming from elsewhere, be it only from the hand of an external God in a unique way, when in fact his freedom, which these theories would explain, is immanent and constitutive, finally conferred by the developing energies of the world itself become conscious.
With this the whole paradoxical idea of a substantial form which is yet itself a substance is no longer needed, such need having ever been its only plausibility. There is therefore much less reason to postulate other separate substantial forms too, angels or “separated substances”, though there was never any absolute need to identify God's messengers (angeloi) with this notion.
Man reigns in the world, God's free but by no means contingent or incidental creation. For he is truly the objective externalisation of the infinite self, as the doctrine of the incarnation expresses. So we hope for salvation and life from the dead. The world is from the start divine, “full of gods”. Divine transcendence, from which nothing is hidden, demands total immanence.
It is difficult to reconcile how Aquinas speaks of how things are with his saying that their creation follows from God's knowledge of them. God cannot know things as other than they really are since his knowledge of them is constitutive. One must then distinguish the way of speaking from the way of being thus intended. So, after saying (at Contra gentes I, 11) that “first” and “highest” are a way of speaking of God relatively Aquinas adds that there are no real relations to creatures in God. It follows that God is not really the first or highest being. Either he alone is being or he is (as we say, predicating) beyond all being.
But to say he alone is being comes close to making him the being of creatures, which is self‐contradictory for Aquinas (I, 26). He has an act of being as does anything else, with which however he alone is essentially identical, i.e. unlike anything else. This is God's uniqueness. It is, however, being without a subject, “pure act”, since the subject is the be‐ing. Is that still existence as we understand it? There occurs act which is not an act of anything. From this proceeds creation, in relation to which alone divine or infinite being is necessarily postulated.
Freedom is a quality at once spiritual and intellectual, as in unconditioned judgement. So the necessary being is unconditioned, his externalisation free. Whether or not this creation begins, as finite, there is no before this beginning, when God, eternal, was alone. He does not change, but nor does he need this creation thus, as actively thought, freely proceeding.
This human form, made in God's image, is whole and bodily. It is groundlessly dualistic then to see just our bodies as fashioned, evolved, in response to animal needs. Thus our human form cannot be placed only as term of creation. It must, as unconditioned intellect, be crown and cause from the beginning. The whole animal life‐system, in that case, must be imaged and begotten upon this form, the face of Christ according to which Adam's face was fashioned being prior to the reverse evolutionary relation as the deeper truth. This is the only way to account for man as natural, and not an angel held in by an ape. Human actuality, therefore, requires the inversion of the world.
The idea of the infusion of the soul (special creation) bears witness to some special status for the species man, to a privileged access to truth, as of one made in the divine image. Yet the attempt to see this as a gratuitous gift of a soul to an ape is itself gratuitously dualist, carrying over into an evolutionary perspective, with which it jars, a crudely unadapted relic of an otherwise superseded magico‐religious view of the world where everything was thus directly created. Yet even within this earlier account special creation of the soul was argued for in man's case alone, if we prescind from the postulation of angels. In their case their knowledge itself, of the species of all things, was as specially created as were they themselves.
But where such a postulation, of a soul from “outside”, is needed we clearly have a world in which God, the spiritual, is not present. Aquinas denied that the rational soul could be transmitted by material generation, understandably. There is an individuality to each soul as destined for this body, though it is the soul itself that makes of the body a this such that it can receive the soul. It is in that way that matter is said to be the principle of individuation. There are tensions and unresolved questions here.
Let us forget for a moment the claim as to reason's antecedent spirituality or immateriality, able to have the form of the other as other. Such claims impose dualism, mind dematerialising matter in the act of understanding it. We might recall Heraclitus: “all things are full of gods”. It is not after all with a part of him that man understands but substantially, as that which he essentially is.
An idealist could claim that in a sense this dematerialised form with which the mind unites is what anything essentially is. As nothing is purely matter so there is no matter, merely finitude. In nature we see spirit, the Idea. For what we observe is a natural process culminating, to date, in creatures able to reflect and understand, aware that they are aware, able to investigate and explain this very process, uncovering the universal and the necessary. There is no question of some higher, more absolute knowledge, before which such (human) knowing has to be justified. It is its own warrant and is understood as such.
In this light, to postulate a special intervention from outside in the case of this intellect is just to deny the truth to which it bears such compelling witness, viz. that nature is a vehicle and expression of spirit, issuing by a natural necessity in such reflexive power of comprehension, this power we call soul or spirit. It is to degrade nature, as a creation specifically, while pretending to a higher spirituality. We do not understand nature; nature, in and through us, understands herself. Nature is not God. Through the process it, and we ourselves, are drawn up towards God, the transcendent to which we are open because he is “closer to us than we are to ourselves”.
Maybe, theologically, each one of us is “foreknown”, but “from the foundations of the world” in that case. The world is such as to bring forth us, me, in due time. No special creation is needed. I am that baby which comes forth, and I show by the freedom of my intellectual nature in itself, progressively, that the whole world and its infinite creator generate me along with my parents, with a necessity transcending their not essentially intellectual act. There is here indeed a special appearance, which the doctrine of special creation (of the soul) tries to capture.
This is the kind of thing though that would happen naturally when nature reaches our stage of complexity, bending back upon itself in understanding possession. The capacity, again, is within nature herself. Nature herself, therefore, the physical, has its being within and suffused by God. One could only call this acosmism (Hegel's characterisation of Spinoza's system) as against an outlook in practice habitually denying this divine suffusion, this transcendence without limit overflowing into total immanence. Nature has no being over and above the divine being in any comparable sense, as if she had some private life, like a citizen of reality, in which it was not the business of the state to interfere. Thus the realist Aquinas was compelled to conclude, again, that God knows us in his idea of us and not in ourselves, for we are not thus independently in ourselves, except insofar as the self might be identical with God, infinite and ultimate.
There is thus no need for special creation. In us, simply, self‐consciousness is reached and life (bios) has done with the biological as its form of growth. Special creation can only be postulated if we see intellect as a separate part of man (anima mea non est ego). It would be absurd to say that we were specially created bodily in a way unknown to dogs and cats. A natural development of intellect is possible, since it exists. Only this claim preserves divine infinity, such that God is immanent in and contains all creation. Just intellect, its emergence, leads us to look back on the rest in that light. The evolutionary principle itself is rational, as rational as the geometry of a spider's web. Things survive, exist, to the extent that they partake in that rationality or are true. Such reason though, thought, is, as first, unbounded, infinite. That is why creation is free as reason itself, the absolute.
In a sense I (any I) have created the nature I look out upon. For just as there is no proportion between infinity and the finite creature in general, so there is no proportion (beyond certain analogies) between intellect and things lacking reflective capacity for the universal in particular. Felt too strongly, this gives rise to the dualism of matter and spirit, a position contradicted by the emergence of the one from the other in which it lay sleeping, as of flower from seed. In a sense there is no proportion between flower and seed either. Just as most seeds do not become flowers, so most sensitive creatures do not transcend themselves towards intellect. This, however, happens at the level of species, whether one or several being for palaeontologists to determine. The need though for the two accounts, mechanist and teleological but each expressive of the other, remains, a work of infinite cunning.
Thought and knowledge are indeed dialectical, but only up to a point. This must be so since it follows that this assertion too will be dialectical and not simply absolute. All things flow. The more they change the more they remain the same, identity in difference of both identity and difference themselves, which are thus not themselves, exclusively. Thinking, that is to say, as spirit, never rests.
We have been considering the thesis of Aristotelian dualism, that the soul, intellect, nous, “comes from outside”. This follows from the premises that mind “can know the natures of all bodies” and that what thus knows cannot itself be a body since knowledge, as identity with the other, would then be stopped, its own body as paremphainomenon getting in the way of the total openness envisaged, the having of the form of the other as other. It is left unclear in what sense if any this now immaterial intellect can have its own form or be something in any way at all.
This can though seem a compelling argument for dualist spiritualism. Thus it is used, for example, by Joseph Pieper,Footnote 2 who contrasts the subjective environmental world of animals to the real total world known by the absolute spirit and knowable, in parallel, to the created finite spirit of man, precisely in virtue of spirit, defined as openness to all being.
Now spirit is also a master‐category in Hegel, who, however, does not use this argument for a “substantial soul”. Spirit rather brings forth the whole of nature and matter does not really exist. For Teilhard de Chardin the evolution of the whole earth and universe, living or non‐living taken as a whole, is a process of psychogenesis. Soul and mind come from below by a directed process for which but a small twist in his thinking is needed to make it dialectical, complexification spanning as a term both temporal development and reason's taking apart what exists as thought eternally, the complexity lying in the mode of analysis, of unfolding (explication) merely.
We do not need dogmatically to deny the reality of the infused soul. With reference though to the first remark, above, about dialectic we must notice that the pressure of the Aristotelian argument, in conflict with the ever more richly confirmed unitary scientific picture of evolutionary continuity, itself brings forth a questioning of its own main premise, in a dialectical change of direction. What exactly do we mean, how far are we justified, in claiming that the intellect can know the natures of all bodies? Conversely, does not the improbability of finding a harmony between this absolutism and an ever more compelling relational account of knowledge and meaning compel a nuancing or rethinking of the premise?
The key notion here is knowledge, as in knowing what something is. This though is always in terms of knowing what some other things are. Yet we are familiar now with the situation of not being able to know the nature of each and every body or particle, in quantum physics, every unknown affecting the quality even of our grasp of the universal, for that matter. In association with this we have a seemingly intractable debate about whether these particles are unknown in themselves, of merely random provenance, or, less radically, their true natures and supposed individual etiology are forever inaccessible to us. Similarly it is not decided whether the choice we have of representing particles as either waves or as corpuscular is decidable as a matter of intellectual truth or as a mere matter of convenience.
This situation is a “straw in the wind” in our context here. Can the knowing of the natures of all bodies be fully separated from our finite concerns of the moment when we apply our minds to the question? This aspect need not be seen as a practical contaminant to the project of theory. Theory, rather, as a notion, has suffered through not having been able, historically, to be placed in the context of that dynamic emergence of mind within evolution in the course of a struggle to survive to which our knowledge now bears witness. Inherited predicative structures of languages also now require constant transcendence, a consideration rather weakening the force of traditionalist objections to a logic (the Fregean) which “can't say what something is”.
Behind this question as to our ability lies that of the object. Are all things knowable in themselves, even to an absolute spirit? We seem returned to Plato here. Omne ens est verum, maybe, but what if some beings (and not merely doubtful propositions), as it seems in their beginnings at least, are equivocal as between being and non‐being. Teilhard emphasises this hiddenness of beginnings. It is common ground that to be a being one must have an essence. But essence can be indeterminate at the start, as the emergence and co‐relatedness of species and even genera tends to confirm and as is yet more marked at the non‐living, more weakly individualised level.
Pieper and Teilhard use concepts of interiority and interiorisation respectively. To be alive, Pieper claims, is to have an interior in the sense of a power of actively relating to, interacting with, the environment, as do plants. Teilhard de Chardin extends this notion to anything whatever. The divide between matter and life, still more spirit, is relativised. Thus it seems a matter of choice, again, whether to class certain viruses as living or non‐living. But matter here is upgraded to spirit and not the contrary.
Essential for Pieper, for Thomists, is the idea of immaterial substance. The stress, however, depends upon identification of matter, by contrast, where substance is first encountered, as antithetical to spirit. This idea entirely evades human evolution as witnessed to in palaeontology and in the emergence of all other species.
For Teilhard de Chardin evolution reaches a critical point which he terms “reflection”, when one knows that one knows, and which he compares to the qualitative change produced in water heated to the critical quantitative intensity of 100 degrees. The question is not raised as to how “absolute” this new stage is or can be known to be. Does knowledge reach right up to the reality? Its doing so was the premise, we saw, for the ancient argument.
Yet such coming from outside, as a notion, depends upon the contrast with “dead matter”, which can be repudiated antecedently if matter and the earth is alive or pregnant with life. Regarding Teilhard's reflection, however, there are many coincidences. Thus the primate, in adopting an erect posture, frees his hands for an all‐purpose “handling” which in turn frees the jaws from their usual animal functions which had in turn demanded strong maxillary muscles confining cranial expansion (this original protuberance upon the spine). Once remove that and the possibility of greater brain‐enlargement is given, the assumption being that the central nervous system centres in the brain (in all animals), upon which the power of thought depends in direct if indefinite proportion. Theoretically it might seem that a corresponding organ might develop in some other region or way in an animal remaining quadruped, say at the neck or belly, or in some creature that had avoided the specialisation of becoming vertebrate and these alternatives reduce the impression of coincidence. Intelligence was just ready to come out in some way or other. We suppose, after all, that what in our perception is fore‐ordained is known and determined eternally as freely occurring, by reason's cunning again.Footnote 3
Thus the superiority not just of man but of the primates depended upon their keeping undeveloped less specialised bodily organs so as not to be tied down to determinate behaviour (e.g. if their hands had become claws) at variance with the free play of what was to become intelligence.
If we return to the question of unevolutionary absoluteness, what is meant by the power to know the natures of all bodies? The mind is declared able to infallibly grasp the quod quid est, what something is, though not in the sense of an absurd claim to scientific omniscience. Rather, error comes in with the mind's second act, the judgement, but never with concept‐formation as such. A concept is got by abstraction if we refer it to universals, but it can also be of individuals, such as the moon, or our friends, and this we might share with less reflexive creatures. Later philosophy would see it as a content of consciousness rather, prior to any making of judgements.
Indeed if our central category is reflection, self‐consciousness, then the question of absolute knowledge is not raised so sharply at the beginning, being rather attained at the end, as in the structure of Hegel's The Phenomenology of Mind. I look at what I hold in my hands, as I eat perhaps, and am aware that I am looking at it. I remember and muse on what I have seen. I ask myself questions. In the practical sphere each individual takes some responsibility in providing for himself, but if he takes a coat, a fur‐skin, with him as he leaves the cave it is because he knows as a truth, even as a theoretical truth, that it will get colder in the evening.
Returning to the quod quid est, it is evident that we know what we know. Prehistoric man knows that the moon looks like a golden melon. If he declares it is one or of similar size he commits an error of judgement he had the means to avoid. The conceptual power, that is, is self‐validating as far as it goes. In this indeed it is little more than an extension of the sense‐power. For there is no point in speaking of a more real nature of sensible bodies than what we sense. Sensible bodies, that is, are the bodies sensed, a situation applying also to observation with a microscope.
Thus the Scholastics had to postulate intermediate powers between sensation and knowledge, such as a vis aestimativa and even a vis cogitativa as a specifically human refinement precisely of sense, without which intellect could get no purchase upon the world. It is plain that the discontinuity there was in form of presentation alone, homo sapiens building smoothly upon his inheritance.
When I write this I am aware that I am writing and of what I am writing. At intervals I look back so as to keep my grasp of the whole, in relation to which I understand and determine the direction of the lines I wish to write next. This is, if one likes, an absolute truth, an absolute reality, because immediately given in awareness. That, and nothing else, is the claim of the quod quid est. To buttress it however one needs to be free of the confused theory that one perceives perceptions. One perceives things, which thus become percepts. It is a matter of my situation whether what I perceive on the road is Pierre, a man, an animal, a moving object or just some disturbance in the (perceived) landscape. Queries regarding certainty may always be raised and spiritualistic absoluteness may be related to some confusion as between certainty and truth, even before Descartes thematised it. Conversely, one may indeed have the form of the other as other, but this other is hardly ever the form of the whole other (and even when I recognise Pierre who knows if what I know is the essential man?). The sense‐form as grasped by us or animals is already of a piece with this; neither of us, as Aquinas admits elsewhere, so simply or easily grasps the nature of any, let alone all bodies. We know rather danger, or a colour. That we could do so, given world and time, well that is indeed not a power given to animals in their present state, but they might well be on the road to it, be it once admitted that our pre‐human ancestors were thus in via. There is development in an individual; there is development in a chain of individuals.
So one might wish to say that to be able to know the natures of all bodies is no more than this power of awareness. The reflective power transforms the association of likenesses into the abstraction of a common species, Aristotle's battle‐formation, to which we give a name capable of extension to an indefinite, even infinite number of related individuals. Intensionality just is, in fact, the mirror‐image of reflexivity, by which I can know the whole world just as an object of my knowledge.
But there is nothing absolute in this so far. It is then man's world. Yet what is true for man is true. Just so, what the dog judges good to eat normally is so for him. It is only that he does not know he has made that true judgement, but just eats. Therefore we see his estimate as no more than an inferior analogue of judgement.
By the inner logic of such concept‐formation one can add perception to perception, building up a picture that in time could amount to knowledge of the natures of all bodies, though maybe never exhaustive. This possibility of being known was therefore endemic to reality from the start. The created, pejoratively named material world, with its “parts outside parts” and, above all, its innate impetus towards life, again coming from within, was set to culminate in some kind of “omega‐point”, if not to progress ever onward. Thus the universe is nothing other than the matter of life, a principle of it. It is not therefore the theatre merely in which some abstract life‐force plays out its drama, contingently.
