HOW DOES GOD ENTER INTO PHILOSOPHY? ''HOW DOES GOD enter into philosophy?" To respond to this Heideggerian question is the purpose of this communication. 1 Heidegger's O'Wn response is that God enters into philosophy as causa sui, but that " man can neither pray nor sacrifice " to this God, nor "make music nor dance " nor fall on his knees before him. 2 There is no doubt that such a ' God ' is inadequate to religion, but there is likewise no doubt that this is not how God has in fact entered into philosophy. This paper will offer an account of that entrance; it will be an historical and thematic study at once, and will present only the argument of a work in progress QO times its length. In order to specify how God does enter into philosophy, we must first explicate the matter at issue in philosophical reflection and then clarify in a minimal way the God of religion. This done, we will be able to pose the question in a rigorous way: How do the Being that philosophy brings to discourse and the salvational Power that appears in religion relate to each other? It is their identity or coincidence that will answer the question. However, since there is always more to Being than is proper to the salvational Power, and reversely, this identity will at once be a difference or divergence. Accordingly, the argument will fall into three parts: the matter at issue in philosophy (Being) , the correlate of the religious project (the salvational Power), and their identity and difference. 1 Martin Heidegger, "Die onto-theo-logische Verfassung der Metaphysik," in I den ti tat und Differenz ( Pfullingen: Neske, 1957), p. 70. Hereinafter quotation marks ("like this") will mark only quotations, and inverted commas ('like this') will indicate metaphor, irony, and so on. 2 Ibid. 165 166 DANIEL GUERRIERE I. THE BEING OF PHILOSOPHY This part will have two main sections: the circumscription of the philosophical object, and then the articulation of this object as far as our question demands it. A summary will serve as the transition to the next part. A. The Circurnscription. of the Philosophical Object The first task is to specify what is always at issue for philosophy, that in terms of which the philosopher tries "to save the phenomena," that horizon within which philosophic discourse interrogates anything at all. The history of philosophy is the display of this proper object: the philosophic tradition takes its coherence from a discernible matter peculiar to it. In a formal and neutral way, the matter at issue may be circumscribed as the Arche. It is the 'origin' in the sense of that by reason of which things are and not not, that in virtue of which there is anything at all rather than nothing, that in everything on account of which anything at all is. It is not one origin among others, but is the originary origin: the origin at work in all possible origins. Other neutral names for the Arohe are: the Foundational, the Apriori, the Radical. No matter what' content' be ascribed to it, no matter what ' identity ' be discovered in it, no matter how explicitly it be discussed, no matter through what approach it be first and subsequently defined, this Arche is what remains at issue in the tradition of philosophy. The matter at issue in philosophy is: the ultimate condition for the possibility of any phenomenon whatsoever, that which renders possible the appearance of anything at all, that because of which everything becomes possible. This matter may be delimited in a formal way through various questions which, in the end, are only variations on one question. How does it happen that things are in the first place? Why, ultimately, should anything be? What accounts for the HOW DOES GOD ENTER INTO PHILOSOPHY? 167 fact that anything at all is-not' is in this way or that way,' not ' is of a certain type,' not ' is this particular one instead of that one,' but simply is? How do things emerge as be-ing (in the participial sense 3 )- not 'be-ing this, that, or the other,' not 'be-ing in one way instead of another,' but simply be-ing? Why is there something rather than nothing? What is the condition for the possibility that anything at all be? The formal answer to this one question is: the A rche. The whole task of philosophy is to give ' content' to this answer. The philosopher articulates the 'content' of the Arche and 'saves the phenomena' in these terms. There are ostensibly many questions in philosophy-questions, for example, of truth, love, beauty, good, time, and God. But what makes these many questions philosophical-when they are philosophical-is the one question: the question of the Arche. The one question diffuses itself into many, and the many concretize the one. Whatever the concrete phenomenon interrogated (e.g. time), what the philosophical question aims to reach is the Arche. Whatever the point of departure for philosophical interrogation, the one aim in all of it is the Arche. Whatever the philosopher asks, the one question in all of his concrete questions is the question of the Arche. The Arche has received many names in the history of philosophy. However, the most revelatory and the most common is the one given to it from the beginning and implicit in the questions that serve to delimit it as an issue. This primary name of the Arche is Be-ing. 4 The task now is to exhibit this. Let us take the questions already formulated. How does it happen that anything at all is? Why should anything be? What is the condition for the possibility that anything whatsoever be? Philosophy puts at issue, interrogates in terms of, or is the discourse upon the fact of Be-ing. a The orthography be-ing will hereinafter connote the participial sense. of the term be-ing will serve to call attention to its 4 'The capitalization unique status, to emphasize it, and to avoid confusion. 168 DANIEL GUERRIERE Or, let us take another approach; let us consider the ' content' of any experience whatsoever. This 'content' is 'thatwhich-is,' taken in the most comprehensive sense. Whatever the concretion of this content, however that-which-is congeals itself into definiteness, for whatever reason the content comes to pass, experience always remains the experience of thatwhich-is. The mode of that-which-is, however universal or particular, remains irrelevant to a comprehensive reflection upon the content of experience. Any distinction comes too late for such a reflection. In other words, we may allow the ' thatwhich-' or the definiteness of that-which-is to remain unspecified, and at the same time bring to explicit affirmation the '-is' in that-which-is. Again: we may ignore the particularity of the phenomenon and reflect upon the fact of its simply being, i.e. the fact of Be-ing. Since that-which-is would not be any 'that-which-' were it not in some sense be-ing, the activity of be-ing is the condition for the possibility of, the immanent origin of, the Arche of any that-which-is. Philosophy is the attempt to explicitate the Foundational in experience, what is always already experienced in the experience of anything whatsoever, to wit, be-ing. Philosophy, at its core, is the discourse on Be-ing. Philosophy has displayed itself as the quest to lmow the Being in, of, and as anything whatsoever. This Be-ing is not-to put it in a preliminary way-the Other of beings. At the threshold of philosophical reflection, we must not conceive of the activity of Be-ing as 'existence' in contradistinction to 'essence' or, in another perspective, in contradistinction to beings. Everything expressed in the ideas of 'essence' and 'beings' already belongs to the process of Be-ing. It is not as if there were a 'gap' between Be-ing and something else <,whatever the latter be called); distinctions must be made inside this process, as it were, and not between it and something else. In other words, the Be-ing happening as or in phenomena does not, so to speak, constitute an Other with respect to them, nor are the phenomena other than the process of Be-ing occur, HOW DOES GOD EN'.rER INTO PHILOSOPHY( 169 ring as or in them. A particular being is an 'instantiation' of the process of Be-ing, and it takes on 'determinateness' as particular beings. What philosophy tries to articulate is phenomena-in-their-Arnhe or, reversely, the Arche-ofi..phenomena. It is the Whole to which philosophy attends. A terminological adjustment is now in order. Having emphasized the participial sense of the term, we may revert to the orthography Being. Beyond this, however, we may now take the following as equivalents: the Being-process, To-be, Be, Is, and others as they develop. 5 At issue, then, is the process of To-be: the Being in, of, and as beings. The fact-of-Be is to be examined. What must be admitted about the fact-of-Be? B. The Immediate Articulation of Being The question of the Arche has become the question of Being. Why is there anything at all rather than nothing? The answer is: the Arche. The primary name of the Arche is To-be. Hence this answer has become the question: what about Being? How to understand it? What ' content' may we find in it? Upon articulation, how does it look to us? What must we admit about it? The task now is to elaborate what we may admit about it immediately-but only insofar as (retrospectively) the question of how God enters into philosophy demands it. Here we 5 The ,primary name of the Arohe has been Being. But the great philosophers have offered a number of different names (some of which we shall derive as we proceed). Plato, for example, called it the idea of the Good, the Beautiful, that which purely and simply is, and so on; Aristotle, on (be-ing) as on, separate form, enteleoheia (to-be-completely), and so on; Plotinus, the One; Thomas Aquinas, ipsum esse subsistens (subsistent To-be itself); John Duns Scotus, the first principle,. infinite enS' (be-ing), and so on; Spinoza, substantia and natura naturans (naturing Nature); Leibniz, the infinite prime monad; Hegel, absolute Spirit, the absolute Idea, Reason, and so on; Jaspers, Transcendence, Truth, and so on; and Marcel, the Transcendent, Being as plenitude, the Pleroma, and so on. 170 DANIEL GUERRlERE will look to Parmenides-the first explicit philosopher-for guidance. What we must admit about Being is at least that it is necessary, absolute, one, and ungenerable and imperishable. The articulation of these four ways in which the process-ofBe itself is and is itself will provide four new ways in which to pose the question that defines philosophy. In other words, the answers to the question of Being that this section elaborates will be further specifications of the very question. But that is all that we need in order to determine how God enters into philosophy. What must we admit about the process-of-Being? First of all, this: "it is not possible that it should not be " (Parmenides, B2.3) . That Being is-not is impossible. In other words, the Being-process in beings is necessary: it cannot not-be. The decisive demonstration of the necessity of Being is a negative one, to wit, that non-Being is impossible. That is why, after only stating the positive thesis of the necessity of Is, Parmenides immediately turns to the negative thesis: "Not-is [is-not], and it is appropriate that it should not be" (B2.4). The Being in, of, and as beings cannot not-be; reversely, Notbe cannot be. Here all of the following are equivalent: nonBeing, Not-be, Non-is, Nothing, Nothingness, and the obvious others. It seems that if there were no Be, there would ' be ' only non-Be. But non·-Being 'is' (so to speak) the total absence of Being; it ' is ' not ' there ' to precisely ' be.' Or: that non-Being would be imports that non-Being would 'be' being, would ' be' exercising Be. But then it would not-be nonBeing. In order to be itself, it would have to be not itself. And further, it itself ' is ' not anything to 'be ' or not-be ' itself.' Again: total Nothingness would not be that which is if there were (as one may wish to affirm) no beings. If we imagine away every being, it is not the case that then Nothing or nonBeing would be left; for Nothing is not ' something ' that is so that it could be left. Nothingness does not 'do' anything: it does not exercise ' be.' Or again: for Not-be to ' be ' it would HOW DOES GOD ENTER IN'l'O PHILOSOPHY? 171 have to 'be' Be. But there is nothing in Nothingness to' be.' It can 'be' only Not-be; it can only not-be; it cannot be. Reversely to the positive thesis: Ising is, Be must be, Being is necessary, the Being-process cannot not-be. If we do not suppose the derivative distinction between essence and existence, we may say: Existence exists, Existence must exist, Existence cannot not-exist. The process-of-Being does itself, the process-of-Existence exists, and does not in any condition do otherwise. Just as 'to be a table' is what a table properly does, so 'to be' is what To-be properly does. That To-be should be To-not-be is impossible. However, a problem arises. While the Being-process of beings is necessary, beings themselves are not necessary. They are contingent. The Being in, of, and as beings cannot not-be; but it is not impossible that beings should not-be. Any one being and the totality of beings do not have to exist. How to understand this? The necessity of Being together with the contingency of beings generates a problem. How to ' reconcile' them? How to think both sides together? We may not deny the necessity of Being in order to save the contingency of beings, nor the contingency of beings in order to save the necessity of Being. The question of Being, therefore, receives a new precision: How to think together Being and beings, the Necessary and the contingent? The great philosophers'-who begin with this question in one or another of its forms-are those who have given an original response to it.. To have arrived at it is enough for our purpose. What must we further admit about Being? This: that it is "·absolute" (pampan, BS.11) ·. For, what may the Beingprocess lack? Or what may it gain? ' Other than ' To-be, 'outside of' Being, would' be' only non-Being or Nothingness. Hence Being lacks only Nothing and may gain only Nothing. But Nothingness is not anything to lack or to gain. In other words, Being does not lack; it is absolved from any lack or possible gain; it is absolute. " So, necessarily is: either absolute- 172 DANIEL GUERRIERE ly To-be or else Not-at-all" (BS. 11). If we be not willing to admit that Being is absolute, then we must admit that Not-atall or Nothingness is. To deny the absoluteness of Being is to affirm the be-ing of non-Being. But such a claim would be absurd. The Being-process is absolute; it is the Absolute. Since beyond Being there 'is' only non-Being, since there ' is ' nothing more than Is, anything that is must be Being; whatever is must be identical to Being, be reducible to it, ' participate in ' it. If there were a being that is not identical to the Being-process, then that process would lack something; but Being lacks only Nothing. There can be no being that would not be Be. That which is not Being is-not. However, a problem arises. For, while beings must be identical to absolute Being, they themselves are not absolute. They are not absolved from lack or gain. They are each limited or restricted in that they are not one another; each being lacks the others. (Indeed, beings lack even themselves to the extent that they are not totally self-identical; this will be taken up below, with the self-identity of Be.) The Being-process in, of, and as beings is not restricted over against something else, yet beings are restricted to be-ing themselves and not others. It would seem that if Being is absolute, then the beings of which it is the Being would likewise be so; or, reversely, it would seem that if beings are finite, then their Being would likewise be finite or non-absolute; but neither may be admitted. How to understand this? How can beings be and not be absolute? How does absolute Being manifest itself in and as beings that are not absolute? We may pose the Being-question with a new precisjon: How to think together the Absolute and the finite? The great philosophers are those who have given an original response to this question. But for our problematic here we need only have come to it. What more must we admit about Being? This: that it is " one ,. (BS.6) . Opposite oneness stands multiplicity, which may- import either ' wan;v ' or ' division.' Hence oneness means, HOW DOES GOD ENTER INTO PHILOSOPHY? 173 respectively, uniqueness and self-identity. Let us take each of these in turn. The Being-process is one in the sense of unique. Briefly, if there were two or more Being-processes, then each would lack the others. But 'other than' Being 'is' only non-Being, and there is nothing in Nothingness to lack; in other words, Being does not lack. Hence it is unique: it is the Unique. Any being, insofar as it is, must be identical to unique Being; each being 'participates in' uniqueness; each, in other words, is unique. But there are many of them that are unique. Hence they are each only co-unique. In these terms, the process-ofBeing is unique in its uniqueness: it is uniquely unique. But still a problem arises. It would seem that beings are all one, since they are nothing other than the Unique. Or, reversely, it would seem that To-be is multiple in that it is the To-be of many. How to reconcile the unique uniqueness of Being and the multiplicity of beings? How to think together the Unique and the many? To have arrived at this new precision of the Being-question is enough for our purpose. The process-of-Being is one in the sense of self-identical. It is not itself in such a way as to lack any of itself. It is not such that any of itself would differ from any of itself; for any phenomena that differ must differ by something (certainly not by nothing) ; hence one of them has what the other one lacks, namely, that by which they differ; but Being does not lack. It is not ' divided ' in itself. It is indivisibly one, equal to itself, wholly itself. " It is not divisible, since it is all alike .... It is all cohesive " (BS.22, 25) . In other words, Being is selfidentical. Opposite self-identity is multiplicity in the sense of division. Each being is divided in itself; it is internally differentiated or, in other words, has 'parts outside of parts'; each is self-exterior. Even so, to the extent that beings are, they are self. identical; for they are nothing other than the Self-identical. Each being is itself or is self-identical but incompletely so. 174 DANIEL GUERRIERE (This incomplete self-identity, this self-exteriority, takes on two forms: space and time.) The problem again arises. Each being is identical to the totally Self-identical; it seems, therefore, that each should be totally identical to itself; but this is not so. Reversely, it seems that, as the Being of internally multiple beings, Being itself cannot be totally self-identical; but it is. How to understand this paradox? Neither side may be denied in order to save the other one. How to think together Being and beings, the Selfidentical and the self-different? For our purpose, it is enough to have come to this new precision of the Being-question. What must we further admit about Being? This: that it is "ungenerable and imperishable" (BS.8). The term genesis (generation) has two meanings: beginning and becoming. The process-of-Being is ungenerable in both senses. It does not begin. If it were to have begun, then before it would have been (so to speak) only non-Being. But it is not possible that non-Be should be; besides, since out of Nothing can come only nothing, there would not be anything now. Therefore Being does not begin. It is ungenerable also in the sense that it does not become. Whatever becomes has a past and a future; and becoming is the transformation of future into past and vwe versa. But past and future differ; they each lack the other. Hence whatever becomes must lack. But Being lacks only Nothing. In it past and future (and therefore present) must be one. It does not become. Being is ungenerable in both senses. It is likewise imperishable. Hence the process of To-be has no beginning and no ending, no different past or future; it is, as it were, totally now. "It was not ever, nor shall it be, it now is all at once, one, cohesive " (BS.5-6) . A problem arises here. Since beings are nothing other than Being, it would seem that they are ungenerable and imperishable, or that Being is not so. However, beings do have a past and a future and do in some sense begin and end, while Being remains the Ungenerahle and the Imperishable. How to think HOW DOES GOD ENTER INTO PHILOSOPHY? 17 5 the two together? Again, it is enough for us to have arrived at this question. C. Summary arul Transition Philosophy at its core is the discourse on the Being in, of, and as beings. What must be admitted about it is at least that it is necessary, absolute, one, and ungenerable and imperishable. If a discourse develops within the horizon of the A rche, if thought does not abstract its matter from the Whole, if a mode of questioning aims at Being, then it is philosophy. The discourse on Being takes on concreteness as the philosophy of knowledge, the philosophy of politics, the philosophy of art, and so on. Our concern here is the philosophy of religion. II. THE SALVATIONAL POWER OF RELIGION This part will have two main sections: a preliminary purification of the phenomenon of religion, and then a specification of what is proper to religion. A short conclusion will serve as the transition to the next part. A. Tlve Preliminary Purification Philosophy may say no more-and should say no lessabout religion than what religion presents of itself to be articulated in terms of Being. It is the embarrassment of philosophy as an academic discipline that philosophers have so often spoken about religion with so little knowledge of it. No one would attempt a philosophy of the formal sciences with only an elementary knowledge of arithmetic; anyone who would offer political philosophy with no more background than what he remembers from secondary school about the phenomenon of politics, what strikes him from journalism, and what rumors he hears about it would hardly merit respect. Yet this is precisely what many academic philosophers do; they speak as if there were no science of religion from which they may learn the 176 DANIEL GUERRIERE phenomenon of religion. Even to learn it from science, however, is not enough. The philosopher must further purify the phenomenon before he can treat it in an explicitly ontological way. This purification has two moments: differentiation and eidetics. The differentiation of the religious phenomenon from all other psychological, sociological, and historical phenomenaeach in the broadest sense-is the work of the science of religion. However, the deliverances of science to philosophy in this regard have not been altogether satisfactory; science has not quite differentiated the religious phenomenon from myth (especially in 'primitive' religions) and from philosophy (especially in Oriental religions). The responsibility has so far devolved upon the philosopher to do this. Although religious proclamation, tradition, and self-critical reflection are at their center irreducibly mythical (i.e. are symbolic narratives about origins), mythic existence (i.e. the experiential compactness of all the dimensions of human existence) is irreducible to religion and religion to it. 6 Myth as the discourse proper to compact existence must be distinguished from myth as the symbolic narrative regarding (exemplary) origins. In the first case, myth is at once all those discourses that we in our era experience as differentiated, including science, both natural and human, medical and psychological art, literature and entertainment, philosophy and religion. It is the discourse proper to archaic or compact man. In the second, case, myth is discourse through symbols; a symbol is, phenomenologically, a double-sense the first of which both reveals and conceals the second which is available only in this way; or, ontologically, it is a single phenomenon in its ambivalent presence. Evidently symbols and thus myths may s For a brief discussion, see Daniel Guerriere, Existence," The Personalist, 55 ( 197 4) , 261-272. " The Structure of Mythic HOW DOES GOD ENTER INTO PHILOSOPHY? 177 be separately scientific, philosophic, or religious. 7 It is not specific to religion that it incorporates myth in the second sense; and it is not distinctively religious to be mythic in the first sense. Although religious proclamation, tradition, and self-critical reflection may appropriate philosophy and may even in practice be undifferentiated from it, the two are not the same. It is doubtless true that the great religious and philosophical traditions of Oriental experience have been compact; indeed Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and Shintoism have quite aptly been called " philosophical religions " and " religious philosophies." Furthermore, in Western philosophy the difference between religion and philosophy has often been obscured, usually through the obscurity of the word ' God,' which may import either the Other of religious experience or the Arche of philosophic interrogation. This compactness in the East and obscurity in the West constitute a methodological problem here; for if we have to differentiate philosophy and religion, i.e. to purify the phenomenon of religion in order then to interrogate it philosophically, we shall have to enter the circle of arbitrariness. We may solve this problem in the usual way: the fact that one can practice religion without philosophy, and institute philosophizing without religion, is enough to allow us to take their difference as a hypothesis for now. In other words, the purification here takes the form of a hypothesis. The justification for it will be what it makes possible: an exact ontological delimitation of the two realms and thus an answer to the question how God enters into philosophy. 1 Philosophic myths include those invented by Plato (e.g. the Socratic account of the genesis of the bad politeia.i) . Scientific myths are cultural or natural. An example of the former would be the legends of the foundation of a nation and, of the latter, the 'theory' of the genesis of the cosmos in a primeval explosion (for there is no science of the unique, i.e. of what exploded, although cosmology can trace back the evolution of the cosmos to one-hundredth of a second after the beginning; see Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes [New York: Basic Books, 1976]). 178 DANIEL GUERRIERE The eidetics of religious objectivity and subjectivity was first the work of the science of religion (under the title of ' phenomenology ') and has been sporadically translated into philosophical phenomenology. 8 On its first level, as the exhibition of the correlative structures of objectivity and subjectivity, phenomenology may say that the religious object is the ultimate, ambiguous, and invocative other, while the religious subject is the prefocal, interpretative, and unique self. On its second level, as the evincement of fundamental objectivity and fundamental subjectivity, phenomenology may say that the religious self is the quest-to-be-let-to-be, while the religious other is the salvational Power. 9 The next section will be a summary statement of the second level of the phenomenology of religion. B. The Specificity of Religion Philosophy, having learned from the science of religion, may prepare access to the phenomenon in many ways. Religion does not need philosophy in order to be itself, and philosophy need never take up the problematic of religion. But philosophy, forging an access in its phenomenological mode, may explicate that condition of man in response to which religion arises. It may define the existential problem to which religion is the response. This explication need not be immediately ontological; here we shall only refer unsystematically. to Being (in order, at least, to show how the discussion may open quickly into ontology) . Why, then, should religion ever arise? Man, for phenomenology, is the quest-to-be, the quest to s For a comprehensive but condensed essay, see Daniel Guerriere, "Outline of a Phenomenology of the Religious," Research in Phenomenology, 4 ( 1974), 99-127. philosophy: the circumscrip9 There is a third level in phenomenological tion of the primordial Unity out of which objectivity and subjectivity arise. For our purpose, this is not immediately relevant. For a phenomenological interpretation of religion on this level, see ibid., pp. 102, 123-127. HOW DOES GOD ENTER INTO PHILOSOPHY? 179 be the one whom he has been given to be, the one who he already is but not yet. The self who he is to be may be called his daimon,. his truth, or ultimately his Being. And the fundamental existential question is: Will I achieve my daimon? Is fulfillment or consummation possible? Or is my quest to be necessarily a failure? Will I end in frustration or will I reach my Being? This is the question that man exists. It is but the interrogative form of the fact of evil-the double evil that man experiences: that which he undergoes and that which he undertakes, vital failure and moral failure, death and fault. The evil that man suffers-which is ultimately death-does not constitute the specific existential problem to which religion is the response. Religions indeed interpret this evil, recommend ways to confront it, and even offer beliefs and rituals that allow man to tolerate or transform it. But the very fact that these responses may all be given outside of religion imports that religion does not constitute itself specifically as them. (Anti-theists no less than preachers are often confused in this regard.) The evil that man does, however, is a different matter. The condition into which man puts himself by bringing evil into the world is the problem in response to which religion arises as the therapeia (in Plato's term). Religion arises beyond questions of morality. (Preachers often preach their confusion apropos this.) Moral codes are the guidelines that human freedom gives itself in its quest for consummation, while religion is the response of freedom to evil vvhose invincibility seems to preclude this consummation. The task now is to explain how the evil that man does becomes invincible-and thus why religion arises. This may of course be done in many ways; but here we will do it in terms of freedom and of completeness. Both ways require a prefatory remark. It is not the essence of evil or, more precisely, the origin of evil that philosophy would explicate in this task. Rather, the myths of the origin of evil remain myths: but philosophy can articulate the condi- 180 DANIEL GUERRIERE tion of iniquity. In ontological terms, this condition is the failure to be. To be morally evil is to not do who I am, to not actualize (my) Being, to not be, to not be To-be. How and why man fails to be is beyond the resources of philosophy to decipher. Furthermore, philosophy knows only the before and the after, not the exact irruption of evil. It is the condition afterwards-the condition of iniquity-that we must delineate here. In general: if the destiny (daimon) of freedom is freedom itself as destiny, then moral evil is to have rendered oneself unfree; if man is to complete the self who is his destiny, then moral evil is to have rendered oneself incomplete. Let us detail each of these. In terms of freedom: since the way-to-be of human existence is freedom, the failure to be myself amounts to self-enslavement. If my To-be is a to-be-free, then to not-be (myself, my Self, my Being) is precisely to be a slave, i.e. the not-free. But if freedom enslaves itself, then it, precisely as the slave, i.e. as not itself, cannot liberate itself, i.e. change its own condition. The condition into which freedom puts itself is beyond freedom to change. The not-free is not free to free himself. To not be free is to not be free to be. In terms of completeness: insofar as I have not constituted myself as myself (my Self, my Being), insofar as I have not done myself, I can no longer do myself. I have constituted myself as failed or incomplete and remain so: for my past is now beyond my power. The fault is permanent. I may indeed modify the effects of it in the future, but I cannot change it. The past is precisely beyond my power to constitute; I cannot undo what I have done. For anything temporal, once to be not complete is never to be complete. This, then, is the fundamental existential problem: the invincibility of human evil for human freedom or power. The not-free cannot liberate himself; the not-complete lacks the complete power to complete himself. Philosophy can project. HOW DOES GOD ENTER INTO PHILOSOPHY? 181 the only possible remedy for this condition, but cannot judge whether what it projects ever becomes actual. What would be the therapeia? Since man himself cannot actualize his consummation, i.e. freedom as destiny and complete self-constitution, he can only hope for it through the work of an other. Self-enslaved freedom can only hope for liberation, incomplete power can only hope for completion-by an other. Man is a quest-to-be who makes himself, through evil, a quest-to-be-let-to-be by an other. Correlative to this fundamental structure of subjectivity, the other (objectivity) is the power that would free man unto his complete destiny. The therapy for the human condition of iniquity would be the work of an other. This work may be given a specific name: salvation, for example, or redemption. The other may be called the salvational Power. What is specific to religion-what constitutes religion, religious experience, or the religious dimension of human experience-is (1) to acknowledge the need for an other to liberate or complete oneself, to abide in one's own exigency for a salvational Power, to wait for it, to hope that it will appear; and (2) if it does appear, if it does advent in one's experience, to accept it, to acknowledge it as what it is, to let it do its proper work. There is no other experience like this; unlike the human response to the evil that man suffers, this double acknowledgement as the response to the evil that he does and (this means) to the condition into which he thereby puts himself has no other sense than what man calls religion. The consummation of the human quest to be in the face of the condition of iniquity is the proper concern of religion. The genesis of religion, then, 1s the ' impossible ' condition of man: the impossibility of self-liberation and self-completion once he fails, no matter how slightly. What is not specific to religion is the response to suffering-to despair or disappointment, frustration, and perplexity in the face of the evil that man suffers. The remedy for that is not the work of an other- 182 DANIEL GUERRIERE a salvational Power-and a fortiori not the provision by this other of compensatory gratification. The remedy for evil suffered is to fight it with all the energy that we have and, at the same time, to give its past a fruitful sense for the future. To be sure, we will not conquer it, if for no other reason than that some of the evil that we suffer is evil that we do to each other. But there is nothing specifically religious about the fight against and the transformation of evil. The salvational Power that philosophy can project as the therapeia for the human condition of iniquity is the religious ' God.' Any other 'god ' is irrelevant: an omnipotent creator, for example, or an omniscient power beyond the world, or an omnibeneficent protector somehow compatible or incompatible with the evil that we suffer. It may be that a particular culture or person understands a salvational Power in one of these ways: but such understanding is at best an extrapolation from and at worst an arbitrary addition to an experience of it. For example, creation may be understood as the first act of salvation;. and the possible compatibility /incompatibility of ' God ' and evil is a speculative issue arbitrarily injected into concrete religious experience. Whether or not a salvational Power advents in human experience, the philosopher as such is incompetent to decide. Indeed, philosophy does not determine whether anything is or, fundamentally, whether there be Being. It can only subsequently articulate Being and then everything else in terms of it. C. Concluswn and Transition But if this be so, then how exactly does the (possible) salvational Power enter into philosophy? What is it in terms of Being? How does it appear within the horizon of Being? The answer shall be that it both coincides with and diverges from .Being. The 'God' of religion and the To-be of philosophy are both identical and different. HOW DOES GOD ENTER INTO PHILOSOPHY? 183 III. IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE The task now is to explicate the process-of-Being and the salvational Power to the point at which their ' relationship ' becomes manifest. It was the Christian theologians of Western civilization and the Islamic theologians who first did this; but they did not make clear the precise point(s) at which they coincide and diverge. It, takes-retrospectively-only one further explication to discover their identity. Let us begin with Being. The To-be in, of, and as beings is ungenerable and imperishable. It has no beginning and no ending, no past and no future: it is all of itself all at once. It is, so to speak, total Nowness. But 'to be all of oneself all at once ' is precisely the definition of ' eternal.' 10 Opposite eternal is temporal. To be temporal means to be oneself but not all at once, to be oneself in a less than total manner, to be such that one also lacks oneself. Whatever is temporal lacks the fullness of itself. But Being lacks only non-Being; it does not lack. It is non-temporal. We may not allege that Being 'always was and always will be.' That is merely temporal-an indefinite temporal extension, to be sure, but nonetheless temporal. (In terms of 'infinity': it is merely, as Hegel called it, " the bad infinite.") The image of Being as " everlasting " (aei) , which we find in Plato and Aristotle, is inadequate to the idea of eternal; the image aei is what happens when the activity-of-Eternality be thought as a temporal process. It expresses the experiential compactness of time and eternity or, in other words, the Cycle typical of mythic existence-which the Greeks did not completely break. Only with the decisive differentiation of compact experience did it become possible to distinguish time and eternity; this was the achievement of Hebrew and then of Christian existence. The Being-process io First .rnd 859). in Boethius, Philos. Cons. V 6 ( CC-L 49, V 6, 4 and 8 =PL 63, 858 184 DANIEL GUERRIERE does itself completely, as never less than itself; it is all of itself all at once; it is the Eternal. But while Being is eternal, beings are temporal. They have a past and a future and in some way begin and end. They are each of them themselves but not all at once; they also lack themselves; they are such that their past lacks their future and vice versa. The problem arises: Every being is nothing else than the Being-process (for they are certainly not other than it), but none of them are eternal. The To-be in, of, and as beings is eternal, but they themselves are temporal. How could that be? Here is another precision for the Being-question: How to think together the Eternal and the temporal? We need only come this far to determine how 'God' enters into philosophy. Let us turn to the salvational Power. The condition of iniquity into which man puts himself is the condition of selfenslavement and permanent incompleteness. The only possible therapeia for it is that an other should liberate and complete man. But if it should do this, then it must be such that the past of man-which is beyond his free power to alter-is present for it. It must be such that every human past-and that includes every future past-must be available to its power. For it, every past of man and thus every human future must be present. In other words, it must be such that past, present, and future are one for it; that it has no past, present, and future separate from each other and thus no beginning and no ending; that it is itself as all-at-once. To be in this way for every human past and future is to be so for any past and future; for their oneness as the present is itself one. Hence if there is to be a salvational Power, it must be eternal. It is precisely here that the salvational Power and To-be coincide. The matter at issue in philosophy and the (possible) other in religious experience are identical in that they both must be eternal. The objection may arise immediately: Could there not be two activities-of-Eternality? The answer is that HOW DOES GOD ENTER INTO PHILOSOPHY? 185 the Eternal is one, i.e. the Ono; for it is Being and Being is one. The identity of eternal Being and the eternal salvational Power was the discovery of Christian and Islamic theologians, first of all St. Augustine. If, as Heidegger says, each thinker has but a single thought, the one thought of Augustine was 'the Eternal.' After him, philosopher-theologians think the identity with inexhaustible energy, as befits one of the great discoveries of humankind. The core of the philosophical reflection on the religious Other is the so-called proofs for the existence of God. These are nothing more than the affirmation of the coincidence of Being and the (mostly) Christian salvational Power. Because this affirmation was not always precise, we must emphasize that the coincidence lies in their eternality. In St. Thomas, for instance, the ' argument ' for ' the existence of God ' runs as follows. There is a first unchanged changer, a first cause (not a causa sui), something necessarily necessary, something perfect, a goal of all; all of these are (rather awkward) names for Being, ipsum esse per se subsistens; and this is eternal. But this To-be is 'God' or, reversely, ' God' is this. Therefore' God' exists. 11 What such an' argument' lacks is an exact statement that the salvational Power of Christian existence, like any salvational Power, advents in human experience outside of philosophy; that it, still without reference to philosophy, must be eternal; and that the identity of it and the Being of philosophical reflection lies in their eternality. Once this be admitted, however, we cannot avoid the counter-affirmation: The salvational Power and Being are not, for human experience, completely coincident; they also diverge or differ. There is more to Being than what belongs to the salvational Power, and reversely. This is evident from each side in turn. The To-be that philosophy articulates is the Being-process in, of, and as beings. They are nothing other than it (while it is more than they) ; they ' participate in ' it (while it is not mere11 ST I, q. 2, a. 3; q. 3, aa. 3-4; q. 7, a. I; q. IO, aa. 1-3; and so on. 186 DANIEL GUERRIERE ly they); they are reducible upward to it (while it is irreducible downward to them) . In contrast, the salvational Power of religion is not such that beings, in particular man, are reducible to it. It remains the Other. Religion does not affirm that the salvational Power whose presence and work it proclaims is the ultimate Identity of man, the Unique with which and in which unique beings are one. It is not specific to the salvational Power that it be the Being of the beings whom it saves and thus that they be nothing other than it. Hence Being and the salvational Power diverge. While Being is necessary, the work of the salvational Power remains gratuitous. It is specific to the Other of religious experience that it be that for which man hopes, that it be nonnecessary, that its presence and work be always a gift. The gratuitous character of the salvational Power is more precisely its "love. Its proper work is to let man be who he is beyond the condition of iniquity into which man puts himself; to let the quest-to-be, which has made itself the quest-to-be-let-to-be, finally be; to let human consummation be. But ' to let be ' is the very definition of 'love! To love is to accept, foster, and promote the person (and derivatively the thing); it is the evocation, the active affirmation, the effective willing of the Possibility (Being) of the person. Love makes or lets him be the one whom he has been given to be; it gives him to himself. Precisely as gift, it is not necessary. (The opposite of the necessary is only minimally the contingent; it is properly the gift.) Furthermore, to love is proper to persons. Hence the salvational Power must be personal. But it is not immediately evident that Being is personal. What is clear, however, is that necessary Being and the gratuitous salvational Power do not completely coincide in human experience. The coincidence and divergence, the identity and difference, of Being and the salvational Power has become evident. They must be one yet also two. They are one with respect to eternality. They are two in that there is more to the Beingprocess than is proper to the salvational Power, and reversely. HOW DOES GOD ENTER INTO PHILOSOPHY? 187 E:KaUTOV 7rpO> aVTO aVa7rTVUUOi>, €VpYJUH> E:V aVT

aA>..oi> r6 wuaVTW> Kal Kara ravra €av yap ' ') 7r€pt ra ttAAa r6 WUUVTW'> Kal Kara ra avr6, dpyt:Z 7rUVTYJ Kal r6 f:vt:pyda Kal Ti £.vf.pyna ov8ap.0v) • To remove even one individual existent from the life of Intellect is to diminish its total substance (ibid., 55-7) . 280 KEVIN CORRIGAN It seems therefore, that here we already have a philosophical prolegomenon to the Thomistic theory, even though in VI, 7, 2 Plotinus's approach is very different and his argument is worked out in a rather experimental manner. However, it is in the study of intelligible substance that Plotinus makes the clearest distinction between a thing's nature and that by which it is. The whole argument takes place in the context of the Good, but it seems incorrect not to interpret it as referring ultimately to the pure value of existence, as activity, by contrast to intelligible essence. According to what criteria is the intelligible form good 22 (VI, 7, 18-20) ? The form is good in its nature; for it derives from the Good. Like St. Thomas's essence, it too is created: ipsa quidditas creari dicitur (De Pot. III, 5 ad 2m) . But if we ask what it is in all these intelligible forms that makes each of them good (cf. VI, 7, 21, 1 ff.), then we are speaking of something which is at once above the object itself and yet present in it. This Plotinus says, is a 'love' (ibid., 11-12), given to the intelligibles by God (cf. 22, 18-19), "not when they are what they are " (olix ifrav fi IJ:rr

..Ao 7rpOU'Ad.f311) 21, 11-12) .213 What is this /J,AA.o which is added to their nature? How can it be an element in their composition? It is light, and all light's content, by which the forms are visible to themselves and to the soul (21, 13-17) . This light 'runs upon' them (22, 1-3) and makes them capable of efficient causality, that is, it makes them able to move us (ibid., OTaV ovv TO cf>w> r6Vr6 Ti> IJiy r6ro Kal KWUTal E7r' al!ra Kal TOV cf>wrO<; TOV £m0€ovro<; E7r' al!rOis yA.ix6µ.wo> palv a'ljro) , whereas everything else is both itself and another (El "/€ 8wv a>..Awv tKaurov avro Kal a>..Ao) •. Life, eternal Being and Act, therefore, are desirable not qua nous (ovx Ti v6Vs) but qua good (ii O.ya8oii Kal a7rO aya06V Kal ds aya86v, VI, 7, 20, 22-23) . At first glance the position of Proclus (for instance in The Elernents of Theology prop. 101) seems to be different. For him all " existence " depends on Being just as all life depends on Life; and Being is the more generic because it gives rise to more effects, that is, Being includes all things, whereas Life includes only all living things. 24 The difference, however, is only apparent; for the well-foundedness of all determinate existences upon the Good is in fact Being when one thinks in terms of effect.25 Hence, the notion of value-existence is equally important for Proclus's thought, even if some of its meaning seems to be lost in the vast hierarchical structure erected. Finally, in this context, it should be made clear that for Plotinus determinate intelligible existence (like determinate 24 cf. In Lib. de Gausis, prop. I: omnis causa primaria plus est influens super suum causatum quam causa secunda uniYersalis. 25 See St. Thomas, De Gausis, lect. IV (Saffrey), p. 28, 4-9. 234 KEVIN CORRIGAN sensible existence) is constituted by the formal principles of the thing, as it is :for St. Thomas; for in the constitution of Intellect, Intellect is shaped both by the One and by itself (cf. V, 1, 5, 17-18); but this self-shaping also has a doubleness to it : on the one hand, nous generates itself only as an expression of the One's power. In other words, its creativity is an ability to move, to shape its own nature by virtue of the power invested in it. This power, therefore, even though it belongs in the effect, is not something which can be reduced to the substratum sim,pliciter. We shall provide an illuminating example of this presently. On the other hand, Intellect's shaping of itself as a formal subject has to be seen in the light of the substrate; and this line of determination is formally caused by that substrate, since in intelligible substances (despite the composition of intelligible matter and form) the substrate is form.2a We have shown, therefore, that a real distinction between essence and existence, as pure value, is an important feature of Plotinus's thought, in which he comes very close to the internal dynamic of the Thomistic theory. We have also shown that this value, as light, is prior to essence and added to essence entering into composition with it and that it is related to the whole notion of nature and grace (i.e. gift from/of God). Finally it appears that the distinction between two different lines of causality, efficient and formal, is as important for Plotinus as it is for St. Thomas. It remains to examine the function of this prior element for Plotinus not only in the composition of immaterial substance, but also in relation to the vision of God. What for instance is its function in thought? In what sense might we term it the actus essendi? Can Form be related to it as potency to act? In a later chapter of the same work, VI, 7, 40, Plotinus argues that both personal experience and the logic of the situaImtion demand that the One transcend 'thought' 2GFor the general principle see I, 1 (53), 12, 24 ff.; IV, 3 (27), 9, 20-22. ESSENCE AND EXISTENCE IN ST. THOMAS AQUINAS 235 plicitly his argument is directed against the possibility of a "thinking of thinking" (v6'1)cm which we find in Aristotle's Theology; indeed, his first statement that "all thought is from something and belongs to something" (40 6; '7r'aCTa v6'1)CTl<> lK Tiv6<> Kat Tiv6<>) is to my mind a covert ' citation ' of some such passage as Physics 224 B 1: 7raCTa KlV'l)CTl<> lK nvo<> Kat n, and indicates (the Aristotelian principle) that there can not be 'movement of a movement' or ' a thought of a thought ', but that the sense of such terms as kinesis and noems must bear a definite relation to a substrate. Plotinus goes on to distinguish two sorts, or aspects, of thought, one of which expresses the notion of " belonging to something" (nvoo;;), the other that of "coming from something " (eK nvo>) • The first has no generative function: it is an activity of the substrate and belongs to it simply (6-10: Kai. oil ECTTlV V7rOKELp.€vov p,ev lxn piv ITVVOvCTa rt)i EfJ,tKELfL€VOV To oil fon v6'1)CTl'>, oiov Be ylv Tau ywvav €¢' lylvv'f K.r.A.) , (b) it accompanies the SUbstance and gives it being (10-11; V6'1)0'l'> fL) • 27 cp. also VI, 7, 40, 55-56: /Je,fl eµavOavev. Ae'YW /Je,el µev -fJ /Jvvaµts avrov,i]v eµavOavov, KEVIN CORRIGAN about existence. Rather, this passage illustrates a similar approach to a similar problem, the meaning of composition in immaterial substance. For Plotinus, the intellectual object already possesses. the duality of form-act and substrate (8-10); and this is also a function of the fact that for him the intellectual " essentia " is created by a sort of emergence from the One, in which form and matter emerge together (6-7): uvv6Vaa rc;i .ze ov £anv) and constitute one perfect object (7-10), whose substrate must nonetheless 'stand under' its form. This is a significant difference between Plotinus and St. Thomas, but it should also be remembered that the form is the substrate. To all intents and purposes, therefore, the first noesis constitutes the bare object or essence of Nous. 28 The second act is that which actually gives it substantial existence (10 ff.): It is prior (cf. 48); it does not belong to the substrate in the same way as the essential " shape " does; it is self-dependent and dependent on the Good; and yet it also enters into composition with the "essence" of the object, where the substance and the " quo est " are different both conceptually and really. The correspondence with the Thomistic theory seems complete: the pure act of Being and Thought is prior, and indispensable, to the ' quod est'. It can not be reduced to the substratum and yet it has an intimate connection with it. The distinction between the two is, therefore, real; but it is not a distinction between two things; and since the ' quod est ' is only an abstraction without the ' quo est ', the distinction is also conceptual. In Plotinus this act, which is a self-dependent power, is related to the vision of God. It is an image of God (VI, 7, 40, 19: 'tvBaA.p.a) the exact equivalent of a" similitudo participata ". The power in virtue of which it generates substance is both the 2s It is worth remarking that Plotinus does not use the word ovuln in lines 6-10. It is only in the light of the second act that the whole object can be ri;iaches that :position itt seen to be one substance by the tim1;1 the lines 15-16, ESSENCE AND EXISTENCE IN ST. THOMAS AQUINAS 237 power by which " it will think " and that by which it sees God (cf. VI, 35, 20-33). This letter, Plotinus says, is the" loving" nous (ibid., 23-26) . Intellect's vision of the Good, therefore, is non-intellectual (" it no longer thinks ") , pre-intellectual and yet clearly it is also " quaedam perfectio " which gives rise to the act of thought in Intelligence. 29 Furthermore, the theory that essence stands to existence as potency to act, developed by St. Thomas with Aristotle, Proclus (Elements, props. 77-9), Avicenna and St. Albert in mind, is very much connected with the idea that the higher act of Intellect belongs to the Intellectual subject only accidentally. The most famous, if indirect, example of this way of thinking is Aristotle's nous thurathen and the long tradition based upon it. And just as pertinent perhaps as Avicenna's "naturae hominis ex hoc quod est homo accidit ut habeat esse " 30 are two examples from Alexander of Aphrodisias and Plotinus. For Alexander when act and object are one, man knows primarily the immaterial intelligibles; he perceives only accidentally that he himself is this object (De An. 86, 14-23, Bruns) .31 For Plotinus, in thinking the Good, Intellect thinks itself per accidens (V, 6, 5, 16-17). Hence, Nous, as determinate Intelligence, is the recipient of a potency for the pure act, noesis, which has come to it from the Good. Hence, in the thought of Plotinus one finds for the first time a natural, organic structure of the immaterial substance in virtue of which it both sees God and is. The correspondences with St. Thomas are exact; but, more importantly, the different 29 It is important to point out two things here: Firstly, I do not mean to imply that what Intellect takes from the vision is any sort of content of the vision. The One remains transcendent of ovulu. (cf. VI, 7, 40, 49-56). Secondly, it may be objected that it is not the non-intellectual vision of the One which gives rise to the act of thought in Intellect, but Intellect's subsequent selfreflection. In my view it is both (cf. VI, 7, 35, 30-33) ; or one might also say that the subsequent self-reflection arises directly out of the non-intellectual vision (cf. VI, 7, 16, 13-16). A full discussion of this subject, however, would require a separate treatment. so Metaphysica, tr. V, c. 2, f. 87. &1 cp. Aristotle, Metaphysies XII, 9, 1074 B 35-36. 238 KEVIN CORRIGAN focus of attention in Plotinus illuminates the nature and function of the distinction between essence and existence in Aquinas, just as the study of Thomistic texts on this question. certainly helps to illuminate Plotinus. How is this double-noesis related to later Neoplatonism? Its exact status in Plotinus with relation to the triad Being-LifeIntelligence would require a separate treatment. 32 However, we can say that pure noesis corresponds to Life, which is cause of existence in Intellect, and that, as something created, this depends upon Intellect's vision of the One, the object of which in relation to itself, as a subject, is Being. The position is much simpler with regard to the anonymous commentary on the Parmenides attributed to Porphyry. 33 Here Porphyry distinguishes two states of Intelligence in a discussion of the Parmenides' second hypothesis. 34 The lower power is that which deals directly with the Intelligibles, the higher is comprehensive and judgmental of them all. The two powers are analogous to perception of the special sensibles and the sensus communis. According to the lower power Intellect is multiple, according to the higher (8.0vaµi<; l7rava/3Ef3'11wia,p. 108, 28-29) it is simple, transcendent and in contact with its prior, the One. The lower power is noesis in the more usual sense, i.e., self-intellection (cf. pp. 110-112); the higher has two moments: as Being it is immobile (p. 110, 22-23), as Life it is an activity inclining from Being, p. 112, 25-26: lK rij<> lKv£i5aaaa lv/.pycia). This Life although indefinite in itself by contrast with the substratum, N ous-noesis, is clearly a prior, comprehensive, self-dependent and generating activity of thought; and as Being it coincides with The One. The motif of double-noesis, therefore, is significantly repeated/ developed 32 On this see P. Hadot, " Etre, Vie, Pensee Chez Plotin et Avant Plotin ", Les So1wr:es de Plotin, Fundation Hardt, Vandoeuvres-Geneve, 1957, pp. 107157. 33 cf. P. Hadot, Porphyre et Victorinus, volumes I and II (cited above in note 1). s4 Op. cit., Vol. 2, p. 106 ff. ESSENCE AND EXISTENCE IN ST. THOMAS AQUINAS 239 in Porphyry. I would argue here that from the point of view of the second hypothesis, Being is the object of Intellect's vision of the One (which is different from saying that The One is simply an intelligible object); in this sense pure existence is derived from the transcendent One and is for Intellect wu7r€p lBia Tov 5vTo<; (p. 106, 29-33) .35 Similarly, for Plotinus the Idea in immobility ( i8ta €v unfun) is the Limit of Intellect (7rtpa<; •.. vov, VI, 2, 8, 23-24), that is, its" boundary stone ". 36 This same notion, ultimately stemming from the Philebus, passes into Proclus within the framework of the internal triadic structure of nous (mone, prohodos, epistrophe) and is at the root of the distinction between ' finite superius ' and ' infinite inferius ', which in Proclus is 7rav T6 5vrn<; 5v i!.t<. 7rtpaT6<; i!.un t<.al d.7rdpii'v (Elements, prop. 89), precwely the equivalent of Plotinus's 7raua v6'Y}ut<; lK nv6<; i!.un Kat nv6<;. It expresses a dynamic, creative movement (which is thought) from the pure identity of God to the distinction between dependence and self-dependence in the creature. This movement is the life of Intellect and the source of its existence, transcending its intellectual essence. The position of Pseudo-Dionysius is different, but similar in important details. From the distinct perfections in the divine procession (Being, Life, Wisdom) ·there come the participated perfections in created things, of which Being is the first; and by Being God is cause of existence to all that is (De Div. Nom. v, 5; P.G. 3, 820 A-C). In this passage T6 dvat avT6, or ipsum esse, is used instrumentally as a channel to link God and creature. As St. Thomas recognises (In Lib. de causis IV, p. 29, 8rn, Saffrey), when' Proclus' speaks of' esse' he means neither separated Being, nor Being participated communally by all existents, but Being participated' in primo gradu entis creati' 35 See 106, 29-35: "Oun 0£TTOV TO .Zvat,TO µev 7rp0V7rapxei TOV llnos,TO oe II e7ra'Y€Ta£ EK TOV 6nos m e7reKeiva tvos ToV elva.L llvros TO a7r6hVTOP Ka! tfJ0'7rep .;, lofo TOv /Snos,ov µeTaO'XOV TL 'Yf"Yovev,ep6µevov elvai. 36 .A full discussion of the differences between Plotinus and Porphyry is to be found in volume 1 of Porphyre et Viotorinti8. Unfortunately, it is not possible to comment further on this topie here. 240 KEVIN CORRIGAN (ibid., line rn) . How is this to be related to 'existence'? Surely Being in this sense already possesses a definite formal content, as Saffrey claims? The " formal content" which Being possesses at this level, however, is not the essential, intellectual nature, but, firstly, the value and meaning of existence grounded in what is beyond substance, and, secondly, a productive power whose efficacy is realized in the essence: Being and Life give existence to the essence and make it what it is, but the essence or ' quod est ' is necessarily distinct, since neither Being nor Life can be simply reduced to it; instead, Being is" received", not" absolute" (cf. De Ente V, 39, 6-10). In conclusion, therefore, I propose three things: firstly, that there is an immediate affinity between the language and thought of Plotinus and St. Thomas on the subjects of light, nature, grace and the finite being's capacity to see God, and that this is directly relevant to the question of essence and existence; secondly, that the distinction between esse and id quod est, first explicitly stated by Boethius, has its roots demonstrably in the general framework I have outlined from Plotinus's thought; and finally that this theory of composition, worked out by Plotinus and developed by Porphyry and later Neoplatonists (especially Proclus and Pseudo-Dionysius) is the real source of the whole character of the Thomistic theory of essence and existence in created immaterial substances, and that, together with the question of individual existence in Aristotle's logic, it prefigures in an important way the more scholastic distinction between essence and existence among the Arab philosophers. Certainly, the question of whether or not the distinction is real receives a definite, affirmative answer when the problem is looked at in this way .37 KEVIN CORRIGAN Athol Murray College of Notre Da-me, Saskatchewan, Canada a1 I should like to thank Professors A. H. Armstrong and R. Crouse, and Father 0. Lewry, O.P., for reading this article and making many valuable comments. KANT'S DILEMMA OF KNOWLEDGE AND TRUTH O NE OF MANY HARD AND FAST distinctions in Kant is that between a priori knowledge and a posteriori knowledge. The former may be either pure or mixed, Kant tells us, but in neither case is it ever reducible to a posteriori knowledge. So central is this distinction to what he is about that what Kant calls his " Copernican Revolution ,; in philosophy consists in showing how one of the species of these two types of knowledge, namely, a priori synthetic knowledge, is possible. A priori judgments which are not merely analytic are possible for Kant only on the assumption that objects conform to mind rather than the other way around. This is the message of the first Critique. But no sooner does Kant forge this distinction between a priori and a posteriori knowledge than he is on the horns of a dilemma. Either he holds that knowledge applies as straightforwardly to a posteriori knowledge as it does to a priori knowledge or else he confines knowledge proper to a priori knowledge, a posteriori knowledge being for Kant no more than true opinion or true belief. But if he takes the first alternative, Kant's definition of knowledge ends up being self-contradictory, whereas if he opts for the second possibility Kant is saddled with a contradictory view of truth. To spell out the dilemma, suppose that knowledge for Kant applies in the strict sense to both a priori knowledge and a posteriori knowledge. In that case, knowledge for Kant would consist in both the conformity of object to mind and in the conformity of mind to object. For Kant's view is that while all synthetic judgments taken from the point of view of their form are possible only if the understanding imposes its categories on the raw material of sensibility, still, considered from Q41 JOHN PETERSON the viewpoint of their matter or content, not all true synthetic judgments consist in this same conformity of object to mind according to him. Rather, only that knowledge which is exemplified in synthetic a priori judgments consists, from the standpoint of its matter and form both, in the conformity of object to mind. For example, the source of the knowledge I have that all events are caused is not experience but human understanding, while the source of the knowledge I have, if it is knowledge, that all cats have fur is sense experience, even though, from the viewpoint of their form, both judgments according to Kant require the imposition of categories. It is neither logic nor the nature of the understanding but rather sense experience which justifies the ascription of the predicate "having fur" to the subject " cats " in the foregoing example. For that reason Kant would say that from the standpoint of its content the knowledge I have that all cats have fur consists in the conformity of mind to object and not, as with a priori synthetic knowledge, the other way around. Therefore, if he predicates " knowledge " univocally of both a priori and a posteriori knowledge, Kant is saddled with the contradiction that knowledge is both the conformity of object to mind and the conformity of mind to object. Nor is the other horn of the dilemma any more palatable or more negotiable for Kant. For suppose Kant predicates "knowledge " of a priori knowledge only, a posteriori knowledge being for him something of the order of true opinion or true belief. In that case, since they are known by us, synthetic a priori judgments would be true for Kant, and true not in the ordinary sense of conforming to objects (for then they would not be necessarily true for Kant), but rather true in the sense that objects conform to them as a rule. 1 What it would 1 Kant characterizes this difference in the sense of "true" as predicated of a priori synthetic judgments and as predicated of a posteriori judgments as the difference between transcendental truth and empirical truth respectively (N. Kemp Smith, trans. Kant's Uritique of Pure Reason, B 185, B 82-84, B 87). KANT'S DILEMMA OF KNOWLEDGE AND TRUTH 248 then mean to say that one of these same judgments is true is exactly what would be meant by human knowledge, the distinction between truth and knowledge having altogether collapsed in the case of synthetic a priori judgments. For Kant's repeated view is that a priori synthetic knowledge consists in the conformity of object to mind. But now, since Kant also admits that empirical judgments are true and true in the opposite sense of conforming to objects, Kant would then end up saying that truth both is knowledge and is not knowledge, that it is both the conformity of object to mind and the conformity of mind to object. The only way out of this is to say that for Kant " true '', like " knowledge " is strictly speaking predicable of a priori judgments only, so that all empirical judgments are true for him only in a derived sense of the term. But in that case all instances of truth would ipso facto be instances of knowledge, in which case Kant could not consistently believe, as he does, that some unknown propositions are nonetheless true. That God exists, that man is free, that man is morally responsible for his actions are propositions which Kant believed to be true even though they are not known. The dilemma, then, is inescapable. Either Kant must swallow the contradiction that knowledge is both the conformity of object to mind and of mind to object just in case he predicates "knowledge" univocally of a priori and a posteriori knowledge, or else, if he confines knowledge to a priori knowledge, Kant invites the contradiction that truth both is and is not knowledge. In answer to this dilemma, a defender of Kant may retort that the first horn of the alleged dilemma is really not contradictory after all but rather quite harmless. For predicating knowledge univocally of both a priori knowledge and a posteriori knowledge is contradictory only if it is assumed from the start that knowledge must be either the conformity of object to mind or the conformity of mind to object and not both. But this in turn assumes that being either the conformity of object to mind or the conformity of mind to object expresses 244 JOHN PETERSON the definition of knowledge. If, though, this conformity of object to mind or of mind to object is accidental to what knowledge is then it would be possible for knowledge to be both the conformity of object to mind and the conformity of mind to object. But then there would be nothing contradictory after all in Kant's predicating knowledge univocally of both a priori knowledge and a posteriori knowledge. But the clear reply to this objection is twofold: first, if either the conforming of object to mind or the conforming of mind to object is not at least part of the definition of knowledge then it is difficult to conceive what would enter into the definition of knowledge. Besides, if this same conformity were accidental to what knowledge is then a person could be said to know something even though there is absolutely no conformity at all between his mind and some object or between some object and his mind. But this is simply unbelievable. But second and more decisive, the denial that knowledge requires one of these two conformities is inconsistent with Kant's own celebrated announcement in the Preface of the Critique of Pure Reason that he is charting a new course in epistemology, the purpose of which is to show that knowledge consists in the conformity of object to mind rather than the other way around. But in that case no defender of Kant can answer the first horn of our proposed dilemma by denying from the start that conformity enters into the definition of knowledge-at least no defender of Kant could do this and be consistent with the philosophy of Kant himself. Granted, then, that the dilemma in question seems to be unavoidable, just how in the first place did Kant ever manage to get caught between its two horns? What presupposition or assumption in the Kantian philosophy spawns and feeds this dilemma? For it may be the case that the dilemma in question is propagated by a tenet which is not at all central to Kant's programme and which can be deleted without damage to the whole. Unhappily, though, there can be no easy patch- KANT'S DILEMMA OF KNOWLEDGE AND TRUTH 245 up answer to this conundrum which will save the heart of Kant's message. For the source of Kant's dilemma on this score is nothing less than his transcendental turn in philosophy together with its consequent dualism of things as known and things in themselves. For what this " Copernican Revolution " forced Kant to do was to live in a half-way house between realism and idealism. To the extent that Kant held that much of our knowledge is derived from sensations which are "caused" by things-in-themselves, Kant felt constrained to define empirical knowledge at least as the conformity of mind to object, while, to the extent that he locates the source of the most important a priori knowledge in the nature of the understanding itself, Kant is led to define knowledge as the conformity of object to mind. But then there is no way in which Kant can give us a definition of knowledge itself without conflating knowledge with truth, unless, of course, he opts to restrict knowledge to those cases in which objects conform to mind. But that, as was shown, puts Kant in a compromising position as regards truth. For then empirical truths for him are true because they conform to objects while synthetic a priori judgments are true because objects conform to them. On the matter of truth, then, Kant ends up having one foot in realism and the other foot in idealism if he takes the second alternative. Unable to bear Kant's fence-straddling on truth but agreeing with Kant that there can be no object without a subject, the idealists after Kant did the only thing they could do to make both truth and knowledge whole again, and that was to l"!bandon the troublesome thing-in-itself. 2 Without the thinghad other reasons for eliminating the 2 Needless to say, the post-Kantians thing-in-itself too, not the least of which was its status as being unknowable and yet as being at the same time the cause of our sensations. Nor does it help to say that the thing-in-itself for Kant is a cause in a different sense from that by which the a priori category of causality is a cause. If the thingin-itself is really unknowable, one could not know either that it was unknowable or that it is a cause of sensations. 246 JOHN PETERSON in-itself, knowledge or truth could no longer be said in any sense to be a conformity of mind to object since it is now mind which makes objects in their entirety as regards both their forrn and their matter. But this does not mean that the postKantian idealists either did nor could occupy the idealist side of the Kantian halfway house and define knowledge or truth as the conformity of objects to mind. For to the extent that even this idealist-oriented definition presupposes a given to be structured, it presupposes representations which are not due to mind but to the Ding an sich. So the Idealists could do nothing else but abandon the conformity or correspondence view of truth or knowledge altogether, adopting instead a kind of holistic or coherence theory of knowledge and truth. To demolish the half-way house of Kant and thus make knowledge and truth well and whole again, the old conformity or correspondence relation had to give way to holism. It is far from being clear, though, that this substitute of holism for conformity succeeded any better for the Idealists than the conformity relation succeeded for Kant in preserving in their systems any distinction between knowledge and truth. For at least in Hegel, " True " with a capital ' T' would seem to be just another name for Absolute Spirit, that state of the Absolute in which it enjoys perfect self-knowledge, or knowledge with a capital ' K '. The highest degree of truth is then one with the highest degree of knowledge. Along the way to this goal, of course, there are lesser degrees of truth as, for example, when the Absolute manifests itself in Christian art. But even here states of truth are no different from states of knowledge. Man's limited knowledge of the Absolute in Christian art is at once the Absolute's limited knowledge of itself. The deepening of the Absolute's self-awareness through history is no different from the deepening of truth itself, so that, with the perfect self-awareness which the Absolute finally enjoys in and through the philosophy of Hegel, we achieve, of course, truth for all time. Be that as it may, though, and assuming that one can swallow, as Kant never could, the extravagant identifica- KANT'S DILEMMA OJf KNOWLEDGE AND TRUTH 247 tion of Being with Mind, Hegel was in a much less compromising position on knowledge and truth than was Kant, who always insisting on the necessity of the given in human knowledge, paid the price, as we saw, of bifurcating the definitions of knowledge and truth. But can Kant's compromising position on knowledge and truth as well as the dubious cure of the Idealists which followed be avoided? To see how they can, look more closely at the reasons which prompted Kant to initiate his celebrated " Copernican Revolution " in the first place. Those reasons are rooted in Kant's belief that if in knowledge our concepts must always conform to objects, we should never have the necessary and universal knowledge of the world which we do in fact have. We would at best achieve only an inductive rather than a strict universality. But since Kant thought that the latter is indeed achieved in geometry and physics, not to mention ethics, he felt constrainted to chart a new course in epistemology according to which objects conform to our concepts. But right here, lurking behind his claim that a priori knowledge of the world is impossible if knowledge is always a conformity of concept to object, there is a non sequitur which, due to his identification of empiricism with Hume's empiricism, Kant seems to have missed entirely. And that is the fallacy of assuming that just because everything sensed is given it follows that everything given is sensed. That Hume swallowed this non sequitur is clear from his definition of an idea as nothing but the faint copy of an impression. For Hume, as there is nothing in or about an impression which is not particular so there is nothing in or about an idea which is not particular. But then there is nothing in the given which has not been sensed. But from this it follows as a matter of course that if knowledge is always a case of our ideas conforming to objects nothing strictly necessary and universal can be known about the world. Kant, then, is quite correct in noting that empiricism (or better still, Humean empiricism) leads straightway to skepticism. Operating under this definition of empiricism and Q48 JOHN PETERSON intent on eradicating skepticism, poor Kant could do nothing else than start a revolution in epistemology and suggest that, despite appearances to the contrary, knowledge must sometimes be not an affair of discovering but an affair of making, that is an affair of objects conforming to concepts. But why should Kant or for that matter anyone else assume that just because what is sensed is given it follows that what is given is sensed? Why not instead assume the opposite and say with Aristotle, Aquinas, C. S. Peirce and a host of other philosophers that there is more in the given than is dreamt of in the philosophy of Hume, and in particular that there are universal structures and relations in sense perception which are not recognized by sense perception, and that, accordingly, what Kant called the given is something far richer and deeper than what the narrow confines of Humean phenomenalism allowed it to be? But if it is, then there would seem to have been no basis at all for Kant's celebrated transcendental turn in philosophy in the first place, or, if there was a basis for it, that basis would seem to have been nothing more than an uncritical and undefended nominalism. Once this is recognized, might it not then be asked whether Kant's transcendental turn in philosophy was not, despite its enormous historical influence on the subsequent course of thought, a wrong turn in philosophy, one which can only be characterized as a tragic, if ingenious, mistake? JOHN PETERSON University of Rhode Island Kingston, Rhode Island "MEANING" AND "MENTAL PROCESS": DEMURRALS TO WITTGENSTEIN W SOME ITTGENSTEIN'S UNUSUAL STYLE of presenation in the Philosophical In.vestigations is one of he chief charms of his work, but also one of the main sources of the uncertainty about his line of argument and its cogency. His interpreters seem often enough to be put in the position of having to supply the joints and articulations of the very structure whose firmness they are supposedly testing. Under these circumstances, many sympathetic expositors have a tendency to be very generous indeed in their estimate of the soundness of his reasoning, while adverse critics may experience an impatience at the size of the job that faces them. The latter are easily accused of missing the point of his thought, and may be so lacking in assurance about their own perceptiveness in this novel case that they are half-tempted to concur in the accusation. Nevertheless, it is by no means clear that adverse criticism of Wittgenstein constitutes prima facie evidence of misunderstanding. On the contrary, because he was incapable by temperament of providing the kind of sustained exposition that would have rendered his thought prosaically accessible, the prudent suspicion would be that there might well be errors and false starts lurking in the inspired utterances which comprise his work. To increase the difficulty, his friendly commentators, who could have been of most help here, have not by and large subjected him to the severe scrutiny his thought calls for; in spite of the wealth of secondary literature, too much has been allowed to pass relatively uncontested. This has had the effect of allowing his followers to retain some of the air of a coterie while they have been in the process of be249 250 KENNETH T. GALLAGHER coming an army. The net result is that one of the most powerful thinkers of the century has not yet been sufficiently confronted by, nor forced to maintain his theses in the face of, a wider and more traditional philosophical audience. Determined criticism from this quarter cannot fail to be useful, and should figure significantly in the next phase of Wittgensteinian reflections. A critic bent on finding bones to pick with Wittgenstein would find them generously strewn in his path throughout the Investigations. These could be picked up at random, but it would very likely be more profitable to try to locate them in respect to some unitary movement of thought contained in the work. Let us single out the process by which Wittgenstein moves from his initial rejection of the " naming" theory of language (ostensibly found in St. Augustine) to his rejection of any proper role for a " mental act " of " meaning " in the elucidation of thought. The crucial notion tha.t facilitates this process seems to be the conviction, arrived at swiftly, that the " meaning" of a word can be equated with '"its use in the language." (43) The first purpose which the " meaning-is-use " theme serves is to rule out the simple, punctilinear meaning which he takes the " naming" theory of meaning to assume, and to see meanings as contextual. An ostensive theory of how words get their meaning inclines us to believe that ultimately there must be words which point to simple unities of meaning (as Wittgenstein himself had concluded in the Traotatus); language is then seen as a mosaic of such words. Once we are disabused of the belief that this is how words acquire their meanings, many things become clear. We no longer feel the need to see each word as pointing to some rigidly bounded " essence," but can see that a " family resemblance " sufficiently grounds whatever definiteness a concept requires. Usage assigns meaning, and linguistic usage is as varied as the employment of tools. It is ultimately grounded in the form of life which sustains it, and so has a factual basis beyond which there is no appeal. DEMURRALS TO WITTGENSTEIN (Philosophy, of course, goes wrong precisely by falsely presuming that it has a ground whereon to stand that is somehow outside the language-games which alone can confer their meanings upon words.) One of the upshots of this view is Wittgenstein's prolonged campaign against the possibility of private languages and the pseudo-problem of "other minds," but this does not form part of the present concern. This is focused in another direction: because the meaning of a term is derived from its use in a language, which in turn is explicated from the "natural history" (25) of a being with a certain form of life, Wittgenstein also finds it impossible to assign any place to a " mental act " in the conferring of meaning and the running-on of the life of thought. " Thinking " is not an additional and separate process alongside of our use of words. Such a process is undiscoverable and would be completely dispensable in any case. " Mental insight," acts of " understanding," or the like, are no guarantee that we know how to use words correctly: it is not our private insight, but the public sanction of our fellow-users of the language that assures us that we are proceeding correctly. Since meaning is use, the criterion of correct meaning is successful use. Wittgenstein spends large portions of the Investigations exorcising the mentalist bogey and rebutting objections he thinks of as arising to his view. (816427, 491-658) He remains firm that "When I think in language, there aren't 'meanings' going through my mind in addition to the verbal expressions: the language is itself the vehicle of thought." (829) If you disagree, " then just think the thought without the words." (880) Such, in broad outline, is the manner in which he moves from employing the formula " meaning is use " to combat the ostensive theory of meaning to employing it to combat the significance of " mental acts." It is quite an extensive move, and the differences between the first and final stages should not be missed. In the first case, " meaning " signifies the content of a term, its ideal freight or signification, and Wittgenstein is contending that this comes from the way in which it KENNETH T. GALLAGHER is used. In the second case, it signifies the act of a subject, an inner, non-linguistic process, and Wittgenstein is contending either that such do not occur or that they are entirely negligible. The second contention is not automatically supported by evidence adduced in support of the first, since they are obviously distinct claims. Meaning as act and meaning as content are clearly different. It seems quite possible logically to assent to either of Wittgenstein's contentions without being an important, if thereby committed to the other. 'This elementary, observation, and should alert us to the requisite care in observing how he proceeds from one usage to the other. In the context of this over-all argument, let us now examine a few of the theses he defends along the way: 1. The formula " meaning is use " is not itself free from possible ambiguities. It has not been sufficiently remarked that Wittgenstein himself qualifies it mildly when first introducing it. He says that " For a large class of cases-though not for all ... the meaning of a word is its use in the language." (43) This is admirably un-dogmatic, but he does not go into the exceptions, and so leaves most readers with the impression that they can be ignored. Furthermore, regarded in itself, the expression might easily be taken to signify that the meaning of a word could only be gathered from its use; this would not reduce meaning to use, but only signalize that the rich variety of the former could only be learned by attention to the latter. Such a construction would attract many adherents from a far wider area than he is usually considered to reach, but it would in no way underwrite the conclusions he then goes on to draw. These conclusions demand that the passage be interpreted reductively: meaning is nothing but use. It is not that we see what a word means by learning to use it in appropriate situations-rather, "knowing what it means" is just using it in these situations. Further, an oddity begins to take shape around the full phrase that he has actually employed. The meaning of a word DEMURRALS TO WITTGENSTEIN 258 is given not just by "use," but by "use in the language." It is only use in a language which can account for the meaning of a word. Not just any kind of use gives meaning or gives a word. A tool is used, too, but a tool is not a word. Other uses of men are involved in the behavior of eating, drinking, fighting, or gathering food. What kind of use makes an instrument a word? Its use in language, we are told. But this suggestion clearly gives language a more primary status than words or their use. What makes a language? What constitutes a linguistic use? Here it seems impossible that we can answer without resorting to a notion of " meaning " which Wittgenstein will later attempt to rule out: meaning as act, meaning as intentional reference. What he later does is to try to base language itself upon a further notion of use, that use which is reciprocal to and expressive of a form of life. The meaning of a word is its use in language, and the meaning of language is conferred by the form of life. Yet the form of life founds sundry usages, so that saying just this much does not explain why one of these usages should be characterized as linguistic. Finally, even if we credit the persuasiveness of Wittgenstein's thesis that a word's meaning can only be garnered in the full context of its use, this would not necessarily rule out the ostensive theory of meaning, although it would moderate its exclusiveness. For one of the uses of a word in language can obviously be to point or to name. Wittgenstein realizes this, of course, and only wants to warn against taking this as the source for language rather than one of its functions. Yet admitting so much will also set limits to his ability to dispense with such mental acts as "imaging" in the constitution of meaning in later discussion. 2. Wittgenstein's devising of the "family resemblance" as a way of conceiving similarities is surely provocative, but by no means so rewarding as some have imagined. It will be remembered that he suggests it in response to the objection that he has slighted the need to find something in common for the various " language-games " he has been inventing: you may 254 KENNETH T. GALLAGHER have a variety of such games, the objection runs, but what is common to all these which makes them into examples of a language-what, in other words, is " the essence of a languagegame?" (65) To which he replies that the phenomena" have no one thing in common," (65) but should rather be considered by analogy with the "family resemblance" which members of the same family often exhibit: " build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc." (67) These criss-cross and overlap, although no one member of a family may have anything identically in common with any other. So, perhaps, language-games form a family, in the manner that other games do: what, after all, is common to board-games, card-games, ball-games, and the multifarious other activities we group under this name? Wittgenstein invokes his salutary "Don't think, but look! " (66) Don't say there rnust be something in common, but look, and you will see an intertwining set of relationships, not a univocal identity. Clearly this is an instance where Wittgenstein's flair for analogy has produced a rich philosophical observation. Yet it cannot be used too confidently without further ado to solve problems, since it raises many of its own. Some have taken it as a sort of rousing rejection of "essentialism," as jf the ghost of Plato had been finally laid. But this is not apparent upon inspection. For, while it may be enlightening to see that in a family resemblance, such items as build, color of eyes, and gait may criss-cross, still in order to make this statement we have to have some unitary meaning for " build," " color," " eyes," and " gait." There must be some common signification here, or we will not be able to state what we mean by family resemblance. Could one claim that each one of these elements is itself an example of a family resemblance? One might try, but the spectre of an infinite regress seems to haunt the whole idea of family resemblance once it is extended in this manner. Not only that, but Wittgenstein chose an example, "games", where his analogy at least an initial ring of plausibility. If, instead, one thinks of such concepts as "odd," "even," DEMURRALS TO WITTGENSTEIN 9l55 "triangle," or even "man," "chair," or "red" (as Wittgenstein himself proceeds to do) , the plausibility of seeing these as exhibiting only a family resemblance becomes much less, since it seems relatively easy to discern an identical meaning. By no means should the analogy be taken as supporting a denial of universals, since it is quite evident that each one of the examples that Wittgenstein cites for "game" is a common meaning which is applied univocally to each one of its instances. That is, while " game " may be perplexing as taking in sundry types of games, still " chess-game " applies univocally to the individual instances as they are played, and so does "gin-rummy," "baseball-game," or "tic-tac-toe." These are species applied to individuals, and as such are straightforward examples of what traditional philosophy has meant by a universal (and perhaps even an "essence"). Wittgenstein is looking at the relationship between genus and species (" game " and "card-game," e.g.), so that his remarks do not affect the species/individual relation, and that is where the problem of universals can best be located. A further ground for misgiving about the import of this notion is that there is an unmistakeable difference between a literal family resemblance and the sort of thing Wittgenstein is pointing out. In taking note of an unfamiliar passer-by as resembling other members of a local clan, we may say " He looks like a Barrett," but in doing so, we do not mean that he is an instance of a certain kind. A family is not a type, and we don't mean that it is. So in ordinary speech there is a difference between the use of family-names and the use of class names. This remains true even though we may recognize families and settle upon classes by means of noticing crisscrossing resemblances. The name " Barrett " is the name of a certain family, but it is not a meaning which can be exemplified by particulars. Contrariwise, the word " man" is not the name for a family or a set of individuals. The name "Jones " is a denomination after the fact: I don't first have the meaning "Jones" and then observe an instance to see whether it ful- 256 KENNETH T. GALLAGHER fills this meaning. I don't abstract the meaning" Jones," since it is the name of a singular case. There is no discernible property called " being a Jones," as there is a property " being a man." All Joneses are alike in being men; it is in another sense that they are alike in being Joneses. Nominalism may hold otherwise, but the error is patent. Therefore, it is likely that trying to understand common nouns by analogy with proper nouns will generate confusion along with enlightenment. It is also clear that there is something peculiar about appealing to family resemblance to ground common names, since there is no limit to family resemblances once under way. That is, from some point of view everything is similar to everything else, and depending on what sort of criss-crossing resemblances we wanted to mark, we could generate an endless number of names for them. This would not disconcert Wittgenstein, of course, since one of his points is that it is only a factual basis that accounts for our concepts: interest determines the way we catalogue and name things, and there is no appeal from thatwe " just do " it this way. That seems fair enough, over a wide area and understood properly, but it does permit entry to the thought that something else is involved in our formation of concepts than just noticing resemblances. It suggests that in each case resemblances are taken as the clue to the presence of a unity which is worth naming. They help us to identify or demarcate a type, but we apply our word to the type, and not to the resemblances. We note the resemblances, but we mean the type. Finally, a brief but important consideration. Even if Wittgenstein could rightly rely on the feasibility of using " family resemblance" to explicate certain features of word usages, it would still be an unsettled question whether " language " is something that can be usefully viewed like this. We cannot just assume that there is nothing common to the various language-games because we feel that other usages lend themselves to this treatment. If some words, to take the minimum assumption, display a common intelligible core, may this not DEMURRALS TO WITTGENSTEIN also be the case with "language"? Wittgenstein might have the right to proceed provisionally, seeing where his analogy leads him, but the ultimate verdict must be reached on the basis of whether so proceeding really does justice to the full meaning of language. Every analogy must prove itself, and most turn out to have mixed cases; this seems no exception. 3. Another analogy of Wittgenstein's carries both interest and risk: the comparison of a word with a tool. This is developed in the course of his quarrel with the ostensive theory of meaning. The latter might seem to require that all words be regarded as" signifying something," and getting their status as words by doing so-and then we might look around for what it is they signify. Yet the search for "the " source for meaning is misguided, if the meaning of a word is to be sought in its use. Uses are diverse, and" ostending" is only one of them. Perhaps we ought to say that words signify not something, but some-how. "Think of the tools in a tool-box," he suggests (11) : "there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screwdriver, a rule, a glue-pot, nails and screws. The functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects." The analogy seems suggestive and unexceptionable insofar as it merely stresses the need for flexibility in conceiving how language works (and it bears against nothing so strongly as against Wittgenstein's own Tractatus view of the matter). Yet he employs it as well to support the claim that there is no common definition that could be framed to apply to these diversely functioning words and tools. And the analogy does not show that. Any neophyte lexicographer might come up with a formula that applied to all tools (and one superior to the weak entry he disposes of in #14, that tools "serve to modify something ") . To recognize a common meaning is not to require anything in common among the entities that fulfil it beyond the fact of their fulfilling it. That is surely obvious once we reach the appropriate level of generality. The difficulty in arriving at a proper appreciation of language arises from the temptation to remain at a lower level of generality 258 KENNETH T. GALLAGHER and to equate the role of words detected at that level with language as such; Wittgenstein rightly warns us off this pitfall, but there is nothing to prevent our ascending to a height that commands a better view of things. The tool analogy is one more step by which Wittgenstein's reflections become irreversibly committed to the explication of meaning exclusively through use. It is therefore worth pointing out that, like all analogies, it has a strictly limited validity. Is a word really like a tool? Well, in some ways yes, in some ways, no. Is the yes or no more important? Only a consideration of the ways in which they agree and differ could help to answer that. Words and tools are both referential to things other than themselves, that is true. Yet the whole being of the word is to be understood from the aspect of its role in the intentional grasp of experience, and that cannot be said of tools. A tool is part of a causal process, and is referred in its functioning to later events in that process. A word is not, as such, part of a causal process; it is a sign, not a cause. It is not temporally related to the object to which it refers. A tool is a means by which we do something; a word is a medium by which we mean something. Granted that this sort of observation would have to be followed up at length in order to perceive its significance, the mere noticing of such differences must give us pause in any tendency to be too precipitate in putting too much weight on the similarities. A word is like a tool? Yes, indeed. But it is also very much unlike a tool, and perhaps it is just this unlikeness that would be most revealing about the nature of language. 4. Nowhere is the ambivalent effect of Wittgenstein's fondness for analogy more in evidence than in the root-metaphor that dominates the Investigations, the likening of language to a game. This is a brilliant, stimulating, lively metaphor which keeps his thought moving in an unfailingly interesting way, and has become part of the lingua franca of contemporary philosophy. He introduces it abruptly in 117 and reverts to it in all sorts of ingenious ways. It is gratefully perceived by him DEMURRALS TO WI'fTGENSTEIN 9l59 as the instrument of his liberation from the unwarranted demand for the rigid boundary and "crystalline purity" (108) of concepts which the earlier "picture-theory" of language of the Tractatus had seemingly enforced. " A picture held us captive," he declares (115) , and we feel a sort of exultation or relief that his new view of language frees him from that bondage. Yet, what an odd sort of deliverance! For, he has freed himself from one image (the likening of a proposition to a picture) precisely through recourse to another (the likening of a proposition to a move in a game). Images apparently had the same mesmerizing effect on Wittgenstein as etymology had on that other oracular philosopher of our century, Heidegger. Just as the notion that a proposition is a picture had flashed across his mind in reading an account of how a model had been used in court to depict a traffic accident, so the notion that speaking a language is like playing a game came to him while watching a football game. 1 Both metaphors are provocative, but ought not to be treated as unchallenged poles of reference. The principal reason for questioning the ultimate utility of likening language to a game is that language is intentional, and games are not. The difference seems crucial, and it sets insuperable barriers to the granting of any decisive character to the analogy. Whatever theory we construct for the nature of language, or however conscientiously we from constructing a theory, it seems indisputable that language as a whole is oriented upon the extra-linguistic. Language refers to what is not language. One might like to protest that this "other-than-language" only presents itself for language, but that does not alter the point. Words, assertions, questions, commands, linguistic expressions of any sort, bear upon what 1 Wittgenstein himself tells us how the " picture theory " of propositions occurred to him in Notebooks, 1914-1915 (edit. by G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe, with an English translation by G. E. M. Anscombe, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1961), p. 7. The inspiration for the game metaphor is recounted by Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (London, Oxford Univ. Press, 1958), p. 65. }(ENNETH T. GALLAGHER is other than themselves. Let us remain entirely neutral as to how this "other-than-language" is to be conceived-the fact remains that the linguistic instruments themselves are unintelligible except as referring to what is not a linguistic instrument. No questioning of the adequacy of an ostensive theory of definition could justify a denial of the need for the presence of some ostensive dimension in language as a whole. That way would lie incoherence. For, unless the speaker recognized that in speaking, he was speaking about something other than his words, he could not even speak about language. Language, in short, is not self-contained; games are. A game is not the medium for the presencing of what is other than itself. It is not an intentional process. The elements which are part of the game are assigned their status and their role, as well as whatever" meaning" they have, in a manner completely immanent to the game itself. The game answers to nothing outside the game. This is because it does not refer to anything outside the game. The Queen of Spades receives its role in the game of " Hearts " by an assignment made by the rules of the game; it just is what the rules say it is. The fact of its being this cannot be measured by anything beyond it. Neither the elements of the game nor the game in its entirety bear upon anything beyond it. It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of this difference, and it puts unmistakeable limits to the value of the "game " analogy. Wittgenstein says (108) : "The question 'what is a word really?' is analogous to 'What is a piece in chess? ' " But this won't do, as it stands. For the piece in chess derives its entire status through the rules of chess. Its " being " is conferred upon it by the rules of the game. It is not an intentional sign of anything other than itself. In this sense, it is not significantly different from a wheel in a machine, the appearance to the contrary being caused by the fact of its being employed in a species of communication between men, which occurs in an intentional setting. The fact remains that the piece is not an intentional symbol, and the word is. DEMURRALS TO WITTGENSTEIN 261 Failure to take this into consideration permits the quite extraordinarily misleading remarks which Wittgenstein makes in #136-137. He has arrived at the point of feeling it necessary to extricate himself from the obligation to treat even a proposition as something which has clear boundaries and a " general form." One might be inclined to say that a proposition could be at least defined as " whatever can be true or false." Wittgenstein retorts that this has only a specious value, since it is like saying that " ' The king in chess is the piece that one can check.'" Such a statement would not confer some special understanding of what a king is. Rather, "This can mean no more than that in our game of chess we can only check the king." Likewise, "That only a proposi,tion can be true or false can say no more than that we predicate ' true ' and ' false ' of what we call a proposition." Here Wittgenstein is proposing that the meanings of " true " and " proposition " are assigned in the language-game, as the meaning " king " is assigned in the game of chess. This quite remarkable proposal only gains the appearance of credibility because insufficient attention has been paid to the radical difference between the intentional character of language and the non-intentional character of ordinary games. The elements in an ordinary game can be arbitrarily assigned their roles, since a game is a self-enclosed process answerable to nothing outside itself. The whole purpose of language, on the other· hand, is to make possible an intentional reference to what is other than itself. It therefore must con ta.in the elements which make such intentional reference possible. The nature of these elements is not conferred upon them by the game, since they are required if there is to be a " game." Language must have a structure which makes its purpose fulfillable. Then in it there must be some act in respect to which it makes sense to ask whether it is true. This act we call a " proposition"; the name is arbitrary, but not the relationship. That there be intentional processes in which the reference to the extra-linguistic is accomplished is part of the nature of Ian- KENNETH T. GALLAGHER guage. The " king" is not something we find, but something we make; under one indispensable aspect, the proposition is not something we make, but something we find. If anything whatsoever is prior to language, then the need for some element in language serving the role of propositions is inevit. able-otherwise this priority of the extra-linguistic could not be recognized, and the whole business of language is to recognize it. Much in language is conventional, but if the meaning of "truth" were conventional, there would be no meaning to calling anything else conventional. Language, which founds the possibility of game-playing, cannot itself be ultimately comprehended as a game. None of this would matter too much if the limits of the analogy were kept continually in mind. But in the present case Wittgenstein is so impressed by the fecundity of the image and the welcome power it confers to break the molds of his previous thinking that he keeps little track of its limitations. Instead, we get a progressively more unqualified readiness to understand language from the vantage-point of the game metaphor, to elide the meaning of words with their use, and finally to conflate thought and language, thus effectively sealing off any relief from that side. 5. A couple of relatively minor moves facilitate Wittgenstein's eventual claim that thinking may be conflated with speaking, and that "mental acts" either play no part or at best play a negligible part in the language-game. The first is his suggestion that naming an object is something like sticking a label on it. (15) He says this in the course of loosening up the fixation many have to see language exclusively as a mosaic of naming words, but he says that it will often prove useful in philosophy to treat a name in this way. One such case is in his builders' game at the beginning of the Investigations: an assistant in the work of building might go and fetch an article when the master shows him a certain mark; the required tools all have the mark in question. Now this surely seems open to the objection that it does not get DEMURRALS TO WITTGENSTEIN 263 anywhere near the philosophical significance of naming words. For, whatever else naming is like, it is not like sticking a label on an object. Every label is stuck on a singular; but no name (no common name) is the name of a singular. The name is a universal which is applied precisely to what is not peculiar to some singular. Even in Wittgenstein's example, the puzzle is to see exactly why the same label may be stuck on different singulars. One who does this is applying a name or making use of a universal, but he can only be moved to do this because of some recognition that makes the application possible-a recognition of a resemblance which it would be exceedingly hard to see as occurring at the level of languageuse. Affixing a tag to a thing is a corporeal move in a language-game, but the motivation to make it is due to an act of recognition; affixing the same tag to different individuals manifests something of the nature of this recognition, but it does not substitute for it. Perhaps Wittgenstein's earlier Tractatzts belief, that names derive their meaning from the bearer, inclines him to his present course, as it had inclined him and Russell -to think that ultimately names had to name simples (and Russell to the belief that therefore " this " was the only proper name). These problems, however, are not inherent in every conception of universals, but only in a certain way of approaching them. His later characterization of the name as a " baptism of an object " (38) likewise would seem difficult to apply to most philosophers who have held the objectivity of universals: since what is baptized is always a singular, the metaphor does not seem apt to convey the thought of those who hold that a concept grasps a universal. It might be more plausible to think of it as suggesting that a noun must refer to something, and therefore as conjuring up a "universal " as the target of a noun; even so, precisely because it is a universal which is conjured up, no proponent of the theory could treat the cases as equivalent. The second set of remarks also arises out of Wittgenstein's attempt to dissipate the need to admit that a concept refers 264 KENNETH T. GALLAGHER to a " common," although his intent here is somewhat harder to fathom. He is considering a suggestion (72) that, for example, when I teach someone the name of a color, I may show him several samples of it, and then say: " The colour that is common to all these I call 'blue'." One might now like to enlarge on this and say that to have understood a definition "means to have in one's mind an idea of the thing defined," adding, significantly, " and that is a sample or picture." (73) This notion that having an idea of a common element is having a sample in one's mind which serves as a paradigm is frequently resorted to by Wittgenstein in explicating the issue of how the common might be apprehended (cf. 50, 53, 56). In no case does he accept the explication, but rather combats it, showing that it will not work and is moreover irrelevant to our use of words; for, we may have a picture without knowing thereby what to understand by means of it, and conversely we may understand a word without any corresponding picture. So it is not any acceptance of this way of explaining the apprehension of universals that concerns us now, but rather that it is the only alternative that he offers to his identification of meaning with use. In #74, he utilizes the example of a leaf: do I possibly learn what "leaf" means by getting" an idea of the shape of a leaf, a picture of it in my mind? " He has no trouble showing that there is no picture of a leaf which is common to all leaves. This could be taken as a laudable dismissal of an empiricist approach to universals, like that of Locke or, even more, Berkeley. But it is the only alternative to his own view which he examines, as if he felt that once we can get over the habit of seeing the universal as a kind of " paradigmatic particular," we are left with nothing more to be said in behalf of a mental act of ideation, but are thereby persuaded that all we need to understand ideation is sense experience plus words in their linguistic context. The same viewpoint seems to surface later on when he considers the role that images play in understanding. He says very rightly that meaning cannot be equated with the having of images or even un- i>EMuRRALS TO WITTGENSTEIN 265 derstood from this side, since it is what I do with the image, how I use it, which gives it whatever relevance it has to the life of meaning. To understand the word " cube" is not to have a mental picture, since that picture could be variously used: the picture does not force some specific use on me. (139) He is entirely right here, but the force of the point seems directed simply against an empiricist view of ideas: no conceptualist or moderate realist from Aristotle to Husserl would have conceived the apprehension of universals in this way. Wittgenstein is rebutting the views of someone who says, " What really comes before our mind when we understand a word?-Isn't it something like a picture? " (139) but the real question still remains, once jejune thoughts like this are disposed 0£. Given that thinking and meaning are not equivalent to having images, how shall they be understood? Unless we conceive of imagery as the " sample " for mental life in general, we cannot impugn the mental reality of thought by showing that thought is something other than imaging. Yet this seems what Wittgenstein is usually about; on pp. 175/176, he studiously tries to show that the grasp of meaning cannot be spoken of in the same manner as the having of images, but seems to take that as evidence that therefore the apprehension of meaning cannot be spoken of as a " mental act " at all. 'lrVe can be grateful for his analyses without accepting his inferences. 6. Following out what seem to him to be the full consequences of his reduction of meaning to use, Wittgenstein is eventually drawn into an emphatic rejection of any role for such a "mentalist " function as " insight " in the process of understanding. Setting out from his own suggestion that the meaning of a word might be equated with its use in a language, he has produced gradually an atmosphere in which whole sentences can be similarly viewed, and in which language itself is comprehended under the canon of use, to the exclusion of any mentalist predicates. Clearly, he has moved a long way from the initial eureka, which only released him from the confinement to an ostensive theory of meaning. 266 KENNETH T. GALLAGHER In a famous set of passages, Wittgenstein contests the need to regard even such a mathematical bit of reasoning as the power to see how to continue a series as the product of an "insight." He had been entertaining the objection: since the meaning 0£ a word is or can be understood in a flash, while the use of a word is mastered gradually over time, it is not possible to equate the two. This objection seems to have a lot to be said £or it, and he grapples with the difficulty at length. Consider the case 0£ a child learning the number series: isn't there a point at which he understands in a mental sense how to produce it upon request? No, Wittgenstein holds; rather it is his disposition to continue as we wish him to do which is the criterion £or whether he has truly understood. (149/150) No inner mental vision will serve; what a man does, not what he says he " sees," determines i£ he understands. It is possible to imagine cases where a person says," Now I can go on," and then can't go on, or goes on incorrectly. Wittgenstein offers the example 0£ a child being taught the series, 2, 4, 6, 8, ... who gets along fine until he reaches 1,000, and then continues: 1,004, 1,008, 1,01£ ... When reprimanded by his instructor, he says, but that is what I took the directions to mean: add 2 up to 1,000, add 4 up to 2,000, add 6 up to 8,000, and so forth. Could we charge him with having failed to see what we mean? Well, says ·Wittgenstein, the correct understanding 0£ the original instructions is decided by the accepted practice. Your claim to know the correct interpretation 0£ the instructions is just a statement as to how you would go on. Nor would an advertence to the algebraic formula of the series help, since the formula has to be interpreted, and the correct interpretation is a decision reinforced by other practitioners. So even i£ I have the formula, the question can still be raised how I apply it correctly, that is, in the manner which custom requires. Then, " In the sense in which there are processes (including mental processes) which are characteristic 0£ understanding, understanding is not a mental process." (154) Wittgenstein certainly comes very close here not simply to DEMURRALS TO WITTGENSTEIN 267 denying that a mental process called " insight " is decisive in confirming that understanding has occurred, but to denying that there is any process that could be characterized as insight. It is simply a name for a disposition to behave in a certain manner, and has no standing in the knowledge process. Yet surely he has over-reached himself, as his own examples can testify. The child who is learning the series certainly has an insight into some possible series-it is just not the one intended by the teacher. Each series has its formula. If the child has misinterpreted the instructions, he has wrested the words away from the intention of the instructor towards some intention of his own. Or, if the instructor has been very obscure, he has said, in effect, " guess which series I am thinking of." As long as the matter is left at the level of words, these being regarded as symbols open to variant or arbitrary interpretation, anything might be read into them. As uninterpreted symbols, words could lead anywhere. Wittgenstein is advancing the claim that the interpretation can only derive from the practice of the linguistic community. But actually he has showed at best that the selection of possible interpretations is made by the linguistic community. However, once some meaning has been given to the symbols, the possibilities of further interpretation are narrowed. Once 2, 4, 6, 8 are designated as the numerals in the natural number series, then any instructions that utilize them can be interpreted far less arbitrarily. Both series which Wittgenstein cites make sense, both have their rules, and we can see what the rules for each are. Each series is an ideal possibility made possible through the series of natural numbers. Our insight is into the ideal series. It is a bit wrong-headed on Wittgenstein's part to treat the fact that there is no insight into the words as such as substantiating that there is no such thing as insight at all. Actually, even for him and the reader to recognize that there are two disparate series involved, and to see on what basis they have been formed, he and they must have an insight into what has occurred in each case. We must see that the child KENNETH T. GALLAGHER and the instructor have seen things differently. At least our seeing is a matter of insight. Really, the chuckle of amusement that Wittgenstein's example arouses in us upon first meeting it is itself a testimony that we have had a flash of realization. Laughter is not aroused by use or disposition over a period of time. We chuckle because we see-at an instant. We do not wait for confirmation, we just" get it." Still, even here one is reluctant simply to reject Wittgenstein's guidance, and just a bit uncertain how his ultimate point is to be best appreciated. On the one hand, as indicated above, he is clearly extending and expanding his earlier proposal that the meaning of a word is its use in language; here strings of words, sentences, even inferences, are said to derive their standing from usage. On the other hand, his way of contradistinguishing understanding from " mental process " is also directed against the granting of any privilege to private experience, and could be viewed as a tactic in the fight against psychologism. Notice that in #154 where he contrasts the understanding with mental processes, he cites as a typical example of a mental process "A pain's growing more or less; the hearing of a tune or sentence." From this remark, one might be tempted to enlist him as a possible ally in the Husserlian war against reducing meaning to psychic occurrences; on this basis, he could be welcomed as a champion of the objective status of meaning. The trouble is that he does not make the Husserlian or Fregean distinction between understanding as an act and understanding as content. He is fighting against psychologism armed purely with the weapon of linguistic use and its public status, and is thereby led to defend badly placed positions. For instance, having defined "understanding" against "mental processes," he is drawn further and further into an outright denial that there is anything called a mental process of thinking at all. Talk about thinking turns out invariably to be talk about behavior, specifically, linguistic behavior. There is no way in which I can be said to " observe " thought; introspection will not do the job. Thinking doesn't strike us DEMURRALS TO WITTGENSTEIN as " queer " when we are doing it, he says ( , but when we begin looking for it, we can't find it: I always come upon verbal expressions, but not, in addition, " 'meanings ' going through my mind." Thinking is not some "incorporeal process" behind the words. (339) In the end he runs through an inventory of processes akin to thought, which might seem to have "mental" credentials-such as, believing, deciding, recognizing, willing, and intending-and finds them unsatisfactory: the criteria for the use of such words are not inner, but language and behavior patterns. (571-653) Wittgenstein has little hesitation in running together the two questions: are there mental processes of thought, and what is the criterion for saying that there are? Yet if there really are mental processes, the only " criterion " needed for saying that there are would seem to he the consciousness of them. It will be seen that Wittgenstein has been led to his strenuous efforts to understand language without reference to mental processes by a determined adherence to the formula enunciated at the start, that the meaning of a word is its use in the language. And yet it is not at all clear that the formula itself dictates this direction. For there seems to be nothing in the notion of "use " which excludes its application to the mental as well as the behavioral. The only way the term " use " can be the instrument for the exclusion of meaning and mental process is by conceiving it behavioristically to begin with. In itself it appears to be quite a neutral term. Why shouldn't there be mental uses? Or, why shouldn't mental processes be involved in the integral use of words? It is in many ways a happy thought on the part of Wittgenstein to loosen up our thinking about " meaning," to reject any premature or doctrinaire equation of it with pure ostension; yet it would be small gain if we were to conclude in a doctrinaire equation of meaning with "use" conceived behavioristically. Perhaps he does not have enough uses for the word "use." Would it not be better to take his initial formula to imply that the meaning of words is conferred on them by the role 270 KENNETH T. GALLAGHER they play in the entire life of consciousness? The content of words is generated and sustained by their reflection and transformation of experience. But to try to see this process without advertence to the fact that experience is conscious experience, and that an appreciation of the full range of language requires continual reference to consciousness, is futile. Clearly, we don't explain something by calling it incorporeal, nor by ascribing it to " incorporeal" processes. Explaining language in terms of thought, if by thought we just mean a mysterious " incorporeal process " parallelling the act of speech does not help much to understand what thought is. But we don't explain something by calling it " corporeal " either-so that explaining the life of language by saying that it is part of a linguistic behavior which we "just do" engage in is not much help either. It may be that, in the long run, language is in some sense inexplicable, but that alone will not automatically certify the Wittgensteinian emphasis upon use. Explanation in terms of pure verbal sounds and their use will not convey how meaning differs from other uses. Unless the speaker understands the appropriateness of his uses, we are left with the correlation of two outwardly observed events, and this is no more an explanation of the life of meaning than would be any other such correlation. Wittgenstein may intend something quite different from this, but it is not clear that he can achieve it with the explanatory instruments he allows himself. If we must come to a point where the " spade turns," why is it more satisfactory to do that with linguistic use than with mental insight? For unless we smuggle in meaning at some point, even our appeal to use will be useless. It is only some irreducibly mental sense of meaning that will allow us to identify what we mean by linguistic use, as opposed to some other sense of use. Wittgenstein supports his denial of the reality of a mental process of thinking by the challenge mentioned above: " Try thinking the thoughts without the words." Not only is this a bit unfair, since it relies on the Humean empiricist bias that only what is separable can be distinct, but it is in no way DEMURltALS TO WITTGENSTEIN 271 decisive, since the challenge could easily be reversed: " Try saying the words without thinking them." Without the animation of the mental intention, the words would only be a string of sounds; in effect, they would not be words, and we would not really have " said " them. Wittgenstein, of course, would claim that what makes the difference is that the sounds as " really said " are simply uttered in conformity with a usage sanctioned by a community. Yet this leaves out quite a bit. Among other things: 1) both individual users and community must be using intentional symbols, so that the intentionality explicates the specific kind of use, and not the other way around; 2) the very existence of the language is the reflection and expression of the multifaceted life of the speaking com-. munity, a life which includes above all the conscious dimension of its existence and the conscious apprehension of it. Above all, it is reflection which makes language possible, so that to try to appreciate language without allusion to it is an unprofitable tour de force. These criticisms do not detract from what is deservedly seen as the genuine contribution of Wittgenstein: his stress on the rich variety of the sources for the meaning of our words, the marvelous philosophical vitality with which he himself reflects upon language, and his insistence on the public character of language, along with the ensuing polemic against psychologism. His purposes, however, cannot be achieved merely by dwelling upon the fact that words are uttered in given circumstances. Words, after all, occur-they are generated. It is legitimate to ask for the ground of their comingto-be, and no answer couched in terms of a re-iteration that they just do come to be is going to be very satisfying. "Use" only contributes to the explanation if it is seen by the speaker to be the appropriate use; thus, even acknowledging a role for use entails acknowledging a role for insight. Undoubtedly, the whole subject of language remains exasperatingly elusive but that should not prompt us to stop with the acknowledgement of it as some kind of gigantic fact. 272 KENNETH T. GALLAGHER Since it is a fact that is continually coming into being, its existence requires some explanation. Wittgensteinians might object that grounding that existence on "thought" simply has the effect of displacing the " mere fact " to the realm of thought. Granted that they have a point, the issue is in part whether even this displacement is an improvement or not. Admittedly, it brings its own difficulties. Yet if explanation must come to an end somewhere, many would feel that it is more intelligible that it end with " seeing," even " mental seeing," rather than with the utterance of sounds. At the very least they would feel that language is inexplicable without the admission of this or an analogous " mental factor " somewhere along the way. Insight is, as Wittgenstein points out, not a mental process of the same sort as feeling pain or having a sensation. But does that mean that it is not a mental process at all? That seems a premature conclusion. An Husserlian (or even a Popperian) would say that it is distinguished from the aforementioned mental processes by a) being intentional b) being related to the ideal. That means that it is not adequately comprehensible simply under the generic classification of "psychic" or" mental," and Wittgenstein has done noble service along with others in bringing this out. Discerning so much, however, sets the problem; it does not solve it or banish it. The problem becomes something like: how shall we discriminate that portion of mental life which is axised upon the ideal from that which is merely " psychic," and how shall we appreciate its special features? In this effort at appreciation, an openness to the myriad features of language is certainly called for-not only to signification, but to feelings, images, sound, associations, memory, action, and an entire gamut of factors not specifiable in advance. Everything from basic physiology to quasi-Kantian a priori categories may have something to reveal to us about language. Since language is an ontological phenomenon, even a contribution from the side of metaphysics is to be rather expected than dreaded. By any yardstick, many of these sources DEMURRALS TO WITTGENSTEIN 278 of illumination will turn out to be " mental," since the whole concrete life of the human subject flows into language. As one of the ultimate expressions of the life of consciousness, it would be odd indeed if language could be viewed without reference to it. Actually, could we not even invoke Wittgenstein himself as an ally in this view? His whole purpose, he tells us, is to battle against the " bewitchment of our intelligence by language," (109) and that surely means that he is making some kind of distinction between thinking and speaking. If the two were identical, would we not be in a position similar to the one he defends in the Tractatus, when he holds that it is impossible to think illogically, since logic defines what can be thought? For, if language as behavior defines thinking, would it really be possible for the intelligence to be bewitched by language? Words without use would have no meaning-but then how could t.hey even appear to have one? How could they erroneously have come to be, except in terms of an erroneous mental attitude? Even the" idling engine" metaphor doesn't seem to evade the difficulty, since we must always wonder whose foot is on the accelerator. If language is identified with use, it seems to be identified with the working of the engine, so that even on Wittgenstein's own terms something else must explain its idling. At the last, let us appeal to that excellent motto of his, which, strangely, could be transferred verbally intact to Husserl: "Don't think, but look!" (66). Let us, then, look. And don't we see anything? It is quite odd for someone like Wittgenstein, who uses this motto, to deny the role of mental insight. For the assumed power of insight seems to underlie his own language-game of classification that he is: playing in the Investigations. There was no need for him to have denied this, and indeed his method might well gain new dimensions by admitting it. KENNETH Fordham University Bronw, New York T. GALLAGHER RE-TRIEVING TRINITARIAN TEACHING: A Review Discussion * 'TI HE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY embraces the ntral teachings of what we might call classic Chrisanity. Its point is, quite simply, truthfully to teach who God is-and to teach this with and for both church and world in such a way as to correspond to what God intends be taught about who God is. "God is one ousia/natura, three hypostases/persoru:i" came to be the climactic trinitarian formula and " revealed " the honorific title attached to teachings of such import. But the set of diverse and conflicting intellectual, religious, and social shifts some call modernity has had a strange love-hate relationship with this doctrine. For the last 200 years in particular, the doctrine of the Trinity has been variously abandoned, re-affirmed, recovered, reformulated, relocated, or ignored in the face of the diverse stands on God in novel christianities and other religious and non-religious ways of life. A teaching which functioned as a sacred canopy for God, world, and church seemingly collapsed under the strain of a culture which forces us to believe we had to choose among such things. The challenges themselves are not surprising-Judaism, classical culture, and Islam all heretofore raised hard-nosed questions about the Trinity. And it is not even surprising that Christians disagree on such things-the classic doctrine of the Trinity was honed against debates within the Christian community which only gradually yielded distinctions between *William J. Hill, The Three-Personea God: The Trinity as a Mystery of Salvation, Washington, D.C. The Catholic University of America Press, 1982. Pp. xv 354. $37.95. + 274 RE-TRIEVING TRINITARIAN TEACHING 275 ortho-, hetero-, and non-orthodox. What is surprising is that even Christians do not seem agreed on what it is they disagree about on this score. Shall we speak of a doctrine, idea, symbol, myth, contemplative or liturgical prayer, experience, praxis, or in some other way? Shall we give the topic its own time and space-not only in our reading and thinking but also in our individual and communal prayer? Or shall we make the Trinity a function of some other teaching-christology, anthropology, ecclesiology, etc.-or some other liturgical feast? Or perhaps it should simply be turned into an appendix to theology or abandoned? And how might we intelligently decide about such issues? William J. Hill's The Three-Personed God: The Trinity as a Mystery of Salvation is a massive contribution to this theological conversation on the Trinity. 1 Hill "re-trieves" trinitarian options past and present in order to propose that the being as well as the salvific activity of God is three-personed. . Those seeking an original overview of trinitarian thinking throughout the ages (including potent challenges to current alternatives) can do no better than to study this text.· Even more importantly, Hill's constructive proposal (sympathetic to an existential and moderately realistic reading of Thomas Aquinas, but identifiable with no single-ism) is probably the most challenging recommendation to focus trinitarian theology on the classic categories of" nature/persons" to come along in many decades. After a summary of the text, I will analyze and evaluate the major ways I think Hill advances the discussion of the Trinity. The summary is brief, just long enough to give the reader a taste of the breadth of the book and suggest the context of Hill's remarks so that my analysis and evaluation will . l The text has a select bibliography as well as indices of names and topics. All numbers in the following essay refer to pages or chapters ("c. ") of this text. .A related book is William J. Hill, Knowing the Unkno'W1b God (New York Philosophical Library, 1971), including a section on "God as Tripersonal" (201-17). 276 JAMES J. BUCKLEY not seem unfair. My primary goal is not to repeat the details of Hill's position but to set it in a context which highlights its I key distinctive contribution to the conversation-without, hope, distorting its internal shape. I. A Re-Trieve of the Trinity The Three-Personed God is fittingly divided into three distinct but mutually dependent parts. The first two parts are an overview of trinitarian options in the tradition and in modernity. Part I (Background: Theology Listening to the Past) moves from Scripture (c. I) through the Greek Fathers (c. 2) to Western Medieval theology (c. 3) . The Old Testament is construed as the" ambiance" of the New. Yahweh as Father of the Elect, with Word and Spirit, is " suggestive of " a trinary structure in God's relation to people-but only suggestive of the Christian Trinity by a kind of (Christianly legitimate) dogmatic eisegesis (4-5) . In the New Testament Hill identifies the implicit trinitarianism in the various " symbols " of a " second " and " third " in God, but proposes that the primary concern of the New Testament" is soteriological, only secondarily Christological, and even more remotely trinitarian" (27, 29). The "doctrine" of the Trinity does not emerge until the Greek Fathers. In the second chapter Hill tracks this shift through Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Athanasius, the Cappadocians, and others. He reads the transition much like Lonergan-as a move from " symbolic " to " conceptual " expression-while affirming that the process involved a great many a-rational factors (50-52). Medieval theology in the West-Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Richard of St. Victor-is read as the climax of classical trinitarianism. Augustine, says Hill, proceeds from trinitarian reflections in finite being and human being before reaching an analysis of the Trinity in se focused on the concept of " relation" (53-62). Aquinas picks up on the Augustinian clue, inserting " relation " into the context of a " metaphysics of notional act " which moves from the divine essence to the proces- RE-THIEVING TRINITARIAN TEACHING 277 sions, relations, and persons of God's interpersonal being (6278). Richard of St. Victor's influence on Aquinas is summarized (78-79), but a full discussion of Richard is reserved for a later chapter (225-32) . The impact of 16th and 17th century reformation on trinitarian teaching is read as a function of contemporary Protestant positions (e.g., 111-13); and contemporary Eastern Orthodox positions would apparently be read as variations on the Greek Fathers discussed in chapter 2. "Modernity" is clearly Hill's central dialogue partner. Thus, Part II (Foreground: Theology Speaking in the Present) organizes the various strategies for dealing with the decentralization of the Trinity after the Enlightenment. At 150 pages, Part II is twice as long as either of the others. It is also probably the strongest of the three Parts. While one might quibble with Hill's reading of one or more figures, Part II . does succeed in bringing an immense number of Trinity-like proposals under the control of five chapters. I will touch on some of the ways Hill agrees and disagrees with these alternatives below. In general, chapters four through seven deal with 7) and chapter 8 sumproposals which stress divine unity marizes those which stress the divine plurality by conceiving the Trinity as interpersonal koinonia (Hasker, Bracken, Richard of St. Victor, Muehlen, et al.) . If I might label the alternatives which stress divine unity more simplistically than Hill does, I would call them Liberalism (c. 4, Schleiermacher, Tillich, Richardson, Lehman, Wiles, et al.), Neo-Orthodoxy (c. 5, Barth, Jenson, Welch, Rahner, Macquarrie, et al.), Hegelianism (c. 6, Pannenberg, Moltmann, Kaufman, Schoonenberg, Kiing, Kasper, et al.), and Process Theology (c. 7, Whitehead, Hartshorne, Ogden, Cobb, Ford, Stokes, Kelly, et al.). Part Three (Focus: Theology as Re-Trieve [Wiederholung]) fuses the horizons of tradition and contemporary thought, the better " to clarify ancient truths " and initiate "new understanding and new truths" (241). This is the shortest (75 pages) as well as the richest of the three Parts. Although it un 278 JAMES J. BUCKLEY could be read on its own as a summary of Hill's constructive position, the method of W iederhofong means Part III largely presumes the reader has worked his or her way through the background and foreground. Hill begins with ten densely packed pages on prolegomena (241-51) and a summary of Parts I and II (251-55) before turning to the Trinity in se (255-72) and ad extra (c. 10). He develops God's immanent identity in three interrelated phases. First, the Ground of the Trinity is " Being as Act." God, not limited by the structure of worldly beings, is "Be-in.g Itself" whose " intentionality " is articulated as knowing and loving (255-56, 259-62). Second, plurality in God is metaphysically real. The fecundity of Be-ing issues in immanent terms which "posit relationality at the core of existence" not simply esse ad or esse in but hypostasis and subsisting relation (256-57, 262-68) . Or, third, we may also make the same point in less " metaphysical " or " western " fashion and in a more " psychological " or "Eastern " manner (258, 267) . Thus, we can shift to " the subjects exercising the act of ' to he,' ' to know,' and 'to love.' " (268) . This yields "notional" (in contrast to " essential") consciousness, knowledge, and love (268-72) . Thus, " Father, Son and Spirit are three centers of consciousness in community, in mutual communication " (272) . In all this, "it is the formal distinction between nature and person . . . that remains irreducible and the key to theological discourse" (271; cp. 282, 27) . The treatment of the Trinity ad extra (c. 10) is not as tightly organized, for here Hill deals with a range of issues-from the Trinity in creation and salvation to the Trinity in nonChristian religious experience. For example, "religious consciousness " moves " from the Trinity encountered in the events of saving history to the inner divine Trinity and thence to an awareness of the Trinity operative in creation" (274). Here the Trinity in the order of salvation is prior to the Trinity in the order of creation. For " theological consciousness " (which seeks to approximate " something of the standpoint of RE-THIEVING THINITARIAN TEACHING 279 God himself ") the immanent Trinity " ' explains ' the trinitarian characteristics first of creation and then of salvation " (274). There is a "presence of the Trinity" in creation by appropriation (282-84) and "a specifically trinitarian presence " in salvation (284ff) . Working this out leads Hill to suggest an ecclesiology which subordinates Church as sacrament to Church as communion (291), a doctrine of the gifts of the Spirit as ecclesially contexted (303-307) , and an analysis of the non-trinitarian dimensions of non-Christian religious phenomena (307-314). II. Two Theses This impressive text obviously deserves scrutiny by exegetes, historians, and metaphysicians as well as systematic theologians like myself. The limits of my perspective will be obvious as I proceed. But the issue is complicated by the fact that, despite some disagreements, I am sympathetic to large segments of Hill's position-frequently because I agree, but sometimes because my intuitions incline me in Hill's direction even when I do not fully understand it. Such sympathies can no longer be gainsaid, even in Catholic theology. Roman Catholics like myself could be placed in all Hill's background and foreground chapters. Those who (unlike myself) identify themselves substantively with any of these existing positions would write a considerably different response from the one that follows. The best I can do in these circumstances is put the discussion in my own terms in order to highlight my agreements, disagreements, and lack of understanding. Whether in doing this I distort or shed light from another direction on The ThreePersoned God must be left to Hill and the reader to decide. At the risk of underemphasizing all that Hill has to say about salvation and evil, our societies and selves and histories as well as the cosmos, I would say Hill advances the discussion of the Trinity in two major ways. First, he proposes that God's being in se (God's "being and identity") and ad extra (God's 280 JAMES J. BUCKLEY "saving activity in history") is three-personed in one naturewith the result that we live in "a universe of natures" and "a universe of finite persons" (277). Second, he recommends we come to this conclusion about God on the basis of a description of theology as "re-trieve (Wiederholung) ," remaining faithful to what we have been and taking up everything all over again from the beginning (xi, 241). The first is a teaching about God; the second is a teaching about teachings (about God). I will begin with the second-not because it is more important (which it is not) but solely because it will generate some useful distinctions for analyzing Hill's central proposal. III. Hill's Methodological Observations ·what Hill sometimes calls "re-trieve," he elsewhere breaks down into " five general characteristics " of his methodology (241). Theology is situated within faith, seeks rational understanding, has its origins in experience, interprets the transmitted texts and symbols of christianity, and uses speculative reason in its constructive task (241-51). In more detail, faith is " an encounter with the living God," ultimately " an adhering primarily to the person of Jesus" (241, 243); theology seeks to understand the intelligibility of this in various ways (243). Because the encounter is an experience, we need (inter alia) a "theory of experience" to "mediate the submission of such experience to the interpreting Word of God" (244). Because the experience occurs in an historical world, we need to interpret " the transmitted texts and symbols of christianity " (245). Because the intelligibility we seek must be as extensive as possible, we need some " theory of being" (247) . Put with a pragmatism that might make Hill cringe, what we do (or do not) teach about the Trinity makes a difference to the way we encounter God, adhere to Jesus Christ, experience the world around us, interpret and otherwise use texts and symbols, and speculate on the complexities of everything there is. And vice versa. RE-TRIEVING TRINITARIAN TEACHING 281 It is somewhat unfair to dwell on these methodological obus with a substantive servations: Hill-fortunately-provides exercise in theology rather than methodological comment on theology. But his observations nicely condense some of the main advantages of the text and suggest some useful distinctions for analyzing Hill's more substantive non-methodological claims. First, Hill's treatment of the Trinity is an excellent example of how we do not have to be fooled in choosing among such things as " faith," " understanding," " experience," " hermeneutics," and " speculative reason " in explicating the three· personed God. In my own terms, throughout the text Hill attends to the variety of practical contexts in which trinitarian issues arise. For example, in praying " to the Father, through , the Son, in the Spirit" (282) we trust coram Deo that our praise and thanks and petition will be cleansed and accepted by God. In offering narratives- whether the mythological portrayals of heavenly councils, brief trinitarian scenes in the Gospels, or a reading of the whole of Scripture as a story moving from Father through the Son to the Spirit-we hope that what we say will· be evaluated by how well it depicts the interaction of characters, plot, and circumstances. When we use trinitarian images, symbols, or metaphors of God-geometrical, cosmological, or otherwise,-we might expect what we say to be evaluated by how well it condenses the narratives or in some other way. When we teach that God is three-personed-from the pulpit or ex aliqua cathedra, in a classroom or home, in inner-Christian controversy or extra-Christian apologetic-we hope our judgments are true to what we are talking about; thus, we hope our teachings about all kinds of things, God, and even teachings about teachings themselves speak the truth. 2 While 2 For Hill's views on these issues, see his index under the concepts of analogy, dogma, myth, prayer, and symbol. One might ask: could not remarks about the Trinity be ideological disguises for remarks about the self, society, history, or the cosmos? This would seem to be the claim of Feuerbach and similar hermeneuticians of suspicion ( 152£) .. Remarks about the Trinity do indeed not only have the force of prayers, stories, symbols, and teachings but also ideological disguises. But the notion that the Trinity is JAMES J. BUCKLEY it would be a mistake to saddle Hill with this or any other rigorous way of ordering these contexts, it is clear that Hill would rightly have us take them all into account. Still further, I believe Hill is also correct to imply that the crucial issues in trinitarian theology-at least once we presume the set of practices which nurture prayer, narratives, images, etc.-have to do with what we shall teach or believe in this regard. This is not to say that " trinitarian language cannot be employed in a symbolic way" (109. Hill's emphasis); nor is this to deny " how tenuous a cognitive hold we have upon the mystery who is God" (311). It is to suggest that taking the Trinity to be a teaching or truth-claim is the most difficult case, for we can then insist that, while there are a number of purposes and contexts for dealing with this topic, one of these purposes and contexts is truthfully teaching who God is. And if we aim to teach truthfully, the doctrine of the Trinity is subject to (if not exhausted in) the kind of reason-giving involved in any proposed teaching. Hill clearly disagrees with "the Trinity of Religious Symbolism" (c. 4), all the while insisting that symbolic discourse has an indispensable role to play. Indeed, I think it is fair to go one step further. Hill's main interest is in the relationship between what we teach as Christians and the broad range of things there are; his proposal is not only " dogmatic " but also and primarily " systematic" (xiv). Hill is attuned to the differences between these two enterprises. His speculative reason, for example, distinguishes the " judgment " that something is the case from the " conceptual grasp of what sort of thing it is" (259-65)-clearly an ideological disguise seems to me to be not so much a way of making remarks about the Trinity oneself as a way of taking account of the fact that othm·s confess that God is three-personed. The latter is a noble enterprise and has parallels in the ways Christians take the doctrines of other religions. But only linguistic terrorists would intend their remarks on the Trinity to be an ideological disguise. I will not take such such instances into account here since they seem to trade on more positive ways of taking the even though I am sure we terrorize the divine more than we care to admit. RE-TRIEVING TRINITARIAN TEACHING suggesting that Hill is more interested in the judgment that God is three-personed than the concept "three-personed." Again, Hill knows that other' theories of being'" are available and no exclusive claims to truth can be made" (247); metaphysical schemes in the wrong hands can and have become " quickly divorced from concrete Christian living " and " religiously sterile " (253) . We can fairly presume that analogous remarks could be ma.de about various theories of experience and hermeneutics. Christian claims about God have been compatible with a va.riety of speculative, experiential, and hermeneutical theories. On the other hand, Hill takes seriously the way our notion of God as mystery of salvation is related to all the things and kinds of things we are saved for and from by this God. If so, why not give full rein to what might be said on this score? I, for one, find this project extraordinarily interesting. But not all will share Hill's interest and a variety of questions might be asked about how his five methodological characteristics are woven together. For example, if we take "to the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit " to be the paradigmatic prayer (282) , are we not giving priority to " subordinative doxology " rather than " coordinative doxology " (e.g., Gloria Patri et Filia et Spirititi Sancto)? 3 If experience is always" interpreted experience" (244), what is the point of distinguishing a" theory of experience" from "hermeneutics"? Why do " symbols " seem to be more hermeneutically crucial than narratives? Could it not be just as true that symbols are condensed narratives as that narratives are "extended" (107) symbols? 4 How differently would Hill's background and foreground read if attention were focused on prayer, symbols, or a See Bertrand de Margerie, S.J., The Oh?-istian Trinity in History, Tran!<. Edmund J. Fortmann, S.J. (Still River, Massachusetts: St. Bede's Publications, 1982), pp. 103-4, 339-46. 4 A good treatment of the relation between "stories" and "symbols" is David Baily Harned, Images for Self-Reeo,gnition: The Christian as Player, Sufferer and Vandal (New York: The Seabury Press 1977), Chapter 5 (Imagery and Stories). JAMES J. BUCKLEY exegesis rather than ancient and modern theologians and philosophers? Once the classic categories " nature/persons " are used in the context of a speculative scheme, how will we distinguish what is communally crucial about such concepts from the speculative scheme? Despite the force of these and similar questions, there is a sense in which they are not fair. Hill's central enterprise focuses on what we shall teach about who God is in relationship to everything there is, all the while insisting on a whole range of appropriate contexts for God's dealings with us and our dealings with God (e.g., prayer, narrative, symbol). It is unfair, it seems to me, to focus on questions about these other contexts and avoid the key issues Hill raises. In what follows, I will suggest some links between Hill's speculative enterprise and prayer, narrative, and symbols; and I will periodically raise some questions about how to distinguish communally essential from more speculative teachings. Nonetheless, my focus (like Hill's) will be on what we (the Christian community) ought to teach about God in relationship to everything there is. A final question about Hill's methodological observations will make for a transition to these substantive issues. It is interesting that Hill's three-personed God plays no explicit role in his methodological observations. There are surely a number of reasons for this. If " methodology " has to do with the truth-claims we make about how to discover what truth-claims we want to make, it might seem self-defeating to build claims about God as triune into such teachings about teachings when the point is to make a case for the three-personed God. Further, Hill clearly worries that building the Trinity into methodology will restrict the doctrine of the three-personed God to a prolegomenal clue by which to structure our theologies. On this reading, the doctrine of the Trinity functions solely in relationship to how we know God (in contrast to who God is) and the immanent Trinity is collapsed into an epistemologically focused economic Trinity. Such is the re-reading of the Trinity proposed by those like Schleiermacher and Tillich who take the RE-THIEVING TRINITARIAN TEACHING Trinity to be merely "a second level concept" (84, 87, 91, 106); and Hill even finds this move in Barth's revolutionary decision to structure his prolegomena around the Trinity (111, 115, 125) . However, it is unclear to me whether Hill accepts a view of the Trinity as not only a teaching about God but also a teaching about other teachings. Clearly he rejects-rightly, I would say-the view that " the Trinity is not a doctrine but the prolegomena of all other doctrines" (125). And his own teachings about teachings focus on "re-trieval" rather than the Trinity. But what if we claimed that the Trinity was not only a "doctrine" (a teaching or truth-claim about God) but also prolegomena! (i.e., a teaching about teachings)? What if the Trinity was not only a teaching about God but also (say) a model for theological Wiederholung (i.e., the way God remains faithful to what God has been and simultaneously takes up everything all over again from the beginning)? Hill does not make this move. He does not deny that it is possible either. And it seems to me that the Trinity is also such a doctrine about doctrines, even if it is not primarily such. My reason for thinking it is not primarily such that " teachings about teachings" normally presume teachings about other things. 5 My reason for thinking it is (or, at least theologoumenally, can be) a doctrine about doctrines is-why not? If the Trinity is as important as Hill claims, why not use the doctrine of the Trinity as the clue for identifying the whole range of Christian 5 I realize that this distinction between "teachings " and "teachings about teachings " could be challenged by those who view language as a kind of a priori that structures what we even count as "reality" and/or "experience." On this view the distinction between " teachings " and " teachings about teachings " would have to be replaced by something like a distinction between ordinary use of teachings and the theological quest for the "grammar " of such use; for one approach see David Burrell, Aquinas. God and Action (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979). This might eventually lead one to ask for the rules that govern the use of trinitarian nouns (Father, Word, Image, Holy Spirit, Love, Gift), verbs (proceed, spirate, etc.), and prepositions. I am very sympathetic to the quest for such rules, but to pursue the issues this way would take me too far from the center of gravity of Hill's proposals. JAMES J. BUCKLEY teaching? This, it seems to me, is what Barth does when he not only structures his prolegomena around the Trinity but also orders the other volumes of the Church Dogrnatics around creation, reconciliation, and salvation. One advantage of allowing for this is that Hill could extend his proposal throughout the whole range of trinitarian discourse-from prayers and stories and images through teachings to teachings about teachings. In any case, on this Hill and I agree: the Trinity is not primarily a teaching about teachings. Even if one is willing to admit that the doctrine of the Trinity can operate as a secondlevel or meta-dogmatic rule, the only way such a prolegomena! guide could be defended if challenged would be to explicate the meaning and truth of the Trinity as a doctrine about God. How so? IV. What shall we teach about God? A. God in se and a.d extra Perhaps the basic axiom of Hill's text is condensed in the subtitle: God is a mystery of salvation. To speak of the threepersoned God is not only to teach about God's relationship to us or our relationship to God; the doctrine of the Trinity is also and primarily a way of identifying God in se. Here Hill stands with almost all pre-modern theologians (except economic trinitarians [30:fl']) and twentieth-century theologians like Barth (116; but cp. 121, 127) for what Austin Farrer calls " the prior actuality of God." 6 He stands against Schleiermacher (c. 4) and those process theologians (c. 7) for whom God is only as related to the world and its creatures. Traditions which do not focus on God's prior actuality find it difficult to explain why we not only thank and petition God for various benefits but also praise God simply for the one God is (e.g., 6" The Prior Actuality of God" in Reflective Faith: Essays in Philosophical Theology, ed. Charles C. Conti (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company 1972), pp. 178-91. RE-THIEVING TRINITARIAN TEACHING the one who blesses and so praises us). Still further, for such traditions, narratives of God can be tales of God's relations (e.g., " acts of God ") but not of God in $e (e.g., the one who acts) . And images of God, for those unwilling to speak of God's prior actuality, tend to be evaluated simply by their power to express and occasion our relationship to God and not also for their power to symbolize who God is. Finally, more philosophically, to claim that God's relations are purely external or economic may make God's ad extra relations a matter of arbitrary fiat. On the other hand, Hill also stands against large segments of pre-modern theology and with theologians like Barth in refusing to separate God in se and ad extra, the immanent and economic Trinity. We not only praise but also thank and petition God. Narratives of God are not tales of God's hidden being but also stories of God's people and cosmos. Images of God trade on our feeble attempts to see God in the world in which we live. Finally, and again more philosophically, to claim that God's relations are purely internal or immanent may make God's ad extra relations necessary to God's identity. Here is the truth in Liberal and Process theologies: "relationality" is essential to God's identity. God is in relation, even if God is not identifiable with God's ad extra relations, much less turned into a relation. The immanent Trinity is not identified with the economic Trinity (as Hill worries it is in Rahner's but is and is only known in God's famous axiom [140f, economic activity. Hill's decision on this score is a large and important one. I will not dwell on it because I am in substantive agreement-at least systematically. (It is unclear to me where Hill would draw the line dogmatically. Is it essential to Christian identity to affirm the priority of God in se-or might it suffice to affirm both God in se and ad extra, leaving a great deal of room for working out the priority and relationship between the two? Further, if the fact that the Trinity is a mystery of salvation means (inter alia) that relations are internal (not only ex- 288 JAMES J. BUCKLEY ternal) to God, (how) is it possible to distinguish what we wish to teach on the Trinity from competing theories of internal and external relations? 7) At any rate, it is one of the major ironies of modern trinitarian theology that a teaching frequently criticized for bearing no relation to life has become the means for affirming such relations-precisely by building "relationality" into God's prior actuality. How so? B. Being and Acting Hill's focal identification of God is "Be-ing Itself (the hyphen serving to convey the participial form of the term) " (260, 248, 256) . God's "Pure Act of Being" (260) reveals itself, Hill proposes, as an "intentionality" which achieves "explicit articulation in the concepts of knowing and loving" so that the " divine ' to be ' is thus identified simultaneously as' to know' and' to love'" (260-61). This notion of God as Be-ing trades on a contrast between our limited be-ing (our "exercise of the act of 'to be'") and God's unlimited Be-ing (260); I will return to the way our identifications of God (as unlimited and necessary Be-ing) are inseparable from our identifications of ourselves (e.g., as limited or contingent being) in a few paragraphs. For now it is important to note that Hill's identification of God as Be-ing is a powerful alternative to a number of other ways of specifying the referent of " God." Hill himself notes that his claim that God is Be-ing contrasts with referring to God as Becoming (who, metaphorically at best, acts [185, 254]) or Being (who, perhaps, acts [260]). But the contrasts could be expanded, particularly if (like Hill) we wish to relate our teachings to the whole range of " religious experience" (807-14). William A. Christian, for example, suggests that the following have been the grammatical subjects 1 I am thinking here of the issues discussed in standard theological and philosophical encyclopedias. For example, B. Mattingly, "Relation," New Catholic Enoyclopedia, 1967, XII, pp. 216-9. Richard Rorty "Relation, Internal and External" The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1967, VII, pp. 125-33. lm-TRIEVING '.l'RINITARIAN TEACHING 289 of some different kinds of "basic religious proposals": qualities, relations, particular natural entities, particular human individuals and groups, Nature, Mankind, Pure Forms, Pure Being, and a transcendent active being. 8 To take God as Be-ing is to rule out an identification of God not only with particular or more universal natural or human entities but also with abstract qualities, relations, and pure forms. Thus, Hill worries that the key referent for Tillich (and, sometimes, for Rahner [136] and others) is an "ideal and purely possible realm" (97)-William Christian's "Pure Forms." And Hill suggests that those for whom God is " the eternal God of History " (c. 6) sometimes seem to transform History into God. " The God of Panentheism " (c. 7) frequently turns Creativity into God. "The God of interpersonal koinonia" (c. 8) seems to have three referents and thus cannot account for the unity of God's " act of ' to be.' " On the other hand, Hill's Be-ing is a novel referent relative to William Christian's list-or, perhaps, a compromise between the referents Christian characterizes as " Being" and " Agent.'' A major problem (Hill suggests) identifying God as "Being" is that it seems to separate divine ousia and energeiarand can yield a hierarchical and therefore subordinationist trinitarian theology (77, 226, 252). The problem with identifying God as Agent (ens in actu in contrast to ens ut actus [ 248]) is that it seems to suggest a kind of divine embodiment and change which Scripture and particularly tradition have wanted BMeaning and Truth in Religion (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1964), especially c. IX. A "basic religious proposal" proposes one of these or some other logical subject as "more important than anything else in the universe " ( c. IV) . Such unrestricted primacy valuations function remarkably like Thomas's discussions of divine perfections (e.g., Summa Theologiae Ia, 13, 7) and suggest interesting links between Aquinas's natural theology and contemporary theories of religion-links that I will not pursue here. I will also not pursue the different views of " reference " in Hill's claim that Be-ing is that which is most perfect ( Three-Personed p. 248) and William Christian's claim that " 'exist ' and ' good' are colorless like water" (Meaning p. 226). JAMES J. BUCKLE1'. to avoid-and, I would add, may be unable to avoid what Hill calls " neo-modalism " (c. 5) !' In claiming God is "Be-ing," Hill aims to avoid these alternatives. " Be-ing " here is clearly a construct of " speculative reason." I think it is fair to say that Hill does not view Creativity, History, or Pure Forms as apt identifications of God either dogmatically or systematically. He seems to think that identifications of God as agent (" a living God intervening in the concrete history of man"), triunity of persons, and Be-ing (and -but that Be-ing Being?) are all apt dogmatically (e.g., is the way of identifying God that best meets the demands of speculative reason. To test this identification, it might be helpful to dispel some of the prima facie objections to identifying God as Be-ing. In prayer, it might be said, we call upon God by name (e.g., "Lord God, ... ") not by a description like "Be-ing." But, Hill might say, does not our prayer also describe God in various ways (e.g.," ... King of the Universe")? And how is one to articulate the pattern in the various; ways God is called upon in (say) Eucharistic Prayers (e.g., Father, Lord God, Lord Jesus, etc.)? Further, a major function of stories is to render the unique identity of God (in the Tanak) and Jesus Christ (in the New Testament) ;10 stories of "Being " are non-existent. But, Hill might retort, New Testament narratives depict trinitarian figures interacting in various ways'"-ways that give rise to a number of questions about the coherence of these narratives. Finally, those interested in more philosophical objections might wonder if an identification of God as Be-ing does not tilt us so much in the direction of" de9 For God as transcendent agent see Robert H. King, The Meaning of God (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1973). For explicit attention to the problems of embodiment and agency see Thomas Tracy, God, Action, and Embodiment (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, forthcoming). 10 See Dale Patrick, The Rendering of God in the Old Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981); Hans Frei, The Identity of Jesus Ghrist. The H ermene1ttioal Bases of Dogmatic Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975). BE-TRIEVING TRINITARIAN TEACHING 9!91 scriptions " that we cannot take account of " proper names." 11 But, if we take "Father," "Son," and "Spirit" to be proper names, we may have the tritheism Christians have been concerned to avoid; still further, Hill claims that we must begin with descriptions of God because we more readily understand kinds of things than unique things (63) and (more generally still) " the concept of unity enjoys a logical priority over multiplicity" . Indeed, Hill might even claim that such activities as praying and narrating God count in favor rather than against God as "Be-ing." For example, prayer does seem to presume One who preeminently is rather than an unactualized possibility. Further, God engaged in praise and thanks and petition, while surely the eternal God of history and creativity, is clearly other than natural and historical process. While we may not want to go so far as to say that a correct understanding of biblical narrative cannot be had unless one sees that this God cannot not be,12 it is the case that our judgments of the aptness of these narratives of God are inseparable from our apprehension of the existence (Be-ing) of this God. Such stories of God depict a concrete character with nature and history and evoking cosmic and human unrealized possibilities but not identifiable with any of these actualities or possibilities. The point is that these distinct referents for "God" (and " Trinity") are embedded in distinct policies toward prayer, narrative, symbols, and more abstract issues like the relationship between proper names 'and descriptions. God as Be-ing has the advantages for prayer, narrative, symbol, and speculative reason suggested above, even if one is skeptical of some of Hill's speculative reasons for claiming God is Be-ing (e.g., that we more readily understand kinds of things than unique l.1 See John Searle, "Proper Names and Descriptions," The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1967, VI, pp. 487-91. For a discussion of the theological issue in Thomas, see .Armand Maurer, "St. Thomas on the Sacred Name 'Tetragrammaton,"' Medieval Studies 34 ( 1972), pp. 275-86. 12 See Patrick's and Frei's texts in note 10 above. JAMES J. BUCKLEY things). The issue at this point is: what is the benefit of the insistence on "Be-ing" for Trinity and salvation? 13 C. Theology and Anthropology One way to address this issue is to move from the referent to the referees, from God's nature and persons to the creaturely world of natures and persons, from " theology " to " anthropology." Hill's identification of God does not simply trade on a contrast between limited contingent and unlimited/necessary be-ing and God. The innerworldly paradigm of ess