The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics

The One and the Many

A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics

W. NORRIS CLARKE, S.J.

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright © 2001 by University of Notre Dame

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

www.undpress.nd.edu

All Rights Reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-268-07704-4

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at ebooks@nd.edu

TO GERALD MCCOOL, S.J.,

in gratitude for the many shared insights of his philosophical and theological wisdom, and for the quiet support and inspiration throughout my own Thomistic journey.

Contents

Introduction

ONE

What Is Metaphysics and Why Do It?

TWO

The Discovery and Meaning of Being

THREE

Special Characteristics of Our Idea of Being as Transcendental and Analogous

FOUR

Unity as Transcendental Property of Being

FIVE

Being as One and Many: Participation in Existence through Limiting Essence

SIX

The One and the Many on the Same Level of Being: Form and Matter I

SEVEN

The World of Change: Act and Potency

EIGHT

Self-Identity in Change: Substance and Accident

NINE

Essential or Substantial Change: Form and Matter II

TEN

The Metaphysical Structures of Finite Being: An Interlocking Synthesis

ELEVEN

Being in Time: What Is Time?

TWELVE

The Extrinsic Causes of Being and Becoming: A. The Efficient Cause

THIRTEEN

The Extrinsic Causes of Being and Becoming: B. The Final Cause

FOURTEEN

The Final Unification of All Being: The Search for the Ultimate Source of All Being

FIFTEEN

The Metaphysics of Evolution

SIXTEEN

Being as Good

SEVENTEEN

Evil and Being

EIGHTEEN

The Transcendental Properties of Being: The Many Faces of Being

NINETEEN

The Great Circle of Being and Our Place in It: The Universe as Meaningful Journey

Glossary of Terms

Introduction

My aim here is to provide an advanced textbook of systematic metaphysics in the Thomistic tradition, one which is alert not only to developments within Thomism but also to contemporary problems and other movements in philosophy. Its inspiration is primarily St. Thomas’s own rich and profound metaphysical system—in the loose, general meaning of the term—which I think is still unsurpassed in its depth, comprehensiveness of vision, and coherence not only with direct human experience but with what is known in other fields of knowledge. But my own adaptation of his system for contemporary readers also draws upon various fruitful developments in philosophy since Aquinas’s time and so is not merely a repetition of his own thought but a creative retrieval of it (to use a term from Heidegger) and sometimes a creative completion of themes implicit in Aquinas but never explicitly developed by him.

Hence this is not intended as a work of historical scholarship aimed at distilling the exact thought in Thomas’s texts. It is, rather, a creative appropriation of his central metaphysical themes, gathered into a systematic order—partly traditional and partly my own—which he himself did not have the occasion to do. It is presented as far as possible in simplified, streamlined terms more accessible to a contemporary reader than Thomas’s own writings with their heavy technical apparatus taken over from Aristotle, which was his chosen medium of expression but is not easy for us to be at home in today without a long apprenticeship. Hence I prefer to call my presentation a Thomistically inspired metaphysics, taking my own responsibility for its philosophical validity. There is always risk involved in transposing a philosopher’s thought into the framework of a different language and cultural background. But the risk is worth it, I think, if Thomas’s own profound seminal insights and rich integrating vision of reality are to enter effectively into the bloodstream of contemporary thought and be made available to those, young and old, who are seeking to appropriate for themselves our rich medieval cultural heritage, and especially to develop for themselves some kind of holistic vision of the intelligibility and meaningfulness of our universe as a whole and our human life within it.

The need for such a contemporary rethinking and representation of the core of Aquinas’s philosophical wisdom, his metaphysics, has become more and more evident. In the recent past, in what has been called the heyday of American Thomism, there were a number of distinguished textbooks of Thomistic metaphysics available; but most have now gone out of print and few new ones are available, at least at a price accessible to students. Outside of the Thomistic and Scholastic traditions, textbooks in Metaphysics today usually mean something quite different from the great classical tradition of systematic metaphysics in the style of Aristotle, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hegel, Whitehead, etc. The very notion of constructing a unified systematic philosophical inquiry into being as a whole, distinct from other philosophical disciplines, has been abandoned by most contemporary philosophers (Whiteheadian Process philosophy is one of the few exceptions still flourishing). This is largely due to the many attacks on the very possibility of such a systematic metaphysics stemming from modern philosophers like Hume and the empiricists, Kant and analytic philosophers generally—for whom, like Strawson, descriptive metaphysics is in; explanatory metaphysics is out. Not to mention the latest phase of deconstruction and postmodernism, which, according to Prof. Miller of Yale, has dismantled the entire engine of Western metaphysics beyond hope of repair—a premature epitaph for a discipline which, as Gilson puts it graphically, has always buried its undertakers.

As a result, what goes by the name of Metaphysics in most contemporary American textbooks bearing the name is not a systematic study of being at all, but a grab bag of diverse particular philosophical problems whose only common bond is that they cannot be solved by scientific inquiry, logical analysis, or the descriptive methods of phenomenology. Examples are the mind-body problem, realism vs. idealism in epistemology, free will, the existence of God, and the like.

The present text is, therefore, a return to a systematic metaphysics of being in the classical Thomistic tradition. The need to make this tradition available to our own day is more urgent now than ever, in the face of the growing tendency of our culture toward specialization and fragmentation of inquiry into careful piecemeal work, as the well-known American philosopher Sidney Hook approvingly described the current fashion in American philosophy (in the editorial preface to his American Philosophers at Work). But with no integrating vision of reality and human life as a whole to balance off this piecemeal approach, we tend to become fragmented people, with our lives in pieces, so to speak, perpetually condemned to fragmentary perspectives, as one former student of mine and lover of metaphysics recently expressed it colorfully. This textbook, therefore, is dedicated to the search for an integrated vision of reality as a whole, to fulfill the need to balance off the fascination of the part with the vision of the whole, as someone described the role of philosophical inquiry within a liberal education. I present it, accordingly, as a Thomistically inspired exploration of the central problems of such a metaphysics in the classical tradition, for which I am indebted principally, but not exclusively, to the profound insights and disciplined method of inquiry of St. Thomas himself (but for whose contemporary transposition and expression I alone take full responsibility). Now let us validate the project, we hope, by its execution!

I must end by warning my readers, lest their expectations be disappointed, that this does not pretend to be a history of metaphysical systems in any way, nor does it regularly compare the position of St. Thomas with that of other rival systems on each point. That is in itself an important and illuminating part of one’s philosophical education, especially for graduate students. But it would make the book impossibly long to attempt to do this adequately in a single volume. I believe anyway that metaphysical systems are more properly compared as wholes, not as parts abstracted from the whole. Hence, my purpose is to offer only a systematic exposition of Thomistic metaphysics in itself. A teacher using it will have to provide historical background and comparisons with other resources. I believe also that the best method to train anyone in metaphysical thinking is not to stand back and compare brief snapshots of many different thinkers, none in depth. Rather, it is to engage the subject like an apprentice, going deeply and thoroughly into one great system of thought, seeing how the problems and solutions are systematically connected, so that if one holds something in one area, one cannot implicitly deny it in another and remain consistent. Having once learned how a metaphysical system is put together and holds together, one can then step back and evaluate it critically, compare it with others, and decide how much one wants to accept, adapt, revise more radically, or reject for some other position. One can learn metaphysical thinking only by first doing it under the guidance of some master, somewhat like the apprentices in any skilled trade or art.

CHAPTER ONE

What Is Metaphysics and Why Do It?

I. ROLE OF PHILOSOPHY AND HOW METAPHYSICS FITS INTO IT

Since every philosopher to some extent, especially in our age of pluralism, works out of a personal view of what the philosophical enterprise is all about, let me lay out first how I understand the philosophical project as a whole and then how metaphysics fits into it. Philosophy is the critically reflective, systematically articulated attempt to illumine our human experience in depth and set it in a vision of the whole. Thus, it is not primarily a search for new experience or new facts—although some may turn up along the way—but a second-level enterprise, so to speak, where we take the experience (including the vicarious experience of others) and data we already have and try to illumine them in depth, i.e., to search out their ultimate grounding or necessary conditions of possibility, their ultimate meaning, and their connections with the rest of reality. And although particular areas of philosophy will focus on particular domains of our experience, e.g., philosophical anthropology on human beings, philosophy of art on the domain of human art, etc., the philosophical eye will always look further to discover how this particular domain fits into an integrated vision of the universe as a whole. This, at least, is what philosophy is all about according to St. Thomas and the classical tradition as a whole, from Plato on.

Role of metaphysics. Metaphysics fits into the overall project of philosophy as its innermost ground, as that part which focuses its inquiry explicitly on the vision of the whole, that is, what is common to all real beings and what constitutes their connectedness to the universe as a meaningful whole. It is the ultimate framework or horizon of inquiry, into which all other investigations, including all the sciences, fit as partial perspectives. Its work will then be to try to discern the great universal properties, constitutive principles, and governing laws of all that is real, in a word, the laws of intelligibility of being as such, including how all real beings interrelate to form an intelligible whole, that is, a universe (the term universe comes from the Latin universum, which means turned toward unity). This is the meaning of the ancient classical definition of metaphysics descending from Aristotle—the first to explicitly define metaphysics—namely, "Metaphysics is the study of being qua being" or being as such. Spelled out, this means the study of all beings precisely insofar as they are real, which means for St. Thomas actually existent. It also includes the whole realm of mental beings of various kinds, such as possibles, abstractions, mathematical and logical entities, theoretical and imaginative constructions, etc., precisely insofar as their very being consists in their being-thought-about by the activity of real minds.

In practice, however, we humans cannot directly inspect all beings as immediately accessible to our experience. We have to start, therefore, with where we are, with what is accessible to us within the limited horizon of our experience, namely, this material cosmos that is our present home, including ourselves. From the study of this universe, insofar as it is open to our experience, we shall first derive the general properties, laws, and principles governing all the beings of our experience as a community of many different, changing, and finite (limited) beings. From this we shall be able (1) to discern a very small number of absolutely universal principles applying to all real beings as such, in any possible universe, because otherwise they would be simply unintelligible; (2) to argue from the necessary conditions of intelligibility of our own changing and finite cosmos to an Ultimate Source or Cause, beyond our experience, of all limited beings whatsoever—the philosophical description of what we call God.

The philosophical ascent of the human mind to this Ultimate Reality belongs intrinsically to the project of metaphysics, as the final capstone of the intelligibility, unity, and meaningfulness of the whole universe of real being. But because of its importance and complexity, it is often treated as a separate treatise of its own, called philosophy of God, natural theology, or the like. This makes sense in itself, but because the majority of students do not get the chance to take such a separate course, we have included the essentials of such a natural conclusion to metaphysics in this text.

II. DISTINCTION OF METAPHYSICS FROM RELIGION AND THEOLOGY

Although the scope of inquiry of metaphysics is universal, embracing all being, its method of investigation is strictly philosophical, i.e., drawing on the resources of natural reason alone as applied to our common human experience, without taking either its data or its conclusions from any higher source of wisdom transcending the human, such as divine revelation and its theological explication. Should the metaphysician as a personal thinker, however, judge these to be authentic, they should be respected; and occasionally they can be sources of new illumination on the deeper meaning of the natural order itself, so as to stimulate natural reason to look more deeply into our human experience to discern what it may have overlooked before. This is to respect the great guiding principle of medieval Christian thinkers, who were both theologians and philosophers, namely, that God has spoken to us in two great books: the Book of Nature, where created things speak to us directly, and the Book of Revelation, where God himself reveals to us his own inner nature and his free gifts and special plans for humanity. These two books, both written by the same Author, cannot contradict each other; if there is an apparent contradiction, either one side or the other, natural reason or theological interpretation of the revelation, has made an error, and each possibility must be reexamined more carefully.

Metaphysics also differs from religion, in that the former is a purely intellectual or speculative quest for wisdom about the meaning of the universe, whereas the latter involves a response of the heart and practical commitment of the whole person to live according to the plan of, and seek union with, what one takes to be Ultimate Reality.

III. INCOMPLETENESS OF ALL METAPHYSICAL EXPRESSION

Metaphysics done by human beings is necessarily tied in its expression to limited human concepts and linguistic frameworks, which are themselves rooted in the intellectual and cultural development of the societies out of which they grew. But these are never complete, totally adequate, or the only possible ways of describing or explaining the inexhaustible richness of reality. Hence, although metaphysicians can indeed discover universal metaphysical truths transcending all times and cultures, the conceptual-linguistic expression of what they have discovered will always have to resign itself to being incomplete, falling short of the fullness of the real, in a word, perspectival, seen from within the resources of thinking, speaking, imagining, and feeling of the metaphysician’s own culture in its situation in human history. Hence no definitive, exhaustively adequate expression of metaphysics for all times and cultures is humanly possible. But metaphysicians are not locked into their own cultures and languages; they can learn from each other, especially in an age of universal communication like our own, and develop more sensitive and sophisticated conceptual and linguistic tools as they go along if they have the humility to learn from others.

A metaphysics, therefore, done by human beings like ourselves must be humble. But what it can give us, if we go about it carefully and systematically, is a deeper understanding and appreciation of the universe in its unity-in-diversity and its meaningfulness. And to be fully human it is good for us to make the effort to expand our minds to the ultimate horizon of being; the effort itself is deeply enriching, rewarding, and consciousness-expanding.

IV. OBJECTIONS AGAINST THE LEGITIMACY OF METAPHYSICS

Many modern, and especially contemporary, philosophers deny the legitimacy of metaphysics, either because for them it is not a meaningful inquiry at all, since it has no distinctive subject matter, or because it is not possible for human minds to achieve it. Let us look at some of the most common objections.

1. No distinctive subject matter. Every distinct branch of knowledge must study some particular class of things, with some observable trait that sets them off from other things, like physics, biology, psychology, theology, etc. Metaphysics claims to study all things at once. But being is no distinguishing trait, since all have it; it is empty conceptually and tells us nothing in particular. I can’t point to it and say, Here is being, and there is not.

Response. Metaphysics does not have a distinctive subject matter, since it treats of all beings, but it does have a distinctive point of view from which it studies them. It considers in them only their most fundamental attribute of being itself and the properties and laws which they have in common with all beings, or all changing and finite beings, as these beings exist in the community of other existent beings, acting and interacting with each other to form the universe in which we are all plunged.

This fundamental dimension of being itself, of the actual existence of what they are studying, is taken for granted by all other branches of knowledge, which then go on to study what it is and how it works. But just because something is taken for granted does not mean that it is unimportant. This is just what metaphysics, and it alone, aims to do: to draw into the explicit light of reflection what all other human inquiry takes for granted or leaves implicit—the foundation of actual existence upon which all else is built and without which all subject matter vanishes into the darkness of nonbeing, of what is not. Martin Heidegger, the great contemporary German metaphysician—not himself a Thomist at all—complained that the whole of Western metaphysics, from Plato on, lapsed into a forgetfulness of being, not of what things are, their essences, but of the radical fact that they are at all, standing out from nothingness and shining forth to us.

One of the few exceptions is the existential metaphysics of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–74), which Heidegger never came to know in any depth and to which we are now going to introduce you. This radical (in its original sense of going to the roots = radices in Latin) investigation is something that needs doing at least once in your intellectual life. This is your chance now. But it cannot be done by any method of empirical observation or scientific method based on quantitative measuring techniques formulated in mathematical terms, but only by its own proper method of reflective analysis and insight into the necessary conditions of intelligibility of being as such, and finally coming to grips with the most fundamental question of all: How come there is a real universe at all?

2. We, as parts of the Whole, cannot comprehend the Whole. Some philosophers say that it is impossible for human beings to do metaphysics, because each one of us is only a small finite part of the whole of reality and it is impossible for the part to comprehend the whole of which it is a part. To do so it would have to step out of the whole or be the maker of it like God. Since this is impossible, we must be content to take the universe of reality as a whole for granted and direct our attention to what the parts are like inside it and how they operate and fit together. Hence, questions about reality as a whole, about existence as such, e.g., How come there is a universe at all? are either meaningless, or, as some are willing to admit, meaningful in themselves and enriching to think about as ultimate mysteries, but incapable of any human answer. (See, for example, Milton Munitz, The Mystery of Existence, New York, 1965. So, too, Bertrand Russell, when pushed back to this point by Father Frederick Copleston in their famous BBC debate, answered impatiently, The universe just is, that’s all. Explanation starts from there.)

Response. But this is precisely the wonder and paradox of the spiritual intellect we all possess. Because it is by nature ordered to being as such as its proper object, it is open to the entire horizon of being without restriction, and so can think about it as a whole and about our own place in it, can encompass it in a certain sense in its own thought—not in detail, of course, but in its broad outlines—which other non-intelligent beings in the universe cannot do. Hence, by the very fact that we can raise the question about being as a whole, the human person is not just a part of the universe but a whole, within the Whole. Every person endowed with intelligence is thus, at least implicitly, a point of view on the whole universe. This is an essential part of our dignity as images of God. This course is aimed at making this implicit capacity in all of us explicitly conscious and reflective. It is appropriate, therefore, to begin our study by stirring up that sense of wonder at what Heidegger has called the wonder of all wonders, that anything exists at all.

3. Objections to metaphysics from modern restrictive theories of knowledge. The largest number of objectors to the possibility of metaphysics come from modern philosophers since Hume and Kant, based on epistemological limitations on the scope of our human knowledge. These can be divided into three very general categories: empiricism, Kantianism, including its more recent Neo-Kantian versions, and relativism in all its various forms (historical, etc.).

Empiricism. This type of thinking denies we can know anything that is not derived directly from some sense experience (strict empiricism of the Humean type—David Hume, 1711–76), or at least anything reaching beyond the range of our human experience in the widest sense. Thus we are never justified in arguing by intellectual inference from something within our experience to some cause or ground transcending our experience, such as God, a spiritual soul that is the root of our acts of intelligence, metaphysical co-principles that are constitutive—but not experienceable—components of every finite and changing being, such as essence/existence, matter/form, substance, potentiality, etc.

Response. One central flaw in all such theories of knowing is that they are in principle unable to do justice to the very subject or self that is asking the questions, since this is at the root of every conscious sense experience and quest for understanding, but not out in front of our senses as an external object to be sensed by them. In a word, the inner world vanishes in its very attempt to understand the outer world. The empiricist way of thinking also cripples the age-old natural longing of the human mind to understand, make sense of, its direct experience in terms of deeper causes not directly accessible to us. The human mind cannot be satisfied to operate only within this straightjacket of an arbitrarily restrictive epistemology.

Kantianism. Stemming from Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who maintained we can never know reality in itself, things-in-themselves (which he called noumena, that which would be knowable by a perfect, creative mind—nous), but only things as they affect us, appear to us (phenomena) within our consciousness. Things in the real world do act upon us, but what they reveal of themselves is only a sense manifold, or jumble of sense image without intelligible order, form, structure. We are the ones who impose form and order and intelligibility on the content of our sense experience, drawing on the a priori forms of intelligibility—plus the a priori sense forms of space and time—which are innate in all human minds. This is the Copernican revolution of which Kant was so proud: it is not the world that informs us, molds our minds to conform to it; it is our minds which impose intelligibility—forms, structures, order, etc.—on the world. It is we who are makers of the world as intelligible. Hence we do not think the world as it is, as everyone took for granted before Kant, but the world is as we cannot help but think it. It follows that any possibility of doing metaphysics—the study of real being with its intrinsic properties, laws, etc.—is cut off at the root for us human beings, who are locked without escape within the walls of our own minds. We can indeed show that the human mind naturally tends to think of God as the unifying cause of this world, but this gives us no right at all to affirm this as objectively true in the real world outside of our thought. Thus both philosophical theism as well as atheism are cut off at the root, and the way is left open for the inner experience of the moral imperative and subjective religious experience.

In later forms of Neo-Kantianism, we still impose intelligibility on the world from within our own a priori’s; but these a priori forms are no longer universal and unchanging for all human minds; they are a priori’s of culture and of language imprinted in us by the society in which we are brought up; they are neither universal for all humans nor unchanging down the ages, but variable and mutable as history goes on. Various relativisms of culture and history result.

Response. One of the central flaws in Kant’s theory of knowledge is that he has blown up the bridge of action by which real beings manifest their natures to our cognitive receiving sets. He admits that things in themselves act on us, on our senses; but he insists that such action reveals nothing intelligible about these beings, nothing about their natures in themselves, only an unordered, unstructured sense manifold that we have to order and structure from within ourselves. But action that is completely indeterminate, that reveals nothing meaningful about the agent from which it comes, is incoherent, not really action at all.

The whole key to a realist epistemology like that of St. Thomas is that action is the self-revelation of being, that it reveals a being as this kind of actor on me, which is equivalent to saying it really exists and has this kind of nature = an abiding center of acting and being acted on. This does not deliver a complete knowledge of the being acting, but it does deliver an authentic knowledge of the real world as a community of interacting agents—which is after all what we need to know most about the world so that we may learn how to cope with it and its effects on us as well as our effects upon it. This is a modest but effective relational realism, not the unrealistic ideal of the only thing Kant will accept as genuine knowledge of real beings, i.e., knowledge of them as they are in themselves independent of any action on us—which he admits can only be attained by a perfect creative knower. He will allow no medium between the two extremes: either perfect knowledge with no mediation of action, or no knowledge of the real at all.

Furthermore, he has no explanation at all, and can in principle have none, of the miraculous fit between the structures we have imposed on the world, apparently independently of anything in the world, and the way the world responds to our practical action on it based on the predictions thought up by our minds—successfully coping with the challenges of nature, technology, etc. Nor can he explain—in fact he never tries—how we can know other human beings as just as real as ourselves and successfully exchange information with them in interpersonal dialogue. For if it is really I that am structuring your being and the messages you seem to be sending in to me through my senses, then it follows that you are also structuring me and my messages—which cancels out into incoherence: both can’t be true at once. No, we are open to truth-grounding communication about themselves from the real active beings that surround us, across the bridge of their self-expressive, self-revealing action. That is what it means to have a mind open to being.

Relativism. Our human knowledge can never be universal and objectively true, but is always relative to, bound within, the a priori frameworks of culture and language of the particular culture out of which it arose, in its particular time in history; and these vary from society to society and from one period of history to another. Since there can be no culture- or history-transcending knowledge, neither can there be any metaphysical knowledge of real being with any claim to universally valid, objective truth.

Response. We cannot respond in detail here to all the various modes of relativism afloat in our world today. One general point is enough. We must indeed take into account the partially differing modes of thinking and self-expression of different cultures. Yet we can transcend our own culture enough to do that, as is shown by the fact that we can translate more or less accurately from one language to another, between all the major languages in the world.

And once any theory of knowledge makes the claim to effectively block any access to time- and place-transcending objective truth, it immediately turns back upon itself and self-destructs, like a snake devouring its own tail. For the only significance and relevance of such a theory, if it is not to be merely trivial or a game, is that it tells us what is actually the case, what is true, about all human claims to knowledge, in all places and times through history. If not, its message is really trivial: knowledge in Paris, or New York, in the 80s, is relative to their culture, but not in Chicago in the 90s. Yet the very attempt to make the stronger claim stick immediately contradicts the very theory it is affirming. Any attempt to block effectively our access to objective knowledge of the real automatically blows up in the face of the one making the claim and becomes either trivial or a game, which we can choose not to play.

Conclusion. It seems that all those who deny the possibility of metaphysics are implicitly committed to some metaphysical positions: (1) To deny metaphysics as the study of being they must start with a metaphysical stance in looking over the entire field of human knowing and its relation to reality; in a sense they start off as fellow metaphysicians, as Bradley, the English metaphysician, has acutely observed. (2) If they refuse to do metaphysics, they must all take for granted their own existence, that of other human beings, and the whole horizon of experience which are their data—the given—to be explained. These basic data must all be left unexamined, since they have banned even raising the radical question: How come there is a universe to be studied at all? If you can’t escape presupposing a metaphysics of some kin, why not admit it, and try to follow wherever it leads?

To sum up our discussion of objections against the possibility of a valid human metaphysics of real being, it turns out that all of them rest in the last analysis on some form of arbitrarily restrictive theory of knowledge. It is interesting to note that in ancient and medieval philosophy it was metaphysics that dominated epistemology, whereas in modern philosophy since Descartes it is epistemology that has dominated and controlled what metaphysics is allowed to say, if anything. With all these arbitrary roadblocks out of the way, we are now free to pursue with critical alertness the deeply challenging and deeply enriching enterprise of asking ultimate questions about the intelligibility and meaning of the universe of real beings, which is our home. A warning is in order, however: since the metaphysical quest will lead us to confront some of the profoundest problems of the origin and meaning of the universe, and therefore of the meaning of your life, a basic moral attitude is required to pursue the quest authentically. It is the self-discipline of fidelity to the call of truth, wherever it leads, and a willingness to change my own life if necessary to be in harmony with what I have discovered from the Book of Nature.

V. THE ULTIMATE ROOT OF ALL METAPHYSICAL INQUIRY: THE DRIVE TO KNOW AND THE INTELLIGIBILITY OF BEING

1. Radical dynamism of the human spirit toward all being as true and good. At the root of all intellectual inquiry, including the metaphysical quest, is the radical dynamism of the human mind toward the fullness of being as true, what Bernard Lonergan (the contemporary Jesuit philosopher-theologian) calls the unrestricted drive of the mind to know being, that is, all that there is to know about all that there is. Its horizon of inquiry is nothing less than the totality of being, of what truly is. This radical dynamism, both longing and capacity, without which we would never be drawn to know anything, is inborn within us, defining our nature as human and not merely animal.

Complementary to the drive of the mind to know in the human spirit is the drive of the will toward the fullness of being as good, as to be appreciated, loved, enjoyed, as bringing us happiness. In a sense it is even deeper than the drive to know, for, as St. Thomas says, unless knowledge itself appeared to us as something good to possess, we would not be moved to desire and actively seek it. Truth itself is one of the ultimate goods. From the first moments of our human existence we are living out implicitly, though not yet consciously, these two basic drives. Philosophy, especially metaphysics, helps us to raise them into explicit, reflective consciousness and understand their role in our lives. Since our present concern is metaphysics, the search for the truth about being, we shall restrict our inquiry principally to the drive to know.

2. How does one discover the presence of this dynamism? We do so by reflecting on our basic human experience of knowing and willing and its implications. When we first come to know—or love—some particular finite being, we are satisfied with it for a while, exploring it and savoring its goodness. But as soon as we reach its limits, discover its finitude, that it is not the fullness of being and goodness, our minds and wills immediately rebound beyond, seeking for some further being to know and enjoy. And the same process continues indefinitely as long as the object of our knowledge (being as knowable) and goodness (being as good, desirable) remain limited, incomplete, less than the totality of all truth and goodness. We keep rebounding spontaneously as soon as we hit the limits of partial truth or goodness. We can observe the same dynamism at work in our effort to understand any one particular being or event. As long as our inquiry leaves something incomplete, unexplained, presupposed, we tend spontaneously to push further until we get it all clear, out in the open, fully understood. This insatiable curiosity, this wanting to know all that there is to know, is a defining characteristic of human beings, as distinguished from all non-intelligent beings below them.

As I sit back now and reflect on this experience of repeated rebounding beyond every limited truth and goodness, I can sum it up and draw the conclusion: my mind is by its nature oriented toward the totality of being as knowable, as its final goal which alone can satisfy its drive to know. Similarly, my will is oriented towards the fullness of being as good, as the final goal that alone can satisfy my longing for happiness.

3. The intelligibility of being. The unrestricted drive to know gives rise to metaphysics, i.e., the search for the ultimate intelligibility of all being. But if this drive to know on the part of the human knower is not matched by a correlative openness or aptitude of all being to be known, in a word, the intelligibility of being in itself, then the drive to know becomes a monstrous living absurdity, a cruel illusion, a deep natural longing that is part of our being, defines us as human, yet is in principle unfulfillable, a radical frustration built into the very nature of things.

But this radical skepticism neither makes good sense in itself nor is an acceptable reading of the common experience of humankind. If it were, then the scope of our knowledge would be drastically reduced to nothing but the immediate empirical observation of what is. Any attempt to explain what we observe in terms of not immediately observable causes or any other conditioning factors, on the grounds that otherwise the things or events observed would be unintelligible by themselves, would be ruled out ahead of time as futile. Thus, all problem-solving in the real order, even of the simplest practical problems, would be ruled out in principle, since the very search for a solution beyond what is immediately observable presupposes the