Philosophy of Being: A Reconstructive Essay in Metaphysics by Oliva Blanchette (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Philosophy of Being: A &constructive Essay in Metaphysics. By OLIVA BLANCHETIE. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2003. Pp. xxiii + 563. $59.95 (cloth), $39.95 (paper). ISBN 08132 -1095-X (cloth), 0-8132-1096-8 (paper). Metaphysics, as many recognize these days, has fallen on hard times. Through the course ofmodern philosophy, it has lost its vital contact with reality and disappeared into the abstractions of "ontology." In this work, Oliva Blanchette takes up the challenge of renewing metaphysical inquiry in the third millennium by deconstructing modern ontology and reconstructing thought as it relates to the concrete. This can be accomplished, he believes, only by returning to a "more ancient view" ofthis science. He sees his book, accordingly, as "an effort at critical reconstruction in the philosophy of being or metaphysics as understood in the ancient sense." He begins with Heidegger, "who has done more than anyone else in our time to bring the question of being back to the forefront of philosophy," but also enlists the help of Plato, Aristotle, and Aguinas, whom he names "the last great metaphysician in the ancient mode" (xiv-xv). Blanchette describes this massive work engagingly as a "play" or "dialog" between the author and the reader in which the reader must take an active part since "one does not do metaphysics except on one's own intellectual initiative" and through the exercise of"one's own critical reflection" (xvi). The play has six parts, dealingwith the question, meaning, properties, structure, communication, and summit of being. Part I takes up the subject and method of metaphysics. Rejecting the essentialism ofSuarez, Wolff, Kant, and Heidegger, Blanchette argues that "only being taken precisely as being can be taken as the proper subject ofmetaphysics" (25-26). He begins by affirming that "knowing is of being" and then reviews the different ways of knowing or different sciences to arrive at "the idea of a first kind of knowing." Finally he asks "how the subject of investigation for this first kind of knowing or this first philosophy is tQ be conceived" (26). This does not involve any judgment about material or immaterial being since being as it "presents itself in the very first act of knowing," in the "primordial conception of being," is "neither material nor immaterial, but simply being, including both, if the two are to be distinguished" (27-28). 469 470 BOOK REVIEWS In describing the method of metaphysics, Blanchette analyzes the act of intelligence into "understanding" (simple apprehension) and "critical reflection" (judgment). It is in the exercise of judgment that being presents itself to our knowing, and metaphysics begins "in the reflection that occurs in any serious exercise of judgment" (45, 70). Metaphysics is "the attempt to formulate this reflective presence of being in an exercise of judgment that transcends the judgments of direct experience" (74). There is no gap between knowing and being since being is not some "thing in itself" (Kant), but is "simply what is known when knowing takes place" (76). Since being is given in the act or "actual exercise" of judgment, the task of metaphysics is to penetrate the exercise of judgment and so "elaborate the full meaning of being both conceptually and in act" (77). In the second part of his essay, Blanchette considers the meaning of being. The notion of being involves three aspects: haecceity (this-ness), quiddity, and the act of being (115). Since being is not a category, but a concept that transcends the categories of Aristotle, it has its own transcendental order which can only be expressed through the use of analogy (117). In his discussion of analogy and its distinction from univocity and equivocation, Blanchette provides some helpful insights into the tendency (or even the duty) of the particular sciences to treat their subject matter univocally (a tendency, he notes, which opens the way to reductionism and which, we might add, often plagues the contemporary dialogue between empirical science and theology) (122, 128). Analogy is a key element "in the reconstruction of a metaphysics that is true to the question of being in its difference and in its diversity" (120). For being is not to be seen as "some...