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PART ONE: PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY I Spirit in the World: Metaphysical Principles of Personal Becoming PART I OF SW ends with three implicit questions: what do matter, spirit, and becoming mean? But these three make the one question of personal becoming, for the human person is an incarnate spirit, a finite spirit becoming spirit in matter. This is not so explicitly put in SW. One could say that Part I ends with only one question, viz., the meaning of Aquinas's excessus and Rahner's Vorgrifj, i.e., transcendence. Indeed even this question is not so explicit as one might wish. But even if it were, it would still have to be said that the notion of transcendence (Vorgrifj, excessus) implies matter (sense), spirit (agent intellect), and becoming (possible intellect) . All one need do is look at the arrangement of Part II to notice that the three major chapters (2, on Sensibility; 3, on Abstraction ; and 4, on Turning, or Conversion) become clear when viewed according to this interpretation. In terms of cognition, sense and agent intellect achieve human knowing in the possible intellect. Possible intellect is for Rahner the most apt summary expression for human knowing. That this means becoming is clear from the very term possible intellect. Hence to say that Part I ends with the question of the meaning of Vorgrifj is to say that Part II must first take up the meaning of sensibility's intuition transcended (reached beyond) by the Vorgrifj (i.e., Chapter 2, Sensibility), must second take up the meaning of the agent intellect that does the reaching out, without grasping (otherwise it would be an intellectual intuition) , toward the horizon of the fullness of being (i.e., Chapter 3, Abstraction) , and must third take up the meaning of the way 30 PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 31 intuition plus the reaching beyond intuition constitute together the hylomorphic act 0£ human knowing (i.e., Chapter 4, Turning ), a process Rahner describes in terms 0£ spirit's becoming itself through letting matter emanate from itself: the becoming 0£ spirit in matter. All this is presented as the question 0£ how metaphysics is possible £or knowledge limited to sense intuition. To answer that man has a transcendence or excessus beyond sensation would be to evade the question i£ by excessus is meant an intellectual intuition. But it does not. It does mean a genuine transcendence of the world,1 but only as an act proper to the very nature of the intellect present in every act of knowing anything . This concept of transcendence (excessus, Vorgriff) is the key to understanding the meaning of spirit from a cognitive viewpoint. Before we study Part II, let us summarize very briefly what can ,be gleaned from Part I. In Aquinas's S. Th. I, q. 84, a. 7, duality in the knower, in the knowing, and in the known is affirmed. The intellect is said to need to turn to phantasms because it is joined to a receptive body (corpus pa,ssibile). This is considered easily verified by referring to common experience (the need to think with images, the fact of senility, etc.) . The second step consists in assigning roles to the two principles involved in the experience of knowledge. The experience itself is described as both an intuition (sense's role), by which knower and known achieve identity, and objectification (intellect 's role), by which knower and known are distinguished. The explanation of how sense and intellect can fill these roles uses the term presence. Thus knowledge is a being's presence to being. A pure .spirit's knowledge would be pure self-presence. An incarnate spirit's knowledge is dual, corresponding to its dual nature: as intellect it is self-presence or presence to self; as sense it is self-absence or presence to other. Thus man is a spirit whose .self-knowledge is mediated by knowledge of other. Man must find himself in the world, must come to himself from 1 GWI, 33; GW~, 68; SW, 54.. ANDREW TALLON the world, where he always already is. Man exists, is intentional, embodied, temporal, spatial because finite. So much for a summary of Part I. There is, of course, much more...

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