La Verità Dell’ Uomo by Luigi Bogliolo (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 343 La Verita Dell' Uorrw. By LuiGI BoaLIOLO. Roma: Pontificia Universita Lateranense, 1969. Pp. 316. This " Truth about Man " represents the first volume of a " new course of philosophy elaborated in accordance with Vatican Council II " to be offered and published by the Lateran University in Rome. Prof. Bogliolo, who was entrusted with the preparation of the new course, is introduced by the Rector of the University as best qualified for his task, not only because of his " generous attempts to meet the demands and the mentality of young people " but especially because of his ability to combine the treasures of tradition with the interesting and sound views of modem times. (5 f.) In his Introduction, the author finds the anthropological orientation of modern philosophy as the most characteristic feature of the mentality of our age. Even Vatican Council II made " the anthropological inspiration of modem thought its own." (10) And since in a most courageous, yet all too forgotten and obscured conception also St. Thomas has seen in " man, in a certain sense, the totality of being," Prof. Bogliolo believes himself justified in endorsing this modem trend, in attempting " the centralization of all philosophy in man," and realizing a metamorphosis of the entire ontology into anthropology in his textbook. (!'l!'l f.) His " anthropological and personalistic ontology " constructed " in conformity with the modern mentality" (35) and characterized as a" study of the human spirit " (45) is divided into seven sections. In the first section entitled: "The Truth of His Being," (15 ff.) the author is concerned with a " recovery of the integral human experience " and with a preliminary view of " man as synthesis of ontology." He rightly recognizes that the possibility of a realistic philosophy depends upon a possible cognitive contact with reality as such. " The heterogeneity of thought and experience " maintained by Kant must and can be overcome; for " thought also is an experience ... capable of serving as the foundation of the first, most radical and concrete of all human sciences," of metaphysics. (~5) It is intellectual, not sensory experience that characterizes man, having as its object the act of existence of sensible beings, and consequently of everything that is. Existence of being is the act of all acts, the perfection of all perfections, "proper to every thing and common to all things." (!'l12) " To experience the existence of any being means the experience of something which is in everything existing and real. It is impossible to experience the existence of one existent without experiencing, in a certain sense, all that exists." (28) In this authentic, integral intellectual experience of the act of existence the philosophy or ontology centered in man has its solid existential foundation. (45) This intellectual perception or experience also explains the unique nature and position of man in the universe as it is visualized in " man as synthesis 844 BOOK REVIEWS of ontology." (35) Of course, man--or rather" the human form" or" the human spirit" (44 f.)-is not seen as the combination of a science, as the title seems to indicate, but as the transcendence and immanence of all cosmic perfections, as the author wishes to interpret these traditional terms. Because of his intuition of the act of existence, man or the human spirit is the totality of being, the substantial culmination of the cosmos, the peak of the interiority of cosmic life and structures; in one word, he is the immanence, i.e., the intrinsic possession of all cosmic perfections and the transcendence or the " existential-substantial superiority " of this possession . (37 ff.) In the second section: "The Truth of His Knowledge," (49 ff.) the author first attempts to determine the nature of human cognition. Knowledge is defined as an identifying and subjectifying activity. It demands that "the subject . . . subjectifies the object, transforms it into itself, giving it a new mode of being, i.e., its own mode of being," (53) so that the object becomes the soul itself. (118) Intellectual knowledge is always the seeing of the being of that which is, an intuition, an immediate contact. (56) In the case of the human intellect, however, it is a conceptual intuition, and man's primordial intellectual vision is...