Spirit's Gift: The Metaphysical Insight of Claude Bruaire

5. An Ontology of Gift: Finite Spirit

C hapter 5 An Ontology of Gift Finite Spirit The outcome of Bruaire’s semantic and eidetic analysis of the concept of spirit is the acknowledgment that if the collection of phenomena of spirit“forces us to use the Word gift to name spirit, it is because gift is, from its very beginning, its own essence.”1 Gift, then, is neither an ontological category that can be enumerated along with others, nor a name capable of describing only the being of the human spirit. Being is gift, in the strongest sense of the term: “esse spirituale et donum convertuntur.”2 To affirm that being-of-spirit is given is to state that it is given to itself; it is free. Since the gift is that of being, the human spirit disposes of itself without being its own origin, and thus being-of-spirit cannot be itself except “by the ontological reflection which converts being-in-itself to being-for-itself.”3 The clarification of Bruaire’s understanding of the human being-ofspirit in terms of gift requires us both to examine in what sense being is gift and to test whether the concept of gift is adequate to expressing being.4  1. EE, 53. See also Aquinas, ST I-I, q. 45, a. 3 and a. 7. 2. EE, 65. In this regard, Bruaire’s ontodology considers “gift” to be the transcendental in whose light the others can be adequately affirmed. The doctrine of the transcendentals, although it can be rooted in Aristotle’s metaphysics (Met. 3.3.998b22), is the result of the development which metaphysics underwent during the Middle Ages. With this in mind, see Aristotle, Met.: for truth, 6.4.1027b25ff.; for the one, 10.2.1054a18; for the good, 5.16.1021b12ff. Also see Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1.6.1096a18ff. 3. PM, 263. 4. PrMC, 126. The ontological reading of gift requires illustrating in what sense there could be a gratuitous return of the gift which is not abstracted from the historical and bodily existence of the being-of-spirit. This will allow us to see that, for Bruaire, being’s presence is nothing but a “gratuitous and gracious gift.”5 Giving before Having It seems perfectly adequate, at first, to consider gift in the realm of the exchange of human possessions. In fact, there always needs to be someone who gives and someone who receives: for example, the bridegroom offering the ring to the bride. Something must be given in that interchange—in our example, a ring. Besides the giver, the receiver, and the actual gift, there is always a certain meaning that the gift itself symbolizes —the ring that the bridegroom gives to the bride is a sign of their mutual love and promise of fidelity. From this perspective, the possession of a good seems to be the conditio sine qua non for the possibility of giving. In this sense, the spouses can exchange rings because they have them and they love each other. If one approaches Bruaire’s ontology of gift from this perspective, the first question that naturally comes to mind regards the legitimacy of talking of being in terms of gift, inasmuch as it initially seems more appropriate to circumscribe donation within the limits of having. In fact, one could say that a gift is given in order to be had and not in order for the other to be. Another difficulty comes from the recognition that, even if it is true that the gift somehow carries within itself the presence of the giver and that sometimes the gift and the giver coincide, the difference between the self and the gift given seems to be an insurmountable objection to the ontological definition of gift. Except for the work of art, if the human spirit is always other from its operations—even in the gift of one’s life in exchange for the other’s—the relation between gift and being appears to remain extrinsic . Finite Spirit  5. PM, 262. The reader should bear in mind that the main text of Bruaire which I shall be following more closely here is EE and that my treatment in this chapter of the theme of being as gift is restricted to the human spirit. The full analysis of Bruaire’s ontology will be complete only when I have presented Bruaire’s understanding of the absolute in the light of gift. Bruaire considers...