Spirit's Gift: The Metaphysical Insight of Claude Bruaire

Conclusion

Conclusion It is not at all easy to free human awareness from the captivating idea that the human being can account for his own existence without coming to terms with the question of his own origin. The anthropological turn of modernity, for the sake of pursuing more pressing matters or more deceivingly fundamental issues, presumed that severing the question of God from the inquiry into the human being’s own identity would give wings to the quest for knowledge. Instead, as postmodernity witnesses, this toooften rated “successful” revolution has yielded a radical dissolution of any unifying principle and thus, of man himself. As Bruaire’s work shows, it is only when anthropological reflection does not prevent man’s questioning from facing the mysterious origin of the human being that it becomes capable of accepting the relation between positivity and being. This unsettling discovery reveals, on the one hand, that the ultimate shepherd of being is another, different from man, and, on the other, that this mysterious source of man’s own being is neither a shadowy threat to his own autonomy nor an intractable engineer who has determined everything before it comes to pass. Bruaire’s reflection poignantly illustrates that in retrieving the truth of its own questioning, anthropology expresses itself in an ontology of gift that is dominated by the surprising discovery that the finite being is given to itself in order to become itself. At first, Bruaire’s anthropology, going hand in hand with a reflection on the nature of the absolute as selfdeterminate , self-determining absolute and infinite freedom, perceives the human being as a self-determining, limited, and finite freedom that, not being the origin of itself, desires, through language, absolute knowledge,  that is to say, to be in communion with the pure ideality of absolute spirit . This negative anthropology, however, requires a metaphysical renewal consisting in the elaboration of a positive ontology that is able to transform the inquiry into the origin. In fact, it is because this other, through its indelible presence in the human being, shows itself as that incontestable infinite positivity that makes the human being be what he is, in total freedom , that the question of the nature of the absolute becomes, in the end, the verification of the circumincession of being and gift. Since the systematic elimination of spirit from thinking about being has resulted both in the dismissal of spirit’s being and in the forgetfulness of being ,Bruaire’s ontodology contends that the retrieval of“spirit,”in its twofold meaning of nou`~ and pneu`ma, is decisive for a restoration of the notion of being to philosophical reflection. Being, for Bruaire, is being-of-spirit. The concept of spirit, however, cannot be dissociated from freedom, where freedom is conceived not so much as freedom of choice but, more radically, as a transcendental, as the twofold rhythm of reflection and expression proper to spirit’s self-determination. Freedom, in this sense, is coextensive with spirit and so also with being. In this light, Bruaire compellingly shows that spirit is freedom that conforms itself to itself through the donation to itself that is characterized as the loving movement of expansion and contraction which makes the spirit one, makes the spirit be. According to Bruaire, then, the most adequate name of the ternary spirit-being-freedom is gift, because “gift” expresses the ultimate positivity that is the very nature of the free being of spirit. Gift is being in its spiritual way of being. Bruaire’s fruitful elucidation of gift, which is neither yet another attempt to rename being with a more suitable term nor a démodé rejection of metaphysics, encompasses both finite and infinite spirit. In fact, it is only possible to conceive of finite being-of-spirit in terms of “gift” because absolute spirit, God, can be shown to be not only determinate spirit but more radically, gift. Otherwise, the discourse on gift would inevitably deteriorate into a vague circumlocution to avoid dealing with more fundamental matters. The intimations of Christian revelation suggest that the Triune absolute spirit, that is, the loving movement of donation, reddition, and confirmation of the gift, is the unique, ever-surprising ground from which an unexpected finite other can blossom. Spirit’s gift, then, is both the gift of himself, which God is, and the gift of what absolute spirit is not: finite being.  Conclusion Bruaire’s ontodology cannot be conceived...