On the Borders of Being and Knowing: Late Scholastic Theory of Supertranscendental Being

12. Conclusion

chaptEr 12 conclusion While our basic journey from the Greeks to Kant should lie open, the entries in this volume are not always arranged along its exact timeline. All but the first such entry, as they developed several interests, were previously published over years, in different venues with different style sheets to follow. Because of diverse readerships and the general unavailability of primary source materials, there was necessarily much repetition among the essays, their footnotes, and endnotes. To have reduced this with countless cross references and constant required thumbing back and forth, would not have made the present reader’s task any easier. Suffice it then to say that with few alterations and minimal additions along the way I have left the entries as they originally appeared. But at this place, looking back and then ahead, some remarks may be made. At the risk of misquoting Parmenides, let me say first in relation to the material of this volume and any difficulties which the timeline might present: “it is all one to me where I begin, for I will come back to the beginning again and again.”1 No matter the order of the essays, the main points in their presentation should be manifest. Starting with Antisthenes and Plato, we remarked a distinction between “being” and a wider notion of “something.” Then we saw Aristotle on the verge of bridging any gap between being and something, but in fact doing otherwise with his important exclusion of being as true from the subject matter of metaphysics. Here, let me affirm that the basic plan of this work and the wider plan which hopefully will include future works is evident from the last article, “On the Borders of Knowability.” In that article my concentration was on the double faces of the upper and the lower boundaries of what we can think and say. From it and from the essays which preceded it, especially, “On Supertranscendental Nothing,” the reader may see that the principal concern in this volume was with the lower boundary. An intended future volume will concentrate on and will attempt to follow Thomistic thoughts about the utterly unknown and unknowable reality of God. It will attend to the fact that before such a God any theology will have to content itself first with abstractive rather than intuitive cognition and then with a concatenation of negative but ultimately true propositions, which, against the background of the Aristotelian distinction, will stand on the side of being as true rather than of being in itself as real. 1 Cf. “… ξυνὸν δέ μοί ἐστιν ὅπποθεν ἄρξομαι· τόθι γὰρ πάλιν ἵξομαι αὖθις” (Fr. 5, Proclus in Parm. I, 708, 16 Cousin, as cited by G.S. Kirk, J.E. Raven and M. Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers, second edition [Cambridge University Press, 1983], 244, n. 289). 294 ChAptEr 12 As I see it now, the point de départ of such a development will be in the recognition that nothing which has been said in this volume about the extension of being as true to pure beings of reason will negate its application to real beings. For even after allowance is made for purely mind-dependent impossible objects, such as a running goatstag, if Socrates is really running it will still be true to say that Socrates is running. And if after the same allowance, God in fact exists and as Ipsum Esse is the external principle of ens commune,2 it will still be true to say that He exists and is that principle. It will also be the fact, and it will be true to say, that He is the principle not only of ens commune transcendentale but also of ens commune supertranscendentale. In a comparable, albeit certainly not identical,3 way, just as animal abstracted from men and brutes does not exclude either, so the abstraction required to arrive at supertranscendental being, alhough it may include pure be2 Cf. St. Thomas, Super librum Boethii de Trinitate, q. 5, a. 4, ed. Dekker, 195; In duodecim libros Metaphysicorum Aristotelis expositio, prooemium; ibid., VI, lect. 3, n. 1220; Summa theologiae I-II, q. 66, a. 5, ad 4; In librum Beati Dionysii de Divinis Nominibus, expositio, ed. Pera (Taurini, 1950), 245, n. 660. 3 Here, there is a basic difference between those who, like Richard Lynch, sj. (16101676 ), following Alexander of Aphrodisias in regarding an impossible object as an aggregate of possible objects, will allow an extrinsic but univocal concept between an impossible and a possible, versus those, like Andreas Semery, who following Averroes to regard...