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KARL RAHNER ON MATERIALITY AND HUMAN KNOWLEDGE IT IS DIFFICULT to think of any recent Christian theologians who have denigrated the materiality of human existence deliberately and in a straight-forward manner. Nevertheless, in as far as Christian theologians entertain the possibility of a connection between human finitude and the need for redemption, a certain ambivalence towards human materiality and its consequences often remains. Karl Rahner presents an example of this ambivalent stance towards human materiality. The first part of this essay will provide a discussion of Rahner's use of the concept of materiality in his metaphysics of human knowledge. The second part of the essay will show that Rahner's anthropology, as found in his metaphysics, contains two strands of argumentation which define the limitations of human materiality in different ways. One of these strands of argumentation seems to affirm that human materiality is essential and good, whereas the other strand seems to deny the goodness and the permanence of human materiality. I Materiality functions as an important concept in Rahner's metaphysics of human knowledge.1 Rahner uses materiality in 1 Rahner explains his metaphysics of knowledge in the greatest detail in Spirit in the World. Our quotations will be from the English translation by William Dych, S.J. (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968.) The original German edition is Geist in Welt (Munich: Kosel-Verlag, 1957.) We will also refer to sections of Hearers of the Word which deal with the implications of materiality for human knowing and existence. Our quotations from this book will be, where possible, from A Rahner Reader, edited and translated by Gerald A. McCool (New York: The Seabury Press, 1975) and where not, from the English translation, Hearers of the Word, translated 367 368 TIINA ALLIK order to explain such limitations of human knowledge as receptivity , spatiality and temporality, and potentiality. 1. Materiality is an explanation for the receptivity of human knowledge. Rahner starts out with the assumption that knowing and being are one, adds to that the fact that human knowing is in fl).ct receptive, and ends up with the concept of human materiality . The problem that Rahner deals with in Chapter 10 of Hearers of the Word, " Man as a Material Essence," and in large portions of Spirit in the World is the following: if knowledge is defined a.s self-presence, how can one conceptualize human knowledge, which is receptive? Materiality is part of the solution to this problem, because " the materiality of the human existent thing is conceived a.s something that knows itself in the receptive knowledge of things." 2 The problem of the seeming contradiction between the essential nature of knowing and the fact that human knowing is receptive is set up by the fact that Rahner conceptualizes human knowledge on the basis of a model which is a conceptualization of God's knowledge.3 He starts out with the presupposition that knowing, in its essence, is the being-present-to-itself of the knowing subject. Thus knowing is perfectly actualized only in God. The cause of God's knowledge of other existing by Michael Richards (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969.) The original German edition is Horer des Wortes (Munich: Kosel-Verlag, 1963.) 2 Hearers of the Word, p. 135. (German edition, p. 167.) a Rahner conceives of the problem of the metaphysics of knowledge as the problem of demonstrating that there is indeed a gap between the subject and the object and that human knowing is consequently receptive. It is well to keep in mind that this is exactly the reverse of what is usually seen as the basic problematic in epistemology. He sees himself as following St. Thomas in this regard: " for the Thomistic metaphysics of knowledge the problem does not lie in bridging the gap between knowing and object by a 'bridge' of some kind: such a 'gap' is merely a pseudo-problem. Rather the problem is how the known, which is identical with the knower, can stand over against the knower as other, and how there can be a knowledge which receives another as such." (Spirit in the World, p. 75. [German edition, p. 88.]) RAHNER ON MATERIALITY AND...

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