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SENSIBILITY IN RAHNER AND MERLEAU-PONTY THE PHILOSOPHICAL PROJECTS of Karl Rahner and Maurice Merleau-Ponty are similar in that both take human cognition to be the clue to the structure of human existence, and take human existence to be the chief clue to the understanding of the world. Rahner's Spirit in the World is a metaphysics of knowledge in which the dynamics of human cognition is the clue to the meaning of reality. MerleauPonty 's Phenomenology of Perception is a work in which perception is revealed to be the basic dynamism of human existence. Key to the understanding of Karl Rahner is the comprehension of the nature and operation of sensibility in his work, as inherited by him from Thomas Aquinas. Key to the comprehension of Merleau-Ponty is the understanding of perception as the basis of man's cognition and motor activity, his access to the visible, and, through the visible, to the invisible. It is the thesis of this article that the understanding of certain areas in either of these thinkers will illuminate parallel areas in the work of the other. Work done by Merleau-Ponty can be used in support of Rahner, and vice versa. Thomistic metaphysics finds sympathy in phenomenological ontology. In the philosophy of Karl Rahner sensibility is part of the ontological structure of the person, a condition essential to the definition of the human. It refers to all that is material in man, in so far as it originates in and is informed by man's spirit. Without spirit, matter does not achieve sensibility. Sensibility refers to the incarnation of spirit in matter, an incarnation that makes the body a person and its material surroundings a world. The spirit gives rise to sensibility. By a process called emanation ,1 the spirit becomes other than itself without ceasing to be 1 Karl Rahner, Spirit in the World (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968), p. 254. 372 SENSIBILITY IN HAHNER AND MERLEAU-PONTY 373 itself, and identifies this otherness with itself. The otherness generated by finite spirit is matter, and spirit flows through its material otherness as sensibility. Sensibility is an important notion in philosophical anthropology, necessary to the theory of knowledge, in which it is referred to as sensation. Sensation is not one kind of human knowing, nor is it an early phase dispensed with and departed from in the later phases; it is part of all human knowing. It has to do with spirit's pouring out of itself into matter, its own matter, as the condition in which extraneous forms can imprint themselves on this matter. From this spirit can later abstract the form, know it as a universal, and refer it back to its particular extraneous source in a judgment.2 Purely spiritual knowledge would be the intellectual knowledge of the abstracted form as universal. But this spiritual knowledge is immediately referred to the material phantasm from which it arises (conversion to the phantasm) ,3 and it is further referred through the phantasm to the particular being experienced (judgment). Man does not have any knowledge that does not come from sensation, which is not referred to a phantasm, which is not at least implied in a judgment. His knowledge and his being are so much the same that any discussion of his knowledge is also one about his nature. Man is a material being, by nature an incarnation of spirit in matter. Spirit is an unrestricted desire to know, and since its natural desire for ever more being and truth is suspended in matter, spirit immerses itself in matter, loses itself there in sensation , and then overcomes this absence from itself by a return to itself.4 Only upon its self-retrieval does it enjoy presence to itself. Man's presence to himself is a mediated immediacy in which it is necessary for him to know another in order to appreciate the truth of his own being. Louis Roberts indicates three levels of knowledge in Rahner,5 2 Ibid., p. U5. 3 Ibid., p. £38. •Ibid., p. 117. 6 Louis Roberts, The Achievement of Karl Rahner (New York: Herder and Herder, 1967), p. £5. 374 ROBERT E. DOUD which he...

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