Dewart’s The Foundations of Belief: A Review Article

DEWART'S THE FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF: A REVIEW ARTICLE LSLIE DEWART in his The Foundations of Belief 1 has both a negative and a positive purpose. Negatively, he criticizes epistemological, metaphysical, and natural theological positions called thomistic. Positively, his efforts are directed toward a total refashioning of episSemology, ontology , and theodicy. While recognizing the dangers of extreme brevity, we may attempt to summarize his position under the rubrics of Being, Consciousness, the Knowing Process, Truth, Reality, and God. Being is that which exists. It is that "sort of reality which is revealed in experience." (p. 431) As such, being is absolutely contingent. Moreover, it is simply a fact that confronts us. Like Mount Everest, being is simply there. Objects that are beings have no innate intelligibility. "Anything that is, is essentially, and as such, a fact. It need not be, it has no meaning that constitutes it as reality." (p. 294) This does not mean that being is unintelligible or absurd; rather, beings may be said to be extra-intelligible; for "there is no reason intrinsic to them and to their constitution why they should be as they are." (p. 294) It is only the extrinsic world situation in history that accounts for the form beings take. The only sense in which we can say that being is intelligible is in the sense that "1oe can understand it." We cannot say " that it is in itself subject to being-understood; for its being understood is not done, as it were, in consultation with it." (p. 296) Being contributes nothing to our understanding of it for " our understanding of being requires only that we relate ourselves to it." (pp. 296-7) Consciousness is the starting point of the knowing process, 1 New York: Herder & Herder, 1969. Pp. 5~6. $9.50. 460 DEWART'S "THE FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF" 461 the undeniable empirical fact common to us all. It is the condition of the possibility of the opposition of subject and object because the subject in the subject-object relationship is constituted as such by consciousness. Consciousness or subjectivity is the presence of the self to itself. Consciousness takes place "in and through the self's self-differentiation from the known self . . . and through the presence of the self to the non-self." (p. Q64) It "emerges as it differentiates, abstracts , separates and opposes things to each other-that is, as it objectifies the world of being-and as it differentiates itself from that which is not itself." (p. 264) In short, growth in consciousness is a growth in self-differentiation and a consequent creation of the self that is accomplished in and through the self's presence to the self and the non-self. The Knowing Process is an aspect of the process of emerging self-consciousness. The knowing process is not one in which the mind bridges a gap between itself and the supposed intelligibility of the object and thereby incorporates that intelligibility into itself. Rather, instead of the mind making the world present to itself in knowledge, it makes itself present to the world by opposing itself to the world. . . . knowledge does not actually combine subjective conditions with objective content. If consciousness creates itself only in and through the differentiation of subject from object, it follows that the creation of the self is made possible only in and through the objectification of being. Hence, human understanding attains to a meaning which ... is not of its own making but which, on the other hand, was not precontained in the reality of the world prior to knowledge. The meaning of reality does transcend the subjectivity of mind; but reality does not have within itself a transcendent meaning which the mind merely transfers onto itself when certain conditions are satisfied. The meaning of reality emerges within the mind's relation to reality which consciousness achieves. Therefore human knowledge is truly operative, not only in the self-creative sense previously outlined, but also in the sense that consciousness is responsible for establishing the meaning of that which is known . . . knowledge is not the transposition of an objective content from reality into the subjective reality of the 462 PETER CHIRICO mind. Least of all...