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17. “Know Yourself!” (2007)
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s e v e n t e e n “Know Yourself!” (2007) I close this volume with excerpts from the last chapter of my book aims: a Brief metaphysics for today, which constitutes my best development to date of the melding of the metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas and of Whitehead that I invited in essay 2 of this volume. I hope it would be fair to say that it amounts to an enriching or modernizing of Thomas ’s metaphysics in terms of more contemporary insights. I began aims with the challenge of the Delphic Oracle: “Know yourself!” In the course of my trying to develop a revised metaphysics by appealing to direct experience as well as to the thought of Thomas and of Whitehead there emerged a basic if skeletal metaphysics that is, as I think, coherent and most certainly teleological. Analogously to Plotinus’s insight into being’s “return,” this metaphysics, like those of Thomas and of Whitehead, pivots around final causality, goal-directedness. The reader will understand, I am sure, that in aims the following lines presupposed all the chapters that preceded them, and here they cannot con232 Originally published in Aims: A Brief Metaphysics for Today (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 118–25. “Know Yourself!” 233 vey the same clarity of meaning. Yet they seem worth reproducing here as suggesting the present end point of the above explorations in unfashionable metaphysics. a sHORt PHeNOmeNOlOGICal DesCRIPtION OF ImmeDIate eXPeRIeNCe What I first notice in my experiencing are objects in a world. these objects confront me sensibly as making a difference to me, for better or for worse. I may choose to ignore them but I always do so at my own peril, for they give themselves to me as enjoying a certain autonomy of existence and activity. taken together they make up a world that I feel myself part of and that, in another sense, is a part of me. Furthermore in finding myself confronted with these objects I also sense a dimension of value that belongs to them as I experience them. this sense of value, good or bad, attractive or harmful, is an ineluctable aspect of my experience of them. I also find that I directly experience a sense of derivation of the present from the past, and of the present as issuing into a future. this is a feeling not only of subjective continuity but a feeling of the continuity through time of the experienced world itself. always present in my experiencing is a sense of my own unity: that although my body and my psyche are doubtless complex, yet they constitute a single, unitary me. another aspect of my experiencing might be called its stimulusresponse dynamic. I literally feel the causal impact of the things that make up my world. they impose themselves upon me willy-nilly, and they call for a response on my part. In fact that seems to be the basic character of all my ordinary experience: an interactive, causal commerce with things in the world. there is one such interaction, however, that is for me paramount: my relations with other human beings. there is no more concrete or valuable aspect of my experiencing than interpersonal relationships. [18.227.161.132] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 22:01 GMT) 234 Adventures in Unfashionable Philosophy I also notice that all my deliberate acts are aimed acts: they are performed with the intention of achieving some as yet nonexistent value. and such value is not peripheral to me like clothing, but it is value-formyself . Better: it is a kind of self-ideal, a new and better me that is aimed at in my every intentional action. most importantly, underlying every such action is the lure of that central aim toward which all my particular aims focus, what I have called my essential aim. the trouble is, it is not immediately clear just what that aim is. as e. B. White wrote in a short story: “my heart has followed all my days something I cannot name.”1 aristotle identified this ultimate aim as “happiness,” by which he meant an activity of soul according to what is best in the soul, and that, he said, is intellectual contemplation.2 that may at first sound too abstract, yet it does say something important. PRelImINaRY PHIlOsOPHICal INteRPRetatION OF eXPeRIeNCING my experiencing involves both the experienced objects and me the experiencer. I have satisfied myself that what I directly experience in sense...