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c h ap t e r 4 System: A New Category of Being? Since the chances are extremely high that I will never again have the opportunity to address such an influential group of my philosophical companions -in-arms with any semblance of official position or authority, I am going to take advantage of the present occasion, wrapped in the ephemeral dignity of office, to present to you one thought that has been causing me considerable philosophical concern during the last few years. I do not ask you to agree with me, but only to let my problem be a guest in your minds for a few moments and see what chords of harmony (or discord) it awakens within you. The question I would like to put before you briefly is this. It seems to me that a significant lacuna in Thomistic metaphysics (and in this I include Scholastic metaphysics in general) has been coming into focus more and more clearly in recent years, and that we should do something about it. The lacuna in question concerns the metaphysics of order or ‘‘system,’’ to use the apt contemporary term, as an ontological feature of our universe, and in particular should be added to the classical list of nine, laid down by Aristotle, accepted without change by Saint Thomas and the Scholastic tradition. Two Ways of Looking at the Universe the aristotelian or substantialist view What is the difficulty? It arises out of two different ways of looking at the universe, two different aspects of reality to which one can pay predominant attention. From this results a different judgment on the kind of category one considers most necessary and fruitful for our intellectual comprehension of reality. First published in Proceedings of the Annual Convention of the Jesuit Philosophical Association 23 (1961): 5–17. 39 40 System: A New Category of Being? One of these ways of looking at the universe I shall call Aristotelian, focused on the unique centrality of substance, the other, the relational view, focused on the equal centrality of the category of relation. Saint Thomas himself lies somewhere in between, but still, it seems to me, a little too close to Aristotle. According to the first view, the center of gravity of the real world lies unqualifiedly and exclusively in real substances, each individual being existing in itself and not as a part of any other being, as in all the other accidental categories, including relation, and distinct from every other. (The point at issue, it should be noted, is not Aristotle’s lack of recognition of the importance of the act of existence as distinct from essence. We are concerned here not with essence versus existence, but only with the modes of existence, that is, the substantial mode as preferred to the relational.) The only categories of reality are accordingly substance and accident, and all accidents, including relations, are conceived of as always individual accidents inhering in some particular substance and individualized by it. Hence the only ontological status of relation as a real mode of being outside the mind is as an individual accident (or as an essential property inhering in an individual substance, not a group, if one holds the theory of essential relations) inhering in one particular substance in the universe and in it alone. Thus whenever two or more substances are interrelated, even in a reciprocal or mutual relation, there are as many relations as there are individual substances. Mutual friendship, for example, is two relations, one rooted in me and reaching toward you, the other rooted in you and reaching toward me. There is no such thing in Aristotelian metaphysics as a single relation or set of relations linking, or immanent in, several substances at once. Now this is fine as far as it goes. But what happens to that aspect of reality which we call order or system? Certainly the existence and importance of objective order were recognized by Aristotle, and even more by Saint Thomas. Both had a rich and keen sense of order in the universe. The difficulty lies not in the recognition of the fact but in the explanation of the ontological status of order in a world where the only realities are individual substances and individual accidents inhering in these substances . The order I am concerned with is not that of one individual to its own particular goals or ends, which is well taken care of here, nor with...

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