VII Transcendental Philosophy in the Catholic Thinking Transcendental

VII. Transcendental Philosophy in the Catholic Thinking

Transcendental Thomism Belgium: • Joseph Maréchal (1878 -1944) Le point de départ de la métaphysique, Cahiers I-V. 1922 -1947 France: • Lépold Malevez (1903 -1973) • Auguste Grégoire (1890 -1949) • Joseph Defever (1899 -1964) • Gaston Isaye (1903 -1984) Canada, USA: • Bernard Lonergan (1904 -1984) Germany: • Johannes Baptist Lotz (1903 -1992) • Walter Brugger (1904 -1990) • Karl Rahner (1905 -1985) • Emerich Coreth (1919 -2006) • Otto Muck (*1928)

Connecting idea: Subjectivity as an approach to God • Starting point: an act of subjectivity (knowledge, thinking, judgment, question, acting, …) • Analyses of act’s condition of possibility: = Infinite horizon as condition. = this proves the openness of human spirit for the Absolute • Ontological issue (beyond Kant): the reality of subjectivity‘s act guarantees the reality of the act‘s transcendental possibility

Transcendental-logic Inspired by Kant and Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762 -1814) • Hermann Krings (1913 -2004) • Thomas Pröpper (*1941) • Hansjürgen Verweyen (*1936) • Norbert Fischer (*1947)

Connecting idea • Human liberty as formally unconditional; • Therefore only a unconditional content corresponds and completes human liberty. • Formally and concerning content / materially unconditional – this absolute freedom which exclusively completes human liberty. • Concept of absolute sense: only a free absolute recognition fulfils human desire of unconditional acceptance / acknowledgment • Epistemological level: justification of an transcendental concept. The concept‘s reference to reality is due to faith.

Karl Rahner (1904 -1984) • German Jesuit, alongside Bernard Lonergan and Hans Urs von Balthasar, considered one of the most influential Roman Catholic theologians of the 20 th century.

Opera magna 1939 / 57 / (64) (1937) 1941 1976

Phil. of. Religion with Kant, Hegel, Thomas Aquin, Przywara, M. Heidegger • Kant: transcendental method: condition of possibility of thinking: being as knowing, infinite horizon of being • Hegel: being as knowledge, subjectivity, Degrees of being, degrees of intensity. • Thomas / Przywara: • Heidegger: Seinsfrage, Analogia entis, analogy of Existential: Spirit in the „Seinshabe“ World (1957) (cf. In-der„property of being“ Welt-Sein) Being as a „fluctuating concept“

• Seinsfrage ← + implicit knowing of being. ← - non-identity with all being = finitude → knowing by conversio ad phantasma, to the material world: matter as the otherness of being as knowing and spirit ← + infinitude of being, infinite horizon, Vorgriff = intellectus agens = preapprehension ← - no object fills the infinite horizon ← + possibility of an absolute reality filling and stabilizing the horizon and setting finite reality ← - the hiddenness of the unknown and free absolute mysterium

Vorgriff to nothingness? (Heidegger) nothingness as the dark backdrop, ground?

„Nothingness grounds nothing“. • „Nothingness cannot be the term of his preapprehension (Vorgriff), cannot be what draws and moves and sets in motion that reality which man experiences as his real life and not as nothingness. “ (Foundations of Christian Faith, dt. 1976, engl. 1978 / 1999, 33). • Being as “dark matter” (as non-ens) which gives rise to the pre-apprehension, the Vorgriff and transcendence of human spirit.

Vorgriff towards being as mere concept?

Neither nothingness, nor a mere concept of being • “Hence what grounds man's openness and his reaching out in the unlimited expanse of his transcendence cannot be nothingness, an absolutely empty void. For to assert that of a void would make absolutely no sense. But since on the other hand this preapprehension as merely a question is not self-explanatory, it must be understood as due to the working of that to which man is open, namely, being in an absolute sense. But the movement of transcendence is not the subject creating its own unlimited space as though it had absolute power over being, but it is the infinite horizon of being making itself manifest. Whenever man in his transcendence experiences himself as questioning, as disquieted by the appearance of being, as open to something ineffable, he cannot understand himself as subject in the sense of an absolute subject, but only in the sense of one who receives being, ultimately only in the sense of grace In this context "grace" means the freedom of the ground of being which gives being to man, a freedom which man experiences in his finiteness and contingency, and means as well what we call "grace" in a more strictly theological sense. ” FCh. F 34

Phil. of Religion: Hearer of the Word • “In Hearer of the Word , originally lectures given at Salzburg in the summer of 1937, Rahner developed his "transcendental arguments“ to explain why God must be thought of as personal and as one whose self could be revealed further in the human realm of history and language if God so chose. As the ones who either encounter or miss this possible self-revelation, we are hearers of either God's "word" or silence. ” http: //www. philosophyprofessor. com/philosoph ers/karl-rahner. php

Human being as material and historical being Seinsfrage: → finite human being → Being as knowing expressed in words Finite being and knowing → otherness of being as knowing (Bei-sich-Sein / self-presence) = being as matter (Außer-sich-Sein / self-absence) → • matter → • space (next to each other, side by side, one on top of the other) and • time (one after the other, in succession) → history • •

Thesis: man as potentia oboedientialis (obediential potency) • “We are the beings of receptive spirituality, who stand in freedom before the free God of a possible revelation, which, if it comes, happens in our history through the word. We are the ones who, in our history, listen for the word of the free God. Only thus are we what we should be. A metaphysical anthropology has reached its end when it has understood itself as the metaphysics of an obediential potency for the revelation of the supramundane God. …” (142)

Rahners‘ idealism: being and God as different modalities of self-possession, subjectivity • Hearer of the Word: “Thomas affirms two things: first that the concept of the being of a being is itself a fluctuating concept, which cannot in its universality be pinned down to a determined, univocal meaning (hence to a determined manner of self-presence). Next, that the inner luminosity, the degree in which being knows itself and is known corresponds perfectly to and varies with the variability of being. The concept of being is analogous, as follows from the very starting point from which we were able to get an idea of what being is; it follows that the meaning of being, its self-presence, is likewise analogous. Of its very nature, self-presence, reflection upon itself, is different with every different being. • We may once more refer to the previously mentioned chapter of Summa contra gentiles (IV, 11), in which Thomas superbly exposes this gradation of the return of the thing into itself, throughout the different degrees of being. Everything strives back toward itself, it wishes to come into itself, to take possession of itself, since it is what it wishes to be, namely being, to the extent that it takes possession of itself. Every activity, from the purely material up to the inner life of the triune God, is but a gradation of this one metaphysical theme, of the one meaning of being: self-possession. ” – Johann Baptist Metz’s Addition: subjectivity (1963).

Trinity as subjectivity of modes -? • God’ possible self-communication has two basic modes, truth and love - modes, anthropologically deduced: truth refers to history as the place of God’s possible selfcommunication; love refers to the acceptance of truth. • ‘The “economic” Trinity is the “immanent” Trinity and the “immanent” Trinity is the “economic” Trinity’ (21 -22, also 23, 24). • Truth and love are modes of God’s existence: Logos and Pneuma. • The one God (essence) subsists in three distinct modes. • Person – often misunderstood as individual - Thretheism

Critique Vorgriff – getting a grip on God? Potentia oboedientialis activa – or – passiva? Philosophical deduction of revelation? No philosophical listening to God‘s silence possible. Switch from transcendental philosophy to transcendental theology Being as knowing, self-possession; otherness as weakness, matter. Otherness as a parte of self-possession.