Rahner on esse in Spirit in the World, some concluding comments
Hugh Williams
Doug et al,
It is time to try and bring these extended musings (at least those of mine over these past fifteen months or so) on the question of being, with the good accompaniment of Doug and Pierre along the way, to some measure of closure by way of our reading together, turtle paced, Karl Rahner’s ‘Spirit in the World’.
There was an effort, on my part, to give this discussion some focus with Lonergan’s question to the 1958 ACPA – “Is there or is there not a human intellectual intuition of concrete actual existence?”
If one reads Rahner in an attempt to discern how he might answer this question, I believe we can come close to an answer in Rahner’s direct treatment of esse under the guidance of Thomas Aquinas. This, in my reading of Rahner, begins in earnest at pp.156-158 in Ch3 on ‘Abstraction’.
Rahner finds his inquiry coming to this point where an understanding of esse is needed. And he says that esse is, in the first instance, what is meant by the in-itself. Rahner at this point in his text is trying to lay out what Thomas says about esse – what it is in its own self, and then to do so more precisely and systematically in the following Sections. It is a tentative effort because Rahner has no intention of covering the whole of Thomas’ ontology, nor is it possible (for him?) to do so. Nonetheless, he is trying to provide a summation of his investigation so far, so that its connection to what follows is as clear as possible.
Rahner then provides us this summation in two propositions: a) human knowledge’s first object as that upon which all others are based is the other of the world apprehended in-itself through sensibility – this is the knowing of esse as the real and only being-in-itself given concretely in sensibility as a concrete and limited self. This means esse is always linked to being as ens apprehended in sensibility without which there is no knowledge possible of what esse means. Yet Rahner says even so the question remains – how is this being, known as real by thought, i.e., as objective? This is not an accomplishment of sensibility, abstraction, we are told by Rahner, is needed. His second proposition is that b) if our knowing is objective in the knowing of this other in differentiation from the knowing subject then it knows this esse as being-in-itself of the definite other objectively only in so far as esse given in sensibility as limited is apprehended as unlimited in-itself in a preapprehension attaining to esse as such.
But, again, Rahner feels he must persist in asking – what is esse? If it is understood as identical with the in-itself, Rahner says that we can say tentatively that there is a knowledge of esse always and already realized that is given antecedent to the affirmative synthesis realized in thought.
[At this point in my own commentary notes I cannot help but ask – is this not at least coming close to the intellectual intuition of being as the act of existence asked about by Lonergan in 1958?]
Rahner says this is another way of describing the in-itself intended in judgment. Esse then means to be actual or real. But then he asks – why can esse as the synthesis encountered as already realized antecedent to the affirmative synthesis be identified with esse as to-be-real? What is in-itself seems to occur in two fundamentally different kinds independent of each other – 1) that which provides the ideal basis for the validity of propositions of eternal truths. And 2) as real existence (whatever that means precisely).
Both kinds, says Rahner, seem to present an in-itself which is always already realized antecedent to the affirmative synthesis to be accomplished intellectually and which is related to these kinds as an in-itself.
Thomas, notes Rahner, does not (explicitly?) know these two kinds because for Thomas esse as to be real is the fundamental in-itself and anything is in-itself only in so far as it expresses to-be-real. Thus, judgment which attains to an in-itself attains to esse. Esse is therefore, in Thomas, not one of the ways in which an already realized synthesis is given antecedent to the synthesis to be achieved by affirmation, but is itself the only in-itself. Rahner reads Thomas in his Boethius de Trinitate and in many other texts saying that the esse of the copula in a proposition is also grounded in the esse of the thing.
At p.162, Rahner then says esse is not a genus but appears as intrinsically variable and not as statically definable but rather as oscillating between nothing and infinity. He concludes this section by saying that the preceding discussion is to serve as an indication that St. Thomas identifies the in-itself to which the affirmative synthesis attains, and which as a whole the preapprehension apprehends in abstraction (as separation), with what he calls esse.
This esse-concept is now to be developed so that the preapprehension which attains to esse can be further clarified. And here at p.179, we (again) encounter a plaguing difficulty as we have Rahner again asking – ‘what is this esse?’ And he answers in the negative that “it is not the object of a metaphysical intuition.” But here I would argue that this does not mean that there is not the intellectual intuition of esse that Lonergan has asked about in 1958, ... an intellectual intuition through the existential judgment. Such an intuition perhaps can be captured in the (basketball) metaphor that we only grasp objects because of ‘a reach that exceeds our grasp’; and so, the formal object of this reach is known as esse which in effect defies ordinary conceptualization and so is only known in and through the existential judgment.
I believe at p.180 Rahner indeed clarifies what he means by insisting, perhaps in a manner at least somewhat aligned with Lonergan's concern about a metaphysical intuition of 'being', that ‘esse is not the object of a metaphysical intuition’. However, as I am reading Rahner, what he is saying is that the fullness of being which, for Rahner, esse expresses is never given objectively in the sense of an ordinary concept that could be the object of a metaphysical intuitive apprehension. Instead, it is given only in the existential judgment as a preapprehension of our knowing intellect in and through this very judgment.
So, in simple
conclusion for this complex and even ‘momentous’ question of
Lonergan’s - “Is
there or is there not a human intellectual intuition of
concrete actual
existence?” I
would answer now with Rahner’s
clarifications, no, not in the sense of a
metaphysical intuition
of some concept of being but, yes, in the sense
of an intuition
in and through the existential judgment of esse … that
indeed makes our knowing of real things and their
conceptualization possible.
thanks for the turtle paced accompaniment
and patience
Hugh
Doug Mounce
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