A Divine Reality…
Rosmini — Being, Truth and God
“Imagine hidden in a simpler exterior a secret receptacle wherein the most precious treasure is deposited – there is a spring which has to be pressed, but the spring is hidden, and the pressure must have a certain strength, so that an accidental pressure would not be sufficient. So likewise is the hope of eternity hidden in man’s inmost parts, and affliction is the pressure. When it presses the hidden spring, and strongly enough, then the contents appear in all their glory”…
– Soren Kierkegaard
metaphysics
/ˌmɛtəˈfɪzɪks/
the branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as Being and Knowing
the Study of Being
the Science of Reality
a priori
/ˌeɪ prʌɪˈɔːrʌɪ,ˌɑː prɪˈɔːri/
relating to or denoting reasoning or knowledge obtained through analysing concepts independent of observations or experience
a posteriori
/eɪ pɒˌstɛrɪˈɔːrʌɪ,ɑː pɒˌstɛrɪˈɔːriː/
relating to or denoting reasoning or knowledge obtained from observations or experiences
Antonio Rosmini was a 19th Century Italian Catholic priest and philosopher.
His life’s work was a continuation of the Medieval Schoolmen tradition that was attempting to integrate Judeo-Christian Theology with Ancient Greek Philosophy.
Exploring the nature of Human’s relationship with God, inquirying into the Nature of Reality and formulating an Order of Things.
Metaphysics and the Study of Being.
“There is an eternal and unchangeable order of truths and values, which we can come into contact with using intellectual intuition”…
– Augusto del Noce
A recognition of the Necessary Being of God and Contingent Being of Man.
A Divine Reality that had up until this point had been explored by numerous leading Intellectual Thinkers that spanned the entire unfolding history of Western Civilisation including inter alia Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, Immanuel Kant and would be either concurrently or subsequently explored by Friedrich Schelling, William Friedrich Hegel, Soren Kierkegaard etc… etc…
Scholastics and Being
So how can Conscious Man not only understand his relationship with the Natural World but also his relationship with God?
In The Univocity of Being this metaphysical question was poised, explored and answered by 2 leading Scholastic Theologians and Philosophers — Saint Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus.
Their distinct responses – a Univocity of Being (Duns Scotus) vs an Analogy of Being (Aquinas) – both capture the capacity of the human mind to build an understanding of Reality from the highest order a priori first-order concept &/or category of Being.
An a Priori concept &/or category of abstraction (i.e. Being ) that could not only be applied to the temporal, contingent and created but also to the eternal, necessary and creator.
The application of a modal form of logic that could discern between the Necessary Being of God (Necessity) and Contingent Being of Man (Possibility) and thereby distinguish between the nature of Being of Humans and God.
Rosmini and Being
“If we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and contemplate things by themselves with the soul by itself”…
– Plato
Rosmini arrives at a similar conclusion to Aquinas and Duns Scotus and recognises the fundamental role that Being performs as the guiding first order conceptual principle of Human Cognition.
An objective light of illumination for the Human Mind (refer Spatial Structures of Thought and Meaning space) that connects the transcendent with the immanent.
The eternal with the temporal.
The infinite with the finite.
“The soul is torn apart in a painful condition as long as it prefers the eternal because of its Truth but does not discard the temporal because of familiarity”…
― St. Augustine of Hippo
Without a priori knowledge of Being nothing can be thought and therefore, Thought would be nothing.
It’s an idea that combines Faith and Reason – two wings of the Human spirit.
“You can only apprehend the Infinite by a faculty that is superior to reason”…
– Plotinus
It is an idea that provides the contingent being of man with the conceptual foundation from which to begin to understand a higher order Divine Reality.
It is an idea that enables Humans to discern between the nature of God and Man ( i.e. Aquinas anology of Being).
The contingent nature of human knowledge and learning.
Recognising the complexity and uncertainty of the World. Human’s fallibilism and need to embrace open inquiry and epistemological humility.
“How can the past and future be, when the past no longer is, and the future is not yet? As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time, but eternity”…
― St. Augustine of Hippo
The necessary nature of God including universality, omnipotence, omniscience, immutability, unity (oneness), trinity, transcendence and immanence, sovereignty, unconditional love and the ultimate source of all meaning and truth.
“ Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free”…
– John 8:32
It is an idea that enables the distinction between realism, objectivity and the eternal and nominalism, subjectivity and the temporal.
A distinction between a priori and a posteriori forms of reasoning and knowledge.
“Man is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation which relates itself to itself… Man is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of possibility and necessity, in short, it is a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two factors. So regarded, man is not yet a self”…
– Soren Kierkegaard
It is an idea that provides the conceptual foundation of what would eventually be synthesised by the early 21st Century via integrating the ideas of Aristotle, Kant and Peirce into Human’s Triadic Categories of Thought.
- Relationships of Being — Being — Ontology — What can exist? (Aristotles Metaphysical Categories and the notion of the Unmoved Mover (Pure Actuality (Unchanged) and Intellect) — Observed;
- Relationships of Understanding — Knowing —Epistemology — How do we understand? (Kants Cognitive Categories and distinction between Phenomena (World Experienced) & Noumena (Things as they are in themselves)) — Observer); and
- Relationships of Meaning — Meaning — Semiotics — Why do things relate? (Peirce’s Semiotic Categories of the Whole and Neglected Argument for the Reality of God (Abduction)) — Signs, Meaning, Practical Effects that shape the formation of Habits and Heuristics
Triadic of Categories that connect the Conscious Self of Man (Observer) with an independent Reality (Observed) and Sign (Semiotics-Meaning).
“If the sign were not related to its object except by the mind thinking of them separately, it would not fulfil the function of a sign at all” …
– Charles Sanders Peirce
The conceptual foundations of a Triadic of Reason that integrates Abduction ( new contingent relationships of meaning) with Induction ( Generalisations of Premises that couple explanation & abstraction with prediction & action ) and Deduction (Syllogisms & Premises to arrive at logical truth claims) .
Semiotics ( Study of Meaning ) with Metaphysics ( Study of Being ) with Logic ( Study of Thought).
“Knowledge has three degrees – opinion, science, illumination. The means or instrument of the first is sense; of the second, dialectic; of the third, intuition”…
– Plotinus
Noting that Truth is the correspondence of Human’s Beliefs to Reality.
A Christian World View where given that Human’s are created in the image of God and via the Gift of Reason (Rationality and Faith ) we have the capacity to comprehend a Divine Order (Eternal Truths — Ground Truths — Categories of Thought).
“The mind commands the body and is instantly obeyed. The mind commands itself and meets resistance”…
― St. Augustine of Hippo
A capacity via Peircian Abduction ( i.e. formulating a hypothesis about new relationships of meaning grounded in a Peircian Neglected Argument for the Reality of God and Human Consciousness Altersense) to gradually reveal new relationships of meaning and rational conceptual logical structures in the World.
A capacity to learn and discover new contingent knowledge about the external World (e.g. Bacon’s Scientific Method — Regular Patterns — Natural Laws) but also throught internal introspection reflect on Human’s relationship with God.
A recognition of Human Reason’s nexus to the Divine.
“You are not the mind itself. For You are the Lord God of the mind. All these things are liable to change, but You remain immutable above all things” …
― St. Augustine of Hippo
A Divine Reason and Logos.
A capacity for Humans to know through the Gift of Reason and Abstraction the existence of God in a personal, objective and relational way.
The revelation of a Divine, Knowable and Objective Reality.
The necessary existence of God as the foundation for all Human Knowledge and Being.
God as the ultimare source of Truth and Being where Truth is the correspondence of Human Beliefs to Reality .
A Logos and light that illuminates Reality.
“Any one who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light”…
― Plato
