Essays Hegelian and Ecumenical: What has been at stake

ESSAYS HEGELIAN AND ECUMENICAL:

WHAT HAS BEEN AT STAKE

by
Stephen Theron

CONTENTS

1. BEGOTTEN NOT MADE 3
2. HAPPINESS AND RATIONALITY 14
3. FAITH, PHILOSOPHY AND THE FORM OF AFFIRMATION 25
4. FAITH AND REASON; REASON AND FAITH 45
5. GOD IS WHATEVER MATTERS: SO WHY DOES GOD MATTER AS WELL? 49
6. GOD, BEING, LOVE 59
7. WHAT IS GOD? WHAT IS MAN? 62
8. SIGNS, SACRAMENTS, INTERPRETATIONS 77
9. YOURS IN SAINT DOMINIC 82
10. CHESTERTON AS SUBJECT 84
11. EVOLUTION AND SUBJECTIVITY 94
12. REDUCTIVE IDEALISM? 106
13. NATURE; EVOLUTION, PHILOSOPHY 116
14. BEYOND THINKING 121
15. SELF AND WORLD 130
16. SPIRIT 140
17. BEYOND COMMON-SENSE: ANTHROPOLOGY AS CHRISTOLOGY AND NOT VICE VERSA. 154
18. PERSONS AND RELATIONS: ETHICS REDEEMED 166
19. THE SYSTEM WHICH IS PHILOSOPHY 179
20. BEING QUA BEING 182
21. OXYMORON 194
22. LOGIC AND THE WORLD 205
23. LOVE, IDEA, BEING, CATEGORIES 217
24. ON THE QUANTITATIVE INDETERMINACY OF SELF 236
25. BEYOND MAN 238
26. LOVE, REASON, PERCEPTION 242
27. MAN THE SACRAMENT OF UNITY: IS MAN A SPECIES? 246
28. WHAT WAS AT STAKE IN MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY UNDERSTOOD IN THE LIGHT OF LATER DEVELOPMENT 248
29. REFLECTIONS ON THE TEACHING OF PHILOSOPHY IN CLERICAL SEMINARIES 258
30. WHATEVER HAPPENED TO MARXISM? 264
31. ON (NOT) SHRINKING THE WORLD 267
BIBLIOGRAPHY 273

2

1. BEGOTTEN NOT MADE

When we question the reality of time we do so in favour of something richer, measuring more fully up to experience, not something poorer. Timelessness, therefore, signifies indeed an absence of time, but in favour of something else which will be more and not less dynamic. We could not, for example, accept a view which represented us vibrant human beings as like immobile statues.

One reason for our confidence in saying this is that, contrary to popular assumption, the doctrine of God was never one of immobility, even where it was one of immutability. In Western and Christian thought God is necessarily a Trinity, a universe of relations, that is to say. Here the Father speaks the Word, the Word proceeds, their mutual love pours forth (spirates) perpetually. Such uttering, equated with begetting or generation, is what the Father is. He was not, is not, anything prior to this generating. Therefore any event that we experience, be it our own perception of something, or any event at all, is so to say undercut and supported by, as having at its heart, this eternal utterance or generation of the Word in which all things are contained. The very newness of things reflects eternal novelty and freshness, and thus time is eternal reality′s image and cipher, not its negation merely.

If therefore anyone would replace this religious view with, as in absolute idealism, a universe of immortal spirits, ourselves, in perpetual mutual relation, then should he or she not say, as preserving the insight of theology, that we in some way generate one another perpetually? We do not just find ourselves passively there. How could we? But nor is the individual alone responsible for all else. Rather, we must be as necessary to the whole community as the community is necessary to us. It could not exist without me, or you, and nor could I without it. We are "begotten" from one another, yet each has his own energy which is yet one with that of the whole.

In a way this is symbolised by the two births, of nature and spirit (baptism), which in reality, however, are not successive, or births at all. We are in ourselves and we are in all the others, as a whole. We are necessary, not born, not dying. Yet we appear to come out and return, ceaselessly, so ceaselessly that our coming out is one with our returning and vice versa. Our life is the world′s life, is life itself. To be alienated is, typically, to feel oneself contingent, from another exclusively. Lucifer or Satan knew or felt this. Yet this figure disappears when we understand, as in the realisation that God is himself the atman, my deepest self, "closer to me than I am to myself" (Augustine). So the eternal perceiving of McTaggart′s spirits is more profoundly their eternal begetting and breathing forth (of one another). More perfectly than in a still hierarchical if egalitarian Trinitarianism, their begetting is their breathing forth. There is just one, unitary action to each one′s being. So there is no multiplicity of disparate processions, begetting, "spirating", being begotten and "spirated", seemingly at odds with the divine simplicity. If there is plurality then it is only of the persons who proceed, each in the same way and with no first or Adamic person. Each of us is passively active and actively passive, begetting (all) the others in the very act of being begotten by them. Each and all, that is, are equally necessary to the whole and to one another.

What about the Trinity then? Well, either it foreshadowed this as a historical conception, our first guess in time at such a reality, heralding the overcoming of religious alienation, or there is in truth an antecedent or divine Trinity (as in Paul′s "In him we live and move and have our

3

being") which we should now be seen as somehow explicating. Perhaps we need not choose, may affirm both.1

Our own birth, our newness, on our first day, this defines the character of each and every day, of each and every moment indeed, as eternal, ever new, not ageing in temporal process, each contained in all and all in each (the principle of music). Birth, which causes time, is yet eternity′s deepest symbol, symbol of a world without decay. So also death, death as required for every particular seen on its own, not seen in the All, where each is "as having nothing yet possessing all things". Non moriar sed vivam and yet, media vitae in morte sumus. Life is an imperfect and still contradictory category, in other words. "Oh life that is no life at all", exclaimed the mystic of Avila, a Hegelian before her time.

To find ourselves simply there, passively, this would be a constraint, unfree, less than infinite. Rather, the Whole, and so we, wills to be. Even the most abject suicide wills this, per definitionem. There is a primordial will, spirit moving on the face of the waters as foundation for the formation of things, necessity within their necessity, whole in each part. Here, in the end, necessity is freedom and freedom is necessity. Satan as protest-figure is produced by religious alienation. In a true philosophy of identity in difference he has no place. The centre is everywhere, in each. Catholicism expressed this by seeing the local church as the whole Church, even the total universe of spirits. This is the positive rationale for the much decried "private" Mass able to be celebrated by a solitary person.

So all is eternally accomplished, not as in some primordial past, but as ceaselessly or in each moment definitively accomplishing itself beyond all movement or change. Movement after all is defined in philosophy as imperfect act merely, i.e. as long as the movement is still going on and is hence incomplete. It is incomplete for as long as it still exists as movement. Time itself, as cyclic, or as viewed whole, is beyond such motion, itself supra-temporal, a flaming wheel. It does not "return". Rather, an eternal return is the unbroken sempiternity of each and all.

*****************************

So birth and beginning, all that we seem to remember, simply is our forgetting our eternal begetting and being begotten. When we love we fragmentarily remember our eternal partners. The time-series upon which we are launched, precisely at birth, is the signum formale we have simply to see through (as we see past the image on our retina). It is thus the symbolic mode of perception proper to us as finite-in-infinite, as parts which are one with the whole, the universal in the particular and, which is more easily forgotten perhaps, vice versa. Obviously we cannot without contradiction proceed beyond or after time itself. We have rather to "go out of" time, and that daily or continually. This is effected by awareness. It can be helped by symbolic or even sacramental presentation, by art or participation in some religious or dramatic action.

This continual "going out of time" is life′s acknowledgement,again, of its own categorial finitude, due to which it is accordingly bounded by death, its end. This end, death, is present in every fibre of life′s essence, upon which actual physical death, always beyond our experience however (since it is as unreal and finite as life), sets the seal. We acknowledge where we have always been as we return to what we never left, and so do not return, do not "go away" (where to?). No birth no death, say the Buddhists.

1 From Hegel′s idealist standpoint such conceptions are self-validating, not requiring witness or empirical confirmation (the mistake of the Crusaders in seeking the empty grave at Jerusalem). But suppose the conceptions too admit continuous improvement or development

4

The contradiction we mentioned, eternity after time, reappears in creation-narrative. Human beings are not really given earth, sky, gardens, any more than they are given their own being as if existing before it. Our necessary milieu is not external to us, except by the metaphor of sensation.

Man is nothing without earth, sky, air and so on, which he projects in symbol as outside of him, or as if he were formed from a pre-existent dust. The outside is the inside. These are also defective categories of thinking. For there is no such duality in concreto. We should see that it is our symbolic form of representation merely. Yet more intimately, we individuals do not exist before or independently of one another. As I am nothing without air, a milieu, so that milieu is pre-eminently the Whole composed of spirits, i.e. a spiritual whole which is more essentially a whole than are the precarious organic wholes of sense-experience. Each and every individual is, like the milieu (since they are this), essential to my being and to my being me, just as I am essential to this milieu. For if some are essential then all must be so. The difference would otherwise be too great and definite.

I cannot be given, as an extra, as a gift, what is already essential to my being. Nor can I be given my being as if being there already to receive it.

******************************

The basic insight here was the replacing of perception with begetting or even a yet more dynamic conception as better approximating to the relation between the persons making up absolute reality. If we posit begetting exclusively of the individual subject, myself, we get solipsism. Solipsism, however, in so far as proposed, had always entailed a web of inter-related solipsisms, thus appearing to cancel itself out by internal contradiction. Its genuine attraction and merit, though, was practical. One should live as if begetter and lord of fate and of the universe. This though is the contradiction within, the impotence of the Kantian practical philosophy. Living "as if" is pretence and unbelief.

Hence our solution. We do indeed beget, as affirming and willing, our environment, our companions. This is the ultimate ground of the exhortation to accept in gratitude life and its gifts, as if from a purely yet infinitely Other, though this is contradiction since otherness by itself is a finite category as bounded by the non-other, ourselves. Hence the further exhortation, in the tradition, to be free, to be master of one′s destiny in eternal terms at least. This freedom is itself then explained as grace and ordination ("fore"-ordination is mere figure, the temporal within the timeless). This, however, is the familiar coincidence of opposites, making even or especially of Augustinian man a crypto-absolute, the atman.

But now, if all and each beget in this way then has not begetting itself collapsed back into mere perception again? One should rather say that we have uncovered perception′s own truth, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder precisely because beauty is in the power and will of the beholder. Yet if all others are not more in my power than I am in theirs as we spring forth eternally together, by free but by no means contingent choice, then power is so to say reduced to perception just as much as perception is promoted to power. Will, that is to say, volition, is saved from its (practical) separateness, is assimilated to cognition precisely as in the Hegelian dialectic.

This then is the meaning, the import, of our begetting one another. It is the truth of perception, and insofar as we are what we behold we beget ourselves too in one another. There is no limit to the identity in difference. This goes no further than, was implicit in the position that each of the divine ideas, according to which all things were said to be made, was identical with the divine essence. Two things identical with a third thing are identical with one another. The truth of identity in difference does not abrogate the basic logical law of syllogism. Otherwise discourse would have come to an end, if it could ever have begun.

5

************************************

The physicists are now coming round to thinking space and matter as one, made up indifferently of quanta, as has already been mooted with light, for example. Space is as granulated as matter at the micro-level, the continuous mere appearance, as with moving film. The structures of quanta (ribbons, strings, membranes, webs) are not in space, they are space.2 In the same way we have found that man, spirit, is not to be thought of in separation from nature. He is within nature, rather, since he is not thinkable apart from nature. His body, the primary symbol of his spirit, of himself, is continuous with it, the outside is inside and so the inside is found projected outside.

Clearly the assimilation of space to matter, or vice versa indifferently, removes all reason for treating time in isolation. Space has now finally lost its absoluteness for the scientists, an event presaged in Kant′s analysis, and time must follow suit. For Kant, held back by the Newtonians, space and time had retained a reduced autonomy as a priori forms of understanding. Nobody, except the absolute idealists, knew what to do with this result, least of all the physicists and astronomers in the field. Now, however, the trajectory, of central importance for contemporary man′s self-awareness, of the history of modern philosophy comes into full and clear view.

Space and time are matter, it now appears. Yet matter is no longer herself as we knew her. She is never perceived in herself, that much may be retained from quantum physics, with the clear conclusion to be drawn that there is no in-herself. Hegel drew this conclusion long ago, however, making use of Kant′s results. It is, at least, one view of the recently enunciated anthropic principle in cosmology and physics. The common-sense objectivities must at this final level be discarded as misperception or, less harshly, as a symbolic view of things, like our art-products. They are forms of spirit′s self-consciousness, of self in other, or other in self indifferently. This is the super-organic unity signified in religion but here demonstrated, or at least proposed as demonstrable hypothesis.

There is a similar coming together of disparate strands in anthropology and related sciences. After Aristotle had left us with the dualism of soul and body ("The intellect comes from outside" he tells us in De partibus animalium), we see-sawed between materialism and spiritualism for a long time. With the advent of a monist evolutionary theory theologians tried to maintain an archaic notion of an "infused" soul (from outside?) in total divorce from the system into which it should be infused. This has gradually given way, helped along by such insiders as Teilhard de Chardin , on all sides to a notion of the world becoming conscious of itself. Nothing more radical can be thought so long as temporality is retained as objective determinant. This notion has now received strong encouragement from palaeontological discoveries showing that the (it was assumed) unsouled homo erectus laid the foundations, of course through intelligence and associated virtue, for man′s domination of the globe and of the world′s life when he pursued the larger prehistoric mammals into less than temperate regions and successfully hunted them, a million years or more before homo sapiens is recorded as appearing. An idealist philosopher would of course relate this insight, as coming at the right time, to the progress in dialectical thinking already going on, as here too in our becoming historically aware of it.

Man, in this way, can begin to be seen as taking his place as the embodiment, the realisation and incarnation, of the whole, with the outside as his inside, his inside fully at home with the supposed outside, as it should be once these categories begin to be cast aside.

2 Lee Smolin, Perimeter Institute, Waterloo, Canada, as reported in Focus, Nr. 21, 23 May 2005, p.79, by Michael Odenwald.

6

I mentioned the history of modern philosophy. We should now understand better what was at stake in the period from Descartes on to Kant and up to Hegel. It is superficial and worse to speak here of German philosophy, as if discrediting by this particularising what is no less than the human advance. It is equally dishonourable to fasten upon Descartes′ supposed vanities and failings in the neoscholastic manner, and to throw scorn upon the very concept of reform (Maritain). Scientific method was here born, and with it the power to penetrate beyond appearance. One should say reborn, in view of the Greek achievement. Yet here, more aware, after centuries of theological seriousness, of the need not to believe lightly, it gave birth simultaneously, to increased self-consciousness, the seed of idealism. This, and not the simplistic dualism, is the mark and merit of Descartes. There is no question but that the doctrine of creation, however open in itself to constant reinterpretation, has served as a bar at times to progress in knowledge of reality.

**************************************

In a sense the primacy of consciousness is obvious, once thought. This was the advance of the philosophers of the early modern period, to bring this into the open, whence it might be read back into Aristotelian and other earlier texts. This is why we find the physicist Smolim, who feels as it were professionally bound (he need not) to be a realist about time and matter, raising the question about the observer of the whole, the universe, who is within the whole. His solution is to try to devise a theory which would be manifestly observer-neutral or the same for all possible observers. This though opens the way for coincidence with the view he would oppose, a universe of pure consciousnesses operating with a common cypher or, more harshly, illusion, viz. matter, time and change.

Smolin speaks of studying "a system that by definition contains everything that exists." But this, quite plainly, would be the system, reality as a whole. We ask, in virtue of what would it be a system. Answer, nothing! This means, plausibly at least, that ultimate reality cannot be a system, must be simple, as Aquinas long ago so trenchantly argued. Aquinas went on, however, in apparent contradiction of simplicity, to claim that this reality formed a Trinity of "persons" who were one with their relationships with one another. In similar vein Smolin quickly deduces that there can be no "absolute properties" of the parts of his ultimate system. Rather, all properties will and can only be relational, such as to "define and describe any part of the universe only through its relationships to the rest." This is precisely the situation of Trinitarian theology. The Father simply is the eternal begetting of the Son, the Word, which he perpetually and self-constitutively utters. The Holy Spirit is perpetual procession, in "spiration", from Father and Son, so that Aquinas says that he is Gift, donum, as name.

Aquinas is able at least to indicate the compatibility of this Trinity with the necessary simplicity, beyond system, of the First Principle. He argues that the more perfectly a thing proceeds from its origin, the more it is to be identified with it, backing this up by what is more than an analogy with human cognitive processes. The case is similar, if different, in McTaggart. The most perfect unity of all, that between spirits, who are persons, is that where the unity "has no reality distinct from" the individuals but is somehow in each of those it unites. This follows once we grant, analytically, that "it is the eternal nature of spirit to be differentiated into finite spirits", though this view differs in some respects from Christian Trinitarianism. As overcoming hierarchic differentiation more perfectly it might seem less at prima facie odds with the necessary simplicity, even though the persons are maybe so many more than three (they might be just one in the end though). There is a real identity in difference here.

Just as the Father begets the Son, so, we claimed, must these persons beget one another, ceaselessly, in an existence of truly mutual support. In the illusory temporal series this is

7

reflected by the ceaseless self-begetting of the human race. Like God the Father, it is plain that we would beget ceaselessly, given the requisite opportunity and physique. For the female such begetting includes the childbirth cycle, as genuinely erotic, therefore. Here we have the true reason for the centrality of sex, the urge of libido, beyond any doctrine of a deformed or "sinful" concupiscence. The urge is to do it again and again, as aping eternity, each satisfactory erotic act embodying in intention the whole, as if each time wanting to be the last or final act before dying. And each offspring too is the same, is the whole world begotten by itself, an individual person who is one with the unity, the Whole, which he or she has constitutively within himself, as his biological and mental development, death apart, will witness.

***************************************

The view might seem bizarre. Consider, though, the alternative, contingency in time and a contingency apart from the other contingency of the created world. In an earlier paper I argued for a divine fiat as only possible explanation of one′s experienced contingency.3 Now I rather question the experience as misperception, calling out to be resolved but not in that way. What it shows, the perplexity at one′s self-being, is that one cannot be contingent. The postulation of a quasi-extrinsic divine and everlasting love or even "election" is a historic attempt at an explanation, not indeed to be rejected but to be itself more perspicuously presented, as mystics or people in mystical mood have indicated. We thus have the Augustinian tag I quoted in 1985 ("there is one closer to me than I am to myself") at the heart of almost the most normative text of the tradition. Whatever is thus closer, one may claim, is I and not another. The empirical, seemingly contingent self is not the true or real self that we are urged to know, a truth which believers in reincarnation also can find strong indications for embracing.

In the paper I had suggested that the ancient belief in an eternal, non-evolutionary world, implying at least on some premises an infinite multitude of individuals, in fact prevented appreciation of the self as person, unique, subject. I was forced to admit the paradox, the greater difficulty, in admitting a finite number of men coming late in time and yet aspiring to understand the whole, as if by right. "All nature is akin, and the soul has learned everything" (Meno). Conditioned to an evolutionary perspective Plato might well not have come so far, so far, that is, as the presupposition of all science, viz. that nature is intelligible in terms of our human intelligence. Intelligence, that is, is human. In fact Plato already overcame the conditioning, not of evolution but of similar materialist views.

This brings us, all the same, to this question of the differentiation of infinity, should we deny now the contingency of this finite number of men of which we are used to think we form part by a certain creative election. The three of Trinitarian philosophy can be made to wear a certain necessity in relation to the infinite One. This will hardly apply to McTaggart′s finite but timelessly necessary spirits, whatever number we might assign. So shall we make them infinite in number? There seems no reason not to from the side of science, since the absoluteness of the finite temporal perspective has been rejected. This will apply even though the number of micro-particles be finite and unchanging, since the ban on infinite divisibility does not apply to spirit and the world seen in a grain of sand can itself be the world of this infinite number of spirits.

^{3 Stephen Theron, "Other Problems about the Self", Sophia, Australia, 24,1, April 1985, pp.11-21.}

8

Alternatively we might replace three with one, analogously at least to the Pauline "You are all one person in Jesus Christ". In the 1985 paper I referred to the evasiveness of "monopsychism", thinking mainly of some medieval Aristotelians but also of Hegel. That is, we might still think of the finite number of consciousnesses as making up this One, as they do the Christian Church, sacrament of the human race as a whole for its supporters. However, it is possible to dispense with the individual self, as Hume, though not McTaggart, had thought. Notions of collective and indeed "egoless" consciousness are common currency in many cultures, and awareness of this can embody the term or outcome of experiences typically classed as mystical.4 Be this as it may, the point is that we need not be saddled with the surd of an absolutely finite number where necessity and freedom meet. If, for example, we admit with McTaggart the possibility of reincarnation within an illusory time-series, then this way of viewing ourselves might just as well, it seems to me, be extended over the equally illusory extensions of space. That is, my (or "my") consciousness might here and now be extending to what might seem to be other persons, some or all of them, though this be as unbeknown to me as my "previous" incarnations. Then, it might seem, the universe "has no grain".

This, however, was precisely the objection felt by the early quantum physicists as they were forced, for reasons later codified by Bell′s theorem, to admit a universe no longer consisting of separate parts locally joined. Measurement of one particle "will instantly determine the direction of the other particle′s spin, thousands of miles away." This has nothing to do with physical signals, unable to travel faster than light. Rather, we deal at any moment with an indivisible whole.5 The connections are non-local since in fact the particles (and why just they?) are the connections, the relationships, from which, since they are practically endless, we can in a sense choose which ones to highlight for this or that purpose. The world is not lawless, but it is fundamentally one, as perfect a unity, it seems, as McTaggart′s community of persons. Yet he thought that only persons, spirits, could be united in this way and in fact one can see the opening to idealism offered by the stress upon the observer in the new formulations, as Niels Bohr and others were well aware. Some scientists are scandalized by this readiness to abandon the physical, as they see it, as unscientific. Yet many of them, like perhaps David Deutsch, then go on to reinterpret the physical in a way that is indistinguishable from an idealist approach, like Hegel before them, e.g. if one affirms that whatever one can envisage or think is "somewhere" real (the "multiverse").

Idealism, that is, as Wittgenstein said of philosophy as a whole, leaves everything just as it is. It is only that we now see how to think it. Any scientific development whatever is and was compatible with an idealist framework. If I suppose with Paul Davies that aliens have inserted messages in my DNA, if I admit the reality of evolution, yet all this reposes within a conception precisely of reality, which is interpretable according to the parameters of absolute idealism. Thus Findlay, it seems to me, misinterprets Hegel′s cautiously negative reaction to the first discoveries of fossil bones understood for what they were.6 Empirical phenomena are not as such absolute, since they are conditioned by the nature of the observer, as Quine, a philosopher certainly friendly to physics, has acknowledged. What Hegel would not have admitted would be the causal evolution of a power, spirit, thus dependent upon our present evolutionary state, which might without further ado give a scientific explanation of that very state, or maybe of anything else.

So did we or did we not descend from the apes, i.e. from earlier now extinct primates? We should note first that any concept of development, such as we have, entails such intermediary

creatures, and the very term "creatures" is significant, whether they be creatures of our own or

^{4 Cf. Axel Randrup, CIRIP, "Idealist Philosophy: What is Real?", the three middle sections, at http://cogprints.org/3373/01/evolutioncognition.html.
5 Cf. F. Capra, The Turning Point, Fontana, London 1983, II,3, "The New Physics".
6 J.N. Findlay, The Philosophy of Hegel, Collier, New York, 1966, pp. 274-5.}

9

some other mind or minds. In either case they are in some sense ideal, they proceed from or as an idea. Development, indeed, for one such as McTaggart, is cipher for a certain order within the supra-temporal C-series, while the concept of dialectic similarly frees development from temporality. So primates and dinosaurs will be as much or as little creatures of our consciousness as is any of our surrounding milieu here and now. Alternatively, they are part of us and, as such, may be persons (which alone exist, it is claimed), Hegel′s articulated spirits and shapes of eternity. Here though we may recall our starting-point, that it must be that we beget one another. Similarly, I create the beings from which I come or descend, since this is just my symbolic way of thinking. In reality I have no beginning, am eternally necessary to an eternal reality. But as we beget one another, so we have a collective consciousness, which may be seen as more important, the domain of science. It is here that our common public past is generated.

Is not this though just a way of speaking, collapsing the concept of truth into that of warranted assertibility merely, as MacIntyre diagnoses the forms of "internal realism"?7 We answer no. There are those who would reduce or collapse truth in this way, not noticing or ignoring the fact that it leads them to self-contradiction "in performance". Yet the avoidance of such contradiction, e.g. in relation to a supposed evolution of our cognitive powers, motivates adoption of idealism in the first place. Absolute idealism, anyhow, is not recognisable under MacIntyre′s description here. He comes close to admitting this when he stresses that "we" is "a keyword in the formulation of this kind of internalism in respect to truth and reality". Yet he misses the essential in his analysis of this when he sees it as confining philosophy to a particular "community of enquiry", instead of enhancing the role of the subject universally. What is essential is that absolute idealism absolutizes the subject. That is, it is seen as true, in the time-honoured old way, and not just "internally", that the subject is theoretically normative, that the self, the conscious subject, is the first and fundamental reality. This is the reason for Hegel′s identification of the person with the universal, making of the thinking subject the antithesis of the particular individual. This situation leads to the discovery of the principle of identity in difference. As MacIntyre says, "it is only insofar as we understand what follows from those premises that we understand the premises themselves." It is not, anyhow, that truth is reduced, to warrantable assertibility or to anything else, though Putnam might be interpreted in that way. Rather, truth is expanded to fuller stature by a so-to-say material inclusion in it of the thinking consciousness as fundamental. Thus Aquinas himself says that the first reality to fall into the mind is being, i.e. mind is prior and being should not therefore be played off against it. Hence it is mind, nous, that provides "the terminus for all understanding" and which crowns Hegel′s dialectic as the Absolute Idea, thought thinking itself. This is the absolute category or, rather, the final transcendence of categorial limits by something that "necessarily... is whatever it is" (MacIntyre), which is itself, rather, necessity, though use of this term casts us back into a phase of the dialectic now overcome. God, any God, such as MacIntyre is referring to here, must be beyond necessity as he is beyond cause.

The sense in act is the sensible in act. The intellect in act is the intelligible in act (in actu), and vice versa in each case. These Aristotelian and scholastic realist tags will also bear an idealist interpretation. Indeed they call out for this. For how will the sensible become the sense, the knowable the knower, unless the reality (sensus est de re) is in essence a function of those who sense and know (sensus est quaedam ratio)? Also the scholastic doctrine was that omne ens est verum, understanding by verum a quality in mente. This was understood realistically (in accordance with a certain type of correspondence theory). Thus understood, however, it is incompatible with our evolutionary paradigms and to that extent, as evoking an "infused" soul or similar dualisms incompatible with a scientific view, archaic. One can, however, preserve

^{7 A. MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, Notre Dame 1988, p.169.}

10