[There’s little new in this entry but I’m trying to restate some of my basic ideas in as simple and clear a form as possible as I move towards an enlargement — God willing — of my understanding of this world, this phase of Creation. I plan on posting an entry before month-end which will be a guide to the entries on this blog, Acts of Being.]
Sometimes I’ll mention that I’m working to show that Christian revelation and modern empirical knowledge can be reconciled in one worldview. While this is true, it’s only a major sub-goal. My greater goal is:
To establish the primary importance of God’s acts-of-being, that is — acts of bringing into being. These acts of creation, necessary to the continued existence of contingent being, are of primary importance relative to everything else, including all aspects of substantial being and also formal truths and the associated acts of reasoning. In my enlarged existentialism, even formal truths are the result of acts-of-being possible only to God.
This doesn’t mean that I undervalue substance, but I do see substance as being secondary to what brings it to be: acts-of-being possible only to our Creator. Another way to put matters is: creaturely substance and particlar entities made of substance are objects of God’s love.
This also doesn’t mean that I think God can, or would wish to, create contradictions or ‘truths’ such as “1+1=5”, but I take seriously the physical nature of human beings and the human brain upon which is founded the human mind. I can’t make sense of the traditional idea that truths somehow float outside of Creation and yet we can somehow perceive them and make them part of our thoughts.
The existentialist insight has been obsured at the expense of some adolescent angst which allegedly lies at the heart of that insight. Both Kierkegaard, from a somewhat liberalized and modernized Lutheran standpoint, and Sartre, from an atheistic standpoint, did produce angst-filled writings to be sure. This is passingly strange since neither man failed to enjoy the goodness of God’s Creation. Sartre was certainly far more disordered than Kierkegaard but that seemingly dour Dane wasted a personal fortune in an impressively short time, even providing a sinfully extravagant birthday party for a young female relative. Before leaving this subject, I’ll note that I read Sartre’s Nausea, the novel mentioned in the citation for his Nobel Prize in literature and came away with the idea that Sartre was upset with the world just because of his existentialist insight. If Sartre could have accepted the more traditional belief in substance as being self-sustaining or even eternal, he would have been more intellectually accepting of the world he so enjoyed in sometimes very sinful ways. It was Sartre’s understanding of some ‘monstrous’ act of creation, no — ongoing acts of creation, that made him understand so clearly that being was outside of his control. Substance couldn’t be shaped freely because it was subject to these ongoing acts-of-being.
At the same time, Sartre appreciated the importance of substance as being the created stuff in which acts-of-being (not his term) inhered. Etienne Gilson has even made the claim that the atheistic Sartre was a better existentialist thinker than the devoutly Christian Kierkegaard, just because Gilson saw Sartre as having a better understanding of substance.
The existential act, the act-of-being, is primary but we’d never know a thing about if it were not for the substance of our eyes and ears and brain. We’d never be if not for that substance nor would we know truth if not for the manifested truths from which the stuff of our world is shaped. Created forms of being, abstract (the truths in their ‘raw’ form) and concrete, have to be studied, but that’s a complicated issue which I’ve discussed in many prior postings. Moreover, it’s the sort of explanation best done by actually producing analyses drawing upon the specific sciences such as physics and mathematics and biology. Hard work precedes the hard work of contemplation and philosophical analysis. That first level of hard work is necessary because higher truths manifested in Creation can be seen only through the substance and the specific things which are shaped from those manifested truths which I call the Primordial Universe.
I’m far from satisfied with the above discussion of my goal, but I’m perhaps edging closer to understanding what I’m up to. The process of understanding is itself the understanding, that is, its a reshaping of my mind and my language. This is to say that I’m edging closer to an understanding of the general direction in which I’m headed, though I’ll probably never pass beyond an understanding more exact than the proverbial “generally westward.” I think I live too early in this process of building the foundations for the next phase of human civilization.