Hedwig Conrad-Martius

Placed an order for Hedwig Conrad-Martius, Das Sein, shipped by Abe Books all the way from Japan… should be here in 30-60 days. The book is one of  Ratzinger’s sources for his reflections on person and relation. The author is a woman, a phenomenologist and Christian mystic. Though Protestant, she received a dispensation to become the godmother of Edith Stein. Stein’s interest in Catholicism came from a visit to the home of Conrad-Martius.

C-M was one of the first women in German to pursue a university education. She came under the influence of Husserl, but later felt that Husserl's transcendental idealist tendency was not adequate. She herself worked out what is called an "ontological phenomenology."

Interesting that her Das Sein is one of the three sources quoted by Ratzinger when he indicates directions for the further development of his insights about the basically relational nature of all personal being. The other two sources are B. Welte, “Homoousios hemin,” in Das Konzil von Chalkedon III, ed. A. Grillmeier and H. Bacht (Würzburg, 1954), 51-80 and H.U. von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe according to Maximus the Confessor, tr. Brian E. Daley (San Francisco: Ignatius and Communio Books, 2003), 235-55. See http://books.google.co.il/books?id=Y1l5R-eROwYC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

Perhaps I should work towards a second article on Person and Relation, concentrating this time on Ratzinger's sources. A sort of retrieval of Ratzinger along the lines of what I tried to do for De Smet: what is his understanding of knowing? being? objectivity / truth? Should be extremely interesting. Ratzinger has, of course, a Bonaventure-Franciscan background, fundamentally, in contrast to several of the other leading theologians of the Council who had a Thomist background. 

Secularism, the Scotist notion of being, and India

Milbank's bete noire - as, interestingly, also Lonergan's - is Duns Scotus and his equivocal notion of being, applicable equally to both God and creatures. It is this notion of being that made possible an account of the world as apart from God, and provided the basis for the concepts of pure nature and the secular in Western modernity.

Certainly Sankara's understanding of Being / Sat is not equivocal: even the most extreme monist interpreters would admit that, to the point of actually regarding the world as maya understood as illusion.

So: where are we?

What do we need to do as Christian thinkers in India? What kind of reading of the Western and Indian tradition? Our complexity, which is largely unknown to the West except for people like Clooney, is the new post-inculturation opposition between Brahmanic Hinduism and the subaltern / Dalit sensibility. Yet perhaps we cannot simply jettison the past. I am for engagement with it - even the Brahmanic past.

Hauerwas and Blond on Scotus

Stanley Hauerwas is one more who, with Philip Blond, identifies Scotus as responsible for modernity and, eventually, postmodernity, with his insistence on the univocity of being, and his exaltation of being over and above God. (See his "The Christian Difference, or Surviving Postmodernism," The Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology, ed. Graham Ward [Oxford: Blackwell, 2001] 147-8.) (Earlier I found Caputo doing a similar thing... See his Philosophy and Theology, and my paper at Yercaud.)

Strangely, it is the Franciscan Sidney Mascarenhas who is now insisting on the pluriverse, accusing Thomas of uni-versity.

Prabhakara's dis-essentialized notion of being

Prabhakara of the Purva Mimamsa seems to imply that being is not to be regarded as yet another essence or whatness. De Smet remarks, in fact, on this dis-essentialized notion of being:

There are many jatis but no highest one, called satta (beingness), as acknowledged by Nyaya. Indeed, we can find groups of characteristics common to classes of beings but no set of characteristics common to all. Beings are ultimately disparate. When we call them all sat (being) we do not mean that they have something like a common essence but that each one is an individual "existing in its own way" as endowed with its own particular essence (svarupa-satta). Note the interest of this dis-essentialized notion of being. (De Smet, Guidelines p. 218)

Useful for a history of the notion of being in India.

Being, on, sat

Working on the text for the IGNOU philosophy course (Being and Essence), I became aware that I have been concentrating so much on essence that I have quite forgotten being. Of course, the whole thing starts with being, with Parmenides who used various forms of einai (to be) to speak of stable, unchanging being. Still, it would be interesting to follow up not merely the Platonic crystallization of what Parmenides began in terms of ousia, but also the vagaries of the Greek word einai and on. Heidegger, of course, famously concentrated on this, and on Aristotle's observation that being is used in a variety of ways...

Then of course I have not looked at all at Indian thought. That is a different history altogether. I suppose I would have to look at the Sanskrit sat and its derivatives. Sat is, like ousia, a derivative and a substantive of as, which is the infinitive to be. So there is a prima facie similarity in the original development. Also, just as Parmenides and Plato concentrated on the unchanging aspect of being, so also in India there is this fascination with the unchanging, the permanent, the stable....

What about essence? That will require some work.

What resources are available for the Indian side? I know there is the Marathi Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Any other reference work like that?

And how much time do I have for all this? Till 27 July. 28 we leave for the Rectors' retreat.

Being and Essence

I am busy this month composing a note on Being and Essence for the new IGNOU course on Philosophy, at the behest of George Panthanmackel, MSFS. I think the CBCI / CRI have managed to persuade IGNOU to offer a philosophy course that would be largely designed by Catholic philosophers, and would be meant to serve Catholic philosophy students - while being open, naturally, to all. This would be a way for our seminarians to have their philosophical studies validated as a civilly recognized degree.

Panthanmackel has been released to supervise the work for 6 months. I believe he is based in Delhi, from where he coordinates especially the writing of notes for the course.

Being and Essence has never been a topic I have been interested in. With a largely Thomist / Lonergan background, one tends to be more interested in esse and existence, rather than essence. I took up the challenge, however, with the intention of seeing how the discourse about being and essence could be led to the recognition of the capital role of esse and existence.

The study has proved to be interesting, however. I discovered that I - and perhaps others - tend to read Plato and especially Aristotle through the lens of Thomas, assuming that Thomas' distinctions are to be found in Aristotle. I am discovering that ousia / being, essence and substance are not at all as clear as they seem to be. It seems that with every book Aristotle has a slightly different meaning of ousia, and substance. And in the middle of it all is his to ti en einai, which Thomas rendered quite literally as quod quid erat esse, and which Lonergan explains as the form or the formal cause, not the essence. What Thomas calls essence is Aristotle's to ti estin, says Lonergan.

But I have to check all this.

I must confess that, thanks really to Panthanmackel, I opened Aristotle's original works for the first time in my life. I am really ashamed about that, but there is always a first time... So.