Horwath 1

Robert Horwath

Phil 400

Professor Trabbic

26 April 2010

Being and Action in The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics:

With An Exploration into Schopenhauer’s Anti-Realism and an Example of Common

Relativism

INTRODUCTION

The author seeks to demonstrate the following: “the meaning of being, its

discovery, being and intellect as correlative, the primary division of being, real and

mental, being as self-revealing through action: every being as active, and an anti-realist

objection and a Clarkean response.”1

THE MEANING OF THE TERM “BEING”

Being “in its primary existential meaning…is a noun derived from the verb ‘to

be.’”2 A being also refers to “that which is.”3 St. Thomas Aquinas “distinguishes another

secondary non-existential meaning of ‘is,’ wherein it functions merely as a copula to join

together a subject and a predicate without committing itself to the reality of either: ‘X is

1
Trabbic, Joseph. Paper Instructions. PHIL 400: Metaphysics. Ave Maria University. Spring 2010.

2
Clark, Norris. The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics. 2001. 25.

3
Clark, Norris. 25.
 Horwath 2

Y.’”4 The word being “used without an article usually means either (1) all that is, or the

totality of the real, or (2) precisely that in a thing which makes it to be a being, e.g., ‘the

being of a thing.”5 “A being is that which is actually presents itself as standing out from

the darkness of non-being into the light of being.”6 Also Clark remind the metaphysician

that he “must recover this fresh explicit awareness of being itself, the being of beings,

instead of being absorbed in what they are, as being ’thises’ and ‘that’s.”7 This recovery

is accomplished through “a consciousness of wonder.”8

THE DISCOVERY OF BEING

In order to call forth “the explicit awareness of the ‘is’ of being” we must venture

into “two main paths”:

(1) Exploring downward into any individual being to uncover the most

basic level of its act of existence by which it is present in the real world,

by which it is. This is the most fundamental of all attributes, which all

others presuppose and build upon. All other attributes talk about the

subject as already given. The is posits it radically as present to be talked

about at all, posits the whole subject with all its attributes at once, to be

unfolded bit by bit in subsequent knowledge. Its actual existence is the

4
Clark, Norris. 25.

5
Clark, Norris. 25.

6
Clark, Norris. 26.

7
Clark, Norris. 26.

8
Clark, Norris. 26.
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deepest level in any being.”9 The other path is, “(2) Expanding outward,

following the drive of my mind to know all that there it, I notice that this

most basic attribute in each being is also that which it has in common with

all other beings, the ultimate bond of community of all real beings,

forming the universe of reality, the community of existents, present to

each other…this ultimate horizon of inquiry can only be expressed by

some all-embracing term like ‘being,’ ‘the real,’ ‘reality,’ or the like.10

St. Thomas avoids an extreme apophaticism in philosophy, “since for him the

fundamental component of being is the act of existence itself, which lies beyond all

limiting essences and forms, pervading them all but irreducible to any one of them.

Hence he can speak of God as pure Subsisting Act of Existence that is, but is beyond all

limiting essences or forms, all whats.”11 Again, Clark moves “the metaphysician beyond

the merely abstract understanding of the meaning of being toward an existential

‘awakening’ to experience what actual existence means in the concrete for the whole

person.”12

INTELLECT AND BEING AS CORRELATIVE

The metaphysician in searching “for the meaning of being, becomes aware that being is

the ultimate objective correlative of the drive of the mind to know, co-extensive with its

scope, that which defines it as intellect. Intellect is radically for being, oriented toward it

9
Clark, Norris. 26.

10
Clark, Norris. 27.

11
Clark, Norris. 27.

12
Clark, Norris. 27-28.
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by a natural, innate affinity, aptitude, or ‘connaturality’ for being. The necessary

corollary of this—the other side of the correlation—is that being itself is for intelligence.

Its ultimate meaning and fulfillment require that it be brought into the light of

consciousness, that it be unveiled i.e., revealed (= remove the veil: revelatum) to mind.”13

Being is an “inexhaustible mystery: The veiled: unveiled.”14 The human mind, “by the

term ‘being’, expresses all that there is, but indistinctly, indeterminately. And we can

never know any real being exhaustively, at least in this life.”15

PRIMARY DIVISION OF BEING: REAL AND MENTAL

Clarks says, “’being’ means that which is, or is present, in some way. But as soon

as we press it hard for clarity and apply it to all the things we know, in the mind and

outside of it, it breaks up into two basic irreducible orders: real and mental being. They

are defined by contrast with each other.”16 Real being is “that which is present not by its

own act of existence but only within an idea, i.e., as being-thought-about. ‘Its being,’ St.

Thomas says, ‘is its to-be-thought-about” by a real mind.”17 The main divisions of

mental being are:

(1) past and future as such, which were and will be, but are not; (2)

content of dreams; (3) abstractions, which are drawn from the real but as

abstract exist only in the mind, e.g. man, life, etc. (4) mental constructs,

13
Clark, Norris. 29.

14
Clark, Norris. 29.

15
Clark, Norris. 29.

16
Clark, Norris. 29.

17
Clark, Norris. 30.
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which can never exist outside the mind but help us to think about the real:

mathematical entities (numbers, circles, squares, etc), logical relations,

negations (blindness, nothingness) (which are really only convenient

summaries of longer ‘not-propositions’), hypotheses for testing, plans for

action, etc.18

Real being is prioritized, and:

since mental being cannot be present save by being thought about by a real

mind and can only be understood by reference to a mind thinking it, it is

radically secondary, dependent, parasitic on real being, which is primary.

Real beings (real minds) can generate ideas; ideas of themselves cannot

generate real beings. All mental beings are in some way derived from and

refer back to the order of real being. They are present in all real minds,

but they are not themselves the ‘really real,” as Plato thought they had to

be in order to ground eternal truths and values.19

The metaphysician must recognize the distinction between real and mental being” is the

first crucial step in the ordering of our experience to render it intelligible. To be able to

tell the difference between the two is the fundamental mark of sanity, just as to confuse

them is the mark of insanity, e.g., to confuse hallucinations with reality, possibilities with

actualities. Ideals…guide out lives as goals-to-be-realized to be made real, but are not

the realization of these goals.”20

18
Clark, Norris. 30.

19
Clark, Norris. 30.

20
Clark, Norris. 31.
 Horwath 6

The student of metaphysics must know the “criterion of real being vs. mental being.”21

Clark says,

that they only adequate criterion for discerning the presence of real being,

one that is both necessary and sufficient and that we all use in practice,

whether we recognize it or not is that of action. What is real is that which

can act on its own, express itself in action, is the center and source of its

own characteristic action…Real beings make a difference in the real

world. Ideas, images, etc., on the other hand, cannot act on their own; I

control them by thinking about them, rejecting them, changing them as I

will…Real beings in their actions on me and mine on them, have real

consequences which I have to cope with or get hurt; ideas do not, unless I

act on them.22

BEING AS SELF-REVEALING THROUGH ACTION: EVERY BEING IS ACTIVE

The student of metaphysics must learn that:

it is through action, and only through action, that real beings manifest or

‘unveil’ their being, their presence, to each other and to me. All the

beings that make up the world of my experience this reveal themselves as

not just present, standing out of nothingness, but actively presenting

themselves to others and vice-versa by interacting with each other…it is

the very nature of real being, existential being, to pour over into action

21
Clark, Norris. 31.

22
Clark, Norris. 31.
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that is self-revealing and self-communicative…existential being is

intrinsically dynamic not static.”23 The student “reaches this insight in two

steps: (1) By observation I notice that this is going on al all the levels of

the beings of the world open to my experience: on the inorganic level all

living things interact with each other and reproduce themselves to add new

members to the community of existents—life is by nature expansive; on

the human level it is natural, a built-in drive within us, to interact and

share with each other by communication, working with each other, and at

the highest levels by affectionate, caring love, which is then productive of

new members of the community of existents. (2) By metaphysical

reflection I come to realize that this is not just a brute fact but an intrinsic

property belonging to the very nature of every real being as such, if it is to

count at all in the community of existents.24

If all beings were indistinguishable from nothingness “there could not be a universe at all.

To have a universe, a community of real existents, its members would have to

communicate with each other, be linked together somehow and all communication

requires some kind of action. A non-acting, non-communicating being is for all practical

purposes (in the order of intelligibility, value, action, or making any difference at all)

equivalent to no being at all. To be real is to make a difference.”25

23
Clark, Norris. 32.

24
Clark, Norris. 32.

25
Clark, Norris. 32.
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Clark in concluding this section states: “’being’ in its strong primary sense as real being

means that which is, i.e., actually exists in the real order, is present as standing out of

nothingness with its own act of existence outside of an idea. It actively presents itself to

other real beings by its characteristic self-manifesting, self-communicating action on

them, and in return receives their action on it, thus becoming a member in the

interconnected community of real existents we call the universe.”26

AN ANTI-REALIST OBJECTION AND A CLARKEAN RESPONSE

German Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer states:

“The world is my idea” is a truth that is valid for every living creature,

though only man can consciously contemplate it. In doing so he attains

philosophical wisdom. No truth is more absolutely certain than that all that

exists for knowledge, and, therefore, this whole world, is only object in

relation to subject, perception of a perceiver, that is, an idea. The world is

an idea.27

Along with this statement, it is often that people of similar relativist strains declare:

“There is no such thing as the ‘real world.’ There are only my ideas and your ideas. No

one can get beyond the ideas in his own mind. The ideas in our mind are the only ‘world’

there is.”28

26
Clark, Norris. 32.

27
Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Idea. Cited by: Dr. Joseph Trabbic. Paper Instructions.
PHIL 400: Metaphysics. Ave Maria University. Spring 2010.

28
Trabbic, Joseph. Paper Instructions. PHIL 400: Metaphysics. Ave Maria University. Spring 2010.
 Horwath 9

A Clarkean response to this form of relativism is that it denies the “Journey of the Many

(All finite beings), projected outward from the One, their infinite Source, by creation: the

work of efficient causality.”29 In stating that our minds are the first principle of ‘my

world’ and yet other minds can construct another ‘world’, this places people not as

contingent beings, but rather in a position as being necessary beings for their own

construction of an individualistic cosmos with them as the center, which is insanity and

demonstrates as lack of understanding or even a denial of God and causality. Clark states

that “Human persons, therefore, are the sole mediators between the material universe and

God, the Source of both, and this is a fundamental part of our mission, our vocation as

humans on this earth, to respond to this God-given call, not just to focus exclusively on

our individualistic journeys to God.”30 This radical individualism which denies the

intelligibility of being and order in creation, all of us being a microcosm of the

macrocosm, placing our thoughts are creative independent sources of causation, cannot

be true just as 2+2 cannot be 5. If all human’s idea of the world is unique to each person

and there is not objective reality and truth in metaphysics then all human persons

participate not in a unique manifestation of their power as individuals, but rather in a

common neurosis which can only be cured through Truth, that there is a Necessary Being

and beings are ordered toward this First Principle as their final End. 31 Creation, at all its

levels, is not a manifestation of our ideas, but rather it comes from the ideas called into

being and proceeding from the Divine Mind.32

29
Clark, Norris. 303.

30
Clark, Norris. 306.

31
Clark, Norris. 308.

32
Clark, Norris. 308.
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Bibliography

Clark, Norris. The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics.

University of Notre Dame Press: Notre Dame, Indiana: 2001. 25-34; 291-314.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Idea. Cited by: Dr. Joseph Trabbic.

Paper Instructions. PHIL 400: Metaphysics. Ave Maria University. Spring

2010.

Trabbic, Joseph. Paper Instructions. PHIL 400: Metaphysics. Ave Maria University.

Spring 2010.
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