The Metaphysical Presuppositions of Being-in-the-World: A Confrontation Between St. Thomas Aquinas and Martin Heidegger

238 Pages·2010·3.07 MB·English

by  Caitlin Smith Gilson

The Metaphysical Presuppositions
of Being-in-the-World
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The Metaphysical
Presuppositions of
Being-in-the-World
A Confrontation between
St. Thomas Aquinas and Martin Heidegger
Caitlin Smith Gilson

To my dearest Fred, far along the way of the Cross
To my little loves, Mary Alison and Lily Grace, who have just begun
And to my beloved grandmother, Mary, who found her way home
One has today so few companions upon the roads of metaphysics that one
does not dare recall to them the word of Saint Augustine: “When you think these
things, it is the word of God in your heart.” But the modern man hardly thinks
anymore of these things. He bathes in the divine without being aware of it.
Etienne Gilson, Linguistics and Philosophy
Contents
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xv
Chapter 1 The Fourfold Historical Origin of Metaphysics 1
Tracing I: How the Deity Entered Philosophy 1
The Return to the Origin 1
Aletheia as the Critical Indicator of Man’s End 3
An Epistemological Digression/Discursus 5
Veritas as the “Aletheia” that Corresponds to Finitude 8
The Formation of the “Same Is for Thinking as
for Being” 10
The Parmenidean Origin qua End as the Ananke Stenai 12
Intentionality and Its Onto-Theo-Logic Directedness
in the Poem of Parmenides 13
Parmenidean Origin versus Heideggerian Ereignis 16
Tracing II: Plato’s Parmenides 18
Why the Parmenides? 18
The First Infi nite Regress 22
A Brief Move toward, and Rejection of Idealism 23
The Argument and Its Movements Understood
through the Fourfold Intentional Presupposition 27
The “Instants”: The Move to the Ground of Being 31
The “Heaps”: In Anticipation of Phenomenology 38
Tracing III: Aristotle’s De Anima 42
Aristotle’s Critique of Earlier First Principles 43
Touch as Being-in-the-World 56
Chapter 2 St. Thomas Aquinas and Classical Intentionality 61
The Luminosity of Consciousness: Abstraction 66
The Exteriority of Consciousness: Self-knowledge 74
The Meaning of Self-transcendence 78
viii Contents
Chapter 3 The Fourfold Reversals: The Displacement of
Being-in-the-World 83
Brief Discursus on Heidegger’s Husserlian Infl uence 84
The Phenomenological Ego: The Man Who Would Be King 85
The Reduction: What Is It and Why Is It? 88
Conclusion of the Discursus 94
Heidegger’s Commentary on the Critique of
Pure Reason: Abyssus Abyssum Invocat 94
Nothing or “No-thing”? 98
Antimetaphysical Ontology and the Loss of the
Intentional Presence 100
Ananke Stenai and the No-thing: A Response to the
Self-caused Cause? 102
Two Opposite Approaches to Finitude: Heidegger and
St. Thomas Aquinas 106
Finitude: Nullity or No-thing? 109
The “Catch-up” of Thinking into Being 111
“Thereness” as Dasein’s Beinghood 114
“Thereness” and the Endlessness of Dasein 118
Intentional Presence: The Meaning of Formational
Being-in-the-World 121
St. Thomas’ Prima Via: A Brief Discursus on
the Ananke Stenai 127
Uncaused Cause versus Self-caused Cause 131
Chapter 4 The Fourfold Intensities 139
The Necessity of the Causal Structure 142
Causality versus Suffi cient Reason 143
Beyond Causality as Suffi cient Reason 147
Causality and Christian Philosophy 152
The Wait and Christian Philosophy 156
Intentional Presence qua Finitude 158
Summation of Finitude: Revisiting the Wait 163
The Aeviternal Structure of the Intentional Presence 167
Conclusion: The Plenitude of the Ananke Stenai 172
Epilogue: The Metaphysics of Tragedy 176
The Elusive Tragic Essence 176
The Tragic Wager 178
The Act of Knowledge within the Tragic 179