Skip to main content

Verum est ens

Still on the first chapter of Raztinger's book, but I want to stop and share this. It's a bullseye, I think:
The Italian philosopher Giambattista (1668 - 1744)... was the first to formulate a completely new idea of truth and knowledge and who... coined the typical formula of the modern spirit when it comes to dealing with truth and reality. Against the Scholastic equation verum est ens (being is truth) he advances his own formula verum quia factum. That is to say, all that we can truly know is what we have made ourselves [ie. what we can see: seeing ~ making. -ed.]. It seems to me that this formula denotes the end of the old metaphysics and the beginning of the specifically modern mind... For the ancient world and the Middle Ages, being itself is true... apprehensible, because God, pure intellect, made it, and he made it by thinking it. To the creative original spirit... thinking and making are one and the same thing. His thinking is a creative process. Things are, because they are thought. In the ancient and medieval view, all being is, therefore, what has been thought... Converesely, this means that since all being is thought, all being is meaningful, logos, truth.*
There is a footnote here as follows:
This statement is of course only fully true of Christian thinking, which with the idea of the creatio ex nihilo attributes to God the material too; for the ancient [pre Christian -ed.]world, this remained the a-logical element, the universal matter alien to the divine... and the limit to which reality could be comprehended.
Ratzinger continues:
Vico advances the diametrically opposite thesis... he asserts that real knowledge is the knowledge of causes... all that can be known is the factum, that which we have made ourselves. [Being] is not [a subject] for the human mind... Man did not produce the cosmos, and its bottommost depths remain opaque to him... The factum was discovered as the dry land on which man could try to build a new existence for himself.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Hiatus will be blogged

This hiatus thing isn't going to plan. As I'm reading (books and blogs) I find things I think are interesting, or things I would like an opinion on, and bingo, my hiatus is in a shambles. So, *coughs*, until further notice, I'm blogging again. The main editorial difference that I can see coming from my few weeks away is that I do not expect to resume posting six out of seven days a week. There could be, at any time and without warning, a break of a week or two between posts. Really, I think that is the only way I can start to get some books behind me, and is also inevitable in the summer season when one wants to get out and enjoy it all. Here's a few things that got my attention this past week. Chris Taylor is blogging once again and has recruited an air force for the Red Ensign Brigade. Heh. Dennis Prager asks, Are you a liberal? Anglicans and Catholics are getting closer to reconciling -over the role of Mary in the Christian faith. Quote: A working group c...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ghost in the machine

In writing up this post I have to mention that I am very impressed with the quality of discussion that one finds on blogs. This truly is a remarkable medium. Thanks go to all three of the bloggers mentioned here for providing such good reading and thinking for the rest of us to try and learn from. I have not had a chance to read all of the entries linked to here, but I do intend to. ***** George Will compares two views of man in his latest column . One is novelist Ian McEwan, who places the following words into the mouth of the leading character in his latest novel, Saturday : Endless and beautiful forms of life, such as you see in a common hedgerow, including exulted beings like ourselves, arose from physical laws, from war or nature, famine and death. This is the grandeur. And a bracing kind of consolation in the brief privilege of consciousness. This character is a neurosurgeon. The quote reminds me that there may be some truth to the observation that those in the biological and...
Post a Comment
Read more