A Note on Neoplatonic Champagne

Neoplatonic emanation has traditionally been a sticking point for Christianity. Despite some of its unifying metaphysical strengths, it seems to render created being necessary, as though God's nature requires that the diversified chorus of finitude pours forth from his lips. Suddenly, a core aspect of the created/uncreated distinction is trivialized.

The big players in the Christian tradition who sought to reap the fruits of Neoplatonism have dealt with this apparent conflict.

To put it simply, when it comes to intentionality or necessity: we must not conceive of the emanation of finite being the way a great and mighty waterfall trickles down into a river below that branches off into countless tributaries and streams. The waterfall would not be what it is if gravity did not exact this necesssity on its emanation. Or rather, it would be like every time you bought a bottle of champagne, it burst open and poured out onto everything, as you speedily try to plug the top in your unexpected panic.

God's emanation is far more like when one, celebrating an acheivement in great joy (perhaps celebrating one's own beautiful nature), shakes a giant bottle of champagne and pops the cork, allowing its bounty to flow forth into the countless and variously shaped glasses of one's guests, held out at different heights below it. And imagine, of course, that somehow this giant bottle of champagne never runs out....

Pax Christi,

The Sound of One Hand Clapping

For the Aristotelian, a severed hand is not really a hand at all. It is detached from the substantial form that secures its function and identity as hand. Apart from this, it is only analogously called a hand, much in the same way we would call a prosthetic replacement a "hand." Without the living, informed body, the severed hand is far more like a prosthetic hand or a claw or even the sculpture of a hand than it is like an organic, living hand.

Similarly, for the Aristotelian, the polis and the common good are naturally prior to the individuals that partake of them; much in the same way that the unified, substantial body is prior to its hands and its feet. It seems apparent then that in many accounts of Modern autonomy, philosophers are proposing that hands are truly hands when they are lobbed off of their arms. Body parts precede the unity of the body. Yet when Modern man is cut off from the common good and the intrinsic "political" aspect of his nature and his end, can we really call him "man?" Or is he in reality closer to a manequin or a sculpture?

Obvisouly Modern man, even in accepting such a vision of autonomy, is not cast out of human community the way an exile or a hermit might have been sundered from the polis in Aristotle's day. Now as then, people still grow and develop and depend upon the specialized skills of others in their communities. So it would be more like a bunch of severed body parts trying to move together in imitation of a real and living unified body. Imagine the child of some deity trying to create a human doll out of a bunch of dead human body parts. It's actions, it's movements, would in effect be no more than those of a doll: what Aristotle would classify as an artifact. What we have then in the extreme accounts of Modern autonomy is an argument for a political Frankenstein.

Are we willing to refer to Frankenstein (the monster) as "man" in the same sense as we would use that word of, say, Dr. Victor Frankenstein?


Pax Christi,

Kant vs. Copernicus

An Easy Essay in the Spirit of Peter Maurin, inspired by William Desmond

Kant (1724 – 1804) vs. Copernicus (1473 – 1543)

Before Copernicus, it was thought that
The sun revolved around the earth,
That man was the center of all.
But Copernicus was a revolutionary,
Whose perspicacity, like none other,
Keenly peered into the
True nature of revolution, and declared
The earth revolves around the sun.
Man was no more the center of all,
But, instead was held in the embrace of a world
Full of things whose intelligibility would lead man
To ever higher realms of existence.

Before Kant, it was known that
The earth revolved around the sun,
That man was not the center of all because
There was a world of things surrounding him.
Kant assumed the position of “revolutionary,”
And declared that he had discovered a new center –
The transcendental subject, and its conditions for thought.
Man was pushed back into the center, and all things
Were now subject to man’s cognitive dominion.
Man now held the world in his fragile embrace,
Imposing intelligibility upon things that prove themselves
To be more and more recalcitrant to man’s dominion.

But if Copernicus realized man was not in the center,
And if Kant pushed man back into the center,
It is odd that Kant declared his movement to be
A Copernican Revolution.