Metaphysics: The Creation of Hierarchy (Interventions) - Softcover

Pabst, Adrian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802864511 ISBN 13: 9780802864512

Verlag: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2012

Inhaltsangabe

This comprehensive and detailed study of individuation reveals the theological nature of metaphysics. Adrian Pabst argues that ancient and modern conceptions of "being" - or individual substance - fail to account for the ontological relations that bind beings to each other and to God, their source. On the basis of a genealogical account of rival theories of creation and individuation from Plato to `postmodernism,' Pabst proposes that the Christian Neo-Platonic fusion of biblical revelation with Greco-Roman philosophy fulfills and surpasses all other ontologies and conceptions of individuality.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Adrian Pabst is Reader in Politics at the University of Kent and Visiting Professor at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Lille.

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METAPHYSICS

The Creation of HierarchyBy Adrian Pabst

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Copyright © 2012 Adrian Pabst
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8028-6451-2

Contents

Foreword by John Milbank.................................................xviiAcknowledgments..........................................................xxivPreface: From Individuality to Relationality.............................xxviiPart I. Substance and Relation...........................................1Chapter 1. The Primacy of Relation over Substance........................5Chapter 2. Trinitarian God and Triadic Cosmos............................54Chapter 3. Relational Substance and Cosmic Hierarchy.....................113Part II. Matter and Form.................................................153Chapter 4. The Priority of Essence over Existence........................155Chapter 5. Participation in the Act of Being.............................201Chapter 6. The Invention of the Individual...............................272Part III. Transcendence and Immanence....................................305Chapter 7. Transcendental Individuation..................................308Chapter 8. The Creation of Immanence.....................................341Chapter 9. Ontology or Metaphysics?......................................383Conclusion: The New Imperative of Relationality..........................445Sources..................................................................456Bibliography.............................................................465Index....................................................................503

Chapter One

The Primacy of Relation over Substance

1. Introduction: The Legacy of Pre-Socratic Poetry and Philosophy

The opposition of the one and the many is the hallmark of pre-Socratic poetry and philosophy. None of the dominant schools or thinkers could reconcile the apparent contradiction of unity and diversity in the world of material things and immaterial ideas. For instance, Hesiod's poem Theogony describes how out of the infinite nothingness of chaos emerges a single divine cosmos, generated and maintained by the omnipotent Zeus. Even though it acts as the first cause and final end of the natural order, the power of the gods is wholly unintelligible to the human mind and a matter of blind belief. (This myth is invoked by Plotinus to describe the eternal procession of the many from the One, as we shall see in chapter 2.) In Hesiod, as in Homer's Odyssey, the presence of gods is absolute and divine intervention in the world is arbitrary.

Early pre-Socratic philosophers, by contrast, contended that the perceptible world of nature can be cognized and explained in terms of its own inherent principles. This argument eschews cosmic fatalism in favor of rational knowledge and human agency. However, it leaves the problem of the opposition between the one and the many unresolved. Faced with the simultaneous occurrence of being and nonbeing, the physicists, for example, searched for some fundamental principle ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) that could explain the multiplicity of things within the overarching cosmos —water in Thales, air in Anaximenes, or the indefinite/borderless (to apeiron) in Anaximander. But they could not solve the paradox of stability and change over time and across space that characterizes the single enduring material stuff which was thought to be both the origin of all things and the cause of their continuing existence. By positing some basic constituent of materiality that is itself eternal and underlies all change (one or several of the four elements), they reduced the whole of reality to a single substratum and advocated a form of material monism. The problem with this sort of monism is that it fails to explain how a multiplicity of things can emerge out of the oneness of the underlying principle and how the immaterial mind can know the material world in both its diversity and unity. As such, material monism is unable to account for the unity of matter itself.

Later pre-Socratic philosophers like Xenophanes, Heraclitus, and Parmenides defended an immaterial monism, arguing that there is something like a first principle which is unitary and permanent and which contrasts with the multiple and transitory nature of the living cosmos. Xenophanes writes that "[o]ne god is greatest among gods and men, not at all like mortals in body or in thought." Likewise, Heraclitus refers in the opening lines of his book to the "logos which holds forever," a law-like principle that embodies the divine order and rules all things within the universe and therefore can be known by the human mind. And since nothing comes from nothing, as Parmenides held, that which is either is necessary or is contingent. Necessary being is necessarily "ungenerated and imperishable; Whole, single-limbed, steadfast and complete; nor was [it] once, nor will [it] be, since it is, now, all together, One, continuous." For Parmenides, as for Xenophanes and Heraclitus, the unity of the primary principle subsumes the diversity of the secondary reality that comes into being and passes away. The problem with this kind of immaterial monism is that it cannot demonstrate how the mind alone can have access to being without the import of the senses. Nor can it give a reason why the oneness of true reality (that which is) would be allied to the void (that which is not) in order to produce the multiplicity of the universe ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) that hovers between being and nonbeing.

Neither pluralism nor atomism resolved the opposition between the one and the many bequeathed by the physicists and left unresolved by Parmenides' Eleatic monism. Anaxagoras and Empedocles replaced a single immaterial substratum as the source of being with a plurality of material elements, but both had to appeal to the operation of the mind or intellect ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII])—a unitary, separate, cosmic, intelligent force that brings the mixture of elements into rotation and holds the universe together. As a result, the pluralismof Anaxagoras and Empedocles complements Parmenides' emphasis on the absolute unity of being with an irreducible multiplicity of material stuffs. The (pre-)Socratic atomists Leucippus and Democritus went further than the pluralists by arguing that all forms of union are illusory and that every whole is reducible to its parts. Yet at the same time, all atoms are made of the same foundational matter and (unlike in Parmenides) true reality is not limited to being but extends to the void, defined as that which individuates atoms and distinguishes them from one another. Thus, both the pluralist and the atomist schools maintained a strict division of unity and diversity by positing a cause or principle of individuation that is separate from plural material elements or bare atoms.

In short, material and immaterial monism is unable to account for the unity of matter and the plurality of finite things, whereas pluralism and atomism need to appeal to a unitary force that secures the oneness of the cosmos. As such, they all mask an ontological and epistemological dualism between the one and the many. The reason is metaphysical and theological: the link between the universe and its source remains hidden, since pre-Socratic poetry and philosophy view the gods as external to the world and divinity as unintelligible to the human mind. Fundamentally, the infinite incomprehensible origin of being and the finite perceptible world of beings are coterminous not consubstantial: being...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0802864511
• ISBN 13: 9780802864512
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 557
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland