Abstract

Our consciousness of the limit is consciousness of surpassing ourselves toward an incomprehensible reality. The ambiguity of the limit-experience actually signifies consciousness of Being as Absolute Mystery. ;This transcendental analysis leads into two further questions. Given the structural ambiguity of human transcendence, what is its integrating principle and ground? And, does human historicity account fully for the ambiguity of the limit, or, is there beyond spirit's ambiguity an ambiguity proper to the limit itself? Karl Rahner's model of human transcendence is elaborated in answer to both questions . What grounds human spirit's simultaneous realization of the self and the other is its transcendence toward that which exceeds its powers of appropriation . The resulting picture of human spirit as a reach which always exceeds its grasp becomes the key for understanding the essential role of ambiguity in the limit-experience. Over and above the ambiguity deriving from human spirit's inconstancy before Being, the experience of Being remains essentially ambiguous inasmuch as it is the experience of that which surpasses one's capacities for experiencing . ;The specific ambiguity of the limit-experience as such is twofold: it is simultaneously continuity and discontinuity with that which forms the horizon for the finite or, simply, Being; and the net character of this limit-experience as simultaneous participation in and alienation from Being oscillates between a mostly enclosive one and a mostly disclosive one in different historical periods. For medieval man, for example, finitude is primarily a cipher of Transcendent Being while modern "existentialist" man comes away from finitude feeling that God is dead and that he is encompassed instead by nothingness. ;What accounts for this paradoxical and fluctuating experience of the limit? Is Being ambiguous? Does it grant itself differently to different epochs as though it were inconstant? Or is it the case that the ambiguity and inconstancy is on the side of human transcendence, that transcendence can be ambiguous before Being? In a way, both. The latter possibility is first explored . The transcendental conditions of the ambiguity of spirit, of its capacity to waver and fluctuate in transcending and before what is encountered in transcendence are examined. These conditions are freedom, in the sense that knowing is always taking a stance toward and this stance may give or refuse itself to what is encountered, and the structural ambiguity of spirit as tension between self-grasp and self-transcendence . Ontic manifestations of this ontological ambiguity are found in the age-old conflict between religious and philosophical consciousness, the recurring individual and cultural psychological strategy of the causa sui project, and the phenomena of overstatement . ;This study takes its start from the ambiguity of the limit-experience and moves toward an interpretation of the significance of this ambiguity in and for human transcendence. ;In a series of analyses the nature of the limit-experience which human transcendence undergoes in each encounter with beings is specified along with its attendant ambiguity. Since the limit-experience is not just the fact of being limited or finite but awareness of this limitedness, it is both discovery of being enclosed and disclosure of something more or other which forms a delineating horizon for what is enclosed. Hence, the limit-experience is an enclosive-disclosive complex